The Gallery magazine articles by Alan Cabal

Although periodical writer Alan Cabal is best known as a New York Press writer, he has written for other publications like High Times and CounterPunch. Then there is Gallery magazine. He wrote two articles for the publication back in 2000. When I mentioned to Mr. Cabal that I had read his Gallery magazine articles, his response was: "It might amuse you to know that they tried to stiff me on the money for that. Of course I got it, but the inherent absurdity of trying to stiff a guy on an article about the collections business resonates with the times, no?" Gallery magazine went bankrupt in 2008, according to Wikipedia. Also, according to Wikipedia, they left "many photographers and models empty handed; some were owed as much as $100,000."

Of Mr. Cabal's two articles for Gallery, one was about his three years in the collections industry and the other was about the Slovenian avant-garde music group Laibach. In "When A Stranger Calls" he gives a personal account of the collections industry followed by advice on how to protect yourself from a collector; and in "They Might Be Nazis?" he gives a short history of the music group Laibach's origins. You can read them both below.

Here are scans of page 46-50 of his Gallery article "When A Stranger Calls: The Ins And Outs Of The Collection Trade"  from the April 2000 issue (republished below with permission from writer Alan Cabal; the illustrations are by Tony Millionaire):

Page 46:

Page 47:

Page 48:

Page 49:

Page 50:

And here is a scan of page 143 of Mr. Cabal's Gallery article "They Might Be Nazis?" from the March 2000 issue (republished below with permission from writer Alan Cabal):

Although Gallery's management were apparently assholes who often wouldn't, or couldn't, pay their employees, the end result seems to have been a decent magazine, with softcore nudity that you can share with your girlfriend to her enjoyment too. You might even be able to get her to recreate some of the photography for you. I did.

The missing Maxim article(s) by William Monahan

Bibliographic research is rewarding, though time-consuming, work. Recently, I brainstormed the idea of doing distributed bibliographic research, for which I will require your help! Despite my extensive research efforts, I am still searching for the Maxim article(s) that filmmaker William Monahan supposedly wrote for the men's magazine back in the late 1990s. I've narrowed down the span of years for which Mr. Monahan could possibly have written for Maxim to 1997 and 1998 (in the following years, Mr. Monahan is neither listed on the masthead, nor given a byline in any article). If you own an issue of Maxim that is anywhere in the range of issues 1 (May/June 1997) through to 14 (December 1998), then please help me out with my bibliographic research by letting me know whether or not there are any articles in your issue that are written by Mr. Monahan. If you do find a Maxim article written by Mr. Monahan, then you are a winner! For your diligent work of flipping through your Maxim issue, page by page, and successfully finding a "William Monahan" byline, you will win a lifetime subscription to Maxim magazine, which will even remain with your estate long after you die, so your children and grandchildren will enjoy this guilty pleasure too. Well, no, I can't really offer you such a prize, sorry. I can, however, give you credit for finding the missing William Monahan Maxim articles. Is that something you might be interested in?

Pick a Maxim issue from the list below and help me find the missing William Monahan article(s):

1. May/June 1997
2. July/August 1997
3. September/October 1997
4. November/December 1997
5. January/February 1998
6. March 1998
7. April 1998
8. May 1998
9. June 1998
10. July/August 1998
11. September 1998
12. October 1998
13. November 1998
14. December 1998

Report your findings in the comments section below:

First known interview with Alan Cabal materializes on the web!

Alan Cabal, February 2010

Jeepers, blogger Mesikämmen has posted an excellent interview with Alan Cabal! It's funny and unpredictable, and as far as I know, the first known interview with Alan Cabal, ever. Here's a sampling of some of the exchanges between Mesikämmen and Alan Cabal:

Q: Who are the most dangerous men on Earth? Why?

A: Darth Cheney has no pulse. Do the math. Does the name “George Romero” ring a bell anywhere? HE’S A GODDAMNED ZOMBIE, they are fucking RARE now, but the fucking things will be galloping over YOUR GODDAMNED WELL-MANICURED EUROPEAN HEDGES shrieking about their RIGHTS to bite into your BRAINS and SPINAL CORDS turning you into their feces or worse.

...

Q: What makes you American? I feel you are in your own peculiar way very American – what is the essence of your American soul?

A: I was born here. I could not possibly be anything but an American. I have no discernible or traceable biological origin. It is sealed.

Alan Cabal, February 2010

For your benefit, I will elucidate upon why, I think, Mr. Cabal's biological origin is "sealed": his biological mother was seriously troubled, and so Mr. Cabal ended up in the hands of an adoption agency that probably seals their records from the prying eyes of their clients' progeny.¹ He probably has little idea about who she was, and even less idea about who his father was. Mr. Cabal  has written that his biological mother claimed to have been raped and that the adoption agency had declared her "borderline psychotic." Here's the rundown about his biological mother from his NYPress essay about his adoptive mother:¹

I was born on Dec. 1, 1953, to a weird little girl from Bridgeton named Helene who was 15 years old. Her mother was a certified schoolteacher who for some reason was working as a bus dispatcher at the time. Her mother has been described to me as "abrasive and domineering." Helene played the piano and had an interest in mathematics. She had a tendency to break out in hives when she got nervous, which was fairly often by most accounts. She had been raped, or so she said. Spring fever, perhaps. The adoption agency’s psychiatrist declared her "borderline psychotic," but psychiatry is at best an inexact science, kind of like voodoo or dowsing. They bury their mistakes, like the rest of the medical profession.

Mr. Cabal's mention of Operation Paperclip in the interview piqued my curiosity, and maybe it did the same for you, too? If you want to read more about some of the ideas that Mr. Cabal has, then check out his extensive bibliography which I put together in my spare time in my capacity as a NYPress scholar.

Take-away question: Why is Mr. Cabal's biological origin sealed?


Sources:

1) "Badlands: Burying Camden And My Mom", New York Press, vol. 13, no. 6 (February 9–15, 2000).

William Monahan once rang up writer Anthony Burgess in the middle of the night

As I wrote a few days ago, I'm apparently a big bother to writer and filmmaker William Monahan. Perhaps it's the far reach of my research into his works, which has brought me into contact with his friends, brief acquaintances, and even former colleagues. Or maybe it's the genealogical research I've been doing into his family tree. What writer wants someone poring through official documents left behind by the members of their family for the purposes of elucidating upon their written works.

You may have noticed that so far I have exclusively discussed writer William Monahan and his works in my blog entries without any mention of other New York Press writers, other than briefly mentioning C.J. Sullivan the other day. This is just the current kick I'm on. Before I started this blog I had just finished writing a biography of NYPress writer Alan Cabal. I've done some research into NYPress writer Jim Knipfel, but other than his memoirs and some of his journalism, I'm not a huge fan of Mr. Knipfel's works. I think Mr. Knipfel is a great character though, but on the whole he's a hack (he admitted as much in an interview, if I recollect properly).

As troubling as it may be to have someone examining your life's work with a magnifying glass, at least my efforts are not inane. As Mr. Monahan tells it, he and his friends once rang up writer Anthony Burgess in the middle of the night and did nothing more than ask one silly question after rousing him from bed. Here is the conversation that Mr. Monahan claims to have had, circa 1992, with writer Anthony Burgess (1917 – 1993):

Excerpted from Mr. Monahan's NYPress essay "Byrne"¹:

One night back in my party days we drank several bottles of Jagermeister, had a talk about the state of literature and decided to call writers. Someone who had just read John Cheever's letters tried to call Allan Gurganus' mother and ask how she thought he'd got into The New Yorker. We tried Julian Barnes. Amis was unlisted. Gore Vidal came to naught—you try to get a phone number in Italy at 3 a.m.

Finally it occurred to us: Anthony Burgess. If anyone would talk to us—if there was anyone we wanted to talk to—it was Anthony Burgess.

He having published his addresses in his autobiography (either Little Wilson and Big God or the other one), we figured he wanted company and wouldn't mind a call. I got directory information in the Principality of Monaco (you have to call France for this) and asked for the number for Mr. John Wilson. The phone purred about 4000 times and then an old Englishman answered.

"Who in God's name is it?"

"Anthony Burgess?"

"Yes?"

"The writer Anthony Burgess?"

"Yes, yes, yes."

I braced myself and got to the clever part.

"Is your pen name John Wilson?"

At this moment, of course, I realized that I'd totally fucked up what I had intended to say. Burgess himself was floored by the inanity of the question. Three thousand miles of weirdness crackled on the line. Burgess recovered first.

"No," he said, smoothly, "I have nothing to do with him." There was another protracted silence. "Go to bed," said Burgess, not unkindly, and hung up.

About a year later, he died. From then till now I have never bothered another writer, and so it shall be, selah. All that's left is karma.

Anthony Burgess was the pen name of John Burgess Wilson, though every reader knows the man by his pen name rather than his real name. When I read Anthony Burgess' A Clockwork Orange a few years back I loved it and even took to using, for a short time, and only with my close friends, the fictional argot called Nadsat that the characters in the novel talk to each other in. If Mr. Monahan's anecdote above is any indication, Anthony Burgess seems to have been a kind, gentle man, though I don't know what his temper was with journalists, interviewers, and his biographers. Everyone has their snapping point.

Take-away question: Who were Mr. Monahan's drinking buddies on the night they called up writer Anthony Burgess?

Sources:

1) William Monahan. "Byrne", New York Press, vol. 10, no. 32 (August 6–12, 1997), Books & Publishing Supplement, p. 14.

Update: The Long Play and William Monahan

The Long Play script that filmmaker William Monahan was hired to rewrite back in 2007 is no longer happening as a feature film. Deadline Hollywood Daily reports that the Mick Jagger/Martin Scorsese project about the rock music business, formerly intended to be a film titled The Long Play, will now be produced as an HBO period drama series. However, Mr. Monahan is not attached, anymore. I guess his rewrite of The Long Play is only of interest to scholars, such as myself, now. I know I've been abusing the term "scholar" a lot lately, but it's hard to stop when it's a major part of your identity.

The rest of my blog entry about Mr. Monahan's days as a musician still stands, though. Read it.

The Collected Electronic Correspondences of William Monahan

While imagining, as a thought experiment, what could be contained in a volume titled "The Collected Electronic Correspondences of William Monahan," I realized that I could be in it. I've had my share of correspondences with filmmaker William Monahan. At first probing with various fake email accounts, Mr. Monahan eventually began using an @mac.com email address ("wjmonahan@mac.com") to size me up. Ours has been a savage correspondence, with Mr. Monahan acting as a ruthless mentor through edit summaries on the English Wikipedia and as a paranoid celebrity through various email accounts. Originally, I antagonized Mr. Monahan by simply being a terrible writer who was working on his Wikipedia article. He'd correct my writing on Wiki. After he got a hold of my email address, silliness took over. Through perseverance I like to think that I've progressed from someone who had below average reading comprehension into a mediocre scholar. Certainly Mr. Monahan had legitimate issues to raise about some of my bad writing on the English Wikipedia. These days, I do my work at Squidoo.

I'm fascinated by the subject of collecting emails from authors. Are such collections of emails going to become the new Collected Letters? Any kind of electronic correspondence could possibly be collected. Facebook and Twitter are currently big with celebrities. The Library of Congress recently announced that it will be archiving all tweets, by everyone. Twitter is easy, since the information is public, but emails are private.

Although all these electronic correspondences need to be saved, it's hard to say exactly how the next generation of scholars will get a hold of all these Important Emails. An extreme method would be to hire your hackers Joe Wardriver, Sue Cracker, or Thomas Nation to break into the email accounts of authors for the purposes of dumping the lot onto the web. There have been instances when excerpts of Mr. Monahan's emails have been published, but this can hardly be relied upon. NYPress founder and former publisher Russ Smith has excerpted, in his Mugger column, some of his correspondences with Mr. Monahan regarding the possibility of a Hillary Clinton assignment. I believe, however, that a more practical method of acquiring Important Emails might be email donations from persons who have had lengthy exchanges with authors like Mr. Monahan. I, myself, happen to have been blessed with several emails from Mr. Monahan, from his MobileMe account, as well as from his various fake email accounts. To give this idea of making donations of Important Emails Exchanged With Authors some weight, I've decided to release a few of the more interesting emails that Mr. Monahan and I have exchanged.

Before I do that, however, I would just like to emphasize the importance of Mr. Monahan's electronic correspondences. In prose, Mr. Monahan is incredibly informative. His densely packed sentences are of equally high quality in both his journalism and his interviews. Mr. Monahan doesn't do conventional interviews, as Juan Morales wrote in his Los Angeles Times article. It seems his preferred format is the email interview and for good reason. Compare his recent Screen Daily interview with the 2008 video interview conducted by Evelyn Vaccaro below:




There's a stark difference in the quality of these two interviews, though both are equally informative. In the Screen Daily interview he's eloquent, but in the video interview above he comes off as a blubbering fool constantly wondering if, you know, we, you know, know what he's talking about. It's unlikely that Mr. Monahan will be submitting himself to much more of that. So when it comes to Mr. Monahan, we scholars will find the most interesting insights in his emails, forum posts, and so on.

There may be a wealth of forum posts out there by Mr. Monahan, somewhere in the deep Web. Vanity Fair columnist James Wolcott remembers Mr. Monahan participating in discussions on an Internet chat board, which might have been Echo BBS since that's where TV critic Aaron Barnhart encountered Mr. Monahan in those days. I haven't yet probed the archives of Echo BBS. You have to register. There's research to be done there.

But to get back to the subject of Important Emails, it was on August 7th, 2009 that Mr. Monahan decided to switch from using various fake email accounts for his correspondences with me to using an @mac.com email address with his real name: "wjmonahan@mac.com". What is telling is that by 2009, you could no longer get yourself an @mac.com email address. The .Mac service was re-branded as MobileMe in 2008, so from then on Apple was handing out @me.com email addresses. It is highly unlikely that the "wjmonahan@mac.com" email address was created a year in advance for future use as a fake email account.

At any rate, it was a Friday night when I received my first email from Mr. Monahan's @mac.com email address. According to the email header of this first email, Mr. Monahan was in the City of London. He had been filming London Boulevard. It was a Saturday morning for him.

Received: from Unknown-00-23-6c-94-2f-4b.home ([81.154.188.105])
by asmtp014.mac.com
From: WILLIAM MONAHAN
To: [my email address]
Subject:
Date: Sat, 08 Aug 2009 04:20:42 +0100
X-Mailer: Apple Mail (2.935.3)

You're fucked. Have a nice day.

END OF EMAIL

My response was immediate:

To: WILLIAM MONAHAN
Subject: Re:
Date: Fri, 7 Aug 2009 20:56:56 -0700 (PDT)

Sir, you have dreamed of having an antagonist like myself. Light House: A Trifle, Dining Late with Claude La Badarian, and even that BlackBook Magazine interview you did with Mr. Thewlis, indicate a deep obsession with the kind of character I have been.

How much do you know about me?

END OF EMAIL

Mr. Monahan's response was equally immediate:

Received: from Unknown-00-23-6c-94-2f-4b.home ([81.154.188.105])

 by asmtp011.mac.com

From: WILLIAM MONAHAN
To: [my email address]
Subject: Re: Re:
Date: Sat, 08 Aug 2009 05:36:24 +0100
X-Mailer: Apple Mail (2.935.3)

I know most recently, Moriarty, that you're the kind of fool who responds to a showdown by instantly cutting his own throat legally with a single English sentence. You're all done, William.

END OF EMAIL

My response was:

To: WILLIAM MONAHAN
Subject: Re: Re:
Date: Fri, 7 Aug 2009 21:42:51 -0700 (PDT)

You mean your email from an hour ago was the beginning of a showdown?

What could I have won if the "showdown" had gone better for me?

END OF EMAIL

Mr. Monahan's response was:

Received: from Unknown-00-23-6c-94-2f-4b.home ([81.154.188.105])
by asmtp019.mac.com
From: WILLIAM MONAHAN
To: [my email address]
Subject: Re: Re: Re:
Date: Sat, 08 Aug 2009 05:47:00 +0100
X-Mailer: Apple Mail (2.935.3)

No, it was the end of one. You crapped it at first fire and admitted that you were an insane stalker, you retard.

END OF EMAIL

Yet, off-and-on we went for months. I tried to steer the conversations toward questions I had about his works, but I was never even remotely successful. We simply had a very weird back-and-forth, which maybe said everything. For the record, I consider myself to be a Monahan scholar rather than his "insane stalker." The character that I had mentioned having been was that of an amateur desperately seeking recognition, an appreciative clapping sound for my efforts. 

At some point, Mr. Monahan decided to try to convince me that he actually wasn't "William Monahan," but I am someone who can penetrate background, so while he was trying to convince me that he actually wasn't who he had presented himself as, he gave himself away, ironically, using a single English sentence:

Received: from [10.103.27.56] (166-205-007-042.mobile.mymmode.com [166.205.7.42])
by asmtp011.mac.com
From: William Monahan
To: [my email address]
Subject: Re: Build now
Date: Mon, 28 Sep 2009 21:25:42 -0700
X-Mailer: iPhone Mail (7C144)

Hey, Maggot, what's shaking. It's probably past time to tell you that im not William Monahan, so whatever rocks you're getting off with the doofy subnormal autodidact antichrist shit, sorry. 

END OF EMAIL

In that last English sentence he uses the idiom "get your rocks off" and the term "autodidact", all the while using a persona that reminded me of some sort of "Rock 'n Roll" guy. Your clues are "get your rocks off" and "autodidact". Back in 1997, when he and NYPress colleague C.J. Sullivan had a tiff in the letters column of NYPress, he made a similar remark to C.J. Sullivan.¹ It's a long letter, which I only excerpt below, but worth reading in its entirety, particularly if you're doing criticism of The Departed:

Boston or the boroughs, I know Sullivan like a species of bird: a shamrocks-and-vomit shovel leaner of the type who gets his rocks off by being "connected." These guys like to hang out with cops and ward bosses and so forth. They tend to use phrases like "fallen fireman" without irony; they start to sound like Barry Fitzgerald when they get drunk; and they like to hang around bars getting off on how superior they are to guys who actually do anything or, say, go home and fuck their wives. You know what had me on the floor about Sullivan's letter? When he mentioned knowing the cop.

So while C.J. Sullivan is the type who gets his rocks off by being "connected," I am apparently the type who gets his rocks off with my "doofy subnormal autodidact antichrist shit." I would have described myself as the type who gets his rocks off by doing literary biography, piecemeal, all the while chronicling my efforts in my blog. As for the term "autodidact", it shows up, in comedic form, in his novel Light House: A Trifle, but more so, it's one of the main themes of his journalism.

It's ironic that while attempting to deny who he was to his unofficial biographer (me), he in fact gave himself away. But then again, I have an encyclopedic knowledge of Mr. Monahan's works, and if anyone was going to pick up on these clues it was going to be me.

After the @mac.com email address ceased to be responsive, other fake email accounts continued our correspondence, with one lady named "Manda Trothero" writing to inform me that the "wjmonahan@mac.com" email address had been previously used by an assistant in her office:

You recently wrote to a defunct email previously used by an assistant in this office. William Monahan does not use email. However, he does answer questions! If you would like to ask questions, please direct them to this address. If you are a journalist please identify the publication for which you work. If you are a scholar, please identify the institution at which you study or teach. Thank you! 

Our conversations abound with silliness. Mr. Monahan is a writer who writes weird characters, such as Claude La Badarian. If I've become a part of Mr. Monahan's creative process, so be it. I enjoy our emails.

As the fictional character Claude La Badarian said of Mr. Monahan:

An obscenity has come to my attention. William Monahan's Light House: A Trifle has gone into trade paperback. After all the work I did--all the letters I wrote, telling Riverhead Books what an unreliable, ridiculous clown and megalomaniac viper they had taken to their multinational breast--after all the lack-of-character-demonstrating e-mails many mediums have received from various "hotmail" addresses, as well as the mindspring account Monahan claimed dubiously was password-hacked a few years ago (Monahan, usually indisposed in other states, as well as rather various, personality-wise, is unusually open to calumny)--I cannot believe that this book has again been put into print.

The part above about Mr. Monahan being "rather various, personality-wise" has been my experience, too. In the fiction serial Dining Late with Claude La Badarian, Mr. Monahan's fictional character Claude La Badarian mentions how the fictional William Monahan's Mindspring account had apparently once been password-hacked, throwing all suspicion on Claude La Badarian, of course; but this is fiction, fiction set in 2001. In the year 2010, I know of only one person who still has a Mindspring account and uses it regularly for email; other than that, it's a relic. The fictional character Claude La Badarian had a Mindspring email address too: LaBadarian@mindspring.com. If Mr. Monahan truly had a Mindspring account in real life, I hope we will one day get to read the email correspondences that took place in his Mindspring account, perhaps in a volume titled "The Collected Electronic Correspondences of William Monahan"?

Take-away question: Is there anyone else out there willing to make donations to the web of their email correspondences with William Monahan?

Sources:

1) William Monahan responds to C.J. Sullivan's letter "The Troubles" to the paper, in his own letter "They're a Touchy People, And Like to Fight", New York Press, vol. 10, no. 4 (January 22–28, 1997), p. 46. Note: Both William Monahan and C.J. Sullivan were NYPress writers at the time.

Who disinherited William Monahan?

Now, for some of you who are following my blog religiously, as much as that is possible given my infrequent posts, the idea that writer and filmmaker William Monahan modeled the personal history of his fictional character Claude La Badarian after his own personal history, may be a self-evident truth at this point. Yet, I am still not satisfied with the evidence that I have discovered and I believe that there remain nuances that could be better understood with further research. Knowing which family member it was that, at some point in time, disinherited Mr. Monahan, could potentially have a huge impact on the body of knowledge concerning the fiction serial Dining Late with Claude La Badarian, particularly if it was Mr. Monahan's maternal grandmother who disinherited him under similar circumstances to which Claude La Badarian was disinherited by his own grandmother. Already I have provided supporting evidence that Mr. Monahan's maternal grandfather is a match for Claude La Badarian's grandfather, so to be able to say as much about both of Mr. Monahan's maternal grandparents would be earth shattering to the insular world inhabited by Monahan scholars such as myself.

It is in Mr. Monahan's 2000 essay "Stoned in Amherst," that he mentions that he was disinherited, a commonality he points out that he shares with the fictional character Ivanhoe:¹

"I suppose it's a sketchbook, technically, perennially associated with undergraduate poets and ex-Seven Sisters Young Moms with a few minutes to spare to pour forth from their collective anima their Mistreatment Diaries and the latest version of I Stand here Ironing, Tillie Olsen's much-anthologized masterpiece about standing there ironing and feeling Vaguely Dispossessed and au fait, as opposed to, say, Disinherited, like Ivanhoe and me."

That phrase, "Disinherited, like Ivanhoe and me," could just as easily have been said by Mr. Monahan's fictional character Claude La Badarian in the La Badarian letters (aka Dining Late with Claude La Badarian) since Claude La Badarian happens to have been disinherited as well, by his grandmother no less, the result of a conspiracy on the part of the Medford La Badarians. Claude La Badarian writes in letter 7, "Claude and the Little People":

"When I explained to my grandmother that I had been disinherited, she wrote me a check for five dollars, the sum she put in my Christmas cards until I was 40. It bounced. If I am going to get a summerhouse of the sort to which I am accustomed, Henry, I am going to have to do it myself–a daunting prospect."

I admit, this is one of the weakest comparisons I have made between the personal history of Mr. Monahan and his fictional character Claude La Badarian. But seen within a larger context, it is further damning evidence. Perhaps you are not familiar with some of the supporting evidence I have previously proffered, indicating that Mr. Monahan was lifting passages from his own published works while writing the La Badarian letters? I will be drudging up new supporting evidence below, so feel free to ignore my previous blog entries while reading this one, until after you are done.

I have previously postulated that in using his own autobiography to create Claude La Badarian, Mr. Monahan is making some sort of point about autobiographical writing. But, then again, there is always the possibility that I am afflicted with a mild form of Asperger's syndrome (based on my understanding of that disorder from David Mamet's book Bambi vs. Godzilla) and am simply connecting everything to the point of uselessness. It's not like a writer becomes an entirely new person each time he starts an essay, novel, or script. But as you will see below Mr. Monahan very clearly copied from his works, practically verbatim. As I have delved deeper into Mr. Monahan's personal history through his works (and genealogical research with regards to his maternal grandfather Harold L. Armstrong), I have come to realize just how much of Mr. Monahan's autobiography has been passed down to his character Claude La Badarian.

From letter 1, "The Last Supper": Claude La Badarian writes:

There comes a time in every writer’s life when he realizes that he has a biography rather than a life. Some of us can delay this disastrous cognition until the Pulitzer, or the Lethe of senility; but I’ve been worried since the age of sixteen about unborn people wondering about what "lay behind" my poems, and where I was living, and whose purse I was taking pills out of, and so forth. Paranoids, Henry, have real biographers–especially when, like me, Claude La Badarian, they’re massive polymathic geniuses.

In his 2000 essay "Coney-Catching,"² Mr. Monahan wrote the exact same thing, which was later copied verbatim to the La Badarian letter excerpted above:

"We wander around Cunt Island, feeling the same. Still hazy. A day to become disoriented in the sky. A day to slam your plane into the water to stop whatever this fucking shit is that is different from life, the shit that happens when you have, and know you have, a biography instead of a life.

And yet another comparison! From letter 4, "Silence, Exile, and Claude La Badarian": Claude La Badarian writes:

Claude La Badarian, from earliest youth (photograph exists of the young Claude in a badged blazer, emerging from a basilica with his palms pressed together and his eyes turned skyward), has been besieged by gratuitous integrity. Anti-success training is the specialty of the Holy Roman Catholic and Apostolic Church.

In his 1995 essay "The Angel Factory",³ Mr. Monahan wrote of having had the exact same experience:

"The last time I took Communion and believed it meant anything was when I was in the second grade, wearing a blue school blazer with a badge on it, coming out of a counterfeit basilica with my palms pressed together, in a sexist double-crocodile of embarrassed Irish and Italian kids. I never got confirmed."

Pretty amazing stuff. The prose speaks for itself.

So, no concluding thoughts this time, simply a promise to discuss the importance of Edgar Allan Poe's short story "The Cask of Amontillado" as it appears in the La Badarian letters for my next blog entry about Dining Late with Claude La Badarian.

Oh wait, I almost forgot, here is a quote from Mr. Monahan's essay "A Night on the Tiles," in which he states that the only person he ever satirizes is himself:⁴

"It's ordained […] that I can never write satire of other people: I can start to do it, but God has ordained that I am smart enough to turn the burning glass around on myself: the only person I ever satirize, thank Christ, is myself. I have a built-in, possibly Catholic, ethical alarm system."

That says it all, doesn't it?

Take-away question: Whom was it that disinherited William Monahan?

Sources:

1) William Monahan. "Stoned in Amherst", New York Press, vol. 13, no. 2 (January 12–18, 2000), pp. 1 (Sec 1), 8–9 (Sec 2).
2) William Monahan. "Mermaid Parade: Coney-Catching", New York Press, vol. 13, no. 26 (June 28–July 4, 2000), pp. 14–15.
3) William Monahan. "The Angel Factory: Making Martyrs & Monsters", New York Press, vol. 8, no. 3 (January 18–24, 1995), pp. 1, 16–17.
4) William Monahan. "A Night on the Tiles: The Big Bad Bollocks & the Mirror of England", New York Press, vol. 13, no. 27 (July 5–11, 2000), pp. 1, 27–29.

The father of William Monahan

If William Monahan's father could perceive that the web now has a blog entry dedicated to the subject of him (you are reading said blog entry right now), he'd probably consider its author to be a true donkey, perhaps the primary donkey (I'd be fine with this distinction, I've earned it). Writer-director William J. Monahan's father was William Joseph Monahan, so both father and son carry the same initials: W. J. M (to avoid confusion I will refer to the writer and filmmaker as Mr. Monahan, and his father by his full name). Born January 21, 1934 in Boston, Massachusetts, William Joseph Monahan was the fifth child of Mary Regina McGee and Alphonsus George Monahan.¹ He had eight siblings, whose names, from oldest to youngest, were: Rose, John, Edward, George, Mary, Regina, James, and Ruth.¹ When William Joseph Monahan was seven years old, his father died. Mr. Monahan recalls in a New York Press essay:⁴

"My dad, whose own father had died when my grandmother's ninth child was unborn, had been shining shoes in Maverick Square in East Boston when he was 12."⁴

As a young man William Joseph Monahan served in the Korean War. His record with US Veteran's Affairs indicates that he eventually achieved the rank of 1st Lieutenant in the US Army Air Corps.⁹ Mr. Monahan writes in another New York Press essay:³

"My dad was a combat infantryman and platoon sergeant at a shockingly young age in the Korean War, but if you heard about the war, it was never from him."³

Shortly before turning 30 years old, William Joseph Monahan married Constance Armstrong. Their wedding took place on February 20, 1960 at St. Ann's Church in Gloucester, Massachusetts. Constance Armstrong must have very recently become pregnant, or was shortly going to become pregnant, with Mr. Monahan who would be born less than nine months later on November 3, 1960. They would have one other child, a daughter named Susan. About six years later, William Joseph Monahan and Constance Armstrong divorced.

Although William Joseph Monahan was an engineer,⁵ he was apparently not an ambitious man which would be the primary reason that his marriage would fail.⁴ His father Alphonsus George Monahan had also been an engineer, a civil engineer for the Bay State Railroad.¹ Mr. Monahan writes:

"My father had an IQ in the 180 range and wanted (though he ended up with more than that by default) no more from life than the enough of the Irish ghetto. Had my mother not left my father owing to his lack of ambition (that is, his ambitions were to be an Irishman), I might have been a very different person. Maybe I'd be dead. And maybe my mother, on the whole, made the right decision on behalf of the child, as women with children will. It used to occasionally occur to me, on the evidence presented by my father, that being very clever and handsome and verbally brilliant wasn't enough--or otherwise he would have lived with us, instead of the more prosperous asshole who did. Perhaps it was for the best. But it was hard to take. It was hard to take at Christmas."⁴

Of his paternal family, Mr. Monahan has written that they were "deeply Irish, deeply Catholic and rigorously structured ('working class' to the bone, as some Irish families can be even when they've got a hell of a lot of money: translate 'working class' as 'ascetic Catholics' and you're more on the ball than a Marxist would be)."⁴ He has described his ancestors from the 1880s as also being deeply Catholic, if not more so than his aunts and uncles:

"While I know some Hispanics who are as Catholic as my paternal family was in Boston in the 1880s, there's not a single Irish or Italian or Pole of my acquaintance under the age of 50 whose Catholicism isn't totally lapsed into a condition of nostalgia."²

At least two of Mr. Monahan's aunts on his father's side were are nuns [see comment below]. After the reforms of the Second Vatican Council of the Roman Catholic Church took hold in the 1960s, his aunts the nuns were allowed to take off their medieval robes and veils and put on ordinary clothes, as well as leave the convents and live independently. While growing up, Mr. Monahan recalls having nuns around the house. His "eldest nun-aunt", Rose Elizabeth Monahan, "used to cram [he and his sister] into some wrecked convent school desks in the attic and teach [them] about God." He goes on to write:

"She nearly gave my sister a complex for life by dragging her out of a room full of uncles at the age of four and hissing at her, 'Those are men! Men!' forcing her to change, crying, aged four, out of a short yellow nightgown which only she had noticed."²

In "Growing Up Racist,"⁸ Mr. Monahan writes of his father's attitude toward African Americans:

"I come from a long line of Yankee racists, who never even saw any black people yet disliked them, and a long line of Irish Catholic urban racists, who saw black people every day and on the whole disliked them more. This was disturbingly contrary to popular wisdom (that is, opposed to Error, as both the Church of England and the Spanish Inquisition used to say) when I was growing up. It took me 20 years to get Dad to stop saying 'nigger,' and then when he did he said 'black chaps' instead."⁸

Among the Monahans, it was Mr. Monahan's paternal grandmother Mary Regina McGee who commanded authority over the family. Mr. Monahan describes her as "a matriarch of the Boston Irish variety (you don't mess with them, ever, take my word for it)".⁶ She lived a long life, but, unfortunately, had to bury four of her five sons before her own time came on April 27, 1997. It was on May 18, 1990 that William Joseph Monahan finally succumbed to the cancer that he had been diagnosed with several months earlier.⁵ He was buried at the Massachusetts National Cemetery in Bourne, Massachusetts, where his brother, a retired Master Sergeant of the US Air Force, had also been buried.^9-10 It was exactly a year to the day that his father died that Mr. Monahan completed "Light House", later to be published as Light House: A Trifle by Riverhead Books.⁷ A fine tribute to his father, as well as perhaps the beginning of Mr. Monahan's literary career.

Sources:

1) Cathy Kendrick. "Descendants of John McGee", FamilyTreeMaker.com, Retrieved 2010-06-24.
2) William Monahan. "Actual Modern Popery: Pope-Art Through the Ages", New York Press, vol. 8, no. 42 (October 18–24, 1995), pp. 1, 18, 20, 22, 24.

3) William Monahan. "M1: It Really Was Father's Day", New York Press, vol. 10, no. 23 (June 11–17, 1997), pp. 32, 34.

4) William Monahan. "Merry Crucifix", New York Press, vol. 9, no. 48 (November 27–December 3, 1996), pp. 6–8.
5) William Monahan. "The Irish question", Old Crow Review, no. 6, FkB Press, December 1995, 5 pages.
6) William Monahan. "The Barbecutioner's Song: On Smoke, Flame, Boredom and Filial Piety", New York Press, vol. 8, no. 22 (May 31–June 6, 1995), p. 19.
7) Darcy Cosper (2001-10-02). "Writer's 'trifle' Aims Higher", The Hartford Courant.
8) William Monahan. "Black Comedy: Growing Up Racist", New York Press, vol. 9, no. 40 (October 2–8, 1996), pp. 31–32.
9) Find A Grave, Inc. Find A Grave, database, "Record, William J. Monahan (1934-1990), Memorial No. 1004292"
10) Find A Grave, Inc. Find A Grave, database, "Record, George F. Monahan (1932-1990), Memorial No. 1004219"