Available January 2012 for $5.99 as an
e-book via Amazon Kindle, i-Bookstore, Sony Nook, Barnes & Noble,
Kobo.
It can also be read without any of these
devices, on an ordinary computer, via the free app available at the Amazon
Kindle page. This enables download of a copy, also for $5.99.
The
strangeness of Columbine, an interpretation
by Lear's Shadow
(335 pages with 33 images)
The cover incorporates a photograph from
the National Aeronautical and Space Administration,'s Visible Earth website,
used as per NASA's terms with acknowledgment that NASA owns it, and credit
to Jacques Descloitres, MODIS Land Rapid Response Team.
The NASA caption reads: “An
early season snowfall accents the Rocky Mountains through western and central
Colorado.”
As shown here, the image has been cropped
from its framing on the NASA website, and rotated 90° to the right.
Unlike with most maps, where north is up, in this case west is up.
The image was made on October 26, 2001
by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) aboard the
satellite Terra, 440 miles (705 kilometers) above the Earth.
It offers a perspective on the Rocky Mountains
from high above the Great Plains to the east.
The location of Columbine High School is
shown as a white dot.
The strangeness of Columbine,
an interpretation, does not repeat the content of Lear’s Shadow
as
a website active between May, 2000 and January, 2006. Some of this
content can still be found by those who care to look for it. Lear's
Shadow was, technically speaking, extremely simple.
So, too, is this announcement of The
strangeness of Columbine, an interpretation.
Published by Lear’s Shadow. Configured
for e-reader and distributed by bookbaby.com.
Priced at $5.99
This is as level a playing field as seems
available. For $5.99, anyone with access to the internet and an attention
span has access to The strangeness of Columbine, an interpretation
in its entirety:
Following is the "puzzler" and the Preface.
The puzzler should perhaps be approached
like an extended zen koan with a visual component: for meditation,
with the e-book’s text, in its 21 chapters, an informing aid.
A puzzler
This is a tighter frame on the cover:
about 300 miles (480 km) on the horizontal, and 210 miles (336 km)
on the vertical. West is up.
The dark curve shows the rise of the Rocky Mountain
Front Range west of Denver on October 26, 2001. At lower left, the
Arkansas River flows south, then east from its source in the Mosquito Range
at lower centre. The same area produces source streams for the South
Platte River, which descends to the plain via South Park and Rampart Range.
The white dot shows the location of Columbine
High School just north of the Chatfield Reservoir on the South Platte.
The satellite Terra, from which MODIS made this
record, lifted into Earth-orbit on December 18, 1999, atop an Atlas-Centaur
2-AS rocket launched by NASA from Vandenberg Air Force Base, California.
Atlas rockets and Centaur upper stages are built by Lockheed Martin Space
Systems Astronautics Operations, headquartered at 12999 West Deer Creek
Canyon Road, Jefferson County, Colorado: in this image just within the
dark curve above and to the left of the white dot.
The day the Lockheed Martin Atlas-Centaur lifted
off with Terra-MODIS, the planetary surface it left behind displayed, in
hundreds of thousands of copies, a black and white surveillance image made
at high angle. It showed, on the cover of the December 20, 1999 edition
of TIME Magazine, the interior of the white dot on the previous
April 20.
1
Preface
Some months
after the Columbine High School Massacre of April 20, 1999, the film critic
Richard Roeper published a column in the Chicago Sun Times called
“Columbine gunshots are reverberating still.” In it, he as a journalist
writing for a major newspaper described a phenomenon:
With
other school shootings, in places such as Oregon and Kentucky, there’d
be a flurry of public attention for a week or so after the tragic event
– but then the community would fade from the media’s consciousness.
Columbine, though, has been different. Columbine just keeps producing
ripple effect stories – some sad, some strange, some controversial,
some that just make you shake your head in disbelief.
Roeper then produced
his own list of “ripple-effect stories” that were recent or current as
of the publication date, November 4, 1999. In 2011, this column can
be read at http://zanazl.tripod.com/Columbine/Articles/ TheAftermath.html,
and is recommended. Roeper’s 15-item list developed out of just a
six and a half-month time frame. Even so, it was dense enough that
he added: “for some reason, the madness at Columbine has produced an inordinate
number of strange repercussions.”
The e-book
into which you are being invited more than twelve years after Columbine
isn’t limited, in sustained consideration of Columbine’s “strangeness,”
to the period that produced Roeper’s list. Nor is it limited only
to “ripple- effect stories” and “repercussions.” There are so many
threads of “strangeness” in Columbine, that it’s sometimes been difficult
to know on which ones to focus. My having chosen as I’ve done
is not to imply that other factors were absent in Columbine: far from it.
But as far as I can tell, the ones considered in this e-book have not been
explored at all. Why this has been the case, I can’t say definitively.
Perhaps it has something to do, though, with widespread unconscious immersion
in the presuppositions that go with a humanist and/or Judaeo-Christian
and/or technological way of understanding the world: specifically that
distinctiveness of place doesn’t matter.
The textual
route of this inquiry will possibly offend some people, or be assessed
as utmost effrontery: that I as an outsider – not from Jefferson
County, or Denver, or Colorado, or even the United States – have dared
to comment at all. To this I can only suggest, with respectful allusion
to Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, that sometimes
an outsider does see things that those
2
2
habituated to
their presence may overlook as background, but that to the outsider can
seem remarkable.
That being
said: the perspective developed in this e-book is not that of de
Tocqueville.
What follows
may not be an easy read: the subject matter is not breezy, and would
be disrespected by any affectation of a breezy tone.
Perhaps I ought
also to make clear that, to the best of my admittedly biased awareness,
the development of this perspective has not been informed by any mental
illness.
It’s just a
different way of noticing, piecing together, thinking, whose implications
I can’t claim fully to understand myself. I’m not a journalist, and
did not work from interviews, but rather from texts and images which made
for a pattern of inference. You, the reader, are free to disagree
with this pattern of inference, or with any part of it. The texts
and images from which the inferences are drawn, however, that exist in
publicly archived books and records, or in verifiable copies including
on the internet, are a different matter: they exist as documentary fact.
Much of this e-book consists of presentation and analysis of such material.
Perhaps occasionally, I’ll overreach in interpretation. But I’ll
dare to say: not always.
Because the
approach is unusual, and unfolds over twenty one chapters in three parts,
it seems fair to provide you, the reader, with a preliminary roadmap.
Part One, called
“Columbine (1999/2010),” is in eight chapters. Were this a paginated
book, it would be about 104 pages long (based on 6x9, single-spaced 12-point
format). It begins with an examination of elements of “strangeness”
embedded in Columbine as an event from its opening moment: the fatal shooting
of Rachel Scott and serious wounding of Richard Castaldo at 11:19 a.m.
Mountain Time on April 20, 1999, by Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold.
This was Columbine’s threshold, whose crossing brooked no return.
Its constitutive details deserve examination.
A focus on
Columbine’s first moments is not followed by chronological description
of the rest of the massacre in detail. This has been done multiple
times elsewhere, including schematically in the Jefferson County Sheriff’s
Office Official Report of May 15, 2000 (available online); in books by
Jeff Kass and Dave Cullen; and at A
3
Columbine
Site as an internet resource run by Cyn Shepard. To do it again would
be to compete in morbid voyeurism. Columbine’s extremity of horror,
set in motion in its opening moments, is assumed, as underwriting both
the style and tone of the inquiry which follows
Instead of
such description, then, and in keeping with the theme of strangeness,
there is a jump-cut ahead eleven years and seven months, to mid-November,
2010 and an incident near the Cherry Creek Reservoir in Arapahoe County,
just east of Columbine High School. It involved two twin sisters
from Australia who were 29 years old: approximately the age that Rachel
Scott, Eric Harris, and Dylan Klebold (as well as two other female fatalities
of Columbine, Cassie Bernall and Lauren Townsend) would have been, had
they survived, and of Richard Castaldo, who did survive. The two
young women rented pistols and shot themselves at an outdoor practice range
called the Family Shooting Center. One twin died, the other lived:
a ripple-effect story that was more like a there-and-gone ripple-effect
tsunami, that itself left “an inordinate number” of strange debris.
One of these was the photocopied cover, found in the twins’ luggage, of
the May 3, 1999 issue of TIME Magazine, that depicted Eric Harris
and Dylan Klebold as “THE MONSTERS NEXT DOOR” and asked: “WHAT MADE THEM
DO IT?” Another was a photograph that suddenly began to appear in
articles, described as “supplied.”
This particular
scenario of “strange repercussions,” eleven years after Columbine, leads
in its specificities to a piece of writing by Dylan Klebold. And
this, after some analysis, leads to two pieces of writing by Eric Harris.
All were part of a 946-page document release by the Jefferson County Sheriff’s
Office on July 6, 2006. These
legacies of
written words suggest levels of complexity in both boys, and in their relationship
to the event called Columbine, that beggar their generic “profiling,” initially
by the FBI and most prominently by Dave Cullen in his 2009 book Columbine,
as “the depressive” (who followed) and “the psychopath” (who led).
In particular, there are within these texts distinctive phrasings that
haven’t previously been isolated out and given the closer look that they
for multiple reasons invite. In Dylan’s text, the phrasing has to
do with “place,” and in Eric’s with “nature,” “the mountains,” and “the
lake.”
These terms,
considered in context, are like hinges, that open a door on a second look
at what has become, perhaps especially since publication of Cullen’s Columbine,
the widespread acceptance of a set of assumptions about the event whose
name the book takes as its own. These were framed succinctly by Cullen
himself in a March, 2009 interview with The New Yorker, just before
the book’s publication. The interviewer, Lila Byock, asked:
“Do you think Columbine could have happened anywhere? Why did it happen
where it did?” Cullen replied:
It
could definitely happen anywhere… I think there’s one primary reason it
happened here, and his name is Eric Harris. Eric’s father was an Air Force
officer who moved the family across five states in fifteen years. If he
had
4
settled
in any of those other locations, something horrible would have happened
there. If Eric had grown to adulthood, it could have been much worse. He
was a budding young psychopath, who enjoyed inflicting pain.
The strangeness
of Columbine challenges the full range of these assessments, as it
challenges also Cullen’s having given, in his book, barely two sentences
to Columbine’s threshold moments involving Rachel Scott and Richard Castaldo,
and his having given no sentences at all to the “there” of Columbine.
This subtext of challenge might not be worth pointing out, but that Cullen’s
Columbine
was
both aggressively marketed by its New York publisher as “the definitive
account,” and endorsed by Oprah Winfrey as “the first complete account
of the Columbine tragedy.” I don’t believe it to be “complete” at
all, or even accurate. And conversely, I do believe that there has
at least to be available, whether people want to read it or not, an interpretation
of Columbine that both respects its complex specificity, and admits the
existence of the “strange”: something else that Cullen does not do.
Period.
As part of
this process, and tied to the fact that Columbine’s legacy includes texts,
The
strangeness of Columbine also incorporates reference to works by multiple
authors: three of them prominently enough to justify a chapter heading,
one per part, as the table of contents shows. The point of these
comparisons is to recognize what appear to be gateways into patterns.
Readers of Lear’s Shadow between 2000 and 2008 will perhaps remember
“Calvin and Eric, Dylan and Hobbes.” It is not repeated here, either
in whole or part. Rather the document release of July 6, 2006, as
well as correspondence with Brooks Brown, as a friend of Dylan, Rachel,
and (sometimes) Eric, as well as the co-author of no easy answers: The
truth behind death at Columbine (2002) suggested an entirely different
route into the relevance of Calvin and Hobbes. So it is with
both respect and some awe that I in Part One approach the written and drawn
public legacy of Bill Watterson.
Part Two, called
“Sand Creek (1863-64)” consists of six chapters, and would be about 105
pages in a printed book. It follows the threads of “place” / “nature”
/ “mountains” / “lake” in a different way, via patterns of cross-reference
that greatly surprised me when I noticed them, but that were so striking
I could not ignore them. They involve, on the one hand, certain of
Eric Harris’s writings including the texts in Part One, and on the other
some passages left by the 19th century American author Fitz Hugh Ludlow
(1836 -1870). On June 10, 1863, Ludlow visited the area southwest
of Denver that more than a century later would be the site of Columbine
High School. He travelled in a horse-drawn “ambulance" provided by
the Governor of the Colorado Territory, John Evans, and left a
5
detailed
record of the experience. In 2005, I found this in Ludlow’s 1870
book The Heart of the Continent. He is the touchstone author
of Part Two, and the pattern of homology with Eric Harris’ written record
is such as to open a kind of time tunnel, initially via June 10, 1863,
into an earlier vortex of Colorado history, that culminated most indelibly
on November 29, 1864 in the Sand Creek Massacre. Documentation of
the lead-up to and aftermath of this massacre, as well as of the massacre
itself, suggests a manifold texture of similarity and reversal between
it and Columbine, as two events of utmost violence and brutality whose
vortices developed over time in the same region; whose culminating horror
was peculiarly theatrical; and whose “repercussions” were profound.
The terms of this comparison point to a number of things: among them a
working concept toward a better understanding of Columbine’s resonance;
a previously unexamined set of plausible factors in the lead-up to Sand
Creek; a different vocabulary in regard to “place”; and, perhaps, a different
level of misapplication of the term “psychopath” to Eric Harris.
Part Three
is called “Jefferson County (2001).” It consists of seven chapters,
and would be about 116 pages long were this a book. It explores still further
the themes of “place,” “mountains,” and “nature” in relation to Columbine,
through a photographic record of visits in January, 2001 to sites in Jefferson
County, Colorado. These are specifically: the alleyway behind 6657
West Ottawa Avenue, where Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold worked prior to
Columbine, and the area of Dylan Klebold’s house in the Deer Creek Mesa
development west of Littleton, as reached from the north via Red Rocks
Park. Various cues in these photographs evoke not only Fitz Hugh Ludlow’s
additional visit, on June 10, 1863, to similar “Fountain Formation” rocks
just to the south, but also multiple dimensions of a novel written more
than a century later by the author of “horror fiction” Stephen King, called
The
Shining. In this case, the text comes with supplements: the cinematic
interpretation given The Shining by Stanley Kubrick in 1980, and
a three-part, 4½-hour ABC-TV miniseries version by King himself
in 1997. But the fact is that King developed, prior to Columbine,
and in the same plain-meets- mountains zone of central Colorado, a convincing
nightmare story around a phenomenon he called “shining.” This conceptual
vocabulary was then adapted and added to, with considerable resilience,
over twenty years: first by Kubrick, and then again by King, whose miniseries
adaptation aired between April 27 and May 1, 1997. These dates themselves
happened to fall between the second and third journal entries of a fifteen
year-old boy named Dylan Klebold, who was living in a house owned by his
parents just sixty miles south-southeast of Estes Park, as the setting
for both the novel and the TV remake of The Shining.
6
In incorporating
literary works in these different ways, I drew some inspiration from the
style, structure, and content of D.H. Lawrence’s 1923 book Studies in
Classic American Literature, especially the chapters on “The Spirit
of Place” and “Fenimore Cooper’s White Novels.” Not everything Lawrence
put in these chapters, that he wrote as a visionary critic rather than
as a novelist, makes sense to me. But a few things do.
As to who I
am: the relevant detail would seem to be that for nearly six years
after Columbine, from May, 2000 to early 2006, I maintained and added to
a website called Lear’s Shadow, most of whose content, initially
anyway, pertained to Columbine. I cannot say why I did this website,
which did not make money. What I can say is that Columbine shook
me deeply, and I tried, out of some earlier experience of Colorado to the
east, south, and west, to understand why. The internet, with its
absence of gatekeepers, seemed to provide a platform both for articulating
this process, and for sharing it with others.
For multiple
reasons, I stopped adding to Lear’s Shadow in 2006, and emptied
it of content in 2008. By then it had registered over 300,000 hits.
My own attempt to exit Columbine, however, then received a sequence of
surprises.
The first of
these was the hyped publication of Cullen’s Columbine in April,
2009, to coincide with the tenth anniversary of the massacre. The
book’s one-dimensional diagnoses, and the boppy avidity with which Cullen
affirmed them, were dismaying. So, too, were representation of the
book as “the definitive account,” its endorsement by Oprah Winfrey as “the
first complete account,” and its rapid eclipse of Jeff Kass’ more sober,
probing, and insightful Columbine: A True Crime Story, which was
published at the same time by a small Denver press, rather than out of
New York. Kass’ book is chock-full of detail about the complex human
dynamics that fed toward Columbine, as gathered by an admirably on-the-ground
gumshoe journalist. It neither excuses nor indulges authority.
And it also references historical context, including seven paragraphs on
Sand Creek (pages 24-25), in situating Columbine as an event. But
it does not simplify, and did not fare well in the intensely marketed glare
of Cullen’s Columbine, that in January, 2011 could still elicit
this memorable online review comment from an American woman blogging as
“Bridget of Arabia”:
I
really appreciated reading this book, and having it all tidied up and cleared
away, once and for all.
7
This is undoubtedly
what many Americans fervently hope might be the case about Columbine: that
it might “all” be “tidied up and cleared away, once and for all.”
Dave Cullen,
along with his publisher, recognized the craving, and provided the “definitive”
and “authoritative” Columbine.
It did very
well, with a Broadway play and a Hollywood movie deal reportedly in the
works.
Both of which
would seem to imply, however: still more Columbine.
Which is to
say: not “cleared away” at all.
Instead morphed
into a smoothly humming engine of potential profit, for someone audacious
enough to have claimed negotiable “rights” to it as represented in his
book.
The mind reels.
The second
surprise that got my attention was the discovery in August, 2009, that
someone had retrieved ten of the
Lear’s Shadow Columbine pages,
including visuals, from the internet wayback machine, and made them available
as a free mega-upload at the Super Columbine Massacre RPG “Thoughts on
the shooting” forum, under the heading “Excellent Columbine pages.”
The necessary inference from this development was that if these ten early
pages were again easily available, then it would be irresponsible for me
not to supplement them with a perspective informed not only by the passage
of time, but by the July 6, 2006 document release, whose significance I
was then beginning to grasp. And especially did this seem the case
given the relentlessly foreshortening effect on discourse of Cullenbine:
The Devouring Machine.
The third surprise
was the incident of the Hermeler twins in November, 2010, that included
the public resurfacing of the May 3, 1999 cover of TIME Magazine.
This was especially jarring in that it happened to have been with a photograph
and meticulous description of this cover that the opening Columbine text
at Lear’s Shadow, “From Absolute Other to Eric and Dylan,” began
its online presence from 2000 to 2008. This description was even
supplemented in 2003 with a layer-by-layer visual deconstruction of the
cover’s images and design.
In view of
this, I could hardly ignore the fact that, in the record established by
the website’s counter, hits from Australia, as identified by country suffix
between 2000 and 2008, trailed only those from the USA, Canada, and the
United Kingdom, and ran into thousands. Perhaps it was coincidence
that the Hermeler twins had focused on the same cover. But perhaps
not, and either way, I again felt a
8
sense of obligation:
at that point to try to think these phenomena through.
This process
brought still more surprises.
Like Lear’s
Shadow as a website,
The strangeness of Columbine has not been
vetted by a book-publishing gatekeeper. I hope there aren’t, in consequence,
too many typos, and that the visuals don’t appear as mush. I’m also
acutely aware that I’ve left out almost as much as I’ve included here,
and hope that in decisions I’ve made the optimum choices. But there
does come a time when something has to be sent out. This is taking
place via e-book in part because of the direct access portal the medium
provides to potential readers, even as – unlike the website – it offers
the possibility of modest compensation for eleven years worth of thought
and work. To an extent, I regret that The strangeness of Columbine
is not available in print on paper, so that copies might be purchased or
accessed by interested people who don’t have an e-reader. In this
I sympathize: I don’t at time of writing have an e-reader myself.
But a publisher would take months or even years to bring out a book, assuming
I could find one willing to risk it, while an independent print run would
cost thousands of dollars and present me with hundreds of objects that
I’d need to disperse from a remote location. Nor can I find many
positive recommendations for print-on-demand.
These factors
aside, though: by far the bloodiest part of the Columbine High School
Massacre (that I’m not going to consider at length here) took place amid
shelves of books. Since then, I’ve had trouble investing wholeheartedly
in doing another print-on-paper book myself. Books that I did with
publishers after Columbine (between 1999 and 2003) were already in a process
as books when Columbine happened. So they got carried through.
But Columbine also produced Lear’s Shadow. And as these investigations
got their start via an electronic medium, it seems apt not only to develop
them that way, but to leave behind the authorial persona (and name) that
preceded them.
There are clearly
some limitations to the e-book format. An index is impossible because
there is no pagination (though it seems reasonable to expect that words
will prove searchable). End notes may be within the realm of the
possible, but even if they are they’re beyond my current means. Should
circumstances at some point permit, I would like to provide page-and-phrase-
based notes. As matters stand, references that seem necessary are
in brackets in the shortest form possible. Those that begin with
“JC” are from the document case files made public by the Jefferson County
Sheriff’s Office.
9
What the e-book
format does allow is color images, in the likelihood that e-readers will
not be bound indefinitely to grey-scale graphics. Color would be
financially inconceivable in any print-on-paper book I might try to do
myself, but was certainly integral to the style of Lear’s Shadow.
As I’m not sure how these images will show on various e-readers, I’m also
making them available, by chapter and in clearer resolution, at the Lear’s
Shadow website address (http://home.eol.ca/~dord). Included there
also is a bibliography.
Various people
have encouraged this enterprise over eleven years. I thank them,
and apologize to any whom I may have offended, or whose feelings I may
have hurt, through my occasionally profound lack of social skills.
As a courtesy, I do not name those I thank. Given the passions
that seem to inform the discourses of both Columbine and Sand Creek, there
may be readers of this text who, though it was produced out of deepest
respect for the memory and pain that came out of these events, are not
pleased. And as I do not know what the outcome will be of my producing
this e-book, perhaps it’s best that no one else be implicated.
The strangeness
of Columbine, an interpretation develops a style of thought that is
unusual. Nevertheless, I hope that the interwoven exploration of
events in relation to place, texts, images, and history will prove illuminating.
---
The strangeness of Columbine, an interpretation,
in three parts and 21 chapters with 33 images, can be downloaded to Kindle
e-reader for just $5.99 by going directly to its
page at Amazon.com.
Also available via i-Bookstore, Kobo, Sony Nook,
Barnes & Noble.
Here is the photograph of
mountains to the west of Columbine High School, that appears in smaller
format at the Kindle page. It was made on January 23, 2001 with a
mechanical 35-mm Nikon FE and 50-mm Nikkor lens on Kodak Gold-200 negative
film. Because of a confusion of negatives, the photograph is introduced
in Chapter One of the e-book as dating to January 20, 2001. This
is corrected in Chapter 15. But the error was overlooked when Chapter
One went to print.
