Kids These Days: Awesome Whether Or Not You Believe in Them

This time last year I was on my second day of what would turn out to be a month-long stay at my local hospital, where I got to experience being told I might lose my leg, that kidneys might never work again, and  the otherworldliness of getting regularly dosed with Oxycontin to help deal with the pain in my leg.

And now, a year later, my kidneys work great, I'm on medication that helps maintain them and the rest of my renal system, and my leg only aches sometimes.

Today has been one of those times.

And with the news of the past few months by turns infuriating and depressing me, I figured it might be time to dust off one of my most optimistic and hopeful posts and repost it here. Sure did wonders for my spirits, yet again! And I hope it does for yours too!

So here it is: a post I originally wrote ten years ago, in the midst of a divisive presidential election-one that reflected (and continues to reflect) my unshakeable faith in this country. And here we are, a full decade later, and that faith in my fellow Americans remains strong and unshakeable.

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So, about my day gig.

I teach ancient history to eighth graders.

And like I tell them all the time, when I say, "Ancient history," I'm not talking about the 1990s.

For thirteen/fourteen year-olds, mired hopelessly in the present by a relentless combination of societal trends and biochemistry, there's not much discernible difference between the two eras.

I wish!

It's a great job. But even great jobs have their stressors.

Like being assigned chaperone duty during the end-of-the-year dance.

Maybe you're familiar with what currently passes for "popular music" among fourteen year-olds these days. I gotta say, I don't much care for it. Then again, I'm fifty-one. And I can't imagine that most fifty-one year-olds in 1979 much cared for the stuff that I was listening to then.

And it's not as if I'm saying I had great taste in music as a fourteen year-old. If I were trying to make myself look good I'd try to sell you some line about how I only listened to jazz if it was Billie Holiday or Miles Davis, and thought the Police were smokin' and of course I bought Dire Straits' immortal Making Movies album, as well Zeppelin's In Through The Out Door when they both came out that year.

Well. No.

In 1979 I owned a Village People vinyl album (Cruisin', with "YMCA" on it), and a number of ElvisPresley albums and 8-track tapes. I also listened to my dad's Eagles albums quite a bit. An uncle bought Supertramp's Breakfast in America for me, and I was hooked on a neighbor's copy of Freedom at Point Zero by Jefferson Starship, but really only because of the slammin' guitar solo Craig Chaquico played on its only hit single: "Jane." And I listened to a lot of yacht rock on the radio. I didn't know it was "yacht rock" back then. Would it have mattered?

The sad reality

But bear in mind we didn't have streaming music back then. And my allowance I spent mostly on comic books.

Ah, youth.

Anyway, my point is that someone my age back then may very well have cringed hard and long and as deeply if forced to listen to what I was listening to at eardrum-bursting decibels, and for the better part of two hours.

That was me on the second-to-the-last-day of school a week or so back.

Two hours.

Two hours of rapper after rapper (if it's not Eminem, Tupac, or the Beastie Boys, I must confess it all sounds the same to me) alternating with heavily autotuned "singing" by Rihanna, Katy Perry, Taylor Swift, etc.

Thank God we got some relief in the form of the occasional Bruno Mars song. Bruno, he brings it.

All Hail Bruno Mars - Savior of My Sanity

And through it all, the kids were out there on the floor. Mostly girls, and mostly dancing with each other.

Great album, great cover, great band.

One group of these kids in particular caught my attention. Three girls, all fourteen, all of whom I knew. All wearing what '80s pop-rock band Mr. Mister once referred to as the "Uniform of Youth."

Of course, the uniform continues to change, just as youth itself does.

But in embracing that change, does youth itself actually change? Bear with me while I quote someone a whole lot smarter than I on the matter:

"Kids today love luxury. They have terrible manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love to gab instead of getting off their butts and moving around."

The guy quoted (in translation) was Socrates, quoted by his pupil Plato, 2,400 years ago.

And some things never change.

Getting back to the three girls mentioned above, their "uniform of youth" was the one au courant in malls and school courtyards across the length and breadth of this country: too-tight jeans, short-sleeved or sleeveless t-shirts, tennis-shoes. They looked a whole lot like so many other girls their age, out there shaking it in ways that mothers the world over would not approve of.

In other words, they looked like thousands, hell, millions of American girls out there running around today, listening to watered down pablum foisted on them by a rapacious, corporate-bottom-line-dominated music industry as "good music", for which they pay entirely too much of their loving parents' money, and to which they will constantly shake way too much of what Nature gave them–even under the vigilant eyes of long-suffering school staff members.

Yep, American girls. From the soles of their sneakers to the hijabs covering their hair.

Oh, right. Did I mention that these girls were Muslims? Well, they are. One from Afghanistan. One from Turkmenistan, and one from Sudan. At least two of them are political refugees.

You see, I teach in one of the most diverse school districts in the nation. One of the main reasons for this ethnic diversity is that there is a refugee center in my district. The center helps acclimate newcomers to the United States and then assists in resettling them; some in my district, some across the country.

So in this campaign season, when I hear some orange-skinned buffoon talking trash about Muslims, stirring up some of my fellow Americans with talk of the dangerous "foreign" *other*, it rarely squares with the reality I've witnessed first-hand getting to know Muslim families and the children they have sent to my school to get an education: something the kids tend to take for granted (because, you know, they're kids, and hey, kids don't change). Something for which their parents have sacrificed in ways that I, a native-born American descendant of a myriad of immigrant families, can scarcely imagine.

(And it ought to go without saying that this truth holds for the countless Latino families I've known over the years as well.)

I'm not saying they're saints. I'm saying they're people. And they're here out of choice. Whether we like that or whether we don't, they're raising their kids here. And guess what? These kids get more American every day. Regardless of where their birth certificate says they're from.

Just something to think about, as we kick into the final leg of this excruciating election season.

Oh, come on. You didn't think this piece was gonna be just me grousing about kids having lousy taste in music, did ya?

(And they do, but that's really beside the point.)

Seems an appropriate way to tie it all together.

 

Thoughts on Writing & Memory

While digging into my current WIP I found myself harking back to some of the questions I asked in the course of writing this post from a few years ago regarding the human memory and the writer's attempts to play with memory over the course of a narrative. Worth diving into again, and I stand by the recommendations below. Happy Valentine's Day to all who observe it!

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Memory is the treasury and guardian of all things.

                 

                                      — Marcus Tullius Cicero, On the Orator

My brother-in-law has a saying: "With family, it is best to have a short memory." 

I was thinking about this quote during a recent conversation I had with my wife. She showed me a photo of something and I asked her what it was. She said to me, "I showed you this thing just the other day."

I responded with an intelligent, "You did?"

And, in that patient tone she tends to employ with me when I'm being especially dense (it happens a lot), she said, "Yes, and you said at the time, 'Looks exactly like I pictured it.'”

I have no memory of this conversation. Or had no memory of it, until my wife reminded me of what I had said.  And I think this is an interesting illustration of how tricky human memory can be.

And what’s even trickier is trying to write human memory in all of its forms: straight remembering; having some thing tickle at the back of your skull, but you can’t quite put your finger on it; not remembering at all, etc.

Luckily we're not talking about THIS kind of "Memory."

One of the things that I have always prided myself on throughout my life, is my memory. Now deep in the midst of my late 50s, I find certain names dates, etc., elude me and I have to reach for them. 

I have also noticed, as illustrated in the instance related above, that my mind is pretty efficient about discarding memory that is trivial or completely unimportant to my long-term goals, to my long-term interests, or to anything other than being in the moment. 

And yet other such memories, the feeling of hiking the Virgin River in Zion National Park, for example, could be a cursory memory that some people wouldn’t remember. And yet I do, and I don’t just remember the hiking. I also remember the sun filtering off the canyon walls, the smell of the river, as I waded through it, the sound of people murmuring to each other as they hiked up the river, and so on and so forth.

Like I said, memory is a tricky thing. 

And it's even more dicey to effectively to write about it. 

Some examples that spring to mind (Warning: there are a few SPOILERS looming ahead)

In his novel Inferno Dan Brown has his protagonist Robert Langdon awaken in an Italian hospital with no memory of the past several days, and he spends the lion's share of of the rest of the book trying to put together some fragmented images and some sentence fragments, especially the repeated phrase “very sorry,” repeated over and over again. Turns out he was thinking of the Italian artist and art historian Giorgio Vasari.

For my money, Brown draws this out quite a bit longer than necessary, and this eventual "revelation" is expected to carry far too much of the load as a plot transition point. This is no criticism of Dan Brown. Far from it. I'll be the first to say that his experiment with the vagaries of a fragmented memory and their collective effect on the narrative, especially when the point-of-view character is the one struggling with their memory, is one worth taking. And it's definitely a larger risk than I have taken in my own fiction writing.

This trope has been around for a while. Memory loss has frequently been used as a crutch tossed into any number of formulaic novels/films/TV shows over the years, with mixed results. Thinking especially of some good examples (The Prisoner, starring the inimitable Patrick McGoohan, and the ambitious World War II psychological thriller 36 Hours–a film featuring superb performances by James Garner, Eva Marie Saint and Rod Taylor–both come to mind) and some hokey ones (Pretty much anything produced by 60s/70s Hollywood TV heavyweight Quinn Martin, with the exception of two stand-out series (The Fugitive and The Streets of San Francisco).

And there are, of course, many other relatively recent novels/films that have played around with sketchy memory: not least the Guy Pearce vehicle Memento, which turns on the point of view character having brain damage that has affected his ability to process short-term memory into long-term memory, and Dennis Lehane's terrific novel (and the Martin Scorsese-helmed film of the same name adapted from it) Shutter Island–a master class in the use of an unreliable narrator.

Other successful novels (and films adapted from them) in the unreliable narrator vein include such bestsellers as The Girl on the Train and The Woman in the Window, neither of which I have read–Or maybe I actually have, and just don't remember? (*rimshot*)–and both of which I am given to understand make use of questionable memory on the part of the main character (at least in part alcohol-induced). 

There have been so many films of this variety, that the whole subgenre even has its own excellent parody: the 2022 Netflix miniseries The Woman in the House Across the Street from the Girl in the Window. It's worth your time. Kristen Bell alone as the main character is worth the price of admission.

For me, though, no one has ever done the "shattered memory holding back the main character, who must race against time to put the pieces together" thing quite so well as thriller master Robert Ludlum.

I'm talking, of course, about Ludlum's masterwork, The Bourne Identity. And yes, I am well aware that Ludlum's novel has long since been adapted into a rightly well-regarded series of thriller films starring Matt Damon and Brian Cox. If you haven't seen these films, I urge you to do so. They are incredibly well-done.

And yet, if you haven't read the source material, Ludlum's original novel...even if you have seen the movies based on it, I strongly urge you to give the book a chance. There are so many differences between book and movies, and I don't want to spoil them, so I'll just close with a phrase that Ludlum used (to vastly greater effect) as his own earlier version of Brown's "very sorry":

"Cain is for Carlos, and Delta is for Cain."

How about you? Favorite works of fiction that play around with memory? Challenges you have faced trying to play around with memory in your own work? Let us hear from you in the comments section!

See you in two weeks!

Ptolemy VIII Eurgetes: What Your Subjects Call You Behind Your Back Is a Lot More Important Than What They Call You to Your Face (CA. 182–116 B.C.)

The Alexandrians owe me one thing; they have seen their king walk!

—Scipio Aemilianus, Roman politician and general 

That’s right, another Ptolemy. But where the first of our Ptolemaic bastards (Ptolemy I Soter [“Savior”]) was ruthless and shrewd, and the second (Ptolemy Keraunos [“Thunderbolt”]) was brave, intemperate, and violent, our third was a gluttonous monster who celebrated one of his marriages by having his new stepson assassinated in the middle of the wedding feast, and later murdered his own son by this same woman (his sister!) in a brutal and sadistic fashion. 

When he took the throne of Egypt in 145 B.C., our Ptolemy took the reign name “Eurgetes” (Greek for “Benefactor”). In truth he was anything but. Quickly tiring of his lying, his murderous rages, and his rampant gluttony, his subjects began to refer to him as “Physcon” (“Potbelly”) because he was so fat. The quote that leads off this chapter references that physical characteristic as well as his laziness. Beholden to the Roman Republic for its support, Ptolemy VIII was forced to actually walk through the city of Alexandria (as opposed to being carted about in a litter) while playing tour guide to a visiting collection of Roman V.I.P.s, including Scipio Aemilianus, the author of the quote.

Ptolemy "happily" giving Scipio Aemilianus the aforementioned guided tour

A younger son of Ptolemy V who didn’t do the Ptolemaic dynasty any favors, this Ptolemy bounced around from Egypt to Cyprus to Cyrenaica (Libya) until his older brother (also a Ptolemy) died in 145 B.C. The dead Ptolemy’s young son was crowned shortly after his father’s death (taking the regnal name of Ptolemy VII) with his mother, Cleopatra II—no, not that Cleopatra—as co-ruler. In short order, our Ptolemy manipulated the common people into supporting him as king in place of his nephew, and managed to work out a compromise with his sister-also-his-brother’s-widow wherein he married her and the three of them became co-rulers of Egypt. 

Alexandria in the first century B.C.

Not only did Ptolemy then promptly have his nephew (and now stepson) killed at the aforementioned wedding feast, he seduced and married as his second wife the boy’s sister, who also happened to be his own niece, and his wife’s daughter (confused yet?), also named Cleopatra. (No, still not that Cleopatra.) This after knocking up the sister/wife/widow of his dead predecessor herself, siring a son named Ptolemy (again) Memphitis. 

When the people of Alexandria eventually rebelled and sent Ptolemy VIII, the younger Cleopatra, and their children packing to Cyprus, Cleopatra II (the sister/widow/first wife) set up their son Ptolemy Memphitis as co-ruler and herself (once more) as regent. Within a year, our Ptolemy (Ptolemy VIII, if you’re trying to keep track) had the boy, his own son, murdered. Pretty awful, right? Unspeakable? 

No, that’s what came next. Once he’d had the child (no older than twelve) killed, Ptolemy VIII had him dismembered and (according to such ancient sources as Diodorus Siculus and Justin, but treated by modern historians with a healthy dose of skepticism) sent to his mother as a birthday present! As if this wasn’t enough, Ptolemy went on to retake his throne and share power with his first wife (yes, the sister/wife/widow whose sons he’d killed) until he died of natural causes after a long life in 116 B.C. 

At least, as she had done with their elder brother Ptolemy VI, Cleopatra II managed to outlive Physcon, place another of her sons (Ptolemy IX) on the throne as co-ruler, and serve as regent to yet another underage princeling.

Unspeakable bastard. 

Antiochus IV Epiphanes: Why We “Draw the Line” (CA. 215–164 B.C.)

After reading [the senate decree] through [Antiochus] said he would call his friends into council and consider what he ought to do. Popilius, stern and imperious as ever, drew a circle round the king with the stick he was carrying and said, ‘Before you step out of that circle give me a reply to lay before the senate.’ For a few moments [Antiochus] hesitated, astounded at such a peremptory order, and at last replied, ‘I will do what the senate thinks right.’ Not till then did Popilius extend his hand to the king as to a friend and ally.

—Titus Livius (Livy), Ab Urbe Condita (The History of Rome)

Gotta love this guy: a propagandist of the first order, his years in Rome had impressed upon him the futility of fighting that resourceful people and of the importance of staying on their good side. A usurper (no surprise, considering how many Hellenistic monarchs were), he stole the throne from a nephew he later murdered after first marrying the boy’s mother. Antiochus was remembered by the ancient Hebrews as the evil king whose coming was predicted by their prophet Daniel. 

Antiochus was the son of Antiochus III, who ruled the Seleucid Empire (which included parts of present-day Syria, Turkey, Iraq, Iran, and Pakistan). Our Antiochus spent many years as a political hostage to the Roman Republic after a peace treaty between the two countries was established. After his father died, Antiochus’s older brother, Seleucus IV, succeeded to the throne. Antiochus was recalled from Rome, while Seleucus’s older son was sent there as a more appropriate political hostage from the new king. When Seleucus was murdered, his older son was still in Rome. Antiochus took the opportunity to seize the throne, at first calling himself co-ruler. 

It took Antiochus a few years to get around to murdering his nephew. After consolidating his power base, Antiochus next went to war with the much weaker neighboring kingdom of Egypt, all but conquering it before being confronted by the Roman ambassador, Popilius, who demanded that Antiochus withdraw from Egypt or face war with the Roman Republic. This is the source of the adage of “drawing a line in the sand” (as laid out in the quotation that opens this chapter). Antiochus did not step over the line, but retreated from Egypt.

A Renaissance look at the “line in the sand.”

By this time broke and really pissed off, Antiochus decided to loot the city of Jerusalem and its venerable temple on his way home to Syria. In his eyes, it was merely a way of catching the Hebrews up on their back taxes. The Hebrews didn’t see it that way, and when rioting ensued, Antiochus made the serious mistake of trying to suppress the Jewish religion. 

Sept Maccabées, by 
Audierne Saint-Germain

The reasonably foreseeable result was the famous Maccabean uprising. You may have heard of a traditional celebration called Hanukkah? Commemorates the rededication of the temple after Judah Maccabee kicked the Seleucid king’s butt? This is that. Later Seleucid kings agreed to allow the Hebrews their religious freedom and limited political autonomy. By that time, Antiochus had kicked off himself, dying suddenly while fighting rebels in Iran.

And on that note, Happy Hanukkah, and see you in two weeks!

Philip II OF Macedonia: Sometimes the Bastard Doesn’t Fall Far from the Tree (382–336 B.C.)

Continuing to excerpt my book The Book of Ancient Bastards. This week, King Philip II of Macedonia, the father and role model of that most terrifying of ancient conquerors, Alexander the Great!

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O how small a portion of earth will hold us when we are dead, who ambitiously seek after the whole world while we are living.

—Philip II of Macedonia 

The hard-bitten, ambitious, and ruthless youngest son of an undistinguished royal house, Philip II of Macedonia was a usurper and military genius who reorganized the army of his backward mountain kingdom and in so doing changed the course of history. He also fathered and trained the most successful conqueror the ancient world ever knew. 

Born in 382 B.C., Philip had two older brothers and was deemed so expendable that he was used as a hostage (a political practice during ancient times in which two sides in any given conflict exchanged Very or Semi Important Persons after the signing of a peace treaty, as guarantee of their future good behavior towards each other). Thus, he spent years in the Greek city-state of Thebes while still a boy, and carefully studied the organization of the Theban army. 

After his return to Macedonia, a Greek-speaking kingdom situated in the mountains and plains north of Greece itself, Philip soon found himself regent for his nephew Amyntas IV, infant son of his older brother Perdiccas II. In 359 B.C., Philip took the throne for himself, setting aside the young king and declaring himself the rightful king. It was a naked exercise of power and nothing else. 

The Macedonian Phalanx

Moving quickly to modernize his army, Philip arranged to pay his soldiers, drilling them incessantly and converting what had previously been feudal levies into the first truly professional nonmercenary fighting force in the ancient world. For the next two decades, he campaigned every year, gradually expanding Macedonia’s territory in all four directions, but especially to the south, toward mainland Greece. 

In 349 B.C., Philip captured the city of Olynthus (in northwestern Greece), whose leaders had made the twin mistake of opposing him and housing two rival claimants to the Macedonian throne. In a preview of what his famous son would later do to those who defied him, Philip destroyed the city utterly and sold its surviving inhabitants into slavery. 

The ruins of ancient Olynthus–destroyed by Philip II in 349 B.C.

By 338 B.C., Philip had conquered all of Greece and the rest of the Balkan peninsula besides. Then he got himself “elected” leader of the so-called “Hellenic League”(a loose collection of Greek city-states that banded together against the Persians). He announced his intention to invade the Persian Empire as revenge for the Persian burning of Athens 150 years previous. 

Philip assassinated at his daughter's wedding

But problems at home distracted him. He quarreled with his son and heir Alexander, who fled along with his mother, Philip’s first wife, Olympias. Recently married (Macedonian kings habitually took more than a single wife) to a much younger woman who quickly bore him another son, Philip disinherited Alexander, making his newborn son his heir. Philip was assassinated in 336 B.C. (allegedly with the complicity of both Alexander and his wild, scheming mother), leaving his infant youngest son as “king” for all of about ten seconds before Alexander, echoing his own father's move against his own brother's son, set aside the baby king and took the throne. 

Critias: Leader of the Thirty Athenian Tyrants– Putting the Terror into Tyranny (436–403 B.C.)

Continuing to excerpt my book The Book of Ancient Bastards. This week: Critias the Athenian tyrant!

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Let it not be in the power of Critias to strike off either me, or any one of you whom he will. But in my case, in what may be your case, if we are tried, let our trial be in accordance with the law they have made concerning those on the list… [Y]ou must see that the name of every one of you is as easily erased as mine.

 —Athenian politician Theramenes, quoted in Xenophon’s Hellenica 

Playwright, poet, scholar, great-uncle of the famous Athenian philosopher Plato (and contemporary of Plato’s even more famous teacher Socrates), Critias was renowned for much of his life as a writer whose work was in demand. He was even featured as the titular character in one of Plato’s dialogues, The Critias. 

Too bad he ended his life as a blood-soaked traitor to everything his city had once stood for, a classic example of conservative overreaction resulting in the loss of much life and property. 

By 404 B.C., Athens had lost its decades-long war with Sparta. As a result of the humiliating peace treaty, the Athenian city walls were leveled, its navy dismantled, and a collection of thirty oligarchs who favored Sparta were placed in charge of the government. Critias, a follower of fellow Athenian bastard Alcibiades during the war, was named one of these oligarchs (known afterward as “The Thirty Tyrants”). 

Critias, a strong personality with lots of scores to settle and bitterness eating away at his very soul, soon embarked on a vendetta against anyone who had ever wronged him. What followed was a bloodbath, one of the first recorded political purges in history.  

“Day after day,” writes Xenophon, “the list of persons put to death for no just reason grew longer.” For every person he denounced and had put to death, Critias received his confiscated property as a reward. When the Athenian statesman Theramenes protested that The Thirty ought to be careful about killing people so indiscriminately, noting that today’s butcher is tomorrow’s butchered, Critias famously responded with a statement that would be echoed for years afterward by politicians conducting similar purges: “If any member of this council, here seated, imagines that an undue amount of blood has been shed, let me remind him that with changes of constitution such things cannot be avoided.” One of the first times a politician used some variation of the notion, “You can’t make any omelet without breaking a few eggs!” 

Critias went on to denounce his former friend Theramenes, calling him a traitor and enemy of both The Thirty and the Spartan troops who had placed them in power. After heated debate, Theramenes was dragged from the meeting and executed on the spot. 

Emboldened by this silencing of their most vocal critic, The Thirty went on to denounce and execute thousands of Athenian citizens, seizing their property as they went. Within a year, the oligarchs had become such an object of fear and hatred that the people rose against them. Critias was killed in the fighting that followed, and his memory was justly damned in the minds of his countrymen for decades afterwards.

See you in two weeks!

The Tyrant Who Sold the Philosopher Plato Into Slavery

A few years back I wrote a series of brief biographical sketches collected in a volume entitled The Book of Ancient Bastards: 101 of the Worst Miscreants and Misdeeds from Ancinet Sumer to the Enlightenment. Now out of print (it is, in fact, the only one of my books not still in print), It remains one of my favorites from among my own work. This week I've decided to share the story from this book, of how an early poet–admittedly an incredibly powerful one–dealt with harsh criticism of his work.

Plato: you expect this guy to be fun at parties?

So here he is, Dionysius I, tyrant of Syracuse!

When Philosophers and Tyrants Don’t Mix (ca. 432–367 B.C.) 

[Dionysius], taking offence at something [Plato] said to him . . . ordered him to be brought into the common market-place, and there sold as a slave for five minas: but the philosophers (who consulted together on the matter) afterwards redeemed him, and sent him back to Greece, with this friendly advice. . . . That a philosopher should very rarely converse with tyrants.

—Diodorus Siculus, ancient Sicilian Greek geographer and historian 

If ever there was a piece of work who could prove single-handedly that one man holding all the levers of power is usually a lousy idea, it was that real piece of work, Dionysius I, tyrant of the Greek city-state of Syracuse in Sicily. Originally a government clerk, Dionysius rose through the ranks to ultimate power based on his ability as a political, diplomatic, and military strategist. To balance this out, he was also arbitrary, capricious, cruel, and (perhaps worst of all) harbored literary pretensions. 

Bear in mind that Dionysius was a tyrant in the ancient sense of the word (Note: in the ancient Greek world the word 'tyrant' didn't necessarily carry the negative connotation it does today. It simply referred to someone who control of a city by military force and used his troops to enforce his rule.). As such he was a military man, and particularly fearsome in battle. He’d lost an eye early in life, and as a result presented a ferocious image that struck terror in the hearts of his enemies. That terror was justified, as even in victory he could be a particularly ruthless bastard: In 386 B.C., Dionysius led his mercenary army in an attack on the Greek city of Rhegium (now Reggio, in southern Italy). After a protracted and bloody siege, the tyrant, who fancied himself a cultured and enlightened man, sold the entire population of the city into slavery. 

So this was the fearsome antagonist, ruthless conqueror and all-around rough guy, who also fancied himself both a poet and a philosopher, boasting “far more of his poems than of his successes in war,” according to Diodorus. Poetry being a big deal in the ancient world, and Dionysius being the big man on campus in Syracuse, he surrounded himself with other literary and intellectual types, including Plato, who, as described in the quote opening this chapter, got sold as a slave in the public market for speaking his mind in the presence of the philosopher-tyrant. 

In another example of why it’s a bad idea for a creative type to be bluntly open and honest with a benefactor possessing no discernable sense of humor, Dionysius asked the poet Philoxenus what he thought of Dionysius’s poetry. When Philoxenus answered candidly, Dionysius had him dragged off to work in the quarries. 

Dionysius regretted the action once he’d sobered up, freed Philoxenus the next day, then invited him to dinner again. The wine flowed (again) and Dionysius asked (again) what Philoxenus thought of his poetry. In response, Philoxenus told Dionysius’s servants to drag him off to the quarries. This time the tyrant laughed. 

From then on, and for the remainder of his time at Dionysius’s court, Philoxenus promised that he would give truthful criticism of the tyrant’s work while also never again offending him. He accomplished this by basically inventing the double entendre. Dionysius’s poetry, according to Diodorus, was “wretched,” and he had a taste for tragedy, so when Dionysius would declaim a poem with a sad subject, then ask Philoxenus what he thought about it, the poet would reply, “Pitiful!” 

Dionysius is reputed to have either been murdered by his doctors to make way for his son to succeed him or to have died of alcohol poisoning from having drunk too much celebrating a win by some of his poetry at a festival in Greece. Either way, neither Dionysius, nor his poetry, proved "deathless."

And Philoxenus? He eventually left Syracuse and went on to write his most famous and successful poem, a comic piece called Cyclops, about the ridiculous passion of the mythical one-eyed monster for a beautiful goddess. Most people assumed that he was making fun of his one-eyed former benefactor. 

If Dionysius wrote a poem about his feelings on the matter, it hasn’t survived.

Thoughts on Writing & Memory

Dear Fellow Sleuthsayers- It’s the beginning of another school at the day gig, and due to some things going on with my family, I’ve been thinking a lot about both memory and how one writes about it. Reposting this piece from 2023, and will follow up next time in the rotation I’ll expand on these thoughts.

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Memory is the treasury and guardian of all things.    

   – Marcus Tullius Cicero, On the Orator

My brother-in-law has a saying. "With family, it is best to have a short memory."

I was thinking about this quote during a recent conversation I had with my wife. She showed a photo of something and I asked her what it was. She said to me, "I showed you this thing just the other day.

I responded with an intelligent, "You did?"

And she said, "Yes, and you said at the time, 'Looks exactly like I pictured it.'”

I have no memory of this conversation. Or had no memory of it, until my wife reminded me of what I said.  And I think this is an interesting illustration of how tricky human memory can be.

And what’s even trickier is trying to write human memory in all of its forms: straight remembering; having some thing tickle at the back of your skull, but you can’t quite put your finger on it; not remembering at all, etc.

Luckily we're not talking about THIS kind of "Memory."

One of the things that I have always prided myself on throughout my life, is my memory. Now deep in the midst of my late 50s, I find certain names dates, etc., elude me and I have to reach for them. 

I have also noticed, as illustrated in the instance related above, that my mind is pretty efficient about discarding memory that is trivial or completely unimportant to my long-term goals, to my long-term interests, or to anything other than being in the moment. 

And yet other such memories, the feeling of hiking the Virgin River in Zion National Park, for example, that could be a cursory memory that some people wouldn’t remember. And yet I do, and I don’t just remember the hiking. I also remember the sun filtering off the canyon walls, the smell of the river, as I waded through it, the sound of people murmuring to each other as they hiked up the river, and so on and so forth.

Like I said, memory is a tricky thing. 

And it's even more dicey to effectively to write about it. 

Some examples that spring to mind (Warning: there are a few SPOILERS looming ahead)

In his novel Inferno Dan Brown has his protagonist Robert Langdon awaken in an Italian hospital with no memory of the past several days, and he spends the lion's share of of the rest of the book trying to put together some fragmented images and some sentence fragments, especially the repeated phrase “very sorry,” repeated over and over again. Turns out he was thinking of the Italian artist and art historian Giorgio Vasari.

For my money, Brown draws this out quite a bit longer than necessary, and this eventual "revelation" is expected to carry far too much of the load as a plot transition point. This is no criticism of Dan Brown. Far from it. I'll be the first to say that his experiment with the vagaries of a fragmented memory and their collective effect on the narrative, especially when the point-of-view character is the one struggling with their memory, is one worth taking. And it's definitely a larger risk than I have taken in my own fiction writing.

This trope has been around for a while. Memory loss has frequently been used as a crutch tossed into any number of formulaic novels/films/TV shows over the years, with mixed results. Thinking especially of some good examples (The Prisoner, starring the inimitable Patrick McGoohan, comes to mind) and some hokey ones (Pretty much anything produced by 60s/70s Hollywood TV heavyweight Quinn Martin, with the exception of The Fugitive and The Streets of San Francisco).

And there are , of course, many other relatively recent novels/films that have played around with sketchy memory: not least the Guy Pearce vehicle Memento, which turns on the point of view character having brain damage that has affected his ability to process short-term memory into long-term memory, and Dennis Lehane's terrific novel (and the Martin Scorsese-helmed film of the same name adapted from it) Shutter Island–a master class in the use of an unreliable narrator.

Other successful novels (and films adapted from them) in the unreliable narrator vein include such bestsellers as The Girl on the Train and The Woman in the Window, neither of which I have read, and both of which I am given to understand make use of questionable memory on the part of the main character (at least in part alcohol-induced). 

There have been so many films of this variety, that the whole subgenre even has its own excellent parody: the 2022 Netflix miniseries The Woman in the House Across the Street from the Girl in the Window. It's worth your time. Kristen Bell alone as the main character is worth the price of admission.

For me, though, no one has ever done the "shattered memory holding back the main character, who must race against time to put the pieces together" thing quite so well as thriller master Robert Ludlum.

I'm talking, of course, about Ludlum's masterwork, The Bourne Identity. And yes, I am well aware that Ludlum's novel has long since been adapted into a rightly well-regarded series of thriller films starring Matt Damon and Brian Cox. If you haven't seen these films, I urge you to do so. They are incredibly well-done.

And yet, if you haven't read the source material, Ludlum's original novel...even if you have seen the movies based on it, I strongly urge you to give the book a chance. There are so many differences between book and movies, and I don't want to spoil them, so I'll just close with a phrase that Ludlum used (to vastly greater effect) as his own earlier version of Brown's "very sorry":

"Cain is for Carlos, and Delta is for Cain."

How about you? Favorite works of fiction that play around with memory? Challenges you have faced trying to play around with memory in your own work? Let us hear from you in the comments section!

See you in two weeks!