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Brother Willie wrote a brand new Kindle book for Thanksgiving: Dusty: An elegy of hope and love.

It’s not a long book: Willie never tells you more than you need to know. But it’s a fun and twisted little Christmas yarn, how to get the hell out of Hades and rebirth humanity in Phoenix, where it belongs.

Here’s the promotional copy from Amazon.com:

Poetry is leadership.
Leadership is love.
Love is family.
Family is hope.
And hope is poetry.

So says itinerant raconteur Willie O’Connell – though he’s now more of a settled man. Make that an unsettled man…

I drove downtown, but that’s been dead forever, killed by a city council that would not yield to reality: Huge parcels of unincorporated land just outside of town. And so I drove that new ‘downtown,’ too – immense power centers surrounded by vast rolling parking lots.

There used to be a city here, a thriving one. Now there’s a rotting core surrounded by wood-framed tract homes loosely connected by commercial corridors – just like every other big-little-shithole in the midwest.

And there’s everything else in Hades, too, of course, everything nobody ever wants to talk about. The out of control corpulence I decry in Phoenix got its start here, one corn chip, one can of carbonated corn syrup at a time. Alcoholism is the scourge I remember growing up, but that seems like a kiddie vice, by now, in a town littered with discarded syringes. There’s an Indian casino, of course. It’s called “Chief Illini’s Vengeance.” And everywhere there are people who are going nowhere – and they know it. Some of ’em can’t wait to get there.

You live for what you live for, and no one can tell you what that should be, and no one can even really understand what it means to you, except in whatever clumsy way you can describe it. But in Hades, everything a man might live for is taken away and broken – not just destroyed but desecrated, deliberately stripped of everything that (more…)

I’ve thought for years about writing a Thanksgiving story — a feast-become-food-fight of ideas over the dinner table — but I’ve never done it. Too much too close for comfort perhaps. Meanwhile, I will give you something to be thankful for, this Thanksgiving and every day, that no one else is likely to mention:

Be grateful for your own fundamental solitude.

You are in this all alone. You were born alone and you will die alone, and the truth of the uniquely human life is that you spend every moment of your life alone. You share what you can with those you love, but when you keep your own counsel, you do it all alone. When you assert your truth in defiance of the mob, you do it all alone. When you bite your tongue to keep the peace, you do it all alone.

Your self — your self-abstracted idea of your life — is the cardinal value of your life, the one that endures as all other values come and go. You are sovereign and indomitable, the sole champion of your triumphs and the sole author of your errors.

You can’t fix your relatives. Alike unto you, they are sovereign and indomitable. I like to say that we get to be who we are, but the truth of the matter is still more stark: Each one of us is going to be who he or she is, no matter what.

You can try to persuade other people of the truth of your ideas, but this is a slow process, one fraught with frequent failures. The only immediate change you can make to other people is to change them from alive to dead — a lesson our statist overlords never tire of teaching us. That unhappy fact suggests a simple strategy for post-prandial political debates — and for casual conflicts of all types: If it’s not something you would fight about to the death, it’s probably not worth fighting about at all.

My attitude always: Cultivate indifference. I will not make the world more beautiful by making my own soul ugly. If I don’t care for the (more…)

Cathleen got a library card, and I got one, too, this so we can each besmirch our own reputations.

To celebrate my first library card in years, I checked out a book called “How Fiction Works” by James Wood.

Accordingly, I now know how fiction works:

Fiction works by befuddling literary critics.

Given the progress of progressive education through the bowels of our culture, fiction promises to work ever-better every day.

You think I’m joking, but I’m not. In epiphany #98, on page 181, the poet Philip Larkin uses an adverb so vague and so clumsy – and so obviously false to purported fact – that not a single writing student can guess it. If that ain’t a muse-ridden mystery, nothing is.

Wood is the kind of booky gnome who thinks fiction works because booky gnomes are afraid of reality, and so, convince themselves that it’s much more important to waste vast tracts of time gravely studying stupidly verbosely unreadably ‘fictionalized’ regurgitations of the unseemly habits of the ‘author’ and his ‘friends.’ The stylized diaries of the mentally ill get the highest praise of all.

I’d go on, but why? I’ve thought forever that libraries are just the branch offices of the publishing industry’s rent-seeking sinecures, and “How Fiction Works” argues that James Wood could probably do better at almost any other job, were Big Mother’s magic teats to dry up. It’s a fun read, despite everything. It’s a shame the man has nothing to write about.

Meanwhile, somewhere in Peoria, Arizona, a taxpayer is going hungry so James Wood can usurp his wages, devouring the physical wealth that he might rededicate himself to destroying the West’s intellectual capital.

Here’s good news, though: “How Fiction Works” can be tough-sledding, and it assumes a deep knowledge of Western lit going back to the Greeks, so relatively few people now alive can read it to any profit. Of those few, fewer still actually will read it – even if they purchase it. And of the few who do, certainly all of them will be like me: Wise to James Wood and his ilk. So as harmful as this book could be, it (more…)

I have so much to talk about, and no one at all to talk to. I wear poor Cathleen out with words, so many are there, so playfully are they misdirected. But she is lucky enough to be able to bear up to me. Too much of what I want to talk about no one but she will endure. This is what comes of trafficking in secret torments.

Funny to me, regardless: A favorite gag of my writing life is the idea of humor-for-one – jokes I hide in prose that only I can get. The prose works for everyone, but the joke is there only for me. I do this for Cathleen, too, write jokes that only she and I can get. I’ll do it with other people, too, from time to time; sometimes they get it, sometimes not. But what’s funniest about humor-for-one is that I mostly write for my own ears alone, anyway. It’s all humor-for-one.

You might think I hate that, but I don’t. What I would hate would be to write something that is enthralling to anyone – or to everyone – but me. It’s plausible to me that this is why I hate almost everything I (start to (try to)) read: Because the author hates it, too, already, long before I got around to hating it.

Whatever. Each man to his own saints, but me, certainly, to mine. I’m rebuilding everything from the inside out, and that’s what I’m doing with fiction, too. I’m at war with narrative art as it’s been done since Cervantes, and with the drama since Aeschylus and before. That might as well be humor-for-one, too, as much as anyone else knows or cares.

Oh, well. My goal is not fame or fortune, but change. And the changes I’m setting in motion now, few and frail, won’t bear their fullest fruit for twenty more years. And the impact of my writing, if any, won’t start to show up (more…)

Of all the first ladies of my lifetime, I like Melania Trump best – elegant dignified silence.

And of all of the women in public life right now, she’s the one who seems most to embody Yael, too, the wife of all wives.

She’s Trump’s best recommendation.

Brother Willie has been writing choo-choo train stories for two years now. The first collection of them publishes today. It’s called “Traindancing: Bedtime stories for your inner child from The Mall of Misfit Families.” You can buy it right now – or give it as a gift – at Amazon.com.

Here’s my elevator pitch for the book:

Hope is family. If you’re looking for a conservative art, figure out first what it is you want to conserve. “Traindancing” is my answer. For a buck, you can learn or share some important news: Family is hope.

If you’ve followed my maundering on art over the past four years, this book is a trail-marker on my journey:

I am building #MyKindOfBenedy stories, of course, but I’m also deploying the Willie story as a battering ram on settled forms of narrative art.

Translation: I’m making war on the novel, both for its time-wasting verbosity and for its veiled pornography. The stories I want to write should give you a ninety-minute film’s worth or an eight-hour novel’s worth of redemption in one to ten thousand words – six to sixty minutes to read.

The important word in that paragraph is redemption, but we’ll come back to that another day.

For now, savor the wonder that is the mind of Loco Willie:

Everything I’m seeing is making me, more and more, into a loco engineer – a guy just crazy enough to think he can change things. I started out just smiling and waving. But smiling and waving at everyone won me small friendships with the Regulars – with the mall-walkers and the Blue Bellies and the Yellow Jackets. In time I wore down most of the Grotesques – simply by refusing to see them as being grotesque. The Specials are all mine because almost nobody else wants them, and to the unwitting children I am The Pied Piper of Arrowhead – the second time for keeps.

I see the normal in the Grotesques and the grotesque in the Normals – I see it all, over and over again. I see (more…)

My friend James Pruitt fingered this news photo, source unknown to me, and this is my subsequent crop of the image – cropping to the action that matters to me.

You see the Rockwell right away, of course, and the genius of Rockwell was that he was able to capture this instant in oils, not instantaneous picture-perfect pixels.

But what matters to me is the undeniable verisimilitude of photography: Nothing but the framing and the instant of exposure was selected by the artist (with me peeing on the tree with my crop). The rest is pure humanity captured in a slice of time.

This is the literal moment of truth – the instant when everyone is so passionately involved in what is happening right now that no one can contrive to lie. Just that much is worthy of study: This is what people look like when they are not hiding.

But there are three-dozen or so identifiable souls in that photo – all but two, colorably, men – and each one of those individuals is… an individual.

Each person’s location with respect to the ball is different, so their reactions are necessarily different. But each person’s place in the orbit of life is different, too, as is each one’s evaluation of risks and rewards in that moment. Each one of these folks was and will be having a different day, week, year, life from all the others – as witnessed by the teen boy straight up from the middle who cannot punish his (absent?) father enough.

Here’s a Netflix challenge: Each one of those people leaves the ballpark after that one second of shared communion. What happens next? If there are three-dozen people there are thirty-six stories, and each one is different from all the others.

Each one of those people is unique and separate and, in every way that matters, nothing like any of the others. Not even the fathers and sons – not even the ones who still like each other.

To the extent that they share common expectations, they can share common spaces and get along with each other – as here. The more rigid the (more…)

The headline isn’t even a challenge: I did it Saturday. I left most of the work on Harvey’s desk, but I showed you how the man can still be lovable and human, despite his current shame and his past shamefulness.

That matters, I think, because that kind of instant universal ostracism can happen to anyone. There could not be a better time to distinguish storgic love – the enduring love of families – from the other kinds.

And that much is me playing #MyKindOfBenedy games: Deploying the tools of satire to make farce, instead. Especially family farces. Especially family farces that defy common expectations of family.

I like those kinds of stories for two reasons: Second, I want to help build an Island of Less-Broken Toys – not alone because this is the only way back to better, stronger families. But first, I just like the idea of stripping away the romantic and erotic love from families, so we can see how storgic love actually works.

Regarding the massively-reviled Harvey Weinstein, I wrote this on Facebook:

I can give you three movies:

1. Grandpa’s redemption.

2. A farce about a lummox who lucks his way into catastrophe – very much the actual news, I think by now.

3. A Sophoclean war of rivalrous brother-kings.

I wrote a piece of the first one, but the full story would be charming – revisiting “Regarding Henry.”

The second one suggests a sort of John Candy vehicle – and obviously the outrages have to be a lot less outrageous.

The third one is most interesting as story – Menelaus and Agamemnon turn on each other – but that’s not something I would want to write.

But the second and third stories could be combined into a Toby Belch/Andrew Aguecheek kind of farce: A war of ineptitudes. From Laurel and Hardy to Abbott and Costello, that comic match-up works.

There are two points for me – here and everywhere:

First, everything can be made into a #MyKindOfBenedy story if you quarry for the humanity of the people involved.

And second, there but for the grace of fortune go you.

Few (more…)