Writer of fiction, poetry and essays.

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Before we begin, I want to point out that this book, which is a science-fiction romance/adventure story, was published in 2014, a full five years before the Star Wars movie that started with the line “The dead speak!” In case you wanted further evidence that the indie book scene has fresher ideas than multi-billion dollar entertainment franchises.

But, as anyone who has read Lorinda Taylor’s The Man Who Found Birds Among the Stars series may be anticipating, this is far more Trek than Wars. It has a federation of intelligent life forms, all of whom work together in a peaceful spirit of friendly collaboration. At the center of the search for intelligent life is Asc. Kaitrin Oliva, a skilled linguistic anthropologist, or should I say, xeno-linguist.

When another exploration team brings back a huge, mortally wounded termite, Asc. Oliva attempts to communicate with it, and records the sounds it makes before it dies. From this, she is eventually able to work out the basics of the termite language, and so a return expedition is soon planned, led by the handsome but enigmatic Prof. Griffen Gwidian.

Prof. Gwidian has a good deal of the Byronic hero about him; cultured and aristocratic, moody and secretive about his past, he and Kaitrin embark upon a tumultuous relationship, to which much the expedition preparation is a backdrop. Interwoven with the romance of the human characters is a palace intrigue drama among the alien termites. These sections are handled almost like a play, complete with stage directions. I liked these parts best of all.

The book features plenty of world-building, including a detailed history of how Earth got to be in the shape it’s in by the 30th century. It’s an optimistic take, again very much in the vein of Roddenberry’s hopeful vision of the future. Of course, even in Taylor’s history of the intervening hundreds of years, humanity has to go through a few rough patches.

But the bulk of the story centers on Gwidian and Oliva’s stormy romance, and in that regard it feels like a more old-fashioned book. Almost like something a Brontë might have written. In the context of the high-tech, spacefaring setting, it was nice to have something so familiar to keep things grounded.

In short, lovers of both sci-fi and romance will find something to enjoy in this book. Taylor’s obvious appreciation for language helps bring both the human and non-human characters together. The only caveat is that, like The Man Who Found Birds Among the Stars, this book ends on a cliffhanger that makes reading the next book in the series an absolute must to see how things play out. So, if you read this one, know that you’ll be wanting to pick up the second one as soon as you finish.

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New York, New York… I’ve never actually been to New York City. Something tells me if I did, it would go not unlike Homer Simpson’s visit. As an ex-girlfriend once pointed out to me, New Yorkers are blunt and up front–they’ll tell you exactly how they feel. She liked that about them. I am more of the classic reserved midwesterner, which perhaps explains why she is an ex-girlfriend.

Nevertheless, I can appreciate the New York City sense of humor, and I think that Twitter, as it was called at the time that this book was compiled, is an ideal venue for the wit of an NYC-er. And I can think of absolutely no other person from New York City who has leveraged the form to greater effect than Adam Bertocci, whose witty sayings from 2010-2012 are collected in this volume.

The book is divided into broad categories by subject, and each section is prefaced with an explanation that puts the tweets in context. Some are about specific news topics on a given day, others are more general observations. It put me in mind of some of Nietzsche and other philosopher’s books that are compendia of short aphorisms. For instance:

If at first you don’t succeed, blog about it at length.

This, I did.

Bertocci’s style really is emblematic of Twitter at its best. It should be a place to find short phrases that make you think, or smile, or both. It should emphatically not be used for conducting affairs of state or debating ideological issues. Not that anyone would ever use it for that, of course, but wouldn’t it be terrible if someone did?

Sadly, I think this form of Twitter is largely gone. I normally shy away from giving my views on current events, but in this case, I feel the need to expound extensively on the reasons for this. I have collected my voluminous thoughts here.

Just kidding. I wouldn’t do that to you, at least not this week. Rather than spend any more time on my pontificating, I invite you to revisit those halcyon days when the bird app was young, and what better way to do it than by reading one of the leading lights of the medium? So if you feel nostalgic for that Golden Epoch, I encourage you to pick up this little collection.

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I’ve long had a rule that I don’t review books for which I was a beta reader. But I’ve decided that’s a stupid rule, and so I’m not going to follow it anymore. I love deciding the state of exception!

Now then, Glencrow Summer is a wonderful little “what I did on Summer vacation” story, in the vein of Litka’s A Summer in Amber. Glencrow tells the story of Ryeth Darth-Ruen, a minor clerk assigned by his uncle and boss to spend the summer at the family’s remote summer retreat, for the purpose of preventing his formidable Aunt Adora from completing her scandalous memoirs.

Fans of Wodehouse will instantly recognize this setup, but Litka quickly makes the story his own, with his typical blend of light romance, a dash of a sci-fi mystery (if I may say so, one of his best), and above all, a wistful feeling of melancholy. Ryeth is haunted by the memory of a lost love. Not that she’s lost in the sense of being dead or even estranged–they are still on good terms. But Ryeth has been, if you’ll pardon the expression, “friend-zoned”, and he’s having a hard time coping with it.

This might be Mr. Litka’s most romantic book, and also his most poignant. Which is not to say that it burdens the reader with excess emotional weight. It’s still a light story about pleasant people. Even the intimidating Aunt Adora isn’t as harsh as she seems at first.

I could go on, but as usual, the author has described his own work better than I ever could:

Are you weary of long, dark, and grim fantasy epics? Tired of evil priests, ruthless kings, sinister queens, knaves, and scoundrels—intricate palace intrigues and endless wars? Are you jaded by blood-soaked tomes of battle after battle, death after death? Need a break from accounts of disembowelment, torture, rape, and murder? In short, are you looking for a different sort of fantasy? Look no further.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: I’m sick of the grimdark. If the liberating force of the internet is good for anything, it is good for letting us find authors like this, unafraid to tell stories completely out of step with mainstream fashion. Go read Glencrow Summer, and lose yourself among the swaying trees and babbling streams of Litka’s world.

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What is creativity? What is art?

Anyone who creates art must at times ponder why we are driven to do it. Even to read, as someone once pointed out, is an act of staring at a page and hallucinating. The line between artistic endeavor and insanity is very fine, perhaps finer than we would like to admit. Which may be why the unreliable narrator concept fascinates me so.

Do fictional characters exist? Of course not, they’re fictional! Yet, if I asked you about Sherlock Holmes, you probably know what I’m talking about. He “exists” as a shared understanding in our minds, drawn from the stories by Arthur Conan Doyle and a thousand spinoffs. He exists as a concept even if not in actual corporeal form, and we can make reference to him, and even, if we so choose, make decisions based on words Doyle gave him to say.

Sherlock Holmes the character is thus, in a way, more real to us than Jerome Caminada, an actual police detective of the era. In Victorian England, Caminada existed, and Holmes was fiction. Nowadays, however, neither of them exist in the physical form, but Holmes’s “presence” is still felt.

Now, this is the part where you’re probably like, “I thought this was a book review?” Or possibly even “sir, this is a Wendy’s.”

Well, you see, even talking about this book requires you to be in a certain frame of mind. This sense of discombobulation you feel is necessary to relate to the story of Ilona Miller, the protagonist of Winter Journeys.

The story is told in interwoven form, alternating between Ilona’s time as a college in student in 1987, and her later life, 20 years later, as she struggles with being laid off from her job, leading her to reflect on her past, and that critical winter of ’87-’88, when her life took a dramatic, unhappy turn, as she became obsessed with Franz Schubert’s composition Winterreise, until her fascination with it came to override everything else in her life, including her own mental stability.

Ilona is one of the most tragic characters I’ve ever read about. Her fixation on the German romantic epic, combined with her obvious empathy and thoughtfulness, gradually override everything else in her life, destroying her relationships with those who care for her the most.

And, as we soon realize, she has never really recovered from this sad episode, even 20 years later. She has tried, no doubt, but in the end it is questionable whether in her heart she ever truly wanted to recover, or if what she wanted all along was to disappear into the wintry world of Schubert’s music. She reminds me of Eleanor Lance, the tragic heroine of The Haunting.

Which brings me to another important point: unlike Driscoll’s other novels, this is one is purely literary, with no supernatural elements.

Or is it?

All right, some of you might be getting tired of this constant second-guessing and ambiguity act that I am running. If so, you are probably in the wrong place, but nevertheless, let me try and explain what I mean: there are no ghosts, monsters, demons, Lovecraftian entities, or other demonstrably non-natural phenomena in this story. That much may be taken as certain.

However, due to the hallucinatory and unreliable-narrator aspects of the story, there is certainly a feeling of the unreal about much of it. Probably the best way to categorize Winter Journeys is as fantastique. Bizarre and inexplicable things happen. Why do they happen? Well, if we knew that, they wouldn’t be inexplicable, now would they?

This is one of those books you’ve got to experience. And the best way to experience it is the way I did: reading it on a frigid January night when it’s too cold to go anywhere, after a few shots of rum, and while having recently been reading about Baudrillard. And of course, listening to Winterreise is an absolute must.

Of course, in my hemisphere anyway, Sumer is icumen in, or at least, we’re moving out of the dead of winter. But rum and Baudrillard are still available; and even if neither is your depressant of choice, my point is that this is the kind of book you want to lose yourself in. Only not too much. Curiously, after finishing the book, I was left more than anything with a feeling of warning against connecting too closely with any work of fiction, lest the abyss should gaze back…

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I think I figured out Geoffrey Cooper’s secret. This is the 8th book in his Brad & Karen series, and when a series reaches that many, you start to wonder what magic is behind it.

Well, I’ve got it, I think: they are like cozy mysteries.

Of course, they don’t fit the standard definition of cozy mysteries. Generally, cozies have at most one or two deaths, fairly lightly described, not very grisly, and usually of unlikable characters. Not so in these thrillers–sometimes bad things happen to good people.

And cozy mysteries tend to be fairly lacking in high-tension fights. Again, not the case here. The Plagiarism Plot has one of the most high-powered combat sequences of the whole series; a full-blown military-style gun battle that would not be out of place in a Peter Martuneac book.

So, again, not cozy. Therefore, on what do I base my assertion that it’s like a cozy mystery?

Mostly, it goes back to the two leads. No matter how dark the crime, it’s always a pleasure to rejoin Brad & Karen in solving it, because they are both likable and fun.

And then of course, there’s the food, which both of them enjoy regularly. Kingsley Amis said that writing about food is the surest way to get your reader sympathizing with your characters, and I think he was right on.

There’s a real comfort in reading about these familiar characters, and that’s what makes it feel cozy, or cozy-adjacent, even as Brad and Karen are once again plunged into the cutthroat world of academia, where ruthlessly ambitious people are willing to go to any lengths to achieve their goals.

I highly recommend this book and this series; even if thrillers aren’t normally your thing. You might just find that you enjoy the less intense, quieter moments of the story.

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You might remember the name Theodore Judson from my review of his incredible book Fitzpatrick’s War. It’s one of my favorite books, and I would call it a must-read for anyone who enjoys sci-fi, except that the book is insanely expensive. I thought I paid a lot when I bought it for 12 bucks; as it turns out, that was a steal.

Ever since, I’ve had my eye on The Martian General’s Daughter. (BTW, that sentence shows you why italics matter. Otherwise you might get the wrong idea…) The only thing that kept me from snapping it up right after finishing Fitzpatrick’s War was the fact that some of the reviews were… less than glowing.

But, once I got a few spare coins in my pocket, so to speak, I picked up a copy. After all, the critics just had to be wrong. The man who wrote an epic like Fitzpatrick’s War couldn’t let us down, right?

I’m sad to report that it’s an “honestly great call from the haters” situation.

The Martian General’s Daughter is supposedly set in the late 23rd century, at the height of the Pan-Polarian Empire. It is narrated by Justa, the illegitimate daughter of General Peter Black, an old soldier loyally serving the Emperor, Mathias the Glistening. Emperor Mathias is a wise philosopher-king, whose teachings of self-denial and stoic wisdom are totally ignored by his handsome son, Luke Anthony, who is a sadistic madman obsessed with violent gladiatorial games. So when Mathias dies, and Luke assumes the purple, things start going to hell in a hand-basket.

Okay, I know most of my readers are knowledgeable sorts, so you probably already see the issue here, but just in case you don’t think about the Roman Empire multiple times a day, let me give it to you straight:  “Mathias the Glistening” is a dead ringer for Marcus Aurelius. And Luke Anthony is a carbon copy of his son, Commodus. (You can remember them by the handy mnemonic, Marcus had an aura, but when his son took over, everything went in the commode.)

Almost everything that happens in the story is just thinly-disguised episodes from the history of Rome. Occasionally stuff about rockets or guns or various other high-tech stuff gets thrown in, but it is immaterial. Almost literally, because there is also some sort of vaguely-described plague of metal-eating nano-machines that obligingly reduces nearly everything to Ancient Roman levels of technology.

I mean, seriously, beat for beat, the story is straight outta Gibbon. I’m not an expert on the period, but even I could see the really obvious parallels. The only time this becomes even slightly amusing is when an actor recites a heroic saga based on the deeds of the mythological hero, Elvis.

In his defense, Judson isn’t the first sci-fi author to do this. Isaac Asimov flat-out admitted to it with his Foundation series. But even he at least took some effort to change names and put some kind of novel spin on the whole thing. This  one is pretty much at the level of “this is Mr. Hilter” in terms of an effective disguise. I am not even kidding. Commodus’ favorite mistress was named Marcia. Luke Anthony’s mistress is named… wait for it now… Marcie.

Now, I suppose if you somehow don’t know anything at all about the Roman Empire, you might enjoy this book. Because no one can deny it’s a good story; the husk of a great nation, collapsing with the rot engendered by its own prosperity. The once-virtuous populace now amusing itself to death with festivals, cults, and gambling on sporting events; the leadership of the formerly august institutions handed to depraved criminals and perverts. A story full of debauchery, sex, and violence, underpinned by a longing felt in the heart of the few remaining noble souls for the memory of a better time. Perhaps Judson’s point in writing all this was that these are unending cycles which humanity is doomed to repeat forever. That’s the theme of Fitzpatrick’s War, too. Only in that book, it’s conveyed with subtlety, wit, and above all, originality.

It gives me no pleasure to write these words, and indeed, I debated whether to even post this review at all. I never post negative reviews of indie writers, and typically reserve my harshest critiques for well-known and successful authors. Judson is in a murky middle ground between the two–he’s not a household name, but Fitzpatrick’s War was published by a fairly large publisher, and over the years has acquired something of a cult following. As well it should.

What ultimately made me decide to write this was the reviews on Amazon. Particularly the ones that make the same points as I made above and then say that reading this made them reluctant to try another Judson book. That’s a mistake. Fitzpatrick’s War is fantastic, and I hate to think of anyone passing it up just because they were unimpressed by The Martian General’s Daughter. To make matters worse, this one is available on Kindle, but Fitzpatrick is not. Which raises the possibility that modern readers will base their opinions of Judson on this book, and that would be a shame.

If you really want a good story of intrigue and political machinations in a collapsing empire, check out something by Patrick Prescott or Eileen Stephenson. If you absolutely love their books, then you can read this one too. Despite everything I’ve said, it’s not actually bad, and if Judson had just made it straight-up historical fiction about Rome, I would have said it was an enjoyable enough read. But as it is, it’s very disappointing, especially from a writer who is obviously capable of great work.

Oh well. As Marcus Aurelius himself might well have said, “omnes vincere non potes.“

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I wanted to be sure and review a romance book for Valentine’s Day. But—and I don’t mean to hurt any feelings when I say this—most romance books just put me right off. They’re either too cutesy or else too hot and heavy for my taste. The latter type are what my mother calls “bodice-rippers” and Kevin Brennan calls “naked torso” books, after the typical cover art. We will discuss this more later.

There’s nothing “wrong” with either type of book, of course. But I like to seek out the strange, the esoteric, the bizarre… something that defies easy categorization by genre.

In Love With Eleanor Rigby was exactly what I was looking for. One way I could tell this was from the reviews on Amazon, most of which are from baffled fans of “normal” romance books who aren’t sure what they just read.

Well, I can see why. It’s ostensibly about a romance between a man named Joe and a woman named Tabitha. Already, you can see where the confusion sets in. “Eleanor Rigby” is not a character, but is a reference to a song of that name by the Beatles. If you know the song, it gives some idea of the tone of the book. I didn’t know the song and only listened to it as part of my research for this review.

Anyhow, Joe loves Tabitha, and hopes that Tabitha loves him back. But Joe has a secret: he’s a recovering alcoholic, and for some time he’s reluctant to tell Tabitha this, and when he finally works up the courage to do so, it is a tense moment in their blossoming relationship.

And that, in a nutshell, is the story. It’s a short story, and you might even suggest that not much happens. That’s because it’s really all about how the story is told. In other words, it’s literary fiction. The phrasing is intricate, philosophical and rambling. Joe, the narrator, is given to over-intellectualizing, as his AA therapist frequently reminds him. At times, he calls the nature of reality into question.

This is probably why a lot of the reviewers were flummoxed. And then there is the matter of the cover, which you’ll notice I didn’t post at the top like I normally do. Well, that’s because I think it’s important to know what the book is before seeing the cover. But now we need to talk about this:

So, it’s not exactly one of the “naked torso” books, but as you can see, a more southerly portion of the anatomy is highlighted. And given that there is only a passing reference to a beach in the book, it’s fair to say that this cover, while in some sense eye-catching, does not accurately reflect what kind of book it is. It’s rather like this early poster for Fritz Lang’s Metropolis.

On one hand, it’s probably not a good idea to market a work of literary fiction about struggles with addiction and loneliness with a cover that looks like a sexy romp. On the other hand, everyone I know who writes literary fiction tells me it’s basically impossible to sell it, so it’s hard to blame someone for resorting to such methods. Better to have a thought-provoking book marketed like tawdry pulp than a trashy story marketed like it’s something profound, don’t you think?

Well, I think so. But, it may be that the Venn diagram of people who read serious literary fiction and people who read books with swimsuit-clad posteriors on the cover are simply two non-intersecting circles. Which can lead to misunderstandings. For example, some reviewers claimed the book is full of typos. Believe me, I have read books that were full of typos. In fact, I may have even written books that were full of typos! And I don’t think most of the oddities in this text are typos. Rather, they are deliberate attempts by the author to convey a stream-of-consciousness.

Personally, I enjoyed the book, and I sympathized with the protagonist. This may come as a shock, but I too tend to over-think things. I think anyone else who does that will be likely to enjoy this story as well. I recommend checking it out. Whether you also choose to check out the models on the cover, I leave to your discretion.

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To recap the previous episode: when we left our hero, Daniel J. Boorstin, he had just discovered that the foundations of the U.S. government were under threat from competing narratives of pseudo-events, which flood the public discourse and make getting a true understanding of political reality from the news effectively impossible.

A lesser man might have turned away at this point, unable to face any further horrors. But not Boorstin! No, he had to know it all.

Having defined the pseudo-event, Boorstin proceeds to document how every aspect of life is becoming more and more dominated by images, facsimiles, reproductions and imitations. Travel, once truly an adventurous activity, is reduced to tourist packages that offer pre-planned experiences. Celebrities have taken the place of heroes; instead of being famous for great deeds, they are famous because they are famous. Images have replaced ideals as the ultimate goal of people, organizations, and nations.

Among the many aspects of American culture that Boorstin analyzes, I want to highlight some of his thoughts on the literary industry that may be of interest to my fellow authors. For example, this remarkable passage on machine translation:

What Thomas J. Watson Jr., president of International Business Machines Corporation, calls the ‘Information Explosion’ is having an ever wider and deeper effect on the form in which we are willing to have our ideas expressed. And incidentally, it cannot fail to affect the respect we show for literary or any other kind of form. Translation, until recently, has been among the subtlest, most difficult and most respected of literary arts…

Now, in order to make available the increasing printed resources in other languages, the new data processing industry has perfected a machine translator. The Mark II machine, developed jointly by IBM and the Air Force, can take a passage of Russian and translate it into what IBM calls ‘rough but meaningful English.’ Here is a sample product of the machine when applied to a passage of Russian literary criticism:

United States appeared new translation immortal novel L.N. Tolstago ‘war and world / peace’ Truth, not all novel, buttony several fragments out of it, even so few / little, that they occupy all one typewritten page. But nonetheless this achievement. Nevertheless culture not stands / costs on place. Something translate. Something print. Truth, by opinion certain literature sceptics, translation made enough / fairly ‘oak.’

This goes on, but you get the idea. Basically, they have been working on AI literature for way longer than you thought.

But that’s just the tip of the iceberg as far as what Boorstin sees going wrong with the literary industry:

The expression ‘best-seller’ is, of course, another by-product of the Graphic Revolution. It is an Americanism (still not found in some of the best English dictionaries) which first came into use in the United States at the beginning of the present century… the word ‘seller’ in England had originally meant a person who sold; only around 1900 did the word come to mean a book (later any other item) that sold well. This subtle transference of ideas was itself interesting, for the very expression ‘best seller’ or ‘seller’ now implied that a book somehow sold itself: that sales bred more sales.

And so:

Best-sellerism has thus come to dominate the book world. Leaders in the book trade themselves often attacked it. In his Economic Survey of the Book Industry in 1931, O.H. Cheney called best-sellerism ‘an intolerable curse on the industry.’ But, he explained, there was (and there remains) a substantial commercial basis for the institution: one way to make a book a best seller is to call it one. Then many potential book buyers ‘want to join the thousands—or hundreds of thousands—of the inner circle of the readers of the book.’… A buyer going into a bookstore is apt to ask for a best-seller; even if he doesn’t, he is apt to be urged to buy a book because it is one…

…One of the most interesting features of the institution is how flimsy is the factual basis for calling any particular book a best seller. To speak of a best seller—to use the superlative to apply not to one item but to a score of items—is, of course, a logical contradiction. But the bookstores are full of ‘best sellers.’

In Boorstin’s view, basically everything is like this; manufactured and carefully-curated simulacra replacing real experiences. And how desperate are we for something that seems genuine to cut through all the public relations verbiage and artificial hype of pseudo-events?

Our hunger for crime news and sports news, then, far from showing we have lost our sense of reality, actually suggests that even in a world so flooded by pseudo-events and images of all kinds, we still know (and are intrigued by) a spontaneous event when we see one.

I’m convinced that part of the reason for the celebration of Luigi Mangione is that his crime was something unexpected and unplanned, and thus instantly attention-grabbing in a world of ads and social media memes.

There’s more—much more—but I can’t quote the whole book, now can I? After all, it would be particularly ironic to confuse the map with the territory in this, of all cases!

Suffice it to say, Boorstin saw the post-Graphic Revolution world as full of images that loom larger than the things they are meant to represent. And just as pseudo-events beget more pseudo-events, so do images beget other images, endlessly refracting until the underlying reality is a distant memory.

In other words, to paraphrase J.B.S. Haldane, the modern world is not only faker than we suppose, it is faker than we can suppose. Everything is a shadow of a shadow of a shadow, to where even what we think of as “real” is actually only a really thick shadow.

There is only one sphere of life that Boorstin does not excoriate for its replacement of reality with image. Not because he didn’t see it—it is inconceivable that he did not—but probably just because he was too classy to mention it. Well, I like to think I run a family-friendly blog, even if that family is the Addams Family, but I simply can’t ignore this particular issue.

The topic I am thinking of is, of course, sex. Now, even in Boorstin’s day, sex and media had already intermingled to quite an extent, and it is no doubt only the good librarian’s conservative sense of propriety that kept him from mentioning Playboy etc. But modern life has seen the Sexual and Graphic Revolutions combine to bring forth some real monstrosities.

The examples are endless, but I am thinking of one particular social media controversy from last year. Someone on Twitter modified this poster for the Amazon Prime series Fallout, probably using AI to do so. The modified poster gave the central figure tighter pants and a more toned backside. The person who modified it believed the woman wasn’t eye-catching enough in the original depiction. Naturally, there was a backlash, and a resulting discussion about sexism, male gaze, etc. etc. etc.

Now, what part of this whole sad episode is fake? Haha, trick question: it’s fakery all the way down! It is a poster for a television show adapted from a video game, further modified by machine to resemble a more visually striking conception of the female form. Literally everything about it is fake, and to become emotionally invested in arguing about any aspect of it is to lose oneself in shadows to the nth power.

Indeed, image so dominates modern concepts of sex that it poses a real danger to human reproduction. Does this seem impossible? Did you ever hear the tragedy of Julodimorpha bakewelli, a species of Australian beetle whose males are so attracted to discarded beer bottles that they mate with them instead of the females of their kind? Could a similar fate befall humanity, with the proliferation of things like AI romantic partners and virtual reality erotica? I don’t know, but I think we’re trying to find out.

None of this would come as a surprise to Boorstin, who in 1962 saw a world awash in shadows and illusions. To the extent it has changed, it has been a change in degree, not in kind. Influencers may have replaced movie stars, and social media may have replaced the nightly news, but it is just a more refined version of the same problem.

So what, then, is the solution? It may be impressive that Boorstin saw and understood the danger of trends that now permeate the society you and I inhabit. But that is of no help to us, unless he can offer us some way out, some hope of finding something real to grasp.

Here is Boorstin’s closing statement. It wasn’t enough to save us in 1962, but maybe, just maybe, we can for once harness the power of the internet to promote something true. Marshall McLuhan, whom Boorstin references more than once, said that “the medium is the message.” I am praying he was wrong. We’ve got the medium, now Dr. Boorstin supplies the message:

Each of us must disenchant himself, must moderate his expectations, must prepare himself to receive messages coming in from the outside. The first step is to begin to suspect that there may be a world out there, beyond our present or future power to image or imagine. We should not worry over how to export more of the American images among which we live. We should not try to persuade others to share our illusions. We should try to reach outside our images. We should seek new ways of letting messages reach us; from our own past, from God, from the world which we may hate or think we hate. To give visas to strange and alien and outside notions… One of our grand illusions is the belief in a ‘cure’. There is no cure. There is only the opportunity for discovery. For this the New World gave us a grand, unique beginning. 

We must first awake before we can walk in the right direction. We must discover our illusions before we can even realize that we have been sleepwalking. The least and the most we can hope for is that each of us may penetrate the unknown jungle of images in which we live our daily lives. That we may discover anew where dreams end and where illusions begin. This is enough. Then we may know where we are, and each of us may decide for himself where he wants to go.

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In case you forgot, according to the Gambrel/Schoch Treaty of 2022, January 31 is Second Halloween. And since it falls on a Friday this year, I have to review something appropriate to the season.

But what would that be? I already reviewed plenty of Halloween and Halloween-adjacent books back in October. For this, I felt that something slightly different was in order. So, after some searching, I was able to scare up (ha!) this curious little volume.

If you’ve read much Lovecraft, you know he had a distinctive writing style. A style sometimes described as, “why use fewer words when more will do?” More charitably, we might say he liked to employ unusual adjectives to convey how strange and horrible many of the creatures and places he imagined were. So for instance, despite his own atheism, he would use “blasphemous” as an intensifier to describe just how thoroughly out of line with our normal rules of reality something might be. And of course, he more or less singlehandedly kept alive the use of the word “eldritch”, to the point that it is now almost synonymous with his style of horror.

The Lovecraftian mode is surprisingly seductive. Once you’ve read a couple of his stories, even if you smirk a little at how overwrought they are, you’ll likely find some of his literary mannerisms seeping into your own writing, like unhallowed shadows from the penumbra of unlighted corridors beyond time; nameless abysms swaying horribly to the piping of a damnable flute held in cacodaemoniacal claws…

See what I mean?

Osvaldo Felipe Agorarte clearly does, and has become so enchanted with HPL’s anti-lyrical prose that he has adapted famous historical documents in this manner. So for instance, the Declaration of Independence is rendered:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, but that there are dark powers beyond our understanding that seek to destroy our free will and replace it by a tyrannical rule.

And the Gettysburg Address is rewritten as:

It is for us to continue the fight against the terrors that threaten our world, to resist the madness that grips our enemies, and to ensure that our nation, under God, and that a government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish.

(For the sake of politeness, let’s just ignore what Lovecraft’s opinions on the actual versions of either of these texts would likely have been, okay?)

Is this rewriting amusing? Yes, it is, at least to me. It’s not quite as catchy as “I pledge allegiance to Queen Fragg and her mighty state of hysteria,” but still, it makes me chuckle.

On the other hand, it doesn’t necessarily continue to be amusing after the first five or six times. It reminded me of a typical Saturday Night Live skit (at least from the days when I watched SNL, which I really haven’t done since Tina Fey stopped appearing regularly), in that it takes a mildly funny joke and carries it on way too long.

As with SNL skits, to fully flesh it out to feature length, the joke needs some sort of development. What I would have liked to see would have been something where the documents start out more or less like we know them, but keep hinting, with increasing urgency as time progresses, at the terrible forces which threaten our world. Like a good Lovecraft story, or even better, an M.R. James story, the horror needs to creep up on you gradually. If we got the feeling that Jefferson was getting vague premonitions of cosmic horror, and by the time we get to say, Calvin Coolidge, he’s really staring down the barrel of a Nyarlathotep-style apocalypse, that would be interesting. (Although it’s tough to imagine “Silent Cal” talking like Lovecraft, no matter what was going on.)

But as it is, it’s kind of a one-trick pony. Admittedly, some of the historical documents are interesting in their own right, and I’d never even heard of some of them, so it was educational in that respect. And it is illustrated with some appropriately grotesque artwork, like that seen on the cover. On the other hand, it’s set in a font that I guess is meant to be Gothic, but frankly looked like a baroque, serifed equivalent of Comic Sans, which makes it a bit of a chore to read.

All in all, it’s an interesting concept, and could be the basis for something promising, but probably isn’t worth buying at its current price, unless you are madly in love with HPL’s prose and simply can’t get enough of it.

by on

Imagine this: one day you are wasting time scrolling through political Twitter in an election year. Amid all the angry ranting, the stupid jokes, the obligatory posturing, the bots, the polls, etc. you see some rando post a cover of a book, saying something like, “this will explain it.”

The book looks interesting, so you make a note of it. It’s expensive on Amazon, so instead you wait to get it from the library. Meanwhile, politics continues. The election happens. A great deal of pixels are expended by people writing about the election, the transition, and the meaning of it all. Social media is the epicenter of all these different sources of opinion, competing to emit the “hottest” of all possible “takes.”

Finally, you read the book. The book is over sixty years old. Indeed, it’s older than one of the candidates in the election. Most of the media we are familiar with today did not exist when it was written. Innumerable technological and cultural changes separate the book’s era and the present day.

So you know that whatever agenda the book’s author had, it can’t possibly have had much of anything to do with the current controversies. He didn’t have any type of modern “derangement syndrome”. Any such hang-ups he may have had are entombed with him. After all, you know what happened between 1962 and today, whereas the book can ipso facto only make educated guesses.

You might expect the book to feel outdated or quaint or charmingly naive. After all, many books from these bygone eras evoke nostalgia for their time, and what American hasn’t occasionally felt wistful for decades past? On the other hand, you might expect the book to feel like a relic in another way, to be offensive, or to expound views of the world that we find at best laughable or at worst repugnant. There are certainly a lot of old books that do that, too. When you read old books, your reaction is usually, “Ah, the good old days!” or “Oh, how far we have come!”. There is also a third category, which is “<sigh>, nothing ever changes…”

The Image is different. It does occasionally evoke all three of these feelings in various places. But none of them form your dominant reaction. Instead, it’s more like…

Well, put it another way: when you read an old book you expect to know more about your own time than the author of that book. That’s not to say you’re “smarter” than the author in any way; just that you are aware of facts that they are not. You read old books, generally, to either understand Universal Truths, or else to learn something about a particular period in the past.

This Daniel J. Boorstin, though… he understands our time perfectly. And he knows us—better, methinks, than we know ourselves.

JFK was still alive. Watergate not only wasn’t a scandal yet, but the place hadn’t even been built. Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan were just names on a map to the average American. And the nearest thing to “social media” was fan clubs.

Yet, though he was writing in the oft-romanticized era of a supposedly more innocent America, Boorstin saw, with terrifying clarity, the shape of things to come. Like a prophet of old, he inveighs against evils that 1960s America must have seen as remote and unfathomable, but are now familiar to the citizens (prisoners?) of the internet age.

The pervasive alienation of modern life; this strange world of propaganda, manufactured controversies, of information warfare, where elections turn on social media ads, and celebrity influencers shape the course of geopolitics… this is the world that anyone my age or younger has grown up in, and which, if we are to lead happy, fulfilling lives, we must somehow navigate. Or perhaps even escape.

Of course, just as a fish cannot know what water is, having never known its absence, it is hard for us to clearly see the pseudo-world that surrounds us. That is Boorstin’s other great advantage: he knew the other world, the one that came before… and so he is well-suited to be our Virgil, guiding us through post-modernity.

I know, this seems like a tall order for a simple book. And make no mistake, I’m not saying that reading it will instantly solve all our troubles. Like the famous quote from The Twilight Zone says, it will not end the nightmare… it will only explain it.

Let’s begin, shall we?

***

Boorstin starts off innocuously enough with a definition of “pseudo-event”: i.e. a manufactured event that exists solely for the purpose of making news. The quintessential example is the press conference, when politicians and other public figures speak to reporters. Any one who has ever watched a press conference knows there is an inherent artificiality to them, and yet they remain major topics of discussion among pundits. As Boorstin puts it, “demanding more than the world can give us, we require that something be fabricated to make up for the world’s deficiency.”

Once you’ve read Boorstin’s description of pseudo-events, you start to realize that the news is full of them. On a typical day, there are far more pseudo-events than real ones in the headlines. And one pseudo-event can spawn more. A good modern example would be when President Obama, after a controversy surrounding a clumsily-worded answer to a question at a press conference, held a “beer summit” to try and smooth over hurt feelings.

Increasingly, politics has come to be dominated by those most adept at generating pseudo-events. To use one of Boorstin’s examples, Senator Joseph McCarthy’s great talent was his ability to manipulate the press–many members of which despised him–into providing breathless coverage of his flamboyant announcements of names and lists of alleged communists.

As Boorstin explains, in the era of modern media, even a politician doing nothing at all can be “news”, e.g. Senator so-and-so’s silence on a given issue can spawn a whole series of speculative articles. The entire category of news known as “current events” is completely saturated with pseudo-events that it takes a truly spectacular development for reality to break through.

Pseudo-events are one epiphenomenon of what Boorstin calls “The Graphic Revolution”: the logarithmic increase in the transmissibility of, and demand for, news. This revolution began with the invention of the telegraph in the 1830s and continues to the present day.

One consequence of the Graphic Revolution, as the name implies, is the proliferation of images. Whereas before people learned information about the world primarily through wordy descriptions, either spoken or textual, beginning in the 19th century, images could now be readily created and reproduced. This change in how information was transmitted began to slowly redefine how people perceived reality, to the point where images could actually overshadow the real thing they were meant to represent.

(It’s not billed as such, but on top of everything else The Image is a fantastic chronicle of American history. Boorstin concisely narrates the flow of major technological and cultural changes that have shaped the country’s growth.)

Boorstin gives example after example of how pseudo-events can be staged to seem more interesting to viewers on television than those witnessing the event in person (e.g., a parade for General Douglas MacArthur’s return to the United States) or how a minor comment by a senator can be blown up into a full-fledged controversy. Real events are later re-enacted for the cameras, and so the reenactment rather than the reality forms the dominant image in the public mind.

Summing up, Boorstin says that, “our ‘free market place of ideas’ is a place where people are confronted by competing pseudo-events and are allowed to judge among them.” With the rise of pseudo-events, which are neither wholly true nor wholly false, Boorstin argues, “the American citizen thus lives in a world where fantasy is more real than reality.” Which has frightening implications for America’s democratic institutions. When a government is built on the idea of a well-informed populace, what happens when the very concept of what it means to be “well-informed” becomes blurry?

So, by now I hope you are saying to yourself, “Well, this sounds like a very intriguing book. Perhaps I shall have to see if I can acquire a copy.”

Reader, I have not finished summarizing the book yet. What I have described above is only Chapter 1.

The Image is not just about the collapse of America’s governing institutions as a result of our increasing inability to discern lies from truth. As Arthur C. Clarke would say, “nothing as trivial as that.” From here, things are going to get much weirder, much darker, and much more personal. What we’ve covered so far is like the titular play in the book The King in Yellow: where reading the seemingly-innocuous first act sucks you in, and only once your eyes fall on the opening lines of the second act do you descend irrevocably into madness.

Except, of course, in reverse. Obviously, I think that reading The Image is actually a path to sanity, to making sense of an increasingly mad world. Then again, Hildred Castaigne would say the same thing about the play The King in Yellow, so it really is all a question of trust.

I make a pact with you, dear reader: you check out the free sample on Amazon, and see if you’re intrigued enough to want to read the whole thing. Then come back here in, oh, I don’t know–shall we say two weeks? Two weeks it is! And there will be no more shadows between us, only truth, as exists between master and apprentice blogger and reader.