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

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.

#amazon #bolesBooks #book #davidBoles #drama #eugeneOneill #god #paperback #publishing #sociology #technology #wire

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

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

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