The Less You Know, The More You Aren’t

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I’ve never understood how people know exactly who they are – not only the presentation of themselves but lying in bed with that awareness. I realize it is mostly a farce created to help us through birth to death, but I remain dumbfounded by their remarkable certainity in all of it.

My heads remains much the same as it was at Mia Frumhartz’s birthday party – I think it was her eighth – at the bowling alley where I decided to help her off with her coat. I didn’t know why I did that, aside from the fact that I like to be in the good graces of the fairer sex. I thought I would begin to know more about who I was as life went on. I was wrong.

My only consistent behavior has been to seek solitutude. The results are pending as is the impetus. In other words, I’m still just a kid trying to get away with stuff. My immediate desire when I have free time is to do things I’m not supposed to – smoke, drink, read trashy books – and get away with that as long as possible.

I do other things too, read stuff like Sartre, re-watch Tarkovsky films and have fine thoughts about important things. And I write too, my latest book focuses on an identity crisis, a person who revels in not only not knowing who he is but condemns those who pretend otherwise. And he blogs about that.

Form of Rejection

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I have been sending out queries and writing samples to literary agents for many years and received the same form responses in a variety of phrasings: It’s not quite what I’m looking for at this time… I have to be particularly selective about which projects I represent…I can only responsibly take on a few new clients each year…I’m not the best fit for this project at this time… I’m not the best match…I’m not the right agent… I’m going to have to step aside…will be stepping back from consideration… I’ll be regretfully stepping aside.

Best wishes in your search for representation. Wishing you the very best of luck in your publishing endeavors. Please accept my very best wishes for your writing success. Best of luck with your future queries. I wish you the best of luck. I wish you all the best in your search for representation and in your writing career. We’re rooting for you! Until then, you have my…Very best.

Along with these snippets of clearly intended prose, the replies are sent from a “Do-Not-Reply-To-This-Email Address”. After 35 years, you’d think I’d get the message.

Advance Reviews for “The Vanishing Pill”

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Contrasting the dim of the city against the icy wilds of Greenland, The Vanishing Pill exposes the violent inner conflicts of our nature. As McPhedran’s liner notes state: “Dreams aren’t simple things; they’re the only fucking thing.”

The advanced reviews are unanimous…

Atlantic Tri-Monthly: “I ate it up like a rabid monkey. McPhedran stews his prose with a burning hot sauce that leaves you screaming for more.” 

USA Tomorrow: “You have not lived until you have read this intoxicating yarn of lust and joy.”

NY1 Off-line: “New Yorker McPhedran’s latest explosion of prose lights up the city with a tower of anguish and delight.”

Foxy News on-line: “It’s a good book, even with all the big words.”

Some Dictator Someplace

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We cannot have a society in which some dictator someplace can start imposing censorship here in the United States. Because if somebody is able to intimidate folks out of releasing a satirical movie, imagine what they start doing when they see a documentary that they don’t like or news reports that they don’t like.

Or even worse, imagine if producers and distributors and others (colleges perhaps?) start engaging in self-censorship because they don’t want to offend the sensibilities of somebody whose sensibilities probably need to be offended. So that’s not who we are. That’s not what America is about.

President Obama on Kim Jong Un’s attempt to prevent the release of Seth Rogen and Even Goldberg’s 2014 film The Interview

No Need for Good and Evil

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One story-telling aspect I’ve always struggled with is the demand for delineating between good and evil, which is what makes blockbusters such as The Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, Project Hail Mary or anything in the Marvel Universe unpalatable for me.

“You and me are good people,” Rocky says.

“Yeah.” I smile. “I suppose we are.”

The technocrats would have us believe that we cannot come to terms with our highly problematic selves nor accept that we will always have needs and desires that will damage us throughout our lives. Another way to picture this is thinking of a tsunami, Hollywood offering a magnificent wave cresting in slow motion over a city instead of the insidiousness of the thing, relentlessly rising, permeating everything, and then staying.

Hurricane Sandy, Downtown Manhattan, 2012

I recently went to see John Proctor is the Villain on Broadway, which also tends toward sorting people as good or evil, although it does allow for a gray area in the end, those who doubt, those we really don’t know, who we tend to judge but now might resist that temptation and think a fraction more.

Ari Aster’s black comedy Eddington digs deeper. Set in the good old Covid days, the film attacks both polarities – a sheriff refusing to wear a mask, a mysteriously glamorous Antifa plane, along with a barrage of other triggering images and dialogue – encouraging the audience to engage while offering little to no satisfaction in the end.

I suppose that is what I appreciate most about an effective narrative. It isn’t the dream of being carried off into a magical world but rather the demanding process of being made to think and realize something other than what I thought I already knew.

My “Hail Mary” Complex

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I was genuinely excited to read Andy Weir’s highly-acclaimed Project Hail Mary, hoping for inspiration on improving the writing, structure and marketability of my own speculative work, The Cx Trilogy.

My positive outlook waned after a few pages. It wasn’t just the undeveloped writing nor the caricatured characters – much of which seem at first draft level – but more the lack of an engaging narrative. While the premise was compelling – why is the sun getting dimmer and how can this be stopped? – there was little development of the protagonist and his journey beyond a barrage of scientific details.

I’ll cite examples to mitigate your opinon of me as a bitter unpublished author. Below that is the room I woke up in. The one with my dead friends. I sniffle and wipe a tear away. Initially, I thought this was intended as sarcasm, but I soon realized that this was a genuine expression of Ryland Grace’s emotion.

Each of them kind of look like a beetle. Each beetle has a name up top: “John”, “Paul”, “George” and “Ringo”. I’m on a suicide mission. John, Paul, George and Ringo get to go home, but my long and winding road ends here. This sense of humor permeates the book.

My students didn’t swear at me. Their squabbles were usually resolved within a few minutes, either by a teacher-enforced handshake or detention. And somewhat selfish but here it is: They looked up to me. I missed that respect. Mr. Weir has clearly never spent a day as a teacher in his life.

I could go on, but why bury myself even deeper? Mr. Weir has achieved incredible commercial success and knows how to market his work, while I’m an unpublished failure who teaches high school…which is what makes this difficult to process.

I genuinely cannot understand what it is about Mr. Weir’s work that is compelling to such a large audience. And what it is about my own writing that seems destined to never get beyond the literary agent’s automatic reply: Unfortunately, your project does not sound like a fit for me at this time, and so I will have to pass. Boo hoo. Poor me.

Werner Herzog’s Reflections on the Natural World

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I had an encounter with a big boa constrictor, which poked its head through the chicken wire surrounding its wooden cage and looked at me fearlessly in the eye for a long time. Stubbornly confronting each other. we were pondering the relatedness of the species. Both of us, since the relatedness was slight, felt sad and turned away from each other.

A drunk spat at a beautiful monkey, black, with limbs that go on forever. He looks very intelligent. He is sitting with his tail wrapped around his buttocks, his knees under his chin and his arms around his knees. I realized I was sitting the same way. Does the monkey dream my dreams in the branches above me?

Next to a surfboard, a cormorant popped up from the water, looking so out of place and artificial that for a moment I thought it was plastic, like the fake ducks that hunters put out on ponds as decoys, but then it suddenly dived so elegantly that I gained confidence in cormorants.

Flesh-eating flowers oozing oily invitations lure insects to their death. On rotting wood, slimy fungi brood poison. The jungle, existing exclusively in the present, is certainly subject to time, but remains forever ageless. Any concept of justice would be antithetical to all this.

Why do these animal dramas preoccupy me so? Because i do not want to look inside myself…and would prefer to observe the jungle revel in its debauched lewdness.

Excerpts from Werner Herzog’s Conquest of the Useless.

Pink Soda Dance

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Hands came over my face, a sharp young woman in sunglasses and nothing of a dress. She pretended it was an accident but demanded that I get out of the way so that she and her friends could post a video.

She feigned shock when I told her that she was being rude. They passed out the drinks, mostly pink soda, and danced, the last one in a blue head band, a feather tied to that, her face pressed close to a wall, near a screwed-down pipe.

I had to get a picture, especially with the ocean and trees in the distance, but was locked out of my phone and had to resort to AI.

Bequeathed Baby

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Winds came hard from the east, carrying my ex to the sands she loved and an urn, a bequeathment from her father, now chipped, his old apartment full of former students.

The water flooded up into a pool, the students playing and spitting, little to say, the phone – the phone again! – half burned in the muddy sand, unable to grip, to move back, even with the kids trying to throw rocks, thinking he might never come back, and then having to go to the bathroom, always that.

He was a baby. He wanted everything for himself and then none of it, vanishing into nothing. And not even that.

Needing to Wake

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Turning a playing card over and over, the same thing on both sides…unable to open your phone, the wrong password, wrong fingers too.

Opening the door, seeing your partner half dressed with a stranger, knowing it would be like that, feeling sick and afraid.

The climactic end to a film oozing down from the floors above, the passage getting narrower and narrower until you can’t find the right door and are on an elevator that twists sideways and stops on an impossibly high floor, everything glass all around.

The terror digs deep, and all you have to do is wake.