My First Torture Story

This week I was reading a back issue of The New Yorker and came across a Jack Handey piece on the "Shouts and Murmurs" page, which you can usually find somewhere between pages 25 and 48, or thereabouts. If you're a Jack Handey fan you're well acquainted with his eccentric sense of humor. 

The title alone had me glued to the page. As I read the opening lines it brought to mind a short story I'd written as a teen. It, too, was a story about torture. After you read Jack Handey's intro I will tell you about my story.

May 30, 2022
MY TORTURE IDEAS
BY JACK HANDEY

People think it's easy to come up with torture ideas. I wish! You can spend hours walking along a tranquil beach, or sitting in a meadow full of butterflies, and not come up with a single torture idea.

Some torture ideas will come to you out of the blue. Your mother and stepfather might be visiting, and suddenly a great torture idea will occur to you.

But most torture ideas come from just putting your nose to the grindstone--locking yourself in a small, dark room with a lamp shining in your face staring down at a pen and a blank piece of paper, until the ideas are forced out of you.  Eventually, whipping yourself, you become the proud author of hundreds of torture ideas--many with helpful illustrations. But here's the catch: nine out of ten ideas need to be thrown out. Biting snails?  Powerful suction cups? What was I thinking?

Read the rest here: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/05/30/coming-up-with-torture-ideas-is-harder-than-you-think

* * * * 

WARNING: GRAPHIC CONTENT
CONTINUE YOU AT YOUR OWN RISK

I may have been 15 or so when I wrote my story involving torture. In fact, the torture scene was the primary feature of the story. There was little to no character development, and probably not even a description of what these gangsters looked like or talked like. (I was just a kid. I never got closer to a gangster than my TV, though on retrospect, maybe...)

In the scene a friend and I are being held captive by these bad dudes in suits. The location is sketchy but it is definitely inner city. We're in a room on about the fourth floor. The room has large windows on two walls (must have been a corner office) showing the scale of this concrete jungle. 

In the middle of the room stood a table and a large grey desk, industrial strength, while remaining insignificant.An assortment of tools and implements re-purposed for generating suffering lay strewn across the table.

The story is told in first person and I am on the receiving end of this scene. The manner in which they secured me in my chair is as follows. First, they pushed a small cable into my cheek and out the other cheek. Then the secured the ends of the cable (to pipes on the wall?) in such a way so as to keep me fairly immobile. The only way to escape would be to jerk my head back and rip my face apart.

Now that I think about it, the bad guys did have a motive. They were looking for information. Neither my friend nor I had a clue what they were looking for. We were the wrong guys. 

In my story one of the torture implements was a belt sander, which made a mess of my friend's toes and shins. Funny how I can't remember hardly any of the other horrors except when they strung up my friend by his tongue with a fishhook.

Again for the record, I was 15. 

Torture seems to have become more mainstream since that time. Dustin Hoffman's worst nightmare in Marathon Man; Mel Gibson in Conspiracy Theory; James Caan in Stephen King's Misery; George Clooney in Syriana. And who can forget Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs, that scene in the warehouse with "Stuck in the Middle with You" as soundtrack. 

I once read that if you want to generate sympathy for your main character, hurt them. 

In my story, they went a little too far with my friend, whom they ultimately eviscerated, filling his torso with fast-drying concrete and dropping him into the East River. You know how New York gangsters are, always making bodies disappear in the East River. In New Jersey they leave them in the Great Swamp.

* * * 

More thoughts on this topic are marching into my head, but I'm going to turn the page. Enjoy your weekend. And stay away from people who think torture is fun. It's not.

Almost Wordless Wednesday: The Wrecking Crew

When I read this I thought of the session musicians who didn't get credit for their work on Blood on the Tracks.

Related Links

The Wrecking Crew (Wikipedia)

The Session Musicians . Who Dominated 1960s Pop from The New Yorker

On Writing About Suicide

This week's New Yorker has an article about suicide that I personally found to be a compelling read. At one time, about 25 years ago, my brother and I discussed the possibility of writing a book on this topic. We had both felt wounded by more than one suicide close to us, though none as intimate as a brother, sister, mother or father... but close enough to want to talk about the topic. He's a Ph.D. psychologist and I a writer. We went so far as to outline it in order to assemble a book proposal, but the whole of it got scrapped when my pastor asked what I thought about Dr. Kervorkian and doctor assisted suicide. This topic was ascending in the news and I didn't have an answer. To gain an understanding I managed to get an assignment from Larry Fortner, founding editor of The Senior Reporter, to write about ethical issues in terminal health care, not from a soapbox position but as a journalist.

The working title for our book, if I recall correctly, was To Heal Broken Wings, based on a Newsweek article whose premise was that suicide doesn't solve problems, it only lays them on the broken wings of those around them. Beyond that, I didn't really have much to add, and am now grateful the project was never attempted.

It's possible that we were interested in somehow bringing resolution in our own minds to the internal unsettledness we both felt. That's why Philip Connors' New Yorker piece so captured my attention: On Writing About Suicide and Not Finding Catharsis. The article opens like this:

My brother died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound nearly twenty years ago. One thing that I learned fairly quickly is that if you want to bring any conversation to an abrupt and awkward halt, you can hardly do better than to mention the fact that your brother died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Every time it came up, I heard the same refrain, over and over: I’m so sorry.

It's possible that a lot of writers are attempting to manufacture a catharsis of some kind in order to purge themselves of the pent up pain, confusion and angst, whether from personal failures or intimate loss. In the case of suicide, there is the additional guilt of wondering whether there was something one could have done. Connors, however, doesn't see writing about suicide in this light.

But the kind of writing that speaks most deeply to me requires a kind of ruthlessness and control that are antithetical to catharsis for the creator, if not the reader. To be asked if my writing is a form of catharsis annoys me, because it annexes the territory of literature under the flag of therapy.

All this to say that Connors' article is insightful and articulate. And I wanted to share it.

After the Fall: The New Yorker Weighs In On Dylan's Basement Tapes

“As I walked out of the lovely old Paramount Theater the last three nights after seeing Bob Dylan and his band, one word kept coming to mind: sublime.”
 ~Mitch Meyer, reviewing Bob Dylan's recent Oakland concerts.

November is the beginning of another busy time for Northland Dylan fans. First there’s the release of the latest set of songs from the vault, Bootleg Series #11, The Basement Tapes. Second, there’s the epic collection of lyrics from the entirety of his catalog, titled simply The Lyrics: Since 1962. And finally, Dylan himself is returning home to Minnesota, some fans already vowing to not miss a concert included the rumored unscheduled one that I can’t talk about.

The quote atop this page is from a review at BobLinks.com, the “go to” source for Dylan concert followers and more.

Regarding the Basement Tapes The New Yorker gave its reviewer plenty of ink to play with in this week’s edition. He begins with a recount of the famously obscured motorcycle accident that is all part of the Dylan legend, hence the title of the review, which begins this way...

On July 29, 1966, Bob Dylan became distracted while riding his motorcycle. Nobody knows what caught his eye—he told Sam Shepard that it was the sun; he told the biographer Robert Shelton that he hit an oil slick—but he ended up at the bottom of a hill in Woodstock, New York, with his Triumph beside him. His thoughts could have been distraction enough.

And so it goes, what really happened nobody knows. What we do know is that Dylan took a break from touring and proceeded to leave an extensive collection of recordings that answer the question as regards how he spent his time during his Woodstock years after leaving The City and The Road.

After an appropriately elaborate setup, author Sasha Frere-Jones digs into the news, which is the occasion for this multi-page review.

Next week, [November 4 to be exact] a six-CD set called “The Basement Tapes Complete: The Bootleg Series, Vol. 11,” featuring a hundred and thirty-nine songs, will be released. It is not exactly an album, and was never intended to be. Some of the songs began circulating in 1969, on an album that came to be called “The Great White Wonder,” and brought the word “bootleg” into the context of music. Six years later, sixteen songs from these sessions, plus eight written and recorded by The Band alone, were enhanced with overdubs and officially released as a two-LP set, under the name “The Basement Tapes.” Several months before the release, Dylan gave his first radio interview in nine years and said, “Somebody mentioned it was a good idea to put it out, you know, as a record, so people could hear it in its entirety and know exactly what we were doing up there in those years.”

The author does more than talk about this latest Dylan set and it’s 139 songs of uneven importance. He offers a detailed autobiographical overview of how he beame a Dylan fan. His first brush with Dylan’s music failed to connect with him. But then, somewhere along the way, like tens of thousands before him and since, a single line or stanza from a single song hits home with force. For Frere-Jones the song was “Mama You Been On My Mind” from the Bootleg Series Volumes 1-3 (Rare and Unreleased.)

It's good article, worthy of The New Yorker. You can catch it in full here.

And in the event you don't have your tickets yet for the Midwest portion of his Never Ending Tour, here's the place to plug in, at BobDylan.com. Three nights in Minneapolis, three more in Chicago and a seventh night in Cleveland, home of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Keep on truckin'. Bob. Let it roll.