Mathias B. Freese

Mayra Calvani did an incisive interview with me some months back.  She also reviewed Down to a Sunless Sea  quite favorably. Her site is darkphantom.com and she now freelances at Today.com. A novelist and reviewer, she is the recent author of a book on reviewing on blogs. I asked if she might review The i Tetralogy, cautioning her as I often do with reviewers about the graphic and very disturbing aspects of the book, telling her to read the autobiographical essay at the end so as to determine my writerly aims and intentions.

In private correspondence she recently shared how disturbing the book was for her, how she found it difficult to sleep and how the book became so much for her at times that she had to go away from it. Nevertheless, she felt the book had to be read. I shared with her that the book had cost me psychologically as well, that a book like this one comes but once to a writer in his or her lifetime; that I doubted I would ever near its intensity ever again or come upon such insights as I did into human behavior. In fact the book intimidates me! It is hard to work on the next book having such a shadow cast upon my efforts.

Calvani’s review is at http://booktalkcorner.today.com/2009/01/22/not-just-another-book-about-the-holocaust/. If I typed this incorrectly just go to her site. I want to quote some of her words because she is the best reader of this book so far:

“I have chosen to review this book in the first person instead of my usual third, if only because it shook me so deeply. Freese shows humanity as it is, in its own raw and naked reality. He does it with bluntness, yes, but with incredible insight. His sentences flow like the blood that gushed from ther victims’ veins during this terrible event — relentless and ruthless. The protagonists reveal themeselves to the core, from the deepest corners of their minds to the bottomless misery of their hearts. I found myself taking breaks between readings. I had to. Immersing myself in this story was killing me a little every time. This is without a doubt the most terrifying book I have ever read, and not because of its callous bluntness, but because it made me realize what human beings can be capable of. ‘To ask why there is evil in this world is to ask who we are.,’ writes Freese (343). I think this sums up the essence of the book. It also brings up the question: is the bystander who watches and lets it happen less guilty than the murderer?”

A very gutsy woman — and reader. The rest of the review contains this kind of intensity.

When I had completed the first novella, i, I shared it with a social worker who had survived Auschwitz. I did not know that. One evening she called me and said: “What part of the camp were you in?” I broke down . I then went on to write three more novellas. Calvani’s review has impacted me in a different way as well. I know I have done my task and I have been truthful to my purposes. No amount of fame, money or accolades can match or equal the value I have received from touching another person who senses my sensibility and who reads my work as if every page counts.

On a slightly tangential note, often reviewers — I should say bloggers — complain that my book of short stories is too dim, dark or desperate; that if they read such a book they want an “Anne Frank” moment, as I call it. That false, surreal belief that for every dark moment there has to be one of light. The shallowness is appalling, expressing the inability to see the species and individual people as they are, not as one might want them to be. Anne Frank has been ripped-off, for she wrote her book not in a camp but in a hidden room. Some do not consider her book as part of Holocaust literature. Her thoughts are turned to “sweeten” the Holocaust because human beings — and that means you and you — cannot cope with their own hearts of darkness. And believe me, you have one. I have seen it as a living person and I have experienced it as a psychotherapist. Many of us live lives of quiet desperation, playing ducks-and-drakes with life, skimming the lake waters.

Kudos to Mayra Calvani for not fleeing from the light.

Before I begin this howl, I’ll define Yahoo as a lout, brute and coarse human being, the term itself derived from Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels.  I vaguely recall reading this fabulous book in the early years of college, thinking it was written for kids. Was I wrong! For the past year I tried to market my book by going to “literary” blogs, reading up a little on the blogger, scanning some of the books read in order to get a sense of the blogspot as a reasonable market for my book. I have seen hundreds of blogs, having sent my book out at least 137 times. And I have read the reviews of the book and now I have a biased (admittedly) perspective on bloggers and blogging. I write in hyperbole, so adjust accordingly. Exceptions are always the case (see my links).

There appears to be a social phenomenon on blogs. It is often called “the challenge.” The blogger sets a pre-determined amount of books to read in a year; or the blogger decides to read at least 25 books on Nazi Germany; the blogger invites suggestions about other books on a topic, compiles a list and merrily goes on to read these books. Assuming the books are read from cover to cover, some bloggers boast that they have read so many books in a year or have completed the challenge as described. Other bloggers laud them. Interactivity about the challenges met strokes each blogger for his or her achievement.

When I was taking a graduate course in English I recall the professor saying that when he prepared for his course on Henry Adams he was lucky if he got through 8 pages per hour, given the notes he wrote in the margins, the symbolism being employed causing him to reflect and reconsider. The point has always been to me that it is the careful reading of prose, the idea that great books need great readers and not how many books read that is the measure of the experience. One does not gather and collect books. One engages books. One examines, one gleans, one fixates on a concept, rolls an idea about in the hallways of one’s mind. Not bloggers. It is consumerism at its worst. Look, I have a library in my house and I can hear the books groaning on the shelves so filled are they with the wisdom of mankind. Bloggers who set challengers remind me unremittingly of Don Quixote, who demented himself by reading tales of knight erranty; isn’t that only one of Cervantes satirical barbs? I will not explore here the difference between illusion and reality in that work for that is not for the “book challenged.”

Consequently a part of blogging is the “challenge” and is yahooism of an “intellectual”
kind.

Another aspect of blogging reflects the ignorance of the blogger, call it being undereducated or not au courant in the field. I offer a book of short stories to be reviewed and some of the complaints voiced reflect little knowledge about short stories. Demands are made for plot, or discontent with the subject matter as if “dark matter” (think Poe) is uncomfortable, which it is for some of these bloggers. Books are comfort food for many of them and they readily dismiss books without a second read or perhaps the first read is shallow, lacking introspection. I sense that books should please and not discomfort. Interesting. I get bird-brain observations about how long the story should be, or how short; I hear shallow thoughts about why the novel is superior to the short story because there is more to read ! It is to say that I look only at murals and I dismiss sculpture. A narrowness prevails for these bloggers, revealing a weak background in the very subject matter they presume to evaluate. These are not critics — often savagely reviewing the writer — nor readers, nor reasonable evaluators; rather, they are Costco customers rummaging through jeans or sneakers. The pretense at being educated and well-read is pronounced and in hilarious poor taste. The personal posturing they give to themselves is worthy of a Swiftian barb. They are cultural boors.

When I am personally displeased with another human being, when I encounter insensitivity or boorishness, when I meet up with shallow hypocrisy I often say to that person: “You are not a serious human being.” Many bloggers are proto-humans blaring forth how cultural and critically wise they are. This is, again, intellectual yahooism.

Of course, blogging reeks of a mutual admiration social club, stroking one another’s reviewing skills, commenting on how interesting the other’s blogger’s life is; citing such fanciful things as a blogger’s birthday, pictures of her spouse, pictures of her pets, of recipes mixed in with reviewing books; I have seen trees, mountains, lakes, the natural world all on a blogspot. The blogspots call out: ME…ME…ME. The saturated fats of these blogspots require heavy doses of Lipitor. And amid all this sound and fury signifying self-importance is some underclass sense that reviewing books may give the appearance of intellect and social consciousness. Oh, sure.

A need to be important, to feel cultured,  to interact, all atwitter, a need to posture and pose like putting your foot forward in a Michael Kors shoe is the abundant blogosphere I have encourntered this past year. Marketers argue that to become noticed as a writer on the web is to leave comments at the site.  At first I did so,  often educating about the short story or to thank the blogger for a review well done. I was not motivated by selling my book — sometimes I was. However, as I scanned these comments it was like jumping into a pool of chicken fat, gelatinous self-congratulatory ooze. One time I engaged the reviewer and asked what he made of the mother in my story. He slapped back with the short sentence that he reviews what he reads, no more, no less; oh, how open and intellectual you are, how accessible to hear another idea. He is a dead human being, but his answer was so lacking in social skills, so loutish that this too is another one of my conclusions — the boors are in charge. Our culture is in charge, running rampant over the web. I am so glad that through hard-work, years of treatment, more years working on myself, on deconditioning my self I have arrived at a personal place where my crap detector senses shit all about. I said a few paragraphs back that I am writing now using hyperbole; that is so. Dear reader, it also is not far from the fact of the matter.

Pretentiousness. Savagery. Cruel Malaciousness. This extended example is true. I queried one blogger with my usual query letter. I received an e-mail in which she tweezed out all the so-called grammatical errors I had made; made observations about the query in that it was not up to standards and if I wanted my book reviewed, in essence, shape it up. More comments were made and I was so stunned. She could have not answered. She could have answered and said that at this time she’ll not review my work for whatever reasons. We call this politeness, or having social skills. The note was bereft of civility. After all it was a query. It reminded me of those English teachers who on subliminal levels savage a student’s paper down to the kind of ink he or she used. Her email was vicious, unnecessary and plain awful.

I thought about it and then decided to respond. In short, I labelled what she had done — a prig; I labelled her criticisms — anal-retentive; and I labelled what I believe to be her essential character disorder — narcissitic. She did not reply back. I never forwarded a book to her, let that be clear. However, six months later I googled the book and her review came up. (Imagine the purchasing or borrowing of the book, the waiting game, the malignant thinking process.) The book was not only dismissed, it was raped and savaged; wait a minute, not the book, but me. She reviewed me, having harbored this malice for some time. This is one disturbed chick. I felt I was being tortured by a Nazi. It was a very cruel event. I never responded. What was appalling is that her conclave of fellow reviewers joined in as she uploaded my response to her; I don’t believe she uploaded her original comments to me. In any case a slew of followers agreed with her assessment and launched an attack upon me, not the book. When I shared this incident later on with Sabrina Williams of breenibooks.com, she wrote back “Holy cow.” I do not exaggerate that this was a scene reminiscent of “The Lottery.” The blogger identifies herself as an “English Major,” that she has been recently married (poor dumb bastard!), and has no record of having publishing anything other than pictures of her feet and herself frolicking on the beach at her wedding to the poor dumb bastard.

All this was appalling. What is salient with this child was her image of herself, her picture of some kind of literary grandee, of being Maxwell Perkins, of correcting all those errors that mortal  writers send to her known as books. The grandiosity is monumental, but the sheer madness of it all is disturbing. Not one of her camp followers dissented, not knowing me at all; the human herd response in all its panoply was clearly represented. Granted this is an egregious blogger, but a consequence of a blogosphere that reflects inordinate self-importance, moral flatulence, the uneducated literary inmates being in charge.

A few final thoughts. Often bloggers will lust for a book after a query is made and then take months to respond, often as a prompt by a query by me. I understand magazines taking 6 months or so; I am used to that. Here is a book of 133 pages and often the delays are inordinate. Recently I had one blogger excuse herself with a paragraph of neurosis about her need to delay or to put off — review the book or don’t review it; sometimes bloggers ask for a book and then tell me that they choose not to review it and then choose not to return the book. A query was answered, a book was sent, the book was not read, and I the blogger now keep it; interesting. You are not a magazine, honey! Again, I help to fill up their libraries. Some bloggers waffle in that they say they’ll not review the book if they feel they don’t like it. I can’t get my mind around that. I submit a book and as the writer I’ll take the heat. A reviewer reviews. Don’t worry about my feelings. Review the book. It is an odd position to take. Or is it. Perhaps it is Americana — we have to be nice to one another, shoving chicken fat up one another’s asses. Yeah, that’s it.

This howl has said it all up to this point. I have no sweeping generalization to make except that blogs simply are cypher-visuals of peacock strutting human beings, some of whom imagine they are literary critics. And so it goes.

I have no particular theme to write about. I have no jawbone of an ass as Samson had to fight off the Philistines. A series of mental quarks come to mind and why fight them off. I saw Eastwood’s “Gran Torino” last evening surrounded by a gray-haired audience, including me, who laughed at all the one-liners in the script, often throwaway lines. I felt as if I was on the conveyor belt of soylent green, except the person next to me was a living cracker. Clintwood is an icon, I suppose, and his performance here was good. His direction is precise and lean, leathery like him, and each shot is composed very well. He began his directorial career with “Play Misty for Me,” with Jessica Walters as the demon from a Greek hell.  Eastwood had been shaped, in part, by Don Siegel who directed him in several roles; Eastwood has said he learned a great deal from him. As I was watching the movie I realized on a very subliminal level that Eastwood, probably on conscious levels, was paying a homage to Siegel. If you recall Wayne’s last movie, “The Shootist,” with Lauren Bacall, Hugh O’Brian, Richard Boone, and Ron Howard (Don Siegel directed), Wayne has cancer and is dying (James Stewart played his doctor). He prepares for his last shoot-out by having his clothes dry-cleaned, new at the time, has a barber shave him, makes out his will with the undertaker (John Carradine) and orders a headstone. And then he is off to meet his maker. In “Gran Torino” this occurs with slight variations as well. If you see movies long enough, one begins to make these kinds of associations which only lend pleasure to the experience. Here it is done so slyly that young audiences have no idea what is coming off. I have lived long enough to tell the tale.

As I work on Sojourner, my Chinese tale of becoming and being, I began to use contractions: “Ah did not think of that,” altered to “Ah didn’t think of that.” By doing this, taking in the seams if you will, the prose began to gallop rather than graze through the pages. Something had shifted in me. Before I saw little to edit and now a whole new vista makes it way. The bones are good, and I am trying to stick close to the ribs, excessing fat. Of course, after writing my first two books I am leery of what I have before me. I have raised the bar perhaps too high for myself which may be a self-canard, if you will. I am in the resurrection business, a nice Jewish boy like me. I am trying to bring life to a book I wrote more than two decades ago. What gives me momentum and at times a case of the slows, call it ambivalence, is that who I  was two decades ago has shifted, different fault lines now. I still think the book is worthwhile so I persevere with all those monkeys on my back. Clearly the themes here are the ones I wrote about in “Young Man” in Down to a Sunless Sea, a story I wrote while depressed with teaching and my life. I felt mired and stuck in an occupation, it will never be a profession, that rewarded mediocrity, sloth and self-delusions above real excellence. Sojourner  reflects that self-quest which I projected upon the lead character Ah. When i wrote it back then it quaked and screamed with discontent and at this time of my life I can fine tune it to reflect as I look backwards what was learned, how did I prevail and what has life taught me. Come with me as I move into the next paragraph.

As I tinker with an old self who wrote an old book very much valid for me at the time, I see how I struggled to become a therapist, to seek intellectual and psychological rewards; how I struggled to teach myself a craft as a way to venting depression, rage and anger; how I did not quit on myself; how I persevered with very little support or external affirmation; how I have in my sixties the same old streaks of paint on the same old furniture that is so much prized on Antiques Roadshow, a good metaphor for many of us. Eastwood is Eastwood and he can play creatively with his persona; Freese is Freese and I can do as well with my writing. I am convinced that the themes in my life are punctuations made very early and that will stay for ever, themes replayed and reworked. After all, how many Hamlets do you have to write? So as I see it here are a few themes that run so true through my life: personal discontent; questioning authority; pain; the questions of existence; stumbling and recovery, then stumbling again; the ability to persevere; and to pay homage to these thoughts: “Reach what you cannot,” and “Overdraw me, Lord, and who cares if I break!” both by Nikos Kazantzakis.

I  am passing on as there are other recurrent motifs in my life — financial insecurity, et al. Most of what we believe in are mental constructs — how we view death, how we see life, how we are with feelings, how we handle stress and anxiety. I feel that we spend an awful amount of time being untrue to ourselves; that what we present to the world and what we present mostly to ourselves is magical thinking, a magician’s sleight-of-hand, playing with self delusions that we feel are realites, often not. We live lies. I live lies.  It is not a question of telling the truth, vastly more complex. We are jugglers of self-delusions because they are facile, easy, what we know, what we are comfortable with, the old slippers, the favorite camera, the favorite jeans. I believe we go to our deaths unknown to ourselves even as we consciously struggle to see through to ourselves. What is known to you is very little, I argue. Insights here and there, seed broadcast to the wind. I associate to our behavior as human beings across the span of thr world, from Israel and Hamas to Cheney and Bush, from China and North Korea as a play of human beings so out of control, so aberrant that some boast that committing suicide brings them martyrdom — the conditioning is mind numbing. Not only is it the task, in my mind, to decondition ourselves from our very culture, our religion and our isms, but then we need to work on our own conditioning of ourselves — I choose to be shy, I choose not to be assertive, I choose to be an enabler, I choose to parentify my children, I choose to merge with my children, and so on. You can see that schools are just a cemeteries. By definition, to school is to condition. At least give the bastard your name so that schools can deal with human issues and not Manifest Destiny.

When the history of this species is written by aliens hence or by cockroaches grown intelligent, it will be abysmal. Give me that good ole existentialism!

I weary of associating. How about this. You associate to what I have written.

Adieu!

Sojourner is the present manuscript I am enmeshed with, and it is not going well because I have lost faith in it. The second half of the book moves quickly, the first half seems too slow paced, although I have cut here and there. I lack the editing skills to reformulate, to shift chapters here or there, or to delete them entirely. I have let the book “rest” and when I picked it up again, it still did not move itself. Perhaps it is a book I should no longer work on and give it up.  When I wrote this book more than two decades ago and submitted it to publishers, the consensus was that it was good literary fiction but did not meet the fast paced rhythms of the market. Publishers commented on the serious themes presented and went out of their way not to discourage me. In fact, in my naivete I thought it could be a young adult novel until one publisher disabused me of that notion. I was pleased with that, but I put it away not knowing that decades ahead I would come back to it again.

 At this point in my life, with two books behind me, I’m at it again because what I have to say has merit. The issue as always is how I go about doing this. I have lost confidence in the book, really a lost confidence in myself. It is hard after remembering all the months I spent on the book as a man in his 40s that I may just have to lay it to rest. One other option has appeared. I could use a reader to give me a sense of how the book plays out. Jane and I have co-edited; Jane likes the book. I have strong misgivings. One blogger who had reviewed my book of short stories e-mailed me that she was pleased that I had won another award. In the same message queried me if I would like a reader of Sojourner as i shared with her I was at work on another book. She has no background as an editor but that may be an advantage as I think about it. It is the public that determines if a book has grit or not. I may very well send her a PDF for her comments. And so in this light, if there are others out there who know of me and my work and are interested in reading Sojourner long before it goes to press or not, let me know. The book may be a stinker; it may be salvageable. I await your responses.

Before I abort said child, I need to go over it once more, but with sufficient notice I could get it to you if you are a serious reader and willing to take a risk with me. I associate to movie producers and directors who screen test their movies and based upon audience comments choose to edit or not. At least I have one reader who is a relative stranger but volunteered to read it. Serendipity!

The final arbiter as always is the writer. A novel, unlike a movie, is not a collaborative effort. However, since I have a fairly good sense of who I am, if someone kicks the tires of this novel and finds them good, I will be energized to complete the effort. And what if the tires are shabby? I will decide then to abort or go to term. The only collaborative effort would be between you, the reader, and the author, and how very intriguing that is.

I will not delude myself, for “one swallow does not a summer make.” Nevertheless, as Forster said, “We need only connect.”

It is the Noble (Not Nobel) Prize for 2008. If you go to http://www.myshelf.com and press the Back to Literature column a little blurb comments on the book. Allow me to cite Carolyn Howard-Johnson at length:

They say self-deprecating humor can be a good thing. So, know that the authors I pick for my Noble will never get famous for the prestige it bestows on the book or the writer. The award is an opportunity, of course, for some bragging rights, maybe in one’s local press and online. But it’s really all about giving writers of literary fiction and poetry a little recognition, appreciation for their talents and, yes, a little love.

For those considering applying for the award, books considered should show literary excellence in use of the English language. They should present themes or premises that might help readers recongnize and curtail bigotry, or explore the human condition in other important ways. The contest is free except for the cost of the book. You may reach me at HoJoNews@aol.com for instructions on where to mail it. . . .

Her blurb says it very well — “The author … tells stories daringly, like none you’ve read before.”

I am feeling somewhat grandiose; I’ll take a nap and it will soon go away.