Eric Larsen's Blog

I said last time that I hoped to see you again before the Ides of March—and here we are with just a week left to go before March fifteenth—the date, thanks mainly to Shakespeare, that reminds all of the assassination of Julius Caesar. It was on March 15, 44 BC, a mere twenty-four centuries ago, that Caesar was stabbed—twenty-three times, they say—by a mob of Roman senators who believed the leader had exceeded all reasonable bounds of power and must, at any cost, be removed. So it was done. And what happened next? Well, you can read more Shakespeare (Antony and Cleopatra) to find out a good bit of it, but the gist is that there was a struggle for power and, in essence, the Roman Republic came to an end and was replaced by the Roman Empire—this being in 27 BC, with Octavian, or Caesar Augustus, established as Rome’s first emperor.
Why do I mention all of this dry old history? Well, because my new novel, The Book of Reading, is concerned in good part with the assassination of President John Kennedy. The date of that event, as everyone knows, was November 22, 1963. Everyone knows, too, that President Kennedy was assassinated by a mob, not of senators, but of operatives. And everyone knows, too, that in the six decades that have passed since that assassination, things have not—repeat, not—gone particularly well for the health and well-being of the American free democratic republic, the entity we know familiarly as The United States.
How, exactly, have things not gone well, and why have they not? Well, allow me to say this: Great crimes of state that go unacknowledged—and that go unpunished—leave great scars. And then allow me to ask this: Now, six decades after the unexplored and unresolved murder of our head of state, are we a fair, just, humane, free, compassionate, unwarlike state—or are we not?
Ten years ago—on June 5, 2014, to be exact—a piece of mine appeared in the online magazine Intrepid Report. It was a long review/essay, or essay/review, of what was then the spiritual counsellor Paul Levy’s most recent book, Dispelling Wetiko: Breaking the Curse of Evil, a book—and an author—that I cannot recommend too highly. Still, that’s for another time. I also leave the definition, or description, of Wetiko for that other time, and instead quote the next-to-last paragraph of my long piece. Not much question but that it suggests my estimation of the health of the wounded republic five decades after the assassination:

Horror, calamity, ruin, death, monstrosities of purpose, murderous deeds, intellectual starvation, spiritual emptiness, emotional penury, war almost everywhere and poverty and starvation everywhere else, the ruin and elimination of entire nations and peoples—these are the “policies,” and these are the “policy results,” that we live among in our age of collective psychosis, of Wetiko, which, Levy reminds us, “is a form of psychic blindness that imagines itself to be sightedness.”

What is a Goodreads author’s blog? Certainly it mustn’t be made of but puff pastry and other sweets that allow an author to toot her or his horn from one day— week, month, season, year—to the next. But here’s a true fact: I love, adore, talking about my own books. Given the right circumstances, I’d be happy to talk about them almost ad infinitum—with other people, that is, who might also happen to be interested in them. It’s a curious thing, but for me they never get old, those books. That’s the way I designed them, and doing it almost killed me. (Note: hyperbole present, though not massively.) On my web site (https://www.ericlarsen.info) there’s an interview with me and the late Adam Engel, and in it I remark that Adam and I are talking about books that remain “interesting, fascinating, to a thinking person who reads them six to eight, ten times during a lifetime.”

Well, if a person seeks them out and reads them that many times, it means they’re built to last. Many books are built to last, and perhaps in a future blog I’ll name some of the ones that have been that way for me. They’re not the same books for everyone, certainly. In fact, it’s important for them not to be. And they may or may not be what back in school days got tagged with the moniker “classic,” meaning books that “had stood the test of time.” Well, different people have different books for re-reading, and they also have different reasons for doing it. Eveline Stahl, I’m positive, re-read plenty of books, or poems. In The Book of Reading, she reads Tennyson and thinks of her recently deceased mother, a memory awakened by the last two lines of this stanza:

And the stately ships go on
To their haven under the hill;
But O for the touch of a vanish'd hand,
And the sound of a voice that is still!

What I argue in the interview I mentioned is that certain books are destined for re-reading not because they’re “classic” but because they’re what I call “subversive.” Now, there’s a word to scare people! But don’t be frightened. In the way I’m using that word—“subversive”—its purpose is actually to distinguish between books that have meaning and those that don’t. Perhaps I can say more on this important subject next time.
Meanwhile, an idea. You could take a look at The Book of Reading and ask that question about it. Has it got meaning? Has it got no meaning? Is it subversive?
I’ll see you again—before the Ides of March, I hope, maybe sooner. I wish everyone well in the meantime.

Dear Readers,

Today, I seem at last to have become a "Goodreads Author," a state of being that for a long time puzzled and eluded me. After all, by
a set of freak accidents, I have somehow come to be eighty-two years old, and perhaps a little bit of "techno-phobia" can be allowed me.

On the other hand, if I may say so, I've done at least medium-well on the techno front, having for several years--with the help of the late, extraordinarily gifted writer, Adam Engel--maintained an online presence for the now-sleeping Oliver Arts & Open Press (its website, for the curious: https://oliverartsopenpress.com/).

In any case, allow me to say Hello to those who might come upon this blog or even, wonder of wonders, read it. So: Hello to you all. I hope I may come to know you better as time goes on.

I owe my presence here to my publisher, The Atmosphere Press, and to its truly wonderful editorial and artistic staff, all of whom have helped make possible the publication of THE BOOK OF READING, my fifth novel (and eighth book). To them I extend my unbounded thanks.

I do hope you'll take a look at The Book of Reading, check it out, and maybe even peek at some of the four that preceded it.

May the weather be fair, and may there be good hope, wherever you are.