Tag Archives: aaron ritchey

A Just Read Review – Atlas Shrugged – Kill My Mediocre Soul

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Reading Atlas Shrugged is an event. Why? I mean, really, it’s an iffy novel. It’s a thousand pages of iffy story, iffier characters, and come on, the climax reads like b-movie Ian Fleming. And the dry, stupid, unnecessary John Galt speech? Please. It was skim-city and I was the mayor. And yet…

Reading Atlas Shrugged is an event because it’s more than novel, it’s a philosophical treatise, it’s passion, it is an enormous literary masterpiece. It is one of the most important books ever written with some damn fine prose. Damn fine prose. I sound stuffy, like I should be smoking a pipe in front of a fireplace. Damn fine, mate, pip, pip, jolly good.

Reading Atlas Shrugged is like being strapped to chair, drenched in water, and electrocuted and brain-washed, with toothpicks keeping your eyes open for days on end like in the movie The Island from the 1980’s. It is propaganda disguised as a novel. It is probably the most subversive book I’ve ever read. It is a book that begs to be burned. It is a suicidal book. It is anti-Christian, anti-communism, anti-novella. And yet, it is inspiring. This is a book that challenges you to change, and sticks needles in your genitals to make sure that change happens. And if you resist, it fights you, fights you to read it, fights every belief you have, fights you until you are exhausted. It had to be 1000 pages. It uses every word as weapon.

If I wanted to take over a country, I would burn Atlas Shrugged, then kill all the lawyers, and then give people free Taco Bell and free cable T.V. I would rule forever.

I love to read the classic novels because they are classic for a reason. If you haven’t read Goethe’s Faust, you are cheating yourself. Don’t read this insipid blog. Go, now, find a classic book, get some coffee and read until your mind explodes.

Reading Atlas Shrugged exploded my mind. The book is simple. It repeats it’s themes over and over again. We all just have 24 hours in a day. What are you doing with your time? What are you doing to live? And what is stopping you? And if you are letting things stop you, well, I’m not. Get out of my way. I’m going for it. I’ll climb over your corpse to get there. Frak you.

Atlas Shrugged is relentless. Like I said at the beginning, it is an event. And maybe that is what literature is, en event. Not just a nice little story that grabs my little attention for a few little minutes. Man, lots of books are like that. And even writing a little book is hard. But to write something that moves heaven and earth–that takes courage. More and more, though, I’m reading my own writing and I can do better. I’m getting frustrated with the chained writing I’m doing. At some stage, I’m gonna have to throw off the chains, and churn out pages that rage. But it’s hard to write books no one can read. I did that for awhile. But I wonder if I could marry the explosion of my early books with the control and plotting of my later novels. In the end, Ayn Rand wouldn’t care about the art of the book, only about the sales. It’s about money, production, success, celebrating life by creating, innovating, selling, and driving forward. Kill the mediocrity inside you.

So, I am reeling from the event of Atlas Shrugged. You’ll get more. The bomb has gone off. It’s gonna take me any number of blog posts to pick up the pieces.

Saturday Music Club Reviews Part 1 – From Steampunk Trenches Cool to Indian Summer Pollution

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Okay, for those who are just joining us, every Saturday, or Tuesday, or Saturdayish day, some of my friends, and some people I don’t know from Sweden, send out music. A song. Just what we’re listening to at the moment. It’s a great way to be exposed to great new music. It’s also a way of spreading the news about bands that need more airplay. And it’s about friends. Here’s to good friends. At some point, I started reveiwing the songs. The SMC’s own Simon Cowell. I’m wearing a black t-shirt. There will be blood.

Kasey Chambers – Pony – My new favorite song. Love Kasey Chambers when she does alt country. When she does her whiny-indigo-girls type of stuff, I hit the next, next, next. But when that girl is on her game, she is unbeatable and haunting. Love the weird, little girliness of this song. Eery. Like Drusilla in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Adore this song.

Clawfinger – Truth – Love this gnashing guitar, rap, Red Hot Chili Pepper cursing fest of sound and delight. Gonna keep this one. However, I gotta say, at one point, the lyrics, the song, hit me like something Michael Scott and Dwight Schrute would have put together. It’s paper, it’s Dunder-Mifflin paper, m*****F*****. Don’t count the asterixes. You’ll be disappointed. Wanna write a book that captures this. Its very ardent. So good, I had to listen ot it twice. Explicit lyrics. They say the “f” word.

Camera Obscura – French Navy – Wow, retro breakfast with a side slender bacon. I felt like it was the 1960’s again, and I was about to sweet talk a hippie chick into my van. But then, I realized, it was 2011. No more vans. No more hippie chicks. Just the distant dream of a cool little song. Very Vampire Weekend.

Butch Walker – Trash Day – Oh, is this Tom Petty and the Delaware Destroyers? Was that Tom Petty’s band. Is this Butch Walker or Paul Westerberg and the Replacements? This is total college band radio nicety with better production values. It’s not bad. I like it. It’s trash day in Atlanda, GA. It’s just, um, derivative. But is that bad? It’s good. The songs it’s derived from are good. It’s all good. And catchy. And nice. I’ll keep it. I’ll recommend it. But it won’t win prizes for newness.

Stone Sour – Zzyzz Rd – Nice piano opening. Isn’t there a literary magazine called Zzyzz. No, I think the literary magazine has a “v” in there somewhere. Lies and promises. Okay. Waiting for the hook. Okay, the drums hit, and I’m hooked. This is a song, after time, that I would either love, or hate, or love to hate, or hate to love. Love that angsty, piano, sing-song, fade away stuff. Nice bridge. Again, nothing new here, it’s the old, done really well. This is my song. Too tired to care, and I gotta go. I would add, gotta go home. Tired and I don’t want to go home. Nicely done. It’s a keeper. Gotta go home. He never says it. Man, that pisses me off. Why won’t he say gotta go home? Why, Spock, why? Okay, I’ll stop. Angsty. Love it.

Six Feet Under – Lycanthropy – Very guitary at the start. But I like the name of the song. And now a demon is about to start screaming. Better get more interesting. I can only death metal when the right mood hits me. I mean, the exact right mood. I mean, it has to touch me like a werewolf’s paw. This wasn’t screamy or demony enough for me. Speaking of lycanthropy, I’m gonna write a novel with were-mules. Yeah, old west, steampunk, weremules. Lots of Braying. “You’re one of us! Carniverous!” That’s funny. But not in a good way. Need more. And then it just fades away? Come on, guys. Come on.

Gordon Lightfoot – Sundown – You know, I used to like Gordon Lightfoot until I realized people called him Gord. His greatest hits was called Gord’s Gold. Gord. Stupid. Yeah, I am that petty. Seriously. This is a great song, and it’s about a girl who was bad, bad news. You know, those kinds of women I could never deal with. I know, I know, the femme fatale, the danger, the mystery, the erotic heights of the unattainable. Those kinds of women don’t mess with me because they know, instinctively, I could never keep up. So like in most areas of my life, I’ve avoided pain by being a wussy man. Next life.

Bassnectar – Timestretch – OMGosh. Please, this song is killing me with cool. I have cool leaking out of my eyes. Cut me? I’d bleed cool. This song is so deep, so entrenched. It’s a World War I fight song. It’s steampunk on acid. It’s so thick and juicy, you couldn’t cut it with a steak knife. You’d need a saws-all. I think dubstep might be the music of my soul. I am going to keep this and pray for more. Arguably, the best song I’ve ever heard. And just when it gets too deep, it then veers off into a wimpy perfect bridge. Last two minutes, variations on a theme. A cool theme. Kick it. Ha, comment on youtube = “If I was the leader of a country this would be The National Anthem!”

Maplewood – Indian Summer – Yeah, is the year 1976? No. This song sounds dated. And not in a cool, steampunk, world war I entrenched cool fight song cool sort of way. Cool. No, this song brings up extra footage from BILLY JACK and the kids have long hair, and flowers in their air, and they’re running across a field, with golden speckles in the sunlight. And then you see an Indian man, crying. One tear slides down his cheek. Pollutions is wrong and makes Indians sad. If I have to hear this guy say ‘Indian Summer’ one more time, I might have to kill him. If the 1970’s Indian Pollution Man doesn’t beat me to it.

You Will Never Write Your Novel, Ever

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Recently, I spent a weekend at a writer’s retreat, and the whole thing is to go away and write. It’s like The Dick Van Dyke Show episode where Rob Petrie goes away to the cabin to write his book because he couldn’t focus at home. It’s a common writer’s idea. I won’t write today, because someday, I’ll have a ton of time to write and boy, won’t it be great. Like Harry Chapin Carpenter’s “Cat’s In The Cradle”, we’re gonna have a good time then.

The thing is, I don’t buy it. Writing is a daily habit because if you wait for the perfect time to write, it will never, ever come. There’s never going to be a good time.

A friend at work, whom I love to hate, and hate to love, gave us a book which has the secret to life. Seriously. It’s by Jeff Olson, and it’s called The Slight Edge. The idea of the book is simple, people are successful by the little choices they make, every day, just itty, bitty little choices that by themselves don’t mean much, but over time, add up and make all the difference in the world. Writing is like that. If you wrote 43 minutes a day, which is the length of a Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode, you would have a novel faster than if you waited for eight hour chunks. Because how often do you have eight hour chunks? If you have my life, you never have them. You long for them. You hunt for them. They are an endangered animal, elusive, yet beautiful. Come here, little eight hours, come to Daddy.

So I’m enjoying the writers retreat because I’m using it to sneak in projects I won’t have time to tackle once I return to normal life. So in the end, maybe that’s the best way to use the time I got, sneak in the impossible books I’ll never have the time to write.

And Rob Petrie never did write his novel. He got distracted. It’s not about the time you don’t have, it’s about using the time you do have, and realizing how lucky you are in this moment and being grateful.

And that pistachio episode of The Dick Van Dyke Show always unnerved me. Pistachios, everywhere, weird.