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Genres, Conflict, and Cartesian Spaces

I have been thinking hard about what I like about the books I like because, lately, I have found myself reading a lot of current books I don’t particularly care for and I wonder what is happening.

I published Fifty-Third and Dorchester earlier this year. I have been immersing myself in writing and the meta-world of the craft of writing. These days, everyone has a theory or method for writing a sure-fire hit. I read and listen to several websites and podcasts a week on writing craft. I have shelves of books on every aspect of the craft. Like me, every aspiring writer these days is flooded with advice. MFAs in creative writing abound. Compared to a decade ago, writers are much better educated on craft.

But I have to ask, why don’t I care much for the recently written books I read? My poor choices? A bad attitude? Out of step with the times? Or has political air pollution put a permanent sour taste in my mouth? Chronic dysphoria?

All of those are plausible, but I think it is something else because there are authors whose books continue to bring me pleasure. For example, I reread Dorothy Sayers first Peter Whimsey story last week and enjoyed it immensely. I saw flaws and superficialities that I did not notice the last time I read it, probably twenty years ago, but these are minor hypersensitivities that come from sweating over the imperfections in my own work. The issues highlight the many things that Ms. Sayers got right rather than detract.

My guess, which I intend to explore, is that current writers have lost sight of some sensibilities that older writers took for granted. Current literary crafters are painfully aware of a certain kind of conflict. The craft books almost all say that every scene, paragraph, and word must convey the striving of the character toward some goal or the reader will lose interest. The entire text must be plotted in a polar coordinate system that points to whatever it is that the character wants. This is robust underpinning. But has a bit of ennui slipped in? Is this the only story that can captures a reader’s fancy? Is it possible that a multidimensional cartesian space can be equally or more compelling?

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Jack London: The People of the Abyss

The People of the Abyss is another non-fiction piece by Jack London that I enjoyed so much, I decided to post it in the Vine Maple Studio.

Winter sunshine
Winter sunshine

Jack London was fascinating and more influential than most people realize. I am not a Jack London fan by choice. In the seventies, I went through a phase in which I collected old paperback editions of London’s books. At first, it was a sort of nostalgia for the adventures I enjoyed as a boy. But eventually, I read one too many of his worst potboilers, and decided to drop the effort.

Now, I approach Jack London warily, but I happened to read The Cruise of Snark about a year ago and enjoyed it. Later, I posted it in Vine Maple Studio. This lead me to look again at The People of the Abyss when I happened to be looking through the Jack London list on Gutenberg, although with much initial doubt.

The book Black Like Me came out while I was in high school. It was popular among the intelligentsia of Ferndale High School, but I was repulsed: the masquerade demeaned both the masquerader and the subject of the masquerade. I was equally unimpressed when fifteen years later, Jerry Brown “spent the night in the ghetto.” Anyone who ventures into an impoverished milieu with a publishing contract or an election in mind is a target for charges of insincerity or worse.

I went through my own immersion experience, made more intense by my naiveté, when I was barely eighteen. I got on a train and rode from the farm that is home to the Vine Maple Studio to the south side of Chicago, staying for seven years. I gained no profound insight into the human condition, but I endured disconnection and bewilderment that came from forced interaction with lives that were constrained and driven by poverty that I could not have imagined without direct exposure.

The People of the Abyss is an account of Jack London’s months long sojourn in the slums of London’s East End at the turn of the nineteenth century. The East End was the most infamous slum of London, the backdrop for Oliver Twist and other Dickens novels, and the location of the Jack the Ripper murders, and a wellspring of crime, vice, and degradation. If there was a worse place on earth, Jack London would have argued the assertion down.

The book was, on one level, a journalistic stunt.

But as a journalistic stunt, The People of the Abyss had good literary precedent. Mark Twain used the same stunt in The Prince and the Pauper and he was preceded by centuries in the Arabian Nights. The idea echoes through literature and folk tales.

At some point, original motivations are replaced by the demands of events. Jack London may have begun with a publishers check in mind and a smug desire to flaunt his moral superiority, but in the course of his visit to the East End, he compounded a raft of ideas in a way that contemporary journalists would do well to study carefully and modern politicians, economists and philosophers should be wary of. Within Jack London’s writing, indictments lurk that cannot be dismissed with pleasing phrases about character and initiative.

The People of the Abyss can be found many places on the Internet, but may find the choice of font and spacing on Vine Maple Studio more readable than other versions. Check it out here.

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Reading and Electronic Editions

From the Vine Maple Studio, I plan to share some of the electronic books that I like in the form that I like to read. Perhaps other readers will enjoy them as much as I do.

Paradoxically, I don’t particularly care for electronic books. I read a lot but seldom watch TV or movies. My tastes in reading range widely and my book collection is varied and in the last decade, it has grown to include many electronic books as well as paper. I am surprised that my electronic books are generally older than those in my paper collection. The oldest literature that I own, if you want to call it literature, is a collection of reproductions of Shang Dynasty c. 1200 BC oracle bone inscriptions that was the text book for a seminar on reading the inscriptions that I took years ago. orac As antiquities, the inscriptions are mildly interesting, tersely chronicling the repeated defeats of the wretched Hsiung Nu and occasionally noting that the king had a toothache. As entertainment, they are barely so-so, but the fact that they are written in characters and language that is closer to modern Chinese than Latin is to French, is astounding. That book is paper, but I have, for example, Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, which was first published in 1621, in electronic form.

As I said, I prefer paper to electronic books, but electronic books are getting better and they do have advantages. I have a paper copy of Anatomy of Melancholy, the New York Review of Books edition in paper back. It is roughly the size and weight of a large brick and with carpal tunnel, tendinitis, and ulnar nerve entrapment, all souvenirs from years as a computer programmer, anatI have to prop Anatomy on a table to read it comfortably without prescription painkillers, which might enhance William Blake, but not the Anatomy. On the other hand, I can read an electronic edition on my Kindle or PDA without such problems.

The other great advantage to electronic editions is searchability. Computers do a much better and quicker job of skimming 1600 pages of text and finding every occurrence of “black bile” than I can, and when finding every occurrence of black bile is necessary, the electronic edition is a sure winner .

And of course, electronic books are cheaper, sometimes free, and they don’t keep the pulp mills on overtime belching sulfur and chlorine. Also, they are quick. Amazon claims you can get a book on your Kindle in less than a minute, and they come close.

There is no need to discuss the disadvantages of electronic books. Every reader I know, including me, prefers paper when all things are equal. But I will say that electronic readers are improving: the electronic ink display on the Kindle is much easier on the eyes for reading than LCDs or CRTs.  The Kindle display is limited to a gray scale and looks a bit drab, but it uses only reflected light, which is what human eyes have evolved to read; it is a genuine improvement and will very likely continue to improve.

I get many electronic books from Project Gutenberg, the source for my electronic copy of Anatomy Of Melancholy.  Gutenberg is wonderful. They have a large free collection of out-of-copyright books in the public domain that is growing all the time. Project Gutenberg is the reason my electronic books are generally old. Gutenberg makes old books easy to find and free, but I don’t like to read Gutenberg editions directly. I always process the text to suit my exact tastes on whatever display device I happen to be using. That is a perk of being both a reader and a programmer and one that might also benefit the readers of this site.