I was sorry to hear of your illness, and hope that you are feeling better. On the other hand, I was delighted to hear that you have grown into the third man. To achieve such a promotion at a time when you are not feeling at your best can only make your accomplishment that much sweeter. I envy you the taste, though not the tortures you doubtless endured to earn it.

You needn't have apologized for taking so long in answering my last e-mail. One of the benefits of not imagining that I am not the center of the universe is that I do not expect others to respond to me--and am always delightfully surprised when they do.

I do apologize for taking my time in getting back to you, particularly since I've already been in touch, more than once, with your old buddy Astrolounge. But my communications with her were but brief notes that I could compose in the blink--on one occasion, of a sleep-laden--eyelid. Your communiqu�s require a bit more thought and therefore more time. On top of that I've been busy sending out my resume to the Democrats, who are in dire need of a good bumper sticker writer; I am even using your quote as a reference.

You were right about Astrolounge, which was why I had to tell her that her praise was undeserved, since I had no intention or perception of knocking anyone down any pegs or humbling anyone.

Yes, in a way it would be nice if writing, or any other art, could be judged by the same kind of objective standards as most athletic activities--break ten boards with a temple-high, front-legged, instep roundhouse, and you pass. (Actually, anybody who could really do that, and not pulverize their foot to boot, deserves an immediate promotion to the highest rank.) It would give writers a feeling that our destiny is completely in our hands, to be molded as we see fit, and perhaps the profession would a little riddled with depression, failed relationships, alcoholism, and suicide. There are probably dozens of reasons--neurological, Psychological--why so many writers are so dysfunctional; but working in a field where you can never truly evaluate the quality of your work and everything depends upon the passing whim of people you mostly never see, is enough to drive even the healthiest person completely around the bend. Kinda like being a postal worker--without the health benefits and the great pension plan.

Unfortunately, I don't think there can ever an absolute standard for the literary arts. For one thing, every book is composed of so many elements that almost no writer can get all of them right; some writers even fail to do a few elements adequately. Most writers pursue strategies that let them maximize what they can do best, cover what they are weak at, and avoid what they can't do at all. A close analysis often shows that what we consider the classic books have attained their status by doing just one or two elements extremely well. (Most writers, by the way, take a few techniques from this favorite writer and a few techniques from that favorite writer, usually discovering along the way that they can't do all of the techniques of their favorite writers; if they're lucky, they'll also find that they have real talent for at least one technique that none of their favorites can do.) Most readers, however, have their own, highly idiosyncratic, list of elements that they absolutely must have in a book--and if an author doesn't provide them, they will hate that writer's work, no matter how well the writer in question performs every other literary task. That right there works against objective standards.

To make matters even more confusing, some readers will love for a writer who seems to do everything badly--except for one particular thing that they do so well the reader forgives everything else. One of my ex-girls once said that Agatha Christie couldn't write at all, except for being the best plotter of mysteries the world has ever seen. Or vice a versa. A former friend of mine who loved mysteries precisely because they have an absolute standard--the plot must outwit the reader yet make sense--loved Raymond Chandler because of his dialogue, characterization, and simile-laden descriptions and quite willingly forgive the fact that Chandler's plot never add up. Go figure. Even worse: I know some readers who like a writer, regardless of his many faults, because they like the person they glimpse behind the words. I know many high lit types who consider Theodore Dreiser sub literate, but love his "sincerity." I've also known those who think that Stephen King is technically inept in every way, but they read him because they like the way he seems to love even his most repulsive characters.

To complicate matters even further: changes in technology, social organization, and popular media will create changes in all the arts, particularly writing. Hemingway is the prime example of this: his style was perfectly suited to a readership whose mass produced, nine-grade educations inclined them to silently reading tabloids rather than reading more complicated material aloud. (Hollywood, by the way discovered that Hemingway's dialogues work great on the page but are actually unspeakable--nobody actually speaks in alternating, monosyllabic, three word sentences.) Several generations of writers, of each and every genre, have followed Hem's example. Among these writers, in the horror genre, was Robert Bloch, who went from writing in the baroque of his mentor, Lovecraft, to crafting hemingwayesque horror stories that read like scripts for the radio plays that were so popular at the time.

Of course, movies are the technology that has had the biggest impact on the horror genre--even in its literary form. And changes in cinematic technology have changed the style of horror films. Working in color, Hammer Films could never be the dreamlike, atmospheric, dark fairy tales that Universal created in black and white--they had to go with a faster paced, more action packed and gore in your face approach, which Universal could have never achieved in black and white (look how bad Twilight Zone stories become when re-shot in color. Black and white even uses a different, more melodramatic, acting style.). And writers raised on this faster approach that continues to accelerate even today write books that are more grue than mood.

In some ways having an objective, absolute criterion for evaluating art and entertainment might not always be such a good thing. Everybody who had the talent to do so would master the criteria and use it to create works that of necessity would be almost, if not completely, identical to each other. This has happened in ancient civilization which had tight artistic canons, and it happens today in broadcast TV and AM radio--and I always find the results to be deadly bores. I have also seen a few artists who have attempted to create works that could be judged on pure technique, without reference to substance, and I have always found that a big bore, too. Some of the most interesting artistic techniques have been created by artists who innovated them to get around those techniques that they couldn't do. So perhaps the lack of objective standards brings with it some benefits along with insecurity and confusion.

In the end, the only thing the writer is ever in control of is his work at the time that he is writing it. I could go on for pages about all of the things that the writer will never have any control of over--going way beyond how his work is received.

If you want to give yourself some encouragement when your writing isn't being well-received and some needed humility when you too many are telling you how brilliant your stuff is--too much praise is as dangerous as too much derision; one bloats the ego, enticing toward egregious error, while the other crushes the spirit--I suggest you go to the book section at Amazon.Com and read the customer reviews of some of your favorite books. I guarantee you, it's a hoot and a half.

What's funny is to see the odd-ball review--the one that says that some book everyone says is wonderful is the worst piece of tripe they've ever read or vice versa. What's funnier is to read two reviewers with opposite opinions of the same thing: I love the way Anne Rice's vampires analyze their existence versus I hate the way Anne Rice's never stop whining about their existence, even though they're rich and gorgeous and immortal and get great sex. And the funniest is when two reviewers fasten on opposite qualities of a given work, both of which happen to be true: Rosemary's Baby is very satirical and well plotted, with marvelous dialogue--true; Rosemary's Baby is very predictable, had undeveloped card board characters, reads more like a screenplay than fiction to be read, and peters out at what should be its climax--also true. What an eye-opener.

That's why I deal with criticism as I do. It's just the healthiest way to do it--a way that keeps you humble enough to learn and strong enough to survive the attacks that everybody in this business eventually receive.

As for those who look down their noses at your love of horror novels, you should view them with supercilious understanding. All genres have their roots in the ancient archetypes, but the ancient archetypes are not respected by a modernism that strains to "make it new." Let's put the spaghetti on top of the sauce, so that our cuisine will be nouveau. Yippee! Horror, like pornography, is a literature of sensation, and the whole concept of a literature of sensation has been getting the short end of the stick ever since that pretentious old windbag Henry James began the process of separating high art from popular art through that horrible book, THE ART OF THE NOVEL. We also live in a society that is as self-reflective as a narcissist masturbating to the image in the mirror. So literature is now the handmaiden of sociology, and the modern mainstream realistic novel is actually an illustration of how it is possible for the average family to have two point five children. This is why mystery and science fiction are awarded a measure of respect denied to horror and romance: they're forms that deal with social conditions. Even among the literature of sensation, horror seems a little weird because, unlike romance and pornography, the sensations horror deals in are unpleasant. Horror is a kind of fantasy that leads us to confront what we are always trying to escape--pain, disfigurement, and the reality of our own death. It is every bit as much a form of speculative fiction as science fiction, but, unlike science fiction, it doesn't speculate about the future and alternate societies--it speculates about what the various kinds of tortures and death might feel like, what the nature of varying kinds of afterlifes might be, particularly the possibility that the afterlife might be as bad as, or even worse than, life itself. Not food for the cowardly. And finally, occult horror deals with ideas and experiences that our mechanically materialistic society is determined to avoid--spiritual matters that have been shut away in that dusty old drawer called religion. So deal with those cowards who look down their noses at your taste--with pity, which is the most self-congratulatory form of contempt.

The point of all of this is: that you should not get discouraged. The next time you read a book you don't like, don't get mad. Do what I used to do. Say to yourself, or to anyone that has no choice but to listen: "If that--who wrote that piece of--(since I fit in this category I won't supply you with the expletives; I'm not that generous) I can get published too.

I see that during your wanderings through the net, you have uncovered my connection to Chaos Magick.

My own Chaos Magick derives from the early works of Austin Spare--not from his later stuff, where he embraces the mediumistic spiritualism that his early works derided, and not from the interpretation of Spare put forth by Kenneth Grant, who mixes a literal belief in Lovecraft's Old One's and Crowley's millennialism with Spare in a mess that distorts the ideas of both Lovecraft and Spare--and from the work of Julian Wilde, who like myself came to Chaos from Eastern Philosophies, which Spare's thinking closely resembles, something that is being slowly forgotten. Like Wilde, I tend to see Chaos Magick as a kind of modern, Western Tantra. I also base a lot of my views on Isaac Bonewitz, who calls his work "Eclectic," not Chaos, Magick, which derives from the discoveries of Parapsychology, which is the only science I attend to in matters magickal.

So, yes, I believe that we have a lot of control over own emotions. In the end, in fact, the only thing we may have any control over is our responses to the uncontrollable events that occur to us--though I am debating with myself whether Tsong Khapa was right to think that we are responsible for our dreams. But I also think that it takes most people a lifetime of work to achieve complete control over their emotional responses--years of Zen meditation, Psychotherapy, Tibetan Tantra, Chaos Magick, and NLP, and I'm still not completely there yet. (In fact, money may actually cure what you call "stupidity," since it allows one to get better shrinks).

Like Spare, whose writings evince a thorough understanding of Freud and Jung along with Lao Tse and the Tantra, I believe that our realities are created by beliefs that are so deeply unconscious that they have become a part of our very physical being, what he called "organic beliefs."

So I don't completely disagree with your views on happiness and victimhood. Many people do participate in their own victimization. One of the biggest reasons for this is the Christianity--which in the world's greatest act of psychic jiu-jitsu managed to make dying like a common criminal a proof of divinity--talk about glorifying victimhood. This has become part our cultural "organic beliefs," subconsciously convincing some individuals that the world is divided into two kinds of people: victimizer's, who will be damned, and victims, who will be blessed by the lord. And some of these people choose victimization as a way to manipulate daddy in the sky into giving them more candy. Ideas like this have filtered into the political sphere. Oh, God, though I may be blond and blue eyed, you know that I am one thousandth part Native American and another thousandth shetle Jew and therefore a good, oppressed victim worthy of your love, and not one of the Anglo victimizer's whom you will righteously smite down. And I've met many a beautiful, women who survived by being helpless, floating from one handsome, helping hand to the other.

The American Dream also contributes to the problem, filling people with the "organic belief" that there is always more to be had and they are entitled to it all, creating more desires than we can ever fulfill, leaving most of us perpetually unhappy. Believe me, I know many foreign born people who, expecting nothing at all as their due, are perfectly happy when the minimum of their biological needs are met. And I've known women from Spain and South America who believed that any woman who stays alone with a man in his apartment, with the doors closed, past nine in the evening, has no right to complain if she gets raped. (Unfortunately, like most women of the Latin countries of Europe and the Americas, they believe that no love is true love that isn't tortured and tormented love--an idea that soap operas sell to the women of this country--just as the ancient Romans considered sorrow to be an essential part of Gravitas.)

I can also see a number of scenarios whereby there may have never been any innocent victims. Parapsychologically speaking, people who are masochistic or suffer from guilty consciences might have the subconscious psychic ability to find the punishment they so desire. If one accepts the idea of karma, which I am inclined to, none of us are victims of anything but the results of our actions. This fits in with a hypnogogic vision I once had, where a stereotypical ancient being told me that I and every other human being who has ever or will ever live were guilty of every crime that has every been committed from the very beginning of the universe.

But since I can't prove any of these more mystical theories, I can only say that on the surface it seems as though there are some--not all, but some--innocent victims; 9/11 and the sniper shootings, would be examples of this. And there are some legitimate reasons to be unhappy, like my friend's widowhood.

It is mostly the absolutism of your statements that I take issue with--while acknowledging that aphorisms force one to make absolute statements, and that I am certainly guilty of this as. In the end, like Spare--who thought that, in a world of duality, unhappiness was unavoidable and one of whose favorite magickal techniques was to wait for a moment of disappointment and then charge a sigil designed to fulfill another, completely unrelated desire, in a sense winning for losing--and Nargajuna before him I believe that: "Only relativity is absolute."

Now, the hunters and headsmen are afoot, looking for those of my kind to behead for the holiday, so I must be finding myself a place to hide. Feel free to use any piece of our correspondence, since I would no more send out a statement unedited and unrevised than I would leave me house naked. And I would apologize for the length of this message, but it would be pointless and redundant. You see, whereas Dean Koontz was right when he said that short stories and the like don't really prepare you for writing novels and writing genre-length novels doesn't prepare you for writing blockbuster novels--you learn each one by writing each one, if necessary over and over again until get them right--still I find that writing long letters and e-mails is a great way to practice some writing skills.

Remember, to put this new clich� through Spare's Neither/Neither and Nargajuna's Eightfold Chain of Negations from which it derives: "Nothing is true; everything is permitted. Everything is true; nothing is permitted. Nothing is true; nothing is permitted. Everything is true; everything is permitted." Ad infinitum. Until we reach the Infinite void.

So Happy Turkey Day to You and Yours. (Hope y'all don't yet any of my relatives.)

All Best,