New year, old habits. I've been in the habit of tracking things I do for a number of years. Whether it's words written or books readen, I try to keep a running list. This is to give me a sense of movement in an otherwise very similar existence: The cyclical nature of my job is reassuring in its familiarity, but it can be disorienting if I'm not careful.
To that end, I jot down the titles of everything I complete during a year. For esoteric reasons I don't fully understand, I categorize my entertainment input in two: Books, and Everything Else (except music). In 2020, I read/watched/played 119 comics/movies/video games. The number is not necessarily accurate. I will put things like "Christmas cartoons", which was probably a good two hours or so of The Amazing World of Gumball, Captain Underpants, or Teen Titans GO! Yet I lumped them all together, rather than counting each one separately. I didn't count Avatar: The Last Airbender, which was watched by my boys in the van during our commute time. I will put something like Deluxe Invader ZIM #2, which is actually a dozen comics in one. Also, it's only completed things. That's easy for something like movies (I watched all of the Jurassic Park films with my kids this summer), but I ended up stopping my rewatch of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles season 2 with, like, two episodes to go. So it didn't make the list. Even The Haunting of Bly Manor, which I have three or four episodes left, didn't get added on, even though each episode is nearly an hour long--meaning that two episodes combined is more than some movies' runtime. And while 119 titles is quite a bit (especially considering how many hours I obsessed over Bloodborne these past few weeks--and, let me just say, that completing that game was a personal accomplishment), what really strikes me is that I only had 37 books or plays read in 2020. I'll admit that there were some…interruptions to how I normally live my life. I did find it harder to concentrate on the written word during the pandemic, and I even fudged my numbers a little by including books that I wrote and finished during 2020 (two novellas actually, my lowest output in years). Some of the books are the annual retreads: Pride and Prejudice, Things Fall Apart, and All Quiet on the Western Front always crop up in the first half of the year. Hamlet…well, I don't actually reread Hamlet each year. I do watch the film with my students though, so… My point is that despite my best intentions, I don't do a lot of reading. Author Joe Hill said that you can get a rough sense of how many pages you read per day by seeing how many books you finish in a year. At 37 titles, I read only 37 pages a day, on average. Part of me feels insulted by this. The rest of me realizes that's probably more true than I'd like to think. It's also tricky, because I only count what I've completed during the year, regardless of how long it took me to get there. I started The Iliad a couple of different times throughout my career, but I only finished it this summer. (That was a complete read, though; I restarted and finished it in 2020.) I finished London: The Biography after it sitting on my nightstand for three years. So it's really an incomplete list. I put all of that down because it's on my mind and I think it provides a bit of context for what I'm about to describe. I finished Stephen King's The Gunslinger: The Dark Tower I today after trying to read it for…I dunno, twelve years? Something like that. An old work buddy gave me his copy of The Gunslinger (and the frustratingly titled The Drawing of the Three, which is the second book in the series…why does it have the number 3 in the title, then?) and I've picked it up a handful of times since then, only to put it back down. After becoming more accustomed to King's writing style, I decided to give The Gunslinger another go. This is in part because I bumped into a former student who was picking up one of the later Dark Tower books and said that, once you get to the third entry, it is really good. That's a bit of a slog, if you ask me. Still, I decided to try it. After all, I reread The Eye of the World and The Great Hunt by Robert Jordan in the hopes that, by the time I eventually get to the third book I'll actually really like it. A man can dream. And I think that's what my problem is with The Gunslinger: It feels like a weird dream. There's a place for that, of course. Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass are excellent examples of dream fiction (both of which I read this year, as a small aside). A lot of Neil Gaiman's work fits into that mold, too--a place where imagination is the fuel of the story. The thing is, I'm not a huge fan of the genre. Or, perhaps more evenly, a little goes a long way for me. And when it comes to King, I've come to expect a different kind of story. Part of the reason It is one of my favorite novels of all time is because the world is grounded, making the fantastical seem more plausible. King does this in other works, too: 11/22/63 and Pet Sematary stand out to me in that way. (The Stand, which I picked up again when the pandemic struck--wonder why--kind of blurs the line a bit more than I prefer.) But when it comes to The Gunslinger, well… The problem I have with dream fiction is that the stakes feel artificial. Since nothing can be taken as real, sacrifice and death, pain and worry all become meaningless. The impermanence of the situation leads me to apathy. In the case of The Gunslinger, I had a hard time believing that Roland was in a real world with real people. He may shoot his way through much of the book, knock boots with a tavern wench, and traverse a seemingly-endless underground tunnel, but is any of it "real" to him? Chapter Five is essentially a twenty-five page conversation, which turns out to have somehow taken ten years and maybe the skeleton is the corpse of the man in black he's been chasing… King himself admits that the book is a cowboy Western take on The Lord of the Rings, which in and of itself both sounds amazing and totally bizarre. The execution of the book--for me, at least--was tedious and meandering. The rich characterization that King does so well in his other books felt lacking here. Forgive a digression here: For almost all authors (Austen and Shakespeare feel like exceptions to this, though I'm sure there are others), the way that we get to care about characters is through exposure to them. Why does it mean so much to see Hagrid carry Harry Potter out of the Dark Forest? Because we've spent so much time with both characters. Why does It clock in at over 1,400 pages yet leave you wanting more? Because we've spent a lot of time with those characters and we have come to care about them. Why do shows like Doctor Who and Supernatural have such loyal fanbases? Because they've spent time in those worlds. The best short story can't connect with the reader as securely as the tenth book in a series for the simple reason that we readers haven't gone through the adventure with them. Now, there are seven books in the Dark Tower series, so there's definitely a chance to get to know Roland. In fact, I can't really fault this first book for not being more since there's a long journey ahead and this, the slenderest volume of the series, isn't going to give me a lot of time with the gunslinger. However, the time I spent with him felt inconsequential. I think this comes from a couple of things. One, Jake comes into the story with his own confusion and inability to remain connected to the world that he came from. At this juncture, Jake feels like a narrative add-in, a character dropped into the story because the idea struck the writer and so he put him in. Then, unsurprisingly, killed him off. I didn't get a strong sense of the gunslinger and the boy becoming close or gaining a lot by being together. Sure, Roland explains how he earned the right to become a gunslinger because Jake was there, but the narrator could have given us that section of the backstory by having Roland reflect on his own past. Jake felt extraneous and randomly included. I don't know if that is a criticism that stands up with the rest of the series, of course. But it is how I felt for this individual book. One thing, however, that I really did like, was what I mentioned earlier: The last chapter of the book--what should be the climax and resolution, a full-fledged battle, according to most fantasy tropes--is a twenty-five page conversation. The book begins "The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed." That sets up the goal, which is attained by the end of the book: Roland the gunslinger catches up with the man in black. But, rather than duking it out, the two sit down around a magically created fire and talk. Thanks mostly to the video game Bloodborne, I've been thinking about eldritch horror a lot more recently. (I had a spat with it about thirteen years back; I even have a couple of Lovecraft anthologies on my shelf.*) And though that game does an excellent job of dealing with the cosmic horror themes, I don't think I've seen anyone describe the terror of that genre as well as the man in black does to Roland. Chapter Five does a lot of things, and while I rather doubt that this Western/fantasy/grimdark tale was meant to also include eldritch fear, the existential dread conjured by the man in black pushes the story into that genre, too. Here's a passage: 'Size defeats us. For the fish, the lake in which he lives is the universe. What does the fish think when he is jerked up by the mouth through the silver limits of existence and into a new universe where the air drowns him and the light is blue madness? Where huge bipeds with no gills stuff it into a suffocating box and cover it with wet weeds to die?' (287-288) Can you imagine what it would be like to be that fish? To be dragged out of the world you know and then, suffocating in an unfamiliar ocean of air, die as you watched beings oblivious to--or worse, the causation of--your plight pass you over? That is an almost unimaginable terror…an eldritch one. Eldritch horror is facing the insignificance of humanity in the face of powers larger and darker than ever before dreamed. In "The Call of Cthulhu", Lovecraft writes, The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to corelate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age. (The Best of H.P. Lovecraft: Black Seas of Infinity, 1) For the man in black, we humans are the fish in a small pond of existence. The idea of so much being out beyond us, past human ken and comprehension, is humbling to the point of disheartening. We do so much in our small scale and view ourselves rulers of the world, yet what can we do in the face of our own mistakes and the turns that consequences inevitably bring back home to us? Like a virus can take a human life (a reality that we've seen iterated thousands of times these past few months--a reality that many millions more outright deny), so too can the comparatively tiny actions of humans accumulate into trophic cascades that may end up ruining the only home we have. We don't even have to go into cosmic horrors to see the effect that size has on us. A single individual's actions can no more change the climate than a twig in the Mississippi will dam it. But you get enough twigs… The idea that there are things bigger than us is maddening. For Roland, it's about interacting and becoming part of light--a metaphysical escape from the eventual nihilism this kind of thinking often leads to. For us, we rest more comfortably in our "placid island of ignorance" than trying to confront the larger (or much, much smaller) worlds that surround us. In Bloodborne, the world the player inhabits is surrounded by enormous eldritch beings called Amygdala. They hang from gothic spires and observe the player from afar. However, until the player gains "insight" (a currency in the game, but also a metaphor), these creatures are invisible. After gaining enough insight, the player is able to perceive what had been there all along. What the man in black is pointing out is that there is so much more in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophies, just like Hamlet told us four hundred years ago. From what I can tell, we have two ways of approaching this: To embrace the reality that there is so much more than we can every possibly learn or understand, or to cave inwards, cocooning ourselves against all uncomfortable aspects of reality. And it's a choice that we have to make again and again. So, should you read The Gunslinger? I don't know. For me, I didn't really like the vast majority of it. Nevertheless, I'm curious to see where it goes. I would say that if a seven-volume epic is too intimidating, don't start. Now that I've begun the journey, I may just have to see it all the way to its cyclical end… ___ * I know about Lovecraft's disgusting racism. I'm not a fan of the guy, and his writing is…well, it certainly exists and can be read. His impact on the horror genre is inescapable, even if I think, as a human, he was a sleaze. As part of my rereading of Shakespeare, I finally finished reading Richard III. I've been struggling to get much of the Bard read--a process that's my own fault, really. In all actuality, I should be able to read a play in an afternoon, since that's about how long it takes to have one performed and I read faster than actors speak. But I don't read Shakespeare that way: I read with a pencil in hand, cross-references to other plays when I think of them, and a careful attention to what I'm reading. The result is that I go through very, very slowly. I finished Richard III at the end of April, despite having started it in January.
Still, I did it, and I've some things to say about this one. Richard III marks a genuine beginning to his writing style that he flirted with in Titus Andronicus but set aside until this play, and that is a focus on a single character. All of his plays are filled with characters, of course--as a writer of plays, he had to consider how his fellow actors would be given their jobs, after all. The early comedies and even the first histories that he wrote, however, are ensemble pieces. Two Gentlemen of Verona has, of course, two main characters and their attendant love interests. Because Taming of the Shrew is a comedy, it has to have the A-plot love interest and the B-plot love interest. History plays are (up to Richard III) split in focus among the different factions and battles. Only in Titus Andronicus do we finally see the intimations of a main character in the plays. Unfortunately, that play is pretty gruesome and lands poorly. It's a bit like The Jungle by Upton Sinclair. He wanted to write a novel that would hit America in the heart (and instill the desire to spread socialism throughout the country, to cease the exploitation of the American worker); instead, he hit it in the stomach, which led to regulations about how slaughterhouses worked. Titus Andronicus might have been intended for a different effect, but the result is that the blood-soaked stage covers anything that might have been happening inside of the characters. Enter Richard of Gloucester. This malevolent Machiavel had already been showcased in 3 Henry VI (where Prince Edward says to Richard "Thou, misshapen Dick", much to the hilarity of future sophomores throughout centuries), and the foundation of what Richard will become in his own play are set down brilliantly. However, Richard's presence in the background of 3 Henry VI is inversely proportional to his presence in its sequel: From the first line he speaks (the famously misunderstood first line: "Now is the winter of our discontent…") until his enduring bargain, "My kingdom for a horse!", he is a force to be reckoned with. With the adroitness of an acrobat, Richard manipulates everyone around him, tugging and cajoling, threatening and promising, nimbly dancing through the many obstacles between him and his goal: The crown. To me, Richard III is the pivot of Shakespeare's genius. (I don't doubt that other Bardolators would disagree with me, by the way: Most hermeneutics are polemics by another name anyway.) It's here that we start to see his mastery of the soliloquy--the unpacking of a character's heart with words* becomes one of the greatest tools within Shakespeare's heady arsenal of dramatic representation of humankind. Couple with his unparalleled poetry, Shakespeare really starts to move into a new level of expression through his protracted examination of Richard III. For Shakespeare to achieve this analysis, he has to do what he always does with his histories: He telescopes events, conflates historical characters, abridges conflicts, and places people in the wrong place at the wrong time.** This is all secondary--or even tertiary--to what he's trying to accomplish. And what is that? Well, it's a theme that seems to preoccupy the Bard: What happens when you give a mortal man too much power? Much of Shakespeare's canon is ruminations on power. He often comes to similar conclusions: Bad things transpire. Indeed, when I read his work under this light, it makes The Tempest an even more powerful story…but that's an analysis for a different day. There is a sense of legitimate power--legitimate use of power, I should say--within some of the plays. I get the sense that he wasn't particularly impressed with the house of York*** and that they ended up "getting theirs". However, when it comes to Richard III, he documents an ambitious man's obsession with power at any cost, up to and including the seduction of his niece (4.4) and the ordering for his nephews to be killed and buried in the walls of the Tower (4.2). This sort of sustained attention helps to generate two conflicting emotions: Admiration for Richard's tenacity and reprehension for his behaviors. Tyrants have long been a part of the makeup of the world. Though we've few historical examples of the Platonic Philosopher-King who rules despite not wanting the job, our drama prefers people of greater drive and motivation. And that's what really makes Richard III (and much of the play Richard III) so compelling: The main character, though we loathe him, actually does what he sets out to do. That's storytelling 101: Give the character a goal, put obstacles in front of that goal, and the pleasure of the story is seeing how the character overcomes those difficulties to achieve the goal. And that leads to the flaws of the piece: Richard III is a bloated play. It is the second longest play in the canon (Hamlet clocks in at 29,844 words; Richard III has 28,439), and it feels it. Unlike the longer (and superior) Hamlet, Richard III struggles to maintain its full narrative drive the entire time. The reason for this is simple: Both Hamlet and Richard have goals. Hamlet doesn't succeed in achieving his goal until 5.2, the final scene of the play. Richard, however, gets what he's after by 4.2, thus leaving the rest of Act 4 and all of Act 5 to finish off the story. Shakespeare manages to keep Richard's attempts to remain king--his new goal--worthwhile; unfortunately, there's also a lot of cursing going on with Queen Margaret and the other women in the play, plus the machinations of events outside of Richard's control. The result of this is that the play doesn't contain the same intensity in the latter portion as in the earlier acts.‡ These are quibbles: Richard himself is such a compelling and charismatic character that it's hard not to like him--at least, in the same way that one likes horror movies, war stories, or rubber-necks a bad accident on the freeway. There's a vile charm about him that we can't help but enjoy. We want him to succeed only so that his fall is stronger and more potent having seen what he did to attain such heights. In this he's a precursor to Milton's Satan, giving us the insights into the darkness of ambition- and pride-gilded minds. This is only possible because of Shakespeare's shift from ensemble to lead. Surely Richard Burbage--the best actor of the company and the man who first voiced all of Shakespeare's most iconic roles--had something to do with it. Perhaps Shakespeare finally understood how well his characters could be expressed and so gave greater attention to the way he represented humanity. Or, maybe, it was happenstance: Perhaps the Bard grew tired of always writing sprawling stories of (comparatively) shallow characters and was ready to try something new. Maybe the structure of history allowed him to expand in interesting ways. (This is something I've found to be true in my own writing: Rewriting an already-told tale takes some of the burden off of the mind, allowing growth in different directions.) Whatever prompted Mr. Shakespeare to do what he did, I'm glad it happened. The arrival of this bad-guy-as-protagonist changed the way Shakespeare wrote, shifting his abilities toward even more powerful representations. Though I highly doubt it was clear to William Shakespeare when he wrote Richard III, the "lump of foul deformity" (1.2.57) ended up becoming the foundation for the apotheosis of dramatic representation: Macbeth, Lear, and--above all--Hamlet. Pretty good for someone not even yet 30 years old. --- * I couldn't help myself from this little allusion to Hamlet 2.2. Nor could I help myself from pointing out the allusion, which is just bad manners. ** This is most obvious when you look at the deposed Queen Margaret, who is still in the English court--basically as a tool to harass the characters--even though in reality she had, for much of the time the play is covering, already returned to her native France and/or was dead (the play covers a fair swath of years). *** I'm not going to weigh in on the idea that Shakespeare wrote Richard III as propaganda for the Tudors, or that he was secretly persuaded by the White Rose side of the Wars of the Roses; I'm talking about how he portrays the historical characters in the plays. ‡ When Shakespeare addresses this kind of story again in Macbeth, he solves the problem in a couple of ways: One, he shortens the story (Macbeth only has 16,372 words--a full 12,000 fewer words than Richard III); and two, he drops this line into Macbeth's mouth, rendering the shift in goals so clearly that it's easy to understand Macbeth's intellectual movement: "To be thus is nothing/But to be safely thus…" (3.1.49-50). Note: The Concurrent Enrollment English class I'm teaching is writing a personal essay about their literary journey. We're using Fahrenheit 451 as our text, but writing our own stories as we go along. Personal narratives are kind of my jam, so I decided that I would draft my own example essays/approaches to the topic. Fortunately for me, I won't be graded on what I write. Instead, I can simply let the story take me where it will. Here's what I wrote.
Naked trees. Kniving winds. The too-early setting of an October sun. A strange street. A dripping nose. In my cold-chapped hands, I held a flyer for Jim Ferrin, a guy in our ward who was using the youth to help canvas Orem neighborhoods with his candidacy. I did not much care about him--aside from being politically ignorant, I was twelve years old and completely uninterested in doing this bit of service. Besides, I wasn’t friends with any of his kids. Add to that the injury of having had to give up a perfectly good book-reading evening, and my pre-teen angst about the job becomes clearer. I walked to the next house, numb fingers fumbling with the slender elastic, wrapping the half-sheet of paper (hunting-orange in my memory, though who now knows what it really was) around the screendoor’s black handle. As the leaves gossiped past me, I shrugged deeper into my thick leather coat. “I don’t want this,” I said to myself. “I want to be at home, with Lessa, F’lar, and Jaxom.” Lessa, F’lar, and Jaxom, of course, aren’t real. They’re characters from the Dragonriders of Pern series by Anne McCaffery. Set on a faraway planet, the book series revolves around the men and women who have become selected to ride massive, fire-breathing dragons, all in defense of their planet from a mindless mycorrhizal threat. The world is a rare feat in secondary-world creation, second only to Tolkien’s Middle Earth in the complexity, interaction of disparate parts, and world-building. (The late Anne McCaffery didn’t build her own unique languages for her world--something that will likely always put Tolkien at the top of the list for most detailed secondary-world creation in literature.) To a twelve year old whose primary experiences were imaginative, having such a wonderfully wrought world--even if it was fictional--was where I wished to spend as much time as I possibly could. What I didn’t understand then but can see more clearly now is that Lessa, F’lar, and Jaxom--and Robinton, Menoly, and the rest of the entrancing cast--came into my life as permanent residents, people who became real to me through the viral act of writing and reading. They felt almost tangible, with problems that were large-yet-solvable, a type of bravery that I could only aspire to, and beneficiaries of a world in which dragons weren’t terrible beasts to slay but instead gentle companions, loyal and true. I grew up in the late eighties and early nineties: Ronald Reagan’s deregulation of what constituted advertisements to children meant that my Saturday mornings were twenty-three minute long commercials with a plot, interrupted by seven minutes of actual commercials. I knew very well how a child could pine for something. After all, watching an entire episode of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles--during which time there were a half dozen reminders that I could actually play with the Technodrome or get that Donatello action figure to round out my collection--was an injection of desire coming straight into my eyeballs. There was a yearning for the toys on the TV (to say nothing of the jealousy I felt toward the child actors who got to play with the toys during the commercial) that can be difficult to fully understand. I would ache for what I saw on TV, almost as if I could physically feel it. That’s what I felt that blustery October day as I hawked flyers for Jim-Ferrin-in-our-ward. But it wasn’t an ache for the action figures and playsets. It was a desire to return to a written world, a place where these fictitious people lived. I wanted to return to Pern, not suffer through the bad weather of Utah in late-autumn. I couldn’t say that this was the first time that I felt such a pining for the fictitious, but it’s certainly one of the strongest. The pull of characters--a concern for them that was akin to caring about my real life friends and their problems--was so intense that I almost cried. (Being freezing cold and miserable probably only added to that emotional response.) This, of course, is a different sort of experience than when I finally “got” what Shakespeare was saying in Hamlet or could “see” Milton’s brilliance. This was a more tangible, more from-the-gut experience. I found myself wanting to be in a place that I had never seen with people I had never met more than I wanted almost anything else in that moment. I did, unsurprisingly, get to go home when my service was complete. I don’t remember if Brother Ferrin ended up winning that election a couple of weeks later; I do remember, however, that Pern has--ever since that time--been a part of me, a place that I happily return to. And though I don’t ache to return there anymore (at least, not to the same degree), I know the keenness of such yearning. I now look forward to the next time an author’s words can so fully enrapture me--I look forward to being teleported again. My trail toward fantasy literature is, in hindsight, a rather obvious one. There's probably a lot of Mormonic undercurrents that pushed me toward it (multiple other worlds, beings with extraordinary abilities, clear distinctions of right and wrong) that I won't dive into here. Maternal influence certainly had something to do with it, as my mom had (and still has) a deep affection for the fantastical. Superheroism and preternatural stories pepper my younger days' reading; little surprise, then, that fantasy fiction has been a mainstay in my life. Except for the tail-end of my high school career. I was taking a science fiction class from Greg Park (a fantasy writer as well as teacher and all around good guy) and, though it was clear that fantasy could do a lot of what was being discussed in the class, I kind of developed the sort of snobbery about literature that's the inevitable result of learning just enough to be dangerous. I didn't necessarily dislike fantasy, but I preferred science fiction. Then my future sister-in-law, Becky, came over (she was dating my brother at the time) with a door-stop tome under her arm. I believe it was Stone of Tears (but I could be wrong). I asked her about it, and she said that it was a really cool fantasy series by a guy named Terry Goodkind. I asked her if there was a lot of magic in it, or maybe just a light touch. For some reason, I didn't want to read it if there was too much of the fantastical in the fantasy novel (an irony that was completely lost on me at the time and will, perhaps, become clear to you as you finish reading). I remember hoping that she would answer that it didn't have too much; instead, she said that there was quite a bit. She recommended it anyway. Stone of Tears was the second book in the series, so I didn't borrow that one. I picked up my own copy of Wizard's First Rule later--probably at MediaPlay--and started reading. Despite its unassuming first sentence ("It was an odd-looking vine"), I was rapidly pulled into the world of Richard the Seeker and his true love, Kahlan Amnell. Despite some extreme content (tame, perhaps, if you're a reader of George R.R. Martin or Joe Abercrombie, but pretty intense for a seventeen-year-old), I really enjoyed the book. I read the entire series (as far as it had been published, at least) before leaving on my mission in 2002. Goodkind inspired me to pursue fantasy in a way that I hadn't before. In many ways, he's foundational to my own writing interest (though not, necessarily, style). I purchased more of his books after I came home, eventually getting Gayle interested in them as well. I read up through the Chainfire trilogy, as well as the novella, Debt of Bones. I even listened to the connected-but-not-about-Richard spinoff novel The Law of Nines. Eventually, much like with Brian Jacques, I stopped reading the same story again and again but with a different cover. Honestly, part of the break with my appreciation for Goodkind happened in Naked Empire. (This is a major spoiler, so if you're going to read/reading his stuff you may want to skip this…and probably the rest, since I'm not really a fan anymore.) In that novel, Richard is poisoned and the only way to be saved is to drink three draughts of an antidote--one of which is destroyed by the bad guy of the story. When Nicholas the Slide (great name, by the way) pours out one of the vials, I thought something along of the lines of, Holy crap! How's Richard getting out of this one? And though there is a pretty clever piece of writing when they figure out who's been spying on them the whole time, I was immensely let down that Richard survives because his magical gift inspires him to describe how to make the concoction that would save his life. Yup. The whole thing was solved "because magic". The Chainfire Trilogy was really enjoyable, and I felt that the end of Confessor was enough of an ending to leave that world behind. But it wasn't just my disappointment in Naked Empire that made me start resisting some of Goodkind's writings: It was his objectivism. One of Goodkind's strengths is his ability to weave throughout his novels rigorous philosophical conversations without them feeling out of place…at least, he used to be able to do that. But his adoration of Ayn Rand (pretty far from my favorite philosopher, if I'm being honest) becomes larger and larger as the books progress, eventually setting up a massive strawman argument that undergirds the entire motivation of the "bad guy" nation, the Imperial Order. The great crime of the Imperial Order is the familiar distortion between communism and totalitarianism, and since I knew my Mormon history well enough to see more than a passing parallel between it and the similarly named "United Order", I felt more and more uncomfortable with what was being denigrated and what was being asserted in the libertarian thrust of the rest of the novels. I still appreciate his willingness to tackle issues that are important to him, and I love the idea that the characters are really motivated by their commitment to their principles…I just don't really jive with what he has to say anymore. The pages long (not joking) rants that some characters have as they evangelize their rugged individualism is not really a highlight of the series, if you ask me. So my own politics breaks with Goodkinds; big deal! Separate the artist from the art and all that…well, sure, but the politics is the art, in this case, so that doesn't work. And more than that, I eventually started seeing Goodkind as having hoodwinked me. As I mentioned earlier, my forays into fantasy were frequent as a kid, but I stopped reading it as much when I went into high school. With Goodkind being my reintroduction to the genre, he acted as a kind of touchstone for me, the source of what quality fantasy looked like. If it was derivative of him--or out of sync with his style--I didn't really care for it. In other words, he became the entirety of my palate. The problem with that is there are other fantasy novels out there, and most of them are different from the Sword of Truth series. So I was kind of faulting a phonebook for lack of a plot--accusing other books of not being what I thought was fantasy because I was reading "real" fantasy. And, strange enough to say this, Goodkind doesn't think that he writes fantasy. First of all, I don't write fantasy. I write stories that have important human themes. They have elements of romance, history, adventure, mystery and philosophy. Most fantasy is one-dimensional. It's either about magic or a world-building. I don't do either. (Interview) This is factually wrong on almost every single count--so much so that it's probably not worth even indulging with a response. He does, however go on to say this about his work: What I have done with my work has irrevocably changed the face of fantasy. In so doing I've raised the standards. I have not only injected thought into a tired empty genre, but, more importantly, I've transcended it showing what more it can be--and by so doing spread my readership to completely new groups who don't like and won't read typical fantasy. Agents and editors are screaming for more books like mine. (I couldn't find the original interview--which makes this suspect--but here's where I found it.) Wow.
So, while Goodkind rails constantly against this kind of cherry-picking of his quotes (claiming that they're out of context, though in reality they sound just as bad in it as out of it), I think it's fair to say that the man doesn't think of himself as a fantasy writer. He refuses to be pigeon-holed (and says calling him one an example of bigotry, which means that he really doesn't know people use that word), despite the fact that he writes fantasy novels. I don't know what he's trying to get at, really, with his rejection of the genre that's made him a millionaire. He writes about wizards, dragons, magic, dark entities, preternatural events…a whole host of things that fits inside of the very broad definitions of fantasy writing. No, there are no elves, nor dwarves, in his books. But if elves and dwarves are the requirement for fantasy, most fantasy these days isn't. It shows a shallowness of reading within the genre (in another interview, he asserts the only other author worth reading is Ayn Rand) that he's insistent on his point of view, at least to me. Do you see the irony I mentioned earlier? So here's where it kind of comes down to: I recognize that there were some really great things in his books, especially in the early ones. There's a lot of excellent development of secondary characters, as well as a hint toward a complex magic system that had a lot of interesting variation. However, I should have realized that the author has little appreciation for other people and that I ought not to add to his overinflated ego, even at the price of one more book. If you don't believe me, let me remind you the name of his first book, Wizard's First Rule. That rule, as described in the book? "People are stupid." I'm not going to say that he's a hack (at least, not completely; he definitely "borrowed" heavily from the only other voice in fantasy that I think he read, which was Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series); he has moments of tension and good prose and some solid ideas. But he also has Superman with a sword and treats him about as well as someone who thinks Superman needs a sword would. There was potential in his world, I think…but it got lost somewhere along the way. I will also say that, at least as far as my own reading will go, it won't include Goodkind again. And that's sad. I did enjoy a good many moments in that series. I wish that it hadn't become tainted in my mind, that his attitude towards his readers wasn't divisive ("true fans get me" is a type of mantra that comes up again and again in his interviews) and that he embraced what he was. Ah, well. Fortunately, there is a lot of great fantasy out there. Perhaps one day I'll be a part of it. Lots of tweets and social media posts are showcasing the major personal events of the past decade. I threw together a quick list myself, but thought that it could be worthwhile to go through with a bit more detail. As far as I can remember, here are some of the interesting things that happened in the twenty-teens.
2010 The decade began with me and a fellow teacher doing a short film Winterim. (Winterims will be brought up in each year for the simple reason that they're actually something different in my otherwise pretty consistent teaching career.) This was my second year at the school, but the first year as a full-time teacher. By the time March came along, my second child was born, which was a different experience than the first one--having a wireless baby was new and exciting. Not only that, but the delivery wasn't as hard on my wife, which was great: I couldn't understand how women could have more children when I saw how badly it hurt my wife to give birth our first. With Number Two arriving, I comprehended that births usually don't lay up the mother for a solid week. Of course, that doesn't mean there wasn't a lot of hospital stuff that year. Son Number Two had a condition called hypospadias, so he had to have a minor surgery along with a circumcision. Not only that, but Son Number One had his third--and, thus far, last--heart surgery to correct his tricuspid atresia, which consumed the entirety of June. At the time, we lived in our townhome, which fit our family just fine. We kept going forward with work and school (I was taking night classes to get an endorsement in history). I began work on what I thought would be my magnum opus, Writ in Blood. This would consume my writing for a couple more years. Come August, the curriculum I had taught for the past two years shifted a bit, pushing the 10th grade toward a broader swath of history. Instead of going from middle ages to the Victorian era, I now taught from the Italian Renaissance up to modern day. This shift was (so far) the biggest change in my curricula that I've had to adjust to. I'm glad that we did, as I much prefer what I teach now. Still, it was one of the biggest changes in my career. Just before Thanksgiving Break, the school moved buildings. We went from a refurbished bowling alley to a custom made school. Though I've moved rooms a couple of times since those days, I am happy to report that we haven't had to move the entire school again. That's a relief, I must say. 2011 I started this year teaming up with the same teacher as the previous year. This time, we did a Garage Band Winterim, where we set the kids up in small bands, had them compose a song, and then perform it for the parents at Winterfest. This was fun, as it gave me a chance to play the guitar more than I normally do, and the students did--for the most part--a really great job. Most of this year is pretty unremarkable, save for a couple of things. One, I pressed on with Writ in Blood, which remains one of the books that I'm most proud of, despite the fact that it was flatly rejected during submissions and rather ruined when I went back and tried to tinker with the thing. The second is that this is the year that I deeply studied World War II. That gave me a whole new way of seeing this monumental event, which is something that I try to transmit to my students every year, even now. I believe we went to Disneyland this year for the first time with our oldest. He loved it to pieces. 2012 Thus began one of the biggest pivots of my life: I taught the Harry Potter Winterim to nine students. Then, with them, my wife, and my coteacher, we flew out to Orlando to visit the Wizarding World of Harry Potter. The class was inexpressibly impactful, and it ended up changing not just how I viewed the book series, but sent me down a path I never expected: I started playing quidditch. This came about because we learned how to play with the Winterim, but the enjoyment of the sport led to creating an actual team. I joined the Crimson Fliers during the summer of 2012, which I pursued for four years or so. I still love and deeply miss quidditch, in part because of its connection to such a special experience (the Harry Potter Winterim specifically, but Harry Potter more broadly, too), but also because the people I met during quidditch are some of the most remarkable human beings I've ever had the pleasure of getting to know. It's a scar--one that will likely remain with me for another decade. I continued working on Writ in Blood as I finished up my history endorsement. Back then, I would go to class on Saturday mornings, take three hours of notes, eat a high-calorie, low-cost lunch at Burger King, then slam out a chapter or two at the UVU library before heading home. I really enjoyed this, as it allowed me time to write. By this point, I had stopped teaching three sections of Socratic Seminar and instead had things like mythology or two sections of creative writing to help round out my teaching day. That sort of flexibility remains with me to this day, meaning I have two sections of Socratic 10 and two elective classes of different stripes. The election of 2012 was a divisive one (aren't they all?) and it was the first time since '08 that I was more than just dimly aware of politics. Because I'm Mormon (you know: a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints), there was, I think, an assumption that I'd be voting for Mittens Romney; I didn't. I think about that election a lot--how the GOP tried a nice guy approach and was soundly defeated, so they went with the most vile they could and won--and how the world might be different had Baseball Mitt had taken the White House. At the very least, we wouldn't have to deal with Agent Orange. 2013 This Winterim saw me making comic books with the students. Like almost all of the Winterims of the decade, I taught with another teacher. This time, it was the art teacher, who's also a big comic book fan. It was a fun experience, but in the aftermath of what 2012 had done for me, it wasn't particularly memorable. By the time 2013 rolled around, I was pretty established in my career. There was a reputation at the school to maintain, plenty of stuff to keep me busy, and the addition of our third child--another boy, bringing our family to its full allotment. I turned thirty that year, which meant a lot to me at the time. I think the idea of having finished my twenties with every goal checked off save one (being published) was significant. I think this also gave me a bit of an existential crisis, as I didn't really have a lot else to try to do. Not that this year specifically stands out to me, but I should point out that every year, Gayle and I went down to the Utah Shakespeare Festival, both during the summer and again in the fall with the students. We had family vacations of all different sorts, though I'm hard pressed to remember what we did each year. I do know that in the fall of 2013, though, I got a new assignment: Teaching the Shakespeare class. I remember this specifically because I sat with my newest son on my lap, reading Twelfth Night aloud to him as he slept. It was a pleasant experience, to say the least, but it was all in preparation of teaching the Concurrent Enrollment English 1010 class with a fellow teacher at the school. So it was equal parts preparation and pleasure, I suppose. The Shakespeare class was greatly enhanced by what came around at the end of the year and beginning of the next. Over Thanksgiving Break in 2013, I left the country for the first time: I took a short trip to Paris to better prepare for Winterim 2014. This was surprisingly impactful to me, and I rely on my Parisian experience whenever I'm teaching my students about Les Misérables or French history--especially the First World War. There's something profound about being in the places where history happens, and I'm hopeful that someday--not that I've any idea how it'll happen--I can return to Europe and England. 2014 This was the Winterim that has the largest effect on me, followed by the World Wars Tour (2017) and my first Harry Potter (2012). I and a dozen or so students flew out to England and had a literary tour. We visited the big tourist sites (and sights), including the Tower of London, Trafalgar Square, and Piccadilly Circus. But we had special additions: Seeing John Milton's grave, visiting Stratford-upon-Avon and Shakespeare's grave, and the Harry Potter backstage museum in Watford. We saw the Eagle and Child (where Tolkien and Lewis would meet and talk about their fictional worlds that have made such a large difference in my life), Cambridge, Oxford, and many other places that will always live on in my mind as foundational. It was truly a remarkable experience. With that sort of a high, it was difficult to return to the normalcy of 2014. I had finished Writ in Blood sometime between 2013 and 2014, and having spent over three years on a single book, I decided to no longer try to write sprawling behemoths. Instead, I began what is my normal way of working, which is to make a novel that's between 50- and 100,000 words. The first experience I had with that was writing Chelsea Washington and the Pathway of Night, my only attempt at a young adult novel. I'm still pretty happy with it, at least in terms of what I was trying to accomplish, and it really helped set me up with the idea that I can start and end a novel in the same year--in this case, it only took a couple of months. My experiences with quidditch continued apace, and I went to Quidditch World Cup 7 in South Carolina that April. It was wonderful to see so many committed athletes, to try to play better than I had before, and to go through something that I never thought would be a part of my life: Sports. Despite going to England for nearly two weeks, I'm pretty certain we went to Disneyland this year. I know we went at some point around here. Strange to say, it's kind of hard to remember. I do know that it was at the end of this year--right before Thanksgiving, I think--that a couple of important things happened. One, we decided to move out and rent our townhome, thus allowing us to save a bit of money with which to--we hoped--spend on a newer, bigger home. The five of us were feeling a bit cramped. (Also, my calling as Elders' Quorum president had been eating away at me and this would get me out. It's selfish, I know, but that's the truth.) Two, I self-diagnosed myself as having depression. It came about slowly, as I realized that what a lot of people on Twitter were describing was similar to my own experiences. Once I realized that I have some sort of chemical imbalance in my head, a lot of my life started to make more sense. I didn't do anything with this information, per se, but it was an important start. 2015 Winterim this year went to The Lord of the Rings, which involved not only studying the text closely, but having the students try to pull a Tolkien and invent their own languages and secondary worlds. It was pretty fun, and I know that I enjoyed it. Much like the comic book Winterim, however, it hasn't stuck in my mind as strongly as some of the others. This year saw me and a coworker joining forces to tackle the Shakespeare class again, which was necessary because I'm still without a Master's degree. Still, I enjoyed teaching Shakespeare in this way, with the texts being the foundation for the different styles of writing that we were teaching the students. Quidditch World Cup 8 happened (again in South Carolina), which I attended with my team. It was fantastic--the Crimson Elite finished 18th in the nation, which is no small thing, in my view. It also marked the last time that I was to play a tournament with my quidditch friend. I retired from quidditch some time between 2015 and 2016 (I don't remember when, exactly). I don't regret that--it was sweet while it lasted, but it couldn't remain. But that doesn't mean I don't miss it. Living with the in-laws was far from an ideal experience, but it did help the way we'd hoped: We were able to get some money saved up for our own house. While we were basement dwellers, my oldest son turned eight, which meant that he decided to be baptized into the Church. I hadn't really anticipated it happening in my in-laws' ward, but my wife and I bought the townhome in January of 2008--eight or nine months before the housing bubble popped. That slowed down our ability to move on from "Old Place" (as we now call it). That summer was a new chapter (lol, pun) in my writing, as I finally mustered up the courage to ask my wife if I could abandon her for the better part of a week to have a writing retreat. I went in the middle of June and wrote most of what I later called Conduits. I wrote 34,443 words (I made a spreadsheet that kept track of the numbers) and had at last figured out how I can best work: Highly focused, in a single place, where my responsibilities can't reasonably be split in any other direction. Since then, I've had numerous retreats, all of which having done a great deal to help my writing along. Oh, and I also started my annual NaNoWriMo tradition this year, too. 2016 This Winterim was really great for me, as it was a chance to teach about dinosaurs. I teamed up with the biology teacher and we had a great time talking about dinosaurs, having the students come up with their own museum layouts, and learning about the terrible lizards. We even visited St. George for a day or two to see some dinosaur-related things, and we got lost in the Nevada desert with a bus full of kids. We made it home all right in the end, and it was a great adventure for us all. By the time spring rolled around, our renters were ready to move on and so were we. We sold our townhome and, with the equity (not much, but some) from it, we were able to move into a much bigger home. New Place (as we call it) is where we still are, and where I'm writing this now. Our first summer in New Place was a busy one, as we moved in on the fifth of July. We had a lot of settling in to do, as well as adjusting to the new commute we'd have every day. Not only that, but I used a week or so right before we moved to go out to the cabin and have a writing retreat. It's become a staple of my summers, now. By the time November came around, Gayle and I were preparing for another European trip--packing bags, making sure we knew where our passports were, getting schedules settled--and then the election came. It's fair to say that I was much more attentive to the entire thing, and the feelings I had about the election are still raw. We had started listening to the Hamilton soundtrack during our move, and so there was a sense of optimism that I'd been harboring for a few months. When the election came out with Clinton having over three million more votes yet still losing the presidency, I had a really hard time believing that America was on the right track. I've yet to change my mind on that. 2017 The World Wars Tour was supposed to be a really powerful and profound experience--and, to an extent, it was--but there's always an issue with time. We spent far too much of it traveling from one place to another, rather than really soaking in what each place had to offer. I definitely would do the tour differently if I had a chance to try again, but the trip wasn't a disaster by any means. It was, as I've mentioned before, an incredible experience that changed my life. Walking through a death camp, through a battlefield, through a museum of collected artifacts, of talking to a man who saw his own father die on the family room floor because of Nazi shells…it was unforgettable. My Shakespeare classes were changing again--we were doing a "Stage and Page" version of the class now--but other than that, there really weren't a lot of big things going down. My writing continued, with some weekly progress in the form of my creative writing classes, though without any sort of progress on the publication front. I'd finished a couple of other books, though I was still reluctant to edit them in any sort of noticeable way. Then summer came, and I brought my writing group along with for a writing retreat. It was very successful--in that month, I wrote over 77,000 words--and it also brought into the world War Golem, the book that I think is the most prepared for some sort of publication. (Whether or not that ever happens is unknown--doubted by me, believed in by most everyone else.) That summer was also remarkable because it was a Disneyland year. I remember this fully, as I got to visit an old high school friend who lives in California. We had a great trip with the Mouse and my friend, including a visit to Blizzard Entertainment campus and seeing some of the neat things they have there. On the way home, I picked up a copy of It from the Barnes and Noble in St. George. That book, as any frequent reader of my essays knows, has also fundamentally changed my life. 2018 I had originally planned on doing a Shakespeare Winterim, but it fell apart at the last minute and I ended up needing to dust off an old one and resubmit it: Thus I taught, for the first time, a repeat Winterim. Ironically, it was the same one that I'd taught my first year--now almost ten years before. The Video Game Winterim was really enjoyable--we played VR games, students invented their ideas for their own video games, and I blew their little minds with some light theory. I wouldn't mind doing that one again, though not for another year or two, methinks. I'd prefer a fresh crop of students--no double dipping. This year marched along in pretty familiar strokes. We did manage to go to Moab for a family vacation during Spring Break, which was a lot of fun. My second son decided to get baptized. My wife and I kept teaching; I kept doing the things that I'd normally do (going to LTUE in February, for example, as I've done every year since the beginning of the decade--I guess I should've mentioned that in 2010, yeah?). One thing I started doing differently in 2018, though, was writing in my reading journal about the things that I thought about whilst reading a book. I don't do that with all of them, but getting into that habit meant a lot. When summer came around, I decided to reread It, this time with pen in hand. Some of my most honest and profound personal thoughts came because of that experience, which is why I love It. I had my writing retreats--solo (56,000 words) and as a group (33,000 words)--and pushed out War Golems, the sequel (it has a plural on it, see?). I haven't looked at the book since I wrote it, but it's never too far from the back of my mind. I'm still not certain how I feel about it, which is probably a good thing--it's not settled, as it were. One remarkable thing about 2018, however, was that I was accepted to a special training at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. I went there with a coworker and had a fantastic experience. I saw much of the city, the monuments, and the Library, as well as some time in the Folger Shakespeare Library and I got to handle original, 17th century copies of Paradise Lost. It was definitely a highlight of the year and of my whole life, honestly. 2019 That brings us to this year. My Winterim was on fantasy literature, so we got to go to my wife's happy place, Evermore, and I got to enjoy a lot of time in some of my favorite pieces of literature. Both this year's and 2018's Winterims saw me teaching by myself--there wasn't time to pull someone in on last years, and this year's didn't need another set of hands--but I still had a good time. It was not, perhaps, the most incredible experience I've ever had, but not everything has to be. One of my writing group friends suggested that we pool together some cash and rent an Air BnB for a winter retreat, which we did at the end of January. It was successful, despite being shorter than I'm used to, and I finished up a NaNoWriMo book, as well as worked on a novella I've been picking at for over a year. I ended up with just over 15,000 words for the day and a half of work. A surprise came our way when my wife was offered a slightly different teaching job for the fall of 2019. Instead of teaching six classes of eight grade science, she would only teach three classes and spend the rest of the time as a teaching coach. She decided to go through with it, despite her reservations about the new administration at her school. Summer saw us at Yellowstone National Park--which the boys in particular loved; I liked it, despite having conjunctivitis--as well as a couple of writing retreats (75,000 words between the two) getting some of my novella-project taken care of. The new school year started without me teaching creative writing for the first time in almost a decade, as well as a CE class and a Shakespeare class--separate this time. It has been a fairly straightforward year, though the decade has treated me differently than I had ever anticipated. Never would I have thought that I would be a world traveler; not on a teacher's salary--and, strangely enough, I only went because I'm a teacher. My family has blossomed and continues to grow. My oldest now comes to school with me (he's in 7th grade). I have written over 1.7 million words since I got married, with the vast majority of those being written in the last decade. The one great regret--the largest failure of my goals and thoughts about the future--is that I'm still unpublished. I know that everyone has a different path, a different journey toward being published. Knowing that, however, doesn't really take the sting away. I do hope that I can change that…though I don't know how I will. I'm not really sure what the future holds. For now, it's enough to look forward with some hope, some trepidation, some familiarity, some newness. In short, there's a life in front of me. I now only need to go and live it. Goodness gracious. Well, 2019, I'm really okay that you're leaving. What a year… That isn't to say that some great things didn't happen: They did, and I'm proud of some of what I've achieved in the past dozen months. Still, there was a lot of stress, strain, and sadness that came with the passing of time, and seeing those woes recede in the rearview mirror is fine by me. I can only hope that they don't pursue me into the new decade. Goals--Made, Lost, and Won As I was staring down the barrel of 2019, I wanted to try something different in terms of my readings: I wanted to reread all of Shakespeare's works, as well as go about my reading habits differently. I wanted to spend a lot of time reading certain books, with less emphasis on my nonfiction writing. I also hoped to finish writing some shorter books. Let's see how I did on these, shall we? Shakespeare reading: This one will go down as a definitive brick on my road to hell, as it was made with the best of intentions and was promptly glossed over. I honestly blame 1 Henry VI for being a fair slog that I'd just seen the previous year at the Utah Shakespeare Festival. Some of Shakespeare's plays can come up again and again without growing stale. The first part of Henry VI is not one of them. It took me a fair amount of time to read through that one, so though I'm finally in Richard III, it's rather frustrating to be sitting at the end of December and only have six plays finished. Yes, I'm going more slowly because I have pencil in hand as I'm roving through the pages, but that doesn't change the fact that, if given a chance to sit and read some of the Bard, I'll probably find something else to do with my time. This isn't because I don't love Shakespeare--obviously--but because reading his stuff is a lot of work. I usually come home from work having already put forward a lot of work, so the idea of picking up some "light reading" at the end of the day usually means not picking up The Norton Shakespeare. I did acquire quite a bit of Shakespeare-adjacent things, including Tyrant by Stephen Greenblatt, Richard III: England's Most Controversial King by Chris Skidmore, and Shakespeare's First Folio by Dr. Emma Smith. My Milton and Shakespeare library grows apace, much faster than my attention span, lamentably. Reading Anew: I had planned on reading one book per quarter, pencil in hand, with an eye toward becoming a deeper reader--as the previous year I ended up reading quite widely. There's nothing wrong with this goal, save my lack of will in completing it. Persuasion by Jane Austen failed to charm me, and I ended up having a really rough time trying to finish the book. With that taking so much longer than I anticipated, I ended up skipping out on whatever else I had planned--though I have read some more in Somme, which is immensely sad (the book, not the amount I've read)--and going back to my default of reading whatever snatched my fancy for the nonce. The pending Harry Potter Winterim, however, did put a monkey-wrench in my summer plans, as I realized that, by mid-July, I would have to start my reread of the entire Harry Potter series. This I did, reading the first three books in the delightful illustrated version, then the final four in my old Scholastic editions, all of which were carefully marked up from the last time I taught the class (back in January 2012). I finished Deathly Hallows a couple of weeks ago. That six month reread ate into the time I might have otherwise spent on the other books I was planning on reading. I'm disappointed by this failure, if I'm being honest. I wanted to broaden my deep-reading skills, but I was flustered by the first choice going so far awry. I still want to read a philosophy, a piece of fiction on my To Be Read pile, and a history book. I still want to improve my reading base. So I may try the same sort of thing in 2020, though appropriately tweaked. And, while I'm on the subject of what I read, I'm going to throw down the list of completed books right here, mostly as a way to remind myself what I finished this year: There are a couple of books I'm missing, I think, which would put me up to about 75 total titles this year. Some interesting (to me) notes: Numbers 48-52, 69, and 72 are unpublished works. Crimson Hands (number 52) is one that I read from a friend in the writers' group. The others are all books that I wrote over the course of the year (more on that below). Other interesting things include that I have absolutely no memory of what Kids These Days is about; it took me a while to remember what Skeleton Keys is; Mother Tongue is an absolute blank in my mind. While I can conjure a couple of thoughts about most of the things on the list, these are some that I don't even know what to think. I also had duplicate readings--not just the normal ones of Les Misèrables or Pride and Prejudice, which I read every year with my students--of things like Why Write? and It. (In the case of Why Write?, I finished it in January, then again in November.) As a matter of blasé interest, I also kept track of my comics, video games, plays, and movies that I enjoyed this year. 1. Fellowship of the Ring I rather doubt this is an exhaustive list. Also, there are still a few days left of the year, and I need to finish watching the Harry Potter movies. In other words, I've another five titles to add to this. I think it's safe to say that I consumed about 100 titles, though how I counted them is rather arbitrary: I counted individual seasons of Upstart Crow, but didn't include any of the Invader Zim or Animaniacs cartoons that I listened to as I shuttled the kids hither and yon during the year. Still, this gives a good sense of what I'm willing to devote my time to, if nothing else.
Nonfiction Writing: This has absolutely decreased this year. Back in 2018, I wrote over 625,000 words. Between my daily essays and the journaling I did, I estimate that about 395,000 of those words were nonfiction. And, though I've still a couple of days to add to the number, my current (not counting this essay) writing levels are these: Nonfiction = 213,000; fiction = 281,000; total (including editing and worldbuilding) = 520,000 words. I'm almost a hundred thousand words behind where I was yesteryear. My fiction output is upped (281,000 in 2019 versus 230,000 in 2018), but my overall word count is lower. In terms of my goal to write less nonfiction, I definitely achieved that. I missed it, however. I really enjoyed putting my thoughts down for all dozen or so readers to see. I liked having the ability to sound off on whatever it was that ate at me, to say nothing of the satisfaction of having written over 600,000 words in twelve months. That's not a small amount of writing, and I feel like it's definitely been a part of my life that I should reincorporate. However, as I look at those estimated numbers, I remember why I decided to ease off on the essays. I've written over a thousand of these things now, and even more than my NaNoWriMo projects, they are abandoned. I don't reread them--heck, I don't even look them over once before publishing them. They're all rough drafts. And, with the exception of the memoir about Shakespeare, I don't think I mind them being anything more than what they are. I'm okay with them being just sketches that never turn into paintings. They're lumps of slightly formed clay. That's fine. The issue is, I've spent hundreds of thousands of words honing my nonfiction writing. I can slap something together with precious little thought and still have it make a bit of sense. This comes because of all of that practice. If I had my druthers, I would want to see that much commitment to my fiction writing. I want to be a fiction writer, not an essayist (and, having read quite a bit by David Sedaris, I know that the expectation and competition in that genre are far above what I think I can attain). I have to put the time in writing fiction if I want to improve how I write fiction. Which leads me to the last goal I wanted to write about… Fiction Writing: I completed a lot of projects this year. I've talked about them before, but in case you've forgotten, I wanted to write a five-novella book that feeds into a novelette--almost like an Avengers-lite, a way of getting to know five characters well, then see them all come together to solve the bigger problem that they were all experiencing (to one degree or another) in their own way. But I had some lingering issues to take care of. The first was my 2018 NaNoWriMo novel, Theomancy. Of all my NaNoWriMo books, this one is perhaps the only one that I'd like to see again--though when and in what way I don't really know. I tend to write an idea, then, if it didn't work, abandon it in favor of something else. So I don't know quite what to do with Theomancy, save knowing that I did like the world, even if (as always happens) the wheels fell off by the end of the story. Theomancy, however, wasn't finished in November of 2018. I let it hover on the edges of my mind until January was about to start. See, in January 2019, I had a winter writing retreat, during which time I decided to finish the NaNoWriMo novel. So while I technically started Theomancy in 2018, I finished it in January 2019. So that's one project done. I've also been working on my horror novella, Mon Ster, for quite a while--a couple of years, in fact. Through some luck, some moments of worthwhile writing, and continual pressure, I finished it in the summer of 2019. That makes for two completed projects. Last school year, I had the opportunity to write each day for about fifty minutes. The goal was, with the rest of the class, to write 50,000 words on our projects by the end of the semester. I spent a portion of that time channeling a couple of different sets of inspiration: At that time, I was playing Resident Evil 2 remake and enjoying that survival-horror-and-hunt-for-clues kind of story. I had also listened to Mr. Lemoncello's Library with my kids, which was using reading, books, and authors as the fuel for his own puzzle story. Having been disappointed in a recent Shakespeare's Secret, I decided to write my own, Shakespeare-inspired puzzle story. Basically, think of The Da Vinci Code but with Shakespearean clues, and you have Raleigh House. Tonally, I think it could have been a bit tighter, but as a love-letter to the Bard, I think it went pretty well. I worked on that one all of second semester, finishing it sometime before school ended (if I remember correctly). That makes for three projects done. Once the writing season (read: summer) was in full swing, I set down the aforementioned novellas-into-novelette story. This required hours of careful plotting, copious note-making, and plenty of revisions to the outline. It's easily the most complicated project that I've tried to do. In my typical way, I wanted to start my first summer writing retreat by having a clear idea of what to do, but not a single word down in the actual writing. During that retreat, I managed to write the entire first novella--about 32,000 words of it--with a bit of time to spare. This was exciting and unexpected, and meant that, though the entire story still had thousands of words to go, I had accomplished something toward it. I count that as the fourth finished project. With the time off from school, I found a way to weave the second novella into being. It wasn't easy, as writing at home is no problem when it's quiet, but as I have three boys, quiet time isn't particularly abundant. (Maybe that's why I like writing on Sundays so much; the children aren't running in and out, friends aren't over, and the entire day is more sedate.) Nevertheless, I had a goal of finishing Novella Two before approaching the next writing retreat. Days before I left for the family cabin, I finished it. Fifth project: Done. When it was time for my second writing retreat (the first was with my writing group; this one was solo), I managed--despite coming down with conjunctivitis--to write a 29,000 word novella. Thus I completed a sixth project. After that retreat, the reading really kicked in, to say nothing of the family vacations that ate up the remainder of the time. School resumed, my attention fractured, and I spent almost none of my writing time in the Novella Story. (I managed to squeeze out four painful chapters--a third of the project--but haven't touched the thing since the end of September.) However, November came, and with it, the desire to retell Hamlet in a modern setting and without the poetry. I started Elsinore Ranch on 1 November, finished the NaNoWriMo goal of 50,000 words, and left the story incomplete. At the same time, I started an edit of War Golem to go along with my goal to improve my editing skills. That took up a fair portion of November and December, though I did manage to finish that edit before Christmas arrived. I call this one my seventh writing project of the year. That's not the end, though. Despite having left my retelling alone through the majority of December, just this past week saw me again picking away at it. I conjoined some chapters, cut out some of what I thought I wanted, and focused on getting it done. With little fanfare, I finished Elsinore Ranch yesterday (28 December). It took a lot--and I can't say that it's all been worth it--but I did complete eight projects in 2019. Yes, you can quibble about the merits of short stories, novellas, and novels, but I feel like each one of these projects is different enough to appreciate them the way I did here. The quality of the stories varies widely, as do the subjects and characters. Still, finishing this many works in a single year is nothing to be ashamed of. My word count may be smaller than before, but I think that I've done something remarkable. Next Year's Goals For that, I don't know. I could perhaps postulate some things, but this essay is already creeping up on 3,200 words, which is far too long for a cold winter's day. I'll end it thus: Just as this year marks a highwater mark for project completion, I'm hopeful that this next decade will see--somehow--a change in my writing career as a whole. I can, at least, hope. It's no secret that It has been one of the most important books I've read in recent years. I first picked it up in the summer of 2017 and have read it each summer since. The reason why is complicated, and though I think I understand why It matters so much to me, I always feel my explanation is lacking. I've written a good 40 pages by hand about It as I've done my last two read-throughs, so I don't know if I really want to retread that ground here. Suffice to say, It moved me in ways that literature almost never does, and certainly not horror.
Lest the complications aren't clear, I should point out that, normally, I try to avoid books saturated in violence, swearing, and explicit sex (though I've more than a fair share that break from that norm). It's something that I've often thought about, but I'm no closer to understanding the permissiveness of my base impulses when it comes to literature or video games, but if it's in cinema I'm instantly disinclined to watch the thing. Example: I thought The Joker looked…like a movie I wouldn't really want to see, probably (I don't much care for the Joker as a character, especially stripped of the context that comes through the dichotomy of Batman); when I learned that it was rated R, I decided it wasn't for me, based simply on the rating. And then there's It. The first film came out in 2017 (that was one of the reasons, incidentally, that I started reading the book, since I couldn't see the allure of a horror movie and the trailer of It gave me nightmares for three days), but it took some time before I finally decided to watch the movie. I was, as a matter of fact, pretty impressed with that film. The score was fantastic (I love the theme song for its mixture of whimsical lightheartedness and menace; I think it's brilliant), except for all of the screechy violin parts that are part and parcel of a scary movie, I guess. The CGI wasn't particularly frightening, but the practical stuff--especially Bill Skarsgård's wonderfully rendered Pennywise--was enjoyable and the story remained surprisingly faithful to the source material. There are abundant questionable things about that book that they skipped over--in part due to time, and in part because of that whole part in the sewer is just…nah. (Oh, and I'm going to be talking about plot points that are nagging at me from here on out, so if you're interested in the films or book and would prefer not to have spoilers, then that's cool; I won't hold it against you if you close the tab and do something more uplifting than read about a horror movie.) However, though there were plenty of changes from the book that I was kind of disappointed in, the turning of Bev's character into a damsel in distress for the six boys to rush off to save was…disappointing. Like, majorly disappointing. Let me step back a bit: One of the things that the first It movie absolutely nailed bang on was the chemistry among the friends. The way that the Losers' Club fuses--and why they come together--is one of the primary reasons that I love the book. I've written about this before elsewhere, but it came crashing in on me (again; this time, it was whilst reading Les Misérables) that there's no shortcut to getting genuine buy-in from an audience: We simply have to spend time with the characters if we're going to care about them. They can be foulmouthed and neurotic (Eddie, anyone?), but so long as we can start to understand where they're coming from, we can go along with their story. By showing us a character's past, traumas, difficulties, and resolve--to make us care about the characters--we have to be able to see the character fully. And, as far as writing goes, this sort of experience only has weight if the book does, too. (This is another problem for a would-be professional storyteller like myself, as aspiring authors have even worse odds of making a debut if the book is too long--a topic that I'll have to return to at another time.) In the case of It, the book allows the reader to spend a summer with the self-proclaimed Losers' Club, to get to know them and their trials in intimate (and sometimes excruciating) detail. This gives a lot of heft to the kids' section of the story. The movie allows this to happen because the chemistry of the actors is spot on, and I honestly just thrilled to watch them go through the experience. It: Chapter One captures--as best it can, all things considered--the reason why I'm drawn to It (the book). But It: Chapter 2…is lacking that. Oh, yeah, the characters are still there--and the casting choices for some of those adults was impeccable (Eddie, anyone?)--and they're going through really similar sorts of things. But the adult cast didn't feel…genuine. That's probably too strong a word. They did pretty good jobs, for the most part, of feeling like grown-up versions of the kids… …until it got to Ben. I know that Ben Hanscom goes through a major physical change with puberty and all that--he goes from the pudgy kid to a buff guy over the course of nearly three decades. It wasn't that young Ben and old Ben don't really look at all alike. He just…didn't fit. Every time I saw him in one of the shots, I thought, Yeah, he doesn't fit in here. His relationship with the others feels the least connected, too--and that comes from narrative decisions. Ben's time on screen is significantly lower than everyone else's (I thought, anyway), and that was fine with me. I'll have to chew on it some more, but I didn't like Ben--at all. And that's sad, because I really like his character. The quiet, shy bookworm who feels like retreating into his own head is the best way to spend a summer? Yeah, that sounds about right. Here's the thing: I remember reading somewhere that Flynn Wolfhard, one of the main characters in Netflix's Stranger Things and Richie Tozier in It, was having a hard time getting his work with It: Chapter 2 done and Stranger Things. I'm not sure of the details, but the point was there was some conflict. I remember thinking, That's weird. He's not really in the new one…is he? After all, though the book snaps between the present and the past with a fairly regular groove, the films don't take the same approach (just like the miniseries, as I understand it, which I own but haven't watched yet). Wisely, the split the story into the two distinct chunks that allow the audience to see first what the kids did, then what the adults did, to stop Pennywise the Dancing Clown. However, It: Chapter 2 requires a bit of retconning--which is funny because it shouldn't be necessary for a movie that's based on a single novel to have to do that sort of thing--to get some of the memories that the adults had lost back into place. Therefore, there were a lot of moments where the child actors needed to be back on set. Every time the Losers' Club was together again, I was happier. Those were the moments that I paid to see--the kids. When I watched Chapter 1, I felt it was too short because I wanted to spend more time with the Losers' Club. (Ironically, the second movie is almost three hours long, which means that the two It movies are actually longer than the TV miniseries that's so beloved by so many.) I wanted to see them build the clubhouse, to smoke themselves into the distant past, to relax and be kids together. It was really great to see that happening on screen, so getting another (albeit weaker) dose of that action in the flashbacks was appreciated. Don't get me wrong, though: There were some great nuances for the grownups, too. Perhaps the biggest one was having Richie crush on Eddie. I thought this was a good move, especially considering the way the movie opens with the death of Adrian Melon (in both the film and movie, he's beaten almost to death by homophobes before being eaten, in part, by Pennywise, if you recall). Sure, Richie's straight in the book, but the way that he and Eddie bounce off of each other, the way they tease each other, has a flirtatious undertone that really serves the film well. It also introduces one of the really important themes of the book--that Pennywise is only a monster; it is the hatred in humanity that is the real horror--and though the film doesn't try to put too much emphasis on the point, the ending with Richie on the bridge, carving in the letter E, brought a thematic closure that felt natural and fitting. There's a bit of a running gag throughout the movie about how Bill Denborough's books all have unsatisfying endings that felt a bit meta. This is a problem (I guess; they say write what you know, after all) with some of King's fiction: He frequently has writers as main characters. Bill ends up being King's stand-in for a lot of the story. (He has Bill stand up for commercial fiction, for example. In the film, to drive this point home even more, Stephen King cameos as the pawnshop broker who sells Bill Silver for three hundred bucks.) And the ending of It has some problems. There are a lot of problems, actually, and the movie sidesteps the biggest ones and lands in others, instead. Essentially, the question of how to stop a town from being haunted is one that the book and film are asking, yet the answer ends up being somewhat underwhelming. (Hey, at least there isn't the Turtle in the films.) King writes with such a hyperrealism that it becomes somewhat jarring when the mystical takes place. Pennywise operates off of a soft magic system that also follows Brandon Sanderson's Zeroeth Law, save it being applicable to horror: Err on the side of SCARY. So Pennywise has certain limits that we as readers can't anticipate--which, of course, heightens the fear--but it also means that when it comes time to end the story, Sanderson's First Law (scroll up on the link above) comes into play: We don't know the magic system well enough to understand how they're defeating It. Honestly, the film does a slightly better job of establishing the rules that will be needed to defeat Pennywise, if only because cinematic storytelling has ways of imbuing significance in objects (like the tomahawk that, I accurately predicted, would end up saving the day against Harry Bowers) or phrases more pointedly than novels tend to. The result of this is that, though there are some unexpected detours, we get to the same kind of ending that I rather kind of expected: They have to rip out the clown's heart. Okay, so the spider thing is less kitschy in the 2019 film than the '90s-era made-for-TV miniseries, and it honestly looks a lot better to me than what I imagined as reading the book, if only because having It just be a giant spider is a bit of a let-down. Seeing a multi-legged Pennywise, complete with his frightening makeup as he moves around the inner sanctum was a satisfying experience. The movie decided not to blow up Derry--which very well could have been a financial decision, rather than anything else--and I wonder at that. Derry is a character in and of itself--not as potent as a character-location as, say, Hogwarts in the Harry Potter books, but at least as important a character-location as the river is in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn--and letting Mike drive away from it, the spirit of It exorcized at last, is fitting…but also kind of disappointing. I think there's a lot to be said about how Derry can't really exist as it did when Pennywise is no more, because Pennywise is Derry. The town is more than just its haunting (hunting) grounds, it's a manifestation of the evil that he represents. And maybe there's something else about how Derry feeds Pennywise…and Pennywise feeds Derry. The first part is pretty straight forward--Derry's children (usually) are being fed to the monster under the ground. That's a feeding. But it also has the implications that it's the hatred and fear--the inhumanity of the citizens of Derry--who respond to Pennywise, too. They're human, yes, but some actually get possessed by Pennywise through the course of the book, allowed in, as it were, because they like what they get from the evil that he emanates. The second idea, however, is the concept that good can come from evil. This isn't something that's particularly explicit in the text, and it's explored even less in the second film, but the adult Losers are anything but. They're all successful, mega-rich people who've built a fantastic life outside of Derry--forgotten, unwanted Derry. The only Loser who doesn't have a seven-digit bank account is Mike…the one who stayed in Derry for his adult life. None of them has kids (a point that's brought up but isn't really explained by the ending of the book). It's almost like the evil that they confronted in Pennywise when they were eleven years old had the benefit of putting them onto a path that would led to immense success later on--though at a cost. I don't know about this concept--that from evil comes good--but it's certainly everywhere in my life. Not just in a horrorbook (King's words), but in Paradise Lost and my own religion. So maybe that's some of what is so difficult for me when I grapple with It. My wife most definitely doesn't understand what I get out of this book. The movie was gruesome and had so much more profanity than I was expecting (though, in all honesty, if a monster dancing clown was trying to eat me, I think I probably wouldn't be using my squeaker language; still…it was excessive); it had shocking and uncomfortable moments, as well as head-scratching ones (what was with the music change when Eddie was getting puked on? So weird, right?) that make the film unsettling for other reasons. In other words, it (and It) goes very much against my normal expectations for what I want in the fiction I consume. I'm not a complete prude, but I have some standards…almost all of which are flouted in this franchise. It is, to put it in yet another way, not something I ought to seek after. And yet. Yet I keep returning. I know there are more reasons, some of which are so intense and personal that I don't know if I'll ever write them anywhere other than my personal notebooks (which, in no small part, have become treasures of my soul that would be one of the things that I would try to save if the house were burning and I could only grab one thing). But the fact I return stems, I think, from the way that this story--this grotesquery--touches on things I've chosen to believe in as being of supernal source. I'm not saying God inspired It by any stretch of the imagination, but I think that there is more to the book than a sewer-lurking clown. (I talked about another angle of this same issue here.) Did the two films manage to capture it? Some. Not all. And that's good, because that means there are reasons to approach the story in the three ways available (film, miniseries, or book) and try to glean as much as possible from that variety. As far as the movies go, I can think of a couple of ways that they could have tightened the story a bit more, given more context for the decisions of the characters. On the whole, though, I think they do a pretty good job with it. I found out about Megan Phelps-Roper's departure from the Westboro Baptist Church when a video clip interview made its way across my timeline on Twitter. I poked about a bit and found out that Megan (I'm going to use her first name instead of her last because it's shorter) left the Westboro Baptist Church a handful of years ago. Now she's written a memoir and doing the whole book-tour thing, which piqued my interest. While I try to buy books as often as possible, sometimes I snag stuff from the library, which also shows support for writers. I put her book, Unfollow: A Memoir of Loving and Leaving the Westboro Baptist Church, on hold and promptly forgot about it. When the text notification let me know it was there, however, I made it a point to pick it up as soon as possible. With all of the other things that I have on my plate--including Les Miserables (for the twelfth time) and Why Write? (for the second time…this year) among others--this was actually the best way for me to read the book: I knew I had to return it, so I couldn't pull a typical-Steve and buy the book so that it could gather dust at my house instead of Barnes and Noble.
I'm glad I read it, though. It really is a heartbreaking and inspiring story that traces Megan's involvement since she was a little kid with her family's church. If you aren't familiar with the Westboro Baptist Church…well, you're pretty lucky, then. This is the church that protests the funerals of soldiers, victims of mass-shootings, and other high-profile people. They tote around colorful protest signs that say things like "Thank God for IEDs" and, their number-one-jam, "God Hates F*gs". They use harsh, offensive language, manipulating press coverage to get themselves more publicity, though the "inside look" that Megan gives us is much more nuanced than this summary. And that's what I really liked about the book. It gave me a glimpse into a life that I had already judged--and, on occasion, was even right about--being one of a type of religious depravity. But there's more to what's going on than hatemongering--which they are absolutely doing. Some of what I've long heard about the church had to do with the late Fred Phelps, the founder of the Westboro Baptist Church and most prominent firebrand. His fiery sermons invoked hellfire, wrath, destruction, and condemnation on any who weren't the elect of God (e.g. his church and its handful of members, almost all of whom are family). His doctrines focused primarily on the collective sin that America has committed by allowing the LGBTQ+ community to have human rights; death was the ultimate punishment, in his mind, drawing attention to that sin during a community's most vulnerable moments (that is, at the funerals for victims of sundry events) was the best way to demonstrate the immorality of the country. From a theological point of view, his thinking was pretty messed up, though Megan points out that, as they were a Calvinist-inspired denomination, they didn't have to worry about trying to convince anyone of what they were preaching, as everyone was already heaven- or (more likely) hell-bound. It doesn't really behoove me to unpack their doctrine, in part because my Bible game is pretty weak, and also because that seems like a waste of time. I'm more interested in seeing the ways that Megan navigated her youth. She's about my age--within one or two years, give or take--which makes it easier to tap into some of the things that she had to deal with, including the way the internet changed everything in the late '90s. However, Megan had a couple of experiences that stood out to me: One was the cocksure way of approaching any problem. "We're right and they're wrong" was a catchall. Biblical explanations pasted over massive problems--while Megan doesn't report of any specific physical abuse from her grandfather, it's clear that he beat Megan's mother (his daughter) and his other children. When explaining this part of the story, Megan did what she does throughout--tosses in a verse of scripture, in italics, that would be used as the hermeneutics for the behavior. In the case of child abuse, she quotes Proverbs 23:13, which reads (in the King James Version of the Bible, which is the one both Mormons and Westboro Baptists use), "Withhold not correction from the child: for if thou beatest him with the rod, he shall not die." I don't think I have to explain--I hope I don't have to explain--why this was so startling to me. What really got to me was that I, as a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, have a distinctly different relationship with the Bible than other denominations (probably one of the larger reasons why I'm not in the "Mormons are Christians, too!" camp, but I've already talked about that). More than that, however, I don't worry about fitting every moment of my life into a biblical narrative, which is clearly an impulse that Megan grew up with. If something bothers my heart, I don't turn to the Good Book to try to assuage what's bothering me--and it really doesn't take too much to find a biblical verse to support any specific idea that one might wish. That isn't to say, however, that I'm not also in a tradition that is cocksure about any and every question. Even if you take one that's non-eschatological (though, if we poke at it long enough, it could be eschatological) as the concept of evolution, some Mormons will assert that the official word is that evolution isn't true. Others, including my wife, will point out that there actually isn't any official stance on the topic (which is correct; the Church doesn't go either way), though there are plenty of opinions on the matter, even from high authorities in the church. The point of this example, however, is to show how "We don't know" can be a bit of a surprise answer when the theology is supposed to be one that "has all of the answers". My own understanding of that reality has been one of the necessary steps I've had to take in how I treat my belief system. Megan had a similar issue, and in the end she decided to abandon her church--which also meant that she had to abandon the family she deeply loved. She apologized for the hateful messages she'd been sharing for the majority of her life, and in many ways sought to make amends. This was hard to read about, not because I think she did the wrong thing (she didn't; leaving her church was the only logical thing for her to do in her situation), but because it's so familiar. Members of the LDS Church are taught to care deeply about families, and a family member who doesn't worship the way the rest of the family does can very often be ostracized. There are plenty of heartbreaking stories about kids who are transgender, gay, atheist, or somehow non-conforming to Church principles being exiled from family institutions. In Megan's case, she left her church after she'd already graduated from college*, making her able to land on her feet, to a large degree. Her process of self-discovery takes up the last third or so of the book, and her musings over what she'd learned, how she had to unlearn it, and what she did to try to make things right is a beautiful component of the text. On the whole, I would really recommend this book. It's thoughtful and thought provoking. I don't always agree with some of her conclusions--particularly the argument, voiced in the final pages, that a marketplace of ideas is the panacea for the poisoned discourse that we suffer through daily (though that's a different topic for a different day)--but Unfollow is a remarkable book. I would say that, of the two, Educated struck closer to home, as its theology more closely mirrors mine, but both memoirs of women leaving the theologies of their youths are worth pursuing. --- * This was one of the surprises about the Westboro Baptist Church: It is a well-schooled institution. Many of the highest members are lawyers, and they always sent their kids to school (Megan picketed her own high school graduation, then went inside to get her diploma), and they are a far cry from the homeschooling version of fundamentalism that I saw in Educated. The other large surprise was that Fred Phelps was instrumental in advancing civil rights for Blacks in America back in the day. That he could view racism (though not antisemitism: he had a lot of spleen for Jews) as a genuine evil but not homophobia is one of the most extraordinary examples of cognitive dissonance I've ever seen. Many years ago, I read The Great Gatsby. Which class and for what purpose is mysterious to me--maybe it was college, maybe it was high school. I honestly can't remember. I do recall thinking that The Great Gatsby was not my favorite thing. In fact, I couldn't really see why people liked it so much.
A year or two later, I reckon, I was asked to teach a junior Socratic Seminar class, which included reading The Great Gatsby. I don't have many memories of that experience, either, but I know that we stretched it out over nine days (because I still have my sticky notes with the schedule penciled into it) and surely talked about the green light on the other end of the harbor, or the eyes of Dr. Eckleburg. Had I the inclination, I could dig out my notes from the time and try to recreate what I did, assuming I was interested in wasting my time. It's been over a decade, and while I'm teaching The Great Gatsby now to my Concurrent Enrollment class, we're interested in gleaning something else from the text. And that's been hard. I wrote a few pages in my reading journal, but in the interest of thinking about something else, I decided to dedicate page-space to other pursuits. Still, there's always something more to say about The Great Gatsby, which is one of its indications of merit, and so I thought I'd toss out one idea that's specifically stuck in my mind's craw: The way in which heat is used to underscore bad ideas. This is not an idea that comes about simply from the text. Back in high school, I read Albert Camus' The Stranger, and I remember my teacher, Miss Bodily, emphasizing the way that Camus describes the temperature on the day that the narrator (whose name I can't remember) kills a man. The existentialism of that text is much clearer, but I think both The Great Gatsby and The Stranger utilize heat at crucial dramatic moments. Camus' novel is a generation later, written in the throes of the Second World War, while Fitzgerald's masterpiece is (in my mind) a direct response to the hedonism-as-solution response to the survival of the First. Still, The Great Gatsby's use of heat stood out to me enough that I was able to dredge up that similarity from my pre-9/11 life to now. That tells me that there may be something there. The heatwave is discussed in detail throughout chapter VII, particularly on page 115. The conductor on the train says, "'Hot! […] Some weather!...Hot!...Hot!...Hot!...Is it hot enough for you? Is it hot? Is it…?'", and Narrator Nick notes that the "commutation ticket came back to me with a dark stain from his hand. […] In this heat, every extra gesture was an affront to the common store of life". No one is willing to move, no one can handle the heat. It's in this milieu that we see the dissolving of the façades that have been carefully constructed--and, to a degree, believed in by those of the story, if only because they don't want to consider the alternative--around the entire Gatsby/Buchannan party. Almost as if their lies to each other can't handle the strain of the heat, Tom confronts Gatsby, who retorts all sorts of lies and truths. The "outing" of the affair between Gatsby and Daisy comes as a revelation to none (save, perhaps, Tom, who may or may not have actually wanted his suspicions confirmed). The metaphor we might think of as the heat of the adulterous passion--if that's even an appropriate way to describe it--turns into the literal heat of the day, where the cooling presence of mint julips, spiked with alcoholic heat, does little to douse the ardor of the proclaimed loves and wounded prides. This heat is disorienting; the text itself, mirage-like, starts to yield to the temperature: "'The master's body!' roared the butler into the mouthpiece. 'I'm sorry, madame, but we can't furnish it--it's far too hot to touch this noon!' What he really said was: 'Yes . . . yes . . . I'll see'" (115). What is actually being said? Can we trust either version that Nick gives? (My instinct says that Nick is an unreliable narrator in an unreliable narrative, which leads me to think that we rather ought not to give too much authority to Nick.) This disorientation leads toward uncomfortable conversations, to angry driving, to casual slaughters. It breaks the image of glamor that Gatsby, in particular, has striven for so long to maintain. If The Great Gatsby is a cautionary tale about the dissolution of an American Dream founded on hedonism, then I find it telling that the moment where America cracked is when the most amount of heat was applied. Our own political rhetoric and clamor is getting hotter than it's been for a quite some time--I listened to the proceedings in the House of Representatives as they began the process of moving forward with additional impeachment hearings, and there was much heat in the voices of those who'd defend the president via nitpicking procedure, much smoke in the representatives who sought only to hold up their Constitutional duty. If The Great Gatsby is a cautionary tale about the dissolution of an American Dream, then heat is the catalyst that brings about the fracture. What kind of heat can America truly take? Back in college, I had to take a handful of American literature as part of my English major. I didn't have any defined taste when it came to the large swaths of literature--British or American--and so, when I first took one of the classes, it was fine. Whatever. A class that wasn't math or science but just about reading and talking about books? No problem.
Part way through my survey course of American lit, though, I started resisting the texts that we had to read. There was some gnarly anthology that weighed down my backpack--it was one of the few books I sold back, mostly because I wanted the cash for my mission--and I distinctly remember not being too thrilled by what was inside of it. For the most part, the literature was from the 1800s, which is one of my least favorite times in the past seven hundred years*, particularly in American letters. At the time of college, if it wasn't fantasy related, I was scarcely interested, though science fiction was still a large fascination to me. And the 1800s--with the notable exception of Moby-Dick, which I didn't study until I was an upperclassman--saw, in my view, a lot of less-than-impressive writers whom we admire because there's no one else. Yes, yes, there are exceptions throughout, but I'm not kidding when I say that very little of American literature really scintillated me. As the years marched on and I took more classes about literature from both sides of the pond, I realized that I very much preferred the British approach to writing than the American. As I had yet to fall in love with Shakespeare, I can only read this as the result of enjoying the variety** of British writing that America has consistently failed to match. During an advanced section on American literature, I realized something: Almost all of America's masterpieces deal with adultery, murder, or both. And while Shakespeare does the same thing for a lot of his plays, he has other things that attract his attention. But few American novels do. Of Mice and Men? Both. The Awakening? Adultery. The Great Gatsby? Both. As I Lay Dying? Both. Pretty much anything by Hemingway? Both in spades. And I'm not saying that those topics aren't fit for literature. In fact, literature is a really important part of our understanding of those topics. It's just that there is more to the human experience than these two ideas. Because so much of American letters orbit around these topics, I quickly became fatigued with the "classics of American literature", if only because they told the same story but with a different skin. I didn't really feel a strong pull to explore the Great American Novels after a while, as I felt like the other important questions about being an American were left untouched. This is probably one of the greatest reasons why I don't teach American history, which my school has broken up as the curriculum for juniors and seniors. I stick with the sophomores because then I don't have to pretend that I like Hemingway (though, for my money, I'd say Steinbeck is the best of the top-tier American writers, followed by Fitzgerald; I've no interest in Faulkner, and the transcendentalists simply irritate me, so Whitman and his ilk have no allure). In my current course, I get to talk about Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, Hugo, Austen, Achebe, and some minor writers in between. All of that is much more interesting to my heart and soul than the tradition of my own country. I don't know how deeply to read into this. I've been frustrated and disillusioned with America for a long time--pretty much once I became politically aware, I realized that there was a massive disconnect between what I'd been led to believe about the country and how it really behaved. The relearning of this American mind was not a pleasant experience. When it comes to other countries, I'm more comfortable giving a balanced look--what they did right, what they did wrong; when they perpetuated violence and inhumanity and when they resisted it--without the attachment of having felt one way about the place and then learned how I was wrong. That detachment (if that's even the right word--it isn't, but it's all I've got right now) allows me to love the art that's been made without it necessarily saying something about the country whence it came. And maybe that's the biggest thing about American literature: Regardless of its topic (adultery, murder, both…or the rare "Other" option), it's always about America, too. I could say that it's the narcissistic vein that runs deeply which provides this impulse, but that's too superficial***. Everyone looks for themselves first in the yearbook, right? With two oceanic moats and only two neighbors to worry about, America has never had a strong reason to see others in the yearbook of history. We've always been quite content with our version, thank you very much, and that's reflected in our literature. While the great export of the American mythos in the form of superheroes is currently the pop culture mainstay, even that is so distinctly American that it's almost embarrassing. Just look at the first Iron Man movie to see how we view ourselves--embodied in Tony Stark--and you'll start to see that we're still telling ourselves the same stories over and over again. I guess it's just a story I got sick of a little bit faster than others. --- * The 1300s has Dante; the 1400s the Wars of the Roses and other Shakespeare-discussed eras; the 1500s has the Tudors and, of course, Shakespeare himself; the 1600s have Milton, plus the English Civil War; then there's the dearth of interesting to me 1700s and 1800s, with a couple of highlights thrown in--some revolutions and Jane Austen; then the 1900s have some fairly intriguing wars and, hey, that's the century in which I was born. Not coincidentally, it is this segment of time that I teach, so it's also the times I understand the best; pre-1300 anything is fuzzy to me. ** I guess it's worth pointing out that my taste heads toward British literature for a lot of reasons. They, too, fixate on certain themes--power structures and obedience are, unsurprisingly, more important to many of the kingdom's preoccupation over the centuries--and that, too, can be tiring. If I had to pick a favorite, it would be British, but that, I think, is a matter of taste. While that should go without saying, I figured I'd say it just to ensure there's no misreading of what I mean. *** Easily as superficial as saying that American literature is only concerned with adultery, murder, or both, perhaps--is it possible?--even more superficial. |
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