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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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Violent Culture

This week, the senate report on “enhanced interrogation” was released. I don’t want to comment on the report or enhanced interrogation techniques. The accusations, denials, finger pointing, and bloviation will have to settle down before I’m ready. For the time being, I prefer to look at the wider context.

Citizens of the United States like violence. Look at the local news. In my neighborhood, there are four main local television stations. When I was growing up in the 50s and 60s, the same stations were broadcasting. Each station had a half hour of local news followed by a half hour of national news in the early evening. Another broadcast at ten or eleven, and an early morning half hour. Altogether, two hours, if that. Today, I would not care to count the number of hours of news the same stations broadcast, but it is much more than hour to two hours of fifty years ago.

And what have they filled it with? Murders, rapes, sexual abuse, beatings, robberies punctuated with an occasional lachrymose piece about recovery from adversity. Careful reporting on difficult to comprehend, and therefore boring, issues like statistical trends, financial reports, policies, planning, and the details of government—the stuff that citizens in a democracy must know—are rare.

Mayhem has become entertainment. Schadenfreude reigns. We love to see our neighbor’s houses fall over cliffs, lives ruined by scammers, families torn apart by abuse and violence, and then solace ourselves by throwing in a few bucks when the hat is passed.

I don’t blame anyone or anything, certainly not the television producers trying to make a living by giving people what they want. I am just sad. It is pointless to try to find who is responsible. It is everyone’s fault. It’s no one’s fault. Choose your favorite scapegoat. Maybe it is the aftermath of the Holocaust, or WWII. Or the pill. Maybe the hippies. Or Dr. Spock. Capital gains taxes. Or structural anthropology. The metric system. Or the new math. Maybe there is something in the water.

The consequence is violence everywhere. Folks want to buy guns so they can get in on the action and shoot each other .We watch violence on the news. We watch it in the movies. For the first time in my life, I felt a passing twinge of sympathy for the government of North Korea when I heard Sony was planning a movie in which the head of their sitting leader explodes.

The great literature of the past was violent. Read the Iliad or the Odyssey, War and Peace, Moby Dick, Bleak House. There is plenty of killing and violence. The past was violent. There is evidence that the murder rate has been decreasing for the last ten centuries. The difference I notice is fascination with the details of violence rather than the consequences of violence. In the Iliad, and Shakespeare, the violence is off stage. The motives, repercussions, ethics, and morality of violence are the subject, not the acts themselves.

There is no lack of principled conduct among the people and institutions I know, but in our cultural life, for every sincere politician, there are three murderers. For every honest and engaged citizen, a dozen grasping and greedy trolls refuse to support the common good and and only want to get rich. Why? I don’t know, but I hope it changes.

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Were the Lambs Silent?

I finished reading Thomas Harris’s The Silence of the Lambs this morning.
I read it years ago when after seeing the movie with Jodie Foster and Anthony Hopkins. I don’t remember reading the book the first time and my recollection of the movie is vague. I did notice that Dr. Lecter’s comment on serving human liver with fava beans was moved to the end in the movie.

My most insightful impression on this reading was that Dr. Lecter progressed from devouring minds as a psychiatrist to devouring bodies as a serial killer, which appears to be an indictment of psychology in a book that popularized criminal profiling. I don’t intend to criticize, I enjoyed the book immensely, but it did not strike me as particularly well written. Too many sentences that sounded awkward in my ear, too many words that clunked because a better choice was available. The writing reminded me of Stephen King, another writer I like to read but would prefer that he put on a little more polish. Both Harris and King tell stories that are hard to put down with engaging characters, but read a little rough, like an elegant piece of furniture with a finish that needs another rubout and coat of varnish.

The characters central characters in The Silence of the Lambs are all driven by their psychology, which derives from their childhood experiences. In this book, we don’t know about Lecter, but Harris’s other books depict it as grotesque. Jame Gumb, a.k.a. Buffalo Bill, was dumped by an alcoholic mother, whom he idolizes. Clarice Starling was deprived of her mother’s love and had to save her horse from her uncle and the glue factory. These wretched childhoods are not seen so frequently in books from the first half of the Twentieth Century. Even Dickens’ orphans were better treated.

Have brutally wretched childhoods become more common? Or have they become more interesting and more discussed? I have no means of knowing, but the media certainly cater to a taste for childhood misery. A scan of a local television app this morning reveals two stories involving children involved in gruesome crime. Thirty years ago, we didn’t have apps to look at, and I didn’t find a newspaper from 1984, but I think child brutality was not an established genre then. But I’ll bet it was rampant.