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Charles Gramlich is a versatile author who can write in most styles.

He has an MA and PhD in experimental psychology. He is a member of REHupa, The Robert E Howard United Press Association, and is one of the editors for The Dark Man, the Journal of Robert E. Howard Studies. He teaches psychology at Xavier University of Louisiana.

Charles is the author of several novels and short stories. Most of his work is science fiction or horror, although he goes beyond these genres. He is a writer who resists categorization because of the individuality of his thinking.

His first novel in paperback form was Cold in the Light, a horror thriller with science fiction elements that drew comparisons with the early work of Dean Koontz. His most recent novels in paperback, Swords of Talera, Wings Over Talera and Witch of Talera, are Sword & Planet works in the tradition of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ John Carter of Mars series.

Charles also writes poetry, fantasy and non-fiction. In August, 2008, Charles had his first poetry chapbook published, a collection of vampire haiku entitled Wanting the Mouth of a Lover, published by Spec House of Poetry.  And in May of this year, a collection of short fantasy stories called Bitter Steel was published by Borgo Press.

Have a look at Charles’ blog for links to all his works and for a guaranteed interesting and informative read.

Charles met me at The Slaughterhouse and we talked about psychology, and the uncertainty of self within horror fiction.

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Do you think that crossing the threshold of consciousness into the core of the psyche is analogous to crossing the event horizon that surrounds a black hole?

That’s a very interesting analogy and not one I’ve particularly thought about before.  One difference is that we know much more about the core of the psyche than we know about what lies beyond the event horizon.  And another difference is that, while very little escapes a black hole back across the event horizon, what’s in the core of the psyche escapes constantly and interacts prominently with the outside world.  We just have a hard time seeing it in ourselves, although we can often detect it easily in others.

Here’s my opinion:  What’s in the “core” of the psyche is animal.  Freud called it an “id,” although there are some subtle differences.  Rationality lies outside the core, outside the event horizon if we go with the analogy.  But we detect the core all the time, primarily through emotions and spontaneous behaviors rather than through thoughts.  Sudden rages, petty jealousies, seemingly irrational desires, are all evidence of something escaping the core.  Most people, however, so strongly reject the core impulses with their rational mind that they won’t even admit that they’ve experienced them and will look at you like you’re crazy if you bring it up.

Sometimes, I think the most important field in psychology is comparative psychology, the attempt to explain or understand human behavior through study and comparison with animal behavior.  I’m talking particularly about mammal behavior.  There’s where we’re most likely to ferret out the secrets of humanity’s personal “black hole.”
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Continuing with the analogy, some physicists believe black holes may be pathways to parallel universes. When you consider the body of literature about doppelgangers, could what Carl Jung called the shadow be a form of psychological parallel universe, given the threat that those repressed energies and thought forms constitute to some individuals?

Stories about doppelgangers have always evoked a sense of Jekyll and Hyde for me, but that story in itself suggests the Jungian “Shadow.”  Hyde is very much such a being.  There’s a theory that says that primitive humans often saw their thoughts as originating outside of themselves, and that this is the genesis of our concept of gods and demons.  It may well be the origin of doppelgangers as well.

The very idea of a psychological parallel universe is a fascinating one.  Given how resistant most people are to really analyzing the baser emotions that surge up from our animal core, I can see the analogy working.  We usually think of the “animal” as living inside us, but it makes as much sense to think of it as living “beside” us.  According to the theory, parallel universes can be as close as a whisper to us and yet go unseen.  Our animal core, from which the “Shadow” derives and from where doppelgangers might reasonably come, is closer still.  It shambles along at our shoulder, but no matter how often we turn our head we are unlikely to catch a glimpse of it.  Maybe some folks do catch a glimpse, and it must be a terrifying experience.  I know I’m going to feel weird about looking over my shoulder for a while.
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Given the fact that most people are resistant to analyzing their base and repressed instincts, do you believe that this repression is necessary to the narcissistic function of the socialized ego and that religion has served the purpose of sanitizing the self as we understand it to exist?

Absolutely.  Anti-theists today tend to want to abolish all organized religions and they point, rightly in many cases, to some of the serious damage that supposedly religious individuals have done and are doing to other people.  However, I think it’s pretty clear that without religion in the past there would be no civilization of today.  For civilization to exist, human impulses had to be curbed and controlled.  Religion has proved to be very successful at that, which is why so many of them still exist and still have so many followers.

Although most religions acknowledge the existence of the baser impulses (at least the less abhorrent of them), they generally do not examine them very closely.  They’d prefer to believe that those impulses can be curbed by a “just say no” approach.  The primary techniques that religions use to curb the impulses are fear and guilt, which are quite powerful forces and often work.

Even people in our society who were not raised overtly in a religious environment are still shaped by religious ideas and ideals.  You’ll often hear people say that they simply cannot “imagine” certain crimes.  That very statement is a clear sign of successful repression, and it generally arises from a level of religious indoctrination.
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Do you think that most people are engaged in enacting a fantasy version of themselves and if so what is the self?

Most people clearly do not have a very realistic view of themselves.  Evidence shows that folks engage in systematic patterns of distortion.  Most people evaluate themselves more positively than others evaluate them, or than objective reality would support. For example, most people will indicate that they vote more frequently than they really do, that they give more to charity than they do, but that they drink less than they do.  Most people will say they were more popular in high school than seems to be true, and that they even scored more points in sports than the stats reveal.  It’s like a fisherman exaggerating the size of his fish.  A key point is that, while people initially understand that they are exaggerating a little, they will eventually begin to believe the exaggeration to be actual truth.  Thus, the “fish” actually becomes as big in memory as it was exaggerated to be initially.

One very interesting thing is that people prone to depression tend to do the opposite.  They evaluate themselves less positively than others do, and remember themselves as being less popular and as scoring fewer points that in reality.  Some suggest that depressed individuals actually have a more “realistic” view of themselves than do other people, but both are distorting their memories in service to their psychology.

As for what the “self” is, I’m fond of saying: “Objective reality is nothing.  Subjective reality is everything.”  I tend to think of self as being a psychological construct of the individual, which in some cases is pretty close to the objective reality and in other cases far removed.  I do believe it is important for people to generally have a positive view of themselves, because it energizes them to work toward their goals and to believe they can be successful.  However, the self-esteem movement in the United States has backfired in some cases by producing individuals who have such high positive self-esteem that they won’t accept responsibility for their own weaknesses and failures.  That is definitely not a realistic view of self.
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If we move this into horror, to what extent is horror driven by the uncertainty of self?

For many writers, not just horror writers, their craft is driven by an attempt to define themselves in relationship to others and to their world.  Much of this is unconscious.  The writer wonders, “what would I do if faced with a specific situation,” and the writer’s characters are the surrogates that are used to answer that question.

For horror writers, the question is, “what would I do if faced with pain and death and decay?”  Because these experiences will come to us all, they are some of the most critical questions any human can ask, and readers also ask them.  They are also such intense experiences that the “self” can easily shatter when confronted with them.  In horror fiction, the characters must always shatter, at least to some extent.  This is a difference between “horror” and “thriller.”  In a thriller, the character will be pushed right to the edge and then come back.  In horror, the character will break.  The self will splinter and, if the character survives, a new self will be hammered back together from the shards.  This is one way that writers, especially horror writers, explore the uncertainty of self.
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Do you think that powerful geographical locations such as valleys and mountains are symbolic to the psyche?

I think that what is “symbolic” to modern humanity are often things that were “salient” to our primitive ancestors.  Essentially, something is salient if it is attention getting, if it stands out.  A red car among more drably colored ones.  The loud noise of a gunshot among the quieter noises of a suburban neighborhood.

Mountains are definitely salient.  They jut up from the surroundings; they draw the eye.  And they are tough to explore, which means they are often mysterious.  Humans seem always to have had a tendency to assign the “strange” to unexplored places.  Old maps sometimes simply labeled unexplored places with “here be monsters.”  Mountains, being highly visible and yet hard to explore, were ideal places for the human imagination to populate with “gods” and “demons.”  Their salience and their remoteness led them to become powerful symbols for modern humans.

Valleys are salient in a different way.  They can provide protection, hideouts from the dangers of the outside world.  And because valleys tend to have rich soil deposited by flood waters, they may be a rich source of food.  It is probably that valleys became the first places where humans settled permanently.  No doubt they are the first places where agriculture thrived.  In the human psyche they become forever linked with wealth and the birth of life.  However, because valleys were rich, they often became battlefields, too, and they sometimes presided over large scale destruction from floods. In this way, valleys became symbolic for modern humans as places of both great promise and great peril.
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Who are your main literary influences?

I’ve always been an eclectic reader so my influences come from many different genres.  The big five for me would be:  Robert E. Howard, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Louis L’Amour, John D. MacDonald, and Ray Bradbury.  These were all writers I discovered at a relatively young age and whose works I devoured. Their relative influence depends on the genre I’m writing in.  For example, my fantasy work is influenced most by Howard, Burroughs and L’Amour, my horror by Howard, MacDonald and Bradbury.

A little later in life I discovered H. P. Lovecraft, Robert Chambers, Dean Koontz, Joe Lansdale, Karl Edward Wagner, and Kenneth Bulmer.  All of these put their stamp on my writing.  The first four had big effects on my horror, while the last two influenced my fantasy more.

I think of myself as a “genre-baby,” a “pulp-baby,” so I don’t think I’ve been much influenced by the authors of the classics.  There are two exceptions.  I’ve read most everything Hemingway ever wrote and I greatly admire the man’s ability with words.  He has definitely been an influence.  The other influence from the more literary side of the writing world is Peter Matthiessen, whose book, The Snow Leopard, is, to me, the greatest work ever written in the English language.
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Do you think that fantasy literature is attempting to undermine reality as we see it?

Well, I suppose we could first discuss the whole idea of “reality,” of what it is.  I tend to think that reality is far more subjective than many folks would feel comfortable with.  I do believe that many things have an objective reality.  A tree that falls in the forest makes a sound, whether or not humans are there or not.  To believe otherwise smacks of immense arrogance to me.  But, what about an argument between two lovers over feelings?  Where does any objective reality lie in such a case?

In a world where imagination and emotional perceptions are important, I believe fantasy literature does exactly the opposite of undermining reality.  I think it teaches us that the standard concept of reality is far too simplistic and restricting.  It expands our notion of reality, and it is from such an expansion that breakthroughs in science and society come.  “Reality” is made to be bent.
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The family is the building block of society, as an experimental psychologist do you think the family is more pathological than other forms of social conditioning?

I wouldn’t say ‘more’ pathological.  Humans are rife with pathologies and the family isn’t any exception.  But at least in the family one often (if certainly not always) gets love along with the pathology, and love can make up for at least some harm.  Political states are rife with pathologies of their own, and there’s certainly no love in them to mitigate the harm. Even good governments can scarcely have any real interest in helping the troubled underclass of their people.  Schools tend to reflect the pathologies of the states, but despite that a lot of good can be done in them when they encourage a love of learning and an open mind.  In too many schools, however, there is an indifference to or an actual distaste for the “free” mind.  Schools not only teach conformity on their own, but provide breeding grounds for the stronger kids to force conformity on their peers.  And religions have their own pathologies.  Some of them are spectacular, as when they encourage violence against others in the name of the religion.

As for my own social conditioning, give me a family first that loves me, give me a school that encourages me to question and explore, give me a religion that practices the charity that they often teach, and give me a government that doesn’t try to use me as either a cash cow or as cannon fodder.  I think they call such a place Utopia.
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What’s the one goal that you have in writing that is a bit unusual?

I’ve always wanted to publish at least one of every kind and genre of writing.  I’ve published SF, fantasy, horror, thriller, western, children’s, mainstream, pastiche, and erotica in fiction.  I’ve done print books and ebooks.  In nonfiction I’ve published scientific articles, book reviews, personal essays and columns.  In poetry I’ve published free verse and haiku.  I’ve published a few stories that combined elements of other genres so I tend to count both of those things.  For example, I have a horror story that has a very strong romantic subplot so I’ll claim that I’ve published romance too.   I did a Robert E. Howard pastiche that featured a boxer so I can claim I’ve written a sports story.

But there are a lot of things I haven’t published.  I’ve never published any poetry in any kind of “formal” form.  I’ve never written a mystery, even of the noir detective kind.  I’ve never done a comic or graphic novel script.  I’ve never published a play.  I’ve never written an animal story, although I have one about a third done.  I haven’t really published an urban fantasy.  I’ve never done an actual ghost story, although I came pretty close.

And since new subgenres form pretty frequently, it’s likely that I’ll never quite achieve this goal.  But I still keep plugging.  And I really appreciate you giving me a chance to ramble on like this about all the weird ideas that churn through my brain.  Thanks.
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Thank you Charles for giving a unique and stimulating interview.
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Matthew C Funk is a horror writer, among other things. He writes dark, menacing and psychologically incisive horror that cuts to the core of the genre. His stories are hard to forget. They get into the reader’s head. He is also the author of 8 novels, 2 screenplays, 2 plays, and nearly 100 articles.

He is a scholar of contemporary defence issues and of World War II and works as a social media consultant for Corporate America in Southern California.

He holds a BA in political science and graduated from the University of Southern California with a Masters degree in professional writing, where he studied with Hubert Selby jnr. He met me at The Slaughterhouse and we discussed horror, politics, terrorism and psychology.
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How would you define horror?

Horror is power.

Horror is being confronted by our vulnerabilities.  Our vulnerabilities compel us – they inform our appetites on the most basic level, whether they’re fear of harm, fear of being alone or fear of hunger.  Practically all we do, as nobly as we might attire our reasons, derives from these fears. Consequently, horror is what directs those appetites.  In many ways, that’s why satisfaction is relative:  An extremely successful, wealthy and secure person can still be miserable if they fear the consequences of failure or emotional solitude.  Conversely, someone forced to do with little can be content if they come to terms with their fears.

Horror in storytelling boils down to externalizing those vulnerabilities.  That’s why horror, as a genre, can be so diverse.  There are comedic horrors like the ‘Goosebumps’ series, low-intensity horror like many of the gentler works by Stephen King such as ‘Under the Dome’ and high-intensity horror like the Splatterpunk movement’s authors, notably Edward Lee, Jack Ketchum and Richard Laymon.  We tell stories about these disquieting things – whether they’re spooky, alarming or disgusting – because we’re fascinated with our fears and somehow need to come to grips with them.

But all storytelling distills to the element of horror, regardless of genre, because all storytelling distills to conflict.  Conflict is a matter of “what will happen,” and if we’re truly engaged by a story it’s because we have an emotional investment – a concern – for the character.  We literally fear for them:  We fear that their true love will never come about; that they will not solve the mystery in time; that they will not overcome their inner demons.  That fear is a horror, no matter how mild.  And we keep bound to a plot because that concern has a power over us.

And, of course, the best stories – the best horrors – are the ones we cannot turn away from and do not want to end.

Appetites drive our horses, but it’s horror that holds the whip.
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Do you think the most effective horror uses the hidden part of the psyche for its effects?

Yes, in that I believe horror must be grounded in the subconscious in order to truly resonate.  It has to inspire the anxieties of our thanatic or erotic identity – our death and sex interest, respectively.  Horror is most effective when it touches the parts of us that influence our basic selves and inform our primal fears and desires.

H. P. Lovecraft famously declared that the greatest fear was the fear of the unknown, but I think this is only true in part.  Yes, there has to be some element of the unknown for horror to have impact.  But even Lovecraft’s writings, which primarily focused on the legacies of alien deities and extradimensional forces, were rooted in the material and played with human anxieties over sex and death.  His prehistorical or outer space evils were scary because they could do harm to us – either by driving us mad, devouring us physically or assaulting us sexually.  So, even when a horror writer employs the power of cosmic vastness to scare us, he or she has to focus that power on afflicting our sex-death fears.

It’s for this reason that, much as I have a pre-occupation with horror, I best enjoy writing and reading stories of the noir, war or thriller genres.  Horror at its more fantastical is not nearly so abhorrent as the horrors that surround us: Criminal deeds, vicious insanity and casual cruelty.  Again, I think of the Horror genre writing of Jack Ketchum, who usually spins his yarns right out of the headlines or from human history, turning the real-life deeds of people like Gertrude Banizewski and Sawney Beane into horror fare.  We’re most afraid – most revolted and disgusted by – what humans do to one another.  In that regard, I believe that most Thriller genre novels are just horror by another name: The predation and depravity of a serial killer uses the same dramatic elements and plays on the same Id fears as the horror story employs.

It’s no mistake or anomaly that the most unacceptable, most horrific stories are those that involve humans engaged in abuse of other humans – particularly sexual abuse.  It’s easier to read a story about a sentient wolf eating a little girl, as in Red Riding Hood, than it is when it’s a human being eating her.

The most potent horror – so potent many can’t bear to read it – comes from what humans do to other humans.  It strikes us, unvarnished and undeniable, in the base of our identity.
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Tell us about your work in contemporary defence issues and what do you think of Chomsky’s observation that we are living in a culture of terrorism?

I’ve always been dedicated to becoming a professional writer, but I went to university to learn something to write about.

No offense to English majors, but I wanted to acquire more than an attention to the craft. I figured that as much fiction and non-fiction that I read, and as close attention as I paid to it, I didn’t have to devote an official undergraduate course of study to it.  I also wanted a broad view of the world, to pick up knowledge of different cultures, histories and personal dynamics.

So the question was, what to learn?  I wanted scholarship that had its teeth sunk into the themes that fascinated me – human extremes, madness, agony, dreams and deceit.  Politics seemed a perfect fit.  I went into Political Science and gravitated toward the brutal and heroic, winding my way into an International Relations Minor with a focus on defense studies.  It wasn’t that I so loved the ‘shoot ’em up’ action; the psychology of people in combat, civilian or soldier, was what entranced me.  The grand strategies were also so gripping, because as much as it might be varnished with patriotic polish and wrapped in the solemn nobility of service to the country, war-making and political victory came down to mass manipulation.

You’ve really axed the keg here, Richard, so prepare for me to pour forth at length.  See, war for me came down to horror and fear, too.  Yes, the argument could be made that resources played an enormous role – both as a motivator for a state to go to war and for a state to sustain that war effort.  However, it boiled down to poker game dynamics; has throughout history.  It was about making the other side fold first, and that took bringing horror to bear against the adversary.  Even before the guns started firing, relations between adversarial nations was a staring contest.  And once the bombs were falling and pieces of human beings were suddenly bursting through the air, all it meant was that the ante was upped in the fear quotient.

Dig me:  Von Clausewitz, a Prussian military thinker during Napoleon’s time, had it right when he said that war came down to destroying the enemy’s ability to fight.  The ability to fight is psychological as much as it is physical.  The most successful war tactics and weaponry are the ones that make the enemy despair and fear.  That’s been various things throughout history – cavalry charges, tanks, cruise missile strikes with laser-guided accuracy.  But it all comes down to making the enemy look at the carnage around him or her – the shredded friends, the smoke and shock and sound, the grim invincibility of the perpetrators – and having them think, “Aw fuck it; I surrender.”

There are exceptions, but they’re few and arguable.  The Mongol invasion of Arabia comes to mind – they wiped out about 80% of the population in Baghdad after warning them not to resist.  That’s a good example of “total warfare,” where the enemy is literally killed into submission.  But even still, it can be argued that the Mongols did that not so much as to defeat the Arabs but to scare future adversaries into giving up without much of a fight.

The pre-eminent role of fear in war is brilliantly illuminated by recent warfare.  In World War II, the Germans – and later the Soviets and Allies – used blitzkrieg operations to gain many of their big victories.  Blitzkrieg is a kind of warfare where your objective isn’t to stand and kill the enemy, but to get behind them, encircle them and make them too afraid to fight on.  Then we have Vietnam, a true staring contest, where the will of the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong prevailed over immense American resources.  It’s the same in the “war on terror”.  The times things have gone well for the Americans overseas is when they can really get a handle on the minds of the adversaries, and twist them to be more afraid of fighting the US than they are of allying with it.  Famously, this is what happened in Petraeus’ surge strategy, which had a lot of similarities to the strategy Pompey Magnus, Caesar’s mentor, employed in suppressing the factious and bandit-ridden states of Mithridates’ Asia Minor empire.  Basically, it came down to paying off and manipulating the guerrilla fighters while presenting such a formidable military force that it seemed more profitable to switch allegiances.

So, war is about psychology – the abyss and the heights of human psychology; the most ruthless and monstrous fears and the most self-sacrificing, transcendent passions.  I was fascinated with warfare for many years and my fiction reflected it.  I wrote mostly about the World War II-era Germans and Soviets, as they had brilliantly depraved characters and settings, and committed the vastest and vilest inhumanities history has ever seen.

To bring this lengthy ramble back to Noir and to Chomsky’s “culture of terrorism,” it’s important to note that what I wrote on – what mesmerized me – was how banal evil was in these grand tragedies.  Monstrosity was less a matter of the cryptic dementia of solitary psychopaths or nefarious plotters as it was born of laziness, pettiness and pedestrian fears.  Whether the subject is the Holocaust, the Soviet Great Terror or the atrocious slaughter of the Eastern Front, the wellspring of that darkness was usually callow and common.  I wrote on the soldiers, slaughterers and victims of Nazis and Soviets because they weren’t demonic – they were, as Christopher Browning titled it in his genius examination of a battalion of Holocaust perpetrators, “Ordinary Men“.  I wanted people to understand this.

Whether the villains are death camp guards or mass murderers or the kind of frontline grunts who had to contend with butchering civilians or running human waves, these were guys who had families and histories of non-violence.  And at this point, readers might nod their heads thinking, “yes, we get it, but war changes people.”  But what I wanted to expose went beyond that.  I wanted to relate, from the oral histories and accounts I studied, that even when it came to pulling the trigger on women and children, the men were usually just afraid to speak up.  They didn’t want to look weak, or lose their jobs, or seem different from the others in the squad.  Or, in the case of combat, they wanted to retaliate to the constant fear and anxiety and horror they felt.  And once that trigger was pulled, it was a step into darkness:  Into shame, into justification, into all the maniacal self-loathing and transformation that turns people into casual monsters.  At the top of it all, you find the easy abuse of the bureaucrat, who issues orders for “pacification operations” – read, mass murder of civilians – or “transportation programs” – read, death camp slave labor – and then goes home worrying more about his kids’ grades or his wife’s griping about needing a vacation or his angina than he does about the fact that he’s consigned thousands, even millions, to agony and death.

Evil is so very easy and so very dumb most of the time.

And that’s what I take from Chomsky’s “culture of terrorism” – that nations, specifically the USA in his study, so readily accept the destruction and agony that their state commits.  You had me pegged right as the kind of grim political analyst that would endorse Chomsky’s observations.  For those not familiar with the term Chomsky advances – the “culture of terrorism” – it’s basically the notion that citizens of powerful countries get incensed at the enemy’s terror but hardly pay a thought to the terrorism their own country, the one they have direct influence over, engages in.

I believe that wholeheartedly.  My Noir tries to reflect that.  I write, usually, about conditions of severe poverty and injustice, and how it warps minds and grinds lives down.  And that is a “culture of terrorism” – a culture wherein, despite our riches and political power, we allow people to starve and be ruined by a bizarre and cruel justice system.

Now, I’ll be clear, I’m a big-time patriot.  That having been said, some facts to support my perception of a culture of terrorism:  America has the largest prison population in the world.  “The Land of the Free” locks up more people than Russia and China – just over 2 million, I believe.  That’s a quarter of the people behind bars in the world, in a nation with 5% of the world population.  And once a US citizen becomes a convict, their lives are wrecked.  Employment is terribly difficult, as are basic freedoms like mobility and voting.  Most of this is from drug crimes and petty offenses.  We also have terrible conditions of poverty.  We tolerate terrible conditions of poverty in other countries too, when it comes to the sweat shop labor that our manufacturers routinely employ overseas – all of which means less American manufacturing jobs.  And, of course, there’s the issue of our actual warfare.

It all adds up to people not really caring much at all about the suffering that they could change, if they took political action – suffering and terror inflicted in their name.  Chomsky’s use of the term “terrorism” relates to the low-intensity wars that the US was advancing during the 80s, using CIA support.  It could be applied to the war on terror though.

To wrap it up, my opinions on the subject vary somewhat from the logical moral conclusion of the analysis.  That’s a fancy way of saying, I’m not anti-war, nor am I anti-intervention.  I am also greedy and lazy.  I want cheap clothes and I want cheap gas.  However, that means I want the American people to really, really think about the cost-effectiveness of what their country gets involved with and their role in endorsing it by political consent.

What bothers me is the irrationality that many citizens apply to America’s war-making.  The War on Terror’s an excellent example.  The American people lusted for payback and security after 9/11, and that’s entirely logical.  Where the moral and logical premise jumped the tracks is when the U.S.A. took a “pre-emptive” strategy toward threats.

Many would argue, “Shit, we have to nail them before they do us.”  But think of the cost of that.  Afghanistan is a historic sinkhole of resources that empires from Alexander to the British tried to “pacify” or “enlighten” to ridiculous lack of success and terrific squandering of lives, pain and cash.  If one makes the argument, “Well, America can do it – we’re wealthy and clever,” then, okay, just check out the price tag.  Don’t get into a mess like Afghanistan or Iraq without realizing that to actually win would take more than a credit card and a pep rally.  It’d take brutal counter-insurgency operations, a tremendous enlargement of the military and decades of commitment to not just taking lives in Afghanistan but improving them vastly.

But people don’t think logically or economically.  They just see burkhas and honor killings and think we have to intervene.  They see evil and want good to win.  Well, the sad news is that evil is all over the place.  And if a nation changes strategy from “we have to pursue our political and economic interests” to “we have to hunt down evil and destroy it,” then there are a lot more threatening evils than where we’re involved: North Korea, Uganda and Myanmar just to rattle off three monstrous nations.

So that’s the point of war and horror:  That we have to understand it to engage it.  That’s what my writing is about and that’s what I’d like to see change in political awareness.  It won’t happen, though.  People have too much other shit to worry about than thinking about who stitches their Nikes or whether fighting Al-Qaeda, a Saudi-based outfit, in Afghanistan, a nation that’s not even Arab let alone Saudi, makes any sense.
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Chomsky uses the term ‘Manufacturing Consent’ when referring to the notion that mass media is prejudiced in its coverage of politics by its economic interests. What do you think of this and the implication that we inhabit a fictional landscape sold as fact which is aimed at manipulating us and supporting political agendas most civilians have no idea about?

I think it’s dead on. I’ll put it concisely as I can:

Sex, sleaze and shock sell, and if the media can’t find that kind of news, it’ll make it.

We inhabit a world entirely manufactured – not just in terms of being given doctored news, but being peddled a product designed to be saleable. Whether it’s cable news, talk radio or podium propaganda, the message we’re given is carefully massaged for marketability.  That’s because all of these things – whether it’s running for office or selling a story – come down to having to make a buck.  Same rules apply to fiction writers – your story’s only so successful as its ability to reach a market.

This means that we’re being told what we want to hear and manipulated into knowing what we want. It has to come down to dollar value – it has to – because you have to sell ad space to stay on the air.  That means messages have to be carved to fit the common audience, or warped to play on the fears and desires of a market.  It’s this force that powered the rise of cable news and talk radio.  FOX News defined itself by creating a “culture war” against the “liberal media” and MSNBC responded by pandering to the liberals.  With all these channels springing up on the TV, radio and Web, people no longer need to hear news they don’t like.  They can tune in to their favorite talking points.

And all of the major talking points are cautious about offending their real sponsors: The corporations that power their stations, link their satellites and buy the ad space.  Anybody who deviates from a palatable portion between car and beer commercials is derided as a lunatic or blatherer.  That means that reforms that would really shake up the system – really change things – like actual tax reform, non-intervention or drug legalization are smeared as fringe ideas.  They may be perfectly logical, but if they don’t sit well with General Electric, pharmaceutical companies or the defense sector, they get only enough air time to get blasted as batshit.

So is that “manufactured”? Undeniably. Anything constructed for a profit motive is, by definition. And is it “consent”? Absolutely. None of the significant political players are shaking things up, and most citizens are happy to point fingers at the other side as the result of the worsening quagmire.  What they fail to realize is that there really are no “sides” – just a fixed fight between two branches of corporate tools.  That’s not just the nature of political compromise.  It’s that the media will always go for the balls when they tell a story, to keep the scandal going.  Heroes are only built up so that they can be torn down. Our news runs on bloodshed and stained sheets, so that corporations can sell diapers. We eat it up, whether with apathy or gusto.

As for whether we have no idea about it, I doubt that. I just think most people don’t care. They hear about the conditions behind bars or the way drug crimes ruin lives or the failure of borders or abuses in a war zone. They just sigh about it then go back to watching Jersey Shore and worrying about the mortgage.
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Given what you mention about economics, much of it is controlled by the pharmaceutical industry.

You are an admirer of William Burroughs’s fiction and he showed addiction as extending from drug users to those addicted to sex and violence. He used it as a metaphor for social control programs. Do you believe that this is still relevant and that the real solution to the drug problem is to legitimise it so that it can be regulated?

It is not only relevant, it has become a principal character in our society. Burroughs’ dystopia is alive and well in the pulse of the First World, and that pulse is heavily medicated. The only futurist writer from the turn of the century who truly nailed the vision of our times would be Alduous Huxley – the citizens of his “Brave New World” gobbling down fistfuls of Soma to get through lives overstimulated by banal, sensationalist crap.

That’s where we are: Burroughs’ boogeyman, heroin, has nothing like the reach of big drug companies. People devour medications in order to take the edge off of conditions that, much of the time, wouldn’t even exist if not for lifestyle choices.  Once the pills put their hooks in, the cure often becomes a disease – anti-anxiety drugs screw up your sleep, so you pop sleeping pills, then need a boost from something else.  And yet we can understand why, in this modern world where multitasking is as necessary as breathing and advertising blisters our brain from every direction, why people resort to these medications.  For tens of thousands of years, we evolved to live the simple – if occasionally really freaking edgy – routines of foragers and hunters.  In the last hundred years, a bombardment of mental stimulation and economic demand has splashed across the civilized world.  Our brains are being rudely used constantly, so why not hold on to the anchor of a good, even high?  As my moody poet ex-girlfriend from Kenyon College used to say, she was glad to be addicted to smokes because it gave her something she could count on.

So, no, given that the real problem is that mad-cap profit motive will continue to gorge us on stimulation and then sell us the dope to handle it, legalization isn’t the solution.  Yeah, it’ll go a long way to fixing some other extremely severe problems – prison conditions, a paroled criminal population unable to assimilate, gangs and cartels with Hulked-out funding from illegal drugs.  It’ll also be a huge boon to the economy.  But it won’t save people from being junkies of our own device.  The linked-in, cracked-out existence is here to stay.  We need our fix to get us through the hysterical work day, get the processed food through our kidneys, help us cope.

The same goes for sex and violence – the volume is getting turned up on that, too.  That’s nothing new, though.  There were no “good old days” when it came to what entertainment gets humanity’s rocks off – just periods of smug, hypocritical propriety like Victorian England. Otherwise, we’ve always been thirsty for donkey shows and dog fights.  What’s new is that, like with drugs, we need more and more stimulation to actually feel it.

The cure compounds the disease.
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Do you think that the most horrifying thing to the readers of fiction is the darkness of humanity, and how would you distinguish terror from horror?

Yes, I believe the most horrifying monsters for readers are found in the darkness of humanity.

Fantastical monsters – wolfmen, vampires, aliens – are just Halloween masks for the actual elements of horror in a story. It isn’t the power of whatever creature featured that’s horrifying, but what that power can do to the victim.  We can cite two particularly fantastic specimens as examples: Stephen King’s “IT” and H. P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu.

“IT” is about a shapeshifting entity that assumes the form of human fears in order to feed on terror and flesh.  That shapeshifting power and appetite is horrific, but only because it does to us what we already fear might happen.  If “IT” fed on our love of music, that would seem benign.  It is because people are troubled by the notion of the sins and terrors of their past harming them that “IT” is a horrifying entity.  Similarly, Cthulhu is a colossal immortal alien who invades our dreams and might, one day, become strong enough to stride the world with his many tentacles, ravaging us.  Again, this is scary not because of Cthulhu’s objective qualities, but because we already fear the harm he might inflict.

Stories that invest those fears in human characters are even more horrifying because it makes it more tangible, more realistic, that such things could happen.  We’re more afraid of Richard Ramirez than we are of the Wolfman, even though they essentially do the same thing.  This isn’t to say that stripping away those masks makes for a better story.  Some readers need those masks – that sugar on the pill that makes the horror palatable.  There is no universal rule for a successful horror story because there is no universal taste among readers.

There is, however, an essentially greater horror to human beings perpetrating horrific acts.  Any horror writer who’s ever scanned for submission guidelines is aware of this, as many publishing venues flatly announce that they don’t want to touch material involving torture, rape or child abuse.  Those are three evils epidemic in human deeds, but they incite such revulsion that the story becomes too unpleasant.  Whatever pleasure is won from externalizing and confronting a horror becomes too personal and too real.  The excitement becomes disgust.  There is a reason to why there are ‘limits’ to what is acceptable in mass-market horror, and that reason is that stories can come too close to what humanity is really like.

In light of this, I would be reluctant to differentiate ‘horror’ from ‘terror’ in a general sense – they’re the same integers in a tally of unpleasantness – but I can draw a distinction in fiction’s elements and effects.  In fiction, ‘horror’ would be a visceral shock and ‘terror’ would be a more psychological offense.  ‘Horror’ is the gruesome, the disgusting, the obscene – the sensory experience that assaults the reader.  ‘Terror’ is the disturbing, the twisted idea, the scare that plays purely on the mind.  To draw examples from my own work, ‘horror’ is discovering the ribs you’re eating came from your girlfriend (“Smoke and Fire“), and ‘terror’ is hearing how a serial killer equates love with murder (“All In My Head“).  It’s important for writers to differentiate these qualities because they are distinctive charms to work on the reader:  Horror without terror lacks suspense, mood and atmosphere – it’s merely a brief affront.  Terror without any horror can lack impact because it lacks physicality, being too abstract.

Both amount to ingredients in a recipe though, and ultimately the proof of the blood pudding is in the eating.  A writer can go too heavy on the horror for some, not heavy enough for others.  I would counsel any beginning writers to find encouragement in this: That we are chefs, and the dishes we create are subject to an audience’s tastes.

There is an appetite out there waiting to devour any well-written story – it’s just a matter of finding it.
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Horror literature is an offshoot of the Gothic revival that accompanied the Romantic movement in the nineteenth century. If you view it as part of the body of fantasy literature there are recurrent themes, such as doubling or multiplying selves, mirror images, metamorphosis and bodily disintegration from Dickens and Dostoyevsky, through Joseph Conrad and R.L. Stevenson, to Franz Kafka and Thomas Pynchon. It sits within mainstream literature and at its root seems to be the sense that the self is indeterminate. What is more frightening, the loss of self to madness or some force that is alien and inimical to humanity?

As a general rule, I would say that the loss of self to madness is a loss to a force alien and inimical.

At least, that is how the sufferer typically perceives it.  Whether that madness is an obsession, a perverse lust or a symptom more phantasmagorical, the ‘host’ often feels beneath its invasive control. Even in the works you cited above, at least those I’m familiar with, the forced transformation of the self occurs by the pressure of an outside catalyst – whether the claustrophobic callousness of the 19th century city or the yawning darkness of the Congo.  Madness may spread to full flower feeding on the corruption and angst of the human interior, but that flower hatches from a planted seed.

However, I take your meaning – “inimical to humanity” being the key qualifier there; suggesting supernatural forces.  I could only guess which is more frightening overall. My guess would be that the loss of self to madness is more frightening, as droves of work deal with that, whereas the loss of self to truly alien, anti-human forces is a niche of the Horror genre.

That isn’t to say that it’s the case all the time.  I think which kind of fright trips the right triggers comes down to personal experience.  I have friends who’ve led harrowing lives, and their nightmares are populated by psycho-stalkers with clear, human faces.  Meanwhile, my dreams swarm with zombies, reflections of my anxieties over a callow, carnivorous society out to devour me.  The same principal applies to which breed of madness – the human or the inhuman – alarms us.  I find Lovecraft to be extremely unsettling, but then I tend to have an overactive imagination and a tendency to worry about things like extradimensional brain worms.  Someone who has a different upbringing, with a different taxonomy of fears, might feel differently.
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What do you think the political role in the mental sanitation of female homicide is?

Same as it has been since the age of Ishtar’s temple priestesses – fear of female sexuality.

In short, the political spin whenever a women gets murderous is that she’s truly a freak of nature.  It gets billed as a P. T. Barnum oddity, cast as monstrous and unbelievable.  Society doesn’t even like to conceive of women as capable of harm.  Being harmed is a different matter; domestic abuse and sexual exploitation usually inspires little more than a shrug, if that.  But when it comes to actually having the will to end another life, society’s lens is foggy when it comes to women.  That’s why “lady killers” get so much play in the media.  It’s like a UFO discovery.  It has to be debunked at first, then if it’s accepted, it’s stamped with lunacy.

This isn’t to say that to cram female killers into the context of madness is inaccurate, but only to the extent that any homicide takes a dose of crazy to happen.  There is a gender bias, though, because that context isn’t applied equally.  Whether male killers are Mafia soldiers or trigger-happy armed robbers, society seeks some logic in their actions.  And on the flip side, the actions of female killers are always explored to find illogical qualities.

Now, granted, it is far less common for women to kill.  In that regard, instinctively analyzing them as anomalies makes sense.  But if we’re to consider homicide itself anomalous to a healthy society, it seems like a lot of twisted male motives get off the hook – many are even romanticized, like when it comes to hard-nosed hitmen willing to take lives out of loyalty to their Capo.

What this has to do with sexuality is that lot of socialization, when it comes to gender, boils down to sexual anxieties.  It may be a man’s world, but male sexuality is preoccupied with sexual contest.  This biological drive can be externalized into plenty of abstract aims – work, wealth, exercise – but they come down to libido.  That we use the term, “Just jacking off” to define someone not seriously motivated to succeed is not a coincidence.

Back in the days of yore – and we’re talking cave-painting days – this obsession of the aggressive male with female sexuality manifest itself as Goddess worship.  Again, not a coincidence that our earliest civilizations crafted phalluses, vaginas and voluptuous female forms when they were first inspired to create objects of reverence.  But as civilizations cohered and collective male ego swelled, that sexual obsession inverted:  Men began treating women less like holy objects, and more like holes. Like property.  Evidence of this abounds, but I’ll name a few from classical civilizations:  The shift from Great Goddess worship to a supreme – and very slutty – male deity, Zeus, in the Mediterranean.  The classification of women as property among Middle Eastern tribes, as in the Tenth Commandment.  The institution of numerous female body deformation customs, from infibulation in Africa to clitordectomy in the Middle East to foot-binding in China.

So what was the shift?  It’s hard to say, but until the industrial era, seeing women as weak and instituting customs to prove it was the norm.  I would argue that it was resources that tipped the scale – ultimately, it was better for the economy if women had more power to wield cash and the vote.  Societies where this isn’t the case tend to have dismal economies, given that they have a literally captive population denied to the work force.  But whatever changed it economically, we’re still trying to figure it out culturally.

We still steep our culture in sexualized females, from ‘Girls Gone Wild’ to Vogue to pornography.  We still criminalize prostitution – a fact that may make someone think, “Yeah, well, so? Of course”, but makes absolutely no sense if we accept the premise that women can do what they want with their bodies.  And whereas in some professional sectors it may even be slightly easier for a woman to succeed, in many – particularly big business, whether it’s oil or the film industry – it is fiercely difficult.  And, to bring it back to your point, we make a homicidal woman into a freak.  We are still uncomfortable with female soldiers after all, even though women warriors date back to the dawn of civilization.

All that oppression of women has its origin in the insecure male urge to control what he desires, manifest in perverse collective.
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Do you think it is harder for a judge to be lenient on a man accused of something the judge himself feels capable of committing?

I think it’s quite the opposite. I think it’s easier for a judge to be lenient on a defendant accused of something he is capable of.

There is the adage about “We hate the evils we see in ourselves,” but it doesn’t apply to sentencing. In sentencing, considering the volume of cases that the judge sees, it comes down to sympathy rather than self-loathing. The more the judge identifies with a suspect, the less likely he or she is to harshly punish them.  Instead, he or she forms opinions on the case within the dynamic of his or her own redemption.

Case in point, the justice system of the South as it’s been related to me.  I’m in regular contact with people from the South who’ve had brushes with the justice system, and those stories suggest that bias is in full-effect.  Every demographic step between a judge and a defendant increases the harshness of the sentence.  It’s a very basic mentality – David Wong, a brilliant writer for Cracked.com – calls it “the monkey sphere,” a reference to a test done on primates that determined there is a biological limit for profound compassion; a “sphere” of people we identify with.  That identification may not come from qualities like gender or race or politics.  But the key element is that identification.

We are far more lenient when it comes to condemning ourselves than when it comes to sentencing those that are strange to us.
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What drew you to writing, and noir writing in particular?

My mother.

I was always energetic and introspective – not to mention self-indulgent – but it was my childhood that compels me to apply those qualities to writing.  My mother took ill with cancer very early in my life, and it was deemed terminal.  It was by will, grit, fortune, positivity and the phenomenal aptitude of my father to manage a family in perpetual catastrophe that the terminal nature was delayed over a decade.

It’s a direct result of that experience that made me want to be a writer on dark subjects.  It changed me from introspective to introverted, seeking refuge in books, particularly fantastic stories and tales of extremes.  It gave me a fascination with suffering and with overcoming suffering.  It fostered in me a fascination with how people – particularly women – endure and prevail over hardship.  It developed an aptitude to see beneath the veneer of happiness or woe to the underlying causes beneath, considering I had witnessed my fair share of false smiles, agonizing accommodation and complicated compromise.  And it instilled in me an overriding desire to engage these forces and to express them to others so that they could better engage with them too.

As I said earlier, I didn’t always write noir.  I wrote horror stories, dark fantasies, gritty superhero sagas and tales of people swept up in warfare.  Discovering that my outlook and expression fit so well with the noir subgenre was practically accident.  I had written part of the Bella Vista mythology that Pamila Payne dedicates herself to – a series of stories set in a haunted motel in rural Texas run by Mafioso – back in the early ’00s. Last year, Pamila told me about Paul Brazill, and his dynamic participation in the ‘net noir scene inspired me to get involved.  It was because of Pamila and Paul that I came to a real habitat for my writing to grow.

I grew up in the shade, so I’m at home in noir. Thanks for letting me bring that to light.
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Thank you, Matt for giving a wonderfully in depth and stimulating interview. Good luck with your novel.

Most of you will know his name.

Salvatore Buttaci is a retired English teacher who has been writing since childhood.  His first published work, an essay entitled “Presidential Timber,” appeared in the Sunday New York News when he was sixteen. Since then his poems, letters, short stories, and articles have been widely published in The New York Times, Newsday, U.S.A. Today, The Writer, Cats Magazine, and elsewhere in America and overseas.

He has lectured on Sicilian-American pride and conducted poetry workshops and readings.

Sal is professional and friendly and one of the most popular writers on the net, for a good reason. He tells great stories that are human and real and he is a kind and supportive friend.

If you haven’t read his wonderful collection of stories ‘Flashing My Shorts’, go and buy a copy now. Here, at All Things That Matter Press , at The Poem Factory, or at Sal’s WordPress and Blogspot sites.

And while you’re at it, have a look at Sal’s chapbook ‘Boy on a Swing’. It’s over at Big Table Publishing.

Sal met me at The Slaughterhouse and we talked about politics, writing, Italy and food.

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Tell us about ‘Flashing My Shorts’.

The title came first.  Flashing My Shorts sounded like a good attention-getter for prospective book buyers.  Next, the cover came to me: men’s boxer shorts strung on a clothesline between two buildings.  All I needed now were the 164 short-short stories to fill the pages!

Nancy Shrader, a poet friend of mine, suggested I contact her publisher, All Things That Matter Press.  The company had published two of her haiku collections.  When I did, it was with my own poetry collection in mind.  ATTMP Phil Harris wasn’t interested, so I presented him with my idea for a flash-fiction book.  I sent him a few quick writes.  He liked them and asked for about 160 more!

Flashing My Shorts is the kind of book I myself enjoy reading.  None of the 164 stories exceeds 1,000 words, a maximum of three pages, and some are no longer than 100 words.  They run the gamut from humor to horror and everything in between.  It’s the kind of book a reader can take anywhere, catching a story or two or three in the cafeteria line, the checkout line, at a red light, in the john.  As I mentioned, anywhere.  Like patrons at a smorgasbord, who can taste a little of this fine dish and a little of that, readers of my book can do the same.  I’ve had several purchasers of my book tell me they have read my book several times.  Based on their comments and many other positive ones at Amazon.com, I would say the book is being well received.

Here is a sample story:

Despots

“So it wasn’t enough those years we spent pulling the wool over each other’s eyes, we had to meet up here and share the same damn fiery pit,” Josef Stalin says with a pit soul’s usual malodorous brimstone breath.
“I just needed a little time, a few more victories,” says Hitler, “less ass smoochers telling me what they thought I wanted to hear!  Dictating is not as easy as it looked.”
“Of course, Herr Head!  You could’ve ruled the world like the old Caesars with their Pax Romana bull crap in one hand, and a sharp dagger in the other!”
“You sack of horse dung, I wrote Mein Kampf!”
“Kampf Shmapf!”
The two old warriors, genocidal megalomaniacs, whose demise gifted the world some respite from terror, sit eternally at lakeside chatting, hurling diatribes, revising history, comparing moustaches, arguing who killed more undesirables, and dipping assless-naked in Satan’s largest Lake of Fire.
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As a Sicilian and an American citizen do you share Sicily’s feelings about Mussolini?

Truth is, Benito Mussolini had those who supported his fascist regime and those who opposed it.  My paternal uncle Giovanni Buttaci was a staunch supporter and my maternal uncle Francesco Amico was a member of the opposing party, the Christian Democrats.

To add to this dichotomy, a good number of those who loved “Il Duce,” learned to quietly distance themselves from him when his alliance with Hitler became too friendly.  In fact, all Sicilians will admit Mussolini’s downfall can be attributed to this dictatorial alliance.  When he accepted Hitler’s Jewish Solution and many Italian Jews were deported to concentration camps, it became quite apparent that Mussolini was not the benevolent Caesar he pretended to be.  His was a pick-and-choose kind of nationalism that favored Christians and condemned Jews.

As for me, an American who loves freedom, I can only say that Sicily throughout its history has been conquered by no less than thirteen great powers, including the fascist Mussolini.  The Sicilian people culled from the invaders all that was good  (poetry, mathematics, and agriculture, to name a few) and learned to forget what was detrimental to their own survival.
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Friedrich Nietzsche visited Sicily and wrote that behind the brightest noon day sun lies the darkest mystery. What do you think of this comment on Sicily?

Nietzsche was himself one of the mystery men of his time!  We’ve all heard of his philosophy, his call to humanity that “God is dead,” so rise up, divest yourselves of morality and become the superman you were meant to be.  For him, acquisition of power was a stronger human need than the practice of morality. Mankind should live separate lives, apart from a world he considered “in ruins.”

A year before he began writing Thus Spake Zarathustra, for three weeks he visited Sicily, the island of which Frederick II (1194 – 1250), King of Sicily, said, “If God had seen Sicily, he would have made it the true Jerusalem.”

Nietzsche, who was born in Prussia, did a lot of traveling during his life.  Sicily was one of his favorite stops, as were cities in Italy and Switzerland.  What did he find compelling about Sicily?  For one thing, its people had been victims of countless invasions and yet seemed resilient enough to go on with their lives.  Perhaps the mystery he alludes to is peculiar to the Sicilian people: to suffer in silence, to keep hidden, from all but their own families, the injustices hurled against them.  And it could have been to Nietzsche that here was an island where the poor toiled away in often fallow fields, and yet they rose above it all.  He might have marveled how that bright noonday sun blinded all who came to Sicily from seeing into the heart of its people.  Being a philosopher, Nietzsche spent his life incessantly delving into life’s mysteries, which no doubt led to his mental breakdown and, a decade later, his death.  Many others besides Nietzsche have been awed by Sicily’s dark mysteries.
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Thinking of the popularity of a series like The Sopranos, do you think that Italian Americans are stereotyped in contemporary drama and what do you see as the remedy to that?

The Sopranos, as well as the current TV travesty, New Jersey Shore, and the myriad films depicting Italian Americans as connected members of the Mafia, have done inestimable harm to our ethnicity.  One might argue that these media portrayals should not to be taken seriously, that those slighted Italian Americans, who rant and rave about how detrimental these shows are, ought to lighten up, see these gangster figures as mere caricatures, not monsters on the wall, innocent caricatures made by simple hand movements meant to entertain viewers, not insult them.  I strongly disagree.

Viewers in metropolitan areas where the Italian American population is substantial might shrug off this kind of media ethnic bias as comical but not rooted in truth, but there are those viewers who have never in their entire lives seen an Italian American up close, and don’t want to.  Once hearing the telltale vowel at the end of his last name, they surmise the man is dangerous.  When I lived in New Jersey, perhaps non-Italian Americans might have wondered if there was a Mafioso in the Buttaci woodpile, but where we now live in West Virginia, some have come right out and asked!

What most disturbs me is this: so many Italian Americans see nothing wrong with being typecast as Mafiosi.  They patronize the viewing of the shows.  They sit back on their living-room couches and laugh raucously when Paulie Walnuts says something one might not expect from such a meticulously dressed man.  They are unaware that the media has posted on the rear ends of all Italian Americans, their supporters as well, a sign that reads, “Kick my ass.  I’m Italian.”  As a consequence, Italian American groups lack the numbers with which to make this fight against ethnic bias viable enough to get results.  There is dissension in our ranks.  We become our own worst enemy.  We do not have that solidarity which the Jews, the Hispanics, and the African Americans have and are not afraid to use to their rightful benefit.  Until Italian Americans see the light, there will be no solution to this injustice.

Those who fight the good fight media discrimination against Italian Americans will continue to do so.  They will go on seeing more of these put-down shows televising throughout America.  More products, Italian and otherwise, will be sold within the context of mafia behavior like “I’ll break your legs if you don’t run out and buy such-and-such.”  Or “Wanna get whacked?  Eat our competitor’s hamburger!”

I am editing a novel I wrote called Carmelu the Sicilian, my small part in fighting media bias.  When it’s done, I will try to interest a publisher to help me reach the Italian American community in particular and everyone else in general.  In my book Carmelu Saccomanni, born in Sicily, immigrates to America and through a series of events makes it to Hollywood and becomes a movie star.  The films he is most famous for are gangster movies.  They earn him fame and fortune, but then when things go wrong, he returns to live out his days in Sicily.  When his epiphany comes, he decides in his old age to stand up to the media bias of which he was once a part.  He does so non-violently.  Carmelu becomes the hero of Italians everywhere.
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How would you like to be perceived as a writer?

Once somebody asked me at a Borders poetry reading if I considered myself a poet.  I had been reading from one of my collections called Promising the Moon.  I told her I preferred being called “a guy who writes poems.”  Calling oneself a “poet” always struck me as bordering on pomposity.  Millions of people write poems.  Are we all poets?  To me, “poet” is a designation reserved for the master guys and gals who wrote and write poetry.  And yet I don’t extend that to, let’s say, fiction writer or even novelist.  I suppose you can tell how highly I place poetry on the literature ladder!

I would like people to consider me a writer worth reading.  I’ve worked hard learning the writing craft, as well as teaching it on all levels of education: elementary school right on through college.  Writing has been my passion, the inner urge I satisfy daily.  I’ve conducted writing workshops and lectured on writing subjects.  I believe words have the power to change minds, elevate readers, elicit emotion, offer vicarious thrills, and express oftentimes mutual feelings of writer and reader.  A student of mine in seventh grade once said to me, “Nobody understands me except this book!”

Because I believe in my writings, I work hard to promote them.  Right now it’s my new book, Flashing My Shorts, that has my nearly full attention.  Second to that, I am editing a follow-up collection of short-short fiction.  The question of whether or not readers will perceive me as I hope they will can only be answered in the reading of my work.  At the expense of sounding somewhat big-headed, I consider myself an entertaining writer whose stories are worth the price of the book.  I don’t lock myself into writing only one type of story to the exclusion of others.  I have as much fun writing humor as I do horror.  I like to write character-driven stories and plot-driven ones.  To see a character come to life on a page is thrilling to me.

How I want to be perceived as a writer?  A guy who takes the writing craft seriously, pens the best he can, is unafraid of rewrites and criticism, and will go on writing for as long as God wants me to!
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What do you think it is about the poetry of Lorca that still appeals and do you think that poetry is music without song?

Poetry is written all over the world, but in my estimation, no one writes better, more powerful poems than the Spanish-speaking poets.  I say that because they have a handle on maximum use of the metaphor and simile.  They know how to inject into their lines top-notch imagery, a definite requirement for excellent poetry.  I find this quality to a lesser degree with Italian poets, but their language is a song while the Spanish language is often a dirge.  Even when it speaks of joy, there is a hint of sorrow.  And they are unafraid to give voice to flowers or wings to that which cannot fly.

Lorca is a favorite of mine because his writings, like those of Vallejo and Neruda, come directly from the heart.  I can see the words shake off the afterbirth as the poet in honest language delivers them to the white page.  When we read Lorca, our own hearts are made lighter.  The writing of the poem and the reading of the poem are heart-generated and heart-welcomed.  The two acts are joined somehow.  The reader becomes privy to the heart secrets of Lorca and is uplifted.  What greater way to fill passing time!

I think poetry goes beyond music.  It is music in its highest form.  A college professor who taught creative writing once told the class, “A poem holds more power in its brevity than any book.  It may unleash itself as a song, dance across the page in a kind of choreographed rhythm, but it reality it is a small miracle of words taking their rightful places and shouting its observations to the world.”
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How did you find the transition from New Jersey to West Virginia?

When I was sixteen, my brother Alphonse and his new bride Celia Ann took me to visit her parents in Crab Orchard, West Virginia.  I was a city boy from Lyndhurst, New Jersey.  I had never seen green mountains or slept with a blanket in late August.  I had never walked down a street and greeted strangers, passing the time of day with them in friendly conversation.  I loved this mountain state so much I made one of the few predictions in my life that came true:  “One day I’ll be living here!”

Except for a year in Sicily when I graduated from college, I spent most of my life in New York and New Jersey.  True, I also lived in Miami and Detroit, but only for very short periods of time, surely not long enough to call them home.  My prediction notwithstanding, I felt certain I’d live out my days in New Jersey.  Like my sister-in-law Celia Ann, Sharon, prior to our marriage, had lived in West Virginia.  When I retired in July 2007, she was very surprised when I told her I wanted to move to West Virginia.  Had I said, Palermo, Sicily, she could not have been more surprised.

We are very happy in Princeton, West Virginia.  We’ve become active in our church.  We’ve made a lot of friends.  Of course, I miss the family I left behind in New Jersey: my mother, two sisters, cousins, friends, and colleagues, but not New Jersey, persae.  At least in Bergen County where Sharon and I lived, no one was friendly.  Everyone seemed to be rushing through their lives with no time to spare for a little laughter.  Perhaps because of the diversity of religions in our New Jersey area, we rarely heard the mention of Jesus, whereas here in Princeton, our daily newspaper posts on its pages a Bible quote, and folks are not afraid to shout out “Praise the Lord!“

We’ve made six visits back since living here, but it’s always the return trip we prefer.
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There has been a shift of power recently in Sicily and Italy with the capture of Bernardo Provenzano, known as the capo di tutti capi after Berlusconi’s fall from power. Prior to him Giulio Andreotti revealed before the Chamber of Deputies the existence of Operazione Gladio, a secret anti-communist structure. To what extent do you think the power shift is part of an alignment towards the centre in Italian politics and do you believe this is possible given the range of Berlusconi’s media empire?

Silvio Berlusconi, despite what many critics will argue, is like the good man you cannot keep down. Despite scandal and accusations that he’s been underhanded in his fight against corruption, he seems to becoming a fixture in Italian politics.  Everyone is familiar with the absurd number of governments Italy has had since post-World War II when De Gasperi served as Italy’s first prime minister.  Since 1946, there have been about 80 elections for that post!  Berlusconi’s party, named Forza Italia, after the cry of his own soccer team, AC Milan, “Go Italy!“ which Berlusconi owns has now morphed into The People of Freedom in Berlusconi’s most recent successful bid for power.

A man of the right, albeit center, he is the enemy of Communism and by whatever means, he does what he can to change the fact that Italy has a huge Communist segment of the over-all population.  His enemies insist that Mussolini too was a rightist and that Berlusconi, with his wealth in the billions, his control of three TV stations, his underhandedness in following his agendas, cannot be trusted to lead Italy.  Many of his businesses, they claim, are tainted with Mafia involvement, and despite Berlusconi’s grandstand play at bringing down the infamous Mafiosi Bernardo Provenzano, the prime minister is no better than him or any of his henchmen.

My feeling is that Italians do not regard Berlusconi as their savior.  The man has too much money!  That alone makes him suspect.  Moreover, he’s been at the center of too many scandals, and like former President George W. Bush,  he closes his eyes to greedy Big Business that holds out its hands for more and more tax relief at the expense of the middle class.  I suspect he will serve out his term and fail in any further attempts to recapture such a lofty position in Italian government.
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You admire Jack London. His writings are often regarded as examples of Social Darwinism, do you think that the forces of social competition are any fewer today?

Social Darwinism was best illustrated by Hitler’s Nazism, which attempted to elevate the Aryans to the top rung of the social ladder while murdering the millions whom he designated as inferior.  And, of course, genocide has decimated other populations in recent memory in Rwanda, Iraq, Cambodia, Bosnia, and Sudan.

We saw Mussolini try to re-establish Italy as the new Roman Empire, beginning with an “Italy-for-Italians-Only” policy which he took to absurd lengths as when he ordered the British department store in Italy to change its name from “Standard” to “Standa.”

In America we now witness the continued growth of neo-Nazi groups like the White Aryan Brotherhood whose mission is to white-wash the nation.

I believe what encourages this national chavinism in America today is the rampant influx of millions entering America illegally, most from Mexico.  States like Arizona and several others who have taken a stand against this illegal practice have been admonished by many, starting with the federal government, because it violates the nation’s sense of tolerance for diverse peoples.  It is also because the practice has been allowed to go on for so long, there seems no solution in sight.  Either a nation closes its eyes to it or they pass laws to either deport illegal aliens or require stringent requirements to remain here and possibly earn citizenship.

We Americans need to keep in mind that the causes that toppled the 500-year Roman Empire are being shared now within our own recent history!  Constant wars, natural disasters, decline in morality, failing economy, political corruption, unemployment, and invasions from those who entered the empire illegally!
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What is the secret ingredient in Tiramisu?

The best Tiramisu I ever ate was in Agrigento, Sicily, at a sweets shop down the road apiece from the Grecian temples.  What made it so good, according to the waiter who brought it to our table and to me who ate it, was the Marsala wine and the mascarpone cheese.  In American restaurants they substitute rum for the Marsala wine.
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Sal, thank you for giving such an in-depth and engaging interview, it’s been great having you at The Slaughterhouse.
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