John Dolan (writer)

John Carroll Dolan (born July 1955) is an American poet, author and essayist.[1] He has been revealed as the once-secret identity behind the pseudonym Gary Brecher, fictional author of the War Nerd column for now-defunct newspaper the eXile. John Dolan now writes as the War Nerd, no longer "in full character"[2] as Brecher, the two identities having merged.

Dolan formerly also wrote for and co-edited the now defunct the eXile under his own name. After the newspaper's demise he was a regular contributor to NSFWCorp and then from 2013 to 2015 to PandoDaily, again both as Dolan and Brecher.[3][4][5] He currently appears on a regular podcast "Radio War Nerd", which he co-hosts with Mark Ames.[6] He also writes the podcast's subscriber newsletter and contributes to the eXiled Online.[7]

Biography

Dolan was born in Denver, Colorado in 1955.[1] Dolan taught and studied at UC Berkeley, where he completed a PhD thesis on the literary works of the Marquis de Sade.[8]

He has published poems in many U.S. and New Zealand literary journals and his first collection won the Berkeley Poetry Prize in 1988. In 1993, he moved to Dunedin, New Zealand, where he lectured at the University of Otago.[1] During his time in Dunedin, Dolan contributed regularly to the Otago literary journal Deep South. In 2001, he resigned his academic post, and moved to Moscow to become co-editor of the eXile, a bi-weekly English-language publication based there.[1]

He was the first reviewer of A Million Little Pieces by James Frey, a bestseller featured on Oprah's monthly bookclub, to correctly expose this alleged memoir as fraudulent years before that was officially brought to light (the title of Dolan's review was "A Million Pieces of Shit" and the first line was "This is the worst thing I have ever read").[9]

He is married to his former student, the author, reviewer, poet and essayist Katherine Liddy.[10] He relocated to Canada to teach at the University of Victoria in Canada in 2006. He claims to have been fired for encouraging students to criticize George Monbiot in 2008.[11]

Until spring 2010, Dolan was an associate professor of English composition and literature at the American University of Iraq - Sulaimani. He was fired in 2010 and wrote a lengthy article on his experience there.[12] The dean of the school, John Agresto, responded in a blog piece calling Dolan "a liar and a fraud".[13]

He subsequently taught English as a Second Language in Najran, Saudi Arabia, until he was fired for one of the War Nerd Articles, and shortly after from East Timor, where he was fired for writing an article on the Indonesian occupation of Timor.[2] He is currently based out of Europe where he has been writing a retelling of The Illiad, which is scheduled for release in October 2017.[14]

Gary Brecher

Gary Brecher is a character invented by Dolan to be the pseudonymous author of The War Nerd column, which first appeared in the eXile, discussing current wars and other military conflicts from the perspective of a "war fan",[15] and later for NSFWCorp, and PandoDaily.[4] "Crude, scatological, un-P.C., yet deeply informed",[16] he analyzes military strategy, tactics, and contexts of ongoing and past conflicts. He was a popular feature of the eXile and was a regular subject of letters to the editor. A collection of his columns was published by Soft Skull Press in June 2008 (ISBN 0979663687).

Brecher's identity was mostly secret throughout the run of the eXile from 1997 to 2008. He was suspected to be Dolan as early as 2005[17] and by 2010 Dolan was openly discussing his alter ego.[18]

Revelation of identity

The fictional version of Brecher's identity, referenced from his first column,[19] was that he was employed as a data entry clerk in Fresno, California and deeply unsatisfied with his job. Mark Ames, editor of the Moscow-based, English language newspaper the eXile offered Brecher a column as a "war reviewer". Brecher wrote that life in Fresno was a "death sentence" and that he spent 15 hours a day in front of a computer ("6 or 7 hours entering civilian numbers for the paycheck and the rest surfing the war news").[19]

In a Dolan article on the eXile about the newspaper and "the strange being known as the War Nerd" (mythologizing Brecher as a separate person to Dolan), Brecher is described as a community-college dropout, and "fat, miserable, and incidentally brilliant".[15] The first hint that Brecher was Dolan was perhaps in an 2001 eXile article, "Cleanse the World", in which Dolan openly admitted to being a "war nerd": "Oh, my poor naive war-nerd brothers, how could you ever have dreamed that Bush...".[20]

The columns were the only source of information on Brecher until an email interview with him conducted by Steve Sailer was published by United Press International.[21] Brecher's reclusive nature and the lack of information about him raised speculation during the interview that Brecher was a pseudonym for another eXile contributor. The use of invented characters was not unprecedented for the eXile.[22]

Researchers of the original Wikipedia Gary Brecher page found the photo[23] on which the illustration at the top of each War Nerd column, supposedly representing Brecher, was based. It was actually that of Roger Edvardsen the tour manager of the Norwegian rhythm & blues band Ehem.[24] One of the page authors emailed the band, and they confirmed the image was of Edvardsen.[23]

Brecher participated in radio interviews including a April 5, 2008, interview by Chuck Mertz on the Evanston/Chicago radio station WNUR [25] and a May 25, 2008 interview by Steve Paulson on Wisconsin Public Radio.[26]

A Buffalo Beast review [17] of Dolan's novel/memoir "Pleasant Hell" stated that "a faithful eXile reader [would] have to be as dense as young John Dolan not to realize you're reading about the birth of 'Gary Brecher' – nome [sic] de guerre of the famed 'War Nerd'." In the memoir, Dolan writes of obsessively studying military history and Jane's manuals while binging on junk food in the basement of a UC Berkeley library building in the mid-seventies. In one War Nerd column, Brecher writes, "I used to spend every free hour, back before there was an internet, going over those big heavy reference books in the library: Jane's Tanks, Jane's Missile Systems, Jane's Combat Vehicles."[27]

On June 25, 2008, the following revelation was published within a short book review in Philadelphia CityPaper.net:[28] "But the War Nerd is, in fact, neither of those things. He is not even Gary Brecher! Brecher is the creation of John Dolan, a poet, novelist, lecturer in English at the University of Victoria, and The eXile co-editor. That's very exciting news for the War Nerd's regular readers: The columns you've been dissecting and debating for the last six years were written by an English professor who writes poetry!"

On November 2, 2010, in an interview with Scott Horton for Antiwar Radio,[18] John Dolan spoke for the first time about his Gary Brecher alter-ego which he described as being strongly based on his younger self. During the interview, he described Gary Brecher "as a more honest version of who I really am".

War Nerd writings

Every two to five weeks, Brecher published his War Nerd column in eXile. In each installment, Brecher offered his idiosyncratic analyses of armed conflict from a military, political, or (rarely) social standpoint. In his first eXile column, Brecher declared that The War Nerd was to be "a column on how all the wars are going, kind of a war reviewer." He has since migrated to the subscription-only Radio War Nerd podcast,[6]

"American peace truly sucks (That's what I live in and work in: American peace. Fresno. Townhouses in a dry riverbed. Scrub acreage with fancy British names. America the hot and stupid)."
"That's why we need a war now and then. You can drain your dick at every bondage site on the web, but you can't really drain your head there, it takes something bigger like a decent war and some of those guncamera shots. I figure about one a year. Which is why this was already a good year."

Following publication of Brecher's article, "Victor Hanson: Portrait of an American Traitor", Hanson responded with an article accusing Brecher of being an anarchist.[29]

In the September 9, 2005 of the eXile, the editors announced that the War Nerd would be suspended without pay for one issue as a result of these accusations. It is doubtful that this was a serious reprimand. Nonetheless, the subsequent issue of the eXile did not contain Brecher's regular column. Another similarly themed Brecher article, "It's All Greek to Victor Davis Hanson", appeared in the December 19, 2005 issue of the American Conservative.[30]

Brecher has summarized his view of modern warfare as follows:

  1. Most wars are asymmetrical/irregular.
  2. In these wars, the guerrillas/irregulars/insurgents do not aim for military victory.
  3. You cannot defeat these groups by killing lots of their members. In fact, they want you to do that.
  4. Hi-tech weaponry is mostly useless in these wars.
  5. "Hearts and minds," meaning propaganda and morale, are more important than military superiority.
  6. Most people are not rational, they are TRIBAL: "my gang yay, your gang boo!" It really is that simple. The rest is cosmetics.[31]

Publications

Non-fiction

Novels

Short fiction

"Children's book"

Poetry

Translation

Criticism

Other publications

See also

Wikiquote has quotations related to: John Dolan

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 "Profile, New Zealand Book Council; retrieved August 4, 2017.
  2. 1 2 Gary Brecher. "The War Nerd: Escape From East Timor (Part One)", pando.com, May 3, 2015; retrieved August 4, 2017.
  3. "Pando: John Dolan," retrieved 26 July 2017.
  4. 1 2 "Gary Brecher, pando.com; retrieved 4 August 2017.
  5. "PandoDaily acquires NSFWCORP to double down on investigative reporting". PandoDaily. November 25, 2013. Retrieved April 24, 2014.
  6. 1 2 Radio War Nerd podcast – with a few exceptions,* episodes available by subscription only (*free "unlocked" full episodes or short episode previews usually noted accordingly in the written episode summary descriptions), retrieved April 9, 2017.
  7. John Dolan, ExiledOnline.com; retrieved August 3, 2017.
  8. Dolan, John Carroll (May 1985). Sadean sympathy: genre, pathos and intention in the fiction of the Marquis de Sade, University of California, Berkeley. 346 leaves (University library listing only; abstract not available); retrieved April 9, 2017.
  9. ""A Million Pieces of Shit", ExiledOnline.com, May 29, 2003; retrieved August 4, 2017.
  10. "[ NZ culture 'hostile to women' – expat writer"], New Zealand Herald, September 16, 2016; retrieved August 4, 2017.
  11. "LIVING WITH CONS AND PAUPERS IN CANADA’S ARCTIC WATERS". The eXile. August 18, 2009. Archived from the original on June 10, 2011. Retrieved 2013-08-01.
  12. Dolan, John. "I Was a Professor at the Horribly Corrupt American University of Iraq... Until the Neocons Fired Me". AlterNet. Retrieved October 8, 2010.
  13. John Agrestom "John Dolan, Academic Fraud", auisstudent.blogspot.co.nz, October 26, 2010.
  14. "The War Nerd Iliad (Paperback) – by John Dolan (Adapter)". amazon.com. Retrieved August 7, 2017. Book scheduled for release October 2017
  15. 1 2 "Conceived in Sin: The Online Audience and the Case of the eXile", linuxmafia.com, April 2005 (reposting from original eXile article).
  16. War Nerd, amazon.com; accessed August 7, 2017.
  17. 1 2 Review of 'Pleasant Hell', Buffalo Beast, December 14, 2005.
  18. 1 2 Gary Brecher. "Antiwar Radio with Scott Horton". antiwar.com. Retrieved August 7, 2017.
  19. 1 2 "Meet the War Nerd." Exiled Online, April 21, 2002; retrieved August 7, 2017.
  20. Cleanse the World, exile.ru (2001).
  21. Sailer, Steve.War Nerd's Interview with UPI (March 2003), exile.ru; accessed August 7, 2017.
  22. "Feis the Music!" (2003), eXile.ru; accessed August 7, 2017.
  23. 1 2 This is the original (perhaps stock image) photo that Brecher's illustration was clearly modelled upon (via the Internet archive).
  24. "Roger Edvardsen". archive.org. Archived from the original on March 16, 2004.
  25. "Archived copy". Archived from the original on July 23, 2008. Retrieved February 6, 2009.
  26. "To the best of our KNOWLEDGE". To the best of our KNOWLEDGE. Archived from the original on May 8, 2012. Retrieved 2016-05-07.
  27. "Most Valuable Weapon: the RPG" (2001), eXile.ru; accessed August 7, 2017.
  28. Fertig, Tami (July 10–16, 2008). Review of "War Nerd" by Gary Brecher – 4th review from top in Non-Fiction Reviews, first published June 25, 2008; retrieved April 9, 2017.
  29. Hanson, Victor Davis (August 26, 2005). "The Paranoid Style". National Review Online. Retrieved February 26, 2010.
  30. "Archived copy". Archived from the original on October 23, 2006. Retrieved November 6, 2006.
  31. "THE EXILE – The Doctrine of Asymmetrical War – By Gary Brecher – The War Nerd". Exile.ru. Retrieved 2016-05-07.
  32. Review of 'Pleasant Hell'Buffalo Beast, December 14, 2005

Archives

This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.