The Son by Philipp Meyer, author of 2009’s American Rust, is as ambitious as it is stunning. Very rarely does a book blow me away like this one has. It gets tiring hearing people throw around terms like “masterpiece” and “instant classic,” but if ever there were a book that deserved such praise, The Son would be it.

As described by its Amazon page, it is “an epic of the American West and a multigenerational saga of power, blood, land, and oil that follows the rise of one unforgettable Texas family, from the Comanche raids of the 1800s to the to the oil booms of the 20th century.” Of course, it is much more than that. Mostly, it follows the intertwining stories of three generations of the McCullough family: Eli, Peter, and Jeannie. 

“Seeing that people like the book is especially gratifying, though actually saying that makes me a little nervous,” Meyer recently told the Washington Post. ”I’ve always thought - at least from the artistic point of view - that praise is just as destructive as criticism. So I try to get it out of my head as quickly as possible.”

If that is the case, he will have a lot of praise to ignore. Here is just a taste of what critics have been saying:

• “With its vast scope, The Son makes a viable claim to be a Great American Novel.” (Washington Post)
• “The stuff of Great American Literature. Like all destined classics, Meyer’s second novel speaks volumes about humanity - our insatiable greed, our inherent frailty, the endless cycle of conquer or be conquered.” (Publishers Weekly)
• “Like Cormac McCarthy’s ‘Blood Meridian,’ it allows the past its otherness and its characters the dignity of blundering through the world as it was. These are not heroic transplants from the present, disguised in buckskin and loincloths. They are unrepentant, greedy, often homicidal lost souls, blindly groping their way through the 19th and 20th centuries, from the ordeals of the frontier to the more recent absurdities of celebrity culture.” (New York Times)
• “For all the debts this novel owes Melville, Faulkner, McMurtry and McCarthy, so has Meyer; ‘The Son’ is a true American original. Meyer describes the Comanche as “riding to haul hell out of its shuck.” It’s an apt description of how it feels to read this exciting, far-reaching book.” (JSOnline)

The Great American Book Sale turns me into a book-buying fiend every June. Since I have been giving away much of the unnecessary books in my book collection over the past year in order to save space and promote the use of reading on my iPad (I’m still having trouble with that), I decided this year to only buy books that I really wanted and were in perfect or near-perfect condition.

These were my purchases, which came in at less than $20:

• Women With Men by Richard Ford
• The Thanatos Syndrome by Walker Percy
• Native Son by Richard Wright
• Black Boy by Richard Wright
• Slapstick by Kurt Vonnegut
• Sweet Thursday by John Steinbeck
• Ragged Dick: or, Street Life in New York with the Boot Blacks by Horatio Alger, Jr.
• An Object of Beauty by Steve Martin
• A Lesson Before Dying by Ernest J. Gaines
• America (The Book): A Citizen’s Guide to Democracy Inaction by Jon Stewart
• Elements of the Writing Craft by Robert Olmstead

And for my classroom:

• The People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn
• Midnight Herring: Prohibition and Rum Running on Lake Erie by David Frew
• The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien
• Darwin for Beginngers by Jonathan Miller & Borin Van Loon
• Dreams from My Father by Barack Obama
• All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
• 1776 by David McCullough
• America at War: World War I by Peter I. Bosco
• 11 of the 12 novels in the Indiana Jones book series by Max McCoy, Rob McGregory, and Martin Caidin

For my classroom, I’ve been working on building my own “open library,” in which students can check out books directly from me (even more important since we know longer have a functioning library in our district). While this has always been my policy, students rarely take advantage of it, so I have been working to grow my collection and get more books that will appeal to 14 to 18 year olds. It’s a work-in-progress.

For now, I continue the purge while simultaneously introducing these new books into my collection. It’s always a balancing act on my bookshelves. 

It is well documented the idea that there is always vanity in writing. In the same essay from the excerpt above, Orwell eloquently described the four great motives for writing: sheer egoism being the first he listed, followed by aesthetic enthusiasm, historical impulse, and political purpose. Furthermore, the vanity in writing a blog about the process of one’s own writing is astounding. How vain anyone is to sit down, pour hours into writing something completely imagined, and expect anyone to be even remotely interested - like the friend who is always angered after trying to explain to his group of friends about his dream that is interesting only to him and nonsensical to everyone else.

One must wonder though how the Twain’s and Hemingway’s and Steinbeck’s might have utilized the internet were they around. Writers, or at least those who right to alleviate some sort of inward burn, desire readership… not money or fame or even literary immortality. There is the craving for and subsequent anxiety over knowing that someone’s eyes have gazed upon your words. What better way to receive instant feedback to one’s writing than the internet? Twain most certainly would be quipping daily witticisms on Twitter, Hemingway perhaps writing letters to the world with poetic simplicity on his blog, and Steinbeck’s scathing honesty might pepper his Facebook page between his publisher’s posts on the discounted price of his latest novel (autographed, of course, if you order one of the first 500 copies).

I am not unaware of this vanity. Yet, the reality is that the difficulty of approaching a blog from the persona of a writer rather than a casual observer of the world comes with its own set of pressures - the least of which being a burning desire to delete a blog entry immediately after publishing it, before friends and family and the world of accidental search engine visitors can read and critique it (“Pssh, he calls himself a writer?”).

There is, of course, even more vanity in the assumption that anyone is reading at all. Or even has interest in doing so. And even more vain is the writer who continually puts their writing on the internet for the world to read, yet claims he or she does not care about people reading it. Of course they care.

Our greatest hope in blogging is to become the first entry listed for a popular Google search term.

It has always been inevitable that I would come back around to writing and writing seriously. I’ve written in the past few years a handful of stories with the intent to write something “mainstream” or “readable” - where I picked up on this backwards idea, I am unsure - but the focus became the audience and the lingering questions on potential for readership. I went into writing for the first time in my life with misguided intentions. Writing those stories became a drag, a chore, a source of frustration. I was never pleased. I kept rereading what I had written already, editing, editing, editing without ever taking the story forward.

This was my way of avoiding carrying on a story of which I had no desire to tell. It was not my story. It never was. It was their story - some imagined conglomerate of deathly loyal readers who would download my stories to their Kindles and spread the gospel that would be my writing at $0.99 per download.

There is vanity in writing. And I again realize what made writing so enjoyable for me in the first place, back when I penned my stories in battered spiral notebooks late at night under my blanket with a flashlight. I am writing for myself.

If it seems like I’ve been off the grid lately, it’s because I’m currently spending my after-work evenings deep into research on 19th century businessman, philanthropist, and social reformer Robert Owen and his experimental communities in New Lanark, Scotland and New Harmony, Indiana.

Some of these books that I’ve been reading through haven’t been checked out of the campus library since the 1960s. I don’t think they’ve been dusted off since then either.

I’m writing a sprawling historiography on Owen, which as far as I know, has never been done - or at least such a critique has never been published. Since his death in 1858, Owen has been labeled everything from the father of socialism and the cooperative movement, to a dirty communist, to the mastermind behind public education and workplace reforms, to a man decades ahead of his time, to a ruthless exploitative businessman, to an idealist utopian dreamer, to a social revolutionary. In reading all of these various interpretations, I’m looking to criticize, synthesize, and fill in all of the missing pieces.

While I’m enjoying the hell out of this (it’s intellectually refreshing after all of those stale educational research courses… quantitative research is not my bag), I’m very much looking forward to getting back to some pleasure reading and writing. I haven’t picked up a book that hasn’t related to Owen or socialism or utopianism in over two months. My psyche is craving fiction. But alas, this is the last roadblock standing between me and an M.Ed. - of which I’m two months away from earning.

Then I have my first summer in a decade without either school or work. I don’t yet know what I’m going to do with myself. Perhaps write some more.

I just began the last course for my master’s program. I’m really looking forward to wrapping that up, not because I dislike school, but because I’m anticipating having some time in which I can read and write only what I please for a time. Between research for my historiographical essay and starting a new semester at work, all of my free time has been spent sleeping, getting my new place sorted out, and recovering from an ambition-killing cold.

I don’t get sick often - and when I do, it’s generally not for long. I have this theory that between having a sewer plant operator for a father and playing around manure all of the time on our family farm, my body has generated for me a superhuman immune system.

Unfortunately, even my superhuman immune system can only take so much of a beating before it gives up in exhaustion and lets the floodgates open. Thus, this epic week-long cold in which I’ve binged on menthol cough drops, store-brand tussin, and Netflix.

Stay healthy out there, folks. Drink your OJ, wash your hands, and get some sleep.

A reading of this earlier piece of mine, by yours truly.

“Accept everything about yourself – I mean everything. You are you and that is the beginning and the end – no apologies, no regrets.”
-Henry Kissinger

When I saw who this quote had been attributed to, I was provided some much needed laughter. It’s obvious to most that this is not something Kissinger would have said. I only wonder if these people who have posted or reposted this quote from omgcoolquotes.com on their Facebook wall even have a clue who Henry Kissinger is. Know history and one will know that even if Henry Kissinger had written this, then the quote would be even more atrocious considering his life and the decisions that he has made.

The quote has become so widespread in its attribution to Kissinger, that it has become difficult to track down the original source. A few minutes of prodding though will find that this quote belongs to Clark Moustakas, a clinical psychologist who is one of the founders of the Association for Humanistic Psychology, not Kissinger, who amounts to little more than a war criminal – you know, Kissinger being the same guy who spewed nonsense such as “power is the ultimate aphrodisiac.”

Always. Check. Sources. It’s a simple enough concept, but one that is lost on much of the internet community. With the ease of mass re-tweeting and re-blogging on sites like Twitter and Tumblr and Facebook, misquotes are becoming a frustrating epidemic.

Take this absurd photo that I have seen posted dozens of times over the past few years:

Besides not understanding the message trying to be portrayed by this quote and photograph being paired (try to cause car crashes or you will regret it?), it doesn’t take a scholar of American literature to pinpoint that Twain would have never said something so pseudo-inspirational, something so live-like-you’re-dying, something fit for a new age self-help book.

I’m convinced that misquoting has become a sort of internet game at this point. I have a theory that most misquotes that get widespread attention are now started ironically by in-the-know bloggers purposely pairing nice-sounding nonsense with famous names. There must be some sort of twisted satisfaction in seeing a misquote one started being shared millions of times by lazy, ignorant bloggers.

The Atlantic recently discussed the increasing spread of misquotes:

[I] n the modern age, where basically everything is track-downable, what’s our excuse? Why do misquotes arise—and why are they so persistent and hard to eradicate? The persistence part is simple, especially with the rise of the Internet. It has become far easier to share—and incorrect information is just as sharable as valid information. The more something is shared, the more hits it gets, the more difficult it becomes to verify, and so forth. It becomes easier to just quote and hope for the best. But why do we misquote in the first place? …

We think we remember something and so we just write it down, rather than spend time checking. Or, we like the way a phrase sounds or the message it has and so we just assume our (likely online) source is correct—and the more sites there are with the mistake, the more persuasive it becomes—instead of painfully tracking down the original to verify it for ourselves.

I have made it a point for years now that whenever I post something that someone said to provide a source along with a name. If I am sharing a quote that someone else put online and did not provide a source, I investigate it, verify it, and then alter it to contain the source.

It usually takes about 30 seconds… maybe a minute or two at most. If after a couple of minutes of using Google, one cannot track down a source, it’s safe to be skeptical. And one probably shouldn’t share it. Or one can add “source unverified.”

Maybe this is an unreasonable frustration on my part.

But probably not.  

• The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence of Evolution (2010) by Richard Dawkins
• A Woman in Berlin: A Diary (1954) by Anonymous
• Destined to Witness: Growing Up Black in Nazi Germany (1999) by Hans J. Massaquoi
• A People’s History of the United States: 1492 to Present (1980) by Howard Zinn 
• Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936) by George Orwell
• Gun, with Occasional Music (1994) by Jonathan Lethem
• Rabbit at Rest(1990) by John Updike
• The Stars My Destination (1956) by Alfred Bester
• The Wettest County in the World (1998) by Matt Bondurant
• Medium Raw: A Bloody Valentine to the World of Food and the People Who Cook (2010) by Anthony Bourdain

As one might be able to tell, I have varied interests. If it sounds interesting to me, I’ll read it. Please feel free to leave me any reading recommendations for 2013. You know, because my impossibly crowded to-read list isn’t already long enough.

As I often do when I am looking to procrastinate, I have been leafing through some of my childhood writings and drawings recently. My memories are vivid. I can remember the moment that I drew a certain picture or wrote a particular sentence. I can remember much of preschool, from getting dressed before my very first day, to naptime, to Lindsey, the first girl I ever fell in love with. I even asked her to marry me. She said yes. I never saw her again.

Still, my image of what I remember my young self being is probably not entirely accurate. I’m thankful my mother saved a lot of this, otherwise my young self would have simply trashed it all. I want to include one story from kindergarten first, titled Rocky’s Adventure. There was definitely help here to write the story which is why there are no spelling errors, and it has colored pictures drawn by yours truly to go along with it, but I will spare myself the embarrassment and just copy the meat of the story. Read on:

Once upon a time there was a bear named Rocky. He swung on a rope and kicked a stone. When he kicked the stone it kicked another stone and it made a fire. His hand slipped and then the rock broke and it was burning. Then he fell in a hole and when he fell in the hole, there was a dinosaur.

A volcano erupted. The lava dried up and there was a pterodactyl that picked him up. It went down to the lava. And he got off his back but there was still lava and it was hot!

Rocky found a tree but it was bad. It was his worst enemy. Rocky took out his hoverboard and there was an avalanche. The tree was throwing teeth at Rocky. Rocky made it back to his house with his best friend. The end.

You can already sense my taste for the violent and epic. Here is an excerpt from a beginning of the year prompt in first grade about my previous summer. All spelling and grammatical errors intact.

“It’s as hot as a burning Stove. Family’s go on vacashions. We have camp fires. We go swimming in the pool. We go to Holaday Camplands in Ohio. We have yard sails. I go to friends houses, play baseball, basketball, football, kickball, tag, dogeball, boling, and volleyball. I’ll draw a lot. I like drawing. We don’t have school. We have party’s. We sing day till night. We play in the rain, watch T.V, play NES.”

We had writing exercises to practice our printing. This was a prompt about what we wished for:

“I wish I could be a Teenage Mutint Ninja Boy but it will never happen so I’ll wish nuthing at all. But I still wish I could Be A Teenage Mutint Ninja Boy.”

Oh, to be young again, longing for something as simple as being a Teenage Mutant Ninja Boy. Maybe someday.

Maximus and I might be a little frailer, a little slower, and a little chubbier than we were nine years ago. But we’re just as weird awesome.

The Legend of Geneva Swamp

Some time ago, I was out at the bar with a few friends and, as usual, our discussions took tangent after tangent until somehow we ended up discussing the giant swamp that one must cross when traveling south on Interstate 79 past Meadville.

“I’m honestly not afraid of much,” I said, “Terrorists, death, snakes – they don’t bug me, but Geneva Swamp freaks me out. There is no amount of money you could pay me to try to swim across that.”

Most of us agreed: driving over the giant marsh was unsettling, maybe mostly because of the legends that surround the eerie, mysterious body of water. This lead to a discussion on perhaps creating a low-budget documentary about the swamp, our little Everglades of the North, and the myths surrounding it, interviewing longtime locals, fishermen, and state game officers, climaxing with my attempt at canoeing across the swamp solo, facing my fears once and for all. Of course, I wholeheartedly jumped aboard at the idea. While I knew this would never happen - we come up with these ridiculous ideas on a weekly basis - I still decided to do some research.

Officially recognized as Conneaut Marsh, but better known to the general public as the Geneva Marsh or Geneva Swamp, I soon discovered that very little seems to actually be known about what is the largest marsh in all of Pennsylvania – or at least there is very little recorded. A quick Google search of all these names comes up with next to nothing. There are a few photos, some directions, and hunters and fishermen talking about their luck there, but other than that, there is not much description of or facts about the marsh itself. I couldn’t even find a simple number verifying the depth of the marsh.

Maybe that just means the legends are true. Growing up, we’d pass over the mysterious swamp on our way to Pirates games or to Grove City for school shopping and we’d always gaze out the windows with equal wonder and fright. As the story went, when the bridge was being built, an escavator – or depending on who tells the story, maybe a crane or a bulldozer – slipped into the swamp and sank, never to be pulled out… or even found. Rumor has that the bridge is floating, because when they built it in the 1960s, the construction workers could never find the bottom – and although I could find nothing to confirm this, I did dig up a local newspaper article that says some of the steel pilings used to hold up the bridge at 200-feet deep. There’s another story about a floating train bridge that used to cross the swamp and a locomotive was parked there one night. When the workers came back in the morning though, it had disappeared. Vanished. Gone. Never to be found again – and they say that it tipped over in the night and fell in.

True or not, I could find no confirmation either way online. This is what I did learn though.

The marsh ranges between a half-mile and a mile wide and slightly over twelve miles long. It’s inhabinats include the endangared venomous Eastern massasauga rattlesnake, the bowfin (which can grow to as large as five feet long), and it is one of the largest havens for Bald Eagles in all of Pennsylvania. It is a popular area for fishermen. Canoes are really the only type of boat able to go out in the marsh. That’s all I’ve got.

And now I’m curious. I can’t live another year without knowing the truth. It is a goal of mine to eventually go to this swamp, camera in hand, to face my fears and tame the beast that is Geneva Swamp once and for all.

Only in Dreams

Like many others, my dreams are often vivid, absurdly detailed, wildly complex, and completely nonsensical. I’ve always been fascinated by my subconscious and its creativity and its ability to craft such cinematic experiences. Of course, I often forget about them within minutes after waking up. Why some dreams make an impact and stay with a person while others don’t is a mystery to me.

I can still recount every detail from a dream during my early childhood. In it, my brothers were transformed into dinosaurs by a mysterious pink cloud, which entered my subconscious after watching an episode of Duck Tales. It was a terribly sad dream because my brothers could no longer come into my grandma and grandpa’s house and instead, because they were dinosaurs after all, they had to stay in the garage. Grandma would take them out dinner and after I ate, I’d visit with them, but when I came back in to watch Nickelodeon, I had to do it alone. I still worry about this actually happening from time to time and occasionally check over my shoulder for that mysterious pink cloud.

Another childhood dream occurred after I watched The Terminator, sometime around the first or second grade. In the dream, I was in a dark and empty parking lot. It was raining. Quiet. Cold. Suddenly, T-800 appeared and my dream-self was suddenly aware that I was dreaming.

“You can’t kill me!” my childhood self shouted at the cyborg. I only received an icy glare as a response. “This is a dream. I know it’s a dream. You can’t kill me!”

The T-800, without saying a word, lifted his gun and although my dream-self was terrified, I stood my ground. Then he shot. I don’t remember anything else or whether I lived or died (as the old myth goes, one cannot die in their own dream), but I do know that I woke up just as terrified as I had been in the dream.

I guess that’s why second graders shouldn’t watch The Terminator. 

I won’t go into details about my dream last night, because dreams are often only interesting to the person who experienced it (and they usually only make sense to that person anyway), but this particular dream involved my getting mixed up in selling illegal weapons on the local black market, which pissed off the established weapons smugglers whose enterprise I began to hurt. Naturally, the smugglers came after me, which resulted in a gun-happy chase that came to a climax at my childhood home which my family sold when I was twelve, which made absolutely no sense, but still made so much sense. When I woke up, I had to consider for a moment whether or not I had actually gotten into the smuggling of illegal weapons.

Dreams are funny like that.

Norm MacDonald: A Misunderstood Genius

He’s done Saturday Night Live. He’s roasted President Clinton. He’s taken a stab at being a movie star, having his own sitcoms, hosting a Daily Show style sports show, and releasing comedy sketch albums, but for whatever reason, Norm MacDonald has never really penetrated American society in a way that comedians like Dane Cook and Daniel Tosh have. Yet, I’d make a case that Norm, besides Louis CK, is the best comedian out there working today.

Norm is a mad scientist of comedy, a comedian’s comedian, a maniacal comedic genius who apathetically confuses the masses with his off-kilter brand of humor. A prime example of this was his brilliant, uncomfortable, and initially misunderstood G-rated roast of Bob Saget, the jokes of which he read from a notecard.

In this interview with the Toronto Sun a couple of years ago, he attempted to explain his sense of humor.

“I try not to be clever, I don’t like clever jokes at all, I never liked them, and jokes with sexual innuendo, I never liked them either,” Macdonald said. “I never understood that, because my mother would laugh at that, but then she wouldn’t laugh at the underlying thing that the sexual innuendo was saying. That seems dishonest. She’d watch Will & Grace, and be laughing, and I’d go, ‘You know, they actually were talking about getting fucked in the ass,’ but she wouldn’t laugh at that. But on Will & Grace they’d say, ‘I’d like to go up in that tunnel,’ and then she’d laugh. I never like to camouflage the real joke.”

And I think that is what I appreciate about his humor. It’s so straight-forward and deliberate that it is sometimes difficult to understand. We just are not used to it, especially when we live in a world where crap like Scary Movie 8, with its constant sight gags, quickly irrelevant pop culture references, and poor hey-look-at-me-I’m-supposed-to-be-this-celebrity impressions, can make $86 million worldwide.

So, here’s to Norm MacDonald and his making this world a much more enjoyable place to live. For your reading pleasure, be sure to check out his Twitter, where he will bizarrely live-tweet televised golf or say things such as:

• My best friend was brutally murdered last week. Its only now that I can look back and laugh
• Do you know more people are killed in this country every year in car accidents than by shark attacks
• they say that being electocuted to death constitutes cruel and unusual punishment. i agree its cruel but it seems exceedingly usual
• Who is this old man sitting next to me making love to his tonic and gin. Its unseemly.

If you think you need some Norm in your life, here you go:

• Norm MacDonald: Me Doing Stand Up (streamed in full on Netflix)
• 90 minute interview
• On Conan (where he tells a legendary moth joke)
• On Letterman
• On Craig Ferguson
• Classic Norm Stand Up