Deep Thoughts & Pronouncements

The Inner Swine Guide to Ignorance

Author: jsomers March 31, 2014 0 Comments

(This originally appeared in Brutarian Quarterly #47; for a while I wrote a column there about ignorance in general and my ignorance in specific. It was a lot of fun and I figure I’ll post them here now and again.)

Episode Two: PERSISTENCE OF IGNORANCE

YOU may think that ignorance is a natural state that requires no upkeep, but you are so very, very wrong. Ignorance—at least at the professional level that I maintain—is difficult to keep pure and unsullied by information. The cosmos is always conspiring to educate and inform you; to remain uncorrupted you have to work pretty hard. And drink. If you drink often enough and in sufficient volume, remaining ignorant becomes fairly easy, since everything people say to you starts to sound like the adults from a Charlie Brown television special.

STAYING TRULY IGNORANT AIN’T EASY

This is necessary because there is information everywhere. Facts, figures, analyses—they’re all pouring from the airwaves all the time. Just walking down the street your eye will catch sight of headlines on newspapers attempting to inform you, stray audio from radio and television programs that try to educate you on current events and their implications, and even overheard conversations that reveal aspects of existence or modern life that you did not heretofore suspect. Staying truly ignorant ain’t easy. I make it look easy, but that’s because of the drinking and the temporary bouts of paralysis I suffer from because of it. It’s difficult to overhear knowledge when you’ve got to concentrate carefully just to avoid falling into the comfortable-looking gutter that calls your name. If I weren’t so hungover in the morning that any motion aside from my ragged breathing caused me considerable pain, forcing me to use all my mental energies to anticipate the momentum of the train and compensate on a second-by-second basis, I’d learn five or six things every day just by peering rudely over the shoulders of my fellow commuters.

And this doesn’t even include all the information I gain from my failed attempts at doing things—nothing teaches like a trip to the emergency room. Like the time I thought I might try to install a radio into my old 1978 Nova all by myself, professionals be damned, and learned all sorts of things about the electrical system, the idle, and the way the human body conducts electricity.[1] Without even seeking to, I reduced my ignorance that day through simple experience. You begin to see how hard it is for most people to remain as pristinely ignorant as the day they were born.[2]

THINGS TO NEVER EVER DO

This effort may explain why ignorance is so highly prized in the world. People are generally proud of their ignorance, and react to any sustained effort to combat ignorance with puzzlement and hostility. The easiest way to make some random stranger your enemy is to make them think you are trying to actively combat your own ignorance; somehow this makes you fancy.

I know this to be true because I am well aware of my own shocking ignorance—see my previous column for a succinct rundown of my mental frailty[3]—and make doomed, frustrating attempts to combat it—this is easy enough to attempt, since I can literally choose anything at random and chances are I am almost totally ignorant of it—and thus encounter the world’s cold reaction to my attempts. For example, the other day I ran across a mention of World War I, and sure enough a quick survey of my store of knowledge of the subject revealed nothing but cobwebs, dancing bears, and humorous doodles of Teutonic men in spiked helmets. So, dedicated as I am to facing my ignorance like a man, I went to the bookstore and bought a book about World War I, which I carried around with me for a while, reading in my spare moments.

I had a dentist appointment one night after work, and was reading this book in the chair while waiting for the good doctor to come back and start scraping months of sin from my choppers. When she arrived, she glanced at my book and raised an eyebrow.

“You’re reading that for fun?”

I hesitated for a moment, because pissing off or irritating dentists is on my list of Things to Never Ever Do, because that same person was about to have a sharp metal stick in my mouth, and even when the dentist in question is perfectly calm, sane, and sober I am often horrified at the amount of pressure they put on that sharp pick lodged in my mouth while trying to unglue a particularly loathsome hunk of plaque or whatever they call it. The last thing you need is your Dentist muttering under their breath while they scrape away at your defenseless gums. Finally, though, I decided that my only alternative to the truth was to bolt from the room, and running just makes me sleepy. So I nodded as cheerfully as I could admitted that yes, I was not in any way required to read this book.

To her credit, my dentist tried to be polite. “Well,” she said with an expression of confused goodwill on her face, “well, that’s just super.”

This said with the same tone usually reserved for mental invalids and small, frightened children.[4] There followed some awkward talk of self-improvement and how super it all was, though you could tell she thought anyone who would read a book on World War I for fun was about one inch removed from crazy, and when she started jabbing into my mouth I had a few pants-wetting moments of terror whenever she glanced at the offending book while working on my teeth. I wouldn’t have been surprised if she’d made an excuse and slipped away to call the Department of Homeland Security[5] on me, which would probably take it pretty seriously, since historically the only people who read for pleasure are communists, terrorists, and child molesters of all stripes—like in the movie Se7en, where the cops utilize the deserted, forgotten library in order to track down the serial killer, who is apparently the only person in the world who still reads.

GREASING THE RIDE THROUGH LIFE

Maintaining ignorance greases the ride through life, there’s no doubt about that. Decrease your ignorance at your own risk, bubba. People will look at you strangely, give you nicknames like Shakespeare or Professor[6], and generally question your patriotism and trustworthiness. In order to maintain a high level of ignorance, I suggest the following battle plan:

1. Tune Out. Use an iPod or other music player all the time, wherever you go, set at sufficiently high volume to block any stray information that might otherwise squeeze into your ears

2. Be Vigilant. Remember, you can inadvertently learn anywhere—stay alert, and flee any radios or intelligent-sounding conversations you encounter. Watch out for people reading newspapers or books, although people reading Harry Potter books are probably safe. Don’t be afraid to stick your fingers in your ears and sing if you can’t make a quick getaway.[7]

3. Drink Heavily. Booze kills brain cells, so any stray information that accidentally educates you will be. . .what’s the word. . .I dunno. Zapped. Zapped is good.

The struggle to maintain ignorance continues silently every day, with unsung heroes everywhere doing their part. Pull your weight in this epic struggle, my friends, and win the love and affection of your fellow man. Remember: Nobody likes a smartass.

———————————-

[1] Hint: Extremely well.

[2] Some, I admit, have a special talent for forgetting life lessons immediately after learning them. Me, I relive these lessons over and over again, dreaming them, waking up in the middle of the night screaming “NO! NOT THE PANTS!”

[3] As a matter of fact, I think I’ve forgotten one or two of the dubious “skills” I listed on my mental resume in that column since its publication. HOORAY FOR BOOZE!

[4] I am disturbingly familiar with this tone of voice.

[5] Recently, someone sitting next to former Black Flag lead singer Henry Rollins on an international flight noticed Rollins was reading a book about terrorism and contacted the Australian government reporting him as a possible security risk. I don’t blame them for waiting to write a letter later; Henry Rollins looks pretty badass and even if he was
wearing sticks of dynamite and muttering under his breath while working on some sort of detonator, I’d probably wait until he was out of sight before reporting him, too.

[6] The Somers Consolidated & Immutable Rule of the World states that it will always be one of these two nick names. You will never be called, for example, Archimedes or Newton. A sub-rule does allow for the usage of Einstein if your perceived attempt at learning has a math or science flavor.

[7] This is a surprisingly enjoyable activity even if you’re not fleeing anything at the time.

Bullshit, Deep Thoughts & Pronouncements, The Inner Swine Guide to Ignorance

Readings: A Guide

Author: jsomers March 26, 2014 3 Comments

So, as mentioned in my other post, I did a reading the other night at KGB Bar in New York. Great bar, great venue, and the event was run very well by local MWA honcho Richie Narvaez. I’d rate my performance an “A” for the evening, because I was reasonably well-practiced, excited, and articulate, and I think I chose my material well (a chapter from Chum). My reading performances are generally all over the place; I’ve stammered and stumbled through them, and I’ve rocked them. This was one of the Rocked ones.

Still, readings are awful, aren’t they?

Writers are interior people, as a rule. That doesn’t mean we’re socially inept or incapable, it just means that we tend to be people who like to sit and tinker with words and get them right, and public performance as a rule isn’t our specialty. Some of us are better than others, of course, and you can learn a bit about public speaking to get better at it. Few of us do. IN fact, it’s rare that I’ve ever seen authors – even fairly successful ones – bring more than a few intimates to a venue.

So here’s a typical author performance at a reading: Head down, staring at a sheaf of papers. Reading in a monotone with very little inflection or variety. Stumbling over the occasional word, speaking too quickly, and diving in media res into a work – published or not – with insufficient back story for people unfamiliar with your work. In other words, who in their right minds thinks this is entertaining?

There are ways. Here’s my quick Idiot’s Guide to Readings, for both the idiots who attend them expecting entertainment and the idiots (like me!) who give them, expecting to sell books.

THE IDIOT’S GUIDE TO READINGS

BE DRUNK. This goes for both audience and reader. Holding literary events in bars is the best idea anyone will ever have, and both audience and performing monkey should definitely get drunk. If the reading ends with everyone singing along to The Leaving of Liverpool then you have won.
PRINT IT OUT. The moment I see a nervous author cracking open their own paperback, a part of me dies. The paperback is a great tool for reading on a train, and a terrible one for reading at a reading. Print that sucker out. A Kindle or similar device is okay as well – but isolate the section you’re reading, and
EDIT. I don’t care if you revised that section 1,057 times already. Read it out loud a few times and edit – remove things that don’t sound well spoken, and make sure it flows as a performed piece. No one will ever notice, or care, that you edited it from the published version unless you are famous and studied, in which case you are not giving a reading at a bar in Brooklyn on a Wednesday night.
PRACTICE. Sweet lord, if I have to hear another author stumble over their own damn words I will set the place on fire with my mind bullets, I swear. Once you’ve chosen your reading material, read it out loud at least three or four times. And, see #3 and edit any areas that don’t lend themselves to your velvety voice.
KISS. Keep It Short, Stupid. Five minutes is an eternity for people listening to you monotone your way through a short story. Ten minutes is the absolute high end. Get in, get out, keep drinking.
EXPECT NOTHING. As an audience member, don’t expect your author friend to have any performance skills. Laugh at their lame jokes and stroke their egos a bit – unless you want to see a grown adult cry.
AT LEAST PRETEND TO BUY A BOOK. Sometimes there are books for sale at the reading – the least you can do is feint at one, then realize you forgot your wallet. If you can’t even pretend to buy a book, fuck you.
DON’T HECKLE. One downside to reading in bars is the drunken heckling you get from people pissed off that they can’t play 27 Rush songs in a row while getting shitfaced. Don’t do this, authors will burst into penniless tears at the drop of a hat. Although –
IF YOU ARE HECKLED, HECKLE BACK. If you get some lout calling you names, stop reading and lace into them. Ignoring them won’t work. Get the crowd behind you. If that doesn’t work, smash a small bottle of gasoline on the floor and toss a match, shrieking expletives.
IDENTIFY YOURSELF. You’re not humiliating yourself in public for fun. Show the cover of one of your books, state your name and the title, and urge people to buy a copy or at least visit your web site. If you don’t do this you are basically the same as homeless people who recite the bible in the street.

There.

Deep Thoughts & Pronouncements

The Inner Swine Guide to Ignorance

Author: jsomers March 24, 2014 0 Comments

Brutarian Quarterly #46

(This originally appeared in Brutarian Quarterly #46 (2006); for a while I wrote a column there about ignorance in general and my ignorance in specific. It was a lot of fun and I figure I’ll post them here now and again.)

Episode One: JUST PEANUTS TO SPACE

FOLKS, this is the tale of truly breathtaking ignorance. My ignorance. I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, Jeff, how can a hip zine publisher around whom at least four known cargo cults have formed be ignorant? The answer, friends, is simple: I simply haven’t been paying attention.

People have tried to educate me. They’ve tried to inform me. Wise men and women have occasionally taken me aside and tried to impart some wisdom to me. Failing that, they’ve tried to beat some sense into me. In each case, I have nodded politely and placed a serious, dour expression my face[1], thanked them for their interest, and forgotten whatever it was they had to say within moments of skipping away, probably in search of beer. Time after time, my would-be educators have failed, leaving me just as dull and ignorant as ever; perhaps more so, depending on the quality of their company and how dubious their wisdom was.

The great thing about modern society—or at least modern American society, which is the only society I am even slightly qualified to comment on—is that it is designed to be more or less idiot-proof. Ignorance will not kill you, usually, in modern day America, which staves off the claws of evolution long enough for someone like me to mature into an adult and wreak havoc. In prior eras, I would have been killed and consumed by wild animals within years of my birth, most probably running towards the killer beasts with a smile on my face, completely ignorant of the potential dangers. Thanks to society having formed around me like a protective chrysalis, however, I remain alive, despite knowing virtually nothing worth knowing.

Too many writers and columnists use their soapbox to try and look smart. It’s easy, after all; you can do research and feign all sorts of knowledge[2]. I could have made the subject of this column String Theory, and spent a few months reading up on it—or, to be honest, a few hours cutting and pasting from web pages—and made it seem that I was knowledgeable and well-read. It’s entirely possible that every columnist and writer in the world is a moron like me, faking it. So I have come to a decision: This column will be about ignorance. I will be unflinching in my exploration of my own stupidity. I will be the one columnist in the world who flaunts his ignorance, who says, “Yes! I am sadly uninformed, frequently drunk, and often at a loss as to the location of my pants!”[3]

First, I think it’s important to take a quick tour of the knowledge I do possess, so we can dispose of the subject and get on with the major work of covering everything I don’t know.

JEFF’S KNOWLEDGE

How much liquor I can drink on an empty stomach without throwing up.
Approximately twelve guitar chords.
One chess opening.
Enough French to mispronounce about six sentences.
Every lyric to every Iron Maiden and AC/DC song ever.[4]

And that’s about it. Not very impressive, you’ll agree, and not very useful—is it any wonder I drink myself senseless every night? It’s the shame, I tell you.[5]

How did this happen? I had a decent education.[6] I had caring teachers who sometimes noticed me sitting there with the vaguely anxious expression I am known for on my face and tried to inflict knowledge on me. The schools I attended had good facilities and valued academic performance. My parents, beleaguered as they were by my tendency to get trapped down wells and lured away by strangers on the street offering to sign me to multiyear recording contracts, encouraged me—indeed, my brother Yan[7] is so smart he is often impossible to talk to, his vocabulary apparently including several words that won’t be invented for years.[8] So how did I manage to squeak into adulthood with a working knowledge of almost nothing except several elaborate and detailed imaginary worlds, of which I am invariably king?

The simple answer is, we live in a world where you pretty much don’t need to know anything. Or at least a world where middle-class people in first-world countries don’t need to know anything. There was probably a time where a lack of knowledge—whether of your environs, your past, or your neighbors—resulted in your immediate painful death, but those times are gone, at least for people like me living in New Jersey in 2005. You simply don’t need to know anything in order to survive—all the sharp edges and pointy things have been covered up by a thick protective layer of government and social services.[9] You can easily coast from birth to natural death in this world with nothing more than basic speech skills and a winning smile. And I sure do have a winning smile.

However it happened, here I am, fully grown and suddenly vaguely alarmed at the whistling emptiness in my data banks. I can do one of two things in response to this epiphany. One, I could attempt to educate myself and pull myself out of this chasm of darkness. Two, I could wallow in my ignorance for the entertainment value my dimwitted adventures afford you, the good people of The Earth. I believe this is really not a choice at all, that the only possible way forward is the latter, because the Universe is just too big.

I’ll never be able to learn about everything there is in the universe. I’ll never even manage to learn about everything in the universe that my fellow men—brighter and more energetic than me—have cataloged and explored, which is a deplorably small data set in itself. As the saying goes, the universe is big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind- bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to space.[10] There might have been a time in history when a man might aspire to being a Renaissance Man, back when the list of human knowledge was much smaller and simply being able to perform simple algebraic equations made you a mathematical genius—but those days, sadly, have passed[11], and I for one barely passed pre-calculus in high school, so no Nobel Prizes in mathematics for me.[12] Since any feeble attempt by me to learn about it is doomed from the start, I have no choice but to choose the road more traveled, and simply try to eke out some minor entertainment value from my ignorance, which I will do here in this space. Since I can throw a dart at any encyclopedia and hit something I know nothing about, I shouldn’t lack for material.

Until next time then, consider your own ignorance—the things you use every day whose inner workings, origin, and manufacture are complete mysteries to you, the places and people in the world whose motives, language, and bizarre appearance fill you with worry and dismay, the mystery of where the food you’re eating actually comes from and what has to happen to it before you can pop it in your mouth and hum in satisfaction. Then, come back to read my next column, and I’ll dance for you. . .even though you can’t really see me dancing.

————————————————————————

FOOTNOTES

[1] Actually the same expression I use for pants-wetting fear, which gets me into no end of trouble.

[2] I do this every day. It’s how I’ve remained employed for more than a decade.

[3] This is an overused in-joke from my zine. It will be over-used here as well, until you decide it’s funny from sheer insane repetition. I am a genius.

[4] This means I also know the lyrics to every Hayseed Dixie song ever, as well.

[5] And, of course, the shakes.

[6] Including daily beatings by Jesuit priests in high school.

[7] Not his real name. People always get upset when I use their real names in my writing, so I make up ridiculous ones like “Yan” instead.

[8] It’s possible that this should really read “words that I won’t learn for years” but determining whether words actually exist or not would require soul-numbing research, so let’s assume Yan is using words he learns when he time-travels to the future and then back again.

[9] Unless, of course, a Hurricane hits your city, in which case you are fucked.

[10] Stolen shamelessly from Douglas Adams, of course, who sadly is no longer in any position to challenge me.

[11] Unless you live in Kansas, in which case just knowing that something called algebra exists makes you a Super Genius.

[12] My ignorance is so deep I am not even sure if there is actually a Nobel Prize in “mathematics” or if it goes under some other name, perhaps “Nobel Prize in Numerology” or “Nobel Prize in Rain Manology” or something. I could go to the library. . .so far away. . .or type something into Google and check. . .so sleepy. . .

Deep Thoughts & Pronouncements

Formality and Haircuts

Author: jsomers March 13, 2014 2 Comments

TWO BITS … Get it?

So, today I had a religious experience: I got my hair cut without once speaking to the barber aside from my initial instructions and the final, murmured approval. In the words of Ice Cube, today was a good day. I went in with enough hair to stuff a pillow (out of laziness; over the summer between High School and Freshman Year of college I let my hair grow and then didn’t get it cut until the next year, and all I can say about having hair that long is never again) and came out looking like Don Draper, if you squint. And ignore the sallow jaundice of a boozehound and the physical fitness of Bluto from Popeye fame. Or Bluto from Animal House, either works.

Sitting there in blessed silence, I was able to contemplate the barber experience and the unnecessary formality forced on us. When I was a kid, there was one thing you did at the barber’s – got your damn hair cut. Later it dawned on me that you could also get a shave, which involved hot lather and a straight razor, so no thank you, psychopath. Now I know there are a lot of intricate things that go on at the barber shop. Shampooing. Neck scrapes. All sorts of fancy hair styling. And the slightly creepy hot towel and shoulder massage they always give you – again, no thank you, psychopath.

Of course, I’ve always been afraid of and intimidated by formality. When The Duchess and I first started dating she insisted we eat at real, actual restaurants. Places that had wine lists. I almost shit my pants, and entered the first few terrified that I would do something to mark me as a Jersey City Rube and be laughed out of the place. This was reinforced on our honeymoon when we entered a fancy restaurant and I was wearing shorts – this was Hawaii, people – and the hostess nearly had a stroke. After a hushed consultation with others she allowed us to be seated, but insisted I drape a napkin decorously over my hideous bare legs.

That didn’t help me get comfortable with formality.

Slowly, I’ve learned to not care so much. Luckily we live in informal times, and luckily most places are much more concerned with your ability to pay the bill after four bottles of wine and six generous whiskies. This is good, because I get itchy in formal wear. Suits never feel right on me, even when tailored. I still don’t know how to properly tie a necktie – no, seriously, I just make up a knot. Who has time for these things? I once started to read an essay on how to choose a suit and almost made it through the second paragraph, which discussed something about the width of the lapel in relation to … oh my god, who cares, you psychopath?!?

I’m a person who is exhausted at the end of every episode of Downton Abbey because of the formal clothing rules those people followed. Sweet Jebus.

So, the barber. I could get all sorts of grooming tasks done there and emerge the best version of myself – well, the best version of myself at this dilapidated age, that is. But who has time for shit like that? Not to mention the opportunity for conversation that sort of lingering would open up. If I never have another conversation with a barber about how I work from home and can get my hair cut any time I want, it will be fine by me.

Deep Thoughts & Pronouncements

FERAL 1970s CHILDREN BURN JERSEY CITY TO THE GROUND

Author: jsomers March 6, 2014 3 Comments

This essay originally appeared in The Inner Swine Volume 17, Issue 1/2, Summer 2011.

Growing Up Somewhat Unsupervised
by Jeff Somers

IN 2008, newspaper columnist Lenore Skenazy wrote a column about letting her nine-year old son take the New York City Subway alone, without an adult. I don’t recall the details—where the damn kid was going—and can’t be bothered to research them. I do recall that it was a bit of a kerfluffle, because apparently in this sad modern age that’s insane, because as we all know the streets of New York (any major city, really) are lined with perverts and slave traders looking to either sell your child to Africa or engage in some CSI-style murderin’ with them.

This has since evolved into a ‘movement’ called Free Range Kids, which advocates letting kids organize their own free time and minimizing parental supervision and intervention in their lives. The idea being that this will cause kids to grow up super self-reliant and confident. Assuming they are not murdered or sold into slavery, of course. Although I’d like to imagine that some of the kids sold into slavery emerge years later as criminal masterminds on par with Keyser Soze or as Black Pirate Roberts types, hijacking cargo ships off the coast of Somalia.

I don’t have kids, and I don’t presume to tell parents how to raise their children. If you think your kid needs to be supervised constantly and should never be allowed to be alone, even in the bathroom, even while they sleep, until they’re approximately 24 years old, that’s fine. I have nothing to say, and heck, maybe you’re right. Maybe this kind of supervision will make your kid feel loved and safe and ensure they survive to the age of 24 without being, you know, murdered or kidnapped. Who knows? On the other hand, Free Ranging it feels better to me, because it’s closer to my own childhood.

(more…)

Deep Thoughts & Pronouncements, The Inner Swine

House of Cards and the Shakespeare Fakeout

Author: jsomers February 25, 2014 0 Comments

Indeed.

Okey – I like House of Cards, largely because Kevin Spacey’s facial expressions in this NetFlix original are fucking-A priceless. The show itself is fucking-A ridiculous, and suffers from one fatal flaw that makes it almost – almost – an effort to watch. That flaw is simple: Frank never loses. Not only does he never lose, he never convincingly doubts the outcome, ever. Oh, the script pays homage to doubt. It walks doubt through a warm room and buys it a few drinks, flirting, but it never takes doubt home. Spacey’s performance, even when he’s reacting in rage or doubt, always hints that it’s just for show. And the writers always offer up a solution right away – a solution that is always exactly right.

So, you can be entertained by a show like that, but never really affected by it. Frank is a monster, and he always wins. If the final episode of this show in 2033 or whatever shows Frank in an old-age home, hallucinating that he once became President of the United States, that would not surprise me.

Richard the IV

Much has been made of House of Cards and its relationship to Shakespeare, notably its use of the aside as a narrative device and the parallels between several plays, such as Richard III, Macbeth, and Othello. The problem with these discussions is the fact that the plays being cited were tragedies, and while the protagonists did terrible things and often did so with black wit and a saucy lack of guilt, they generally could be said to have suffered for their hubris and power grabs.

Frank Underwood doesn’t suffer much. Now, maybe the next season will be all about Frank’s fall into disgrace and punishment (Ed: LORD I HOPE SO) but so far Frank is simply the smartest man in the room, and his mean-spirited and largely joyless attitude is justified by the fact that his superpower is always being right and never losing. He may be the least Shakespearean character in the modern tradition of using Shakespeare to imbue your characters with classic weight and gravitas.

No Scrubs

And that’s the problem. Frank’s relentless success is fucking boring. The cycle the show goes through roughly every forty minutes is this:

Frank reveals sick, twisted plan to manipulate the shit out of everyone. Sneers at camera.
Unbelievably complex plan that relies on people doing the stupidest thing possible because Frank planted a hint in their ear about it five minutes of screen time previously succeeds completely.
Frank sneers at camera.

The details of the insane scheme are often entertaining, and Spacey is basically having the time of his life playing this character – it’s like going to the Zoo at feeding time to watch some lions devour raw meat in their enclosure. But there are no stakes. Because Frank is going to win, and you know that going in.

Now, plenty of shows require their protagonist to always win – because in TV land we must always have a main character to hang the next season of the show around. So, no points off for Frank actually always winning – but a setback would be nice. A believable threat. Maybe a solid half hour of screen time when it actually seems like Frank might be in actual, real trouble? And then some clever writing. That last bit is the tricky part.

Because, House of Cards is okay at a lot of things. Dialogue. Kevin Spacey Bitchface. Painting everyone in the universe as a sexual pervert and potential serial killer. One thing it is not okay at is plot. It treats plots like a box of feral cats it found on the street which keeps scratching its arms and puking on its feet. Everyone does what Frank wants because it’s the only way the writers on this show can think to keep the plot moving.

In the end, it doesn’t matter: The purpose of the show is to get you to pay Netflix $8 a month, and as far as that goes it works just fine. And there’s always the possibility that in Season 3, Frank will go full on Greg Stillson from The Dead Zone on us, having a threesome with his wife, his secret service agent, and the dead dog from Chapter 1 while he gleefully pounds the LAUNCH button, staring unblinkingly into the camera.

I’d pay to see that.

Deep Thoughts & Pronouncements, Someone Else's Writing

The Disappeared

Author: jsomers February 19, 2014 1 Comment

Your Face Here, Probably

As a writer, I have a serious problem: I have the memory of brain-damaged potato.

This manifests in a variety of different ways. Have I walked out of the house without keys, wallet, or identification? Of course I have, and the end result is me on several Terror Watch Lists. Have I promised my wife The Duchess I would perform certain chores for her during the day without fail and then totally failed to even momentarily think about them? Yes, I have, and have the literal scars to show for it. Have I forgotten appointments, commitments, occasionally to show up to jobs?

Yup.

But worst of all, worst by far is the simple fact that I forget my own life. I forget things I’ve done, places I’ve been, and people I’ve known. I literally forget people so thoroughly I sometimes can’t even remember them when I reminded. Based on a recent experience, let’s call this the LinkedIn Rabbit Hole Hell.

The LinkedIn Rabbit Hole Hell

A few years ago when I lost a job I joined LinkedIn, like everyone who loses a job does. In fact, the moment someone shows up on LinkedIn you can assume they have lost a job, hate their job, or suspect they will lose/hate their jobs very soon. It’s kind of amusing, when you yourself aren’t looking for a job, to see everyone wash up on LinkedIn’s shores like unemployed cosmic flotsam, furiously network for a few months, and then suddenly disappear once they’re employed again and all this networking rubbish is too much work again.

So, the other day I was “invited” to link in with a former co-worker. Since I do nothing with LinkedIn these days, I have applied my usual policy when it comes to social networks, which is to say I accept every invitation and request sent my way. Why not? I never go to LinkedIn and rarely read my Facebook Wall, so what the hell do I care if I have 200 friends I couldn’t pick out of a police lineup?

Anyways, this person I did actually remember and while we were far from friends, I popped over to LinkedIn to accept their invite and promptly fell down the Rabbit Hole of LinkedIn’s algorithms, as it reminded me of a million people I used to work with. Including one name that didn’t ring a bell. But the dates matched up: I had once worked with this person for a year in an office of five people.

I had zero memory of them.

None. Nada. Bupkus. I have every email I’ve ever sent or received since 1996, and I have emails from and to this person. We interacted on the physical plane. I couldn’t tell you a single thing about them. I have no visual memory of them, or any other memory.

It’s fucking creepy, sometimes.

Writer Skills: Activate!

For my writing career, there are two possibilities here. On the one hand, my terrible memory might be a super power, as it forces me to invent details constantly, keeping my alcohol-softened brain functioning and limber. On the other, having zero memory of things and people might mean I’m missing out on formative memories that I could be using to create my prose. Obviously I prefer to imagine the former.

Or maybe it has no effect at all. And it’s not like I don’t remember everyone: I can remember and reliably (I think) picture friends and teachers from Grammar School. But there are these oddball holes. Maybe they’re just folks who didn’t make much of an impression on me (in fact, it generally is these folks) but it’s still disconcerting. I lived those moments. I earned those memories. And I’ve been robbed.

Deep Thoughts & Pronouncements

Writing Under the Red Gaze of the Single Unblinking Eye of Facebook

Author: jsomers January 4, 2014 2 Comments

Back when I still put a print version of my zine The Inner Swine out, I once wrote an essay about someone I knew that wasn’t particularly complimentary. I didn’t know this person very well, but in my essay I portrayed them (accurately!) as an insane person more than likely to kill me, dry my meat, and make me into sausage or something like that.

And then, much to my chagrin, this insane person requested a copy of the zine. That particular issue, in fact. I realized that if I gave them the issue as it was, I would soon wake up in a pit with the Crazy One telling me it puts the lotion on its skin as it lowered a basket down to me. So, I did what any coward does: I created a single special issue of the zine with the offending article replaced by something else and handed it to Crazy One with a straight face. As the Somers Family Motto goes, Congratulations on a Job: Done.

Of course, I was only able to save my skin in this way because of the primitive time this took place in, a glorious time before social media, before Facebook, before Twitter. Because if I write something viciously meanspirited, completely unfair and yet totally fucking hilarious today, the Crazy Ones out there will see it no matter what I do, become enraged, and arrive on cue to kidnap me in their Rape Vans and imprison me in their Karmic Penalty Boxes. Or just punch me in the nose.

(more…)

Bullshit, Deep Thoughts & Pronouncements, The Inner Swine, Writing

Gone Girl

Author: jsomers December 27, 2013 2 Comments

So, after much cajoling by The Duchess, I read Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn. It’s going to be a movie next year starring Ben Affleck and several dozen other people you’ll recognize, produced by Reese Witherspoon and most probably being the talk of the town for a week and then disappearing. As films do.

Anyways, I’ve been thinking about this book. Because it could be used in a creatve writing class to simultaneously demonstrate how to pull off some writing tricks well while also being used as an example of how to pull off some writing fundamentals really, really poorly. You don’t often find books that are simultaneously clever, well-written in spots, and disastrously bad nonetheless. It’s sort of made me obsessed with the book, frankly: On the one hand I am breathlessly jealous of Flynn for her genius twisty concept. On the other I am angry at the way she frittered it away. Let’s talk about it.

The Good

HERE THERE BE SPOILERS

First of all, let’s be positive, the way they teach us in writing workshops. The twist is super clever, and cleverly handled, in my opinion. The creative use of unreliable narrator totally sets you up for the reveal, and it works. The first half of the book is very well observed, with both narrative voices working. I believed the marriage between Nick and Amy, I believed their slow descent into disdain and anger at each other, and I believed the ancillary characters. The mystery of what happened to Amy was intriguing, and overall I was sold.

The reveal itself was great, for a while at least.

What Flynn does very well is create a mystery. A down-home, old fashioned mystery. What happened to Amy? What’s Nick hiding? It’s set up really well and I was sucked in. The problem is that the books is all set up. It’s so much all set up that Flynn herself seems to lose interest in the book after the big reveal.

The Bad

So, spoilers: You know the basic plot, I guess, if you’re reading this. Nick’s wife Amy disappears on their fifth wedding anniversary, after much marital water has gone under the bridge. It looks very much like Amy was abducted violently, and that someone cleaned up the crime scene. Nick falls under immediate suspicion. The story is told in alternating first-person narratives, Nick in the present day and Amy via diary entries that seem to detail a romance and marriage falling apart, and a husband getting angrier and more abusive. Then, it’s revealed that Nick is having an affair, Amy knew of it, and she stages her own kidnapping in order to punish him, by framing him for her murder and watching him rot on Death Row.

Yup, it’s quite a twist. It’s borderline ridiculous, but could have been sold if Flynn had handled it better. The audacity of the twist almost sells the book by sheer power, in fact. The problem is simple: Flynn plays dirty, so dirty that the second you get over your amazement at the reveal you get pissed off.

Using faked diary entries from Amy – written by her but intended to present the police with a totally false depiction of her life with Nick in order to set him up as an angry, abusive husband – totally works because, as with all unreliable narrators, we’re fooled into thinking it’s real. That’s a simple trick. The problem is that while the Fake Amy in the diary makes sense to us, the Real Amy whose distasteful, sociopathic Voice takes over in part two of the novel is so awful you simply cannot believe for one second that anyone likes her, much less marries this monstrous woman.

Yes, she’s pretty. And we’re told a lot of other things about her to explain her ability to lure people into thinking she loves them while simultaneously being horrible to them. But that’s the real problem with the character (all the characters, really): We’re told these things. The characters themselves do not behave in any way that makes sense.

We’re told that Amy is brilliant, yet she acts incredibly foolishly beyond her clever frame-up of Nick. We’re told that Amy is vindictive and dangerous, yet when she is victimized at one point in the second half of the book she takes no revenge and meekly allows two grifters to steal all her money. This is a woman who frames her husband for her own murder in order to punish him, yet when two minor characters rob her she does nothing. We’re told that Amy can charm people and make them feel like they’re special to her, but we don’t actually see how that’s possible because the Amy we see is awful, all the time.

Nick’s an unreliable narrator as well, and that’s where things get stupid, because we’re in Nick’s head. Amy’s diary was a fake, so it’s acceptable that she’s lying – it’s done purposefully. Nick’s narration has no such device. He’s just narrating his life to us. Why in the world would he purposefully not think about the woman he’s having an affair with for the first third or more of the book? No reason, aside from Flynn’s clumsy need to keep his affair as a twist to shock the reader. We’re also told a lot of things about Nick that his actual behavior doesn’t support, like his feelings about his father and his feelings for the woman he’s screwing around with. Nick is a device, Amy is a device. Neither are characters.

The Ugly

Now, all of this would have been gleefully forgiven if the book had ended well. I’ll stipulate. If the book had a great ending I would have mentioned my carping about narrators and show-dont-tell and all that other stuff only after a few drinks and some encouragement.

The ending is not good.

The ending is so not good, you can literally feel Flynn running out of steam. The chapters get shorter. The writing more terse. She’s barely there, just tapping out contractually-obligated words to give the whole mess some sort of form. Characters behave in increasingly ridiculous ways, all justified by the supposedly awesome, unbelievable power of Amy, who is apparently, by book’s end, simply an elemental force. Unstoppable. You have to either believe that Amy is absolute power personified, or the ending become ridiculous and unsupportable. And I don’t use the word unsupportable lightly. The ending is so bad it requires not just a suspension of disblief, but a willing disregard of the concept.

And as I said, the worst part is the perfunctory way Flynn writes these last chapters. We’re called to believe that a) Nick cannot in any way prove Amy’s actions despite having a high-powered lawyer and a pretty good idea of exactly what she did – and a sympathetic police ear, b) Despite knowing how awful she is he would allow himself to be bullied into living in the same house with her, c) Despite knowing how awful she is he would remain married to her and d) when she performs her final repugnant act, impregnating herself with semen culled from masturbatory tissues Nick just left lying around the house (really! REALLY!) Nick would simply roll over and resign himself to spending his life living with a sociopath.

That’s a lot of heavy lifting for a writer, but Flynn presents these final chapters as brief sketches. There’s so little effort and detail it’s almost surreal. I could literally picture her just grinding out those final few thousands words with her agent or editor’s edit letter on the desk next to her and a half-finished bottle of liquor by her hand.

It’ll make a better movie, I think. And it’s not that the book isn’t enjoyable. It just made me angry.

Deep Thoughts & Pronouncements, Someone Else's Writing

Everything Old is New Again: Doctor Who

Author: jsomers December 10, 2013 1 Comment

As River Song would say: SPOILERS.

SO, Doctor Who. I remember it, vaguely, form my childhood. My older brother, always a sucker for old-school monster stories, liked it for a while during the gory, gothic-tinged Tom Baker era and being a younger brother I naturally avoided it in public and then watched it secretly a few times and was scared witless by Tom Baker’s Insanity Grin. Then I forgot about it for a long time, and when it was reborn in 2005 I barely paid attention. Over the years I’ve occasionally heard a few things about it, seen come clips on YouTube etc., but generally ignored it, as any good American should.

Recently, for no reason whatsoever beyond being intrigued by the hype surrounding the 50th Anniversary of the show, I started watching. I sprinkled in some of the classics and a few of the older new episodes, but mainly I started watching the Matt Smith era for no other reason than there seemed like there were some interesting details in there. And for those who are already wondering: Yes, I watched Blink. It was actually the first episode I tried out, and based on it’s success I forged on. So stop asking me if I’ve seen Blink. I have.

Anyways, Dcotor Who has always been problematic for me, and remains problematic. In the old series I was always bothered by the slow pace, rough editing, terrible special effects, and the silly costumes. In the modern series they’ve solved many of those problems but some of the plot problems remain. All in all I think I’m in a Love/Hate relationship with this show at the moment. It’s sort of like an old friend from elementary school who comes back to stay with you for a while. You have fond memories, and you find him good company sometimes, but it’s just kind of strange.

Or maybe I’m more haunted by Tom Baker’s Insanity Smile than I’m letting on. LOOK AT IT (you can’t look away):

HOLY SHIT

The World is Ending! Again! And Again! And Again and Again!

So, let’s keep in mind that I am mainly familiar with the Steven Moffat/Matt Smith era. I know a lot of the general backstory and some specifics from previous incarnations, but let’s stipulate that I’m playing with half a deck. Still, I have observations about this most modern version of the show.

The first is simple: It is a lot of fun.

People often say that Doctor Who is a children’s program, and it is, to an extent. The science is all wobbly and the history is too, but there is an awful lot of fun in the stories, the sense that danger is fleeting, death impossible, and that we’d all prefer to be flying around the universe rather than, say, going to work. Yes! That. There are dramatic moments and even deaths from time to time (not counting the 12 times the Doctor himself has ‘regenerated,’ stated as canon as a type of death, since what makes him him dies and his memories are reborn as someone new) but generally speaking this is a show where the universe is a playground and even the most dire of threats are resolved by the end of the episode – or the story arc, at the very least.

The characterizations are fun, too. The Doctor himself is played with an affecting mix of boyish charm, wonder, curiosity, heavy sadness, and insane temper, but always with a human heart somewhere under all the alien physiology. The companions I’m most familiar with, The Ponds, make for fun people as well, and have supported some very effective dramatic beats in the story.

Overall, I’m saying: Don’t take any of my criticisms to mean I’m not a fan. I am! I really enjoy it.

But.

The problem with the modern Doctor Who is simple: The world is always ending. The world is always ending and Amelia Pond is always near death or being tortured or abandoned for 36 years or having her baby torn from her loving arms. Always. Always. This is an effective strategy for telling interesting, compelling stories … until it isn’t, because my dramatic/end of the world chip is burned out.

Moments

The modern Doctor Who always wants moments – which is to say, Steven Moffat, the showrunner, wants moments. As in, Moments. The show craves those big, dramatic, emotional moments like a writer craves booze. That is, constantly. Few episodes go by without a big emotional beat between characters, or the end of the world, whichever is happening sooner. After so many partings of the way and heartfelt declarations of affection and epic this and epic that, my Epic Emotion Chip gets a little burnt out. These sorts of moments are meant to happen rarely in any story. Not every single episode. Not to mention the fact that Amy Pond has, let’s see, been abandoned several times, suffered childhood psychological trauma, been assaulted and near death, been kidnapped and had her baby taken away from her to be raised as an assassin, been split into two versions one of which was left to rot and fight robots for thirty-six years, robbed of her ability to have more children, and eventually banished to the past to live out her years decades before her own parents and everyone she knows is born. And yet at no point is there any serious suggestion that Amy has suffered, you know? Because she got to go on adventures in between these horrific moments.

After a while you get tired of The Girl Who Waited and want her to get some peace and stop being Moffat’s little Emotional Beat monkey.

Of course, part of this is a product of binge-watching – fair enough. I’m not waiting weeks or months for the next episode – I’m just porning my way through them, and why not. The thing is, once you release a work, you can’t force people to watch in some very slow way so your emotional beats feel measured. That sort of thing has to be baked in.

The Bandage

Part of this is, I think, a reaction to the fact that Doctor Who has never had the greatest plots. Now, 800 or episodes is a lot of storytelling, so I will grant that not only have some of them been very good, but Doctor Who has a certain structure and feel to it that remains even in the new version. It’s a Monster of the Week serial and always has been: Most episodes can be boiled down to a few basic plot points:

1. Doctor and Companion arrive somewhere, usually unexpectedly

2. There is mystery. Doctor surmises alien of some sort is behind it.

3. Doctor investigates/opposes, seems out of moves and about to lose

4. Twist = Victory!

Now, certainly not every single episode follows this pattern – but most do, and it works well enough, even when the Monster of the Week is the Daleks Yet Again or the Cybermen Yet Again. But the point is it works precisely because Moffat et al have created characters we really do care about. The Doctor is kind of charming, especially with the spice of his darker side emphasized. The Ponds were charming and hilarious, and their back story in regards to each other and the Doctor was affecting. That stuff worked, and it distracts from the fact that most of the mysteries are explained, somehow, via timey-wimey and a sonic screwdriver. In other words, Moffat basically writes himself into a corner and then shouts TIME LORD!, throws a smoke bomb, and escapes yet again. You can do that when your character has 50 years and 800 episodes of history, but goddamn it, Moffat is abusing the TIME LORD/SMOKE BOMB button. If you ask me.

Which no one has. Am I thinking too hard about this? Likely. I tend to get all obsessive with things like this – I ignore them for years while others are telling me to check them out, and then suddenly, as if it was my idea all along, I dive in, burrow deep, and live and breathe it for a while.

I do enjoy the show and will keep watching it. But that doesn’t mean the Smoke Bomb’s gonna keep working on me.

Bullshit, Deep Thoughts & Pronouncements, Someone Else's Writing