The Myth of Posterity

In 1945, the great Finnish composer Jean Sibelius prepared a major bonfire of several of his unpublished works, including his still-incomplete Eighth Symphony (which he had promised to a variety of American orchestras for well over a decade). It was a major loss for music, since Sibelius remains one of the most innovative 20th century composers and symphonists. However, some sketches and possibly even a complete score of the Eighth remained—glimpsed by some—on his bookshelf. But he consigned this to secrecy and made his family promise never to release it to the public. He died in 1957, and no mention of the symphony or any subsequent material appeared, despite repeated requests to his estate. Some rumored that at the turn of the 21st century new works would materialize, but other than some found sketches among his published papers and notes, no discovery was forthcoming. Today we only have 3 minutes of music that may have been intended for the Eighth Symphony. 

Download My New Fantasy Novel from Amazon: The Dark Backward

I just released my fourth fantasy novel, The Dark Backward, as a Kindle e-book on Amazon (sorry, no print yet) for 99 cents. I like to call my novels the fantasy novels that Jane Austen would have written if she had lived long enough to read Tolkein and Rowling (and maybe Lovecraft, as well). I try to combine period detail (the 17th/18th centuries) with classic fantasy often verging on the pulp--I love stories of enchanted books, bottomless chests, and wizards from other worlds and dimensions. Silly stuff, but if you treat it properly--and aren't afraid to laugh at yourself--it sort of works. Maybe? 

Though this is my fourth novel, it's not the fourth in a series, but is set in the same world as my other three books, and shares one of the main characters--the wise, yet duplicious sorcerer, Hildigrim Blackbeard, whose ambitions always get the best of him (and those who trust him). It's a loose sequel to my first book, The Count of the Living Death, as it showcases the two main characters, Leopold and Mary, much later in life, though you certainly don't need to read the earlier book to read or appreciate this one.

You can find the novel here, along with a brief synopsis and 7 sample chapters: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0756526L5/ref=la_B00FQLZER2_1_4?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1503975241&sr=1-4

Remember that even if you don't have a Kindle, you can download a free Kindle reading app for your phone or computer. If you read it, please leave a review, even the most cursory one, since the more reviews, the more traction my novel gets. Thanks for checking it out! 

Authors and Writers: One and the Same?

When I first started teaching in 2000, I didn’t have the foggiest idea how to do the very thing I was being paid to do: teach college-level writing. It was my first year of graduate school, and as part of my assistantship, I had to teach two classes a semester, for which I would be paid a small stipend—enough to keep me alive until next semester. Being ambitious and curious, I opted to teach two sections of non-native composition, meaning the students had all come from other countries (in this university, mostly South America and the Middle East) and had a fair command of the language. I vividly recall the first day of teaching...once I mustered up the strength to ascend the stairs to the third floor and actually enter the classroom, I met a sea of faces who stared back at me with equal trepidation. Somehow, I muddled through, reading the syllabus, taking roll, offering some insights for how to do well in the course. By the time it ended, I felt elated, relieved, confused, excited; after all, now I was a teacher! Or was I? 

The Original Grimdark: King Harald’s Saga

Fantasy literature uses the word “saga” quite liberally, as if any story with wizards and battles qualifies. Yet sagas refer properly to the old Icelandic sagas, a vast collection of histories, tales, and legends dutifully recorded by Medieval scholars and poets. Though most of these writers saw themselves as writing factual accounts of the heroic past, they were quite willing to stretch the truth when necessary; thus the legendary King Harald of Norway becomes almost eight feet tall, and can rush into a battle without shield or armor and hack down a horde of foes unscathed. It certainly sounds better than what must have been the still remarkable, but far more mundane reality. Not surprisingly, given the fuzzy distinction between truth and reality, Icelandic sagas touch on a number of modern genres: history, fantasy, romance, folklore, even horror—it’s all here, written in succinct yet extremely colorful language. 

Learning to Re-Read the Novel

In Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719), often considered the first English novel (as we now define the term), the book opens with the words “I was born in the Year 1632, in the City of York, of a good Family...” and ends some two-hundred pages later without a single chapter break or exchange of dialogue. Though one of the most influential books written in English, everything about it now seems hopelessly old-fashioned and a tedious chore for the modern reader (weaned on YA lit, especially) to wade through. For this reason it appears less and less frequently on college syllabi, and not at all in the high school classroom, where it was once enjoyed a popularity similar to—and perhaps even rivaling—Harry Potter. 

Framing Life in Art: Posy Simmonds’ Gemma Bovery (1999)

Gemma Bovery is one of my favorite graphic novels--and indeed, novels period--and I've read it a good 4-5 times now. It gets better every time. It's also a work that truly benefits from the comic book form, even though it is a highly 'literary' work, where you have to do a fair amount of reading. Yet words and pictures are closely allied, and make for a rich, complex reading experience. 

The book loosely follows the general plot of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1856), though acquaintance with the novel is not necessary to appreciate Simmonds’s story.  The novel opens in the French town of Bailleville (in Normandy), where the local baker, Raymond Joubert, consoles Charles Bovery, still mourning the death of his wife.  Raymond admits to the reader that “the blood of Gemma Bovery is on my hands” (2), and jumps at the chance to snatch her recently discovered diaries, which Charles has been too distraught to examine.  Spiriting them away one by one, Raymond fills in the gaps of the tragic story he both witnessed and played a significant role in creating. 

A Subjective List: Top 25 Favorite Novels (or Short Story Collections)

At some point, you need to take stock of the works that have shaped not only your writing but your reading career: the books that, through sheer identification of re-reading have entered your literary DNA, and shape all your aesthetic choices about a ‘good’ or a ‘bad’ book. I’ve spent a good chunk of my life reading, probably more than doing any other activity—eating included, since I often eat with a book in hand (doesn’t reading intensify the thrill of eating? Just me?). So I thought I would subjectively make a list of the books that have stayed with me the most over the years, all of which I’ve read more than once, and a few cases, up to 6 or 7 times. Naturally, this is a subjective list and doesn’t pretend to be universal or persuasive. In fact, it’s severely limited in many respects, being largely Western (and very English), and showcasing more men than women. You might not agree with a single book on my list, but this list reflects my reading journey from ages 16 to 43, and as a teacher, the works I most often return to in my own classes.

The Dream of our Past: Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven (2014)

Toward the end of Emily St. John Mandel’s post-apocalyptic, literary science fiction novel, Station Eleven, several characters contemplate whether or not to teach their children about the world before...the one that had electricity, planes, phones, computers, and convenience. They now live in a world of tiny, isolated towns hiding from feral children and insane prophets. Yet the old world remains all around them, silently watching as if the right word could spirit them back to life. But there is no word, and apparently, no way to conjure up the world that only twenty-odd years ago shaped their lives and dreams. Yet the children of ‘today’ are haunted by the shapes of yesteryear, which even their parents still inhabit in a haunted, hollowed fashion. As one of the characters remarks, “Does it still make sense to teach kids about the way things were?” (269).

Why College Matters--a Note to the Naysayers

There have been a lot of arguments lately about how college is bad for the US, how education is "dangerous," and how young people (and older people) feel betrayed by it. Many ask, why go to college if you're learning useless, old, irrelevant information that doesn't even guarantee you a job and drowns you in debt? Some even accuse colleges of 'brain washing' young minds with liberal dogma and trying to play Petruchio to their Kate (a Shakespeare reference--courtesy of your local English dept). Basically, in The Taming of the Shrew, Petruchio 'tames' his prospective bride, Kate, by making her claim that the sun is the moon, that black is white, etc. So many detractors of higher education would say that we're doing much the same--teaching students that black lives matter, or that we live in a heliocentric system, or that Shakespeare had homoerotic tendencies and/or relationships (you know, things that everyone knows aren't true!) :)  But the bottom line for many critics is this: college simply doesn't pay off in the "real world" or break down into a tangible return investment for the time and money spent. 

To me, college is a lot like traveling to foreign countries: it doesn't magically make you cultured to visit France. You don't learn the language simply by eating a baguette--even from an authentic boulangerie. Going to Africa won't make you 'multicultural', and circumnavigating the world won't make you Magellan. It's what you do in your travels--what you see, experience, learn, and interact with that makes something happen. Blaming college for not 'working' is like blaming Spain for not making you a flamenco dancer after a two-night stay. In short, college is a lifelong investment, not something that 'pays off' in the weeks and months following graduation. 

Indeed, college is a beginning, not an end. It won't necessarily get you a job, but it will prepare you to get a job (and possibly, give you the skills to adapt to it--and thus, keep it). Yes, college is too expensive and yes, the curriculum has problems, but that's more an issue with how colleges are regulated by outside forces (which seem hellbent on making it toothless). All I can say is that college saved my life: I was a shiftless, unmotivated high school student with no plans to do anything but work at a local bookstore. College gave me ideas, purpose, resolution, and direction. It didn't magically give me a job or a paycheck, but it began to teach me why things mattered, and unveiled so many mysteries which I had simply taken for granted.

If you look at college and just see classes, fees, and requirements, then okay, maybe college is a roadblock. But if you look deeper and see that each class represents hundreds if not thousands of years of thought, discipline, and collaboration, you can never dismiss it so lightly or assume that it has nothing to teach you--or that it can do without you, either. College grows stronger by everyone contributing to it, so it gives more back to every single student. But if you sleepwalk through classes and expect to learn by osmosis, then you learn nothing, and the engine of higher education fails. It really is collaborative and requires active participation. It's not a 'pay to play' proposition (though yes, it should cost a lot less money--or ideally, be free). Giving up on higher education (and on education in general) is cultural suicide. No culture in history has abandoned its cultural wealth and knowledge and prospered. I doubt we'll be the first. 

The Mysterious, Intimate World of Vermeer

The Dutch master, Johannes Vermeer, bequeathed only 35 paintings to posterity, though some are undoubtedly lost, and others have been judged spurious. Still, in an age where painters needed to flatter the nobility to obtain a constant stream of commissions, Vermeer seems to have painted slowly and somewhat grudgingly. He remained in debt his entire life and left his family—including eleven children—harried with misfortune, his wife forced to peddle off his remaining canvases for paltry sums. We know almost nothing about his personal life or ideas except what trickles down to us from his paintings. What they seem to tell us is that Vermeer cared little for politics or history, much less current events; he painted a world untouched by turmoil or intrigue, where only love letters intruded on the shadows and solitude of domestic life. 

Reading in the Moment: Terry Carr’s Cirque (1977)

Some books, even great books, are destined to elude your grasp. You will go your entire life without reading them or even hearing their name. A book that could conceivably change your life, or simply allow you to disappear into a haze of literary delight, will remain on the shelves. But every now and then, by luck or fate, one of these books swims into your life, and you realize how easily you might have missed it. Clicking too quickly through a web page or not stopping to linger on a dusty bookshelf, and the moment would disappear—as would the book in question. For me, that’s exactly what happened when I found Terry Carr’s little masterpiece, Cirque (1977): I was browsing a used bookstore’s out-of-the-way science fiction section with my son, and had actually already found what I was looking for. So while he continued to sort through the Star Trek novels, I killed time by scanning the spines, now and then pulling a volume I just as quickly pushed back. Until I found Cirque. 

The Astrologer's Portrait and The Count of the Living Death are FREE to download July 5-6th!

To test out my new covers for both novels, you can download them free this July 5th and 6th from Amazon (you can download a free Kindle app even if you don't own a Kindle). These novels have been out for a few years now, and I've tried to brush them up a bit, fixing minor details and of course, revamping the covers (though I might eventually go back to the old ones). Please leave a review--even a one sentence review--if you've read either one, since Amazon only 'sees' a book after it's garnered 20 or more reviews. 

Thanks for checking them out! The links for each book are below, and you can sample a few chapters by clicking on each cover:

The Count of the Living Death (2013): https://www.amazon.com/Count-Living-Chronicles-Hildigrim-Blackbeard-ebook/dp/B00FQ6711Y/ref=pd_rhf_gw_s_t_1

The Astrologer's Portrait (2014): https://www.amazon.com/Astrologers-Portrait-Joshua-Grasso-ebook/dp/B00LKQ0DXC/ref=pd_sbs_351_8?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=KXK3737TNNCBVX849A2M

Disappearing Dwarves

In his 1987 book, Role-Playing Mastery, Gary Gygax (famed founder of Dungeons and Dragons) discusses what makes a good role-playing adventure—which, surprisingly, is the same thing that makes a good novel or story. Foremost for Gygax is a plot that contains a central mystery that gives a group of characters (each with his or her own motivations) something to solve, search, and discover. Every story in virtually every genre can be boiled down to a few basic plots, since the point of a story is to delight and amaze the reader, and to frustrate and challenge the characters. To illustrate this, Gygax took a single plot, called “The Disappearing Dwarf” and adapted it to numerous genre-specific scenarios, as seen below: