Joseph Hirsch's Blog

Most people hate their jobs. And most people also love to read about other people performing their shitty jobs. Figure that one out. Maybe it’s a bit like the old Patton Oswalt bit about why he enjoyed watching Cops: watching other people endure misery helps you endure your own, maybe especially if their lots are even more miserable than yours. We even get a loanword from the German to describe this feeling: Schadenfreude.
There are enough books on working crappy jobs for various subgenres to have developed within the main body of the genre. There’s the story of a socially conscious journalist slumming for a year or two, working crappy jobs and keeping notes before writing their book. Usually these works mix field reporting and personal observations with hard data and quotes from more academic sources. The other main subgenre (which I prefer) consists of firsthand accounts of people working various crap jobs not out of sociological interest or class solidarity but simply because they have no choice. These people tend to be overeducated, underemployed types who dream of being professional writers or at least tenure-track professors. A lot of times they got their MFA in the hopes of writing the Great American Novel. In the meantime, though, they’re saddled with a ton of student debt and they have to do something to avoid ending up on the streets.
My favorite of these books is probably Iain Levison’s A Working Stiff’s Manifesto: A Memoir of Thirty Jobs I Quit, Nine That Fired Me, and Three I Can’t Remember. Its subtitle should give you a sense of its darkly humorous tone. Levison was an extremely talented, insightful and acerbic writer. I say “was” because the guy hasn’t written anything besides a handful of articles in years. The last I heard, he fled to China and is teaching English to Chinese kids there. Why is it that the most talented writers are almost always the least prolific?
Getting back to the book: Levison’s description of his various crap jobs—the physical pains, the sometimes dangerous mishaps—evoke laughter but also push the reader toward tears. Whether you’re still working a crap job or you’ve escaped it (or you’re one of those lucky souls who never endured the grind) you’ll still feel for the man.
It’s been a while since I read the book, but some of the scenes were so vivid that even years later they remain fresh in my mind: like the time he served wine at a toney party but kept cutting his hand with the corkscrew and ended up getting his blood mixed in with the drinks; or that time he was delivering home heating oil via truck to large mansions and—thanks to some confusing instructions from dispatch—ended blowing the head off a statue with a blast of hot oil from a hose; or working an offshore fishing rig and having netfuls of stinking mackerel dumped on his head while he attempted to shovel his way free.
Of course, the granddaddy of all crap job books is Skid Row poet laureate Charles Bukowski’s Factotum. The book follows the peregrinations of young Hank Chinaski from one Greyhound station to another as he seeks work while trying to make it as a writer. He works at a dog biscuit factory, as a janitor, as a “ball bearing man,” and at a million other sundry shit gigs all while remaining either blackout drunk or enduring the agonies of an excruciating hangover. Reprieves come in the form of trips to the horse racing track and making love to equally sloshed and shabby women in seedy rooming houses. It’s a bitterly funny-sad book whose point appears to be that the average life at the lower social rungs is mostly pointless. Scene follows scene with no connecting thread except that Hank—somehow—remains alive despite a strong self-destructive streak…
I suppose people are still writing books about their crap lives and crap jobs, but I haven’t read anything on the subject lately. It’s a shame, as I feel that the genre is long overdue not only for an update, but for a book on the subject to outdo everything that came before. Not that the aforementioned books weren’t great in their own way, it’s just that the labor market has become even crappier since those books were written, the situation of your average prole even more desperate.
Yes, Bukowski had endured the Great Depression, but Factotum took place in the Forties, during the war boom when jobs were plentiful, especially for young, able-bodied men. It’s debatable how able-bodied the heavy-drinking Buk was, but with all the non-4F (draft deferred) youngsters overseas, getting a job was fairly easy even for him.
In the intervening decades—especially since the Dotcom boom and bust, as well as the opening of the immigration floodgates—competition for even the worst jobs has grown only more fierce. It’s not just that, but most of the gains have been for management and the owners at the expense of the workers. The game is rigged thanks to all kinds of legal and linguistic legerdemain, as well, designed to keep you from getting even the meagerest benefits. You’re not an employee, you’re an associate, or subcontractor. People no longer have jobs, they work gigs. Octogenarians who should be doting on grandchildren in living rooms are struggling to keep smiles on their faces while stocking shelves or serving burgers to obese ingrates; Amazon fulfillment centers that look like concentration camps sprout over the countryside and fleets of blue panel trucks comb the land delivering sex toys to shut-ins. People who were in war-torn nations last week bring orders of fast food and recreational marijuana edibles to the doors of young girls masturbating via webcam for men old enough to be their fathers.
It’s all quite hellish—hellish enough, in fact, for new words, concepts, and neologisms to have emerged in hopes of describing or dealing with this monstrous society we’ve created. The “precariat” slave away in a “techno-feudalist” system ruled by billionaires who dream of leaving Earth behind for Mars and implanting microchips in our heads (ostensibly for our own good, but probably for their own, nefarious purposes. After all, turnover in slave mines is probably pretty high and those rare earths and cobalt are not going to dig themselves up.)
The people who run the show grow ever more detached from the people they rule over, as well. Rather than wearing giant wigs and powdering their faces with arsenic-soaked puffs like the elite of a bygone era, our rulers go to ski resorts and talk about installing internet kill-switches to keep the rabble in line, or achieving the singularity and uploading their consciousnesses onto deathless electronic platforms.
The only good part about such a terrifying situation is that there are still some people out there strong enough to laugh, and perceptive enough to find the beauty in all that ugliness. Brave, enough also to look their situation in the eye and describe it as it is—without meaning or purpose besides what little they might give it with their words.
I can’t help but think about the person who could do it, come out and finally say it for the rest of us, an avatar for a whole class of people who tend to get overlooked. A young man or woman who dreamed of becoming a writer but is now currently pushing a forklift. Tomorrow they’ll be delivering Chipotle for Uber Eats or driving a bagful of groceries for DoorDash in their tiny Prius. The next day they’ll be stocking shelves at a vape shop run by an Indian berating them for moving too slow. Maybe they’ll even sign up to be a subject of medical testing just to add a touch of novelty to the agonizing grind.
At night, body aching, mind numbed, soul almost without hope, this person will return to their apartment they share with three equally hopeless roommates. They’ll go to their room, sit down in front of a PC and force themselves to write a thousand words or so. Slowly—through excruciating trial and error—they will learn to be a good writer. They will learn what to leave out and what to put in, how to hold a reader’s interest, how to make reading about hell less than hellish, or even enjoyable.
Hopefully it leads to a good book, and hopefully they have the balls to send it out into the world. Hopefully also some publishing house picks it up. But if not, I hope they self-publish the work and don’t worry about it being perceived as a “vanity” project.
Hell, part of vanity is caring what other people think, which makes most established, well-respected writers vainer than any kid out there willing to circumvent the “Big Six” and take the DIY route.
One thing I know for sure, though.
I’m not going to be the one to write that book, as those days of busting my ass for shareholders and owners I’ll never meet are far in my rearview. I busted my ass hard enough in the Army, and if this writing shit doesn’t work out for me, I’ll go live under a bridge somewhere. Roast rats on a wooden spit over a barrel fire during the day while nodding out on fentanyl in my little canvas tent at night.
Maybe—assuming I don’t overdose—I’ll even write a book about it.

Forgive the prolixity of this post’s title. Forgive me also if this blog entry ends up going all over the place. It’s fairly late in the evening, several publishers have been running me ragged with various assignments, and to top it all off, I’m on a rough diet. It’s got me a little lightheaded, a little cranky. I think I may be going through carb withdrawal.
Usually it takes me some time to get to the point in these things (sometimes too long) but that shouldn’t be a problem tonight. Mainly because the thing I wanted to talk about—my problem—is staring me in the face in that first paragraph I wrote. Go back there and read it again and see if you can see what the problem is, the weak spot that’s calling out for correction.
Don’t see it? Lucky you. That means you’re not torturing yourself at two a.m. trying to do the impossible, by which I mean perfect your writing.
Here’s the part that’s bothering me: “…to top it all off” is a readymade phrase, and the use of such phrases is many times evidence of lazy writing (or at least a tired mind.) A writer is supposed to consider every word that they write, measure its effect, judge its placement with regards to the other words around it. Only then do larger structures such as sentences and paragraphs begin to factor into the picture.
When you write something like “to top it all off,” or “one fell swoop,” you are not writing. You are basically allowing the stale and tired concepts of other writers to march through your mind, out of your fingers and onto the keyboard.
Kind of scary when you think about it, almost like being possessed by the spirit of some lazy hack.
Maybe, in fact, the writer William Burroughs was correct, and that language itself is a virus, a way for us to contaminate each other with bad ideas. That old “Bull Lee,” developed this insight well before Dawkins talked about memes and “lateral transmission” only underlines the man’s genius. There’s almost a syllogistic logic to it all. Humans are a viruses (in Burroughs’ estimation) and we are inhabited by viruses, and thus everything we do (from sex to speaking) can’t help but be viral.
Maybe we should all just shut the hell up?
There are certain writers who seem to be a little less downbeat than Burroughs, inasmuch as they behave as if they believe the virus is at least treatable. Certain writers have used a reductive, “deceptively simple” style that helped them avoid regurgitating the pat phrases of their lazier forebears. Reading Ernest Hemingway or Cormac McCarthy or Sherwood Anderson—whatever you think of them—is always a clinic in seeing what happens when weighted consideration is given to every word. It’s as if with each keystroke they’re trying to drill through layers of received and accreted wisdom, trying to clear the air and begin anew. It’s learning via unlearning.
Some, like Bukowski, take it a little further. Bukowski, after all, is the one who said he decided to make simplicity his God. Raymond Carver also ideally aimed for sentences of ten words or less, in order to avoid the problem. Keep those sentences short enough and it’s hard to let the pat phrases and preexisting ideas sneak through.
Still, if there is a peril to this style of extreme vigilance, it’s that it seems like…work, both to write and sometimes even to read. Writing, for me, should not be like climbing a mountain, should not be arduous. It should be a way to unwind, find some succor and solace after a long, hard day.
Others obviously don’t feel this way. Someone said that when Normal Mailer wrote, it was common to hear him grumbling, banging things around, making himself miserable.
Hemingway—like a handful of other writers I can think of—wrote while standing up, mostly in the morning.
To me that seems too much like work. Yes, I believe in developing good habits, being disciplined—trying, in a word—but I don’t view writing as a chore, not most times at least.
And Hemingway obviously felt that way. To bring Bukowski back into it again: “Anyone who writes standing up at seven a.m. has no sense of humor. He wants to defeat something.” Hemingway, by the way, began writing early in the morning (also strange and uncomfortable for me) mostly because it left him the afternoons free to fish and drink.
In other words, writing wasn’t a way to have fun; it was something to get out of the way so that he could have fun after that.
And frankly I don’t want to feel this way about writing. I want to have a good time when I write, and if this prevents me from ever creating a stone cold masterpiece, then so be it. I have better things to do than immiserate myself in pursuit of praise and awards. Moreover, I can think of several writers off the top of my head who were feted and showered with accolades who went on to take their lives. Nothing is going to immunize you against the pain of the human condition. You might as well use writing to palliate that pain, rather than exacerbating it in pursuit of some probably phantomic perfection, or praise from other pained beings.
Of course, too, there are times when readymade phrases are entirely appropriate (I almost wrote “just what the doctor ordered” but stopped myself in time.)
Say, for instance, you are writing in close third or first person perspective for someone whose language and culture are well-salted with peculiar idioms. Say this character is especially religious, and very familiar with the Good Book, loquacious and given to homespun wisdom. In such a case, the following would be perfectly acceptable:
“I was plumb tickled when I found out ma wasn’t going to die. Lord willing, she’ll live for many more summers, the crop will come in, and then we’ll be in high clover.”
Those two sentences are filled concepts that did not originate with your character, or with you, the writer. They were inherited, “horizontally transferred” (h/t Dawkins) alongside social mores and taboos as memes, just as eye color or hair color are “vertically transferred” (ibid) via genes.
That’s something else to consider when it comes to starting “fresh” and trying to simplify things in order to avoid using the timeworn and readymade. Language itself is inherited, and while the “language acquisition device” touted by generative grammar proponents has never been literally located in the brain, no words we write (or think, or speak) are probably sui generis, or ever necessarily our own.
Hell, concepts like egology nicely dovetail with Dawkinsonian mimetics to argue there is no “you,” or “me.” And I don’t mean this in the sense a spiritualist guru means it. I simply mean that the concept of personhood is a convenience for our genes to transmit themselves into the next generation. You, in a very fundamental sense, might not even exist, so how can you hope to be an original writer?
It’s something to think about the next time you sit down to write, I suppose. That “you” are not really writing, that it’s all just genes and instinct and mechanisms of the brain developed over eons.
How the hell did I get from talking about aesthetics to this murky outpost of phenomenology?
Hell, don’t ask me. I told you it was late and I was tired and hungry. Even worse, the central heating here has crapped out, so you can add “cold” to that list.
Christ, sometimes I wish I knew how to do something more useful than writing.

A while back I heard an interview with a comedian (I can’t remember which) talking about how almost every aspect of a road comic’s life sucked. You spent almost all of your time traveling from one gig to another—either in anonymous and sterile airports, or driving mile after mile on unchanging highway. Once at your destination, you either went to some random hotel (or even worse, a motel) for the night, or you went to a house the club kept specifically for their acts while in town. A lot of those acts—comedians, musicians—knew others would come after them and they liked to play pranks. They would leave perishable items out rather than putting them in the fridge, hide used condoms beneath the pillows in the bed, unscrew lightbulbs and throw them in the trash. The usual gross and immature stuff you would expect grown adults not to do, unless, you know, they were comedians or rockers.
But then the big night of the show would come. Granted, said “big night,” was probably just at some tiny, smoky comedy club—The Chuckle Hut, the Funny Bone—and not a coliseum, like when you first envisioned taking this path. But the fans would be there to see you (if you were lucky) and not have just showed up for a night of random comedy. Maybe parts of the set would be clunky (you’d be trying out new material), or a drunken heckler would ruin a bit at a key moment. But, some nights there would come a time where you hit your stride, a kind of comedic flow state where you were having success and the crowd was in that moment with you. Maybe it was a bit of improvised crowd work that didn’t just go well, but featured the kind of serendipitous exchange everyone would be talking about on their way home. And there would be a little bit of something ineffable—euphoria—when things went your way and you felt like you’d made the right career choice. You knew, in this moment, that you were doing what you were born to do, and that—while you might be generally useless—you were at least good at this one thing, dammit.
Yes, the high would soon fade, and be followed by an hour of manning a merch table, selling a handful of CDs and t-shirts to fans. After that, maybe a couple of bumps of cheap coke cut with God-knows-what in the greenroom with your opening act and the bartender, then the comedown. After that, who knows? Maybe anonymous sex with a fan or a more random hookup you met at the bar. More likely, though, just coffee, a slice of pie, and a cigarette at some vinyl booth in a dingy all-night diner on the edge of town, before heading back to the motel to get some sleep. Only to get up and do it again, and again, and again.
And somehow, either for the luckiest or the unluckiest of comics, those few minutes where everything flowed right on stage make the rest of the nightmare worth enduring…
I’m not sure what exactly this comedian called it, this life of so much tedium and hassle with that little bit of incredible joy mixed in there. But it’s something I’ve come to think of as the “misery to joy ratio” (which you can probably tell from this blog entry’s title.) And it’s something that I imagine exists in probably every artform, some bargain the art makes with the artist that ends up winnowing the large cohort of people who try it down to a much smaller group of those who have no choice but to do it.
My own art (I feel ridiculous calling it that, but just play along for the sake of this blog) is my writing. And it is an art that comes with its own many agonies and its handful of joys that must still somehow provide enough compensation to keep me going even when there is very little literal remuneration involved.
What are those pains and joys?
The pains are myriad, and probably any writer can tell you about them, and many in fact spend more time complaining than writing.
There are, for instance, those days where you not only don’t want to write, but you don’t even want to get out of bed. Maybe your body is hurting (I know mine is) and even the physical task of sitting in your chair and typing brings a certain amount of agony with it. Most of the time, though, even when the physical pain is absent, the psychic pain is still there, the gnawing doubt, the self-loathing, the feeling that you are the least successful and least talented person to ever attempt your particular craft. For me it’s a running monologue, a soliloquy of self-defeating insecurity that continues to play in the background as I work. It always starts out very loud and (usually) if I keep writing, keep plowing through it, the voice grows quieter, more distant, faint. But even then it’s still there, if only as a remote and faded echo.
At first, though, it’s speaking in ALL-CAPS.
WHY THE HELL ARE YOU DOING THIS? it says DON’T YOU KNOW YOU’RE THE WORST WRITER IN THE WORLD? NOT ONLY THAT, BUT YOU’RE GETTING OLDER, AND YOU STILL DON’T HAVE A WIFE OR KIDS OR ANY KIND OF REAL CAREER TO SPEAK OF. DON’T YOU REALIZE THAT YOU COULD DO SOMETHING—ANYTHING ELSE—THAT WOULD PAY YOU BETTER THAN THIS? WHY, YOU COULD BECOME A DAY TRADER! STOP DRIVING AROUND IN YOUR RATTY HYUNDAI AND WEARING PANTS THAT ARE BASICALLY COMING APART AT THE SEAMS! IF YOU WOULD ONLY GIVE UP THIS STUPID DREAM AND FACE REALITY, YOU COULD HAVE A CAR THAT WOULDN’T LEAVE YOU FEELING EMBARRASSED AND INFERIOR EVERY TIME YOU STOPPED FOR A TRAFFIC LIGHT. YOU COULD EAT SUSHI AT A NICE BOUTIQUE EATERY WITH A PRETTY WOMAN WEARING AN EXPENSIVE DRESS, INSTEAD OF EATING TOP RAMEN WHILE YOUR DOG WAITS AT YOUR FEET HOPING FOR A NOODLE TO DROP FROM THE TINES OF YOUR SPORK.
BESIDES, JOE (YOU ASSHOLE), LET’S SAY YOU EVEN DO WRITE SOMETHING THAT—MIRACLE OF MIRACLES—DOESN’T SUCK. ARE YOU AWARE OF HOW GREATLY THE ODDS ARE STILL STACKED AGAINST YOU? HOW BIG THE SLUSHPILE AT EVERY PUBLISHER IS? HOW HARD IT IS TO BREAK THROUGH WITHOUT CONNECTIONS, A PEDIGREE, AN AGENT? AND DID YOU NOT HEAR WHAT EVERYONE FROM JOYCE CAROL OATES TO JAMES PATTERSON HAS SAID ABOUT THE POLITICIZED NATURE OF THE PUBLISHING CLIMATE AT THIS POINT? NO ONE WANTS TO HEAR ANYTHING ELSE FROM YOU, WHITE MAN, AND EVEN YOUR VERY EUROPEAN, VERY STODGY NAME IS GOING TO MARK YOU AS PARIAH BEFORE THE SLUSH READER GETS PAST THE COVER LETTER. AND YOU CAN HARDLY BLAME THEM. AFTER ALL, WHY PUBLISH SOMETHING WRITTEN BY SOME SCHLUBBY WHITE DUDE FROM OHIO WHEN YOU COULD PUBLISH AN AFROFUTURIST MASTERPIECE WRITTEN BY A UGANDAN TRANSWOMAN RECIPIENT OF BOTH A GUGGENHEIM FELLOWSHIP AND A MACARTHUR GENIUS GRANT WHO ALSO WRITES MOVING POETRY ABOUT THE PLIGHT OF PALESTINIAN CHILDREN AND EVEN PERFORMS THE WORKS AS SPOKEN WORD WHILE WEARING A KEFFIYEH AND BACKED BY A BONGO PLAYER.
And the worst part about that self-defeating litany is that a good portion of what it tells me is in fact true. This is a very hard gig. Even successful writers for the most part make less than enough to subsist on, and either have to rely on spouses or other gigs to support what the world views as a hobby, regardless of how seriously the writer takes it.
So why do it? Why, when there is so much misery and disappointment involved in the craft, and even those odd and unexpected moments of joy are so ephemeral and fleeting and are never guaranteed?
If you followed the first part of this analogy about comedy, you already know why I keep doing it.
I keep doing it, 1) Because I have to and 2) Because when everything goes my way, when the fingers dance and typing feels more like moving a planchette over an Ouija board than “digging a ditch,” to quote John Colapinto, the buzz is unlike anything else. Hell, even after it’s passed, that residual echo of the high is something you can carry around with yourself for hours afterward, and it makes trudging through mud or slogging through snow feel like walking on air. And it’s something to look forward to finding again and again, something I’m willing chase no matter how much of a harangue I have to hear from that self-defeating homunculus screaming from the center of my head every time I sit down and begin typing anew.
Besides, what else am I going to do at 2.a.m. when I can’t sleep and there’s still nothing good on TV?*
I suppose I could try day trading, but even that pursuit probably has its own misery to joy ratio.
* Yes, even in a world where there are a thousand streaming services offering a million options, many times it feels like there’s nothing on TV (or on my computer.) On such nights, I have come to realize, I’m better off entertaining myself with my writing than relying on Hollywood, YouTubers, porn stars, and assorted other riffraff out there in cyberspace to entertain me.

I had a sort of rough Christmas season. Not as rough as the Reiner Family’s (too soon?) but as much darkness as light certainly. Part of that is just the kind of weather we had here in the Nasty Nati. It was blistering cold and overcast, for the most part. And when the chill finally let up, the rain started falling, threatening to become ice and snow as soon as the cold returned, which it always inevitably did. Someone once said that Cincinnati only had two seasons, freezing winter and scorching summer, with only a couple weeks of fall and springtime thrown in. Whoever said that knew what they were talking about.
Another thing that made the Christmas season hard was seeing how frail both my mother and father have become. I know, it’s the human condition and I should be grateful they even made it into their late seventies like this. Especially considering the old man is a former smoker and the old lady is still smoking (both weed and cigarettes.) I haven’t talked to old Ned Ryerson recently, but I’d still venture they’ve both already beaten their odds on the actuarial table. I should be more grateful, but gratitude is the hardest of virtues to muster, and is usually only forced on us when we see someone else in even greater distress.
It hurts to think about what’s coming for them (and the rest of us, no matter what), and a sense of dread accompanies every parting with them, that question lingering in the background of our every interaction. When? Even my dog, once a feisty little terrier with a black coat, is now a gray dame with no teeth, bad eyesight, and poor hearing. At least, though, the olfactory bulb is still in working order. I know this because every time I drop the smallest piece of food on the floor, she comes alive and starts rooting around like a truffle pig let loose in the forest.
Part of what made the time gloomy, though, was what I was reading: horror author Thomas Ligotti’s “The Conspiracy Against the Human Race,” subtitled, “A Contrivance of Horror.” In the book, Ligotti argues convincingly that all of human existence is a horror, that in an ultimate sense horror is the only thing that is real.
Ligotti further makes the case that human consciousness is different from the awareness that exists in other animals. It is an outgrowth of instinct, or rather a mutation, that has allowed us to think about thinking (metacognition), but also forced us to think constantly about our own mortality and the meaning of our existences. In Ligotti’s opinion, every invention of man is in some way designed to try to solve the unsolvable problems created by this mutation. Some turn to religion for answers, but the answers it provides are lies or delusion. Others try to distract themselves with hedonistic pursuits, blighting the pain with drugs or orgiastic sex. But as both sex and drug addicts can tell you, there comes a time when the pursuit stops killing pain and starts causing it.
Ligotti offers no solution in his book, because—unlike almost everyone else—he simply cannot bring himself to lie. He faces the void as long as anyone can without blinking, and though the book was depressing—terrifying even—his unwavering commitment to the truth as he sees it is admirable. The closest he comes, in fact, to a solution is a philosophy of anti-natalist nihilism. He’s not talking about drowning babies in the bathtub; he simply refused to bring children into a world whose pains outnumber its pleasures by some great order of magnitude. Like William Burroughs, Ligotti thinks pleasure an illusion, or simply “relief from pain.” The “pleasure” the addict feels when indulging their addiction is always greater when they indulge it after a long time without the drug. Because the pain prior to fixing was then at its most intense, and the abatement of pain is confused by the human animal as pleasure. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that among the biographical tidbits available about Ligotti online, it is mentioned that he is a lifelong sufferer of anhedonia. When he won the Bram Stoker Lifetime Achievement Award, he chose that time to make a speech in favor of assisted suicide. The man is almost sui generis in his commitment to ending what he perceives as the farce of existence for the human animal, a puppet motivated mostly by pain.
There is a time, without a doubt, when I would have been less receptive to Ligotti’s arguments. Had I read the book as a fifteen year-old on a breezy summer day, its rhetorical perfection probably would have had a quite different effect on me. It’s hard to feel much besides lust—let alone think—when the endorphins are pumping and the hormones are swimming as they are at that age. Naturally, as a middle-aged man in the dead of winter being visited by his ageing mother and paying visits to his frail and trembling father, the book hits differently.
There were times I wanted to quit the book, and yet there were also times when the sublimity of the guy’s prose was its own compensation. The film critic Roger Ebert once said that a well-made film with a dark subject can leave the viewer feeling exuberant, and the experience was something like that. Ligotti is so good—so erudite in his interdisciplinarity—that the book remained a fun read even when he was basically telling me I was doomed and any arguments to the contrary I could proffer were born of delusion. Yes—horror of horrors (at least from Ligotti’s perspective)—the book was actual fun. After all, how many people can go from talking about G.K. Chesterton to the Buddha to John Carpenter’s “The Thing” in a single paragraph? The man simply has a gift.
After a couple weeks of slow reading, I finished the book and reviewed it over at Goodreads, then I went on to the next thing. Of course, it has continued to linger in my mind, as evidenced by this blog post here. And I still worry about my mother and father. They both have good and bad days, but the bad days are seeming to start to outnumber the good ones, especially for the old lady. There was one day when she fell on the lawn and could not get up, and reached out to me for help. Alas, I couldn’t help much, either, as I had torn my shoulder apart in the army and have to be careful about lifting more than twenty-pounds. She’s thin, shrinking by the day, but she still exceeded my twenty pound limit by nearly a hundred pounds. And it wasn’t just the torn shoulder preventing me from being much help. Recently I had been diagnosed with “afib” (atrial fibrillation) and an aortal aneurism had been found in my heart. It’s treatable with pills, diet, and exercise, but still, it’s another reminder of my mortality. Am I the guy who used to max out his PT tests in the Army? The guy who could do eighty-something sit-ups in two minutes then run two miles in 13:30 even after a night of hard drinking and chain smoking? Clearly that guy and I share the same name and fingerprints, but he is no longer who I see in the mirror.
My terrier, it turns out, is not the only one who has gone from black to gray…
I recall an interview with Ligotti I read some years back, before I had read “Conspiracy,” before I had encountered much of his fiction. The interviewer asked him what advice he would give to those who want to write horror. Ligotti’s answer was succinct, and a little terse, a rarity for him. “Don’t,” he said, or words to that effect. “Unless you absolutely must, in which case, I’m sorry.”
In the past I have written some horror stories, some of which even saw publication and earned me a few dollars and even a few words of praise. But it was not a matter of necessity with me, a feeling of obligation to stare into the void and write about that and nothing else. Now, though, I’m starting to feel like I may write nothing but horror, at least for a time, and that maybe that time will be the rest of my life.
In any case, on the day writing horror becomes a simple must rather than an option, I will accept Mr. Ligotti’s apology, and of course extend my own to him as well. Not, however, that my sympathy can save him, any more than anything else can. Besides which, he’s sort of hard to find. He doesn’t go to conventions and after more than three decades in the field, I can only find three photos of the guy online. It would seem, like a lot of geniuses, the man is something of a recluse.

Yesterday my new novel came out, Church of the Last Lamb. I hate describing my work—summarizing it, synopsizing it—but it has to be done in this business. If you’re curious, the book can be described as a postapocalyptic zombie novel. Just writing that—“postapocalyptic zombie novel”—made me feel like I’d just gotten punched in the gut. I imagine some of the other people reading it took it the same way. How many postapocalyptic zombie novels, movies, TV shows, and comic books have there already been? And now we’ve got another one?!
Yawn.
And while it’s true that the “dance is in the doing,” and a stale subject can always be made fresh, it’s very hard to do. To even try is a fool’s errand, but since writing (and the arts in general) is for fools chasing dreams rather than money, I guess it’s okay. I can forgive myself for the folly of devoting a year and some change to a project some people will reject out of hand, having become fatigued with the subject.
Do you want to hear something else foolish I did recently? I’ll tell you. While waiting for the novel to come out, I began writing another novel. It’s finished—shorter than the last one, about 89,000 words—and is currently being edited. It’s titled Animal World and (here comes the elevator pitch) it’s about a transsexual prostitute and her drug dealer boyfriend. Their plan is to raise enough money to get her the full sex change operation, after which they will presumably live happily ever after.
With this project at least I had a decent “high concept” X meets Y sales pitch that even a cokehead film producer could get behind. “It’s sort of an update of Dog Day Afternoon meets Scarface.” That hardly gets to the heart of the work, but it might at least get my foot into a door when shopping the work around.
Still, there is a larger problem with the work, namely its subject. And I think it is fair to say at this point that everyone—trans ally and transphobic—is exhausted with the topic of trans. Comedians no longer have bits about transgenders but do meta bits on how the subject itself is passé and any comedian touching it is a hack.
Not only is everyone tired of the subject, but there are other perils waiting, built-in to the topic, waiting even if it reaches a receptive audience. It is such a charged issue that attempting to tell a fictional story about a transsexual character won’t be accepted in most quarters. Your vision must comport with the reader’s own standards, definitions, and perceptions of the subject. Even those who don’t want to have a bias on the subject will be prey to kneejerk reactions on works that touch upon it. This is somewhat understandable, as sexuality is a tricky issue, and identity is a slippery thing under the best of circumstances. Many people have struggled with these issues, endured mockery, undergone painful and expensive operations and nonsurgical procedures in their quest to find themselves. And now you (me in this instance), a cisgendered white male, are going to presume to use this as simply grist for a story? Just to spin a yarn and maybe, hopefully, sell it to a publisher?
To which I could only honestly answer: yes. The essentialists (as my professor called them in college) believe it a kind of heresy to write from the perspective of someone unlike oneself. At least, males should not try to write from the perspective of females, and straight men from the perspective of queers. Even writing in “close-third person,” is probably too close for these people.
But to the point…
A zombie novel followed by a novel about a transwoman. One subject is played out beyond belief, and even bringing up the other subject causes eyes to roll and both binary and nonbinary sphincters to pucker.
Why, I keep asking myself, am I making it so hard on myself? Why am I mining this territory when the lode appears most exhausted? Shouldn’t I—to mix mining and forging metaphors—have struck while the iron was hot? Harnessed the zeitgeist? (there’s a third metaphor thrown in for you, harnessing a draft animal, God I suck.)
“Zeitgeist” is one of those funny German compound words that doesn’t really translate literally to English. It’s also a word that you never really see the same way again after you become fluent in German. “Geist,” by itself can mean anything from “spirit” to “mind” to a more literal sort of “ghost.”
“Geisteskrank,” could literally be taken as “ghost sick,” (I’m tired of these damn ghosts haunting our house!) but it means “mentally ill.” Take “polter,” which means “to clatter” and pair it with “geist” and you get “poltergeist,” a pretty good movie by the late Tobe Hooper that means “clatter ghost.”
But that’s all etymology. And I’m only bringing it up because if I don’t I’ll only feel even more foolish about squandering my GI bill on getting my master’s degree in German Studies. My real point is that I think the zeitgeist (the time ghost / spirit of the times) is overrated, at least when it comes to art.
I think there’s something to be said about seizing on the spirit of the times if you’re a journalist, though. The best example of this would probably be gonzo gadfly Hunter Thompson’s “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.” The book did a wonderful job of capturing the tragicomic moment when idealism is betrayed and one man chooses drug-induced madness over cynical acceptance. Thompson captured not just a feeling but a clash of contradictory feelings, that still resonates in the American psyche. It’s not just the barefoot burnout hippy girl walking around with her canvases of Barbara Streisand portraits. Or the polyester kitsch casualties of the Silent Majority sporting Hawaiian shirts and black sock garters bitching about the longhairs. It’s these elements and more soaked together in a psychedelic mélange that make the book what it is. Thompson experiences disgust in the face of many people—most of humanity, including himself and his “Samoan attorney” friend sometimes. But the judgment of his subjects is more keenly sociological and anthropological than moral. It’s not for nothing that Thomas Wolfe called the book “a scorching epochal sensation.”
Having praised it, though, I must say that my favorite works of art do not feel of their time, but existing out of time. For an artist to devote time to a work while letting the world pass them by—ignoring not just the news but the cultural temperature—produces the most interesting results. I like the anachronistic magical realism of Borges, the claustrophobic under-described urban nowheresvilles of Kafka, Thomas Ligotti’s fantastical and therefore more real than our real worlds.
Think also of something David Lynch’s Eraserhead. The sense it gives not of being a mirror of its time and place (late seventies Philadelphia) but of being an artifact both ancient and futuristic. A labor of love fashioned by someone who had their back turned to the world and instead chose to face the darkness of a roominghouse closet.
I could go on, but I think you get what I’m trying to get at, in my own muddled, thinking out loud at 2:30 am way. When I create, I am less interested in what is currently interesting, what is currently going on, using my butterfly net to snatch something ephemeral from the ether. Instead, I want to build something that stands against time, to the extent that anything can. Obviously it can’t in the long run, but I believe, as Bob Dylan once said, the purpose of art is to stop time.
At least for a time. And the best way for me to do that is to ignore the clock, media (especially the news) and even the world around me. To not rush by speaking to the moment, but instead to take enough time that the passage of time in some way becomes the subject of the work.

Spaceman (2024)
Directed by Johan Renck
Written by Colby Day
Starring Adam Sandler, Carey Mulligan, and Kunal Nayyar
Spaceman ** ½
I should have known as soon as I discovered that the cloud of interstellar dust particles was named “Chopra,” that this movie would not be real science fiction. Guru Deepak Chopra, after all, is the person most responsible for confusing the issue when it comes to non-Newtonian physics. Instead of trying to reckon with its complexity, he dumbed its mysteries down into a philosophy of “manifesting one’s will through visualization.” Or mind over matter, rather than mind’s interaction with matter.
In a way, Spaceman is basically a numinous negro story, only instead of a negro we get an alien. And instead of Bagger Vance showing up on the links to help a white man, we get a spiderlike creature showing up in space to help a human.
It stars Adam Sandler as Jacob Prochazka, a Czech astronaut (though they still say “cosmonaut” in formerly communist countries) on a strange mission. He has been sent to investigate the origin and nature of a cloud of interstellar dust radiating purple light over the Earth. One would think that an unmanned mission would be safer, or that processes like gravitational lensing and spectral analysis were now advanced enough to investigate the cloud from afar. After all, the dangers to the crew on a manned mission would be significant, especially if the cloud were radioactive enough for its rays to break through a vessel’s shielding.
Thankfully, though, Spaceman, despite its title, is not really a science fiction movie, and so it isn’t really concerned with such granular details.
Prochazka has been alone, and in space now for several months, and though he is nearing his destination, he is cracking under the strain. He maintains two links to Earth to keep himself from getting too lonely. One is to a standard mission control setup. That allows him to talk to the mission’s planners, investors, and children curious about what it’s like to be in space for so long. Cosmonaut Prochazka goes through the motions in these meetings, clearly uncomfortable talking to a roomful of people after months of solitude amidship. There’s even a hint of self-loathing in those moments where he has to give shoutouts to the mission’s various sponsors.
His other link is the more intriguing one, and also the one more vital to him. It is a device that uses the principle of quantum entanglement to allow him to talk to his wife without experiencing any day. The device isn’t explained in any detail, but that’s okay since we’re in the future and the people using it likely take its to-us magical nature for granted.
These meetings are especially important to Jacob since his wife is very pregnant with his child, and there are longstanding and unresolved tensions that exist between them. She wants him to pay more attention to her, and the time they have together, while his mind remains beyond Jupiter. It is suggested that his lack of concern may have contributed to the stress that led to his wife’s previous miscarriage. One day, though, Prochazka’s wife Lenka (ably played by Carey Mulligan) doesn’t show up for their chat at the appointed hour.
It turns out that she can no longer take being married to a man who is married to his work, and is also more interested in himself than anyone else. She wants to tell him it’s over, but the people behind the mission don’t think that’s a good idea. Wait until he’s finished exploring the cloud, the Commissioner, played by Isabella Rossellini, urges. Despite doing my best to see things from Lenka’s perspective, I found myself concurring with the Commissioner. If your husband is only a few days away from making a discovery that could alter the fate of humanity and maybe the universe, maybe put the mission first? I suppose, though, this may make me a misogynist in the eyes of some.
Rather than let Jacob hear Lena’s kiss-off, the Commish decides to stall, first citing problems with the QE machine, then Lena’s being out of town. Jacob suspects something is wrong, but soon he has bigger problems. A giant spiderlike creature capable of speech (or its telepathic equivalent) is cohabitating the ship with him. He tries to quarantine it, then kill it via release of decontamination spray, but nothing works.
At last he realizes the spider only wants to probe his mind and memories in order to understand humanity. That, at least, is what it says. What it really wants to do is help Jacob see the error of his ways, understand how selfish he’s been, and what he owes his beleaguered wife stranded on Earth.
I liked this story better when it was called A Christmas Story, and the least the FX crew could have done is deck the spider out with some Jacob Marley chains. Repent, Spaceman Prochazka, before it is too late!
Like Arrival—a much better made, but still ultimately mawkish affair—this isn’t a movie about the wonders of encountering alien entities. It’s about how encountering alien entities makes us more human, make us more caring and thoughtful. Real aliens would more probably be interested in dissecting our corpses (or even more horrifying, vivisecting us.) But these aliens are basically just interstellar therapists. The Spaceman could have solved his problems much easier, and much more cheaply, by paying a shrink to sit him down on the couch.
Like Arrival, Spaceman also features lots of stirring, manipulative musical cues by Max Richter and Malick-esque whispering between characters caressing each other with their loving words.
In case you can’t already guess, I hate this shit, and find it insufferably false.
That said, none of what doesn’t work in this film is the fault of Adam Sandler. There’s no point this late in his career spilling ink (or wasting keystrokes) expressing shock that he can actually act. Punch-Drunk Love proved he was a talented dramatic performer, as have myriad other roles since then. Uncut Gems not only solidified the impression, but showed he was capable of actual onscreen greatness.
Here he does a beautiful job here of presenting a man who is tired and lonely to the point where it registers in his every expression. A genuine and ancient suffering seems to claim the Spaceman’s features, the bags under his eyes almost deep enough to look like scars. He smartly doesn’t even attempt a Czech accent, but still somehow gets across that he is a man from a place that is not America. It’s in how believable he looks and sounds when talking about his father, a former communist functionary who did terrible things in his spirit of true belief. Or in those scenes where he recalls running across beautiful green fields and through woods in the countryside outside Prague. Or in his vision where he imagines himself kissing a water nymph from Czech mythology, knowing her kiss will kill him but consequences be damned.
The design on the giant spider is also very good, and despite it being CGI, it is mostly convincing. I would say I have a normal amount of arachnophobia, and thus found myself surprised by how cute I found its change in expressions. And of course, as a binge eater with a sweet tooth, I practically fell in love with him (it?) when I discovered his love for Nutella. Paul Dano also does a good job voicing the spider, expressing curiousness as well as wisdom, making the creature sound as long-lived as it claims to be.
Also, unlike in a lot of nominally science fiction films, the ship actually looks real, too. Most of the equipment is sheathed in ruggedized casing, and lots of the controls and buttons appear to be real holdovers from the Soviet era. There are plenty of scenes in which Prochazka navigates from room to room and none of it feels stagey or like a set. His zero g spins through the space do not appear to be mere camera trickery, but instead a probe through a cramped, albeit three-dimensional space. The cloud itself is also impressive, a luminous explosion of elements and debris supposedly leftover from the Big Bang. How it got from its starting place some thirteen billion years back in time and space is another matter (maybe that Einsteinian “spooky action at a distance” again.) Regardless, it is a marvel to look at, and there is a genuine emotional charge the moment the Spaceman and the Spider make their final approach.
It sort of makes me want to go and find the source material, a book called Spaceman of Bohemia by Jaroslav Kalfar, see what got lost in the transition from page to screen. Because the movie, for all its faults, definitely has its moments, and will no doubt find its fans and defenders.

The other day I saw a weird as shit horror movie called “Messiah of Evil,” made in the early seventies. It was released multiple times, under multiple different titles, one of which was “Return of the Living Dead.” This of course caused the Godfather of the Zombie genre George A. Romero to initiate a lawsuit against the movie as released under that title.
Sidenote: Did you know that Romero and cowriter of the “Night of the Living Dead” screenplay John Russo fought over ownership of the property? This resulted in the weird decision to let Russo keep the “living” portion while Romero was left only to work with the “dead” in his movies. This is why the sequel to “Night of the Living Dead” is called “Dawn of the Dead,” rather than “Dawn of the Living Dead.” It’s also why Russo, when he made his own solo contribution, got to call it “Return of the Living Dead.”
There’s some irony there for you: Romero defended his work’s name only to lose it to his friend and cowriter.
That’s all inside baseball, though.
The movie “Messiah of Evil” deserves to be considered on its own terms, and under its own title. It begins with a young woman coming to Southern California to visit her father, a famous artist. He is something of a recluse, who lives in a large seaside mansion in a town called Point Dune. The fictional town is obviously a stand-in for the very real “Point Dume,” famed as the place where author John Fante resided and wasted his talent writing screen treatments that rarely got produced.
The lady’s father has apparently gone missing from his mansion, leaving behind only a journal in which he records the slow dissipation of his mind, body, and soul. Meanwhile, strange things are going on in-town, some of them cliché horror tropes, some of them less-so. In the cliché column, we have a drunken bum who warns all and sundry that evil is afoot.
In the not-very-clichéd column, there is a strange cross-eyed albino who drives his truck through town, ferrying around dead bodies in the flatbed. He also likes to eat rats and has taken an interest in the bizarre rituals some of the moon worshippers perform at the oceanside. Supposedly the people gathered by the sea at night to pray by torchlight are wedding celebrants, but it is clear that this is no ordinary exchange of nuptials. I figured they were trying to dredge the dread tentacled Yoth-Sothoth or maybe eldritch Cthulhu himself from the depths, but apparently not. Instead, they are trying to bring back the ghost of a cowpoke who, during his own stab westward, suffered hunger pangs until forced to engage in cannibalism. After first eating human flesh merely to survive, he began to acquire a taste for it, and the locals became disgusted by his taboo-breaking behavior and burnt him as a warlock.
Oh, and there are also a bunch of well-dressed, pallid zombified folk who hang around the local grocery store afterhours. What are they doing at Ralph’s past midnight, you ask? Why, they’re simply there to eat raw meat directly from the freezer case. Unless of course, some nosy interloper shows up, in which case they’ll leave the cold flesh in pursuit of warm meat…
It isn’t just the strangeness of this film that stuck with me, though it obviously made an impression. How, after all, could it not? Instead it was something about its melancholy tone, the mournful undercurrent running through the thing. There’s not much suspense, since it’s pretty clear the curse is well-advanced even at film’s beginning. And, as to the mystery, it’s also evident early in the first act that the things that don’t make much sense then are going to make less rather than more sense as things go on. Like in a bad dream where every attempt to find logic on the part of the dreamer causes the thing to change shape and grow more amorphous, less readable.
That’s okay, though, as sometimes I prefer the mystery to abide rather than getting neatly wrapped up. And the sense of doom and inevitability of death—threaded through the warp and weft of the work’s cloth—eventually becomes weirdly comforting, almost like a much-needed sleep…
“Messiah of Evil” belongs to a subgenre of horror film that, for lack of a better term, I’ll call the melancholy macabre. Other entries I’d add to the list would be “I Bury the Living,” the original “I Am Legend,” and “Carnival of Souls.” These are movies that deal with solitary people suffering through strange and probably hopeless circumstances, trying to reckon with forces too powerful to defeat. Sometimes these forces are too powerful to even understand, incorporeal and thus impossible to even fight.
And yet, despite how these films might sound when given in thumbnail synopses, there is something comforting about them. Something about the disjunction between what they seem to offer and the feelings they actually induce. At least for me.
And yes, I enjoy falling asleep to all of them.
I keep asking myself why that might be, and the best I can come up with is this: Sleep might not be Shakespeare’s “petit mort,” (that’s something else.) But for me, the end of the day (or sometimes the middle of the day if I suffered insomnia the previous night) is a time to succumb. Embrace rather than run from that inevitable defeat that’s awaiting us all, and even to find it exquisite rather than agonizing. “Sleep,” as the rapper Nas observed, “is the cousin of death.”
Granted there might be something on the other side of this defeat and death, a spiritual victory occluded by the seeming failure as viewed from this side of things. It’s also possible something even worse than this life is awaiting us on the other side, punishment at the hands of some Lovecraftian or Ligottian (sic?) god who rules the netherworld and has contempt for all us soft bundles of nerves and neurotic consciousness.
I get the feeling, though, that like most of us grasping toward meaning—religion, transcendence, transhumanism—that there’s probably just nothing. A void beyond all blackness…
Consciousness itself torments the characters in these movies, not just its imminence via zombies or vampires or curses. It’s something more inescapable than that, immanent in the fabric of the worlds they inhabit.
As far as we know we’re the only creatures cursed to be conscious, every moment knowing at some level that we are going to die and there’s nothing we can do about it. At best we can delay it.
That’s sad and eerie, but in the same way that moonlight hitting a moss-covered grave can be sad and eerie. There’s an undercurrent of the exquisitely gothic tied up in the reality of the human condition and this handful of low budget weird movies reflects that feeling. A mournful pull toward sleep (both temporal and eternal). A fate usually worth fighting and railing against (even though it does no good), but sometimes also one worth feting, falling into like a much-needed sleep.

There’s a quote from the writer Charles Bukowski. Lots of people dislike Bukowski for lots of different reasons, but that’s okay, because tonight we’re just considering one quote from him without context:
It comes from one of his final works, a slim volume with the wonderfully prolix title of “The Captain is Out to Lunch and the Sailors Have Taken Over the Ship.”
In the book, he reassesses several writers who had a great influence on him when he was younger: Ernest Hemingway, Carson McCullers, Sherwood Anderson.
Anderson, with his deceptively simple style, seemed to have aged the best, while Hemingway with his lean and much more striking simplicity suffered greatly upon reassessment. “Hemingway tried too hard,” Bukowski claimed. “You could feel the hard work in his writing.”
Naturally some would consider criticizing someone for trying their hardest to be an unfair and maybe even ridiculous line of attack. Aren’t you supposed to try, do what you can, summon as much light as you can against the gathering and inevitable darkness? We know we’re fallible and weak and mortal and that both we and our works will eventually perish from this Earth. But to succumb to that realization prematurely, to surrender and not even try, isn’t that tantamount to sin, even for the areligious? “Do not go gently into that good night,” Dylan Thomas urges in his wonderful villanelle of the same name. “Be angry at the sun,” poet Robinson Jeffers likewise counsels. Clearly, being angry at the sun is not going to make the sun budge an inch or cool off a single degree, but that’s sort of the point. Humans are uniquely conscious (probably) and this consciousness can either work as a paralyzing hindrance or a great motivating engine. You either fight or succumb, so why not fight as long as you can as hard as you can?
Hemingway used to call stepping to the blank page “facing the white bull,” and facing down an angry bull is not the kind of thing one can do in a half-assed way.
What, though, is the alternative to trying too hard? Not trying at all? Someone committed to such a worldview would never bother writing anything in the first place, or at least writing anything more than some chicken scratch on a cocktail napkin at happy hour. I suppose one could sit lax before their typewriter, crack their knuckles, shrug their shoulders, and just let it all flow out.
There are certainly writers who had this kind of freewheeling approach to the craft. Think of Jack Kerouac’s improvisational, jazz-inspired staccato punching of the keys of his Underwood. I’ve never seen footage of him typing, only still photos of him hunkered over the machine and brooding, with a lit cigarette dangling from his sulking lips. I imagine, though, that if he were viewed in video or in person we would see him tapping his leg like a drummer working the kick while his fingers strayed o’er the keys like Gene Krupa doing rimshots.
It's certainly the feel invoked by On the Road, which was produced on one long and interrupted typewritten scroll, and reads like it.
Bukowski hated Kerouac’s writing, which is a little ironic, considering his own aesthetic philosophy—at least as it applies to work rate—isn’t much different than Kerouac’s. He wrote his first novel, “Post Office,” in roughly two weeks; it’s a ragged and uneven work, but undeniably entertaining.
So far as I know Truman Capote never publicly opined on Charles Bukowski, and likely wouldn’t have had anything good to say about him or his writing, anyway. He did, however, give his assessment of On the Road, opining, “That’s not writing, that’s typing.” His point, it seems, is that the unmediated nature of the writing, the lack of deliberation and consideration (as if crafting words were making moves in chess) ruined the work. Kerouac had failed to try hard enough, at least in Capote’s estimation.
Maybe then, there’s some kind of golden mean, a synthesis between the thesis of hard work and the antithesis of basically automatic writing, treating a keyboard like an Ouija planchette.
This debate—to try or just let it happen—is hardly confined to the world of the writer.
The boxer Oscar De La Hoya, like many pugilists, became obsessed with golf at some point in his career. Initially he did it just to relax, as a hobby to distract him from the serious work of making men bleed. Eventually, though, he discovered that this seemingly innocuous hobby was altering his view of boxing. He claimed golf taught him not to push so hard, not to try or to force it in the ring.
That when he attempted to bash the ball, it usually shanked, or he even whiffed, and that there was a corollary “trying too hard” in the ring that was best avoided.
“Don’t force the knockout,” the old heads say to the young impetuous pugilists. “Trust the process and the knockout will come.” “Stay loose and only clench the fist directly before impact on the opponent’s body or face.”
De La Hoya had no doubt heard all this before, but didn’t really process it until he got onto the green. Probably until it came time to stop driving and start putting, a part of the game where trying too hard can quickly take you from birdie to bogey.
Ultimately, every writer must decide for themselves how hard to try, or how light or heavy a touch to give it. And since we are talking about an art and not a science here, there is probably no right answer. Not only that, but a writer who tries very hard at one point might adopt the lighter touch later in their career. One might even change tact from paragraph to paragraph, the same way a scalpel is better suited to some tasks while a chainsaw gets the job done better with other work.
For me, the main effort does not come when I’m actually writing, engaging with the word as I’m doing right now. It is fighting through the free-floating fear, the anxiety and paralysis that come from procrastinating, thinking about writing rather than doing it. Walking around my house, letting the thoughts of imposter syndrome crowd out my ideas, letting fear curdle into self-loathing. Letting my insecurities basically gnaw away at my creative impulse until the writing muscle goes slack and my fear of failure becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. And I fail before I even get a chance to try, hard or otherwise.
Once seated, the battle is nine-tenths won or lost, but at least it has been joined.
Or, to paraphrase Stanely Kubrick quoting fellow cinema titan Steven Spielberg: “The hardest part of directing a film is getting out of the car.”

I once had dreams of being a filmmaker, back when I was a teenager. These ambitions were probably fueled in part by where I was living then, and what was going on there at the time. I was in Memphis, in an apartment around Cooper-Young, one of those funky “transitional” neighborhoods popular with college kids and what used to be called hipsters.
In the neighborhood was a video store called Black Lodge, located in an old white house on a gently sloping hill. The store’s sections were divided by director rather than genre (very auteur-ish) and the staff were certified film buffs. I remember there was a red velour couch in the center of the store, facing a TV on a stand usually playing something black and white. One of the guys who hung around there named Craig had just made his own very low budget movie on digital that was doing the rounds of the local circuit. Craig turned out to be Craig Brewer, who would go on to direct the very Memphian hit film Hustle & Flow.
Sadly, Black Lodge was a casualty of Covid, though my dreams of becoming a filmmaker ended well before they closed their doors. At some point I realized I was frankly too socially withdrawn to engage in a collaborative art like filmmaking. I had enough trouble just communicating my ideas from my fingertips to the keyboard, forget other people.
Back when I had that cinematic ambition, though, I read a bunch of books on the subject. Some of them were helpful, some less so. One series I found fascinating were Faber & Faber’s series of interviews with various directors: Scorsese on Scorsese, Lee on Lee, etc. In the books the filmmakers would talk about their philosophies, their training, the complications and the joys of filmmaking. As with any creative endeavor the complications seemed to outnumber the joys, but the joys were what kept them coming back again and again.
Two of my favorite books in the series were Lynch on Lynch and Cronenberg on Cronenberg. For those not big into movies who can’t guess from the titles, the first book dealt with surrealist master David Lynch, the latter with body horror maestro David Cronenberg.
The men’s oeuvres are both completely original—sui generis in a way, despite their stated influences—and both have stood the test of time. The one thing they have in common (or had, since Lynch is sadly no longer with us) was an unwavering and uncompromising vision.
You could probably tease out some other similarities but the differences are more numerous and starker: David Lynch presents Francis Bacon-like tableaux onscreen, using music and light and off-kilter performances to evoke the muddled logic of a bad dream. Then, at strange and unpredictable moments, light breaks through, letting us see the darkness in a new context. He is interested in fabrics and surfaces, music and images that feel like non sequiturs impinging on our quotidian realm from a much stranger and deeper one.
David Cronenberg’s approach is more conscious and analytical, more that of a vivisector than a magician. He is interested in bodily decay and the vestiges of the reptilian lurking beneath our mammalian facades. Like with William Burroughs (whose “Naked Lunch” he adapted for the screen) there is a piercing intelligence intent on stripping layers away to arrive at a terrible core truth. That intelligence interrogates itself as mercilessly or more mercilessly than those around it. Like Burroughs, Cronenberg seems to believe there is a force at work in every man not working to his advantage, and he wants to root it out. But since this isn’t Scorsese, we’re not talking so much about catharsis as the excision of a cancer.
Both men were aware of their different approaches. Lynch hated interviews—comparing them once to a firing squad which you somehow survive. He also didn’t like to talk about his projects in any kind of detail. Not the ones he had done, because he wanted them to speak for themselves and allow audiences to arrive at their own individual interpretations of his work. Nor the ones he was working on, since, like Norman Mailer, he feared “letting the air out of the tires.” Probing too deeply into his intentions was to potentially spoil whatever was there, operating behind the curtain.
Cronenberg spoke of this tendency—not specifically as it applied to Lynch, but in general. He acknowledged that it worked for some people, but that he wasn’t one of them. He was more like Kubrick in that he constantly examined his intentions, before, during, and even after the process. “Why am I doing this?” “What is the significance of making this choice rather than that one?” “What is my unconscious trying to tell me and how can I make that a more prominent and conscious part of my filmmaking?”
He could no more go in relying on intuition and instinct than could a surgeon with his scalpel, or a chemist playing with highly reactive substances.
I’m sure that anyone reading this has their own preference: either to work from the unconscious without tampering with it or coax the meaning from the depths of the sleeping mind and to examine it under the brights before going forward. There are no doubt strengths and weaknesses to each approach, and the final call on how much to think about the meaning of what one’s doing is each artist’s own call to make.
And there’s no law that says you must stick with one method or the other throughout your entire career. One day you might wake up knowing every beat in a story that came to mind, knowing also its thematic significance. Then you might wake up the next day and put a pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard) with a completely blank mind, writing automatically so that it’s almost like pushing a possessed Ouija planchette.
My own style seems to be a blend of both approaches, although I’ve found that as I get older I do tend to think more about what I’m doing (and why) before actually doing it. This is especially true with the novel, if only because it requires such an investment of time and energy. I feel far more fallible these days than I did in my twenties, and I know my time is limited and that I can’t afford to waste it.
Still, I do hold to the idea of not talking (too much) about a project while it’s in progress, but that seems to be more a matter of superstition than aesthetic choice. I can analyze it, but only alone and throughout the day. I talk to myself in the voices of the various characters while in the shower, or while walking the dogs. When out in public doing it, I make sure to mutter under my breath, and barely move my jaws like a ventriloquist. After all, I don’t want to be taken for a crazy man, just a mild eccentric.
I suppose, then, that there is no ultimate answer to which approach is better—letting the unconscious power the work or dredging that submerged impulse and harnessing its power consciously. Instead, there is only a matter of preference and the circumstances surrounding the project in question. No surprise there, since art is not a science.
Unless you take the clinically Cronenbergian approach, in which case sometimes art very much is.
Here we are then, back to square one, the Lynch-Cronenberg Continuum now turned Conundrum.

I used to be really obsessed with the filmmaker Ed Wood, officially Edward D. Wood Junior. Most people who know about him probably know about him mostly thanks to the feature biopic film, Ed Wood, directed by Tim Burton. They also know (or think they know) that he is the worst director of all time.
Understand, it’s not that Plan Nine from Outer Space is the worst film ever made (I can think of a dozen worse movies off the top of my head.) Rather, it’s that the disjunction between Ed’s heartfelt ambition and what he actually put up on the screen is so wide. In his screenplays, he wrote things with utter sincerity, pouring his heart out, and yet the results, when uttered by actors, were completely ridiculous. His films are lead balloons, burdened by protracted soliloquys on man’s violent nature, his refusal to accept people as they are, and the danger of narrowmindedness.
And yet there tends to be some weird joy in the laughter of people who set out to watch his films with the sole intention of mocking them.
Why?
Everyone who cares about answering that question (not too many of us) no doubt has their own theory, and mine goes back to something said by author George Saunders. He claimed that, while fiction had to make sense on a line by line basis, poetry was more about the inadequacy of words to express those things we wish to express. Sure, the poet utilizes words, but in the best poetry the desire to express something outruns the ability of words to express the feeling the poet desires to convey.
The disjunction, then, between what Ed Wood wanted to do versus what he could do becomes its own kind of crazy poetry. Had he been merely a competent journeyman, we likely would have forgotten his films by now. Had he failed but less spectacularly, his movies likewise would probably be destined for permanent obscurity.
But, like a madman sinking his fortune into a doomed venture, there is something romantic, even monumental about Ed’s failure. It is—in its own wild and paradoxical way—better than a success.
Something even his detractors also readily admitted was that Wood was an auteur. His stylistic thumbprint was distinct, or, as one critic said, "You'll never mistake a bad Ed Wood film for a bad film by someone else.”
One of the things that make Wood’s oeuvre stand out is how prominent a role his own sexuality plays in his pictures. His contemporaries like Hitchcock or Lang might have included veiled or symbolic references to everything from intercourse to masturbation in their works. But there was no such veiling or subtle innuendo employed by Wood. Instead, he favored a different tact: addressing his sexuality head-on, despite his fetish—transvestism—still being incredibly taboo in the 1950s, outside of a kind of vaudevillian mockery of the kink.
Some might credit Wood with being brave. And while that might partially be true, I think narrator Gary Owens hit closer to the ultimate truth in the documentary, “A Look Back in Angora,” in which he claimed that Ed’s sexuality “bubbled up” in his work in the unlikeliest of places. Or, in other words, Ed had no choice. His truth betrayed him, manifested whether he wanted it to or not.
I sympathize with Wood in many respects, regarding myself as an earnest but failed artist whose best hope is to wait perhaps for some posthumous reassessment. Even if, as in the case with Wood, said reception is laced with irony and all the superlatives heaped on me involve variations on “The worst…”
I also sympathize, more specifically, with Ed’s inability to control revealing certain things about himself in his work. It’s a compulsion I share, one that—like the narrator’s in “The Telltale Heart”—can do me very little good and much harm.
No, I don’t risk imprisonment, but I do risk severe embarrassment, and since the words live on forever (in print and online) that embarrassment can always return to haunt me.
Looking back over my own body of work, there are multiple instances of me sharing too much information about myself and sexuality. My own sexual weirdness “bubbled up,” especially in my book “Veterans’ Affairs.” Maybe if the narrator of that novel were not such an obvious alter-ego for yours truly, it might not be embarrassing to recall all the stuff I confessed about myself: interest in femdom, “queening” (look it up), my various crushes which were ongoing at the time, my desire to be dominated by a woman, weird residual oedipal desires that make me look like a less violent but still hopelessly pervy Frank Booth. Some of these fantasies were so elaborate in their staging and orchestration that many of them could be spun out into their own novel-length works, had I any interest anymore in writing “erotica.”
All of this weirdness could have been easily forgiven if it had been relevant to the story, if it had added anything besides extraneous and bizarre details to the narrative. But the exact opposite is probably the case. The weird sex stuff, when introduced, tended to disrupt the narrative flow, “spoil it” as one reader complained about the erotic elements in another of my works.
I never considered that while writing, though, simply because I couldn’t consider it, as I hope I’ve impressed upon you by now.
I remember getting personalized editorial notes back from a slush pile reader at a publisher who had given the MS of “Veterans Affairs” to his boss for review. This pair of eyes must have liked the MS enough to pass it on, but his superior, while intrigued by parts, concurred with that reader who thought I tended to “spoil” my own best work with the sexuality that kept bubbling up.
The bossman’s notes claimed he had enjoyed the novel, but found all the gratuitous references by the protagonist to his sexual fantasies unnecessary. In his words, “it got old quick” and derailed the narrative.
I knew then and know now that he was right. And yet I couldn’t change a word, and instead went with a much smaller publisher who cared less about such things.
Even weirder (and more cringeworthy at this great remove) is that I was actually proud of my “accomplishment” with “Veterans’ Affairs” at one time. I was still in college when it came out, in a graduate program that had nothing to do with literature (subversive or otherwise.) And, like a dumbass, I gave copies of the book to other people in the program, fellow-students about whom I knew very little. Students who would now know the thoughts and feelings hidden locked away in the innermost recesses of my mind.
Imagine writing your darkest and strangest thoughts in a diary, and then having that diary published, and available for perusal by your coworkers. Now imagine being crazy or stupid enough not to care, or even worse, to feel a sense of pride.
Such cluelessness reminds me a bit of that scene in Taxi Driver, in which Travis Bickle takes the Cybil Shepherd character on a date to a porn movie. And then has the gall to be confused by her storming out of the theater in a disconcerted huff.
I even gave a copy of Veterans’ Affairs to an instructor about whom I wrote explicit sexual fantasies in said-book, without considering the implications.
She must not have minded, though, as we continued meeting and being on friendly terms after that. Or perhaps she did mind and was too polite to mention it. Or (and this is probably the most likely scenario), she put the book I gave her on a shelf and never bothered to read it; I certainly hope that’s the case.
What hell was I even thinking, though, by not only publishing that book, but giving it to people I barely knew?
I wish I could track down every copy of “Veterans’ Affairs” still floating around out there, heap them all onto a giant pyre, douse it with lighter fluid, toss a match and watch it burn.
Maybe that sounds a little harsh, but it’s how I feel sometimes about that early work, in which I most definitely shared far too much.
As to why I tend to be less confessional in my work now than back then, who knows? I could offer some suppositions, like that I’ve gotten it out of my system, or that a decade has passed and that, having entered middle age, I’m less ruled by my raging libido.
Both of which statements are true, but neither of which, considered alone or together, quite explain the disappearance of the embarrassing personal stuff from my writing. And besides, who’s to say I don’t eventually go back to “oversharing,” say, when I reach my early seventies? After all, the concept of the “dirty old man” didn’t appear from nowhere. Let’s just hope that if it comes to that, that next time the sex at least is integral to the plot. And is not so informed by my personal kinks.