"I give the fruit jar a swat with my Stetson and a hundred phosphorescent dots of light explode up into the night sky, winking like muzzle flashes in a treeline, a hundred Alabama lightning bugs, alive and free, and glowing, like sparks from a fire."
- Gustav Hasford

Basically an addendum to my last post - it needs to be made understood that The Short-Timers and The Phantom Blooper are like two sides to a thematic coin. Both sides represent humanity in its natural states - killing and living, respectively - and both books are just as beautiful to read. The story of both novels has reached a black crescendo by the time we re-meet Joker in Khe Sanh, bullying New Guys into staying alive and throwing corpses into the wire around their little sandbagged compound just to bear fangs at the jungle and fate which is closing in around from all sides. The second book comes in three parts, just as the first, although where The Short-Timers deals in indoctrination, glamour, and truth, The Phantom Blooper deals in rot, re-birth, and then both. It stabs cruelly at the American state-of-mind and brings up the same familiar questions even know. Soldiers as I've come to know them only have on true religion and it's a rebel kind of hate for peace - not that dream of peace, mind you, just the kind of animal that seems to thrive in it, and the attitudes it brews up, and the complacency. People are born to fight but our kind of peace seems to revoke and deny that, sliding a manhole cover over the instincts genetically inherent to us and letting them mutate in the sewer. Anti-war and Pro-war are both words that mean nothing. There's stupid people, smart people, and then there are soldiers. 

Philosophy aside, the prose is brilliant and alive with colour. Everything is told in broad, visceral strokes and the drama unfolds in your head in shades of red and green and black where necessary, like the pages of a graphic novel massaged into your head. 

"I stomp my foot and the rat retreats into a shadow.
In the light of the flare my bros in the Lusthog Squad of Delta One-Five look like pale lizards. My bros look up at me with lizard eyes. No slack. I gave them the finger. Their lizard eyes click back to their poker cards.
From his new strategic position, the Viet Cong rat stares back to assert his principles.


The illumination flare trembles, freezes Khe Sanh into a faded daguerreotype. Look at all the junk of modern war spilled across our dusty citadel, look at how bearded grunts hang on while the world spins and gravity cheats, look at the concrete bones of an old French outpost (patrolled at night by the ghosts of dead Legionnaires and by the Mongol horsemen of Genghis Khan)--see how the broken walls of the outpost are like rotting teeth, look out beyond our wire at a thousand acres of blasted moonscape, feel the cold hard terror and the calm of it."

- Hasford

Why haven't you read these books?

Taking a Page out of Gus Hasford's Book

“Guns tell the truth. Guns never say, "I'm only kidding." War is ugly because the truth can be ugly and war is very sincere.”

- Gustav Hasford


I figured I'd write-up a quick update. It is my intention to update this blog frequently enough to not let it die. I'm going to do this by quickly covering the books I've been reading, those I can remember. I've bought so many books it's going to be difficult to remember the multitudes I've gone through in the last few months. Gustav Hasford stole so many books over the years he cruised through the literary world he ended up doing jail time. I may be afflicted by the same irrepressible urge to collect books, to the point where I swear I'll make myself bankrupt picking up dog-eared paperbacks from the dime-aisles. I love Hasford's writing - it comes from the gut and has a heartbeat and is black and oppressive. He paints a picture of war that is real in the same way shadows cast at oblique angles are real - bigger and more monstrous but still there and still honest. I'm talking about The Short-Timers and The Phantom Blooper, specifically. Ugly books, beautiful in their ugliness.


I tore apart Last of the Amazons, another of Steven Pressfield's operatic Classical-Age ballets a few months ago. Once again, written in his frenetic, visceral prose, a red canvas made up of the violent brush-strokes of paragraphs catapulting the story forward. And what a tale, adventure, romance, Heroic. Also read The Hunter by Richard Stark, a blistering novel about crime and revenge more recognizable as Mel Gibson's Payback: Director's Cut. Tim O'Brian's The Things They Carried and If I Die in a Combat Zone a tore through as well, brilliantly written, and Stephen King's On Writing I re-read. I'm reading Elmore Leonard's Rum Punch right now, another crime novel (Jackie Brown on the silver screen). Also L. A Confidential and American Tabloid by the esteemed James Ellroy. A man who tells stories in sentences that make better punctuation marks, like foliages stripped down to the bark. The man doesn't write, he whittles, it's crazy.


I expect I'll start writing soon - I'm two weeks from the end of this damn Leadership course. All that's left is the Defensive portion, that part of warfare essentially unchanged since the First World War. Trenches, OverHead Protection, rivetting, wire, mines. Direct and command. I'm enjoying the core components of the course, leading the working elements of Patrolling, Urban Patrolling/Assaulting, and the theory which just looks good on a resume.


I have stories brewed up. And waiting.

Your Head a-Splode!

There's something to be said for a band that sounds nothing like anything else out there. It raises them up where other shortcomings might drag them down - Disturbed, for example, in their genre have an absolutely unique sound.

I'm here to talk about A Place to Bury Strangers, specifically their album Exploding Head. Yeah, yeah, welcome to last year, whatever. APTBS is one of those bands who sound nothing like anything else out there - further to that, they are outstanding and should be checked out immediately.

Their sound is like surf-rock played at the bottom of an elevator shaft - the riffs grate and twang like steel reeds and bring to mind visions of beaches of brass shavings, where waves of mercury lap the shore and all the surfers wear respirators.

The album roars to life with It is Nothing, the guitar starting up like a motor and the vocals a broken, echoing lament. It clocks into my personal favorite track - In Your Heart - a track sure to boil your blood an spread through your body like ink in water. The rhythm-guitar crashes back and forth like echoes in an abandoned hospital. It shakes you down at high velocity, it makes you run, man. Keep Slipping Away amps down the tempo and makes me feel like I'm sitting in a Tiki bar on some Venusian shore. Just alien brilliance. It takes noise-rock to a new level.

Just lend an ear and fly into space.

Really.

Savage!

I'm going to take a minute to talk about Savages, Oliver Stone's latest. When it comes to Stone, I recognize competence and occasionally brilliance and will doll out credit where due. I loved Platoon and I loved Born on the Fourth of July, despised Natural Born Killers and half mixed feelings towards Alexander.




Savages is a hell of a ride, though. I remember seeing the trailer and thought little of it - just another shitty revenge movie, good director or no. A friend of mine suggested we go see it - he'd read the book and knew the source material enough to give it a chance, and we agreed. What I found watching the movie was a splendid exercise in subtlety. You wouldn't think it, from the gore splattered framework of the trailer and the big-name actors headbutting each other for screen time, but the movie is constructed to the minute detail and what I'm going to attempt to illustrate here is what I think worked, and what I think Stone was trying to do.




I learned a long time ago to dismiss the whole book-film relationship and weigh them one against the other on some kind of scale. Film and literature are two completely different narratives. They are two completely different ways in which to convey story, plot, theme, message, and tripping one over the other is going to be like trying to run with your Sperrys tied together. If anything, O's blustering narration throughout the film accentuates just how grating it is to read a movie over watching one. Ridley Scott stripped the narration from Blade Runner for a reason - it was fucking retarded. What Stanley Kubrick did with The Shining was take the bare-bones story of a horror novel and make it a visual experience that conveyed all those feelings of unease and morale bankruptcy frame-by-frame.




The first thing the viewer might notice about Savages is that the protagonists are a bunch of fake fucking morons who are impossible to like. O is about as mature and intelligent as a parking meter and everything she says is stupider than the last, like trying to get a conversation from a stoned High School beauty-queen. I don't even remember the names of the two men she's banging. One if an absolute pastiche of every ex-military protagonist every created - he borrows from so many stereotypes he isn't so much a character as a walking kaleidoscope of cliches. Every now and then some real characterization shines through, like pearls through muck or silt - you get the sense the only thing he really enjoys is killing and mayhem and high-stress. You get the sense he really doesn't give a shit about O, either, other than that he feels he should give a shit (and that her lips look just as good around her bong as they do around his dick). He doesn't really care about [insert name] either, but enjoys taking him under his wing all the same. Especially when the killing starts. It's like he's a Bigger Brother, only finger-painting with blood and cordite. In a way, he's like Tommy Lee Jones in Rolling Thunder. Oliver Stone served two combat tours in Vietnam, and has a very good grasp of military characters - of traumatic stress, of their motivations, of all that. Every time our character (John?) talks about Iraq he talks as if his dialogue was written by every hoagie-eating, ignorant, fat McDonald's Monopoly-playing dipshit who's ever slapped a cowboy hat across his knee, and then edited by the first batch of University students protesting their increased tuition rates to discuss moral ambiguity. It's cardboard, but there's a reason for it to be cardboard. The other of the two men is a "Buddhist", "cares for people", "wants to help the unfortunates", all while selling weed. The man's head is so big I'm surprised it can fit up his own ass. I'm digressing, here - the three protagonists have about as much collective depth as a gasoline puddle in a supermarket parking lot.




The villains, however, the Cartel hooligans, the Mexican Cartel Queen, the crooked FBI agents... all of them have superb dialogue, are excellent actors, deliver where it counts... they make this movie. Thematically, the films begins to work -as the audience (an intelligent audience, anyway) begins to side with the villains. We basically cheer when O gets kidnapped because quite frankly, she's an idiot and deserves to be kidnapped. We cheer the way audiences cheer for Jason when he slashes up college kids in the abandoned campground. The "savage" nature of the movie begins to reveal itself, like the first flakes of ringworm. We might as well be watching gladiators hack each other apart on the sand.




I'm not going to delve into the characterization of the villains, Salma Hayek and Del Toro as always deliver, as does Travolta. The protagonists make stupid decisions and get lucky with a few good ones. The Buddhist starts killing people and John is happier than a pig in shit that he can share his favorite hobby with his best friend. The masks worn throughout the movie are strangely familiar to Army of Two, yet another modern videogame glamorizing amoral, private military contractees running around killing foreigners for no reason other than to do it in bullet-time. I'm going to refrain from spoiling the movie, although halfway-through the viewer can flesh out the finale himself. The film ends, and then ends again. It ends the way Oliver Stone would have ended it, most likely, it ends the way things peter out in the book, no less. But that can't be the real ending! It isn't a happy ending!




I don't think Oliver Stone ever forgave American audiences for their reception of Alexander, and who would? American audiences are retarded. It's why George Lucas is still making money. Stone uses Savages as a means to show those audiences just what he thinks of them, and the result is very entertaining. Thematically, the line between good and bad guys blurs very meticulously until at the finale - who cares who wins? Although the unlike-ability of the protagonists may tip the scales. All in all, good flick.

Sweet Rejection

"Dear Cap, 

Thank you for submitting "Phone Call" to The Walrus. Unfortunately, at this time we do not see a place for it in the magazine.

Thank you for your interest in The Walrus, and best of luck publishing your work elsewhere.

Regards,

The Editorial Staff"

That, ladies and gentlemen, would be the contents of my very first rejection letter. From Walrus Fiction. The story in question is a brief window into an average evening for me while in Kandahar, focusing on an uncomfortable phone call made to a significant other. For those of you who've seen Jarhead (and if you haven't, take the time) you may make the parable to that god-awful scene where he attempts to talk to his High School sweetheart on the phone. I always turn my mind back to Taxi Driver, to how Scorsese pans the camera away from Travis Bickle as he talks to last night's date on a pay-phone. There is no agony like that disconnected from personal contact, and something about the disembodying nature of a telephone call can be, in my mind, the hardest ten-minutes of a lifetime with nothing but your voice and awkward silences to fill the void (not to mention incriminating ambient noises).

Anyways, I finally feel like a real writer! Oh, boy!

I remember more than anything thumbing through Stephen King's earlier novels, where his poor and downtrodden characters made ends meet however they could in the midsts of supernatural situations. Specifically the Torrance family in The Shining (my favourite parts of that book being the first 100 pages or so), and King's frequent forewords, after-words, arguments, 'letters from the author', or the body of On Writing, specifically those making reference to his early days as a writer - a long-haired hippie-punk determined to re-write Lord of the Rings and nailing his rejection notices to the wall above his bed. I think largely due to King I've romanticized the struggle of working-class, poor student, artistic types (allowing, perhaps, for my comfort level therein). It may shed light on why I'm almost overjoyed to received a rejection letter. Then again, I've never been comfortable with praise above constructive-criticism. 

"Phone Call" isn't particularly the kind of story that ends on a positive note. Even reading it again (and, alas, editing) makes me want to bare my teeth, smoking old angers out from behind my gums to strike sparks against the air. I'm very comfortable with hurt and angst, and anger - they broil out of that oven-hot period of my life and bring back those kinds of memories. I have happier things to write about now, but it's less simple to find the words. Dark moods, moral blacks, they can be comforting in that way darkness can both be comforting and terrible. Ideally, I would like to post the excerpts and short stories I drum up on a separate page. Hopefully I can figure out how to use Blogger effectively! Within the next few days I plan to write a review for A Place to Bury Strangers' album Exploding Head, and some more books - among them John Vaillant's The Tiger and perhaps some James Clavelle. 

"I will beg my way into your garden,

just to break my way out when it rains"

-John Mayer

Paperbacks

“Looking back over sixty-odd years, life is like a piece of string with knots in it, the knots being those moments that live in the mind forever, and the intervals being hazy, half-recalled times when I have a fair idea of what was happening, in a general way, but cannot be sure of dates or places or even the exact order in which events took place.”
- George MacDonald Fraser


As promised, I'm going to trudge forth today with a couple of reviews.

Fiscal irresponsibility seems to stay a consistent factor in my erratic city-life, and my recent discovery of Amazon.ca has not helped any. Now, when I say 'discovery', don't be confused, I haven't been unaware of Amazon all these years, I just never bothered to shop online very often. Long story short - no shipping costs for used paperbacks with purchases over $35.00 delivered right to my door? I have a bit of a problem when it comes to owning books - I can't step into a library, for instance, because I'll never return a single copy. I just want that book to live on my fucking shelf, dammit - I want the sum total of my collection to be stacked in more elaborate ways until I have an Arche de Triomphe of books on my shelves, until I've stacked them in pagodas and temples palisaded with other books of different genres and sizes. It's a bizarre quirk. It's hard to say whether I'm better off thanks to the Internet, or worst. In the days when I would wander Chapters and walk out with more books than I could afford, my literary appetites seemed much less efficient... then again, my credit cards are now maxed out and I need to buy more furniture. More bang for my buck still doesn't leave me with any more bucks...

Whatever.

Quartered Safe Out Here
by George Macdonald Fraser

The above quote is from the memoir in question, an account of the author's experiences during the Burmese campaign in World War II. I chose it not only because it was one of the few I could find without a hard-copy of the book in my hand, but because it unashamedly represents something so lacking in most war memoirs - unabashed honesty. 


There are millions of books written about war, from a million perspectives, all of which are without second-guessing taken with a grain of salt (hopefully) by their legions of readers. But this is the only book written about a man's experience at war where he flagrantly takes into question his own reliability as narrator. Having served on combat operations in Afghanistan back in 2010, this hit home. I find myself remembering certain events differently than members of my own platoon (one must take into account those differing perspectives), or than journalistic accounts of them. Fraser is one of the few authors who has effectively sat down and stated "these events are true in the sense that I remember them happening this way" and shrugs as to their veracity in accordance with historical review. Reading these accounts, so comfortably honest, makes it easy to sit down behind that blank OpenOffice document and start typing. I kept slim notes, while I was deployed, but most of them I imagine my ex-girlfriend burned along with all the other correspondence I sent her during my rotation. So it goes.

Honesty is really what drives the story home here, and Fraser's knack for authentic dialogue that practically runs off the pages in rivulets. The narrative in itself is interspersed with personal reflections from the author himself, centering around political and humanitarian issues like the dropping of the Atomic bomb, British Colonialism in India, and the question of "emotional pornography" in the Modern Age. All of these are unapologetically shaped by the author's experiences and as a soldier I can sympathize and even agree in some places. The latter issue, for instance, hit home - I remember being aggressively questioned as to the state of my mental well-being after rotating home, to the point where it was offensive. And with forty-or-so other Camerons having just rotated home, I wasn't alone. The fact is, whatever issues came up from our individual experiences were soothed away by collective therapy. And when I say 'therapy', I mean the kind that takes place in the Junior-Ranks Mess after-hours and during the excursions to the Byward Market. The sad reality is we're fine, and most people can't seem to accept that because they consider their mediocre, sheltered lives to be normative in the grand scheme of things.They labels us (affected by war as we are) as deviants, when in reality we are just fine and probably better off less ignorant and self-entitled.

The central theme to the story is the dysfunctional camaraderies between the members of Nine-Section, who mostly speak in a Northumbrian accent so thick you could spread it on rye. There is that imperishable sense of brotherhood from living together in austere, depraved conditions, with others that has translated over from so many war narratives before and after I won't waste time dwelling on it here. But Fraser's prose is very visceral, and a quarter into the novel I could feel the humidity sucking against my clothes and the rain dripping off the tip of my nose, smell gun-oil and the cheesy waft of old boots. It concerns itself with the infanteer's experience, that is to say slogging through the muck from engagement-to-engagement (which are few and far between, as were mine, in varying degrees of intensity) and more interested in the little stories between road-movements (like the author's promotion and attempt at distilling a well, without success and with ensuing hilarity).

This is what it was like being a British soldier in Burma during the war, and this is what it is like being a soldier at war in general. I burned through this book like wildfire and have since passed it off Cameron-to-Cameron with positive reception all-round. If anybody who reads is reading this, pick it up, you'll be surprised.

No Direction Home

'At the crossroads of my life
I came upon a dark wood,'

I'm sitting in a third-floor mod in Meaford, ON, full of bland mess-hall food and listening to an arrangement of music ticking back and forth between The Black Angels and P. W. Long, with Francoise Hardis thrown in every now and then just to add a few new dimensions to the ambiance. I'm rooted to my chair and so weighed down by the lack of things to do I'm beginning to feel the cafadre I remember feeling on the hotter days in Kandahar, Afghanistan. Land Force Central Area Training-Center Meaford (LFCA TC) isn't the kind of place you can easily find on a map - a small pimple of dormitories, classrooms, and office buildings orbiting the Georgian Bay and the unlucky recipient of all its crazy weather patterns. It isn't unlike most Canadian Forces Bases, to be honest, only that it is located in that region of Ontario dominated principally by small townships, antique stores, and church picnics where the tallest buildings are WAL*MARTs and most of the kids seem to think they are either gangsters or MMA fighters from Huntington Beach, all of whom look and act like fucking clowns.

I'm employed currently in an instructor position for the Basic Military courses running here throughout the summer, teaching infantry fundamentals and trying not to notice how much hotter the female candidates are than I remember from my training years back. In past instances, sequestered in this armpit over a weekend, I would start drinking at noon and wind up going bananas at Bananas Beach Bar in Wasaga, but as I am trying to cut down on that particular vice (amongst others) I am coming to full appreciate just how fucking boring these little towns can be. Petawawa, at the very least, is paradise for the outdoors-man (and Ottawa is so close-by). I think my brain is cooking out of my skull from boredom, and here I am.

I span up another blog because I kind of wanted to focus on literary aspirations, away from the direction my sister blog had taken (which haphazardly cataloged my more debauched escapades and darker moods). The last school year has been tumultuous and unpleasant (romantic upsides notwithstanding), in that terrifying way I'm sure life seems to most people my age. I failed or withdrew from most of my classes at Carleton (which left a sucked-dry feeling in my gut) due principally from lack-of or waning interest, doing nothing for my post-secondary education but sinking me further in debt. I've come to realize that I've come to realize nothing, really - I'm still suspended in a confusing maelstrom without direction in regards to my future aspirations. I clocked As in both my Creative Writing courses, in a rock-star kind of way. I dropped most classes to soldier with the Camerons (and earn enough bank to pay for rent, and groceries). I just can't seem to come to terms with what I want to do with my life. Write? Police? Paramedic? Soldier? Teach? It'll come to me I suppose, and I'm not the first underachiever to spend nights in the dark pulling out his hair. I can't decide whether I want to enroll in Fall classes this September. In terms of military careerism, you can only get so far as a Reservist - and I'll just chew the insides of my mouth on that one, for now.

I'm considering going through with a Commonwealth Transfer to the Royal Parachute Regiment in the UK, for a 4-year contract. So I can travel and see the English military at its finest. Just waiting for my sweetheart to finish her last few years of University (being far more organized than I am). I'm also more recently considering some Private Military work, having met a fellow Corporal who spent some time in Africa doing the same. I miss the adrenaline high and the sleepless numb of the operational tempo, and I'm getting a taste of it working long days here as an instructor, although it has substantially less bite.

I'll keep threading water, I guess. In the meantime, I'll use this blog to review books and music I find particularly spellbinding, tell stories, write excerpts, and just plug World-Wide into the Web.

"Oh, be joyful
'cause that shit spreads"
- Matthew Good