Not taking a position on last night’s Smith/Rock incident. But for anyone piously intoning some version of “Violence never solves anything, violence is never the answer, violence has no place in XYZ, etc,” have you considered what discourse would be like with zero possibility of offense to words leading to violence?
The Heart of the Matter
Monday, March 28, 2022
Will Smith, Chris Rock, and "Violence Is Never The Answer"
Tuesday, March 08, 2022
Where's the Outrage?
Someone asked me in another thread why I’m not outraged about Ukraine.
Saturday, March 05, 2022
What America Should do About Russia's Invasion of Ukraine
From a comment I left in a Facebook thread asking me what America should do about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine:
Tuesday, December 28, 2021
RIP Andrew Vachss, A Warrior Protecting Children
This morning I received extremely sad news: Andrew Vachss, a lawyer and novelist who dedicated his life to protecting children, is gone.
About ten years ago, International Thriller Writers asked a collection of novelists to contribute to a forthcoming book: Thrillers: 100 Must-Reads. My entry was about Vachss, who I didn’t know at the time other than by his reputation and through his novels, which I’d been devouring since first discovering them through the work of another writer, violence expert Marc MacYoung, in 1989. Sometime after Thrillers was published, Vachss got in touch and we became friends. We never met, though we would talk on the phone every few months. Those conversations were long and involved, and my wife Laura could always tell when I was talking to Vachss—everything about my expression and posture revealed how closely I was listening.
Vachss had an unusual and insightful take on everything: politics, writing, publishing, and most of all, human nature. He had an encyclopedic knowledge of crime, and his website will remain an invaluable resource for anyone wanting to learn more about human predators and how to combat them (as well as for thriller and mystery novelists who aspire to greater realism).
You might think someone who had seen the things Vachss had seen would be consumed by pessimism about our species. But a pessimist wouldn’t fight as hard or as long as Vachss did. I once asked him how he managed not to despair. He said, “Barry, why do you think I always ask about Emma [my daughter]?” I understood then. His calling was a battle with poisonous evil. The antidote was hearing about love. I told Em as much about Andrew as I told Andrew about Em, and I know the hug I got when I shared with Em the news about Andrew’s death would have meant a lot to him.
Vachss had a way of summing up concepts with deadly accuracy and memorable brevity. Love is a behavior, not an emotion. Behavior is the truth. Blood makes you related—love makes you family. He had no patience with platitudes like “to heal, you have to forgive.” He knew that forgiveness is a choice, not an obligation. As he put it, justice was his vehicle, but hate was the fuel it ran on. I borrowed that concept for my character Livia Lone because it suited her so perfectly, and dedicated my book The Killer Collective to Andrew and his wife Alice Vachss, a former sex crimes prosecutor and herself a warrior against human predation. I don’t think any novelist has had as big an impact on my writing as Andrew, and without Alice’s book Sex Crimes: My Years on the Front Lines Prosecuting Rapists and Confronting Their Collaborators, Livia and her world would be far less real and compelling.
Andrew, who suffered from (though never complained about) various severe health problems, had no illusions about his own mortality. He often said that if he could go out carrying a bomb into a room filled with every child abuser on earth, he would do it gladly. Such a thing wasn’t possible, of course, at least not literally—but Andrew did give, he did dedicate, his life to the protection of children. If you want to honor his memory and his work, I’d suggest contributing to the Legislative Drafting Institute for Child Protection, an organization he founded and which even in his absence will continue to wage what Vachss called the only holy war worthy of the name.
If ever there was someone whose spirit will outlast him, it was Vachss. The world was made better by what he did with his time in it. And through all the children he saved, all the work he inspired, and all the battered souls he touched by speaking truth and abhorring bullshit, it will remain better even now that he’s gone.
Sunday, November 28, 2021
Talking Violence in Fiction and Fact With Tim Larkin
Saturday, October 16, 2021
Flash-Forward Preambles: What, How, and When
- A presentation of something central to the story. Examples:
- Breaking Bad—the impossibility of simultaneously trying to be a meth criminal mastermind and inoffensive high school teacher family man (duty to others vs self actualization)
- City of God—how to escape the favela when trapped between its warring forces (physical survival vs following your dream)
- Goodfellas—the cost of becoming a gangster, which “I always wanted to be”
- The Hangover—“Getting married in five hours,” “Not gonna happen, we lost the groom”
- Nobody—“Who are you, really?” (which identify defines us and which should we be true to)
- A complete presentation—that is, no fragments, no shadows, no direct mystery about what you see in the preamble, only an indirect mystery about how what you see in the preamble relates to the larger story. You can see everything, you just don’t yet know (but you badly want to know) how we got here, which makes you want to watch the rest of the movie or show.
- doling out certain critical information on who, what, and where, to draw in the viewer and ground the viewer in the story; and
- simultaneously causing intense curiosity about each piece of doled-out information, and ultimately instilling an even greater global curiosity about how and why we got here—a global curiosity that can only be satisfied by watching the rest of the show.
Breaking BadBrickCasinoCenturionCity of GodDeadpoolDeadpool 2FallenFight ClubGoodfellasHacksaw RidgeThe HangoverJohn WickKiss Kiss Bang BangLet Me InLimitlessNobodyOnce Upon A Time In AmericaOut of SightPulp FictionTrue RomanceThe Usual Suspects
Bad Times At The El RoyaleCasino Royale
Monday, October 11, 2021
It's Not a "Bad Art Friend." It's a Bad Artist
Recently the New York Times published an article by Robert Kolker called Who Is the Bad Art Friend, which purported to be about the incredibly silly question of what constitutes a “bad art friend,” even the diction of which is markedly childish (for a short, incisive rejoinder, see Elizabeth Bruenig’s The Harsh, Central Truth of the Viral “Bad Art Friend” Story in the Atlantic).
In 2015, a person named Dawn Dorland donated a kidney to a stranger. In preparation for the procedure, Dorland started a private Facebook group where she discussed her decision to donate and invited various people to join, including writers Dorland knew from a Boston organization called Grub Street. Some of those people failed to react; among them was a Grub Street writer Dorland thought of as a friend, Sonya Larson (I slightly know Larson because she handled the logistics for a talk I gave at Grub Street, I think about ten years ago. We also have some friends in common. I don’t know Dorland, although it’s possible we met when I gave my talk at Grub Street). When Larson failed to react to Dorland’s posts about her donation, Dorland pinged Larson to ask why. Larson then replied with some polite praise.
Later, Dorland learned that Larson had written The Kindest, a short story about someone who donates a kidney but with fundamentally narcissistic intentions. This upset Dorland, who signs off letters with “kindly.” Still later, Dorland learned that in Larson’s story, the narcissistic fictional character writes a letter to her kidney recipient, a letter that echoed a real letter Dorland had posted to her private Facebook group and incorporating something like 50 words from the real letter.When The Kindest started winning awards and garnering other acclaim, Dorland began contacting various parties to complain—an awards committee, a book festival, the Boston Globe, Grub Street, a writing conference where Larson had once had a scholarship, various friends of Larson’s. She also hired a lawyer and threatened litigation (strangely, Dorland claims “I'm not threatening,” but her threat to sue the Boston Book Festival—which planned to distribute 30,000 copies of The Kindest in connection with its One City, One Story program—for $150,000 succeeded in getting the festival to cancel the program for that year out of fear of being embroiled in a lawsuit).
Larson beat Dorland to the courthouse, alleging defamation and tortious interference; Dorland counterclaimed for copyright violation and intentional infliction of emotional distress, including alleging that Larson had caused Dorland to engage in self-slapping (apparently Dorland had previously sued a writing workshop Dorland was part of, also for causing emotional distress).Pursuant to the discovery Dorland demanded in her lawsuit, Larson provided Dorland’s lawyer copies of private texts between Larson and her friends in which they commiserated about Dorland, deriding her as annoying, self-important, unselfaware, and creepy.The judge has thrown out Dorland’s emotional-distress claims; her copyright claims haven’t been ruled on. The Times article doesn’t mention the status of Larson’s tortious interference claims; presumably they haven’t yet been ruled on either.While the case was pending, Dorland contacted the New York Times and pitched them the story that became Who Is the Bad Art Friend—which is Dorland’s own framing, the prism through which she views the situation.
Perhaps the most significant moral characteristic of a nation is its hypocrisy. We have noted that self-deception and hypocrisy is an unvarying element in the moral life of all human beings. It is the tribute which morality pays to immorality, or rather the device by which the lesser self gains the consent of the larger self to indulge in impulses and ventures which the rational self can approve only when they are disguised. One can never be quite certain whether the disguise is meant only for the eye of the external observer or whether, as may be usually the case, it deceives the self. Naturally this defect in individuals becomes more apparent in the less moral life of nations. Yet it might be supposed that nations, of whom so much less is expected, would not be under the necessity of making moral pretensions for their actions. There was probably a time when they were under no such necessity. Their hypocrisy is both a tribute to the growing rationality of man and a proof of the ease with which rational demands may be circumvented.
Especially now, especially working within the arts, especially in educated and liberal-leaning circles, there’s a certain cachet in having been wounded, wronged, injured in some way—not only a cachet, but a near-limitless license for aggression. What could never be justified as offense can easily be justified as self-defense, and so the key to channeling antisocial emotions into socially acceptable confrontations is to claim victimhood. Dorland, in particular, went looking for hers, soliciting Larson for a reason the latter hadn’t congratulated her for her latest good deed, suspecting—rightly—a chillier relationship than collegial email etiquette would suggest. She kept seeking little indignities to be wounded by—and she kept finding them. Her retaliations quickly outpaced Larson’s offenses, such as they were.
What an angel, right? A selfless act like that? Well, come to find out, she’s been yapping all over town about how she gave away one of her kidneys and isn’t she such a saint and whatnot. Okay, look. I’m grateful, I really am, but I didn’t sign up to be anybody’s big step on the stairway to heaven, you know what I’m saying?Why couldn’t I have gotten a kidney from some nice dead kid? A terrible boating accident, a traumatic head injury—something, as long as the kidney becomes available through an act of God that forces a bereaved and loving family to make a final gesture of kindness and generosity, not through some weirdo theatrical display of nephro-altruism that didn’t get enough likes on Facebook. I don’t know whether kidneys are imbued with the souls of their bodies of origin, but I’m starting to think I might just as well give it back…
That Dorland might be damaged or difficult is of little interest to me. That she’s destructive is my concern. This isn’t about an artist trying to protect her own rights; it’s about a person attacking the artistic rights of others.