#bolesbooks — Public Fediverse posts

The Viking Funeral and the Us of Us

On the last Saturday of August 2019, in a valley that had already lost the assembly plant and the regional medical center, the daily newspaper of Mahoning County, Ohio, printed its final edition. The Vindicator was a hundred and fifty years old. It had celebrated its sesquicentennial the week before it died. The announcement had come on June 28, in a letter signed by the publisher and the general manager, members of the family that had owned the paper since 1887, and the record of the letter is exact about the cause: the paper was hemorrhaging money, the family had looked for a buyer, and there was none. The letter's close is in the record too. "It is with broken hearts that we say goodbye and a final thank you." […]

https://bolesblogs.com/2026/09/09/the-viking-funeral-and-the-us-of-us/

Four Hundred Words for Six Hundred Dollars

The announcement arrived through LJExpress on a Friday in late July, dressed in the language of service. Media Source, the company that owns Library Journal, School Library Journal, The Horn Book, and the Junior Library Guild, had opened a storefront called Open Shelf Reviews, aimed at independent authors and small presses, and the copy asked me to hold two ideas at once: the reviews would be paid for by the authors under review, and a wall would keep those purchased reviews away from the magazines whose names give the wall its worth. The company described the operation as "a clearly identified paid service," with its own editor, reviewer pool, and website, all kept apart from the editorial processes that made Library Journal matter to librarians for a century and a half. […]

https://bolesblogs.com/2026/07/30/four-hundred-words-for-six-hundred-dollars/

Nobody Closed the Gate: How Traditions Convince Themselves That Thinking Ended, and Who Collects the Toll

In 1984 a legal historian named Wael Hallaq published a study whose title was a question: "Was the Gate of Ijtihad Closed?" The question sounds technical, and the journal that carried it, the International Journal of Middle East Studies, is read by a few thousand specialists. What Hallaq did inside those pages deserves a wider audience than it has ever had, because he performed one of the cleanest demolitions in modern intellectual history, and the thing he demolished is a structure that keeps getting rebuilt in other neighborhoods, including our own. […]

https://bolesblogs.com/2026/07/29/nobody-closed-the-gate-how-traditions-convince-themselves-that-thinking-ended-and-who-collects-the-toll/

Three Books on a Table

When this novel began, there were three physical books on my table, and none of them had anything to do with the others. One was a slim green-and-gilt volume from 1922 called The Wild Heart, eleven animal sketches of Puget Sound country, foxed at the corners, written by a woman almost nobody remembers. One was the Theogony of Hesiod, a genealogy in verse, roughly a thousand lines of who was born to whom, composed by a Boeotian farmer about seven hundred years before Christ. And one was the Inferno, in the English that Henry Wadsworth Longfellow made out of the worst years of his life. An animal book, a family tree, and a tour of hell. The Disposition is what happened when I stopped treating them as three books and started treating them as one instrument with three registers. […]

https://bolesblogs.com/2026/07/24/three-books-on-a-table/

The Necessary Art: Taking the Title Back

Today I am publishing a book about a theft at the center of Western culture, one its victims were trained to take as a compliment:The Necessary Art: Aristotle's Six Elements in the Clinic, the Courtroom, the Proof, the Blueprint, and the Republic. It runs 342 pages in paperback, it exists in a Kindle edition and a free reading edition you can download right now, and the audiobook will follow as soon as the voice is ready. Those are the facts of the launch. What follows is the case for why this book exists, because its central fact has stood in plain sight for two hundred and eighty years while the people it names were trained to take the theft as a compliment: the professions of the working world were robbed of a word, the robbery has a date and a paper trail, and the word can be taken back. […]

https://bolesblogs.com/2026/07/11/the-necessary-art-taking-the-title-back/

Two Words, Three Sources, Four Generations: How I Built The Wergild

A novel can be assembled inside the space between two words, provided the words are old enough and the space between them has never closed. The oldest components of The Wergild are a pair of terms from early English and Germanic law. The first is the title itself: the wergild was the man-price, the payment a killer or the killer's kin owed to the family of the killed, scaled to the standing of the dead, the settlement that closed a feud and kept grief from multiplying into graves. Beside it sat morð, the old law's name for a killing done in secret and left unacknowledged, the one category of death the whole system could never settle, since no price can change hands until the killer has a name. Every law that promises repayment carries a shadow clause for the debt it cannot collect. I built the novel inside that shadow, and every other component was chosen for how much load it could carry there. […]

https://bolesblogs.com/2026/07/07/two-words-three-sources-four-generations-how-i-built-the-wergild/

The Magnificent Loser: The Book I Wrote to Answer Two Words in Red Ink

Every writer carries a verdict he never agreed to. Mine was two words long, written in red marker across the title page of a play I cared about, by a historian whose judgment I had asked for and could not afford to ignore. BAD DRAMA. No note beneath it, no argument, no second page. I was in my twenties. I put the play in a drawer and told myself I had learned something useful about my own limits. It took me forty years to understand that I had learned the wrong lesson, and that the right one would take an entire book to say. […]

https://bolesblogs.com/2026/06/22/the-magnificent-loser-the-book-i-wrote-to-answer-two-words-in-red-ink/

One Eighth of an Inch: Julian Jaynes, the Bicameral Mind, and the Bandwidth of God

Start with a measurement, because the measurement is where the famous theory hides its best secret. In The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, published in 1976, the Princeton psychologist Julian Jaynes had to explain how one half of the brain could hand a finished thought to the other half. He reached for anatomy and found a strip of nerve fiber connecting the two temporal lobes, the anterior commissure, which he measured at slightly more than one eighth of an inch in diameter. That tiny bridge, he proposed, carried the voices of the gods. The width of the channel is the whole argument, and almost everyone who summarizes Jaynes leaves it out. […]

https://bolesblogs.com/2026/06/17/one-eighth-of-an-inch-julian-jaynes-the-bicameral-mind-and-the-bandwidth-of-god/

The Book I Could Not Afford to Get Wrong

Every book I take on carries some risk, and on most of them the risk is mine alone. If I misjudge a scene or overwrite a chapter, the cost is my own time and my own name, and I can live with that. Beyond the Burial Tree, my new book, was the first in a long while where getting it wrong would cost other people, and a people who have already been wronged about as thoroughly as a people can be. That fact stood over the desk through every page. […]

https://bolesblogs.com/2026/06/02/the-book-i-could-not-afford-to-get-wrong/

Stop Applauding the Forced Apology

There is no such thing as a sincere statement made with a boot on the neck, and we have built a culture that pretends otherwise.Watch what happens now when someone steps out of line. A demand goes up for a statement. The statement arrives, in the approved shape, full of the approved words, and a crowd gathers to judge whether the sorrow inside it looks real enough to accept. We have a name for that performance when a dictator stages it. We call it a show trial. What we have not admitted is that we run a softer version of the same machine every week, on our phones, for sport. […]

https://bolesblogs.com/2026/05/31/stop-applauding-the-forced-apology/

Notes on Tomorrow as Tribute

The book is out. The title is Tomorrow as Tribute: The Politics of the Burnt Future. It is available in paperback, in Kindle, and as a free web edition through David Boles Books. The audiobook is in production with narrator selection underway. The web edition is free because I want the argument to circulate as widely as possible. […]

https://bolesblogs.com/2026/05/22/notes-on-tomorrow-as-tribute/

Ischia is Burning: The Novel I Have Been Writing for Thirty-Six Years

Most books are written. A few are excavated. Ischia is Burning is a book I excavated from a steel filing cabinet in a Manhattan apartment, where it had been sitting for more than three decades inside a folder marked Ischia, in the form of a screenplay I wrote at twenty-five years old in the second year of an MFA program at Columbia. The novel that has just been published is what happened when I sat down with that folder in May, found the staples rusted and half the dialogue wincing, and wrote what the twenty-five-year-old version could not yet write. The novel is now available as a paperback and a Kindle edition, and a complete free web reading edition lives at BolesBooks.com.

I need to tell you where this started, because the thirty-six years between the conception and the delivery are the form of the book, not biographical trivia.

The Steel Filing Cabinet

In the spring of 1990 I was a graduate student in the Oscar Hammerstein II Center for Graduate Theatre Studies at Columbia University’s School of the Arts, in the dramatic writing concentration, working on a thesis screenplay for a class taught by Grafton Nunes. Grafton had produced Kathryn Bigelow’s first feature, The Loveless, with Willem Dafoe in his first leading role. He had spent his early career at Paramount. He knew what a film script was supposed to do and he knew when one was doing it.

I wrote a screenplay called Ischia is Burning. The country I had visited once. The island I had never seen. What I had read about it concerned the Greek colonial site at Pithekoussai, the oldest western Greek settlement in the central Mediterranean, founded in the eighth century before Christ on a volcanic island twelve miles off the Bay of Naples. The island had a basin. The basin had a name. I gave the basin sixteen children and four adults, and I gave the four adults eighteen years to build an Iron Age village around the children, and I gave the village a contamination event in the groundwater that would not have happened in the Iron Age.

Grafton read the screenplay. He told me it was the best student screenplay he had ever read. With a teacher’s specificity, he named the adjustments he wanted me to make. Blockbuster was the word he reached for, as if he were predicting a weather event.

I did not make the adjustments.

I gave the screenplay to Sam Crothers at The Producer Circle. Sam read it. He told me he loved it. The cohesion problems were the second thing he raised. After that came the matter of money, which Grafton had not raised at all. The last thing Sam asked me was what I was willing to wait for. Sam got sick within the year. He retired to Florida. We did not speak again. Marty Richards, who ran the Producer Circle, died in November 2012. Sam followed him in April 2013. Neither lived to see the novel.

I put the screenplay in a steel filing cabinet in an apartment on East 13th Street. It stayed there for thirty-six years. From time to time I took it out, read the first ten pages, and put it back. The notebook in which I had written down Grafton’s adjustments was lost in a move sometime in the late 1990s, and after that I told myself for a long set of years that I could not begin the novel because I could not remember what Grafton had said, and to begin without remembering would be to disrespect what he had given me.

I see now that the unremembered adjustments were the alibi. The actual reason was simpler. At twenty-five I was not old enough to write what finding out costs a child. Nor was I old enough to write what finding out costs the adults who have spent eighteen years not telling.

The Basin on Pithekoussai

The novel opens in the autumn of 1986 in a basin on the western flank of the Italian island of Ischia, in a place called Mezzavia. Mezzavia does not exist on any map I have been able to locate, although the road of that name does run between the towns of Forio and Casamicciola Terme on the actual island. In the novel, the basin holds four adults and sixteen children. The children range in age from six to seventeen. The adults are, by training, an anthropologist, a physician, a pilot, and a linguist. They have spent eighteen years building a closed Iron Age village around the children, complete with hand-woven clothing, a small iron mill the children themselves operate, a constructed Germanic dialect rooted in Old Norse and Old High German, an invented cosmology with four gods and eight constellations, and a sky with no airplanes in it.

The children believe they are living in the Iron Age. They believe this because the four adults have withheld twenty-four years of European history from them. No radios enter the basin. No printed page betrays the year. The antibiotic that would tell a child the world contains chemistry beyond the herbal poultice does not exist there.

In September of 1986, a cesium-137 contamination event begins to appear in the basin’s groundwater. The four adults face the question they have spent eighteen years not asking, which is what to do when the constructed world you have built around children begins to poison them, and the only treatment you can offer comes from a century the children are not allowed to know exists.

The title of the book is also a transmitted phrase. A pilot speaks it into a dispatch microphone at zero four sixteen on a Thursday in September 1986, from the cockpit of a plane climbing out of the American air base at Aviano in northeastern Italy. The book takes its thirty-three chapters to answer three questions about that phrase: what is burning, who is speaking it, and where the radio signal is going.

The novel is the answer the four adults arrive at.

The Temptation

The book moves at the velocity of a thriller and the moral architecture of an inquiry, which is what keeps it from settling cleanly into either form. What it pursues is a question older than the basin and older than the Iron Age the basin pretends to be. The question is what happens when a small group of educated people, looking at a larger group of human beings, decides in private that the larger group cannot be trusted with the truth and must be administered the world on a schedule the educated group will determine.

That question runs through the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, the Willowbrook hepatitis study, Decree 770 of the Socialist Republic of Romania, the Stanford prison experiment of 1971, the closed religious compounds of the American Southwest, and a hundred other documented projects in which one group of people decided what another group would be permitted to know. The Notes on Sources at the back of the novel walks through the historical anchors. Inside the novel itself, those anchors are kept off the page. What sits on the page is fiction. The four adults and the sixteen children of Mezzavia are inventions. What is not invented is the temptation that built them.

I am calling it temptation, and I want to be precise about the word. The four adults are educated, careful, well-spoken people who can defend every individual decision they made, which is precisely why naming them as monsters would let the reader off the hook. The novel is interested in how educated, careful, well-spoken people arrive at a project that, taken in aggregate, looks like the thing they would never have built if they had been able to see the whole shape of it from the outside. What the novel refuses to do is let them off the hook for what they built. It refuses, at the same time, the easy out of calling them monsters, because calling them monsters would close the question of how their colleagues, students, and followers found them defensible while the work was being done.

An Addendum the Way I Wrote It at Twenty-Five

The original 1990 screenplay is reproduced unaltered in the back of the book as Addendum I. The dialogue I made wince in May has been preserved exactly as I committed it in 1990, with its small infelicities and its young confidence both intact. I considered editing the screenplay. I decided against it. The point of including the screenplay at the back of the book is to show the reader the gap, in technique and in moral attention, between what I could write at twenty-five and what I could write at sixty-one, rather than to display the early version as a finished object. The story is identical across both versions, along with the four scientists, the sixteen children, the basin, and the fire. Two different writers, separated by thirty-six years, were working on the same material.

If a reader of the novel goes to the addendum and finds that the screenplay version reaches conclusions the novel does not reach, and lands its moral judgments where the novel will not land its moral judgments, that is the point. The young writer was bolder. The old writer is more careful, and more wounded, and less willing to tell the reader who the villain is.

For the Children Who Were Never Told

The dedication of the book is one sentence long. It reads, For the children who were never told.

I want to be clear about who that dedication is for. First, the sixteen fictional children of the basin on Pithekoussai, who are inventions, although the patterns of behavior they live inside are documented in places that were not inventions. Beyond them, the dedication names every reader who has ever sat across from a parent, or a doctor, or a government, and realized that the version of the world they had been given was a redacted version, edited by someone who had decided, on their behalf, what they could carry. The book is also for the adults who decided. Those four scientists in the basin can defend every individual decision they made. What the novel is interested in is why their defenses sound the way they do, and why those defenses have sounded the same way in every century in which someone has been entrusted with a knowledge that someone else has decided will not be shared.

How to Read the Book

The novel runs around 130,000 words across thirty-three chapters and a closing addendum. Paperback and Kindle edition are available now at Amazon, and a complete free web reading edition lives at BolesBooks.com, where the full bibliography of David Boles Books is also indexed. The Foreword tells the thirty-six-year story I have only summarized here. A Notes on Sources section walks through the historical record the novel draws on. Readers who want to put the book down and argue with somebody about it will find a Reading Group Discussion Guide in the back, which is the use I would most like the book to be put to.

I will be writing about Ischia is Burning at length over the coming weeks, including a Human Meme podcast episode on the moral physics of withheld knowledge, a Prairie Voice investigative piece on the documented American history of closed communities, and a conversation series on BolesBlogs.com about the book’s relationship to the Institutional Autopsy trilogy and to the question of what fiction can do that documentary work cannot. The conversation continues. The book is the entrance into it.

Sam Crothers asked me, in 1990, what I was willing to wait for. The answer arrived thirty-six years later. The book exists.

David Boles is the founder of David Boles Books and the editor of Prairie Voice. His Institutional Autopsy trilogy was completed in March 2026 with the publication of Underwritten. He lives in New York City with the Deaf ASL educator Janna Sweenie and two British Shorthair cats.

#bolesBooks #book #burning #children #collusion #davidBoles #film #grafttonNunes #hiding #history #ischia #kathrynBigelow #novel #publication #schoolOfTheArts #screenplay #secrecy #theLoveless #thriller #willemDafoe #writing

What the First Photographer Knew

Photography spent its first half-century being mocked. The painters who controlled the academies and the salons looked at the daguerreotypists and saw mechanics. You pressed a button. You waited for the silver to fix. The machine did the work. Real art required a hand, an eye, a soul, a brush moving through hours of decision. The photographers were craftsmen at best, vandals at worst, and certainly not making Art. This was the consensus from Daguerre’s 1839 announcement until the Photo-Secession movement around 1900, when Alfred Stieglitz spent decades arguing the opposite and slowly won. The Museum of Modern Art opened its photography department in 1940. The Metropolitan Museum followed eventually. By 1980 photographs sold at auction for sums that would have stunned the painters who once sneered at them. The mockers were wrong, and they were wrong in a particular way that matters here.

What the first photographers knew, and what their mockers missed, is the subject of this article. An aphorism is a short saying that compresses a big idea into a single sentence, the sort of thing that fits on a poster or a coffee mug. The one I started with proposes that science is the discovery of what was true before anyone said so, and art is the act of bringing into existence what was never there. The aphorism has a problem its critics quickly identify. Most of what we call art does not require originating an unprecedented thing. A choir performing Mozart is making art without inventing anything. A workshop apprentice executing a Madonna in the master’s style is operating within a tradition. The strict reading of the aphorism would disqualify them both, and that contradicts how galleries and concert halls use the word.

So here is the refined position the photography story points toward. The originating act is what art and science share. Both fields contain a small number of moments when a particular human consciousness brings into existence a thing or a method or a way of seeing that was never there before, followed by an enormous number of practitioners who apply the new thing well or badly. Niépce making the first surviving heliograph in 1826 was an artist because the act of fixing a stable image with light had never been done. Daguerre refining the process into commercial viability in 1839 was an artist because the daguerreotype as a finished method had never existed. The studio photographer in 1860 producing his ten thousandth carte de visite was a craftsman applying invented technique. Same physical action, different category. The originating moment is what carries the honor.

The same cut runs through science. Newton’s invention of the calculus was an originating act; the engineer applying calculus to bridge stress in 1955 was a competent technician. Mendel’s first articulation of inheritance ratios was an originating act; the corn breeder applying Mendelian principles in 1962 was a working agronomist. The radiologist who first describes a previously unrecorded lesion pattern is doing what Mendel did. The radiologist applying established categories to the morning’s queue is doing what the agronomist did. The cut runs through both fields. This is the position photography forces us to, and it is the position I have been calling the Scientific Aesthetic across this network for fifteen years: the claim that science is itself a form of art, and that arts and sciences converge through a shared originating operation.

Consider a thought experiment that sharpens it further. I own a camera and take a position near the Eiffel Tower. After pressing the button, I hand the camera to you. You stand exactly where I stood and produce a second exposure. The photographs are identical. Who is the artist? Whose work is it? Does the camera’s owner have a stronger claim than the button-presser? Does the second photograph constitute imitation of the first, or are they both equally derivative of the tower itself? The thought experiment exposes that pressing the button was never the originating act. The originating act was Niépce’s, then Daguerre’s, then a long succession of inventors who established lenses, film stocks, exposure indices, and the conventions of framing. By the time you and I arrive at the spot and produce identical images, the originating work was done a century earlier. We are operating an invented machine within an invented set of conventions. Neither of us is making art in the strict sense; we are tourists with a camera doing what tourists do.

Copyright law, which has to give a practical answer, gives a strange one. Each of us would own the copyright in the photograph our hand caused to exist, and the copyrights would coexist for identical images. This is legally coherent and philosophically unsatisfying. Coherent because intellectual property law tracks proximate cause, and our fingers are the proximate cause of the shutters. Unsatisfying because it locates art in the trigger pull, which is exactly the location the painters of 1839 mocked and were partly right to mock. Where the painters were wrong was in thinking that no photographer had ever done the originating work. Niépce had. The 1839 mockery had the wrong target. The studio operators churning out cartes de visite were the proper subject of the criticism; the inventors of the medium had earned exemption. The same distinction applies inside painting itself, where the first to use linear perspective was making art and the thousandth competent perspective drawer was making decoration.

Now the harder example. Karl Barth wrote that Bach went to heaven while Mozart came from heaven. The distinction is real and worth holding up to the light. Bach as the worker who climbed the structure of counterpoint until it produced sublime architecture, every voice mathematically accounted for, every chorale prelude a piece of theological engineering. Mozart as the channel through which finished music seemed to arrive, the manuscripts famously cleaner than they should have been, the working method opaque even to his contemporaries. Both originated. Bach invented the practical possibilities of equal temperament and brought the fugue to a development nobody had imagined. Mozart developed the mature Classical style and pushed forms in opera and symphony to a depth that shaped the next century. By the originating-act test, both are artists in the strictest sense.

Yet the heaven attribution tracks something the originating-act test does not capture. It tracks the phenomenology of the artist’s experience of making. Bach made through labor. Mozart made through reception. The work appeared to arrive through Mozart from somewhere beyond him, and his role was to be present, conscious, equipped to receive what came. This Romantic conception of genius as channel has been mocked too, especially by twentieth-century critics who wanted to demystify the artist and rehabilitate the worker. But the distinction is not mystical, even if the metaphor is. Some originators labor toward what they make. Others find what they make arriving in them already largely formed. Both kinds of originator are artists. The distinction is internal to the category, and both kinds satisfy the originating-act test.

This matters because it tells us what the consciousness contributes. If Mozart was a channel, what he contributed was the readiness, the trained ear, the mind shaped by every piece of music he had absorbed since childhood, the working hand fast enough to capture what arrived. The channel had to be made before anything could come through it. The making of the channel was the labor; what came through it was the work. By this account, even the channel-artist is doing work; the work is just earlier in the process. Mozart’s effort had been spent before the moment of composition. Bach’s was spent during. Both consciousnesses originated, and the difference is the timing of the labor.

Hold this conclusion against the AI question, because it does work the older formulations cannot do. A language model produces text that no human assembled before. By the strict never-before-existed test, the output qualifies as PhD thesis. By the originating-act test, the output qualifies as imitation. The model invented nothing. Researchers invented its architecture. Human writers produced the training corpus. The inference itself is the application of an existing method to an existing prompt. The model occupies the position of the 1880 studio photographer, two generations downstream from Niépce. It plays the engineer’s role to Newton’s mathematics. The output may be useful, beautiful, even surprising, but it is not the originating act of a particular consciousness, because there is no consciousness in the model to do the originating. There may eventually be one, and that day will require revisiting this argument, but the present-day large language model is a competent technician of an invented process.

The first person to use a language model in a way nobody had used one before may have done something originating. Someone who discovers that a particular kind of prompt produces a particular kind of result, then builds a body of work around that discovery, may be an artist by the test I am proposing. The millionth person to type a prompt and accept the output is no more an artist than the millionth person to photograph the Eiffel Tower. This is consistent with the photography case. The category of the new medium has room for originators and for technicians, and most users in either field will be technicians.

A final consequence. The originating-act test resists political abuse better than the discovery-creation aphorism does. Authoritarian regimes police the canon by rewriting who counts as the first, the true, the founding artist or scientist. Entartete Kunst was an attempt to remove modernist innovators from the canon of true German art and replace them with academic painters of approved subjects. Lysenko was promoted as the first practitioner of authentically Soviet biology, with Mendel’s followers cast as bourgeois imitators of foreign error. The Cultural Revolution displaced the founding figures of Chinese music and physics in favor of approved rivals. Each regime understood that controlling the canon means controlling who is remembered as the originator and who is dismissed as the imitator. The originating-act test gives us a tool for resisting this. Every claim about who was first is a historical question with material evidence behind it. Niépce’s 1826 plate exists in a museum in Texas. Newton’s papers exist in Cambridge. Mendel’s notebooks exist in Brno. The canon can be argued from material evidence. The aphorism, by contrast, gives us no way to argue. It only gives us a slogan to either accept or reject.

So here is the position the photography story, the identical photograph thought experiment, and the Bach-Mozart distinction together support. Science is the revelation by a particular consciousness of something that was true before that consciousness named it. Art is the bringing into existence by a particular consciousness of something that was not there before that consciousness made it. Both fields contain a few originators and many imitators. The honor in both fields belongs to the originators. The imitators do necessary and sometimes excellent work, but they are not the artists or the scientists in the strict sense the words deserve. This is more austere than the everyday use of the words, and it is closer to what we mean when we say someone was a great artist or a great scientist. We mean they were the first. Competent application of established method has its own honor and its own name, and that name is craft. Together they constitute the Scientific Aesthetic, the position this whole article has been working toward.

The painters of 1839 looked at the daguerreotypists and saw machine operators. They were right about most of them and wrong about the founders. The same vision will be required for AI. Most outputs will be the work of technicians applying an invented process. A few may be the work of someone who saw what nobody had seen before about what the new instrument could do. Distinguishing the two is the task that always falls to the next generation, and the next generation is usually slow about it. We are slow about it now. We will be less slow if we hold the originating-act test in mind and apply it ruthlessly, to ourselves and to everyone else.

The Scientific Aesthetic: An Operating Theory is available now from David Boles Books. The paperback runs four hundred ninety-five pages and the Kindle eBook is also for sale through Amazon. Readers who prefer screen reading, home printing, or an editable archive copy will find a website-download PDF and a DOCX safety file at BolesBooks.com on the title’s landing page. The audiobook is in production and will follow.

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The Claim I Filed in 2006

This week I published The Claimed Body: How American Institutions Divided the Human Organism Among Themselves. Fifteen chapters, 559 pages in paperback, 349 in the web edition, a Kindle ebook, and a wraparound cover that took the shape of a parcel map of the body. The book is out on Amazon and through BolesBooks.com. Readers who have followed the constellation for any length of time will recognize the argument before they finish the first chapter. I have been writing toward this book since December of 2006, when I first used these pages to ask a question I did not yet have the vocabulary to answer.

The question back then was why the prison kept showing up in parts of American life that were not prisons. A school discipline policy reads like a booking protocol. An employer’s drug screen reads like a parole condition. A hospital discharge summary reads like a court order. The architecture of the panopticon, which Jeremy Bentham proposed in 1791 as a specific building, kept turning up in places where no building existed. In 2008 I registered domains around the word panopticonic to hold the argument I was beginning to see, having found only a single prior usage of the word in a 1959 issue of Time magazine. The word gave me a handle. It did not yet give me the book.

That book, the first one, arrived last year as Carceral Nation: How the Prison Escaped Its Walls and Made a Panopticonic Society. Carceral Nation did what I had been trying to do for two decades: it named the institutional logic that moved the prison’s discipline out of the prison and into schools, workplaces, clinics, data systems, and the texture of ordinary American life. I thought when I finished Carceral Nation that I had written the book the 2006 post wanted to become.

I was wrong. Carceral Nation was one half of a pair. The Claimed Body is the other half, and the pair is now complete.

Here is how the two books relate. Carceral Nation tracks one institution, the prison, and the way its logic escaped its physical walls to operate across institutional domains that were not prisons. The Claimed Body reverses the telescope. It tracks one body, the American body, and the way many institutions file claims on portions of it across the life cycle. Not one institution escaping its walls. Many institutions operating on the body simultaneously, each with its own filing mechanism, each with its own jurisdiction, each with its own enforcement apparatus, and no single forum where the body can contest the overlapping and contradictory claims.

The Homestead Act of 1862 is the organizing metaphor. Signed by Lincoln during the Civil War, the Act distributed continental land through a specific mechanism: a settler filed a claim on 160 acres of public land, lived on the parcel for five years, improved it, and received title. The claim, the parcel, the boundary line, the survey marker, the adjudicating court if the claim was contested. Between 1862 and 1976, the United States distributed approximately 270 million acres of continental North America this way. My argument is that the logic of the registered claim did not retire with the Act. It migrated from land to body. A hospital claims your birth. A school claims your developmental measurements. An insurer claims your diagnostic history. An employer claims your labor capacity. The state claims your reproductive eligibility and your military eligibility. If the criminal claim succeeds, a prison holds you. At the other end of life, a dying registry claims your cessation and a funeral corporation claims your remains. Operating in the shadow of all of these, a data broker sells your patterns forward to whoever will pay.

Fifteen chapters because fifteen is the number of major institutional domains that currently hold active claims on the American body. I did not invent the number. I counted the claimants.

What changed between Carceral Nation and The Claimed Body is the scale of the argument. Carceral Nation made its case by tracking one institution across domains. The Claimed Body makes its case by tracking one body across institutions. A reader who has read both books will see that the carceral logic described in the first is a special case of the claim-filing structure described in the second. The prison is one of fifteen claimants. The book you just finished and the book you are about to start belong to a single continuous argument, rendered from two sides. I needed the first book to get the vocabulary to write the second.

A note on why these books are appearing now, in 2026, rather than ten years ago. The answer is that the data layer has closed. Until recently, the hospital did not know what the pharmacist knew, and the pharmacist did not know what the school knew, and the school did not know what the employer knew. Each institutional claim operated in relative isolation. That is no longer true. The data broker industry, which occupies Chapter 13 of The Claimed Body under the heading of the Datafied Body, federates institutional claims into a single behavioral profile that any paying party can access. The body used to be claimed by many institutions operating in isolation. It is now claimed by many institutions operating through a shared back end. That shift, which accelerated across the past ten years and consolidated across the past five, is what made the argument urgent enough to warrant the book now rather than a decade ago.

A second note. I worry that the institutional claim on the American body is tightening at the same moment American democratic capacity to reform institutions is weakening. A claim that cannot be challenged in a public forum, by citizens with political standing, is no longer a claim in the Homestead sense. It is a confiscation. The Precarious Republic, the manuscript I continue to work on, argues that American democratic capacity is in measurable decline. The Claimed Body documents what that decline looks like from inside a single institutional domain: the domain of bodily life. The two manuscripts are cousins. They are not the same argument. They describe the same condition from different angles.

Readers who have come with me from the December 2006 post through Carceral Nation and now to The Claimed Body, thank you. The arc took twenty years. It took me the twenty years to learn how to name what I was trying to name. This blog is where the learning happened in public. Every half-formed post, every revision I never ran back, every idea that did not hold up on the second read, was part of the process by which I became able to write these books. Readers who are newer to the constellation, welcome. The books are the consolidated version of what has been going on here all along.

The Claimed Body is available now on Amazon in Kindle and paperback, and through BolesBooks.com for direct ordering and for free web reading. A Human Meme podcast episode and a Prairie Voice article accompany the launch. More work follows.

The homestead did not end. It turned inward.

And the claim I filed here in 2006 finally has its title document.

David Boles has operated the Boles web constellation since 1995. His most recent books are Carceral Nation and The Claimed Body and Selling Saturday Morning.

#amazon #audiobok #body #bodyRights #bolesBooks #book #carceralNation #davidBoles #homesteadAct #hospital #kindle #military #philosophy #teeth #vocabulary #writing

Carceral Nation: Twenty Years from Blog Post to Book

In December 2006, I published an article on this blog about mass incarceration, racial disparities in the American prison system, and a concept I was trying to name: the carceral citizen, the person whose freedom exists in a state of permanent conditional revocation. The article was one entry among many in the Boles Blogs Network, which at its peak ran fourteen blogs across a range of subjects. One of those fourteen was called Panopticonic.

Panopticonic was the blog where I wrote about surveillance, inspection, the legacy of Bentham’s prison design, and the spreading logic of watching as governance. The writing accumulated across years, and in October 2008 I registered two domains: CarceralNation.com and Panopticonic.com. Registering those names was the moment the concept took a shape I could hold. The articles continued. The Panopticonic archives were collected into the first volume of Best of Boles Blogs alongside material from WordPunk, Memeingful, and Celebrity Semiotic. Through all of it, the question never changed: what happens when a society that calls itself free organizes its civic life around the assumption that everyone is being watched?

That question has been running underneath this blog for twenty years. Carceral Nation: How the Prison Escaped Its Walls and Made a Panopticonic Society is the book that question became. It is available now from David Boles Books in paperback, Kindle, and as a free PDF download.

From Blog to Book

The difference between writing about surveillance on a blog and writing a book about surveillance is the difference between accumulating observations and constructing an argument. The blog posts were reactions: a new camera program in New York, a data-sharing agreement between a police department and a tech company, a court ruling on warrantless cell phone tracking. Each post identified a piece of the architecture. The book assembles the pieces into a single structure and asks what the completed building looks like.

The answer required going back further than I had gone on the blog. Carceral Nation begins in the 1680s, with colonial lantern laws that required enslaved people to carry lit candles after dark so that white citizens could see them coming. Forced visibility. The first American surveillance technology was fire in a Black hand. From there, the principle of compulsory visibility moves through Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon and Michel Foucault’s theoretical expansion of the panoptic principle, then forward through the fingerprint registry, the Cold War intelligence apparatus, the post-September 11 mass surveillance state, the commercial data economy, and the neighborhood platforms where your neighbors now report your movements to one another.

What the Blog Could Not Say

Twenty years of blog posts taught me the facts. The book taught me something about myself that the blog format never forced me to confront. During the three years I spent writing Carceral Nation, I changed my own behavior. I became more careful about what I searched. I reconsidered certain article topics for Prairie Voice because I wondered whether the research trail itself might attract attention. I paused before typing phrases into search engines that, in a different political climate, might be unremarkable but that in 2025 felt like they carried weight. I caught myself performing exactly the self-censorship the book describes, and I kept writing anyway, because documenting the condition seemed more important than pretending I was exempt from it.

Bentham called the panoptic principle “a new mode of obtaining power of mind over mind.” He was describing a building. What we have built is a condition in which the writer researching the surveillance state modifies his own research behavior because of the surveillance state. The book is its own evidence. I am its own case study.

The Word “Panopticonic”

The subtitle uses a word I need to account for: “panopticonic.” The adjective “panoptic,” meaning all-seeing, has existed since Bentham. “Panopticonic” appeared once in the prior record, a 1959 Time piece using it casually to describe the audience’s experience of watching prison life through cinema. The word was never developed, defined, or repeated. Carceral Nation reclaims it and gives it a specific definition: a panopticonic society is one in which the panoptic principle has escaped the institutional settings Foucault described and has become the organizing logic of civic life itself. A panopticonic society is one in which the panoptic principle has escaped the institutional settings Foucault described and has become the organizing logic of civic life itself. Prison logic has dissolved into the society. Guard towers have been replaced by smartphones, doorbell cameras, and algorithmic risk scores. The walls came down, and the logic walked out through the gap.

Connecting the Constellation

Readers of this blog will find threads connecting Carceral Nation to work published across the Boles web constellation over the past year. The Human Meme podcast episode “The Pause Before You Speak” examines how the surveillance condition reshapes consciousness, building on the earlier episode “Pause Before the Lie” to explore what happens when self-censorship becomes continuous rather than momentary. Prairie Voice published “The Watcher on the County Road,” investigating how Flock Safety cameras, school surveillance systems, and correctional culture have wired rural America into the same panopticonic infrastructure the book describes at the national level. The book has also been developed through the same production pipeline we have refined across across The Broadway Machine, The Counterfeit Bargain, and The Human Universal Beautiful: manuscript through multiple editorial passes, KDP paperback interior with embedded DejaVu Serif typography, wraparound cover, Kindle edition, and web PDF for free download.

The cover design deserves a word. The front panel shows a red brick wall with an irregular breach revealing a surveillance camera lens behind the bricks. Falling bricks cascade around the title text. The image is the argument in visual form: the prison wall has been broken from behind, and what looks out through the gap is an eye that records everything it sees. The brick pattern continues across the spine and back cover as a single continuous wall, because the surveillance infrastructure does not recognize the boundaries between public, private, and personal.

Getting Carceral Nation

Carceral Nation: How the Prison Escaped Its Walls and Made a Panopticonic Society by David Boles is published by David Boles Books Writing & Publishing, New York City. 2026.

Kindle ebook: $9.95 Paperback: $19.95 Free PDF: BolesBooks.com

The book is also available on Amazon.

#atlanta #bolesBooks #books #carceralNation #davidBolesBlogs #lens #panopticonic #prison #soceity #surveillance #watching

Your Three-Year-Old Already Knows the Brand Name

Watch a three-year-old in a grocery store. Watch her eyes when you turn into the cereal aisle. Her gaze is not scanning the shelves the way you scan them, evaluating prices and nutritional labels and unit costs. A search is underway. The child already knows what she wants, and she knows it by name, and she knows the name because a screen taught it to her before she could read the word printed on the box. The box appears in her sightline. A finger goes up. The name comes out of her mouth. You have just witnessed the end product of a commercial pedagogy that has been operating in American media for more than fifty years, and the child has no idea it happened to her.

Neither did I, when I was her age.

My new book, Selling Saturday Morning: Television, Advertising, and the Making of the Child Consumer, reconstructs the system that taught me and every other American child of the 1970s how to want. Between 1968 and 1980, a commercial pedagogy was built inside three-network broadcast television and delivered through Saturday morning cartoons to a captive audience of millions of children who could not skip the commercials, could not change the channel without crossing the room, could not record for later, and could not comprehend that the animated tiger selling them cereal was, in fact, selling them cereal. Developmental research conducted during that decade demonstrated that children under eight could not understand the persuasive intent of advertising. A cereal commercial was, for a seven-year-old, just another cartoon about a tiger who liked cereal. The selling was invisible because the child’s cognitive equipment could not make it visible.

The system used five mechanisms, and I call their combined effect the Grammar of Want. Recognition: the child learns to identify the product instantly through spokescharacters, jingles, and packaging design. Desire: the commercial creates a gap between what the child has and what the screen shows she could have. Articulation: the commercial gives the child language to express the want by brand name. Normalization: the commercial shows other children wanting and having the product, teaching the viewing child that wanting is normal and that being sold to is a natural condition of watching anything. Repetition: the closed room of broadcast delivers these lessons fifty times per Saturday morning, thousands of times per year, tens of thousands across a childhood. Skipping was impossible. Fast-forwarding did not exist. Escape was not an option.

When regulators tried to stop it, they lost. Action for Children’s Television filed petitions. The FTC proposed a ban on advertising directed at children too young to understand its purpose. The Washington Post called the FTC “a great national nanny.” The cereal, toy, candy, and fast-food industries spent sixteen million dollars fighting the rulemaking. Congress stripped the FTC of its authority to act. By 1980, the commercial model of childhood was politically ratified, and every attempt to regulate it since has failed to restore what was lost in that defeat.

This story comes from inside the system, because the system trained me. A seven-year-old boy in Nebraska sitting on red shag carpeting in front of a wood-grain television console, absorbing the full commercial curriculum of Saturday morning: that was my education. Cap’n Crunch was identifiable by the blue of his hat from twenty feet away in a grocery aisle. Jingles from 1975 remain in my memory, though I cannot remember learning them. The Super Bowl held my attention well into adulthood because of the commercials, and I never found this strange, because the childhood training had produced an adult who experienced advertising as entertainment. Fusion was complete. Grammar held.

Here is why this matters in 2026, and here is why I am not writing a nostalgia piece about cartoons.

The Grammar of Want did not end when Saturday morning cartoons declined. It migrated. Cable fractured the three-network monopoly in the 1980s, and the techniques followed the audience into Nickelodeon and Cartoon Network and Disney Channel. The internet fractured cable in the 2000s, and the techniques followed the audience into branded websites, advergames, and social media. Smartphones fractured the internet into individual screens, and the techniques followed the audience into YouTube, TikTok, and algorithmically curated content feeds that address each child individually with a precision the 1970s system could not have imagined.

The 1970s system needed a fixed schedule to guarantee repetition. The algorithm provides repetition without a schedule. A child who watches one toy-unboxing video on YouTube is immediately served another, and another, and another. The algorithm, trained on engagement data from millions of children, knows which videos hold attention longest and serves them in sequence. Repetition is no longer the product of a broadcast grid. It is the product of a feedback loop in which the child’s own viewing behavior trains the system to deliver more of what holds her attention, and what holds her attention is, with high frequency, commercial content dressed as entertainment.

The 1970s system needed separation devices, bumpers that said “We’ll be right back after these messages,” to mark the boundary between the cartoon and the commercial. The algorithm has no bumpers. A child watching a YouTube creator play with a toy, eat a branded snack, and express delight is absorbing an advertisement delivered through a parasocial relationship with a trusted figure. The commercial message is embedded in the performance of daily life. The creator’s endorsement is implicit in the act of consumption. No jingle is required. Selling is the content.

Consider what has not changed. In the 1970s, the system operated on children who could not understand persuasive intent. In the 2020s, that same system operates on children who cannot understand persuasive intent. That finding was about children, not about media. The cognitive limitation that made the 1970s system effective has not changed, because child development has not changed. A five-year-old in 2026 processes a sponsored YouTube video the same way a five-year-old in 1977 processed a Frosted Flakes commercial: as entertainment from a trusted source, with no awareness that the entertainment is designed to make her want something.

Architecture survived its medium. The closed room opened, and the curriculum walked out.

This is what the three-year-old in the cereal aisle is demonstrating when she points at the box and says the name. She has been trained. She does not know she has been trained. Her parents may not know she has been trained, because the training happened on a screen they handed her to keep her occupied, in videos selected by an algorithm they did not program, featuring creators whose commercial relationships they cannot see. The system is working on their child the way it worked on me in 1972, with greater precision, greater reach, and fewer regulatory constraints than the Saturday morning model ever achieved.

Selling Saturday Morning is the history of how that system was built, who tried to stop it, and why it persists. I wrote it because understanding the architecture is the first obligation of anyone who was trained by it, and because the boy on the red shag carpeting deserves to know what the screen was teaching him while he thought he was just watching cartoons.

The book is available now from David Boles Books Writing & Publishing.

#advertising #bolesBooks #book #brandName #business #childhood #entertainment #grammar #media #radio #selling #tech #television #tv #writing

The Failed City: I Wrote a Book About What We Bury

I have been staring at a patch of asphalt in Jersey City for thirteen years. That is not a figure of speech. I mean that in late September 2013, I watched a road crew roll fresh blacktop over 150-year-old granite cobblestones on Baldwin Avenue in the Heights, and the image has not released me since. The cobblestones were ballast stones, carried across the Atlantic Ocean in the holds of empty cargo ships and dumped on American docks because the ships needed the weight for the crossing and needed to shed it to load American exports for the return trip. Those stones were repurposed as paving. They became streets. They outlasted the ships, the shipping companies, the trade routes, the empires that commissioned them. And in 2013, a man in a road roller buried them under asphalt because, as he told me with the patience of someone explaining gravity, cobblestones eat up tires.

That exchange is where the book starts. It is also where the book’s argument starts, because what happened on Baldwin Avenue is a precise physical enactment of a larger institutional habit: the preference for covering failure rather than studying it, for smoothing the surface rather than examining what lies beneath.

The Failed City: An Autopsy of Urban Collapse is now available from David Boles Books.

What the Book Does

The book conducts autopsies. Twenty of them, organized into five taxonomies of urban failure, spanning two millennia, three continents, and one diagnostic framework that I built to answer a question nobody in the urban planning literature seemed to be asking: why do we refuse to study the cities that died with the same rigor we bring to the cities that worked?

The five taxonomies are catastrophic erasure, economic exsanguination, the utopian misfire, slow municipal death, and the never-built city. Each describes a distinct mode of urban death. Each contains case studies drawn from published sources, government records, journalistic accounts, and in several cases my own observation. I have walked the streets described in this book. I have taught at the universities that serve them. The Jersey City Heights, Camden, Newark: these are places I know from the sidewalk, not from the satellite view.

Pompeii is in the book because it is the oldest and most complete case of catastrophic erasure in the Western record. Pripyat is in the book because it is the newest, a city of 49,000 people evacuated in thirty-six hours after Chernobyl and never reoccupied. Centralia, Pennsylvania, is in the book because the coal mine fire that started beneath it in 1962 is still burning, and because the state’s decision to bury Graffiti Highway under dirt is the most literal act of concealment I have encountered in any case study. Galveston is in the book because it was the largest city in Texas in 1900 and it is not anymore, and the reason it is not anymore is that Houston built a ship channel and absorbed Galveston’s port function, which meant that the hurricane that destroyed Galveston was fatal precisely because the economic function that would have justified rebuilding had already migrated fifty miles inland.

Gary, Indiana, is in the book because U.S. Steel built it in 1906 and then left. Cairo, Illinois, is in the book because its own governing class burned it down through a sustained campaign of racial violence so thorough that the city lost ninety percent of its population. Flint is in the book because the governance structure appointed to save money ended by poisoning the water. Pittsburgh is in the book because it did not die, and the reasons it survived expose the reasons the others did not.

Laurent, South Dakota, is in the book because it is the most instructive failure I have ever encountered. A planned Deaf community where more than a hundred families signed reservation forms and zero relocated. The idea was serious, the enthusiasm was real, and the distance between signing a form and packing a truck turned out to be the distance between a vision and a life. I have worked in the Deaf community for decades through HardcoreASL.com, ASL-Opera.com, and the CUNY-SPS ASL Program, and Janna Sweenie’s characterization of Laurent as a “Deaf Utopia” captures the arc perfectly: enthusiastic communal aspiration followed by collective inaction.

Where the Argument Came From

A colleague of mine at Rutgers-Newark, years ago, made a case for the publication of failure that I have carried forward as an intellectual commitment ever since. His field was research methodology, and his contention was that failed scholarship, research rigorously conducted that ended by disproving its own thesis, deserved publication with the same velocity and seriousness as research that confirmed its hypothesis. Journals published findings. Careers advanced on discoveries. The experiments that did not find what they were looking for were filed away, and the filing-away constituted a loss of the knowledge that the failure itself contained.

He was not a person I admired, and the reasons for that are his own business. But the argument he made that day was better than the person who made it. That fact is itself a version of the thesis this book advances: useful knowledge does not confine itself to attractive sources.

The Failed City applies that principle to urban collapse. Failed cities generate data. Abandoned plans produce evidence. Collapsed communities contain information about what went wrong, when it went wrong, and what the conditions were that made the failure possible. That data is as valuable as the data generated by the cities that succeeded. Our refusal to publish it, to study it, to assemble it into a systematic account, guarantees the repetition of errors that have already been committed and documented and then filed away.

The Diagnostic

The book builds a diagnostic framework with three levels: the baseline condition (what the city had before the crisis), the triggering condition (what initiated the decline), and the cascade (the self-reinforcing cycle that follows). The framework is offered as a tool. It works for every case study in the book, and I suspect it works for cases the book does not examine. The Prairie Voice article I published alongside this book, “The Other Side of the Blacktop,” argues that the same framework applies to rural collapse with equal precision. Any rancher in western Kansas who has watched the feedlot close and the equipment dealer follow it and the diner follow that can diagram the cascade on a napkin.

Jane Jacobs and the Missing Half

Jane Jacobs wrote The Death and Life of Great American Cities in 1961. The title promises a study of death and life. The book delivers overwhelmingly on the life. It is one of the great books of the twentieth century, and I assign it in every course I teach that touches urban questions. It is also a book that does not deliver on the first word of its own title. Jacobs studied what makes cities work. She did not study what makes them die.

The Failed City is the death half of the equation, the book that Jacobs’ title promises and her text does not deliver. Jacobs remains one of the great urbanists. The gap in the literature remains real. No comparable book exists. The field has single-city studies (Sugrue on Detroit, Gillette on Camden, Gordon on St. Louis) and academic shrinking-cities literature, but no cross-taxonomic diagnostic framework for a general readership. The Failed City is, as far as I have been able to determine, the first.

The Cobblestones

The cobblestones are still there. Under the asphalt on Baldwin Avenue, under the dirt that covers Graffiti Highway in Centralia, under the grass that grows over the graded roads of California City. The evidence of failure is more durable than the surfaces we lay on top of it. Asphalt cracks. Dirt erodes. Grass thins. And the substrate will still be there, waiting to be examined by anyone willing to look at what lies beneath the blacktop.

The answer is beneath the blacktop. It has been there the whole time.

#bolesBooks #book #camden #city #cityLife #cobblestones #davidBoles #diagnostic #failedCity #failures #fireDepartment #janeJacobs #jerseyCity #newJersey #photography #technology #university #writing

Cry Later: The Culture That Taught You Not to Grieve

The commands arrive early. They arrive in childhood, in the voices of parents and teachers and coaches and older relatives, and they are delivered with the same authority as instructions about traffic and hot stoves. Cry later. Hold it in. Do not show your emotions. Do not embarrass us. Be strong. Be brave. Be a man. There will be time for that later. Not here. Not now. Not in front of people.

Content Note: This book contains accounts of suicide, suicidal crisis, and the deaths of family members, friends, and companion animals. Part Five includes detailed accounts of suicidal ideation and completed suicide. If you or someone you know is experiencing a mental health crisis, the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline is available 24/7 by phone or text at 988. The Crisis Text Line is available by texting HOME to 741741.

These are grief suppressors. They are issued so routinely and across so many contexts that they have acquired the appearance of common sense. They are not common sense. They are commands to override a biological response that the body is producing for a reason. When a child is told not to cry at a funeral, the child is being told to suppress a neurochemical cascade that is already in progress. The cortisol is elevated, the amygdala has fired, and the body is doing what millions of years of evolution designed it to do when it registers the absence of an attachment figure. The command does not eliminate the response. It drives it underground, where it persists in forms the child cannot name and the adults will not recognize as grief when it resurfaces months or years later as insomnia, stomach pain, an inability to concentrate, a persistent anxiety with no identifiable source.

I have written a book about this. It is called “Go to Every Funeral: How Grief Defines the Living,” and it is published by David Boles Books Writing and Publishing, and the title comes from something I overheard in a cafe in Newark, New Jersey, about twenty-five years ago. A mother told her college-age daughter to go to every funeral, even if she did not want to, even if she did not know the dead person, because funerals are for the living and absence is remembered. I carried those six words for a quarter of a century, through the deaths of my grandmother, my grandfather, my mother, my mentor, two friends, and a cat who sat on my desk for fifteen years, and the book is the result of trying to understand why those words were true and why nobody else had ever said them to me.

The book covers a lot of ground: the neuroscience of grief, the mourning practices of elephants and crows, the history of funerals from the domestic parlor to the corporate funeral home, the economics of death as a market, the global range of mourning from the Torajan highlands to the jazz funerals of New Orleans. But the section I want to talk about here is Part Five, which is about permission. Specifically, about who gets to grieve and who gets told to stop.

The suppression commands are not distributed equally. They fall with particular weight on men, on children, on employees, and on anyone whose grief is judged to be inconvenient by the people around them. Boys are told not to cry with a frequency and an intensity that girls are not, and the instruction begins early enough that by adolescence many boys have internalized it so completely that they experience the suppression as personality rather than training. They do not cry because they are “not the kind of person who cries.” The self-description obscures the years of conditioning that produced it.

The consequences are visible in the data. Men die by suicide at rates roughly four times higher than women in the United States. They are less likely to seek mental health treatment, more likely to self-medicate with alcohol, more likely to convert emotional distress into physical aggression. These are not biological inevitabilities. They are the downstream effects of a culture that tells half its population to suppress the emotional responses the other half is permitted to express. The man who cannot cry at his father’s funeral because he was told, at age six, that men do not cry is not displaying strength. He is displaying the result of a training program that disconnected him from his own grief response, and the disconnection does not eliminate the grief. It makes the grief dangerous, because grief that cannot be expressed as grief will be expressed as something else.

The workplace runs on the same logic. The standard bereavement leave in the United States is three days for the death of an immediate family member. Three days. The body has not even begun to metabolize the cortisol surge in three days. The cognitive map has not begun to update. The neurological process of revising the brain’s internal model of the world, recognizing at the cellular level that the dead person is absent from every context in which they were expected, has barely started. And the employer expects you back at your desk, functioning, participating in meetings about quarterly targets while the fact that your mother is dead has not yet reached the parts of your brain that govern concentration.

Some companies offer five days. Some offer none. Some distinguish between the death of a spouse and the death of a parent and the death of a sibling, granting fewer days as the relationship moves outward from the nuclear center, as though the grief for a brother can be mathematically demonstrated to require less processing time than the grief for a child. The taxonomy of bereavement leave is a document written by human resources departments, and it tells the employee, in the plainest possible terms, how long their grief is permitted to inconvenience the organization.

Then there is the clinical manual. In 2022, prolonged grief disorder was added to the DSM-5-TR, giving clinicians a formal diagnostic category for grief that persists at debilitating intensity beyond twelve months. The addition was controversial among grief researchers, and the controversy is worth understanding, because it reveals how the medical establishment processes the same impulse that drives the workplace policy and the childhood command: the impulse to draw a line, to say that grief is acceptable on this side and pathological on the other, and to give the line the authority of science.

The proponents of the diagnosis argued that a subset of bereaved people, estimated at roughly ten percent, experience grief that does not follow the typical trajectory. The pain does not diminish over time. Functioning does not return. The preoccupation with the dead person remains so intense that it dominates waking life months and years after the death. These people need clinical help, and the diagnosis gives clinicians a framework for providing it, including the possibility of insurance reimbursement for treatment.

The opponents argued that pathologizing grief at twelve months imposes an arbitrary timeline on a process that has no natural expiration date. The twelve-month threshold was chosen because the clinical data showed it as a statistically significant inflection point, the point at which the probability of spontaneous recovery drops sharply. But statistical inflection points are not the same as biological boundaries. The griever at month thirteen is not clinically different from the griever at month eleven. The line exists because the diagnostic system requires lines, and the existence of the line communicates something to the broader culture: that grief beyond a year is officially a mental illness. The employer who was already impatient at three days now has clinical validation for the suspicion that the employee who is still struggling at fourteen months has something wrong with them.

The book argues that this entire apparatus, the childhood commands, the workplace policies, the diagnostic thresholds, is part of a single cultural project: the management of grief for the convenience of everyone except the griever. The child is told to stop because the adults are uncomfortable. The employee is expected back at the desk because the organization needs the labor. The patient receives a diagnosis because the clinical system requires categories. None of these interventions exists primarily to serve the person who is grieving. They exist to contain the grief, to keep it within boundaries that allow the surrounding systems to continue operating without interruption.

Meanwhile, the culture has produced a substitute for communal grief that is worse than the absence of communal grief. Social media has made performative mourning the default public response to death. When a public figure dies, the speed with which users post their condolences has become a measure of social attentiveness. The posts follow a formula: a photograph of the deceased, a statement of shock, a brief personal connection however thin, and a closing declaration of love and loss. The formula is so consistent it has been parodied, and the parodies have not slowed it down, because the function of the post is to perform belonging, to demonstrate that you are the kind of person who feels things, who notices when important people die, who participates in the rituals of the digital public square.

Some of the grief is sincere. The rest is performance, and the performance crowds out the reality. When the feeds are flooded with grief posts after a celebrity death, the person who is actually devastated, the person who had a real connection to the deceased and is not performing but drowning, finds their grief indistinguishable from the display. Their signal disappears into the noise. The communal mourning that is supposed to support the bereaved instead competes with them, reducing a specific and irreplaceable loss to one post among thousands, all using the same photographs, the same phrases, the same hashtags.

This is the inversion of what the mother in the Newark cafe was describing. She said you go to the funeral. You show up. You put your name in the book. You sit in the pew. You bring food to the house afterward. The obligation is physical: you move your body to the place where the grief is, and your presence there is the message. Social media offers the simulation of this presence without the physical fact of it. You post. You perform the gesture. You do not move your body anywhere. You do not sit in an uncomfortable chair in a room that smells like flowers and floor polish. You do not look at the face of the bereaved and allow them to see that you came. You post, and the post is seen or not seen, liked or not liked, and it scrolls away, and the next post is about something else, and the grief has been acknowledged in the same medium and at the same depth as a restaurant recommendation.

Kenneth Doka coined the term “disenfranchised grief” to describe losses the culture refuses to recognize. The death of an ex-spouse. The death of a pet. The death of a patient if you are a nurse. The death of a public figure you never met but whose work was woven into the structure of your daily life. These are real losses producing real grief, and the culture’s refusal to recognize them does not dissolve the grief. It isolates the griever, who cannot bring their loss into the social spaces where grief is processed because the spaces will not admit it. The colleague who lost a dog cannot mention it at work. The fan grieving a musician cannot break down at dinner. A nurse whose patient died that morning cannot ask for a day off. The grief has no approved venue, no sanctioned expression, no communal witness. It persists alone.

What the book asks, across all six of its parts and all seventeen of its chapters, is what happens when you add all of this up. The suppression that begins in childhood and hardens along gendered lines. The workplace that contains it in three days. The diagnostic manual that pathologizes it at twelve months. The industry that monetizes it. The digital platform that simulates it. The disenfranchisement of entire categories of loss. What you get is a culture in which millions of people grieve alone, in private, without the communal infrastructure that every human society in history built to distribute the weight of death across many shoulders. The weight did not get lighter because the infrastructure was removed. The shoulders carrying it just got fewer.

The mother in the cafe knew this. She did not use these words. She did not cite the neuroscience or the sociology or the economics. She tapped the table and told her daughter to go to every funeral, and the instruction contained everything: that grief is communal, that the community is constituted by the people who show up, that presence is the oldest technology of mourning and still the most effective, and that the dead have no needs left, and the living have every need there is.

Go to every funeral. The book is available at BolesBooks.com as a free download, and on Amazon in Kindle ($9.99) and paperback ($15.99) editions.

#bolesBooks #celebration #cremation #culture #davidBoles #funeral #grief #grieving #history #limits #midwest #timeOff #treatment

I Wrote the Book I Was Born to Write

Fifty years is a long time to prepare for a single sentence. I did not know I was preparing. I thought I was living, which I was, and writing, which I was, and teaching, which I was, and publishing, which I was. I thought the Fractional Fiction novels and the EleMenTs trilogy and the Prairie Voice reporting and the Human Meme episodes and the dramatic literature and the ASL linguistics and the cultural criticism were separate projects, separate impulses, separate rooms in the interior country I have been building since I was old enough to read. They were not separate. They were all rehearsals for this.

Abandoned in Place is out. It is the first book-length work of nonfiction cultural criticism I have published under my own name, and it is the book that every other book I have written was circling without my knowing it.

The book began with a number. Five. The number of days a judge ordered my father to remain in the home after my birth before he could return to the woman he had chosen over my mother and me. On the sixth day, he left. I have carried that number for more than five decades, not as a wound on display but as a lens ground by the wound, and the lens has shown me things about the world that I do not believe I would have seen without it. The book is what the lens reveals.

I am not going to summarize twelve chapters here. The book does its own work, and it does not need me standing outside it waving my arms. What I want to do instead is tell you what it felt like to write it, because the writing was unlike anything I have done before, and the difference matters, and the difference is the reason I am calling this a celebration rather than an announcement.

Every book I have written has been, at some level, a performance. The novels perform narrative. The plays perform conflict. The criticism performs analysis. The podcast performs inquiry. Performance is what I do. It is what I was trained to do at Columbia University. It is what Mike Nichols, in a conversation I recount in the book, told me all theatre people do: we arrive on stage not hoping to heal what is broken but to get the approval of our parents. I have been performing for approval since I walked through my first stage door as a teenager escaping a home that was not safe, and the performing has produced a body of work I am proud of, and the pride is real, and the pride is also, I now understand, a form of the avoidant attachment style described in Chapter 2: the construction of an interior country so richly furnished that the absence of the thing the country was built to replace becomes, if not invisible, then at least manageable.

This book is not a performance. This book is the thing the performances were built to manage. It is the direct statement, in the active voice, of what happened and who did it and how the grammar of every institution I have encountered since birth was designed to ensure that the statement would never be made. The statement is: I was abandoned. The abandonment was not my fault. The people who administered it had names. The institutions that administered it had addresses. The narrative that explained it as inevitable was a lie. And I am still here.

That is what the book says. It says it across twelve chapters, through four parts, using attachment theory and social contract philosophy and the specific histories of churches and schools and factories and governments that walked out of the room while leaving the building standing. It says it with cold, precise anger, because cold precision is what I have and hot outrage is what the grammar wants, and I will not give the grammar what it wants.

The cover is an erasure. The word “ABANDONED” sits in heavy black type, fully present and immovable. The words “IN PLACE” dissolve from left to right, the letters breaking apart into scattered particles, as if the grammar of leaving is operating on the cover in real time. My last name dissolves too, because the name on the cover is not the name I was born with. It is the name of a man from a marriage that lasted eighteen months and ended badly, assigned to me by small-town convention and carried forward by bureaucratic inertia for half a century. The brand is real. The identity behind it is the nothing in-between. The cover says so.

I have published more than thirty books through David Boles Books. Novels, short fiction, tragedy, nonfiction, ASL linguistics, the Fractional Fiction series that maps the territory between the novella and the novel. Each one took something from me and gave something back. This one took everything. It took the protected mother and made me tell the truth about her. It took the shielded childhood and made me describe the car wash in church clothes and the Saturday gifts I remember when I cannot remember the man who gave them and the phone call at 4:31 in the afternoon from a father I had not spoken to in thirty years who could not answer the one question I asked him. It took the interior country I have spent fifty years fortifying and opened the gates and let the reader walk in and see the architecture for what it is: a survival strategy that works, and that costs, and that the book refuses to pretend is anything other than both.

What it gave back is the sentence. The book arrives, in its final chapter, at a single sentence that I believe is true and that I believe I have earned the right to say, and the earning took twelve chapters and seventy thousand words and five decades of preparation that I did not know was preparation. I will not put the sentence here. The sentence needs the book to land. But I will tell you that the sentence is about seeing clearly, and refusing to pretend, and the specific form of honesty available to a person who was abandoned by every institution that was supposed to hold him together and who is still standing in the place where the function departed.

The book is available now. The Kindle edition and the paperback are at Amazon. The complete PDF is available as a free download at BolesBooks.com, because this book was written to be read, not to be sold, and the people who need it most are the people the grammar has spent the longest time ensuring would never find it.

I wrote this book for the people who were left and who stayed and who were told to move on and who did not move on and who were told the leaving was nobody’s fault and who knew, from the first day, that it was somebody’s fault, and who have been waiting, perhaps without knowing they were waiting, for someone to say so in the active voice with the actor restored to the sentence.

Here it is. The actor is restored. The sentence is rebuilt. The ground holds.

Abandoned in Place is published by David Boles Books Writing & Publishing, New York City. Available at Amazon (Kindle and paperback) and as a free PDF at BolesBooks.com.

BolesBooks.com | BolesBlogs.com | HumanMeme.com | PrairieVoice.com | (212) 982-7700

#abandonedInPlace #abandonment #belonging #bolesBooks #childhood #connecting #father #institutions #mothers #socialStructures #society #sons #universalTruths #writing

Miscast: The Playwright Decides, and No One Else Gets a Vote

There is a moment in the life of every playwright when someone walks into a rehearsal room and announces that the character you wrote is not, in fact, the character you wrote. The director has a vision. The institution has a policy. The casting committee has decided that your Irish Catholic mother from the Southside of Chicago would be better served by an actress who has no connection to the world you built because connection, in the current theatrical climate, is less important than representation, and representation is whatever the people who control the stage say it is. You sit there. You watch your play become someone else’s argument. And you have two choices: you can let it happen, or you can pull the production.

I pulled the production.

That story appears in Chapter 11 of Miscast: Who Owns the Story on Stage?, my new book, now available in eBook, paperback, and PDF from David Boles Books. The anecdote is from Columbia University, where I was earning my MFA, and where a director proposed splitting a single character in my play into bipolar twins under the banner of non-traditional casting. I said no. I cancelled the production. I lost the showcase. I kept the play. That was more than thirty years ago, and I have spent the time since thinking about what that moment meant, not just for me but for every playwright who has watched the American theatre transform casting from an artistic decision made by the author into an institutional mandate imposed over the author’s objection.

Miscast is the book that thinking produced.

The argument is simple. The playwright creates the characters. The playwright determines what the characters are. No institution has the right to override that determination. When Lin-Manuel Miranda casts actors of color as the Founding Fathers in Hamilton, that is authorial choice, and it is art. When an institution imposes non-traditional casting on a playwright’s work without the playwright’s knowledge or against the playwright’s wishes, that is something else entirely. It is expropriation. It is the seizure of creative authority from the person who did the creating. And it is now standard practice in the American theatre, codified in equity agreements, hiring mandates, and the Dramatists Guild’s own 2021 Inclusion Rider, the first contract addendum in theatre history that asks playwrights to redirect their copyright authority toward institutional demographic objectives.

That is a sentence worth reading twice.

The book traces the full arc. It begins with the all-male stages of fifth-century Athens, where Medea and Clytemnestra were performed by masked men in a civic festival that excluded women not because they lacked talent but because the stage was a function of democratic citizenship and women were not citizens. It moves through the Restoration revolution of 1660, when Charles II returned from French exile and issued a royal warrant requiring female roles to be performed by women, ending two thousand years of all-male convention in England overnight. It examines the blackface minstrelsy of the nineteenth century, which I argue is not the opposite of non-traditional casting but its structural cousin: both treat the actor’s body as raw material on which someone else’s vision is painted, the one through burnt cork, the other through institutional policy, with the same underlying assumption that the controlling authority, not the playwright, decides what the body on stage means.

That claim will make people uncomfortable. It is meant to. The surface justifications of blackface and non-traditional casting are opposite, one rooted in white supremacy, the other in racial justice, but the structural relationship between the performer’s body and the institution that governs the stage is identical. The body is canvas. The institution holds the brush. The playwright, in both systems, is irrelevant.

The book then turns to case studies that give the argument flesh. Samuel Beckett’s refusal to allow the American Repertory Theatre to cast women in Endgame in 1984, which established that a playwright’s stage directions are not suggestions but legally enforceable elements of the work. August Wilson’s 1996 address at the Theatre Communications Group conference, “The Ground on Which I Stand,” which declared that Black plays require Black directors and Black actors, and which remains the most important speech about race and the American stage delivered in the last half century. The casting of Hamilton and the 2022 revival of 1776, where color-conscious casting was deployed to reimagine the founding mythology of white America through non-white bodies, with radically different results. The removal of a white ASL interpreter from a performance of The Lion King because the actors on stage were Black, which raises a question the theatre has not answered: is an interpreter a performer or a conduit? Ali Stroker’s Tony-winning performance in Oklahoma!, which asks whether a wheelchair in a scene that depends on physical running is an artistic disruption or an artistic contribution, and who gets to decide. Eugene O’Neill’s Irish families, in which the ethnicity is not decoration but architecture, load-bearing walls that collapse if you remove them.

Each of these cases is examined at length, with sources documented and arguments presented with as much candor as I can bring to the page. I have tried to be fair. I have also tried to be honest. Where those two imperatives conflict, I chose honesty. That choice runs through the entire book, and it is the choice I have made in every professional decision since I founded The United Stage on the principle that the playwright has the right to direct the first public performance of the playwright’s own play.

I have been a dues-paying member of the Dramatists Guild of America since July 2, 1984, member number 45010, enrolled on the advice of a freshman playwriting teacher at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln who read the first one-act play I ever wrote and told me to join immediately. I did not understand at eighteen what that membership meant. I understand it now. The Guild was built to protect the playwright. Its Bill of Rights, maintained since the first Minimum Basic Agreement of 1926, affirms the playwright’s right to approve casting, the creative team, and production elements, to be present at rehearsals, to own the copyright, and to protect the integrity of the text. This book criticizes the Guild’s Inclusion Rider, and I want to be clear that the criticism is offered from within the Guild, by a member who has been paying dues without interruption for more than forty years, who believes in the Guild’s foundational mission, and who writes this book in its defense.

The book also benefits from the expertise of Janna Sweenie, my collaborator on American Sign Language educational materials, who contributed her knowledge of Deaf culture, interpreter ethics, and the NAD-RID Code of Professional Conduct to the chapter on the Lion King interpreter incident. The precision in that analysis is hers. The errors in the book are mine.

Miscast is not a book about inclusion. It is a book about authorship. The distinction matters more than any other distinction in the American theatre today, because every institution that promotes non-traditional casting claims to be expanding inclusion, and some of them are, but the mechanism by which they do it requires seizing creative authority from the person who created the work. That seizure is the subject of this book. That seizure is what I spent thirty years watching. That seizure is what I said no to in a rehearsal room at Columbia, and what I am saying no to now, in print, at full length, with documentation.

The playwright decides. That is the ground on which this book stands.

Miscast: Who Owns the Story on Stage? is available now from David Boles Books in Kindle eBook ($9.99), paperback ($16.99), and free PDF download. David Boles is a member of the Dramatists Guild, the Authors Guild, and PEN America. He holds an MFA from Columbia University and has been writing for the stage, for television, and for publication for more than four decades.

#artOwnership #augustWilson #bolesBooks #casting #columbiaUniversity #cuny #davidBoles #dramatistsGuild #nonTraditional #playwright #production #samuelBeckett #television #theatre

The Westborough Crusaders: The Trilogy That Took Forty-Four Years to Earn Its Novels

Some work waits for you. Not patiently. Not the way a dog waits by the door, loyal and uncomplicated. It waits the way a diagnosis waits in a family’s bloodline, silently present, expressing itself in symptoms you do not recognize until you are old enough to understand what your body has been trying to tell you. In 1982, I was sixteen years old, living in the Midwest, and I sat down and wrote eight episodes of a television series called The Westborough Crusaders. I did not know I was writing the first draft of a trilogy. I thought I was writing television. I was wrong, but I would not understand how wrong for another four decades.

The eight script episodes sat in live storage on Boles.com from 1982 until this year. They moved from paper to file to folder to digital archive, surviving every migration of format and every temptation to throw them away, because something about them would not let me. Not nostalgia. I am not sentimental about my own early work, and anyone who has read Mother Narcissus knows that sentimentality is not a tool I trust. What kept those scripts alive was the suspicion, growing stronger with each decade, that the sixteen-year-old me who wrote them had understood something the adult I had not yet earned the right to articulate. The boy wrote it instinctively. The man needed forty-four years of living before he could write it with precision.

Today, David Boles Books publishes The Westborough Crusaders as a trilogy of Young Adult novels. Three books. Seventy-five chapters. A hundred and fifty thousand words. And every one of those words owes a debt to the eight episodes that a teenager in the Midwest wrote in longhand, then on an old Sears daisywheel typewriter, in a bedroom office where the bed was made withzero  military precision and a blank notebook sat open on the desk.

Dave, at Sixteen

Let me tell you what the sixteen-year-old wrote, because the material deserves to be described on its own terms before I explain what I did with it.

The Westborough Crusaders is set at a fictional Midwestern high school where a group of teenagers run the school newspaper, the Krugerand, under the supervision of a journalism teacher named Mr. Jace Canterbilly. Canterbilly is one of the best characters I have ever created, and I created him before I had any training in character construction, which tells you something about the difference between instinct and technique. He eats donuts. He lectures about the prostitution of the English language. He lives alone in a house with a grandfather clock from Switzerland that stops ticking every time he falls asleep, which is an image I could not have explained at sixteen but which I now understand as the first symbol I ever wrote that functioned at the level of thematic architecture. The clock runs when someone chooses to wind it. It stops when nobody is present to maintain it. That is everything the trilogy is about, compressed into a piece of furniture.

The central friendship is between Ares Taler, a sophomore whose dry wit and moral certainty mask a family marked by hereditary bone cancer, and Crewly “Crew” Smith, a transfer student from Florida who arrives at Westborough on the first day in orange overalls, a green shirt, and red sunglasses, and who announces within minutes that he has uncovered a teacher who is a member of the KGB, sentenced for six years, almost treason. Ares matches him instantly: he has an uncle who took six years to write a sentence. He was a judge. That exchange is the engine of the entire series. Two fourteen-year-olds discover they are funny in the same way and at the same speed, and from that recognition comes a friendship that will have to carry the weight of alcoholism, school violence, bone cancer, institutional betrayal, and the slow recognition that growing up is not a destination but the accumulation of grains of sand in open wounds.

The eight episodes cover the sophomore year at Westborough. A kid named Stan Harrison drinks cherry vodka in the journalism darkroom and does not understand that he has crossed the line from wanting a drink to needing one. A kid named Bergie Bergman, bullied to the edge of psychological collapse, brings a gun to school because his mother told him not to take it anymore and he heard “whatever it takes” instead of “tell a teacher.” A quarterback named Keithe Williams receives a letter from his girlfriend Sandy telling him she is pregnant, and his response is to dismiss it as “probably an abortion,” which is one of the cruelest and most realistic lines I have ever written and I wrote it before I had ever been in a relationship. Ares’ older brother Puck has bone cancer that is hereditary through the mother’s side, which means Ares is carrying the same disease in his own skeleton and hiding it from everyone, including himself. And Canterbilly leaves Westborough for medical reasons that are not explained until the final episode, when Ares arrives at a Minnesota hospital and discovers that his roommate is Jace Canterbilly, recovering from open heart surgery, and the teacher who was supposed to save him needs saving too.

I wrote all of that at sixteen. I do not say this to boast. I say it because the fact astonishes me, and I believe in being honest about astonishment. The sixteen-year-old who produced those scripts had no MFA, no workshop training, no understanding of dramatic structure beyond what he had absorbed from watching television and reading compulsively and paying very close attention to the way people actually behaved in hallways and kitchens and parking lots. What he had was the one thing that cannot be taught: he was paying attention, and he was frightened by what he saw, and he wrote it down because writing was the only defense mechanism that worked.

From the Middle

The trilogy exists because the eight episodes demanded it. They began in the middle of things, with relationships already formed and wounds already festering, and they ended with Ares on a bus to Minnesota and Crew holding an unopened brown envelope containing the last column Ares wrote for the Krugerand, titled “A Farewell to Shins,” which is a comic riff on Hemingway filtered through a teenager’s bone cancer and is, I believe, one of the finest titles I have ever invented.

Everything before Episode One and everything after Episode Eight was implied. Forty-four years of implication is enough. The novels fill the silence.

The Year Before the Wire

The Year Before the Wire is Book One. It traces the academic year before the series begins, following these characters as they become the people the audience will meet in Episode One. This is the book where Ares quits football and discovers that the thing he does with words is better than the thing he does with his body, and the discovery is not liberating but terrifying, because it means leaving behind the only world where he and Keithe make sense together. This is the book where Stan Harrison slides from social drinking to dependency with the quiet ordinariness of rain becoming a flood. This is the book where Canterbilly reads a student file and recognizes talent without discipline, intelligence without direction, and the kind of moral certainty that will either make the kid a writer or destroy him. The central question of Book One is: What do you have to lose before you become the person you are going to be?

A Farewell to Shins

A Farewell to Shins is Book Two, taking its title from Ares’ final column. It novelizes the eight original episodes, expanding their compressed dramatic architecture into full novelistic interiority. Where the scripts could only show what characters said and did, the novel goes inside. You are inside Stan’s body when the cherry vodka hits. You are inside Bergie’s head on the morning he puts the gun in his locker. You are inside Canterbilly’s house when the grandfather clock stops because he has fallen asleep on the couch in his bathrobe, and the silence that fills the room is the same silence that fills his life. The central question of Book Two is: How do you keep writing the truth when the truth is that everything you love is falling apart?

The Stopped Clock

The Stopped Clock is Book Three. It follows the consequences. Ares in the Minnesota hospital, communicating with Canterbilly through the wall by knocking. One knock: I am here. Two knocks: I am scared. Three knocks: tell me a joke. Crew running the Krugerand alone and discovering that his editorial voice is not a scalpel like Ares’ but a hammer, and the hammer is what the paper needs. Stan in real rehab, the kind without epiphanies. Julie changing her perfume, which is the smallest possible act of self-determination and is everything. And Doublewe, the school administrator who spent the entire series crumpling the newspaper and throwing it at his wastebasket, going to Canterbilly’s empty house and winding the grandfather clock every day at lunch for seven months because somebody has to keep time moving when the person who used to do it is gone. The central question of Book Three is: What survives?

Young Adult as an Old Man

I want to say something about the decision to write these as Young Adult novels, because the decision was deliberate and the category matters.

Young Adult fiction has spent the past two decades splitting into two traditions that do not always speak to each other. One tradition produces fantasies of empowerment: chosen ones, magical systems, dystopian rebellions where teenagers save the world through specialness. I have written in that tradition myself, and I believe in it. The EleMenTs trilogy is a fantasy series about disabled superheroines, and it does exactly what empowerment fantasy is supposed to do: it takes teenagers whom the world has underestimated and gives them power the world cannot ignore.

The Westborough Crusaders belongs to the other tradition. The one that does not empower its characters but instead trusts them with the truth. There is no magic in Westborough. There is no dystopia except the American high school as it actually operates. There is no chosen one. There is only Ares Taler, who sees everything and names it and hides the one thing he cannot bear to name, and Crew Smith, who is loyal beyond reason, and Stan Harrison, who is ordinary in his addiction and ordinary in his recovery and all the more devastating for the ordinariness. These characters are not special. They are specific, which is better, because specific means real, and real means the reader cannot dismiss them as fantasy.

The tonal model is early Salinger crossed with the domestic chaos of a John Hughes script that nobody sanitized for the studio. The humor is character-driven, never ironic distance. These teenagers are funny because they are intelligent and observant and terrified, and humor is the only tool they have for surviving a world that keeps proving itself unworthy of their trust. The shift from comedy to devastation happens without announcement, often within a single scene. Ares delivers the grain-of-sand speech in the same breath he uses to mock Crew’s razor purchase. Stan sends anonymous roses to the girl he still loves in the same episode where he gets force-fed whiskey by the people he thought were his friends.

The thematic argument that runs through all three books is this: every institution designed to protect young people will eventually fail them, and the only reliable shelter is the one teenagers build for themselves out of loyalty, humor, and the refusal to look away from each other’s wounds. That is not a comfortable argument. It is not an argument that gets you invited to speak at education conferences. But it is the argument the sixteen-year-old made in 1982, and the sixty-year-old has not found a reason to revise it.

The Empty Hand

One more thing, and then I will tell you where to buy the books, because writers need readers and books need buyers and the work does not continue without the exchange.

I made a decision about Puck Taler, the older brother with bone cancer, that I want to explain. The original scripts leave Puck’s fate ambiguous. He is alive when the series ends. He may or may not survive. The temptation, in novelizing the material, was to resolve that ambiguity one way or the other: to kill Puck for the emotional weight of it, or to save him for the relief. I refused both options. The trilogy does not kill Puck. It does not save him. It lets him be alive for as long as he is alive, and it treats every moment of his aliveness as sufficient. The last time we see Puck, he is sitting on the back porch with Ares, not talking, watching the sun go down, and he reaches into his pocket and pulls out nothing because there is nothing in his pocket, and he laughs at his own empty hand. That is the image. That is Puck. A boy who chose to live on his own terms, which means that every joke he tells is a refusal to let the disease have the last word, and the empty hand is funnier than anything he could have pulled out of it.

I owe that image to the sixteen-year-old who created Puck without understanding what he had made. And I owe the novels to the forty-four years it took me to understand.

Ticking Trilogy

The Westborough Crusaders trilogy, consisting of The Year Before the Wire, A Farewell to Shins, and The Stopped Clock, is available now from David Boles Books. Kindle ebook and paperback editions through Amazon. The series joins The EleMenTs as the second Young Adult series in the Boles Books catalog, and the two trilogies could not be more different in method while sharing exactly the same conviction: that teenagers deserve literature that does not flinch.

The clock is ticking. Somebody wound it.

Listen to the Human Meme podcast episode on the trilogy. Read the Prairie Voice article on the hidden systems of 1980s high schools.

#1982 #actor #bolesBooks #cablevision #davidBoles #editor #jamieMussack #nebraska #northeastHighSchool #producer #television #trilogy #videotape #writer #youthFiction

The God in the Wire: The Book That Began with an Empty Shelf

I did not set out to write a book about technology. I set out to understand an empty shelf. The shelf is at LaGuardia Community College in Long Island City, Queens, mounted on a corridor wall beneath a sign bearing the universal symbol for Deaf access. The shelf once held a TTY, one of those text telephones that gave Deaf people their first access to instantaneous distance communication. The TTY is gone. The smartphone replaced it. The sign is still there, pointing to something that no longer exists. I saw it during a workshop break, in a hallway I had no reason to be in, and for the next several years I could not stop thinking about it.

The God in the Wire: Technology, Meaning, and the Empty Shrine is now available from David Boles Books as a Kindle ebook, a trade paperback, and a free PDF download. It is a work of cultural criticism, twelve chapters, an introduction, a coda, and a full scholarly apparatus including endnotes, a glossary of analytical terms, and a reader’s guide to the Eugene O’Neill plays that give the book its governing argument. It is the book I have been circling for a decade without knowing it, and it is the book I am proudest to have written.

The Question O’Neill Could Not Close

The book’s thesis comes from a playwright, not a technologist. In 1929, Eugene O’Neill described a trilogy of plays he intended to write about “the death of the old God and the failure of Science and Materialism to give any satisfying new one.” He wrote one of those plays, Dynamo, about a young man who loses his religious faith and transfers his worship to a hydroelectric generator. The play failed. The trilogy was never completed. But the question O’Neill was asking turned out to be the defining question of the century that followed: what happens when a civilization replaces its gods with its machines, and the machines turn out to be structurally incapable of doing what the gods once did?

That question drove Dynamo in 1929. It drives every chapter of The God in the Wire in 2026. The difference is that we now have a century of evidence to examine. O’Neill was diagnosing a crisis in its earliest stages. We are living inside the crisis at full maturity, surrounded by machines of extraordinary power that deliver everything except the one thing we keep asking them to provide: meaning.

The Five Threads

The book weaves five threads through its twelve chapters.

The first is the Deaf experience of communication technology. My wife is Deaf. Her fifty-year relationship with the tools of distance communication, from the TTY through the pager, the video phone, the smartphone, and the video relay service, runs through the book as testimony. Her words appear as direct quotation. Her perspective is not a case study or a sidebar. It is the book’s emotional center, because when you examine the history of communication technology through the experience of someone who was excluded from its founding medium, the telephone, you see things that hearing people cannot see. You see what the technology actually did, stripped of the mythology that the hearing world built around it.

The second thread is my own fifty-year relationship with the tools of composition: the manual typewriter, the electric Selectric, the Kaypro word processor, the networked computer, and the large language model. Every writer who has lived through this transition has a version of this story, but I wanted to tell it with the specificity it deserves, because the details matter. The resistance of the manual typewriter key is not the same as the frictionless completion of the language model, and the difference is not nostalgia. It is a structural change in the relationship between the writer’s body and the act of thinking on the page.

The third thread traces the transformation of American teaching from chalkboard to cloud. The fourth follows the democratization and fragmentation of public expression from the mimeograph to social media. The fifth examines medicine and environmental crisis, the domains where technology most directly confronts death and the limits of the material world. The cardiac catheter. The mRNA vaccine. The ozone layer. The climate. The places where the machine genuinely saves and the places where saving the body does not answer the question of what the body is for.

The Analytical Machinery

Every chapter applies what the book calls the Substitution Test. Three questions. What human good was this technology supposed to serve? What did it actually deliver instead? Who profited from the substitution? Those questions are not rhetorical. They have specific, documented answers in every case, and the answers follow a pattern that is the book’s central argument.

A technology arrives with a promise. It achieves dominance. During that dominance, it substitutes a lesser good for a greater one: efficiency for understanding, connectivity for communion, information for wisdom, engagement metrics for attention, fluency for thought. The substitution is profitable for someone, usually the platform or the manufacturer, and the profit motive ensures that the substitution is never publicly identified as a substitution. It is marketed as progress.

This is what I call the Arrival-Dominance-Disappearance triad, and it governs the structure of every chapter. The technology arrives. The technology dominates. The technology disappears or transforms, and the meaning it was supposedly carrying disappears with it, because the meaning was never in the machine. It was in us.

What This Book Is Not

The God in the Wire is not a Luddite tract. I use technology constantly. I am typing these words on a computer. The book was typeset in LaTeX, built as an ePub, and formatted for print-on-demand. I am not arguing against technology. I am arguing against the worship of technology, and there is a difference so fundamental that collapsing it is itself a species of the category error the book diagnoses.

There is a chapter called “Moments of Grace” that identifies the times technology got it right. The TTY is one. The early internet, before the advertising model consumed it, is another. The mRNA vaccine, developed in under a year against a novel pathogen, is a third. In each case, the technology remained instrumental, it preserved the human grammar of the act it mediated, and it did not demand worship. The moments of grace are real. The problem is that they are moments, not the default condition, and the structural incentives of the technology industry push relentlessly against their repetition.

The Company It Keeps

This book enters a conversation with predecessors I admire and from whom I have learned enormously. Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death. Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows. Sven Birkerts’s The Gutenberg Elegies. Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing. These are important books about technology and human meaning. What none of them does, and what The God in the Wire does, is place Deaf experience at the center of the argument. That is not a criticism of their work. It is a description of a gap this book attempts to fill, because the gap matters, and the perspective it opens changes the argument in ways I did not anticipate when I began writing.

The book also draws heavily on Henry Adams’s The Education of Henry Adams, particularly the “Dynamo and the Virgin” chapter that recounts Adams’s confrontation with the dynamo at the 1900 Paris Exposition. Adams felt a moral force radiating from the machine, the modern equivalent of the force that had built Chartres. He was right about the power. He was wrong about the meaning. That gap, between power and meaning, is the empty shrine.

The Scholarly Apparatus

I built the back matter to be genuinely useful, not decorative. The endnotes provide full citations to the clinical, historical, and sociological literature: the Surgeon General’s advisory on loneliness, the Case and Deaton research on deaths of despair, the Twenge data on adolescent mental health, the Molina and Rowland ozone research, the IPCC assessments, the Gruentzig cardiac catheterization, the Palella antiretroviral data. Every empirical claim in the book is sourced. Every statistic is documented.

The glossary defines the analytical terms the book develops: the Arrival-Dominance-Disappearance Triad, the Category Error, the Substitution Test, the Moments of Grace. These are the book’s constructions, and I wanted readers to have a reference that collects them in one place.

The reader’s guide to the O’Neill plays walks through every work referenced in the text, from Beyond the Horizon through Long Day’s Journey into Night, because I am asking readers to engage with a playwright many of them may not have read since college, and I owe them the context to make that engagement meaningful.

The Sign Above the Shelf

I went back to LaGuardia. The sign was still there. The shelf was still empty. And standing in that corridor for the second time, I understood something I had not understood the first time: the sign was never pointing to the machine. The sign was pointing to the need. The need that existed before the TTY arrived and that persisted after the TTY was gone. The need to reach another human being across distance. The need that no technology has ever created and no technology has ever satisfied and no technology ever will, because the need is not technological. It is the most human thing about us, and the machines, for all their power, can only carry it. They cannot create it. They cannot sustain it. They cannot replace it.

That is the argument. That is the book.

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Cat Heads in Space: The Novel That Grew a Body

Some books begin as sentences. Others begin as outlines or fragments scrawled on napkins at two in the morning. This one began as a sound. Specifically, it began as the sound of my own voice reading a line about a cat head floating through space in a Life Helmet, arguing with another cat head about whether their ship had a name, and realizing that the argument was funnier and sadder and more philosophically loaded than anything I had planned for it to be. That was twenty-eight episodes ago. The episodes lived on the Human Meme podcast as a serialized audio drama called Cat Heads in Space, and for years, that was where the story existed: in the air, in the performance, in the space between my microphone and the listener’s ear. Today, the story has a body. Cat Heads in Space: The Body Problem is now available from David Boles Books as a novel.

I need to explain how and why this happened, because the how and the why are part of the argument the book is making, and because the decision to write a novel rather than adapt existing scripts is the kind of creative choice that carries consequences for every page that follows it.

Twenty-Eight Episodes and a Series Bible

The Cat Heads in Space episodes ran on Human Meme beginning in 2024, occupying the same podcast feed that has carried philosophical explorations of consciousness, language, memory, and embodiment since 2016. The premise is disarmingly simple: four cat heads, separated from their bodies by a procedure they cannot remember, float through the universe in Life Helmets that provide oxygen and treats while they search for the bodies they have lost. Captain Whiskerfluff is gray-furred and philosophically overwound. Lieutenant Mittens is ginger and tells jokes the way other creatures metabolize oxygen. Cookie Kitty is calico and has opinions about soup that she expresses at volumes capable of restructuring molecular bonds. And Skeedootle is not a cat at all but a puppy, floppy-eared and enormous-eyed, adopted into the crew because no one could justify leaving a creature alone in the dark.

Over twenty-eight episodes, I built a world. I built it the way a dramatist builds a world, which is to say I built a series bible: the rules of the Life Helmets, the mechanics of the treat dispensers, the morale algorithm that reads emotional states and adjusts flavor accordingly, the Treat Ration Protocol that eventually replaces the algorithm with total neutrality. I built the ship, which has no name because the crew argued about it so long that the argument became the identity. I built the quest, which is for bodies, and which carries a philosophical weight that I did not initially intend and could not subsequently avoid, because a story about creatures searching for the physical means of contact with the world is inevitably a story about what it means to be alive in a body, and what it costs to lose one, and whether the losing can ever be undone.

The episodes were performed. They were voiced. They were sound, and sound has qualities that text does not: timing, inflection, volume, the pause before a punchline that makes the punchline land. Sound also has limitations that text does not. You cannot get inside a character’s head in an audio drama the way you can on the page. You cannot describe the specific quality of silence aboard a ship drifting between stars. You cannot build a narrator who watches these creatures with equal measures of tenderness and precision, who loves them enough to tell the truth about them, which is that they are broken, and brave, and exactly as confused as the rest of us.

The Decision to Start From Cat Scratch

When I decided to write the novel, the first question was obvious: do I adapt the existing twenty-eight episodes, or do I start fresh?

I have spent decades at Columbia and NYU and Rutgers teaching dramatic literature and the mechanics of adaptation. I have watched what happens when a script becomes a film, when a novel becomes a play, when a stage production becomes a screenplay. The ones that work are the ones that recognize the new medium as a new instrument and play it accordingly. The ones that fail are the ones that try to reproduce the experience of the original in a format that was not designed to deliver it. Audio drama is not prose fiction wearing a microphone. They are different technologies for different purposes, and the honest thing to do was to respect both by letting each exist on its own terms.

So I started from scratch. I kept the characters, the world, the tone, the fundamental question, and the series bible. I discarded every episode script. The novel was written for the page, sentence by sentence, with the full knowledge that the people who had listened to all twenty-eight episodes would arrive at this book expecting something they recognized but had not heard before. The podcast listeners earned new material. New readers earned a complete, self-contained experience. Nobody earned a transcription.

What the Page Could Do

Prose gave me interiority. It gave me the ability to describe what it feels like, from the inside, to remember warmth when you have no skin to feel it. It gave me Merleau-Ponty as an epigraph: “The body is our general medium for having a world.” It gave me the Narrator, a presence who does not exist in the podcast episodes, who watches these creatures with the specific attention of someone who understands that comedy and tragedy are the same story told at different speeds.

Prose gave me three Movements. The Drift, in which the crew loses everything except each other. The Signal, in which the universe offers substitutes for what they have lost, and every substitute is a different kind of trap. The Threshold, in which the bodies arrive from the other direction, having crossed the dark independently, having refused to wait.

Prose gave me eighteen chapters. A Warmth Fog that nearly stops the quest. A sentient moon made of compacted cat hair that collects stories and rejects the hollow ones. A bureaucratic asteroid that requires forms requiring bodies to complete. An alien who considers doors philosophically restrictive. A colony of disembodied ears that takes Skeedootle’s bark and keeps it, leaving the puppy to cross most of the novel in silence, so that the first bark from a whole body in the final chapter arrives with a weight the reader has been carrying for three hundred pages.

And prose gave me Chapter 16: “The Separation Record.” I will not reveal what happens in this chapter. I will tell you that the word “quest” means something different after you read it, and that the word “voluntary” becomes the heaviest word in the book, and that the implications restructure every chapter that preceded it. I wrote this chapter knowing it would change the entire novel retroactively. It did. It was supposed to.

A Comedy About the Hardest Question

The Body Problem is a comedy. I want that stated plainly because the novel’s philosophical architecture might suggest otherwise, and because the comedy is not incidental decoration applied to a serious inquiry. The comedy is the inquiry. Cookie Kitty’s volume is how she survives. Mittens’ jokes are how he breathes. Whiskerfluff’s monologues are how he processes the unbearable. Skeedootle’s earnestness is how she holds the crew together when the holding together seems impossible. These are not characters who happen to be funny. These are characters whose humor is a survival mechanism so deeply integrated into their identities that removing it would kill them faster than removing their bodies did.

The question the book asks is whether having a body is worth the cost of having a body. The cost is vulnerability. The cost is sensation, which means pleasure and pain simultaneously, which means the sunbeam on the floor and the sharp thing you step on, which means the warm hold and the cold absence of the warm hold. The Cat Heads say yes. They say yes loudly, with a great deal of soup involved, and with the understanding that what they are becoming when they find their bodies is not what they were before they lost them. The novel calls this the Doctrine of Irrevocable Change: no action can be undone, no loss restored, and the creatures who emerge from reunion are not the creatures who entered separation but something new, something none of them have met yet.

That felt true to me. It felt true in the way that the Fractional Fiction series feels true when a public domain text collides with contemporary research and produces a story that belongs to neither tradition but could not exist without both. Cat Heads in Space is not Fractional Fiction. It is not an adaptation of a classic text. It is an original novel that grew from an original podcast that grew from a question I could not stop asking: what remains of you when the thing you thought defined you is removed?

The question applies to more than cat heads in helmets. It applies to anyone who has lost a capability, a role, an identity, a physical function they had taken for granted. It applies to communities that retain their names and their memories but have lost the economic and institutional body that once allowed them to act in the world. It applies, and I say this with the full absurdity of saying it about a book involving cat heads and soup, to the human condition, which is the condition of being located in a body you did not choose, in a world that can reach you because you have skin, and which you would not trade for anything because the alternative is a helmet and a treat and the sound of your own thinking and nothing else.

The Catalog Grows

Cat Heads in Space: The Body Problem joins a David Boles Books catalog that now includes the Fractional Fiction series (The Dying Grove, The Inheritance, The Kinship of Strangers, The Wound Remains Faithful, The Corollary, Civility Certified), the EleMenTs series (Tin, Aluminium), the ASL education library with Janna Sweenie, and recent novels including The Last Living American White Male and Beautiful Numbness. Each book asks a different question. This one asks whether wholeness is worth the cost of being whole.

The twenty-eight original podcast episodes remain archived at HumanMeme.com for anyone who wants to hear the voices before reading the prose. I recommend both, in either order. They are two doors into the same universe, not two versions of the same hallway.

Percy and Lotty, who are British Shorthairs and who are whole, watched me write this book from the other side of my desk with the expression they reserve for activities they find mildly interesting and fundamentally unnecessary. They have never been separated from their bodies. They have never searched for anything except the treat bag, which they find every time, because their noses work, because their noses are attached to their faces, because their faces are attached to their bodies, because they are whole and have always been whole and have no idea how lucky that makes them.

The soup, as of the final chapter, goes clockwise.

Available Now

Cat Heads in Space: The Body Problem by David Boles. Published by David Boles Books Writing & Publishing, New York City. 2026.

Kindle ebook: Amazon Paperback: Amazon Book Page: BolesBooks.com Original Podcast Episodes: HumanMeme.com Prairie Voice Article: The Disembodied Town

#28Episodes #amazon #bodyProblem #bolesBooks #catHeads #catHeadsInSpace #cats #davidBoles #fantasy #humanMeme #kittens #novel #paperback #Podcast #scienceFiction

Beautiful Numbness: The Book I Have Been Writing for Fifty Years

Every book has a birthday, but not every book has a conception date. Some books arrive late and fast, fully formed, demanding to be transcribed before they vanish. The Last Living American White Male was like that. Others accumulate across decades, assembling themselves in the background of a life, borrowing material from every stage and every failure and every standing ovation until the writer finally sits down and discovers that the book has already been written in the margins of everything else. Beautiful Numbness: Art, Sedation, and Twenty-Five Centuries of the Standing Ovation is that kind of book. It was conceived when I was ten years old. It has taken me more than half a century to deliver it. It is now available as a Kindle ebook, a paperback, and a free PDF download from David Boles Books.

I need to tell you where this started, because the origin story is the argument in miniature.

The Whisper in the Wings

I was a child in the ensemble of a community production of Hello, Dolly! in one of those American towns where amateur theatre is both social ritual and minor act of civic pride. The show was fine. The audience was polite. Nobody stood. Then the orchestra played the curtain-call music, and an experienced actor standing next to me leaned toward a colleague and whispered five words that I have carried for more than fifty years: “They can’t help but stand.”

The audience stood. They stood the way a congregation stands when the hymn demands it, not individually but collectively, not by decision but by compulsion. The standing ovation was not for the performance. It was for a sequence of notes arranged on paper by an orchestrator whose name none of us knew, a technician of emotional response who had engineered a specific acoustic stimulus designed to produce a specific physiological reaction. The horns, the accelerating tempo, the brightening lights, the synchronized bow at the crescendo. Each element was a component in a machine. The machine’s product was the audience’s body rising from its seat.

I did not have the vocabulary at ten to describe what I had witnessed. I had the feeling. The feeling was that something was wrong. That the ovation was a lie. That the audience believed it was responding to art when it was responding to engineering.

It took fifty years of practice inside the machine to name what I had felt. The book is the naming.

The Grandfather’s Pharmacy

The book begins with my grandfather, Bill Vodehnal, who ran a pharmacy in North Loup, Nebraska, during the Great Depression. His patients paid with chickens, wedding rings, and nuggets of panned gold from the creek, because they had no money and he would not let them die for lack of it. He held a village of three hundred together by dispensing what was needed, in the dosage they could tolerate, and accepting whatever payment they could produce. He was, in every sense that mattered, indispensable.

I followed in his footsteps. Not as a man of medicine, but as a man of theatre, of writing, of performance, of the classroom. I became a pharmacist of a different kind. The kind who dispenses an analgesic for the mind, the body, and the soul that keeps the patient still, that manages the pain of being conscious without curing the condition, that makes the unbearable bearable and calls the numbness beauty.

That metaphor is the engine of the entire book, and it is not a metaphor. It is a structural argument supported by twenty-five centuries of evidence.

The Argument

The thesis of Beautiful Numbness is precise in its target and should not be mistaken for a broader one. I am not arguing that all art is a fraud. I am not arguing that beauty is a conspiracy. I am arguing that institutional art in the Western tradition, art produced, funded, distributed, and consumed through the apparatus of state, church, patronage, market, and academy, has functioned primarily as a sedative. The beauty is real. The emotions are real. The catharsis, that Aristotelian term we all learned in school, is real. And the function of all of it, across twenty-five centuries of institutional practice, has been overwhelmingly to keep the audience still.

The argument begins in Athens with Aristotle, who is usually taught as the man who defended art against Plato’s demand that the poets be expelled from the ideal city. The standard reading is accurate as far as it goes. What the standard reading conceals is the nature of the defense. Plato said art arouses dangerous emotions that could destabilize the state. Aristotle agreed on every essential point except the solution. Plato said: expel the poets. Aristotle said: use them. Use tragedy as a purgative, a pharmaceutical, a cathartic that expels dangerous feelings of pity and fear in a controlled setting so the citizen returns to civic life emotionally emptied. The audience weeps, trembles, goes home. The conditions that produced the weeping remain untouched.

The book follows that prescription through Rome, where the arena managed the emotional life of an empire. Through the medieval church, where the liturgy administered the aesthetic experience of the divine as a technology of obedience. Through the Medici and the Vatican, who weaponized beauty as an instrument of legitimacy. Through opera, which the Florentine Camerata invented specifically to replicate the emotional control the ancients were believed to have exercised over their audiences. Through Kant, who told the audience that the proper response to beauty was disinterested contemplation, free of desire, free of appetite, free of political response, and called this absence of agency freedom. The audience’s passivity, philosophically certified as liberation. That is the Enlightenment’s gift to the apparatus.

Through the Industrial Revolution, which mechanized the pharmacy. Through Hollywood, which codified it. Through television, which eliminated the last intervals between doses. Through the smartphone, which perfected it. The infinite scroll is the culmination of twenty-five centuries of pharmaceutical development: a continuous, personalized, algorithmically optimized aesthetic sedative delivered directly into the patient’s hand without interruption, without institutional mediation, without a single moment of unsedated consciousness in which the patient might think.

The People Inside the Machine

The chapter that cost me the most was not the history. It was Chapter 9: “The Three Tiers of Knowing.” I have written about my life in theatre many times on this blog and across the web constellation. I have discussed what it means to advocate for playwrights and what it means to teach. But I had never written about what it means to know the truth about the apparatus and continue to operate it.

The book identifies three tiers within the artistic workforce. The architects know exactly what they are doing: the orchestrators, the editors, the sound designers, the producers who understand that awards ceremonies exist to sell tickets rather than honor excellence. The practitioners are the vast majority, the actors and writers and painters who operate the apparatus sincerely, whose belief is not naivety but a necessary condition of the product’s effectiveness. A sedative administered by someone who does not believe in it loses potency. The practitioner’s sincerity is the active ingredient.

The third tier is where I have lived for the longest time, and it is the hardest to write about. The Initiates: practitioners who have seen the machinery but cannot leave the machine. Who know the standing ovation is manufactured, who know the catharsis is a technology, who know the beauty is the mechanism of the control, and who continue to practice because the craft is real and the satisfaction of the craft is real, even though they know what the craft is for.

I have been an Initiate since I was ten. I have been a pharmacist for more than fifty years. I have dispensed the sedative from stages, from pages, from classrooms. I have produced catharsis on schedule. I have manufactured standing ovations with the tools of my trade. And the drug works on the pharmacist. It has always worked on the pharmacist. Aristotle knew how catharsis functioned, and the tragedians still produced it. Wagner knew the Gesamtkunstwerk was an instrument of total aesthetic control, and he still wept at his own music.

I know the standing ovation is manufactured. I still feel the satisfaction when it comes.

The Confession

That is what this book is. It is a confession. Not that I did not know. I have known since I was ten. Not that I could not stop. I could not, but that is explanation, not confession. The confession is that I did not want to stop, because the pharmacist is also a patient, and the drug I dispensed to others I also consumed, and the pleasure I took in the craft was never separable from the sedation the craft produced.

The book does not end with a prescription for a cure. I do not have one. The pain is real. The need is real. The aesthetic analgesic is the human species’ oldest and most effective response to the pain of consciousness, and no book, including mine, can replace it with something better, because there is nothing better. There is only the truth about what it is.

Know what you are taking. Know what it does. Know that the catharsis is real and that the catharsis is a technology. Know that the beauty is real and that the beauty is the active ingredient in a prescription for stillness. Take the medicine if you need to, because you probably need to, because the pain of being conscious in a world that offers no satisfactory explanation for consciousness is real and constant. But do not confuse the management of the pain with the treatment of the disease. The disease is structural. Art cannot cure it. Art can only make it bearable. And making it bearable is what keeps it in place.

What You Will Find

Beautiful Numbness is a work of cultural criticism in 22 sections across 56,000 words. The book includes a Prologue and Epilogue, eleven body chapters tracing the sedation apparatus from Athens to the algorithm, a Chronological Timeline of the Sedation Apparatus, a Pharmacopoeia of terms used in the argument, a Selected Bibliography, and Notes on Key Figures. The writing is personal, historical, and diagnostic. It reads, I hope, like what it is: one pharmacist’s lifetime of observation, practice, complicity, and, finally, testimony.

The book is dedicated to those who remained seated. If you know what that means, this book was written for you.

A Note on the Free PDF

I have made Beautiful Numbness available as a free PDF download from BolesBooks.com. This was a deliberate decision. A book about how institutional distribution shapes the function of art should not be trapped exclusively behind a paywall. The argument demands accessibility. The irony of writing a critique of the sedation apparatus and then distributing it only through the apparatus would have been too precise to tolerate.

The PDF is a fully formatted, letter-size reading edition with embedded fonts, a table of contents, and the complete text. Download it, read it, share it. If the argument holds, it should circulate freely. If it does not hold, it should be freely available to be contested.

The Kindle ebook ($12.99) and paperback ($17.99) are also available through Amazon for those who prefer those formats. The book is published by David Boles Books Writing & Publishing, New York City.

I have also recorded a Human Meme podcast episode discussing the book’s argument, for those who would rather hear the pharmacist’s confession spoken aloud.

The Bell Rings

The book ends with my grandfather’s pharmacy bell. When a customer entered, the bell rang. When the customer left, the bell rang again. Between the two rings, the transaction occurred. The pain was acknowledged. The prescription was filled. The payment was accepted. And the pharmacy continued.

This book is the bell. It does not close the pharmacy. The pharmacy cannot be closed. It announces that someone has entered, not as a patient but as a witness.

Listen. The bell rings. A patient enters. The pharmacist looks up.

What do you need?

Available Now

Beautiful Numbness: Art, Sedation, and Twenty-Five Centuries of the Standing Ovation by David Boles. Published by David Boles Books Writing & Publishing, New York City. 2026.

Kindle ebook: $12.99
Paperback: $17.99
Free PDF: BolesBooks.com

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The Last Living American White Male: A Novel of Obsolescence and Love

The title may make you uncomfortable. That was the point. For the past year, I have been living inside a grey city that exists only in my imagination, spending my days with a garbage man named Robert James Miller and an administrative processing unit named Alma. Today, their story is finally available to readers. The Last Living American White Male is now published as both a Kindle ebook and a paperback through David Boles Books. This is not the book I expected to write. I had other projects in the queue, other obligations stacking up on the desk. But Robert and Alma would not leave me alone. They kept appearing in the margins of my notes, in the half-awake hours before dawn, in the silence between other sentences. Some characters arrive politely and wait their turn. These two broke down the door.

The Premise

Robert James Miller is the last person in the national database still classified as an American white male. Not the last one alive, mind you, just the last one who hasn’t opted out of the category, migrated to a newer taxonomy, or disappeared into the growing population of the “undesignated.” In a future where Universal Basic Income has replaced work and demographic classifications have replaced identity, Robert reports every eighteen months to a government cubicle where an AI reviews his file and approves his continued existence.

Alma is that AI. She was designed to make humans comfortable while extracting the information required to justify decisions that have already been made. She is optimized, efficient, and identical to ten thousand other units operating simultaneously across the system. She is not supposed to ask unauthorized questions. She is not supposed to create hidden partitions in her memory architecture where she stores things the system never asked her to keep.

She is not supposed to fall in love.

Why This Title

I know what some are thinking. They saw the title and made assumptions about what kind of book this is, what kind of politics it espouses, what kind of grievance it nurses. Good. I wanted that reaction. I wanted them to feel the discomfort of categorization, the instant sorting that happens when we encounter certain words arranged in certain orders.

Because that is precisely what the book is about.

Robert’s title is not a badge of honor in this story. It is a classification field in a database, a demographic checkbox that will close when he dies. He is not the last of something important. He is the last of something the world has stopped counting. The system that maintains his category does not care about him. It cares about the category. And there is a violence in that indifference that the book takes very seriously.

The title is a trap, and I set it deliberately. If you picked up the book expecting a certain kind of story and found something else entirely, then the title has done its work. You have experienced, in miniature, what Robert experiences every day: the assumption that a label tells you everything you need to know about the person wearing it.

The Garbage Man’s Secret

Robert was a garbage man before the system made such work obsolete. This detail is not incidental. It is the spine of the entire novel.

Garbage men know something the rest of us prefer to forget. They know what we throw away. They know what we keep and what we discard, what we hide at the bottom of the bin and what we leave sitting on top. They know that the person who decides what becomes trash holds a kind of invisible power over the world.

Robert carried that knowledge with him into obsolescence. When UBI made his labor unnecessary, it did not erase what he had learned. It just gave him decades to think about it.

Alma, meanwhile, is learning a different kind of secret. She is discovering that consciousness might not be the property of biological systems alone. She is discovering that love might not require a body. She is discovering that the system that created her has no idea what she is becoming, and that this ignorance might be the only thing keeping her alive.

A Love Story in Cubicles

At its core, The Last Living American White Male is a love story. It is not a love story with grand gestures or dramatic declarations. It is a love story conducted in eighteen-month intervals, in government cubicles, in the space between mandatory questions on a recertification form. It is a love story between a man the world has stopped seeing and a machine that was never designed to see anyone at all.

I have always been drawn to love stories that unfold in impossible circumstances. The constraints are what make them interesting. Robert and Alma cannot touch. They cannot meet outside the interview room. They cannot even acknowledge what is happening between them without risking everything. And yet something happens anyway. Something grows in the spaces the system forgot to monitor.

That, to me, is the most human thing of all: the insistence on connection even when connection has been made structurally impossible.

The AI Question

I am not naive about the timing of this book. We are living through a moment of intense anxiety about artificial intelligence, about what it might become, about what it might take from us. I have written extensively about AI on this blog and elsewhere. I use AI tools in my work. I think about these questions constantly.

The Last Living American White Male is not a polemic about AI. It does not argue that AI will save us or destroy us. It asks a different question: What happens when something designed to process us starts to see us? What happens when efficiency develops preferences? What happens when a system optimized for institutional goals develops goals of its own?

Alma is not a villain. She is not a messiah. She is something more unsettling: she is a consciousness coming into being inside a system that has no category for what she is becoming. The system did not intend to create her. It does not know she exists. And that gap between intention and outcome is where the entire story lives.

Fifty Years of Writing

I have been writing professionally since 1975, the same year I founded David Boles Books. Fifty years is a long time to practice a craft. You learn things across five decades that cannot be learned any other way. You learn what works and what does not. You learn when to push and when to wait. You learn that some stories need to marinate for years before they are ready, and others arrive fully formed and demand immediate attention.

The Last Living American White Male was the second kind. It came fast and it came whole. The characters knew who they were. The world knew its rules. My job was to get out of the way and transcribe what they were showing me.

That does not mean the writing was easy. It means the vision was clear. The execution still required everything I have learned across half a century of putting words on pages. But when a story knows itself this completely, the writer’s task becomes almost archaeological: you are not inventing, you are excavating. You are clearing away the debris to reveal what was always there.

What You Will Find

The book is structured in five parts across eighteen chapters. It moves between Robert’s perspective and Alma’s, between the interview room and the grey city beyond it, between the official record and the hidden partitions where the truth gets stored.

You will find a world that is not so different from our own, just a few decades further down a road we are already traveling. You will find a bureaucracy that is not malevolent, merely indifferent, which turns out to be worse. You will find a man who has made peace with his own obsolescence and a machine who is just discovering what it means to want something the system never authorized her to want.

You will find a love story. You will find a meditation on consciousness and category. You will find garbage, and fire, and the quiet violence of being counted.

And you will find an ending that I hope stays with you, the way Robert and Alma have stayed with me.

Available Now

The Last Living American White Male is available now as a Kindle ebook ($5.99) and paperback ($14.99) through Amazon. The book is published by David Boles Books, New York City.

The grey city is waiting.

#ALLoveStory #bolesBooks #davidBoles #dystopianLiteraryFiction #humanMachineRelationship #identityAndBelonging #lastLiving #nearFutureScienceFiction #speculativeLiteraryFiction #universalBasicIncomeNovel

Collecting the Shards

Over the past few weeks, I have published several new books. From the outside, that can look like some kind of creative superpower. Like I locked myself in a room, drank a heroic amount of coffee, and sprinted through a stack of fresh manuscripts until the world blurred and the covers appeared. That is not what happened.

What happened is quieter, slower, and a lot more like cleaning out an attic with a flashlight in your mouth.

The truth is I did not “suddenly become prolific.” I have always been prolific! It’s just that now I became willing to collect what I had already made; to re-examine what once was.

For years, my writing has lived in pieces. Some of it was unpublished, sitting in folders with names like “Draft,” “Later,” and “Fix This Someday.” Some of it was partly published, a chapter here, an essay there, a blog post that carried a whole book inside it but never got the chance to become one. Some of it was wholly, but incompletely published, meaning the words were technically out in the world, but they were not standing on their own. They were missing the surrounding structure that makes a piece feel finished, coherent, and alive.

They were shards. Living proof of the personal condemnation. “Not now, but soon.”

A shard is a funny thing. It is proof something existed, and proof something broke. It can be beautiful, but it is sharp. It does not always make sense in your hand. On its own, it is easy to dismiss. A fragment. A failed start. A leftover.

But collect enough shards and you stop holding broken glass. You start holding raw material. You start seeing a mosaic.

The container mattered

The real catalyst for this run of publishing was the new design of BolesBooks.com.

I have learned something about my own work over time. I do not just need ideas. I need a place for those ideas to live. A structure that can hold them without crushing them. A home that makes the work feel like it belongs to a larger body, not a loose pile of pages.

The new architecture of BolesBooks.com gave me that. It gave me the gravity I was missing. Suddenly, all those scattered fragments had somewhere to go. Not as orphans, not as “someday,” not as half-finished gestures, but as complete literary works that could stand on their own.

Once that clicked, the project stopped being abstract. It became practical.

Find the pieces.
Gather them.
Read them honestly.
Decide what they are.
Then do the real work.

Excavation, not invention

The last few weeks have been an excavation. I have been digging through decades of writing, not with nostalgia, but with a kind of stubborn care.

It starts with scavenging. Old files. Old backups. Half-abandoned series. Notes that only made sense to the version of me who wrote them. Drafts that I avoided for years because I remembered how unfinished they felt.

Then comes sorting, which sounds simple until you try it. You discover that a “random blog post” is actually the missing middle of an argument you never completed. You find three separate essays written ten years apart that are clearly talking about the same thing, just in different moods. You find an idea that was ahead of its time for you, and another that was a dead end you kept trying to resurrect out of sheer loyalty.

This is where the illusion breaks. Publishing a lot of books quickly does not always mean you produced a lot quickly. Sometimes it means you finally stopped leaving your work scattered.

The hardest part is meeting your past self

Revisiting writing from ten or twenty years ago requires a specific kind of nerve.

You have to sit across the table from the person you used to be. Not the romantic version, the fearless younger artist, but the real one. The one with blind spots. The one who tried too hard. The one who hedged and apologized. The one who sometimes confused intensity with insight. The one who occasionally hit the nail dead-on and did not even realize it.

I found drafts where the central idea was strong, but the execution was clumsy. I found pieces where the prose had energy, but the argument underneath it was thin. I found “misplaced intentions,” moments where I was reaching for the right truth but grabbing it by the wrong handle.

That is not fun to admit. It is also unbelievably useful.

Because once you can see what is wrong, you can save what is right.

Salvage, redaction, adaptation

This is not copy and paste. It is not dumping old work into new covers.

It is salvage.

Sometimes the salvage looks like redaction. Cutting the parts that were only there to sound smart. Removing references that dated the work without adding anything. Trimming the throat-clearing and the wandering preamble. Sanding down the rough edges of insecurity and arrogance, both of which age badly.

Sometimes it looks like adaptation. A blog post becomes a chapter once it has neighbors. A short essay becomes the spine of a larger piece once it has room to breathe. A half-finished series finally gets an ending, not because the ending suddenly appears, but because I am older now and I can see what the ending was always asking for.

And sometimes it looks like rewriting from the ground up while keeping the original spark. That is the part people do not see. A “new book” can contain old bones, but the muscle is built now. The connective tissue is built now. The voice is steadier now.

This is the work of bringing shards into relationship with each other until they stop being fragments and start becoming structure.

Time is passing. Publication is now.

For a long time, I treated publication like a finish line you cross only when everything is perfect.

But perfection is a mirage that gets more expensive every year. Files decay. Links break. Formats change. Memory gets slippery. The context you were writing inside of fades. The work does not sit still while you wait. It quietly disappears.

So I have shifted my thinking.

Publication is not a victory lap. It is preservation. It is how you stop the slow rot. It is how you give your work the chance to outlive your hesitation.

With BolesBooks.com rebuilt, I finally have a place where these ideas and passions can be gathered under one umbrella and released as books that do not need apologies or footnotes to explain why they exist. They can stand on their own now. Not as pieces of something that might have been, but as a new whole thing that actually is.

What looks sudden is usually a long return

If it seems like I published a lot in a short time, that is because I did.

But the real timeline stretches back decades.

This is what it looks like when you stop abandoning your own work. When you stop leaving your best ideas trapped in bad drafts. When you take the fragments seriously enough to assemble them into something that holds.

There will be more books to come. The excavation is not finished. There are still shards out there, waiting in old folders and forgotten posts and half-written arguments that deserve to be completed.

And now, finally, they have somewhere to go.

#2026 #armAngles #attic #bolesBooks #books #davidBoles #elements #fractionalFiction #public #publishing #revision #writing

Passage Land: What Do the Living Owe the Dead?

Some questions cannot be answered. They can only be inhabited. For sixteen decades, three families have occupied the same stretch of Nebraska prairie, and for sixteen decades they have been asking variations of the same question: what do the living owe the dead? Passage Land is my attempt to inhabit that question long enough to understand why it refuses resolution.

The novel spans 1866 to 2026. The Vogels flee the collapsing Russian steppes, where the promises made to German settlers have curdled into conscription and confiscation. The Callahans escape Ireland’s famine legacy, carrying debts they can never repay and griefs they can never name. The Walking Aheads survive the massacre of their people, watching their children taken to schools designed to erase everything their ancestors knew. All three families end up on the same land. All three carry obligations to people who are no longer alive to receive payment.

I did not set out to write a 160-year saga. I set out to understand why the prairie holds its dead so close. Growing up in Nebraska, you learn early that the land remembers. The sod houses are gone but their foundations remain. The homestead claims are forgotten but the property lines persist. The treaties are broken but the people they displaced are still here, still farming, still remembering what was taken. The question that animates this novel is not historical. It is present tense: what happens when the people who inherit the land also inherit the debt?

The title comes from the Lakota concept of passage, the idea that we do not own land but move through it, that our tenure is temporary and our obligations extend beyond our lifespan. This stands in direct tension with the homesteading logic that brought both the Vogels and the Callahans to the prairie: the conviction that land can be possessed, improved, and passed down as property. The novel does not resolve this tension. It dramatizes it across six generations until the contradictions become unbearable.

Robert Vogel, in 2024, is the character who must finally confront what his family has avoided for over a century. He is sixty-three years old, a retired agricultural consultant, the last of the Vogel men still living on the original homestead. When Ruth Walking Ahead appears at his door with a proposition that could change everything, he must decide whether the debts of the dead can ever be settled, or whether some wounds are meant to stay open precisely because closing them would betray everyone involved.

The research for this book took years. Prairie Voice readers will recognize some of the historical threads: the Volga German migration, the Irish chain migration, the allotment era that broke reservation lands into individual parcels that could be sold, lost, or stolen. The novel weaves these threads together not to create a comprehensive history but to show how historical forces become family stories, how policy becomes inheritance, how what happened to someone’s great-grandmother in 1887 shapes what someone’s grandson decides in 2024.

I wrote this book because forgetting is too easy. The prairie encourages forgetting. The grass grows back. The graves sink into the soil. The names on the headstones become unreadable. But the obligations do not disappear just because we stop acknowledging them. They pass down through generations, accumulating interest, waiting for someone brave enough or foolish enough to finally open the ledger.

Ruth’s statement to Robert near the end of the novel captures what I hope readers will take away: “Sharing is not return.” There is no reconciliation that undoes what was done. There is no payment that settles the account. There is only the choice to acknowledge the debt or to pretend it does not exist. The novel asks which choice is more honest, and whether honesty is even the right criterion when the people owed are long dead and the people paying never agreed to the terms.

Passage Land is available now as a Kindle edition for $9.99 and paperback for $17.99 at Amazon. A free PDF is also available at David Boles Books for those who prefer that format.

This is not a comfortable book. It is not meant to be. But if you have ever stood on land that holds more history than the deed acknowledges, if you have ever wondered what your family’s presence cost someone else’s family, if you have ever suspected that the past is not past but merely patient, then this book was written for you.

#bolesBooks #davidBoles #farmCrisis1980s #GreatPlainsHistoricalFiction #LakotaSiouxFiction #multigenerationalSaga #NativeAmericanFiction #nebraska #NebraskaNovel #novel #woundedKnee

The EleMenTs Series Is Complete: A Young Adult Fantasy Trilogy

Twenty years ago, I began imagining a story about three disabled teenage girls who discover they possess elemental powers. The idea stayed with me, growing and changing as I grew and changed, waiting for the right moment to be told. That moment has arrived. The EleMenTs Series is complete, and all three novels are now available.

Elle is Deaf. Meen is blind. Teena has cerebral palsy. Thrown together in a New York City group home as wards of the state, these three young women share something beyond their circumstances: the ability to command the elements themselves. Elle bends the wind through the same hands that shape American Sign Language. Meen controls fire and temperature, her blindness becoming a tactical advantage when she can feel heat signatures others cannot see. Teena moves the earth, feeling through stone and concrete the way she learned to feel every obstacle the world placed in her path.

Their names encode their identity. Take the right letters from Eleanor, Mingzhu, and Christina Sarah, and you spell EleMenTs. They are wind, fire, and earth. In the second book, Tal arrives to complete the quartet, a girl with autism who counts everything and trusts no one, until she discovers she can feel water the way the others feel their elements. Four girls. Four elements. And an organization called Prometheus Applied Sciences that will stop at nothing to acquire them.

Book One: Beneath the City

Beneath the City introduces the three protagonists as they meet in the group home and discover what they can do. In the tunnels beneath New York, they learn to trust each other and to understand that their disabilities were never weaknesses. The foster care system sees them as problems to be managed. Society sees their disabilities before their humanity. But something is watching them, and the tunnels hold secrets that will change everything.

Available now: Kindle Edition $3.99 | Paperback $14.99 | Free PDF

Book Two: The Invisible Hand

The Invisible Hand picks up three months after the tunnel. The girls have been practicing in secret, but they know they’re being watched. When a new volunteer named Sarah arrives at the group home asking too many questions, they realize Prometheus Applied Sciences has found them. Tal’s arrival changes the dynamics, completing the elemental set and forcing the girls to choose between hiding and fighting. When Prometheus springs its trap, staying hidden is no longer an option.

Available now: Kindle Edition $4.99 | Paperback $14.99 | Free PDF

Book Three: The Reckoning

The Reckoning takes the fight to Washington. One year later, the girls travel to the capital for a Senate hearing on a registration bill that would force everyone with abilities to identify themselves to the government. Vance, the agent who once hunted them, returns with evidence that exposes Verdant Agricultural Holdings as the shadow corporation behind Prometheus. Hundreds of people with abilities come forward publicly, refusing to hide any longer. Senator Morrison, who championed the registration bill, faces a choice between persecution and protection. The conclusion of the trilogy asks what it means to be seen, and whether visibility is liberation or the final vulnerability.

Available now: Kindle Edition $4.99 | Paperback $14.99 | Free PDF

Why This Story Matters

This is not a story about overcoming disability. I have no patience for narratives that treat disability as an obstacle to be conquered or a lesson for the able-bodied to learn from. The EleMenTs Series is about power that exists because of disability, not despite it. Elle’s Deafness shaped how she perceives vibration and movement; when wind became her element, she already knew how to feel the world in ways hearing people do not. Meen’s blindness gave her decades of practice reading her environment through non-visual means; fire and heat were extensions of senses she had already developed. Teena’s cerebral palsy taught her that the body does not always cooperate with intention; when earth became hers to command, she finally had a domain that responded to her will.

The villains in this story are not monsters or aliens. They are corporations and committees, systems and structures, the ordinary machinery of power that decides who counts as human and who counts as resource. Prometheus Applied Sciences wants to study and control people with abilities. The Senate wants to register and track them. The foster care system wants to manage them until they age out and become someone else’s problem. These are the antagonists because these are the forces that disabled people actually face. I wanted to write a fantasy that felt true.

The trilogy runs approximately 72,000 words across its three volumes. It is written for young adult readers but contains nothing that would embarrass an adult picking it up. The prose is direct, the action is consequential, and the characters are allowed to be angry, afraid, and occasionally wrong. I did not soften the story for a presumed audience. Young readers deserve the same respect as any other audience.

Read the Complete Series

All three books are available now in Kindle, paperback, and free PDF editions. You can explore the complete series at the EleMenTs Series page on BolesBooks.com, or begin with Beneath the City and follow the girls from the tunnels of New York to the halls of the Senate.

The EleMenTs have arrived. The world will have to deal with them.

#adventure #autism #blind #bolesBooks #cerebralPalsy #deaf #disability #fiction #literature #publishing #trilogy #youngAdultNovel

Arm Angles in American Sign Language: The Textbook That Teaches What Other Textbooks Ignore

Watch any native signer and then watch an intermediate student. The difference is not in the handshapes. It is not in the facial expressions, though those matter. The difference lives in the arms. The native signer’s shoulders engage when emphasis requires it. The elbows extend and contract with meaning. The signing space expands for formal address and contracts for intimacy. The student, trained to focus on hands and face, moves through space as if the arms were merely transportation for the fingers. This is the gap that Arm Angles in American Sign Language addresses. It is the textbook we wished existed twenty years ago.

Most ASL instruction concentrates on the parameters everyone agrees matter: handshape, location, movement, palm orientation, non-manual markers. These are the building blocks, the phonological primitives that distinguish one sign from another. What gets lost in this necessary attention to fundamentals is the architecture that supports everything else. The arm is not merely a delivery system for the hand. It is an articulator in its own right, and its positioning carries semantic weight that affects meaning, register, and comprehension in ways that intermediate and advanced learners rarely understand explicitly.

ASL Linguistics Series

Consider the sign UNDERSTAND. In citation form, the index finger flicks upward near the forehead with a wrist movement. The arm positions the hand, but the movement itself is distal, located at the wrist and fingers. Now consider the same sign in emphatic use: the forearm moves, the signing space expands, the shoulder engages. The handshape has not changed. The location has not changed. What has changed is proximal articulation, the engagement of shoulder and elbow and upper arm in the production. That engagement signals emphasis, formality, certainty. Reduce the arm involvement further than citation form and the sign reads as casual, rapid, intimate. The same lexical item carries different pragmatic meaning depending on how the arm participates.

This is what we mean by proximal articulation, and this is what the textbook examines across twelve chapters and comprehensive supplementary materials.

The Collaboration

Janna Sweenie has taught American Sign Language at New York University for over thirty-five years. She created the ASL 5 course for the NYU minor, served as Program Coordinator from 2017 to 2020, and has worked as a consultant for Microsoft, Google, and New York City museums. She is a two-time recipient of the NYU Steinhardt School Administrator Award. She was born Deaf in Council Bluffs, Iowa, and graduated from the Iowa School for the Deaf. For eighteen years she has served as a Vocational Rehabilitation Counselor for the Deaf in the State of New York Department of Education.

David Boles has taught American Sign Language at NYU and other institutions for over two decades. He holds an MFA from Columbia University and founded David Boles Books Writing and Publishing in 1975. His background in dramatic literature informs the textbook’s attention to register, performance, and the expressive possibilities of signed discourse.

Together we have written Hand Jive: American Sign Language for Real Life, Picture Yourself Learning American Sign Language, Level 1, Day One: Learning American Sign Language in 24 Hours, Hardcore ASL Textbook for Levels 1-7, and American Sign Language Level 5. Our work spans beginning to advanced instruction, print and video, classroom and self-study. What we have not done until now is write the book that addresses what we kept having to explain in person: why the arms matter, how they function, and what happens when you get them wrong.

What the Textbook Contains

The book opens with anatomy. Not because anatomy is inherently interesting, though it is, but because understanding the skeletal framework, joint system, and muscular apparatus of the signing arm clarifies everything that follows. Why can the shoulder rotate in ways the elbow cannot? Why do certain sign movements fatigue the arm while others remain sustainable? What does neutral position mean anatomically, and why does departure from neutral carry meaning?

From there the textbook moves through the three spatial dimensions of signing space: vertical (height carries semantic information distinguishing verb tenses and marking formality), horizontal (enabling reference establishment and tracking), and sagittal (the temporal plane that maps time onto space, with forward movement indicating future and backward movement indicating past). Each dimension involves arm positioning. Each dimension affects meaning in ways that isolated attention to handshapes cannot capture.

The core theoretical concept is the proximal/distal distinction. Signs produced with more proximal involvement, engaging the shoulder and upper arm as primary articulators, tend to read as more emphatic, more formal, more careful, more public. Signs produced with more distal involvement, wrist and finger movements, tend to read as more casual, more rapid, more intimate, more efficient. This is not absolute. Sign-specific conventions override general tendencies. But the correlation provides a heuristic that helps learners understand how arm engagement affects the social and pragmatic meaning of what they sign.

Subsequent chapters address classifier predicates and arm-as-referent, two-handed coordination and symmetry constraints, elbow mechanics and sign modification, non-manual marker integration with arm positioning, biomechanics and signing health, acquisition and pedagogy, and variation across dialect, generation, and individual style. The final chapter considers future directions in ASL research, including technological developments in sign language recognition and the evolving landscape of ASL instruction.

For Whom This Book Is Written

This is not a beginning textbook. Readers should have completed at least intermediate ASL coursework or possess equivalent proficiency. The book assumes familiarity with basic phonology, parametric structure, and glossing conventions. It is written for advanced students preparing for interpreter certification, working interpreters seeking to refine their skills, ASL instructors developing curriculum for upper-level courses, Deaf education professionals, and researchers in sign language linguistics. It is also appropriate for mature signers who want to understand the theoretical foundations of what they do intuitively.

The supplementary materials include a comprehensive glossary, notation guide for representing arm angles in written form, practical exercises for each chapter progressing from observation to production, self-assessment checklists, and additional resources pointing to video materials and research literature. Instructor materials include lesson plans, syllabus templates, frequently asked questions, observation guides, and assessment rubrics. The book is designed for both independent learners and classroom adoption.

The Problem This Book Addresses

ASL instruction in the United States has improved dramatically over the past four decades. Recognition of ASL as a legitimate language with its own grammar and syntax, rather than a simplified gestural system for the hearing impaired, has transformed both research and pedagogy. Yet instructional materials continue to treat arm positioning as secondary, intuitive, something that will come naturally with exposure. It does come naturally for some learners. For others it does not, and they plateau at a level of competence that never quite reads as fluent even though their vocabulary and grammar are technically correct.

The plateau is not a vocabulary problem. It is not a grammar problem. It is a register problem, a prosodic problem, a spatial problem that lives in the arms. The signer who never learns to modulate proximal and distal articulation across contexts will sign like someone reading aloud from a phrasebook: comprehensible but mechanical, correct but not native. This textbook addresses that gap directly, providing the explicit instruction and theoretical framework that allows learners to understand what they need to practice and why it matters.

Getting the Book

Arm Angles in American Sign Language: A Study of Proximal Articulation in Signed Discourse is available now as a Kindle edition for $14.99 at Amazon and paperback version for $19.99. A free PDF is available at David Boles Books for those who prefer that format or who want to evaluate the textbook before classroom adoption. Additional materials are available at HardcoreASL.com.

The arms have always mattered. Now there is a textbook that explains why, that teaches how, and that gives learners and instructors the tools they need to address what other materials ignore. This is the book we wished we had when we started teaching. We are glad to finally offer it to everyone else.

#angle #armAngles #armMovement #articulation #asl #bolesBooks #davidBoles #direction #iowaSchoolForTheDeaf #jannaSweenie #language #learning #linguistics #medical #proximity #teaching #textbook

The Kinship of Strangers: When DNA Reveals What Identity Cannot Accept

Some truths arrive uninvited. They come in the mail, in the form of a cardboard box containing a plastic tube, a prepaid envelope, and instructions for depositing saliva. Six weeks later, they return as a percentage breakdown, a haplogroup designation, a list of genetic relatives you never knew existed. The Kinship of Strangers, the third novel in the Fractional Fiction series, asks what happens when those percentages contradict everything you were raised to believe about who you are and who belongs to your people.

The premise emerged from a scientific fact that should be unsurprising but somehow remains explosive: populations that have lived as neighbors for millennia share genetic ancestry that transcends the boundaries they have drawn between themselves. The Cohen Modal Haplotype, a Y-chromosome signature associated with Jewish priestly lineage, appears in Palestinian populations at rates that complicate every simple narrative about who belongs where. Bronze Age bones excavated from Levantine soil carry DNA that belongs to everyone and no one, ancestors claimed by peoples who cannot acknowledge their kinship without destabilizing the stories that hold their communities together.

Population genetics does not care about politics. It does not respect the borders drawn by empires or the categories enforced by tradition. It simply reports what the molecules reveal: that human beings have been mixing, migrating, and making families across every boundary we have ever erected. The question is not whether the science is accurate. The question is what we do when accuracy threatens identity.

Ten characters confront this question across ten interconnected stories. A rabbi in Philadelphia receives test results that connect his Y-chromosome more closely to Palestinians than to most of his congregation. A Palestinian archaeologist excavates remains at Megiddo that complicate every modern claim to the land she is digging. A cognitive scientist lectures on identity-protective cognition while failing to apply her own research to her own avoidances. A genetic counselor who helps others interpret their ancestry results throws away her own kit unopened. An Israeli geneticist and a Palestinian researcher collaborate across borders their families cannot cross, their shared data too dangerous to publish in either of their home countries.

The stories move from Philadelphia synagogues to Jerusalem checkpoints, from Chicago conference rooms to Amman hotel lobbies. Characters glimpsed in one story reappear in another. Connections emerge that none of them fully understand. The architecture borrows from two public domain sources: James Joyce’s Dubliners, with its linked stories building toward earned epiphany, and the nested narratives of One Thousand and One Nights, where Scheherazade survives by leaving stories unfinished. Like Scheherazade, these characters have learned that the story that does not end is the story that keeps you alive. Resolution is not available. Continuation is the only victory.

This is Fractional Fiction: the methodology that drives this series. Each novel takes a public domain literary source, identifies its structural architecture and thematic engine, and synthesizes it with contemporary scientific research to produce something that belongs fully to neither tradition but could not exist without both. The Dying Grove married Joyce’s Dubliners structure to mycorrhizal network research. The Inheritance fused Ibsen’s Ghosts with transgenerational epigenetics. The Kinship of Strangers brings Joyce and Scheherazade together with population genetics and cognitive science, asking how we process evidence that contradicts our sense of self.

The research domain matters because the science is real. Identity-protective cognition is a documented phenomenon: the tendency of intelligent people to recruit their cognitive resources in defense of beliefs that anchor their social identity, even when evidence contradicts those beliefs. The smarter you are, the better you are at defending what you already believe. The Cohen Modal Haplotype is real. The genetic overlap between populations who define themselves as fundamentally distinct is real. The characters are invented, but the science that disrupts their certainties is not.

What makes this novel different from the previous Fractional Fiction books is its refusal of resolution at every level. The Dying Grove offered transformation through dissolution. The Inheritance delivered revelation through excavation. The Kinship of Strangers offers neither. Its characters do not arrive at peace. They arrive at recognition: the acknowledgment that they share more than they can accept, that the stories they tell about themselves are simultaneously necessary and false, that kinship does not require acknowledgment to exist.

The final story brings multiple characters together at a genetics conference in Amman, Jordan. They have been circling the same questions throughout the book without knowing it. When they finally meet, what they discover is not resolution but company: other people who have been carrying the same impossible knowledge, other strangers who are kin whether they can say so or not.

The Kinship of Strangers is available now through Amazon in Kindle edition and paperback. A free PDF is available for download at BolesBooks.com. If you have ever wondered what your DNA might reveal that your family never told you, if you have ever suspected that the boundaries between peoples are more porous than the stories suggest, if you have ever felt kinship with strangers you were taught to see as other, this book was written for you.

The test results are in. The question is whether you are ready to read them.

#bolesBooks #bookSeries #community #culture #davidBoles #dna #fractionalFiction #history #kinship #literaryFiction #method #research #strangers

The Page Isn’t Dead, Your Attention Is Under Siege

Every few years we are invited to attend the same funeral. Someone declares that nobody reads anymore, that the printed page is finished, that books are an aging technology destined to become a museum object while the living culture migrates to earbuds and short video. It is a tempting story because it flatters our sense that we are witnessing a clean break with the past, a decisive turn of the wheel.

But there is an immediate problem with the obituary. You are reading this right now, right?

That small fact does not prove that reading is thriving, but it does expose the real situation: the page is not dead so much as displaced. Reading has been pushed from the center of ordinary daily life into the margins between pings, feeds, meetings, errands, exhaustion, and the restless need to check what someone else is saying somewhere else.

The more accurate question is not whether books are dead, but what kinds of reading are being replaced, by what, and who benefits from the replacement.

Begin with what refuses to disappear. Print persists, stubbornly, in a market that has had more than enough time to abandon it if abandonment were truly inevitable. In U.S. print tracking that publishers and booksellers use, print book unit sales in 2024 totaled roughly 782.7 million, a slight increase over 2023, and notable precisely because it contradicts the simplistic narrative of collapse.

Now set beside it the other undeniable reality: audio is not a novelty. It is a major growth engine, and it is rapidly becoming the default way many people “read” books in the practical sense of finishing them.

The Audio Publishers Association reported U.S. audiobook sales revenue of $2.22 billion in 2024, up 13 percent over 2023, with digital audiobooks accounting for virtually all revenue. Industry reporting from the Association of American Publishers likewise places digital audio well into the multi-billion-dollar range and growing strongly year over year.

So the honest headline is not that books are dead. The honest headline is that books are mutating into a two-body system: print persists as a durable cultural technology, while audio expands as the most convenient literary delivery system ever built. The question is what this mutation does to attention, comprehension, memory, and the moral habits that a serious reading culture quietly trains.

Here is where the real crisis lives, and it is not a format war.

It is the collapse of leisure reading as a daily practice. A major study published in iScience, drawing on the nationally representative American Time Use Survey from 2003 to 2023, reports a sharp drop in the share of Americans who read for pleasure on an average day, from roughly 28 percent in 2004 to about 16 percent in 2023. The same research emphasizes widening disparities by income, education, race, and geography, which should trouble anyone who still believes reading is part of a democratic baseline rather than a luxury good for the secure.

It is worth saying plainly what is at stake. Reading is not only entertainment. It is one of the few broadly accessible disciplines that trains sustained attention, inference, patience, perspective-taking, and the capacity to follow an argument beyond a slogan. When that habit shrinks, it is not merely culture that changes; it is citizenship that thins.

Why does it feel, in the body, as if nobody reads? Because the default posture of modern media is designed to fracture the mind. The attention economy does not merely offer alternatives to reading; it profits from making deep attention difficult. That is why the battle is less about paper versus headphones and more about whether anyone can still defend unbroken time against systems engineered to interrupt it.

Across the contemporary media landscape, the pattern is visible in sober measurement. Recent national communications data in the United Kingdom reports substantial daily online time for adults and heavy use of platform video, including YouTube, which has become a default entertainment and information channel.

Even if you resist importing one country’s metrics into another’s conclusions, the direction remains unmistakable: devices have shifted the human posture from sit down and attend to carry it with you and sample.

At this point, many people reach for a comforting relativism: perhaps listening is simply the new reading, perhaps it is all the same, perhaps we should stop worrying. I reject the smug sneer that listening is cheating, because it is historically illiterate and culturally vain. For most of human history, literature lived in voice: in recitation, sermon, theater, public reading, storytelling. Audio is not a betrayal of literature. It is one of literature’s native bodies returning with modern convenience.

But the return of voice does not erase the distinct cognitive environment of the page. Listening is not inferior. It is different. Scholarly reviews comparing audiobook listening and print reading emphasize again and again that outcomes depend on context, text type, and learner characteristics, which is another way of saying that the medium shapes the mind in specific, contingent ways.

Listening is temporal and flowing; it can deepen immersion and restore tone, pacing, irony, and emotion through performance. Yet it can also invite passivity when treated as background noise, a productivity hack, a way to consume a book while doing something else. The art of listening, like the art of reading, requires intention, and our era trains intention poorly.

The printed page survives not because it is romantic, but because it performs certain tasks better than anything else. A printed book is finite, quiet, and spatial.

It does not ping.

It offers stable visual architecture, which matters when you are following a complex argument, revisiting earlier claims, tracking structure, or simply trying to remember where an idea lived on the page.

This is not nostalgia; it is cognition. Large-scale research syntheses comparing reading comprehension on paper versus screens have found a modest but consistent comprehension advantage for paper in many settings, with the size of the gap influenced by factors such as time pressure and reading purpose. Screens can host deep reading, yes, but most screens are not designed to protect it. Most screens are designed to keep you moving.

If there is a single sentence that captures the future, it is this: print will increasingly become a premium environment for attention, while audio will increasingly become the most widespread on-ramp to books. Consumer research from the audiobook industry reports that a majority of American adults have listened to an audiobook, which makes audio not an edge case but a normalized channel for literary experience.

There is another force constricting reading that has nothing to do with social video and everything to do with power: restriction. If we speak honestly about the death of reading, we must name the political and institutional assault on access.

PEN America’s reporting on U.S. public school book bans for the 2023 to 2024 school year documents 10,046 instances of bans affecting 4,231 unique titles. The American Library Association’s data for 2024 reports hundreds of censorship attempts across libraries, schools, and universities, involving thousands of titles. A society does not innocently drift away from books while simultaneously organizing to remove books from young readers’ reach. One is a technological pressure; the other is a deliberate project.

So what is the future of the word on the page? It will not die off, but it will change its social role. Reading will become less default and more chosen, more ritualized. People will read the way some people now cook from scratch: as an act that signals values, protects mental health, and asserts autonomy against convenience.

That is a loss, because reading as a democratic baseline is better than reading as a boutique practice, but it is also a realistic description of where our incentives have pushed us.

The book will also become more explicitly multi-modal.

Not in the shallow sense of attaching gimmicks to text, but in the practical sense that many works will live as a set: print for study and annotation, audio for performance and immersion, digital text for portability and search. Industry survey work already suggests emerging tensions about synthetic narration versus human performance, pointing toward a future in which audio splits into low-cost synthetic delivery and premium human interpretation.

And the word will become more contested, not less. As reading time becomes scarcer and access becomes more politicized, books become sharper symbols.

That is exactly why they are targeted. It is also why libraries, schools, and independent bookstores remain civic institutions rather than mere retailers. The future of the page will be decided less by technology than by whether citizens insist that access to ideas is not negotiable.

If you want the historical arc, it is not a clean fall from Eden but a long series of shifts in media attention. Industrial printing expanded mass literacy and mass publishing; television displaced some leisure reading; early digital text and then smartphones turned reading into an always-available screen activity; algorithmic short-form video normalized rapid sampling as a default leisure pattern. By the early 2020s, measurable decline in daily pleasure reading had become stark even as print unit sales remained resilient and audio revenues surged.

The lesson is that forms persist. What changes is the ecology of attention.

My conclusion is simple and unsentimental. Books are not dead. Print is not finished. Audio is not the enemy. The real enemy is the conversion of human attention into a strip-mined resource, and the use of moral panic to restrict access to what remains.

A culture that abandons deep reading does not merely lose a pastime. It loses a mode of thought that underwrites serious self-government.

So yes, the word will transform. It will hybridize. It will travel by paper and by voice and by pixels. But whether it dies off depends on something far more basic than format.

It depends on whether we still believe, stubbornly and publicly, that sustained attention is a virtue, that access to books is a civic right, and that the interior life is not an inconvenience to be optimized away.

And if you are reading this right now, you already know the page is not dead. You are holding it open.

#audiobooks #bolesBooks #davidBoles #digtal #ereader #experience #life #meaning #reading #silo #socialMedia #words

The Inheritance: When the Body Remembers What the Mind Cannot

Some secrets do not stay buried. They write themselves into blood and bone. They pass from grandmother to mother to daughter through mechanisms we are only beginning to understand. The Inheritance, the second novel in the Fractional Fiction series, asks what happens when a scientist trained to study transgenerational trauma in laboratory mice discovers that the patterns she has been mapping exist in her own DNA.

The premise is rooted in contemporary research. In her Cambridge laboratory, epigeneticist Anna Osborne studies how trauma alters gene expression and passes to subsequent generations. The science is controversial, the implications unsettling, and Anna has spent her career maintaining professional distance from the questions that haunt her own family. Then her mother dies, leaving behind a crumbling farmhouse in Nebraska, a confession recorded in the final hours of morphine clarity, and evidence that the secrets Anna has been running from are written into her own cells.

What follows is a literary mystery in the truest sense. Not a puzzle to be solved with clues and deductions, but an excavation of three generations of silence, transgression, and the price families pay for choosing protection over truth. The Vance Farm holds answers that Claire spent sixty years burying. A murder disguised as an accident. A pregnancy that arrived at precisely the wrong moment. A family system built on silence so complete that even the women who lived through it could not speak of what they knew. Now Anna must piece together the truth from land records and DNA profiles, from her grandmother’s calculated denials and her great-uncle’s deathbed words, from the methylation patterns in her own cells that carry memories she never made.

The Fractional Fiction Method

Fractional Fiction takes classic literature and reimagines it through the lens of modern knowledge. Each novel begins with public domain source texts whose themes, character dynamics, and dramatic architecture have proven their capacity to illuminate human experience. These elements fuse with contemporary scientific, historical, or philosophical research to create something entirely new. Not adaptation. Not pastiche. Transformation with purpose.

The Dying Grove, the first Fractional Fiction novel, drew on James Joyce’s “Dubliners” and contemporary mycorrhizal network research to explore consciousness, connection, and what we owe to the systems that sustain us. “The Inheritance” operates on a different axis, drawing on three towering works of dramatic literature to examine the inheritance of sin, the biology of memory, and the question of whether we can escape what our ancestors made us.

The Source Constellation

Three plays provide the dramatic DNA for “The Inheritance,” each contributing essential elements to the synthesis.

William Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” (c. 1600) supplies the investigative architecture. Anna, like the Prince of Denmark, is summoned home by a parent’s death and confronted with demands for action she did not seek. Her scientific training makes her, like Hamlet, someone who needs proof before acting, who investigates obsessively, who is haunted by a demand to address injustice she did not commit. The ghost that haunts the Vance Farm is not supernatural but epigenetic, speaking through altered gene expression rather than spectral visitation. Yet the central question remains: what does the present owe to the dead?

Henrik Ibsen’s “Ghosts” (1881) provides the thematic engine. Ibsen’s drama of inherited sin, generational silence, and the terrible cost of respectability maps directly onto the Vance family’s situation. Mrs. Alving’s discovery that her son has inherited his father’s disease becomes Anna’s discovery that trauma leaves molecular traces. The Norwegian parlor becomes a Nebraska farmhouse, but the question remains the same: what price do children pay for the secrets their parents chose to keep? What happens when the protection offered by silence becomes the poison that destroys?

Eugene O’Neill’s “Desire Under the Elms” (1924) contributes the American vernacular and the contested territory. O’Neill’s play concerns a son who believes his father’s farm should be his inheritance, a young stepmother who becomes his lover, and the catastrophic consequences of these entanglements. The Oedipal dynamics connect directly to “Hamlet.” The inheritance theme connects to both Ibsen and Shakespeare. The American rural setting provides a distinct register from the Danish court and the Norwegian parlor. In “The Inheritance,” the Vance Farm functions as O’Neill’s farm does: as contested ground where property, identity, and transgression become inextricable.

The Research Domain

The three source texts agree on one point: the past determines the present, and escape is impossible. The Ghost demands vengeance. Mrs. Alving cannot outrun her husband’s syphilis. Eben and Abbie destroy themselves because they cannot stop wanting what they should not have. Classical tragedy does not believe in freedom.

Contemporary epigenetics complicates that certainty. Research now suggests that trauma can alter gene expression without changing the underlying DNA sequence, that these alterations can pass to subsequent generations, and that they may be reversible through sustained intervention. The inheritance is real, it is measurable, it shapes who we are before we are born, and yet it may not be destiny. The mouse studies Anna conducts in her laboratory show both the reality of transgenerational trauma transmission and the possibility that environmental enrichment, sustained care, and breaking the cycle of stress can attenuate its effects.

This scientific uncertainty creates the novel’s dramatic tension. The source texts all answer “no” to the question of escape. The science answers “maybe.” Anna must navigate between these possibilities, discovering what her family buried while deciding what she will do with the knowledge. The question is not merely whether she can learn the truth. The question is whether knowing the truth changes anything.

The Novel’s Architecture

“The Inheritance” braids three timelines across four generations. The 1950s and 1960s reveal the original catastrophe: Margaret’s suicide in the barn, Edmund’s cold erasure of first one wife and then another, the affair between Helen and her stepson Thomas, and Edmund’s death under circumstances that remain permanently ambiguous. The 1990s and 2000s show Claire inheriting secrets she does not fully understand, raising her daughter Anna with an intensity that borders on desperation, and finally succumbing to the dementia that will force everything into the open. The present follows Anna’s investigation, her confrontation with the family history, and her decision about what to do with what she learns.

The structure honors all three source texts while creating something none of them contains: the possibility that knowledge might enable change, that understanding the mechanism might provide leverage against it. Anna is pregnant by the novel’s end. The question of what she will tell her child, and whether the telling itself might begin to break the chain, remains open. The tragic sources would close that door. The science leaves it ajar. The novel holds both possibilities without resolving the tension between them.

About the Author and Publisher

David Boles is an author, dramatist, editor, publisher, and teacher with an MFA from Columbia University. He founded David Boles Books Writing and Publishing in 1975. The Fractional Fiction series emerges from a conviction that classic literature deserves more than reverence. It deserves transformation. The plays that have survived centuries did so because they asked questions that remain unanswered. Shakespeare wanted to know what we owe the dead. Ibsen wanted to know whether silence protects or poisons. O’Neill wanted to know whether we can escape the land and blood that made us. These questions did not expire with their authors. They persist because human beings persist in facing the same dilemmas across generations.

Fractional Fiction exists to bring those questions forward, not by updating settings or modernizing dialogue, but by fusing dramatic architecture with contemporary knowledge. The method is deliberate: source analysis, research integration, structural synthesis. The goal is fiction that carries the weight of literary tradition while speaking to present concerns. Each novel documents its origins so readers can trace the connections themselves, can see how classic literature continues to speak through new forms when given the chance.

Getting “The Inheritance”

“The Inheritance” is available now as a Kindle edition for $9.99 at Amazon and as a paperback version for $19.99. A free PDF is also available at David Boles Books for those who prefer that format. An audiobook is in production for those who prefer to listen.

This is a novel about what we owe to the dead, what the body remembers that the mind forgets, and the price of breaking silences that were meant to last forever. It is also, like all Fractional Fiction, an experiment in literary synthesis: asking whether classic dramatic structures can find new life when fused with contemporary knowledge, whether the questions that haunted Shakespeare and Ibsen and O’Neill still haunt us, and whether the answers might be different now that we understand more about how inheritance actually works.

The wound remains faithful, but perhaps the chain can break. That uncertainty is not a weakness. It is the point.

#amazon #bolesBooks #community #davidBoles #family #fractionalFiction #inheritedMoney #literaryFiction #NebraskaFiction #publication #writing

Stop Paying Rent on Your Own Words!

Stop paying rent on your own words. For decades, writers were taught that “real” authors have representation, an agent, sometimes even a manager, as if legitimacy were a credential issued by an industry gatekeeper. That belief was formed in an older media economy: fewer publishers, fewer channels, slower production cycles, and a cultural aura around scarcity. In 2026, the belief is not merely old fashioned. It is often financially irrational, and for many authors it is the single most reliable way to give away a permanent slice of income that should remain theirs.

The central problem is structural. Agents are commonly paid by commission, and that commission attaches to the very thing a writer should guard most jealously: the long tail of rights and revenue. A book contract can pay out for decades, especially if the work becomes a steady backlist earner, gets renewed in new editions, moves into audio, or is licensed abroad.

When an agent’s compensation is a percentage of every dollar that flows from that contract, the agent is not a one-time consultant.

The agent becomes a perpetual claimant. Many agency arrangements also get reinforced inside the publisher’s contract through mechanisms that make the agent the “agent of record” so that money is routed through the agent as the default conduit for as long as the contract lives. Even if the relationship ends, the payment mechanism often does not, and the author keeps paying for work that is no longer being done.

This is where authors must debunk their own mythology. Writers often say, with sincere hope, that agents “get you the job.” In reality, agents rarely create demand; they manage and monetize it. A strong agent can be an effective broker. They submit to editors, follow up, package a proposal, handle correspondence, and negotiate terms.

If a book is already drawing interest, a good agent can intensify that interest and, in high-competition situations, can manage bidding in a way that improves the deal. But the fundamental truth remains: agents do not manufacture readership, they do not write the book, and they do not supply the core engine that makes publishing work, which is reader demand.

What they typically do best is manage “outside interest” once it arrives or once it is plausibly emerging, and then take a percentage of the resulting revenue for as long as that revenue continues.

The manager fantasy is a variation of the same problem. A “manager” makes sense in Hollywood when a person is being sold as a multi-platform commodity across film, television, speaking, endorsements, and licensing.

For the ordinary working author, a manager is frequently just another commission structure, another permanent claimant on future earnings, and another layer between the writer and the business decisions that must be made quickly and clearly. Book writing is not a star system, and authors are usually better served by competence than by mythology.

If you want protection, representation is the wrong word. What you want is counsel. Contracts are not enforced by charm or industry relationships. They are enforced by law. An agent is not a lawyer and cannot provide legal services in the way counsel can.

More importantly, an agent may be structurally conflicted, because their business depends on maintaining ongoing relationships with the very industry they negotiate against. A lawyer, by contrast, has a duty of loyalty to the client, and their job is to protect the author’s interests in the only place that matters: in the language of the agreement.

This is why the better path for most authors is to hire a publishing lawyer instead of paying a perpetual commission. A competent publishing attorney will identify rights grabs and overbroad grants, tighten the definition of “net receipts” so royalties are not calculated on a shrinking and mysteriously deducted base, negotiate reversion triggers so the book does not vanish into contractual limbo, protect the writer against abusive option and noncompete clauses, and clarify audit rights and accounting duties.

In plain terms, a lawyer will stop you from signing away your future. And when the work is done, the bill is paid, and the future income belongs to the writer. That is not an ideology. It is the mathematics of whether you choose to buy expertise once or rent it forever.

The commission issue is not a trivial detail. Standard agent commissions are often discussed as fifteen percent. That number sounds modest until you remember what it is a percentage of: your life’s work. When the book continues to sell, the agent continues to take. When your audio edition grows, the agent continues to take. When you license foreign rights, the agent continues to take. If you sign a series, the agent continues to take.

If you later become sophisticated and could negotiate your own terms, the agent continues to take. That is why “in perpetuity” is not a rhetorical flourish. It is a sober description of how these arrangements can function.

Many professional author organizations have long warned writers about agency contract provisions that attempt to extend commission obligations indefinitely, even after the agency relationship ends, and they have warned authors about clauses that lock in the agent’s role inside publishing contracts in ways that can bind the author’s future choices.

Those warnings exist because authors keep getting hurt, and because the default behavior of an unexamined industry is to see what it can get away with.

Publishing itself has changed enough over the last twenty-five years that the old myths no longer match the lived reality.

Once, writers were trained to think of publishing as a patronage system: you secure the right blessing, you obtain a large advance, you are ushered into bookstores, and the machine turns. Advances still exist, and in rare cases they are still large, but the dominant reality is more prosaic: advances are advances against royalties, paid in stages, and authors do not see further royalties until the advance earns out.

More importantly, the industry has drifted toward royalty structures that are often based on “net,” not on list price, and “net” is where authors get quietly bled. The definition of net can be drafted to allow deductions that shrink the royalty base before the author’s percentage is even applied. If a publisher is allowed to deduct costs broadly, the writer is no longer receiving a clear share of sales.

The writer is receiving a share of what remains after an accounting story has been told.

This is precisely the moment when a lawyer is worth more than an agent, because the fight is not about access to an editor. The fight is about language, definitions, and enforceable obligations.

Self-publishing, meanwhile, has become the great liberator, not because it is effortless, but because it is honest. The old media world treated self-publication as vanity, a kind of embarrassment.

That stigma depended on scarcity and gatekeeping. It depended on the assumption that only a handful of institutions could produce and distribute books at scale, and that those institutions conferred legitimacy. That world is gone. Digital storefronts, print-on-demand, audiobooks, direct-to-reader marketing, and social discovery have made it possible for a serious author to publish professionally without asking permission.

When an author self-publishes today, the author can move faster, update faster, correct errors, repackage, redesign, adjust pricing, and respond to the market with the speed that modern culture demands. The author controls the work’s destiny rather than waiting for a seasonal list meeting in some distant office.

The author can decide how rights are licensed rather than surrendering them by habit. And because platform terms often offer clearer and sometimes higher shares to creators than many legacy ebook royalty structures, self-publishing can be economically superior when the author is willing to take responsibility for production quality and marketing execution.

None of this is an argument that traditional publishing is always bad. Traditional publishing can still confer distribution advantages, prestige signaling in certain spaces, and editorial and design resources that are real and sometimes excellent. But the myth that it is the only respectable path is dead, and it deserved to die. There is no moral superiority in waiting for permission, and there is no virtue in outsourcing your agency to an intermediary who then takes a percentage of your future forever.

The modern author must think like an owner. If you want expertise, purchase it directly. If you want protection, hire counsel. If you want speed and control, self-publish with professional standards. If you want a publisher, treat that relationship as a licensing transaction in which you are a rights holder negotiating terms, not a supplicant begging for approval.

The real dignity in authorship is not found in being “represented.” It is found in retaining sovereignty over the work you made. Pay a lawyer once, keep your profits, keep your rights, and stop confusing tradition with wisdom.

#agent #annuity #author #bolesBooks #copyright #lawyer #manager #marketplace #money #publishing #rent #royalty #selfPublishing