The Absurd

I've never wondered about the so-called "meaning of life". There isn't one. To assume that there is a meaning to life is to exhibit a selfishness that's hard to describe. I have a difficult time understanding such a degree of self-centered pathology.

About ten years ago I began to read the works of Charles Bukowski. His poetry and his fiction and his essays captured me in a way that the words of few others have been able to do. In some ways, it was his style of writing that grabbed me and held my attention. There is something so deceptively simple about it that it throws you off. Because it isn't simple--it only seems that way. His stories and novels display a level of intelligence and insight that I've yet to encounter in just such a way anywhere else.

Bukowski wrote about real people. The rich and the famous rarely enter into his world. This is good, because they rarely enter into my immediate world, either. Bukowski's world is an insular one, but he wrote with a strange kind of compassion for other people, despite the outward impression of what most readers see as Bukowski's antipathy toward his fellow man.

The older I get the more despairing I become of the fate of our species. We seem bound and determined to head straight down the hole of Oblivion into extinction. And, as we all know, that's a one-way trip. The greatest bummer of it all is that we will take so many other fellow creatures down into that sucking hole with us.

Alas.

Bukowski seems to have come to his same conclusion. He understood Human Nature for what it was, but he also understood that the greater force of Nature was going to have the last say-so. The Big Storm is going to well up over the walls we've built around us and overwhelm everyone and the lightning will strike. We're going down for the count. It's just a matter of when, not if.

Yes, the older I get the more my admiration grows for old Bukowski. He wasn't misanthropic. He just knew the real deal. Bukowski's gone, now. But he went down laughing. I admire that. You have to.

Sentient

If there's a mammal that I find more intimidating than a leopard seal, I have yet to see it. No, they're not as large as killer whales. And they can't chase you down on land like a brown bear or a Siberian tiger. But Jove, those predators are just frightening to look upon.

But even these animals--top predators--can show compassion.

Non-human Animals think and feel.

If you're worried about the impact that over six billion consuming 200-lb. primates are having on the planet, you have a right to be. If you want to witness our dwindling array of ecosystems, you'd best hurry. Soon, many of them will be gone. And not within hundreds of years or even in decades, but within years or months. Certainly many unique ecological niches will be swallowed into oblivion and extinction within our brief lifetimes. If you want to see some of them, then I'd suggest that you get on with it.

Lingering Notes

As with many writers, I try to keep a notebook around. I often have a small pocket notebook in my shirt. This is for the times when an idea for a story or the thoughts of a character hit me and I need to write it down in quick order before the idea fades completely away. And they do that--ideas--they come and go.

And when I open those little notebooks I dig through them and do a literary triage and ignore the ones that were probably not very good to begin. About one in ten seem worth of further work.

This is one that I've actually been carrying around for years. Maybe one of these days I'll do something substantial with it:

Characters for new book or story. ("Beryl" or THE GLENDALE.)

Copyright 2009 By James Robert Smith.

Girl--Beryl. Young woman. 24 years old. Unmarried, with child. Child is a little boy. Father was a black guy who left Beryl, she didn't know the guy that well, anyway. But here she was with this three-year-old half-white kid who she loved with all her heart. But she's sick of the stares, the hateful stares and the muttered threats and the out loud remarks of "nigger-lover" and "whore". She can't get away from it. Every street. Every neighborhood. Every store, every mall, every apartment complex, everygoddamnedwhere she goes.

Boy--Wiley. Beryl's son. Smart as a whip. Sweet as a child can be. He loves his mommy the way every kid does, but he never whines and he never complains and it's almost as if he understands that the nasty looks and the bad names are because of him. He's a sad little boy.

Michael--the guy who lives one door down from where Beryl and Wiley have moved--the Glendale Apartments on Whitney Street. The apartment complex is strange (more about it later). Michael has lived there a while. He's seen his neighbors change a number of times. His girlfriend of two years has left him, tired of waiting for him to marry her and move away from Glendale. He's interested when he sees Beryl. She has the same accent that he recalls from back home in Savannah, and he isn't surprised when he finds that's where she's from. Also, her little boy doesn’t put him off. In fact, he likes Wiley. Michael is a decent guy and maybe he's tired of being alone.

THE GLENDALE--strange place, really. Most of the tenants have been there a long, long time. There aren't many like Michael and Beryl. The place is shaded and kind of dark and damp on the outside, and it looks kind of dilapidated, but that's only from a distance. When you get up close you can see that it's quite well tended, new paint and it's only all of those live oaks and all of that Spanish moss that makes the place look so old. The Glendale is a series of buildings all interconnected by walkways and breezeways and by god you can get lost in there. It's almost like a maze and once or twice Michael HAS gotten lost. Kind of spooky out there at night, so he always tries to be in by nightfall and carries a flashlight when he thinks he might not be home by then. Best to be careful. And those strange noises and tickings at the windows are best just ignored--there's never a break-in at the Glendale, so he looks upon the weirdness and bizarre sounds as something of a mixed blessing.

Liked it Best When it was a Secret--A Re post

In light of the rising noise of the imminent release of THE ROAD, the film version of Cormac McCarthy's apocalyptic novel, I figured I'd re post this version of my blog:

There are some things that you realize you just enjoyed more when it seemed as if you were the only one who knew about it. Secret swimming holes. Secret parks. Secret restaurants. That kind of thing. Then everyone else finds out about it and the crowds set in and the yammering begins and...well...things are just never the same.

So it was with my love of the books of Cormac McCarthy. Many years ago I discovered his work when an acquaintance casually mentioned one of his novels--BLOOD MERIDIAN. I'm not sure how early on in his career this book was written, but surely one of the first half dozen or so. I went out and bought a copy blind, on my pal's recommendation.

The writing is pretty much as good as it gets in modern English. It's high art. The chapters are all like the best of what humanity has to offer in the way of displayed skill. McCarthy is probably the finest writer around, to my way of thinking and in my experience. To this day, BLOOD MERIDIAN remains one of my favorite works of art.

Subsequently, I went out and found his earlier work and consumed them in quick order. THE ORCHARD KEEPER, OUTER DARK, CHILD OF GOD, SUTTREE...these were works of wonder for me. It didn't hurt that they were also set in my native South and I recognized both the geography in which they were set, and the folk who lived in those worlds. Here was a writer to be admired and to be ultimately respected and especially not imitated. To attempt to parrot the style of Cormac McCarthy would be to invite disaster and well deserved contempt.

And then everyone else suddenly discovered McCarthy. He changed direction and moved his settings from the deep South to the West. Like America in its early days, he was moving off in a different direction. The newer novels had become exceptionally popular. The masses were on to him. He was my secret, no longer. And not that he had ever been--it just seemed that way to me. And then, of course, the folk in Hollywood found him.

ALL THE PRETTY HORSES ensued as a film. I didn't see it, but of course even a poorly attended film has the influence to increase the sales of the books from which they originate. McCarthy was suddenly a hot property and now when I mentioned his name everyone knew who I was talking about. Good for McCarthy, and I hope that he's a very wealthy man, these days.

And then came NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN with an excellent cast and directors and screenwriters who seem to understand the book. More fame. More followers of the author. Now comes THE ROAD...a really good book, and I've seen the previews and I find it hard to believe that the makers of the film understood the novel at all. But it doesn't matter. It has an A-list cast and "the buzz". McCarthy will be even more famous than before. His books are everywhere. They have stacks of them, mountains of them, displays dedicated specifically to them in almost every one of the book superstores I visit.

Like a great swimming hole or a waterfall that only you know about, it all seems different when it's discovered by the crowds. You go one day to take a look and enjoy the sounds of the falling water and you peer down and there are footprints beside the pool. You look again and there are people filling the water. You listen and all you can hear is the squeal of the crowds as they soak up your special place.

It's ruint...

I swear it is.

Anthology Invite

I was invited to submit a short story to another anthology. So I've been working on a short story for that. I needed a break from my novel work, so this was a good time to set aside the longer form to try my hand at writing a short story.

When I was a kid, all I really wanted to do was write short stories. Most of my favorite authors had been exceptional short story writers: Ray Bradbury, Harlan Ellison, Robert E. Howard, Stephen King, Robert Aikman, Fritz Leiber...you get the picture.

So for a few years I labored away, writing short stories every time an idea would hit me or a phrase would occur to me or something as slight as the color of the sky would inspire me. At such times the thing to do was--to my way of thinking--write a short story. Most of these were pretty horrible. Not good-horrible. Awful-horrible. As in I hope I've burnt them all by now.

At a certain point, though, after I'd gotten to a level where I could write a creditable short story and had managed to sell a few dozen, I stopped. I'd decided to become a novelist and had turned my hand to writing longer works of fiction--things with themes that couldn't be handled in just a few thousand (or a few hundred) words. Since that time I've only rarely gone back to writing short fiction. For one reason I lost touch with the anthology market and I didn't know where to sell stories (the magazines are mostly dead these days); so there was that. But mainly I was so busy writing novels that I just couldn't bother to write short stories at all.

But now I've found that they give me a reason to relax when I'm struggling on completing a novel. They help even more than my efforts in writing for this blog. (Admittedly, the main reason I keep a blog is to help with my fiction efforts. They keep the old joints greased, so to speak.)

So that's what I'll be doing most of the day on Sunday: working on a short story to submit for the approval of the editor of an anthology.

The Day We Found Cairo

These are photos that I took the day we found Cairo.

The morning that we found Cairo we got up to discover this early morning rainbow hanging over the park. Soon after it began to rain buckets.

Deciding to go for a drive, we stopped in the tiny village of Cairo. There's only a very small downtown area with a few stores and this building, which was once a bank for dealing with the large amounts of cash from the now-depleted oil fields that once lay beneath this area.

This is the visitors center in a County Park. This has to be one of the nicest county parks I've ever seen. It's huge and straddles the thousands of acres that was once the city of Volcano and the oil fields there. Now it's forests and canyons and streams. It was in this building where we met the woman who had found the abandoned kittens outside in the rain.

The geese were warning me not to go in. "Quack! Honk! Don't go in! Kittens inside! Warning!" I didn't listen.

Argh! Suckered by the cutie pie!

Slime to the Tenth Power

When I was in my late teens, just after high school, I found myself living in the small town where I'd been born, but from which I'd not been (except for brief visits) since the age of seven. The place is Brunswick, Georgia and it's a pretty horrible spot. I suppose some people must like it there, for it has a permanent population of several thousand. And I reckon other folk just stay out of some kind of ignorant loyalty for a familiar place. At the age of seventeen I found myself there, and I loathed it. Of course I could have just walked away from it, but I didn't. I didn't have the necessary forethought to hit the road. Alas.

In those days of loneliness and pining for the mountains of southern Appalachia where I'd spent the previous four years, I discovered that I could drown my loneliness and misery in feature films. Keep in mind that this was in the days before affordable VCR machines, and the DVD format was decades away. So if you wanted to see a movie you had to keep an eye on the TV Guide and wait for something good to see and set your schedule, or else you went to the cinema.

Me, I went to the movies. A lot. In those days Brunswick had a grand total of five screens, as I recall. And that's counting the Sunset Drive-In, which was, the last time I checked, an overgrown lot of weeds and trees. But, with no friends and a lot of pure fucking depression to drown, I would hit the movies several times per week. I'd go to every theater in town until I'd seen everything. For me, misery was a popular film that would lock in a screen for weeks at a time, thus depriving me of seeing something new.

It was during this time that I found that I loved the small movies. I enjoyed films made on low budgets; or movies that the masses seemed to dislike. I found that I really liked to watch the kind of movie that most people avoided. During these days I developed an admiration for actors and directors and writers who were not as well known, or who were ignored or overlooked. I liked guys like Warren Oates and Harry Dean Stanton. I'd rather watch a film that never made a dime than a blockbuster that made jillionaires out of its producers.

The underdogs were the ones for me.

One movie that made an absolutely huge impression on me was STRAIGHT TIME. It was a Dustin Hoffman movie, which should have meant that it would have made a lot of money. But it came and it went and no one seemed to even notice that it had ever existed. I did. It was one of the four films I saw the week it appeared. The week after it hit Brunswick it was gone. They'd replaced it with something else--something I'm sure I saw, but I couldn't tell you what it was.

But STRAIGHT TIME I could tell you about. I liked everything about it. Even as I watched it I felt my mind tilting a bit. Dustin Hoffman as a career criminal. And not even a mobster. No, here was this great actor portraying a nothing hood who robbed at gunpoint, who broke and entered, who smashed and grabbed, who snatched purses. He was a loser with a capital L. It was amazing. I believed for two hours that Dustin Hoffman was a loser criminal searching for his big score.

And the cast who rode along during the movie: a cast made in 70s-movie Heaven. Harry Dean Stanton, yes. Gary Busey. Kathy Bates. And I'll never, ever forget Theresa Russell as she made her first appearance in the film. I'd never seen a more shapely ass, and I'll never forget that scene.

But the greatest performance in the film was by M. Emmett Walsh. For some reason, Emmett Walsh has a tremendous talent for portraying bastards. And I'm not talking about just minor-league assholes, but the full on twelve-gauge sort. And of all of the assholes he has ever played he portrayed the slimiest of all as Earl Frank, Max Dembo's (Hoffman's) parole officer. I'd never met a parole officer (still haven't), but after seeing Walsh's portrayal of Frank, I wanted to see them all burn in Hell. At the earliest opportunity.

So I dedicate this bit of my blog to M. Emmett Walsh, one of the most unforgettable actors of my youth in the single best role I've ever seen out of him.

M. Emmett Walsh as Earl Frank. Slime never looked so nasty.

An ass-kicking and humiliation has NEVER been more deserved.