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“The past is a foreign country,” according to L.P. Hartley. In his latest volume, Zachary Shatzer sets out to explore this foreign country, armed with nothing but his own whimsical sense of humor.

The first, and perhaps most educational section of the book focus on Emily Post’s Etiquette in Society, in Business, in Politics and at Home, published in 1922. Specifically, the section the proper usage and modes of address on visiting cards. Personally, I’ve wondered what visiting cards were since I listened to “The Grandson of Abdul Abulbul Amir,”  which includes the line: “and his visiting card / bore the name of this bard: / Count Ivan Skavinsky Skivar.”

Well, they were like business cards (which I’ve also never used) except in the early 1900s, everyone used them for social calls and occasions, and an incredibly complex system of etiquette evolved regarding their use. Ms. Post—excuse me, Mrs. Price Post, which is apparently the correct form of address for a divorcée—describes the rules for what a card should and should not say in different situations.

A few years ago, I reviewed a book that made reference to the debutante season, and I said it felt like reading about an alien civilization. I get that same vibe here. Frankly, the scariest part is that it feels like an alien civilization that is superior to our current one. Like we’re just apes throwing bones at monoliths.

But I digress. Shatzer then turns his humorous touch to more of the jests of Joe Miller, whose work he had previously collected in another volume. If you read that one, this feels like more of the same, although personally, I thought some the jests were too dark. As Shatzer notes, hating one’s spouse seems to be a source of much of Miller’s comedic material this time around.

From there we get an excerpt from a book (which sounded promising, I might actually read it), a selection of fables from the notoriously jaundiced eye of Ambrose Bierce, and a complete short story about baseball. Now, here I must confess that I find baseball to be extremely boring, and unless a work of fiction about it is written by, say, Mark Paxson or Kevin Brennan, it’s not a must-read for me. Shatzer’s humorous asides make it tolerable.

We then get another set of acerbic observations on relations between the sexes from a writer named Helen Rowland. I’d never heard of her before. Sadly, she seems to have had bad experiences in relationships. One of the running themes in this section is that men are constantly being unfaithful with chorus girls, which, oddly enough, was apparently the reason Emily Post divorced her husband.

Speaking of Emily Post, the book ends with another set of tips from her, this time on the art of camping, or roughing it without anything rough. This idea of simulating hardship while not actually having anything difficult or upsetting happen is, if anything, the most recognizably modern sentiment in the book. Perhaps that’s the reason Shatzer chose to end on that note, to remind us that we are not so different from our ancestors after all.

As a whole, the book is a charming look into the past, and an invitation to reflect on what future eras may think of our own. The public domain is a treasure trove of interesting works, and I hope Shatzer continues this practice of adding his commentary to older works. They can enliven even rather dull stories.

And I would also note that The Great Gatsby recently entered the public domain, so if Mr. Shatzer ever feels “borne back ceaselessly into the past…”

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The first thing to clarify here is that the title is intentionally provocative, to the point of being misleading. I think a lot of people read it and assume the idea is that the whole thing was faked, and that Baudrillard was some kind of conspiracy theorist. But really he was something much crazier and more dangerous: a French philosopher.

And in this series of essays, he does not deny that something happened in the Persian Gulf in 1991. But he disputes that what it was was really a war. Or at least, contrary to Fallout, that “war has changed.” Would King Leonidas or even Ernst Jünger recognize modern warfare? Airstrikes and cyberattacks have taken the place of direct combat between infantry in many conflicts, and Baudrillard argues the first Gulf War was an example of war being fought for the purpose of spectacle. Whoever convinces the TV audience they are winning is winning, regardless of what the actual situation in reality may be.

This ties in to Baudrillard’s signature idea of “hyperreality”, a condition of the modern world in which what we call reality is actually largely fake, with symbols having taken the place of the things themselves. For the vast majority of people, their experience of the war was solely in the images presented to them via mass media.

If this sounds like Daniel J. Boorstin to you, then congratulations! You have been a careful and attentive reader. Boorstin was a forerunner of Baudrillard, and nothing about this replacement of the territory with the map would surprise him. Honestly, if you read The Image, you’ll find yourself chuckling sardonically as DJB’s prophecy of 30 years earlier is fulfilled.

These are interesting ideas, and they seem to have become only more relevant since Baudrillard wrote them. Unfortunately, the essays themselves are rather hard to read since they are (a) dense abstract philosophy and (b) translated from French. I think it’s a very good translation, but still, there is just some inevitable weirdness that creeps in as a result. That’s on top of all the other weirdness in play here.

The fundamental problem isn’t really this new type of war at all; rather, it’s a symptom of our global communications networks. Back in the old days, if the Greeks fought the Persians, most people not in Persia or Greece had no reason to know or care about it. But in the modern world, when there’s an armed conflict anywhere, especially between nuclear powers, everyone hears about it. And has an opinion on it.

As is often the way with books like this, the author does a magnificent job describing the problem, and a very poor job describing how to solve it. Baudrillard leaves us only with a note of warning for what these virtual wars imply for the future of the world:

“The more the hegemony of the global consensus is reinforced. the greater the risk, or the chances, of its collapse.”

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Only Adam Bertocci could take one of the oldest and tritest riddles in the book (it dates to 1847, I discovered in writing this post) and transform it into a compelling work of literary fiction.  I mean, really, in this very short story he manages to weave together feelings of romance, fate, heartbreak, and dark comedy. I’ve read novels that didn’t have as much going on in them as this book does.

It’s the story of a chicken named Bertram, and the reasons that he decides to flee the farm life and go to… the other side. But, like many another literary crossing, this is more than just a literal crossing. It is a spiritual transformation.

This is somehow both very moving and deeply funny. I’m reminded of Paul Graham’s essay “Taste for Makers”:

The confident will often, like swallows, seem to be making fun of the whole process slightly, as Hitchcock does in his films or Bruegel in his paintings– or Shakespeare, for that matter.

That’s Bertocci to a “T”. He crafts something that is simultaneously a parody of the literary short form and a magnificent example of it. And he does it while staying true to the source material. The same cannot be said of many another modern adaptation.

And while I’ve never been as good at writing to prompts as, say, my friend Mark Paxson is… this made me wonder: what other hackneyed jokes or riddles could be repurposed as fodder for literary works? Knock, knock… who is there?

Well, I’ll leave that up to the rest of you. In the meantime, if you’re in the mood for a quick and clever literary experiment, pick this up.

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New Dawn is a military sci-fi thriller. The premise is that a dystopian Earth sent the titular colony ship to Mars, crewed by dissident and free-thinking scientists and explorers, who rebelled against the authoritarian Earth governments. The ship disappeared, and it was assumed that all the crew had been lost.

Many years later, New Dawn reappears in the sky above Earth, with a mysterious crew and sending ominous messages demanding Earth submit to their demands or face an invasion.

The Earth nations quickly scramble to fight back against this foe, including rounding up a team of their best engineers and scientists to go aboard. They are some of Earth’s most brilliant minds—and, as it happens, some of them have crossed paths before, and not in pleasant ways. This leads to tension between people like the brilliant engineer and his bitter ex-lover, as well as the young graduate student who would very much like to become his current lover.

There’s plenty of emotional turmoil among Earth’s military personnel as well. We have the daring Italian pilot who flies for NATO and the young Russian who fights alongside him. These two were probably my favorite characters in the book.

And then there’s the sinister NATO intelligence officer who oversees the whole operation. A classic manipulative bureaucrat, using blackmail and coercion to get others to play into his hands.

It’s an interesting concept, and the characters have potential. Unfortunately, a number of things didn’t work for me. The dialogue is quite stilted, and much of the prose seemed choppy and repetitive. Also, a number of key plot points were telegraphed early on.

Also, early on in the book, a traumatic event happens to one of the characters. It’s mentioned briefly, and then people carry on as if nothing happened. Then it comes up again much later in the story, as part of a plot twist (although this is one of those things that I could see coming), but then it’s dropped again, and it really shouldn’t be. Because it calls into question the whole modus operandi of what is being presented as a largely sympathetic faction, but it’s just hand-waved away in a couple pages. I wish could be more specific, but I don’t want to spoil it.

The book feels very much like the later Tom Clancy books: many of the plot beats are predictable because it’s quite clear who is supposed to win. Also, like Clancy, the book does get politically heavy-handed towards the end. I’m not against political messaging in books, and I try not to let whether or not I agree with an author’s views color my opinion of a book.

But what does color my opinion of a book is whether the political commentary is handled deftly or not. I mean, what is the point of putting your story in a futuristic sci-fi setting if you are just going to have exactly the same political dynamics as present-day Earth? To me, the advantage of a different setting is to be able to create allegories and analogues to political issues, to allow discussion of topics that otherwise would be too charged to raise.

In summary, I think New Dawn is an interesting concept, but the execution was so-so. But I will say this much: I kept reading it, because I wanted to know what would happen next. And to me, that’s the ultimate test of a story.

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Movie poster for 'Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World' featuring Russell Crowe as Captain Jack Aubrey, with a sailing ship in the background.

It’s become a meme to say derisively that a film has been made for “modern audiences”. This is usually a synonym for the dreaded “W” word, which in today’s usage is curiously not far off in meaning from another “W” word. Essentially, when somebody says that a film is being pitched at “modern audiences”, it is understood to mean that it has changed the demographics of characters, or altered details to reflect modern political concerns, and, perhaps above all else, prioritized the audience’s perceived sensitivities over honest storytelling.

Master and Commander has gained a following over the years as a film that takes us away from all that; a film that hearkens back to the good old naval yarns of yore, about a daring captain and his steadfast crew on a bold seafaring journey. Everyone loves sailing for adventure on the big blue wet thing!

The story begins with the famous intro: “April, 1805. Napoleon is master of Europe. Only the British fleet stands before him. Oceans are now battlefields.” Captain Jack Aubrey of the HMS Surprise has been ordered to pursue the French frigate Acheron along the coast of South America. Aubrey enthusiastically follows his orders, even after his first encounter with the Archeron goes against him, and through setback after setback after that. 

But of course, that’s not the real meat of the film. The charm of Master and Commander is in its portrayal of life aboard a 19th-century man-o’-war, The confinement to close quarters, the dense ocean fogs, the dependence on the wind (or lack of it), the camaraderie and conflict among the crew, the superstitions of the common Jack Tars, the ambitions of the young boys who hope one day to rise to command a ship themselves… all these elements are portrayed in great detail, making HMS Surprise as vibrant and alive as any city. 

And most memorable of all is the friendship between Capt. Aubrey and the ship’s doctor and amateur biologist, Stephen Maturin. The two men talk, argue, affectionately mock one another, and, when the time comes, stare down death together. At it’s core, it’s a buddy movie, and who doesn’t enjoy a good pair of friends facing adversity together?

Small wonder the film has become a cult classic. I’m reminded of what somebody said about The Man Who Would be King (another great historical epic buddy movie): “even when it was made, they said they don’t make films like that any more.” 

However… there is just one small issue. Go back and read the first paragraph of this post. Now, Master and Commander doesn’t do any of the typical things associated with films for “modern audiences.” Not only are there no female characters who could be accused of being too-perfect “Mary Sues”, there are no female characters, period. It fails the Bechdel-Wallace test almost as hard as Lawrence of Arabia. The crew of the Surprise, while racially diverse, has a distinct and well-defined hierarchy to it. Modern political sensibilities are largely absent, save perhaps for one brief discussion on the ethics of flogging.

But here’s the thing: in the book on which the film is based, the action is set in 1812, not 1805. And the vessel that Captain Aubrey is pursuing is not French, but from a different hemisphere altogether. It is… the USS Norfolk. 

Now, if you know a little something about history, this makes a hell of a lot more sense than the movie’s actual plot. Why would a French ship be sent south to plunder whaling ships, when we have just been told Napoleon is planning an invasion of England, and could use the ships somewhere closer to home?  But it actually seems quite logical for a ship from a piratical upstart nation to be seizing whalers. Indeed, this is exactly the sort of thing that John Bull would expect Brother Jonathan to be doing, and in fact, did. 

But the North American box office is a considerable market, and a film which portrayed the Americans as antagonists would presumably just not fly. So they made the enemy French instead, and no one questioned it, because Britain and France fighting each other just seems natural. “And I’ll wager in their joy they kissed each other’s cheek / (Which is a-what them furriners do!)”  

Does this ruin the movie? Well, it pretty much did for Peter Hitchens, but he’s a hard guy to please. It does take it down a peg in my estimation, from being “great historical epic” to merely “good flick.” But good flicks are hard to come by these days. So, if you enjoy the minute details of 19th-century naval life, and don’t care about the larger geopolitics of the era, it’s a decent way to spend 138 minutes.

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Do you like cozy mysteries? You’ll be hard-pressed to find a cozier mystery than this one. Indeed, I believe it is an example of what the young people call cozy-maxxing.

Of course, this is no surprise for fans of Litka’s work. All his stories take place in a warm, gentle world where even the crimes have a certain pleasant kind of charm. It’s like the world of Wodehouse, albeit with sci-fi technology. But this story is even closer to a Wodehousian never-never land than Litka usually gets. It has a quaint country fair, complete with games and sports. Shades of “The Purity of the Turf.” As if that weren’t enough, there’s a scene where a lady is painting in a field when she is surprised by a sudden rainstorm. Reading this, I instantly was reminded of this intro to a Beatrix Potter video I watched as a child, which is possibly the coziest thing ever.

You’ll notice I haven’t said much about the plot yet. Well, once more, the lawyer-turned-detective Redinal Hu, AKA “Red Wine”, is hired to investigate an intrigue among the Great Houses. A mysterious character called “Agent Nine” has been leaving ominous notes in the dead of night at a wealthy businessman’s estate. No one knows how this Agent Nine gets in or out. Some believe that he or she is no living creature at all, but a ghost haunting the old manse.

A good plot, but if we’re being honest, the plot is not really why we’re here. It’s just an excuse; much as Red’s frequent walks with his dog Ellington are an excuse to see the attractive lady painter holidaying in the nearby village. So if you want an escape into a far more pleasant world than our own, I encourage you to pick up this short story. My only complaint is that it goes by so fast—but then, Litka has given us no shortage of other delightful tales of near equal-coziness to enjoy as well.

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The great philosopher-humorist Zachary Shatzer recently told me I might read “too many books about gritty, unshaven antiheroes who say things like ‘Sometimes a man has to do what must be done.'” And he may well be right. I’m descended from Irish policemen, many of whom probably played by their own rules and refused to do things by the book. So I’m a sucker for stories about tough cops who can’t stand being hamstrung by red tape. My epithet might well be the line Gallus says to Sejanus in an episode of I, Claudius:

A song sung by every small-town corrupt policeman, which is what you are and what you should have stayed!

Well, come to that, I think Sejanus got a bad rap.  He was just trying to get stuff done in the notoriously corrupt Roman Empire. But I digress.

This book is about just one such gritty cop: David Forbes Carter, a brilliant, daring and extremely anti-bureaucracy Interplanetary Police Force agent. Since the mysterious death of his sister, Carter has become an increasingly loose cannon, and so the IPF assigns profiler Veronique de Tournay to try and get a sense of his unstable psychology and determine if he is still fit to serve.

It’s the classic set-up: two cops forced to work together, neither of whom likes the other. It’s been done a thousand times. But, as George Lucas once said, “they’re clichés because they work!” He ought to know. Star Wars and Raiders of the Lost Ark are nothing but clichés, and they became some of the most beloved films in history.

So it is with Phoenix. It’s nothing I haven’t seen before, and that’s exactly what made it so much fun; like seeing an old friend again after a few years. It doesn’t hurt that Janeski and I seem to have more or less the same vision for what a future solar system-spanning civilization would look like. Space stations, corrupt mega-corporations, cultists, conspiracies, etc. I had a very easy time picturing this world.

And of course, those cultists and conspiracies and mega-corporations soon get in the way of Agent de Tournay’s efforts at profiling Agent Carter, and the pair is caught up in trying to solve a massive plot to destroy the entire interplanetary government. As often as not, they resort to Carter’s decidedly non-standard methods of operating, though with time, Agent de Tournay helps him understand that waving a gun in people’s faces isn’t always the best answer to a problem.

Like I said, if you’re expecting something groundbreaking, you won’t find it here. But if you’re expecting a fun adventure story in a great sci-fi setting, this is just the ticket. And it would make a great movie!

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Indie writers, take an hour of your time today to watch Saffron Asteria meet the Writers Supporting Writers group to discuss her work. Saffron is an incredible supporter of indie authors, and an all-around cool person. I encourage you to subscribe to her podcast BOOKED and watch her site Indiosyncrasy, which is currently undergoing a revamp, but which has been and will soon again be a wonderful place for indies.

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This post isn’t just about football, though at first glance it appears to be. Stick with me, non-gridiron fans, it will be worth your while…

10 years ago tomorrow, the New England Patriots played the Denver Broncos for the AFC Championship. It’s one of my favorite football games ever, partially because I predicted how it would play out almost exactly. Defense wins championships, and the Denver defense of 2015 was tough enough that they could shut down the mighty Patriots and Tom Brady, with Peyton Manning more or less playing the football equivalent of El Cid.

But it wasn’t just that I called the game correctly that makes it a favorite memory of mine. I remember that at the same time I was watching it, I was also following news of the Paris premiere of a movie called Jane Got a Gun. I can literally remember seeing a picture of Natalie Portman and Joel Edgerton at the photocall at the same moment as Brady was throwing a seam route to Gronkowski on the Patriots’ last valiant, but ultimately doomed drive.

I’d been looking forward to Jane Got a Gun for months, and indeed I got to see it for myself on its US release five days later. See here for my retrospective thoughts on that film. It’s a small, but important, part of this story.

Fast-forward ten years, and a lot has changed. Not much of it, I am sad to report, for the better. Tom Brady won three more Super Bowls. Does Natalie Portman even still make movies? And there were… um… other things, too. We don’t need to get into specifics. To quote Jane Got a Gun: “It’s hard to remember how things seemed when you know how they actually turned out.”

But, like the Vicar of Bray, “whatsoever king may reign”, the Patriots will still be in the AFC championship, sir! And they are facing none other than the Denver Broncos again. Instead of Brady vs. Manning, we get Drake Maye (who?) vs. Jarrett Stidham (again, who?) What was it Marx said? Something about, “the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce”? Or, in the words of the anti-human philosopher Nick Land summarizing a scene in Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra:

The dwarf makes some kind of remark like, “even eternity is a circle,” or some kind of flip little remark… And Zarathustra says to the dwarf, “Oh, you know, don’t be an asshole. You know, like, it’s more interesting than that.”

It is, indeed, more interesting than that.

At first blush, you think: so the Broncos are starting some guy who hasn’t thrown a pass all year, the Patriots should easily beat them. But then you remember that even the Great and Powerful Belichick’s legendary defense lost to Nick Foles in a Super Bowl. And there is actually a possible advantage in starting a quarterback who hasn’t played all year: there is no film on him for the Patriots to study. Whatever little tics, tendencies, and tells Stidham has will have to be discovered as the game plays out.

I did say above that defense wins championships, and both the Broncos and the Patriots have outstanding defenses. It would be delightful for a traditionalist like me, in this modern era when all the rules are designed to give us 52-49 games, to see a conference championship decided by a score of 6-3. Or better yet, 5-0. Football is supposed to be a brutal, physical game where getting a field goal feels like a hard-won victory. Nowadays coaches pass up field goals like they are nothing. Is this related to the decline of modern society generally? I’m not saying that. I’m not not saying it either…

But, I’ve not yet finished explaining why that 2016 AFC Championship game is one of my favorites. Like the writers of Jane Got a Gun, I’ve deliberately structured this to keep the most important revelation for the end. You see, on that prediction post of mine from a decade ago, I made a friendly bet with a reader and fellow blogger named Barb Knowles. That led to an online friendship with Barb. And through Barb, I met Carrie Rubin. And Carrie pretty much single-handedly encouraged me to keep writing when I was about to give up.

It goes deeper than that. Through Carrie, I met Mark Paxson, and through him, Audrey Driscoll and Kevin Brennan. And through all of them, in various way, I’ve found Lorinda Taylor and Richard Pastore and Noah Goats and Peter Martuneac and Lydia Schoch and Chuck Litka and Roger Lewellyn. And through Noah, I’ve discovered Zachary Shatzer, and through Lydia, Adam Bertocci… and the list goes on and on. There’s a sidebar on this blog that has the full roster.

What if Barb hadn’t commented on that post? Or what if I had picked the Patriots, and she hadn’t felt the need to say anything as a result? Would I know any of these wonderful people? (Not to neglect the old guard, like Pat Prescott and Maggie, who have been with me since the Blogger days!)

So that’s why it’s one of my favorite football memories, even though on paper I should really dislike both teams. It led to some of the most enjoyable friendships I’ve made in my life, and I would be vastly poorer without them. It just goes to show you how a simple post about something as ephemeral as a football game can change your life in ways you never expected.

Anyway… I see Vegas favors the Patriots, just like they did last time. They’re probably right to. But as I just explained, I won big by picking the underdog ten years ago. And so… for auld lang syne:

Broncos: 22
Patriots: 20

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When the history of our era is written, what will they say about our literature?

I can’t help asking this sort of question. I read about Weimar literature and fin de siècle literature and Victorian literature and all other sorts of literature categorized by historical period. Each one has some pithy one-line summary associated with it: Weimar was “experimental”, fin de siècle was “decadent”, Victorian was “sentimental”, and on and on. These words can hardly be expected to do justice to vast numbers of books written by countless people over periods of years, and each one represents only a general consensus of literary critics and historians. But, you know, you’ve got to start somewhere.

So, again: what are they going to say about our era? You know they’ll say something; they have to. What they say is going to depend on which books they read.

Well, for those future historians writing about “Early 21st century literature”, the works of Adam Bertocci are not a bad place to start. I’ve reviewed many of them already, but since he is not incredibly famous and wealthy thanks to the massive success of his books, clearly I have not reviewed enough of them yet.

Confessions of an Off-Brand Princess starts with a Bertoccian staple: a young woman named Sydney who is working her way through grad school as an employee of her step-mother’s company, which provides rent-a-princess services for children’s birthday parties. Sydney has played versions of all the recognizable fairy tale princesses, albeit with enough plausible deniability so as not to be sued by a certain mega corporation that owns the rights to many of their likenesses.

Sydney likes her job well enough, and her step-sisters are anything but wicked. Still, even though she enjoys her work, she can’t help feeling a sense of malaise as well as loss: her memories of her mother’s early death haunt her, perhaps more than she cares to admit.

The book blends deeply-felt human emotions with the superficial and banal tropes of commercialized princess culture. This, I finally realized, is why I love Bertocci’s work so much. I’ve occasionally heard critics complain that he undercuts the raw human emotion of his stories with superficial jokes and pop culture references, but this misses the point: the life experience of anyone born in the 1980s or later has involved searching for genuine expressions of real humanity, now obscured in a techno-decadent jungle. Like Diogenes of Sinope, we are all searching through this mass of ephemera for something true.

What becomes apparent only rather late in the story, is that it is a retelling of a classic fairy tale. Fairy tales are a tradition which reflects the changing state of culture. Most of the famous ones emerged from the dark forest of German Romanticism only to be sanitized by aforementioned mega corporation into mere trite caricatures.

And yet, as Sydney learns over the course of the story, it all springs from the same well of human desire. And so, Bertocci crafts a retelling for the 21st-century, where concerns like social media and paying for college and not being taken to court by a company known for a cartoon mouse occupy our time and mental energy.

Beneath it all lies something more important, but it takes a while to emerge. But when it does, it’s like the beam of a headlight piercing the dark of night.

When they go to write the history of 21st-century literature, they will have to include Bertocci. Few authors currently going understand our era as well, and even fewer have the gift of translating it to the page as he does.