Chateau Lloyd

Until last week, the only Vladimir Nabokov book I read was, for obvious reasons, Lolita.  I suppose it is worth a post on its own merits, but my father, who is a serious Nabokov nerd, said it was not emblematic of his other work.

I therefore decided to read Mary, his first novel but one that only received an English translation after his career was well established.  It is a quirky book, not the most accessible and I found its conclusion to be unsatisfactory.  It's very much a first-try kind of book.

As I often say, you write what you know, and Nabokov wrote of being a Russian emigre in Berlin during the 1920s.  The tale is set in a pension filled with Russians from various walks of life.  The protagonist is Ganin, a young man who served with the "Whites" (counterrevolutionaries) and was evacuated from Crimea.  The story (which is quite short, barely breaking 100 pages) is about him finding renewed motivation to move forward with life via recollections off Mary, whom he hopes to meet soon.

Much of the text is taken up by description, which is precise and sometimes unsettling.  Ganin's physical relationship with Mary is described in some detail, which I'm sure was unusual at the time.  I'm sure some readers might fight it erotic, but it seemed to me that Nabokov was trying to recreate the sensations of the relationship with precision rather than eroticism.

While easy reading, I found the pacing to be slow and was heavily tempted to flip ahead to the end.  That speaks well of the tension, but it induced impatience rather than interest.

I've got some more of his stuff and will reserve judgement until I get deeper into his works.

Five years ago, I almost died.

It was the Tuesday after Labor Day, and I was feeling awful.  The weekend started well, and I had a slight fever on Saturday, but by Sunday it had cleared up.

In the interim my kids managed to break first the washing machine (by overloading it) and then the dryer (by filling it with dripping wet clothes).  With school about to hit high gear, my wife implored me to fix the situati  Ion by Tuesday.

So that's what I did.  I went online, found a local store that had both machines in stock ordered them to be ready for same-day pickup, and set about dismantling the old ones and hauling them out of the basement.  That done, I picked up the replacements (which required two trips), and got them installed and running by 5 p.m.  

Not a bad day's work.

The next morning, I drove the kids to school, and I was not feeling well at all.  I'd already made up my mind to call in sick, but even driving was a strain.    My arms were tingling, my chest was tight, breathing was difficult and by the time I got home, there was an edge of darkness around my eyesight.  I laid down on the floor and suggested my wife might want to dial 911, which she did.

It wasn't a heart attack, though it presented as one.  It was instead an attack of myocarditis, an obscure affliction in those days before Covid "vaccines" spread it far and wide.  The ambulance crew was polite and professional, and I quickly rallied.  After every test imaginable over the next two days, no clear cause for the attack was established.  One of the nurses in the cardiac unit suggested it was a combination of physical exertion, general exhausting and whatever bug or virus I was fighting off.

It was during my convalescence that I began the research for Long Live Death and the pleasure (and success) of that project inspired me to write Walls of Men.

If nothing else, my literary output benefited from those extra five years.

I've also lived to see all my kids finish high school and welcome two wonderful grandchildren into the world.  I've lost a few friends along the way, made new ones, and reconnected with others.  My faith has grown by leaps and bounds, which is kind of surprising because I thought I was in a good place back then.

Maybe I was, but now I'm in a better one.

Death has its own schedule, and no society in history has expended so many resources and developed such extensive technological means to forestall its arrival.  And yet we also are craving it to a greater degree than ever before, murdering unborn babies, harvesting their best parts and encouraging the old, the disabled and the depressed to kill themselves.

It is something of a paradox.  The world is worse than it was five years ago, but maybe that was also necessary to people to return to God.  I notice Mass is filling back up with younger people.  The vocations in my area are strong and healthy.

As for me, I'm more attuned to my health, and have had to reluctantly accept that I'm not in my 30s anymore.  This is a realization that is also a paradox because knowledge of my limitations has made me more reasonable about getting word done and I stress less on things outside my control.

In any event, I think it's a good idea from time to time to pause and consider where we are and what else we could be doing.

Amazon Prime's desecration of J.R.R. Tolkien's work continues with the release of the second season of The Rings of Power.

A stunning (but at the same time predictable) development is the decision to "humanize" the orcs.  Tolkien's villains were cruel, cowardly, cannibalistic monsters who lived a debased existence.  They were a twisted mockery of elves created by Morgoth to serve as the foot soldiers for his war against the Valar.

These creatures immediately struck a nerve in the popular culture and were part of the original elements of Dungeons and Dragons and are now a staple of fantasy environments.

Alas, in our decadence, people have decided that what was once obviously evil must now be seen as good, so just as sodomy is the highest form of sex, so orcs are just misunderstood and must be rehabilitated into yet another People of Color oppressed by white bigoted imperialists.

I've dealt with the whole question of whether they are supposed to be an allegory for actual people, and the short version is "yes and no."  Yes, they represent human vices and were written with bloodthirsty and battle-crazed soldiers of World War I in mind.  No, they are not a racial caricature of anyone.

As the old saying goes: if you hear a "dog whistle," you're the dog.  Anyone who looks at misshapen, homicidal, cannibals who delight in cruelty and says:  "You know who this reminds me of..." is the bigot, not the guy who made them up.

It is yet another milestone on our civilization's downward path, and their utter rejection gives me comfort and hope for the future.

Now that my schedule has loosened up a bit, I'm able to seriously think about writing.  The question then turns into what I should write?

After 11 books, I've covered many of the topics that have interested me.  Scorpion's Pass has scratched an itch from my college days, as have both Long Live Death and Walls of Men.  

Battle Officer Wolf got the whole authorship rolling, and it's got a sequel built into the original concept.

The Man of Destiny series allowed me to work out my Star Wars prequel hate and create a new universe of my own.

Similarly, Vampires of Michigan has the potential to be a franchise if I want do go that way.

Three Weeks with the Coasties was originally intended to be an introduction into semi-autobiographic writings on my military experience.

Finally, there's plenty of space for more game designs and even an update of Conqueror: Fields of Victory.

Given this vast amount of open terrain for creativity, why am I not using it?

The answer, I think, is boredom.  Having done a topic, I'm done with it.  I simply cannot relate to authors or filmmakers who want to constantly revisit their earlier work.

That being said, I'm now looking at things a little differently, and seeing if a story I'm turning over in my head might fit in an existing setting rather than needing a new one.

And yes, there is some commercial element to this as a new title will bring the older ones to the forefront and timed with a discount, could boost my sales.  However, since my motivation is pleasure rather than profit, this is not persuasive to me.

A better argument is that I enjoyed creating my characters and settings and revisiting them could be a fun way to tell new stories about people I haven't talked about in a while.  This is beginning to resonate with me.

I'm reading up on the Saipan campaign in June of 1944, and it underlines the theme of one of my earlier posts about the 'rules of war.'

Spoiler alert: there are no rules.

The Japanese defenders of the island breached just about every custom of war they could find. 

They used civilians as literal human shield (herding them in front of their attacking columns). 

They targeted medical corps personnel and would purposefully leave wounded G.I.s in the open so that they could pick off troops trying to treat them.

They even went so far as to boobytrap their own casualties and also taught their wounded to have a grenade, so they could kill American medics trying to treat them.

Because Americans weren't stupid, they came up with countermeasures, which basically boiled down to: kill everything in sight.

What this meant was that wounded Japanese who might have wanted to surrender never got the chance.  Innocent civilians who just wanted to be left alone were pulverized along with everything around them because the Japanese could not be trusted to respect any of the rules of war which were designed to prevent such savagery.

The paucity of Japanese prisoners has led to the myth that the Japanese were everywhere and always fanatical in their courage and devotion, which simply isn't true.  We cannot for certain say how many Japanese troops wanted or even tried to surrender, only to be shot down by disbelieving Americans who may have actually witnessed earlier fake attempts.

The thing is, Japan had previously followed the rules of war, and achieved victories over China and Russia.  By throwing them away, they gained a fleeting tactical advantage but its price was hundreds of thousands of dead and total defeat.

It has long been axiomatic that most film adaptations from books are flawed if not outright terrible.  

What is far less common, however, is for the film to exceed the book.  The three examples I usually cite are Jaws, M*A*S*H and Last of the Mohicans.

The book version of Jaws contains several annoying side plots involving class differences in the seaside community (summer homes vs year-round residents) and Mrs. Brody cheats on the chief with Hooper, who in the book is a tall, stud rather than Richard Dreyfuss' brilliantly played shark nerd.

M*A*S*H bogs itself down with comparisons between service status (draftees vs regular army or reservists), and it comes across as totally cartoonish.  That element was toned down precisely because it was boring and rendered it even less plausible than it already way.

As for Last of the Mohicans, Mark Twain thoroughly dismantled James Fenimore Cooper more than a century ago, and Michael Mann's 1990s production is far superior to the written version.

A similar situation exists with The Big Sleep.  I've long enjoyed the Bogart and Bacall film, which while light on the plot, has excellent acting, great dialog, and is just wonderfully evocative.

When I saw a used copy of Raymond Chandler's book, I picked it up because I wanted to see how much had been changed, and whether the changes work.

In fact, a lot had been changed, and not for the better.  Back in the 1930s and 1940s, movies were still subject to the Hayes Code.

In the modern age, the code has been held up as horrifically stifling censorship, but it is no accident that films were much, much better when they had to use story, character and setting rather than just flash boobs to pack people into the seats.  Books, however, were under no such restriction, and so topics like homosexuality, drug use and pornography could be openly discussed in Chandler's book.

For the film, these topics had to be approached with care and ambiguity, which made for better storytelling.  I'd heard that the book's ending is better, but it's actually much worse - everything is tied into a tidy little bow that makes no sense.

Chandler has some great conversations, and writes well, but his characters as written simply aren't as compelling as the cast of the film.  I have no desire to re-read the book, but I know I will continue to re-watch the film.

One of my colleagues at Bleeding Fool has reported that Disney is now so desperate for recycled material that they are going to do backstories on all the characters they killed off in The Acolyte.

This is taking the strange obsession with retconning and prequels to its logical and absurd conclusion.

No story ever moves forward; that's dangerous.  Current writing emphasizes world-building and details rather than plot, character development and progression.

The Star Wars setting has immense potential for standalone stories, yet all Disney has done is try to recycle existing material, and in the process has created a host of contradictions that destroy the integrity of the thing.  When the stories were pushed forward, they were hateful takes on existing characters, so one can see why no one has had the stomach to revisit the disastrous sequel trilogy.

Yet.

I've written about prequels before and I don't like them.  Many of my settings could easily accommodate them, but why move backwards when one can move forward?  I suppose one could argue that if I did a book for The Vampires of Michigan about the bootlegging years, that wouldn't be a prequel so much as a different story in the same setting, especially if I use different characters.

That would be the only way I can see it working.  When I write a character, I don't generally create a full and massive biography just in case.  I flesh out only the details I have.  Going back and adding in more risks the integrity of what already exists, and one can see this in how much J.R.R. Tolkien struggled to make his concept of Galadriel work.  She had a backstory when he wrote Lord of the Rings, but as he dug deeper into the First Age, he went back and forth about who she was and how she got where she was.

The published version of her in The Silmarillion is not the final form, which was still in draft.  Instead, Christopher Tolkien, his son and literary executor, chose the most finished version, which was also in line with existing texts.

If a genius like Tolkien struggled to make prequels and backstories work, I'm far less qualified to bother with it.

I am thinking about sequels however, and many of my books are suitable for that.  This intrigues me because I've yet to try it, and it would probably be good for sales because the original book would get a boost.  It's been difficult to write of late, but I'm restructuring my schedule to make it more friendly for that pursuit.

Even better, I'm starting to get ideas about what scenes I would run.  Writing has been a helpful hobby for many years and I miss it.  Hopefully I'll be back in the swing of things soon.

Is any movie a better distillation than 1990s youth culture than Wesley Snipes' Blade?  It's got a bit of everything - the brash anti-hero, vampirism as a decadent (secular) lifestyle, and of course that sexy soft-core lesbian porn that was just starting to creep into the popular consciousness.

Indeed, in retrospect that was a clever marketing ploy by Hollywood, because while two men having sex is disgusting, two women having sex is merely absurd - and far more aesthetically pleasing.

In any event, I hadn't watched it in many years, which may strike people as surprising given my (fairly) recent authorship of The Vampires of Michigan.   To a certain extent, Blade was the Ur-text of that book insofar as it treated vampirism as a morally neutral biological phenomenon.  Obviously, the blood drinking was bad, but religious symbols and sacred objects were specifically mentioned as useless.

Garlic and silver were instead the primary threats to the vamps.

The storyline is unremarkable, and what sells the picture are the actors and the remarkably slick aesthetic.  Wesley Snipes is just so damn cool.  He oozes cool, personifies it - women want him, men want to BE him.  Modern movies simply cannot produce that level of charisma.

Put simply, it knew what it wanted to be and became that thing.  

That being said, there is a spiritual void at the heart of the picture which I had not noticed before - in part because it has been so long since I saw it.  When you are in your 20s, partying and lots of sex seems all that one could want in life.  Later on, other priorities emerge.

That was a large part of what inspired my take on vampires.  I very much enjoyed (and incorporated) fight scenes with cool weapons and people capable of dishing out (and taking) absurd amounts of damage, but the real heart of the matter to me was how one kept going after 100 years of orgies.  There had to be something more.

Anyhow, the film has held up remarkably well.

When I was a child, I had a regular cycle of ear infections, and two of the dark memories that haunt me from that time are getting an injection in the butt and the taste of yellow Triaminic.

I've the worst one I had in many years and decided to go into the clinic to speed my recovery.  Before I left, I got word that come coworkers had tested positive for Covid, and I have to confess I thought it rather quaint.  It never occurs to me to test for that.  It's over.  Covid is just another cold and - as we now know - was not much more than that to begin with.  

The response was grossly disproportionate to the threat.

As it happens, I did test positive, but it was something of a footnote because like many others, I have no symptoms.  My problem is an ear infection, which I'm in the process of shaking off.

That in turn reminded me of Stephen King's On Writing, a book I read some years ago after a friend recommended it to me.  This was back when I was just beginning my authorial career, and I'm sure he meant well, but his advice - ignore the biography and focus on the writing tips - was exactly wrong.

I despise Stephen King.  I dislike what he writes and how he writes it.  His politics are abhorrent and he seems like a very bitter, angry old man, which is strange given the immense fame and fortune he has achieved in life.  He's pretty much the prime exhibit that secular materialist goals only get you so far.  True happiness and love come from God, and the closer one draws to Him, the greater the joy and peace one will find.

That is why King's autobiography was of interest.  It was no shock to me that he had an unhappy childhood with frequent ear infections and painful treatments (in his case, the doctor just pierced the eardrum with a hot needle).  His family was poor, and he was surrounded by decrepit spooky stuff that he later incorporated into his works.

To me, that is the value of literary biographies/autobiographies - to see where the inspiration came from and how they came to write what they did.  Once you've visited Fort Monroe, you can understand  why so much of Edgar Allen Poe's work centered on oppressive masses of damp, dark masonry.  He wrote what he knew, which was the interior casemates of the fortress where he served part of his time in the U.S. Army.

I don't get sick very often, and once again I'm reminded that part of why we get sick must be to make us appreciate being healthy.  I'm certain that I will do that, and hopefully it will be soon.

American culture borrows heavily from the Puritan tradition, and it's so deeply embedded that even American Catholics have unconsciously absorbed a lot of its assumptions.

This wasn't always the case.  Catholics were once considered outside the American mainstream and targeted for persecution by the Protestant majority.  The "Blaine Amendments" which barred public funding of religious schools were an attempt to cripple Catholic education.  At that time public schools included religious instruction, and it was of course Protestant in nature.

When Catholics began to leave their cultural ghetto in the 1960s, their children quickly assimilated the American Protestant culture and its version of history.

In this telling, the Revolutionary War was about escaping from the sinister power of Rome and the horrors of the Spanish Inquisition.  The truth was radically different.

The Pilgrims, for example, were fleeing Anglican persecution, not Catholicism.  The Puritans took an ultra-scriptural approach to their theology to the extent that they banned Christmas because it was not explicitly written about in the Bible.

By the 18th Century, the British government was no longer hunting down Catholic priests and burning them, but Catholic subjects were confined to an inferior legal status.  Catholic Emancipation did not take place until 1829, and while the legal restrictions were removed, their remained (and still remains) a strongly anti-Catholic element in British society.

The Revolutionary War of course predated the Constitution, but many of the guarantees in the later document reflect wartime goals - the principles the Patriots were fighting for.

Thus, the Constitution's prohibition of religious tests to hold public office was a repudiation of current British law.

Aleteia has a timely piece on George Washington's friendly stance towards Catholics, and how - despite being a nominal member of the Church of England - he fully supported Catholic aspirations and even donated to the construction of a new Catholic church.

It was therefore an easy case to make for Catholics to actively support the American Revolution, which promised greater liberties for them than virtually any other group.

This episode not only offers additional reasons to admire the genuine greatness of our first president, but is a useful lesson in political pragmatism.  Instead of debating which candidate is more morally acceptable, it may be wiser to ask which one is more likely to leave you free to live out your faith in peace.

It's worth noting that the chief of staff for the Republican Army in the Spanish Civil War was Gen. Vincente Rojo, a practicing Catholic whose armies busied themselves in destroying churches and slaughtering clergy.  Whatever his personal belief, he was actively fighting against the Church.