The Next Species

We were talking about the next species to come. The species after Homo sapiens. She said she hoped its defining characteristic would be a new sixth sense. And when I asked her what sense that might be she said, “A sense of guilt.”

 

I formulated the idea that there already were members of the next species living here on our little planet. After all, it’s not always the case that a new species pops suddenly and distinctly into its new existence precisely at the time when the old dies out. We now know that both can survive, at least for a while, along different evolutionary paths. I thought of all the good things good people are doing against the tide of so much bad. And so I said, “Maybe there are already some of them amongst us. Some of the next species who have this intuitive sixth sense of guilt of which you speak.”

 

And she smiled with that melancholy blue-eyed smile of a beautiful vegetarian cat-rescuing pacifist and answered, “Yes. Perhaps a relative few.”

 

I wanted to believe that the current species could develop, en masse, this sixth sense of which she spoke—this sensitivity to how one living organism affects another’s sole chance at life and living, a deeper appreciation for the profundity of nature at is best, a longing for fairness and equality in a decidedly unjust world. But the televised jabber of the nightly news interrupted the formation of my thought, the scenes of disparity and avarice and rampant destruction undermining the premise before it was fully laid. And I recalled the simple logic of that aspect of the theory that says that, more often than not, when evolutionary branches sprout new offshoots only one or the other survives. “Then it’s probably only a question of time,” I said over the blaring shock of the broadcasted news. “A question of time before the new humanoid species or the old predominates and the fate of the world is determined.”

 

And she said, “Yes. It makes me feel guilty just to think about it.”

 

James Gaitis

http://redroom.com/author/james-gaitis

Author:

The Nation’s Highest Honor—A Literary Satire (Kunati Books 2009)

A Stout Cord and a Good Drop­—A Novel of the Founding of Montana (Globe Pequot 2006)

The View From Stansberry Lookout—A Literary Tragicomedy (Now seeking publication)

Dan Brown, Masons, and Pulp Fiction

James Gaitis

 

It’s more than unlikely that I will ever read a Dan Brown novel. I’ve yet to read a novel by Grisham or King or Clancy (or to see a single Rocky movie), so why start now? I do appreciate how works of authors such as these might placate the general reading public but I prefer something more eclectic or classical or at least literary in the sense that I define that term. On the other hand, I did see enough of the film The DaVinci Code (on an airplane where such things are difficult to escape) to know in my own mind that Mr. Brown is more interested in selling books than in keeping strictly to the historical facts. And I know, as well, that the reading and viewing public is too easily influenced by information that is incomplete and distorted and mischaracterized primarily to suit marketing needs. I know that Mr. Brown’s latest effort will be the talk of the town, if not the world.

 

Despite being a bit chagrined by all of this, I am nonetheless personally humored by the release of Mr. Brown’s next effort and, more particularly, by the fact that it is rumored to take on the Masons and their influence on history, which influence often was highlighted by the Mason’s own exploitation of lawlessness and a secretive, ideological, manipulative behavior that should never be countenanced in a civilized society. I purport to know something on this subject, having seriously researched one aspect of the Mason’s American history and having written an historical novel that features dozens of true-to-life Masons acting at their worst.

 

As a consequence, I naturally am happy to see contemporary society take something at a look at the Masons of the past. Yet I know that the gloss of daytime talk shows and the spin of Hollywood and motivations of the mega-booksellers and the follow-the-crowd book reviewers and all of that will dissuade the public from really taking much of an honest look at something that warrants close examination. Movies are simply for entertaining, after all; as are most of today’s best selling books. Who cares about what happened in the past? The answer, of course, is that we all should care; that those who do not learn from the past are bound to repeat it. Oh, well.  The more we think we’ve changed, the more we stay the same.

 

In the meanwhile, if anyone is truly interested in one tale of how the workings of the Masons influenced, and continue to influence, American history, I encourage them to read about the hanging spree (in which at least two dozen men, including a popular sheriff and two of his deputes, were hanged) that took place in the formative years of Montana’s history. And of how the perpetrators not only arguably became rich by it but, also, of how many of them became some of the most powerful men in the West and in the entire country. There are coming to be more and more works on this subject and similar subjects. Many of them are well worth reading. It is time we spent more time analyzing what really went on in the past such that we might do better at avoiding its repetition. There is too much repeating going on right now, as some of us well know.

 

James Gaitis

http://www.redroom.com/author/james-gaitis

http://thenationshighesthonor.blogspot.com/2008/10/james-gaitis-new-literary-satire-to-be.html

Author of:

The Nation’s Highest Honor—A Literary Satire (Kunati Books 2009)

A Stout Cord and a Good Drop­—A Novel of the Founding of Montana (Globe Pequot 2006)

The View From Stansberry Lookout—A Literary Satire (Now seeking publication)

Missing articles in action

James Gaitis © 2009

 

It is has been years now since I took the advice of the renowned editor Maxwell Perkins and immersed myself for the first time in Tolstoy’s War and Peace. Perkins, of course, was long dead by the time I took to reading Tolstoy’s novel of Russia’s pivotal role in defeating Napoleon and of the trauma and tragedy war brings to families great and small. So Perkins’ advice came to me only vicariously, through the indirect route of biographies of the authors that worked under his direction. But it is advice that has lived with me, so much so that by now I have read the novel twice in English and as many times in Russian.

 

Perkins, it is said, considered War and Peace  to be the greatest novel ever written. And he therefore handed a copy to his new authors—the likes of Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Wolfe—with the instruction that they study in particular the descriptive quality of the action scenes that frame the warring sections of the novel. And yet Perkins could not read Russian and thus was dependent on English translations of that great work to justify his own opinion, his own advice. What he thus might not have known was that there is something missing in War and Peace, just as there is something missing in every piece of Russian literature and in every piece of Russian writing. To paraphrase Gertrude Stein, “there is no ‘the’ there” in the Russian language. And there is no “a” there either.

 

It turns out that the Russian language, which is not at all as complicated as rumor might suggest, includes no definite or indefinite articles. No Russian word for “the”; no Russian word for “a.” Not that such a deficiency might have mattered to the likes of Wolfe (who had far too many words at his disposal) or to Hemingway (whom some would say had far too few) had either of them learned to read Tolstoy in Russian, which they did not. For study suggests that the words “the” and “a” and the definition they bring are not quite as necessary as one would think. Instead, they often are merely the bane of translators and interpreters who must pick and choose whether the author meant for things to be definite and clear or vaguely indefinite such that one must guess what is intended between the written lines.   

 

You might think this point is a bit arcane. But I would argue it is not. It is the lack of definition, the explicit vagueness of a scene, a piece of dialogue, an entire plot that sometimes befits the writer’s purpose, the writer’s goal. Let the reviewers, the critics, the readers think what they will. Some things are best left unexplained and open for interpretation. Life is not an open book but rather a raft of confused pages that somehow manages always to have a beginning, a middle, an end.

 

I make this narrow point because a minor case of writer’s block has served to remind me of the importance of what is missing in action, of the value of the lack of perfect definition in an imperfect and confounding world. Of the value of what is not said and not explained. For when the plague of writer’s befalls me, it is my practice, perhaps in obeisance to Maxwell Perkins, to turn to Russian literature and to read it both in Russian and in comparative translated English for the better appreciation.

 

Last night I chose as the prescription for my writer’s block something by Anton Chekov, the great Russian short story writer and playwright who, too, influenced Hemingway as well as Raymond Carver and Shaw and many others. The title of the story that I chose . . . well, the title of the story depends on how you read the story and how you translate the Russian in which it was written, keeping in mind the absence of the definite and indefinite articles, the “the’s” and “a’s” on which we so defend. The title of the story, first in literal Russian, was “Man in a Shell,” and second by the translation of a very capable translator, “The Man in a Shell.”

 

I suppose you might ask, “What’s the difference?” But I can tell you it makes all the difference in the world, especially because the two narrative characters in the story seem to see the life of the man who encased himself in a figurative shell to be, on the one account, the pathetic tale of an individual and, by the other account, the pathetic tale of humankind. Perhaps you recall when Neil Armstrong stepped upon the moon and, as some contend, inadvertently said, “That’s one small step for man” when he meant, “That’s one small step for a man.” A world of a difference is what the little grammatical article can make.

 

All of this makes me think that I wish I could write in Russian, which I cannot. Reading that language is far too much of a challenge for me to seek a higher plane. But I do aspire to achieve, at least at times, that so pleasing lack of definition that the Russian language affords both to the writer and the readers it is meant to serve. And I wish for you that same ambiguity as well, so that our readers are left to struggle with their own interpretations without worrying over much whether they are wrong or right.

 

James Gaitis

http://www.redroom.com/author/james-gaitis

http://thenationshighesthonor.blogspot.com/2008/10/james-gaitis-new-literary-satire-to-be.html

Author of:

The Nation’s Highest Honor—A Literary Satire (Kunati Books 2009)

http://www.amazon.com/Nations-Highest-Honor-Novel/dp/1601641729/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1241031753&sr=8-1

A Stout Cord and a Good Drop­—A Novel of the Founding of Montana (Globe Pequot 2006)

The View From Stansberry Lookout—A Literary Satire (Now seeking publication)

Cool ‘eh?

Here’s a bit of a recap for all you Montana history/Western Americana enthusiasts regarding how we used to select our political leaders and how we chose the people after whom we would later name our counties, our schools: http://coolehmag.com/frontEnd/interview.php?i=47&s=82

Thanks to Dzana Tsomondo

Always Cry, Wolf

James Gaitis © 2009 (Author: A Stout Cord and a Good Drop—a novel of the founding of Montana (Globe Pequot 2006))

 

And here we go, again.

 

For those of us who have fought for the re-integration and survival of the grey wolf in the Northern Rockies, the news that the Obama administration has approved the de-listing of the grey wolf as an endangered species in Montana and Idaho is truly a heartbreaker of monumental proportion. It is almost as though the new government (which we hoped to be truly liberal and conservation-minded) as fallen for the same “cry wolf” attitude that proliferated at the time the wolf was originally eradicated from the American West at the behest of cattlemen and sheep growers and their kind. Except this time the leading voices behind the newly approved “open season” hunting tags on wolves are cattlemen and sheep growers. Oh . . . . So much for change.

 

Alright, I’ll admit the responsibility for the latest wolf-extirpation policy does not  rest solely on those ranchers who make sure all you meat eaters get to buy your hamburgers and lamb chops on the cheap (on the very cheap, given that in the West most of the cows and sheep you eat are grazed for next to nothing on overgrazed public land, yours and mine); it is also “sportsmen” who have pitched in with the standard arguments that the existing number of wolves are reducing sportsmen’s opportunity to exploit high technology to punch holes in prey species so they can mount their heads in their living rooms as evidence of just how sporting they really are. It would seem that the lessons learned by the studied and literary work of Farley Mowat’s in Never Cry Wolf are all too easily forgotten.

 

Mowat, of course, knew the risks that the easily misunderstood wolf has always suffered at the hands of the all-too-predictable humankind. at the hands of the all-too-predictable wildlife “managers” who manage lobbying interests better than they do the wildlife: “It may be that there is still time . . . . If we can indeed save the wolf it will, in some small measure, be a rejection of the strictly human crime . . . of biocide.”

 

Montana’s wildlife commissioners, who have now sanctioned the open season on wolves, would argue that there is no longer an issue as to whether the wolf will survive. But their argument is really the same old shell game, a game of numbers. Yes, some will probably survive. But not enough to ensure reasonably intact ecosystems. And not enough to ensure that the “wild” remains wild.

 

Alright, alright. I’ll admit that it’s not just the ranchers and it’s not just the sportsmen (sportspeople, really) who are responsible for this latest assault on the idea of maintaining some kind of reasonably balanced predator/prey relationship in the wild reaches of the Northern Rocky ecosystem. It’s everyone who loves their burger so much that they simply can’t do without. Believe me, those ranchers aren’t raising their cattle for fun; they’re doing it for you.

 

Why is it, I sometimes wonder, that humanity (especially in “developed” nations such as ours that are supposedly more educated, more intellectual) has so little regard for that which is wild. To some extent, I know that callous attitude it is merely the result of real lack of exposure to the outdoors and what it has to offer. But there is something else insidious in a world that has such a low regard for the natural things that surround us, or could surround us if only we would let them. We in this country apparently have little fear of driving fast, of guns concealed in every other pocket, of over-eating, over-drinking, under-exercising, and all the other never-ending foibles that help ensure an early death or a prolonged purposeless life. But there’s another way to look at things. Says Barry Lopez in Of Wolves and Men, “The appreciation of the separate realities enjoyed by other organisms is not only no threat to our own reality, but the root of a fundamental joy.” One joy that I have had is from seeing wolves in the wild—wolves in packs and the lone wolf alone—of hearing their deeply emotional howling late into the night, of seeing their track in the snow, in the mud, and knowing they were around me when I hiked and biked and kayaked and skied and slept. I fear now that that joy again is at risk for no good earthly reason.

 

And, alright. I acknowledge that it’s not just the cattlemen and sheepmen and burger eaters that are so indifferent to the fate of the noble wolf. It is now my president, my party that collectively really doesn’t give a hoot and, instead, renders their decisions based on the lowly desire to ensure the vote, to ensure their own perpetuity. In the end, it is their legacy as well, although the written histories (such as they are) are unlikely to report it. So, the next time you go to Yellowstone and Glacier, the Bitterroots, the Snake, the Tetons and all the places between and beyond and you fail this time to see a wolf and maybe next time a grizzly and the time after that who knows what, thank the cattlemen and the sportsmen and the politicians (left and right) for their foresight and have yourself a burger and think not too much about it.

 

 James Gaitis

http://www.redroom.com/author/james-gaitis

http://thenationshighesthonor.blogspot.com/2008/10/james-gaitis-new-literary-satire-to-be.html

Author of:

The Nation’s Highest Honor—A Literary Satire (Kunati Books 2009)

http://www.amazon.com/Nations-Highest-Honor-Novel/dp/1601641729/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1241031753&sr=8-1

A Stout Cord and a Good Drop­—A Novel of the Founding of Montana (Globe Pequot 2006)

The View From Stansberry Lookout—A Literary Satire (Now seeking publication)

In Search of Abbey’s Grave

James Gaitis © 2009 (Author: The Nation’s Highest Honor—Kunati 2009)

 

Here’s my understatement of the day:  In a literary sense, it is an exceedingly difficult challenge for all but the very best of naturalist writers to follow in the heavy bootworn footsteps of Edward Abbey.

 

Abbey, whom Larry McMurtry called “the Thoreau of the American West,” was so radically original in technique and delivery, so aggressively sincere in his unwavering belief in the value of wilderness and all that is wild, so sure of the validity of his perspective, that his works are probably viewed as too confrontational and too threatening for the vast majority of the contemporary green and greening crowd. “No Compromise in Defense of Mother Earth” was the cry of many an environmentalist in the early ‘80s. A far cry from today’s conservative post-9/11 ideology that tells us only to “Be afraid. Very afraid.” Why worry about the survival of a few endangered species, the last few unroaded areas, the last stands of oldgrowth when we have borders to protect and independence to preserve?

 

Having conceded the inevitability of Abbey’s superior abilities to dissect and declare the pathology of the American West, I am personally left with having to be satisfied with the fact that by serendipitous circumstance I seem to have followed in Abbey’s footsteps in a far more literal sense. By happy coincidence, so it seems. And perhaps due to having just a little in common.

 

Yes, like so many others, I’ve been to Arches and have walked under and around and through the same windcut desert architecture where Abbey once lived and of which he wrote of in the first pages of Desert Solitaire. And, like many another who were lucky enough to win a permit in the lottery draw, I’ve kayaked down the San Juan more or less as Abbey did to see the same remote petroglyphs and cliff dwellings and carved river canyons as he wrote about in Down the River. Like Abbey, I decry the ever-burgeoning increase in human population, unnecessary wars, uncontrolled consumption, the utter failure to maintain a long-term perspective relating to that which can only be preserved with the long term in mind. But there is more than that between Abbey and me. Call it geographical or, better yet, topographical, if you will.

 

As I now work on a series of essays (meant ultimately to be book length once compiled together) of my twelve winters off the grid in the remote North Fork in Northwest Montana—where grizzlies and wolves and lynx still roam—I find myself reminded again and again that Abbey spent a summer up in the Numa Lookout on the west flank of Glacier Park fifteen years before I arrived at that same place, on the other side of the river. I remind myself that for twelve years and more there were only three buildings I could see from my mountain home (all fire lookout towers) and that one of them for a time was Abbey’s home. I open my worn copy of The Journey Home and reread his account of his summer looming high above the pristine glacier-stained waters of Bowman Lake with Numa Peak and Rainbow, Square and Reuter, towering above, rereading his words of warning and defiance against the varied forces that would tame and erode and slowly destroy the last of our diminishing wilderness. I see again, am reminded by words written aggressively and with little regard for consequence, that we agree on many things. And I want to follow his steps in more than just a literal way.

 

And as I write, I reflect on my time living in the deserts and the mountains of New Mexico, in the staid beauty of bonny Scotland and I cannot help wonder what coincidence is this that brought both Abbey and me to these places also, and other mutual places as well. I open my battered copy of The Monkey Wrench Game, and the words jump off the page to offer combative explanations. To remind me of where my commitments should lay. Why I remain out West even though, like Abbey, I was raised east of the Mississippi.

 

And now, here on the very edge of Tucson where the deer and bobcat, coyote, javelina, snake and ringtail, coati and raccoon, an occasional bear and lion no doubt, scorpion and gila monster creep and play, where the owls great and pygmy and vultures and hawks and opportunistic birds large and small (the cardinal, the mocking bird, thrashers and hummers and giant cactus wren and woodpeckers of various size and oddly shaped) soar and swoop around the periphery of my house in search of another meal a measure of shade a respite from the heat, I find myself somehow again in Abbey’s Country. Up into the mountains just above Tucson, into the corkbacr fir and mountain maple, the tall ponderosa and high island skies that Abbey, too, knew all too well. And into the desert the canyons the arroyos, looking mostly to the ground but also into the trees always into the mountains that surround these places just as they surrounded Abbey not too many years ago.

 

And I think, perhaps I should go in search of Abbey’s grave, which I know is somewhere out in this desert, hidden somewhere in the sometimes shadows of these very mountains, laid down into the hard brittle soil beneath worn rock and blowing sand, just where he asked to be placed when he knew his time had come.

 

Which is where I leave off, where I start up anew. Searching for Abbey’s grave just as we all are in search of some place where we can be both calm and exhilarated at the same moment in time. Wanting to follow in Abbey’s footsteps, if only for a while.

 

James Gaitis

On Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aZ1Tan929SQ

http://www.redroom.com/author/james-gaitis

http://thenationshighesthonor.blogspot.com/2008/10/james-gaitis-new-literary-satire-to-be.html

Author of:

The Nation’s Highest Honor—A Literary Satire (Kunati Books 2009)

http://www.amazon.com/Nations-Highest-Honor-Novel/dp/1601641729/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1241031753&sr=8-1

A Stout Cord and a Good Drop­—A Novel of the Founding of Montana (Globe Pequot 2006)

The View From Stansberry Lookout—A Literary Satire (Now seeking publication)

Resistance

James Gaitis © 2009 (Author: The Nation’s Highest Honor—Kunati 2009)

 

“We had come to regard the work of writers and artists in our country as too compliant, as failing to expose or indict the escalating nerve of corporate institutions, the increasing connivance of government with business, or the cowardice of those reporting the news. In the 1970s and ‘80s, we thought of our artists and writers as people gardening their reputations, while the families of our neighborhoods disintegrated into depression and anger, the schools flew apart, and species winked out. It was the triumph of adolescence, in a nation that wanted no part of its elders’ remonstrance or any conversion to their doubt.”

 

I wish these words were mine but they are not. They are the words of National Book Awardee (and internationally acclaimed and oft-honored author) Barry Lopez in his 2004 tour de force work of fiction entitled Resistance. They quite clearly were written as the entire book was written as an indictment on the George (W.) Bush administration but also as an indictment on historical trends that should be evident to us all and which have dominated the history of humanity just as Lopez suggests they have. I more than commend Resistance to you; I commend to you its lessons of humility and strength and persistence but most importantly its message that through writing and other creative expression that manifests resistance we might still be able to effect meaningful change in a world dominated by the subjugating forces of excessive power and excessive wealth.

 

I’ve known something about Barry Lopez for a long time, but only because I read his work Of Wolves and Men at a time when I lived in the midst of grey wolf habitat and frequently heard the wolves’ sonorous calls and sometimes even saw them, ghostlike and majestic, albeit just as often black in coat as grey, hunted and hunter in the foreground of the cold Montana forest in which I lived. At that time, I considered Barry Lopez to be what I then would have called a nature writer, a conservationist.

 

Recently, by reading more of his works and dwelling on his conjoined Desert Notes (Reflections in the Eye of a Raven and River Notes (The Dance of the Herons) I have learned while Lopez is indeed a nature writer and conservationist, he is far more in a literary and philosophical sense. He is (in my view) one of the few writers of the last century and now this to have that rare genius of a Faulkner—one whose thought instantly perceives the depth and core of issues, their texture their ironies their complications, and can expose their weaknesses and strengths through an extraordinary ability to exploit written language as might Mozart have exploited the potential of musical composition and arrangement without ever having been taught.

 

My purpose here, however, is not to advertise the quality of Lopez’ writings but rather to advocate the serious imperative of his message, stated in Resistance thusly: “Our strategy is this: we believe if we can say what many already know in such a way as to incite courage, if the image or the word or the act breaches the indifference by which people survive, day to day, enough will protest that by their physical voices alone they will stir the hurricane.”

 

As for genres, I do not think it matters all that much, although it seems fair to argue that some genres (not to be mentioned here) lack the sort of content that has much potential to effect significant progressive change. Those exceptions aside, we who are writers have the opportunity, whether through the device of humor or tragedy, journalism, historical criticism, poetry by whatever written means, to incrementally add to the architectural effort that is required to create a new and better world. What matters most is that our creative efforts have content that is meaningful and persuasive. Most importantly, content that reflects informed and cogent resistance to what is wrong; what is right will naturally follow. That, at least, is the prevailing message of Barry Lopez’ Resistance and perhaps of all his extraordinary writings. I can only wish that I could do as well as he at resisting through the use of the written word at a time when resistance at times seems truly futile.

 

 James Gaitis

http://www.redroom.com/author/james-gaitis

http://thenationshighesthonor.blogspot.com/2008/10/james-gaitis-new-literary-satire-to-be.html

Author of:

The Nation’s Highest Honor—A Literary Satire (Kunati Books 2009)

http://www.amazon.com/Nations-Highest-Honor-Novel/dp/1601641729/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1241031753&sr=8-1

A Stout Cord and a Good Drop­—A Novel of the Founding of Montana (Globe Pequot 2006)

The View From Stansberry Lookout—A Literary Satire (Now seeking publication)

The Literary Satire Dialogues, # 18—Vonnegut’s Faulted Perspective

James M. Gaitis © 2009 (Author: The Nation’s Highest Honor—Kunati 2009)

 

            Ouch. Ouch. I’ve just finished reading Vonnegut’s semi-fictional and (like all of Vonnegut’s other works but arguably even more so) semi-autobiographical Timequake and I keep feeling as if both the past and future are jabbing at me jabbing at me jabbing at me (as Paula Poundstone might have said). As though the past and future are telling me humanity is stuck on automatic pilot with only the slightest predilection or ability toward incremental change. And that I’m stuck with them. That I must live with a future that is bound to be the foreseeable product of a rather unhappy past. That even if a temblor in our timeline occurred, even if time itself became faulted, upthrown and cracked such that we were thrown back with the opportunity to try it all again, we would do it the same way, make the same mistakes, relive the consequences and suffer the same errors.

 

            This feeling I have is a lot like sitting in a prickly pear and not being able to get up. I’m stuck in more ways than one. I’m being stuck and jabbed even though we’ve momentarily become more liberal and more progressive (if only in small steps, one cautious vote-ensuring foot carefully forward at a time).

 

            I’m stuck, so it would seem, with guns guns guns. Everyone knows what they’re good for (especially but not only handguns) and what their implication is and what they portend for the insanely bloody future, but, as Vonnegut suggests, our society more and more comes to view them as a “virtue compelling appliance.” And so even with a new administration and a wave of Democratic Party election successes we see new laws allowing guns in our national parks and guns in restaurants and guns in our classrooms and guns in the dorms, as though a little good ole fashion shoot-‘em-up O.K. Corral action (semi-automatic style) now and then in the middle of a meal or a movie or a hike or a football game or some studying would serve to instill some peace and quiet into our existence. I’m stuck with that, so it would seem. Or as Leonard Cohen would say, “I’ve seen the future, brother, it is murder.”

 

            And I’m stuck with religion religion religion. Religion that results predictably (apparently very predictably for Vonnegut back in 1997 when Timequake was published) in someone thinking he (it could just as well be she) is “delighting Jesus Christ by shooting dead a doctor coming to work in an abortion mill.” And religion as a justification for torture when those doing the torturing are holding forth their actions as ordained by the very deities they worship. And I feel myself being stuck repeatedly as though I, too, am being pinned to a wall by their masterful techniques that even Mephistopheles would have reason to admire.

 

            And I’m stuck with my own country’s denials denials denials when, like Vonnegut, “I know of a single word that proved our democratic government was capable of committing obscene, gleefully rabid and racist, yahooistic murders on unarmed men, women, and children, murders wholly devoid of military common sense. . . . That word is Nagasaki.” So we bomb another wedding party or funeral in Afganistan or Iraq or now in Pakistan because that’s the safest way to do it for our own men and women and I feel again as though I am being jabbed and stuck and jabbed and I wish I could get off this cactus and move on to greener pastures.

 

            And I’m stuck in a world of unregulated unmitigated career-inspiring greed and greed and greed and even recently have learned yet one more time (I’m slow at this sort of learning just as I’m slow at growing up) that “The Fiduciary is a mythological bird. It never existed in Nature, never could, never will.” So I’m stuck and stuck again this time by the hand of someone in my pocket (“the faithless custodians of capital” to which Vonnegut alludes), in my family’s pocket, taking out that which belongs only to me, only to them.

 

            And whose fault is it? It’s all of our faults, I suppose. Mine included. I suppose perhaps that was actually what Vonnegut was observing when he observed that, “In real life, as during a rerun following a timequake, people don’t change, don’t learn anything from their mistakes, and don’t apologize.” Our time here is short and yet we do not do enough to alter the misguided direction of our paths toward more pollution and less health care and fewer truly wild places and always global dominance and inequality and all of that. That we unable to adequately re-contour the sad topography of our existence that we, ourselves, have landscaped.

 

            Not that life is all bad, of course. In some ways there are blessings in its predictability. I attest that Vonnegut thus also rightly says in Timequake that “all male writers, incidentally, no matter how broke or otherwise objectionable, have pretty wives.” And while he also suggests that “Somebody should look into this,” I must concede that when it comes to the future and the past, sometimes it is best to leave well enough alone.

 

James Gaitis

http://www.redroom.com/author/james-gaitis

http://thenationshighesthonor.blogspot.com/2008/10/james-gaitis-new-literary-satire-to-be.html

Author of:

The Nation’s Highest Honor—A Literary Satire (Kunati Books 2009)

http://www.amazon.com/Nations-Highest-Honor-Novel/dp/1601641729/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1241031753&sr=8-1

A Stout Cord and a Good Drop­—A Novel of the Founding of Montana (Globe Pequot 2006)

The View From Stansberry Lookout—A Literary Satire (Now seeking publication)

ALA Booklist: The Nation’s Highest Honor is “a quasi-dystopian futuristic story . . . with a certain charm”

American Library Association Booklist:  James Gaitis’ The Nation’s Highest Honor is “a quasi-dystopian futuristic story . . . with a certain charm. A quirky variation on the ever-popular dystopian tune.” 

The Nation’s Highest Honor. Gaitis, James (author).

May 2009. 256p. Kunati, hardcover, $22.95 (9781601641724).
REVIEW. First published June 1, 2009 (Booklist).

As this quasi-dystopian futuristic story opens, it’s time once again to award the Nolebody, the nation’s highest honor, named for the inventor of the vaccine for a disease that nearly eradicated humankind years prior. (The year and country are not revealed.) This year’s winner of the award is Leonard Bentwood, a recluse living in a desert shack and writing poetry on scraps of paper. Unfortunately, the assistant minister of cultural affairs, who’s in charge of this year’s ceremony, can’t pin the guy down, and Bentwood’s odd female friend, who delivers his mail, isn’t helping matters. When a new threat emerges that could bring the country to its knees once again, all hope seems to rest with Bentwood, much to his confusion. Though Gaitis takes potshots at just about every incompetent branch of government and mocks the public for its lemminglike qualities, the novel retains a certain charm, thanks to the appealing Bentwood and his simple life. A quirky variation on the every-popular dystopian tune.— Mary Frances Wilkens     Nation’sHighestHonor_BooklistReview1

My Conflict Resolution Resolution

James Gaitis © 2009 (Author: The Nation’s Highest Honor–Kunati 2009) 

If your recent experience is anything like mine, you’re hearing a lot these days about the importance of injecting constant conflict resolution into your longer works of fiction. It might be an editor who explains authoritatively how every chapter should begin with a tidy little conflict and conclude with a neatly ribboned and bowed resolution that carries the reader gently forward. Or it might be one of the ubiquitous writing instructors from the now-ubiquitous online, or in-your-town, or resort locale writing conferences who explains the ins of conflict and the outs of resolution.

 As if we all were engaged in some suburban write-by-numbers club in which our final product looks suspiciously like our next door neighbor’s product, just as theirs does ours. As if our novels must always be segmented with a long series of short stories, like some sort of millipede whose multiple thoracic parts can stand and survive alone if severed from the whole.

 That might work for some forms of fiction, but not for mine. My novels tell a single long story, not a bunch of short ones that all lead to a single conclusion.

 As you can see, I find myself conflicted by all this stuff about the imperative of constant conflict resolution. Maybe it’s because I’ve lived a lifetime filled with unresolved conflicts and generally am a hopeless soul. Or maybe because I thrive on conflict and do not want my conflicts resolved until it is absolutely necessary, assuming it is possible at all. Or maybe my frustration is the result of reading too much material that does not seem to be laced with intermittent conflict resolution; you know, Shakespearean tragedies in which conflicts are not resolved until the final desperate body-strewn scenes, or Cormac McCarthy where the only resolution is a bleak and deadly proof that morality and pride and a sense of honor have their own merits and detractions, or the works of Hemingway, which (as we know) are a self-indicting suicidal reproof of an author’s misperceptions of his own ability to face and resolve inner conflict.

 Besides, I’m not that much of a planner to be draping my writing over some preordained skeletal structure buttressed with the requisite conflict here and the reinforcing resolution there. So I’ve made a resolution, as antithetical to my free form as that act might be. It’s conflict resolution resolution, if I may. If you will.

 And my Conflict Resolution Resolution is simply this: That I hereby resolve to not resolve any conflict of my own fictional making until I feel damned well ready to do so.

 I’m not kidding, either. I’m not being even the least bit satirical about it. I’ve been conflicted by too many editors and advertising writing instructors of late and have been fuming over the topic now for several months. And then this morning—in the wee sleepless hours where one seeks sleep by staying awake and reading—I read these lines, written reflectively in Timequake by an already aged Kurt Vonnegut—words I find to be so true that in pronouncing them as truth I feel awash in my own desperately needed conflict resolution:

 “I always had trouble ending short stories in ways that would satisfy a general public. In real life . . . people don’t change, don’t learn anything from their mistakes, and don’t apologize.”

So make no mistake about it, I hereby refuse to end my chapters and sections of my novels with gratuitous conflict resolution as if they were short stories in a long novel. I suppose this might be a mistake on my part, but I refuse to alter my ways and I offer no apologies.

 James Gaitis

http://www.redroom.com/author/james-gaitis

http://thenationshighesthonor.blogspot.com/2008/10/james-gaitis-new-literary-satire-to-be.html

Author of:

The Nation’s Highest Honor—A Literary Satire (Kunati Books 2009)

http://www.amazon.com/Nations-Highest-Honor-Novel/dp/1601641729/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1241031753&sr=8-1

A Stout Cord and a Good Drop­—A Novel of the Founding of Montana (Globe Pequot 2006)

The View From Stansberry Lookout—A Literary Satire (Now seeking publication)