Last night, I saw a live performance of “A Charlie Brown Christmas” at the San Francisco Symphony. One of the people I went with had never seen the original television cartoon—yes, it’s true.
Afterwards, she asked a simple question: “Why did Charlie Brown pick such a bad tree for Christmas?”
As we walked, we talked a bit about Linus’ speech at the end, and how the story asks about the “true” meaning of Christmas. This was all fine, but it merely danced around her question of the tree.
What I said next sprung from me. It wasn’t something I formulated or ever considered before:
“Charlie Brown recognizes something familiar in the tree. It’s been overlooked and doesn’t seem to have much to offer anyone, which is what he’s experienced in life. At the end, the other kids see the beauty in the tree, and in decorating it they’re appreciating Charlie Brown too.”
I don’t claim this is a deep insight, or even an original one, but it came to me all at once. I watched the TV show as a child in the 1970s, and rewatched it countless times over the years, and yet I’m still finding meaning in this Christmas tale.
It’s been awhile. Although the web site has been mostly quiet, I’ve actually been juggling a few projects and staying busy.
First, I am working on a new novel, which I hope to have mostly finished before the end of the year. It’s a bit of curveball compared to my past work—an absurdist caper comedy shot through with gallows humor. I’ll share more details when the manuscript shapes up and the final book comes together.
Second, I’m developing another interactive fiction video game. I’ve filed my intention to submit it for the Interactive Fiction Competition this fall, although having it ready and debugged in time for the comp will be tight. This one will be a bit different than my prior title (According to Cain), in that this new game more like a detective story, where interviewing people and gathering clues is vital to finishing the game. Again, more details will be coming as development finalizes.
My presentation at NarraScope went well. I had a great time in Pittsburgh, meeting a variety of people in the interactive fiction space from academics to seasoned game developers. A casual and positive conference. If you’re interested in my presentation, a PDF of the slides are here. (I’m told a video of the presentation will be available later; I’ll post here when that happens.)
Finally, I have a few blog posts in the hopper. Keeping busy with the above means I’ve neglected the blog. I do plan on paying a little more attention to it in the coming months.
As always, if you’re looking around for your next read, please consider my latest (A Man Named Baskerville), my Bridge Daughter series if you’ve not picked it up yet, or any of my other books. If you’re not on my mailing list, sign up and you can download a preview of A Man Named Baskerville.
I’m an inveterate Wordle player. When I wake up, I’ll open the app and try to finish the game before rising. I’ve played nearly two hundred rounds so far, which is by no means a long span of time compared to other Wordle fanatics I’ve seen online.
Like most ardent Wordle players, I have my start word, that is, my initial guess which is intended to locate as many common consonants and vowels as possible, in order to make better-educated guesses in the next turns. I went through a few start words when I started playing, landed on one I liked, and have religiously opened with it since.
Well, this morning I hit pay dirt: My start word was, in fact, the word of the day. I’ve wondered for a while now if it would ever happen. Praise be, it has.
And no…I’m not telling you the word today (although see comments for more).
Indeed, Sherlock Holmes, Dr. Watson, and the bulk of the Holmes canon have been in the public domain for decades now (in the United States, at least). My conclusion was that the Doyle literary estate has been using fear tactics to con creators—from movie studios down to independent authors—to pay them bogus licensing fees.
Something strange happened after posting that entry, though. I check in with Google Search Console now and then to see how my web site is being indexed and discovered by users. My post on the history of Sherlock Holmes’ copyright status has been indexed by Google but is not available via search. In other words, Google’s servers have seen the post, they’ve analyzed the content, but they refuse to add it to their search engine for users to discover. (Google has indexed pages on my web site that link to the page, but not the page itself.)
It’s been over three months. Posts I made after the Sherlock Holmes entry were indexed and made available on Google immediately, usually within a week. Almost all my other blog posts are available on Google (so far as I can tell). Not the entry on Sherlock Holmes’ copyright situation, though. I’ve made repeated attempts to get the page indexed. I ran a Google Search Console tool to find any problems on the page. I’ve gone through Google’s help system to find any valid reason the page may be excluded. The result: Zilch, and my page remains unavailable on Google search.
This isn’t a problem on alternative search engines Duck Duck Go or Bing. It’s only Google.
Google is free to present or exclude any pages it wants to. I’m not even arguing they owe me an explanation, although I’d appreciate one.
But just as Google is in control of their web site, I’m in control of mine. I’ve tried my best to navigate their systems and understand why they’ve excluded my page, to no avail. So I’ll use my final option—my voice, however small—to let others know.
Update: Several weeks after posting this, Google Search began returning the page as a result.
Update, 7 Jul 2022: I’ve taken a fair amount of heat for the sin of admitting I’d not read Sadly, Porn before producing the following post. Note that I did read the Amazon sample before writing what follows, which is 10% of the book’s opening; I don’t count that as a full read, and didn’t want to quibble about that point when I first published this. Scott Alexander’s review quotes substantially from the book as well, but again, another quibble.
What my detractors don’t seem to get is that this post spends the bulk of its energies examining W. H. Auden’s “West’s Disease” and not Edward Teach’s book. The post originated as a comment to Scott Alexander’s follow-up to his review, but as my comment grew and became more involved, I decided to publish it here, on my blog.
As such, this post should be framed as “If Astral Codex Ten and Resident Contrarian are correct about this one point in Sadly, Porn, it relates to West’s Disease in this way…”
But, of course, it depends on the reader to carry the logic from there, and not simply dunk on me and walk off with LOLs.
I am now reading Sadly, Porn. For the record, I’ve read nothing so far that changes my mind on any of my thoughts below. If anything, it’s only cementing my position.
Allow me to state this up-front: I’ve not read Edward Teach’s Sadly, Porn. Scott Alexander of Astral Codex Ten (ACX) has, though, and in response wrote a rather lengthy and discursive review, as well as a follow-up on the comments it elicited. At this moment, most of my understanding of Sadly, Porn comes from these sources (which I freely admit is an imperfect substitute for reading the book).
From what I’ve gathered, Sadly, Porn is a meandering and intentionally obscure treatise (diatribe?), grounded in psychoanalytics, which purports to explain—among other things—the ways people lie to themselves. Released in December 2021, the Kindle edition clocks in at over 1,100 pages, brimming with extended discourses on topics you might think plucked from the air, such as a ten-page examination of Shel Silverstein’s The Giving Tree. It’s also larded with David Foster Wallace-esque footnotes and Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius-style exhortations directed at the reader. The author opens with a thirty-page erotica story which, he later claims, is only included to scare off readers. (An odd strategy, since there are a multitude of writers producing such fiction for a lucrative living.) Really, to get a good idea of the book’s scope, read the ACX review.
What lit my interest in it comes from ACX taking a stab at boiling down Sadly, Porn to its core thesis:
Psychologically healthy people have desires. Sometimes they fantasize about these desires, and sometimes they act upon them. You’ve probably never met anyone like this.
Psychologically unhealthy people, e.g., you and everyone you know, don’t have desires, at least not in the normal sense. Wanting things is scary and might obligate you to act toward getting the thing lest you look like a coward. But your action might fail, and then you would be the sort of low-status loser who tries something and fails at it.
Again, from what I’ve gathered, Edward Teach believes that social status is the chief (or even sole) motivator of human behavior. (Or, perhaps he doesn’t; ACX makes it clear the book is too cagey to state its arguments plainly.)
Teach certainly paints us all as loathsome meat-bags of pettiness. Yet there’s something familiar about his observations that makes it difficult to reject his assertions. In a time where social media has devised a multitude of ways to score our social standing (via follower counts, likes, retweets, and so on), and in a culture endlessly promoting concepts like self-actualization and fame, his claims about the primacy of status-seeking has substance.
Now compare Teach’s accounting of Man’s damnable condition with W. H. Auden’s analysis of Nathanael West’s novels, where he first describes “West’s Disease”:
This is a disease of consciousness which renders it incapable of converting wishes into desires. … All wishes, whatever their apparent content, have the same and unvarying meaning: “I refuse to be what I am.” [But the sufferer] cannot desire anything, for the present state of the self is the ground of every desire, and that is precisely what the wisher rejects. [Emphasis mine.]
Nathanael West
To simplify Auden’s distinction: A wish is the simple act of imagining oneself as a different person, or in a different situation; a desire is imagining how one might convert one’s current self into a different person or situation. A wish is wanting to be thin; a desire is vowing to join a gym and work-out every day (even if one doesn’t act on it). West’s Disease is the inability to transform one to the other, leading to inaction, loathing, and rage.
The finest examples of West’s Disease may be found in The Day of the Locust, Nathanael West’s most well-known novel. It’s a brilliant and acidic look at 1930s Hollywood, as witnessed by a motley group of misfits well-distanced from Tinseltown’s glamour, money, and success. “Hollywood’s success as a dream factory is predicated on knowing our wishes and actualizing them on the silver screen,” I wrote two years ago. “That’s why Hollywood appears a tantalizing cure for West’s Disease.”
Auden’s diagnosis that a person with West’s Disease “cannot desire anything” echoes another summation of Sadly, Porn from blogger Resident Contrarian:
[Teach asserts] we in general are incapable of action; we don’t want to act but also can’t act, and we rely on a nebulous “them” to put us on a track towards having to do it. … we want a situation where we don’t have to take an action, but where an action is demanded of us by circumstance.
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that RC’s example (“you don’t want to talk to the pretty girl; you want her to trip so you have to catch her”) sounds like a stock scene in a Hollywood romantic comedy. And I do equate wishing, in Auden’s terms, with Teach’s idea that we crave an externality to occur that actualizes our wishes for us. Teach is perhaps exploring Auden’s wish mechanism a bit more fully, but it looks to me that Auden in 1962 struck upon the same vein of thinking that Teach is attempting to communicate in 2022.
Poster for The Day of the Locust (1975) movie adaptation
West’s Disease is what paralyzes the misfits in The Day of the Locust. These Hollywood outsiders witness the fruits of Hollywood’s money and glamour being distributed to others, never themselves. They want success, but success is supposed to come to them, not vice-versa. Faye Greener, the only character who can claim to have a film career in front of the camera, complains “the reason she wasn’t a star was because she didn’t have the right clothes.” (There’s a similar shrugging passivity in McCoy’s They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?)
But Auden is less absolutist than Teach. It’s West’s Disease, after all: It only afflicts certain individuals, whereas Teach finds it to be widespread. (Perhaps Teach is right, though. Perhaps West’s Disease is contagious and has spread virulently since 1962. Or since 1939, when Locust was published.)
Auden also does not pin down West’s Disease as a natural state of the human psyche, but as a result of modernity:
There have, no doubt, always been cases of West’s Disease, but the chances of infection in a democratic and mechanized society like our own are much greater than in the more static and poorer societies.
When, for most people, their work, their company, even their marriages, were determined, not by personal choice or ability, but by the class into which they were born, the individual was less tempted to develop a personal grudge against Fate; his fate was not his own but that of everyone around him.
But the greater the equality of opportunity in a society becomes, the more obvious becomes the inequality of the talent and character among individuals, and the more bitter and personal it must be to fail.[Again, emphasis mine.]
This jibes with one of my intuitions as I read ACX’s review: That Teach’s near-universality of status-seeking in the human psyche is more likely the result of (or greatly amplified by) recent trends in technology and social organization. Auden wrote the above when notions like meritocracy were ripe in the air and corporate ladders were being erected sky-high. Today, social media and tabloid-esque journalism is king, can show you the numbers to prove it, and has disjointed our culture in unexpected ways.
What’s more, 21st-century American popular media doesn’t merely make “inequalities of talent and character” obvious; our celebrity-obsessed culture revels in and celebrates them. As Budd Schulberg wrote about status climbing: “It will survive as long as money and prestige and power are ends in themselves, running wild, unharnessed from usefulness.”
The Day of the Locust opens describing those with West’s Disease as those who “loitered on the corners or stood with their backs to the shop windows and stared at everyone who passed. … They had come to California to die.” In the final chapter, they rise up in revolt, and Los Angeles burns. Auden saw West’s Disease as damaging not merely to the individual, but to the society around them.
Teach seems to treat West’s Disease as an intellectual, and perhaps masculine, failing. (Apparently cuckoldry is a running theme throughout Sadly, Porn.) The book adopts a scolding and sneering tone toward the reader, implicating them as weak and blithe to this delusion of false desires and status envy.
Years ago I discovered on Forest Books‘ sidewalk cart an unassuming hardback with an unassuming title, Great American Detective Stories, edited by legendary Bay Area writer Anthony Boucher and published in June 1945.
Curious what stories made the cut, I expected the usual names and the usual reprinted titles. I did see the usual names—Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, and Cornell Woolrich being of the most interest to me—but was surprised by Boucher’s story selections. He included one of the three Sam Spade short stories Hammett wrote for easy money (which were not widely reprinted until recently). The Chandler selection was a novella I’d never heard of before, “No Crime in the Mountains”, which appears to have been the nucleus (Chandler would say “cannibalized”) for The Lady in the Lake.
Over the years I’ve dipped into this collection on occasion, and discovered it to be a fine snapshot of late-World War II popular American writing.
But it was the book’s front matter that gives me pause, specifically the publisher’s note:
This book is manufactured in compliance with the War Production Board’s ruling for conserving paper. … Thinner and smaller books will not only save paper, plate metal and man power, but will make more books available to the reading public.
The reader’s understanding of this wartime problem will enable the publisher to cooperate more fully with our Government.
It’s a fine-print reminder of how the cost of war used to burden everyone’s daily life, and therefore was a constant reminder of war’s price, both in human cost and economic.
Printed above the note:
“Books are weapons in the war of ideas.”
– President Roosevelt
They still are, but we’ve allowed our attention to wander, and it’s to our detriment.
I’ve spent twenty-five years writing in cafes. For a quarter of a century, I’ve attempted to produce passable fiction within the thin caffeinated air of Bay Area coffeehouses. I’ve endured countless hours of crummy music blasted overhead by baristas with something to prove—coexisted with hundreds of cafe patrons as neighbors, each with differing notions of privacy and personal space—suffered wobbly cafe tables and seats as hard as steel—and consumed gallons upon gallons of coffee, steamed soy milk, and espresso shots—all in the name of writing books someone might want to read.
My first foray into the writers’ cafe subculture came in the mid-1990s with the purchase of a Fujitsu laptop computer. This machine freed me from writing on a desktop PC-compatible occupying the corner of my bedroom. This freedom gave me a way to find a neutral place to get writing done—a place neither the home nor the office.
Cafes back then were largely for drinking coffee and reading a newspaper or book. Writing, when it was done at a cafe, was performed with pen and paper. The parallel advents of cheap personal notebooks and wireless Internet rewrote the cafe landscape in America, morphing the coffeehouse from a casual light-fare experience to a pseudo-shared office for the creative class.
Any writer will tell you, finding a good writing cafe is a cherished gift. Every change-of-address I’ve made over the last twenty-five years was always followed by long days of stumbling from one neighborhood cafe to another in search of the right one—the mother lode, Nirvana, the comfortable and welcoming writer’s cafe. Even when traveling abroad I make a point of finding a local cafe for writing.
As such, I’ve written in so many bad cafes I cannot begin to categorize them—but I’ll try.
Where to begin? There are the noisy cafes, the cafes where the baristas play Dave Matthews so loud I cannot hear my own music, even when I press my headphones tight against my ears with my palms. There are the cafes I can never find a seat in and must ask to share a table. Most creative types seem to find this burden distasteful and will invent an invisible friend joining them shortly, so, sorry, I’ll need to sit elsewhere.
There are the overpriced cafes. There are the cafes with rock-hard high stools seemingly designed by 1970s McDonald’s interior decorators. There are the cafes that are too hot, even in the winter. Here in San Francisco the opposite is largely the case, the cafes where the owner props the door wide open no matter how cold it is outside, allowing chilly breezes to charge inside at sporadic moments.
Clocking in years of cafe time taught me never to tell to anyone sniffing around me that I’m writing a novel. Doing so only elicits all manner of unproductive responses, from snarky to nosy to rude to inane. More than once I’ve had to pry myself away from a chatty cafe patron who, delighted at my endeavor, felt compelled to describe to me all their book ideas. (Sometimes they offer to let me write their book—”We’ll split the profits fifty-fifty.”) In an otherwise wonderful cafe in Campbell, a regular got his tenterhooks so deep into my work I would startle to find him crouched behind my chair peering over my shoulders to watch me write.
I’ve seen tip jars stuffed full of bills ripped from counters, the thief racing out the door with coins clanging across the floor in their wake. I’ve seen notebook computers swiped off tables while the patron was still typing and likewise rushed out the door. I’ve written in cafes decorated like giant doll houses, cafes decorated like discount clothing stores, and cafes so meticulously decorated I felt I’d entered a movie set. I’ve seen a darkened cafe in San Francisco arranged like a ziggurat with staggered levels of cafe patrons seated facing you as you enter, every one of them typing furiously on their MacBooks. The uniform rows of the backlit Apple logo could only remind me of the 1984 Super Bowl commercial.
There are cafes that cap their electrical outlets to force laptop owners to run on battery power only. There are cafes that employ exotic WiFi systems that only give you so much time online before you must buy another drink or pastry. Some cafes are too-brightly lit, making one snow-blind in the evening hours, and some cafes are so dim you cannot see your hands on the keyboard. There are the cafes that close early, eliminating prime evening-hour writing spurts, and there are the cafes that don’t open weekends for mysterious reasons.
I’ve been in cafes where the owner would assure me I could pay anytime before leaving—and then grouse I never paid for the first coffee when I return to the counter for a refill. I’ve been in cafes where the owner relentlessly pushed a food purchase on me. I’ve been in cafes with owners who grumbled under their breath about people not buying enough coffee or staying too long.
The Slate.com feature “My coffeehouse nightmare” is the Platonic example of this type of owner. He served his coffee “on silver trays with a glass of water and a little chocolate cookie,” hired a Le Bernadin baker to produce specialty croissants, and thought the fast-track to coffeehouse profits was pulling Vienna roast espresso shots instead of Italian. In six months, his cafe was out of business. “The average coffee-to-stay customer nursed his mocha (i.e., his $5 ticket) for upward of 30 minutes. Don’t get me started on people with laptops.” By which, of course, he means people like me.
Cafes hold a unique position in American culture. They straddle commercial and social divides. As a cafe patron, you are engaging in commerce with the owner and her staff. On the other hand, you share a quiet, almost intimate, personal space with other patrons, perfect strangers often seated less than a foot away. Unlike a movie theater, where all are sharing a common experience, cafes are a collection of private moments (reading a book, engaging in conversation, outlining a novel) hosted within a shared public situation. At the risk of romanticizing it, successful cafes are places where both halves—the commerce and the social—are well-balanced. Failure, I’ve always found, is where such balance is missing.
My personal code of cafe ethics? Always buy something. Don’t bring in outside food or drink. Tidy up the table before leaving. Don’t hog the electrical outlet. Voices down and phone calls outside. Please and thank you carry a lot of water in any situation, social or commercial.
What cafe do I recommend for writing? The one I’m sitting in right now. And, no, I’m not telling you its name.
