A Hell Of A Catch

Here is the problem.

I have begun work on the eleventh draft of the novel.

The last two drafts stalled out after the first act due to my lack of confidence in my work.

Here is the Catch-22 of my situation:

This work is so odd, and so personal, that I have come to be very, very sensitive about it. Critiques that fail to understand what I'm doing have become actually painful for me to deal with.

This is not how I think of myself reacting to criticisms. I have an iron hide, damnit!

But I don't. Not now. This book is an open wound, and I'm stitching it shut by writing it. I don't need anyone poking around in there!

But! But!

If I don't get regular feedback and praise, I lose confidence, my will to perform shrivels, and I work less and less, and then...

nada.

It looks kind of gross to me, but there it is. I need to figure out how to get regular doses of praise that will keep me interested in working on the novel, while not getting any critiques that trigger my overdeveloped defensiveness about the quality of my work.

Here is one thought.

At this point, I've written a volume's work of short fiction. Short fiction does not sell; publishers do not like it.

I'm very curious about self-publication.

Perhaps I should start going through my back catalog, revising weak works and compiling strong ones, and put together a collection. Do a story every week, every other week, while I work on the novel.

But what if I can't do both at the same time? What if interactions based on the short fiction don't bring energy to the novel?

I've got to do something. Any ideas?

The Stone 3

And there we go. This will do. I have to remember to be patient and put it through a few states before I call it quits, print different versions and compare, and so on. This is a printmaking process!

Although the visual qualities of this approach seem closer to painting in some ways. Starting off with a gray background really threw me at first -- it took me a while to realize that while in conventional drawing, I'd ground this kind of image with clearly defined areas of solid black, in this case it was the white highlights that nailed the image to the eye. Very, very different for me, and I've still got a lot to learn. But I think I managed to get a decent composition here.

The Rhetoric Of Scorn

Jonathan Swift, H.L. Mencken, Dorothy Parker, Hunter S. Thompson -- the writers who use words as weapons have always held a powerful fascination for me. As a child, I read the original Gulliver's Travels, and the book's obsessive fixation on the horrid nature of mankind seemed perfectly reasonable to me.

I have learned from them, and from talking trash back in Richmond, and from the languages of criticism and scientific analysis. I know how to use words to strike out, and I relish the opportunity to do so.

This is a situation I regard with some unease.

Yesterday's post on Ken Ham and his book Dinosaurs Of Eden has been overwhelmingly the single most popular post I have ever put up on this site. It was also a total razor job, with any respect or mercy being shown to Mr. Ham used purely for the sake of keeping a firm grip on him while I cut.

I believe I was fair and reasonable, and that he merited what I said.

But I mistrust the pleasure I took in that rebuke, and I'm wary of the attention that post is getting.

I believe that all the writers above suffered as a result of the world-view that made them such remarkable masters of invective. The type of judgment I display in my post on Mr. Ham is the type of judgment I turn on myself continuously, and on those around me, and those I read of, and hear about, and imagine.

This pattern of judgment is one I'm trying to break.

But on the other hand, there genuinely are times when fools and scoundrels are in need of a drubbing, and my suspicion of my own cruelty need not imply ignoble pleasure to the delivery of a well-deserved blow.

Do I feel bad about what I said about Ken Ham?

No. My only regret is that I forgot to include my, 'someone needs to give James Gurney a hug,' joke.

Do I feel bad about being the kind of person who says things like that?

Well, that's more complicated. Here is the thing. If I find something that bothers me, and I can't let go of it without saying something? I find that acceptable. That's what happened here.

But if I had heard about Mr. Ham -- and I heard about him a long time before his idiot book dropped in my lap -- and sought out his book in order to make fun of it?

That might not have been cool. It might have been, it might not.

I don't want to encourage myself to seek out things I hate in order to vent my spleen on them. If some magazine were to want to pay me to, say, sit in on a Goldman-Sachs power breakfast and then spray bile, I'd be tempted.

And I like seeing numbers on my blog, I like getting readers. If I were to put up more posts attacking religious figures, I suppose I could get more readers. I did okay with my Pope slam.

But how much of that do I want to do? How much do I want to reinforce the pattern of resentment and attack?

Okay, if someone wants to pay me money to spit acid, I'll do it. And if something comes up that I can't get out of my head, I'll use the rhetoric of scorn as a scouring pad. (There's that space whale rape story. I can't stop thinking about it.)

But aside from that, I think I'll be avoiding the intentional pursuit of prey. Yeah, it would be fun to spend all my time thinking of horrible things to say about people I imagine I dislike, but you know?

I may be a foul-natured brute with a tongue like a file, but that don't mean I've got to be evangelical about it.

A Wrong, Bad Book

(All quotes and images copyright 2001 Ken Ham, and are used for purposes of review. All art by Earle and Bonnie Snellenberger.)

Oh, yard sales, what wanton agents of fortune you are. I have been looking at this book for the last six months, trying to figure out how to write about it. The problem is that it's hilarious.

Ken Ham is a young Earth creationist. He argues that the Bible is literally true, and consistent with the fossil record, and that dinosaurs have lived alongside man until very recently.

Every single page presents one with a worldview so patently deranged that reading it is like being slapped with a rubber chicken over and over again. Nothing about it isn't funny.

Except that it's presented to children as fact, with the promise of Heaven and the threat of Hell held over them as a goad to belief.

I am an atheistic materialist. I find this is the only worldview that is both internally consistent and congruent with observed reality. I do not object specifically to the existence of religion, although I regard it as a sign that humans are not perfect thinking machines. I will say grace, I will attend church if invited, I will pray alongside the faithful when it is important to them. My feelings about religion are mixed. I state this up front so as to make my perspective clear.

Let me tell you something. If nothing else, living under the Bush administration taught me something about the banality of evil. This book features evil whose banality has gone baroque, and it announces itself as clearly as the hard buzz of a rattlesnake.

Young people often ask the question, "If there's so much evidence for the Flood all over the earth, and if it's so obvious God created, and the Bible is true, wouldn't the scientists surely believe these things?"

The answer is that scientists, like everyone else, are sinners. Because of this, they don't want to believe. It has nothing to do with the evidence. (Use of bold taken from text.)

If you are an adult, and you find, "Because I said so, and only bad people argue" convincing, you are an idiot. If you find the blanket condemnation of scientists as willfully-ignorant sinners acceptable, you are contemptible. But if you hear this when you're a kid, and your critical faculties haven't been developed, well.

In the future, the US will be able to look to Mr. Ham and say, "He helped keep our children away from science." I do not believe that will be regarded as a good thing. Mr. Ham is militating for a stupider nation.

I am not going to do a point-by-point refutation of Mr. Ham's position. I simply shrug, and say, "Geology, biology, paleontology, astronomy, chemistry, and physics all view the world the same way, and they work. You don't have the integrity to keep your own story straight, so not only is everything you say wrong, it isn't even wrong from a conceptually valid stance. Nothing you say is correct once you drift from the idea that people should be nice. Arguing with you is like braiding worms, and I will not do it."

I am going to engage in a bit of humor at the expense of Mr. Ham and the Snellenbergers. But as I do, please understand that I've imagined being a small child, and having the minister I have heard speaking with authority on the subject of sin and the fate of sinners come to me with this book.

I'm thinking about how much larger the minister is then I am. I imagine cologne, and warmth from his body as he sits next to me. This is a man of authority. He shows me a picture --

Take a close look at that gorilla. The single most important goal of this book? Get teeth wrong. Every damned time they show or mention a tooth? They get it wrong. Oh, and it's Eden so of course lemons are delicious. What kind of dummy are you, anyway?

-- and tells me that the only reason anyone would disbelieve it is that they are sinners and they choose not to believe.

What happens if I laugh? I don't know. But there is no way this situation could ever work to the benefit of the child.

I wanted to make this clear before I start with the haw-haw -- I am not belittling Mr. Ham when I mock his beliefs. Rather, I fear and despise the power he has over the lives of others.

He may be a good man. He may be, in the balance, a good father. But to present a child with this kind of cognitive dissonance is damaging, and worthy of strong rebuke, and I cannot find it in me to respond to this book and its mindset with anything but condemnation.

I understand that religion is the most important form of folk culture in the world, that the intellectual tradition springs from religion, that it is an important force for social organization. But it is the easiest way in the world for someone to simply claim a position of authority and begin exercising power and...

... remember what I said about the banality of evil?

Anyway.

Click on this image for madness. QED, motherfuckers.

What I love about this diagram? The implication that there is no problem here, see? They fit!

Now, the myth of the ark makes sense if you only know about a couple of dozen types of large animal, but by the time you take the world into account -- how many types of tapir are there, anyway? -- you have to start getting into some serious handwaving to get it to make sense, and our boy Ham here decides fuck it, pedal to the metal, we're including the entire fossil record as well. All of it.

Do you think he has a little cart in which to carry his balls, or do attendants bear them in a sling?

Is is just me, or does that kid have a holster? What kind of Bible-science bullets does it shoot? Or is it a zap gun? Probably a zap gun. This is all so exciting!

What's cute is the way Ham hates science so much he's going to reclaim silver jumpsuits for the faith. And the Biblical control panel is a concept resistant to speculation -- what happens when you turn the knobs? Maybe it adjusts Leviticus so you can stone people you don't like without having to eat kosher.

And let's take a moment to notice the semi-competent art. I bet the Snellenbergers have taken classes, maybe even have a degree or two between them. But the stiff, clumsy, vaguely ugly quality of the illustration is of a piece with the text.

When religious belief takes on a quality of grandeur, when it truly does exalt the human spirit, then it's hard for me not to get swept up in the moment. But this book shows a world without wonder -- flat words and images have condemned it to a sort of folding-chair spirituality, a cafeteria of the soul, a holy linoleum.

Okay, start at Babel, head North, and then turn left when you get to the white part.

I'll give them this much. I like this one. The idea of a polar pack-Pachycephalosaur is genuinely charming, in a crack-brained way.

I can't tell you how much pleasure and concern this terrible, terrible book has brought me. But interestingly, it has also led me to perform a dangerous act only to have my faith in mankind renewed.



These horses show up over and over again in the background of illustrations in this book, and they are never given a name. Actually, they aren't horses. The only type of living wild horse is Przewalski's horse, and these aren't those.

My current thought is that these are a Snellenberger's concept of a quagga. But the question of their identity was really bugging me. So I did the only Google search that I thought might give me some solid information. It was also the single riskiest search for images I've done since Harlequin ichthyosis.

"Wild ass images."

Of course my fear was getting into the eyebleach zone with scat porn at best and having my understanding of human sexuality expanded at worst. There are reasons the Internet age is also the age of hand sanitizers -- after the things we see, the entire world seems filthy.

But in this case?

Zebras, onagers -- wild asses. The ones I was looking for. The first screen I called up was entirely crazy little horsies of one kind or another.

I actually responded emotionally to the moment. Don't get me wrong, I don't feel crappy if I run across a picture of a cute butt on the net, but the idea that I could get clean results from that search seemed nothing short of miraculous. Perhaps I sensed the hand of God at work, a kinder God than one who'd put an old drunk on a boat with a bunch of fucking dinosaurs.

I didn't go to the second screen. Why tempt fate?

The Stone 2

Writing today sucked, but the art compensated. Here's the basic image I started out with, compiled from three different photos. The goal is to create something simplified, more painterly, and more coherent in appearance. It needs to be reproducible through laser printing in black-and-white. So here we go...

And there it is -- the first Swillistration for issue six. I am not satisfied, but I am pleased, and I think the technique worth exploring. I start with a neutral gray background, and then render up and down in tone, developing the image simultaneously as highlights and shadows. Next art? A turtle. Plesiobaena antiqua, to be precise.

The Stone 1

Swill is being a pain in the ass. We need more stories, and I am girding my loins to begin the process of begging. I've also recalled how much of a pain in the ass it was last issue when I had to do all the art at the last minute. It worked out well, but it was a horrid experience.

So I'm starting a little early this year.

As I mentioned in previous posts, I'm working on a new technique. I want it to look less photographic, more expressionistic. I want size-independent resolution. I want the option of easily reworking the images in color. And I want something that will allow me to use a wider variety of sources with less concern about the initial qualities of the images in question -- I want to be able to blend scans from the newspaper, sketches, and photographs from cameras bad and good seamlessly.

What I'm doing is making composite images in Photoshop, then rendering them as black, white, and .25, .50, and .75 flat gray images on separate layers using a combination of the magic wand selection tool and the pencil tool. Then I bring separate files for each layer into Illustrator, autotrace them, and Bob's your uncle. (First time when that phrase seemed right. Apologies to Bob.)


Here's an early attempt. It's still too photographic and busy.

This time around, I'm laying out color roughs first and only using the photograph as a guide, and the composition already seems a lot livelier to me. Now to find a few hours to noodle compulsively until the edges are clean. Or, rather, dirty in the right way.

Thinking About Drinking

I was working with great difficulty on my piece on hierarchy, when I had a bleak moment of realization. Since I’ve begun putting myself out into the world, one aspect of my stance has gotten a lot of comment. That’s my honesty, my willingness to present myself both clearly and without any defense but truth. This is the public face of a private conviction – that the denial of unpleasant truths is the most direct way of empowering them.

I reached this conclusion by observing my mom and Grandma Jean. Both of them presented faces of unlimited optimism. And each hid despair. This dichotomy tore me up when I was younger, because I assumed that either one or the other could be true, and their optimism had a distinct odor of bullshit to it. Now I understand that things aren’t as clean cut as that, but I still have the mental habits formed by those reactions.

So as the concept of hierarchy proved resistant to organization, I reflected on the nature of my difficulties. How much easier would this be if I wasn’t crazy?

Look. I don’t want to take an, ‘I’m a victim, pity me,’ position here. But in my case, this is a legitimate question. I have to ask it to approach an understanding of my situation.

Difficulties in focus and decision-making are symptomatic of fetal alcohol syndrome, and I’ve definitely got that one. You can look it up if you want, but the symptoms can be roughly summed up as either, ‘ne’er-do-well,’ or, ‘asshole.’ Poor impulse control, emotional volatility, not too bright in general.

I am far from a typical case, but I am far from typical. I’m lucky enough to have compensatory brain power, so I’ve been able to function despite my condition, but it has had a very powerful impact on my life. If you deal with me and at times you wonder if I am actually a small child or poorly acclimated Martian, this would have something to do with it. The combination of genius (yeah, I’ve decided to claim that one too) and brain-damage mimics autism at times, but it ain’t the same thing at all.

(My current frame of mind is that if I’d been healthy? I’d have wound up working either for the oil industry as a marine micropaleontologist, or as a flavor chemist, or if I was not entirely healthy, just more functional than I am? I’d have wound up in the military. So it might be a good thing that I’m totally defective.)

This led me to wonder if anything else was going on. I seem to favor the layered look in mental illness, so it would be fucking typical if I had a few extra lesions and bruises floating around the old cortex. Head blows would be one possibility. I’ve been watching the news about brain-damaged football players with interest and dismay. Could be part of my problem.

My mom always said it was because I had a high fever from a bout with pneumonia when I was a baby in Ceder Rapids, Iowa. In fact, she took me around to doctors a number of times when I was a kid. Some said bullshit, most said yeah, there’s some kind of brain damage there.

I remembered that when I was running through the shrinks. One particular MD, not a shrink, was openly dismissive of the brain damage theory in a particular way. There are certain diagnoses that doctors use to indicate that there’s a problem and they don’t want to confess complete ignorance. ‘Borderline schizophrenia’ is one that I’ve gotten before, and then had explained to me by better shrinks.

I think ‘brain damage’ falls into that category.

My mom also involved my brother and I in a study exploring the possibility that gifted students who did badly in school were suffering from food allergies that caused learning disabilities. (Long story short – bullshit on that, simply not true.)

Now here’s what crossed my mind at this point in contemplation.

Mom ran a day care center. She was beginning her course of study in child development, one that would lead to her MA. And my visible signs of fetal alcohol syndrome were the basis of family jokes. I’ve mentioned that I get mistaken for Asian periodically.

It suddenly dawned on me. Did Mom know or suspect of my condition? On one hand, she was one of the shrewdest people I’ve ever known, a real student of the human condition, and in training to deal specifically with my kind of problem. On the other hand, her capacity for self-deception and selective observation is the stuff of legend.

But then I thought of the way Mom and I came to emotionally separate from one another.

Mom had moved to Merced, and got in the habit of calling me drunk late at night in order to more-or-less beg me to tell her that I had a perfect childhood because she had been a perfect mother.

When I lived with her one summer, Mom’s intake was twenty-four Buds a night, minimum. Minimum. And she weighed somewhere between ninety and a hundred pounds. That’s the equivalent of me having fifty drinks. Every night. Minimum. I could knock out a couple of cases of Bud if I had to, but taking weight into account…

Not that you could tell, most of the time. She paced herself, you got drunk with her (there was no point in my drinking career at which I would even contemplate pacing Mom), you never even noticed when she got a little blurry, a little glossy.

But when she called on those nights she was hammered. Slurring, repeating herself, not responding to what’s said – and desperate for confirmation that my childhood was the kind you read about, that kids should be buying stickers with pictures of my childhood to put on the heads of their beds, where they would bring pleasant dreams.

This was not the case, and I ain’t much of a liar. Things were not pleasant. I’d dance around the fact that my childhood was fucking awful like a bear on the end of a pole, shuffling around a cesspit. Mom wanted solid statements. I’d evade.

Oh, it was ugly.

And then the calls stopped.

This morning, I wondered. Why was it so important to Mom to hear me tell her she was a perfect mother? Did she suspect that she hadn’t been?

Because now I know four things I did not know at that time. I know I have fetal alcohol syndrome, and what that implies about Mom. I know that at that time, she was undergoing radiation therapy for lung cancer, and she would never, ever tell this to anyone, including her treating physicians at the end of her life. I know that the missus spoke to Mom, and Mom thought she’d been told never to call me again, and if you are capable of getting a straight story out of the combined testimony of Mom and the missus?

You are a very special person.

But the fourth thing, the thing that just caught my mind as part of the context, is that Mom had started her brief career working with at-risk kids.

I know some of these things from clearing out Mom’s files after her death. When I got to the section dealing with her clients, I tried to avoid looking, literally taking the files out in huge handfuls unexamined.

What I was unable to avoid was horrible. When my sweet little mother described an eight-year-old girl as a relentless sexual predator in unsparing and clinical language, I lost innocence I hadn’t known I had.

(An aside for writers. I knew as someone who works the noir side of the street? I was throwing away money. And by denying myself that information, I limited my view of humanity.

I think I did the right thing. I’d do it again.)

What crossed my mind this morning? I’ll bet some of her clients had fetal alcohol syndrome. Did this play into things? What went on there?

And that, of course, led to the real killer of the day.

Mom died of massive cancer that started in her lungs and erupted through her skull. Her lifestyle was black coffee, Budweiser, and Filter Kools in industrial quantities. She was self-medicating like a ring-tailed son-of-a-bitch.

My question.

Did she suspect that I had fetal alcohol syndrome? When did this thought cross her mind? Did it contribute to the levels of stress she experienced? Did it in some way contribute to the voracious consumption of chemicals necessary for her to maintain a bearable state of mind?

To what degree am I a link in the chain she forged for herself? How much responsibility can a person actually have for another one?

Fuck.

I am not tipping into the dark side again, don’t worry, but this is a bit of heavy contemplation for me.

Honestly? I want a drink.