Blog Archives

Weakened or Corrupted Masculinity Does Not a Good Man Make

1/31/2018

Soy boy. Beta. Cuck.

These terms appear on the internet rather frequently these days. As far as I know, they originate from males on the right end of the political spectrum who coined these pejoratives as sneering insults against males they disapprovingly consider traitors and opponents. The barb the insults contain - the scoff against a perceived lack of masculinity - is obvious, but what makes them interesting is that they come at a time when the very notion of what masculinity should comprise or represent is being challenged. For some, masculinity amounts to little more than a violent, aggressive, predatory, and oppressive social construct that needs to be challenged and, ultimately, destroyed. For others, masculinity is part of an inarguable biological reality that, in itself, is essentially admirable and good, but as is the case with practically anything else, can easily be corrupted to become something deplorable and malevolent. However masculinity is defined, there is no denying its current place of prominence in contemporary social discourse. What men are and how they should behave is very much in vogue these days.

I thought quite a bit about masculinity while I was writing my novel The City of Earthly Desire. I found myself wondering what an optimal form of masculinity might be and how individual males could achieve it. It is a difficult question. In one of his many YouTube videos touching upon the subject, psychologist Jordan Peterson defines optimal masculinity as a competent man who is capable of mayhem, but is able to render this mayhem under control. According to Peterson, a good man is someone who is capable of violence, aggression, and oppression, but chooses not to employ these attributes and instead harnesses these energies to bring about good in the world. Men who surrender to violence and aggression without justification are corrupt, he argues. To be honest, I like this interpretation and it mirrors my own beliefs about what optimal masculinity looks like. Good men are fierce, principled, and firm, but they do not allow themselves to become tyrants. Good men also do not allow themselves to be pushovers just for the sake of being good. Good men are civilized monsters rather than cowards and slaves.

For better or for worse, these traditional notions have not made much of a dent in the ruling ideology of the day which decrees masculinity itself is oppressive. The time has come for men to change, this line of thinking cries. Men need to become more sensitive, less aggressive, and more submissive to those around them. In other words, men should change the exact notions of what it has traditionally meant to be a man. Some go as far to demand that men have weakness and emasculation imposed on them through societal forces if they are unable to do so at the level of the individual. The violence, aggression, and oppression must be reverse socially constructed and the concept of masculinity must be obliterated altogether. Peterson advises against this, arguing that the pursuit would create a world filled with weak, emasculated men who would be of benefit to no one. I am no admirer of weak and emasculated men either and I agree with Peterson's argument. Then again, a word filled with corrupted men who are unable or unwilling to wield masculinity properly would be of little benefit to anyone as well.

As I mentioned before, I explored the concepts of emasculated and corrupted masculinity when I wrote my novel The City of Earthly Desire. I constructed the protagonist to be a typical “nice guy.” Unlike our contemporary soy boy, Béla Drixler is not a low-testosterone, feminized male, but rather a typical beta “good guy.” Though Béla has many admirable qualities – honesty, conscientiousness, agreeableness – his overall goodness also makes him indecisive, unassertive, meek, childish, irresponsible, and gullible. Simply put, his ingrained and flawed conception of goodness makes him a patsy. The flaws inherent in his goodness become apparent when he meets his love-interest, Suzy Kiss, who recognizes his weakness immediately and uses it to manipulate and dominate him for the bulk of the story. Béla’s inherent goodness, coupled with his incessant desire to please, not only make him blind to manipulation and reality, but also eventually lead to his downfall.

I must admit, Béla Drixler was not an easy character to create. He is also not an easy character to read. Nevertheless, I felt the need to analyze weak men like Béla because, as far as I can tell, the West is completely flooded with pushovers like him. When I created Béla, part of my motivation was to show that – despite the contemporary scorn for so-called toxic masculinity and unchecked male aggression – weak, good men such as he are not only undesirable, but ultimately harmful to themselves and society at large.

I present many examples of corrupted masculinity in the novel, but the crime boss Viktor Vilinovich, based loosely on the real-life figure of Semion Mogilevich, is probably the best example. I will not go into the details about his character here; suffice it to say he is a true representative of what many refer to as toxic masculinity. (Despite the prevailing fashion of the day, I despise this term, but I will use it here for the sake of this post.)

I am not sure how effective my analyses or portrayals of weak masculinity and corrupted masculinity are in The City of Earthly Desire, but I am certain of one thing. A good man can be neither weak nor corrupt; a weak man or a corrupt man cannot be good. Try as they might, weak men and corrupted men can also never be virtuous. In the end, an optimal form of masculinity might be one that is strong without being corrupt, sensitive without being weak, and assertive without being tyrannical. Perhaps this is along the lines of optimal masculinity for which individual males should aim.

1 Comment

Writers Who Rate Their Own Books And Why I Do Not

1/28/2018

0 Comments

Before I launch this rather hushed rant, I would like to preface this post by stating that, as individuals, writers are free to make whatever choices and decisions they deem fit when it comes to the writing, promoting, or marketing of their own work. This is merely my opinion of a topic. What individual writers do on their own time is their own business.

Having said that, I am amused by the sheer number of writers, of both the self-published and conventionally published variety, who give five-star rating to their own works on sites such as Goodreads. To be honest, I cannot make sense of the gesture in any meaningful way. What is a writer attempting to communicate when they bedeck their own creation with a five-star rating?

In most cases, I believe it is nothing more than a joyful affirmation of accomplishment or an innocent declaration of pride at having written and published - Hey, I have written this book and I think it is just super! Nothing inherently wrong with that, I suppose. Writing and publishing a book of any length is an accomplishment of which one should be proud. There is also nothing inherently wrong with promoting one's book as something of merit that readers will find worthwhile and good. I imagine all writers, myself included, engage in this in some form or other. Nevertheless, in my more cynical moments I surmise that five-star self-ratings are attempts to skew the overall rating of a book to the positive side because a single five-star rating can do wonders to an overall average if a book has only ten or fifteen ratings in total. Perhaps self-rating writers are simple egoists. Who knows?

Despite these attempts to show some understanding, I must admit self-ratings make me physically cringe whenever I stumble across them and I wonder if others feel the same way. I see a writer has given their own work the highest rating possible, I cannot help but think it is little more than shallow self-congratulation. When writers give themselves five stars, it tells me they believe their work to be perfect – that they have perfectly captured the vision in their heads. It reeks of hubris. The act is smug, arrogant, gauche, and pathetic all at once. I would liken it to listing yourself as a reference on a resume - pointless and tactless to say the least.

In my own case, I firmly believe the novel I have written has some merit and is of high quality, but I am unwilling to declare this in the form of five little yellow stars. Firstly, no matter how good I think my novel may be, I know it is merely a transcription of an idea rather than the pure idea itself. The original vision for the book was five stars; hence, my transcription could never be that high. Readers may see it as five stars because, unlike me, they did not experience the vision and idea in its pure form. For them the book is the idea and the vision, so the chance exists that they might perceive it as something worthy of the highest praise. Secondly, though I am proud of my achievement, I acknowledge that it could have been better, that I may not have reached the objective I had set for myself. Finally, I do not believe it is my place to rate the thing I have created. That is an activity for readers and critics. To put it another way, a chef's high opinion of his or her own dish is of little use if the food set before me is not to my taste. In fact, the chef’s high opinion puts me in awkward spot if I happen to find the food disagreeable. I will question either the chef’s taste or my own. In the end, my taste will win regardless.

Concerning my novel, most of the ratings I have received thus far have been positive, but overall they have ranged from five star all the way to one. I think that is fine. If I had to rate my own work, I would do it in the following manner: my book is all the stars in the known universe and the starless void before the Big Bang simultaneously.

In other words, my work is great, and it is nothing.

There is simply no other way I can look it and this underscores the notion that perhaps writers should not be looking at their own work from a self-rating perspective at all.

0 Comments

A Partial Defence of Annoying Characters

1/24/2018

0 Comments

“The characters in this book are so annoying!”

Complaints such as the one above railing infest reader comment sections at Goodreads and other book-related sites. Why do so many characters in books cause nothing but irritation? As with anything else, the topic is a complex one and immediately invites a plethora of questions.

What is meant by the term annoying?
What makes the character annoying?
Did the writer intentionally or unintentionally create the character to be annoying?

In my opinion, the most striking examples of annoying characters are poorly crafted ones. The one-dimensional, the thinly-fleshed out, the utterly inconsistent, the reprehensibly clichéd, the ideological mouthpiece, and the lazy imitation are common examples of these. In these cases the annoyance stems from a writer’s inability or unwillingness to bring the character to life. I would posit that any irritation readers experience here is more directed at the writer rather than at the creation; we are annoyed at the writer’s own incompetence rather than at the character they have conjured into quasi-being.

The second question is far more difficult to answer. If the character is annoying simply for the reasons touched upon above, then we need look no further than the author. However, experience tells me this is not what some readers mean when they complain about a protagonist or character being annoying. And this is where the issue becomes more nuanced. I am generally perplexed by readers affixing the annoying label to well-written characters and I begin to wonder if the moaning about annoyance is merely a matter of personal taste or if the grievance is based on some higher objective level of analysis. Some readers are irked by characters of the political or personal views the characters express or represent. Others find it maddening to read about people they would do everything in their power to avoid in real life. There are readers who find characters annoying because they consider the character boring, tiresome, unexciting, or morally flawed. The inability to relate to a character is another common complaint. This is significant because statements like “I found the protagonist annoying” tend to be idiosyncratic in nature more often than not. In other words, they reveal far more about the reader than they do about the annoying qualities a given character may or may not possess.

This brings us to the third question – intentionality. Many great writers have purposefully created characters that could readily be classified as annoying. Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Goethe’s Werther, and Dostoevsky’s Underground Man spring to mind as examples. To claim that these characters are unintentionally annoying would be to insult these giants of literature. So why did these revered writers purposefully craft such flawed, weak, irksome characters? Characters they knew would drive their readers to the very edge of exasperation? To address that question in the manner it deserves would require an essay many times longer than this blog post, and I have no intention of delving into a detailed analysis here. Instead, allow me to offer the following: These writers created such characters because they wanted to make us uncomfortable. They want to tug us out of our comfort zones and make us confront aspects of humanity we sincerely believe we do not possess.

As readers, we are annoyed by Hamlet’s indecisiveness, hesitancy, and refusal to act. We silently scream at him to just do it! Take a sword and stab your father’s murderer through the heart! But as you sit there stewing in your smug, self-consciousness ask yourself if you would act any differently. When we read of Werther’s melancholy, heartbreak, and world weariness, we are made uncomfortable by the awkwardness and intimacy of it all. We demand Werther stop being such an overemotional milksop and pull himself together. Yet as these frustrations seep through us, we conveniently forget about those times in our lives when we were Werthers too. Through the Underground Man, we are drawn into a vile world of resentment and malevolence. By forcing us to navigate the treacherous landscape of his soul, the Underground Man forces us to consider the treachery within our own souls. This naturally instills discomfort, and I would wager this discomfort registers as annoyance in most readers’ minds. “I could never be like that,” we assure ourselves as we close the book glad to be free of Dostoevsky’s abomination. Though readers might be able to identify with Hamlet and Werther, it takes a special kind of reader to identify with Underground Man. Yet, if the novella is read properly and seriously, you will not only identify with Underground Man, but also sympathize with him and, in the end, realize that there is an Underground Man very much alive in you.

I spent a great deal of time thinking about all of this as I wrote my novel The City of Earthly Desire because I knew the protagonist I was creating would possess some infuriating attributes. Though he is talented, driven, and academically intelligent, he is also lovesick, foolish, and petty. He makes idiotic decisions, betrays his finer instincts, and is blind to reality throughout the bulk of the story. As I fleshed the character out in my mind, I wondered if I would succeed in making him sympathetic. I worried about this because – as anyone with at least one “How to Write a Bestseller” book on their bookshelf or MFA degree in creative writing program can tell you – readers must be able to identify with the main character or they will not find the narrative engaging. Put another way, readers have to care about the protagonist or else the story is toast. But the more I thought about it, the less I cared for this notion. Some characters are there to make you wince in discomfort. That’s all there is to it.

And that’s troublesome for many people. As was the case in the nineteenth century, we live in a time where the vast majority of people in the West present themselves as gleaming pillars of virtue and goodness and absolute experts in the art of self-mastery. Yes, the world is teeming with righteous and just people who all miraculously have their shit together. And what could be more annoying than encountering characters in books who do not espouse the spotless virtue and stable comportment we espouse? They are nuisances, such characters. Best avoided at all costs.

There are different kinds of annoying characters in literature. Some annoy because they are underdone, ill-conceived, or poorly crafted. This kind of annoyance is understandable and forgivable. Nevertheless, I have found that for many readers, annoying characters are those who force readers to not only look upon the awkward and dark aspects of human nature, but also acknowledge that these dark and awkward aspects very much exist within the readers themselves.

Encountering something like that can be very annoying indeed.

0 Comments

What I Admire Most About Charles Bukowski

1/11/2018

0 Comments

Charles Bukowski is what I would refer to as a polarizing writer; readers either love him or hate him, and not much gray area exisits in between. Regardless of how one might feel about Bukowski's work or Bukowski the person, there is one area where Old Buk is simply beyond reproach, the thing I admire most about him - his work ethic.

Despite all of the up-and-downs of his often ramshackle life, despite his fondness for intoxication, despite his loneliness and personal problems, Bukowski made no excuses when it came to the act of writing. Unlike most writers, Bukowski actually wrote. The consistency, conscientiousness, and care he poured into the act borders on the religious, and for this the old bard deserves nothing but praise and recognition as far as I'm concerned.

0 Comments

Where Can Truth Be Found?

1/8/2018

0 Comments

In many places, I am sure, but to me it seems that most profound truths are also preserved in narrative. They reveal themselves if you read or listen to stories properly.

0 Comments

A Few Thoughts About Casual Sex

1/5/2018

0 Comments

Like casual sex, this blog post will likely be sloppy and confusing, but for what it's worth, here goes.

As I continue making notes and gathering ideas for my new novel Fallen Men, I find myself reflecting frequently on the writing of my first novel The City of Earthly Desire. More specifically, I ponder about the themes I chose to address in that book and, perhaps more importantly, why I even bothered to address those themes at all.

One the central themes I explored in The City of Earthly Desire was casual sex. Now if you happen to be one of those hacks churning out 99 cent ebooks with titles like I Don't Care Who You Are, Just Fuck Me, the subject of casual sex probably does not inspire a great deal of soul-searching or angst within the dark recesses of your sybarite imagination and that's just swell, I guess. But for a writer like me, one who explored the topic extensively through narrative only to come to the conclusion that the very notion of casual sex is perhaps the most acute oxymoron ever created, well, the subject becomes a tricky one to write about. How do you criticize the altar one of contemporary society's most alluring and most worshipped golden calves without coming off as moralistic, prudish, self-righteous, or biblical? (Damn, I just got all biblical there with the whole golden calf thing!)

The answer to that is simple. For most readers, you can't, and you won't.

What you say grinds against the entire sexual liberation philosophy that has infested our culture. When I approached the topic of casual sex in The City of Earthly Desire I came to the realization that what I included in the story would turn many people off and make them scoff in defiant irritation. Given the choice, they would choose the calf and that's all there was too it. This didn't trouble me too much. In the end, I believe the decision to accept a contradictory concept like casual sex is ultimately an individual choice, and like all choices of that nature it is the individual who must face the echoes and consequences of their decisions. What really interested me was the ubiquituous and pervasively fundamental belief that casual sex was totally free of any sort of consequence. This inspired to ponder the origins of our beliefs about casual sex and our attitudes toward its practice in the real world. These lines of thought eventually found their way into the story.

I began with the simple question of what people believe casual sex to be. On the surface, the concept is an attractive one; one can fulfill one's sexual desires in an encounter that has been mutually agreed upon by another consenting adult, or perhaps many other consenting adults. Seen in this light, casual sex becomes the epitome of the old cliché of "having your cake and eating it too." In theory, you can get together with another person for whom your feelings never ascend past the physical, get your rocks off, then have a good shower and go home without giving the encounter another thought beyond perhaps a warm feeling of physical satisfaction and satiation. Approached this way, sex is reduced to the level of a good meal, a fine glass of wine, or an exhilerating workout at the gym. And let's be honest - even if we have not indulged in casual sex, who among us has not yearned for such sexual experiences? Who among us has not at least daydreamed of getting down with someone at the purely primal level and then getting up and getting out with no strings attached once the getting down was done? It's the stuff fantasies are made of, and since sex is a powerful primal force in most of our lives, casual sex fantasies are powerful forces to be reckoned with.

Yet as I began to explore the subject in my first novel, I came to the rather cold conclusion that casual sex is, in essence, nothing more than a fantasy. Not fantasy in the sense that it is impossible to act out in the world on the physical level, but rather fantasy in the sense that it cannot be acted out in the world the way people envision that it can. As much as we would like to deny it, sex without consequences is impossible.

Traditionally, the most obvious and concrete consequences associated with casual sex - unwanted pregnancy and disease contraction - were also the the biggest deterrents. The advent of the birth control pill and condoms removed these obstacles and the path to wanton, liberal, and, most significantly, consequence-free fornication was cleared. Or so it seemed. There is no denying that birth control and condoms practically obliterated the concrete consequences of sex, but no pill or ribbed-for-her-pleasure latex sheath can defend against the more subtle consequences of sexual encounters, namely the psychological and the spiritual consequences.

Of course, those who subscribe to casual sex and do not comprehend the contradiction inherent in either the term or the action cite pleasure as the only consequence worthy of discussion and vehenmently deny the severity of any other kind of consequences. As I wrote my novel, I found this to be a misguided and dishonest stance. A denial of reality. A fantasy. Or, as Jordan Peterson recently quipped in one of his YouTube videos, "a demented adolescent's fantasy."

To believe that one can engage in a casual physical sexual encounter without the encounter leaving any lasting psychological or spiritual consequence on oneself or upon the person with whom one experienced the sexual encounter seemed both peurile and wrongheaded to me as continued deeper into the writing of my book. Despite the allure of the phrase, I found that there was nothing truly casual about casual sex. Despite promises to the contrary, pleasure was not the sole side effect. The words casual and sex bind together only in fantasy. In reality, the meaning inherint in each word repels the meaning inherint in the other. In this sense, casual sex is a true oxymoron - the first word utterly contradicts the second. To echo the original Greek meaning of the term oxymoron, casual sex becomes something that is pointedly foolish. Casual sex = pointed foolishness. This was the conclusion I reached as I wrote The City of Earthly Desire.

All right, so casual sex is pointed foolishness. Great. The problem is this - I realized that weaving this idea into a narrative would not win me many friends. Why? Well, who among us wants to face the possibility that casual sex might not be so casual after all? It's not so much that people fear they might be denied the freedom to engage in casual sex, but rather that people fear they might be denied the freedom to fantasize about casual sex. Engaging in casual sex relies solely on the belief in the casualness of the act, that is, that the act is truly free of consequence. Accepting the reality that the act is anything but casual is, to put it colloquially, a bummer. The fantasy of the demented teenager ends and we are forced to look upon the subject with sober adult eyes. And let's face it, there's not much fun in that is there?

Unless, of course, one considers all the recent sex scandals plaguing America - Harvey Weinstein and all the rest of them. Sure. Sure. Faulty comparisons. But are they?

If I learned anything while writing The City of Earthly Desire it was this: We do not approach the topic of sex with any level of acceptable seriousness. I'm not sure what the ultimate answer is, or if such a thing even exists, but as I wrote the novel I came to the realization that most of us really are demented, fantasizing teenagers when it comes to the topic of casual sex. This mode of thinking becomes dangerous in the end simply because it does not grant the appropriate level of gravitas to the subject.

As I mentioned before, this conviction will be considered problematic, contentious, or laughable by many, but there it is.

Sometimes I wish I were a 99 cent hack erotica writer - life would be a hell of a lot simpler and more profitable then. I could propogate and indulge in the fantasy of casual sex and devote me creative energies to composing killer titles like . . .

aw, the hell with that. When it comes to writing, I will always choose what I feel is right rather than what is easy, which is another theme I addressed when I wrote The City of Earthly Desire, but I won't wade into that now.

0 Comments

Dostoevsky: The Literary Line of Demarcation

1/4/2018

2 Comments

I am not an expert on Fyodor Dostoevsky. Though I have read his major works, I have yet to read most of his short stories, essays, and novellas. When it comes to his life, I know only the basics. My knowledge of that period of history in which he lived is a bit more extensive, but not by much. In short, what I know about Dostoevsky - the man, the author - is equally matched by what I do not know about Dostoevsky. Setting these shortcomings aside, I am firmly convinced that Fyodor Dostoevsky is one of the greatest writers the world has ever known.

Few writers have ascended the heights he asended or the plumbed depths he plumbed. If I had to categorize him, I could offer only the following: as a writer, Dostoevsky is a prophet/mystic/demon/saint. Like Shakespeare, he is in a class and category all to himself. For me, Dostoevsky represents a literary line of demarcation. His work forms a boundary marking the end of something and the beginning of something else entirely; a sharp dividing line separating writing from WRITING.

It has come to my attention that others also view Dostoevsky as a line of demarcation, as the end of something and the beginning of something else, but for these people - a rather surly collection of postmodernist/Marxist theorists, thinkers, writers, and culture warriors - the demarcation line Dostoevsky represents runs closer to the medical definition of the term. For them, Dostoevsky represents a zone of inflammatory reaction separating gangrenous flesh from healthy tissue. I will let you decide which side these thinkers believe they occupy.

Though most of these critics grudgingly admit that there are some aspects of Dostoevsky's work that perhaps deserve a few crumbs of respect or, at the very least, acknowledgement, they scornfully label Dostoevsky a regressive and callously scoff at what they regard as meaningless religious obsessions. For readers such as these, Dostoevsky is passé and archaic, a historical and artisitic footnote, best ignored and forgotten. He has nothing to offer. Nothing to say. Nothing that resonates or supports the world they are trying to conjure into being.

Whenever I encounter people sporting such attitudes about Dostoevsky, another literary line of demarcation - one that is pragmatic rather than aesthetic in nature - etches through my mind.

2 Comments