'Proud Gods and Commodores' is a collection of modern poetry and epic tales written by Dr. James McMillan, the poetry exhibiting a wide range of styles and purposes, and the tales though modern in appeal are written in a timeless and captivating epic style that brings to mind such classics as Beowulf, The Iliad, and Paradise Lost.

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Debuting author invites readers to immerse themselves in an enthusiastic weaving of poetry and narrative. ... Alternating between booming classical mythologies and contemporary accessible voices... - Kirkus Review McMillan immerses the reader in multiple styles of poetry and epic tales, plus characters that leap into life and all its consequences, from despondent even suicidal, to recovery, to mystery, to love, and sometimes even to absolute triumph, plus a healthy dose of what he calls "gnarly Haiku", trying to compress so much into so little. - AuthorHouse ... A topsy-turvy view of pop culture and literature in the grand tradition Surrealists and Dadaists... - Kirkus Review His style is not poetry nor narrative not stream-of-consciousness, but one he hopes to carry the reader as if on a river, faster and slower, with twists and turns, and maybe a few rapids just for the hell of it. Come on in and see what you think.

When I was young I ran with San Francisco's counter-culture revolutionaries, wanting to burn it all down, even a trek to Cuba for a radical meeting with Fidel, cutting sugar cane with him, then at dinner all of us eagerly listening to his self-serving yet sometimes rhapsodic even humorous exhortations on "El Pueblo" and revolution, unleashing within us that 'Ubermensch Derangement Syndrome, ' that your humanity is somehow greater than another's humanity, therefore empowering you over them, including of course a lynch-mob if necessary, because people are suffering. Later because of injury I virtually fell into Chiropractic college, a Damascus experience, Saul to Paul. Though this book is not about Chiropractic at all, it does reflect the profound change its study and holistic philosophy inspired in me. What an adjustment is to the body, a good poem is to the soul. A number of poems in this collection are what's called 'maguffins, ' which is an old Alfred Hitchcock term for plot devices, that is hinges upon which the plot swings but really themselves are not essential to the story. A classic example is the stolen money in "Psycho," or the gold or whatever it is in the briefcase of "Pulp Fiction," or even one could say the blackbird itself in the movie "Maltese Falcon," or The Memphis Belle in "Memphis Belle," all just devices to evolve the characters and move the story, yet in themselves are not really essential to the story, or especially to character resolution, just devices to keep things moving along, as opposed to HAL in "2001," a villain at the time when society was paranoid about computers, but 30 years into it, the computer age, HAL redeems himself in "2010," itself a disappointing and pretentious film in which HAL's redemption, courage and self- sacrifice are the most interesting, most noble, and by far the most moving of all the human interactions of that film, ...just saying. Several poems in this collection, especially the first, 'The Rape of Athena, ' and all of the tales are exactly that- maguffins- their ostensibly written by various characters in the two epic sagas I am currently writing, as well as the several excerpts in these volumes taken directly from those sagas:

In this book, the author sets out to dispel the idea that Melville was an author of raw genius who knew, or cared little, about the art of the novel. Rather, he shows how Melville not only knew about the novelist's craft, but also appropriated and transformed a series of distinct genres.

Sea-Brothers offers the most extensive analysis to date of the sea and its meaning in American literature. On the basis of his study of Melville, Crane, London, Hemingway, Matthiessen, and ten lesser-known sea-writers, Bert Bender argues that the tradition of American sea fiction did not end with the opening of the western frontier and the replacement of sailing ships by steamers. Rather, he demonstrates its continuity and vitality, identifying a central vision within the tradition and showing how particular authors draw from, transform, and contribute to it. What is most distinctive about American sea fiction, Bender contends, is its visionary, often mystical, response to the biological world and to man's perceived place in the larger universe. When Melville envisioned the sea as the essential element of life, indeed as life itself, he changed the course of American sea fiction by introducing the relevance of biological thought. But his meditations on the whale and "the ungraspable phantom of life" project a different reality from that envisioned by his successors. In American sea fiction after Melville, the influence of Origin of Species is as powerful as that of Moby Dick or the theme of sailing ships being displaced by steam. The ideal of brotherhood so central to American sea fiction was severely compromised by the biological reality of a competitive, warring nature. Twentieth-century sea fiction has continued to center on the biological world and address the possibility of democratic brotherhood, but the issues were fundamentally changed by Darwin's theories. This book will be a valuable source for students and scholars of American literature and will interest readers of sea fiction.