(Book) Writings
(Book) Writings
January 20, 2021 Pre-Game God: B.C.
For most of my life I was so far gone , that there were cracks every once in a while. There would have to be, because I had no language for God , no language for the nightmare that I was living , a double nightmare for all that I could sense that was wrong but couldn't explain or describe or fix.
So dreams would come, prophetic allaying dreams. Colorful, brash and helpful. Ladybugs would appear: one always crawling on me, come to visit me through my window, thousands in a shower in the sky: one yellow and black one that alighted on my forearm one day as I cried fitfully, as like a ray of beautiful truth so quiet that I stopped at once as if I'd been faking, and it was all a lie but this. Until I shook her off like a childish fantasy, passing out deep into sleep eyes wide awake again and falling crying into my friend's arms because the pain was the only reality I could accept as true.
Then God came and my ladybugs flew away, like thousands of tiny red composites of my anger, only once dear friends, all swallowed into the Final blue sky. The dreams that were always there but now in trickery, as they'd been infiltrated once I no longer slept. I put my hand to my friend's arm surrounding me and felt the embossed scars of cuts and slashes because she had problems too, and I opened them, and I stepped away until I fell and fell and fell like Shel Silverstein, Falling, falling falling … But Falling Up
Thanks,
God
Sincerely,
The Unwitting Memoirist
February 1, 2020
Miracle Man: The Certainty of Miscalculation
I read this book over and over again and carried it around with me like a Bible in my early 20s. Miracle Man by Ben Schrank. It still causes a heartache when I think of it, and I dunno why since I haven't read it since, well, my early 20s.
Miracle Man is a story about a white guy trying to escape his middle class background. He is a mover for a living with his Hispanic childhood friend. He falls in love with a poor Puerto Rican girl who longs for things. He is a modern-day Robin Hood who steals from the rich and gives to the poor, except he miscalculates because these poor don't respect a thief.
You think about concepts like audience reaction, about the so many times when you were so sure but miscalculated with people. Your hopes as a miscalculation. Your dreams as a miscalculation. Your beliefs as a miscalculation. You'd tell your best friend that you saw her boyfriend cheating, and suddenly she is back with her boyfriend and you have no friend. Insanity. You think about all the miscalculations because you were so sure, so sure
About what?
Sincerely,
The Unwitting Memoirist
October 27, 2019
Lousy Book Covers
So my book "made" a "lousy book covers" list. And I don't know whether to laugh or laugh some more since my book cover is deemed "lousy" by a guy who runs a very lousy looking website. I think I'm more offended by my book appearing on a lousy looking website. Anyhow, imagine me just innocently googling my book title and coming up with that find.
Actually, one of the first things I thought was, wow, look at how clear my book cover is. I've never seen my book cover appear this clear before—even on reputable sites!
Luckily, I'm going through some sort of God-inspired spiritual transformation at the moment so I'm experiencing a lot of emotional flatlining these days.
Anyway, I'll take the PR wherever I can get it.
Sincerely,
The Unwitting Memoirist
July 28, 2021
Man Calling Libraries to Masturbate on Supreme Court Case
I mean, I've called the library many times throughout my life ... inquiring if they had a book, an article ... trying to get my own book stocked; but, I swear, my hands were nowhere near my private area when I made these calls.
It seems as if an unidentified man has been calling libraries across these United States to ask that a Wikipedia entry for a Supreme Court case be read to him. I don't have a computer, he says; and especially in this climate you'd not only fall for it, but praise it. Good for you, you'd say. Technology is coming to be the downfall of us, you'd opine shaking your head, closing your shawl tighter around your shoulders. You think about Satan and wonder, OK, now where were we? Oh, yes, This nice young man who would like to 'write it out by hand', until you start to read and he begins panting and shouting: “Oh yeah, give it to me. Give me that exculpatory evidence. Spank those prosecutors!” *
It turns out that this guy has been getting off to a landmark Supreme Court case that, well, gets people off. It's called Brady v. Maryland ; and it comes from a 1963 decision that declares that if prosecution has any evidence that might exonerate you, they must give it up to get you off. That's right. The government must turn over any (exculpatory) material to defense counsel that might exonerate a criminal defendant, as was the case with John Brady who, along with Charles Boblit, participated in a robbery in 1958 that resulted in the death of an acquaintance. Though Brady stated throughout his trial that Boblit had actually committed the murder, and prosecutors had a written statement from Boblit saying as much, a Maryland jury found 25-year-old Brady guilty of first-degree murder. Prosecutors never turned over the statement to Brady's defense team, and Brady was sentenced to death. Some people only start developing an interest in libraries when they’re facing death prison time or the bar. Sigh.
Brady challenged the conviction, and his sentence was reduced to life in prison because here in America we have the right to a fair criminal trial aka Due Process under the 14th Amendment. So if you’re ever facing criminal charges for allegedly being a low life, just know that you have the right to request a “Brady disclosure”. This is America dammit, a country founded on laws protecting us against the direct vote of the mass stupidity of our peers, and the vast overreach of a corrupt government: It’s OK to get a little excited. Happy July. 🧨
Sincerely,
The Unwitting Memoirist
P.S. See also “Brady Cops”, and “Brady list”
* quoted from Joe Patrice. "Man Calling Libraries And Masturbating To A Supreme Court Opinion." Above the Law, 2021. Web.
January 19, 2020
Portrait of a Book Reviewer
I was on Goodreads some time ago when I came across a 2-star review that went on to read,
I enjoyed this book.
And 2 cars crashed together in my brain like cymbals, or like 2 neurons that come together and short-circuit because they don't go together.
Now the picture beside the review was of a woman and she had a South Asian-sounding name, so we will call her Samantha Singh, because I used to work in an otherwise normal kindergarten class with a little girl named Samantha Singh. Samantha was a cute little girl with olive skin and a brown ring under her lips commonly referred to as "lip licker's dermatitis" because her tongue was always licking in the direction of her chin. She had pretty shiny pigtails that always had the look of bedhead, and an unfocused glint in her eye, and you always had to say, Samantha!, like 5 times before she looked in your general direction.
I don't remember much about Samantha, only that the teacher had to stop story time like 7 times to hiss, Samantha!, even though Samantha never really seemed to be doing anything. You would say her name crossly, and she would look at you out of focus, just to the slight right or left of just one of your eyes so that you always had to turn to see who she was looking at, and the teacher would go back to story time because I think she was afraid.
Anyway, Samantha really liked story time but she seemed like if you asked her anything about the story afterward, she would stop and look down and start counting on her fingers.
The End.
Sincerely,
The Unwitting Memoirist
December 30, 2021
You're A 1 Star! ⭐
People who rate books with a 1 star with no explanation shouldn't be allowed to pass the SATs. I mean, that's how it works, right? I guess at an answer on the SATs, and they measure that it's a guess, or that I'm cheating, by my inability to show how I got that answer. Eff you. So I might as well not even answer it.
Well, that's just how it should go. I remember when my friend put on her father's tie and I stood in the doorway looking at her very proud of how she looked in the tie and saying, You look stupid, before walking away.
It's like, I didn't even think she looked stupid, but I wanted to do something mean. Like penalize her for guessing on her SATs or something. Isn't this how evil is passed around?
And I'm not even saying this because I had a book rated with a 1 star. I'm talking about my lifelong preoccupation with criticism. I'm looking for a reason not to buy it maybe. not to buy into myself. Or criticism with some merit, something or other. I don't know precisely what I'm looking for but I'm very interested in the 1 star. So you can imagine my consternation when I find a 1 star with no review. Eff you. You shouldn't even be allowed to have a computer. How do you think it's acceptable to do that?
OK, maybe this has something to do with some unresolved issues about the SATs. How are you going to make me not guess by penalizing me for guessing? I shouldn't be made to show my answer. I've always been a horrible math student, but I really did have the ability to come up with right answers and I couldn't even tell you how. It's like I was a wizard or something. I remember testing so low in math in college that I was placed in pre-algebra. It's like math before the math. College prep before they even allow you on the college campus. But when I transferred to another school, I took a paper and pencil test and placed into Calculus. Who can understand the human brain?
But this is all about how people who rate a book 1 star must show their answer for why they rated it a 1 star. Or they shouldn't be allowed to have fingers. I had to show my work on the SATs and so should you! Jerk!
I could've really been smart if only I was allowed to guess at it ... ⭐
Sincerely,
The Unwitting Memoirist
July 5, 2020
When Was The Last Time You Doubted Someone's Personal Experience?
Several years ago, I read a book that I absolutely could not finish. It was The Liars' Club by Mary Karr. Ironically, I read it, thinking, oh you're such a f**king liar Mary Karr. I think it was her elaborate descriptions of incidences in her life from when she was like a toddler that set me off.
Which gets me to thinking about why we believe people's stories, or not, and the consequences of that.
Especially in the age of social media when people say and post pictures and things that you cannot verify other than through your own belief in them.
In the wake of the garbage dump of Communism that is burgeoning in America right now, I thought about one of my favorite authors, Richard Wright, a black guy who grew up on a plantation in Mississippi in the early 1900s, and who later became heavily leftist and a defector from the Communist Party. His work was often a grim commentary on the black condition in the Jim Crow South. I then thought about the popular conservative radio host Jesse Lee Peterson, who I often listen to, and who often speaks of a very different, even happy, life growing up under Jim Crow on a plantation in Alabama in the 1950s. What to believe? Who to believe? And why?
Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried masters the art of the unreliable narrator. You don't know what to believe, and it doesn't really matter. The story wouldn't be as good if you believed it.
I don't know if you're aware, but there's a travel memoir called The Travels of Sir John Mandeville that was supposedly written by Sir John Mandeville in the 14th century. While the book is real, its extremely unreliable and fantastical nature makes it likely that the story is not, along with Sir John being a knight, or there even existing a man named Sir John Mandeville. Yet, it was one of several books to heavily influence Christopher Columbus, an unconfirmed Italian who sailed for a Spanish Crown that distrusted him for not being Spanish. And, well, like it or believe it or not, here we all are … in Asia, or wherever we are.
Sincerely,
The Unwitting Memoirist
May 11, 2020
Verisimilitude and The Work Memoir
The work memoir is a different kind of beast. I wrote one; and, recently, I read one.
When I visited the Amazon page for 15 Years A Deplorable: A White House Memoir by Mike McCormick, I saw a review about how it had "more than a few 'retaliatory' comments about co-workers" (who, the author explains, tried to sabotage him), and it made me think about the double irony of the work memoir. (And high functioning retards)
The work memoir, like the workplace experience being described, will forever be relegated to some obscure eat-shit-look-happy definition of professionalism, because there is a very very very fine line sometimes between truth and slander, libel. Between the Truth and the satanic workplaces people create. Between truth and judgment.
The barometer for discerning, of course, is anger. I knew my time was up when my anger had taken precedence over everything, including the "rights" I cared about. Luckily, I was given a natural out by losing all interest in my job. McCormick went to HR despite knowing that the act in and of itself—by way of a constitution-based White House rule—was grounds for immediate termination (whether the complaint was legitimate or not). It reflects poorly on the President, it turns out, even when you're a Trump-supporter being harassed by Trump haters in a Trump White House. Irony abounds. Maybe McCormick could've used the union I was Steward of, and that helped me fight for a job I hated.
Most importantly though, get out before it reflects poorly on you. On your scruples. The truth is in the transcript, McCormick, the former White House stenographer, writes. It requires no fighting. So start writing. Start recording. The memoir is the appeal, the still witness that there is another side to the story.
Sincerely,
The Unwitting Memoirist
June 8, 2020
This is Fine: Book Reviews & Dumpster Fires
As a book reviewer, I don't rate anything under 3 stars; and this is because I have an English degree, which means that I love literature and find very little, if anything, irredeemable about it. So you see, the only way I'd give a less than 3 star review of a book is if it's a coffee table.
The 3 to me means, this is just fine, but, also, this is the lowest I go. Which means that if a book is a literal dumpster fire to me, this is fine. I almost welcome books at this time that are worse than reality.
The rating system is the least I can do, but the review is where I can talk all about my interaction and experience with a world another has created. Sometimes I rate with nothing to say, and sometimes that means that it was such an irredeemable piece of sh*t that made me wanna gouge my eyeballs out like Oedipus Rex. Either way, you'll never know and everybody wins. I'm reading indie books while the world burns around me, and you know what? This is fine.
Sincerely,
The Unwitting Memoirist
November 21, 2020
There's No More Material: the Power and the Glory
I'm currently (side) reading The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene, one of my favorite authors. He was introduced to me in my Major Figures in Literature or some shit class, back when I was an English major.
Can you imagine being 13 in 2nd grade? Why not? I'd suppose because most people would say, because you're not supposed to be so old in such a low grade. Like that. They'd answer you with the question rearranged with no real comprehension.
That's a scene in the book. The city is godless and all the priests are being hunted down and shot. The living ones won't dare to do it, degraded into a life of humiliation. They back away in fear from the pleas of the people with their hands up as if under a gun. Nobody can be trusted. The hostility toward God has reached a breaking point to where the townspeople have descended into hell. There's no more material because there's not too many books and so few examinations. It's funny how in the world you need actual material to graduate, but in the spiritual world, all you need is to graduate from the material.
Imagine that you're ahead because there's so few books so you've read them all, but you're behind because there's nothing to be tested on. The intellect has reached a breaking point. Where will it go? There's no more material.
Sincerely,
The Unwitting Memoirist
September 25, 2022
Gonzo
Long before I watched Louis Theroux jail documentaries, I watched a snippet of Hunter S. Thompson—you know, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, in a 1967 CBC interview with a Hell's Angel. I didn't know it at the time, but when I found Louis Theroux and his prison documentaries, he introduced me to this term of what I saw Hunter S. Thompson doing: gonzo journalism.
Gonzo journalism is when the journalist becomes a part of the story he's journalizing. It's not just Louis Theroux reporting on prison or "hospital" conditions in Coalinga or San Quentin, but he's in the cell. He's not a prisoner—perhaps something like a simulation—but this is life. Where all the world's a reporter, journalizing his or her life. Reporting live from the outside. Reporting live from the inside. Reporting live from my life.
"Gonzo" journalism is said to have been popularized by Hunter S. Thompson in the 70s, the style anyway. Gonzo was a character in the Muppet Babies though if you were an 80s baby like me. He had a long hooked nose, and he was blue and one of the craziest looking muppets even though they all looked crazy. GJ doesn't make any claims to sanity either, or objectivity: The experience of the author comes center stage, the ground floor of facts drops away, and there is only what's left of hyperbole and satiric bitterness and equal LSD-like insanity.
Ever since I've come into God and come out into the world this is what it feels like; gonzo journalism, only you're in the world, not of it.* You bear witness only as a detached journalist, but you are still the main character of the story but the spirit of God is translating the story for you. You can say, today I went to prison, or got a job or went to a wedding or slept in a homeless shelter and have no real ideas about it. You're just takin' field notes on it. Reporting live from your life. To you, you're a part of the story, but not the story. Not the whole story. You can't know it, you can't know that. It's endless, it's God, it's a whole story I can't see.
Gonzo. Totally f**king gonzo. You become life.
---
*John 17:11-17 Jesus Prays for His Disciples
I will remain in the world no longer, but they are still in the world, and I am coming to you. Holy Father, protect them by the power of your name, the name you gave me, so that they may be one as we are one. [...] I am coming to you now, but I say these things while I am still in the world, so that they may have the full measure of my joy within them. I have given them your word and the world has hated them, for they are not of the world any more than I am of the world. My prayer is not that you take them out of the world but that you protect them from the evil one. They are not of the world, even as I am not of it. Sanctify them by the truth; your word is truth.
October 30, 2019
Libraries & Bank Robbers
Today I visited my local library and just so happened to remember to chat it up with the guy at the desk.
Is there an acquisitions librarian? I asked, because I'd read that in an article somewhere.
If you mean the person who gets the books, he said, and I nodded. He got the books, turns out.
In short, it's always just as simple as asking. He looked around for a second and then held up a paper with a local author holding up his own poetry book for a talk in a few weeks about the importance of writing accessible poetry.
We don't get all the books we want, of course, he said, looking around again and then holding up a paper of their monthly budget for new books. Yes, I know Overdrive, he answered. But we get the books from Baker & Taylor.
But just say you're a local author, a resident of this city, he said. ISBNs don't really matter. We carry self-published books, you just gotta ask.
Like on the central library's website, for instance. You got a sec? He asked. And spun around his screen so that I could see the short request form.
Huh. I marveled. It's just that simple, I said.
Yeah, he said. One guy called around to all of the libraries in the city and gave a talk here about his memoir not too long ago.
Oh yeah? I perked up. What was it about?
He reddened. His experiences as a banker turned bank robber, he said.
Sincerely,
The Unwitting Memoirist
June 1, 2021
In Defense of Classic Literature
Some time ago when I thought Twitter was a good idea, I came upon an account that deemed Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart as "sexist", "racist" and a whole lotta other liberal buzzwords I might recall if I hadn't've swooned several times. I mean, here I was, up to about 50K in hock for an English degree that I worked like a slave—pause, I'm black—to acquire, by writing stupid papers about hamartia, and paralleling works like Things to a modern-day Greek tragedy, when I could've just passed in a paper reducing it to "racist" or "wrong". Man, where was the yokel dim-witted reverse-racism wisdom of this account then?
What was even more swoon-worthy was that the person behind this account appeared to be a white male with longish girly-like hair, who then went on to identify the very Nigerian Achebe as a "person of color"; and, believe me, till this day, I'm still looking for Person of Color country on a map. TO THIS DAY! (black person freak out voice)
I wrote an article some time ago that cautioned the reader when approaching historical fiction, which, by the very nature of being true, cloaks itself with this kinda unfair untouchability. Well, except when authors lie. But; for the most part, classic literature—works even earlier than Achebe's—should be approached with the same kind of caution. For, to study classic literature—or really old books if you wanna be funny—is to study history. And what we do when we block our minds in anger to the realities of old realities ... well, we run the risk of repeating the anger of the old realities again by being liars and rewriting history in a fantasy of untruth. It was said in Eugenia Kim's The Calligrapher's Daughter, that when Japan occupied Korea, they burned the literature and so history of Korea. The conquerors then became just as delusional and disillusioned by their anger as the conquered, that nobody can tell the truth. A Moorish-ruled Spain for over 700 years has historical guides today that cannot explain why much of Spanish architecture is Muslim, at the expense of appearing total victors.
When you read the works of an H.G. Wells or a George MacDonald or an Achebe or a James Joyce, Alice Dunbar-Nelson or Joseph Conrad, you are reading works informed by persons who were living through World War I and II, The American Civil War, Irish Home Rule resistance to the sovereignty of the British Empire; works informed by the stranglehold of the Catholic Church, tuberculosis and typhoid; quasi-Siberian exile for Polish protests against a once and twice Polish-Lithuanian and Russian-colonized Ukraine. It's world literature; and if you're smart, you may be able to see past the spoiled selfishness of your own un-specialness to see the grand God expression of artistry, and the beauty and interconnectedness of world history in classic literature.
Sincerely,
The Unwitting Memoirist
November 12, 2019
Casting Shadows Everywhere
by L.T. Vargus
My life (as a writer) is a very storied story, judged not by the actual things I've gone through, but by random remembrances of things that I've done that alarmingly ring no bells of recognition for who I am today.
I'll see the word "haiku" for instance and automatically say, I remember when my haiku was published, but then my 37-year-old self, looking out of the corner of my eye, will suddenly wonder when the hell I ever wrote haikus. Then I'll real-time remember that this was during my I'll-Say-Anything-to Be-Published phase, and that it was my first and last haiku to be published, centered around how many times I'd been rejected by the publication that published it.
I'll run into people from my past and they'll say, Girl, I still have your poetry book! And I'll mouth, 'poetry book'? then recoil in remembered horror. It was my Rhyming-Angry-Poetry-Make-Your-Own-Chapbook-with-8 1/2-by-11-White-Paper-and-Pass-It-Out-on-the-Street phase.
In the summer of this year, I decided to review books. That's what I'll do! I thought. Except, when I stumbled upon my bio from the Amazon account I've had since 2008, I looked at 3 books that I'd reviewed back in 2013 as, apparently, my I've-Already-Decided-to-be-a-Beta-Reader-and-Book-Reviewer phase.
But this story isn't about how scared I am about considering what else I've done and forgotten, or name-dropping, because I had no idea who the author was. I volunteered to beta read for an author named L.T. Vargus who had written a book called Casting Shadows Everywhere. I submitted my review in 2013 and forgot, only to be reminded of it in 2019. The book now has over 300 reviews, a slow and steady trickle and burn over a 6-year time span. I googled her name and apparently she’s a pretty well-known author … Now. Wow, I said. That's so cool!
One of my favorite parts in a book is the opening scene of J.M. Barrie's Peter Pan when Peter keeps trying to put his shadow back on because it keeps slipping off (so Wendy has to sew it back on for him).
Sincerely,
The Unwitting Memoirist
July 17, 2021
Paying For It
Awhile back, I read a really disgusting but interesting book called Paying For It by Chester Brown, a graphic novel about the author’s experience as a “professional john”. And if you don’t know what being a professional john entails, here’s a rough outline:
Wake up,
Order some p***y
Go to sleep. Repeat Mon-Sun. It’s a graphic novel, so in case you need some graphics to go with it.
What’s cool about the book though, if I can remember, is the discussion about things like criminalization and decriminalization, and the origins of romantic Love with the Troubadours and how, really, Romantic Love all ends with a book of a “professional john” talking in bed to a prostitute about the history of Romantic Love. Unreasonable expectations. Brown at the time was a john in Canada, which allowed interesting interpretations of prostitution: for example, “in-call” prostitution where you go to her place wasn’t allowed, but “out-call”, where she comes to your place or hotel was, or something like that.
I remember going on the Reeperbahn for the first time in Hamburg Germany’s red-light district, and being utterly shocked. Behind a kind of cordoned off area in a narrow alleyway were a group of women with fanny packs and “moon boots” quietly yet openly soliciting men for sex. My friend who was German told me it was legal. They pay taxes, he told me. They pay taxes! I screamed, as if nothing drove the point home more in my American mind or made me more shocked that prostitutes paid taxes.
What I think I’m roughly getting at here I think is how a society, like America, is paying for it, right. We’re now paying getting paid to get screwed. What I notice about a lot of godless countries and societies, there is a centralized parent-like government playing God and so falsifying and demeaning that society or country. Socialism, communism, if you will. In North Korea men spend the day drinking, gambling smoking and playing table games, while the women are heads of households, working all day while still being expected to look like women in skirts and dresses, performing the work of a man, while the man gets the praise. In places like Germany and Canada, governments become also false gods, moral arbiters, ironically demoralizing society with the acceptance of abnormality such as selling sex because, really, they’re just spiritually bankrupt johns as well whose bottom line is to pimp you out too. And as America ramps up to another round of free money for Americans to depend on, while they regulate the attack of God and Christianity and the legality of homosexuality and acceptance of blame and cancel culture and “sex” work, our society collapses in Sodom and liberalism that doesn’t work for the governing of a society, and we’re paying for it. Because the thing is, that you can’t regulate God and the wrong thing. The thing is that prostitution is dangerous exactly because it’s wrong. That’s the natural laissez-faire regulation for prevention. For Paying For It.
Sincerely,
The Unwitting Memoirist
November 6, 2019
Words Mean the Most when They Mean Nothing at All
One of my favorite books is Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift. And one of my most favorite parts in a book is when Gulliver encounters the Houyhnhnms, a race of intelligent horses governed by pure logic and reason. I'm not sure how it goes specifically, but one of the horses says something like,
why lie? If the whole point of language is to be understood?
A couple of weeks ago I got into a misunderstanding with my friend. She was trying to be helpful, I know, in suggesting things I should do to promote my book, but I wondered aloud the merit of her suggestions, considering that she hadn't even read my book for starters, even though I'd given it to her for free. tl;dr.
She then got angry, telling me that, yes she did "read" my book: she "glanced" at it and "read" three pages. I swooned. She accused me of accusing her of lying and not knowing what all she did in her life, and I was dumbfounded that she was giving me tips on how to promote material that she had "read" the whole not thing of. ¿ I couldn't have cared less about her "glancing" my whole book. ¿
Denotation vs. Connotation, or, the literal meaning of a word vs. whatever the f**k is going on in someone else's head depending on whatever they've gone through in life.
It's how a word like "cunt" can mean something good with black Americans and something bad with white Americans.
How, in American culture, we don't say "fat" even if they are, but "overweight". He's a "big guy".
How we may describe someone or something as "interesting" or "wild" instead of "crazy" or "bad".
I dunno. I thought about my kerfuffle with my friend and I think that I went to public school and got a good education. I remember an elementary school teacher, Mrs. Flynn, mostly because she wore eyeliner just beneath her bottom eyelid, and how she and all of my elementary school teachers sent us home every week with new vocabulary lists. But what if someone didn't go to school or like school? I wondered. They learned definitions of words by context, context of the culture of their experiences. Context of feeling. Talking without vocabulary. What if they don't really care about the meaning of words? Are we really talking the same thing? Anyway, I think I've always been a Houyhnhnm.
Sincerely,
The Unwitting Memoirist
June 2, 2021
The Nigger of the Narcissus: by Joseph Conrad
As I currently watch video after video of blacks non blacks and non American blacks alike mastermind hate crime hoaxes through the rolling verdant hills of these great United States, I think about The Nigger of the 'Narcissus', a novella written in 1897 by Polish-British novelist Joseph Conrad.
It's so apropos: Call yourself a 'nigger' using white face, or hire some big black burly Nigerians to beat you up in the name of whitey like racially ambiguous Jussie Smollett, and you've got the recipe for a huge sailing ship that Conrad once sailed as a merchant marine, named the Narcissus.
The story is based on a black sailor who Conrad once knew—in the novella, he's a black West Indian sailor named James Wait. In this novella, Conrad masterfully centers a white crew around this black sailor, who through exaggerated claims of sickness and dying to avoid work, manages to get waited on hand and foot, ultimately creating a division on the ship between Wait's supporters and detractors. The Narcissus, the ship of course, is the anger of the grand ego, tossed and turned about on choppy attention-grabbing waters. It's damn near a mutiny all over Wait.
In the end, well, I won't spoil it for you—it's not good for Wait. Ah, what the hell, he ends up dying because it turns out that he was actually much sicker than he feigned not to be.
It's worth noting that at the time this novella was written, Dodd, Mead and Company was reluctant to publish it, not because of the offensiveness of the word "nigger" or anything but because the publishers believed that a book about a black man wouldn't sell!
"TO MY READERS IN AMERICA
(a note from the author; The Nigger of the Narcissus: Doubleday, 1914)
From that evening when James Wait joined the ship—late for the muster of the crew—to the moment when he left us in the open sea, shrouded in sailcloth, through the open port, I had much to do with him. He was in my watch. A negro in a British forecastle is a lonely being. He has no chums. Yet James Wait, afraid of death and making her his accomplice was an impostor of some character—mastering our compassion, scornful of our sentimentalism, triumphing over our suspicions.
But in the book he is nothing; he is merely the centre of the ship's collective psychology and the pivot of the action. Yet he, who in the family circle and amongst my friends is familiarly referred to as the Nigger, remains very precious to me. For the book written round him is not the sort of thing that can be attempted more than once in a life-time. It is the book by which, not as a novelist perhaps, but as an artist striving for the utmost sincerity of expression, I am willing to stand or fall. Its pages are the tribute of my unalterable and profound affection for the ships, the seamen, the winds and the great sea—the moulders of my youth, the companions of the best years of my life.
[...]
1914
JOSEPH CONRAD"
Sincerely,
The Unwitting Memoirist
June 8, 2020
Psychological Tactics, The Existential Crisis of Reviewing Your Own Books
Back in January, I saw a Goodreads author give his own book 3 stars. It's something that psychologically haunts me until this day.
I could see 1 or 5 stars since both ratings live on the same side of delusion Street, but 3? Why would an author do that? Btw, I lost track of this book but for some reason think the author is British due to some semi subconscious weird racism that I'll have to get to later, but that correlates a 3 star rating with mediocrity and being British.
Honestly, I haven't met many British people, but I grew up watching incredibly dry but entertaining shows from the BBC like Absolutely Fabulous, Keeping Up Appearances and Are You Being Served?, where they said 'p*ssy' uncensored all the time but it was bad to say 'bloody'. Anyway, maybe I correlate the hubris of rating your own book—but the rating being mediocre with being British because of some subliminal brain manipulation from watching all those shows. Almost like it's entirely British to act entirely like you're the shit but to involuntarily appear mediocre. Anyway, I told you that it's psychologically haunted me, and now I really want to read that book.
Sincerely,
The Unwitting Memoirist
April 23, 2022
Where Does the Money Go? An Indie Ghost Mystery.
I'm writing an indie Mystery. And it's called Where Does the Money Go? I'm particularly interested in the magical phenomena of money vanishing into thin air. This is a false lead, but I recently watched the Thai movie Chocolate (Magnolia), which is absolute insanity (and one of my favorite movies). It's about a teenaged autistic girl that develops some sort of savant-like propensity for kicking ass from watching martial arts movies. Like osmosis. She then goes on to harass Thai gangsters all over the city for money they owed her mother who's been in the hospital and needs special medicine because her hair's falling out. Mama money! She yells. Going to each gangster's office with her hand out and no eye contact. Mommy hospital, need mama money! And this is another story about how money seems to appear out of thin air when you start kicking ass, but that's for another indie mystery.
Anyway, I remember reading a particular awesome short story awhile back called "Mountain Man" by Robert E. Howard, the guy who wrote the Conan the Barbarian series. Anyway, I knew the date for it was still too early for public domain so I started snooping around for the copyright and found it via WATCH, a database of artists and their copyright holders. I was particularly horrified I think the word is by the seemingly baseball card trading of copyrights, and the singular journey of 1 dead writer's estate. Turns out the courts gave Howard's father his estate who gave it to his friend, his friend giving it to his wife and daughter, and his daughter giving it to the widow of her cousin who gave it to her children, who then sold it to the Swedish now US company Paradox Entertainment. Ironic. And this is the dog that worried the cat that killed the rat that ate the malt that lay in the house that Jack built.
So if Jack is dead, where does his house go? I mean this is the stuff that knock out drag down funeral family fights are made of so I think it's safe to say that nobody ever really cared about Jack. Jack gets lost in artistic integrity soon as his paintings or essays on Capitalism are exchanged for more groceries or a bigger house than the one that Jack built.
What's the problem of taking a dead artist's video free on YouTube and converting it to an mp3 instead of paying for it? Where would the money go? Jack isn't technically on Bandcamp or Amazon anymore, but maybe his widow or children are, but maybe they're not because they're a company. What's the value of paying for a dead man's art? This is another false lead but I once saw an interview with Randy Quaid and his wife talking about "Star Whackers", people paid to kill celebrities, and I believed him, because I believe in the devil that he exists. After all, it's not hard to see that we live in a world where people are unforgiving and hate the living but revere them as soon as they're dead. Chaka Khan said awhile back in an interview that they as artists were worth more dead than alive. To who? What's the value of paying for art of big business? Where does a dead man's money go?
Hm. Weird Tales. And a most auspicious indie mystery.
