Fritz Leiber would have been 100 years old today, and I'd like to think that somewhere people are gathered in a ChiChis celebrating. Not likely since it’s Christmas Eve but I can hope.

I'm sure no one argues with Leiber's place in genre history, but I'll be honest and say that he wasn’t an author I took to from the first. Sure I'd played enough D&D to be familiar with the name, settings, and characters from the Fafhrd and Gray Mouser stories, but when I first read them they left me less than engaged. Yeah, I dug "Thieves' House" and "Claws from the Night", but even the good bits were over my head and the prose lacked what I can only describe as the purple quality I craved.

Leiber was unlike any Fantasy fiction I had encountered before. He was something else, something weirder, and more than a bit dangerous, like sneaking a shot of whiskey from my parents liquor cabinet. I'd tried it and thought it wasn't for me, going my way without realizing how much my tastes would change six or seven years later.

When I was in my 20s and living in Jersey City, I bought one of those slim paperbacks that had the word "sword" in the title. One story had the two heroes go on a fishing trip and engage in dubious philosophy, another told what happened when they decided to live together and the misadventure that resulted. The stories showed real life writ as adventure fiction. I got where Leiber was coming from, and every now and then, say waiting for a bus in Chinatown, I'd look at the weather-aged buildings of lower Manhattan, and, if I squinted, I'd see Lankhmar. (It's likely for reasons like this that M. John Harrison wrote "A Young Man's Journey to Viriconium" and "What It Would Be Like to Live in Viriconium". Get treatment, indeed.)

Something similar happened with the comic book Love and Rockets.

I’d been to enough specialty comic shops growing up to recognize the Hernandez Bothers' work, but it wasn't until college when a friend sat me down with a stack and told me to "Read!” that I got hooked.

Now if you've never read Love and Rockets, I'm not about to try and describe the series to you. To the point of this post, the Hernandez Brothers in Love and Rockets mix life and genre in such a way that you're never quite certain where one ends and the other begins. They'll take real life and recast it as superhero comics (or they 'll take superhero comics and recast it in the mold of real life -- I'm not sure it matters). It's a bit hard to describe, but you know how everyone in your family approaches a mythic archetype in your mind? It's a bit like that. The Palomar stories or the misadventures of Penny Century, and how life happens to Maggie and Hopey, all these things sweep you along and somewhere there you see yourself and where you came from and the people you know.

That's what I was also getting from Leiber.

In “The Life of the Mind” Hannah Arendt says “there is nothing in an ordinary life that cannot become food for thought”, and I’d say that’s the quality that links Leiber and the Hernandez Brothers. They’re exploring ordinary life in their work.

It's only their personal preference for the extraordinary that makes their work into genre.

(Yeah, I know there's a lot more to Leiber than the sword & sorcery stories. Folks interested in his stuff should check out his horror fiction. In particular Our Lady of Darkness is a favorite, though it's hard to pick one especially when set beside Conjure Wife and The Sinful Ones.)

A Gustave Doré woodcut for Rime of the Ancient Mariner: Death and Life-in-Death game for the Mariner’s soul.

The first issue of Fantastique Unfettered comes out today, featuring my story “The Driftwood Chair”, a tale of nautical tragedy, hallucinatory demon ghosties and star-crossed beach flirting, set in Cape Cod, and much influenced by Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner. I wrote it at Odyssey in 2005 as a kind of good-natured challenge with PD Cacek, got some phenomenal criticism from my fellow classmates and Steve and Melanie Tem, then sat on it obsessively revising and revising for the succeeding five years. You know, the usual story. There was way more Mariner in the original draft… but the feel of it (and an easter egg reference or two) is still there in spades. I love this story. Hopefully you will too.

O the Mariner is so awesome, it’s really hard to pick out just one quote.

Her lips were red, her looks were free,
Her locks were yellow as gold:
Her skin was as white as leprosy,
The Nightmare Life-in-Death was she,
Who thicks man’s blood with cold.

If you’ve never read it, do so now. In fact, if you’ve only got time for one, skip “The Driftwood Chair” and just read the Ancient Mariner. Of course, if you’ve got time for two….

Continuing with the bullying posts...
( Part 1 can be read here.)

I'll posit that there are two types of bullies, whether or not they are exclusive entities from each other or simply two aspects of one behavior I'm not too worried about at the moment. For want of better terms I'll call one the Predatory Bully and the other the Herd Bully.

Also as I go through and put my students’ behavior under the microscope don’t imagine that I’m holding myself separate or above them. Too often I've encountered myself while dealing with my students.

The Predatory Bully

You know the phrase "I wouldn't cross the street to pee on so-and-so even if they were on fire". It's generally used to show one's level of contempt and loathing at another person. Well, the predatory bully is the opposite of them.

They'd cross the street to pee on you simply because you're having a nice day.

These are the people who can’t bear to see others happy or having a good time without feeling the need to stop and crush it for no reason other than their, the bullies, own desire to get back at the world because they’ve been bullied themselves. As an adult the predatory bully might simply be a criminal, but he or she could also be the type to destroy a person's enthusiasm in order to boost their own egos. (In a recent blog post the writer Robert Twigger gave these folks the sci-fi sounding name of "Energy Pirate".)

The worst male bully at one of my schools is this type.

He’s a small kid who I suspect is quite smart but he has learning disabilities (ADHD and possibly dyslexia) that make school and sitting still difficult, an older and also small for his age brother that is himself bullied at his school and subsequently comes home and bullies his brother, my student, and both of whom live a hand-to-mouth existence that’s likely one stroke -- they live with their grandmother -- away from them being homeless. To say the kid has issues is an understatement, but to empathize with his plight is one thing, to tolerate his behavior is another.

The Herd Bully

Another common type that shows up regularly among male and female students, these are the bullies whose insecurities get the better of them. These are also the bullies we encounter most often as adults as they police societal norms.

The worst female bully is this type.

She’s smart and talented, but lacks the confidence to be her own person, so she’s made herself the Number 2 in her clique which is the alpha-clique in her class. If she perceives any threat to her position, she’s quick to lash out and, with her words, get the group against the offending person. If someone is in a weaker position and she thinks she can get away with it, she’ll exploit it in an effort to shore up her own position or if doing so will elevate her own status. It’s a bit sad to see on a number of fronts. The fact that she's lived abroad gets exploited by the other students who say she’s not Korean but Canadian (actually they says “She is Canada-people”), so it’s easy to see where her insecurity comes from.

I've learned it’s a rare student who has the confidence to go along with their excellence. Hell, it’s a rare person who has the two hand in hand. But again, it's one thing to empathize, it's another thing to tolerate. In both these cases the student's teacher has stepped in and actively tried to right both these behaviors. From what I've noticed the teacher has been successful.

On a side note, a lot of people talk about the differences between “Eastern” and “Western” mind-sets, and I think too much gets made out of this. Yeah, personality is a cultural construct, and group identity might be stronger in the “East”, and the “West” tolerates more overall, if superficial, atomization among its populace, but both cultures have their norms and to be perceived as somehow outside the norm allows oneself to be open to attack. It’s a rare bully that exists in isolation and even wolves have packs. So regardless of culture one lesson most people learn early in life is that it’s best not to stand out but stay within the group, or within the limits that the group deems appropriate.

This is why I find this stuff fascinating because it's not like it goes away. The schoolyard bully remains with us, as does the hurt experienced by the bully's victim, and as adults these experiences determine our character and behavior in so much as we operate without self-awareness and run on autopilot letting our accumulated assumptions and default settings guide our actions.

Up next, the workplace! And finally, the Ukulele Story!

And in case any of you are currently being bullied, here's a video one of my students showed me.

Remember, never underestimate the kick to the groin!



(Actually my student showed me the Korean-dubbed version. It was like they went to central casting and found an Italian "hood" and taught him Korean.)

This is going to be an at least three part series of posts on bullying as witnessed over the last year that I'll relate to bullies in the workplace and their contribution to overall workplace toxicity levels. That'll be the Ukulele Story.

But for now I'm going to talk about bullying in an abstract fashion.

It’s been interesting dealing with kids this past year because after all kids are people with the same drives and emotions as adults except without the psychological masking, rationalizations, or experiential framework to guide their behavior. As most people know bullying is not something that goes away as people get older, but something one encounters too often even if it's masked beneath other names.

What surprised me over this past year was noticing how not all kids reacted to bullying in the same way.

With my first and second graders it was hard to distinguish bullying as separate from the general tumult of their experience. The exception being when say a fifth grader started bullying a second grader, but even then the second grader's ego was more malleable and likely to bounce back without damage because there was less cruft accumulated around the wires. Then around about the fourth grade things started to get different. By then the personality/ego/whatever had become more fixed and bullying became more perilous, and one was apt to embrace it as the norm and let it shape behavior.

After that, puberty comes along and all this ego/identity posturing ramps up and gets really weird.

Take all this with a grain of salt. I’m not a behavioral psychologist, nor am I positing a cut and dry series of developmental stages. Basically all I’m saying is younger kids bounce back from bullying better than older kids, because younger kids have a less fixed attachment to their sense of self. It's not really a groundbreaking observation, but it did get me thinking.

For visualization purposes imagine a stick.

That's the sense of self. A little kid can encounter something threatening to the stick and let go of it easily before grabbing the stick in the same place or elsewhere soon after the event. An older kid, a teen, or an adult when they lose their handle on the stick it takes a lot longer for them to get hold of it again, and there’s always the possibility that they won’t.

We’re not gifted by default with infinite adaptability.

And if the stick breaks, or even more importantly if one perceives the stick as breaking, because, really, the stick’s a fabrication, then one’s likely to encounter something really ugly.

Which I'll talk about next time when I tell you about some of my students.