From "Perspectives"

The other day I received a very nice birthday note in the mail. Among the contents of the envelope were a couple of pieces either photocopied or torn from a book of collected essays. I so appreciated receiving them and enjoyed reading them that I'm slapping them up here. The sender underlined certain portions she thought particularly pertinent; these emphases I am keeping to myself.

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January 9, 1937

On Being Modern-Minded

Bertrand Russell

Our age is the most parochial since Homer. I speak not of any geographical parish: the inhabitants of Mudcombe-in-the-Meer are more aware than at any former time of what is being done and thought at Praha, at Gorki or at Peiping. It is in the chronological sense that we are parochial: as the new names conceal the historic cities of Prague, Nijni-Novgorod, and Pekin, so new catchwords hide from us the thoughts and feelings of our ancestors, even when they differed little from our own. We imagine ourselves at the apex of intelligence, and cannot believe that the quaint clothes and cumbrous phrases of former times can have invested people and thoughts that are still worthy of our attention. If Hamlet is to be interesting to a really modern reader, it must first be translated into the language of Marx or of Freud, or better still, into a jargon inconsistently compounded of both. I read some years ago a contemptuous review of a book by Santayana, mentioning an essay on Hamlet 'dated, in every sense, 1908' -- as if what has been discovered since then made any earlier appreciation of Shakespeare irrelevant and comparatively superficial. It did not occur to the reviewer that his review was 'dated, in every sense, 1936'. Or perhaps this thought did occur to him, and filled him with satisfaction. He was writing for the moment, not for all time; next year he will have adopted the new fashion in opinions, whatever it may be, and he no doubt hopes to remain up to date as long as he continues to write. Any other ideal for a writer would seem absurd and old-fashioned to the modern-minded man.

The desire to be contemporary is of course new only in degree; it has existed to some extent in all previous periods that believed themselves to be progressive. The Renaissance had a contempt for Gothic centuries that had preceded it; the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries covered priceless mosaics with whitewash; the Romantic movement despised the age of the heroic couplet. Eighty years ago Lecky reproached my mother for being led by intellectual fashion to oppose fox-hunting: ''I am sure,'' he wrote, ''you are not really at all sentimental about foxes or at all shocked at the prettiest of all the assertions of women's rights, riding across country. But you always look upon politics and intellect as a fierce race and are so dreadfully afraid of not being sufficiently advanced or intellectual.'' But in none of these former times was the contempt for the past nearly as complete as it is now. From the Renaissance to the end of the eighteenth century men admired Roman antiquity; the Romantic movement revived the Middle Ages; my mother, for all her belief in nineteenth-century progress, constantly read Shakespeare and Milton. It is only since the 1914-18 war that it has been fashionable to ignore the past en bloc.

The belief that fashion alone should dominate opinion has great advantages. It makes thought unnecessary and puts the highest intelligence within the reach of everyone. It is not difficult to learn the correct use of such words as 'complex', 'sadism', 'Oedipus', 'bourgeois', 'deviation', 'left'; and nothing more is needed to make a brilliant writer or talker. Some, at least, of such words represented much thought on the part of their inventors; like paper money they were originally convertible to gold. But they have become for most people inconvertible, and in depreciating have increased nominal wealth in ideas. And so we are enabled to despise the paltry intellectual fortunes of former times.

The modern-minded man, although he believes profoundly in the wisdom of his period, must be presumed to be very modest about his personal powers. His highest hope is to think first what is about to be thought, to say what is about to be said, and to feel what is about to be felt; he has no wish to think better thoughts than his neighbours, to say things showing more insight, or to have emotions which are not those of some fashionable group, but only slightly ahead of others in point of time. Quite deliberately he suppresses what is individual in himself for the sake of the admiration of the herd. A mentally solitary life, such as that of Copernicus, or Spinoza, or Milton after the Restoration, seems pointless according to modern standards. Copernicus should have delayed his advocacy of the Copernican system until it could be made fashionable; Spinoza should have been either a good Jew or a good Christian; Milton should have moved with the times, like Cromwell's widow, who asked Charles II for a pension on the ground that she did not agree with her husbands politics. Why should an individual set himself as an independent judge? Is it not clear that wisdom resides in the blood of the Nordic race or, alternatively, in the proletariat? And in case what is the use of an eccentric opinion, which never can hope to conquer the great agencies of publicity?

The money rewards and widespread though ephemeral fame which those agencies have made possible place temptations in the way of able men which are difficult to resist. To be pointed out, admired, mentioned constantly in the press, and offered easy ways of earning much money is highly agreeable; and when this is open to a man, he finds it difficult to go on doing the work that he himself thinks best and is inclined to subordinate his judgement to the general opinion.

Various other factors contribute to this result. One of these is the rapidity of progress which has made it difficult to do work that will not soon be superseded. Newton lasted till Einstein; Einstein is already regarded by many as antiquated. Hardly any man of science, nowadays, sits down to write a great work, because he knows that, while he is writing it, others will discover new things that will make it obsolete before it appears. The emotional tone of the world changes with equal rapidity, as wars, depressions, and revolutions chase each other across the stage. And public events impinge upon private lives more forcibly than in former days. Spinoza, in spite of his heretical opinions, could continue to sell spectacles and meditate, even when his country was invaded by foreign enemies; if he had lived now, he would in all likelihood have been conscripted or put in prison. For these reasons a greater energy of personal conviction is required to lead a man to stand out against the current of his time than would have been necessary in any previous period since the Renaissance.

The change has, however, a deeper cause. In former days men wished to serve God. When Milton wanted to exercise 'that one talent which is death to hide', he felt that his soul was 'bent to serve therewith my Maker.' Every religiously minded artist was convinced that God's aesthetic judgements coincided with his own; he had therefore a reason, independent of popular applause, for doing what he considered his best, even if his style was out of fashion. The man of science in pursuing truth, even if he came into conflict with current superstition, was still setting forth the wonders of Creation and bringing men's imperfect beliefs more nearly into harmony with God's perfect knowledge. Every serious worker, whether artist, philosopher or astronomer, believed that in following his convictions he was serving God's purposes. When with the progress of enlightenment this belief began to grow dim, there still remained the True, the Good and the Beautiful. Non-human standards were still laid up in heaven, even if heaven had no topographical existence.

Throughout the nineteenth century the True, the Good and the Beautiful preserved their precarious existence in the minds of earnest atheists. But in their very earnestness was their undoing, since it made it impossible for them to stop at a halfway house. Pragmatists explained that Truth is what it pays to believe. Historians of morals reduced the Good to a matter of tribal custom. Beauty was abolished by the artists in a revolt against the sugary insipidities of a philistine epoch and in a mood of fury in which satisfaction is to be derived only from what hurts. And so the world was swept clear not only of God as a person but of God's essence as an ideal to which man owed an ideal allegiance; while the individual, as a result of a crude and uncritical interpretation of sound doctrines, was left without any inner defence against social pressure.

All movements go too far, and this is certainly true of the movement toward subjectivity, which began with Luther and Descartes as an assertion of the individual and has culminated by an inherent logic in his complete subjection. The subjectivity of truth is a hasty doctrine not validly deducible from the premises which have been thought to imply it; and the habits of centuries have made many things seem dependent on theological belief which are not so. Men lived with one kind of illusion, and when they lost it they fell into another. But it is not by old error that new error can be combated. Detachment and objectivity, both in thought and feeling, have been historically but not logically associated with certain traditional beliefs; to preserve them without these beliefs is both possible and important. A certain degree of isolation both in space and time is essential to generate the independence required for the most important work; there must be something which is felt to be of more importance than the admiration of the contemporary crowd. We are suffering not from the decay of theological beliefs but from the loss of solitude.

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December 5, 1923

On H.L. Mencken

H.L. Mencken

Ask a professional critic to write about himself and you simply ask him to do what he does every day in the practice of his art and mystery. There is, indeed, no criticism that is not a confidence, and there is no confidence that is not self-revelation. When I denounce a book with mocking and contumely, and fall upon the poor author in the brutal, Asiatic manner of a drunken longshoreman, a Ku Kluxer, or a midshipman at Annapolis, I am only saying, in the trade cant, that the fellow disgusts me -- that his ideas and his manners are somehow obnoxious to me, as those of a Methodist, a golf-player, or a clog-dancer are obnoxious to me -- in brief, that I hold myself to be a great deal better than he is, and am eager to say so. And when, on the other hand, I praise a book in high, astounding terms, and speak of the author as if his life and sufferings were of capital importance to the world, then I am merely saying that I detect something in him, of prejudice, tradition, habit of mind, that is much like something within myself, and that my own life and sufferings are of the utmost importance to me.

That is all there ever is in criticism, once it gets beyond cataloguing. No matter how artfully the critic may try to be impersonal and scientific he is bound to give himself away. In fact, his very effort to be impersonal and scientific is a form of giving himself away, as the writings of my eminent colleague, Prof. Dr. Erskine, well demonstrate. I have never had the honor of being presented to Erskine, but I know quite as well as his grandmother that he is essentially a shy man -- that the winds of doctrine alarm him and he has no stomach for rough adventure. Hence his plea for decorum and tradition, i.e., for what has passed the stage of experiment and danger, i.e., for safe harbors and refuges. He can no more get himself out of his criticism than he can get himself out of his skin. Nor can, at the other pole, the critical Bolsheviki of Greenbaum Village -- all of them as foreign and as loathsome to Erskine, I daresay, as so many Nietzsches or Beethovens. When these bright young men print profound aesthetic treatises upon the art of Fatty Arbuckle, Gertrude Stein, and the "Parisian Widows" burlesque troupe, they say, of course, nothing that is pertinent to aesthetics, but they do say something extremely amusing about their own tastes, and hence about themselves. More, they say something even more amusing about the seminaries where they were bred to the humanities.

With criticism thus so transparent, so unescapably revelatory, I often marvel that the gentlemen who concern themselves with my own books, often very indignantly, do not penetrate more competently to my essence. Even for a critic I am excessively garrulous and confidential; nevertheless, it is rare for me to encounter a criticism that hits me where I live and have my being. A great deal of ink is wasted trying to discover and denounce my motive in being a critic at all. I am, by one theory, a German spy told off to flay, terrorize, and stampede the Anglo-Saxon. By another I am a secret radical, while professing to admire Coolidge, Judge Gary, and Genghis Khan. By a third, I am a fanatical American chauvinist, bent upon defaming and ruining the motherland. All these notions are nonsense; only the first has even the slightest plausibility. The plain truth is -- and how could it be plainer? -- that I practice criticism for precisely the same reason that every other critic practices it: because I am a vain fellow, and have a great many ideas on all sorts of subjects, and like to put them into words and harass the human race with them. If I could confine this flow of ideas to one subject I'd be a professor and get some respect. If I could reduce it, say, to one idea a year, I'd be a novelist, a dramatist, or a newspaper editorial writer. But being unable to staunch the flux, and having, as I say, a vast and exigent vanity, I am a critic of books, and through books of Homo sapiens, and through Homo sapiens of God.

So much for the motive. What, now, of the substance? What is the fundamental faith beneath all the spurting and coruscating of ideas that I have just mentioned? What do I primarily and immovably believe in, as a Puritan believes in hell? I believe in liberty. And when I say liberty, I mean the thing in its widest imaginable sense -- liberty up to the extreme limits of the feasible and tolerable. I am against forbidding anybody to do anything, or say anything, or think anything so long as it is at all possible to imagine a habitable world in which he would be free to do, say, and think it. The burden of proof, as I see it, is always upon the policeman, which is to say, upon the lawmaker, the theologian, the right-thinker. He must prove his case doubly, triply, quadruply, and then he must start all over and prove it again. The eye through which I view him is watery and jaundiced. I do not pretend to be "just" to him -- any more than a Christian pretends to be just to the devil. He is the enemy of everything I admire and respect in this world -- of everything that makes it various and amusing and charming. He impedes every honest search for the truth. He stands against every sort of good-will and common decency. His ideal is that of an animal trainer, an archbishop, a major general in the army. I am against him until the last galoot's ashore.

This simple and childlike faith in the freedom and dignity of man -- here, perhaps, stated with undue rhetoric -- should be obvious, I should think, to every critic above the mental backwardness of a Federal judge. Nevertheless, very few of them, anatomizing my books, have ever showed any sign of detecting it. But all the same even the dullest of them has, in his fashion, sensed it; it colors unconsciously all the diatribes about myself that I have ever read. It is responsible for the fact that in England and Germany (and, to the extent that I have ever been heard of at all, in France and Italy) I am regarded as a highly typical American -- in truth, as almost the archetype of the American. And it is responsible equally for the fact that here at home I am often denounced as the worst American unhung. The paradox is only apparent. The explanation of it lies in this: that to most Europeans the United States is still regarded naively as the land of liberty par excellence, whereas to most Americans the thing itself has long ceased to have any significance, and to large numbers of them, indeed, it has of late taken on an extreme obnoxiousness. I know of no civilized country, indeed, in which liberty is less esteemed than it is in the United States today; certainly there is none in which more persistent efforts are made to limit it and put it down. I am thus, to Americans, a bad American, but to Europeans, still unaware of the practical effects of the Wilson idealism and the Roosevelt saloon-bouncer ethic, I seem to be an eloquent spokesman of the true American tradition. It is a joke, but the joke is not on me.

Liberty, of course, is not for slaves: I do not advocate inflicting it on men against their conscience. On the contrary, I am strongly in favor of letting them crawl and grovel all they please -- before the Supreme Court of the United States, Gompers, J. P. Morgan, Henry Cabot Lodge, the Anti-Saloon League, or whatever other fraud or combination of frauds they choose to venerate. I am thus unable to make the grade as a Liberal, for Liberalism always involves freeing human beings against their will -- often, indeed, to their obvious damage, as in the cases of the majority of Negroes and women. But all human beings are not congenital slaves, even in America. Here and there one finds a man or a woman with a great natural passion for liberty -- and a hard job getting it. It is, to me at least, a vast pleasure to go to the rescue of such a victim of the herd, to give him some aid and comfort in his struggle against the forces that seek to regiment and throttle him. It is a double pleasure to succor him when the sort of liberty he strives for is apparently unintelligible and valueless -- for example, liberty to address conventions of the I.W.W., to read the books of such bad authors as D. H. Lawrence and Petronius Arbiter, to work twelve hours a day, to rush the can, to carry red flags in parades, to patronize osteopaths and Christian Science healers, to belong to the best clubs. Such nonsensical varieties of liberty are especially sweet to me. I have wrecked my health and dissipated a fortune defending them -- never, so far as I know, successfully. Why, then, go on? Ask yourself why a grasshopper goes on jumping.

But what has liberty to do with the art of literary criticism, my principal business in this vale? Nothing -- or everything. It seems to me that it is perfectly possible to write profound and valuable literary criticism without entering upon the question of freedom at all, either directly or indirectly. Aesthetic judgments may be isolated from all other kinds of judgments, and yet remain interesting and important. But this isolation must be performed by other hands: to me it is as sheer a psychological impossibility as believing that God condemned forty-two little children to death for poking fun at Elisha's bald head. When I encounter a new idea, whether aesthetic, political, theological, or epistemological, I ask myself, instantly and automatically, what would happen to its proponent if he should state its exact antithesis. If nothing would happen to him, then I am willing and eager to listen to him. But if he would lose anything valuable by a volte face -- if stating his idea is profitable to him, if the act secures his roof, butters his parsnips, gets him a tip -- then I hear him with one ear only. He is not a free man. Ergo, he is not a man. For liberty, when one ascends to the levels where ideas swish by and men pursuer Truth to grab her by the tail, is the first thing and the last thing. So long as it prevails the show is thrilling and stupendous; the moment it fails the show is a dull and dirty farce.

Let's Read Pierre: Books X - XIV

Shit just got real. And it got real fast -- which is rather a surprise, given the torpor with which Pierre has meandered along for the preceding 200 pages. For nearly half the book's length, Pierre just sort of plods about between his mother, Isabel, and Lucy, worrying, deliberating, and waffling over what's to be done.

And then all of a sudden, there's Book XI, "He Crosses the Rubicon." What a perfect title for this chapter.

In its abruptness, Pierre's expulsion from Saddle Meadows recalls the awesome Götterdämmerung at Moby Dick's conclusion. (Yes, I've just been slathering for an opportunity to use that word.) In that book, Melville spills gallons of ink across hundreds of pages constructing the Pequod, its crew, and the fantastic human (and/or) American ingenuity it represents, and then in the course of only eight paragraphs it's all erased from existence. In Pierre, Melville takes two hundred pages to create Pierre's idyllic home, charmed life of security and abundance, his loves, and then his dilemma and indecision -- and then after a single chapter, he loses virtually everything.

Now Lucy can't stand the sight of him: "drive it away from me!" she screams to her maid (italics mine). His mother immediately disowns him and severs him from the family fortune. The folks of Saddle Meadows groan about how awful a thing it is for Pierre to have gone so rotten, but none have any comfort or kind words to offer him. And now he's off to New York City with a bit of gold to pawn, zero experience living on his own, and absolutely no plan.

I wonder if this is the last we'll be seeing of Mary Glendinning, Pierre's queenly mother, who becomes a steely, icy empresses when her pride is touched. If she's to be bowing off the stage, she certainly does so on a strong note. You can definitely see a stroke of Ahab in her parting words to Lucy's maid.

From Moby Dick, Chapter 124:

'Men,' said he, steadily turning upon the crew, as the mate handed him the things he had demanded, 'my men, the thunder turned old Ahab's needles; but out of this bit of steel Ahab can make one of his own, that will point as true as any.'

Abashed glances of servile wonder were exchanged by the sailors, as this was said; and with fascinated eyes they awaited whatever magic might follow. But Starbuck looked away.

With a blow from the top-maul Ahab knocked off the steel head of the lance, and then handing to the mate the long iron rod remaining, bade him hold it upright, without its touching the deck. Then, with the maul, after repeatedly smiting the upper end of this iron rod, he placed the blunted needle endwise on the top of it, and less strongly hammered that, several times, the mate still holding the rod as before. Then going through some small strange motions with it -- whether indispensable to the magnetizing of the steel, or merely intended to augment the awe of the crew, is uncertain -- he called for linen thread; and moving to the binnacle, slipped out the two reversed needles there, and horizontally suspended the sail-needle by its middle, over one of the compass-cards. At first, the steel went round and round, quivering and vibrating at either end; but at last it settled to its place, when Ahab, who had been intently watching for this result, stepped frankly back from the binnacle, and pointing his stretched arm towards it, exclaimed, -- 'Look ye, for yourselves, if Ahab be not the lord of the level loadstone! The sun is East, and that compass swears it!'

One after another they peered in, for nothing but their own eyes could persuade such ignorance as theirs, and one after another they slunk away.

In his fiery eyes of scorn and triumph, you then saw Ahab in all his fatal pride.

From Pierre, Book 12.4:

So the lady moved to quit the room, saying that once every two hours she would send to know how Lucy fared.

"But where, where is her aunt, Martha?" she exclaimed, lowly, pausing at the door, and glancing in sudden astonishment about the room; "surely, surely, Mrs. Llanyllyn -- "

"Poor, poor old lady," weepingly whispered Martha, "she hath caught infection from sweet Lucy's woe; she hurried hither, caught one glimpse of that bed, then fell like dead upon the floor. The doctor hath two patients now, lady" -- glancing at the bed, and tenderly feeling Lucy's bosom, to mark if yet it heaved. "Alack! alack! oh, reptile! reptile! that could sting so sweet a breast! fire would be too cold for him -- accursed!"

"Thy own tongue blister the roof of thy mouth!" cried Mrs. Glendinning, in a half-stifled, whispering scream. " 'Tis not for thee, hired one, to rail at my son, though he were Lucifer, simmering in Hell! Mend thy manners, minx!"

And she left the chamber, dilated with her unconquerable pride, leaving Martha aghast at such venom in such beauty.

One of my favorite Mary Glendinning moments in these chapters is her exchange with the local priest Mr. Falsgrave. Much of Saddle Meadows' Eden-like facade has been breached in preceding chapters, and not even poor Falsgrave goes unspared. You'll remember how much, much earlier in Book V, Melville extols the clergyman's grace and godliness across three or four entire pages. And now Mary flat out calls him a useless sissy and kicks him out of the house in a just a few paragraphs. After Falsgrave's evasive exchange with Pierre back in Book VIII, we have reason to guess as much of the clergyman's true character, but Mary's icy dismissal of him conclusively punctuates this assessment and sends the man packing. I doubt we'll be seeing him again.

The highlight of these chapters, as far as I'm concerned, is Plinlimmon's pamphlet in Book XIV, and probably because of its similarities to my favorite chapter in Moby Dick: Chapter 9, "The Sermon."

Similarity #1: I get the impression that Melville's take on the Book of Jonah and the excerpt from Plotinus Plinlimmon's "Chronometricals and Horologicals" were composes independently of the novels in which they appear. I could very easily be mistaken about this -- but even from a writer with such a predilection for digression as Melville, these chapters rather seem to me like foreign materials inserted and integrated into the larger narratives. I imagine what Melville presents as an excerpt from a philosophical tract was just some half-finished essay he had sitting in the drawer of his writing desk. Why else would he take such a tone of tongue in cheek deprecation in introducing it to the reader -- which appears all the more directed toward himself by his unusual use of the authorial "I" in doing so? And why else would he give the writer his permission to skip over it?

The pamphlet rather reminds me of the textual interludes between chapters in Watchmen. You can skip over them and the narrative will lose no coherency, but the significance of certain events will be lost without the historical context the interludes provide. And by the same turn, the reader who passes over Plinlimmon's pamphlet in Pierre (of course, if he's already slogged this far through the book, why would he start skipping around now?) deprives himself of some crucial metaphysical context.

Similarity #2: Both sequences (the sermon in Moby Dick, the pamphlet in Pierre) more or less encapsulate the pith of the novel containing them.

What Mapple's sermon means to/says about Moby Dick is a chat for elsewhere. But what does Plinlimmon's pamphlet say about Pierre?

If I had to venture a guess without having read the rest of the novel -- which is exactly what I'm doing -- then I'd say the answer is: pretty much everything.

You can read (or hopefully reread) the pamphlet here. But here's the short of it, by my understanding:

Heaven and God are basically unattainable ideals in this world. That which is of the Earth is fundamentally out of tune with that which is of God.

Sometimes delivers a person called chronometer to the world; Melville/Plinlimmon names Jesus as an example. This special soul is attuned to Heaven's "time," making him an incorruptible, sinless, sacrosanct soul, and therefore compelled to bring the Earth more in tune with God and Heaven. He usually suffers for it and he can never wholly succeed, but he does set an example, deliver a message, and reverse the tide to some small extent.

The chronometrical soul is absolutely exceptional and extremely rare, as it's obviously impossible for most people to lead a life more saintly than the saints'. God and the Bible set impossibly lofty standards, but these aren't the standards to which most people should necessarily be held:

Nevertheless, if a man gives with a certain self-considerate generosity to the poor; abstains from doing downright ill to any man; does his convenient best in a general way to do good to his whole race; takes watchful loving care of his wife and children, relatives, and friends; is perfectly tolerant to all other men's opinions, whatever they may be; is an honest dealer, an honest citizen, and all that; and more especially if he believe that there is a God for infidels, as well as for believers, and acts upon that belief; then, though such a man falls infinitely short of the chronometrical standard, though all his actions are entirely horologic; -- yet such a man need never lastingly despond, because he is sometimes guilty of some minor offense: -- hasty words, impulsively returning a blow, fits of domestic petulance, selfish enjoyment of a glass of wine while he knows there are those around him who lack a loaf of bread. I say he need never lastingly despond on account of his perpetual liability to these things; because not to do them, and their like, would be to be an angel, a chronometer; whereas, he is a man and a horologe.

In books 5.5 and 5.6, Melville insinuates that Pierre's motives and ambitions are Christlike; his strivings are patently chronometrical. To illustrate vis-à-vis Hamlet...!

Crime and justice in Hamlet: Prince Hamlet has reason to suspect his uncle Claudius -- the recently-throned king of Denmark, his mother's beloved new husband, and a thus far pretty gracious stepfather -- of having murdered the late King Hamlet. Hamlet cannot let this crime stand. Eventually, after a lot of waffling, he resolves to murder Claudius at any cost.

Crime and justice in Pierre: "Prince" Pierre discovers that his father secretly impregnated a poor French woman and then abandoned her for Mary. He finds his lost half-sister, Isabel, drifting through toil and poverty. Pierre cannot let this crime stand. Absolutely refusing to leave Isabel in her current situation, and yet equally unwilling to drag his father's name and mother's pride through the mud by revealing Isabel's identity and paternity, Pierre (eventually, after a lot of waffling) takes the responsibility for the fruit of his father's sins upon his own shoulders.

So he enacts a new life under a noble lie: "hello Lucy, hello mother. Sorry, but I've just eloped with a dirt-poor servant girl named Isabel. Sorry!"

He frees Isabel from servitude (at least temporarily) and gives her a family, and does so without tarnishing his father's memory, but sacrifices his own honor and happiness in the doing. If this isn't Christlike, it's certainly at least saintly.

But if I had to guess, our man Pierre is no chronometer. And if you're not a chronometer (and you almost definitely aren't), it's not your business to try acting like one:

By inference it follows, also, that he who folding in himself a chronometrical soul, seeks practically to force that heavenly time upon the earth; in such an attempt he can never succeed, with an absolute and essential success. And as for himself, if he seek to regulate his own daily conduct by it, he will but array all men's earthly time-keepers against him, and thereby work himself woe and death. Both these things are plainly evinced in the character and fate of Christ, and the past and present condition of the religion he taught. But here one thing is to be especially observed. Though Christ encountered woe in both the precept and the practice of his chronometricals, yet did he remain throughout entirely without folly or sin. Whereas, almost invariably, with inferior beings, the absolute effort to live in this world according to the strict letter of the chronometricals is, somehow, apt to involve those inferior beings eventually in strange, unique follies and sins, unimagined before. It is the story of the Ephesian matron, allegorized.

And so Pierre finds himself getting sort of uncomfortably turned on by his own sister. And so Pierre burns the portrait of his young father along with all of his family letters and keepsakes, thereby severing and cauterizing his every last bond with the family whose honor meant more to him than his happiness. And so Pierre Ophelizes his beloved (now-ex) fiancee Lucy. And so Pierre and Isabel head toward a tenebrous future in New York City, cut off from the Glendinning fortune and without any viable long-term prospects, and they're taking poor ruined Delly along for the ride.

Things are going to get a lot worse a lot faster from here on out.

If anyone out there is still reading along, what are your thoughts?


Postscript Passage of interest: perhaps it's because I've been spending so much time with Quakers lately, but the first couple paragraphs of Book XIV jumped out at me:

All profound things, and emotions of things are preceded and attended by Silence. What a silence is that with which the pale bride precedes the responsive I will, to the priest's solemn question, Wilt thou have this man for thy husband? In silence, too, the wedded hands are clasped. Yea, in silence the child Christ was born into the world. Silence is the general consecration of the universe. Silence is the invisible laying on of the Divine Pontiff's hands upon the world. Silence is at once the most harmless and the most awful thing in all nature. It speaks of the Reserved Forces of Fate. Silence is the only Voice of our God.

Nor is this so august Silence confined to things simply touching or grand. Like the air, Silence permeates all things, and produces its magical power, as well during that peculiar mood which prevails at a solitary traveler's first setting forth on a journey, as at the unimaginable time when before the world was, Silence brooded on the face of the waters.

Let's Read Pierre: Books VII - IX

(Image borrowed from Michel McNinch)

Gentlemen! We still doin' Pierre?

Judging by the number of replies to the last post, several of our number have opted out. Well -- I can't say I'd blame anyone. So far Pierre has been just as prolix and melodramatic as Moby Dick, but this time there's no Lucifer-like Ahab, whale slaughter, or cannibal bedfellows to hold readers' interest between philosophical tangents and rhetorical flourishes, and the plot moves even slower.

I'm reminded of a Futurama episode in which Fry makes a tremendous fuss about not being able to get an anchovy pizza because the species has gone extinct. When he finally manages to get the last extant anchovy tin and puts them on a pizza for his friends, they're all repulsed. "No one likes them at first," a blithe Fry says, "but they'll grow on you!"

Melville is probably an acquired taste is all I'm saying, and Pierre is definitely not a good introduction to his work. I'm still enjoying the book, but that's probably because Melville has already grown on me and I went into it with a pretty good idea of what I could reasonably expect.

Readers should consider that Melville is somewhat out of his usual element here. We've already mentioned that Pierre is the first of his novels to have been written in the third person, but it also bears mentioning that it's the first that has nothing to do with sailors or sea voyages. Coming from an author who claimed "a whale-ship was my Yale College and my Harvard" and was known during his lifetime as "the guy who wrote about living with the South Pacific cannibal tribe" and posthumously as "the guy who wrote about the insane sea captain and the white whale," Pierre seems rather incongruous with the rest of the Melvillian bibliography.

Melville had never taken his fiction very far inland before Pierre. I think we can forgive him if it took him a while to find his land legs.

But for all its incongruities, Pierre's points of contact with Moby Dick multiply as we press deeper into the text. Two spring directly to mind:

1.) The Shakespeare influence
2.) The America influence

Touching upon the latter: when Melville wrote the bulk of his novels, the United States had not even been a nation for four score years. As the fledgling nation of former British subjects tried to work out its identity, you often see it doing so by way of contrast: emphasizing its democracy (in several sense of the word) and its not having a nobility (which we saw in Pierre's Book I).

For many years, the subjects of Western fiction and drama were kings, princes, knights, and nobles. Melville, a reader of the classics, wanted to replicate the high drama of the old works while transplanting it into a society where royalty is saliently absent.

And so in Moby Dick there's an apology for his investment of a shaggy Nantucket whaling ship captain with the qualities of a godlike emperor. An in Pierre, our son of an 19th century landowner in upstate New York is treated as princeling; his mother as the severe and vain queen; his illegitimate, half-crazy sister as the downtrodden Cinderella princess waiting to be rescued; and the estate of Saddle Meadows as their royal kingdom.

Pierre reminds me of those modern Shakespeare productions where the director plants everything in a 20th century setting. The props look different, the context is tweaked, and there's some anachronistic dissonance when a sword is mentioned and a gun is drawn -- but the story and poetry are unchanged, and we're still dealing with a nobility's internal politics, mad princes, spurned princesses, and spiteful monarchs.

This thought conveniently brings us to the Hamlet connection, which Melville now makes explicitly clear in Book VII. Leading up to it are a pair of sequences which are implicitly drawn from Hamlet, which are...

1.) Mary Glendinning and Claudius

In Pierre 7.3, our hero's mother bares her teeth. If we want to keep drawing parallels between Pierre and Hamlet, I might hold it beside Claudius's confessional soliloquy in Hamlet 3.3.

The circumstances are different in such a way as to actually seem inverted. In Hamlet's scenario, the prince's suspicions about the king are verified. In the case of Pierre, the queen mulls over her own presentiments toward her prince's conduct. Claudius admits to an abominable crime; Mary suspects her son of a transgression she cannot forgive and awaits his confession.

Both monologues in both pieces are (a) the first we get a direct look into the monarch's mind (b) the first time we see that they pose a threat to our hero, or are at the least on course toward an irreconcilable conflict. (This happens fairly often in Shakespeare: at the very onset, the hero and his rival have no reason or desire to kill each other, but are ineluctably impelled towards it by the exigencies of their vital interests. Pierre's conscience allows him only take one course of action in response to his discovery of Isabel's existence; Mary's nature permits her only one course of action in response to Pierre's inexplicable behavior. And this conflict of interests will be what destroys the relationship between mother and son.)

2.) The Terror Stone and the Bare Bodkin

Pierre 7.4 and 7.5 functions as our hero's "to be or not to be" moment. An indecisive Hamlet thinks about ending his dilemma by falling on his own dagger. An anxious and unsure Pierre crawls under a tenuously balanced boulder and dares it to fall on him. Hamlet's own indecisive, metaphysical waffling convinces him to stay alive and continue his waffling; Pierre's petitions to destiny fail to save him from having to embark on a course which he is helpless to resist choosing. In both cases the hero is confronted with a murky future that only promises pain, and neither of them are getting off easy. Both test the viability of suicide and find that it isn't an option.

(Note that Melville takes time to mention that climbing the massive Terror Stone isn't so awful, but crawling under it is. Suggestion: Pierre's destiny won't win him fame and glory as did that of his great-grandfather, the revolutionary hero. His trial will be the act of debasing and burying himself for the sake of his family's honor. This probably isn't a case of literary apophenia: Melville loved  his symbolism.)

Directly after the Terror Stone sequence comes Melville's "Hamletism" digression. The chapter is rather short, so let's just slap the whole thing up on here:

For, not to speak of the other and subtler meanings which lie crouching behind the colossal haunches of this stone, regarded as the menacingly impending Terror Stone -- hidden to all the simple cottagers, but revealed to Pierre -- consider its aspects as the Memnon Stone. For Memnon was that dewy, royal boy, son of Aurora, and born King of Egypt, who, with enthusiastic rashness flinging himself on another's account into a rightful quarrel, fought hand to hand with his overmatch, and met his boyish and most dolorous death beneath the walls of Troy. His wailing subjects built a monument in Egypt to commemorate his untimely fate. Touched by the breath of the bereaved Aurora, every sunrise that statue gave forth a mournful broken sound, as of a harp-string suddenly sundered, being too harshly wound.

Herein lies an unsummed world of grief. For in this plaintive fable we find embodied the Hamletism of the antique world; the Hamletism of three thousand years ago: "The flower of virtue cropped by a too rare mischance." And the English tragedy is but Egyptian Memnon, Montaignized and modernized; for being but a mortal man Shakespeare had his fathers too.

Now as the Memnon Statue survives down to this present day, so does that nobly-striving but ever-shipwrecked character in some royal youths (for both Memnon and Hamlet were the sons of kings), of which that statue is the melancholy type. But Memnon's sculptured woes did once melodiously resound; now all is mute. Fit emblem that of old, poetry was a consecration and an obsequy to all hapless modes of human life; but in a bantering, barren, and prosaic, heartless age, Aurora's music-moan is lost among our drifting sands, which whelm alike the monument and the dirge.

(There is much more we can say about this touching its context within the American character and modern literature, but let's rather stay on track and allow the excerpt to just speak for itself for now. As I progress through Pierre I find more and more and more that could be examined at length, but I'd rather keep these as half-baked blog posts instead of developing them into half-baked essays.)


So what else is there to discuss?

Oh, right.

Mystery! Mystery!
Mystery of Isabel!
Mystery! Mystery!
Isabel and Mystery!
Mystery!

Isabel. I don't know how at all how to feel about her, but I'm certain she unnerves me. Melville obviously intended her to be the otherworldly "dark lady" in contrast to Lucy, the sweet blonde girl next door (cf. Age of Innocence, May and Ellen). And Isabel brings an exotic presence to Saddle Meadows, to say the least.

An angelic-looking woman with the brain of a half-addled child. Very strange.

I imagine Melville wished for the reader to be as bewitched by Isabel as Pierre, but I'm having a hard time feeling it. I'm fascinated by her, but I wouldn't say I'm captivated.

I can think of two related reasons for why this might be.

Reason #1: I will now admit that Melville probably could've toned down the siblings' dialogue. Pierre and Isabel's interactions are melodramatic even by Melvillian standards.

Reason #2: Isabel is female, and Melville has as little experience writing about women as he has writing landlocked novels.

I can't claim to have read all of Melville's fiction (yet), but women usually don't figure into his stories. Now and then a lady or a girl will pop up, but never for very long and rarely with much consequence. In Pierre, three of the four major characters we've seen so far are female. This is a very unusual thing in a Melville book.

Melville is great at writing about (a) men dealing with themselves (b) men dealing with other men. Male/female relationships -- well, he seems to handle them rather maladroitly. But you could have surmised as much from the early Pierre/Lucy sequences.

We'll see what happens, though. Perhaps changing circumstances will strain the siblings' relationship. This wouldn't be much of a drama if Pierre's and Isabel's wills never clashed, and Melville is definitely working toward something.

Isabel side note #1: In 8.2, Isabel says:

Now I resolved to learn my letters, and learn to read, in order that of myself I might learn the meaning of those faded characters. No other purpose but that only one, did I have in learning then to read. I easily induced the woman to give me my little teachings, and being uncommonly quick, and moreover, most eager to learn, I soon mastered the alphabet, and went on to spelling, and by-and-by to reading,

I wonder if Melville had read Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass?

Isabel side note #2: In 8.4, Isabel says:

Out of yon chamber, Pierre, Delly hath not stepped, for now four weeks and more; nor ever hath she once lain upon her bed; it was last made up five weeks ago; but paces, paces, paces, all through the night, till after twelve; and then sits vacant in her chair. Often I would go to her to comfort her; but she says, 'Nay, nay, nay,' to me through the door; says, 'Nay, nay, nay,' and only nay to me, through the bolted door; bolted three weeks ago -- when I by cunning arts stole her dead baby from her, and with these fingers, alone, by night, scooped out a hollow, and, seconding heaven's own charitable stroke, buried that sweet, wee symbol of her not unpardonable shame far from the ruthless foot of man...

Another reminder that Saddle Meadows is not the American Eden it appeared at the onset.


Two Words that Mean Different Things Than You Might Think:

1.) Enthusiasm. Melville frequently employs this word. To us it usually means something like "glad eagerness." Melville uses its classical definition. The word is originally from Greek, and referred to instances when a person is possessed or inspired by a god. When Melville calls Pierre an enthusiast, he has a very specific meaning in mind.

2.) Electric. Melville uses the word "electric" a few times in Book VIII during Pierre's one-on-one with Isabel. The connotations must have been entirely different in Melville's time, before the invention of the light bulb and when science was still struggling to understand exactly what electricity was and how it worked.

I think that’s all I got for now. I’m not certain how many folks are still reading along, but I’ll continue posting my Pierre thoughts once a week. (After all, it spares me from having to think of update topics.) Keep reading along if you’d like. And if not, that’s groovy too. 


Next time: Books X - XIV

Postscript: my favorite Melvillian flight of fancy from this section was:

Still wandering through the forest, his eye pursuing its ever-shifting shadowy vistas; remote from all visible haunts and traces of that strangely willful race, who, in the sordid traffickings of clay and mud, are ever seeking to denationalize the natural heavenliness of their souls; there came into the mind of Pierre, thoughts and fancies never imbibed within the gates of towns; but only given forth by the atmosphere of primeval forests, which, with the eternal ocean, are the only unchanged general objects remaining to this day, from those that originally met the gaze of Adam. For so it is, that the apparently most inflammable or evaporable of all earthly things, wood and water, are, in this view, immensely the most endurable. (7.2)

Words typed into Notepad at two in the morning when I couldn't sleep

I moved into a new room in a different building two days ago.

Tonight while walking back from her place, I noticed Jupiter in the sky, north of Aldebaran. Two months ago, Jupiter was a morning star. Now it's a midnight star in a sky where the autumn stars rise earlier every night.

I felt guilty that I was too distracted by my writing -- this short story is taking too long, I need to revise and finalize the new (short) novel, I really should get around to drawing more comics, this would all be so much easier if I could just quit my day job -- to be very good company.

But in another year -- for certain this time -- I won't have the day job. I won't be here, and I won't be able to see her anymore. Not like this, anyway.

Three days ago -- no, now four -- I stood at the curb outside a Philadelphia hotel and said goodbye to a girl I met in May, beneath Arcturus. Her work is taking her to Tanzania and I may very well never see her again.

Vega was almost directly overhead -- maybe inclined slightly toward the west -- when we sat on the patio above the street sipping cocktails, and she mentioned my book. There was a lot about it she liked, but she offered several points of criticism; but overall she honestly liked it and thought that it was an impressive first effort and those reviews she'd read weren't fair.

I first noticed Aldebaran and the autumn stars -- REALLY noticed them -- one September night in 2009. We'd all taken acid out in the Poconos and I kept a campfire going while everyone else was away. That very night I made up my mind to learn more about the constellations. And I resolved to finally finish the manuscript for a novel called The Zeroes, of which only the last three chapters remained to be written.

The day job would be piling the hours on next week. I wished I could quit it.

I may very well never see her again. And it's likely the last September I'll be living here, where my day job is. And I really like my day job, which I can say for the first time in two years. But the short story isn't writing itself, and I'm still worrying about a novel I wrote three years ago.

My birthday is now in less than two weeks.

It's staggering. The conceit that these moments are my only moments. That it's always my last chance.

Tonight I spent half an hour looking at the Milky Way through the binoculars when I could have been writing. It was astonishing. It always is. And there is a nonzero probability I'll never do it again.

It's what happens during the intervals between our assessments and plans for it. However deliberately we try to live it, life happens indeliberately, and largely unobserved until


"Well. I'm really not at liberty to say."

Let's Read Pierre: Books V & VI

(Image stol'n from here.)

And so Pierre's plot thickens, as rich, atramentous molasses in a one-gallon pickle jar congeals and condenses, forming a....and....uh....

Obviously a prime reason for my being so impressed by Melville's epic similes arises from my own inability to match them.

Since I plan to be away from my desk for most of the weekend, I'm typing this up much earlier in the week (Wednesday) and telling Blogger to automatically post it on Sunday. My apologies if this post seems fragmentary and rushed.

We begin again with Pierre's perfectly happy little life, which is fast becoming more complicated. To use an overblown metaphor (of which Melville surely would have approved), Pierre's acquisition of knowledge now threatens to expel him from the American Eden of Saddle-Meadows. If we want to stretch the analogy a little further, we could say that as Adam and Eve at the apple and acquired knowledge of good and evil, the revelation of Isabel and its consequences have made Pierre acutely aware of heretofore unperceived facets of his parents' characters: his upstanding, blameless father was a philander who seems to have knocked up and then practically discarded some poor French servant girl, and his tenderhearted mother becomes downright vicious when her pride and authority are challenged.

If I had to venture a guess, this is only the beginning of the unraveling. The exposures of the blemishes on his parents' characters are only the first of the illusions set to be rent. (Perhaps it will turn out that Pierre's expulsion from Eden will occur as a shift in his perceptions: he will learn that his charmed life is only charmed as long as he remains ignorant of its darker underpinnings.)

Pierre rather reminds me of Hamlet. And Pierre rather reminds me of Hamlet. (DO YOU SEE WHAT I DID THERE?)

Both Hamlet and Pierre are about a young noble uncovering a dark family secret and being compelled to take action at the risk of ruining their lives. They're also intensely psychological -- the real meat of Hamlet and of Pierre (so far) is in the stuff that happens in their titular characters' heads. (Melville was perhaps a careless writer, but he deliberately plants the phrase "sea of trouble" in a passage about his hero pondering his next move.) 

Hamlet is a very long play. Pierre is a much longer book. Six hours isn't nearly enough stage time to drill as deeply into Pierre's head as Melville wants to.

So -- good news if you're into stories about princes planning, stalling, and privately wrestling with their doubts and passions. And of course you are, so we won't speak of any accompanying bad news.

So if Pierre is Hamlet, I guess that would make Lucy our Ophelia. He's not certain how, but he's already guessing that in order to help out Isabel, he'll have to screw over Lucy. And, like Ophelia, Lucy's getting shafted will be entirely avoidable and pretty much the hero's own stupid fault for not thinking things sufficiently through (even though all he does is think).

Hmm. Back when we looked at the first two chapters (er, books), Mr. Angevine commented on Melville's narrative style reminding him almost of a film or television voiceover. Well, the extent of his involvement in the narrative is certainly a far cry from the usual authorial voice in modern fiction, but in 19th century literature -- especially where those damn Romantics were concerned -- the author often didn't restrict himself to telling the reader what was going on, but also suggesting how he should feel about it.

Actually, more than Rocky & Bullwinkle narrator, Melville's running commentary on events rather reminds me of the chorus in ancient Greek theatre. Given how this is a novel whose characters soliloquize like Shakespearean figures and speak in anachronisms, why the hell shouldn't Melville provide a running commentary on the drama a'la Sophocles or Euripides?

Strangest feelings, almost supernatural, now stole into Pierre. With little power to touch with awe the souls of less susceptible, reflective, and poetic beings, such coincidences, however frequently they may recur, ever fill the finer organization with sensations which transcend all verbal renderings. They take hold of life's subtlest problem. With the lightning's flash, the query is spontaneously propounded -- chance, or God? If too, the mind thus influenced be likewise a prey to any settled grief, then on all sides the query magnifies, and at last takes in the all-comprehending round of things. For ever is it seen, that sincere souls in suffering, then most ponder upon final causes. The heart, stirred to its depths, finds correlative sympathy in the head, which likewise is profoundly moved. Before miserable men, when intellectual, all the ages of the world pass as in a manacled procession, and all their myriad links rattle in the mournful mystery. 

Cf. the "chorus" parts in pretty much any extant ancient Greek tragedy. Melville's meditations are more involved and rhetorical, but the idea is the same.

Distinction wherein this analogy might collapse: in Greek theatre, the chorus members were still characters in the play -- characters who played very passive roles, commenting and narrating rather than participating. Melville, as a narrator within the narrative, does not claim physical presence within the narrative.

But for a Melville novel, this is rather an odd thing.

There's a passage at the end of Book V that aroused my interest:

So let no censorious word be here hinted of mortal Pierre. Easy for me to slyly hide these things, and always put him before the eye as perfect as immaculate; unsusceptible to the inevitable nature and the lot of common men. I am more frank with Pierre than the best men are with themselves. I am all unguarded and magnanimous with Pierre; therefore you see his weakness, and therefore only. In reserves men build imposing characters; not in revelations. He who shall be wholly honest, though nobler than Ethan Allen; that man shall stand in danger of the meanest mortal's scorn.

First: here Melville "speaks" not as a chorus, commentator, or narrator, but rather addresses the reader as the book's author. He's done this before in his other novels -- but in his other novels he writes in the first person as an actual player within the narrative. (Even if Ishmael had basically no involvement in Ahab's saga, he was on the ship.) And this fourth-wall breaking is a little jarring, considering some details about the man's life and literature. Think on the commercial and critical failure of Moby Dick, a book which he knew was a masterpiece; and think that in printing Pierre, Harper ignored Melville's request to publish the book without his name on it. And if you've read Moby Dick, recall the message of Father Mapple's sermon.

The chip on Melville's shoulder betrays itself.

All this and we've barely mentioned Isabel yet! I think I'll leave that to you folks. How are we feeling about Pierre's dark and strange sister? Are we buying her story? What role do we see her playing in Pierre's impending fall? Tell me how and why she weirds you the hell out!

And do please post any epic similes that might have caught your fancy.

My favorite pitched metaphor of these chapters might be:

It was one of his fond mother's whims to perfume the lighter contents of his wardrobe; and it was one of his own little femininenesses -- of the sort sometimes curiously observable in very robust-bodied and big-souled men, as Mohammed, for example -- to be very partial to all pleasant essences. So that when once more he left the mansion in order to freshen his cheek anew to meet the keen glance of his mother -- to whom the secret of his possible pallor could not be divulged; Pierre went forth all redolent; but alas! his body only the embalming cerements of his buried dead within.

Chapter Wherein the Author Copes with Negative Reviews

Recapping the story thus far...

In 2009 I wrote a story called The Zeroes.

In 2010 I pitched the manuscript to literary agents and small publishers. I honestly lost track of how many. About 10% responded with polite form letters that began "Dear Author." The other 90% didn't respond at all. I have no reason to believe that any of the people I pitched ever actually read the book. (Which is understandable, but nevertheless discouraging.)

In 2011 I resigned myself to getting the damn thing off my hands and bearing the stigma of being a self-published author.

Earlier this year (2012), the manuscript became a novel. In February it was published as an ebook. In April it was released in paperback form.

Since then I've devoted less energy to finalizing the draft of a new short novel (written between September and May) than trying to make people interested in reading (and ideally purchasing) The Zeroes.

Once again, this is why you want to have a publisher to begin with. They take care of all that crucial but excruciatingly bothersome business for you. They put your book in stores, see that it gets reviewed by the right reviewers, and design Facebook ads on your behalf so you can work on writing more books and making them more money.

A failing to which I will freely confess is that I have no business acumen. I don't know how to design snappy ads or pitches. Relentless self-promotion puts a bad taste in my mouth. I don't have an outgoing personality and I'm not very good at disingenuous glad-handing. Frankly, I'd rather write than tell people about what I've already written.

In a 21st century market, this is a crippling deficiency. I'm well aware.

One of my primary motivations for maintaining a blog, updating a webcomic, and doing these video game reviews is to give myself a platform from which I can promote my book. Yes, I do enjoy working on all this stuff for its own sake -- but between my fiction and my video game criticism, the fiction is much more important to me. And between the two, I'd rather people were reading my fiction.

But a book is an imposition. A free article about a familiar video game in a web browser is much less of an investment than a 300-page novel by an author who's not respectable enough to be adopted by an imprint but still has the nerve to ask for your time and money. I'm finding that if, for instance, a hundred people read my EarthBound writeup, it doesn't necessarily mean even one of them will click on the link to my Amazon page and shell out $15 (or even $3) for a copy of The Zeroes, even if I cajole them.

This is where the reviews come in.

Ideal scenario: you convince a blogger to review your book. They tell everyone in their sphere that your book is worthwhile, and some of these people actually purchase and read it. And if the reviewer has some clout, other people with clout might be more willing to give you and your book a chance.

One thing I've learned over the past few months is that it's almost as hard to get a book review as it is to get a book deal.

There's absolutely no shortage of book review blogs focusing on "indie" books. But there's even less a scarcity of self-published nobody authors incessantly pleading and screaming REVIEW MY BOOK NEXT. And so for days and weeks you toss custom-written pitches toward these bloggers (who, for all you know, only receive traffic from other self-published authors desperately searching for reviewers) and hear nothing back from any of them, not even a "no thanks," because their inboxes are already inundated with a hundred other solicitations from a hundred other lousy authors begging them to review a hundred other books nobody wanted to publish.

The only blog that agreed to check out and review The Zeroes was the Unbound Underground. Go on, read the review.

It's not very flattering. Statements like "seems to lack any depth or understanding of depression" and "incredibly condescending and insulting" rather negate any of the scant bits of praise that buoy the rating up to a 3.

Shortly after it was posted, a reader hopped on my Formspring an asked me about my reaction to it. I let it all out and felt pretty good about myself.

Not long afterwards, somebody (perhaps the person who submitted the question to begin with) sent me a few words of advice. The gist of it was that while people who'd already read and appreciated my book might agree and sympathize, but to the much more sizable Everyone Else, the rant would make me look like some bitchy diva with a wounded ego -- especially since the Unbound Underground was actually doing me a favor by reading and reviewing the book to begin with.

He was absolutely correct. If some other blogger were considering The Zeroes for his next post and doing some research on its author, a Formspring page containing a tirade against the last person to review his book would almost definitely change his mind. So I thanked him for his clarity of judgement and axed the question and my response to it.

I started pitching other bloggers, hoping to offset this one negative review with a few positive ones from readers who might better understand the book.

A prewritten form letter won't work. Especially not when you're asking somebody to take on a project on their own time and offering them no renumeration. And especially not when you're pitching them a book that is, by your own admission, as deliberately mundane as possible, and for which you can't effectively compose a snappy plot summary because there (deliberately) isn't much of a plot. Your task becomes finding a suitable blog, reading enough of it to get an idea who you're dealing with, and then composing a personalized pitch that adheres to their unique submission guidelines.

It's a grinding process -- scouring the web for somebody who might be hip to what you're offering, skimming the last two or three months of their blog, and then writing them an unctuous personalized message that will give them the impression that you're excited to show them your book because you're an avid reader who's really into what they're doing, and certainly not some exhausted, red-eyed creep who sincerely could not give a shit what they're reading or talking about unless it's your fucking book.

(If any bloggers I may have solicited are reading this, please be assured I consider you exceptional. Would I lie to you?!)

One, two hours per pitch. One, two hours that you could be doing any number of other things, like going outside, visiting friends, napping, gardening, reading, playing video games, dancing, fucking, or working on your next book. And you do this one, two, five, a dozen and more times. And none of them write back. And none of them ask you to send them your book.

But we already understand that we can't blame them for this. Pitches pile up in their inboxes like spambot messages appear in yours.

This would be the advantage of paid reviews. (The legitimate kind, I mean -- not the perfidious phony type that makes life harder for everyone.) You throw a respectable book review publication some cash and they agree to give your book a read and a review. You're not guaranteed a good review, but your check buys you the assurance that somebody will read your book and write about it.

Kirkus Indie is a service offered by publishing industry authority pillar Kirkus. The short of it: you pay them $500 and they review your self-published novel, regardless of how obscure you might be.

A few nights ago I received Kirkus Indie's review of The Zeroes in my inbox.

Basically, I paid $500 for two paragraphs about how The Zeroes is a dreadful book about awful people and why nobody should read it.

The only upside is that my receipt reserved me the option to request that the review never see the light of day. I have already made that request. And I deleted the review.

It's a good thing I had the next day off from work. I was practically catatonic for about sixteen hours.

The question becomes: how do I read and respond to this feedback?

None of the criticisms offered by either review are especially helpful or constructive. One complains that the book is extremely depressing. Great; it's meant to be. The other lambasts the characters for being pathetic, self-absorbed, and drinking too much. Sure; that was rather the point. Both reviews bring up the word "entitlement." Well, yeah -- I thought that was a fairly obvious component of the subtext.

It's clear that the reviewers just didn't get it.

They Didn't Get It. The chorus of the failed artist. Repeated so many times by so many people that it can't possibly be true anymore. They'd get it if you were as good as you thought you were. Why should the writer have to explain himself?

So now I think about that new manuscript I've got sitting around. About polishing and finalizing it. About how I'll have to spend another few months pitching it to the agents and small presses again. About how I'll very probably have to resort to self-publishing again. About how I'll have write dozens of letters to dozens of bloggers pleading for reviews again. About how I'll watch the sales counter freeze again and sit around trying to figure out what to do next again.

But that's just how it goes. Art is a bitch and nobody cares. Nobody wants to hear about it, and you truly have no right to complain and don't deserve any sympathy. (Some asshole wrote a book about this once.)

This brings us to an alternative reading of the tea leaves: why not take the hint and call it quits?

You're never going to make any money off this. That much is certain. Given how the written word -- and especially the novel -- are trundling into irrelevance, that spicule-thin probability of being vindicated much later down the road will get closer and closer to zero as time passes. And since you seem to agonize over writing like you do, wouldn't it be better to just tear the monkey off your shoulders and find some happier and more rewarding activity to occupy your time?

Czeslaw Milosz refers to his choice to write as the deformation of his own life. Somewhat less poetically, I'd call it a kind of behavioral disorder. Unless it's paying your bills, it just doesn't make sense. It's a lot of trouble and it's really not worth it.

Fuck -- if I quit writing, I could go out and try to find a real job. I mean, one of the reasons I've been so reluctant to dive into a capital-c Career is my fear that it wouldn't leave me enough time or energy to dedicate to what I've always felt is my real work. If I stopped writing, I would almost definitely stop smoking. I'd have no excuse not spend more time with my friends, read more books, work in the garden more often, play more Street Fighter, or go to bed at a decent hour. I could go out and get laid more often. I might find myself readier to get into a sustainable loving and working relationship with a human being who actually exists outside of my own head. I'd never have to write another fucking pitch to a literary agent or blogger for the rest of my life. I could actually relax on my weekends and days off.

Quitting makes a very convincing case for itself.

About sixteen hours after reading a paid professional opinion that my writing is garbage, I finally got out of bed, had lunch, and sat down to make some progress on a new short story I've been tinkering with. I'll worry about the backdraft of rejection slips from literary magazines later on.

Ultimately, I'm still just too stupid to quit.

And it must be terminal, because I'm totally cool with it.