Month: October 2025

Back to the Horror

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For a truly lazy man nothing is worse than hyperactivity.  And so, my current frenetic schedule has rendered me borderline despondent.  But the mail must get through!  No, wait.  The show must go on.  So, let’s do this thing.

Let’s start with the government shutdown.  I think the Democrats are crumbling in real time, before our eyes.  Most of the people impacted by programs that are about to run out of money, (e.g., Snap) vote for Democrats.  So, they’re going to be hurting really soon and that is going to be bad for Democrats running for office.  I read an article that said Schumer is already dealing with a bunch of Democrat Senators who are frightened that they’re going to be blamed for poor people going hungry.  My guess is things will come to a head in about a week.  Well, good.  Anything that makes Chuck Schumer look bad is by definition a wonderful thing.  So, yay!

Next, the Mamdani ascension to Gracie Mansion looks poised to happen in two weeks.  And both Democrat and Republican establishment figures are petrified that this guy is going to reduce New York City to a Mid-Atlantic version of Mexico City.  Basically, a bankrupt madhouse run by gangs and beyond the control of the police.  And I think they’re right.  I read that a large number of the NYPD are going to retire if he wins.  I don’t think you need anything more than that to tell you where the city will be next summer.  Bedlam.

On a personal note, I received a detailed proposal for the marketing of my book, “The Sniper.”  Currently I haven’t had a chance to even look at it yet.  I’m bogged down in Dunwich civic life to such an extent that I lose track of the day of the week.  But as soon as I can I intend to study it intensively and make up my mind on whether I think I should pursue a commercial plan to market it.  By the way, if any more of you folks have finished reading it, please pass along your criticisms to help me weigh the value of going forward with a structured commercial release of the book.  Well, to be continued.

I’ve been following Trump’s press releases and moves on the Ukraine War.  He was talking as if he would provide Ukraine with Tomahawk missiles.  But when Zelensky showed up in Washington to receive them it didn’t happen.  Some outlets are saying he told Zelensky he no longer believes Ukraine can win and they should negotiate seriously with Russia to find a ceasefire and a peace plan.  I have to confess I’m not sure whether Trump has a plan or is just trying to keep both countries at arms’ length.  Russia has made some significant (albeit glacially slow) gains on the battle field.  The cities of Pokrovsk and Kupiansk are teetering on the edge of complete capture and several others (Kostyantynivka, Myrnohrad and Lyman) are not far behind.  Pretty soon the Russians will accomplish through arms what they are telling Ukraine they demand for a peace settlement.  What happens then is anybody’s guess.  The NATO countries are stating they are getting ready to send their troops into Ukraine.  But I have a hard time believing that England, Germany and France will get their people to agree to this.  Well, maybe Trump can broker a deal that’s not too disastrous for Ukraine.  We’ll see.

Well that enough for now.  Back to the horror.

The Throne of Hyperborea

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The way books and movies have degenerated is extremely dissatisfying for me.  All of the futures they draw are unattractive.  It’s not even that they are inordinately dystopian.  Instead, they are boring and lame.  I think this is because they are directed at women.  It goes without saying that male and female sensibilities differ significantly.  And because publishers and movie studios have decided that their primary audience is women, they have stopped making stories that interest men.  We’re supposed to adapt to the sensibilities and conventions of plots aimed at female readers.  Well, I think we’ve all had enough of that.

I believe we are waiting for the first post-feminist movie and book to come out and reach a mass audience.  Perhaps it will be a remake of some older intellectual property like Conan the Barbarian or a James Bond who isn’t crying all the time.  A male character who talks and acts like he isn’t afraid of being canceled by the longhouse for projecting the male gaze at some attractive woman.  Preferably one of the major themes of the story should be the hero just doing whatever the hell he feels like doing and it upsetting as many women in the story as is theatrically possible.

But you know, I think I’d prefer if the story were completely new and original.  The Zoomers need their own myths and their own heroes.  It would make sense that these new stories are of this time and don’t need to harken back to the actual stone age.

Maybe a good framing for such a myth could be a post-collapse world where the niceties of the feminist project just have no place in the scarcity and violence of a devastated landscape.  Humanity returning to an environment of tribes and survival of the strongest.  So, it doesn’t have to be Conan in the Hyperborean Age.  It can be the day after tomorrow and somewhere between Iowa and Arkansas.  New stories based on timeless truths.

And you know what?  I don’t think it will be too long before we start seeing books and movies going in this direction.  It won’t be the big five publishers or the Hollywood studios.  It’s going to come from someone who controls a platform that is popular with the young men.  Some “influencer” who has tens of millions of followers and can monetize a property that he can sense will be popular.  And after the first break out it will be copied by a bunch of wannabees and before you know it the big players will be drooling for a piece of the action and everything else will blow away in the wind.

And this is not because we want this to be so.  It’s because its opposite has been pushed on the population for decades and it has proven destructive.  A pent-up force representing human nature held back from its natural course is about to sweep away many of the feminist projects in a raging flood of normalcy.  One thing.  I think Sydney Sweeney’s career will be in the ascendancy.  Conan needs a curvy woman to drape over his shoulder as he ascends the throne of Hyperborea.

Thoughts on Jack London’s Short Story, “To Build a Fire”

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When I was young, every high school English curriculum would include a review of some classic short stories and Jack London’s “To Build a Fire” was inevitably among them.  And rightly so.  Within the space of seven thousand words London casts a spell that draws you into the inhuman realm of winter in the Yukon.  We barely have a thumbnail sketch of the protagonist; “the man” and his unwilling accomplice; “the dog.”  But we learn the tragic details of what can happen when a man ignores the physics of arctic winter weather.

‘At the man’s heels trotted a dog, a big native husky, the proper wolfdog, gray-coated and without any visible or temperamental difference from its brother, the wild wolf. The animal was depressed by the tremendous cold. It knew that it was no time for traveling. Its instinct told it a truer tale than was told to the man by the man’s judgment. In reality, it was not merely colder than fifty below zero; it was colder than sixty below, than seventy below. It was seventy-five below zero. Since the freezing point is thirty-two above zero, it meant that one hundred and seven degrees of frost obtained. The dog did not know anything about thermometers. Possibly in its brain there was no sharp consciousness of a condition of very cold such as was in the man’s brain. But the brute had its instinct. It experienced a vague but menacing apprehension that subdued it and made it slink along at the man’s heels, and that made it question eagerly every unwonted movement of the man as if expecting him to go into camp or to seek shelter somewhere and build a fire. The dog had learned fire, and it wanted fire, or else to burrow under the snow and cuddle its warmth away from the air.’

…

‘Already all sensation had gone out of his feet. To build the fire he had been forced to remove his mittens, and the fingers had quickly gone numb. His pace of four miles an hour had kept his heart pumping blood to the surface of his body and to all the extremities. But the instant he stopped, the action of the pump eased down. The cold of space smote the unprotected tip of the planet, and he, being on that unprotected tip, received the full force of the blow. The blood of his body recoiled before it. The blood was alive, like the dog, and like the dog it wanted to hide away and cover itself up from the fearful cold. So long as he walked four miles an hour, he pumped that blood, willy-nilly, to the surface; but now it ebbed away and sank down into the recesses of his body. The extremities were the first to feel its absence. His wet feet froze the faster, and his exposed fingers numbed the faster, though they had not yet begun to freeze. Nose and cheeks were already freezing, while the skin of all his body chilled as it lost its blood.’

…

‘A good idea, he thought, to sleep off to death. It was like taking an anaesthetic. Freezing was not so bad as people thought. There were lots worse ways to die.

…

He drifted on from this to a vision of the old-timer on Sulphur Creek. He could see him quite clearly, warm and comfortable, and smoking a pipe.

“You were right, old hoss; you were right,” the man mumbled to the old-timer of Sulphur Creek.

…

Then the man drowsed off into what seemed to him the most comfortable and satisfying sleep he had ever known. The dog sat facing him and waiting. The brief day drew to a close in a long, slow twilight. There were no signs of a fire to be made, and, besides, never in the dog’s experience had it known a man to sit like that in the snow and make no fire. As the twilight drew on, its eager yearning for the fire mastered it, and with a great lifting and shifting of forefeet, it whined softly, then flattened its ears down in anticipation of being chidden by the man. But the man remained silent. Later, the dog whined loudly. And still later it crept close to the man and caught the scent of death. This made the animal bristle and back away. A little longer it delayed, howling under the stars that leaped and danced and shone brightly in the cold sky. Then it turned and trotted up the trail in the direction of the camp it knew, where were the other food-providers and fire-providers.’

London reveals the emotions and thoughts that race through the mind of the man as he tries to escape the consequences of his terrible mistake.  But at every turn he’s thwarted by the limitations that cold have imposed on his failing body.  And we listen to his thoughts as his time runs out and he accepts his fate.

Jack London created a remarkable story.  There is no filler.  The story only includes what is needed to paint the picture of a tragic human tale.  And I will say that if I ever write anything half as good as, “To Build a Fire,” I will consider myself an accomplished writer.  Well done Mr. London.

Life over Art

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Thomas Mann was a famous German author whose heyday was the first half of the twentieth century.  He had a Nobel Prize in literature for one of his novels and a reputation for writing psychological stories that were full of melancholy and longing for lost happiness.

In addition to his novels which were too long for my liking he wrote a handful of novellas that were collected in an English translation under the title “Death in Venice and Seven Other Stories.”  One of these stories is named “Tristan” and is the story of a sanitarium up in the Alps that especially treated people suffering from tuberculosis which is never actually named in the story but only hinted at when a patient would cough and then check a handkerchief for blood.  But in addition to the actual patients at this sanitarium called Einfried there was one resident who stayed there for the atmosphere; a “novelist” named Detlev Spinell.  And novelist would be an exaggeration.  No one has ever read his book and even letter-writing is an enormously slow and painful exercise when performed by him.  In the story, this writer is the cause of the death of a woman who is attempting to recover from a mild case of tuberculosis which is several times emphatically stated to be only affecting “the trachea, and not the lungs, thank God.”  He is a malevolent force that insinuates into the young woman’s mind that she is the victim of a crass, plebian existence that sacrificed her health and artistic spirit at the altar of mundane human activities, specifically; marriage and childbirth which was the event that sapped her strength and weakened her body sufficiently to allow the wasting disease to get the upper hand with her.

And this unhealthy influence by Spinell eventually causes her health to completely break down.  And so, the doctors call for her husband to return to the sanitarium before her incipient death.  And while this catastrophe is occurring Spinell takes it upon himself to write a letter to this husband who at this point is occupying a room in the same building.  He painstakingly writes the letter, mails it, smiles at the husband in the hallways when they meet and gives no thought to what will happen when the letter returns from the post office to the building that they both reside in.  The letter is an insulting and disparaging polemic attacking the husband for his “plebian” tastes and lack of artistic feeling.  And he announces that he has awakened the wife to her true spiritual stature and thereby causes her to renounce her allegiance to ordinary life (and by that choice, life itself).

Now all of this is quite bizarre but Mann paints the personalities of husband, wife and Spinell very skillfully.  And this allows the personalities and their relationships to each other to make sense.  The husband is a very plain and “normal” individual.  A businessman who embraces the life of a husband and father along with his hard charging life as a capitalist.  He loves his wife and child but he isn’t above pinching a maid in a hallway when the opportunity arises.  The wife loves her husband and child but she has the artistic side to her personality and she can be influenced into believing that the prosaic life of a housewife and mother is a demeaning occupation for someone as sensitive and with such an elevated soul as herself.  And then there is Spinell.  He is an abnormal spirit of the “artistic” type who sees life through a prism that only values the spiritual and pure emotions and sensibilities of the artist.  All ordinary things like the normal male/female relations are fraught with unacceptable amounts of inartistic reality.  Thus, his hatred of the husband in the story and his beatification of the wife.

The climax of the story, to my mind is the collision when the husband reads the letter and confronts Spinell down the hall from him.  He reads parts of the letter to the author and then rains verbal abuse on the head of his frightened and contrite adversary.  But just as his screaming abuse reaches its crescendo, from out in the hall, comes news that his wife’s lungs have collapsed under the ravages of her ailment, causing her to cough up an enormous quantity of blood and that she is on the edge of death.  The husband shifts his focus onto the bearer of bad news:

‘“Is she dead?” yelled Herr Klaterjahn.  As he spoke he clutched the Rätin by the arm and pulled her to and fro on the sill.  “Not quite?  Not dead; she can see me, can’t she?  Brought up a little blood again, from the lung eh?  Yes, I give in, it may be from the lung.  Gabriele!”  he suddenly cried out, and his eyes filled with tears; you could see what a burst of good, warm, honest human feeling came over him.  “Yes, I’m coming.”  He said and dragged the Rätin after him…’

Mann shows us the reality of life and compares it to the shadow of life that Spinell hides in.  He uses art to hide from life.  As for the husband, who really was a crass, plebian individual full of crass plebian faults, he is also a living, breathing human being.  Spinell is a wraith.  His artistic sensibilities and motives are pathetic and infantile.  Now this is coming from Thomas Mann who embraced art as the central motive of his life.  What I find interesting is that he so clearly shows us the primacy of life over art.  I find that powerful.