Mathias B. Freese

Chubby, pudgy, with brush haircut, always wearing poorly coordinated clothes (tasteless, like himself), small specks of dry skin on the right side of his lower lip, with elaborate and future jowls, he reminds me of ignorance dressed in knowledgeabilty, much more entertainer than commentator, stuffed like a turkey with opinions on all things, and poorly mentally groomed. On purpose I have not gone on to the web to find something about his biography, although I did come across that he is a recovered alcoholic and has no degree in journalism. How has this mediocrity risen so “high” is more of a commentary on us than on him. When I look at Beck I try to assess him as I often did when a new client came into my office. I tried to register this human being and continued to do so until treatment ended, be it months or a few years. I worked on feeling this person, to discover as one therapist called it, the central organizing dynamic, that is, what drives this person, what is the emotional spine of this human being. When I look at Beck, who considerably annoys me, I find a messy oxymoronic individual. I feel that he wants to be smarter than he is and he knows that his pretensions outweigh his insights. As long as we go along with that, are suckers, in effect, buy into his media self,  he can feed his family. All unconscious to him, for I doubt he has ever experienced the awakening of intelligence, as Krishnamurti termed it.

Bringing charts and signs to his presentations, I feel I’m with a hack school teacher trying to communicate with his students who feel, with their silence, that he is a jackass. I’ll endeavor to reach further into what I am trying to say. Beck is a shaky man interiorly, presenting self-assuredness and adamantine opinions seemingly arrived at after long cogitation — George Will, he is not. Will is a constipated self, a stuff-shirt and anal whereas Beck-a-la is oral, the major sewer main of discharge of Fox 5 News. Go further with me as I look at Beck from a prejudiced point of view, how delightful. I find him particularly annoying in that he presents his opinions as if thought out. I believe not. I believe he is a product of his producers. He is a prepared TV personality in that I find it hard to believe that preparation for anything has ever played a part in his life.

Capturing Beck is like capturing quicksilver, for what we get are only images, so my assessment is not based on who he really is but on what he gives us visually. However, in his case, I believe that the Mr. Bluster he gives us is in large part the Mr.Bluster he is in real life. His slobbering bluster is much too real to be affected. He is an unrealized human being. I would find as his son or daughter or wife that I am being presented with a false self, a person inhabiting a self without substance. That’s scary. I grew up with a fairly empty father and I have had to scramble all my days and years to make sure that I ejected what emptiness he gave me so that I could fill myself up with healthy nutrients — and that has been one of my life tasks.  Beck’s emptiness, I feel, sadly, is largely unknown to himself; however, he uses his neuroses, don’t we all, as the schtick by which he entertains and keeps his audience, for he, like O’Reilly, sustains a large market share. That’s all right; millions loved Nixon. Americans, historically, are enamored of dunderheads — Custer, MacArthur, Reagan, Nancy, too, Michael Jackson, endlessly so.

Beck’s appeal is to the lowest common denominator, the person who actually feels the flag goes beyond symbol and is alive and vibrant in and of itself — and idol of the mind; he satisfies those of us who want their pablum in tightly condensed packets; subtlety is unknown to the followers of Beck; he speaks for the masses, as he sees it, much like priests say what god wants or does not want as if they had a smart phone jacked into their asses and are speaking to god himself; Beck warbles the primal cries of the infant — feed me, wash the drool off my mouth, take away my soiled Pamper. It is a distinctly curious thing to me, worthy of more self-reflection, how Beck ties in with millions out there in terms of his primal songs, his base attitudes, his gross neediness. It all comes back to Beck who is a narcissist, for it all feeds him like some grotesque literary Grendel. When Hitler had his rants if you’ve seen old movies or heard him on old broadcasts, one could feel how enwrapped he was in the spirit of the race and of Germany, how his howling and rampant rage ensconced him into passion, zeal and fury. Watching Beck is watching an attentuated Hitlerian tantrum, of a lesser order but garnished with the same neediness and infant cry to be heard, to be tended to, to be needed.

Beck is not despicable because he is who he is, although as a person there is much to deride. It is we who are despicable if we attend to what he says and encourage his primal lunacies. I must try to extinguish this naivete within myself because I am always in a state of mild astonishment that Beck is salaried, watched and listened to by large herds out there in never never land; he speaks for the untethered, the uninhibited, the boors, the crude, the pistol packin mother fuckers who watch Obama and really want to blast him. And, of course, we have an entire channel that supports the morons from the right — Coulter, Limbaugh, Hannity, O’Reilly, Cavuto, who feign rational discourse and tap into their basest passions and offer them up to the public as if pristine pages from a newer testament, Christian, of course. All religions are structured to be rigid and unyielding; many of these “commentators” have that same conditioning that religion provides. It is in the air; I can smell it. An argument can be made, I suppose, that to be well indoctrinated in the gravies and soups of religious thought is to have been brainwashed. In fact religion has brainwashed the species from the beginning of time. In short, query the prementioned newscasters and you will find card-carrying religious believers. This tangent is not so tangential as it may seem.

Writing this blog I associated to Laura Ingraham a Fox 5 commentator, who wears her gold cross clearly to be seen– why else wear a cross? I read it this way: I have the truth and you don’t; this is the way to the truth and your way is misguided; this is a symbol that I belong to the greatest of the great; that because I wear this cross I am dedicated to the truth, indeed, I have and I own the truth; my religion mints the truth; that although TV news is secular it is sad and a disgrace that it is not religiously grounded; finally, for all you out there who don’t wear the cross, I feel so sorry for you, for you are lost and forlorn. And, of course, as Laura gives her truths, in fact, pontifications, given from a staunch and steady stream of language filled with pebbles and stones, you can detect the conditioning, that this is the way, the only way, that my religion supersedes yours. I have and own the truth.  In another time, people like Ingraham, were crusaders, fascists, Nazis, conquistadores, Torquemadas, and Herods.

I’m revising my new book of short stories and hopefully my last on the Holocaust. I think it has some measure of character to it but I’m not sure. I believe the stories in which I allowed my fantasy to take over may be the better ones, again who knows. I may be strident in a few of them, trying too hard. In any case revision sometimes involves when to drop a story completely. I’ve done that and it hurts. Sometimes I feel I have a paragraph or phrase that has come from the mouth of the muse herself and it is so damn hard to let go of that, like an affair or a memory of an earlier heartthrob. Since I am an autodidact, completely self-taught, unwilling to take courses, et al I am aware of the defects of being such a fellow; however, I do like the freedom of not being conditioned of how to write and in what ways. The learnings I’ve amassed over 40 years have been hard won and I feel as ignorant of the requisite skills as I did when I began in depression so many years ago. Writing then was a search for release or mental health. I began in pain.

I am stubbornly intuitive; ask me about the arc of a novel or how to plan a novel or how to write a short story and you will not get much from me. I am just too ornery to learn all that it takes. I go my own way. What I know now has been essentially acquired over decades; youth is now gone and my old age shows the pock marks where writing skills have not been assimilated — or learned. I am not a practitioner of a craft. In the truest sense I suppose I am an amateur. I believe I am a very good writer, no more, no less. The weaknesses I have do not gnaw at me. I go my merry way. The journey has given me success, inner success. For someone who did poorly in English in high school in the desperate 50s, I’ve accomplished much. I recall how I felt “less” when I mistakenly and in an unhealthy way compared myself to the teachers about me who had majored in English (I majored in history) and had grammar down pat. I still am weak in that area; but in terms of imagination and empathy I more than compensate for that — I excel. So whenever I teach a workshop I stress the feeling aspect of writing, the capacity to enter the world of others, to feel, to palpate the meaning in others, to see through cant, to feel oneself as a self. It is here that I have my autodidactic strengths. I  didn’t plan for all this. Thoroughly serendipitous. And what is serendipity except surprise.

So revision, I guess, for me, is to extract feelings within my prose, to make you feel touch or sensate in some way. I trim, I whittle, I cut out words, but I have a hard time shaping or making a paragraph or page send the reader out of the park looking for the baseball. Consequently I am very good at deleting words, condensing sentences, of writing leanly, sparely but the weakness may be in that I may not have squeezed the feeling to the fore. I may just be pulling out lint from the dryer filter. It is here I may fall short or I do fall short because I am lacking the necessary writing skills. What can be done about that? When you throw the dice against the felt wall and they break out into numbers, all has been done. A part of me feels the loss of skills, a part of me regrets that, a part of me stubbornly clings to old feelings, or armor and becomes defensive. One sane part says, support the ego! How many lives do I have? At this point I am just trying to churn out books of some quality with posterity in mind, with the children in mind, with myself greedily in mind before I come down with the wrack and ruin of being aged.

I am driven to do a good job, driven in the sense that I put my ass down on a seat and write; that I make a commitment to myself to create some kind of literary art; to do, to be; a personal commitment to understand myself before I enter the world of electrons; to pay homage to the culture that I come from; to honor my heritage, secular and atheistic Jew that I am. I give my all and often it does not measure up in the very writing I struggle to make excellent — or just damn good. Why have I chosen to write, often part time, often late into the night, on Saturday mornings when the kids were growing up? I wrote to find me! And I have, to large measure, come to understand a few of the greater continents in my being. River valleys, mountain ranges and lowlands have escaped my investigations, of course. And I have the grandiosity to believe that what I have discovered about myself may be of use to you, or of interest simply because we are connected as a species. When I go to my sleep, it gives me pleasure to know that a Freese may turn to one of my books and examine a father or grandfather or a spouse, and revisit that soul within any character in a story or novel. I am in the very periods I write; I am the paragraphs; I am the darkness and light: I am in every nook and cranny of my work and yet most of this is unknown to myself for the writer is the last to know — human beings as a species are the last to know about themselves.

We are all in need of continued and continuing revision.

Sitting downstairs is the first good draft of the above titled book. Coming in about 185 pages, it contains about 20 or more original stories written since I thought about writing such a book, I believe, in May 2009. Jane will do the first reading of it, writing notes for her promised introduction to the book as well as suggestions of what to keep in and what to drop from the collection. I tried all kinds of writerly approaches in this work, from traditional stories to the avant garde. I have one story in which the character tells me, the author, to stop interfering with the arc of the story; in other words, butt out. I have stories in which there are three points of view which gave me a chance to comment on what I was writing. I have one story dealing with cannibalism, one with Shoah business, one reveals the workings of a survivor’s thinking after the war, and a few fantasy stories all with a serious bent. I believe this is my last effort in this area. I must move on. But who knows?

For me the test of a good story or one that I am relatively satisfied with is a story that makes me feel first, then the reader. As a writer I can never tell if I reach that mark, so I count on Jane, of late, to give me her sense of it.  Our “contract” is simple: tell me the truth, don’t pull your punches. A story can always be redone or dispensed with.  And it is working so far. Of course, I have learned to balance the stories in a collection, starting off with an appetizer or “starter,” moving into entres and then ending with a hefty dessert. Most of the stories are no longer than 5 pages, some as much as 12 or 16 pages. I felt I could get to the point sooner. As I come closer to my end, less is more seems very pertinent — and true.

Robert Langer, one of our better writers on the Holocaust, and a professor of English, I believe, tells the story of his sister’s concern for him as he wrote book after book about the Holocaust.  She felt he would enter into depression if he continued to do such work. What she did was to crochet or knit covers for throw pillows for her brother with such comments as — Life is good; Things will get better; Go outside and smell the roses, or some such slogans of good cheer. Langer tried to convey to her that this was his life’s work and that the events he dealt with were sullen, sorry and sordid, however, he had the requisite skill to stand back and to observe, to record and reveal his perceptions. Amen to that.

What I feel about my book is that on some level it is a metaphor for what I have personally suffered in life; that is, an attempt by me to find purpose, intent or meaning, perhaps insight or a kind of equanimity about the events that have befallen me. The more I plunge into a story and experience the suffering, empathize with the anguish, the more I expel my own personal pain. I cannot think of a better way to spend my time than to explore and divine my inner mental, psychological and emotional states, for shortly I will be gone with the wind. As I see the “weather” about me, the climate conditions that spin about the tops of mountain ranges and oceans,the flying scud, I realize the puke of social weather –events,  social media, the morons that rule and defame and kill are really “storms” that are all peripheral to who I am. I believe there is no meaning to life,  a philosopher’s charade. It is in meaninglessness that I dwell and I am now quite use to it. I find no meaning in meaninglessness. It ain’t that simple.

I feel some stories are good, some so so, some I don’t know if they work or not. The second part of my writer’s life will be to revise, revise and revise. And then revise again and again. When all that is done, I may still have a piece of dreck on my hands. But it is my dreck, and I fashioned it. The carpenter planes, the farrier shoes the horse, and the writer crafts a tale. My life, of late, has become a mystery once more to me. Realizing that once again I am perplexed and stymied by personal family issues which I will not share here, I face once again a kind of living agony of knowing how ignorant I really am of self and other, of the inner world I live in. Once again I have to put on the harness and plow my way through the field for what I once thought was plowed land is really virgin sod. I am feeling a sadness today that cannot be shared but only felt. When I make my way through it, I may be left with nothing except, perhaps, the finer particles, of human interaction. The sadness speaks of no resolution, no finality, no making its way through things. Like the Holocaust, it has no meaning but only the weight of an immense suffering. I will prevail.

Adieu.

I find it eye-popping to observe the shared ignorance we are seeing at these town hall meetings. Many of our fellow Americans (yahoos, in effect) vomit the word socialism continuously when I know damn well they have no idea of what it means nor are they in the slightest degree aware of the honorable and progressive history of socialistm in 19th century Europe. I want to ask the most heated of them to name one socialist in history if they can. If it were not for W.W.I, the advent of socialism would have continued. So we have these schmucks using socialism because it scares them; no use in asking any one of them to differentiate between socialism or communism because that is too fine a distinction for them to draw. The ignorance is appalling. You have born again Christians — wasn’t once enough? — condemning Arlen Specter with the fires of hell. You have the cherubic Glen Beck calling Obama a racist and doing a skit in which he gives wine to Pelosi in an attempt to poison her. He has no degree in journalism. Fox News keeps him on because Fox News is the sleaziest “news” outfit around. We have Shawn Hannity preaching fire and brimstone, for he has been so religiously conditioned that he has Aquinas and Augustine up his tight ass. Freud was dead on when he mused about how fragile civilization is, like a weak pie crust. It’s that old valid axiom that if righteous men and women do not stand up and vigorously challenge these negative eruptive forces, we will be overrun by barbarians.

Many of the yahoos, one even wore a pistol to a fracas, just mouth slogans and offend history by misinterpreting facts. The schools of this presently wretched nation have failed miserably to educate our population. And the students themselves have failed as well. On Hardball, with Chris Mathews, one woman, a face in the crowd, was invited to be interviewed about her opinions. A mother, 35 or so, she used the word socialism in her screaming at a town hall. When asked about social security and medicare, she had no idea that they were pragmatically socialistic in nature, as well as our postal system. She was a rather empty young woman, who knew little, was poorly educated and gave outer-directedness a bad name. The interviewer was not harassing her. He was trying to elicit from her how she arrived at her political points of view. Admittedly, she said that she only recently “woke” up. I was mortified watching her. Pure, unadulterated ignorance mixed in with rage and foolish passion, all to produce a mental eunuch. Her children are condemned to live with this mother.

The one good thing coming out of all this is my conviction, like Caligula, I could bring a horse to the U.S. Senate, make him a senator, and he would do just fine. The level of ethics is beyond deplorable. Karl Rove is an example of a ruthless, vindictive son-of-a-bitch. The good note here is that a reasonable intelligent human being should run for office. All he or she should do is hang up a sign in the office — If you are personally corrupt, get the fuck out of my office. These are not good times for rearing our children, for models of moral excellence are few and far between. How could a parent expose a young teen, let us say, to Fox News with its biased reporting, venom and vituperation without instructing the youngster how to apply critical thinking to what he is observing and hearing. Walter Cronkite, Brinkley, Sevaried, Murrow gave us the news and we had to determine what we thought about it; rarely could you find a slanted newscast. In today’s world as the news is being given on Fox News, the reporter will smirk, editorialize or laugh, thus revealing his or her own opinions. Don’t believe me. Watch Fox News for awhile; it becomes nauseating. Present the news and keep yourself out of it is no longer journalism. Instead we have the moronic Beck, the religiously constipated Hannity, the steely, coquettish Coulter and lumbering Limbaugh giving us pure, unadulterated opinion without substantiation. As to O’Reilly, what can one say? He was a New York City teacher (so was I) and probably was insufferable to his students, dogmatic , religiously conditioned, with all the values of a Christian crusader. I see no significant difference between the Spanish conquistadores and their Franciscan friars, the sword and the cross, who brought havoc to the Americas and the aforementioned “Christians.”

Underneath a significant part of this rage, of course, is fear. So-called death panels bring the elderly jumping out of their chairs, thinking that fellow Americans will cast them out on ice floes when they are too old to be treated. Goebbels would have smacked his lips as he watched the big lie growing bigger and bigger every day and all the suckers buying into it. If Hitler reached his twisted pinnacle, he did so by thuggery, shouting down dissent, fist fights, and street brawls. We are moving in that direction. I need only cite the murder of the abortion doctor a few months back; even the term “abortionist” has come into use as if this were a kind of demonic enabler. I’ll end this rant with a thought. Sarah Palin represents, in my mind, the shallow and sleaziest part of America, candidates ill-equipped to deal with their own lives much less the country, individuals who are remarkably empty, ill-prepared, who make their appeal to the Joe the Plumber types, using the same old corrupted American values that have gotten us into trouble across the world. “Mission Accomplished,” oh, yeah!

1. He liked reading the works of Karl May, a German author of stories about the American West.

2. Hitler modeled his moustache after Charlie Chaplin who he mistakenly thought to be Jewish.

3. His superior officer in W.W.I was a Jew.

4. He detested Goerring.

5. Hiler had few if any close friends or confidants. Goebbels was someone who he could “confide” in.

6. He disliked birthday cake.

7. Hitler frequently washed his hands throughout the day.

8. He enjoyed the “Mountain” films of Leni Riesenthal, the woman director, giving her permission to film the 1936 Olympics.

9. His suits and uniforms were impeccably tailored, several extra large about the girth in case he put on weight.

10. Eva Braun always insisted on knotting his tie.

11. It is reported he rarely dreamed.

12. And he apparently had a lowered libido . . . He detested pornography and vexed by Julius Streicher’s prurient interests in that.

13. Always concerned, inordinately so, with his bowel movements, the content of his stool as well as regularity. When constipated, he refused laxatives.

14. When a general lost a significant battle or did not distinguish himself in a military engagement, Hitler ordered the SS to murder at least one relative, but not a wife or children.

15. Hitler never shaved himself, leaving that to his orderly who reported after the war that Hitler enjoyed French lilac water as an after shave.

16. Hitler once shared with an aide that not once in his life had he engaged a Jew in conversation, for he felt he would be contaminated by some foul substance. He believed Jews practiced mind control.

17. As a child Hitler was a poor student, recalcitrant and withdrawn.

18. And there is some evidence to suggest incest snaked through his ancestry, perhaps crudely hinting at his policies to euthanize the retarded, and mentally impaired.

19. It has been substantiated that in his bedroom Hitler wanted to be defecated upon.

If you are a writer, may I suggest you take one of these items and write a short-short story about it.  I will gladly put it up on my site if it is of merit. Or, do you wish to add to this list? I accept lies, untruths, fiction, weak facts. If you are a “birther,” do not e-mail me.

Facebook informed me that my profile was “disabled” (love that jargon) when I went to log in. It is a scene out of 1984. No information is being given to me, no reasons are supplied. I simply have been deleted. Several e-mails later still no success. it is beyond farce — here is so-called social media acting without due process, to say the least, and totally bereft of social skills. McCarthyesque, in that I cannot face my accusers. Given that I had not been actively contributing to the site for several weeks, that I am not a purveyor of pornography nor have I been vulgar in language, it is perplexing. I am being stonewalled. In the great scheme of things I don’t give a shit. Still, I have a nagging curiosity about what may have made the powers to decide to disable the site. I am open to your thoughts. As to the Facebook experience itself, it is mostly merchandising, advertising and tedium.

What is more important is that I am continuing to write as my new book is almost completed. I hope to come in about 175 pages; many of the stories have me breaking the boundaries of narrative and time because at this point of my life, free of the marketing shit that comes with publishing, free of the need  to reach out to bloggers for reviews and the internet as well, I just go on my merry way. I am metaphorially trying to own me and what I create as a writer. I am free, reader, of what is expected of me, and how delightful that is. As long as I can print my book and hand it out or sell a few copies or give talks about it I am pleased. After writing about the Holocaust in an as many ways and styles I can imagine, after experiencing that torturous mindset of existential despair and unremitting pain, the rest of publishing is horse feathers. Shortly, Jane and I will sit down and try to place the stories in some kind of emotional order or rational sequence. Jane will write a preface which I always look forward to because she is a fine reader of writing, quite knowledgeable. And then I’ll fine tune the writing, give it to my favorite editor at Wheatmark, have my son design the cover, get a few blurbs and I’m off to see the wizard.

The next or parallel project to this book of short stories is a revision of The i Tetralogy. I have some internal corrections to make, one or two rephrasings  and a new cover. I have sufficient quotations lauding the book to begin the new edition with several pages in praise of, etc. My hope is to someday teach the tetralogy and the new book together. I am finished with the Holocaust as a writer, for the moment.

After hustling a little I am in contact with the local librarian and I will be meeting up with him this week. I am offering my general vanilla workshop on writing as well as an ongoing workshop for critiquing works in progress. Of course, it comes down to participants. The course will be offered in October and hopefully I will have some takers. I am not charging anything at this time; however, in the future I will ask for some small fee. The idea here is to volunteer and then to see what I can get for my efforts. The fantasy is to have workshops out of my house. Jane will, from time to time, co-lead a group with me.

Jane and I are pretty well settled in; we have spent an inordinate amount of hard cash to bring the house up to snuff. We have our bills like every mortal. We will see it through. However, the perks here are terrific; shopping, restaurants galore, private swimming pool, gated area; middle-class neighborhood, we hope; mental stimulation; the Strip, omigod, the Strip; the casinos, the signs, the odd folk on the streets, the scuzzy mayhem of losers trying to be winners; the inept handyman; the scam artists; the crazy Nevada politics — who cares! our two office-nests where we write and work and the dearest treasure of all, the continuing intensity of our relationship — you may request pictures.

Adieu