This list is chronological rather any organization which would make sense. Anything that I have read before is marked with an asterisk. Books which I have also seen adaptations of are marked with (m) or (tv).
Fiction: *The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins *Whose Body – Dorothy L Sayers *Clouds of Witness – “ *Unnatural Death – “ A Man Lay Dead – Ngaio Marsh *Pride and Prejudice (tv/m) – Jane Austen Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (m) – Hunter S Thompson
Nonfiction: Dark Alliance – Gary Webb Go Down Together – Jeff Guinn Chaos – Tom O’Neill The French Connection – Robin Moore Poisoner in Chief – Stephen Kinzer Chasing the Devil – Tim Butcher My Dark Places – James Ellroy High Noon – Glenn Frankel Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72 – Hunter S Thompson The Technological Society – Jacques Ellul
One conclusion from last year is that I have finally reached the point of frying my brain on social media that I just can’t read anymore. I was there a couple years back but it’s even worse now. The odd thing, however, is my desire for nonfiction remains consistent, or even a little greater than before, but I find it hard to care about fiction at all at the moment. I went on a minor British mysteries kick at the beginning of the year then didn’t read any fiction after July. None.
There are several blog posts about nonfiction books I wish I’d written (I think it’s safe to conclude frying my brain affected that ability as well). I read a couple things that were fantastic, but also a bunch that were frustrating, bad, or hard to get through. Chaos and Poisoner in Chief both deserve scathing reviews. The French Connection is incredible how badly written is it. My Dark Places I expected to be weird (based on previously reading LA Confidential), but it was an unpleasant, nasty train wreck for the first 3/4ths and then boring as hell for the last part. High Noon was just communist propaganda, but I expected that. I was hoping for more interesting information about the movie, however, and it didn’t deliver.
My favorite out of everything was Go Down Together, a book about Bonnie and Clyde, which I picked on a random whim from the library. The author has an unfortunate tendency towards adding “they must have” or “it would have seemed” type statements (you’re making it up if you write things like that) but on the whole it was an engaging and interesting read.
I did it. I got another cat. This one has three legs. The shelter people really think I’m crazy now. Maybe this year I can get a deaf one and round off my disabled cat collection.
For 2024 I made a comment about depression, about having a problem and it was getting worse. Well, boy, did it get worse. It got to the point where people, ones that didn’t know me that well even, were messaging me and asking if I was okay. I wasn’t. I mean, I could have been much worse. There’s always worse. But by about July I decided that I needed something to change or I was going to snap. I started trying to make plans and look for something different to do. Anything. I needed to get out the rut. I forced myself to go to an event with a coworker which was… a mixed bag to be sure. Stayed out way too late. Felt like shit the next day. But it was different. I immediately started looking for ways to do again.
Then the next day after that some random person DMed me on twitter. That’s not odd. I’ve talked to a several different people. Except a couple DMs turned into a conversation and then conversation didn’t peter out like they normally do and now I’ve spend the past three months playing video games online with my new friend.
Anyone over the age of 30 knows exactly how impossible it is to find friends. Your old ones drift away, or move, or just your life states change as to make it difficult to keep up (like one person being married with kids and the other being single). Finding new people is hard. Finding new people you actually like is harder.
Depression and loneliness are not the same things. They can be totally separate, but they can cause or exacerbate one another. Loneliness is a particularly hard to deal with, however, because it cannot be solved on one’s own. You have to have someone else to fix it. Oh, sure, adding a couple cats into your life can help, but nothing is like having another person to talk to and actually do things with.
Curing loneliness doesn’t cure depression, but it certainly takes away part of it. And having other people expecting you to do certain things at certain times helps keep you from getting into that easy trap of depression of doing absolutely nothing at all. Do I feel like playing video games all the time? Not always, no. But usually all it takes is getting started to forget that. Adding Isambard to the mix so we’ve got three way games scheduled on the regular made that even better.
The thing that is the most funny about this is that after a resolution and an effort towards making a significant change… I didn’t have to. I went to one lousy thing and then got to do what I always wanted in the first place: only hang out and do things with specific people I know I enjoy being around. Not going to unfamiliar place with unfamiliar people and failing miserably to make small talk.
So now I get to wake up some mornings with two cat noses, one in each ear, and get to look forward to whatever co-op we’ve got planned (or not planned but will happen anyway) for that day. Life is not so bad.
The Crack Dealer is a long time comic book fan. For as long as I’ve known him (ten+ years) he’s been obsessed with Jack Kirby and silver age Marvel. I would not be surprised if he has read every issue of particularly series. Understandably he was also a fan of the movies, but I thought that he, like any sensible person, had given up on the MCU as a lost cause.
The last two times that I’ve spoken with him, however, he has brought up recent MCU movies. “Were you and Isambard going to go see Thunderbolts?” No I said. He apparently forgot he asked this the first time and asked a second time, on both occasions launching into an explanation of how it looked like it might be better than the other recent films. He also talked about how maybe the Fantastic Four movie might not be awful either.
My friend is not stupid, but he’s acting like someone in an abusive relationship. Maybe this time will be different. Dude, it’s not. The MCU doesn’t love you; it loves your money but not enough to make movies worth spending it on. It loves woke nonsense and spitting on its original fanbase and the things that they loved.
Is it really that easy to forget or lie to yourself about the quality of things that you once loved? Is this some side effect of the parasocial relationships? Or perhaps the utterly forgettable nature of the MCU? Sure the last movie was ghastly but do you even remember it? Probably not! But shouldn’t you be able to remember that you don’t remember it? I know it’s been a long time but that junk food made you feel sick last time you ate it; don’t do it.
I’m not. I’m going to go back to not knowing anything about the latest Marvel release.
I would get more blog posts written if I didn’t keep doing things like this:
watch movie, for example The French Connection
oh, that’s based on a book, need to read it
it’s also one of three, slightly similar, movies produced by the same guy; I should rewatch Bullitt AND The Seven Ups
Bullitt is also based on a book, need to read
By the time I get to one of the next steps I have forgotten whatever it was I was going to say about the first so it then loops back on itself… I need to watch The French Connectionagain… or something like that.
(I am actually reading The French Connection and while the story is interesting I am not thrilled about the writing style. “He chortled in anticipation” is a sentence that should not appear in any piece of writing but especially not in a nonfiction book about police work.)
I watched Longlegs (2024) prior to Nosferatu but seeing the latter made me want to go back and give the former another look. Having seen The Blackcoat’s Daughter, I did not expect to like Longlegs and I can’t really say that I did. But the contrast between the two films is striking. Longlegs has its flaws, but it is a far, far better film than Nosferatu is.
The film opens with a little white house surrounded by snow. A little girl with a camera encounters a strange and creepy man who tells her that he “wore my long legs today.”
Years later, a young woman named Lee Harker is working for the FBI. On a canvasing assignment, she is strangely able to tell which house a suspect is hiding in. After being subjected to some tests by the Bureau, it is decided that she’s slightly psychic and is put on serial murder case which is baffling her superiors.
Family after family is dying in murder-suicides with the father killing his wife and children then himself. The cases would appear to be unconnected except for notes, written in code and signed by “Longlegs,” left at the scene. There’s no evidence that anyone else was in the house except the families. The only similarity between them is that each had a daughter who had a birthday on the 14th of any given month
Lee, using the powers of autism, discovers that the deaths form a Satanic triangle symbol when plotted on a calendar. She’s also able to decode Longlegs’ code after he breaks into her house and leaves her a coded birthday card. She and her boss, Carter, discover that an earlier murder-suicide left the girl alive but in a mental hospital. Upon visiting that family’s farm, they find a large and lifelike doll hidden under a crucifix in the barn.
Longlegs, however, is a step ahead of them. Someone has already visited the survivor in the hospital and left Lee’s name on the log. And Lee, as it turns out, has a birthday coming up herself. On the 14th…
Longlegs is miles better than Osgood Perkins’ first film but still bears some of the same hallmarks. Perkins loves long, lingering shots but manages to use them to great affect. Here is a film that actually has creeping dread. Perkins keeps trying to trick us into thinking that we’ll see something move or appear in the background, which works because sometimes you do but often is a fake out. This keeps the audience on their toes; you never know if there will be a demonic shadowy thing there or if the open doorway remains mercifully empty.
He also plays around with the aspect ratio in interesting ways. All the flashback sequences are framed as if to look like old photographs while the present is in a wide format. The use of colors is good, though it relies a little too heavily on an orange/brown filter, and I wish, so badly, that modern movies could recreate the texture of older films. It looks digital. If it’s set in the ’90s, why can’t the picture quality look like the ’90s? The aesthetics actually reminded me a lot of the video game Control, with its supernatural government agents and retro look.
Lee Harker’s sort of psychic powers, however, don’t affect the plot as much as I’d like. Her discovery of various clues may as well be because of autism than being psychic, and it’s implied at the end that she has lost those powers… but this doesn’t do anything. The upside to this is that Lee is not much of girlboss. She comes across as awkward and out of her depth, struggling to make eye contact and stumbling through interrogations.
Longlegs himself is played by Nicolas Cage, being very Nicolas Cage. It’s made stranger since he’s under a layer of makeup so thick he no longer looks like himself. This is slightly detrimental as his face seems too stiff to properly emote at times. But the end result is gross and disturbing, and while it’s a recognizably Cage performance, it works well within the context of the movie.
The ending is the real reason I can’t say I like Longlegs. It’s frustrating and open ended. The audience knows exactly what is about to happen, and Lee stands there like an idiot and doesn’t do anything until one person is dead. It’s not clear what would have been accomplished by the triangle being completed nor does it make any sense for Lee to leave the final doll intact. Her gun clicks empty when she attempts to shoot but so what? Smash the damned thing.
The gun, however, is a rather annoying goof or maybe continuity error. Lee has a Sig of some sort when confronting Longleg’s accomplice. It disappears when she passes out and is never seen again. Instead she suddenly has a revolver in the climax. A revolver which apparently only has three shots in it. It can’t be that the doll is magically able to stop the gun from firing because we saw one get its head blown off with a shotgun earlier. Why switch guns like this? There’s no good reason for it.
Like Nosferatu, the issue of Christianity within the movie is worth considering, but, unlike Nosferatu, Longlegs doesn’t even offer it as an option. The devil is the real villain. The few Christian symbols that pop up are being used to his advantage. A woman pretending to be a nun proclaiming “a gift from the church” is his way of sneaking into houses and destroying people. A character says that prayer doesn’t do anything. The only exception is the crucifix on top of the evil doll. Unlike Nosferatu, there is no alternate power to fall back on. Without Christianity, is it any surprise that evil remain undefeated?
It is, I’m sure, something the filmmakers never considered but offers an interesting comparison with the other film. Nosferatu gets a point for acknowledging the power of Christianity but still rejects it. Longlegs admits the devil is real but doesn’t offer a contrary power.
On the whole, however, I think that Longlegs is a far superior film. Better visuals, an interesting story, and good performances throughout. I have no desire to give Robert Eggers another chance but Osgood Perkins will get one. At least I know that, even if I don’t like his stories as much, his style is well worth it.
***
I’m going to complain about a couple minor things now which don’t really belong in a review proper.
Lighting: IMDb tries to claim this is not a goof, but the barn scene, at night, has bright lights streaming in through the windows as if it’s daylight outside. Someone has tried to excuse this as the floodlights outside, but those lights are not angled to shine directly in the windows like that and in one shot we see them only on the front of the barn with the side dark, but the next shot shows more floodlights on the side so that’s not right either.
Sound: Lee Harker’s panting is too loud in certain scenes. I suppose this is supposed to illustrate her panic, but I found it rather annoying.
That damned door: The front door of Harker’s mother’s house looks exactly like the basement door on my parents’ house years ago. Except that that house is much, much newer than the house in the movie. The door doesn’t fit. At first I tried to dismiss this as my brain being silly–after all someone could have installed a new door along the way–but then I realized the door remains the same even in the flashbacks which are supposed to be in 1974. That door was installed at my parents’ house some time in the ’90s if I remember correctly.
The houses used in the ’90s didn’t look particularly ’90s either…
I wouldn’t have gone to see Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu on my own. But the Crack Dealer said he was going with some friends and asked me and Isambard to come along. Well, it was something to do and an attempt to be more social than I’ve been inclined to be recently.
The story is one that’s been told many, many times. The original Nosferatu in 1922 was an unauthorized adaptation of Dracula. It (and its remakes) do not quite follow the story.
Eggers’ version begins with a young woman calling out for something, anything to come and comfort her. Something does, and it’s very bad.
In the “present” of 1838, Thomas Hutter, recently married, is hoping to get a situation and so he does. He leaves his wife Ellen, despite her pleas, and heads to Transylvania to do a real estate deal with Count Orlock. Before even reaching the count’s abode, Thomas encounters some strange doings at the inn nearby. The Gypsies parade around a naked woman while digging up a grave and stabbing the corpse.
In the morning, everyone has vanished, including his horse, so Thomas walks to Orlok’s castle. On the way a carriage picks him up and drives him into a nightmare.
Meanwhile, Ellen, who is staying with Friedrich and Anna Harding, has been sleepwalking and having seizures. Dr. Sievers recommends putting a corset on her and tying her to the bed, but nothing helps. The Hardings are their wits end, and Sievers decides to consult a former mentor, now an occultist, Von Franz. Von Franz determines that there is a demonic influence at work, and he and Dr. Sievers investigate.
Thomas having escaped his clutches, however, Count Orlok is making his way to where Ellen is, and he brings a terrible plague with him. Can Thomas get back in time to save his wife? Can Sievers and Von Franz determine the source of her affliction? Can Ellen just bang Orlok and save the day?
Generally, a reviewer is expected to say something positive about a movie, but I am struggling to think of much. It’s well made. It’s not Marvel slop. That automatically puts it leagues ahead of the competition. I wonder, however, when movies like this come out and lots of people rave about them, how much is it that the movie is actually good and how much is the fact that it’s something different that the gray-paste that modern entertainment is currently force-feeding everyone? It being different is a worthy thing, but not sucking is not good enough to make something truly good.
A lot of people have praised the visuals. Honest to goodness there were a couple parts where I started thinking the projectionist had screwed something up because of how horribly out of focus the picture was… only to have something in focus come into frame and show that it was deliberate. The movie is too blurry and too gray. It’s like Eggers wanted it to be black and white but wouldn’t (or couldn’t) commit. The result is unpleasantly murky.
One of the few visuals that caught my attention was Thomas in the woods when the carriage comes to pick him up. Interesting light and shadow, even if it is murky. It’s creepy, rapidly turning into nightmarish… But then it never stops being nightmarish. One of the Crack Dealer’s friends praised the movie afterwards for the “creeping dread” that was throughout. Creeping dread requires some subtlety. Eggers’ Nosferatu is about as subtle as dropping a sledgehammer on your foot.
The movie relies unfortunately on some very modern horror tropes. Mostly with Ellen, however. She had foam and spittle coming out of her mouth, or blood, or her eyes rolling back in her head, or doing that dumb arched back/bridge thing that they want to include in every horror movie. I find these things annoying and not scary. As is the excessive amounts of gore. It’s a vampire movie so one might expect blood about, but there is a scene, for instance, where a madman bites the head off a pigeon, and it fountains blood everywhere. That’s a very pressurized pigeon. I don’t think pigeons have that much blood in them.
And then there’s the sex and nudity. Why are the gypsies parading around with a naked woman in the woods? The unpleasant sexualized nature of Orlok feeding on Thomas is somewhat more forgivable, but Thomas’s encounter with a naked Orlok is stupid to the point of being laughable. Is seeing his dick supposed to make him more scary? It really doesn’t. There’s a fair amount of boobs scattered throughout. A character is discovered in a compromising position with the corpse of his dead wife, implying necrophilia. Thomas and Ellen have sex while clothed. I support our Zoomer brethren in their disdain for sex scenes; I did not need to see that. And we’ll get to the ending in a minute.
The movie’s relationship with Christianity is an odd one. It doesn’t outright reject it. In fact, some of what happens seems to be very positive towards it. Especially in the case of the Orthodox nuns and priest who help Thomas. None of our protagonists, however, rely on crosses or the like to ward off Orlok. Perhaps the “modern” people of Wisburg are too rational now to seek protections with religion–the major except being Harding’s children who are seen praying, though their father rejects Von Franz and his superstitious nonsense. Von Franz, however, goes too far in the other direction. He makes no distinction between the supernatural powers, calling on both “angels and demons” to protect them. He talks about how Ellen would have been a priestess in the old days. So by having Ellen be the one to stop Orlok (and in the way she does), the movie turns its back on Christianity and offers a solution from pagan times.
Ellen is awful. For the first part of the movie, she seems a fairly innocent victim, somehow tied to Orlok’s malevolent influence. Then she starts being nasty. She angrily confronts Harding over her treatment in his house, ignoring the doctor who ordered her tied up and the fact that Harding has a wife and two young children to protect and thus might not want a madwoman wandering around his house every night. When Thomas returns, she tells him of having an affair with Orlok in the past and says (with her face right next to his crotch) that he (Thomas) could never satisfy her the way that Orlok did. Because of her idiotic begging for companionship as a young woman, she somehow summoned Orlok. It is because of her that Orlok has come to Wisburg and hundreds of people die. (One cannot help but wonder if Orlok was able to have a sexual relationship with her in the past while he was still residing in Transylvania, why does he have to travel to Wisburg to get at her now?) Ellen resists Orlok for a couple days while he kills more people and then she invites him and has sex with him so that he can be killed by sunlight the next morning. She dies. The movie ends.
So, in conclusion, I believe that by rejecting a Christian solution and instead resorting to sex as a means defeating Orlok, Ellen goes to hell. And she can take the whole damn movie with her.
This list is chronological rather any organization which would make sense. Anything that I have read before is marked with an asterisk. Books which I have also seen adaptations of are marked with (m) or (tv).
Fiction: The Mourner – Richard Stark The Killer Inside Me – Jim Thompson One Lonely Night – Mickey Spillane Death Wish (m) – Brian Garfield The Incomplete Amorist – E Nesbit All Systems Red – Martha Wells Artificial Condition – ” Legionnaire – Jason Anspach & Nick Cole Rogue Protocol – Martha Wells Exit Strategy – ” Little Fuzzy – H Beam Piper
*Starship Troopers (m) – Robert Heinlein The Demolished Man – Alfred Bester
*A Scanner Darkly (m) – Philip K Dick
*The Maltese Falcon (m) – Dashiell Hammett
*The Bagthorpes Abroad – Helen Cresswell South by Java Head – Alistair McLean Network Effect – Martha Wells
Nonfiction: Raymond Chandler – Tom Hiney Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho – Stephen Rebello Blood River – Tim Butcher The Making of the African Queen – Katharine Hepburn Bowling Alone – Robert Putnam Into the Wild – Jon Krakauer A Walk in the Woods – Bill Bryson Into Thin Air – Jon Krakauer Bogart – AM Sperber & Eric Lax
I continue to be displeased with the number of books read during the year. However, while some of the fiction (i.e., Martha Wells) are novellas, I had some tomes in the nonfiction, especially Bowling Alone and Bogart. Bowling Alone is definitely interesting and worth the slog, but it’s a touch dry for my tastes.
I was in a Hollywood mood for nonfiction, that and odd travelogues–the two of which are tied together by Blood River which makes multiple references to the African Queen and Katharine Hepburn’s little book about it as the author makes his way across the Congo. The two biographies I read–of Bogart and Raymond Chandler–were rather depressing, Chandler more so because of the wretched state in which he dies. The picture of old Hollywood painted in Bogart, however, is one of awful immorality. I knew this already, but that doesn’t make it any better.
I am a little late posting this because I realized that somehow I had neglected to write Legionnaire on the list and was trying to figure out when I read it. I never did finish the sequel. Shortly after my previous comments on it, I listened to about an hour more of the audiobook and was so enraged that I couldn’t take any more. I have some further thoughts which need to be expounded upon, especially in relationship to the Murderbot series, so we’ll see if I can keep my head above water in the Swamp of Despair long enough to write it down. I almost forgot to come back to this so that’s not a good sign…
A couple months ago, I did something dumb. I looked at the local animal shelter website. I swore years ago that I would never get another pet. I get too attached; they die. But it’s a bummer to come home every day to a cold and empty house. And on this particular week, events had conspired that all of my immediate family was out of town. I had no one to visit, nowhere to go, and nothing to do. I was feeling acutely alone, and there I see a picture of a tiny, ratty kitten with eyes like black and white swirled marbles. Absolutely awful looking. I knew instantly that I had to have her.
I exchanged a couple emails with the shelter, but they acted shocked when I showed up the next day, forked over the adoption fee, and carted off my little potato cat. The first thing she did when I got her home was to get overly excited and run face first into a cabinet. She’s 100% blind and always will be. She’s got an upper respiratory infection that we can’t seem to shake, and I see hundreds more dollars in vet bills in my future. I won’t be surprised if she doesn’t live more than a few years.
But Little Potato is doing great. Half the people who meet her swear she can’t be blind because she gets around so well. I’ve got to be careful about moving furniture or anything else she might run into because she’s got the house memorized. She goes nuts any time a fly or other bug that makes noise gets in and has even succeeded in catching a couple. She’s tearing up my floors, my furniture, my clothes, and me. I have so completely lost my mind over this cat that I’ve started looking at shelters again in the hope of finding ANOTHER disabled cat so she can have a friend.
Once you have something alive relying on you, even if it’s only a plant, a certain amount of freedom is removed. The plant has to be watered. The cat has to be fed. I cannot on a whim galivant off to the beach or anywhere else for multiple days without a second thought anymore. There was a short time where I kind of enjoyed that freedom. I didn’t have to explain where I was or what I was doing to anyone. I could go out and do random things whenever. The problem with that sort of freedom is it requires that you reject things that tie you down. And therein lies the paradox of freedom. If you’re required for reject certain encumbering things, then you’re not really free to chose now are you? But if you chose the encumbrances, then you lose the freedom to do other things. There will always be a trade off.
Even having a house is like this. I have far more freedom not having family/roommates anymore. But the house needs work, and I can’t pretend the yard doesn’t exist. The pipes could freeze in the winter. During the summer, the bittersweet tried to grow up and engulf half the house like a monster from Doctor Who. I’ve got trees that need to be cut down. Flowerbeds that need to be mulched. Firewood that needs to be split and stacked. Get one thing, give up another. You are as free as you chose not to be.
***
I guess I could say this year’s been okay. I’ve been debating having another go at the blog for months now. Had some ideas but otherwise not particularly inspired. It’s always been a question of the worth of screaming into the void. I seriously doubt any of the couple regular readers I used to have are still here or will come back. Well, so it goes. I never had and never will have what is necessary to be a blogger anymore than I have to be a novelist. The bigger problem, however, stems from depression. I managed to keep writing fiction because it was fun and distracting, but everything else just slid down into that swamp.
I know that I have mentioned depression before on here, but I’ve always been hesitant to say much. “I suffer from depression” always sounds like begging for attention. I don’t want that kind of attention. I don’t want any kind of “poor dear” type stuff. But 2024 was the year to come to grips with the fact that I have a problem, and it is getting worse and not better. There’s a lot of reasons for this. A genetic predisposition. Loneliness. Insomnia. My job being stressful as hell. The accumulation of incurable, chronic health problems. It sucks. I’m going to work my way out of it somehow. Maybe talking about it will be good, maybe it will be horrible mistake.
At least now, when I wake up at 4 am and can’t go back to sleep, morning after morning, there is usually a little, wet cat nose in my ear, purring.
There’s been a lot of talk this election cycle among certain circles about “no blackpilling.” It is, generally, a good strategy to avoid destroying enthusiasm and making people stay home in despair. The relentless push, however, exposes some of the problems I’ve always had with positivity and optimism.
Not everyone is, can, or should (I think) be optimistic. The opposite is just as true: not everyone should be pessimistic. People are different. Opposing viewpoints balance each other and see aspects of problems that others can’t. Too much pessimism leads to despair; too much optimism leads to complacency.
I don’t think Trump is going to win. Or rather I don’t think he’s going to be allowed to win. In fair fight, yes, he would. But America is barely better than a banana republic these days. The optimists talk about how we’re going to overwhelm the cheating by electing Trump by a landslide while multiple states are saying they won’t have election results until days after, are allowing unvetted foreign absentee ballots, Michigan has more registered voters than eligible voters (but those’ll be removed next year, never fear!), the DoJ is suing states that try to clean up voter roles, and so on and so forth. As funny as some of the “Trump is locking blackpillers/libtards in crystals for 10,000 years” memes are, tweeting about how we’re going to win isn’t doing much to stop the steal, now is it? And there’s not a lot (any) time left to do anything about these issues.
I’m willing to give accounts such as the Virginia Project slack because he’s done real world work in his state and he’s cognizant of the risks elsewhere. But has someone like, say, Mystery Grove done other than sneering about pessimists being “midwits” and doing a little cheerleader dance?
Of course, the election is not the only thing people behave this way for. There’s been all kinds of nonsense about the “power of positive thinking” for decades now. This idea is built on the belief that people are “blank slates,” that everyone can be anything.
Maybe the trite messages about “just do it” for [fill-in-the-blank-subject] don’t work for some people because they’ve spent years trying and failing to do whatever it is.* The sad fact is not everyone is talented or able to have a successful career, relationship, hobby, whatever. Not everyone is smart. Telling people like this that they just have to be positive and try harder, the only person to blame is themselves, is not going to lead to great outcomes.
If you make the mistake of saying something contrary to or about these cheerleaders, they have an amazing tendency to explode or block anyone who disagrees. It’s one thing to find a different attitude annoying, but the violence of the reactions to negativity leaves one with the impression that their positivity is so fragile that cannot brook any dissent. What good does your optimism do if it only functions when you’ve plugged your ears and are shouting la la la in order to block everything else out?
There is also a distinct lack of empathy towards other people. We are all not positive nor optimistic. There are definitely times people wallow unnecessarily but not always. Sometimes expressing doubts and negative emotions is a way to cope or expel them. People resort to pessimism because failure is painful and accepting it before the fact can lessen the blow. I believe very strongly that different people feel different emotions more or less than others and that pessimistic or anxious people are often so as a self-protective measure.
So let me be pessimistic. I’ll be happy to be proved wrong.
…
*A personal note on “just doing it.” I’ve talked before about giving up on being a writer. I am never going to be novelist nor a successful blogger. I have neither talent nor temperament. But I do enjoy writing, on some deranged, compulsive level, and I will never stop trying to improve.
I have, in fact, had the best writing year of my life these past twelve months. The last few years I’ve been hovering around 50,000 words per year, and I have more than tripled that during this time period. Which is pretty damn good considering I have for years struggled to write even as much 250 words a day. I started last November trying to carefully outline a story only to have it peter out on me after 24,000 words. Which was twice as much as I usually get so I was disappointed but saw it as a sign of improvement. I had another idea, though, that was bugging me and the easiest way to get rid of something like that is write it down. Oft times this can cause an almost instant expulsion from my brain. Well… about 150,000 words later, I am approaching an “ending.” It’s hard to call it a real ending because this barely deserves to be called a “story.” It’s a plotless, rambling mess that blatantly violates POV rules and has no main character. I’ve already thrown away thousands of words, maybe as much as ten thousand, but nothing I do will ever turn this into a good story. I am doing absolutely everything wrong. I even have an idea for a sequel. It’s terrible, and I’ve never had more fun writing something in my life.
You see, sometimes it’s better to embrace the fact that you can’t do a thing rather than keep beating your head into a wall. We don’t all have talent. Some of us have none at all. Having aspirations beyond one’s abilities only leads to disappointment and frustration. It’s better to be realistic about personal limitations. But saying “I can’t do this” doesn’t mean never improving. I can’t be a novelist anymore than I can climb Mount Everest, but I wrote this silly thing and the other day I ran the length of a soccer field with no ill effects. That sounds pathetic, but I used to feel like I was going to pass out after half a length so that’s a big improvement.
Let us be content with what we can do and the small improvements that are possible instead of wasting time and energy reaching for the impossible.
When reading series, the natural place to start is at the beginning. But the first book, especially when early in a writer’s career may not be emblematic of the quality of a series as a whole. It can take a couple books to get legs under it. So when you don’t like the first book, should you keep going or give up?
There’s a bunch of series which, beginning them as a kid, I read completely out of order. Discworld. Nero Wolfe. They don’t have to be read in order but do sometimes build on earlier books. As an adult, however, I’ve been more strict about trying to start with the first book and go from there. This isn’t always a good thing.
I read The Hunter years ago now, and while I liked Westlake/Stark’s writing, I didn’t like Parker. But I’d been meaning to try another of his, and so at Misha Burnett’s long ago suggestion, I finally got my hands on The Hot Rock. I’m sorry that I didn’t do this back when he commented about it because The Hot Rock is an extremely different book. It’s the closest thing to a cartoon something in writing could be. It is hilarious. I enjoyed it so much that it prompted me to give Parker a second chance. I have read three more Parker novels and have enjoyed them. Not as much as The Hot Rock but Parker gets toned down just a little in the second book so wasn’t randomly murdering innocent people like in the first book.
Also tried years ago was the first of the Bosch detective books. I liked (most of) the TV series so obviously had to give the book a try. I didn’t like it, it wasn’t terrible, but it didn’t draw me in, not enough to keep going. I read another book by the same author last year, figuring it was written long afterward, maybe he’d improved. No, I liked it even less. Micheal Connelly won’t get a third chance.
A couple other first books I read last year were Sins of the Fathers by Lawrence Block and The Moving Target by Ross MacDonald. I was on a hardboiled tear at the time. Neither one made me want to run out and read the next book. Sins, however, is firmly in the category of no, never thanks to the idiotic (im)moral message while Target is eh, maybe? Maybe the main character improves in subsequent books and stops sounding like a weirdo obsessed with breasts who doesn’t understand how they work. It seems like every scene with a female character he found it necessary to mention her breasts and repeatedly describes them as being “erect.”
I’m having a problem right now with Anpach and Cole’s Galaxy’s Edge series, except it’s reversed from first book to second. I liked Legionnaire (except for the ending) but am struggling with Galactic Outlaws. The main problem with the ending of Legionnaire was its many unanswered questions so the second book skipping off to a different time, a different set of characters (none of whom I like) is less than ideal. I’m debating if I’m going to finish it. Then the question is, should I give them one more chance? Maybe the beginning of the series is just a rough patch. Or maybe they just really like poorly ripping off Star Wars and wasting enormous amounts of time on repetitive inner monologue of an annoying little girl.
Seconds chances are hard to give when you have little time and it costs you money, but in the unending quest for new and different books and series, too often, if you don’t give that second chance, you’re never going to find one.
Nixon Now 
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