Die Trying

Mutt Ploughman on two recent films about musicians.

I’ve never been delusional enough to believe that I would become a successful writer. I have also never tried to hide the fact that doing so was something I aspired to anyway. If you’ll pardon the semi-spicy verbiage, why the hell wouldn’t I? What can you possibly expect to gain without aiming high? Better yet, what do you have to lose by it? One of my favorite expressions about my own literary career is that I have always intended to die trying. You may or may not ever read one of my books. But you definitely will not hear me say I am giving up.

The music business has been a sometime fascination of mine, and the subject for some of my writings that actually have appeared in print. I probably don’t need to say why I relate to struggling or aspiring musicians. The ones that conquer all the odds on the way to massive success are very inspiring to me. The ones that struggle long and hard without ever getting there are sometimes even more so.

The Irish film director Jim Sheridan knows all about overcoming the odds. He also knows about tragedy and struggle. He is the creative force behind some of my all-time favorite films. The Boxer, a love story set in Northern Ireland, is in my personal top five. The central performance of another Jim Sheridan film, My Left Foot, delivered by the incomparable Daniel Day-Lewis, is possibly the greatest I have ever seen on film. And one single shot from his beautiful and nuanced film In America – a close-up of a baby’s eye fluttering open for the first time – accounts for what may be the most moving moment I’ve ever experienced in a theater.

Sheridan is an extremely talented director and writer who as a knack for telling stories about individual souls struggling against long odds in a way that moves the audience while staying clear – I’m not exactly sure how – of sentimentality. Most of the stories he tells are either set in, or have something to do with, his native Ireland and the plight of its citizenry. Whether his characters are laboring to eke out a living on their own home turf, suffering in an English prison, or competing for a slice of the pie in the United States, they are unmistakably Irish, both in accent and in temperament. Jim Sheridan’s characters waver; they fall; but they do not stay down. It’s no accident that one of his finest films concerns a hard-fisted fighter with an oversized heart.

This celluloid history is one of the things that made his 2005 picture Get Rich or Die Tryin’, based loosely on the biography of its star, the famous and notorious rapper Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson, so striking. The idea of a rumpled, gray-haired Irishman giving direction to a muscular, street-savvy rap artist with a million-dollar smile and zero acting credentials was a fascination to cinephiles, and, I suspect, to insiders in the hip-hop community. Sheridan had made some amazing movies, to be sure, but 50 Cent was a world away from Day-Lewis, whose courageous performances made My Left Foot, In the Name of the Father and The Boxer so believable. How would the grizzled director who rose from urban poverty in Dublin make a screen presence out of the former drug dealer-turned-rapper who rose from the same in the Bronx?

As it turns out, he couldn’t. Sheridan isn’t God, after all. But even in the bottom line-driven world of cinema, there is such a thing as a noble failure. I would place Get Rich into such a category. The final product lacks a couple of things that would have been necessary to make the film more memorable.

A credible central performance, for one. As the orphaned Marcus, Jackson looks intense and compelling. He possesses a kind of natural charisma. But in the film, he is unable to shoulder the emotional weight of the story, even if it is based largely on some details from his own life – or maybe because of that. His face remains mostly impassive, no matter what the moment calls for; one becomes far too suspicious that a single tear on Jackson’s cheek during a particularly pointed scene with his childhood muse-turned adult love interest (a remarkable Joy Bryant) might have been added with an eye-dropper before cameras rolled. Another famous urban wordsmith, Eminem (who discovered 50 Cent, the rapper), was able to deliver a performance in a similarly-themed 2002 film set in Detroit, Curtis Hanson’s 8 Mile, within which the viewer could sense depth, turmoil, and a life-changing determination all roiling beneath the surface of his storm-tossed heart, to borrow a phrase from James Joyce. Jackson is a stone that even Sheridan’s gripping emotional sensibility couldn’t wring blood from.

The mention of 8 Mile introduces another quibble with Sheridan’s film: you’ve seen it before. There’s no disputing that 50 Cent’s personal story is remarkable, given that he survived being shot nine times in 2000, made it out of the drug culture, and was able to elevate himself in the post-Tupac universe. The re-enactment of his shooting in the film, though under somewhat different circumstances, is well-staged and horrifying, even though the audience knows it’s coming. But you feel as though you’ve seen many of the other sequences in other films. The triumphant ascendancy of the rapper onto a stage a la Hanson’s picture; ultra-violent thugs making aggressive power plays a la New Jack City or Scarface; a montage of revenge killings a la every Martin Scorcese mafia picture. Hell, there’s even a torturous payback scene that would please fans of the Saw franchise.

Much like another film that worked extra hard to spin gold from arguably straw-like talent (rather successfully), Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire, the real star here is on the other side of the camera. Credit Jim Sheridan for recognizing and attempting to illuminate for us the shared humanity between poor Irish families struggling collectively for their national dignity and motherless children victimized by the drug underworld in New York City. In every frame of Get Rich or Die Tryin’, one can feel the emotional investment the director has made in telling this story. This is one DVD where watching the “making of” feature is a must, because it gives the viewer a chance to observe Sheridan guiding 50 Cent through his old Dublin neighborhood, choreographing a nasty knife-fight in a jail with his own physical stunt work, even instructing the rapper on how to express himself more effectively in the recording studio! In spite of the film’s debatable artistic success, the uncommon collaboration that produced it is special.

Get Rich or Die Tryin’ may not have made an actor out of Curtis Jackson. But the man made it out of his own story alive. And he was smart enough to put the telling of it into the hands of a visionary filmmaker who, while perhaps looking like a fish out of water on the streets he shot it on, clearly could hear and feel the steady pulse hammering between and around them, and in his film he put his finger right on to it.

*

On the subject of tapping into a steady beat, there’s another kind of pulsing rhythm that has been marking time for decades now, and that – contrary to popular convention – still bangs just as hard as ever. I’m talking about the brain-throttling pulse of heavy metal. And nobody knows that better than the subject of the second film I wish to discuss here – the two founding members of a band called Anvil, singer/guitarist Steve “Lips” Kudlow and drummer Robb Reiner, who met one another at age 14 and are now in their 50s.

Anvil: The Story of Anvil, first released in 2008 and directed by newcomer and über-fan Sacha Gervasi, is a compelling and surprisingly effective documentary about nothing less than the unwavering pursuit of a lifelong dream. It helps if you go into this film with an appreciation for the under-sung cultural legacy of heavy metal music, which peaked in the 1980s. I happen to be of the correct gender (i.e., male) and the appropriate age (I was a teenager during that glorious decade) to have acquired as much.

I have written before [hyperlink to http://www.americanchronicle.com/articles/view/99248] about my personal history as a trooper in the metal militia, and can report with all honesty that I have always resisted the inclination to denounce this heritage. What fun would that be? Maintaining one’s embrace on heavy metal requires one to keep a stranglehold on the last vestiges of juvenile bluster. My suspicion is that this is easier to accomplish for men than women. But I have not worked both sides of that particular aisle.

Another way to express the operative principle at work here is to deploy the motto from those old KISS concert t-shirts: IF IT'S TOO LOUD, YOU'RE TOO OLD.

Anvil, the documentary, opens with 1982 concert footage from an outdoor metal festival in Japan. Do not adjust your sets: people actually looked and acted like that once upon a time. The film points out that every single band participating in that show went on to sell millions of records – with one glaring exception. The viewer is introduced to Anvil doing what they did then, and have continued to do ever since, no matter who is or is not listening. The song “Metal on Metal” is performed in all its chord-crunching glory, and it becomes the musical and thematic centerpiece, illogically, to the entire film.

From there, we are transported to freezing Ontario, Canada, the hometown and current stomping grounds of Kudlow and Reiner. Kudlow works diligently delivering food to disadvantaged children as a day job, and in between stops he waxes rather hopefully about his undying rock and roll dreams. An inherent humanity and generosity of spirit shines through Kudlow’s foul-mouthed and simplistic monologues about what he has accomplished and what he still hopes to do. Reiner is revealed to be a less verbal and perhaps slightly more jaded brother in arms to Kudlow’s sometimes manic personality. But one eventually leaves the film having no doubt that “brother” is the appropriate term for both men.

Throughout the entire first half of this earnest and lovingly-crafted documentary, one’s gut instinct is to laugh at all the calamities and misfortunes that constantly saddle these aging rockers. Or, if a viewer is slightly more mean-spirited, to hurl adjectives such as “lame” and “pathetic” at the men. We witness the latest incarnation of the band, with its Spinal Tap-like turnstile of members (hardly the only nod towards the classic “mockumentary” This is Spinal Tap directed by Rob – one “b” – Reiner to appear here), survive a disastrous tour of Europe in the hands of an inept manager. We wonder how long these full-grown men with spouses and children (in Kudlow’s case) can, or should, continue to fool themselves.

I said earlier that it helps to have an appreciation of metal music, but it is far from necessary for Anvil to rock your heart. The reason for this is simple, and perceiving it is the filmmakers’ triumph. The more you witness the degrading circumstances these men battle against, and observe the way they respond to them, the more you understand that Anvil – the film, and maybe even the band itself – is not really about heavy metal music at all. At each setback they encounter, we see Kudlow physically slump as though he has taken a pounding. But his attitude towards his failures is far from a defeated one. He expresses gratitude for those who helped him try, and renews his dedication to keep going – every time.

One realizes that, all along, Kudlow has never asked for much. All he wants is an opportunity to seize the happiness he has been yearning for his entire life, and he understands that the only way he can do that is to build something worthwhile with the tools he’s been given. He’s not looking for a handout. By the time we reach the end of the film, where Anvil takes one more crack at this elusive hope in an unexpected venue, we find ourselves caring for these men in a way we never would have believed possible. You may tear up before this film is over – no kidding.

After viewing Anvil: The Story of Anvil, one inevitably recalls the fact that all of us have been given certain gifts by a generous Creator. Are we as grateful for our own as “Lips” Kudlow is for his?

Or, I could summarize all of the preceding thoughts in another way. Here is a documentary that makes just about everyone who sees it aspire to be a little more like the lead singer of Anvil, an 80s metal bastion that flamed out long ago in a blaze of obscurity. If that doesn’t say something about the accomplishment of this film, I don’t know if I have other words that can.

What the #@&$ is Going on Here???

An interview with Mutt Ploughman.

Mutt, rumor has it that you have abandoned the novel you’ve been working on for almost 3 years. What the #@&$ is going on here???
I wish I knew. Do you know?

Is that your answer??
Nah. The answer is, that rumor is not true. But it is kind of “tabled” for the moment. I haven’t worked on for many weeks. Months, in fact.

What happened?
I’m not exactly sure, but I have some half-formed theories. It was a conscious decision on my part to set it on the shelf for a while. But I made that choice reluctantly. The fact is I had been working hard on a seventh chapter, and ended up just crashing into a brick wall in the middle of it. I didn’t worry too much about that initially, because that has happened with many of the other chapters, and I was able to muscle through it. And I think I probably could have made my way through it in this case, too, and completed some form of a seventh chapter. But for whatever reason, this time doing that didn’t feel right to me. I felt like I was forcing it too hard and the result would bear the marks of that. Although I had written six previous chapters and had a pretty good idea of where the whole thing was going, it got very hard for me to continue. I felt like I had lost something this time around, for some reason.

What was lost, in your opinion? Having had a few months to think it over.
It’s hard to say. But it’s a gut feeling that something went missing in doing that work. I thought about that question specifically for a while. Finally I realized it was my personal struggles interfering too much with my writing life. 2009 has been a very challenging year for me and my family. I have felt more stress this year than in any other year I’ve experienced as an adult. I’ve been struggling on many levels. And it finally dawned on me that my whole life was in too unstable a place to be in the right frame of mind to dedicate myself to this book. I was not able to focus as hard on it as it takes to do it right. Once I realized that I felt the only thing I could honorably do was set it aside.

What sort of things happened to you this year?
I prefer to answer that question in a general way. My wife and I experienced a personal loss early in the year, the kind that marks you forever. We have had a series of financial struggles this year, as many Americans have. And I have had a major health setback. Not the fatal kind, fortunately. It’s treatable. Ripples from all of these things, however, have made the seas rather choppy in my house all year long.

That is a lot to deal with. Are you disappointed with what has happened with your novel project?
Yes, to some degree. I had high hopes to cross the halfway point this year and really make strides towards getting the first draft done. It’s hard any time you fall short of your ambitions. But I have plenty of experience with that, as do most of us. But I believe God is in control of my life, not me. He may have intentions for me that are more important to what I aspire to in my own mind.

Given all this though, it sounds like the book is pretty much dead. I’ll ask you again: is it?
It is not dead. It is on the shelf. I am getting distance from it. I hope to go back to it. My intention is to return to it and finish what I started.

When?
I don’t know.

Do you think your father would be disappointed to know where things stand? It has a lot to do with his life.
Not really. It’s not his novel. There’s nothing he can do about it. For the most part, my Dad isn’t very sentimental. I think he’d want me to complete the novel, but I doubt very much he would be upset to know that I’m having difficulty. He was a scientist, he’s very black-and-white. Some things work out and some things don’t, and sometimes you just have to try again later.

What about your writing life in general? Is that dead?
Absolutely not. If my novel is not dead yet, my writing life is not dead yet. If my writing life is dead, check my pulse, because that means I am dead myself. I will always be writing or thinking about writing – working up to writing – something, until my mind fails. I know that much about myself by now.

Which of those are you doing now then? Writing something, or working up to it?
Both, actually. I wrote one short story a few months back called “Job 4:18” about a delusional angel who crashes to earth, literally, and attempts to enforce God’s will his own way. I sent it around to a couple places and collected the usual rejections. Then I took several weeks to work on an essay I was really itching to write, a critical piece about my relationship to the music of the singer and pianist Tori Amos called “Me and a Girl”. That took me a long time to get right. I got really into it. After that, for several weeks, late summer heading into early fall, I didn’t know what to do next. I had a few very loose story ideas. I thought about writing a book review. But then I decided to begin a short story called “A Chemical Episode”, and something curious happened. Although the very first glimmer of this idea didn’t reveal as much to me, I realized almost as soon as I started it that I was writing about characters I’d written about before. And it became clear immediately who they were – a big surprise for me since I had absolutely no intention of revisiting previous work. It was strange, but interesting too.

Who were/are the characters?
The Meegan twins, Tommy and Terry, from a collection of unpublished, autobiographical stories I wrote earlier this decade called A Son of the Suburbs. Mainly Terry – that is, my altar ego. But most of the stories were written about him anyway, with Tommy having more of a side role, especially towards the end of the collection.

Isn’t that a “diss” to your brother?
Of course it’s not a “diss”. [Looking around.] Who is this idiot!?.......[Turns attention back to interviewer.] Autobiographical stories are about yourself, by definition. If he wants Tommy to be the main character, he can write his own book of stories! And my brother understands that.

Why did you decide to bring back these characters?
As I indicated before, it was almost involuntary. But maybe it was similar to the way many of the previous stories in A Son of the Suburbs had come about – I was remembering various incidents and anecdotes, things that happened to me or to people I knew when I was growing up. I wanted to find some way to work these things into stories that, hopefully, would go a certain distance towards capturing the essence of my childhood, my upbringing. In this case, I had an idea to write a story about an incident that had occurred when I was a teenager or maybe just into my 20s. There was this weird chemical plant down the street from the house I lived in in New Jersey, and one hot summer night, in the small hours, it just blew sky-high. We never really found out why. There was some kind of bad reaction or some accident. There was a massive explosion that shook the house itself and woke up whoever was asleep. For a few days they evacuated our entire neighborhood; my family scattered. We slept with friends. I never knew where my parents went. It was such a bizarre thing, and all these years later, it still felt like something to try to capture in a story. But at the time I had the idea, several weeks ago, I didn’t connect it at all to the earlier stories I had written. After all, I wrote them anywhere from five to six years ago, and it had been some time since I had even thought about them. But as soon as I started the story, I realized I was back into that same fictional world. So I made the story about the Terry Meegan and the Meegan family, one more time.

What happened with the previous stories? A Son of the Suburbs?
They were just sitting on the shelf with all the other works of fiction I have written.

Did you try to get any of them published?
I only tried to get one published. It is called “The Races”. It’s one of my all-time favorite of my stories, if I can get away with saying that. Duke thinks it’s my finest short story. I might debate that, but I think it’s one of my best. I sent it to several places, but it was always rejected. The others didn’t really stand alone very well, and they probably weren’t as well done as that one story.

What do you mean by “the others didn’t really stand alone very well”?
Well, Suburbs was written as a series of connected stories. In fact, I call it “A Novel in Stories” on the manuscript title page. Most of the stories build off of information the reader has from the previous one. But “The Races” could stand with just a few tweaks.

Could the new story stand on its own?
I’m not sure yet. I hope it can. I haven’t gotten very far in it yet, but I am slowly working on it. I feel no pressure to rush it. Why whould there be any? I have a lot of fun saying to people that a fiction writer never really has too much to lose. No one wants to read your dumbass stories! There’s a kind of liberation in that. You’re free to try anything.

Where does the new story stand timeline-wise in relation to the previous stories?
The stories collected in Suburbs take place between 1978 and 1994. The most recent story, “A Chemical Episode”, jumps from around 1996 or so to 2009, the present day, and back again. It goes back and forth between Terry Meegan’s early 20s and his later 30s.

But it’s been six years since you wrote the last of the previous stories?
Well, I wrote the last one around 2005, so it’s been a good four years at least, probably more like five.

How do you feel about the stories in A Son of the Suburbs today?
The answer to that question is interesting. If you’d asked me as recently as three months ago I might have said they meant well, but were pretty weak. But recently I’ve had a feeling about them – maybe this started working on me subconsciously before I even attempted the story I’m writing now – and I wondered what it would be like to take a look at them again. Normally I really cringe through every time I make the ill-fated decision to read my older stuff. I always conclude that I understand why they were never published! Right now I am re-reading the entire collection in preparation to continue on with “A Chemical Episode”. And I have to say I believe in these stories. I think what I tried to do holds up pretty well even under scrutiny. They’re not written very well, but I see where I can make improvements to the writing itself. But the concept is not all that terrible, I think. What I wanted to do was create a series of stories that captured the general essence of my childhood. I remember having a kind of two-fold purpose: first, to work in the mode of fiction about “things I knew”, as the old adage for young writers goes; second, to create a record in stories about my life as a child. And I think I did that. The more time goes on, of course, the further away our way of living in suburban New Jersey in the 1980s and early 90s drifts into the past. I know how important it has been in my life to have some idea of what my own father’s childhood was like. At the time I began these stories, I had one daughter, and I was very motivated by the simple notion of capturing my youth in some kind of record so that she could one day read it and understand a little of what my life was like. After all – who else could do the job? But I also wanted to write stories specifically, and so I created characters that were based on people I knew, but let the stories kind of go in whatever direction they were going to go in. I wove in elements and anecdotes from my life, but I think I created a place and a central narrative of its own, and it all comes to a head fairly successfully, I think, in the last and titular story, “A Son of the Suburbs”. Now, it took me two and a half years to write the stories and most of a third to edit it down to a second draft. And by the time I got through with all that I felt very tired of them and sort of burned out. Having “The Races” rejected a few times instilled the usual doubts about the quality of the entire enterprise. So I just set them on the shelf, much like what I am doing with Only the Dying, my ailing novel. Starting into “A Chemical Episode” made me pull out the old manuscript, and as I read through them, I see a lot to wince about, but I think the stories have some life. Plus they have made me laugh.

Will you try to do anything more with A Son of the Suburbs?
Remains to be seen. I have thought about it a lot lately. Is there anything here which can be salvaged and reborn? The answer could be yes. But for now I am re-reading them as their own collection and thinking about the current story.

What can you say about “A Chemical Episode”? What’s it about?
It’s about darkness. It will be one of my darkest stories. It begins in the middle of the night and it will end in the middle of another night, in the middle of a much different, and even darker, sort of night – metaphorically speaking now. It’s a fictional work that will reflect very much the last year or so of my life, and that is a conscious decision. It’s not about wallowing in difficult times, rather it’s intended to be a kind of therapy for them. I drop a bomb on the reader in the first or second paragraph that would only make sense to those who have read the stories in A Son of the Suburbs, and it concerns only a minor character from the previous work, but it’s enough to provide a pretty good clue as to the tone of what will follow.

Given the subject matter you just described, are you anxious to continue to work on the story? Sounds like your year has been hard as it is.
I'm not really anxious, and I’ll tell you why. For me it’s not about going back to anything that has been hard and sticking my nose in it again. It’s about processing it, thinking about it, deciding what it means today and what it means for my future. In a way, it’s about facing it again and deciding how to go on. And I must say that although it has been a tough year, it could have been so much worse. It’s not that I suffered a great deal. At the same time, I did suffer a little bit, and, worse, I brought some suffering to others. I have to pick up from that, learn some lessons, ask God to see me through it and, more importantly, teach me through it. So this story to me goes a way towards taking that process on.

Good luck on the story, and thanks for taking the time.
You got it buddy.

Blame it on the Government Bureaucrats!

Thoughts on Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

Not much ambition for this post other than to offer some commentary on having just completed the fifth book of the celebrated Harry Potter series of novels by J.K. Rowling, entitled Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. I have made no secret on this blog of my over-arching ambition to read both this series and Stephen King’s “Dark Tower” series and some day write about both. I also provided some general thoughts on the Harry Potter series at the midway point last August after finishing the fourth novel, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.

Although most people know it by now (but not all – Duke wouldn’t, for example), this installment in Rowling’s ridiculously profitable and widely-read series returns the young wizard of the title, a.ka. “The Boy Who Lived”, to Hogwarts School of Wizardry & Witchcraft for a fifth year of studies – and the imminent scourge of “O.W.L.” exams that confronts all fifth year students at the end of the school calendar. But as usual, Harry can’t wait to get back, because of the mistreatment he suffers during his summers living at the home of his Muggle-born guardians, the Dursleys, whose disdain for Harry apparently is limitless. To this point Rowling’s novels usually have begun with a somewhat madcap and Keystone Cop-like intro circulating around this family unit that involves a form of misfortunate befalling either themselves or their guests and then fixing Harry with 100% of the blame, only to have him affect a zany escape back to school.

This novel is different, however, and darker, and this much is foreshadowed by the opening episode in Phoenix. Dudley Dursley, Harry’s cousin, is again involved, but in this case a surprising collision of the magical and Muggle puts Harry and Dudley into grave danger, and Harry can only think to worm his way out using magic – something strictly forbidden for Hogwarts’ students in the Muggle world. (Note: in the film version, directed by David Yates in 2007, this scene is spectacular.) Even though Harry saves Dudley’s life, he gets into hot water with both the Dursleys AND the Ministry of Magic, who learn quickly of his crime and threaten to expel him. He is summoned to a “hearing” early in the novel where he must attempt to exonerate himself. Just one more weight to pile on Harry’s shoulders as he drags his baggage, literally and figuratively, into a challenging fifth year at Hogwarts.

Once back at Hogwarts, the customary moving pieces to Rowling’s grandiose plot mechanisms sort of lumber into life, and the whole weighty chuckwagon of a novel begins to churn forward dutifully. Questions abound, as they always do: Albus Dumbledore, the headmaster and Harry’s mentor, has reconvened an ancient group called The Order of the Phoenix to help determine ways to resist the workings of Lord Voldemort, or “You Know Who” – but why is he keeping a steady distance from Harry, even through his displinary hearing? Why does Sirius Black, Harry’s godfather, have to stay in hiding from the Ministry of Magic? For that matter, why does the Ministry itself refuse to believe Harry’s eye-witness account of Voldemort’s return from the conclusion of Goblet of Fire? Why is Hagrid no where to be found for half the novel, and when he does finally come back, why does he always show up covered with cuts & bruises? And, perhaps less importantly, does the pretty young wizard girl Cho Chang really “fancy” Harry Potter or not? (Adolescent drama, so poignant in the rear view mirror but so agonizing when it’s still in front of your grill, comes into play here; but somewhat half-heartedly, in my opinion.)

All of these questions are answered in due time, of course, and if there is anything Rowling does specialize in, it’s tying all the disparate pieces of her labyrinthine plots back together in an orderly and satisfying fashion. Her plotting skills and pacing continue to impress me; she knows how to keep readers interested and fully immersed in her world. It is her most obvious gift, and it’s one that she seems to have become more aware of and in full command of as her series grew longer.

The prime mover in terms of plot lines in Order of the Phoenix, however, is the introduction of a new character, Professor Dolores Umbridge, a hand-picked operative of the Ministry of Magic who is thrust upon Hogwarts as the latest Defense Against the Dark Arts instructor. The Ministry, as noted earlier, doesn’t accept the fact that Voldemort hasn’t returned, and thus wants to squelch the entire idea as a theatrical rumor. This means muzzling Harry Potter, and doing everything possible to keep him from succeeding in much of anything – from playing Quidditch to leading an unathorized band of schoolmates in his own Dark Arts lessons, based on his growing catalogue of experience against Death Eaters, Dementors, and even Voldemort himself. Harry endures cruel and painful detention sessions with Professor Umbridge, the embarrassment of expulsion from his dorm house’s Quidditch team, and a nefarious press campaign that turns many students against him.

Meanwhile, Umbridge gleefully smiles and cackles her way through a one-woman campaign to turn Hogwarts into a Ministry-run government outfit worthy of Orwell’s 1984, posting directives and declarations restricting students from this or that freedom, and getting herself into position to be appointed “Hogwarts High Inquisitor” first, and, finally, Headmistress - supplanting Dumbledore, who seems only too ready to step down on a questionable violation.

With Umbridge, Rowling lays it on thickly as she does with all her villains. You can say what you want about Stephen King, but he knows villains; when he creates one, he lets his imagination run wild and avoids most stereotypes. But the concept of having a Ministry implant at the school is intriguing, and a subtly entertaining way of introducing some more sophisticated realities to younger readers. After all, these intricacies do exist. In adult life, of course, there are plenty of examples to be found of how high office can corrupt people, and how the wasteful and bureaucratic structures of governments can incite paranoia, cause no end of conflict, and snuff out the promise of the individual. It just makes sense that in a fictional world as large and fully-imagined as Rowling’s wizarding universe there would be, somewhere, a government-type behemoth ready and willing to come in and screw things up.

Meanwhile, while I have already blogged previously on how Rowling’s villains aren’t particularly well drawn and don’t seem to even have the writer’s full attention – her sympathies are so firmly set with her young hero that it’s as though she doesn’t have the time or energy to make villains like Draco Malfoy, Snape, or Umbridge any more sympathetic or even worthy of our consideration – her ongoing development of Harry Potter himself is successful and engrossing in this novel. Harry is plagued with dreams that seem to connect him mentally, almost spiritually, with Voldemort, quickly ushering the reader towards the already-apparent conclusion that only one or the other can make it out alive when all is said and done. Not both. The reader doesn’t mind that the ultimate showdown has been telegraphed since Book One – the way Rowling builds tension slowly for this inevitable collision makes the series more exciting.

Also, in this volume and in this series in general, the author comes up with just enough interesting and original ideas to keep her story fresh and feeling unique, even though it leans heavily on almost every conceivable folklore tale and saga known to humankind. In this case, the climactic scene takes place in an eerie labyrinth deep in the bowels of the Ministry itself, lit with millions of small glass globes, each containing ancient prophecies – an entire vault full of mystery and secrets. It may be illusory, but it’s a neat way to create the impression of a long, old, history of magic and legends. In a thrilling battle with wands and magic against a troop of Death Eaters, glass shattering and ghostly secrets escaping everywhere, one particular prophecy involving Harry is revealed, and in this way we find some of the pieces of the puzzle that have been missing from the very beginning. The encounter in the Ministry also claims the life of one of Harry’s closest friends and ushers the teen wizard into more pain and confusion, not to be dissipated before the end of this installment.

Rowling’s utter mastery over her creation remains the most satisfying aspect of the series. It is hard to think of any epic of this size and scope where the creator seemed to have a more thorough understanding of the entire macro-economical picture. Imagine Dickens’ voluminous novels, but all tied together in one seamless and engrossing saga, and you’ll have an idea of the scale of her feat. Even Stephen King – in fact I would say particularly in the Dark Tower series – often seems to be flying by the seat of his pants. You can’t say that for Jo Rowling. She knows exactly what she is doing, and she inserts different pieces into her construction at the exact correct times and in the right places. She’s a storyteller by nature, and although this isn't the case everywhere, the simple fact that the Harry Potter saga is a wonderful story can overcome most of the series’ shortcomings. It not only does what we ask stories to do – lift us out of our own circumstances, entertain us for a while, and reveal to us our own nature. It also will do what the greatest stories can, and we ourselves cannot, at least not in this world.

That is to say, it will endure.

From "Me and a Girl: My Abnormal Attraction to the Music of Tori Amos"

Below is an excerpt from a new essay about my relationship to the music of Tori Amos.

My only way out is to go so far in…. (1997-2002)

After failing to connect with Boys for Pele, my relationship with Tori went on a hiatus that lasted nearly five years. I cannot say I thought too much about it; that’s what happens. Musicians, artists of any type, come and go throughout most of our lives.

And yet during this time, in our own distinct and contrary ways, both Tori and I would take extensive inward journeys, while deliberately broadening our external horizons; we would discover and throw ourselves into true love; and, eventually, we would both arrive at a new understanding of life, the world and, to some degree, our own individual places in it. I’m not saying that my own life is comparable to Tori’s in any other aspect. But I am saying that during the five-year period when my life was only rarely brushed by her music, both of us, in some ways, were undertaking analogous journeys.

For me personally, the years before the new millennium were about turning away from the kind of life I had lived in the nineties and setting the stage for a round of massive changes. From 1998-2001, I worked by day in an office building that stood literally in the shadow of New York City’s World Trade Center; by night I rode the subway uptown to Greenwich Village, where I attended an M.F.A. program for writers. To take seminars on literature and participate in writing workshops with New York artist-types was about as far from Fort Benning, Georgia, as my own resolve and resources were able to carry me. It was the fulfillment of a dream to go to graduate school and train in a craft I desperately wanted to learn well.

By the time those twin towers fell down in September 2001, I had met a woman, fallen in love with her, and became engaged. The month before the attacks, I was transferred to an office in New Jersey, so I was not in Manhattan on that awful day. (Oddly enough, Tori was, in meetings with music executives.) But for me part of the aftermath of that national tragedy became a conscious choice to move forward into love and the family relationships that I had always hoped to experience. In 2002, my wife and I got married, and our journey into parenthood quickly followed.

As for Tori, it turns out she was interested in parenthood as well, but her path towards it was longer and more difficult. Some time earlier, she had become romantically involved with sound engineer Mark Hawley, with whom she’d worked on Boys for Pele; the two married in 1998. As most Tori fans know, the subsequent events in her personal life that would have the most obvious impact on her art were her three miscarriages, occurring between 1996 and 2000. These personal tragedies – the pain of which my wife and I would later learn for ourselves – seemed to have a profound impact on Tori’s psyche, and possibly her soul. Signs of the struggle could be discerned throughout her music of the period, perhaps nowhere as directly as in her 1998 single “Spark”: “She’s convinced she could hold back a glacier/But she couldn’t keep baby alive.” Anyone who has ever lost a child to miscarriage, fathers included, can connect to the bottomless loss underneath these words.

All the while, however, Tori continued to bring new things to life creatively. The recordings I missed during these years catalogue not only an extraordinary emotional and spiritual evolution, but also a seismic shift in her musical direction. Her three major releases of the period – 1998’s from the choirgirl hotel, 1999’s To Venus and Back, and 2001’s cover album Strange Little Girls – opened up entirely new vistas in Tori’s soundscape, mainly by expanding her palette from just a woman with a piano/keyboard/harpsichord to a collaboration with a full band, including the exceptionally talented rhythm section of Jon Evans (bass) and Matt Chamberlain (drums). Tori had become confident enough in her abilities to hold her own recording and touring with other talented musicians, while at the same time wise enough to understand that she needed other committed professionals to continue to mine her creativity.

When I had occasion to come back to these albums after my relationship with Tori was rekindled, for me the most striking aspect of this prolific period was the apparent catharsis Tori seemed to have been going through of a moral and/or spiritual nature. This is a struggle that, in my view, seems to continue. Rightfully so; for who ever decisively concludes this battle?

Since Tori had always known, or thought she knew, who her enemies were, she launched new offensives against God and Man, distancing herself once again from both. However, there were greater indications of doubt than before. For every signature Tori-swipe at the sacred, like “If the Divine master plan is perfection/Maybe next I’ll give Judas a try” (“Spark”), one could find several other horses of a different color:


We scream in cathedrals/Why can’t it be beautiful/Why does there/Gotta be a sacrifice? (“Iieee”)

I can’t find those church bells/That played when you died (“Playboy Mommy”)

Is that what I taste/In your supernova juice/You know it’s true I’m part of you (“Bliss”)

My fear is greater than my faith (“Suede”)

My only way out is to go/So far in (“Spring Haze”)


It would be over-reaching to make the case that Tori dropped her defenses and returned to religion on the evidence of these lines. But it would also be silly to deny the evidence here of a person unsure of her footing. These voices are hardly the same one that felt the need to let God know He didn’t always “come through”, and to ask if He required the ministrations of a mortal woman in order to buck up.

A possible counter-argument can be found in Tori’s own words about the various personas she brings to life: “That’s the most misunderstood thing about my work: where or even whether I am in the songs. I don’t think anybody really and truly knows what character I am in a given composition”[i]. As the artist, Tori has a right to say this about her creative and intellectual property, but it feels like a copout.

Either way, the more self-assured, angrier Tori would return on later albums, with every arrow in her quiver sharpened. If anything, the difficulties and tragedies of her experiences in the pre-millennial years would strengthen her convictions against organized religion and patriarchal society. Marriage and, later, motherhood would provide her, as it does for many of us, with deeper insights into human experience, and a broader – in her case, more maternal – perspective on both interior and exterior concerns. After all of her struggles with infertility, Amos and her husband welcomed their daughter, Natashya, in September 2000, an event which, naturally, reverberated in her future work to a profound degree.

What I find interesting about the period is that while Tori seemed to have been experiencing the highest degree of confusion, I was the furthest away from her music in my own life. I find myself imagining how the music she was producing in this period would have informed my own journeys while they were happening. But I had been put off by some of her earlier, slash-and-burn methods, and I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to suggest that Tori’s uncertainty would have further contributed to my own.

[i] Amos, Tori, and Powers, Ann; Tori Amos: Piece by Piece, Broadway Books, 2005. p. 144

The Audacity of Mutt

A Reading Experiment for 2010

Ever since I came up with the idea of the Annual Dickensfest, reading one Charles Dickens novel late in the year, every year, since 2000, I’ve been trying to come up with other challenges to propose to myself as a reader of literature. It may seem nerdy, and I guess it is, but on the other hand, when you’re passionate about doing something well, and you work at it long and hard, eventually you develop a desire to challenge yourself anew with the passage of time. You don’t get better at anything without raising expectations of and for yourself. I know that is how I feel about writing. Why should that not be the case also with reading? What’s the matter with wanting to become a better reader? In some ways, both Duke and I have been trying to do this for our entire lives.

But I like the challenges to have a point, not just to be challenges for the sake of having challenges. Dickensfest has a clear purpose, in fact several of them: 1) to become well read on Charles Dickens’ entire catalogue, indispensible for writers of fiction; 2) to continually observe and in fact study the art of writing novels from one of the greatest practitioners of that art ever to draw breath; 3) to celebrate the novel in general, and become immersed in long, rich, dramatic stories, of which Dickens was the great craftsman; 4) to learn about the past; 5) to entertain myself, which Charles Dickens was also always game for.

A while ago, I blogged about another reading challenge I was toying with imposing upon myself, which ran counter to the way I usually go about my reading. The idea of consuming a number of works in a row by one particular author, whose work merited the time commitment and the intense scrutiny, was appealing to me. Yet I never managed to even attempt my own challenge this year; I was too backed up with other books I wanted to read, and maybe was even a little intimidated by taking on so much of my author of choice, Herman Melville. Interestingly, though, Duke liked the idea so much he took it as his own, and not only that, he actually had the chutzpah to choose William Faulkner. And on top of that, whereas I had only entertained the idea, he actually delivered on it! If you don’t believe me, read his outstanding post on the four William Faulkner novels he read end-upon-end, and you’ve read Faulkner, you know this was no mean feat. An amazing reading accomplishment by Duke.

Partially inspired by that feat, and driven by some other motivators, I have now come up with a far more ambitious reading experiment that I will attempt to execute in order to make up for my earlier failure to complete the Melville exercise. In 2008 I was talking about trying to read anywhere from 4-5 Herman Melville titles in a row in order to bone up on his work and to increase my appreciation for a true American master whose books were grossly underappreciated in his own time. For 2010, what I want to try to do is take that idea and blow it up into a Ahab-like quest: to read books by, or about, Herman Melville EXCLUSIVELY throughout the entire year.

Am I nuts??? Probably! Normally I dislike reading even two books by the same author in a row, but to read only one author for an entire year (or about that author – criticism, biography, etc.) is downright insane, and I am sure I will have a tough time completing the journey. I get impatient to read other things even when I am reading one large book. So why do it?

Part of it is for the sheer challenge – so you might say some of the reason is for challenge’s own sake. Another reason, however, is that Melville is the kind of writer whose work merits close attention and whose genius has only become clear with the passing of time. After all, his best known work, Moby-Dick, furnished the entire world with a universally-recognized metaphor for anyone who pursues something obsessively. Not everyone has read the novel, but almost everyone with half an education knows what it means to have a personal “white whale”, or what it means to refer to an individual on an obssessive journey as a kind of “Ahab”. What a legacy for a writer to have earned. Many of Melville’s other works were visionary, well ahead of their time: he published a fantastical story in 1855 that basically pre-visualized robots ("The Bell-Tower"); his novel The Confidence-Man is a precursor to any story about a con-artist or huckster.

Other reasons I have for doing this are admittedly more abstract. But I got to thinking about where I am going to be in life in that year, 2010. I was born in 1970, and I started writing seriously in 1990. This means 2010 is my 40th year of living and my 20th year of “serious” writing, if any of my writing can be considered serious by anyone apart from myself. It’s an interesting time to do something different as a means of reflecting on where I am, how I got here, where I am going. And I find as I approach these two milestones that I feel a bit like a Melville character. I’m in the middle of some long struggles. I haven’t had the successes I wanted to achieve in some areas, and the true prize of my life journey, from the standpoint of my own vocational ambitions, remains elusive. I keep going after the dream of writing stories and books like it’s the only thing that matters, even though it’s obviously not the only thing that matters; it may not, in the end, matter at all.

In short, even though I am no where near his level of genius creatively, I feel a kinship with Melville. He struggled his entire life with debt, underappreciation, his own artistic visions, his desire to be understood. I feel that way about my own life so far. I’m not saying it hasn’t been happy. A great deal of it has, and I know I am a very lucky man. Nor am I saying my artistic aspirations trump other matters, such as family or spiritual ones, for example. But I am saying that my artistic life is incomplete at best. Melville seems like the right person to study for an aspiring writer arriving at this point and with these things to say about his own accomplishments.

Lastly, because this is how my mind works, to take on an ambitious reading project for me opens a door, however small, to the possibility of an ambitious writing project for the future. I would like to try to take on this challenge of reading Melville for an entire year, but it wouldn’t be me if I didn’t record my thoughts about it along the way, with the distinct possibility of someday gathering these thoughts together and writing about them. In other words, there may be a book in here somewhere. The idea of spending a year with Melville exclusively and then writing a book about that experience is not too far-fetched (see The Year of Living Biblically or Julie & Julia for just two examples), and may make for a very interesting and therapeutic experience for the writer and even for a potential reading audience. One never knows how far one’s ideas can go unless you go after them, follow them, see where they lead. It's true in life as much as it is in creative writing. I even have a pretty good title for the potential book in my mind, but I will save that for a later day.

So that’s my grand ambition, and I am going to try to stick to it. So far the only Melville books I have read are Moby-Dick and Typee, and I’ve read some of his short stories such as the aforementioned “Bell-Tower” and the famous “story of Wall Street”, as Melville himself called it, “Bartleby, the Scrivener”. I have copies of Mardi, Redburn, and Billy Budd/The Piazza Tales waiting for me at home, as well as my copy of Moby-Dick, which I have long aspired to re-read. I also have a critical work entitled Melville: His World and His Work by Andrew Delbanco, and wouldn’t mind reading a full biography too if there’s one readily available. Other books I plan to read during the year but do not have copies of are White-Jacket, Omoo, Pierre or The Ambiguities, and The Confidence-Man.

I’m not sure how this project will effect other projects I have going, such as the writing of my novel, or the annual Dickensfest reading project, but time will tell. Normally I read somewhere around 40-50 books each year, so how am I going to fill up an entire year with just Melville’s work? Well, his books are big, and not very easy to get through, and then there’s criticism, and the idea of reading some books twice. So we’ll see how it all goes.

For now I just wanted to float the idea out there, if you will. Later on, after it goes underneath and runs deep for a while, I will have to set out after it on a vessel and chase it until I defeat it. Or it defeats me.

Our Shared Secrets: Encounters with the Short Fiction of Raymond Carver

Duke Altum here - bursting out from under six feet of dirt like Lemmy Kilmeister on his chopper!!

[If you don’t get that reference, that means you didn’t grow up in the glorious heyday of hair-and-leather metal bands and MTV’s The Headbanger’s Ball, so you wouldn’t remember Motorhead’s famous “Killed by Death” video. And I feel sorry for you.]

Anyway… imagine this: you are actually reading a post on this blog that was NOT written by Mutt Ploughman, the stalwart and hard-working writer who has singlehandedly kept The Secret Thread going while I have been engaged in pressing family and work matters. I want to thank Mutt now not only for keeping these pages fresh and interesting, but for his support of myself and my family while my daughter has been laid up following her cleft palate repair surgery. I am happy to report she is healing slowly but surely, and we are finally starting to get back into a more normal sleeping and eating routine with her. It’s not every day you wake up with one mouth and go to sleep with a totally reconstructed one! But she has pulled through remarkably well as only an 11-month-old, with no preconceptions or illusions, can.

Well. Even though I have been very conspicuously absent from these pages lately, the reading never, ever stops, as Mutt implied below. It’s a ravenous thirst that won’t be quenched. You simply make the time, one way or another – you don’t have a choice. In the past few months there have been many books I’ve wanted to write about here, most notably two novels written by Nobel laureates from very different parts of the world that I read back to back (Rabindranath Tagore’s The Home and the World and Jose Saramago’s The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis – both, in an interesting coincidence, unconventional love stories set against the backdrop of emerging social and political revolution). But for this post I would like to offer some personal reflections on the short fiction of Raymond Carver, having just finished his powerful collection Cathedral.

I’d read a little bit of Carver here and there before, and by that I mean three or four stories at the most. So I really didn’t know much about his work beyond his well-known reputation for being a master of clean prose and brief, powerful short stories. He’s one of the leading figures in the so-called “Dirty Realism” school of writing, which seems to include writers known primarily for their short stories and for an economic, spare prose style: Hemingway, Tobias Woff, Richard Ford and others. What that’s supposed to tell you though is basically what it told me about his work: absolutely nothing. Except not to expect florid, lengthy, Thomas Wolfean sentences and descriptions.

Mutt has written extensively and eloquently here on TST over the past year or so about the nature of the short story, and attempted a critique on its current state in popular literary magazines. Both he and I have admitted a tendency to enjoy a more lyrical, descriptive writing style than you get from writers like those listed above. However, the more I read short stories, the more I have come to appreciate a more economic, terse style – and I think for me that comes from my fascination with the craft of poetry.

One of the things that intrigues me the most about poets is their uncanny ability to find just the right combination of words to capture what is essentially ineffable, and to do so without wasting even one. This is immensely difficult but when done well, delivers a knockout blow of awe and beauty akin to any masterwork of visual art.

Have you ever stood before a painting and thought to yourself, “I wouldn’t change one stroke of this thing, it’s perfect”? I was immensely fortunate once to visit Paris briefly, and I can distinctly remember standing before one of Monet’s paintings – Notre Dame cathedral reflected in the Seine River, awash with rose sunlight – and having that very thought. Not one brush-stroke or color highlight seemed out of place, and the overall affect was dazzling.

[Side note: I realize this is going to sound like ridiculous hyperbole, but I recently had more or less that same sensation – a genuine moment of awe – while re-watching for the third time the exquisite film Ratatouille with my sons… strangely enough the setting here is also Paris… but when I see some of the scenes in that film and pay attention to the details, my jaw literally hangs open at how beautifully rendered it all is. Down to the tiniest, most seemingly insignificant leaf or kitchen tile. And, while I’m at it: is there a more important and accessible film about the dignity and value of self-expression and having the courage and tenacity to follow one’s true calling than this one? It’s a perfect storm of sophistication (for adults), action (for kids), humor and sheer visual exuberance (for both).]

A great poem ought to strike the reader just like that Monet painting struck me: not one word out of place, the whole expressing an emotional truth that cuts through the clutter of your rational mind, right to the softer, wiser core of the heart. And the same, I think, is true of a great short story. In my experience, a great short story affects you more emotionally than it does intellectually or rationally.

A simple thought experiment may bear this out: if you think about the stories that have affected you most, more often than not what you remember about it is more like a feeling than a fact. The fear and dread and utter hopelessness is what lingers in your memory long after you’ve read Jack London’s “To Build a Fire.” I’ll never forget how my heart practically hurt with loneliness and an almost overwhelming sense of despair when I finished reading Breece Pancake’s devastating “A Room Forever.” And no one who reads the great Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man is Hard to Find” without recalling, almost viscerally, the mix of shock and disgust they felt when they read the final pages.

Carver himself made an interesting comment in an archived audio interview I had the pleasure of listening to recently: he opined that “the short story has more in common with poetry than it does with the novel.” As a prolific (and highly regarded) writer of both short stories and poems, he would know. For many years I’ve been sort of fascinated by this blurry line between the short story and the poem, and Carver’s comment, along with my reading of several of his finely-crafted pieces in Cathedral, has ignited that interest again. I may even attempt a few “experimental” pieces of my own that attempt to stake some sort of claim within this murky no man’s land between the two forms… I already have one in mind, based upon recent experiences waiting around in the hospital while my baby daughter was being operated on.

But this rambling and increasingly off-topic post was supposed to be about Carver’s short fiction, so let me offer a few reflections before they escape my memory (and your interest) entirely.

The very first thing that struck me about Carver’s stories is how easy they are to read. I blew through this book in a few sittings, and that’s saying something considered how hectic my schedule has been lately – I am not known for the speed of my reading either. He truly epitomizes George Orwell’s famous dictum: “good prose should be like a window pane.” Carver’s is impeccably clear, without a scratch or smudge. Again, not a wasted word to be found. In that same audio interview I referenced earlier, he said he had been instructed by the great novelist and story writer (and a personal favorite of mine & Mutt’s) John Gardner to take a 15-word sentence and then re-write it in ten. But then he went on to say that he made it his goal to say whatever had to be said in five. And that’s the essence of how he writes. You get what you need to know, and that’s it. Hardly any adornment or elaboration. He leaves that part of it up to you and your imagination.

It’s not only the sentences themselves that make use of this minimalistic style and leave room for the reader to fill in the details – the stories themselves, taken as whole units, are like brief glimpses into lives that, you sense, are much larger and more complex. I noticed several common elements in virtually all of the stories in this collection, which I thought was interesting. Some of them find their origins in Carver’s own life experience – for example, characters start drinking alcohol in every story, and usually to excess. The demon of alcohol that tormented Carver so much in his early life is always lurking around the corner here. Another aspect of his early life that comes up in every story is the broken marriage. Married life itself is a major theme in Cathedral and, I gather, in much of Carver’s fiction. But so many of the characters here allude to marriages that either had broken up or were about to, almost as if the author wanted to prove the utter impossibility of two people living happily together over the long haul. (Carver himself got hitched early at 19 and that marriage fell apart during his heavy drinking years, but he later found lasting companionship and happiness with the poet Tess Gallagher.)

I also noticed that in just about every story, the characters seem to be dealing with some kind of major crisis or situation, but then along the way the narrative will focus on one specific detail or event that doesn’t seem to have anything to do with the larger issue at hand. And very often the story’s title will come from one of these side details that doesn’t seem to connect with the main thrust of the tale. So part of the intrigue and mystery for these stories, at least for me, was in trying to figure out how why this little detail was worth pointing out and what Carver was doing with it. Sometimes the connection was obvious, such as in the story “Where I’m Calling From” – the story’s narrator is spending time drying out in a rehab center, and he mentions those words when relating in an aside that he wants to call his ex-wife just to hear a familiar voice, but doesn’t want to reveal where he is.

One fascinating example of this technique (conscious or otherwise?) in Carver was in the penultimate story, called “The Bridle.” In it, a couple that loses their farm in Minnesota to foreclosure drifts down to this seedy apartment complex in Arizona, where they rent a room for several months. The husband, it is noted early on in passing, is a horse enthusiast who lost all of their money by buying and then betting on a race horse. One night they are hanging out with friends by the pool, getting drunk (see?), and the wife observes the husband – who, by the way, is unemployed – climb up to the top of a shed and attempt to jump into the pool. He doesn’t make it, and sustains serious head injuries. Shortly after they move out, and when the landlord is cleaning out their room, she finds a bridle the husband had brought with him in the closet. I have to rely from memory here so I’m paraphrasing, but in the final lines I recall Carver writes about the bridle being a burden and a restraint, but then observes that a horse fitted with one “knows at least that he’s going somewhere.”

In that one line towards the end of the story, Carver takes this small detail that seemed to have only an incidental relationship to the tale being told, and illuminates it – but only for a split second, like a lightning flash. Again, it’s up to us to think about what we saw, and ponder why it’s significant.

My point in all this is that Carver seems to be able to use this minimalist approach not only for the sake of brevity or clarity, but also to hint at larger mysteries. Somehow his spare style is an invitation for us to enter into the lives he’s writing about, almost as if the space left by the omitted words provides access for his readers to seep through the membrane of the page and into this other world. He employs a true artist’s deft touch to share with us just the right thought or physical detail that will give us a glimpse behind the curtain, but not spoon-feed us any insights. We bring to these characters our own life experiences and hard-earned wisdom, and we can recognize in their struggles and disappointments (and, occasional moments of hope) the common burden of being human.

In short, what Carver wrote when he reviewed his friend Tobias Wolff’s first collection In the Garden of the North American Martyrs applies equally to himself: “He has somehow gotten his hands on our shared secrets, and he’s out to tell us everything he knows.” Raymond Carver is one writer who has successfully mined the ore of his own life, especially his early struggles, to produce subtle, nuanced stories that you'll read in one sitting, but savor for far, far longer.

Not Dying Today

Talk Amongst Yourselves

I’m sure our legions of dedicated readers are wondering at this very moment what the heck has become of the semi-regular, wit-crammed, intelligent posts on this blog from the likes of your humble scribe and the creator/founder of this blog, Duke Altum. No doubt hundreds of you are suffering from withdrawal and probably breaking out in hives at the suspense of not knowing more about how the strenuous progress of my first “novel” is coming along (poorly, see below). And other subsets of you are surely holding side-meetings and online colloquies to discuss the apparent demise of Duke’s “Poem of the Month” series, much-admired in the (way)underground channels of the literary world, and lamenting the death of his occasional posts on whatever corner of the world he has conquered in his international reading. (Don’t believe me? Two words: Rabindranath Tagore.)

Well, the good news is that reports of this blog’s death have been wildly exaggerated. We’re not going away. But “real life” still has a way of imposing itself on grownups, especially those of us who are responsible for little kids, and both Duke and I have been pulled away from this page recently to focus our attention on other pressing matters unrelated to literature and film anyway, if not the spiritual life.

Poor Duke Altum, the driving force behind and surely the soul within this blog, was already getting thumped repeatedly in his “day job” before recent events, but is now doubly taxed with the far more important and emotionally burdensome task of helping to guide his 11-month old baby daughter through a grueling recovery period following a scheduled surgical operation. Anytime you put any loved one’s well being in the hands of doctors, however accomplished, there is certainly an element of nerves involved. But with a child young as his daughter is, it’s that much more of an emotional journey. Needless to say, The Secret Thread wishes Duke’s daughter all the best for a speedy and complete recovery, and we trust that with God’s help and Duke and his wife’s unconditionally loving care, she is already well on her way there. Good thing Duke was boning up on how to raise girls right (see “What We’re Reading”, left) before this occurred so that he can be there body and soul for his little woman of the future. No doubt Duke will one day, hopefully soon, make a triumphant return to this page with a new film review or post on one great book or another.

As for the present scribe, unfortunately my novel has hit the skids yet again. This time some external pressures in my life are really impeding on my creativity and fictional writing process to the extent that I have been forced to “table” the current chapter until I feel a little better grounded to continue. This is the first time I have really felt that way about this story. Many times I have hit what felt like a blockage but I didn’t think it was a large enough problem that I couldn’t muscle through it. But 2009 has been a difficult year in my household for private reasons, and I have discovered that even the little time I have to devote to developing my writing craft has to be sacrificed more frequently than I want it to be. So be it; I am responsible for my own household. It’s a hard thing to feel like I have devoted three years to writing this story only to reach a temporary place where I cannot continue. But it is nonetheless the case, and what I need to do is focus on overcoming some of the burdens that have put me here.

Me and a Girl

Nonetheless, if you know me, you know that I am not able to completely stop doing some form of creative writing. The day I do that, you can lay me in the ground and cover me up; it’s over. And while I am unable to get into and sustain a long-term fiction project for the moment, I can at least report that I am hard at work – although I have even less time to devote to it – on a shorter piece of writing that falls into, I guess, the critical essay category. Once again I find myself writing a serious piece about a musician who has made an impact on my creative life, following two previous critical essays, both of which were published, on singer-songwriter Bill Mallonee (“Lonesome Traveler”, Rock & Sling, Winter 2006) and The Innocence Mission (“Hope on the Wing”, The Other Journal, Issue #11, August 2008).

This time though, maybe for the first time in a nonfiction piece I have written, I am taking on a subject that I do admire and respect artistically, but that I do not find myself sympathetic towards in terms of their worldview/attitudes/beliefs. I thought it would be an interesting challenge to write about an artist that I had difficulty connecting with on moral grounds but still found myself drawn towards. And I found the perfect subject for this in my new piece, tentatively titled “Me and a Girl: Investigating my Abnormal Attraction to the Music of Tori Amos”.

I’ve been listening to Tori Amos’ music for about 15 years. I have always enjoyed a great deal of it, and have marveled at her astounding musical and composing abilities as well as her fierce independence and creative audacity over the years. In terms of pure creative gifts, I believe she is arguably a genius. She has always taken risks and stretched the boundaries of what one would expect from just one woman and her piano, and those are aspects of her career I can look upon with admiration. However, anyone who spends any time listening to Tori’s music knows that she is very aggressively anti-religion, and provocative in most senses of the word. She is famous for her passionate and complicated femaleness, her spacey lyrics, her vehement posture against what she perceives to be the “Patriarchy”, and her semi-suggestive physicality in live performance.

Tori Amos goes to uncommon lengths to hold onto a life-long grudge against organized religion and continually hammers on what many Christians in particular hold to be sacred in her lyrics and public statements. Yet at the same time she is a self-described “daughter of the Christian Church”, having been raised by a Baptist minister. One story about her is instructive: when her father got after her for never writing a Christmas song or even sending a Christmas card, she suggested that a much-discussed photo of her suckling a piglet in the CD booklet of her 1996 album Boys for Pele was as close as she was ever going to get to fulfilling that wish for him. (What that may have to do with Christmas is classic Tori.)

And lest you think she has mellowed with age, this is her discussing some of the motivation behind her latest record, Abnormally Attracted to Sin (as if this doesn’t prove the point!), from her website: “I'm a minister's daughter. The power of the church is insidious, and it permeates everything. A lot of what the Church discusses is not about the compassionate path of Christ, it's about what kind of lifestyle is acceptable and approved of by the Church when god knows what they're doing behind closed doors.”

Those who know me know that I do not subscribe in any way to this point of view. So why spend time being inundated by it? For me it’s three-fold: 1. it’s to get outside of my “comfort zone” as a writer, writing about people who do not share my ideas. In that sense it’s a literary exercise. 2. Although I find a lot of her ideas unappealing and offensive, and even feel resentment towards her for her sweeping generalizations about religious communities, I am still considerably drawn towards her music, and want to explore why. 3. I have a theory that there may be a kind of Hazel Motes-quality to Tori Amos, for where would she be if she had never had men or “the Church” to hammer against? And who spends an entire career pounding on the same ideas they feel opposition towards without also spending a lot of time contemplating those ideas, thinking about those ideas, and indeed being engaged, even negatively, by those ideas? Is Amos’ journey a real-life search for the “Church of Christ Without Christ”, as Flannery O’Connor’s Hazel Motes put it in Wise Blood? What is really going on in her art, anyway?

These are the answers I am seeking in my writing about her. I may not find them, for Tori Amos is an extremely complicated and tough nut to crack, but going after them is a challenge, and writers have to take on these challenges. Sometimes your subjects choose you, and you have to accept the gauntlet if they hurl it down in front of you.

Wish me luck.

Buried in the Railroad Earth

For a number of years when I was younger – let’s say from around 1995 to 2001 – there were few writers, if any, whose work affected me as profoundly as the work of Jack Kerouac, the mercurial, hard-living, enigmatic American scribe most famous for writing the classic 1957 novel On the Road. That book and many others have stayed with me ever since that period. I’ve always assumed that literally thousands of young men (and perhaps young women, but it’s less clear) who ever harbored literary aspirations since Kerouac was with us have probably felt the same about this man’s writing.

There have been many, many books and essays written about Kerouac, and probably any one of them can offer a more coherent literary analysis than any thought I can offer to the reader here. But I have recently had occasion to reconsider his work, and it came to me as a complete surprise, allowing me to discover again, almost freshly, the resonance Jack Kerouac’s words have had through my life since 1995.

I don’t remember exactly how I first got onto Kerouac. I suppose I had heard enough about On the Road over time and was starting to get interested in literature and eventually decided that as a single young man, the definitive novel about getting in a car and high-tailing it several times across the United States with a couple of buddies for kicks was something I ought to read. It didn’t matter that the trips were taken in the late 40s and the book wasn’t published until 1957. Something about that concept of spontaneously blowing cross country with your pals has natural appeal to young men without many ties, still savoring their first true taste of personal liberty. I didn’t have a whole lot of liberty, however, because I was a soldier, and therefore sworn to do whatever Uncle Sam wanted me to. But I didn’t have a family, and I did have some crazy dreams, most of which were destined never to be realized; some of which actually would be, but only later.

Oh man, but I would think if you were a young man in your twenties, and an American on top of that, and starting to develop literary aspirations on top of that, then you couldn’t avoid running smack into Kerouac. Who else had ever laid down what it meant to be young and free in the United States of America better than he did? Who else had ever written so crazily and so knowingly about the holy longing inside of us all, the desire to see things, the thirst to know things, the need to understand everything?

So at some point I decided that I had to take on Jack Kerouac’s writing. And I suppose I felt that I needed to begin at the beginning. So I bought a paperback copy of the first novel he published, in 1950, called The Town and the City. I had no idea what it was about, and if you were to suggest to me at the time that it was more or less a knock-off of Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel, that is an idea that would not have found purchase in my mind because I didn’t know who Wolfe was and had never heard of that book either. I knew The Town…. was a big book, and that was fine by me. And I also knew that I had planned to visit New Orleans, on my own, over a three-day weekend, so I decided to bring Jack with me.

This was the end of August, 1995. I can distinctly remember sitting in a coffee shop at an outdoor table in the Garden District across from one of those cemeteries with the above-ground graves sipping on a coffee and reading Kerouac, feeling like much the Bohemian, but also feeling like I was trying too hard to appear sophisticated. Good thing nobody was paying any attention.

I remember the little boy in the story accompanying his fedora-wearing father to the race track and proudly placing bets. I remember the drawn-out death of that father in the novel, a figure so central to the forlorn spirit of the book; also representing a parallel to Thomas Wolfe’s earlier story. I remember the mangled dog tags belonging to the protagonist’s brother being discovered by Japanese soldiers in some Asian theater of World War II, after the body that wore them had been obliterated. I remember the sadness I felt when I came to that scene. I remember the very first words of the novel: “The town is Galloway….”, a thinly-veiled facsimile, I would learn much later, of Kerouac’s own provenance of Lowell, Massachusetts.

I don’t remember very well my first reading of On the Road, which came next. It was probably also in 1995. But I do recall the overall effect, which was one of total immersion into my own crazed dreams, as though Kerouac’s fictionalized chronicle had opened up a huge door within myself. As I imagine happened to so many others, the book landed on me like a bomb. I started journaling even crazier thoughts (I had been journaling since college), and, inevitably, began the regrettable imitation of Kerouac’s fiction that probably so many other young writers have done. I made a mix tape for my brother called “We Lean Forward to the Next Crazy Venture Beneath the Skies”, a direct quote. I remember puzzling like everyone else did over the famous question Kerouac poses towards the end of the novel, “Don’t you know that God is Pooh Bear?” I remember how Kerouac’s Dean Moriarty in the novel said “Whoo-wee!” all the time.

I remember a whole first “novel” I started to write called “No Wonder You Look Tired” (honest to God!) that I managed to keep working on until 1997, when I lost about ¾ of the manuscript in an armed robbery in Philadelphia. Later I even changed the name of the novel to The Sound of Diamonds, which was, again, stolen from Kerouac ("Silence is the sound of diamonds which can cut through anything.") The entire story grew out of a broken heart, and it was a pitiable Kerouac imitation from top to bottom. It was painful to lose the fruits of that struggle at the time, but I think I can render the final assessment that this was the most appropriate fate for that particular story. (Incidentally, I still have the first 50 pages or so, handwritten. They’re atrocious!)

Later I read On the Road again, and I still own the version I bought back in ’95. I am quite sure I’ll read it a third time.

Then there was the book that really got to me – even more than On the Road – a little pipsqueak of a novel Kerouac wrote around 1953 called Maggie Cassidy. It wasn’t published until later, after On the Road made him a literary sensation. To this very day it is my favorite Kerouac novel and will always be one of my favorite books. It was probably the major inspiration behind that early attempt at a novel I mentioned, although, I need not point out, Kerouac’s book was much better than my efforts. This novel also influenced later writings of mine, including a collection of eleven unpublished short stories called A Son of the Suburbs written between 2002 and 2005, and in particular two stories called “The Fountain of Agonies” and “Poison Summer”.

Maggie Cassidy doesn’t seem to be remembered as one of Kerouac’s better novels by the critical establishment. For me, however, the book was seminal. It didn’t have much of a plot – few Kerouac novels do – and I can see why it wouldn’t appeal to everyone, since it’s about a high school girlfriend written from a boy’s broken-hearted point of view, with a decidedly nostalgic flavor. But it really slammed into me where I was at that time in my life. The language was beautiful, filled with longing and anguish. To me the words felt like my own thoughts and inexpressible ideas, all coalesced right there on the page. Even though it was dated, and its author seemed to pine for a time which for me was a vanished America, never to be experienced, the sentiments and the crushed-soul emptiness expressed in the novel resonated through every part of me. I felt like I had once loved young Maggie. As with On the Road, I remember certain turns of phrase – the boy in the novel fixing his gaze on “the swan of her neck”, for example – and I also recall the exuberant and sometimes infantile cajoling between the main character, Jack Duluoz (Kerouac’s alter ego in many novels), and his pals, talk about beaning each other with baseballs, etc. From the moment I read this novel, it struck a chord in me that still sustains in spite of the fact that my circumstances have changed tremendously since that time and continue to do so. I’ve read that book twice too and am seriously considering a third run. It would be interesting to read now that I have two young daughters.

After Maggie Cassidy I was hooked into Kerouac, and felt a kinship with him in spite of how divergent his life and lifestyle had been in relation to what my own were. I went on to read other books: Visions of Gerard, a moving, short novel based on his relationship with his dead older brother, who passed away at age nine from an illness; Lonesome Traveler, a kind of half-short story, half-essay collection about his various travels in America doing odd jobs, the title of which I later purloined for a profile I published of the singer-songwriter Bill Mallonee in Rock & Sling magazine; Desolation Angels, an amazingly-titled later “novel” (by the end of his career the line between fiction and nonfiction had blurred considerably in Kerouac’s work) which revisited some earlier terrain but with a wiser, more visionary eye and considerably more free-association-style prose. (By this time Kerouac had fallen under the influence of Zen Buddhism and had a far more mystical outlook on the world.)

Speaking of titles, Kerouac was always my favorite in the art of naming his books, and other titles of books he wrote which I have not read still marked me in their own smaller way – books like Old Angel Midnight, Mexico City Blues, Pomes All Sizes, and my favorite in the title stakes, The Sea is My Brother.

And so it went. After the year 2001 or so my infatuation with Kerouac waned slightly, but the inspiration he gave me, the insatiable hunger his language sparked within my gut to write my own mad dramas, has never left me, ever, since those earlier times. His influence lingered in my writing, as I have explained, as it did elsewhere. When I attended The New School in New York City to pursue a master’s degree in Creative Writing in 1998, I met a writer named Hettie Jones, who knew Kerouac personally and had authored a memoir called, unabashedly, I Am Hettie Jones. She was a graying, former Flower Child-type, but I remember speaking with her at some faux-intellectual cocktail party and listening to her account of Kerouac coming upon her and a girlfriend in a pub and wrapping them both together in his arms in one massive bear hug, shouting his greetings. My twin brother and I still quote and make reference to Kerouac regularly, as though he were another brother whose words and memories were integral to our own.

Thus we come to last weekend, when I, now a somewhat chubbier, less energetic, but still literary (or so I like to think) husband and father of three small children, rolled out with my family to attend a wedding of my wife’s cousin in northwestern Massachusetts. Being a husband, and a man who is not all that into weddings in the first place, I had barely been paying attention to where this wedding would be taking place. I just knew I had to be there for it and we had to bring all three kids. Only a few days before we left, it occurred to me, probably by listening closely to my wife, that we were going to Lowell. And it hit me then: Wait a minute. Lowell, Massachusetts? As in, the birthplace of Jack Kerouac? As in, the “town” in The Town and the City? As in, the setting for Maggie Cassidy? Yes, that Lowell.

It was then that I knew, absolutely, without question, that I had to visit Jack Kerouac’s grave, for I knew he had been buried back there, even though his death occurred in 1969 where he had been living at the time, near Orlando, Florida. Lowell was really the only place you could have interred Jack Kerouac. It had made such an impression on his soul as a youth – a reality so beautifully and sorrowfully played out in his earlier novels, as Lowell was an industrial town filled with smog, ramshackle row homes, and hard-working, humbled Americans struggling to get by.

The morning of the wedding, we made our way with a group of attendees, my wife’s family and friends, to a place called The Owl Diner in Lowell – the sort of wondrous, small-town eatery that has amazing, home-made food and a cramped, manic atmosphere that you might call “local flavor”. It was the site of a truly delicious breakfast and some fun conversation. Across the way from where I sat, outside the window, I could glimpse a few bedraggled row-homes, with sagging porches and peeling paint, and I thought about Jack Kerouac and the children running through the streets of the Lowell he had painted for me there many years before.

While I was putting away a huge platter of corned beef hash, listening to people talk, taking turns with my wife to hastily shove scraps of food towards my one-year-old son in the hopes that we would be quick enough to stave off his bellow for more vittles, I finally said, “I’m sorry, I have to do it.” I pushed back from the table and approached a young waitress. “I know this sounds ridiculous,” I said, “but I really love Jack Kerouac’s books, do you know if he is buried here?” I knew he was, but it was a way to kick it off. She gave me a look that said, “Whatever”, but said she wasn’t sure. An older woman, however, seated nearby, said to me, “Oh yes, I’m sure he is. Isn’t he in the such-and-such cemetery…..”

A beefy, Good Will Hunting­-looking dude, decked out in a white apron stained with grease from the food he’d been slinging in back moments before he evidently went on break, and who called me “guy”, said he would go find out fawr me. A few minutes later he came back to our table, tapped my shoulder, and said, “He is buried here, guy. Edson Cemetery.” I thanked him for his neighborly spirit and his, well, good will.

From there it was all my brother-in-law’s iPhone. He is not necessarily of the literary persuasion, but he is a darn good sport, and generous, for he knew it meant something to me. I tell you, that man had located Edson Cemetery, found directions, committed them to memory, and was ready with his car to whisk me over there as soon as we got back to the hotel all within about 20 minutes. Just like the commercials, I was thinking.

It turns out, by some “coincidence” – which I don’t know if it’s too out of line to call Providence – Jack Kerouac’s grave was located only 1.5 miles from where we were staying. I know Kerouac was no saint. But he was a child of God, and a Catholic (a bond I actually can claim with him), and he wrote words which really had marked my life, as I was rapidly recalling with more clarity with each passing moment.

My hard-charging bro-in-law brought me straight to the man’s gravestone. We disembarked from his car. We were standing in a lovely, bucolic cemetery, very large, set in the middle of southern Lowell, with many streets stuffed full of those same tired row-homes right there within view. There was a gentle breeze and a lazy, unoppressive sunshine filtering through large, leafy, obviously well-aged trees. A stout fellow wearing a green Vietnam-era soldier’s blouse and baggy shorts was standing nearby looking at the ground. I knew we were in the right place. As we set off down the gravel pathway this guy turned and said to us, “Are you here to see Jack?” I said we were, and we exchanged some brotherly/literary pleasantries, paying homage to the man below.

And there, marked with a simple, unassuming rectangle of grey stone, was Jack Kerouac’s final resting place. We stood before it and I was startled with the knowledge that right there, beneath what he once described, in Lonesome Traveler, as “the railroad earth”, were the bones of this man, this seeker, this honest scribe of the American heart. In front of the grave, pressed firmly into the earth, many previous visitors, writers, fellow dreamers, had deposited pens and pencils. Some of them had little notes with them, impaled into the ground, upon which, one presumes, the writers had paid their final respects. I didn’t have a pen with me, but my brother-in-law stepped in again: he had an automatic pencil in his car. I smiled to myself: the automatic pencil, as those close to me know, is my writing instrument of choice. He handed it over, and I stuffed it into that same railroad earth.

It was endearing to me to see his childhood nickname on the grave, which as Kerouac readers know was “Ti Jean”, from his French-Canadian ancestry. His full name, as inscribed in the stone, was JOHN L. KEROUAC. But it wasn’t until I saw the epitaph that I was actually moved, for it must be the simplest, pithiest, yet most accurate epitaph I can think of for anyone.

It reads, “HE HONORED LIFE.”

Today I honor him.

Job 4:18

A Fiction

PART TWO
[To read Part One, click HERE.]

Entering the small church, I found myself on one end of a long, narrow corridor, which seemed to me to follow the same route as the center aisle in the nave overhead. On either side of the hallway there were doors here and there that seemed to lead into smaller chambers, classrooms and meeting areas, decorated with colored paper on which small children had crayoned in scenes from Sacred Scripture.

Seeing these wonderful pictures made me laugh. Adult humans, especially in this country, are constantly asserting that they don’t ‘believe’ in miracles because they’ve never seen any. What they don’t understand is that they can probably see them in their homes much of the time. The small children receive the Word in places like this one, and it takes root in their hearts. There it blossoms into spectacular visions: these are what wind up on sheets of colored paper. When pure love meets with innocence, there is a spiritual combustion.

You sightless men and women, I thought, windows into Heaven gape all around you.

From the opposite end of the hall the music trailed out into the air like incense; I breathed it in and followed after. The last door on the right side was ajar. I approached and filled the open space with my large form. A woman in a white sweater and a long skirt sat with her back towards me at a much-maligned piano, dutifully tapping out notes, her head bobbing up and down in an ongoing effort to coax the music from the throats of the innocents surrounding her.

The little children sat in a neat semi-circle around the piano, their bruised limbs curled beneath them, hands benignly folded, faces canted towards the nodding adult, wide eyes spilling over with hunger for direction …

One small child in particular saw me first, a moment before the others, it may have lasted for half a second – but in that one glance so much occurred. She revealed her nature to me – I could see she was pure, of course; but also called, destined to drag God’s beacon forward into the yawning mouth of darkness for the rest of her life. At the same time I felt part of myself fly unto her, and I knew that the very moment she laid her eyes on me she was seared with what some have called the White Burn, the permanent mark of the Heavenly encounter as experienced on earth, like the Mark of Cain but with a positive signature, caused by the same force that discolored Moses’ skin when he came down from Sinai. I am not the Master, but I do carry within me some of His Light.

This small child’s eyes shuttered open, an instantaneous reverse eclipse; then all of the children were gasping and squealing, some of them gawking openly, some hiding behind one another. The woman turned and saw me and her face blanched. I saw and felt her strength waver; she could offer no protection from me and she knew it.

In moments of extreme crisis on earth, such as war, acts of terrorism, natural disasters and so forth, it has been revealed to us through observation that the human character responds to decisiveness. A soldier on the leading edge of battle may stand next to a comrade of three years in one minute and in the next minute he may find himself surrounded by human detritus. At such times the best thing is a directive. Grab your weapon and fall back. Return fire. Attack!

The woman in front of me had arrived at her own version, in one sense, of such a moment. She knew what I was but at the same time she disbelieved what she knew. So I moved in and said the exact same thing we told the shepherds on the night of the Master’s birth. Fear not.

I had come for them. I knew that now, although I hadn’t before. The woman simply had not been called to receive the same message. So I spoke to her, quietly, and said to leave the children with me, for they are safe, and to go join the others outside that I knew would be gathering even then. They will ridicule you for what you say and criticize you for what you have done, I told her, but in your eyes they will see the Truth, which is you had no choice.

With her gone I moved forward in the small room on to an oval of colored carpeting and the trembling children, bested by their blameless curiosity, came to me and surrounded me, and because of my own nature, I slowly, painstakingly unfolded my battered wings, white feathers trailing from them like snowflakes on the desert floor, and held them out high over their tiny heads. They drew in, nine of them, as though my light gave them warmth; a few of them placed their hands on my translucent skin and shuddered as they felt the vibration of the eternal chord within my very form. It was exquisite.

We stayed that way for a time. I prayed for them and I praised the Master for allowing me to fulfill this extraordinary calling. Then I sat down right among them, so close I could feel their warm breath. They crawled, surged, pulsed around me. Their thirst was palpable.

Then the little girl, the beautiful child God had chosen to speak for them – the one God had marked with the vision of me – said:

Tell us about God.


… the door of the church is opening and the schoolchildren are coming out! There you can see – here we go – a single-file line coming out of the front of the church. And they seem to have their coats on and everything, as though someone had organized them and sent them out for recess … now, the parents … look at the obvious relief there in the body language of the civilians gathered on the other side of the police barricade … now the police or the FBI or whoever is represented by those armed men in SWAT gear, the first one has come forward to receive the children …. Janet, can you see anything more?

—Karen, unfortunately I am closer to the other side of the building, where the authorities have also been monitoring the back door, where the suspect went in … now, there, I can see the children up on the front grass. There seems to be a great collective sigh of relief down here that the suspect has released these little children, although no one really knows—

—Whoa! There, suddenly – now the suspect is coming out the back of – what is that!!

—Oh my God! Bob, get this …. over here!

—Look at that! Folks, as you can see, someone has emerged from the back of the church, dressed in white, wrapped in some kind of sheet or cape – vestments! could those be vestments!? – he’s making his way quickly on foot, very fast – he’s heading right for the police cruiser ….

—Karen, this is Janet, it’s erupted into chaos down here, a man in white, cloaked in something, has come out of the church, and the authorities are literally shooting at him – you can see the muzzle flashes I’m sure – Jesus, Bob, take cover!

—The police and federal folks are now firing on the suspect, who is running head down and underneath some kind of white cape or shield–
­
—Karen, I can see the man now. That is no cape or shield. Holy God.

—What did you? ... straight at one of the police vehicles, where now the sus—

—­My God!

—Oh! Oh! Oh! The suspect literally flung the officer to one side, with great force, and is now trying to squeeze himself into the police vehicle ... the branches are partially obscuring the overhead shot – Janet?

—Karen, the man, or whatever this thing is, he overtook the officer, who was literally shooting at him at the time, just, I don’t know, cast him aside, and has now apprehended the police vehicle … my cameraman got it, I don’t know if viewers are seeing his pictures—

—Janet, could you tell, did he have anything underneath the shield or cover—

—Wings, those were wings. Look out, Bob!

—The police car now containing the suspect, you can see, has launched straight forward, careening right over the lawn towards the front of the church, total disregard for anyone’s safety including his own – there you see – right past the police barricade, wildly back onto the road, several police vehicles already turning after him – we’re going to have a chase —


I sent the children forward, no harm done to anyone, but they met me with bullets. A fear-filled response—unsurprising. I enclosed my entire body when I came out, for protection and concealment, though it did little to achieve either. They cannot stop me with their projectiles, of course, but my wings were now riddled with them, perforated, and I could feel the wounds, the tears in my skin, the feathers torn and trailing away. Fragments of metal, burning, embedded into my tissue. It’s always the first reaction—especially among these totalitarian squads they deploy—the general approach is to begin by shooting and allow things to work themselves out from there.

Bouncing over the grass, avoiding the graveyard, my only purpose now was to put distance between myself and all of those conflicted souls with their murderous instincts … how do they arrive at these places from the small, pure creatures they are at the beginning, among whom I had just spent wondrous moments in communion?

Peripherally, I could see those little children falling into the arms of their mothers, their fathers, after I sent them out. Take care of them, you jaded people, let them live and breathe…you will notice the White Burn on their cheeks and you will know the power of the Lord.


Now I am back on a road driving this vehicle as fast as it goes, and they are giving chase, absurd horns blazing and so forth, they want me stopped, they want me contained. So they can do what? Inflict violence on me for some crime they believe I have committed? I have already been sentenced by the true Judge. Your human ‘justice’ whimpers its meaningless decisions to a courtroom filled with cackling corpses. Your purported authority, which has never been your own but mere illusion, went up in smoke the first time one of you had the gall to cite it.

The howling, screeching sounds and the speeding vehicles have affixed themselves to my trail. It is useless. I will outrun you all, and make my way unimpeded into exile. This is a huge, sprawling wasteland in some places, this earth; I know where to hide where you will not find me. But I helped some innocent creatures, I gave them knowledge that is not of this world …


… we now have images from several helicopters that have converged on, or over, the scene. As you can see there we have at least ten police and military vehicles in pursuit of one police car that contains the suspect who earlier on this very tense and chaotic morning closed himself inside of a church with nine nursery school children, only to release them less than an hour later with no harm. He sent the children out one end of the church, then slipped out the other side, ran through a virtual hail of gunfire to a nearby squad car, wrestled away the officer there, and appropriated the vehicle. That was the start of this high speed chase you see in these startling live images.

As you know if you’ve been tuned in, there is all kinds of speculation as to exactly who, or do I even say what, this suspect is … I don’t think there’s any question that there will be a great deal of ongoing discussion and a reviewing of the pictures from earlier to try to determine what exactly has happened here today. And whether we were capturing video of what was truly a hostage situation or whether it was actually something else entirely, something that has never been seen before, at least not during the cable news era, when we can break stories as they happen …. Janet, your thoughts?

—Thoughts, Karen? …. I … I’m not prepared to make any final assessments on the air, not at all … I know I saw something I have never seen anywhere before, that is for sure … I think it’s like you said, Karen, that there will be a lot of reviewing the footage, and I think that when people actually study the images .. well, the cameras don’t lie, do they.

—No, Janet … they never do … meanwhile, ladies and gentlemen, the suspect has made his way onto a freeway, there you see below the squad car moving extremely recklessly, with a huge armada on his trail, an endless stream of flashing lights, and I’ve just been told that the police have set up a roadblock a few miles ahead. So we may be witnessing the final scenes of this high speed drama ….


Faster, faster, they are all coming with the vehicles of retribution, persecution, when I have brought harm to no one, only good. The Master said this would happen. He said those who are hated because of Him would be blessed. And I feel the strength that brings, the power and the glory of that blessing, the self-assurance that is the right of the anointed. Now I understand: it was never banishment: this was my time to make myself known, for I was not selected on earlier occasions. It was not I who marched into Sodom and tore its structures down forever. It was not I who told those shepherds to fear not. It was not I who came to administer to the Master while he danced with starvation on those desert peaks.

But now it is clear my time has arrived, and I have seized it, I gave those children new life at their tender ages, I praise Him for letting me know what it means to mark souls for all time! Would that I had understood before what this would be like. I would have waited with more patience, conducted myself with more grace, more righteousness … but the Lord had plans for me, larger than I imagined ….

Here, now, I grip this ridiculous wheel with new vivacity, unalterable zeal, unassailable single-mindedness. Yet what is this I see before me: they have brought more vehicles together. I see a few people standing and a few kneeling down; are some of them training their guns upon me again? They have cobbled together a ramshackle wall. Do they not remember what God does to man’s walls?

I can only laugh, and I do so now, largely, loudly, and because of who I am my laughter mutates into song, and my voice bellows within the confines of this clunking chamber with its garish lights. It is the sound of a multitude; there is no silencing it. And while my song ascends my foot descends, suppressing the pedal all the way to the floor of this rolling mausoleum. Here come the vehicles, hurtling forward, see the tiny men scatter and hear them whinny with terror, here now is their pathetic wall. Give way to God’s fist!