Patrick E. McLean

INTRO SCRIPT: It's Thursday and this is a throwback to a Seanachai podcast episode first shipped Sept, 8th, 2005. I have precious little explanation for this bit of madness other than to say I was a writer who had set an absurd deadline for himself and who was trying to uphold the highest production standard I knew how.

The genesis of this a conversation I had in an odd moment between panels at DragonCon. As you'll hear from the result it was a very odd moment indeed. Something about the rock paper scissors world championship. Which it turns out is a real thing. Anyway, I was stuck for content and I glommed on to this idea and ran with it. I really, really enjoyed my half-good Howard Cosell impersonation, who for my money had one of the most fun and distinctive voices in professional sports.

Beyond that, I have no other justification for this throwback episode. Other than to say I listened to it again and it made me laugh.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit patrickemclean.substack.com

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit patrickemclean.substack.com

Feeling lost? Start at Episode 1

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Chapter 2 - A Professor of Privilege

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Why is making things, and trying to make them as well as you possibly can, worthwhile? And what is art good for? And how should the artist (in the least pretentious sense of the word) approach his or her work? 

In every serious conversation about what I’m doing with How to Succeed in Evil, these questions have come up again and again. So I thought I would gather my answers together in an essay. Because they are sane and useful. And these principles have helped me put my life back together after trauma as well as grow and learn and become a better person. My answers might not fit you, and that’s fine, but I do hope you find something in here that you can use. 

Before we can get into it, I have to talk about the philosophical foundations of this essay and how they are at odds with the time in which we live. 

I believe that art is a source of profound meaning. And the practice of any art or craft is deeply personal and transformative. And further, I think the psychological crisis of our times is a struggle against meaninglessness. Maybe this has always been the struggle, but as I read history, it has has been particularly acute since WWI. 

In the humanities, this crisis of meaninglessness has a name. Critical Theory. Critical Theory seems to me to be the stance that the majority of academics – by academics I mean non-artists – take towards art, especially the literary arts. Art is seen as primarily political. Art is about power. Art is about class struggle. It is very important who made the piece of art, and how the work is used or can be read as revealing of a political struggle for power.

Critical theory is concerned with things like “forms of authority and injustice that accompanied the evolution of industrial and corporate capitalism as a political-economic system,” and dealing with social problems by “by situating them in historical and cultural contexts, to implicate themselves in the process of collecting and analyzing data, and to relativize their findings.”

I think Harold Bloom nailed it when he described critical literary theory as the “School of Resentment,” saying that politics has no place and not much use in literary criticism - that a Feminist or Marxist reading of Hamlet will tell you something about Feminism or Marxism, but probably not very much about Hamlet. 

Critical theory is the “everything is relative”, “all interpretations are equally valid” “truth is socially constructed” section of the intellectual trailer park that the academic Humanities seem to have become. 

I don’t believe that truth is socially constructed or that everything is relative. For example, the second law of thermodynamics is not socially constructed. It operates whether you believe in it or not. 

I believe everything is very complicated, especially context, but just because the truth can be difficult or even impossible to know doesn’t mean that things like truth and beauty don’t exist. To assert that is to say that any good can be bad and any bad could be good. That any act or sensation can mean anything you want it. That the world is utterly meaningless. So an argument for this view might say that some people in some contexts enjoy pain. And with a snigger, cite bondage enthusiasts.

But pain is not a social construct either. You can’t argue or assume away significant pain. Pain and fear are fundamental psychological realities. And I think even the instances where pain appears to be good, are only good because of other, deeper, non-relative meanings. The pain of childbirth. The pain of one sacrificing him or herself to save another. For these things to be good, requires an appeal to a higher, non-relative idea. 

The effect of music is also not socially constructed. There are things about music and it’s genres that certainly are. But music has an effect that you can’t argue with. There is something forceful about beauty – that seizes the person who apprehends it. You can’t stop it – you can only resist it or embrace it. And by that I mean, to love something or to hate it are not opposites. The opposite of strong emotion is mere indifference. 

Comedy, of course, is more contextual, and you might say socially constructed than other art forms – but a great joke still has the same effect – when it works it seizes you. You have a strong reaction to it that’s not entirely within your control. 

A joke is like a bomb of meaning. And I think you could describe a work of art as a sufficiently dense collection of meaning that continues to reward multiple readings/viewings. Each time you go back to it, you get more out of it. On some level, it’s crazy that it’s even possible that people can make things like that. But there certainly are paintings and buildings and books and pieces of music that you can return to again and again and again and you still draw more out of. 

I think if you believe in the presuppositions of critical theory – truly believe and try to embody them in action, they make you utterly miserable, neurotic and unable to create. And in that is an irony. Critical theorists seem very upset about consumerism, but in the end, all these beliefs can create are resentful consumers. 

If it’s all relative, if nothing is true and beauty is not eternal – or a least the echo of eternity – why exert yourself to make anything? If it’s all meaningless, why struggle at all? Why suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune? When you can just kill yourself and so doing, drain your sea of troubles?

I believe the answer is only to be derived from your personal experience of being alive. You’ve got to find something within your experience that’s worth going on for. The most powerful answer to this question is something that critical theory might also say is only a social construct – Love. Ask any parent with a newborn child what it all means, and they will look at you like you are an idiot. A child must be cared for. The purpose of life is to keep enough diapers on hand and try to get the baby to sleep. 

The durable answers to "why life?’ can only found in living; in action rather than contemplation. Great works of art, like religious traditions, can give us clues, but it is on each of us to go investigate. The Sermon on the Mount is beautiful but only when you try to put those ideas into practice do they become meaningful. Making is a profound form of investigation. 

Emerson wrote, “All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.”

I touched on this in the essay, What if Enjoyment is a Skill? The more deeply you can enjoy life, the more life you get to live. or to say it another way, the more you can expand your experience of being alive, the more life you get to live.

You see more deeply. Feel more fully. And understand more what it means to be alive, what it means to be human, to understand, what it means. 

And for me, Art is that which expands the experience of being alive. It enhances not only the moment when you are with the art, but the way you experience all the rest of your life. It can’t put more years in your life, but it can put more life in your years. 

Dramatic art does this and it can teach us how to be in the world. Fiction does this and it can convey even greater depths of the interior consciousness of another person. 

In The Closing of the American Mind, Alan Bloom, lamented the decline in reading, especially of serious fiction, by the general public. And he said it was particularly bad because a person who didn’t read fiction lost a deep psychological understanding of what other people were. And so they went, unarmed into the world, either trivializing everyone they met or encountering every personality for the first time – which puts them at a tremendous disadvantage when they try to understand others or themselves. 

In a similar way, not reading history can leave a person with the impression that the way things are now are the way things have always been. Which strands them in an incredibly limited perspective and renders them provincial in time. It’s …

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It often feels like we live in a time of horrible leadership. Just across the board. Everybody in power seems to be frighteningly old and since the last 40 or so years have been so easy, none of the people in charge of anything have dealt with a real crisis. Or had to build anything. They tear down, they criticize, they pass the buck and grift their way through, with seemingly no awareness that the stakes might be real and far more important than any one person's advantage.

Many of the characters in How to Succeed in Evil are predicated on this kind of idea. People have great potential and power, but they are stupid about using it. Even stupid about doing the wrong things with it.

As I returned to How to Succeed in Evil, I consciously tried to turn away from current events. These stories are meant to be an escape and enjoyment, rather than any ill-advised attempt to reform anything about the world. Because entertainment is a noble thing in its own right. Everybody needs a break.

But here we are. Perhaps it's an unavoidable theme in this moment. I can't even read ancient books without running into it.

BUT FIRST, A THEORY OF CONSCIOUSNESS?

The craziest book I've read in the last year is The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes. And he argues that before some point, the executive functions of our brain were opaque to us -- and appeared to us as voices or gods commanding us to act.

And this was because (loosely speaking) the left side of the brain tends to deal with routine situations and the right side of the brain deals with more novel situations. And if there's a wall between them -- if they are in separate chambers as the term bicameral literally means, then when faced with something novel, the only way the right side of the brain could get through to us in waking hours, was a hallucination. And Jaynes makes the argument that this is how it worked and very much the way schizophrenics and people with specific kinds of brain damage experience the world today.

None of these claims are nuts to me. At one point we, as a species didn't have consciousness -- we weren't aware we were going to die and of the problems that created for us on multiple levels and on multiple time frames -- and at some point, we woke up.

But here's where it becomes audacious. Jaynes claims that you can see this split in ancient literature. Running like a fault line into works that are before consciousness and works that are after.

Before this split, there was no interior sense of self, consciousness, or agency in the way we'd think of it. No lying or deception. The Epic of Gilgamesh is totally like this.

And after this split, people are conflicted. They become liars and aware that other people can be liars. And the nice thing about this theory is that it explains, in the Iliad, why the Gods are the primary motive forces. The book -- more properly, a poem -- doesn't have men and women reflecting on events and deciding what to do, but gods and goddesses visiting them and making decisions for them. I'll provide some examples in a moment.

This leads to all kinds of crazy lines of thought. Because without intent, is ever killing in the Iliad a kind of 2nd-degree murder. There can't be premeditation because there's no meditation. You know, if you don't look at the Trojan war as war in the story, which it absolutely is.

But here's the crazy part -- Jaynes argues that this fault line of consciousness runs right between the Iliad and the Odyssey. This is a crazy idea and I love it. And he seems to make a pretty good case for it. But to really evaluate it I think you have to be an expert in Ancient Greek, neuroscience, psychology, and consciousness. And people like that are very scarce on the ground. Especially because we know effectively nothing about consciousness.

But as a writer, I don't care if it's true. I care if it's USEFUL. If it's productive of more ideas. If I can use this theory as a lens to increase my understanding. And oh boy, does it ever.

As I came back to How to Succeed in Evil, I was more conscious than ever that characters can be representations of different aspects of the psyche. This started off pretty obviously in How to Succeed in Evil. Sloppily speaking, Topper is the Id. Agnes is the Ego. Edwin is the Superego. At least in the original book. Part of my challenge for writing more was to add depth and challenge to these characters.

So I decided to re-read the Iliad through the lens of each character being an aspect of personality. And also to see how well Jaynes' theory fits the story from my, admittedly, uninformed perspective. When I did, something amazing happened. And it illustrates the rewards of giving time and attention to great literature. Let me show you:

In my memory, the Iliad is the story of Achilles' anger. I mean, it's certainly a war story. But that's the external plot. But what makes a story powerful is the internal story. A contemporary and simple example of this is Jaws. The external story is that the sheriff must defeat the shark to keep the town safe. The internal story is that the sheriff must defeat his fear of the water. And that's what makes him heroic in our eyes.

And the reason it's easy to think of the Iliad as the story of Achilles' rage is that's the way it starts. The first chapter is entitled "The Rage of Achilles" and the first line -- the traditional invocation of the muse is

> Rage goddess, sing the rage of Peleus' son Achilles, murderous, doomed, that cost the Achaeans countless losses, hurling down to the house of death so many sturdy souls.

Okay, so, cautionary tale about the destructive perils of rage. That's a theme that's never going to go out of style. But, why is he so angry? He's angry because Agamemnon, the leader of the Greeks, is a worthless leader.

> Many a brave soul did it (Achilles' anger) send hurrying down to Hades, and many a hero did it yield a prey to dogs and vultures, for so were the counsels of Jove fulfilled from the day on which the son of Atreus, king of men, and great Achilles, first fell out with one another.

Even in the explanation, Jove -- Zeus -- Jupiter -- is the force driving the whole thing. Son of Atreus king of Men is Agamemnon.

So, at the beginning of the story, which starts in the middle of the war, a plague has descended upon the camp. People are dropping like flies. Homer represents this as the god Apollo striking them down with his arrows.

> He cut them down in droves and the corpse-fires burned on, night and day, no end in sight.

This goes on for nine days. And finally, Achilles can't take it anymore. He calls together the men and says, we're going to lose the war if this keeps up. But before we give up, we should ask a priest. So they do. And, reluctantly, because the priest is well aware of what a jackass Agamemnon is, he tells them that Apollo is unhappy because Agamemnon won't give up a girl he's taken as a slave. But if he gives the girl back to her father, the plague will stop. So, what does Agamemnon do?

What would you do? I mean besides not trying to sack Troy or taking a girl as a slave in the first place. As a good leader, what would you do?

I'd said, "Great. Here's the girl. Spare my men." This concern for the troops is what motivates Achilles to go to the priest. Right? It's the most important thing. Everybody can see that. Except for Agamemnon who goes off on the priest.

Seer of misery! Never a word that works to my advantage!

Always misery warms your heart, your prophecies --

never a word of profit said or brought to pass.

Now, again you divine god's will for the armies,

bruit it about, as fact, why the deadly Archer

multiplies our pains: because I, I refused

that glittering price for the young girl Chryseis

Indeed I prefer her by far, the girl herself,

I want her mine in my own house! I rank her higher

than Clytemnestra, my wedded wife -- she's nothing less

in build or breeding, in mind or works of hand.

Now don't get distracted by the fac…

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When I did the Seanachai podcast, I lived in this great, transitional neighborhood in Charlotte. The neighborhood has since transitioned so much and so well that people like me can't afford to live there anymore. But when I was there it still had enough Bukowski left in it to be interesting.

My home was a tiny old mill house on the street behind one of my very best friends. Which was nice. There were also plenty of great places to go within walking distance. And an interesting cast of characters. When I moved in, I was on a downslope in life, but when I moved out, I was on my way up.

This house was the inspiration for the Vampire in My Attic. It was where I wrote and voiced most of the Seanachai and conceived of and wrote How to Succeed in Evil. It's also the house that Hobbs retrieved the stash of money from in The Soak. That a lot of mileage out of one old mill house.

I left the place to move in with my girlfriend, who in the course of things became my fiancee, and then, doubling down on a dubious bet, became my wife. The dubious bet worked though, sometimes long shots do pay off. Against all odds, I domesticated right up and got serious about the business of having and providing for a family.

One of the first steps on this road was the acquisition of a dog. Many couples do this. I did a Seanachai episode about it called 'Floor Pirahana.' Not one of my best, but she was a good if troubled dog. She was abandoned on the side of a road in the Smokey Mountain National park. And found her way to us, malnourished, hair falling out and with the mange. She bounced back quickly enough, And even though she never barked much, she was always on edge. That little b***h was a survivor.

Primarily because she never barked. The consensus was someone dumped a whole litter of puppies out on the side of the road in the National Forest and all the other ones were eaten. And one of the reasons that Annie survived was that she was quiet.

The fiancee and I got a house in the next neighborhood over. But we were still friends with folks in the old hood. Including a girl, we'll call Frankie. I call her Frankie because we hooked her up with another friend of ours who shall for the purposes of this narrative, be called Johnny. The relationship was disastrous. Nobody got murdered, but it was so bad, that after they took a long break and Johnny told me that they had gotten back together, I said, "Aw, but you guys were so great not together."

Some of this of course was selfish, because when you connect two friends romantically, then when it's not going well, you get to hear ALL ABOUT it from BOTH SIDES. And you feel like you have to listen because you are a friend and in some sense, it's your fault, but part of you just wants to sound a collision alarm, spin the wheel hard a-starboard and go full Larry David on the whole situation.

Anyway, when things were going well. We went on some kind of double-date with Frankie and Johnny. It was in the daytime on a Sunday. There was brunching. So we walked over to Frankie's house with our dog and because she was compatible with Frankie's dogs, we left both of them in the backyard and commenced to day drinking in observance of the religious holiday -- or at least Sunday

When we return, our dog is limping. Which, I do have to point out is, at this point, our trial child. This is very disconcerting. There is what appears to be a tiny tear on her back leg. As my wife tends the dog, I walk the fence to see if there's any loose nails or anything. Because it turns out Spiffy -- Frankie's dog has one too -- but it's been there for few days with no limp. There's no evidence of the dogs having been in a scuffle. They always got along great. So I wonder if there's a nail protruding from the fence somewhere. So I walk the perimeter very carefully and find nothing.

So we pack the dog up and go home. I say, let's give it a day, if she's still limping, we go to the vet.

Well, the next day comes and our dog still isn't putting any weight on her leg. And my fiancee is very upset. Not just because the dog is hurt, but because of me. Because I said when we got the dog, that there was going to be an upper limit on how much we would pay for one-time medical expenses. Just like a car, at some point, a dog is totaled.

So we had a fight about that. And after that fight was over, I told her what I will now tell you.

When I was growing up, we had a dog named Sampson. My sister and I named him that because we knew he would grow up to be big and strong. And he did. He was big enough for a child to ride. And he was a wonderful, gentle Great Pyrenees. But as that breed will, he liked to roam. And one day he got hit by a car. Now we were fortunate enough to be able to afford leg surgery for the dog. But the recovery was incredibly painful. There was a cone of shame and everything. And his entire temperament changed. He became mean. He bit my baby sister. And we had to give him away to someone who didn't have kids. Who loved him and had plenty of space for him to run.

And STILL, he managed to find another car to run in front of and got killed. Because the pain had driven him crazy.

So, beyond a certain point I think it is selfish and cruel to try to keep a severely injured animal alive for your feelings. Would Sampson have changed if we had just agreed to have his leg amputated? Who knows. But maybe not.

Because I know a lot of interesting people, I know a vet who collects three-legged German Shepherds -- not even she knows why this is so, but it is. And those dogs are really happy. They don't care they are missing a leg, they joyously get on with the business of sniffing butts and fetching balls and all the other pleasures that make a dog's life worth living.

Digressions aside, we take our dog to the vet. They do an x-ray and they find a bb, in the outside of the knee joint. Someone has shot my dog with a BB gun.

And, it turns out, that someone has ALSO shot Spiffy, the other dog, with a BB gun. Spiffy's BB went all the way through the thigh muscle and was lodged under the skin on the inside of the leg. And while we know that Annie, our dog was shot in the middle of a sunny Sunday afternoon, Spiffy, was shot some days before.

The dogs both have the BB's removed and make full recoveries. But we are stuck with the problem of who shot the dogs with a BB gun. While they were in a backyard surrounded by a six-foot fence.

I commence my investigation, with suspects and fields of fire. To make this easier to understand, there are diagrams in the show notes.

On one side of Frankie's house lived my best friend, his wife, two very young boys their cat and dog. They don't own a BB gun, and in the 25+ years I've known them, have never mistreated an animal. Ruled out.

On the other side of the house lived a young professional couple who were out of town on that Sunday. Ruled out

The Generational Tragedy of the Rundown House

Across the small side street from the young professional couple, them was a rundown house that was generally recognized as a source of trouble in the neighborhood. It was an asbestos shingle-sided hovel, which has since torn down.

It was owned by a grandmother that was regularly overrun by hooligan grandchildren. And perhaps abused by them. This family was not well off, and the grandkids have been a cause of disturbances. Suspects.

The last possibility is the house directly behind Frankie's house. Where a police officer lives with his girlfriend. But before we get to the cop it's worth exploring the dynamic at the unruly grandchildren house. Because, in my experience, it's something of an archetype.

I've seen this same drama play out, exactly the same in multiple places I've lived in Charlotte. This is a dynamic city, growing like mad. Which means that a lot of people see their homes appreciate in value dramatically.

It plays out like this. An older generation busted their ass to own a home. In this case by working in a textile mill. Now, you may think that your job …

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So there is this crazy thing that happens when I work on a big project. It always arrives with a song. Not like an existing song that I think of or listen to while I'm writing. No, I mean a theme song. The original How to Succeed in Evil theme song was this -- played by me on a cheap keyboard.

The Merchant Adventurer had a theme -- that I played on a ukulele, even though it's not at all a Ukulele song. But I think I got the right sound out of it.

As a writer, I use playlists as a creative tool. But they are filled with songs that I don't really listen to in the way that I listen to songs when I'm not writing. They set the vibe, let me get into the feel of the world and remind me that now it's time to put all that other b******t aside and write.

So I've taken all these songs and put them on a Spotify playlist. (Yes, I've literally made you a mix tape.)

Super Bon Bon by Soul Coughing.

This song was the first thing that pulled at me about Edwin Windsor. This idea of him breaking bad and being this unstoppable force.

I Don't Want to Know About Evil by Beth Orton

Just as I finished the draft of the Original How to Succeed in Evil novel, Pandora served this song for me. It was something of a mystical experience. Serendipity in the Jungian sense, not so much in the Police sense.

We Don't Need Another Hero (Thunderdome) by Tina Turner

Okay, in college I used to go to this bar that has now been turned into a Starbucks and play at an open mic there. And there was this guy who would come in late. A black guy who worked as a security guard and he'd come in in uniform, get up on stage and just crush it. Amazing voice, played the guitar as much a percussion instrument as a melodic instrument. And he covered this song. He just tore it up. Just burned the place down every time he played it. Not my favorite Mad Max movie, but this has been one of my favorite songs ever since.

Superman's Song by The Crash Test Dummies.

"Superman never made any money, savin' the world from Solomon Grundy." This song, to me, speaks to the essential sadness at the heart of Excelsior's character. For all his superpowers, he's just lost, adrift in the world just like us "normal" people. There are more stories to tell with this character and I know how to tell them better now.

Eminence Front by the Who

This is partially Topper's song from Hostile Takeover, but it's also that drive and the whole world of deception and everybody having a dual identity. It's just a great, great song and really helped me write these books.

For this round I really got hooked on Jose Gonzalez', Cover of This is How We Walk on the Moon, I Will Possess your Heart by Death Cab for Cutie, Corporation by Jack White. And this Torre Florim cover of Firestarter by The Prodigy.

As I've been working on How to Succeed in Evil this time around, I realized that I was going to need a theme. I mean, I didn't push it. I just put it on the list. Find some music for the intro and outro. The last thought in my head was to compose something.

But at the same time I found myself noodling this little thing on guitar. Playing it incessantly, really. You know, just working at it like a kid works at a loose tooth. Drove my wife crazy, she said, it's beautiful, but do you have to play it all the time? There may have been more cursing involved in that conversation.

And when it really started to gel, I realized it might be the theme. So I sent it to a musician friend of mine both whose judgment I trust and whose taste is very different than mine. He liked it too.

So anyway, this is the theme for the new How to Succeed in Evil. I'm going to get a little help and try to produce a richer, more polished version of it, but this totally works as just guitar or piano.

And that's it. That's all I've got to share with you right now. It's all coming together right now. And we're very much on track for an August launch.

If you have a song that you think would fit on the unofficial soundtrack of How to Succeed in Evil, put it in the comments.

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If you were the Showrunner of How to Succeed in Evil, what would you do with it? That’s the question I ask Edward Newton.He’s is a great guy. Super conceptual and every time I talk to him, the ideas just bounce around like pinball machine on speed.

I first met him when he premiered Stranger Things (No, not the Netflix one — this was before that.) which was a sci-fi podcast series that he basically wrote and produced that was shockingly good. If you don't know how hard it is to actually pull off all of that off, it's impossible.

He's gone on to have a nice career in media. You can IMDB him -- but he's a thinker. And I've never talked with him and not had a great idea come up. He's been instrumental in helping me make How to Succeed in Evil better. And that's why I'm talking with him today.

So enjoy the podcast, or not. And then ask yourself the question I pose to Edward: If you were the publisher or showrunner of How to Succeed in Evil, what would you absolutely want out of the premise?

I feel a responsibility to squeeze as much great stuff out of this idea as possible, and you can help. If you have an idea, please share it. I can't promise that I will act on your input, but I can promise to take it seriously.

Every Sherlock Holmes story as read by Stephen Fry.

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Let's keep it civil people. Most of the customs you call manners were paid for in blood.

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