My Ideal Bookshelf Part 3

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[NOTE: this is being posted only hours after the announcement that Elmore Leonard had died. It’s a dark day for writers everywhere. God bless him, his family, and his legions of fans.]

A reminder of the rules: like any other “best of” or “my favorite whatever” list, this one is subject to change every time I encounter a new text. Also, there is no specific order to this list, even though it’s numbered. #1 is not necessarily better or more important than #25. I only number them to give the columns a sense of structure. In terms of content, I have limited myself to one text per author, though on a few, I’ve cheated a bit.

#15.     Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace.

You’re going to think I’m crazy, but I have a confession to make: this is the only book on my list that I haven’t actually read. I’ve read the rest of them several times, but I have never even opened this one. So why is it here?

Put simply, I love David Foster Wallace’s work. When he killed himself a few years back, one of American literature’s lights went out. He had a real command of the language, a knack for making dull-on-the-surface subjects interesting, a vivid imagination. He was a writer’s writer.

Some people call Infinite Jest his masterpiece. Others call it a doorstop, inaccessible, too postmodern for its (or your) own good. Based on the rest of his work, I know I’ve got to read it someday, but things keep getting in the way—work, obligations, life in general, other works whose very page counts aren’t as daunting. Keeping it on my bookshelf, always and forever, is the only way I’ll have a chance.

If you have tackled Infinite Jest, please feel free to comment here.

Other texts that would work well: A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again; Brief Interviews with Hideous Men; The Pale King; Consider the Lobster.

#14.     The Stand by Stephen King.

King is often dismissed as a hack who churns out genre dreck with the regularity of good bowel movements. I won’t argue that every book or story in his oeuvre meets the standards of great literature; a few are poor (The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, a fun story undone by a deus ex machina ending), some are too self-derivative (From a Buick 8, too close to the stronger Christine), and some are done well up to a certain point before going off the rails (Black House comes to mind).

But most of his works are, at worst, excellent page-turners, and many transcend the pop-culture, genre-fiction ghetto (not that I believe in those things anyway). There’s a reason some critics have crowned him the 20th century’s Edgar Allen Poe. The Stand, another doorstop tome, is his masterwork. It’s also one of the best apocalypse texts you’ll ever experience.

For those who don’t know the basics: thanks to a government experiment gone awry and lax security at a military base, the United States—and, soon enough, the world—is caught in the grip of a modern-day plague, a superflu colloquially known as Captain Trips. The disease is airborne and easily spread through contact with another infected person. Soon, almost everyone in the world is dead, and the global population’s suffering is shown in horrific detail through the eyes of characters who will survive. Once the dying stops, those who remain must determine how to live in a new, mostly empty world where, as one realizes, all the old toys (cars, camping gear, nuclear missiles) are lying around, just waiting to be picked up.

The survivors converge on two locations. Through visions of an old woman, the good, noble people seem drawn to Denver by way of Kansas. Those with a greater sense of self-interest and the plain old assholes gather in Las Vegas, where a supernatural being of increasing power plots the destruction of the Denver society.

Who goes where? How will the two factions re-create society? What happens when the two groups become aware of each other? And how will each individual choose to meet his or her fate?

A novel as grounded in human free will and individual strife as in cosmic questions of fate and good vs. evil, The Stand is King at his best. Above, I’ve linked to the “uncut” version, which should include all the sections that King originally had to cut due to his publisher’s financial concerns (when art finds itself at the mercy of the bean-counters, we’re all in trouble). Feel free to read the abridged version if you wish, but the longer one is richer, denser, more gripping.

Even if you’re a literary snob, make your own stand and buy this book.

Other texts that would work well: pretty much anything from the mid-1990s or earlier. The Shining comes to mind, as does Salem’s Lot, Pet Sematary, It, or the various short story collections, though if you like horror fiction, start with pretty much anything he’s done. For good latter-day works, Desperation comes to mind, but you should also read the Dark Tower series at some point. Under the Dome is worth your time, too.

#13.     The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens.

Of all the American Modernist poets, Stevens is the one I keep coming back to. His cool clinician’s voice often belies the passionate intensity of his imagery. The dense, fecund ideas in his work never cease to engage my intellect and my imagination.

Start with his oft-anthologized works—“Anecdote of the Jar”; “The Snow Man”; “Peter Quince at the Clavier”; “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” and more. You’ll find rich ground for exploring and understanding how poetry works, what literary Modernism means, and how the two intersect with very human, often mundane concerns. In fact, his work often takes the mundane and makes it seem strange, as in “Disillusionment of Ten O’Clock.”

Move on to his Modernist smackdowns of institutions like religion in “A High-Toned Old Christian Woman” and “Sunday Morning.” He delivers a pretty good manifesto in “Of Modern Poetry.” And he produces what I have often described as my favorite poem in the language, “The Idea of Order at Key West.”

I’ve touched only on some of his most famous works, but his collected poems will take you wider and deeper than this. If you’re looking for light verse or easily found meanings, stay the hell away from Stevens. If you’re in the mood to be challenged and intrigued, pick up his collected works today.

Other texts that would work well: rather than send you to Stevens’ individual books, I’d suggest you broaden your reading of the Modernist era. Pick up a collection or three from T.S. Eliot or Ezra Pound if you’re in an elitist mood. Read William Carlos Williams or Robert Frost if you want seemingly simple but deceptively deep text. Try Marianne Moore if you are in a mood somewhere in between. You could also try H.D. if you’re of a mind.

#12.     The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven by Sherman Alexie.

One of the best contemporary writers, Sherman Alexie is a treat for readers of all ages. His YA novel The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian is a hoot for adults, too. His novels and short story collections are consistently high-quality. He deals with very serious postcolonial issues, but don’t think his works are all doom and gloom. While some of his work is deadly serious, he often uses humor as a way of dealing with trauma—his people’s, his own, his characters’.

The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven follows that pattern. Some stories are bleak, even apocalyptic. Others are side-splittingly funny. Some of the best ones are a mixture of both, as in the hilarious and heart-breaking “This Is What It Means to Say Phoenix, Arizona.” The stories in this book are interlinked. You’ll meet characters who struggle with reservation life—their love of community, their hatred of the poverty and alcoholism, their struggle to reconcile their conflicting emotions. You’ll be thrust facedown into that poverty, into those shattered lives, into the Res itself, a kind of refuge from the white world that is also a very effective, soul-deadening prison. You’ll see yourself reflected in the characters, both Native and white Americans, and you’ll feel both empathy and shame.

If you are only open to very traditional forms of storytelling, writers like
Alexie might freak you out (as any postmodernist might, for that matter). But if you are interested in the strivings, the triumphs, and the failures of humanity and our nation, you need to seek this man out. Come with an open mind. Leave with a better soul.

Other texts that would work well: The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian; Reservation Blues; The Business of Fancy-Dancing; Ten Little Indians; and pretty much anything else he’s written, including the film Smoke Signals, the adaptation of The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven.

#11.     Love Medicine by Louise Erdrich.

Another collection of linked stories (or a novel-in-stories) by another Native American author, Love Medicine is only one of several excellent works by Louise Erdrich. Less humorous than Alexie’s but just as insightful and devastating, this work follows the intersecting lives of two Native American families over the course of several decades. As the families fight, intermingle, intermarry, and fight some more, the reader is treated to the burgeoning of a great American voice.

Here, as in Alexie’s work, you will meet Native American characters at war with mainstream society, with their families, with themselves. You will find alcoholism, domestic abuse, jailbreaks, and one honest-to-God tribal battle in a factory that makes cheap plastic replicas of Native American artifacts like spears, bows and arrows, and headdresses. You will also find the sheer strength and beauty of the human spirit as it refuses to be shattered in the crucible of modernity.

What happens when you attempt an ancient love ritual but substitute mass-produced ingredients for the real thing? What happens to a love triangle when all three people are old? What happens when the love is so hot it burns down a house?

Husbands and wives struggle to understand their children, and vice versa. Old loves are rekindled in the unlikeliest of places. The white world constantly threatens to intrude, even though we seldom see it on the page. And always, always, always the families plod onward, eking out an existence on land they do not always even own. The shimmering power of their endurance is a joy to behold. Read this book today.

Other texts that would work well: A Plague of Doves; Tracks; The Round House; The Painted Dove; The Bingo Palace.

More soon….

 Follow me on Twitter @brettwrites.

Email me at brett@officialbrettriley.com.

 

My Ideal Bookshelf Part 2

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A reminder of the rules: like any other “best of” or “my favorite whatever” list, this one is subject to change every time I encounter a new text. Also, there is no specific order to this list, even though it’s numbered. #1 is not necessarily better or more important than #25. I only number them to give the columns a sense of structure. In terms of content, I have limited myself to one text per author, though on a few, I’ve cheated a bit.

#20.     Going to Meet the Man by James Baldwin.

One of the best works by a great 20th-century author, Going to Meet the Man is a collection of short stories that examine, among other issues, the ways that racism scars both the oppressed and the oppressors. Baldwin deals with issues that mainstream America has worked hard to sweep under the rug—not just racism, but also sexism, classism, and homophobia—and, like the best art, he drags those issues back into the light. Art can be pretty, but it doesn’t have to be, and it often needs to be something else. Baldwin is not afraid to take his work to those places.

From the opening familial drama “The Rockpile” to the religion-meets-secularism-meets-race-meets-sex story “The Outing,” from the oft-anthologized “Sonny’s Blues” to the absolutely devastating and horrifying title story (one that always freaks out my students), this collection is essential, not just to your bookshelf but to America.

Other texts that would work well: Go Tell It on the Mountain.

#19.     Birds of America by Lorrie Moore.

Lorrie Moore may be the best writer that most people don’t seem to have heard of, and Birds of America is one of the best short story collections most people don’t seem to own. Combining wit with a sharp eye for detail, Moore creates works of great beauty, hilarity, deep sadness. Plus, she’s got some of the most interesting titles out there.

In “People Like That Are the Only People Here,” she examines the everyday tragedy of the badly sick child with keen insight. “Four Calling Birds, Three French Hens” looks at how important pets can be in our lives and the different ways that people grieve—even people who, ostensibly, should feel both happy and lucky. “Real Estate” takes the reader into a life that has gone horribly wrong in many ways. The stories are full of death, language so sharp it may cut you, pathos, emotional distance. If you have never experienced this collection, do yourself a favor and buy it today.

Other texts that would work well: Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?

18.       Walden by Henry David Thoreau.

Whenever I want to feel transcendental, I read either Thoreau or Ralph Waldo Emerson. In my experience, Emerson is a bit too esoteric for modern readers outside academia; sometimes he’s too esoteric for me, and I read/write/teach literature for a living. Thoreau is more accessible and just as eloquent.

For those who don’t know the “plot” of this nonfiction work—back in the mid-19th century, Thoreau decided to put aside most material things and squat near Walden Pond, a body of water close by Lynn, Massachusetts. For a little over two years, Thoreau lived there in solitude, welcoming the occasional visitor and walking about the pond and township whenever the desire arose. He lived as simply as possible, relied mostly on himself, and pondered the nature of society even as he removed himself from it. In Thoreau’s own words:

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.”

What Thoreau discovered—about society, about humanity, about nature, about himself—is worth your time. Is progress really progress? Thoreau thinks not, and he articulates this idea in ways that would later find echoes in literary/popular cultural figures such as Fight Club’s Tyler Durden. “We do not ride upon the railroad,” he says. “It rides upon us.”

Structured through specific chapters that deal with the work’s major ideas, Walden is part early environmentalism, part spiritual journey, part philosophical treatise, part memoir, and fully worthy of its place on my ideal bookshelf.

Other texts that would work well: I’d seek out his various essays and poems—perhaps start with Collected Essays and Poems, which contains “Resistance to Civil Government” (sometimes called “Civil Disobedience”) and other important works like “Slavery in Massachusetts”—or, lacking that, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers.

17.       Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman.

I love poetry, but I’m only putting a few works on this list because I’m mainly a fiction guy. No ideal bookshelf of mine could ever be complete, though, without Walt Whitman’s masterpiece. Often credited, rightly or wrongly, with inventing what many call “free verse” (T.S. Eliot’s claim that it doesn’t exist notwithstanding), Whitman revised Leaves of Grass throughout his lifetime. He saw his work as being just as organic as the sprouts after which it was named, and he often let the poems grow, often trimmed them, let some of them die and planted seeds of others.

From the simple missions statement found in “One’s Self I Sing” to the complex, multifaceted “Song of Myself”; from the passionate, some say shocking, sensuality of “I Sing the Body Electric” to the melancholy of “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d”; from the national spirit of “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” to the deeply personal yet universal “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking,” Whitman’s work spans the universe, the body, the soul. It erases borders between traditional dichotomies. It feeds the soul in ways that resemble the effects of holy texts. Indeed, one of my old professors used to say that when she wanted to be uplifted, she read one of two texts: the Bible or Leaves of Grass.

If you have never read Whitman, it takes some getting used to—the long lines that often seem to (but don’t really) meander, the catalogues, the odd spellings, the repetition. But Whitman is worth the effort. Pick up the book today; he stops somewhere waiting for you.

Other texts that would work well: try one of the collected prose volumes. Concentrate on Specimen Days. If you’re not in the mood for prose, support the works of another great 19th-century poet—Emily Dickinson or the in-my-opinion-underrated-as-a-poet Stephen Crane.

16.       The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain.

Huck Finn is often wrongly dismissed as a children’s book. If you dismiss it as such, you’re making a mistake (and probably thinking of Tom Sawyer). Twain’s masterpiece is about a child, but the themes and ideas are very much adult-oriented.

Huck Finn is also often dismissed as a racist text. Critics who call it racist are right to a certain extent, though not because of the use of the “n-word.” That onerous word does appear far too much for comfort, but that’s part of Twain’s point. Twain was a Realist who, by definition, believed that literature ought to record life as it is, not as it should be. Southern white people used that word constantly. So do Twain’s characters. The novel’s (unintentional) racism lies in Twain’s failure to create realistic black characters rather than caricatures.

Still, when your young white protagonist chooses to go to hell rather than turn in his enslaved friend; when he makes the conscious decision to help Jim escape in spite of everything society has tried to make him believe; when he recognizes that those on top of the social ladder rest at the bottom of the moral hierarchy, we might recognize the book as a flawed but genuine attempt to critique racism, not perpetuate it.

“It’s enough to make a body ashamed of the human race,” Huck says in reference to how two white conmen trick rural rubes out of their cash. “He had a dream, and it shot him,” Huck says about Tom Sawyer’s misguided Romanticism. And when Huck decides to “light out for the Territories” rather than stay in a corrupt society, Twain reveals his own beliefs about what he once called the “damned human race.”

Huck Finn is often hilarious. It is often thought-provoking. It is often touching. But to the discerning reader, it is never anything but one of the finest pieces of literary art ever produced. If your school system bans the book, move, because you’re surrounded by idiots. Read this imperfect critique of American racism, this adventure story, this comedy, this living novel and join the conversation about a truly American text. Ernest Hemingway allegedly said that all 20th century literature comes from Huck Finn. I don’t know if that’s true, but it does cast one of the long shadows in which we writers labor and create.

Other texts that would work well: A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court; Life on the Mississippi.

Join us, won’t you?

More soon…

Follow me on Twitter @brettwrites.

Email me at brett@officialbrettriley.com

 

My Ideal Bookshelf, Part 1

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A few months back, Entertainment Weekly published a small article in which famous writers listed the contents of their “ideal bookshelves.” The concept intrigued me. What tomes would I buy over and over? What would I pack if I were exiled to a desert island? What books would I never want to live without?

For anyone who might care, I thought I’d answer those questions with a series of short columns. If nothing else, I hope that what follows might inspire you to think about the books that matter most to you.

Fair warning: like any other “best of” or “my favorite whatever” list, this one is subject to change every time I encounter a new text. Also, there is no specific order to this list, even though it’s numbered. #1 is not necessarily better or more important than #25. I only number them to give the columns a sense of structure. In terms of content, I have limited myself to one text per author, though on a few, I’ve cheated a bit. You’ll see what I mean.

Without further preamble, below you will find the first five texts on my ideal bookshelf. Comments, alternatives, compliments, and protests are welcome.

[Note: the Bible is not on this list because I didn’t want to suggest it might be “just” a creative work. But I’d take it with me.]

#25.     Sandman: Season of Mists by Neil Gaiman (graphic novel).

For those not in the know, Sandman is simply the best comic-book series ever. If you only read comics for superheroes, don’t buy this series. But if you believe that the medium is supple enough to tell any kind of story—and it is—then give Neil Gaiman’s book about an uber-race of gods a try. Known as the Endless, these gods, unlike any other pantheon, do not depend on mortal worshippers to maintain their power. They transcend human will and belief. They rule the areas of life that all humans encounter, no matter the faith or dogma. Their names are Destiny, Death, Dream, Destruction, Delight, Desire, and Despair.

Sandman focuses on Dream, also known by many other names, including Morpheus and Oneiros. A tall, pale stranger with eyes like stars and a cloak made of night, Dream walks the realms of our sleep, building his empire, shaping our nightmares.

I would love to put the entire Sandman series on this list. In fact, I’ll go ahead and tell you to buy it all, either one trade paperback at a time or in the doorstop hardcover editions I’ve been collecting over the last few years. But if you’re going to read one, and only one, I’d go with Season of Mists.

The plot: thousands of years ago, a less-mature, colder version of Dream imprisoned a woman in hell for the crime of rejecting his love. In the present day, Dream incurs the wrath of Lucifer, the fallen angel called the Morningstar. I won’t tell you why. For that, you’ll need to consult Sandman vol. 1. In that storyline, you’ll also see the events that cause Dream to reconsider his earlier behavior.

As Season of Mists opens, Dream finally decides to journey back to Hell and free his old lover. In spite of his fear of Lucifer, the second-most-powerful being in the universe, Dream enters the gates of Hell. Soon enough, he encounters Lucifer—but no one else. Having foreseen Dream’s coming, Lucifer has made a rather startling decision that has a triple purpose—to fulfill Lucifer’s own desires and to torment Dream. This decision will have far-reaching implications for Earth, for the metaphysical plane, for every pantheon of gods, and for Dream himself.

Exploring world religions and universe-shaking powers while concurrently delving into the recesses of individual motivations and emotions, Sandman: Season of Mists is exciting, thought-provoking, and, of course, well-written. Beautifully penciled primarily by Kelly Jones, with Mike Dringenberg and Matt Wagner filling in, this book is a gorgeous and eerie edition to anyone’s bookshelf. If I could pick only one Gaiman work to take with me, I’d pick this one.

Other texts that could work well: Sandman: Preludes and Nocturnes; Sandman: The Doll’s House; Sandman: A Game of You; Sandman: The Kindly Ones; American Gods; Neverwhere.

24.       Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons (graphic novel).

Probably the greatest limited series in comic-book history, Watchmen attempts to answer the question, “What if superheroes were real?” The result is not pretty, but it is absolutely fascinating.

Actually, only one of the heroes qualifies as super, and he’s not much of a hero. He’s aloof at best, viewing the world’s mad dash toward destruction with curiosity, when he thinks about it at all. The rest are middle-aged and struggling—undersexed, overweight, psychopathic, egotistical.

When the fate of the world really does depend on these all-too-human outlaws and their godlike acquaintance, they perform much better than you might expect. They reveal they have skills. They work together well in spite of their bickering. They solve a mystery that no one even knew existed. And yet….

It’s hard to save the world when you’re fighting yourself.

A series of deep and nuanced character studies, a labyrinthine mystery, an action-adventure, a romance, a science-fiction romp spanning the solar system—Watchmen is all that and more. It takes its subject matter completely seriously even as it deconstructs the usual tropes of the genre. It makes your average superhero comic seem naïve and quaint. I read it once every couple of years just to remind myself of the medium’s possibilities. You should, too. Skip the so-so film adaptation and go right to the source.

Other texts that could work well: any trade paperback of Moore’s run on Swamp Thing; The Killing Joke; V for Vendetta.

23.       Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories by Sandra Cisneros.

Whenever I teach a multicultural literature class, I try to include something by Sandra Cisneros, and the titular story in this collection almost always makes it into my World Literature II and American Literature II syllabi.

The stories in this book focus on women who live on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border. Sometimes those women cross the border, but no matter where they go, they are confronted with a sense of cultural dislocation, of Otherness, as they encounter patriarchal attitudes and outright abuse. Readers are immersed in a rich evocation of Hispanic cultures and the triumphs, failures, and contradictions of what those cultures mean.

Yet for all the high-minded darkness of that description, the book is also full of joy as women connect to each other, overcome their circumstances, reject the deadening influences of authority in their lives, find the joy in acts of rebellion great and small. Read this book and, like one of the women in the titular story, you might find yourself shouting with the pure joy of freedom and possibility, even if you’ve got tears in your eyes.

Other texts that could work well: The House on Mango Street.

22.       The Complete Works of William Shakespeare.

You can’t have a list like this without Shakespeare. This is one of those “cheats” I was talking about, where I’m taking an anthology instead of a single work. Given that this anthology actually exists (there are several versions),  that it isn’t just a product of my wishful thinking, I’m including it.

If you’re older than, say, thirteen or fourteen, you don’t need me to tell you what’s so great about Shakespeare. From the great tragedies—Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, King Lear, etc.—to the comedies—Much Ado about Nothing, The Taming of the Shrew, and so forth—to the histories like the King Henry plays, Shakespeare’s work is synonymous with theater and what we often call “literary” work.

One great thing about the Complete Works is that you also get the poetry, especially the sonnets. Shakespeare was good enough as a poet that it almost seems unfair; it would be like discovering that Alfred Hitchcock was also a piano prodigy.

I’m linking to the Bevington anthology because that was pretty much the standard back when I studied the works in graduate school. But feel free to pick your own. As for me, this is the one I’d take with me.

Other texts that could work well: if I couldn’t take Shakespeare, I’d take some other dramatist—Arthur Miller, Tony Kushner, George Bernard Shaw, Tennessee Williams, etc.

21.       In Country by Bobbie Ann Mason.

In the mid-80s, seventeen-year-old Sam Hughes tries to come to terms with her father’s death in Vietnam and her uncle Emmett’s inability to get over the war. What could be a real downer of a novel (not that there’s anything wrong with that; some of my favorite texts are downers) evolves into much more through Mason’s deft handling of Sam’s teenage viewpoints and her dependence on popular culture to define her life (M.A.S.H. in particular).

Sam struggles to understand seemingly contradictory ideas that would confuse anyone who thinks about them for too long—a veteran’s erectile dysfunction with a friend’s pregnancy, the way the world changes around her so fast even as her father’s picture remains frozen in time, and more. Through her, we view the 80s as a confusing landscape that belies the homogenous nature of its politics and pop culture. Through the novel, we see Vietnam from an outsider’s point of view and reimagine it as the crux of understanding different lives, rather than just as a world event that kills.

Often dismissed as “only” a YA novel, In Country is that and much more. For whatever reason, it resonates with me. I think you’ll dig it, too.

Other texts that could work well: Shiloh and Other Stories.

So there you have the first five. More to come soon.

Email me at brett@officialbrettriley.com.

Follow me on Twitter @brettwrites.

 

Songs for Divorce

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Back in the early 1990s, my life pretty much imploded. I had gotten married just before my senior year in high school. The bride was the person I would point to as my “high school sweetheart,” whatever that means. Without delving too far into the details—a soul-wrenching undertaking that I shall save for other columns, or my memoirs, should there ever be any interest in my writing them—I can safely tell you here that our divorce knocked my world off its orbit. I have often said that we loved each other deeply but didn’t like each other very much. I still think that’s accurate, at least from my perspective. She was the first person I ever truly loved, and though our lives together turned almost unspeakably ugly, the death of our marriage destroyed my concept of “forever” and my faith in relationships in general. It took a long time and much trial and error for me to recover in substantive ways.

When I think about that time period, my memories are inextricably linked to my life’s soundtrack. I don’t remember exactly which books I was reading, what films I was watching, or what TV shows I followed, but I remember the music.

Often, after the latest kick in the teeth, I would get in my car and just drive. My piece of junk had no air conditioning, so I would roll down the windows, crank up the volume, and hit the road, the wind whipping my hair as I banged my head and sang along, not caring who heard. Some of the songs appealed to me because of their lyrics. Others fit my mood perfectly through their tones, their tempos. Some did both.

When I think of that time period, these songs play on a loop in my head. It’s always in stereo, always loud. If you’re going through your own personal hell, you’ll probably find your own soundtrack, much of which might well be more contemporary or, possibly, more historically widespread. You might, though, want to consider the music that follows. Much of it will probably mirror how you feel. Some of it might help uplift you just when you need it most. In any case, for those who want to join me, here’s a little window into my past—my own personal songs for divorce, in no particular order.

The Singles:

1.         “What’s Up,” 4 Non Blondes.

“Twenty-five years and my life is still / Trying to get up that great big hill of hope / For a destination…”

I was not yet twenty-five, but with all my plans dashed to pieces, I identified with the struggle to reach one’s goals. I no longer had any destination in mind. Indeed, sometimes it seemed that the only possible destinations were jail or a cemetery. That sounds melodramatic, I know, and it was, but to my younger self, it was real.

“And so I cry sometimes / When I’m lying in bed / Just to get it all out / What’s in my head / And I am feeling a little peculiar / And so I wake in the morning / And I step outside / And I take a deep breath and I get real high / And I scream at the top of my lungs / What’s going on?”These lines eerily nail what I was going through at the time. In my life, I have almost never cried, not even when I should have. But during this period, I would often awake to find tears on my pillow. I sometimes cried while watching sitcoms. Sometimes the tears echoed the aching sadness I was feeling; sometimes they were expressions of a dangerous rage. But that need to get out of your own head, to scream, to hit something or someone—I could relate to all that. And for me, the words “What’s going on?” took on a special importance, because I honestly had no idea what had happened, how life had come to that point.

A lot of people dismiss this song, and the band that produced it, as an early-90s lark. As for me, I still remember how I felt back in those days, and when I hear this song now, I feel grateful that I can understand it in a different context.

2.         “Jet Airliner,” The Steve Miller Band.

“Goodbye to all my friends at home / Goodbye to people I’ve trusted / I’ve got to go out and make my way / I might get rich you know I might get busted / But my heart keeps calling me backwards / As I get on the 707 / Ridin’ high I got tears in my eyes / You know you got to go through hell / Before you get to heaven…”

A song with multiple personality disorder, “Jet Airliner” combines the desire to get the hell away from your current situation with the knowledge that wherever you go, there you are. The above verse of the song says goodbye to important people in one’s life and suggests that the speaker desperately needs a change, even one for the worse (rich or busted). I especially identified with the idea of going through hell to get to heaven; I desperately wanted to believe that something better lay in my future (spoiler alert: it did).

If this verse was all about leaving, though, the chorus reminds us that we can never truly get away from ourselves: “Big ol’ jet airliner / Don’t carry me too far away / Oh, Oh big ol’ jet airliner / Cause it’s here that I’ve got to stay.” Take me away, but not forever. Let me leave and find myself again, but know that I want to come back. With my family, my friends, my daughter, and my work, I had too much in my life that I could never leave. Too much that I would never want to give up.

The need to go, the need to stay, pulling you in opposite directions, ripping you in two—I heard all of that whenever I listened to this song.

3.         “Already Gone,” The Eagles.

Every single lyric in this song—as well as its up-tempo, celebratory nature—appealed to me back then. It’s really a “screw you” song, and I needed a few of those. A couple of examples:

“Just remember this, my girl, when you look up in the sky / You can see the stars and still not see the light (that’s right).” The image of a woman seeing but not understanding really got my blood pumping in those days. Not “woman” as in “women in general,” of course—I always pictured my ex. I believed that she did not understand me. I believed that one day, she would realize what she had given up and would look to the heavens for some answer to the question, “Now what do I do?” It was the same question I was asking so often, and the petty, revenge-seeking part of me really wanted to be there when the epiphany happened.

The verse that appealed to me most, though, went like this: “Well I know it wasn’t you who held me down / Heaven knows it wasn’t you who set me free / So often times it happens that we live our lives in chains / And we never even know we have the key.” Those lines were so prophetic that they sent chills down my spine. I knew that I had not been happy in our marriage, but I also knew that the decision to stay—or to leave—had been mine. I had been the key to my own liberation for all that time. Even though leaving cost me a great deal, it was still the right thing to do for everyone involved.

In my more upbeat moods, I listened to this song until the cassette broke. Then I bought a new one. I would repeat that pattern for most of the works on this list.

4.         “Black” and “Jeremy,” Pearl Jam.

“Jeremy” tells the story of an angry young man who erupts one day in school. It’s a great song, but it had little to do with me. I listened to it more during my divorce than I ever did before or since, though, mostly because of its ominous, angry tone. It fit my dark mood on most days.

“Black” was different. “Oh, and twisted thoughts that spin round my head, I’m spinning, oh, I’m spinning, how quick the sun can drop away” could have been written about what was going on inside my head on most days. But the lyrics that really drew me in were, “I know someday you’ll have a beautiful life / I know you’ll be a star in somebody else’s sky / But why, why, why can’t it be, can’t it be mine?” There were, you see, many days when I missed my wife. When I wanted to go back, even though I knew it would be the death of me, or her, or both. When I wanted to scream at life or fate or God and ask why my path had led me to feeling so lousy about myself.

When I wanted to revel in my own misery, “Black” was a great accompaniment.

5.         “Blew” and “School,” Nirvana.

I loved Nirvana from the first time I heard their album Bleach. That record contained several great tracks, perhaps most notably “About a Girl.” But in my time of emotional dying, these are the songs I repeated ad infinitum. There is nothing terribly thematic about either song, at least in terms of my own situation, though the refrain of “Blew” resonated with me: “Is there another reason for your stain /  Could you believe who we knew was stress or strain? / Here is another word that rhymes with shame…” I suppose it was that image of being stained, marked somehow, that I related to, though the seemingly throwaway reference to shame probably contributed to my fascination.

“School” never appears on any best-of lists, but its sheer simplicity appealed to me in a time of complex causes and effects. The lyrics are as follows: “Wouldn’t you believe it?  / Just my luck / No recess.” Later, the repeated line “You’re in high school again” give the whole track the feeling of a dark fever dream, one of those where your life doubles back on itself. There you are, back in high school (or grade school, or college, or your twenties, or whatever), doing the same things you used to do. You retain the sum total of your life’s experience, your knowledge, yet you’re covering the same ground that you never expected to see again—the road already taken.

Neither song completely adheres to Nirvana’s famous, Pixies-esque “loud-quiet-loud” aesthetic. Neither is particularly memorable compared to “Smells Like Teen Spirit” or the dirgelike “Something in the Way” or the eerie, nightmarish “Heart-Shaped Box” or the tinged-with-regret “All Apologies.” But both “Blew” and “School” found their way into my divorce rotation. Make of it what you will.

6.         “Don’t Go Away Mad (Just Go Away),” Motley Crue.

Look at the title. Remember that I’m talking about divorce. Do I really need to explain this one?

Let’s let the lyrics, about a good-riddance separation, speak for themselves.

“Seasons must change / Separate paths, separate ways / If we blame it on anything / Let’s blame it on the rain / I knew it all along / I’d have to write this song / Too young to fall in love / Guess we knew it all along / That’s all right, that’s okay / We were walkin’ through some youth / Smilin’ through some pain / That’s all right, that’s okay / Let’s turn the page…”

This one has an upbeat, poppy tempo—a departure from most of the Crue’s hair-metal jams, though not unheard of from them. It’s more of a kiss-off than anything else, and any divorce mix needs some of those. Plus, it references two awesome songs—the Crue’s own “Too Young to Fall in Love” (off their album Shout at the Devil, which should have been on Entertainment Weekly’s list of 100 Best Albums) and Bob Seger’s “Turn the Page.”

Then there are these lines: “We were two kids in love / Trying to find our way / Thats’s all right, that’s okay / Held our dreams in our hands / Let our minds run away…” When I hear that, I can only nod and say, “Yep. That’s it.”

Of course, the song ends with, “Girl, don’t go away mad / Girl, just go away,” which is how I felt about my ex more often than not.

Incidentally, 80s hair metal is often unfairly maligned, sniggered at, dismissed by hipsters and music snobs. I don’t know why. Recently, someone giggled when my wife mentioned that we’re going to see Motley Crue in concert. I wasn’t around, but if I had been, I would have said, “Yep, they’re funny, all right. All they’ve done is sell millions of records, make tens of millions of people happy, influence thousands of young musicians, and make lots of money in the bargain. What have you done with your life?”

The Albums:

1.         Led Zeppelin, IV.

There is nothing here that lyrically spoke to me about my own life at the time. But sometimes I just wanted to be happy, and Zep always does the trick. I’m not sure I would want to live in a world where Led Zeppelin had never existed.

Why this album? Well, why not? You can’t really go wrong with Zep, but this is the one I played until the tape broke.

Think about it. The nasty, hard-driving blues of “Black Dog.” The pure heart-pounding joy of “Rock and Roll.” The esoteric weirdness of “The Battle of Evermore.” What some people think is the greatest rock song ever, “Stairway to Heaven.” The best Zep song that people keep forgetting about, “When the Levee Breaks.” What’s not to love?

When I felt optimistic, you’d hear this album blasting from my car as I drove down Arkansas backroads.

Of course, there was one album that, for whatever reason, served both kinds of moods:

2.         Nirvana, Nevermind.

The album that effectively ended hair metal as a music phenomenon. The record that made Kurt Cobain a household name, in spite of his own ethics and aesthetics.

Nevermind is one of those perfect albums, and one I’ve written about before. Of all the songs on it, I have a hard time remembering what “Lounge Act” sounds like in between listens. The rest are as fresh as the day I first heard them. I suppose the best compliment I can give the album in the context of this writing is that my horrible mood did nothing to dampen my enthusiasm for it.

3.         Alice in Chains, Dirt.

During my divorce, on eight nights out of ten, I was either drunk, or driving really fast and seriously considering a hard right turn into the nearest tree or bridge abutment, or both. On those days, I did not want cheering up. I did not seek happiness. Call it out-of-control romanticism, that weird death-wish that so many young people seem to have, or a pity party. Both would be accurate. But when I felt that way, I sought out music that would reflect and enhance those feelings.

Dirt by Alice in Chains fits the bill. Understand that I love this one and the last record on my list because they are great rock and roll records. I still listen to them a lot. But they had special significance during my divorce.

Tragically, two of the musicians who made this record are now dead—Mike Starr, the troubled bassist who passed away in 2011, and Layne Staley, the band’s distinctive vocalist. He died several years ago. I have never really gotten over it, to the extent that I can’t yet bring myself to listen to the band’s new album. It ain’t AiC without Layne.

How about these lyrics from the track “Rain When I Die”? “Is she ready to know my frustration? / What she slippin’ inside, slow castration / I’m a riddle so strong, you can’t break me / Did she come here to try, try to take me?”

Or these: “Will she keep on the ground, trying to ground me / Slowly forgive my lie, lying to save me / Could she love me again, or will she hate me”?

Of course, the dirge-like “Rooster” is always good for your sad, angry mood. That goes without saying. It’s also arguably the album’s best song, and that’s saying something.

“Hate to Feel” is a full-throated shout of frustration and misery, perfect for those nights when even the stars seem to be laughing at you. “Angry Chair” is great for head-banging, steering-wheel-pounding moments.

The two songs I was most drawn to back then, though, were “Would?” and “Down in a Hole.” I present some lyrics for “Would?” below:

“Into the flood again / Same old trip it was back then / So I made a big mistake / Try to see it once my way…”

These lines make up the chorus. They speak of covering the same old ground to no good end, of mistakes acknowledged, of the desire—the drive—to be understood. Of course, the chorus’s very repetition suggests that understanding never happens. Then there are these lines:

“Am I wrong? / Have I run too far to get home? / Have I gone? / And left you here alone? / If I would, could you?”

Did I make all the mistakes? Have I been wrong about everything all along? Is it too late to fix things? Is reconciliation possible? The song never answers these questions. Neither did life, at least not all at once. Sooner or later, I realized that the answers were no, no, yes, and no. And then all I had to do was figure out how to live with those answers.

“Down in a Hole” is perhaps the most appropriate song on the album for a divorce soundtrack, at least if you’re unhappy that your life has taken such a turn. Again, I’ll present the chorus, the lines that we hear more than any others:

“Down in a hole and I don’t know if I can be saved / See my heart I decorate it like a grave / Well you don’t understand who they / Thought I was supposed to be / Look at me now I’m a man / Who won’t let himself be…”

Self-explanatory, right? You can’t ask for a more fitting breakup song than this, at least if you’re a self-pitying kid who just wants to be loved.

So some songs on Dirt appeal to your self-indulgence. Others are good for moments when you’re just plain good and pissed off. But if you want darkness, you should seek out the final album on my soundtrack…

4.         Nine Inch Nails, Pretty Hate Machine.

A lot of critics claim that The Downward Spiral is the best NIN album. Maybe they’re right. I also freely admit that NIN’s later song, “Only” (from With Teeth), provides one of the best kiss-my-ass lines in history: “You were never really real to begin with / I just made you up to hurt myself.”

But in many ways, Pretty Hate Machine kept me sane during those long, sunless months. Sometimes it didn’t make a lot of sense. The album’s opener, “Head like a Hole,” isn’t ostensibly about relationships; it seems more like an anti-capitalist rant, with its pejorative references to “god money.” But the pounding music is good for working yourself up into a lather, and the bridge and chorus fit bad breakups like a snug pair of jeans:

“head like a hole / black as your soul / I’d rather die than give you control / head like a hole / black as your soul / I’d rather die than give you control / bow down before the one you serve / you’re going to get what you deserve / bow down before the one you serve / you’re going to get what you deserve…”

If your ex is greedy, even the verses can fit.

As for the rest of the album, you can probably understand how well they work during a divorce just by reading titles: “Terrible Lie”; “Sin”; “That’s What I Get.”

How about these lines from “Down in It”? “So what what does it matter now / I was swimming in the hate now I crawl on the ground / And everything I never liked about you is kind of seeping into me / I try to laugh about it now but isn’t it funny how everything works out / I guess the jokes on me, she said…”

Trent Reznor might well have been spying on me when he wrote those lines. “I was up above it,” he wails, “now I’m down in it.” I know exactly how he feels.

“Sanctified” perfectly captures the helpless self-awareness, the bipolar tides that pull you apart: “Heaven’s just a rumor she’ll dispel / As she walks me through the nicest parts of hell (bitch) / I still dream of lips I never should have kissed / Well she knows exactly what I can’t resist / I’m still caught up in another of her spells / Well she’s turning me into someone else / Everyday I hope and pray this will end / But when I can I do it all again?”

Then, of course, there is the funereal “Something I Can Never Have,” and the line that perhaps best sums up the loathing you feel for all that you’ve let someone else make of you: “Gray would be the color if I had a heart.”

Those who knew me at the time can probably recall how well these lines fit: “You make this all go away / I’m down to just one thing / And I’m starting to scare myself.” I scared a lot of people back then.

When you have lived with someone for a long time and wake up one day to find them, or yourself, gone, you feel dislocated, as if someone picked you up and dropped you in a foreign country, the language of which you do not speak. Nothing makes sense. Nothing seems right. Yet everything still reminds you of what you’ve lost. Hence these lines: “In this place it seems like such a shame / Though it all looks different now / I know it’s still the same / Everywhere I look you’re all I see / Just a fading fucking reminder of who I used to be.”

Pretty Hate Machine punched all the right buttons for my darkest moods. Listen to it often, with the volume turned all the way up, during your next catastrophic breakup. Then go pet a puppy and look at a rainbow. You’ll need to cleanse your soul’s palette.

These are the songs, the albums, the artists, that saw me through what I might, in a moment of tremendous understatement, term a “rough patch.”

Now…if you have made it this far, you might feel like this essay (if that is the right word for this piece) is less developed than other things I’ve posted, other things you’ve read. Perhaps that’s true. Maybe it’s less revealing, less “important,” less eloquent. Maybe it’s thought-provoking and emotionally bare, but maybe it’s only one or the other. Perhaps it’s neither. What it will do, I hope, is lead is to these questions?

What did you listen to during your divorce, or your engagement, or that whirlwind six months between meeting the love of your life and committing to a full-blown relationship? What did you listen to after your mother died, after your first child was born, while he/she was growing in the womb? What made your playlist when you graduated medical school, got rejected from a graduate program, published your first poem? What music accompanied the ripping out of your heart or the greatest triumph you have yet experienced?

What makes up the soundtrack of your life?

Follow me on Twitter @brettwrites.

Email me at brett@officialbrettriley.com.

 

 

 

 

 

The Ten Zombie Films You Must See before You Reanimate

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With the recent release of World War Z and the upcoming season four of The Walking Dead, zombies in pop culture are harder to kill than the (ahem) real thing. So are “best of” lists. Even Rolling Stone made a “ten best zombie movies” list, so what follows is hardly original in conception or content. Still, some of you asked for it, so here it is—my list of the ten zombie films you have to see before you reanimate and try to eat your kids. Feel free to disagree, kvetch, and counter-argue. I’m pretty sure I’ll forget approximately six hundred movies that should be on this list.

First, a few rules: believe it or not, I haven’t seen every single zombie film ever made. I will therefore decline to cheat and put anything on this list that I haven’t experienced first-hand (sorry, Fido and Plague of the Zombies; I’ll get to you one of these days).

Second, I won’t list any movies that are what I like to call “zombie-adjacent”—films in which the hordes often act like zombies but are not, in fact, reanimated corpses. That forces me to leave out several movies I really dig and would still recommend that you see before you shuffle off this mortal coil, come back as a zombie, and spend all your time, uh, shuffling around this mortal coil.

Such movies include 28 Days Later and its good-but-inferior sequel, 28 Weeks Later; Planet Terror, Robert Rodriguez’s excellent modern-day grindhouse flick; and the Evil Dead films. I have seen Raimi’s trilogy on some zombie lists, though I’m not sure why. Sure, a couple of corpses come back and make trouble, but mostly, it’s about spirits and what they do with live bodies.

Other films that are worth watching but have no place on this list: George A. Romero’s The Crazies and the 2010 remake starring Timothy Olyphant, two more zombie-adjacent flicks; and Drew Goddard’s fine meta work The Cabin in the Woods, which features zombies but also a couple dozen other supernatural baddies.

Third, I can’t in good conscience write about anything I saw years ago but was too drunk or exhausted to remember. Thus, at least one staple of zombie top ten lists, Peter Jackson’s Dead Alive, doesn’t make the cut, through no fault of its own.

You could easily argue that Return of the Living Dead should be on here, given that it is generally credited for introducing zombies that hunger for brains, not flesh (a stereotype that does not hold in most canonical texts) and, according to some critics, the concept of fast-moving, even intelligent zombies. It’s fun in its own way, but it deviates so strongly from the visions of people like George A. Romero that I would only be putting it on the list because of its difference. I’d still advise you to watch it at least once, and if you’re a fan, feel free to substitute it for either #9 or #10 below.

On to the list…

10.       White Zombie (1932), directed by Victor Halperin. White Zombie

This movie, which many viewers still find creepy, features an interesting performance from Dracula himself, Bela Lugosi, long before he torpedoed his career with drugs and starring roles in Ed Wood movies. One of the taglines: “See them dug from the grave and put to work as slaves to murder!” Set in Haiti, the film locates zombies in exotic locales inhabited by dark-skinned people, which allows for the continuing comfort of the first-world viewer. It also both contributes to and reflects the early 20th century’s problematic racial attitudes in ways that later zombie films engage more directly and complexly. Madge Bellamy’s very white protagonist, Madeline, is reduced to a zombie slave on a Haitian plantation, providing an interesting wrinkle to any allegorical readings of race. Some critics believe that the movie can be read as an anti-imperialist text; they suggest that the characters’ attitudes toward Madeline, the nature of zombification, and the plantation itself mirror Western colonial attitudes. All that is well and good. But this movie is on my list mainly because it is widely considered the first zombie film, and if you’re going to delve into the canon, you might as well start with cinema’s version of Patient Zero. You might love it or find it cheesy, badly acted, and horribly dated, but you should experience it for yourself before the inevitable zombie apocalypse.

9. [REC] (2007), directed by Jaume Balagueró and Paco Plaza. [REC]

Purists may well cry foul here and accuse me of breaking rule #2. They may well be right, and if you think so, feel free to strike this one out and replace it with what you feel is my most egregious omission. I, however, am giving [REC] a pass that I did not give films like 28 Days Later for a couple of reasons: a) the antagonists act like zombies, including through their stubborn refusal to die from anything but a head shot, and b) the film itself leaves their exact condition ambiguous. While the movie pretty much tells us that their illness seems to be viral, such that it can pass from animals to humans, many zombie outbreaks in cinema are similarly sourced. [REC] suggests, near the end, a possible non-zombie cause of the outbreak, and it is often unclear whether the victims are truly reanimated or if their zombie-like condition is merely the last stage of some illness. Enough ambiguity exists for me to include this film here.

And, as horror films go, it’s a doozy. A Spanish movie, it may well test your ocular and cognitive abilities while you watch the action and read the dialogue simultaneously. The plot centers on a young female reporter and her cameraman, Pablo, as they cover a local fire company’s night shift. When the company answers an emergency call about an ill woman who won’t come out of her apartment, the reporter and cameraman tag along, only to find themselves quarantined inside the building as the occupants and would-be rescuers are transformed into vicious creatures that rip into human flesh.

The film is probably best known for its cinematographic conceit. We see the entire film from Pablo the cameraman’s perspective; his handheld camera is the only camera used, which immerses the viewer in the characters’ experience. We only see what Pablo films; we only hear what he can pick up on his camera microphone. It’s unsettling and scary, perhaps even more so than The Blair Witch Project.

The acting here is much better than you’ll see in White Zombie or the Romero movies, which you have to grade on a sliding scale. You can’t expect Academy Award-winning performances when you’re working with an unknown cast and a 73-cent budget. [REC] has more to work with, but it’s still a horror film, so don’t expect to discover the next Olivier or Brando.

One of the movie’s taglines— “Whatever You Witness….. Never Stop Recording”—might well be the basic direction for any reality TV cameraman.  [REC] was remade in America as Quarantine, a nearly shot-for-shot remake. But I would seek out the original and watch it first. Tell Netflix I sent you.

8.         Day of the Dead (1985), directed by George A. Romero.  Day of the Dead

Some zombiephiles feel very strongly that this movie is the second-best Romero entry in the canon. Here, it appears at #8 mainly because I’ve seen it less than the others and don’t feel comfortable placing it higher.

In Day of the Dead, the apocalypse has already happened. The plot focuses on the few survivors holed up in a military bunker. The scientists there conduct gruesome experiments on the zombies as the survivors try, with varying degrees of success, to cope with the realities and tensions of their lives. The scientists are convinced that the dead can be reconditioned, and much of the film is spent exploring zombie physiology and psychology. In fact, much of the fanboy love for the movie stems from the explanations for why zombies eat human flesh and so forth.

That’s all well and good, but you’ll also be treated to some old-fashioned zombie attacks. Come for the blood and guts; stay for the course on zombie motivation.

7.         World War Z (2013), directed by Mark Forster.  World War Z

Elsewhere I have already expressed my admiration for this movie’s pulse-pounding action sequences, for how it represents an evolution in zombie methodology (the swarming behaviors that mimic certain animals, the idea that zombies can tell the difference between a good meal and a bad one), the way the production managed to snag a prestigious director and star (Brad frickin’ Pitt!!!). I have also articulated my problems with the film’s character development and its over-dependence on CGI. Plus, there’s this issue, to quote Kalene Westmoreland: “a lot of these problems wouldn’t have happened if they just had a can of WD-40.” Seriously, they spend five minutes talking about how the creatures are attracted to sound, and then they take the world’s squeakiest collection of bicycles to the plane? Every door in the WHO facility has to creak like it belongs in a haunted house?

Here, though, the positives truly outweigh the negatives. World War Z lives up to its title; it takes a global view of the zombie apocalypse, demonstrating that these filmmakers truly understand the scale implied in the term. Philadelphia collapses. Israel is overrun. And after all that international carnage, the climax is surprisingly intimate and intense, providing both a break from and a logical extension of the larger issues.

If you haven’t seen this movie yet and you’re a fan of zombies, action movies, apocalypse narratives, or Brad Pitt, get thee to your local theater. If you have seen it, spread the word.

6.         Zombieland (2009), directed by Ruben Fleischer. Zombieland

World War Z had an Oscar nominee in Brad Pitt. Zombieland has four: Woody Harrelson, Jesse Eisenberg, Abigail Breslin, and Bill Murray, who plays himself in a hilarious small role. The other major star, Emma Stone, is a Screen Actors Guild award winner and one of Hollywood’s hottest young actors. Therefore, if you’re looking for A-list acting and recognizable faces, you can’t find a better zombie flick than this.

The premise: zombies have taken over the world (or, at least, America). Our young protagonist, Columbus (so named because that’s where he wants to go), decides to see if his parents are still alive, so he takes to the road, where he encounters the eccentric, zombie-hating, Twinkie-loving  Tallahassee (Harrelson); the beguiling Wichita (Stone); and young-but-not-helpless Little Rock (Breslin). Columbus has survived because of his “rules,” which could double as a meta lesson on what every dumb character in horror films never does: limber up before you enter any unknown territory, in case you have to run. Work on your cardio. Always “double-tap” seemingly dead zombies. Always look in the back seat, etc. Echoing Randy’s rules for surviving a horror film as seen in the first Scream, these rules are winking, self-referential, and absolutely true.

Characterization here runs deeper than in most of the genre’s entries. We know backstories. We understand motivations. Even though the characters sometimes seem to come from central casting—the sensitive but competent geek, the snarling tough guy with a secretly soft heart, the love interest who might be a femme fatale—they transcend their stock origins and become living, breathing, wisecracking people you will care about.

Zombieland is more funny than scary, although parts of the film do provide genuinely frightening scenes, especially near the end. This is not a criticism. The often lighthearted tone provides a nice counterpoint to the highly serious, doom-and-gloominess of most zombie films. Plus, Zombieland features an awesome soundtrack: Metallica! The Black Keys!

Fun, often funny, and sometimes gory, Zombieland deserves its place in anyone’s top ten. If you haven’t seen it, prepare to have a lot of fun.

5.         Dawn of the Dead (2004), directed by Zack Snyder.  Dawn of the Dead 2004

We enter the top five with what is, by far, Snyder’s best film to date. Though fanboys and -girls say that Romero’s zombie classic did not need to be remade, I really like this movie. Sure, it lacks the social consciousness of the original. Romero’s Dawn was set in a mall to critique our out-of-control consumer culture, while this film seems to appropriate the setting merely because it’s logically safer than the other options. But you know what? That’s fine with me. I still have the original when I want to think. This movie, by contrast, is an exercise in inertia, in pure kineticism.

The cast doesn’t quite equal Zombieland or World War Z in terms of A-list prestige, but the actors are all game. Ving Rhames plays, well, pretty much every Ving Rhames character you’ve ever seen. Sarah Polley provides a strong performance as our protagonist, and Ty Burrell kills as the absolute polar opposite of his Modern Family character. Throw in Jake Weber as an unlikely hero, Mekhi Phifer as a troubled family man, and excellent character actor Michael Kelly as the meanest mall cop you’ve ever seen.

You like gore? This film’s got it. Watch out for chainsaws, dude. You want fast zombies? There ain’t no shufflin’ goin’ on here. You want zombie mob scenes, gallows humor, strong uses of lighting? Check, check, and check. Plus, the worst newborn since Rosemary’s baby (well, not counting Trainspotting)!

Bottom line: this film isn’t high art, but it’s good. When it starts out with Johnny Cash’s “The Man Comes Around,” you hope the rest of the movie will live up to it. It does. Stick around for the super-bleak ending over the credits.

4.         Night of the Living Dead (1968), directed by George A. Romero.  Night of the Living Dead

Not the one that started it all, but it sure seems like it. The first Romero zombie flick, it came with this tagline, among others: “If it doesn’t scare you, you’re already dead!” There’s some truth to that.

If you’ve never seen the film, well, it pretty much establishes the tropes for every other zombie movie you’ve ever seen. Outbreak of the dead rising and eating the living, with scientists providing, at best, a working theory as to what started it? Yep. A core group of characters thrown together by chance? Got it. Internal strife over how to handle the situation? Check. Our heroes finding themselves trapped and surrounded by the dead? Uh huh. Zombie infestation of the supposedly safe zone? Right. And if you think it took more contemporary texts like Snyder’s movie or The Walking Dead to trot out the zombified children, you’re wrong.

NotLD starts out in a cemetery, with Barbra and her dickish brother Johnny visiting graves. When Barbra feels creeped out, Johnny says, “They’re coming to get you, Barbra!” Little does he know they’re real, and they’re coming to get him, too. When Johnny buys it five minutes into the film, you aren’t sorry, but you’ve got to feel sorry for Judith O’Dea, the actress playing Barbra, because she has to spend the rest of the movie playing either catatonic or whiny. Throw in the bickering couple Harry and Helen Cooper and the more likeable but also more forgettable young couple Tom and Judy, and you may actually find yourself rooting for the zombies.

The main character, Ben, is extraordinary, considering the time period’s attitudes. Played by Duane Jones, Ben is our protagonist, and when the ever-angry Harry Cooper gets out of line, Ben slaps him around until he shuts up. Ben also acts as Barbra’s caretaker, and, when Harry finally goes too far, Ben’s method of dealing with him is both shocking and inevitable.

Why is all this so unusual? Because Ben is the only black member of an otherwise lily-white cast. Many critics, including one of my grad-school colleagues, have written about NotLD as an allegory for American racial attitudes in the Civil Rights era, and the characters’ different generational attitudes toward a strong black man seem to support such readings, as do the searing images of pale-white zombies mobbing Ben throughout the film. The ending’s indelible imagery will disturb you, and this, I think, is part of what Romero intends.

Add in to all the social commentary a lot of good zombie action (Romero, of course, only uses the shuffling kind) and some unintentional humor (see the sheriff’s hysterical line, “Yeah, they’re dead. They’re….all messed up”) and you’ve got a film that has fascinated generations of viewers. Much like most of the movies on this list, you shouldn’t expect stellar acting or writing, but this one transcends its limitations. See it now, if you never have.

3.         Dead Snow (2009), directed by Tommy Wirkola.  Amaray Wrap.EPS

Two words: zombie Nazis. That should be all you need to know about this Norwegian film.

A group of friends takes a vacation to a remote cabin. The one who was planning to ski cross-country through the mountains, alone and at night, never arrives, but soon, a mysterious stranger appears, warning our core group of a local legend about cursed soldiers and missing Nazi treasure. You can imagine what happens next.

Much like Scream, Dead Snow is postmodern in its metatextual references. One of our main characters is a film buff, who immediately recognizes the threat for what it is and warns the others not to get bitten. To say that the plan doesn’t work out very well is an understatement.

Unlike a lot of zombie texts, this one often sets the action in the daylight. In fact, the snowy landscape lends a near-blinding sheen to the gore, so that you see nearly every spatter of blood and almost every flesh wound in detail. As plan after plan fails, as the most competent characters succumb, as you view one of the grossest and most hilarious gags involving a crotch in cinematic history, you’ll laugh and grimace in disgust, sometimes simultaneously. In tone, it’s closer to Cabin in the Woods than Night of the Living Dead; you can decide for yourself if that’s good. Just watch the movie. Like now.

2.         Dawn of the Dead (1978), directed by George A. Romero.  Dawn of the Dead 1978

This one is Romero’s best, and it’s possibly the most loved and respected film in the canon. Starring one of Romero’s trademark cast of stars you’ve never heard of, featuring B-level acting and lines that run the gamut from good to dripping with cheese, utilizing the most absurd and nonsensical use of a blood pressure machine ever, Dawn of the Dead has nevertheless transcended its genre roots.

Like the remake, it’s set in a shopping mall. Unlike the remake, the mall here is infested with zombies, who shuffle by the locked doors of the shops our heroes inhabit. The monsters here look not all that different from your typical suburban consumer, and these images likely resonate now more than ever, given how we all do the “cell phone zombie shuffle,” staring at our handheld screens as we walk into fountains and trip over potted plants. This critique of consumerism foreshadowed the “more is more,” “greed is good” decade to come.

Beyond all the scholarly hooey, though, stands a really good genre movie, one with all the usual trappings plus the addition of a bloodthirsty biker gang that may be more dangerous than the zombies. If Snyder’s film is an exercise in pure forward motion, this one is more contemplative, but as a movie that extends what a zombie movie can be and do, it’s more important.

Dawn of the Dead isn’t as flashy or ironic or bloody as some movies on this list, but you absolutely must see it before you reanimate. And always, always, always pick a good time to check your blood pressure.

1.         Shaun of the Dead (2004), directed by Edgar Wright.  Shaun of the Dead

I may well catch some flak for putting this movie on top of my list. I don’t care. Shaun of the Dead does so many things at once that it may well be the only movie here qualifying for high-art status.

Is the movie a parody of zombie flicks? Yes, but like the best parodies, it completely understands its source material. Wright and his co-writer, star Simon Pegg, referred to the movie as a “rom-zom-com”—a romantic zombie comedy. It’s all that and more. It’s uproarious, often at zombies’ expense, and yet it is at times a gory, genuinely frightening, tension-saturated zombie movie. It’s a romantic comedy; the only thing more important to Shaun (Pegg) than surviving the apocalypse is repairing his relationship with his girlfriend Liz (Kate Ashfield). It is poignant; witness the scenes near the end with Shaun’s mother, his stepdad Phillip (Bill Nighy (!!!)), or his best friend Ed (Nick Frost).

Shaun of the Dead is, in other words, several films in one, all of them excellent. It brought Pegg (most recently seen as Scotty in Star Trek: Into Darkness) and Frost a cult following. It led to further collaborations between the stars and Wright in the underrated Hot Fuzz. (Pegg and Frost would write and star in Greg Mottola’s Paul in 2011, while Wright would direct the energetic Scott Pilgrim vs. the World without his stars. Wright is now at work on Marvel’s Ant-Man movie, of all things.)

If you are among those who have never watched this movie, run—don’t walk—to your computer and Netflix it right now, or buy it and watch it tonight. I highly doubt you will regret it.

So there it is, folks, for better or worse: my top ten zombie films of all time. Feel free to post replies or email me with comments, complaints, or praise. And remember—they’re coming to get you, so there may never be a better time for a movie marathon. Stay up late and scare yourself silly. Live a little before your spouse gnaws your arm off.

 Follow me on Twitter @brettwrites.

Email me at brett@officialbrettriley.com.

 

 

 

 

MAN OF STEEL, WORLD WAR Z, and Source Material: or, The Film Adaptation Did What, Now?

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Since at least 1975, when Steven Spielberg’s Jaws became arguably the first summer blockbuster, the summer film season has evolved—some might say devolved—into a kind of paddock in which every snapping, chomping, exploding, shoot-em-upping, CGI-heavy popcorn flick prowls. If it involves killer robots (giant or otherwise), aliens, super-heroes, car chases for the sake of car chases, debauched partying, and/or monsters, you’re more likely to see it on summer movie screens. You won’t see many Prestige Films from May to August. What you will see are the fanboy flicks meant to generate the bulk of the year’s income; these movies are the engines that drive the studios and, sometimes, allow them to fund movies with stronger plots, better characterization and character development, clearer cinematography, better editing, effects that supplement the plot rather than substitute for it.

That is not to say that all summer films are bad—far from it. Many are fun. Many are well-constructed, well-conceived, well-acted. Some might be equally at home in the fall, when Oscar-bait pictures enjoy wide releases and strategic advertising campaigns that are meant to entice the Academy as much as Joe Consumer. But for the most part, summer is the stomping ground for the kind of movie that inspires theme-park rides, action figures, and ComicCon panels.

And, in today’s ever-more-cynical Hollywood, most of these lumbering, clunky, and yes, often exhilarating movies are built not just to make zillions of dollars but also to jumpstart a franchise.

Two recent summer releases follow this pattern. Both were adapted from beloved source material. Both are CGI-heavy action films, though one also utilizes elements of the suspense thriller. Both opt for kinetic thrill over character development and present some troubling moral quandaries for the viewer.

But make no mistake—World War Z is not Man of Steel.

I wanted to like Man of Steel. I really did.

For over twenty years, I was an avid comic collector. My collection easily numbered in the thousands. I was purchasing around sixty titles a month at one point. Eventually, in the mid-1990s, I quit, the reasons for which could fill another column. Suffice it to say that I grew sick of the lazy, marketing-based storytelling. Should the reader be interested, I’ll break it all down sometime.

For now, I will simply say this: even at the apex of my comics-collecting frenzy, I never really followed Superman closely. He never really interested me. In the old days, no villain had a chance against him unless he/she happened to find a piece of kryptonite lying around. Superman was “super” to a fault, with more powers than the combined might of your average super-team, plus near-invulnerability. Moreover, I came of age in the 1970s and 80s, a time when comics were growing darker and ever more adult in tone. “The Big Blue Boy Scout” and his utterly pure ethics were much less interesting than the shades-of-gray morality of, say, the X-Men or the everyman struggles of Peter Parker. On the DC side of things, Batman’s neuroses—perhaps even psychoses—provided fecund grounds for character-based storytelling and action-based plots with real stakes. You always knew that Batman wouldn’t die or get hurt too badly—his name was on the book, right?—but he was vulnerable in ways that Superman could never be.

When Richard Donner’s first Superman film was released, I watched it because it was a super-hero film. Christopher Reeve did an admirable job. Superman II was, to my young eyes, pretty awesome. Terence Stamp made for a willowy, aristocratic Zod, but the triple threat of the Phantom Zone escapees posed real problems for Superman. I dug it. Of course, Superman III was really more of a comedy, and the less said about Superman IV, the better. Much like with the comics version, the filmic Superman interested me enough to keep up with what was happening, but not much more.

I never watched Lois and Clark on TV. I still have not seen Bryan Singer’s Superman Returns. Do you get what I’m saying? I respected Superman’s place in pop culture history, but I was never really invested in him, either.

Still, for some reason I can’t quite explain, I got really excited when I saw the trailers for Man of Steel. I found myself rooting for the Big Blue Boy Scout. I wanted the film to be good, a box office success and a critical smash. I bought my tickets and sat among the other drooling fanboys and girls, ready to be dazzled.

As I’ve said elsewhere, Man of Steel is really the first of the various Superman films to demonstrate understanding of Superman’s sheer scale. The leveling of Smallville and large sections of Metropolis provide strong, clear images of what would happen if godlike beings threw down, and, viewing the scope of the wreckage, the ticket-holder could be forgiven for his/her relief that such beings don’t exist in our world. Even if we forget about the potential loss of life, can you imagine the sheer economic devastation that would occur in the wake of just one super-battle? Insurance premiums alone would bankrupt your average citizen.

The problems with the film as a film have already been covered by other critics—the lack of chemistry between the leads, the over-dependence on CGI, the relentless battles that bleed into one another as if good scriptwriting were only a matter of moving from one near-incomprehensible set piece to another (I honestly wonder if the script might have been only 30 pages long), and so forth. To these concerns, I have added my own distaste for the fetishistic destruction of New York-substitute Metropolis, especially the scenes in which the Daily Planet staff wanders about a landscape that looks suspiciously like Ground Zero on 9/11. In fact, why did we even meet Perry White et al. in this film? They never really did anything substantive.

I also don’t like the typical Snyder-film acting style of SHOUTING EVERY LINE AT THE TOP OF ONE’S LUNGS, ESPECIALLY TO SUPERMAN, WHO HAS FRICKIN’ SUPER-HEARING. Michael Shannon’s a fine actor, but he chews too much scenery here.

A sidebar: at one point, Zod says to Superman, “I was bred for this! I was trained all my life to be a warrior! Where did you train, A FARM?” Um, dude, you were the one who got your ass kicked by a scientist in hand-to-hand combat.

Were it not for strong performances by Henry Cavill and Russell Crowe, the oft-dazzling visuals (Snyder’s greatest strength thus far), and the early scenes that ground Clark’s humanity in a typical “Who am I, really?” search, I would have hated the film. Still, I thought it was okay at best, C- material.

Back to the subject of this column, my main problems with the film lie with its ending and how that ending demonstrates the filmmakers’ fundamental misunderstanding of Superman’s character, as well as their own failure to construct a clear sense of ethics for Clark/Superman.

SPOILER ALERT: if you don’t know how the film ends, stop reading and come back after you’ve seen the movie. Go ahead. I’ll wait.

If you’re still with me, then I can tell you that I am firmly in the camp that believes Superman should never kill. Certainly the actions of the cinematic Superman have no bearing on the source material. But as I said to a friend recently, if you’re coming to an adaptation of a beloved character, you expect some level of faithfulness to what made you a fan of that character in the first place. Superman is not Wolverine, or the Punisher, or Deathstroke, or Deadshot. He always finds a way not to kill. Having Superman kill Zod without even trying anything else (why not zoom up in the air with him? Put your super hand over his eyes? Pull him backward? Bop him on top of the head really hard?) is like a Harry Potter adaptation in which Harry is a heroin-addicted sexual pervert. It is, at best, a fundamental misunderstanding of your source material, one that cannot be whitewashed with creative license. At worse, it’s a betrayal of your audience. You can surprise them without insulting them.

Of course, all that assumes that cinematic Superman believes in the same ethical code as comic-book Superman, and the audience is likely to assume he does because the film does not construct a clear set of moral codes for Clark in his early years. I find this flaw within the film even more troubling than the alteration of the source texts.

As portrayed in the film, Jonathan and Martha Kent seem to exemplify the worst parenting tendencies of the contemporary age, specifically the propensity to teach our children that they are special to the point of exceptionalism. I’m all for building our kids’ confidence and showing them that, as individuals, they are valuable and strong and wonderful. But as an educator, I have seen how many parents take this too far. Children of these parents grow up believing that they are perfect, that anything they do should be unconditionally praised, that success in every endeavor is both a given and their right as human beings, that they are truly and unequivocally the center of the universe.

Jonathan and Martha Kent teach Clark that his safety, his life, is more important than anyone else’s. When Clark saves a busload of children but exposes his powers in doing so, Jonathan implies that letting all those kids die would have been a preferable solution. When Jonathan is about to die in the big tornado and Clark wants to save him, Jonathan waves him off. He is literally willing to die for his son, and I’m wondering why none of the Superman-as-Christ commentaries seem to be parsing this particular scene. So Clark grows up having been told that his own safety is paramount, even if others have to suffer and die.

To his credit, Clark rejects that idea, risking exposure several times in order to help others. Given his upbringing, we might wonder where these morals come from; surely there is an academic nature-vs-nurture article here. In any case, though, he seems to be rebelling against the teachings of his parents and following his own conscience.

Therefore, when he is forced to kill Zod (or isn’t imaginative enough to figure out another way) and subsequently screams in teary-eyed—what? Anger? Frustration? Guilt?—we hope that this will be the start of a contemporary take on Superman’s morality. What effects will this action have on him? How will he ever get over it? Is he becoming more like his Earth father, in spite of his intentions? How much sleep will he lose? How long will he have to wander the Earth doing penance? How will such penance affect his burgeoning relationship with Lois and, more importantly, his ability to help the world become a better place?

Apparently, his reaction to breaking his own moral code—of not just letting someone die for the first time but actually taking that life himself—is to say, “Oh, well.” In the subsequent scenes, Superman trades one-liners with a general. He has a frank talk with his mother about his future, and his solution to his deep and scarring ethical breach is to smile and basically say, “I think I’ll get a job.” How has his relationship with humanity in general, and with Lois specifically, changed? Apparently not at all. He is the smiling, slightly horny, newest member of the Daily Planet staff.  Wow. That’s some deep stuff right there.

In Man of Steel, this ultimate breach of Superman’s canonical ethos and the rupturing of the film’s own ethical continuity (or, rather, the movie’s last revision of its own shaky construction of Clark’s ethics) have no visible consequences whatsoever.  In this world, Superman kills, and he’s momentarily sorry, and that’s about it. On to the next one. One wonders how Lex Luthor will die in the inevitable sequel and whether Superman will even bat an eyelash.

In this origin story, Clark never comes close to reconciling the varied sets of ethics with which he is presented, so the viewer is left wondering just what kind of Man of Steel we have been given. This kind of egregious and, thus far, purposeless dismissal of the source and the audience’s history with the character is unforgivable. And it undermines Man of Steel as a stand-alone story.

So why is World War Z, a film that radically departs from its source text, any better?

For one reason, World War Z does not carry so much historical weight. Superman’s first appearance, in Action Comics #1, occurred in 1938. Along with Action Comics, Superman appeared in his own eponymous book, various incarnations of Justice League of America, spin-offs, team-ups, and special issues, not to mention the various television shows, cartoons, and films that featured the character. Whole generations grew up with Superman, who, my own tastes notwithstanding, is still the most iconic super-hero of them all.

World War Z appeared, if I am not mistaken, in 2006. Though it enjoys a devoted following, particularly among zombie culture aficionados (among which I count myself), it has not enjoyed the kind of generational, wide-ranging cultural saturation that Superman has. If nothing else, its very recent appearance on the cultural stage assures us that a comparative iconography with Superman is, as of this moment, impossible.

Because World War Z does not and, at this point in time, cannot mean as much to as many people as Superman, the filmic version’s alterations of the source text seem less problematic.

World War Z the novel also eschews typical narrative conventions like point of view. As an “oral history of the zombie war,” its goal is to present as broad a view as possible of how a zombie apocalypse might evolve, as well as its effects on the global community. Instead of reading about the zombocalypse from the perspective of one central intelligence or one set of core characters, we jump from country to country, character to character. In doing so, we see how the zombie apocalypse affects various strata of humanity: men, women, and animals; the rich and the poor; first-world countries and undeveloped nations; religious and secular communities.

We don’t get much depth in terms of character development or setting, but the tradeoff is that we finally see the apocalypse for the world-wide cataclysm it should, by definition, be. It’s a different kind of story-telling that some love and some aren’t so crazy about; I find myself somewhere in the middle, liking the book but wishing that it were longer or the scope smaller so that the elements that make stories worth telling could have more time to develop. Still, the book does what it does well.

In terms of the film adaptation, it could not possibly tell the story in the same way. The book’s structure tries some audience members’ patience but still succeeds because it can fill a few hundred pages with vignettes. In the movies, though, telling the story that way would completely deconstruct any narrative through-line. You would have to spend only a minute or two at most with each vignette, leading to an experience that would be fragmented to a fault, or you would have to focus on just a handful, meaning that you’re leaving out most of the text anyway and would have little time to do more than establish the basic narrative situation of each before you cut to the next one.

Now…films like Cloud Atlas remind us that it is possible to utilize a fragmented narrative with shorter narrative arcs set in varied locales and time periods. In that film, the arcs focused on different characters and their interconnected plotlines; it used careful scripting and masterful editing to create a narrative that makes sense. However, Cloud Atlas concentrated on five or six locales and character sets; World War Z the novel covered many more. Therefore, the same problems mentioned above would still arise. What do you keep, and what do you leave out? Any omission would limit your devotion to the source text. Filmmakers are limited by budgets, running times, and actors’ schedules, among other things, none of which a novelist has to consider. So Marc Forster and his producers would, in adapting World War Z, have to leave out most of the novel or cover everything at far too fast a pace and in far too jumbled a way. You could, perhaps, faithfully adapt World War Z into an ongoing television series, but there seems to be no way to do so in a two-hour film.

Knowing that material would have to be left out anyway, the filmmakers decided—rightly, I believe—to focus the narrative on Gerry Lane and his family. Gerry still nation-hops, much like the correspondent does in the novel, only now we are seeing the apocalypse as it happens, rather than hearing about it second-hand. Forster and company might have chosen to shoot the film documentary-style and hewed closer to the book, but this approach allows for more action and less talking about the action—more showing and less telling. And while showing rather than telling is always good narrative advice, it is crucial in the visual medium of film.

There is also no discernible breach in the source text’s established ethos. In zombie texts, the undead are monsters, no longer human. There is no moral compunction to consider; you cannot feel guilty for protecting yourself against something that is already dead. So when Gerry kills zombies, he echoes what the various characters of the novel do.

We see the Lane family act in the midst of the zombie outbreaks: they steal a vehicle; they run away from the zombies, leaving other people to die; they protect themselves at the expense of others. When possible, as seen with the family in the apartment building, they help their fellow survivors. When no hope for help exists, they save themselves.

You can argue the moral relativity of their actions from now until the zombies bash in your own door; such arguments have and will probably continue to provide fodder for academic and cultural studies of zombie texts. Here, though, the point is that the Lanes act no differently than your average survivor in the novel. Sometimes they are selfless, risking their lives for others. Sometimes they flee in terror, probably glad that they can outrun their slower brethren. They fight on the side of humanity but exhibit human fears and the realistic tendency to break social and ethical codes when the society built upon those codes breaks down. They are no better or worse than the characters in Brooks’ novel. Therefore, while some readers might take issue with the altered structure and the focus on Lane, it is likely that fewer would find themselves deeply offended by Lane’s actions or how they fit within the framework of the narrative’s world.

In terms of how it functions as a film, World War Z is above average, but not perfect. It is very well-acted, especially for a genre film. Brad Pitt is particularly good; I forgot that I was watching Brad frickin’ Pitt in a zombie movie and found myself invested in the character’s survival (which, really, isn’t much a concern until the film’s final scenes; he’s the main character, after all). The action scenes were mostly well-done. The final scenes in the WHO labs positively drip with suspense; even if you can see what’s coming, as I did, you still want to know how it happens and who will survive. Like the character played by Christopher Meloni in Man of Steel, World War Z’s female Israeli soldier (whose name, like Meloni’s character’s, I cannot recall) was compelling. She endures physical and emotional trauma and still comes off like a badass.

If we are left wondering who Superman/Clark Kent really is, we know Gerry Lane well enough. He is a former U.N. operative with strong family ties. He is highly competent. He values his family more than other people but never abandons anyone when the possibility for saving them still exists.

Does World War Z leave questions unanswered? Yes, and it admits to doing so. We don’t know how the plague started or where it originated. We don’t know how well the solution will work. We don’t know exactly how it will be implemented. Yes, it’s that cynical Hollywood machine in action again, setting up a potential franchise at the expense of the stand-alone story. Yet this story does stand alone. The first stage is over. Some fans may feel cheated that the whole story was not covered, but at least they should not feel as cheated as Man of Steel viewers might. Marc Forster and company didn’t create a race of zombies that kill humans but raise puppies and daffodils or something equally insulting to the source mythology.

Even if you ignore the novel, World War Z isn’t flawless. I would like to see more development of Gerry’s backstory. The subplot with his daughter’s asthma fizzles out. Thomas the orphan boy seems to have little place in the film. Mireille Enos has very little to do other than look concerned. And, as my wife rightly pointed out, two of the major screw-ups in the film happen because a woman does exactly what she should not do at exactly the wrong time—not exactly gender-progressive.

While all these issues are troubling, though, they aren’t film-killers. World War Z is better acted, more coherent, and much less insulting than Man of Steel. I would grade this one in the B+/B range, significantly higher than Man of Steel’s C-. If these two films do indeed jumpstart franchises, which is clearly Hollywood’s hope—and the jury is still out, as both opened very strongly, but Man of Steel suffered a 71% dropoff in its second weekend—I hope that the second Z film (World War Z II? World War II-Z?) is even better than the first. And I hope that the Man of Steel team finds a way to redeem Superman. He deserves it, and so do we.

Follow me on Twitter @brettwrites.

Email me at semioticconundrums@gmail.com.

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A Garden Where the Sun Always Shines: Regarding Shauna

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In his obtuse, frustrating, beautiful poem “The Hollow Men,” T.S. Eliot writes, “Life is very long.” That idea goes against what most of us have heard—that life is short, that we must make the most of every day, that every passing second leads us that much closer to dying. I’ve always wondered which is true. Does life stretch out and out and out, or does it flash by like a film montage where pages fly from a calendar, floating off-screen and disappearing forever, moving us toward the action that matters, the conflict that advances the story?

 In my forty-second year, I have decided that the answer is both.

Some days, even weeks, of my life creep by on their bellies like snakes that have lain too long in the sun. Time seems interminable—the in-class activity that shuffles along until it ends in a whimper, the grading session that drags on and on and on, the dinner where the waiter pops by every twenty minutes to make sure we haven’t died of thirst while he took his smoke break.

But other times are different. They don’t creep or shuffle or drag. They zip past you like the purse snatcher that steals your valuables without ever breaking stride, so that you don’t even realize what is missing until the thief has turned the corner and disappeared forever.

These moments fly.

The hell of it is that these latter times aren’t bad, at least not all of them, maybe not even most of them. Often, the moments we would love to cherish are the very ones that we cannot hold onto. They disappear in the space of a breath, leaving us gasping in their wake.

I’ve been thinking about all this lately, not because I’m forty-two, which isn’t that old. No, I’ve been pondering the passage of time because my children are growing up. One, in fact, is no longer a child in any sense of the word, and another stands on the cusp of adulthood. My youngest is thirteen. And as they grow up and perhaps have children of their own, I have been thinking, even more than usual, about what kind of father I’ve been. What kind of man I am. What kind of people they’ll be, and how much I influenced their evolution, for better or worse.

Anyone who knows me well would tell you that I have never been good at sharing my feelings. The only-sparsely-revised, not-all-that-carefully-edited nonfiction on this blog represents more confession than I’ve ever made to most of the people I’ve met in my entire life. I am trying to be honest here, because if you are going to write any kind of non-fiction, you have to be honest to the point of brutality, of rawness. The audience will recognize your bullshit. They will crucify you for it. So you try to be true, even when it hurts, even when it angers those closest to you, and you pray that the art (if there is art) in what you say will eventually salve those wounds.

So I come here again, as I usually do, to open up a part of myself that I have never been able to express, except, perhaps, in some oblique fashion through my fiction. I come to speak from the heart, directly and honestly. I come to speak about my kids.

More specifically, I want to talk about my oldest daughter, Shauna. I want to say things about all my kids, of course, but I cannot say everything, even if I wrote nothing else for the rest of my life. And I cannot speak about all of them at once, because the very facts of their being overwhelm me. Thinking about them is like standing on a ship’s deck in the middle of the ocean, nothing but expanse and majesty all the way to the horizon. I have to take them one at a time, one piece at a time, and if I do this occasionally throughout the course of my life, perhaps they will know me better than they would have otherwise. Perhaps they will not be sorry that it was their fate to spring from me and the better parts of myself.

So. One at a time, whenever I can muster the courage and, hopefully, the words. Starting here, with the first about Shauna, others to come in the future, given world enough and time.

But really, what can I say about her that would be sufficient? Saying something in an honest, hopefully new way is part and parcel of the writer’s job, but sometimes language seems insufficient in and of itself; to truly know the thing about which one writes (or reads), one must experience.

We named her Shauna, but we might have named her other things. My first reason for living. My North Star that guided me through the darkest part of my life. My friend. My daughter. String bean, lovely woman.

I would like to start here by telling you that the person she is, the woman she’s grown to be, staggers me. At twenty-four, she is a better person than I have ever been. She has always been better, right from the start. And in being nothing more than herself, she has made me better.

She is a child of divorce—of two parents who became parents too young, who got married too quickly, who bulled their way into adulthood as if some Matador were waving a red flag that attracted them when it should have signaled a warning. I lived with her for the first several years of her life, before her mother and I finally did what we should have done in the first place and got away from each other. After that, every parting was a little tragedy marked by tears and sighs and regrets. Because of the divorce’s timing, I never got to take her to school or pick her up. I seldom got to help her with her homework. I never hosted a sleepover or helped her build a school project. I did not teach her to drive. I did not get to embarrass her in front of her boyfriends. Now that she is grown, with a life and job of her own, I get to see her roughly once a year. In so many ways, our story is about pain and missed opportunities, about how the little aggravations that typical fathers and daughters experience were lost to us. When I think of all that we missed and are still missing, I can barely lift my head.

And yet. And yet . . .

For many years, until she matured enough within herself and in her social relationships to let go of her father’s hand and fly on her own, we maintained a ritual on the night before I had to take her home. As that last day progressed, she would grow quieter and quieter, and nothing I could do or say would draw her out of that silence. Eventually we would go to bed, and I would lie there, dreading morning’s arrival, until I would hear it coming from her room—tiny little sniffles, choked-back sobs, the sounds of someone in pain, of someone who wants to keep that pain to herself. Of someone who did not want to bother anybody.

I would always get up and go to her room, and there, for minutes or hours, we would talk—about why she had to live so far away, about why I couldn’t just get a job where she lived, about why she couldn’t come see me more often, about how she didn’t want to go home. Not, I always hoped, because she did not want to see her mother, but because she knew we would miss each other.

During these conversations, I would never allow myself to weep. It was her time to hurt and my job to salve it in whatever way I could. It was not about me, would never be about me. I had no right to share my tears with her because, knowing her as I did, I knew that she would push aside her own pain and try to stop mine. To weep would have been selfish and egotistical and wrong. Our children should not have to bear our burdens. They should not have to fix us.

One day, though, in the middle of our end-of-visit ritual, I said to Shauna, “I’m really, really sorry you’re so upset.”

She looked at me for a long time, her eyes filled with tears, before she said anything. Then, finally, she asked, “Do you ever get upset?”

This question poleaxed me. I had never considered that my calm-on-the-surface demeanor might have been suggesting that I was perfectly okay with her leaving. That I would go back to bed and fall right to sleep as soon as she let me off the hook for the night. That she might not realize that I lived every single day of my life in fear that I was failing her in ways both fleeting and fundamental. That she might one day wake up to the fact that, in spite of all his efforts, her father was not a good man and might never be one, and that for evidence she need look no further than how I had failed to remain an everyday presence in her life.

Of course, I could no more tell her all that than I could burst into tears and ask her to comfort me. All I could do, all I had the right to do, was pull her close and hug her as hard as I could without cracking her ribs. All I could do was kiss the top of her head and say, “Of course I get upset, every time. But that doesn’t matter. All that matters is you.”

I suppose that if I could say only one thing to her that would sum up her place in my life, it would be the same thing I would also say to my wife and my other two children, and yet it would be just as true for each of them. “All that matters is you.”

I don’t mean that nothing else matters, of course. I cherish my art and glow with pride every time something is published, every time someone tells me something touched them or made them laugh or think or curse my name. I want my work as a writer, a teacher, and a human being to survive me and matter to the world. I want to make the world a better place, not a worse one. I want to give my family the best life I can possibly give them, and if I can’t give them what I want, then I want to be able to say, honestly, that I tried hard to do it. These things matter more than I can say.

But these things are tied inextricably to my love for and duty toward my family. It is a Gordian knot that I have no interest in untying. In this case, being bound is the greatest kind of freedom. And before I knew Kalene, before Brendan and Maya existed, Shauna taught me that. She was my first graduate program in being a better man.

I cannot possibly tell you about everything we did and what it all meant and what it all taught me. But I can tell you some things.

 * * *

 I remember when her mother announced to me that we were likely going to be parents. It was the summer before our senior year in high school. We had broken up, as we often did, and this time, I was determined to make it stick. Even then, the relationship was turning me into someone I didn’t recognize and didn’t like, and I had finally had enough. I was out, and I was determined to stay out. I had taken back my class ring, that great high school symbol of commitment, and wore it myself for the first time since buying it. I had even gone out on a date with an ex-girlfriend with whom I still had a connection, and I felt pretty sure we were going to get back together and live a long, happy life together.

Then Shauna’s mother-to-be showed up at my house and knocked on the door to my room. I opened it, saw her standing there, scowled. I had nothing to say to her and felt no interest in hearing what she had to say.

“I’m late,” she said.

“Here,” I said, giving her my class ring back.

We were married a few weeks later, and we spent every day together until the moment when I left, heartsick and wrecked and wondering if I were doing the right thing.

I don’t regret marrying her. We were miserable and at each other’s throats day and night and poor and stupid, but at times, we were also happy and in love and rich in ways that most of our classmates would take years to discover. Mainly, I don’t regret it because it gave me years with Shauna that I would not have had otherwise—feeding her, changing her diapers, watching the same videos a million times until the VHS tapes broke. It was all as glorious as a sunrise over the sea.

 * * *

I remember the trip home from a high school football game—Malvern? Pine Bluff?—where we had gone to watch my former teammates play. I had loved the games and hated the practices, so it was no great loss for me or the team when I had to go to work and miss playing in my senior year. Still, whenever we were both off on Friday, Christie and I would go to the games, where I would cheer on my friends and part of me would wonder what might have been.

I was driving through the dark, the road unspooling in front of me, Christie in the passenger seat and asleep for all I knew. I was thinking about what I might have done on that long pass that just missed the receiver’s outstretched hands; in my head, I would have caught it, though in my heart, I knew I probably would not have been fast enough either. I was watching the road and daydreaming and listening to some hard-rock song on our car stereo when Christie reached over, turned down the volume, and said, “I just felt the baby kick.”

Something turned over in the deep pit of me. Some creature that had been sleeping in the darkness and dreaming in its own primordial way. It woke up and whimpered and crawled away from the crack of light that had suddenly appeared.

Never taking my eyes from the road, I reached my right hand over and Christie took it, placed it low on her stomach, pressed it harder than I would have advised. The car had grown silent; it seemed that even the regular thrum of the tires, the whistle of the wind as it blew past us, faded, until all that I could hear was my own heartbeat.

Then I felt it—a tiny, almost imperceptible tap against my palm. Like placing your hand on a taut tent wall and feeling someone brush against the other side. Just a millisecond, just once, but undeniable, and very, very real.

And light flooded my eyes. It wasn’t until that creature in the deep pit of me screamed and vanished that I realized it was my own ignorance, my own sense that, even though we had gotten married and had begun compiling cribs and plastic bottles and onesies, we could not possibly be parents. I had known Shauna was real, but I had not believed it on some vital level until I felt that tap, the touch of a person who was not yet a person but who one day might be anybody.

Five miles or so down the road, I felt my face hurt and realized that I had been smiling for a long time. And for perhaps the first time in my young life, I was truly happy. Terrified and incompetent and ignorant, yes, but happy.

 * * *

I remember her birth, the moment she was pushed out into the world, screaming and purple and covered in goo.

“Why is she purple?” I asked, alarmed.

 “She’s cold,” said the doctor. “Where she’s been, it’s nearly 99 degrees.”

“Want to see me weigh her?” asked a nurse. I walked over to the scale with her. She eased Shauna onto it and waited for the readout. The numbers appeared; the nurse looked at me. “Nine pounds, thirteen ounces? Is that right?”

“How the hell should I know? It’s your scale.”

By this time, the doctor was pulling out the afterbirth while Christie grimaced and grunted. When he got it out, it looked like something you might see on the side of the road in the deep South, a creature that dozens of tires had squished beyond all recognition. I mentioned that I had once seen something like it on Nightmare on Elm Street. Nobody laughed.

A few minutes later, still clad in the disposable gown they had pinned on me, I walked into the waiting room and presented Shauna to her grandparents. She was wrapped in a blanket and looking about curiously, acclimating herself to her new world. Everyone ooohed and aaaaahed and grinned and slapped me on the back and passed her around like they were playing Hot Potato.

Later that night, as Christie slept in her hospital bed and Shauna dozed in her bassinet beside me, I took in the silence, the sheer peacefulness of that room compared to the chaos of the birth, and wondered, not for the first time, if I were remotely qualified to be in charge of this little person who would look to me for everything.

 * * *

I remember one night, a few months later when I had been at home alone with Shauna. It was time to pick up Christie from work, so I loaded Shauna into the carrier-thing that also doubled as a car seat. I strapped it down and got in the car and backed out of the driveway. About halfway to Andy’s Restaurant, where Christie was working at the time, I held the steering wheel with my left hand and stretched my right hand into the back seat. I touched Shauna’s tiny little bird hand and she jerked it away.

“Huh,” I said. Against all reason, it hurt my feelings. I wondered if it meant something, knowing in my head that it was probably a reflex or evidence that she had not yet learned to control her body, any of which would have been perfectly natural. But in my heart, a voice whispered, She knows about you. She knows you are not a good person. She wants nothing to do with you, which just proves how smart she is.

All of this happened in perhaps two seconds. And then, before I could pull my hand back and grasp the steering wheel and start feeling really sorry for myself, that tiny bird hand settled on mine and wrapped itself around my index finger. And in that moment, like the Grinch’s, my heart grew two sizes.

I drove all the way to Andy’s like that, my right arm cranked painfully backward and twisted and stretched. I smiled through the pain and the numbness and kept on driving, and Shauna did not let go.

 * * *

I remember watching the same videos hundreds of times, everything from Disney classics to Scruffy to stop-motion California Raisin shows. I had them all memorized. So did Shauna. She never just sat in front of the television for hours at a time, and we never used the television as a de facto babysitter. But when she wanted to watch, she would sit there attentively while those same dogs did and said the same things they had always done and said. It never seemed to get old.

I can no longer quote those movies and shows verbatim. I don’t even really remember the plot. But just hearing the word “scruffy” sends my mind down those same roads, and I wind up back in that mobile home, sitting on that couch and watching Shauna watch TV. In times like those, that trailer was a sanctuary, a garden where the sun always shined and things grew in rich black soil.

 * * *

But like most places, there was nothing intrinsically good or bad about our first home. Its nature depended on the people in it and what they did for, or to, each other. I also remember the fights, the screaming matches that often devolved into physical confrontations.

Just as when Christie and I were dating, our marriage was a study in extremes. We were giddy and joyous and thrilled at life’s possibilities. We were hateful and violent and heartsick. I loved her desperately and wanted her to love me back, but she never did, at least not like I loved her. At times, she seemed to value me; at times, she would speak and act with nothing but contempt, as if I were a bug that she wouldn’t bother scraping off her shoe. I never knew which Christie I was going to get, and I didn’t understand the one that seemed to hate me, and so, once I learned to lash out, I let that part of me take over when I felt hurt or threatened or useless or stupid, which was most of the time.

When our arguments became physical, they threatened to rip that trailer in half. We were like a storm that blew in out of a cloudless sky, tearing sturdy buildings off their foundations and scattering trash for miles around.

Every time this happened with Shauna in the house, she would do something unexpected while we were raging about her. She might fold the basket full of clean laundry that we hadn’t gotten around to yet. She might pick up the clutter in her room. She might grab a rag and dust. Whenever I would see her trying to impose order on the chaos surrounding her, my heart would break, and I would try to stop the argument, shut down the swirling negative emotions filling the house like acrid smoke. Sometimes it even worked. But it never fixed the underlying problems.

One day, in the middle of a huge fight in our kitchen/dining area, I happened to look down. Shauna was hiding under the table, knees drawn up to her chest, arms wrapped around her legs. She was crying and rocking back and forth. And in that moment, something broke inside me. What spilled from that break were pain and guilt and the sudden, dawning realization that my marriage would never last. I knew that Christie and I were too different, in our goals and our worldviews and our values. I knew that as long as we lived together, the fights would never stop, and that every single day would bring about the possibility that Shauna would wind up under that table, sobbing and wishing that her Mom and Dad would just love each other.

I stayed a couple more months and tried to fix things, but eventually, I did what I had always known I would have to do. I packed my things and moved out. I initiated divorce proceedings that would drag on for several months as we all wept and wailed and fought and tried to patch it all back together and eventually moved on.

It was perhaps the hardest thing I’ve ever done, leaving that trailer and the woman I still loved and the daughter I adored. I was afraid and depressed and so very, very angry, none of which would change over the next two years of my life. I was entering the darkest period I have ever been through, but I had to do it. I could no longer abide the sight of that sweet girl hiding under a table, the knowledge that I bore half the responsibility for putting her there. I was changing things in the only way left to me. But every night, for months and months and months, my heart would break all over again, and I hated the world for letting things come to this. I hated it, but even more, I hated myself.

What happens when she finds out that you are not a good man?

 * * *

I remember when Christie’s mother informed me that Christie was getting remarried and moving to Pine Bluff. Until that time, I had seen Shauna whenever I wanted, which meant any time that I was not in class or at work or trying desperately to get some sleep. Now, the original custody agreement would be enforced—visitation every other weekend and alternate holidays.

The prospect of not seeing my daughter daily finished shattering what was left of my heart. In fact, it nearly killed me.

I got this news with only a couple days’ notice. I was supposed to work that night. I had an American Novel test the next day. I knew that I would not keep either commitment. Not when my world had just been turned upside down again.

I picked up Shauna and brought her to my parents’ house. I found her something to do. Then I went back to my parents’ room, closed the door, and grabbed their phone. I called my workplace and got an assistant manager.

“This is Brett. I’m supposed to work tonight, but I….I…” And then I burst into tears.

I couldn’t stop. The pain and confusion poured out of me in deep, throaty sobs. The manager listened quietly, and when I finally calmed down a bit, he said, “What is it?”

“It’s my daughter,” I whimpered. “She’s moving away, and I…”

“Don’t worry about coming in,” he said. “Take care of yourself. Take care of her. Let us know when you can come back.”

This small act of generosity—of taking me at my word, of putting my obvious breakdown ahead of whatever inconvenience the store might feel at my absence—nearly sent me into hysterics again. But I managed to swallow it. I thanked him and hung up.

Now for the test. I tried to look up my professor’s phone number, but it wasn’t listed. So I checked the number of another professor, one I had taken classes with several times. She was friends with the American Novel professor. I was in good standing with both of them; I was honored to know that they considered me one of their best students. I was hoping that Professor #2 would give me Professor #1’s number.

I dialed Professor #2 and waited as it rang. I took deep, slow breaths, determined to calm myself this time, to handle things better. I didn’t want to look like a fool, and I wanted to make the best case possible for myself.

“Hello?” said Professor #2.

“Hi,” I said. “It’s Brett Riley. I’m sorry to bother you at home, but I….”

That was as far as I made it before it all ripped out of me again. I burst into sobs that were just as deep, just as uncontrollable, just as wrenching as those that came before. It took me at least a couple of minutes to calm down.

“What’s wrong?” said Professor #2, and I was grateful for the concern that I could hear in her voice.

“It’s my daughter,” I said. “My ex-wife is moving away, and I’ve only got two days, but see, I’ve got this test in Professor #1’s class….”

“Don’t worry about it,” said Professor #2. “I’ll talk to Professor #1. She’ll let you make up the test.”

I thanked her about a hundred times and hung up, feeling a bit better because at least I could spend those two days with Shauna without worrying about all the other things in my life. Not until I became a teacher myself did I really understand what Professor #s 1 and 2 did for me. It wasn’t just being generous enough to give a make-up exam to a student with a real-life problem. It was how they worked together. Professor #2 had made a promise about how Professor #1 would handle a situation in class. Professor #1 lived up to that promise, even though she hadn’t made it herself and would have had every right to be angry with me and Professor #2. I have worked with several professors—little martinets who run their fiefdoms with iron fists, regardless of circumstance—who would not have been so generous. Who might have failed me for seeking aid from a colleague. Who would have resented the colleague for speaking out of turn. But somehow, Professor #2 had conveyed the depth and sincerity of my sorrow. Professor #1 honored both me and her friend. To both of them, I have ever been grateful.

When I came out of that bedroom, I had dried my eyes and blown my nose. I would not cry in front of Shauna until she was in her 20s. But when she asked me if I ever got upset when she had to leave, I thought back to those first departings, the ones that knocked my world off its axis and left me a blubbering mess in front of my co-workers and my teachers, and I think, “Yes. From the very beginning of all this. But that was not your cross to bear. It was always mine, and mine alone.”

 * * *

I remember leaving work once a week and driving an hour and a half to Pine Bluff. I would pick Shauna up from her new apartment and take her somewhere—a restaurant, a movie, a mall, some combination—just to get some extra time. I would have to drive back home, crash for a few hours, and get up early the next day for work or school.

One mid-week visit found us at the mall’s arcade, playing all those carnival games that spit out tickets based on your score. We managed to cobble together enough tickets to purchase the kinds of crummy prizes those places stock, garbled and hastily-constructed bits of plastic and rubber that would either survive a tactical nuclear strike or break within two days.

After she picked out the prizes she wanted, we had a few tickets left over, just enough to get a plastic Sheriff’s badge, gold-ish and hard as a rock, a clip-on job. You could barely read the writing on the front. It was the very definition of a throwaway toy. It was not, strictly speaking, a toy at all. It was tacky decoration, the kind of thing only a little kid would be drawn to.

I remember wondering why Shauna wanted it, what appeal it possibly could have held. She took it and clipped it to her shirt, where it hung like a dead man from a tree, weighty and shifting with every movement, threatening to drag the neck of her shirt halfway down her torso.

Nothing about her outfit or bearing connoted “Sheriff.” She was not dressed in western garb. She was obviously not wearing a county sheriff’s uniform. She might as well have been wearing a football helmet or a pair of boxing gloves.

There was something about the incongruity of the badge—her wanting it, her wearing it unselfconsciously—that struck me as such a little kid thing to do that I found myself misty-eyed, a lump in my throat. It was the sweetest thing I had seen in months.

I still think about that day, that badge, her wearing it while holding the rest of the loot we had won. It still chokes me up. Meaningless to anyone else, probably forgotten by her. Yet it has stayed with me in ways that other, seemingly more memorable events have not.

From little moments like this, we piece together our lives. 

I remember how once, when I was taking her home from a weekend visit, Shauna asked me to stay the night. “You can stay at our house,” she said. “I bet Mom won’t mind.”

“Yes, she would,” I said. “She would definitely mind.”

I left that night after another bout of tears. Our visits during those years were always punctuated by Shauna’s tears and my sleeplessness, my nightmares. I don’t care what Shakespeare said. When it comes to your kids, there’s nothing sweet about the sorrow of parting. Nothing sweet at all.

 * * *

I remember moving to Baton Rouge, Louisiana, to begin my doctoral program. I had to do it. I am a writer, but I am also an educator, and you cannot work in the college/university system without a terminal degree, not if you value decent pay and the possibility of job security and benefits. I had to go, for myself and for my family. And so the every-other-weekend-and-alternate-holiday visits became six-weeks-in-the-summer-and-alternate-holidays-and-sometimes-spring-break visits. Even less time than before.

Thus, the end-of-visit anguish intensified, for both of us. We had great times during the visit. It always seemed like we had never been apart. We still knew each other as well as ever; we still loved each other just as fiercely.

But the time. Always the time, and never enough of it.

The night before her leaving was always like a little funeral, not for us or our relationship but for every missed day, missed conversation, missed opportunity to share our lives.

We have survived so many little deaths.

 * * *

I remember living in Baton Rouge and hearing her ask tearfully if we could at least arrange it so that we could see each other more.

“Six weeks just isn’t very long,” she said.

“Yes,” I said. “As soon as I can save up the money for the court costs and get things settled enough to impress a judge. We can absolutely do that.”

“Okay,” she said.

It never happened. By the time I saved that money and settled my life, everything had changed. Now she had friends, boys, a social life, activities—the things that every healthy, well-adjusted kid has, the things that no decent person can begrudge them.

“Six weeks is an awfully long time,” she said when she told me that she wanted to cut those six weeks down to two. The two would eventually become none, and then she was grown, and working, and dating seriously.

Time flies, and all your good intentions fly with it. When it all goes, you are left with empty rooms, the silence that always descends in the wake of loss. People call it Empty Nest Syndrome, and it is no less painful when that nest has only been occupied part-time. It is natural and good; it is progression, evolution, maturation. It is the very essence of the word “bittersweet.”

What happens when she finds out that you are not a good man?

 * * *

I remember Shauna’s high-school graduation. I watched her walk across that stage and take her diploma, and I felt as proud as any parent ever does. I felt relief, because she had not only survived all the mines that her mother and I had dug for her; she had thrived. She was moving on to an adult life full of possibility. She could be or do anything. And whatever she might do, I no longer had a say in it. More bitterness, more sweetness—that moment when your child moves past you into a world truly their own. Visitation dependent not only on desire and convenience but also work schedules and vacations.

Graduation is beautiful and agonizing and scary and part of the natural order. It is like the moment when the baby birds finally jump out of the nest, exhilarated and flapping their wings as hard as they can, hoping to catch the right updraft before they splatter on the ground. Meanwhile, the older birds sit in that nest, suddenly alone, time stretching before them all the way to the horizon. They want to scoop up those children and usher them safely back to the fold, knowing all the time that they cannot, must not. That they would not be allowed.

 * * *

I remember Shauna’s surprise visit on my birthday. I had not seen her in a year. I walked into Kalene’s office one Friday afternoon, tired and grumpy and ready to go home. Shauna was sitting in a chair, smiling.

I was thunderstruck. I said the only thing I could think of: “Holy shit!”

It was one of the best presents I’ve ever gotten. I remember once, when she was a little girl, she drew a picture for me and presented it to me on my birthday. I can’t even remember what it was. All I know is that it was hand-drawn and colored and said, “To Daddy.”

“It’s all I have to give,” she said.

“It’s all I want,” I replied, hugging her. “I can’t imagine getting anything better.”

What do you do for someone who has so often given you all she has to give? When you have so often failed to give her what she asked for, what she needed? How do you sleep at night? What do you dream about? What happens when she finds out that you are not a good man?

I suppose that the only answer is that you try again. That, even when you can barely stand to look at your own reflection, you stand up and walk. You write her on Facebook. You text her. You invite her to your new home and let her know that she always has a place there, that she never has to ask. You remind her that if she needs something and it is within your power to give it, you will, for this is your duty and your privilege.

And when you screw it all up, you pray that she has one more ounce of forgiveness in her heart.

Do I ever get upset? Oh, yes. God, yes.

But I don’t dwell on those things. I dwell on the blessings I’ve been given—to know her, to be whatever kind of father I’ve been, to spend time with her, to influence her in ways that are, hopefully, more positive than negative. I look at the woman she’s become and hope that her goodness is partially because of me, not just in spite of me. I thank God for her presence in my life—a presence that saved me in very tangible ways.

And then I move onto the next task that will take me through the next minute, and the next hour, and the next day, until she gets off the plane and everything is like it should be again, for just a little while.

 Follow me on Twitter @brettwrites.

Email me at semioticconundrums@gmail.com

 

 

Puppy Love #creativenonfiction

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Puppy Love

            Recently on Facebook and Twitter, I stated that those who say they wouldn’t change a thing about their pasts are either lying or overly stubborn. I caught some flack for that claim. One of my friends misunderstood; he argued that he wouldn’t change a thing along the way because he’s happy with the destination. Another said that, because she constantly critiques herself, she wouldn’t change much. As for the latter, I can only envy my friend’s comfort with most of her decisions and actions. I constantly self-critique, too, but in retrospect, I still find that I’ve erred much of the time. In terms of the former, my statement wasn’t about changing who I am today. It’s about wishing that my present self could go back and say to the younger me, “Even though you think you know what you’re doing, you are about to make a mistake. Don’t be dumb/selfish/mean/insensitive.”

            Many of those past actions involve wronging others. And while I could—and, eventually, will—write about my struggles with relationships and family, today I am thinking of my failures to take care of an old friend. His name was Tank. He was a dog. He loved me, as dogs love people, unconditionally and with his whole being. And, as is often the case with people and their “love” for animals, I cared about him when it was convenient and ignored him when it wasn’t. Now, when I try to sleep at night, I often see his face—dark fur with brown patches, a white chest as if he were wearing a cummerbund, eyes so radiant they could melt a glacier. He always looked so happy, until the day he got sick and I abandoned him.

            I still remember the day I brought him home. It was during my first marriage, when things were always volatile. I was nineteen years old, with a wife and daughter. I was a student at Louisiana Tech University and was majoring in engineering, which I hated. But I had come out of high school with dollar signs in my eyes, and since I had taken all the college-prep math and science classes my high school offered, I felt well-prepared. I didn’t particularly enjoy the work in those courses, but I believed that I could work a job I didn’t like if it meant that I could make enough money to do whatever I wanted otherwise. And since even in 1989-90 we could tell that computers would soon rule the world, I declared a computer engineering major.

            I hated my classes. Hated them. My favorite things to do were reading and writing, and there I was, taking Calculus II and Chemistry and Introduction to Computer Programming. As I sat there taking notes on arcane formulas and weights of gases and ways to make a “DO WHILE” loop or whatever it was called, I saw my future stretching out before me, endless days of sitting in front of a screen and writing code so that other people could use computers to do the kinds of things that I really wanted to do. But I have never been a quitter, and my parents were proud of me and my scholarships, and my wife and her family constantly expressed money concerns in ways that told me changing my major to, say, English would lead to full-scale civil war. And so I trudged on, miserable and bitter, angry at myself for declaring a major that I didn’t want and at them for pressuring me to stick with it.

            My strategy—if you can call unconscious decisions a strategy—was to self-sabotage. I stopped going to classes I didn’t like and never got around to dropping them. I skipped tests to go home for a weekend. I went to see Aerosmith and Joan Jett the night before a Trigonometry final, which I showed up to twenty minutes late and left before anyone else. When the university put me on a one-semester academic suspension, I packed up my family and moved back to southeast Arkansas, where I enrolled in the University of Arkansas at Monticello without declaring a major. After drifting for a semester or two, I finally pulled the trigger and declared. I was an English major. I have never looked back.

            But in between realizing that I hated engineering and finally making the right decision, I went through several varieties of hell. And since my family life caused a lot of the tension, I wanted something else to love, something that, like my beautiful daughter, would not judge me or pressure me to live a life I didn’t want. I thought a pet might strengthen the already-firm bonds between me and my daughter. So I decided to get a dog.

            A lady I knew from work was giving some away. They weren’t any special breed, but I knew when I got mine that he would be fairly big—not Great Dane or Saint Bernard big, but not poodle or Pomeranian territory, either. I chose him because he was gorgeous and gregarious, and because he had a great name already—Tank. It conjured images of unstoppable canine energy, powerful runs through tall grass. I brought him home in the back seat of my car. He was good.

            Of course, Tank would later royally piss off my wife, who wanted no dogs bigger than her mother’s Boston Terriers. As he grew, he barked gruffly at inopportune moments and refused to be housetrained even to the extent of scratching on the door. Thus we would awake to find the newspapers we had left out still as spotless and crisp as the day they were printed, while a steaming pile of poop sat on the floor right next to them. He pissed on the tile floor of our mobile home’s kitchen and soaked the carpet more than once. I was constantly cleaning up after him, and none of the old tricks I had learned worked at all. And so I became hyper-aware of any noise in the night—light scratching, the staccato clicks of toenails on tile, whining. And I would rise up out of my deep sleep, already shouting, “Tank, NO!” as I bolted down the short hallway.

            More often than not, I was too late or found it was all a false alarm. Tank kept me on my toes that way.

            I couldn’t leave him outside; we lived in a trailer park that did not allow loose pets, and we had no money or permission to build a fence. I had no desire to chain him to a tree or a doghouse just for my own convenience; I was at least that selfless. And so I would sleep a few hours at a time, these restful periods broken up by anxiety and stress and nasty work that I had little patience for.

            Oh, I still loved the dog. During the day, we’d go outside and I would let him run around in the thirty yards or so between our trailer and the next one. He would chase insects and frolic and play fetch with whatever ball I could find. I’d run with him, trying not to trip over him or step into a hole. I’d tackle him and ruffle his fur and scratch his belly, and he would chase me and rear up on his hind legs, his forepaws on my stomach. Sometimes I’d take those paws and walk with him, fashioning an awkward dance.

            Yes, our life together waxed and waned between frustration and boy-and-his-dog joy. Until, that is, we moved back to Arkansas.

            Our new life brought all kinds of changes. We lived next to my in-laws, who had multiple dogs and two or three cats. Our trailer sat at an intersection between a road leading to a highway and a gravel road that wound through the more rural portions of town—the dangers of traffic and big trucks in one direction, the song of small patches of woods in the other.

            I now had to commute around an hour and a half every day. I was taking a full undergraduate load and working a part-time job that actually drifted toward full-time hours, though the pay was rotten in those days of three-dollar-and-thirty-five-cent-an-hour minimum wage. I had homework and old friends to see and relatives to visit, as well as a wife and daughter that needed and deserved my time and love. And as all this coalesced, my nineteen-to-twenty-year-old self made some good decisions and some bad ones.

            Good: I took care of my school, work, and family responsibilities. I made time to hang with my friends, to throw parties, to read for pleasure and play video games every chance I could.

            Bad: I had less and less time for Tank. And because I was so busy, I was able to rationalize it. “He’s got a lot of other animals to play with,” I said, letting him out more often and hoping that he would not find his way to the highway, where he would almost certainly be flattened. “It’s not like I’m being lazy,” I said, and that much was true. “It’s not like I don’t care about him anymore. There’s just so much to do.”

            Easy words. In many cases, justified. But empty and hollow and insufficient nonetheless.

            Because eventually, Tank got sick. One day I came home and he did not greet me with bounds of joy. He looked my way and dragged himself over to the car as I got out, his head hanging as if he were ashamed of his poor efforts. He moved like a dog four times his age. It struck me as odd. I asked everyone about him, but no one had paid him much attention. So I sat with him awhile, scratching behind his ears and telling him what a good boy he was. I talked with him as if he could understand (which, for all I know, he could) and might reply at any time. I told him about my day. But as evening descended and the temperature dropped, I patted him on the head and said, “See you later, buddy.”

            By this time, Tank was a full-time outdoors dog. His refusal to take to house training, along with my in-laws’ always-open and comparatively warm laundry room, led my wife to insist on it. I was too tired and distracted to fight about it, and besides, in southeast Arkansas dogs with worse places to sleep led full and happy lives.

            Around this time, my school workload increased, and my employer wanted me on duty more often than not, as the cold months had descended, bringing with them the approaching holidays. And so for several days in a row I came home at odd hours—3 pm or six or eleven—exhausted and hungry and ready to fall into bed.

            I didn’t see Tank. And, to my everlasting shame, I didn’t even think about him.

            Finally one day my wife was waiting for me. She looked both upset and angry. “Tank’s sick,” she said. “He’s in the laundry room.”

            “Shit,” I said, more annoyed than concerned. The weight of the day settled on me; I felt it in my lower back, my shoulders, my aching head. I dropped my things on the living room floor and crossed over to my in-laws’. I pushed open the door of the laundry room.

            Tank lay there on his side, breathing shallowly. When he craned his neck to look at me, his movements were stiff and labored, as if the very motion pained him. It probably did. His eyes were dull and weeping; his fur looked matted. And yet, as I came in the room, his tail beat a weak tattoo on the concrete floor. I thought I heard him make a low sound in his throat. It might have been an abortive bark, or a whine, or nothing at all.

            I sat down with him and took his head in my lap. I stroked his fur and spoke softly to him and promised him that he was still my dog, even though I had failed him lately. I told him that he would be all right, that whatever had taken hold of him would let go. That he would stand up again, and frolic and leap and bark and wake the neighbors and dig in the hard fall dirt. I apologized for being gone so much, for not realizing how he felt.

            And yet I couldn’t think of what I could do for him. I was an undergraduate, meaning I had no income at the college. We had already spent the overage from my financial aid that semester. I doubted that any of my relatives would have lent me money to take Tank to the vet, and all of my friends were either off at college somewhere or broker than I was. And I could not stay out there with him much longer. I was starving and tired, and I had to go do it all again the next day.

            So after a while, I lowered his head back down to the concrete and promised him that I would be back as soon as I could.

            I never saw him again.

            The next few days were even busier than before. When I came home, I was in no mood to take care of anybody besides my daughter. I would do what she required, and then I would sit on the couch and vegetate or go to bed or slog through some homework. I thought about Tank, and I asked about him; apparently his condition had not changed one way or the other. I took this as a positive sign—no news is good news, right?—and went on with my day.

            Then one day I came home and was told that Tank was gone.

            “What do you mean, gone?” I asked. “Did he die? I thought he was stable.”

            At this point, my wife revealed that her brother had gotten tired of watching Tank suffer on the laundry room floor. He had loaded Tank into a truck and carried him out into the woods, where he laid him down on the ground and shot him. It was a mercy killing; my brother-in-law had no malice toward Tank. He was doing the only thing he knew to do, which was put Tank out of his misery, because I, Tank’s owner and friend, had done nothing.

            When I heard this news, I felt as if someone had stabbed me with a coring knife and hollowed me out. Into that emptiness spilled conflicting feelings that threatened to crack the foundation of my self-image. I was furious with my brother-in-law for killing my dog. I was grateful to him for doing something to help Tank. I was sad that Tank was gone; I was happy that he wasn’t in pain anymore; I was relieved, damn me, that I would not have to take the time to go into that room and comfort him. Yes, I actually felt relief for myself.

            What kind of person was I?

            Tank had done what very few people have ever done for me. He accepted me and loved me and gave me his loyalty without question or condition. He loved me when I played with him, and he loved me when I ignored him. He greeted me every day as if he hadn’t seen me in years, during a time when my own wife seemed to wish I would disappear forever. He lay on that cold concrete and fought against whatever was ripping him apart and looked at me. He tried to wag his tail.

            And what had I done? Had I gone to every friend and relative I had until I had found enough money to take him to the veterinarian? Had I begged a vet to work out a payment plan with me so that my friend, for whom I was responsible, could live a longer and happier life? Had I sold something precious of mine to finance his treatment? God help me, did I take him out and shoot him myself if I could not be bothered to do anything else?

            No. I let him lie there in his sickness and rot from the inside. Because I was busy. Because I wanted some time for myself. In truth, because I was lazy and selfish.

            As I have gotten older, I have come to believe that how a person treats animals says a lot about how much they value life itself—the Earth, the people in their lives, people in general. If Kalene’s diet allowed it, I really think I would try to become a vegetarian because I simply cannot abide how animals are treated in the food industry, how each animal’s life must be as important to it as mine is to me. I believe that animals have souls, emotions, desires, maybe even dreams and goals. And I want to do as little as possible to hurt them, my meals notwithstanding.

            But in those days, no matter my intentions, I was not a good person. I mistreated that dog, even if I did so for what seemed like good reasons and mostly by omission, rather than commission. I was responsible for his life, his health, his happiness. I failed him in every way possible, even in my own heart.

            But I didn’t emerge unscathed. I have never stopped thinking about Tank, or the other pets I had before him. And every single thing I’ve done for my pets since then has been influenced by his presence in my life. It’s why I gladly put off getting things I want or going on trips when my cat needs medical attention. It’s why I advocate for animal rights, why I speak out against things like puppy farms and kill shelters. It’s why, even when I take a bite of steak, I remember that it was once a part of a living, breathing creature that did not want to die and that had done nothing to me.

            Tank taught me one of the most important lessons I’ve ever learned, one I’ve tried to pass onto my children. Animals aren’t interchangeable tokens we move around at our leisure. They are important, soulful beings with whom we share this planet, this life. If I ever see him again—and I believe that I will—then I plan to tell him that. And I will run with him, talk with him, pet him, and throw that ball to him for as long as he wants.

Follow me on Twitter @brettwrites.

Email me at semioticconundrums@gmail.com.

Returning with …

Returning with Some Random Thoughts

So I guess I should start out with an apology for not updating this blog over the last three or four months. Last semester got really crazy and pretty much stayed that way, and then the Christmas holiday travel and gift-shopping schedule took over, and then I had to prepare for this semester. In short, I’ve been swamped. I got very little done on my ongoing projects, including this blog. But I’m trying to start off this semester on a better note. I’ve been working on my young adult novel and have finished first drafts of two other projects. I continue to submit finished works to various places. And I’ve got a comic-book project percolating at the moment. As for this blog, I will do my best to update regularly, though when the grading crunch arrives, I’ll probably have to take some time off. Sometimes there aren’t enough hours in the day.

As a way of reconnecting to all my faithful readers (all three of you), I thought I’d return to this blog with some random thoughts on things that have happened since the last update.

The Political Circus

In no particular order:

1)      I support the Occupy movement. It’s good to see Americans returning to their roots as protestors, dissenters, and activists. Naturally, the mainstream media’s dismissal of the now-worldwide movement was both expected and disheartening, but it’s done very little to stem the tide of the movement. Keep on occupying, folks. When they try to dismiss you as if you don’t matter, you know you’ve at least gotten their attention.

 2)      I have stated before that many Republicans seem to have gone functionally insane in the post-9/11 world, but this latest round of–*ahem*–“candidates” should make any thinking Republican shudder with fear and contempt. As they all scramble to take ever more reactionary positions in order to appease the fringe nutjobs, they get more and more laughable yet dangerous. Is the moderate Republican (and no, I don’t count Romney in that bunch after some of the things he’s said) really extinct? I hope not.

 3)      Barack Obama should have this election sewn up since the right can’t find anybody even remotely appealing to run against him. I’ve got mixed feelings. As an Independent, I have no particular loyalties to the Democrats, though the ever-more-radically-conservative Republicans present no candidates I could stomach voting for. That pretty much leaves the Democrats, since this country has no viable party beyond those two. It’s a damn shame, because we should be able to choose the best candidate, not the less-crappy one. As for Obama himself, I like a lot of what he’s done—ending the Iraq war and DADT, passing some semblance of health care reform, and so forth. But I’m troubled by other things he’s done or failed to do. He hasn’t addressed true financial reform; you can’t do that and still leave the same guys that got us into this mess in charge. I didn’t like the compromises in the health care bill, especially the lack of a public option. Some sources claim we’re the only first-world country without universal health care. If that’s even remotely possible, we’re not whom we claim to be as a people. And we still need to address LGBT and women’s rights, especially given how they’ve come under fire from the Republican candidates. Those are just a few of the actions and positions that please or disturb me, but I hope they demonstrate my concerns with the country’s directions. We’re much more on track now than we were under that jackass Bush, but we’ve still got a long way to go, and too many people still want to live in 1830, not 2012. I hope the President and his party gets off the fence and start addressing more of those issues.

Mixed Martial Arts

1)      I truly think that Shogun Rua vs. Dan Henderson was the best fight I’ve ever seen, but the end result was wrong. The fight should have been scored a draw, and I can’t believe that not even one judge saw it that way. Under the current scoring system, the winner of a round gets ten points, the loser nine or less. Judges are supposed to score rounds 10-8 or below only when one fighter truly dominates the round. Under that system, I would have given the first three rounds to Dan Henderson, all of them 10-9. Henderson’s camp has argued that you could have scored the round a 10-8 because Henderson dominated Shogun and almost finished him, but that only occurred over approximately one minute of a five-minute round. Later in the round, Shogun came back to stagger Henderson with several hard punches. That’s hardly a dominant round; it’s a dominant minute. But, demonstrating the kind of heart that both fighters have and that made the fight so special, Shogun came back and completely dominated Henderson throughout the fifth round. He stayed on top, much of the time in full mount, and bashed Henderson throughout the round. Henderson did nothing offensive and very little that could be called defense, other than rolling from side to side and covering up. If that wasn’t a 10-8 round at least, I don’t know what is. Thus, since the bout went to a decision, the final score should have been 47-47. This is especially true because, earlier in the night, these same judges gave Stephan Bonnar a couple of 10-8 rounds, even though he maintained less dominant positions (fighting in half-guard, for instance) for lesser periods of time. Inconsistent judging caused Shogun to take a loss, when both guys deserved equal status.

 2)      I’m glad Brock Lesnar is healthy again, but I’m not shedding any tears if he’s really retiring. I’ve never cared for the guy on a personal level, and it isn’t as if he needs the money. Go have a great life, Brock, and let the martial artists get that money now.

 3)      Jon Jones is hard to figure out, and I don’t mean his fighting style. One minute he seems like the most humble, respectful guy you’ll ever meet. The next, he has to be told to check on a downed opponent after a win. Weird.

 4)      So both Anderson Silva and Lyoto Machida have knocked people out using what is essentially a Karate Kid-style crane kick, and now Edson Barboza has knocked out Terry Etim using a spinning-heel kick. I can’t believe either move worked in real life, but I watched it happen. What’s next? Shooting-star presses? Asai moonsaults? Crazy stuff, man.

The BCS Championship Game

The LSU Tigers had what may well be the greatest regular season ever. You’ve all heard the numbers—wins over eight ranked teams, a division title, a conference title, wins over two or three top-three teams, wins over two BCS-bowl-bound AQ conference champions. Certainly no team has accomplished so much in my lifetime, and only that one Notre Dame team from seventy or eighty years ago has come close. I’d say it’s much harder to accomplish today, too, given the methods of preparation and the state of today’s athletes.

But the team that played in the regular season was not the team that showed up in New Orleans. They looked flat, lifeless, uninterested—especially on offense. The regular season showed that they were the best team in the nation, but on that night, I’m not sure they would have beaten anybody. As an LSU graduate, I’m very proud of them for the year as a whole, though that final game leaves a bad taste in my mouth. In theirs too, I’m sure.

Most of LSU’s problems over the last four years can be traced back to two things—poor quarterback play, and Les Miles’ refusal to take Jordan Jefferson out of the game. I don’t like to pick on college players; they’re all very young. They are amateurs. They have their whole lives in front of them, and I don’t want to throw them under the bus. But four years of Jefferson’s lack of pocket presence, middling accuracy, and panic-mode bone-headed mistakes have tried my patience. I truly believe that LSU would have been near-unstoppable over the last four years if we had had a strong quarterback. What else have they lacked? The offensive line was porous for only one year. The running backs and receivers have all been awesome. The defense has been great. But at the most important position on the field, we’ve been lacking.

I don’t know what Jefferson has on Miles, but it must have been really damning. I can’t think of any other reason Miles would have stuck with Jefferson against all logic, common sense, and evidence. It took Jefferson’s arrest to get him out of the lineup, and even then, Miles seized on the first opportunity to yank Jarrett Lee out of the game—when he had two interceptions in a row against Alabama. Lee seldom saw the field after that, in spite of his excellent play in the first two-thirds of the season. And when did LSU’s offense start struggling? When did they suddenly find themselves trailing in games, needing the special teams to give them the spark they needed to come back? It all happened after Jefferson took over.

All of this was never more evident than in the title game. Jefferson was the only player on the field who looked terrified, overwhelmed not by Alabama (whom he has faced multiple times and beaten before) but by the stage he was playing on. He made bad decision after bad decision, looking completely lost. And yet Miles never pulled him. When asked why, Miles claimed that he thought about going with Lee, but that given the pass rush, he needed a quarterback that could run.

Yet Jefferson was not running effectively. More often than not, he folded like a cheap card table. At some point—trailing, in the last half of the last game, the national championship on the line, the crowd chanting for Lee—why not try something?

I still don’t get it. But at least now LSU goes into next season with new people at quarterback. We don’t know if they’ll be better yet, but we know they can’t be much worse. And on behalf of Tiger Nation, I’d like to wish Jarrett Lee a great life. You deserved better than you got.

Aftermath of the BCS Title Game

I’ve been really dismayed by the responses to the game I’ve seen, both from the national media and from people I know personally.

The AP ruined its credibility in my eyes when they failed to vote for a split championship. If ever a year screamed out for co-champions, this was it. Look, the Alabama Crimson Tide are my second-favorite college football team. I have worked at the University for six years. I don’t begrudge them their national title; they were certainly the better team on championship night.

But they weren’t the best team this season. Not even close. Like I said above, no one had a season like LSU’s—not this season, perhaps not ever. They won their division; Alabama didn’t. They, not Alabama, won the SEC. The Tide did not beat every SEC team they played, or Oregon, or West Virginia, and so forth. Going into the title game, everybody in the nation agreed that LSU should be there. The controversy revolved around Alabama, given that they didn’t win any championships to get there and lost to LSU during the regular season.

The voters have split the national championship several times before, for much worse reasons. LSU certainly did a hell of a lot more this year than USC did when they got to split the championship with LSU.

No, the refusal to split had nothing to do with credentials, or fairness, or a holistic view of the season. It was borne out of a backlash against the SEC.

In the wake of the all-SEC title game rematch, the BCS is considering changes to negate any such possibility in the future. Before the rematch was announced, fans and sportswriters from all over the country lamented the possibility and voiced their displeasure with the SEC’s dominance, as if the conference’s strength was somehow a bad thing for which it should apologize. Tons of people threatened to boycott the game, even though the only non-SEC team with any claim on the title game was Oklahoma State. I publicly claimed that Oklahoma State had an excellent argument for being in the title game; they had a better regular season than Alabama, even though I still felt that Alabama would beat them if they ever played. Eventually, Alabama got its rematch, leaving the rest of the country out of the sixth straight SEC national championship. And the whining, kvetching, and tantrums commenced.

None of that was LSU’s fault. It wasn’t Alabama’s fault. But LSU—the only team to truly dominate on a national scale—was the only team to pay the price. I truly believe that the AP was terrified of the backlash against their own writers and voting system if they let not one but TWO SEC teams take home a national title. So they acted like chickens and voted for the team that won, even though all logic, evidence, and precedent screamed for a split title. Shame on you, AP writers. As far as I’m concerned, you undermined your own integrity.

Some of my Alabama friends and acquaintances have also been a bit overenthusiastic about how things turned out, to say the least. When LSU beat Bama in the regular season, theoretically ending their national title hopes, I could have rubbed it in. I could have acted immaturely. But I knew that the game and the team were really important to my colleagues and students, so all I did was congratulate the Tide on a good game and a great season.

Unfortunately, in many cases, that courtesy was not returned. As soon as the game was over, I saw several Facebook posts whose contents might be summarized thusly: “Nan-neh nan-neh boo boo, my team won and your team sucks! Ha ha-ha-ha-ha!” The LSU jokes flew fast and furiously. In other words, even though many people knew that my team and that game were important to me, they did not congratulate my team on a great season. They took the opportunity to poop on something that I cared about. And these are highly-educated, really nice people that I like very much.

I even had one fifty-to-sixty-something acquaintance who got on Twitter and taunted Tyrann Mathieu. He’s like nineteen years old and can thus be excused for a certain amount of immaturity. I wonder what my acquaintance’s excuse was.

Then there’s the contradictions in attitudes that drive me crazy. Bring up the idea of a split title with some Alabama fans, and they’ll shake their heads firmly and say, “No way.” Uh-huh. Right. But I guarantee you that if the situations were reversed—if Bama had had the kind of season that LSU did, and beat LSU on Nov. 5th, and won the division and then the conference, but lost the title game—this entire state would be screaming bloody murder for a split title. (Well, probably not in Auburn, but you get my meaning.)

The advent of social media has taught me that there’s something about sports that make people act irrationally, even with mean spirits. You don’t have to like LSU’s football team to respect me and have some courtesy for my feelings. Why are your loyalty to your team and your investment in them more important or legitimate than mine?

I saw a lot of this earlier in the season from some of my Arkansas acquaintances. I grew up in Arkansas, so, according to some people, I’m legally and morally required to root for the Razorbacks. I reject that notion. I’ve got actual ties to LSU and Bama; I’m going to root for them over a team that happens to be located in a state I used to live in. But according to some folks, I’m not allowed to choose my own teams.

Moreover, there’s been a real double standard about who can say what. My Arkansas friends can apparently make all the LSU jokes they want, even when such “jokes” attack the character of the young men on the team or the intelligence of the schools’ personnel. I find nothing funny about those kinds of jokes. They’re just mean and have nothing to do with football. But these folks claim that they can do whatever they want, whenever they want. If I say anything back, though, all bets are off. I made some football-related Arkansas jokes and got lambasted for being unfaithful to my home state (whatever that means) and for taking college football too seriously. I should also point out that when my team beat theirs, I didn’t rub it in. You can bet I wouldn’t have gotten the same consideration. I know, because I didn’t last year.

See how that works? When they do something, it’s fine, all in good fun, light-hearted. When I do the same thing, it’s overly sensitive, disloyal, grumpy. I didn’t think you could have it both ways.

Here’s grumpy: “Oooh, I see what you did there. I’m shocked the Nobel committee doesn’t know about you—your depth of thought, your awesome creativity, your sheer originality! You actually managed to rhyme the word ‘who’ with the letter ‘U!’ Wow! I bow to your awesome intellectual and comedic prowess!”

I didn’t say that. I have tried to be light-hearted and generous and kind in both victory and defeat. I’m not perfect, but I’ve sure tried. I wish everybody I knew would do the same.

Basically, social media is ruining sports for me, not because people root for different teams but because so many are hateful or hypocritical about it. We’re all mean and distant from each other for so many reasons already; do we really want to let sports divide us even further?

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

Kalene and I went to see it on our ten-year anniversary (yes, I know it’s hardly a romantic choice). We both liked it a little better than the original. Excellent film, but for God’s sake, don’t take the kids. Hoo boy.

More soon, I hope. And more focus next time.

Follow me on Twitter @brettwrites.

Email me at semioticconundrums@gmail.com