James Hazlett Foreman

Category: Culture

Writing about pop culture, high culture, low culture, and middle culture.

  • The Impossible Grief of Hamnet

    Now cracks a noble heart

    When my psychiatrist asks me if I’m having “death thoughts” my answer is always the same: “not in the way you are asking, but yes.”

    I’m not suicidal, but death is a constant preoccupation. The intensity increases and decreases as I cycle through the usual peaks and valleys of depression and anxiety. In other words, I’m pretty much always thinking about death (my death, the deaths of my loved ones, the deaths of strangers, the concept of death, life after death, etc.).

    Naturally, I’m drawn to art about death and dying.

    My sister recommended Hamnet to me, so I read it, and I want to write about it because it affected me greatly in all the best ways that great art does.

    Hamnet, a Love Story About Grief

    Grief is a kind of universal element that lives in all of us, like the carbon atoms in our bodies. Every human on earth has (or will have) a personal experience with death. New people join our own universes all the time and they all leave eventually, too. They always seem to leave before we’re ready. Nobody in Hamnet’s life was ready for him to go.

    We know from the very beginning of this novel that Hamnet will die, so it’s not a spoiler. When it happens, we’re still shocked. The magic trick of this book, and maybe all great historical fiction, is how O’Farrell hides the historicals behind the fictionals.

    Hamnet is a Boy and Agnes is his Mother

    I can approach Hamnet thematically and say it’s about grief, but that’s not quite accurate. It’s really a book about a person, Agnes, who is a witchy sort of woman living in the middle ages in Stratford, England. Her husband happens to be a playwright we all know but he’s never named and we mostly learn about him as he comes in and out of Agnes’s story.

    Agnes is a kind of village shaman, using herbs and other natural things to heal people. The writing borders right on the edge of magical realism, because sometimes it seems like Agnes really can learn about people just by touching their hands in a specific place, and sometimes it seems like her folk remedies actually can rid someone of the plague or fix whatever else is wrong with them.

    In the world of the book, she can and she does.

    She grows up feeling wrong, out of place, too dark, too tall, too unruly, too opinionated, too silent, too strange.

    A Note About Craft

    I am a big fan of O’Farrell’s writing. Here’s one of my favorite passages:

    WHEN THE TWINS WERE VERY SMALL, PERHAPS AROUND THEIR first birthday, he had turned to his wife and said, Watch, Agnes had lifted her head from her workbench.

    He pushed two slivers of apple across the table to them. At exactly the same moment, Hamnet reached out with his right hand and gripped the apple and Judith reached out with her left.

    In unison, they raised the apple slices to their lips, Hamnet with his right, Judith with her left.

    They put them down, as if with some silent signal between them, at the same moment, then looked at each other, then picked them up again, Judith with her left hand, Hamnet with his right. lis like a mirror, he had said. Or that they are one person split down the middle.

    Their two heads uncovered, shining like spun gold.

    I have read other reviews that mention how affected the prose is and that makes me wonder if I’m missing something or if they’re seeing something I’m not. However you want to describe Maggie O’Farrell’s writing, I think it’s great and I want to read more of it.1

    A Mother’s Grief

    You never get over grief. It’s not like a virus or infection that runs its course and goes away. We have to live with it always. It comes and goes.

    Hamnet shows us the architecture of the grief in Agnes’s heart after her son dies. One measure of a great story is that it reflects back at you what you can recognize but in ways you never thought of before, or illustrates them in ways you would never have considered. I see myself in Agnes and her anguish.

    This passage puts to words an experience we can all relate to: when we think of someone and, for a moment, forget that they’re gone.

    She, like all mothers, constantly casts out her thoughts, like fishing lines, towards her children, reminding herself of where they are, what they are doing, how they fare. From habit, while she sits there near the fireplace, some part of her mind is tabulating them and their whereabouts: Judith, upstairs. Susanna, next door. And Hamnet? Her unconscious mind casts, again and again, puzzled by the lack of bite, by the answer she keeps giving it: he is dead, he is gone. And Hamnet? The mind will ask again. At school, at play, out at the river? And Hamnet? And Hamnet? Where is he? Here, she tries to tell herself. Cold and lifeless, on this board, right in front of you. Look, here, see.

    It’s not just a book about how Agnes and her family roil and boil in their grief over Hamnet’s death. A good story also has a trajectory, a movement from the state of things in the beginning through some transformational event. That transformation is the heart of drama.

    It’s part of the human story, too. We begin a life, even a single day, as one person and events happen that change us forever. Agnes suffers the death of her son and grieves and, in the last chapter, is permanently transformed. I’ll get to that in a minute.

    Station Eleven (the series)

    I haven’t read the book Station Eleven by Emily St John Mandel. I was so powerfully affected by the series that I don’t want to alter it in my mind by reading the book. I don’t know if that makes any sense. I don’t even like recommending Station Eleven to people because I’m afraid they won’t like it as much as I did, or, perhaps worse, won’t be as affected by it as I was.

    The tv show was a profoundly moving experience. I watched it as the last few episodes aired. It was a show that was being made before and during the pandemic and it aired those last episodes just as the lockdowns were ending.

    The series is about Kirsten, in both the present day and 20 years after the pandemic that killed most of the world’s population. She is an actor in the Traveling Symphony, which performs music and plays to the communities that have sprung up in the bones of the old world.

    It’s post apocalyptic but not in the way you might be used to. One of the things I loved about Station Eleven is how it depicts the end of the world as the beginning of a new one. Most post-apocalypse stories are about how society breaks down and sets people against each other. This does not ring true for me and what I know about people.

    What do you see on the news when disasters happen? What do you see when tragedy happens in your own life or in your own community? People don’t scatter and huddle in their basements with guns aimed at the door — they spring into action to help. Look at the aftermath of any disaster, anywhere in the world. The pile of rubble that used to be a hospital is crowded with people digging others out, tending to the injured, comforting their neighbors. If the end of the world happened, I don’t think everybody would immediately leap at the throats of their neighbors.

    There are violent people in the post-pan(demic) world of Station Eleven, but they’re fringe crazies, aberrant exceptions. They barely appear in the story at all.

    By the end, Station Eleven brings all of the characters we’ve met over the course of 10 episodes and puts them in a post-pandemic, post-apocalyptic production of Hamlet. In acting out the play, our characters reach a kind of mutual understanding of each other and allows them to set aside the traumatic happenstances that led them to fighting and scheming against each other.

    Hamnet is Also Hamlet

    Factually, William Shakespeare had a son named Hamnet who died of the plague at the age of 11, and a few years later he wrote a play called Hamlet. We also know that Shakespeare made a lot of money and sent most of it back to his family in Stratford. He retired there, too.

    In the book, we see a Shakespeare who can’t sit still. He needs to be in the city, performing, creating. Even after the death of his son, he can’t stay with the family. He can’t explain it to Agnes, who is perplexed by his callousness and selfishness. She watches him leave after their son’s death and she understands him even less than she did before.

    In the book, Agnes hears that her husband has written a play with the same name as their dead son, and she’s enraged by it. How dare he! She and her brother travel to London expecting to be disgusted.

    But that’s not what happens.

    She watches the character of Hamlet, who looks and acts just like her son, who has been coached and trained by her husband exactly how the boy stood, or smirked, or walked, or spoke. Her husband plays Hamlet’s father, a ghost.

    “Hamlet, here, on this stage, is two people, the young man, alive, and the father, dead. He is both alive and dead. Her husband has brought him back to life, in the only way he can. As the ghost talks, she sees that her husband, in writing this, in taking the role of the ghost, has changed places with his son. He has taken his son’s death and made it his own; he has put himself in death’s clutches, resurrecting the boy in his place. ‘O horrible! O horrible! Most horrible!’ murmurs her husband’s ghoulish voice, recalling the agony of his death.

    He has, Agnes sees, done what any father would wish to do, to exchange his child’s suffering for his own, to take his place, to offer himself up in his child’s stead so that the boy might live.”

    Agnes experiences her husband’s production as a catharsis, a revelation. Through this performance, she can process the death of their son and see, finally, and in stark relief, the context and shape of her husband’s grief, too. Agnes can move on to the rest of her life with a new understanding of her husband where before she had always struggled to comprehend him. Art transforms.

    Shakespeare, Agnes, Kirsten and Jeevan all use performance, as witnesses and as participators, to talk and listen to each other.

    The stage allows us to be vulnerable and exposed while also hiding our true selves behind masks and costumes. Words written for us, spoken by characters who bear no relation to ourselves except in our mutual humanity, resonate through time and distance and unite us together and help us, too, to understand each other. This is not just performance but all art. Great art shows us ourselves while it shows us things we’ve never seen.

    I gave you a piece of Hamnet to read, so naturally I want to give you a piece of Station Eleven to watch.

    This has small spoilers, but it’s from the second episode so you’re not missing much context. Jeevan, the man taping up the vent, is introduced to us as a guy watching a production of King Lear who sees a famous actor on stage have a medical event and instinctively runs on stage to help him. Kirsten is a child actor in the same production who gets lost in the chaos after this event and the simultaneous outbreak of a world-ending flu pandemic. They take refuge in Jeevan’s brother’s apartment.

    Kirsten is also the adult woman in a production of Hamlet that does not fully unfold fully until the end of the show (but you can see it hopscotches through time).

    Great Art Transforms Us

    As we watch a play or performance, we experience the text of the songs being played or the lines of dialogue being spoken and they allow us to reflect on our own lives and feelings.

    We see a wrathful Iago scheme and plot against his commander and remember the times where we, too, were passed over for a promotion. That other guy didn’t deserve it, but we do! When we see Othello, twisted and contorted into seeing an unfaithful wife, we can think of the times we lost our faith in our own friends or lovers. When Othello snaps and strangles his dearest love, we can all remember the times we treated someone badly because of our own anger or resentment.

    Hamnet and Lincoln in the Bardo

    The obvious accompaniment to this book, or maybe another book in a reading list, would be Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders. It’s a different kind of book in lots of ways — it takes place in the Bardo, or the space between life and the afterlife, and our characters are all unquiet ghosts in a cemetery. Stylistically they couldn’t be more different, as it’s all told in a shifting, choral sort of epistolatory first person. These ghosts witness Abraham Lincoln come to visit the temporary tomb of his son who has, like Hamnet, died young from a disease.

    Lincoln’s grief is legendary and known to us. He is said to have held his boy’s body in this temporary resting place.

    All three of these pieces — Hamnet, Station Eleven, and Lincoln in the Bardo, are in conversation with each other, at least in my mind. They are certainly in conversation with each other to me. Interestingly, Hamnet and Station Eleven kind of came out around the same time, so they weren’t in clear communication with each other.

    You don’t have to squint to see it is also in conversation with The Pitt, which also hops back in time to the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic. It, too, is kind of about grief and moving on when everybody seems to be dying around you.

    We’re so powerless against death. We are always fighting it, writing about it, making shows and art about it, trying to understand it.

    1

    thankfully she has written lots of books

  • A Sequel to Andor: Rogue Company

    My pitch for a thrilling Star Wars show after Andor

    The rebels won, but the dirty work isn’t done.

    Added 9/13/25: I’m revisiting this for the algorithms because the conversation about Andor has not stopped. This is my vision for a series that would take place after Andor, but you can also see this as Andor Season 3. This article goes over some of it — Tony Gilroy gave an interview where they asked him about a fan’s idea for Andor Season 3. That idea is similar to mine, but it frees Daedra from prison and makes her a Hannibal Lecter type of character as she gets revenge. I don’t like that because I think it’s much more interesting to put her where I have (as a double agent against both the Empire and the Republic).

    This is a long post of very niche, nerdy fan fiction. I’ll include a little overview of my relationship to fan fiction and related topics at the bottom. Until then, enjoy my pitch.

    Some art feels like it was made specifically for us and sometimes that very art stirs us to make our own. I have had this idea rattling around in me for quite a while, probably some time after Rogue One came out. I want more stories like the ones Andor gave us, so I wrote them.

    Anyway, I’ll start with the pitch:

    Title: Star Wars: Rogue Company

    Logline: A year after the fall of the Empire, A team of rebels hunt down the worst Imperial war criminals against the backdrop of a burgeoning New Republic.

    Tone: Andor meets the movie Munich

    Synopsis: The long galactic nightmare is over. The Emperor is dead, the Imperial Remnant has been defeated and scattered to the Outer Rim. The New Republic is building what it can from the wreckage of what came before. While the leaders of the Rebellion pick up the pieces of what’s left of the Imperial government, a small team of operators, spies, soldiers and scoundrels work in the shadows of the new dawn to hunt down the worst of the Empire. From the disgraced Senators who collaborated with the evil Empire to the generals at the tip of the Imperial spear, Rogue Company brings them to justice.

    Main Characters:

    Kleya Marki. The main protagonist. She worked for many years with Luthen Rael to chip away at the Empire and, ultimately, create the circumstances that allowed the Rebel Alliance to exist. In the days of the Empire, bombings and assassinations were the norm, but the new bosses want her to stay on the straight and narrow.

    Arin Mosch. The other main protagonist. He’s a true believer in the New Republic and its lofty ideals. He’s the moral counterpoint to Kleya’s ends-justify-the-means methods. He is the scion who went to war while his siblings managed the family business. He frequently clashes with Kleya.

    General Alexsandr Kallus. A former ISB agent who secretly fed information to the Rebels under the name Fulcrum and defected to the Rebellion. He is tasked with developing a New Republic espionage and counter-espionage division while also staying true to its ideals. He is Rogue Company’s commandant, the guy who gives the orders and sets up missions.

    Dedra Mera. Imperial triple agent. Dedra survived the fall of the Empire only to find herself among a small Imperial Remnant after a prison break staged by Rebellion operatives. The Rebels believe that she is their secret but she is actually feeding them false information. She works against both the Imperial Remnant and the New Republic in service of her mysterious new master. She walks the knife’s edge at all times and even she doesn’t know where her true loyalties lie anymore.

    Mon Mothma. The leader of the New Republic. In addition to the constant challenges of creating a new government, she has to deal with the old, unsettled scores of her life as a Senator, appease the many factions fighting for favor, and prevent the Imperial Remnant from filling the vacuums that the New Republic can’t fill themselves. On top of that, there’s the matter of all the promises, compromises and favors she made in the service of the greater good and what happens when those porgs come home to roost.

    Senator Tamril Yoost. Senator from Kuat. Yoost is the main antagonist to Mon Mothma, representing the planet most sympathetic to the Imperial Remnant. Yoost is outwardly supportive of the New Republic as it takes shape but unabashedly critical of the Rebel Alliance’s methods during the war. Maintains the lie that the Jedi are dangerous and blames Darth Vader for the Emperor’s radicalization.

    Chief Advocate Marl Fetter. A harried and experienced attorney in the Coruscant justice system, Fetter defended Rebel criminals against Imperial crackdowns, constant authoritarian overreach, mercurial shifts in enforcement, and capricious, inscrutable corruption, all while deftly avoiding reprisal. He was a natural choice to head the new government’s criminal justice reforms and the prosecution of the Imperials, but he’s used to being on the other side of the courtroom.

    Neska Pujar. Ambitious young journalist with something to prove and new hire at the Coruscant News Network. Neska has only ever known the Empire and lived a hard life in the lower floors of Coruscant. She has fought hard to get to where she is, and was just assigned to the Reclamation Desk where she does little more than rewrite official reports from the garbage and sanitation departments. She stumbles upon information that suggests things are not what they seem in the new government.

    Supporting Characters

    Moff Kobb Sobelle. Sobelle was the Moff in charge of the Kuat sector during the Empire. He is most definitely still in charge of Kuat, albeit unofficially, and maintains his luxurious lifestyle. He keeps a reprogrammed Operation Cinder messenger droid as a toy. His hedonistic lifestyle hides his true ambition: rebuild the Empire with himself as the Emperor.

    Hosan Maye. A low level Imperial manager who only knew the Empire as his employer, blissfully unaware of the crimes and atrocities and nearly every aspect of the Galactic Civil War. The New Republic is just the new boss to him, and he dutifully continues his work overseeing Sector 7345 in the Coruscant Sanitation Department.

    Episode 1: Long Live the Empire

    An angry Kallus storms out of a meeting with the New Republic military. Kallus has presented irrefutable evidence that Kuat is harboring an Imperial Moff who oversaw and facilitated multiple war crimes. The military council refuses to act, preferring a diplomatic solution that has so far gone nowhere.

    Kallus finds Kleya Marki who has been quietly supporting rebellion elements in Imperial Remnant sectors. He convinces her to come back into the field and undertake a secret, unofficial mission to bring Moff Sobelle to justice.

    Mon Mothma presides over her own contentious meeting, though hers is with representatives of the Rebel Alliance and members of the Coruscant delegation. They argue about how much power former Imperials should have and what concessions are necessary in order to keep the capital planet operating smoothly. One of those is the head of Coruscant Reclamations, who returns to his own department with a chip on his shoulder.

    He is forced to demote one of his best administrators, a mid level Manager named Hosan Maye, a former Imperial who oversaw multiple departments of garbage sorters, including a family of Ugnaughts. They’re fired by their uncaring, ambitious new manager. One of those Ugnaughts kept an old holo diary of a Clone Wars commander turned Imperial who suspected, and gathered evidence, that Darth Vader was actually Republic hero Anakin Skywalker. This Ugnaught quietly gives Maye this recording as a parting gift.

    This is a pretty great pitch, right? Maybe one of your Hollywood friends would like to read it haha lol jk or unless…?

    Share

    I stopped at one episode because you get the idea.

    The plot of the show is structured similarly to Andor. The main story centers on Rogue Company and their secret missions to bring war criminals to justice. That sets the scaffold on which the whole show is built and gives us our two leads, Kleya and Arin.

    Their first mission, likely over the course of a few episodes (following Andor’s 3-episode arc structure), would be to extract Sobelle. Further adventures, quests, or missions could include more extractions (and a few lively debates about assassinations), heists, and general shenanigans against the Imperial Remnant. We could even venture into the dark underbelly of the galaxy — we don’t see it much in Andor, but the Hutts and the Pykes are two among many criminal organizations still active and still very much a threat to peace.

    The possibilities for continuing adventures are endless, but here are a few of my own arc ideas:

    Life During Wartime. A deep cover specialist with cyber mods that allow them to change identities goes silent. Their final message warned of an impending disaster and hinted at another secret super weapon. Is this a paranoid break with reality or something much worse?

    Uneasy Ghosts. Tay Kolma was a loose end to Luthen and Kleya but he wasn’t just a man in the wrong place at the wrong time: he was a connected and influential member of the Coruscant elite. Tay’s widow, penniless and destitute, comes to the Coruscant NewsNet with a wild accusation: her husband was murdered on orders from Mon Mothma herself.

    Too Many Masters. The hits keep coming for Dedra — her Republic controller demands something they can use or they’ll cut her loose. Her leads on Republic secrets have dried up and her Imperial commanders are losing patience. One night, a stranger visits her in the dead of night with an offer: for the low, low price of an undefined favor some time in the future, they will give her exactly what she needs to satisfy both. What could possibly go wrong?

    Sympathy for the Devil. The return of the Republic means the return of the rule of law and the pursuit of justice. Marl Fetter has become a steady hand in the chaos, balancing a need for justice against cries for revenge from the many victims of Imperial rule. His dedication to truth and justice is tested when Rogue Company brings in a famous war criminal who might not be who he claims to be. The victims want blood, and there are lots of people in the New Republic who don’t care that he might not be the man responsible — they need a win. Can Fetter knowingly sacrifice an innocent man on the altar of freedom if it’s for the greater good?

    This central conceit and set point of view on Rogue Company could be easily modified a little bit to make it a procedural, with a Villain of the Week structure. I don’t think that’s as interesting as my version, which builds on Andor’s depth and scale.

    Character Dynamics

    Just like Andor, Rogue Company lives and dies by its characters. A proper Season 3 of Andor should pull some characters over — Kleya feels like a natural co-lead. The character of Arin is meant to be a foil to her. He’s a true believer in the values of the New Republic. He’s been submerged in the rhetoric for so long that the whole struggle must seem pretty black and white. Kleya long ago gave herself up to the gray. Throughout the course of the show, they will bring each other a little closer to their side and maybe meet somewhere in the middle (at least in some cases). While Arin is due for a rude awakening, Kleya could use a little light in her darkness.

    Again, like Andor, we also follow other stories. Mon Mothma has an unenviable job in front of her. She has to help make a new government that’s better than the old one, rebuild the Senate, deal with the last 20 years of Imperial authority, rebuild the bridges she burned when she joined the Rebels, and try to pay all the debts she accrued and return the favors she promised while she led the Rebel Alliance to victory. A lot — and I mean a LOT — of people are going to want to take credit for what the Rebels accomplished. She’s their main target.

    Senator Yoost is a villain with a lot of juicy possibilities. He’s been around a long time and has too high a profile to be removed. In private, he changes his mask depending on who he’s talking to — in his meetings with Mon Mothma and other rebels, he’s a sympathetic fellow traveler who misses the easy choices of the Old Republic but grudgingly must do what his constituents demand. To the former Imperials still floating around Coruscant, he’s just playing nice with the New Republic while helping funnel aid to the Imperial Remnant. The New Republic has “may the force be with you.” The Imperial Remnant has “Long live the Emperor.” To the public, he’s a fiery critic of the new government and is quick to remind everyone of how great things were when the Emperor was in charge.

    We’ve never seen criminal justice in Star Wars. The arrest of Andor and his subsequent imprisonment are the closest we’ve seen. There are some in the deep, pre-Disney lore, but I bring it to the forefront. If you’re bringing war criminals in for justice, what does that justice look like? My pitch for Andor Season 3 introduces the tantalizing possibilities for Star Wars courtroom drama and lets us explore what this victory really means for the good guys. How good are they, really? Let’s find out!

    More on the Supporting Characters

    I didn’t fill out more of the Company itself, which could include a bunch of really interesting side characters pulled from the Star Wars galaxy — maybe a refugee from Ghorman (like Magva Yarro), a fan favorite like Migs Mayfield, a spunky droid like C1-10P (Chopper), etc. I’d love to see some diversity, of course, both in the human contingent (lest we forget that Rogue One had zero white guys in the main cast) and the nonhuman one.

    The Big Secret

    The Death Star looms over Andor and Rogue One. That secret is the engine behind a lot of what we see eventually play out, especially in the second season. I propose a similar secret behind the action of Rogue Company: the true identity of Darth Vader.

    Behind the immense struggle between an authoritarian Empire and the ragtag Rebels is a religious dispute: Emperor Palpatine is a practitioner of an ancient religion who wiped out his generational enemies, the Jedi, as part of his rise to power. To this end, Palpatine pumped the galaxy full of anti-Jedi propaganda for decades.

    Anybody who is remotely pro-Empire is going to lean into that propaganda to sow discord against the New Republic, which has an actual Jedi at the center of its two greatest victories: the destruction of the Death Star and the death of the Emperor.

    I can easily see the Imperial survivors blaming Darth Vader for all the bad things that happened, including the evils of the Empire itself. All the galaxy knows is that Palpatine started the Empire after the Jedi tried to assassinate him. Simultaneous to this was the appearance of Darth Vader, in his spooky black armor, at the Emperor’s side. Nobody knew who he was or where he came from. The obvious move for the Imperial sympathizers is to blame Vader for everything, including Palpatine’s sudden turn to authoritarianism. Palpatine would approve.

    Imagine all that discord circulating in the galaxy and then it comes out that evil, manipulative Darth Vader was all along Anakin Skywalker, the Jedi hero. Palpatine was right: the Jedi are evil schemers and their deaths were all faked by the Jedi themselves. They have secretly been in power this whole time, using their mind powers to twist the Emperor into their servant. That’s bad news for the New Republic! Especially since their big hero was Anakin Skywalker’s son. Imagine if these same people found out who Darth Vader’s daughter was.

    Nobody really knows what happened in that throne room during the Battle of Endor. All anybody knows is that Luke Skywalker, a known Jedi, went in with Darth Vader and the Emperor and only Luke came back out. Those Imperial sympathizers would be absolutely frothing to use that against their political enemies. If they knew that beloved Rebel hero and survivor of the Alderaanian genocide, Leia Organa, was Darth Vader’s actual daughter in addition to Luke Skywalker’s sister, and that Darth Vader was also the Jedi hero Anakin Skywalker, I imagine the outcry would be immense. Or, at the very least, the pro-Empire Senators and other leaders could use that to destroy the reputations of the people the galaxy is supposed to trust with the new government.

    If all that is true, what other secrets are the Rebels covering up? How can the galaxy trust them at all?

    This naturally leads to the third storyline: the reporter.

    Journalism in Star Wars

    Just like criminal justice, we’ve never really seen what journalism looks like in Star Wars. I’d love to see a hungry, young reporter find out who Darth Vader really was and what lengths the New Republic would go to keep that news from leaking out. We could trace her investigation of his real identity and, through that, explore parts of the galaxy we’ve never seen before.

    I imagine Neska, listless and annoyed by the reality of working in the big city, absent-mindedly flicks on the holorecording given to her by the harried, now unemployed former sanitation worker. In this recording, a low-level Imperial officer recounts his theory that evil Imperial scapegoat Darth Vader is actually Anakin Skywalker, the hero of the Clone Wars. She watches this recording, realizing that it might be true, while on the screen behind her, Senator Yoost blames Darth Vader for the latest atrocity to come to light. In this moment, at the end of Episode 1, we set the stakes.

    The Canon Question

    According to the internet, the true identity of Darth Vader was not revealed to the galaxy until shortly before the sequel era, in a book called Star Wars Bloodline. That would be decades after Rogue Company, so my idea clears the canon issue (I find most questions of canon to be tedious and irrelevant to good storytelling, which should always be the primary aim, but I concede it here).

    What Happened to Dedra?

    I couldn’t let Dedra die in prison so I would put her back in action for this story, too. She’s on the run and in more peril now. I have her working for the Imperial Remnant but owing her life to the Rebels and serving an additional third master. It seems obvious that this master would be Snoke or a First Order predecessor of some kind, but I left it ambiguous. Dedra is fascinating and I love Denise Gough’s performance. But I also don’t want to make her a hero — she’s a very banal monster but a monster nonetheless.

    Her life is an unrelenting nightmare of imminent discovery. The model for this storyline for me is Baltar in the 2003 Battlestar Galactica. I want to see what lengths Dedra would go to in order to protect herself.

    The Ghosts of the Future

    Looming over any story after the Return of the Jedi is the unavoidable certainty of things like the return of the Empire as the First Order and the return of the Emperor as, well, the Emperor. It gives me some cover for this story, though, because I don’t have to pretend that the New Republic is going to be a return to the thousands of years of peace that preceded the Clone Wars — they’re going to fail, at least for a little while.

    Continuing Qualities of Andor

    Some aspects of Andor that I want to continue and are important ingredients to what I would call Andor-Like Star Wars storytelling.

    • no big characters. I don’t want to see any of the famous faces we all know and love. They’re superstars in the Star Wars universe, too. Luke Skywalker, Princess Leia, Han Solo, Lando Calrissian — they are too big for this story.

    • no Jedi. The force is mysterious and misunderstood, at best.

    • no easy answers.

    Threading the Needle

    I don’t want the thesis of Rogue Company to be: “you have to kill all the Imperials just to be sure they don’t come back” nor do I want it to be “you have to be merciful in victory and treat your enemies better than they treat you” despite my own complicated feelings on these issues. I see this show as a way to tell some really juicy, complicated stories in the giant universe of Star Wars and Andor is a beautiful door into those stories. As all fan fiction, I’m just building on what came before me.

    Star Wars is about good guys doing good things and bad guys doing evil things and Andor, and Rogue Company, let us look at the shadows between light and dark. Even so, I would want to make sure that light stays bright. It’s important that even as we have fun on the margins of the story, we acknowledge that the story of Star Wars is a victory of good vs. evil. Let’s not lose sight of that.

    Final Notes

    Like I said, this is fan fiction. I don’t expect an actual sequel to Andor, nor do I envision this as an actual Andor season 3. Getting this whole thing out of my head and into the universe is my only aim. I also welcome any comments or (nice) criticisms.

    I posted this to the Andor subreddit but without this last bit because nobody there wants to read about my history with fan fiction.

    Anyway, a lot of talk around writerly folks (or maybe creative folks in general) floats around the idea of a “flow state” or the trance-like act of work/creation that we are all trying to access or engender in ourselves.

    For a creative writer in the flow state, the words come out as if some greater power is dictating them. Accessing the flow state means tuning our radios to that frequency and transcribing what we hear. It’s the closest I have managed to get, personally, to what I would call a spiritual experience, or a feeling that powers bigger than me are using my brain and my fingers in service of something else.1

    The exact nature of this flow state is one of great interest to me and I’ve been collecting data since I read The Artist’s Way (this data mostly amounts to things written and said by famous creatives like Tom Waits and Bob Dylan). The nature or origin of the flow state is probably just some combination of body and brain chemistry that strikes like flint to steel, but it sure feels like, well, the hand of god. Or maybe the hand of “a” god. It’s fun to think about anyway.

    I mention the flow state because my longest encounter with it was many years ago, in the back yard of my future in-laws house, where I sat at a picnic table and smoked dozens of cigarettes while hand-writing a script for the first (pilot) episode of a Star Trek show. My show took place a hundred years or so after Picard and company and would form the basis of my first (and only finished) novel (that has nothing whatsoever to do with Star Trek or Star Wars). I couldn’t stop writing that fan script until it was finished, and it came out of me so forcefully.

    I had a similar, but smaller-scale, experience with this. I suspect the restrictions of an established story with its own rules is empowering to me, like when you pinch a garden hose. I have spent a lot of idle hours in my life imagining what my own Star Wars stories would be and what I think are interesting directions to take the stories we’ve seen.

    Fan Fiction is Great

    This would have been impossible to convince me of 20 years ago2, but I am completely in favor of fan fiction as a viable and worthy way to spend our creative energies. I find the ability to create so tenuous and the motivation so often elusive that creation itself, and creative writing specifically, is a sacred and beautiful act, even when (or maybe even especially when) it’s created by a new writer. It’s true that writing fan fiction leads writers to explore their own creations, but that’s just a nice bonus feature. Fan fiction itself is full of wonderful stories and I encourage you to head over to AO3 to find something that rings your bell. I didn’t post this there because it’s not my community and I don’t want to parachute into someone else’s fun corner of the internet for my own gratification.

    Gratification is an interesting word. Is that why we write? I would argue that we only write what we want somebody to read, but that’s not always true. Writing something is its own end and requires no purpose.

    Thanks for reading Middlebrow! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

    1

    note that this does not mean I think my Star Wars fan fiction is dictated from God in order to fulfill some purpose, merely that the act of creation is good and pure and primordial irrespective of its point

    2

    I wasn’t anti fan fiction back then, but I was definitely dismissive of anything that wasn’t Writing Your Own Stuff because I was a prat

  • The Thrill of Competence: Watching The Pitt

    Grief and joy in endless repetition

    Every generation gets their own prestige medical drama. I end up watching a lot of them despite my squeamishness. I’m not ashamed to admit that I close my eyes when Dr. Bangs on The Pitt takes a scalpel to a teenager’s eye socket.

    I had a couple of brain surgeries a few years ago. The first surgery was just to put a shunt in my head. The second surgery was the Big One. They popped open the back of my skull, plucked out a little tumor, and stitched me back up.

    After the surgery was complete, the surgeon told my family about a moment that happened during the operation. As I sat, insensate, in a supine position with the back of my head pealed open, he touched the surface of my brain with his scalpel. My heart stopped. When he removed the scalpel, my heart resumed beating. He did it again, for some reason, and my heart stopped again.

    This was, apparently, hilarious.

    The Pitt is a Pit But it’s Also a Pitt

    The Pitt is a great name for this show. The title refers to the cute nickname the people of Pittsburgh Regional Hospital have for the emergency department. This is because it’s kind of pit-like but also because it takes place in Pittsburgh (which is why they spell it with two Ts).

    There are references to Pittsburgh peppered throughout the show and there were only a few little moments that hit my ear wrong (as a 20+ year Pittsburgh resident). For instance, they eat Primanti Bros, but without the requisite “I hate Primate Bros” comment from an aggrieved foodie. My brother Rob observed in the family Discord that they call Pittsburgh’s light rail “the subway” which is a sweeping and grandiose word for what we actually have (we call it “the T” and most people who live here have never ridden it). They drink Iron City and there’s a derisive reference to Philadelphia, so that’s pretty good.

    While they don’t always get all the little facts right, they do get one thing right: what it feels like.

    The show takes place in the late summer, around the time of a fictional music festival. I read this interview with the producer, John Wells, who went to CMU.

    “We shot in early September and there’s that wonderful, muggy, warm, late-summer, early-fall feeling that we wanted to get in,” Wells said. “The way the air feels and the way in which we shot it, we worked hard to get that into those scenes when we were outside, to get that feeling that there’s a heaviness of the air.”

    Wells said the crew spent time discussing how to capture the feeling with a camera “and how we were going to move at a certain pace in a way to try and get across that feeling. It’s hard to describe in any kind of specifics. It’s just the way the city feels.” – PPG

    He’s so right! The city does feel like that and they captured it so well that I can forgive the tiny little bits that didn’t hit right. Notes for next season: gimme at least 1 yinzer. It’s not Pittsburgh without one! I wonder if Jon Daly is available.

    Each episode of The Pitt is an hour of a single day shift in the Emergency Department. There is a palpable dedication to realism1. There are no cartoonish villains or perfect heroes or outrageous scenarios. I really enjoy the tightness of the writing and the economy of story.2

    This show also made me miss being in the hospital. I know, I know, but hear me out. When I was in the hospital for those surgeries I didn’t have to worry about anything. The hospital is a building full of people who want to heal you and send you home. They bring you food three times a day. They don’t want anything bad to happen to you. If something really bad happens to your body they will try to fix it.

    Out here in the world, anything could happen and I have to find my own meals. Terrible!

    I wrote about these subject in previous editions:

    The Thrill of Competence

    The Pitt is a medical drama, but there’s another genre it belongs to: the unfortunately-named “competence porn.”3

    I like watching really smart people do smart things. I like to see problems solved and lives saved by skilled professionals.

    As I thought about the thrill of watching competent people I started to realize that this is something a lot of my favorites movies and stories have in common. I also suspect this is one of the reasons why people love sports? Maybe!

    Great Examples of Competency as a Genre

    The movie Sneakers is about a misfit red team who stumbles onto a device that can break any cryptographic code. They use it better than the guy who invented it, because they’re more competent than everybody else.

    The book/movie The Hunt for Red October is about a lowly CIA analyst who figures out how a disgruntled submarine captain is going to arrange his own defection while also delivering a secret prototype into American hands.

    The show Slow Horses is about competent (and occasionally incompetent) spies manage to figure things out before anybody else. More competent spies can be found on The Agency and Counterpart.

    I love it when smart, capable, people solve problems because they’re smart and capable. It’s thrilling! That probably explains why it’s so common in the thriller genre lol

    Entering Into the Chaos of Another

    The competency is nice, but I don’t think I would enjoy a show about auto mechanics. The urgency and enormous stakes of medicine make it fertile ground for drama (which is why we get so many medical dramas).

    I worked for Carlow University for a few years. Carlow was founded by the Sisters of Mercy, Catholic nuns whose devotion to helping people is summed up nicely by this quote by John Keenan:

    “Mercy is the willingness to enter into the chaos of another.”

    People who work in emergency rooms leap into the chaos of the acutely sick and suffering. They heal and fix and work to save people and join them on the worst days of their lives. The Pitt is fiction but it vibrates with emotional truth. I can’t tell you if it’s factually accurate, but it understands big feelings pretty well. I know a lot about those.

    Grief > Joy > Grief; Repeat

    In the first episode of the show, elder attending physician Dr Robby gives a med student some advice about how to deal with the constant seesaw of joy into grief and then joy again in emergency medicine.

    During a chaotic crisis, Dr Robby, who has shouldered the burdens of these feelings both in himself and in his staff and patients, and the weight of the billion little decisions they make that can unravel into terrible consequences or bloom into ecstatic relief, breaks down, finally, huddled in the pediatric care room. For him, and for us, the suffering is just too great, as his past and his present collide and collapse, a staggering overload that drops him to the floor. We can’t take anymore and neither can he.

    The med student he advised finds him and, not knowing what else to do, joins him. Robby tells him to get up and get moving. But he’s saying this as he, himself, can’t.

    There’s no monologue at the right moment that breaks the spell. They just get up and keep going. They’re not cured or refreshed, they just continue. All they can do is continue. They open the door and go back into the chaos of the dead and dying.4

    They continue on, and the crisis winds down as the day ends. We follow the doctors out of the building, through the waiting room that’s already full again.

    But before that, the student and Dr Robby reconnect for a minute. The med student repeats back the advice Robby gave him earlier, and tells him he knows the prayer that Robby had been repeating, in biblical english rather than Robby’s talmudic Hebrew.

    She-ma yisrael, adonai eloheinu, adonai echad
    Baruch shem kavod malchuto l’olam va-ed — the Shema prayer

    The tension from the crisis has abated but not with a narratively easy or convenient explosive release. We do get our release, but this is it: a quiet moment between mentor and student. The story closes its long loop from beginning to end, the wise elder has imparted his wisdom and the young student has metabolized the advice into something greater for both of them.

    Robby’s advice is the thesis of the show: you can’t help people on the worst days of their lives and not feel the joy and the grief as if it’s your own — the best you can do is find a balance. The only way out is through, unfortunately.

    These Are Spoilers

    The last few episodes of the show take place during a mass casualty event. There’s a shooting at the music festival and the Pitt is the closest hospital to the disaster, so they get the worst of it.

    When the news hits, the whole hospital mobilizes to deal with the crisis, citing their own “mass shooting training.” They wheel in giant bins of emergency medical supplies. One of the doctors has military experience (we learn along the way), so he has tricks he learned by treating victims of warfare.

    The ease with which the hospital moves into mass casualty mass gunshot mode is depressing and scary and sad and infuriating. I hope this is not the world we will live in forever but it’s the world we live in now. Like a lot happening lately, I wish it weren’t.

    1

    no tv show can be completely realistic, of course. Drama requires the laws of reality to bend to fit the demands of the story. There are good discussions on the subreddit for the Pitt if you’re curious.

    2

    it’s a nice counterbalance to the over-written tragedy of shows like The Boys or The Last of Us, which never have relationships or subtexts that they don’t love announcing in direct dialogue between characters who already know about them

    3

    People on the internet like to apply the blank porn appellation to lots of things and I dislike every one of them. Porn is famously hard to define but anything called porn is very specifically intended to serve a function beyond simply entertaining or telling a story. The Pitt is good drama about competent people doing their jobs well.

    4

    you can watch this scene yourself for as long as the video stays up (I expect it to be taken down because these clips always are). I recommend watching everything that leads up to it first, though. I will say I also forgot the little detail of Robby pushing Whitaker away after he helps him up. The little touches like that are a different kind of competence — the thrill of watching great storytellers, filmmakers, actors, writers, etc.

  • The State of the Union

    This has some bad words in it 😬

    Politics are like gravity: it’s either vague and distant or crushingly immediate.

    We don’t think much about how the planets stay in their orbits, but it’s hard to think about anything else when your car spins off a bridge and you are plummeting to the bottom of a gorge.

    I don’t like to write about politics. I’m not particularly good at it. I don’t know how I feel about most political matters most of the time. I have core values and I try to measure the events of the day against those values. This is probably what most people do!

    I’m happy not worrying about how the roads get repaired, how prepared our military is, or how medical research gets paid for. Those are matters for other people, and I vote for the people I think are going to do things that align with my personal values. Again, this feels like what most reasonable people do.

    But We Are Beset By Unreasonable People

    Donald Trump is way more than just “unreasonable,” and so are the people who voted for him.

    I wrote most of the below before that utterly insane meeting between Zelenskyy and our President. What before was a vague unease before the election turned into outright anger after the inauguration which has now become incandescent rage. I am disgusted by what happened there, and what continues to happen. I’ll try to spell it out.

    We Call It Bear Baiting

    Watch the press conference closely (or don’t, if you value your good mood). Vance immediately goes in on Zelenskyy’s unwillingness to talk about Putin in nice terms:

    Vance: The path to peace and the path to prosperity is, maybe, engaging in diplomacy…That’s what President Trump is doing.

    This is a direct shot at Zelenskyy’s unwillingness to take a conciliatory tone with Putin, the authoritarian dictator who has been very public about his intention to take back what he thinks belongs to Russia and who has invaded a sovereign country, bombed its cities, and killed its citizens.

    While Vance strikes Zelenskyy with one hand, he strokes his boss with the other. He knows what Trump wants: obedience, praise, compliments, and credit. Which is why, when Zelenskyy refutes the notion that he needs to be nice to the guy killing his people and calling him a Nazi, Vance pushes his boss (who is barely paying attention to any of this) by saying:

    Vance: And do you think that is respectful to come to the Oval Office of the United States of America and attack the administration that is trying to prevent the destruction of your country?

    This is directly and specifically intended to get Trump mad. That’s the only reason he said that, and that’s the only reason he’s even sitting there.

    Power in Washington is given to people who are obsequious enough to the President, who repeats his stupid lies back to him, and who join in his refusal to accept obvious facts.

    This whole situation makes me feel like I’m going crazy. How can anybody support this circus?

    Send This to Your Trump Supporting Friends because I feel like arguing with a moron

    Share

    What the Fuck Are We Doing Here?

    Have you seen what happens when a reporter asks a Republican politician to speak an obvious fact that goes against the wishes of the President?

    The President believes, or says he believes, these things:

    • the 2020 election was stolen from him and that he actually won

    • Ukraine was not invaded by Russia

    • the President has absolute power over the entire federal government

    Those are just three of the big ones, but there are tons more. The things that he seems to believe are not true. They are not facts. They are lies.

    Trump Lost the 2020 Election Because He’s a Loser

    But he’ll never admit it in public. He is surrounded by Wormtongues who nod and agree and pump him up and tell him everything he wants to hear. He’s so easily manipulated that the ones who do so skillfully are the ones who reap the benefits of their proximity to power.

    If you disagree with Trump then you become his enemy. He makes things bad for his enemies. Sometimes he just fires them, but sometimes he mobilizes a mob of his followers to bust down the doors of their workplace, beat up their guards, shit in their offices, and try to hang them.

    Make no mistake: I have zero percent respect for any of the pro-Trump crowd. Let me be specific: if you think Trump is good or you support what he does, please help yourself to a walk through the nearest window. I have no time for you, I think you have low intelligence, and I suspect you might actually have something deeply wrong with you. In other words, get fucked.

    Trump represents the politics of grievance. He has no platform that isn’t cobbled together from the manifestos of white supremacists and Christian nationalists who piled into the space left by establishment Republicans who tried to nudge his populist barking into something coherent and were pushed out of the nest by spitting fascists like Steve Bannon.

    There is no unifying ideology, no vision for a better country, nothing. The people who support Trump are tired of getting pushed around by other countries, they’re tired of pretending like they have to be nice to people with dark skin, they are sick of hearing people speak Spanish at the grocery store, and they’re scared that some big transgender woman is going to kick their door down and take their guns away. They’re mad! They want someone to demand respect.

    Just like Vance was baiting his boss, he was baiting his base, too.

    And I’m really fucking sick of it.

    Senator, is gravity real?
    Well, we can’t really say. I definitely feel something when somebody throws a can of soup at my head, though.

    I Haven’t Even Gotten to Elon Musk Yet

    I’m so tired.

    There are very powerful people who cannot even disagree with the president or his cabinet of clowns because the richest man in the world has promised to fund their rivals. If that weren’t enough, they are also afraid of being murdered by Trump’s followers, who have demonstrated their willingness to destroy and tear apart the institutions, buildings and people who get in the way of their leader’s grabs for power, influence and money.

    Even the followers who aren’t personally willing to inflict violence on Trump’s behalf widely and loudly support those who do. Regardless of whether or not January 6th was an organized insurrection it was at least a riot created by an aggrieved wannabe-tyrant that got actual people badly hurt and at least one person badly dead.

    Members of Congress are afraid to voice their differences because the current monarch-in-chief has loyalty and obsequiousness as his only values. There have been many opportunities to stop all of this from happening, but each one was squandered by Republicans who saw the Trump administration as a means to an end and Democrats who kept tripping over their dicks at every turn.

    That end is and has always been power. They wanted power over people, over the country, over the world. They got it. Congratulations, you pigfucks. Enjoy the ashes of whatever it is you think you’re burning down.

    I thought we were better than this. I thought we had principles. I thought a lot of things that have turned out not to be true.

    They Don’t Have a Plan

    There is no guiding principle. There is no grand vision. Trump is mad at people who aren’t loyal to him. Have you seen what happens when reporters ask a Republican to state a simple fact: that Trump lost the 2020 election? It’s nuts. They refuse to say it! Public disagreement with the president makes them his enemy.

    Here’s the vice president refusing to admit it.
    Here’s the Attorney General refusing to admit it.
    Here’s the Secretary of Defense refusing to admit it.

    Why are they so obsequious? Why don’t they state obvious facts? Why do they pretend that true things aren’t true? Because they want that power, baby! That’s all it is!

    You know what he does to his enemies? Ask Mike Pence or his security detail.

    The guiding principle of this country has always been based on what I would call core Enlightenment values.1 These values are, roughly: facts are indisputable and laws should be followed. These assholes in power don’t want laws to be followed, and they think the facts are whatever Donald Trump thinks is true.

    So What Do We Do?

    I don’t know. I’m sorry, I don’t have a solution for you. I don’t write that kind of stuff. I have my own ways of fighting back against this authoritarian encroachment. I’ll get to that in a second.

    Let me be clear: I don’t care about your political party. I don’t even care who you voted for, because voting is only a very small (and of questionable mathematical significance) part of our responsibility as a citizen2.

    In years past, I shrugged as Republicrats won and lost their elections, because I believed then (and still do) that they were basically the same party with slightly different talking points.

    My core values haven’t changed — I still believe in the essential dignity in all humans, that we are all basically good and do things for good reasons, and that all people are better off the more freedom they have. My values roughly align with what’s considered liberalism and enlightenment-era ideas about expression, religion and commerce. Neither party does super well on those values, though occasionally one of them does. Lately it’s been the Democrats, even though they sure do a great job of making it hard to root for them. I am often encouraged by opposition parties, because they’re the ones who are moving against (or just standing against) the authoritarians.

    For a long time, nothing ever really changed for people like me. The people on the margins always suffer the worst excesses of the rulers, but white men usually get the better end of the deal. I have done what I could the best way I knew how, by giving money to charities so they could do good things with it. I still think that’s the best way for me, personally, to offset the damage being done by King Dump and his Dumplings. I won’t tell you which charities you should give your money to because that’s a deeply personal thing and you need to make a decision based on your own values.

    This time it feels more urgent than before, and that’s partly because a few people in my immediate orbit have suffered, will suffer, and continue to suffer because of what Trump has been doing.

    This Time, It’s Personal

    Some people I know are at risk of actually dying and I don’t say that lightly and I don’t mean that they will be forced to hear opinions they don’t like or find new jobs or whatever. I am not even referring to people who will have to find new ways to pay for their medicines or healthcare or the people whose very existence is disputed and degraded, but that’s bad enough and it makes me mad, too.

    When I say I know people whose lives are endangered by Trump’s brainless orders, I mean that literally and specifically. The police and military are full of Trump supporters. The people with the guns are on the side of the tyrant, and they’re extremely capable of using those guns against people who look like somebody they’re supposed to hate.

    Those future and potential victims are just the most obvious and unavoidable reasons I’m so angry about the state of things in this country, but every day provides more. It’s only been a month since that pile of dirty diapers didn’t put his hand on the bible when he was sworn in, and it’s only going to get worse.

    The Bible Thing Was an Omen

    I have zero percent christianity in me, so I do not care whatsoever that Trump didn’t put his hand on the bible when he was sworn in. The important part of the bumbling fumble of that swearing-in was his rejection of the little traditions and norms that all make this country what it is.

    I like it when Presidents have an understanding of the office and what it means and who sat in that office before them. I don’t demand any huge intellectuality, but I do like it when the President respects the office as a servant of the people, not as its only, towering authority.

    You Really Did it This Time, My Mom is Protesting

    I can count on a single hand the number of times my mom said something bad about somebody else.3 I don’t remember her ever being particularly political, though she’s always volunteered and helped out in the community. National politics hardly ever entered the family conversations.

    Imagine my surprise when this photo appeared in the family group chat:

    I asked my mom why she was protesting:

    I am protesting because right now, there is really nothing else in my power to do. Dealing with the horrible frustration that many of us feel due to the events of the last month in our nation is overwhelming at times. I am many generations away from the beginning of this grand experiment called The United States, the basic tenets ratified when the states approved the draft of the Constitution have held us together until now. The crisis is tangible. Demonstrating with signs is one way of standing our ground against this administration’s lack of respect for the rule of law. Many honks in appreciation have led me to believe there are others out there with similar fears. The cold right now is an issue when standing in freezing rain and ice but as I recall my great (times 6) Grandfather, who fought and bled with George Washington in freezing cold and sizzling heat in the Revolutionary War, the least I can do is feel a little discomfort.

    Family friend Bryn did some protesting, too. Here’s what she had to say about it:

    It’s hard to pin down all the things to protest. Mostly the wealth disparity. But that includes lots of other things like healthcare. Protesting the destruction of federal programs that help everyone.

    But I think her signs speak even louder:

    The planet spins, things are always changing, and just as sure as gravity keeps holding us down, I’ll have something new to be mad about in a couple of days and hopefully things can settle down and get back to some kind of normalcy.

    Until then, though, Elon Musk, Donald Trump, JD Vance and everybody who likes them and supports them can eat a big bowl of shit.

    Programming Note

    Don’t worry. I’ll get back to writing about my feelings and grief and stuff. In fact, I’m changing the name of this newsletter again, so when it comes to you next time it will be called “Middlebrow” because I want to write more about all kinds of stuff that are interesting to me. If you’ve been here a while you remember the last time I sort of tried to do that but now I’m serious! Nothing will change on this end of it except some branding.

    Anyway, you have that to look forward to.

    Thanks for reading this. If you liked it, subscribe now because I got tons more in me.

    1

    “The central doctrines of the Enlightenment were individual liberty, representative government, the rule of law, and religious freedom, in contrast to an absolute monarchy or single party state and the religious persecution of faiths other than those formally established and often controlled outright by the State.” via Wikipedia

    2

    to be clear, if you voted for Trump, please don’t tell me

    3

    That’s not entirely true — she has nothing good to say about the bad drivers of West Virginia

  • A Touch Too Much Orson

    It’s All About Me

    I went to bed the other night with joy in my heart.

    My phone, and other devices I use, have immediate and unlimited access to millions of books. Books are my favorite things in the world. I always prefer things in book form over other forms. It’s not a contest—I love movies, music, and short stories, but books are my first and greatest love.

    The joy I felt came from the vast piles of books I have not yet read. I will never run out of books.

    The Joy Didn’t Last

    I have spent the last 18 months depressed. I am in the deeps of it now, though some days are better than others. Don’t worry, I’m fine. I mean, this is part of being me. It happens. I say “I’m fine” because I’m not the kind of depressed that leads to self-harm. I always feel the need to say that, because I don’t want anybody to worry about me.

    This particular bout of depression is notable not for its intensity but for its length.

    What Kind of Depression Is It?

    Two mornings a week, I don’t have to get up for work, so I sleep. I sleep 12 hours, maybe more. I have almost no appetite, yet I’ve gained every pound back that I had lost just before it started. I am disgusted by the very sight of myself.

    This is not the largest I have ever been, but it sits differently than it did. Rather than distribute itself around my body, it now sits reliably in my abdomen. I feel more like Orson Welles than I ever have, because I resemble him more than I ever have.

    Orson was exactly the same age as me when he recorded this interview in 1960.

     

    He was big, brilliant, big. There are other huge differences between me and Orson, but it’s the similarities that plague me.

    Enough about that. There’s more to depression than the physical features. There is a spiritual toll, too.

    The things that brought reliable joy no longer do. I find it hard to motivate myself to do anything that doesn’t keep the lights on.

    Work is something I still am able to do, enthusiastically, as I find a great respite in the reliability and challenge of work and it is only during the work day that I feel distant from the cloud that follows me. Sidebar: I’m reminded of the many stories about David Letterman and his intense self-punishment and loathing that he endured in every hour of the day that wasn’t spent at work.

    Spurts of extra motivation go to cleaning. I’ve never been very messy, but I’ve also never been very clean. The litter box and the bathroom and the kitchen and the living room and the laundry all get cleaned regularly, and when those tasks are completed I reward myself by doing nothing. I’ve gotten very good at doing nothing.

    I work, and then nothing. I don’t do anything.

    I spend many nights nights on my phone, reading articles on Reddit and Twitter. I have friendships that go unattended, hobbies ignored, movies remain unwatched, tv shows unbinged.

    Everybody talks about how great a show is, and, rarely, I might watch a few episodes. I watched the entirety of Squid Game, but I found myself entranced by the difference between the subtitles and the dubbing (I watch everything with subtitles on, because I’m much more annoyed by loudness than I am by closed captions).

    I didn’t really even watch the show for the plot, which I found unremarkable, or the characters, which I found familiar, or the message, which I found pedantic. I watched one episode, the one with the glass bridge, in bursts. I fast forwarded through most of that episode. The drama and suspense of the game itself didn’t thrill me.

    I don’t say that to brag. I don’t think it’s a good thing to watch a popular suspense/thriller show and ignore everything except the subtitles and the dubbing.

    Breakthrough Happiness

    When people who are being treated for depression and anxiety are stable and adequately treated, the brief bouts they get of their symptoms are called “breakthrough.” I have breakthrough happiness. It comes in brief blasts. It can come from many places, or, indeed, any place. My cat is a frequent source of joy. My family. My friends. The usual suspects. But it’s elusive.

    I have felt lately that some of the fog is lifting, though I am reluctant to celebrate too early. Early signs are good that some of these struggles are becoming less struggl-y.

    I wrote a bunch of new words for my second novel, which is almost done and needs only a great opening chapter (and then a great deal of editing, which I enjoy). That was impossible only a month ago.

    I gained weight, yes, but I really just returned to the weight I was before. What is more alarming than the weight I gained was that I lost it in the first place. I was living under a different cloud then, one of anxiety. I was an anxious wreck. I didn’t eat. What was terrible for my happiness was great for my waistline. I would say it was good for my health except it most definitely was not. My current weight is bad for my health, too, and I have already made great strides to getting closer to where my body wants to be.

    My life was extremely different when it was bad, and I am still trying to fix some of the things I broke. I fear that some of them never can be fixed at all, but that’s life.

    I fully expect that the next edition of this newsletter will be about something other than me, because I’m frankly tired of myself. It took me weeks to write this newsletter, and I push publish with the relief of having finished something.

    I direct you to the most recent League of Lensgrinders, where we discuss our depression specifically in the ways it intersects our creativity. We took most of 2021 off, but my friend Evelyn Pryce and my brother Robert Long Foreman are still excited about the League. It’s far too much fun for us to stop altogether. Frankly, I don’t think I could stop it if I wanted to.

    I leave you with one of my favorite songs. I used to listen to this with my father, who is in my mind a lot lately. He’s still around, but, you know, getting old. Parents tend to do that, if you’re lucky.

  • Middlebrow

    Middlebrow | culture criticism by a Middle Aged Middle Child

    Oh Look, Another Project

    I saw that Twitter has a new thing, or Twitter bought a new thing, called Revue, so I decided to start a new project. This is in addition to my other projects that I’ve started and continue to iterate, none of which is my reason for living (pretend I wrote that phrase in French), which is writing fiction. Or nonfiction, or whatever I’ve decided I write. I don’t really write anything. Except this?

    Here’s a list of stuff I do:

    • The League of Lensgrinders. This is a podcast and a secret society that I get to do with my brother Rob and my friend Evelyn. 

    • The Collected Foremania. This is my newsletter. It’s personal but not gross. It’s a deep dive into the things I think are interesting. I’m not entirely sure what it is, but people seem to like it.

    • Middlebrow. Middlebrow culture from a middle-aged middle child. Marvel, Star Wars, comics, movies, fast food, that kind of thing. My intention is to write stuff about the stuff I love that is entertaining and accessible to everybody, even if you don’t share my enthusiasm. And if we can’t separate who we are from what we make, I am very middle. I’m middle-class, too, but adding that to the title seemed excessive. This is my newest baby. 

    • My Blog, which is focused on writing and stories.

    Some Things I’ve Abandoned Recently 

    • The Hazlett Histories. I really had big plans for this one. I was going to walk to the library once a week with my iPad and keyboard and research lesser-known Pittsburgh and Pittsburgh-area history and write about it. That project was as much about the process as it was about the product, as I learned when the pandemic struck and I broke up with my fiancée and found myself not living within walking distance of my favorite library in the world nor needing a break from home life that I could do once a week. My desire but mostly my ability, to create that newsletter fizzled.

    • Twitch Streaming. I was streaming as my gamer identity, alteredbeef, but I lost interest. I still do it, sporadically, but not as a thing. If you’re not streaming all the time (or at least on a regular schedule) then you won’t gather much of an audience, and without an audience, you’re just narrating whatever game you’re playing to nobody, and that makes it harder to want to do it. I don’t have to trim my nose hairs when I’m just playing games by myself, and I can zone out and not talk when it’s just me. A stream would be fun with a guaranteed audience, but it’s not fun without anybody else to do it with me and/or watch me do it. There’s no point doing something to get attention if nobody pays attention to it!

    • Plants. I always intend to Be Better This Time and not let my plants die but I never succeed. It always ends up killing them through neglect. If plants were as noisy as my cat, who I never forget about, maybe I would not be so neglectful. 

    • Exercise regimens. I always have good intentions and get a good start but then I just don’t care anymore.

    • Smoking cigarettes. Ok, that was actually 15 years ago but I’ve never had another cigarette since then and I’m still proud of it. 

    • my novel. I wrote one and it sits on my hard drive and on cloud backups and, in pieces, in the inboxes of America’s most promising agents. Most of them sent very nice rejections, and after the 30th one I simply stopped trying. I will try again, after revising it again. Until then, I will continue to work on the other novels.

    Process is Product

    That kind of sounds like a glib marketing book title or something but it’s not. As I indicated in my last Foremania newsletter, I find myself limited by my process. I can’t write my fiction because I don’t have access to the elements that make it fun for me, and if it’s not fun for me then I don’t have any reason to do it. The reward for writing fiction is the writing itself. The process is the fun, and if I can’t engage in that process, I can’t have fun, and I no longer have any reason to do it.

    Anhedonia is the Pits

    I don’t know why, but I’ve found it more and more difficult to access joy. When I first started taking Prozac, I found that joy was readily available. There was a door in my mind labeled “Joy” and whenever I opened it, rainbows and balloons would flow out.

    I credit the Prozac because I had just recently started taking it and even though I had more responsibilities then, and more stresses, I was possessed by a constant good mood. It was like putting my hand on a live wire supplying positive vibes. 

    I realize that starting a new psychiatric drug can cause an artificial elevation in mood, so maybe it was that. I also know that prozac can reduce its effectiveness (as all brain drugs can), so simply knowing that information might be having a somewhat negative influence in my conclusions. 

    My inability to access joy has translated to a consistent feeling of not being very good, emotionally. It’s like allergies except with feelings. Imagine having rhinitis except it’s your self-worth that suffers instead of your mucous membranes. I don’t know how to stop it. 

    Doctors!

    My psychiatrist is a lovely Russian man who insists I call him Dr. [first initial] despite my taking 3 semesters of Russian and flawlessly pronouncing his name in my initial call. He doesn’t know I can pronounce Russian words but I am tempted to bust out a couple of phrases I remember from college just to make him feel comfortable. He asked me three times whether I needed refills before I understood what he was saying. I don’t like comparing him to Latka from Taxi but, let’s be honest, that’s exactly how he sounds. 

    I addressed this anhedonia with him and he was more interested in finding a cause for my feelings that was not related to my antidepressant. He wasn’t the one who prescribed it, so I don’t think it’s a matter of pride. I think it’s more likely to be a case of his particular approach to psychiatry, which is refreshing. He’s not looking to antidepressants to solve everything. Maybe if I exercised more I would feel better. Sure. Maybe. We’ll see! I’m also getting bloodwork as part of his due diligence, which is also refreshing. 

    Personal is Private is Public is Popular

    I learned this early on in my blogging, which also happened around the time as my divorce, which was 1) a long time ago and 2) emotionally interesting. I wouldn’t call my divorce a particularly exciting event, especially 15 years later, but it was big news among my friend group at the time. I learned a lot then, including how much attention I could get from showing everybody everything they were curious about, which was “how is Jim dealing with his divorce?” 

    People love getting a glimpse inside someone else’s train wreck (me included!) so I’m not surprised.

    Anyway, this was just a way to get you to subscribe to my pop culture criticism newsletter/blog Middlebrow. I mean, I’ll probably get too busy with other things and stop doing it within a couple of months so it’s not like I’ll be blowing up your inbox. If you’re not interested in the stuff I like, you probably won’t like it, so I won’t feel bad if you don’t subscribe.

    While I’m Plugging Things

    We recently had a barn burner of an episode (er, meeting) of the League of Lensgrinders with my pal Amy and I really think you’d like it. You can click the link above or listen to this snippet but either way you should listen to it. Soon (this week!) I’ll be publishing our next episode on Food Writing! It’s a good one too!

  • Me and The Baron

    I only mentioned cancer once this time

    I am writing this from my latest Instagram impulse purchase: a surprisingly inexpensive (at least it was when I ordered it—I see they’ve substantially raised the price since then) and extremely responsive e-ink tablet with a pen. I can write long hand, with decent character and handwriting recognition, for a fraction of what an iPad costs, and this thing is also thinner and lighter than a notebook of similar size. I’m pretty amazed, I don’t mind admitting, though it definitely qualifies as a silly impulse buy. I don’t need this thing. I have more paper notebooks than I could ever hope to fill. I even have one of those iPads, and it does more stuff. I can’t watch movies on this tablet. 

    Even so, I am a believer in e-ink. When it got good enough to replicate paper on a functional level (and in a way that made reading still feel like reading), I shifted most of my reading to a Kindle. There is something to be said for electronics that feel like analog. Maybe that’s only true for people like me, digital adoptees, not digital natives. Would a kid who only ever had iPads get the same kind of enjoyment from these almost-devices? I don’t think so. 

    What’s Old is Old

    There’s a tendency for implementations of new technology to mimic what already exists until someone who doesn’t know any better comes along and breaks all the rules they’re supposed to follow because they don’t know about those rules, and everything changes. That’s why the earliest movies resembled stage plays so much. 

    But those things never really completely go away. We still have plays. Almost exactly three years ago, I was in London watching a production of Much Ado About Nothing (the link does not go to the version I saw, but it was at that location and with some of the same actors) at the Globe that would solidify it as my favorite Shakespeare play and, in Beatrice, see something of the kind of woman I’m drawn to most. Aye, there’s the rub. If you know the play, the relationship between Beatrice and her beau is a bit, uh, contentious at first. That’s the fun of it. 

    Here’s an empty stage:

    I promised someone I would stop writing about relationships, so I won’t break that oath here. Whenever I do, on other platforms like Twitter or what-have-you, this person swoops in to smack me, nicely, but not too nicely. I always take their advice, except when I want to cause trouble on purpose. 

    Where Ya Been

    It’s been a while since I wrote one of these, but I can’t say that I’ve done much of anything to justify it. I’ve been in what my ex wife (and now dear friend) calls a “bulking phase” — rather than write much, I read. I know others have said they have trouble reading books in Times Such as These, but I have not had the same experience. In fact, I’m more voraciously reading than ever. Those same people often report that they watch tv shows and movies instead. Weirdly, I’ve found it almost impossible to watch anything except documentaries about English history, for reasons I can’t explain. There’s something exotic and yet familiar about them that I can’t get enough of. 

    I’ve been reading books, and watching documentaries, and working, and petting my cat, and talking to my cat, occasionally streaming on Twitch with my cat, talking to my family, a few friends (but not enough) and very little else. I’m not depressed. I bathe as often as I did before and still brush my teeth twice a day and wear deodorant, even though Emmitt doesn’t care. I order food from Target and pull up in a parking place and someone very kindly comes out of the store with everything I ordered and puts it in my trunk. The only time I ever have to go into a store is to pick up my medications from the Giant Eagle, which also allows me the chance to buy some of the few fresh produce items that Target doesn’t really carry. 

    That’s all I do. I might occasionally play a video game, listen to a podcast, or take a walk. I certainly don’t write anything that isn’t a work assignment. 

    Do I Have a Fever or am I Just Cold?

    I play that game with myself almost every day, and I have yet to have a fever. I lost weight (and then found some of it) at the beginning of the pandemic, so temperatures that would never register before are suddenly making me put on my housecoat. 

    This video popped up in my head as I was writing something for work (it is related, but only tangentially) and it is both still funny and also cringingly dated. To paraphrase Paul F. Tompkins, there was a period there in the 1990s where “he’s gay” was an adequate punchline. You didn’t need to do anything except imply someone was gay in order for a joke to land. We are thankfully beyond that, or at least I am, and any comedy I enjoy is. 

    Anyway, this sketch has that quality to it, unfortunately, and is also inexplicably racist in its depiction of someone speaking an African language. Adding random pops or clicks to your fake African dialect was, alas, also enough for a punchline. 

     

     

    Oh, That, Too

    I also celebrated something I’ve come to think of as an additional birthday, celebrated only by me and Emmitt (who gets more treats): the anniversary of the brain surgeries that saved my life. I have noted in other places (social media, mostly) about how difficult it is for me to write about my experience, despite putting “writer” next to my name a lot and mentioning the whole cancer thing whenever I can plausibly work it into a conversation. I can talk about it, but writing about it requires a deep dive into my memories and they’re still too fresh. I suddenly find that I’m experiencing the terror and pain again and I’d really rather not. I’ll take my occasional dizzy spells, bad memory, daily little headaches and an optimistic neurosurgeon any day. 

    Baron Samedi

    There’s a pivot for you, but I’m allowing myself to write about one of the memories I have of my experience that is more interesting than “oh yeah, that hurt a lot and I thought I was going to die slowly and in pain.” On the night after my first surgery, I hallucinated that Baron Samedi was dancing around the edges of the shadows of the doors and windows.

    For the record, this is the person I saw: 

    Here’s a relevant passage from his Wikipedia page: 

    He is noted for disruption, obscenity, debauchery, and having a particular fondness for tobacco and rum. Additionally, he is the loa of resurrection, and in the latter capacity he is often called upon for healing by those near or approaching death, as it is only the Baron that can accept an individual into the realm of the dead.

    This was not exactly on the forefront of my mind, and it was not an otherworldly experience. I can’t explain the appearance of Baron Samedi, a character out of my memory, whose appearance also happened to be extremely appropriate to the circumstances. Is it spooky? Yes, it is, in the telling of it, but not in the moment. 

    When I say I hallucinated a dancing vodou god, associated with death and resurrection, what I mean to say is that it was an extremely peaceful, almost joyful thing to see. I had survived a surgery I was convinced was going to kill me and I knew that I was hopped up on a lot of powerful painkillers and steroids and it was in the middle of the night and hospital was very quiet, and I couldn’t move my head, and I was a captive audience to the cartoony dancing. I was alive. I had made it through the first half of the journey, through the first surgery, and it was just me and the Baron. I was not scared, because I knew it was a figment of my imagination. It was fun? Yes. Maybe a little.

    That’s Enough

    I’ve had enough writing, and I’m boring myself, which is a terrible sign. I will leave you with two things:

    One of the things I’m doing is my podcast, which is delightful and fun and I get to talk to two of my favorite people. I forgot to include that in the things I’m doing. I’m putting up the newest episode tomorrow, so subscribe etc. 

  • Boltcutters, Love, Relationships, Me

    Author’s note: what you are about to read is heavily redacted from the version originally written. Sober but drunk on the exposure to a creative genius, I unspooled like a ball of yarn and wrote everything down. I have those thoughts, still, and it accounts for at least double what follows, but removed and put into my journal, where it belongs. I don’t say that to taunt but to confess. I had more to say that was far more personal than I am willing to share, even with the people who read this newsletter, most of whom I know. It’s not embarrassing or confessional, but it was raw, and I prefer my ideas to be, at least, a bit seared.

    I just listened to Fiona Apple’s new album, Fetch the Boltcutters. Anyone who knows me or has read these newsletters is probably surprised that it took this long, because that album is extremely in my emotional wheelhouse, not just in general but for this particular moment. It is also an album that is of the moment, the quarantine, the COVID nightmare (and it it less about the other monumental moment occurring right now, though one could still probably draw some parallels — that is not for me to say).

    Sorry. Back to what I was talking about: being middle aged, being single, having no children, and feeling lots of big feelings. This is Fiona Apple’s burden as well as my own. I love pulling my feelings out of my body and holding them up and looking at them from every angle, and sometimes I do it in the presence of someone else and they’re not comfortable with it at all and they don’t want to be around me anymore. I’m like the kid who picked his nose on the playground. Everybody’s watching you, dude. Can you not?

    You’re making us all uncomfortable.

    I’m doing it right now. I’m examining myself in real time. There are no earth-shattering revelations to be had here, no moments of revelation.

    I’m going to throw a quote at you.

    My friend Andrea, who has examined some of my feelings with me, showed me this link, which is Fiona Apple explaining her songs. There’s no opaque “I prefer my audience to figure it out what it means for themselves” dissembling from Apple. These songs are about her life, about the women and the men who have joined her orbit, and even the dogs they bring along with them, and while she is kind enough to the subjects of those songs not to share with us, the motley public, who she’s singing about, she thinks the people she’s singing about sometimes don’t even know that they’re who she’s singing about.

    It’s refreshing to know that even somebody as rich, famous, and talented as Apple still has to contend with narcissists and petty men, and that even the great among us still have to suffer to be among us, and themselves, and each other.

    We’re all in this together and none of us is getting out alive.

    I know for a fact that I have made people uncomfortable by simply being me. I constantly walk on the knife’s edge of losing all of my friendships because I will do that one unconscionable thing that they cannot forgive, and I will have stumbled into it blindly and with good intentions, which only makes it worse because that means I won’t learn any lessons from it, and I will be back to being myself, except by myself this time. That’s the fear, anyway. Like most fears there’s a bit of truth to it, but hiding under that truth is a vast iceberg of doubt and self-recriminations.

    As we get older, we sift our friendships.

    The easy ones pass through the sieve like sand, while the harder ones, the big rocks or cigarette butts or chunks of concrete bounce around on the top until you get sick of trying to get them to fit into your life and it’s not worth the struggle anymore.

    Good luck finding someone who thinks you deserved a second chance. You got that chance. We’re on seventh and eighth chances now. If you’re not going to pass into our lives easily, then you’d better be worth it.

    Oh, right. The quote.

    “It’s almost a matter of luck, if your chemistry happens to bump into the chemistry of somebody else, then it might just work, because you react to each other in different ways. I did have hope when I was writing that song, and honestly, there’s absolutely hope that I could find a relationship. But I don’t really want to. I really just don’t want to. I like my life how it is, and I don’t feel very romantic these days.”

    She’s talking about her song Cosmonauts, which is one way to look at a relationship: two people trapped together, in space, getting sick of each other. Maybe the bitter aftertaste of a failed relationship is the wrong time to be thinking about these things but it’s at the top of mind because while everything else is happening in the world right now, we’re still in the middle of #MeToo. I don’t want to reduce someone else’s experiences into a hashtag, but it resonates with me because it is absolutely true. Just as white people are due to come to grips with the pain they’ve caused, even unknowingly, men have had to reevaluate themselves, also.

    Any man who says he has never made a woman uncomfortable is either lying, joking, or is hopelessly lacking in self awareness. I mean heterosexual men, those of us who have had the privilege of our patriarchy and the sexual proclivities to treat women differently from others. Again, to dismiss this as woke virtue signaling is to avoid the question, because the answers are uncomfortable.

    Yeah, you made that girl feel weird to be around you once.

    You did it. It happened. You probably realized it much too late, long after you did it, long after anybody remembers it, but she probably does remember it and now you suddenly do, and you want to reach out and apologize but you’re a better person now than you were then and you know that to readdress that awfulness is in service only of your agenda, not hers. You want her to tell you that it’s okay, you didn’t know any better, and she will say that because she has been forced to treat men like babies with soft feelings that are vulnerable and need to be protected. So you keep your mouth shut, because you did enough damage already. Leave it. Just try to be better next time.

    When I say you, I mean me. I mean I. I did those things. But so did you. Maybe the men who come after us will be better.

    “It was a challenge, because he wanted me to write a song about two people who were going to be together forever, and that’s not really a song I’m equipped to write because I don’t know if I want to be together with anybody forever.”

    That’s another quote about the same song. I’m feeling this album very hard. I have to set it aside and glance over at it and not listen to it for a few days, because the truths in it are too true. They’re like staring into the sun, or, worse, looking into yourself. Myself. This is about me.

    I, also, have made women feel weird, but not in a long time. I’m better at it. I’m better at knowing boundaries. It’s easy to be better and it doesn’t take much.

    How to be a better man, in three easy steps.

    1. Treat women like they don’t have gender. Don’t treat the women in your life differently. You probably don’t talk to your sister differently from how you talk to your brother — same idea. This approach will never steer you wrong, because you’re treating everyone the same. At work, on the bus, everybody is an independent human being with goals, desires, and opinions. Their bodies are none of your business. Their activities are none of your business. You are ships passing in the night. Smile at the men and smile at the women. You are a cloud moving through the sky, among other clouds.

    2. This doesn’t apply to some very small selection of specific circumstances when the gender difference is, intentionally, at play, when you and the object of your affection are alone or at least alone together. These times of closeness are sacred. A woman allowing you to join her in close proximity is a person who is trusting you to be safe, to not demand anything she is not offering, to respect the boundaries she creates. You have to assume those boundaries are there, and ask permission to cross them. You’re not ruining the mood. You’re being a better man.

    3. Don’t assume anything. If you’re not sure, ask. Take no for an answer. Dear lord, if you don’t take No for answer, delete yourself from my life.

    These are lessons I learned and lessons I figured out. There are general guides to life embedded in the above, and in my worldview, and they all kind of mesh together. All life deserves respect. All humans deserve perfect happiness. Trust first, and decide later.

    I don’t know if I want to be with anybody forever. I don’t know if I want to be with anyone, period. I don’t feel badly about it. I don’t feel like I’m missing anything. I feel like I’ve given chances, and chances have been given to me, and the dice of the universe have been cast, and I will continue being me. If my future is one of asceticism, it is willing.

    “I like my life how it is, and I don’t feel very romantic these days.”

    I’m in good company.

  • Facts

    What this newsletter will not include is a discussion of Black Lives Matter or the protests currently happening across the world. I spent the week shutting up and listening, and increasing my understanding. I absolutely believe that Black Lives Matter, and all that statement implies. It is not my place to talk about the Black experience in America, but I can talk about science.

    The Origin of Species

    When western science was just getting going, mankind, like Adam, started naming the animals. The person we credit with giving us a lexicon of what shape these names should take is Carl Linnaeus, who you probably remember reading about in biology class. He suggested the system we still use, taking a sloppy and disorganized field of biological classification and streamlining it into simple, easy “binomial” categorization (which is why species names are in Latin and Greek and italicized and the first word is capitalized and the second one isn’t — thank Linnaeus).

    The only way people had to define what was in what species was by observing and examining the characteristics of each plant or animal. Perhaps then it was easier to believe that humans with massive differences in appearance would be different from each other in other ways, too. There were entire continents of people with different colored skin! Surely, the differences between a white man and a black man had to be more than skin deep.

    The discovery of genetics, and the encoding of the human genome, blew that completely apart.

    Data has no bias. The purpose of science is partly to strip away bias from data, and to reveal the essential nature of the universe.

    Science does not tell us what we want to hear.

    Biological essentialism, the idea that there are significant genetic differences among the races, is an idea without merit.

    Let me be absolutely clear: human beings are one species, and the differences between humans are vanishingly small. The differences we define as race are, in fact, only skin deep.

    White supremacy is a deadly, stupid, senseless lie.

    This is not idle opinion or woke liberal thinking. This is fact, readily available to anyone curious enough to investigate it, which white supremacists tend not to be (or they wouldn’t be white supremacists).

    We uncovered some really cool things about ourselves when we started decoding our genes.

    Our DNA doesn’t just have instructions on how to make a creature (you, or me, or a slime mold, as it were). It carries the history of every species that survived long enough to pass its genes on to us, the animals who came before us, stretching all the way back to the very first life on earth. It is what Carl Sagan called an “unbroken thread” and it goes back billions of years, all the way to the very first cells.

    This gives us unprecedented insight into our own origins, and yet tells us absolutely nothing. There’s no instruction manual. It is data, that’s all. It is up to us to figure out the stories we tell. For many years, the story was that certain kinds of humans were lesser than others. They were less intelligent, or less athletic, or less capable. This is all demonstrably false, and each of us carries the evidence in every nucleus in our bodies.

    By looking at the genes of humans in different areas, and measuring the differences in those genes, we come up with a pretty good idea for how old our species is. The answer is: we’re really young. Like, stupidly young. We’ve only been around for about 200,000 years, which is barely a blink geologically, and hardly a sneeze biologically speaking.

    Here’s Where it Gets Really Crazy

    You thought the other stuff was wild, hang on to your hats because I’m going to tell you about genetic diversity between individuals. This is where the DNA rubber meets the racial essentialism road. This is what drives white supremacists crazy, and it’s 100% provable.

    Until very recently, humans had a tenuous grasp on survival. We suffered numerous bottlenecks, maybe as recently as a few thousand years ago. A bottleneck happens when the population is drastically reduced, by disease or climate change, or asteroid impact, or whatever. We went through a bunch of those. We kept almost dying and then breeding like crazy and then almost dying off again. Like bad pennies, humans keep coming back. How do we know that? It’s not like humans were reduced to a few thousand individuals and wrote books about it. No, the answer is in our genes, the unbroken thread.

    Humans have about .1% difference, between individuals, no matter how distant their populations are from each other. A human from America and a human from Asia have roughly the same differences between them that two humans from Asia have. The differences get really blurry, and almost inconsequential. Genetically speaking, we’re so young and so plucky and so inbred (ew) that we literally cannot be very different from each other. It would be impossible. It seems otherwise because the human lifespan is so short. We started out in Africa and spread out from there at a furiously fast clip. Biologically speaking, it was yesterday.

    Okay Jim, but how do we know that? Because we didn’t just decode our own genes, we decoded other species, too! We looked at chimpanzees, which share a lot of the same characteristics that we have. We’re not very different from chimps, but that difference accounts for a lot.

    The genetic differences between chimpanzees that live across a river from each other is something like 1% or so. That’s enormous! That’s humungous! Compared to us, that is.

    Not only does this realization contextualize the origins of chimps (big deal, who cares) but it shows us how closely related we really are, and it makes our recent history even more depressing and/or enraging.

    I won’t even reach too far back for this one: just until a few decades ago, white people were segregating entire populations of people whose only difference amounted to the genetic equivalent of a rounding error. We put our brothers in chains and told them they deserved it because they dared to have slightly (and it really is slight) more melanin in their skin.

    Racism is embarrassing and senseless and disgusting.

    You are more likely to have more in common with a Nigerian bus driver than you are with a President with the same color skin as you. You have more in common with people you’ve never met than you do with the other guys in your genealogy club. We celebrate what country our relatives came from a few hundred years ago, ignorant and dismissive of the vast similarities we share with our African and Asian brothers and sisters.

    While we can’t do anything about history, we do have control over our futures. We’ve accrued a lot of differences since that first migration out of the womb of Africa, but nearly all of them are in our minds, not in our genes. As my ancestors survived Ice Ages and settled into colder climates with less sunlight, our bodies changed a little. The change is so small and so recent that it takes very few generations to make everybody look alike again, and we won’t be any less diverse than we were when we started moving back together.

    It’s one of the greatest crimes ever committed, and repeated, as whites used their slight technological advantage and the blind destruction of disease to steal from their victims, and then continue victimizing them so thoroughly that their children, us, are almost entirely ignorant of the damage caused. I am keeping my promise of never getting political in this newsletter because it is not a matter of opinion or point of view, but a sequence of hard truths we are morally obligated to examine and, if we can, prevent from ever happening again. This is the minimum we can do, and I worry even that is too much. It’s hard to convince the powerful to give up their power, because they’re terrified that those they subjugated will treat them way they were treated.

    Let’s hope our family forgives us.

    SOME NOTES AT THE END

    • Some people think we still have a tenuous grasp on survival, and I’m inclined to agree. Until we’re sufficiently distributed around the solar system, all of our eggs are still in one fragile, blue basket, and we haven’t been very good about taking care of it.

    • There probably were other species of human beings, but they’re not around anymore. They didn’t make it. Did humans wipe them out? Possibly. I like to think that we just adopted them into our families and the species that emerged is us. Luckily for me, the data supports this bias, as we keep discovering the DNA of other hominid species hanging out in the corners of our own genes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interbreeding_between_archaic_and_modern_humans

  • Art

    Man, I love art. It’s one of the best parts of being alive in the western world in 2020. We get to enjoy all kinds of art and we can ignore the kinds we don’t like. It’s great!

    What Is It?

    I don’t know! One workable definition of art is this: a thing that doesn’t have a purpose except to exist. It usually has some aesthetic appeal, but not always. Duchamp’s Fountain (a urinal with something written on it) is not exactly beautiful, but it’s definitely art. The obvious things that nobody would debate, like the Mona Lisa or Girl With the Pearl Earring, or Donatello’s David, don’t need to be defended. They’re obviously art.

    What was the first art? We have no idea! The artifact most widely believed to be the oldest art in the history of the world is this:
    It’s a bunch of red lines drawn on a piece of rock approximately 73,000 years ago. Its incredible age, 30,000 years older than the previous record-holder, is one reason why not everybody thinks it’s art. This skepticism is consistent with debates that go on even today about contemporary creations that, some decide, is not art.

    Roger Ebert

    I always enjoyed Roger Ebert’s writing and I was sad when he died. One unfortunate thing he’s remembered for is saying, repeatedly, that video games were not art. He mounted a major defense of his point, which I won’t get into here. That made me sad, too, but not because he didn’t think video games were art. What made me sad was that he felt justified declaring that anything isn’t art.

    A game of baseball isn’t art, but if I take a photo of it and put it in a frame, it is. If I get a bunch of my friends together and dress one side up like German philosophers and the other like Greek philosophers and have them play soccer and film it, that is art. Even hard rules, like “sports aren’t art,” are flexible.

    So what is art? Art is anything we say it is. We can therefore debate the merits of a certain piece of art (“how artistic is this art?” Or “what is this art saying?”) but its existence as art is undeniable. It might not be pretty but we should not be willing to say anything isn’t art. When someone says “this is art,” we should never say “no it’s not.”

    Performance Art

    It’s hard for a lot of people to appreciate performance art. I confess to once being one of those people. It wasn’t my experience of performance art that changed my mind (in fact, I once saw some performance art that simply reinforced my opinion, at the time, that it was not art). What made me come around was the the slow erosion of my preconceived notions, a process that naturally happens as we age. I got older and more appreciative of things that I had at one time dismissed. This is an ongoing theme of this newsletter because it is an ongoing theme of me. I am, broadly speaking, more apt to accept things and appreciate them, than I was when I was younger. I am less certain that my opinions are correct, so they take on a certain plasticity. This is supposed to be the opposite of what happens when you get older. Your opinions are supposed to calcify as your biases are reinforced. I feel lucky to have this experience of wonder rather than skepticism. I was extremely skeptical as a younger man, and I am less so now.

    But enough about me, how about that Marina Abramović!

    This TED talk is a good summary of her work, in her own words. The difference between performance art and theater, according to Abramović, is the participation and complicity of the audience. She talks about one of her most famous performances, Rhythm 0, which she performed in 1974.

    Rhythm 0

    I’d call this piece emblematic of what performance art is to me, even though it’s an outlier and not representative of how most performances are constructed. Abramović is, herself, an outlier, and calls herself the Grandmother of Performance Art. I think it’s a good representation both because of how it was constructed (echoed by her most famous performance, Artist is Present) and some unsettling realizations about the audience. The setup was simple: Abramović stood completely motionless near a table with 72 items. The audience was encouraged to use them on her in any way they liked. One of those items was a knife. One was also a loaded gun. The acts performed on her grew progressively more brutal and dehumanizing as the six hours went on. This outcome was not entirely unexpected, but even the artist was surprised by how it all went. In her own words:

    I felt really violated: they cut up my clothes, stuck rose thorns in my stomach, one person aimed the gun at my head, and another took it away. It created an aggressive atmosphere. After exactly 6 hours, as planned, I stood up and started walking toward the audience. Everyone ran away, to escape an actual confrontation.

    While all art engages the audience in some way, even just as a passive viewer (as in the painting Las Meninas, in which the viewer takes the perspective of the King and Queen of Spain, whose portrait Velázquez is painting — they can be seen in a mirror reflection in the background), performance art often includes the audience in some way. Indeed, without an audience to perform various acts on her during the performance, there is no Rhythm 0, which would be a powerful statement of its own. Am I suggesting that an unobserved person standing alone in a room with a table covered in objects for six hours is art? Yes, it could be!

    My Favorite Art

    First of all, my favorite artist is my mother. I own a few of her paintings, and it warms my heart to look at them. Not only are they good paintings, but she’s my mom and she made them and I love her. I particularly love her watercolors. The attic of her house is a mini-gallery of her watercolors, specifically of dogs, and I adore each and every one of them. I also love the art made by my friends, who are my second-through-seventeenth favorite artists (you know who you are).
    “Dolores”

    One artist I love is an artist I’ve never met, Simon Stålenhag, from Sweden. Sure, he paints giant robots and unnatural creatures, but they’re only part of what I love about his work. My favorite of his paintings are the ones that turn the fantastic into the mundane. I love the cognitive dissonance of a person encountering something unimaginable with a sigh of familiarity.

    Here are two of his paintings that I love, and what I love about them.

    The eye is immediately drawn to the giant robot, of course. And there’s a kid with a gun! Where did he get that? Is it real? Probably his dad’s, because semi-rural Sweden is a lot like semi-rural West Virginia, where I grew up, and this kid is up to no good. His sister, or neighborhood friend, is bored, and doesn’t care about the gun or the giant robot, she just wants to do something else. The fantastic and the familiar collide and we see it in the girl’s body language and her expression. (Here’s a bigger version where you can get a good look at the details)
    I also love the body language in this painting, which is also the cover of his book, The Electric State, which is a series of paintings like this one tied together by the story of a woman, Michelle, and a childlike robot traveling across the country. It’s America, not Sweden, but one that’s been ravaged by a virtual reality simulation that replaced real reality for so many people that civilization appears to have collapsed around it. What I love about this painting is the familiarity of the parking garage and the cars and the (again, bored) expression of the woman. I know that pose, hand out, waiting for a curious kid to stop staring at whatever captured his attention and come along already. (Here’s a closer look at the detail)

    Charlie White

    When I was doing data entry at a big company, it was my first Real Job. I was so comfortable there that I stayed for 8 years. I tend to get very comfortable in my comfortableness, even in bad situations, which is also something that happens to me less and less often as I get older. The Me of 2020 would never have stayed there for that long, because I’m less and less inclined to let my comfort command my better judgment. A little discomfort is good when it leads to a better place.

    One thing that I carried with me at every cubicle (they shuffle you around a lot in big companies like that) was a photograph from an issue of Wired magazine. It was a feature story about an artist named Charlie White and his work immediately grabbed me. In particular, I loved Fleming House, and kept a two-page spread of this work thumbtacked to the wall of my cubicle.
    This photograph is another clash of the fantastic with the mundane. Reading that article again I see that he was influenced by The Raft of the Medusa and Saturn Devouring His Son by Goya, which are paintings that loom large in my mind, also. I love the reactions, the capture of a moment in time that could never happen in reality (luckily for us), and the fact that there’s a giant monster about to eat some college students.

    I freely admit that I am drawn to these works because of the robots and monsters, and that without these fantasy elements, I probably wouldn’t have taken a second look.

    I have a fondness for the extraordinary. Maybe it’s childish, or escapist, and a sign of arrested emotional development, but I don’t think so. I won’t turn this into some wide-ranging defense of science fiction and fantasy, as much as I’m tempted to. I can’t explain precisely why space ships and dragons make me happy, they just do!

    But Not Everything I Love is Science Fictiony or Whatever

    I love those things, and I love Stålenhag’s work for those elements, but I love plenty of things that don’t have anything weird or fantastic or magical in them. I’ve written before about the Raft of the Medusa and the amazing story behind it, and a video project made about the painting, in my newsletter about Routines. I confess that something needs to have a hook to keep my attention, but that hook can take many forms. Even when the hook is science fiction, like Star Wars, my favorite moments from movies like that are the human ones. My favorite scene in all of Star Wars has nothing to do with space ships or laser swords — it’s two people having an argument in a hallway.

    I Feel Like I’ve Used This Example Before

    I like to write, as you might have noticed. I enjoy the process of converting thoughts into words and communicating and telling stories. I love doing it! I also love it when people read what I’ve written (so, you know, tell your friends).

    What I tend to write tends to have a tendency toward the fantastic. That’s not to say that it’s all space ships and dinosaurs, but the hook that interests me enough to propel my fingers to write a piece of fiction is usually in the category of what is largely referred to as “speculative,” which combines science fiction and fantasy and all that other associated weirdness. I need some level of weirdness to make me want to write something, but I make sure that not everything I write has weirdness or speculative elements.

    The example I referenced above is from the Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, so stop me if you’ve heard this before. The show was fun and disappointing at the same time, and I rarely watched it. I was a kid, and didn’t appreciate that George Lucas was using a young Indiana Jones to explore the history of the early 20th century. Lots of stuff happened in that era, including the invention of the blues.

    Young Indiana Jones often encountered some famous person and, from them, learned some valuable lesson. In this episode, he learned how to play jazz, but he only practiced improvisation. One musician plays the Saints Go Marching In on the piano, and plays it perfectly, much to Indy’s amazement. The lesson imparted to our hero is one imparted to me, too: you have to know how to do it right before you can start improvising it. You must master the mundane before you can start messing with the fantastic.

    I lurk on a few message boards for writerly types, and I see a lot of people asking questions about their magic systems, or the power levels of their characters, or what they should name their character’s sword. My advice to them all is the same: who cares? They’re almost always new writers who have never really tried anything before and, influenced by something they’ve watched or read, have lassoed their imaginations and are expressing themselves. This is good! I’m glad they chose to write. But unless there’s something meaty on those bones, it doesn’t matter.



    Post Script

    In researching Charlie White, I discovered that he very recently joined the faculty of Carnegie Mellon University, which is mere minutes from where I live. I’d love to meet him sometime, but I’m content to enjoy his work. I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone I know only from their art (but I wrote about that, too) and I’m not sure I’d know what to do.