Excitement's Crave - a line-by-line analysis.

[trabuco]

Aug 1, 2016 12:49:22 GMT cityofchill said:

Jul 31, 2016 19:44:57 GMT trabuco said:

"Planned exile"

"Plans take action"

"The second stanza ends with:
The selected route will unmask/Character when plans take action"

The way the second stanza ends I think he is lecturing himself.

Whether rightly or wrongly in someone else's eyes

I interpret his use of the word "Character" to mean "The EAR".p

Recently on this board I read a post from a member who has since disappeared

but before he did he posted something I found interesting.

He said something like what if he is apprehended and he pleads guilty to murder.

His first murder that happened in another country in the year 1965. If he is locked up

in that foreign country for life, where would that leave the investigation in California?

Cityofchill, do you know the date when authorities received the Excitement Crave poem or when

they believe it was written?

Trabuco,

I do believe that "character" is kind of a double-entendre. The author uses it to complete his point about choosing to define his character — in his case, how his crimes reveal his character. But I also believe he does mean character as a reference to himself — "The selected route will unmask / Character." So believe he is also saying that that his actions will tell us who he is as a person, as well as what his character is, in the sense of his values and personality traits.

This is another example of the author playing with words and demonstrating his intelligence by using a word like "character" in two different ways — to speak of his values and personality, and also to refer to his actual identity as the EAR.

I don't want to say much more on this point here, because I am doing a painstaking analysis of these lines that I hope to post soon, and would prefer to focus on that for now, rather than being redundant and making my point here and in my analysis of the two lines and their possible meaning(s).

I wish I could write like you.

[cityofchill]

Aug 1, 2016 21:55:05 GMT trabuco said:

Aug 1, 2016 12:49:22 GMT cityofchill said:

Trabuco,

I do believe that "character" is kind of a double-entendre. The author uses it to complete his point about choosing to define his character — in his case, how his crimes reveal his character. But I also believe he does mean character as a reference to himself — "The selected route will unmask / Character." So believe he is also saying that that his actions will tell us who he is as a person, as well as what his character is, in the sense of his values and personality traits.

This is another example of the author playing with words and demonstrating his intelligence by using a word like "character" in two different ways — to speak of his values and personality, and also to refer to his actual identity as the EAR.

I don't want to say much more on this point here, because I am doing a painstaking analysis of these lines that I hope to post soon, and would prefer to focus on that for now, rather than being redundant and making my point here and in my analysis of the two lines and their possible meaning(s).

I wish I could write like you.

That's very nice of you to say, Trabuco. Thank-you 🙂

Oh, and as far as the date it was received, I think it was December, 1977. So pretty early in the offender's criminal career. Perhaps someone can correct me if I'm wrong about the date. I also don't remember if it was sent to the police or to the local media.


Just thought I would add, for those following the thread....

I am busting my butt trying to get the final part of my analysis of the second stanza completed and posted. It covers a lot of ground and I am juggling a lot of different projects, so it's taking a while to finish it. I hope to post it soon and then move on to the third stanza. Thanks to everyone who has read and contributed to this thread! I'm going to complete the analysis as I originally intended, and I am going to do it properly. But it might take a while, lol. My apologies for the lengthy posts and long gaps between them. I hope that they are interesting and insightful. 

[cityofchill]

Analysis of Stanza II, Part IV — Childhood's End ~

~ Introduction

So we are two stanzas deep in a poem that is only seven stanzas long (not including the three-line sign-off, which mimics the concluding couplet of a Shakespearean Sonnet, but as with everything else about this poem, does it in its own strange and unusual way. But we have a while still before we get to that). For now I want to bring together everything I have written so far, touching on the first stanza briefly, but really delving deep into the second stanza and the theme that these eight lines of poetry establish and then build on, before the EAR appears suddenly in the last stanza, before signing off using his moniker as a kind of middle finger to the audience, the victims, the city of Sacramento, and "prevailing society" (ln. 4). There is a lot of material in this essay, I know, and it doesn't always flow smoothly because i'm not approaching this project with an overarching thesis to unify the whole and bring it under control. So I've divided it into two thematic sections: one that underlines three of the most important elements of the first two stanzas — what I call the three P's: pronouns, paradoxes, and prevailing society. The second part is devoted to a deep analysis of the author's use of language in the third and fourth line of the second stanza, with special attention to the allusions he makes to his identity and crimes when he says "The selected route will unmask / Character when plans take action" (lns. 7-8). These lines "unmask" the author's true character and set the stage for the double-game that he plays until the very end when he does unmask himself, so to speak, and literally jumps into the poem, Sacramento's phantom menace of the night in all his glory.

So, let's get to it then....

~ Part I: Pronouns, Paradoxes, and Prevailing Society (oh my!)

For many, the most perplexing detail about this poem is that the EAR wrote it at all. Here is public enemy number one, communicating directly with the public he loves to terrorize, but he only spends one stanza euphemistically referring to his actual crimes. Instead, the poem is mostly a meditation on choice as a key feature in becoming a mature person — examining questions about maturity, what our values say about us, and how one deals with the "task" (ln. 5) of choosing them. This seems to make no sense. Why would this sexual terrorist and narcissist use his grand opportunity to communicate with the public to talk about something so...pedestrian? What do we imagine a malignant narcissist like EAR would want to communicate to the city he is terrorizing? Perhaps we think he would be gloating, bragging, talking about how superior he is, going into detail about his crimes, doing everything he can to make Sacramento afraid, and generally being the diabolical criminal his crimes show us he is. So if that is what we imagine EAR should be doing with his poem, what is he actually doing and why? In order to answer these questions and better understand what is really going on in the poem, we must throw out any preconceived notions of what we think a serial rapist would write a poem about, and instead look closely at what is written. We must be willing to go down the rabbit hole and try to understand what point the author is trying to make and why it is so important to him.

Detective (Ret.) Jim Bevins and others are right to find it strange that a poem purportedly written by a serial rapist who is holding a city hostage (and asking for a ransom too! His penis may be small, but his balls are gigantic) would write a kind of skin-deep reflection on the nature of growing up in American society. It doesn't make any sense! However, if one is willing to really listen to the author and pay attention to what message comes through, it becomes apparent that it does makes sense; there is a method behind the madness, and all the talk of maturity, values, society, decorum does have a point. We want to imagine that a psychopath serial rapist would write something much different, much more manifestly evil and twisted. It is in our nature to want to believe that a monster should look and sound like a monster. But the poem is no mistake. This is the EAR speaking, and we need to listen to him and take him at his word if we want to understand him and his motives better.

Although EC may seem like a harmless little thing for the first six stanzas, the view of society and the maturation process described by the author is disturbing on a number of levels, and meshes quite well with the psychopath's self-centred worldview and narcissism, with a dash of cold cruelty and gloating for good measure. Israel Keyes' suicide poem is a reminder that serial killers don't necessarily revel in their crimes when they have the opportunity to make a "statement." A psychopath takes no responsibility for their harmful acts — it is always the fault of someone else, something else. And that is what Excitement's Crave is all about — an indictment of a society with conflicting values and a tremendous emphasis on self-gratification and materialism as prime goals. For EAR, American Morality is a farce, prevailing society is a joke, and his greatness comes from the same quality that makes so many American heroes worthy of admiration and adulation: their ability to successfully blaze a trail and be true to themselves. Excitement's Crave is a lot of things. I've already spoken in some detail about it being an origin story that feeds the author's obvious quest for fame and notoriety. Perhaps more than anything, the poem is an apologia in the classic sense of a defence or explanation for one's opinions or actions. EC operates on many different levels, and while I don't think the author intentionally wrote such a layered poem, it is what it is, and the layers are there if we are willing to take the time to peel them back.

For all its layers of significance, EC is a very compact poem, and the first six lines take us from birth to maturity without lingering long. Up to this point, the poem seems to he be a superficial and mundane reflection on the precariousness of life, the fine line that separates life and death (a line EAR will come to know first-hand when he morphs into a killer, and one which he straddles each time he strikes), and the transition from youth to adulthood. On the surface, it seems not much is going on other than some less-than-insightful statements about life, maturity, society. However, when we take a closer look at a few things, the poem starts to take on more significance, and the EAR's worldview comes through loud and clear:

All those mortal's surviving birth
Upon facing maturity,
Take inventory of their worth
To prevailing society.

Choosing values becomes a task;
Oneself must seek satisfaction

Even though the poem focuses on a human's development and journey through life in the context of "prevailing society," the early stanzas speak about experiences in the third-person voice, which gives the author's reflections a distanced quality. He does not use first-person pronouns until the final stanza, when he suddenly injects himself into the poem with references to "my life" and "I'd like to add" (lns. 21, 23). The poem only has six stanzas, not including the concluding "triplet," when he announces himself by name, and brings the poem to an end. So what is going on in the majority of the poem, when the author himself isn't even a character? Up until then, his reflections on society and the process of maturation possess the quality of an outsider looking in: "All those mortals surviving birth" who take inventory of their worth. This is very different than saying "All us mortals surviving birth" who take inventory of our worth, because by removing himself from the picture, he is suggesting that he is somehow outside of it — an observer of a phenomenon, but not a participant in it. And yet the whole poem is a reference to his experience, his life, his journey, his maturation. He may be trying to make a generalized reflection about life in America, but he is doing it very much through his vision, which is distorted and twisted in all sorts of ways.

So why does he not include himself in the poem until the sixth stanza, when he appears fully formed, as the mythical East Area Rapist, ruminating about a future crime and asking for a ransom from the city of Sacramento to pay for a movie of his life? He is clearly talking about himself and his life before this point, but we don't hear from him in the first-person until he puts on his mask, so to speak, and taunts Sacramento and his victims. If we didn't know what this poem was and who purportedly wrote it, we wouldn't know what to make of the first five stanzas. There is nothing personal in it, no deep insights or reflections; just general observations spoken from the perspective of an outsider, who doesn't seem count himself as one of those mortals who go through the process of birth and maturity that he describes. So why does the author choose to speak as an outside observer about his own experiences in society until the very end? My feeling is that he does feel like an outsider, and is an outsider — a pariah in the truest sense — perhaps wearing the mask of one who belongs during the day when he is the "unsuspected," as Quester has called him. But in speaking about the process of maturation and the task of choosing values in the context of society, the author knows he stands apart from "prevailing society," because the urges that lure him out into the night to rape and terrorize have probably been evolving within him for some time. Even in the context of the deeply divided culture of the 60's and 70's, the author knows he has no place. And so when he speaks of the process, even when it becomes clear that he is speaking about himself and his need to "seek satisfaction," he is standing outside the social norms he speaks of, and is looking on as an outsider and observer of a society he knows he is not a part of. EAR's position as outside observer is something he is comfortable with in real-life as well. We know he spends hour after hour watching the society he speaks of: every aspect of it, mundane and sordid, paying out in front of him as he peers into the lives of unknowing victims living their lives unaware that they are being observed and studied. The author is only able to make the shift from third-person observer to first-person character in the final stanza when he makes an appearance as himself, the villainous rapist who'd like to "add the wife of a mafia Lord" to his "file" (lns. 23-24). The euphemism and indirect reference to his actual crime is extremely interesting, but that discussion is for another time. For now, I think it is important to keep in mind that, although the author is telling us about himself and his story, he feels the need to do so from a remove, because he is discussing his evolution in the context of a society he does not feel a part of. When he speaks of "All those mortals" in the very first line, he is separating himself from everyone else in dramatic fashion. And he knows his crimes will make him immortal, as I discussed at length in the essay EAR, American Outlaw. It is also worth noting again that the third-person puts him in a role he is very comfortable with — that of the observer, watching life pay out from a remove.

In a matter of six lines of verse, the author of EC takes us from birth to youth to adulthood. While he uses third-person pronouns in a way that makes it seem as though he is talking about a general process that other people experience, it is apparent that he is, in fact, discussing his own evolution in the context of "society." This is very much a them vs. me statement, wherein the author tells us what makes him different from others. All people are born, go through their youth not thinking much about who they or what their values are, but there comes a time when the carefree days of youthfulness vanish and we are forced to take stock of ourselves, measure our "worth" against the norms of "prevailing society," "take an inventory" (ln. 3) of ourself, our desires, our upbringing, the values and cultural norms we have learned from parents, peers, teachers, role models, society, and make choices about what matters to us. The writer is calling attention to how paramount his own process of maturity is, spending most of the poem lingering on the same theme: maturity, as a thing and a process. Excitement's Crave, more than anything else, is a poem about growing up and becoming mature. But what does that entail for a violent psychopath? As the poem opens up in later stanzas, we get a better idea, but the second stanza already starts to hint at the answer.

The poem's preoccupation with the transition from youth to adulthood is, I believe, an important clue that the author is either going through this transition, or has recently made the transition from youth to mature adulthood. The second stanza is really all about values, and making a conscious choice to use values as a way to "seek satisfaction" (ln. 8). This is where we can start to see the author's worldview taking shape, and that it is essentially a rejection of the values of what he calls "prevailing society." Values, along with morals, inform our worldviews and shape our understanding of the world, our place in it, and what our obligations are to ourselves and to others. For EAR, values are a means by which he can achieve "satisfaction," not by grounding his actions in a set of political, philosophical or spiritual beliefs, but rather in a simplistic, misanthropic equation: for EAR, satisfaction is achieved through the commission of his crimes and all that goes into them. He craves excitement, and achieves it through his criminal acts — "excitement seeking" — which in turn gives him a sense of satisfaction. While those mortals who survive birth must choose values, the author is above all that; his value is singular and all-consuming.

The writer spends most of the first two stanzas (and much of the poem) making a simple and mundane observation about human life: that there comes a point when we reach "maturity" and have to make decisions about our lives, in the context of the society we live in. I have already postulated that his preoccupation with this process tells us it is something that he has recently experienced himself — the transition from youth to "maturity." There is no doubt in my mind that he started having thoughts and fantasies about rape and torture at a young age, which would make the process of "Choosing values" (ln. 5) quite a task indeed, since he is part of a society that paradoxically loves and loathes criminals, respects people who reject social norms in order to be their own person, and simultaneously values conformity to certain cultural norms (which he will touch on in stanzas three and four), while at the same time putting tremendous significance on seeking satisfaction through the accumulation of wealth and material goods. Individualism, in other words. Contained in his bland observation about a simple fact of human life and society, the writer does have a point he wants to make about values that is directly related to him, even if he speaks about it from a remove: there is an inherent contradiction implicit in the values of American culture and it muddies the waters for a youth who must choose his values upon reaching maturity. He picks up on the two opposing forces of society — "prevailing society," or "what's right and expected," (ln. 16) but also the "promise for more" (ln. 10) that is implicit in the American dream.

In the eyes of the narrator-observer, the process of choosing values has only one outcome worth pursuing : "Oneself must seek satisfaction." The author's takeaway from the process of becoming a man is that pursuing one's own gratification is the main point of life. In American society, achieving satisfaction as an adult is often synonymous with achieving success and material wealth by excelling in one's vocation. At the same time, the author of EC understands that Americans don't have nearly as much respect or reverence for the salaried worker as they do for the self-made man of wealth and leisure. The author will reflect on this fact in the next two stanzas, but for now he needs to make a point about the purpose of life. The point he makes is really quite self-evident and redundant — that people are born, grow up, make choices, and become adults — but his conclusion is the interesting thing, which is that maturity teaches only one lesson: that satisfaction must be attained. This imperative to seek satisfaction is to be expected of a rapist-killer, but the writer wants the reader to see that it is not just him who is corrupted. We are all corrupted by prevailing society's conflicted values and mixed messages about the pursuit of happiness in society. Is there a moral truth that a person should seek to embody in their lives, or is self-gratification the main thing about human life? It is clear what the writer of EC believes. The only thing that matters is one's own urges and the imperative to satisfy them.

It is amazing how, when I start writing these essays, I am reminded how many layers there are to every line of EC; all the levels on which it operates, and how much it reveals about the author's character and worldview. His description of the journey from birth to maturity is not just a detached retelling of his own maturation process, but also a biting commentary on the hypocrisy of American values told from the point of view of one standing outside those values, which on one hand teach us to contribute to society in a certain way — get a job, receive a paycheque, get married, buy a house, be a good person, etc. — while at the same time reminding us that this kind of life is portrayed in American culture tremendously unsatisfying, while the real heroes are the non-conformists who make a successful life for themselves by rejecting what is accepted ("what is accepted seems tame") and choosing their own path. So there is an inherent contradiction in mainstream American values that the author of this poem takes great pains to call the reader's attention to. As much as American values teach people to follow the rules, do well in school, work hard, etc., on the other hand, America is a country born of revolution, with an underlying pioneering spirit that also rewards individualists who play by their their own rules. The "immortal" American heroes revered by the public are not generally those who followed the rules, but those who blazed a trail and pursued their own form of satisfaction.

Im EC, the values of the "prevailing society" the author speaks of are a paradox. How does one square the family values morality of Christian American with the sexual revolution and free love mentality of the 60's and 70's? How does one believe that hard work is a virtue in and of itself when advertising and popular culture glorifies the life of leisure and worships the god of all things material? The fact is that these conflicts in values cannot just be papered over — they are in opposition to one another, so that the same men and women who go to church every Sunday to hear sermons about Jesus' love of the poor, the evils of greed, lust, avarice, covetousness, etc. also live in a culture where all those things are not only facts of life, but in many ways glorified by popular culture. What happens in church is not an accurate reflection of life outside its doors. When one "takes inventory of their worth / To prevailing society," (lns. 3-4) how is it possible to measure one's values against a society with such deep cultural divisions? What are the values of prevailing society anyways? Ask a liberal Democrat and they will give you a very different answer than a conservative Republican or an Evangelical Christian or an avowed atheist, or a Marxist, and so on.

In the 1960's and 70's, American society was riven by a break in society that occurred when the Boomer generation took inventory of their parents' values — the values of the so-called Greatest Generation — and found them to be wanting in many ways. Individuality and the pursuit of individual gratification came to be the mantra of the youth counter-culture, and part of that was a rejection of the older generation's sexual mores in favour of "free love." Sexual satisfaction was (and is) central to American life and culture. The "free love" ethos of the 1960's continued well into the 70's, and in many ways came to define our perception of the era. Before AIDS ended the free love philosophy of the 60's counter-culture, sexual gratification was mainstream and just about everyone under the age of forty was indulging in the new-found liberation. In many ways, EC paints EAR/ONS as a twisted byproduct of his generation; an example of a man being his true self, so to speak, seeking his satisfaction with a fervour that disregards all other life but his own, except in its ability to help or hinder him. In a way, he doesn't actually see himself as being much different than the "others" (ln. 13) who hear "temptations call," except for the fact that he has liberated himself from any pretence, however superficial, of being limited by the morals of prevailing society. When temptations call, he answers, no matter how sick and perverted they are. Satisfaction must be achieved. The "others" he speaks of are presumably all those who feel they must suppress their most extreme urges in order to uphold some standard of common decency. His disdain for the others — prevailing society — is obvious at various points in the poem, but in the second stanza he is mainly focused on the task of reaching maturity in a society dominated by the values of self-satisfaction and individuality over the collective spirit, sacrifice and family values that the Greatest Generation embodied and instilled in their children, but which the youth counter-culture saw as empty and meaningless in the face of social injustice at home and the war in Vietnam. EAR is caught between these two worlds, just as many young people were at the time, and the poem is largely a meditation on what a maturing man does when they have to choose values within a society whose cultural norms are in flux. For the EAR, even the counter-culture youth have it wrong. Speaking as an onlooker, he sees that their ideas of sexual liberation don't go far enough. If individuality and being true to oneself is a virtue, then why constrain yourself with the bullshit morals and values of a corrupted society?



**Note: I wanted to get this posted as soon as I could even though it isn't finished. I am still working on those devilish two lines in the second stanza, and that was meant to be the second part of a two-part essay. But because it has taken me so long to complete this first part, I want to post it now, because it may he another few days before I can finish the second part. Unfortunately my bold and italics disappear when i paste this into a thread, and I have serious trouble editing such a long post with my tablet. So i will have to return at some point and fix all these essays up, but for now, I'm just trying to get them done. The next post will be the second part of this essay, dealing entirely with the second two lines of the second stanza, and that will be the last post on the second stanza. I have already begun work on my essay for the third and fourth stanzas. i actually had the whole second part almost done and then I came across the FDLE profile again and read the whole thing again, and it changed the way I viewed those two lines in some important ways. As a result, I've had to go back and practically re-write the thing, making reference to the profile at different points, and refining my own analysis with the insights gained from re-reading the profile.

[Drifter]

And that is what Excitement's Crave is all about — an indictment of a society with conflicting values and a tremendous emphasis on self-gratification and materialism as prime goals. For EAR, American Morality is a farce, prevailing society is a joke...

 ... an interesting interpretation. To me, this so speaks about America after Nam.

Drifter

[william]

I remember reading something on one of the EAR/ONS sites regarding the title of the poem. Does anyone know what the reference means about "William" Grayson and Marion (or perhaps her name is spelled Marian)? I am curious about this...

[almagata]

CoC,

I agree that EC is a statement on American values that EAR was critical of. Do you think EAR was making a political statement by targeting people who were employed in specific occupations? If yes, then how do you explain that attacks on young girls? Was that a parallel to soldier behavior in Vietnam or something else?

[biglebowskyoz]

I hate to praise this piece of sht but I think this poem is very well written and he must be really intelligent. I usually think poems are not very good and hard to make sense of but this one was fairly easy. Why didn't Le go to all the colleges and schools and post this copy of the paper and what is assumed to be homework on that colonel or general can't remember exactly? They should have put it up at every school and college in the state asking for info.

[Drifter]

Aug 9, 2016 10:09:02 GMT william said:

I remember reading something on one of the EAR/ONS sites regarding the title of the poem. Does anyone know what the reference means about "William" Grayson and Marion (or perhaps her name is spelled Marian)? I am curious about this...

Here's one reference thread, below.  But there are other threads, as the Marion/Grayson discussion is spread out over several threads.  Read back through this line-by-line analysis from CofC; it also contains references to Marion and Grayson.  You can also use the Search function by typing in "Marion" and "Grayson".

www.earonsgsk.proboards.com/thread/1768/work-col-john-boyd-poem

Drifter

[Drifter]

biglebowskyoz wrote:

he [EAR] must be really intelligent.

Yes, I would agree.

And the EC poem comes across as written by someone who was vastly more mature and/or intelligent than the person who wrote those silly homework papers.

D.

[cityofchill]

Hey William,

akwliks has done quite a bit of work comparing William Grayson's poem 'The Swamp Fox' to 'Excitement's Crave.' Here is a link to one of his posts on that topic: earonsgsk.proboards.com/thread/160/excitements-crave?page=3

I discussed the link between one line from Grayson's poem and 'Excitement's Crave', with specific reference to the latter's title, pretty extensively a few pages back ( earonsgsk.proboards.com/thread/928/excitements-crave-line-analysis?page=4 ). Other posters offered their own insights into the connection in this thread as well as in other threads on this board. There is also a tenuous connection between the subject matter of 'The Swamp Fox' — a poem about Francis Marion, a historical hero of the American Revolutionary War who used guerilla tactics against British soldiers and loyalists — and the EAR/ONS' own use of "guerilla-like" tactics in his crimes. As I said, the connection is tenuous at best, but still worth noting.

After my brief (and unfinished!) analysis of the second stanza  I've found a few additional connections between 'The Swamp Fox' and EC. One of them is that they are both myth-making hero-narratives of American "rebels" who use innovative tactics to achieve their goals. For Marion, that goal was defeating British soldiers and loyalists as part of a heroic struggle for American Independence. For EAR, the goal was seeking his own gratification by raping, torturing, and terrorizing victims in their own homes. Whether or not there is any intentional connection between EC and Grayson's poem is competely hypothetical and based almost entirely on the poem's theme, and by the appearance in 'The Swamp Fox' of the those two key words together in the same order (but without the possessive apostrophe the writer of EC gives to the word "excitement" in the title):  "In fever's wild excitement crave, / And find refuge in the grave." Another similarity between Grayson's poem and EC is evident in these same two verses: both employ an eight-syllable verse, even though Grayson strings together four iambs instead of EC's four trochees per line. Grayson also employs an AABB CCDD rhyme scheme that is different from Excitement's Crave ABAB CDCD. But both of them struggle to keep the rhythm of their respective poems in check, and they have plenty of ragged areas where their poetic rhythm falls apart completely, like the second line from Grayson's poem quoted above. If Grayson's work is an inspiration for the author of EC, it's no wonder his poem is so mediocre.

Whether or not there actually is a substantive and meaningful connection between the two poems, taking a look at the two of them together reminds us of one of the few facts we have in this case: the writer of EC — who I believe to be EAR — is a mediocre amateur poet . I was recently directed to something written by a former member of this board named Sandia who no longer posts here. She has written that there was a return address on the envelope that originally contained EC, and that it led back to a "curmudgeonly" amateur poet who was a member of a class called World of Poetry run by a man named Eddie Lou Cole, who apparently held classes, contests, and a publication for amateur poets in the Sacramento area. Apparently the police concluded that the curmudgeonly poet was not the author of EC. Sandia has claimed in the past to have sources inside LE, so it is possible that she learned this information from one of those sources. Here is a link to the page where the claim is made: originalnightstalker.proboards.com/thread/525/excitements-crave-book-discipline-parallels.

The links I've provided should help you better understand the connection between these two poems, William.

As for Sandia's claim about the "curmudgeonly" poet who had attended Eddie Lou Cole's classes...if it's true, it could be a possible lead. How would EAR know this person, know they were an amateur poet, and want to put his address on the envelope? Is it possible that they attended a class together at some point? I am quite convenced that the writer of EC had studied and written poetry before sending in this homage to himself iin December of 1977. EC does not suggest an author with no experience writing poetry or who has no knowledge of poetic conventions, but it also doesn't suggest an author who studied poetry at the university level. Something like Eddie Lou Cole's World of Poetry sounds like a much better fit for the man who wrote 'Excitement's Crave.' I'm not in touch with Sandia, but if someone is, perhaps they can ask her what her source for this story is.

Peace y'all

cityofchill

PS..


..I know I've written A LOT on the secomd stanza of EC, and still have to post one more essay on it before I move on to three and four, which I am going to discuss together. I thank all of you who have been following my work on the poem, and who have slogged through my lengthy, poorly edited posts. I am really trying to make this analysis deep and thorough, and because the first and second stanzas frame the rest of the poem, I think it is important to take some extra time lingering on them to help us better understand what comes later. So thanks again to everyone reading my posts and contributing to the thread. It is your observations, questions, criticisms and interpretations that make this this thread interesting and compel me to keep my mind open as I do the work. So thank-you to everyone. I hope to have the second part of Childhood's End up by the weekend, and I hope that those following the thread can comment on what I've written and add their own thoughts and insights.

Peace

[cornbread]

Aug 10, 2016 0:46:35 GMT biglebowskyoz said:

I hate to praise this piece of sht but I think this poem is very well written and he must be really intelligent. I usually think poems are not very good and hard to make sense of but this one was fairly easy. Why didn't Le go to all the colleges and schools and post this copy of the paper and what is assumed to be homework on that colonel or general can't remember exactly? They should have put it up at every school and college in the state asking for info.

I think he may well have lots of specialized knowledge, or even a savant's specific expert skill at one or two particular things, but I don't get the sense he's the possessor of what you might refer to as a classic high-level intelligence. (He is certainly smart enough not to get caught, which is something in and of itself. If he's not smart, he's lucky.)

I say all this with the caveat that I may well be wrong (the admittance of which is often seen as a mark of intelligence, incidentally).

I will also genially differ with some on the quality of the poem. I don't think it's very well written by any measure, and I also don't think easy to read = good. Then again, art's in the eye of the beholder, right?

That said, as lunatic psychopath poesy goes, it's right up there.

[biglebowskyoz]

Wooooow cityofchill that was absolutely amazing. Well done.

[cityofchill]

Aug 10, 2016 6:28:51 GMT cornbread said:

Aug 10, 2016 0:46:35 GMT biglebowskyoz said:

I hate to praise this piece of sht but I think this poem is very well written and he must be really intelligent. I usually think poems are not very good and hard to make sense of but this one was fairly easy. Why didn't Le go to all the colleges and schools and post this copy of the paper and what is assumed to be homework on that colonel or general can't remember exactly? They should have put it up at every school and college in the state asking for info.

I think he may well have lots of specialized knowledge, or even a savant's specific expert skill at one or two particular things, but I don't get the sense he's the possessor of what you might refer to as a classic high-level intelligence. (He is certainly smart enough not to get caught, which is something in and of itself. If he's not smart, he's lucky.)

I say all this with the caveat that I may well be wrong (the admittance of which is often seen as a mark of intelligence, incidentally).

I will also genially differ with some on the quality of the poem. I don't think it's very well written by any measure, and I also don't think easy to read = good. Then again, art's in the eye of the beholder, right?

That said, as lunatic psychopath poesy goes, it's right up there.

I have to agree with you on the quality of the poem, cornbread. It's not a "good" poem by any measure, and would be of no interest to anyone whatsoever if it didn't have a connection to EAR/ONS. However, as I've said before, it does suggest an author with a basic grasp of poetic conventions and some experience writing poetry. Something like Eddie Lou Cole's World of Poetry classes for amateur poets sounds like exactly the kind of venue the author may have picked up his knowledge 

That said, despite it not being a particularly good poem, it does make for interesting reading and has given me quite a lot of insight into the writer's thinking. It does have a lot of layers, intentional or not, and if those of us who love good poetry are able to look past its poor quality and focus on what's there, I think there is a lot to be learned from it. 
 

[cityofchill]

Aug 9, 2016 7:17:43 GMT Drifter said:

And that is what Excitement's Crave is all about — an indictment of a society with conflicting values and a tremendous emphasis on self-gratification and materialism as prime goals. For EAR, American Morality is a farce, prevailing society is a joke...

 ... an interesting interpretation. To me, this so speaks about America after Nam.

Drifter

Precisely. As I write later in the essay:

"His (the author's) disdain for the "others" — prevailing society — is obvious at various points in the poem, but in the second stanza he is mainly focused on the task of reaching maturity in a society dominated by the values of self-satisfaction and individuality over the collective spirit, sacrifice and family values that the Greatest Generation embodied and instilled in their children, but which the youth counter-culture saw as empty and meaningless in the face of social injustice at home and the war in Vietnam. EAR is caught between these two worlds, just as many young people were at the time, and the poem is largely a meditation on what a maturing man does when they have to choose values within a society whose cultural norms are in flux. For the EAR, even the youth counter-culture of the era has it wrong. Speaking as an onlooker, he sees that their ideas of sexual liberation and individuality don't go far enough. If individuality and being true to oneself is a virtue, then why allow yourself to be constrained by any of the bullshit morals and values of a corrupted society?" 

EAR is very much a product of his time and place — living a short drive from the birthplace of 60's counter-culture — not long after the end of the Vietnam War, in which tens of thousands of young Americans lost their lives for no apparent reason. He is witnessing the aftermath of the rejection by the Boomer generation of old-fashioned American values of sacrifice and hard work embodied by their parents, and replaced with an emphasis on personal liberation, individuality, and self-gratification. The "Greatest Generation" may have survived the Depression, fought and died for freedom in the Second World War, and helped bring about an age of peace and prosperity in America in the late-40's and 50's, but it was that same generation who enforced racial segregation in much of the country, brought the world to the brink of nuclear holocaust, and sent its young men to die by the thousands in a meaningless war in Vietnam. These contradictions were at the heart of American values and all-too-obvious to the children of the Greatest Generation. However, by the mid-to-late 70's the pendulum had swung far in the opposite direction, and the baby had been thrown out with the bathwater. 1970's America was defined by its excesses, with violence and crime at epidemic levels in the cities; once-prosperous cities and towns were hollowed out by riots, declining industry, and white flight to the suburbs; promiscuity and hedonism dominated the personal lives of many young people; and personal gratification and individualism became the preeminent value that defined American culture for many people. I think it's no concidence that the 1970's is also the age of the serial killer, especially in California, the home of the counter-culture. EAR/ONS is a product of his times, and Excitement's Crave is him looking on at the society he is a part of and saying to the world: YOU made me the way I am.

[cityofchill]

Aug 9, 2016 18:16:03 GMT almagata said:

CoC,

I agree that EC is a statement on American values that EAR was critical of. Do you think EAR was making a political statement by targeting people who were employed in specific occupations? If yes, then how do you explain that attacks on young girls? Was that a parallel to soldier behavior in Vietnam or something else?

That is a really interesting point, Almagata, and his choice of victims is something I do plan to discuss in my analysis of the poem. When I went back to the FDLE profile over the weekend, it really talked a lot about his victim choice and the level of violence inflicted on the women compared to the male victims. This got me thinking, and I ended up having to re-write the second part of Childhood's End with d'Ambrosia's words in mind. That's why I posted only part one, and have yet to post part two, Unmasking Character.

But your point about victim choice is absolutely relevant and important, and I think it does factor into EC in the sixth stanza with his euphemistic reference to his crimes and adding a Mafia Lord's wife "to his file." As the FDLE report noted, the EAR/ONS had a tremendous hatred of women, but targeted women of a certain social class. At one point the profile mentions the EAR/ONS targeting victims who he thought were "worthy" of him, which is a bit of a paradox since, in his view, these women were all "whores" and deserved to be raped and murdered. But this notion that the victim must be "worthy" of EAR/ONS appears in the poem as the Mafia Lord's wife — someone of stature who he can bring down a peg by proving that she is just another "whore." I believe EAR/ONS attacked these women as proxies of a woman or women from his own life whom he had tremendous anger and resentment towards. This tells me EAR/ONS probably came from a similar socio-economic background as his victims. 

As far as the attacks being a political statement...I tend to believe his choice of victim was much more personal, but I am certainly open to the idea. I do believe he saw a certain hypocrisy in middle-class and upper-middle-class women, who he believed appeared one way on the surface, but were all "whores" at heart regardless of money and status. The diamond knot tied in expensive embroidery cord that he left on the wrists of the Smiths might have been a comment on this — that you can "package" something in fancy wrapping, but what lies beneath the exterior is rotten. For him, that was what women, and especially women of status, were: common "whores" in pretty packaging. Charlene Smith, more than perhaps any of his murder victims, exemplified the idea of the woman of society who presents herself as one thing, but underneath that exterior, he sees her as just another "whore". But I think the idea of the woman of status who "pretended" to be more than the "whore" he believed she was caused him tremendous anger. I imagine he had watched Charlene and knew about her life and her extra-marital affair — confirmation, in his mind, of what he already believed to be true. Perhaps the woman in his own life who caused him all the anger he directed at women in his crimes also had an affair. It's hard to say, but I think one can speculate pretty confidently that his choice of victims tells us something about his own socio-economic background, and the tremendous hatred for middle-class professional women he showed in his crimes probably gives some indication of the kind of woman who planted all this hatred in his heart.


As for the young girls...it's harder to say. I think he believed all women were whores, regardless of age. But there is a discernable pattern of him choosing mostly working/professional women in their 20's and 30's. As for Vietnam, I really have no idea. Personally, I don't think he fought in Vietnam. I'm not even sure he was even in the military, on account of the hours he kept, but I do think he had a certain respect for the military and may have had a close family member who was in the military and taught him tactics, how to shoot, etc.