War All The Time

My mother was a tremendous sculptor and painter, who ultimately cared more about being a mom than about being an artist. I got lucky because she was talented at both. When I was very small—because we couldn’t afford babysitters and she didn’t believe in them anyway—she’d take me with her to galleries and museums. And though I didn’t become a visual artist, the storied demimonde of painters, sculptors, potters, and art students in 1970s California made a deep impression on me.

Once, standing before an electric blue painting of someone’s backyard pool with hills beyond it (I remember the image, not the artist, who may have been a graduate student at SF State), I noticed that I couldn’t look at it for long. This perplexed me because it was just a painting of someone’s backyard. I didn’t have words for what I was feeling, but my mom took the time to help me articulate it: the painting aggravated me. It seemed aggressive, even though its subject matter wasn’t. There are two sorts of artists, my mom said, those at war and those at peace.

Years later, I’d realize that this didn’t just apply to artists. As an English lit. undergraduate at UC Irvine, I had the great fortune of learning from a few university professors who actually took their job seriously. And, before that in Catholic high school, I’d met a few priests who were the same—serious people on a mission to articulate what they believed was true. All of them were at war with something and the reflection of that thing they’d found in themselves.

Maybe this is why I’ve started writing about The Exorcist again. It’s part of a collection of books and movies to which I return every few years. And I always see it from a new perspective. It demonstrates many of the personality types I saw growing up, but it also functions as a prism for what I happen to be experiencing in my life.

As a creative writer (and, I’ll admit, in general), I’m not at peace. I’m far more Father Karras than Father Dyer, and I’m certainly nowhere near the one-pointed authenticity and conviction of Father Merrin.

The first people I met like this were artists and writers. There was the Fr. Dyer type, a bon vivant, who has accepted the world as it is, enjoying the advantages and ignoring the restrictions of his life. Yes, he makes art—maybe a lot of it—but a certain calm contentedness radiates through it. At some point, he called a truce with the world. He’s happy and grateful to be part of things, but he’s not on a mission. He’s not at war with himself or the world. He’s mostly bearing witness. [1]

Then there’s Father Karras, at war with everything and so riddled with self-doubt and loathing that he can’t bring himself to commit to anything. These are some of the best artists and writers; though, it goes without saying that most of them die young, whether from addiction or mental illness or because the temporary release afforded by the creative process has stopped and their only recourse is ending their lives.

Their war is never ending. The pain of it, the alienation of it often makes me wonder whether they could have chosen differently or whether they’re condemned, by virtue of character and aptitude, to lead such a life. Looking in the mirror, I often ask myself these things.

And very rarely, there is Father Merrin, a man easily dismissed as a magical thinker [2], a man with a warrior ethic, who has no time for the bon vivant, who has transcended the inner difficulties of Father Karras and sorted himself out, completely committed, ethically and spiritually, to a single path.

Father Merrin is also at war. And he is particularly dangerous because he is not confused or in doubt. Teachers, artists, and mentors like this will change your life if you are lucky enough to encounter them. You may not agree with them. You may not adopt their beliefs. But you will never forget them.

They tend to be less prolific than the others, perhaps because of their deep commitment, because their output has nothing to do with magnifying their egos and drawing prestige or fortune. What they create is less visible because marketing is not relevant. They live wholly on the path and that is where they will die.

In The Hagakure: The Book of the Samurai, Yamamoto Tsunetomo writes, “Even if it seems certain that you will lose, retaliate. Neither wisdom nor technique has a place in this. A real man does not think of victory or defeat. He plunges recklessly towards an irrational death. By doing this, you will awaken from your dreams.” So it is with art. Like Fr. Merrin, it’s best to commit wholly, completely, and irrationally if you’re going to do it, instead of being lost in dreams like Ft. Karras. Granted, that is more easily said than done.

You need some money, food, healthcare, and a place to live because otherwise you cannot commit to the path in a meaningful way. But you don’t need fame, stroking, the adoration of crowds, the or accoutrements of respectability. All the things the world thinks are good take second place to the one thing you know is good, your mission, which matters more than anything else.

I hope the student who made that electric blue painting awakened from her dreams, found the path, and walked it. But ultimately, whether she did or not matters only to her. The world keeps turning. And war never ends.

—

[1] I find it darkly ironic that the actor who played Fr. Dyer, an actual Catholic priest named William J. O’Malley, was accused of sexually assaulting a student in the 1980s, while teaching at McQuaid Jesuit High in Rochester, New York.

[2] The movie, however, settles this fairly quickly. You may be a medieval thinker but, look, the bed is floating and the girl’s head just turned completely around. That’s as medieval as it gets. Mirabile dictu, don’t you agree?

The Smart Set

Go downtown and look. These people have nothing to say to you. They’re too busy saying it to themselves. But go at lunchtime and sit in the square. Talking won’t be necessary. You’ll hear the little mewling sounds that come with broadcloth and pearls in 92-degree afternoon heat with 74% humidity. You’ll see the superiority, the office fear-porn colliding with competitiveness colliding with whatever they plan on saying at the next high school reunion.

You’ll see the anxiety about sweat rings and runny makeup, the self-loathing when they turn toward Burger King, checking their plate-glass reflections all the way down. These are the adepti of the high rise financial institutions situated around the square, the high-class middle-aged folks who didn’t hang themselves and the beady-eyed 20-year-olds who hope to become like them. This is the smart set, but it isn’t smart for long.

In college, I lived for a short time with an aerobics instructor, who once told me she’d made the choice to only be with women because all the guys at her fitness level were gay, stupid, or on roids.

“What about the all straight, smart, non-roided guys?”

“Fat.”

She didn’t blink. That was her truth. I slowly, gently placed my beer on the coffee table. I didn’t consider myself fat, but in her world there were two kinds of people and beer was an indicator.

I remember her looking at the condensation on the can already making a ring on the wood and going to the kitchen for a coaster. And I recall thinking to myself, this is why you’ll never find love. But that was uncharitable of me.

The truth was that she’d never find love because she was only attracted to herself or to someone as similar to her as possible. Variety, diversity may be the spice of life, but she was on a special diet of bland self-obsession.

I think of her at lunch sometimes, watching the financial district all-stars broadcast their assorted miseries as they choose intestinal depredation over the bean sprout tofu bowl and wheat grass smoothie they’d planned three hours earlier. The best laid plans of mice and men have often gone to the carbs or the fats or the spiritus frumenti of sadness. Little sobs hiccuped in dark rooms. Where did it all go wrong? Sip. Why are all the good ones taken? Sip. Why did this have to happen to me?

Well, at least they have the sips. A friend of mine used to say that the gods gave man beer to apologize. But for those of us who haven’t touched a drop in years, the apology is not accepted.The few of us who happen to be non-roided and alcohol-free are condemned instead to bear witness to what the gods hath wrought.

There goes a guy who looks like a walking hatchet. Even his tie wants to kill you.

There goes an assistant VP of marketing with an expression that suggests she hasn’t defecated in three weeks. I hope that’s not true.

There goes the lunatic who pushed down the nice Filipina auntie who works at 7-11 and ran out with a chicken sandwich in front of me a few weeks ago. Now I notice him everywhere, wandering, having discussions with invisible friends, maybe with people from his past. He doesn’t seem like he has the slightest idea of where he is or who he is. He fits right in with the smart set. They might smell a little better. Then again, they might not.

The smart set exists in every big city on the planet. They do all the same things, have all the same hatreds, all the same lusts, all the same hallucinations, all the same terror up their spines.

They want to be rich. They take pills. They’d stab certain coworkers if they thought they could get away with it. They have nice hair and a certain animal wariness. The world turns and they turn with it, talking to invisible friends, checking their reflections in plate glass windows, fantasizing about stealing a chicken sandwich and running to a dark place where they could eat it greedily and not choke.

Oda a Frank and Nancy

You see them in any city more interesting than Omaha. You definitely see them if there’s a body of water nearby, a port, blocks of marble from a thousand years ago, or columned bunker-like vaults housing all the imperial treasures mankind’s evil could produce.

Sometimes you see them even if there are none of those things. And you know you’ve seen them because they’re always the same. They always have the same disappointed air, the same sourness. At least, the husband does. Eventually, the wife does, too.

“But Frank, the wine.”

“There’s wine in Alaska.”

“But the cheese.”

“Guess there’s cheese in Alaska, too.”

The retirees on their big vacation. The one they’ve been saving up for. The one that was supposed to be worth it. The toil. The trouble. The tyrannical managers. The ulcer. The insomnia. The procedure. The humiliating work-stress “condition” that had to be kept secret. The counting down the years, months, weeks. The big payoff. Because, after all, it’s Paris, Honolulu, Venice, London, Dublin, New York City, Osaka, Dubai, San Diego, wine, cheese.

Frank thought they should’ve taken the cruise to Alaska like his co-worker Bob and his wife. Bob’s wife loved it. She brought back a pair of napkin holders carved like laughing bears. Nancy would’ve liked carved laughing bears. But she wouldn’t even consider it.

“Daisy’s there and I really want to see how she’s doing.” That was the real reason. Not the museum. Not the hill with the trail going up that everybody’s supposed to hike when they visit. Not the bookstores. (Oh Frank, the bookstores.) None of that.

What it really was: their daughter has been here for six months for a photography program and, in that last selfie she sent, there was someone named “Tony.” But they’d been planning on the big trip since forever. So Frank’s attempts to talk Nancy into something less expensive were doomed from the beginning.

Frank worked the numbers on the flight because if he couldn’t sleep at 3.5 feet, he certainly wasn’t going to at 38,000. The way he figured it, a cruise to Juneau would have been at least 54% less expensive. Some sunsets. Some carved bears. Booze. Peace and quiet for a change. That didn’t sound too bad.

“Daisy’s all grown up, honey. She’s in college.”

“Oh, I know. I know. I just don’t think she’s ready to make any decisions.”

“We weren’t ready to make the decisions we made.”

“Do you think she was drunk in that picture? I mean actually drunk, not just tipsy.”

Frank pulled the complimentary in-flight blanket up to his armpits and continued tapping on his phone calculator, jotting figures on his little yellow pad. And a small fragment deep down, a splinter of the old Frank that hadn’t died yet, thought, I goddamn hope so.

Their luggage was now somewhere over the Atlantic. But at least they’d landed. And where was Daisy? She wouldn’t return their texts. Frank knew his daughter was in town because he looked at the credit card bill before they left Omaha.

You see Frank blinking at a grinning cab driver known for fleecing tourists. You see Nancy clutching her purse to her chest with both hands because she read about people on mopeds snatching purses on the street. You see them peering at the city, at the pollution, and the crowds in a bewildered, disappointed fever. Because neither rivers of wine, nor mountains of cheese, nor bookstores with laughing bears will ever justify what it took to get them here.

For them, the city is a fancy restaurant that isn’t living up to its reputation. You see that and shake your head. Because a city is just a city, regardless of the waters or the marbles or the famous emperor who burned his mother on a tower 700 years ago.

You know you can see Frank and Nancy in every place on earth. You want to hug them and tell them they’re good people. And then you want to sell them a leather belt or a cell phone case or a ride in the back of your decaying Toyota to big ancient ruin on top of hill that everyone should see at least once.

But you don’t because that would freak Frank out. And Nancy, when she calmed down, would say, “Oh, the locals.” So you just watch from a distance as they get in the back of a different cab and take it to overpriced hotel with itchy sheets, where the wine and cheese will not be very good and the gift shop won’t have bears or books.

And you know Daisy is probably naked in bed with Tony right then, high and sweaty, and this makes you glad. Because everyone should be Daisy and Tony at least once or twice before they have to become Frank and Nancy forever.

Sufficient Unto the Day

Then there was the gas station. 24hrs. Glowing in the tule fog, with an open mini-mart lit up like heaven. I’d made it on less than vapor, sometime after midnight, Fresno, California, one of the worst places on earth. You may imagine I’m exaggerating about that. Go ahead.

I pumped gas into my sad Cavalier, which was destined to throw a rod in 2012, but I could not have anticipated that from the fog-glow of a highway gas station in 2008. I felt there were worse things waiting for me than running out of gas somewhere outside Lemoore on the 41 north. But then, as now, I let the evil of the day be sufficient thereunto.

I was approached by a tall man in pajamas. He came out of the fog. He did not come from the mini-mart. If you know Fresno after midnight, if you know the tule fog or the old prostitute motels and truck stops that have dotted the highways since the intersection of itinerant labor and agribusiness, you know that a weeping man in pajamas coming towards you out of the tule fog is just another fish in the fish tank. Not even an exotic fish. A fish of the usual water.

He didn’t have a pajama top. Only bottoms. No shoes. He was fat. His belly was completely covered in tattoos, mostly writing in gothic script. I remember he had a big gold nipple ring. The memory of him is burned into my mind. He moaned to himself and wiped his eyes, like he’d seen through everything to the hideous truth that awaits us all. He asked me for $1.30. I often wonder why he asked for that specific amount and not just $5. I said I didn’t have any cash, which was the truth. He nodded. Yes.

Then he went into the mini-mart. Less than a minute later, I’d squeegeed tule condensation off my windows and was about to depart, when I saw him running out with a case of Miller High Life under his arm. He vanished into the fog. The cashier ran out a half-step later, a delta of blood over his mouth. He held a small wooden table leg, like from grandma’s settee.

He stopped at the edge of the gas station property and screamed “MotherFUCKER!” into the fog. Well, I thought, okay. Right. I got back in the Cavalier, rolled onto the road, and slowly, carefully resumed my way back up the 41. There were three stories here, but I only knew mine. And that was good.

My future was full of thrown rods and heartbreak. But I didn’t have to crouch in an irrigation ditch in my pajamas, guzzling Millers on the foggiest night of the year. I didn’t have to stand at the edge of the gas station asphalt in a blue vest, holding a table leg, screaming into the dark. The tank was full. The windshield was clean. The sun was four hours away.

Alien: Romulus – Two Years Later

I finally watched Alien: Romulus. It wasn’t bad. It also wasn’t good. It followed the Alien formula, which is the Friday the 13th formula: only the chaste and innocent shall survive the lurking horror, which pretty much means only “the final girl.”

Or, in this case, only the final Gen-Z girl—who shall nevertheless physically and tactically outperform a Colonial Marine and a variety of lethal aliens under extreme pressure in an adverse environment. And she shall be accompanied by an autistic, desexualized artificial companion, who she loves platonically as only a mutual can.

Cute-as-a-button Rain, played by Cailee Spaeny (essentially Rae Skywalker meets Zoomer Ellen Ripley), blows the alien out the cargo bay, instead of the airlock this time, for the sake of novelty. Meanwhile, her non-threatening imperial protocol droid, Andy (David Jonsson), functions as scene furniture and a deus ex machina. Whenever the story threatens to stall, he’s the answer: Andy! Open the blast door! Why aren’t you opening the blast door, Andy?! over and over.

(David, you’re a better actor than the others and I hope you got paid a lot, but you’re being forced to do Lance Henriksen’s ‘“Bishop” through a Rain Man filter and I feel sorry for what you signed up for here. Have you considered a career in theater?)

Alien: Romulus’ spin on Friday the 13th is that Big Pathological Cyberpunk Corporation (BPCC) wants to kill you with either (1) planetside black lung in the “mines” as an indentured servant or (2) in a secret bacta tank with an alien face spider or (3) by injecting you with alien bug juice that will cause you to immediately give birth to a Lovecraftian horror.

It wants to do one of these things to you because life is cheap, evil corporations of the future rely on 19th century extractive industrial power (even featuring canaries in little cages because these are apparently coal mines), and the alien is a “perfect organism.”

Of course the alien is perfect in a horrific killing machine kind of way, but that Hollywood villain pathology is so overdone that it barely registers. The evil corpo manager in these movies (here represented by CGI Ian Holm as the requisite sociopath android, “Rook”) always amounts to a crypto-Nazi trying to build a better gas chamber or call up the devil for der Führer.

Every Spielberg / Lucas movie is ultimately about WWII. And every Alien movie is a monosyllabic response to Spielberg / Lucas. And every one of those responses features a gas-chamber engineer in love with efficiency. Acid for blood? Perfect! Weird sexual impregnation spider alien body horror? Excellent!

Hence the movie’s sub-theme: the magical titan progenitor race of rubber-faced, cloak-wearing, weapons manufacturers from far-off Hyperborea (see Prometheus) created the alien species and were even better at genocidal technology than BPCC. It evokes the old sci-fi Nazi on top of the Van de Graaff generator getting electrocuted with demon energy from some Wunderwaffen, screaming about ultimate power, but unable to prevent his own face from melting. Moral: eugenics was probably a mistake, kids.

Event Horizon and Raiders of the Lost Ark did it better. And Sigourney Weaver in the first two Alien movies had a unique combination of sexual magnetism and indignant Boomer anger that Zoomer Rae and C-3PO just can’t touch.

The others are basic horror movie tropes: the insecure teen who shoots his mouth off, vulnerable girlfriend who whines to the extent that we hope Jason gets to her sooner rather than later, and the captain of the football team, who should survive but doesn’t because of his hubris.

Stereotypes. Alien fodder. Aliens, had great characters, including weaselly Carter Burke, Corporal Hicks, and Private Hudson screaming that we’re in some real pretty shit now. Well, we are. We were. Only, this Alien: Romulus shit really ain’t as pretty.

Alien: Romulus is fundamentally a big alligator in the sewer movie. The alligator was created by a mad scientist from central casting obsessed with genocide. And only the kids from home room can do anything about it.

Well, of course, it’s Dracula.

Notes on a French love letter to a Wallachian prince.

I thought I might write about Luc Besson’s Dracula: A Love Tale, which came out in 2025. But, as I read the reviews and interviews published since then, I realized most of the things I wanted to say had been said. The weight of vampire scholarship, specifically centered on the Dracula story, is vast, ponderous, and more than a little tedious.

It seems like any Dracula review has to navigate existing impressions and ideas built up around Stoker’s (essentially boring) Victorian novel and somehow reach a Jungian conclusion—archetype, collective unconscious, mythos, trope, this is who we are when we’re denying our desires, etc.

At least, that typifies the genre of pop-culture vampire criticism. I’m not very interested in that (even if I won’t be able to avoid doing some of it here). So this can’t truly be a review in the “Dracula genre” sense. It can be akin to “notes,” which puts it more in line with Besson’s movie, also something that can only be described as “notes.”

My lasting takeaway after multiple viewings is that everything Besson does is self-consciously derivative. Nevertheless, like M. Night Shyamalan, he’s one of those directors who picks your pocket while you’re aware he’s doing it and you still love him for it.

That’s something about the director, not the movie, but it needs to be said. Maybe it’s all we can say, since Dracula: A Love Tale really does seem like a love letter to other, greater creations and creators. It cannot stand on its own as a coherent statement. But maybe that’s okay.

A funny thing happened on the way to Henry Spencer’s house.

Dracula: A Love Tale works best as a lesser reprise of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, but without the round character development, stunning editing, and multi-dimensional plot work. In nearly every scene of Besson’s movie, one thinks, well, of course it’s happening like this, it’s Dracula, after all (or it’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula after all, remade by a keen student of the master).

Besson merely gives end notes to the Stoker myth as powerfully articulated by Coppola. In order to appreciate each of the scenes, you have to understand the comparable scenes in the earlier work. Otherwise, Besson’s seem flat, rushed, telegraphed through cinematic shorthand.

His films always have an irresistible boyish infatuation with their subject matter, even if, in each of his big splashy movies (thinking especially of The Fifth Element, The Messenger: the Story of Joan of Arc, and Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets), the spit and bailing wire holding up Field Marshal Potemkin’s village is inevitably exposed.

The idea of Besson’sDraculaas a creative love letter—a derivative work suffused with so much adoration that it passes beyond the delicate boundary of homage into worship—is appropriate. And that also makes it resonate, at least in a spiritual way, with Stoker’s epistolary form; though, Francis Ford Coppola adapted that better, too.

This doesn’t mean Besson’s movie isn’t worth watching. As Christoph Waltz puts it in a 2024 interview with Collider, “I always think comparing directors or comparing actors or comparing people, really, is a little unfair because, of course, they are all individuals. . . . They have their method and their vibe, if you want, their specific energy that makes them unique. . . . Luc has a very specifically French [energy], which I admire and enjoy a lot.”

And that tracks to how, for example, The Fifth Element felt with Jean Paul Gaultier’s costume design, the heavy Moebius influence, and the “Federated Territories” warships that seemed a lot like “French Navy in Space.” In other words, Besson’s Frenchness is part of the draw, part of his ever-present Metal Hurlant vibe. We can love his movies for that, if nothing else.

*The Fifth Element* / Moebius: all the *Metal Hurlant* you’d ever want and more.

We should, of course, take note of the celebrity voltage brought by Christoph Waltz. For all his humor and magnetism, he seems trapped in the psyche of Colonel Hans Landa from Inglorious Basterds, another far greater film.

Here, Waltz, as the vampire-hunting priest, is meant to embody the Van Helsing principle. As with Anthony Hopkins in Coppola’s movie, Besson seems to hope that Waltz will ground the story in a modicum of seriousness or at least wizardly fascination.

Compare this to Dolly Wells’ impressive Van Helsing as “Sister Agatha,” the vampire-expert nun in the 2020 Netflix miniseries, Dracula—much more of a comedy than Besson’s, yet she seems to out-Hopkins Hopkins. In every Dracula story, there needs to be a least one person with some magic who understands the horrible stakes and reminds us that this is still Gothic horror.

But Waltz, true to form, brings a weird mirth to the role that diminishes it. On one level, it’s delightful because it’s Waltz, but it exemplifies what’s he’s talking about in the Collider interview—different energies, different people, different performances. Unfortunately, his doesn’t fit very well with the overall movement.

It comes off a little too much like What We Do in the Shadows. Too much airy Taika Waititi, not enough gravely Hopkins. That would be great for a different movie, but not here. Waltz doesn’t want us to draw this comparison (or any comparisons), but how can we avoid it?

The merry inquisitor, first for the Reich, now for god.

Then there are the ham-fisted attempts at humor, which are never a good thing because when they fail, they wreck immersion. Ewens Abid goes through his paces as Jonathan Harker, but the role is so bumbling that it verges on Jerry Lewis and Mina’s dismissal of him seems like an afterthought. Dracula hesitates to eat him in the beginning because “he’s a funny man,” but he’s not written as funny, just pathetic, nervous, and bewildered.

Ewens Abid doing his best with what he was given.

Ultimately, what’s true for Jonathan Harker is true for every supporting role in this film. Zoë Bleu (Mina-Elisabeta) and Matilda De Angelis (Maria) are undeniably gorgeous (thank you kindly, M. Besson). And it’s true that Dracula must always be surrounded by horrors and beauties, but Bleu and De Angelis don’t get to act.

They come across as just another principle in the dominant formula—the shopworn embodiment of what we’ve come to think of as the bipolar Victorian dynamic of the feminine, the uncorrupted virgin vs. the fallen sexual beast. Winona Ryder
(Mina) and Sadie Frost (Lucy) did it far better because they were given individual arcs. Coppola allows us to see the evolution of Mina’s chaste inner torment and Lucy’s depraved seduction and victimization at the hands of the Count. They’re real people.

Sadie Frost as Lucy Westenra / Matilda De Angelis as Maria.

And, after all, what remains to be said about Caleb Landry Jones’s portrayal of Dracula? Should we compare him to Gary Oldman (or, for that matter, to any of the very impressive “master vampire” performances delivered by Christopher Lee, Tom Cruise, Willem Dafoe, even by Antonio Banderas, who did more in his small part as Armand in Interview with the Vampire than is done by anyone in Besson’s entire film)?

We should, if only to get a sense of what’s missing. But perhaps we can leave that to the vampire scholars and professors of pop-culture. No doubt, a year after its release, there are books being written about how this movie fits into the Dracula legendarium. For now, as with Ewens Abid or any of the cast, we can only say, yes, Jones did his best.

Ultimately, I will never stop loving and feeling shortchanged by Luc Besson’s movies. So when he inevitably remakes Lord of the Rings as the story of two plucky soldiers in Napoleon’s Armée de Réserve française marching into Great St. Bernard Pass in the War of the Second Coalition, I’ll be present for it.

Monsieur Gandalf, I’m ready for an adventure.

Talismans of Goodness

Why having a day job and dying in obscurity might not be a bad thing.

My struggle as a writer isn’t about getting published. It’s about self-protection and self-realization, time and space, sanity and endurance. It might also be a love affair with death. It’s not about sales.

Goes like this:

I try to write fiction, not ad copy, because I’m not a salesman.

In order to write fiction, I have to write what I want to write. Otherwise, I’m marketing someone else’s preexisting product, betraying my reasons for committing so much of my life to this, and losing sight of the deepest part of who I am. I’m writing for me, not to move units.

When I say this, people (especially those who’ve adopted the values of the publishing industry) tend to get defensive: “Don’t be so arrogant. Think about your audience! Don’t you want your work to sell? Why should anyone care?”

My answer is always: “Go away now. The little squeals coming out of your mouth are offending my neighbor’s dog.” Because you cannot speak to advertising people in the language of artists. All you can say is, “I’m not interested” and “Mind the ‘No Solicitation’ sign on your way out, please.”

That doesn’t make me an elitist jerk (though I know someone who will laugh at me and call me that if she reads this). It makes me self-aware. Why? What I want to write (I almost want to say, what I have to write) is connected to the things that I care about and that occupy my inner life. And I’m a really weird guy with a weird inner life.

My writing is often me trying to express my weird visionary experiences—about others, about myself, about the world in which I live. I believe everyone has what passes for a unique inner landscape. The difference is that I’m exploring it through writing and others try hard to ignore it on their way to the widget factory or the bar.

So I’m not giving the reader a massage (a different metaphor also comes to mind). It’s more like I’m sitting in a completely dark, empty room in an abandoned house, talking to myself. When I die, I’ll get to rest. Until then, it’s talk, talk, talk, talk, talk to the emptiness. I take my birthday and Christmas off. Otherwise, I’m on the grind every day, whether I get one sentence (or nothing) or ten pages.

I can’t write to please others, but I also can’t stop myself. That doesn’t translate into profitability. It’s just what I need to do to in order to avoid jumping off a tall building. Often, it’s an excruciating obsession. And death is always there, waiting patiently. That’s a great relief. Someday, this will all end. Someday, all the talk can stop.

I’ve always been like this. I’m not working on a community project. I don’t even like community. I’ve developed myself interpersonally in order to get along in life and I do have a few friends, who I mostly connect with online now that we don’t live close to each other. But I’m a moody loner, an introvert, and highly, painfully empathic (yes, also in a new age sort of way, which is subject matter for a different piece).

I fundamentally accept those things about myself, but there’s no money in it. Expressing weird inner experiences and then selling them is generally not going to work as a career unless those experiences resonate with a customer base. People want to buy experiences that function like a flattering mirror, not like a window.

They want to spend money for a product that makes them feel good (or a little less horrible) about themselves. This is why genre fiction exists. I’d argue it’s why commercial literary fiction exists, too—i.e. literary prose as just another genre. Did I actually just say that? Did all the stained glass windows in all the English departments of the world just shatter at once?

When it comes to contemporary adult literary fiction, the job of the publishing industry is the same job as that of the person selling a salad shooter, saying as gently and persuasively as possible: you didn’t know you needed this, but I’m here to enlighten you on that point—with an added moral imperative.

It follows a dependable pattern: You’ve been reading a lot of genre fiction that provides vicarious emotional closure you’re never going to get in real life. Now let me show you how much better you’ll feel if you purchase this trendy lifestyle product, this coffee table literary novel, designed to demonstrate that you’re a good person for buying it. It has the correct politics and employs the correct discourse. It has been vetted by sensitivity readers and blurbed by people on the correct side of all the things that upset you. Don’t worry—you don’t actually have to read it. You just have to have it in your home. Like a talisman of goodness. That’s a lot of value for $34.99 in hardback.

It sure is. But I’m writing to find out about myself, not to market talismans of goodness or literary salad shooters. Back to the publishing squealers: “Well, then you can’t expect to make a living as a writer!”

This is a version of the ancient adage, the customer (market) is always right, and I don’t dispute it. In fact, I have a day job that I like for that specific reason (and because eating is good). It frees me from the squealing. And it forces me into the world, where I have to learn new things and grow in spite of my introversion and moodiness. A day job is vitamins for an artist’s soul. If you enjoy your work and your coworkers, all the better. Luckily, I do.

I’m no Franz Kafka. But I think about him a lot. And I often recall something by Anne Rice that is misattributed to him: “Don’t bend; don’t water it down; don’t try to make it logical; don’t edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.” It doesn’t matter to me that she (a notorious bender and down-waterer) was the one who said it. She channeled Kafka powerfully. It’s just what he did. And he had a day job, too.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Beginning Fiction Writing

Long, long ago in a writing program far, far away, an idiot and his idiot story were dragged into the red-hot torture seat, the one with the spikes beside the jeroboam of leeches and the bucket of acid. Of course that’s how it was. Of course the idiot was me.

But you realize that. What you don’t realize is a famous two-book wonder guest-taught there for a semester and said we practiced the “Zen-inquisition” method. We did. Another, perhaps less famous but no less horrified and intimidated guest-teacher called the program “butch.” It was. Did they expect anything else? I, for one, had come to welcome the abuse.

Here was my story. Here was the inquisition chair. Here was my twerpy classmate, wasting two years of his trust fund, whose signature workshop comment was, “Maybe if the writer understood dialogue, this scene would have worked,” gleefully pumping the bellows, getting the iron good and hot.

Our professor had just offered his customary start-of-workshop invocation, “What are you people actually doing here?” It was an opening which always made him chuckle as if he were coming up with it for the first time. He slid my 20-page manuscript out and looked at it. He didn’t read it. He didn’t page through it to review his margin comments and line edits. There were no margin comments and line edits. There was only the slab of paper before him like a fish he had to eat.

When the most dateable girl in the program, the one who could do no wrong in any workshop run by this professor, summoned her opaque critique face, I knew it was on. For the next 90 minutes, I’d be receiving what a friend of mine liked to call, “The Royal Rubdown.” The Dirty Dissection. The Opprobrious Ordeal. Yes. I’d be put to the question. Confess! Confess! Only, I wouldn’t be allowed to speak. So others would confess for me. Maybe if the writer knew how to use dramatic tension, this scene would have worked.

But I lived. Over time, the torture chair, the emotional thumbscrews, the medieval chirurgeoning, the uncompromising imposition of the MFA workshop style made us hard. My inquisitors splashed the acid, but I was laughing on the inside—as I knew my colleagues would be when they were dragged into the chair. Everyone got their moment, their opportunity to laugh on the inside.

The professor would often ask the person being workshopped whether he wouldn’t be better served somewhere far away, doing something else, as if a rational, self-aware person would clearly find that the most reasonable option. But getting MFAed in fiction seemed to indicate a priori that we were neither rational nor self-aware.

Then he’d grin. And that was the worst. There was no warmth in that grin. I invited the grounding effect of the leeches when that happened. A light dash of acid. Perhaps a few degrees hotter on the chair spikes to bring me down to earth from that terrible unamused grin.

To be fair, he was powerfully hung over much of the time. And so were we. To be even more fair, he was an excellent fiction writer. But so were we. In the hindsight of years, I’ve slowly come to realize that we were all talented, all good, all had the guiding star that causes people to choose art instead of a fulfilling career in pesticide sales or human resource management. The creative heroin. It’s a helluva drug. But at the time, most of us were convinced we were talentless pretenders. After thinking about it, I’ve come to believe our professor felt that about himself, too.

But whatever. It was what it was. It was what it wasn’t. And it was highly traumatic both ways. Maybe if the writer knew how to be vulnerable in front of a room of nervous, competitive, somewhat Stockholm-syndromed mean girls, the MFA could have worked. Because it didn’t. It couldn’t. All it was was time and space.

Time to write. A small space carved out for creative development. For years, I’ve written about that as something extremely valuable in itself. But the shops? The Royal Rubdowns? None of us learned anything from those except how to nurse deep psychic wounds for months or how to angrily reject an entire room of one’s peers without uttering a word in self-defense.

I was mostly in group two, the Angry Rejectors. Too weird to vanish from sight, too macho (butch?) to take it like a freshly paddled schoolboy. When my twerpy classmate smirked and said to the table had the writer known, when the ingenue of the century pulled up her workshop face and mumbled passive-aggressive things people invariably asked her to repeat, when a catty status-anxious colleague pounced in retaliation for some imagined slight in some dingy classroom at some earlier time, I laughed on the inside and thought, well, that’s just, like, your opinion, man.

Because that’s all it was. An opinion from the netherworld of the MFA Industrial Complex expressing itself through insecure 24-year-old mouths. The training we were getting was speaking through us. Later, we’d have to untrain, deprogram, and write essays about it in order to produce fiction that didn’t function like literary Xanax.

Now we’re all Substacking in Virgina Slims’ kitchen: you’ve come a long way, baby. We have. But it’s hella hot in here. We can take the heat. We suffered on the inquisition chair all those years ago. We’ve got the callused backsides to prove it. Thick skin? Child, you have no idea. Still, not everybody’s like that. Not everybody can withstand the rubdown.

On Substack, in particular, the kitchen gets hot and some people can’t take it. Virginia has every burner dialed up to high in mixed writerly company: school kids, college “aspiring writers,” YA stylesheet laborers, pulp-noir-weird tale imitators, journalists on the grift, journalists off the grift, metaphysical embodiments of the grift as yet to be classified by traditional western science, bricks through the Overton Window, MFA convalescents, Andrew Tates, your cousin who’s deeply into novels about werewolf dungeon explorers, The New Yorker having its usual case of slick-magazine FOMO. Even Margaret Atwood. But we don’t talk about Margaret Atwood.

What we talk about is whether so-and-so’s writing is any good. We talk about it constantly, sometimes behind a self-deprecating façade, but it’s there all the time: so-and-so is a talentless hack; so-and-so is a brilliant savant; so-and-so bores me; I want to have so-and-so’s babies; I hope so-and-so self-immolates; I’m taking midnight dictation from my cat so don’t blame me; well, this reads like your cat wrote it—no it was my hamster he’s the literary one. All things around, about, beneath, in the middle, in spite of, in lust and torment and longing of and for writing. Because Substack started and remains, to a certain extent, a writer’s platform, which, in turn, implies a certain degree of inquisitorial distress.

Substack, connect me with other writers and creatives. “Be careful what you wish for,” says Virginia as she flips a pancake over a three-inch gas flame. Just know what you’re asking. Because not everybody welcomes the inquisition chair. Not everyone’s ready for the Royal Rub-a-Dub-Dub and maybe if this writer understood what Substack is for, she wouldn’t be lonely and ignored and unloved and scorned and her writing wouldn’t suck like the Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s wind tunnel on a Thursday. Maybe. And people with my background will often shrug and say, “If you can’t take the heat . . . ”

But no. That heat was never productive, never did what it was supposed to do. It only caused pathological levels of anxiety that got in the way, that we had to transcend later in order to keep writing. See, Virginia isn’t actually one of us. She’s an agent of the system. She’s keeping the burners up to keep the algorithm at a rolling boil. You’ve come a long way in spite of the heat, baby.

So when I see a kid posting her first short story—which is probably just fine and might even be a work of art—I’m not going to let the Substack Industrial Complex speak through my mouth. It won’t be knives out. It’ll be: “Good for you. Keep going. Don’t read the comments. Use the block button. Don’t compare yourself to other writers. And put your time in as regularly as you can.” Because art, like life, is ultimately an expression of love. And somewhere, there’s a star in the East glittering just for you. Pack your bags right now and get going. You need to follow it.

Talent Actually Is Enough (if you can calm down)

Talent should be enough (to keep writing). And if it feels like it isn’t, you shouldn’t quit doing what matters to you. You should simply put your work out there differently and adjust your expectations. Because writing is the point, not complaining about the dehumanizing effects of working with the publishing industry.

Of course it’s dehumanizing. Literary publishing is about profits, not humans, not even about art. The writing, beyond its potential ROI and marketing clout, is often regarded as a tertiary consideration at best. But you’re a writer. What does any of this have to do with you sitting down and writing?

Publishing is sales with sales values and, in that respect, it isn’t different than any other profit-driven industry. But you may have an artist’s values, which is very good if you’re an artist, right? So when publishers, agents, and editors talk about books as “units,” your stomach may do unpleasant things. That is why you are not a publisher, agent, or editor.

Few artists and business people understand each other. Few ever have. Publishers and editors often have no idea what it takes to actually write. This is true even when they fill the air (and the screen) with advice on writing, which is actually just marketing advice (the only advice they’re truly qualified to dispense, whether they know it or not).

Beyond some very basic considerations, knowing how to massage your text into something professionally acceptable and how to prune your subject matter into something inoffensive and salable is not tantamount to knowing how to realize a creative vision. Often, editorial qualms will run counter to the impulse that brought you to the desk in the first place.

On some visceral level, writers know this, even if they’ve allowed themselves to be bullied into compliance. But literary editors may not and, in fact, often do not understand the creative impulse. They are instead driven by corporate values.

This is true even when publishing industry executives pretend that they’re also creative artists, perhaps because they’ve come to think that making art is really nothing—how hard can it be? There’s a commercial formula. Success depends on how faithful a submission fits into that formula. If you know the formula, do you really need 500 submissions in a slushpile or can you just put it together yourself, maybe with the help of a large language model?

At the same time, writers have no real idea what the business people have to go through to continue to exist as bagmen in the cultural assembly line. You think submitting to their homogenizing, risk-averse style sheets and paranoid social media surveillance is dehumanizing?

Try their job for a few weeks. It’s that to the power of a thousand. You think writers become drinkers due to the pain and frustration inherent in the creative process? Sit in a fiction editor’s ergonomic open-plan desk chair under an ugly light for a bit and you’ll be taking the pledge this time next year.

It’s all hard. Have some sympathy for the guy in the suit. He was once a child like you. He liked comic books and ice cream. Don’t hate him because now he’s got insomnia about losing the house if the latest coffee table novel he backed doesn’t clear an upcoming sales target. You can always write something else. What can he do? He doesn’t want to go back to selling vapes over the phone.

This isn’t a new thing. Watch the famous scene in Altman’s The Player where Larry Levy extracts formula script ideas from newspaper articles. It’ll help you understand how the publishing industry thinks. Levy asks whether it’s necessary to even include creatives in the process if a group of executives can use a newspaper article to extract a movie idea (“Save the Cat” is an oblique version of this. And literary editors love it just as much as Hollywood script editors).

The publishing industry and Hollywood are now doing the same thing with AI. Do we really need to pay writers to hack out safe scripts that will attract Chinese investors if AI can do it in an afternoon?

Besides, AI hasn’t said questionable things on social media. AI hasn’t had inappropriate sexual liaisons that might affect sales down the line. AI doesn’t pal around with individuals on the organization’s cultural “red flag” list. AI is beyond reproach because it is not human. And that’s the point.

Do you want a seat at Larry Levy’s table? I think most writers would prefer to be cleaning restrooms downtown at the Greyhound bus terminal. At least the shit there can be temporarily flushed. The AI slop getting literary and movie executives so juiced up at the moment is just another enshitified volcano of “content.” But you’re a writer. What does any of this have to do with you sitting down and writing?

There’s a trend of articles* on Substack by frustrated writers saying versions of the same thing: the publishing industry has become a morass of ideological, over-stylized, hyper-saturated, heavily mediated, spineless slop, and it is managed by advertising-and-marketing people who fundamentally despise writers.

Well, yes.

But when was it any different (other than for the celebrity 2% at the top—the same 2% that still exists)? There was no golden age where every writer got a fair shake and equal access. It was always a risk-averse old-boy network. And it still is. The old boys just have different performative politics and dress codes. Trendiness and cultural clout dominate because that’s what sells. And sales are the point. But you’re a writer. What does any of this have to do with you sitting down and writing?

On some level, you already know how bad it’s always been. And you say, “But if I reject traditional publishing and only self-publish, my signal will invariably get lost in the noise of the self-publishing shit volcano.” Probably true. So what? You’re bitter because you need a day job? You can write and still make a living if creating art matters to you at all. You are not a precious lily of the valley. And neither is your creative vision. Just keep showing up. Or quit.

Rick Rubin, in The Creative Act, puts it like this:

Popular success is a poor barometer of work and worth. In order for a work to connect commercially, stars must align and none of them relate to how good the project is. It might be the timing, the distribution mechanism, the mood of the culture, or a connection to current events.

If a global catastrophe happens on the same day a project comes out, the project might be overshadowed. If you’ve made a stylistic change, your fans may not initially be receptive to it. If a highly anticipated work by another artist is released on the same day, your project may not land with the same impact. Most variables are completely out of our control. The only ones we can control are doing our best work, sharing it, starting the next, and not looking back.

Do that and don’t worry about how many units can be shipped. That has nothing to do with you.

* Two of these articles are “For Writers Who Have Considered Literary Suicide When Talent Wasn’t Enough” and “Talent Isn’t Enough (And It Never Was)”—linked to each other and somewhat overheated but, in this writer’s humble opinion, well written and worth a look.

On Control: a Conversation with Myself

Instead of trying to control the people around you, which is ultimately impossible, why not try controlling yourself?

If you say, “My experience depends on this person. So I have to persuade, indoctrinate, contain, or otherwise influence her* in order to feel alright,” you are in for some roller coaster-level misery.

She has individual hopes, dreams, fears, agendas, desires, and wants to feel good just like you. So she’s faced with similar decisions: does she choose to control conditions or herself? Chances are, she’s thinking, “My experience depends on him. So I have to persuade . . . “

Trying to push all that she is into a box and keep it there disregards (and disrespects) her. Moreover, it’s ultimately impossible. She will break out and do her own thing. People hate to be controlled, even if you think you know what’s good for them. And your personal preferences are certainly not the only right ones.

“But if I don’t take some kind of action, she’ll hurt me.” Maybe. If you allow it. But this is also a question of self-control. Marcus Aurelius writes something about this in The Meditations: “Choose not to be harmed and you won’t feel harmed. Don’t feel harmed and you haven’t been.” It’s very much up to you how you feel—not up to the multitude of people who’d like to influence you in a particular way. You’re the only one doing the feeling.

No one can push a feeling into you. You allow it to arise inside yourself. And you can accept it or reject it, change it or embrace it. It’s all you. Nothing is happening to you. Everything is happening within you—with your implicit permission. Realizing this is the first step toward having a little peace of mind. It also makes your relationships better over time. You’re in charge.

“But if she hadn’t done the things she did, I wouldn’t be in this position.” That may be true, but no one lives in a sealed, pristine environment where everyone is selfless and accommodating. We live in a world of friction and contrast with individuals determined to seek their own freedom and truth. That’s what makes people so interesting. It’s also what makes us want greater control over our experiences. Nevertheless, trying to do this by controlling others and the conditions around us is misguided.

What’s the alternative? Think of three things. One, stop complaining and whining, as if mommy’s going to run over and fix things. Mommy never actually did. And now that you’re older, the world isn’t going to act like a surrogate mommy. As is often said, nobody’s coming to save you—you make your experiences from the substance of your attitudes and perceptions. Character really is destiny. So accept responsibility for your life and then change it from within, without complaining.

Two, get your head straight. You are not a victim. Even people who are physically harmed by others can choose not to be victims. Survivors of violence are often some of the strongest people—not necessarily physically strong, but strong in mind and spirit. Victimhood requires your acquiescence and participation. Don’t participate in that. Choose not to be harmed without trying to force others into submission.

And three, your imagination is your greatest attribute; use it. Focus on what you want in order to associate yourself with it more intimately. This includes your relationships with others. If you focus on the things you find pleasing in others, you don’t have to cajole and manipulate them into behaving the way you want.

In a broader sense, this applies to all life and it’s not New Age foolery. It’s just the power of imagination applied to attention. Let confirmation bias work for you instead of against you. In short, the more you imagine something and look for it in the world, the more you’ll notice it and wind up interacting with it. Selective attention is a real thing. And it, too, is a choice synonymous with mindful self-control.

In Polishing the Mirror, Ram Dass writes, “If somebody . . . is a problem for you, they’re not the one who needs to change. If someone is a problem for you, it’s you who needs to change. If you feel they’re causing you trouble, that’s your problem. It’s on you. Your job is to clear yourself.”

You’re living your best life. You’re in heaven right now. You just have to see it. And, if you can, you’ll fall in love with everyone because you’ll realize they are just like you—trying to find relief, trying to find meaning, trying to rise above the fog of their inner confusion and drama. Don’t get in their way. Don’t get in your own way. Let others be free and so free yourself.

*Pronouns are always a problem. I’m randomly picking the female one so as not to have to butcher the English language. This isn’t about anyone in particular.