Mike Robinson's Blog - Posts Tagged "literature"
Great Passages, Part I
from BLOOD MERIDIAN, by Cormac McCarthy:
"War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner. ... War is the truest form of divination. It is the testing of one's will within that larger will which because it binds them is therefore forced to select. War is the ultimate game. Because war is at last a forcing of the unity of existence. War is god."
from THE DIVINE COMEDY (PARADISO), by Dante:
"Thence the high beings read the signs, the trace
of that eternal Power who is the end
for which the form is set in time and place.
All natures in this order lean and tend
each in distinctive manner to its Source,
some to approach more near and others less-
Whence from their various ports all creatures move
on the great sea of being, with each one
ferried by instinct given from above.
This is what makes the fire rise toward the moon;
this, the prime mover of the mortal heart."
from A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN, by James Joyce:
"The desire and loathing excited by improper aesthetic means are really not aesthetic emotions not only because they are kinetic in character but also because they are not more than physical. Our flesh shrinks from what it dreads and responds to the stimulus of what it desires by pure reflex. ...Beauty expressed by the artist cannot awaken us in an emotion which is kinetic or a sensation which is purely physical. It ought to awaken or induce an aesthetic stasis, an ideal pity or an ideal terror, a stasis called forth, prolonged and at last dissolved by what I call the rhythm of beauty."
from SKINNY LEGS AND ALL, by Tom Robbins:
"What is plain is that neither money nor the love of it is the root of all evil. Evil's roots run deeper than that. Anyway, money is not a root. Money is a leaf. Trillions of leaves, actually; dense, bushy, dollar-green, obscuring the stars of reality with their false canopy."
from CONVERSATIONS WITH GOD, BOOK II, by Neale Donald Walsch:
"You must stop seeing God as separate from you, and you as separate from each other. The only solution is this truth: nothing exists in the universe that is separate from anything else. Everything is intrinsically connected, irrevocably interdependent, interactive, interwoven into the fabric of all life. All government, all politics, must be based on this truth. All laws must be rooted in it. This is the only hope of your race....If everyone in your race gave all, what would you require? The only reason you require anything is because someone else is holding back. Stop holding back."
from WEAVEWORLD, by Clive Barker:
"Nothing ever begins. There is no first moment; no single word or place from which this or any other story springs. The threads can always be traced back to some earlier tale, and to the tales that preceded that; though as the narrator's voice recedes the connections will seem to grow more tenuous, for each age will want the tale told as if it were of its own making."
from ON WRITING by Stephen King (this one's for the writers):
"What's equally wrong is the deliberate turning towards some type of fiction in order to make money. It's morally wonky, for one thing -- the job of fiction is to find the truth inside the lie, not to commit intellectual dishonesty in the hunt for a buck."
from DANDELION WINE, by Ray Bradbury:
"And everything, absolutely everything, was there....'I'm alive,' he thought.....The grass whispered under his body. He put his arm down, feeling the sheath of fuzz on it, and far away, below, his toes creaking in his shoes. The wind sighed over his shelled ears. The world slipped bright over the glassy round of his eyeballs like images sparked in a crystal sphere. Flowers were sun and fiery spots of sky strewn through the woodland. Birds flickered like skipped stones across the vast inverted pond of heaven. His breath raked over his teeth, going in ice, coming out fire. Ten thousand individual hairs grew a millionth of an inch on his head. He heard the twin hears beat in each ear, the third heart beating in his throat, the two hearts throbbing his wrists, the real heart pounding his chest. The million pores on his body opened.......'I'm really alive!' he thought. I never knew it before, or if I did I don't remember!"
from A CONNECTICUT YANKEE IN KING ARTHUR'S COURT, by Mark Twain:
"You see my kind of loyalty was loyalty to one's country, not to its institutions or its office-holders. The country is the real thing, the substantial thing, the eternal thing; it is the thing to watch over, and care for, and be loyal to; institutions are extraneous, they are its mere clothing, and clothing can wear out, become ragged, cease to be comfortable, cease to protect the body from winter and disease and death. To be loyal to rags, to shout for rags, to worship rags, to die for rags -- that is a loyalty for unreason; it is pure animal."
from BREAKFAST OF CHAMPIONS, by Kurt Vonnegut:
"The picture [of this yellow band] shows everything about life that truly matters, with nothing left out. It is a picture of the awareness of every animal. It is the immaterial core of every animal - the 'I am' to which all messages are sent. It is all that is alive in any of us, unwavering and pure. A sacred picture of Saint Anthony alone is one vertical, unwavering band of light. If a cockroach were near him, or a cocktail waitress, the picture would show two such bands of light, identical."
from VICTORY, by Joseph Conrad:
"Heyst was not conscious of either friends or of enemies. It was the very essence of his life to be a solitary achievement, accomplished not by hermit-like withdrawal with its silence and immobility, but by a system of restless wandering, by the detachment of an impermanent dweller amongst changing scenes. In this scheme he had perceived the means of passing through life without suffering and almost without a single care in the world - invulnerable because elusive."
from MYSTIC RIVER, by Dennis Lehane:
"They came to be elated and uplifted, Dave knew, raised up out of their lives by the rare spectacle of victory. That's why arenas and ballparks felt like cathedrals -- buzzing with light and murmured prayers and forty thousand hearts all beating the drum of the same collective hope. Win for me. Win for my kids. Win for my marriage so I can carry your winning back to the car with me and sit in the glow of it with my family as we drive back toward our otherwise winless lives. Win for me. Win. Win. Win."
"War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner. ... War is the truest form of divination. It is the testing of one's will within that larger will which because it binds them is therefore forced to select. War is the ultimate game. Because war is at last a forcing of the unity of existence. War is god."
from THE DIVINE COMEDY (PARADISO), by Dante:
"Thence the high beings read the signs, the trace
of that eternal Power who is the end
for which the form is set in time and place.
All natures in this order lean and tend
each in distinctive manner to its Source,
some to approach more near and others less-
Whence from their various ports all creatures move
on the great sea of being, with each one
ferried by instinct given from above.
This is what makes the fire rise toward the moon;
this, the prime mover of the mortal heart."
from A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN, by James Joyce:
"The desire and loathing excited by improper aesthetic means are really not aesthetic emotions not only because they are kinetic in character but also because they are not more than physical. Our flesh shrinks from what it dreads and responds to the stimulus of what it desires by pure reflex. ...Beauty expressed by the artist cannot awaken us in an emotion which is kinetic or a sensation which is purely physical. It ought to awaken or induce an aesthetic stasis, an ideal pity or an ideal terror, a stasis called forth, prolonged and at last dissolved by what I call the rhythm of beauty."
from SKINNY LEGS AND ALL, by Tom Robbins:
"What is plain is that neither money nor the love of it is the root of all evil. Evil's roots run deeper than that. Anyway, money is not a root. Money is a leaf. Trillions of leaves, actually; dense, bushy, dollar-green, obscuring the stars of reality with their false canopy."
from CONVERSATIONS WITH GOD, BOOK II, by Neale Donald Walsch:
"You must stop seeing God as separate from you, and you as separate from each other. The only solution is this truth: nothing exists in the universe that is separate from anything else. Everything is intrinsically connected, irrevocably interdependent, interactive, interwoven into the fabric of all life. All government, all politics, must be based on this truth. All laws must be rooted in it. This is the only hope of your race....If everyone in your race gave all, what would you require? The only reason you require anything is because someone else is holding back. Stop holding back."
from WEAVEWORLD, by Clive Barker:
"Nothing ever begins. There is no first moment; no single word or place from which this or any other story springs. The threads can always be traced back to some earlier tale, and to the tales that preceded that; though as the narrator's voice recedes the connections will seem to grow more tenuous, for each age will want the tale told as if it were of its own making."
from ON WRITING by Stephen King (this one's for the writers):
"What's equally wrong is the deliberate turning towards some type of fiction in order to make money. It's morally wonky, for one thing -- the job of fiction is to find the truth inside the lie, not to commit intellectual dishonesty in the hunt for a buck."
from DANDELION WINE, by Ray Bradbury:
"And everything, absolutely everything, was there....'I'm alive,' he thought.....The grass whispered under his body. He put his arm down, feeling the sheath of fuzz on it, and far away, below, his toes creaking in his shoes. The wind sighed over his shelled ears. The world slipped bright over the glassy round of his eyeballs like images sparked in a crystal sphere. Flowers were sun and fiery spots of sky strewn through the woodland. Birds flickered like skipped stones across the vast inverted pond of heaven. His breath raked over his teeth, going in ice, coming out fire. Ten thousand individual hairs grew a millionth of an inch on his head. He heard the twin hears beat in each ear, the third heart beating in his throat, the two hearts throbbing his wrists, the real heart pounding his chest. The million pores on his body opened.......'I'm really alive!' he thought. I never knew it before, or if I did I don't remember!"
from A CONNECTICUT YANKEE IN KING ARTHUR'S COURT, by Mark Twain:
"You see my kind of loyalty was loyalty to one's country, not to its institutions or its office-holders. The country is the real thing, the substantial thing, the eternal thing; it is the thing to watch over, and care for, and be loyal to; institutions are extraneous, they are its mere clothing, and clothing can wear out, become ragged, cease to be comfortable, cease to protect the body from winter and disease and death. To be loyal to rags, to shout for rags, to worship rags, to die for rags -- that is a loyalty for unreason; it is pure animal."
from BREAKFAST OF CHAMPIONS, by Kurt Vonnegut:
"The picture [of this yellow band] shows everything about life that truly matters, with nothing left out. It is a picture of the awareness of every animal. It is the immaterial core of every animal - the 'I am' to which all messages are sent. It is all that is alive in any of us, unwavering and pure. A sacred picture of Saint Anthony alone is one vertical, unwavering band of light. If a cockroach were near him, or a cocktail waitress, the picture would show two such bands of light, identical."
from VICTORY, by Joseph Conrad:
"Heyst was not conscious of either friends or of enemies. It was the very essence of his life to be a solitary achievement, accomplished not by hermit-like withdrawal with its silence and immobility, but by a system of restless wandering, by the detachment of an impermanent dweller amongst changing scenes. In this scheme he had perceived the means of passing through life without suffering and almost without a single care in the world - invulnerable because elusive."
from MYSTIC RIVER, by Dennis Lehane:
"They came to be elated and uplifted, Dave knew, raised up out of their lives by the rare spectacle of victory. That's why arenas and ballparks felt like cathedrals -- buzzing with light and murmured prayers and forty thousand hearts all beating the drum of the same collective hope. Win for me. Win for my kids. Win for my marriage so I can carry your winning back to the car with me and sit in the glow of it with my family as we drive back toward our otherwise winless lives. Win for me. Win. Win. Win."
Dispatches from Arkham: On Lovecraft's Significance
The moment I cemented my decision to not pursue an M.F.A (or any academic training) in writing is vivid. While enrolled at Otis College of Art & Design, I found in my mailbox a little perfect-bound literary booklet featuring work by the graduate students in fiction. I flipped it open to a random story. After wading cautiously into the second paragraph of a painful scrutiny of eyebrow-plucking, I was done. Other entries weren’t much better. Too many of them seemed concerned with stereotypical, high-literary minutia, unfortunately the focus and baffling preference of innumerable professors, awards, journals, and workshops (I’m looking at you, Iowa).
No doubt a lot of what follows stems from personal taste. Quite candidly, I have little interest in quaint journalistic accounts of Malaysian transvestite violinists at the turn of the century (a fabricated example - save yourself the Google), or the endless slew of aptly-termed “McFiction” featuring some cocky narrator coming of age amongst his or her overfed, dysfunctional family. No, I prefer going head-on at the Big Questions, going at them, as George Carlin might say, with no less than a sledgehammer. Give me ballsy confrontations with Life, Death, the Cosmos, with Existence, with God. Too big? So what? As Salmon Rushdie reminds us, “Grand failure is better than mediocre success”.
In their noble attempts at social redemption and inclusion, many contemporary teachers of literature present writings in the framework of their political significance. I am hardly one of their neo-con critics, but such attempts seem to me nothing more than new forms of division. It is looking at the grains and forgetting the shore. Does the world really need a Marxist reading of "Huckleberry Finn", complete with ten-dollar jargon? Academics are on the lookout for the “next best thing”, the new trend in analysis, the new prism through which to see literary works of yesterday and today. I say: what about our shared heritage? Our shared -- and uncertain -- future? Not as any one ethnicity, gender, party, or faction, but as an entire civilization. A species. A collective piece of this vast Universe.
Of course, much of this material is studied, and much of it is exhaustively considered and written about. In the fictive arena, most of such writings arise in the umbrella field of speculative fiction, which includes science fiction, horror and fantasy of many shades and stripes.
As anyone who follows such genres will likely know, H.P. Lovecraft revitalized speculative fiction (largely posthumously), defying tropes of ghosts and vampires and expanding imaginations with interconnected tales of ancient civilizations antedating our own, of towering alien-gods, of unseen dimensions and humanity’s sanity-shattering smallness in an inexplicable cosmos. His unknowns are truly Unknown, and will forever elude explanation.
Certainly Lovecraft’s work has failings, failings probably more surface-level than those of other lauded authors. He was well aware of his own wooden dialogue (hence, quotation marks are scarce in his pages) and his prose sometimes gushes into the purple. Nevertheless, his voice, with its richly archaic, darkly celebratory cadence, stands alone, and will survive as long as we’re unsure what lurks “out there”.
Sadly, Lovecraft, and especially his “Cthulu” mythos, have become somewhat franchised, relegated to corners of the market generally associated with "Dungeons and Dragons" fans, horror enthusiasts, and nihilistic young adults sporting black fingernails and lipstick. It is a wide “cult following”, but nonetheless a cult following. Although some scholars have acknowledged his importance, many see him as a troublesome bridge from Poe to Stephen King. It is this identity that has, I’m sure, dissuaded many from giving him a serious go. “Lovecraft? Oh, no, I don’t like that horror stuff.”
But back up. I don’t necessarily consider Lovecraft “horror”. Certainly there are horrific elements in his work, and his career does include several standard supernatural yarns. But in his treatment of cosmic mysteries, and the shadowed realms of prehistory, his is more a prying curious eye, forcing us to consider those Big Questions, to ponder notions of, and issues with, the likes of religion, biology, cosmology, archaeology, and psychology. He sets you on the outside looking in, a contrast to being in and looking further in to the point of navel-gazing. This exercise of outside-looking-in, one I believe most writers of fiction should undertake, helps in a kind of rounding out of thought.
No matter the genre in which one writes, I believe the best, most poignant stories have at least an undercurrent of this “larger awareness”, a perception conveying authority and wisdom. So many stories feel constricted by their own world, characters or concerns. Yet to read Lovecraft is to confront directly that raw Unknown that surrounds us, that is us. It is to be reminded of our collective fragility, to appreciate the vastness of history, to be humbled by our kindergarten knowledge of the universe and the possibility of greater intelligences possessing unimagined secrets. In short: perspective. A shambling, roaring, behemoth upswell of perspective.
Such perspective can heal, too. In an era of economic, cultural and political tumult, when millions of Davids the world over shout in fiery voice against the few far-reaching, corrupt Goliaths, there is morbid comfort in knowing that, despite whatever the megalomaniacal egos of sadistic leaders, immoral bankers, or bribe-pocketing politicians might make of themselves, there are impenetrable forces beyond all of them that will cast mocking eyes towards their suited-up, gold-rimmed delusions, if they even care to acknowledge them. Lovecraft reminds us just how little power the powerful actually wield. After all, Goliath was, what, ten feet tall? When the mountain-sized Cthulu rises once more, those people will be nothing but scrambling ants -- along with the rest of us.
No doubt a lot of what follows stems from personal taste. Quite candidly, I have little interest in quaint journalistic accounts of Malaysian transvestite violinists at the turn of the century (a fabricated example - save yourself the Google), or the endless slew of aptly-termed “McFiction” featuring some cocky narrator coming of age amongst his or her overfed, dysfunctional family. No, I prefer going head-on at the Big Questions, going at them, as George Carlin might say, with no less than a sledgehammer. Give me ballsy confrontations with Life, Death, the Cosmos, with Existence, with God. Too big? So what? As Salmon Rushdie reminds us, “Grand failure is better than mediocre success”.
In their noble attempts at social redemption and inclusion, many contemporary teachers of literature present writings in the framework of their political significance. I am hardly one of their neo-con critics, but such attempts seem to me nothing more than new forms of division. It is looking at the grains and forgetting the shore. Does the world really need a Marxist reading of "Huckleberry Finn", complete with ten-dollar jargon? Academics are on the lookout for the “next best thing”, the new trend in analysis, the new prism through which to see literary works of yesterday and today. I say: what about our shared heritage? Our shared -- and uncertain -- future? Not as any one ethnicity, gender, party, or faction, but as an entire civilization. A species. A collective piece of this vast Universe.
Of course, much of this material is studied, and much of it is exhaustively considered and written about. In the fictive arena, most of such writings arise in the umbrella field of speculative fiction, which includes science fiction, horror and fantasy of many shades and stripes.
As anyone who follows such genres will likely know, H.P. Lovecraft revitalized speculative fiction (largely posthumously), defying tropes of ghosts and vampires and expanding imaginations with interconnected tales of ancient civilizations antedating our own, of towering alien-gods, of unseen dimensions and humanity’s sanity-shattering smallness in an inexplicable cosmos. His unknowns are truly Unknown, and will forever elude explanation.
Certainly Lovecraft’s work has failings, failings probably more surface-level than those of other lauded authors. He was well aware of his own wooden dialogue (hence, quotation marks are scarce in his pages) and his prose sometimes gushes into the purple. Nevertheless, his voice, with its richly archaic, darkly celebratory cadence, stands alone, and will survive as long as we’re unsure what lurks “out there”.
Sadly, Lovecraft, and especially his “Cthulu” mythos, have become somewhat franchised, relegated to corners of the market generally associated with "Dungeons and Dragons" fans, horror enthusiasts, and nihilistic young adults sporting black fingernails and lipstick. It is a wide “cult following”, but nonetheless a cult following. Although some scholars have acknowledged his importance, many see him as a troublesome bridge from Poe to Stephen King. It is this identity that has, I’m sure, dissuaded many from giving him a serious go. “Lovecraft? Oh, no, I don’t like that horror stuff.”
But back up. I don’t necessarily consider Lovecraft “horror”. Certainly there are horrific elements in his work, and his career does include several standard supernatural yarns. But in his treatment of cosmic mysteries, and the shadowed realms of prehistory, his is more a prying curious eye, forcing us to consider those Big Questions, to ponder notions of, and issues with, the likes of religion, biology, cosmology, archaeology, and psychology. He sets you on the outside looking in, a contrast to being in and looking further in to the point of navel-gazing. This exercise of outside-looking-in, one I believe most writers of fiction should undertake, helps in a kind of rounding out of thought.
No matter the genre in which one writes, I believe the best, most poignant stories have at least an undercurrent of this “larger awareness”, a perception conveying authority and wisdom. So many stories feel constricted by their own world, characters or concerns. Yet to read Lovecraft is to confront directly that raw Unknown that surrounds us, that is us. It is to be reminded of our collective fragility, to appreciate the vastness of history, to be humbled by our kindergarten knowledge of the universe and the possibility of greater intelligences possessing unimagined secrets. In short: perspective. A shambling, roaring, behemoth upswell of perspective.
Such perspective can heal, too. In an era of economic, cultural and political tumult, when millions of Davids the world over shout in fiery voice against the few far-reaching, corrupt Goliaths, there is morbid comfort in knowing that, despite whatever the megalomaniacal egos of sadistic leaders, immoral bankers, or bribe-pocketing politicians might make of themselves, there are impenetrable forces beyond all of them that will cast mocking eyes towards their suited-up, gold-rimmed delusions, if they even care to acknowledge them. Lovecraft reminds us just how little power the powerful actually wield. After all, Goliath was, what, ten feet tall? When the mountain-sized Cthulu rises once more, those people will be nothing but scrambling ants -- along with the rest of us.
Comfort Zone, Twilight Zone
One of the best steps I've ever taken, for growth not only as a writer but a human being, was to set foot outside my intellectual comfort zone. This may sound an obvious necessity to veterans, but it's not easy to recognize as a greenhorn, no matter your age. Even writers who've been scribbling for a while may be resistant to it. In considering Twain's famous remark of a classic being a book we all want to have read but don't want to read, I feel his observation can be expanded to encompass all works that challenge not just our minds but our tastes -- for we don't know our tastes until we discover them. And we all know the rewards such discoveries can provide.
For the four or five years after blindly whipping out the first draft of a first novel no one on this Earth shall hopefully ever remember or see again (including me), I formed my reading lists mostly from the popular fiction shelves. Stephen King, Dean Koontz, Michael Crichton, Mario Puzo and more Stephen King all went down my gullet and the stagnancy of my writing -- in style, voice and originality -- reflected that. And for those wondering: literature in my high school was in short supply, and I never attended a formal university. Such situations, unfortunate as they may sound to some, have made my independent explorations far more nourishing and memorable.
You might smell a snob here, but rest assured: this isn't a condemnation of popular writers so much as it is a warning about only swimming laps in one's pool and ignoring the ocean that's right there. Sure it's wide and intimidating, and you might swallow a mouthful of shit, but it's an experience, it's new, it's rattling. In my own case, I was frankly insecure about my own intellectual abilities. I understood King and Koontz -- the likes of Joyce and Kafka and Cervantes were for the cerebral and scholastic. Then one evening I cracked open Dostoyevsky's Crime & Punishment (a violent act in and of itself considering it was my mother's decrepit copy, over sixty years old) and within thirty or so pages I found myself saying, on a perhaps less conscious level, "I get it. I get it!"
Not only did my subsequent writing vastly improve, but so did my self-trust, self-confidence and my basic cognition -- essentially, my ability to think, reason and speak extemporaneously with more complexity. Most crucial, however, is that I've come to realize the integral role literature has played, and continues to play, in my development as a person. I notice nowadays in choosing a book that my criteria is not only, "What enjoyment can I get out of this?" but, "What wisdom can I get out of this?" The latter makes the former even more, well, enjoyable.
For the four or five years after blindly whipping out the first draft of a first novel no one on this Earth shall hopefully ever remember or see again (including me), I formed my reading lists mostly from the popular fiction shelves. Stephen King, Dean Koontz, Michael Crichton, Mario Puzo and more Stephen King all went down my gullet and the stagnancy of my writing -- in style, voice and originality -- reflected that. And for those wondering: literature in my high school was in short supply, and I never attended a formal university. Such situations, unfortunate as they may sound to some, have made my independent explorations far more nourishing and memorable.
You might smell a snob here, but rest assured: this isn't a condemnation of popular writers so much as it is a warning about only swimming laps in one's pool and ignoring the ocean that's right there. Sure it's wide and intimidating, and you might swallow a mouthful of shit, but it's an experience, it's new, it's rattling. In my own case, I was frankly insecure about my own intellectual abilities. I understood King and Koontz -- the likes of Joyce and Kafka and Cervantes were for the cerebral and scholastic. Then one evening I cracked open Dostoyevsky's Crime & Punishment (a violent act in and of itself considering it was my mother's decrepit copy, over sixty years old) and within thirty or so pages I found myself saying, on a perhaps less conscious level, "I get it. I get it!"
Not only did my subsequent writing vastly improve, but so did my self-trust, self-confidence and my basic cognition -- essentially, my ability to think, reason and speak extemporaneously with more complexity. Most crucial, however, is that I've come to realize the integral role literature has played, and continues to play, in my development as a person. I notice nowadays in choosing a book that my criteria is not only, "What enjoyment can I get out of this?" but, "What wisdom can I get out of this?" The latter makes the former even more, well, enjoyable.
Fact or Fiction: The Literary Rock Star
As some of my short fiction and recent novel "Skunk Ape Semester" might attest, cryptozoology, the study of 'hidden animals', is a fascination of mine. Famous 'cryptids' include the Loch Ness Monster, the Yowie, Bigfoot, the Yeti and other entities mammalian, reptilian, or possibly interdimensional. While vastly suggested by numerous eyewitnesses and some strong material evidence, their reality is officially doubted by mainstream science. I propose a new creature, however, persisting in popular consciousness despite a stark decline in evidence supporting its existence. I am a believer in Bigfoot and the Yeti, but not in this creature. And Bigfoot and Yeti are likely the same species, or very close cousins.
This new cryptid is the "literary rock star", now more a mythic notion than a reality, or even, I would argue, a possibility, irrespective of the millions of files flooding Smashwords or hardbacks sagging physical shelves.
I am surely not against the independent publishing movement. In fact, I think it's been essential to cutting out a lot of fat in the industry, thrusting authors and readers nose to nose, making more personal the whole writing-publishing-reading paradigm, which is ultimately what it should be. Because a book is a private conversation with another person, after all, a contextual mind-to-mind dialogue, beautifully subjective.
What interests me is the surviving notion of a 'literary icon', or 'voice of a generation', a throwback to the days of Dickens or Twain, who corralled legions of international followers around their words, whether on the page or at the podium. Over the twentieth century, this kind of frothing celebrity for authors lost significant elbow (and leg) room to the crowding of new technologies. Certainly authors commanded fans, but more among factions in spheres genre or academic or cult, which, over time, only occasionally became a mixture of all three.
Fiction suffered a deep puncture wound from radio and TV from which it has never recovered, and has been bleeding, draining, for decades. The novel and short story, once sharp instruments of social awareness and change, became blunted. The last great flare-up, I feel, before chronic cultural marginalization, came in the tumult of the late sixties, when students toted battered paperbacks of Pynchon or "Slaughterhouse-Five" and "Stranger In a Strange Land" in their backpockets, when reading a certain story was a cool communal thing to do, not because it whisked you away to Hogwarts, but because it resonated with you, it resonated with those like you and made of the world something symmetrical, encouraged growth and momentum on an individual and even collective basis.
If you'll notice, common definitions of literary "eras" or "ages" stopped after the sixties and early to mid-seventies. From then on, literature has no clear age. We saw, and have seen, prominent and talented writers emerge, and older ones continue working. There was the good ol' fatwa declared on Rushdie. But what else? We have quasi-footnote blurbs relegated to the backwater corners of magazine pages saying, "Oh yeah, 'The Corrections' was the book that captured 9/11". In such an environment, how can any "icon" emerge? Their voice, shouted only once or sporadically, drowns in an ever-sweeping cultural tide.
Frequently authors today are touted as "voices of a generation", yet how often is such a claim justified? Are enough ears (and brains) attuned to what the author is actually saying? Or are these the assertions of lone critics and academics, speaking as they are for generations who have since turned away from novels towards reality shows, American Idol, the fifth remake or reboot of a certain movie franchise, or, if they read at all, cookie-cutter memoirs? How often do you see a novelist talking with Jay Leno? Truman Capote used to be a regular on Carson's Tonight Show. Some might say we're just missing an author with larger-than-life personality, a real party-hard rock star, gifted at polemic and gut-thudding shenanigans. But I think we've just shifted our attention elsewhere. How detrimental or advantageous, depending, such a circumstance might be remains to be seen.
This new cryptid is the "literary rock star", now more a mythic notion than a reality, or even, I would argue, a possibility, irrespective of the millions of files flooding Smashwords or hardbacks sagging physical shelves.
I am surely not against the independent publishing movement. In fact, I think it's been essential to cutting out a lot of fat in the industry, thrusting authors and readers nose to nose, making more personal the whole writing-publishing-reading paradigm, which is ultimately what it should be. Because a book is a private conversation with another person, after all, a contextual mind-to-mind dialogue, beautifully subjective.
What interests me is the surviving notion of a 'literary icon', or 'voice of a generation', a throwback to the days of Dickens or Twain, who corralled legions of international followers around their words, whether on the page or at the podium. Over the twentieth century, this kind of frothing celebrity for authors lost significant elbow (and leg) room to the crowding of new technologies. Certainly authors commanded fans, but more among factions in spheres genre or academic or cult, which, over time, only occasionally became a mixture of all three.
Fiction suffered a deep puncture wound from radio and TV from which it has never recovered, and has been bleeding, draining, for decades. The novel and short story, once sharp instruments of social awareness and change, became blunted. The last great flare-up, I feel, before chronic cultural marginalization, came in the tumult of the late sixties, when students toted battered paperbacks of Pynchon or "Slaughterhouse-Five" and "Stranger In a Strange Land" in their backpockets, when reading a certain story was a cool communal thing to do, not because it whisked you away to Hogwarts, but because it resonated with you, it resonated with those like you and made of the world something symmetrical, encouraged growth and momentum on an individual and even collective basis.
If you'll notice, common definitions of literary "eras" or "ages" stopped after the sixties and early to mid-seventies. From then on, literature has no clear age. We saw, and have seen, prominent and talented writers emerge, and older ones continue working. There was the good ol' fatwa declared on Rushdie. But what else? We have quasi-footnote blurbs relegated to the backwater corners of magazine pages saying, "Oh yeah, 'The Corrections' was the book that captured 9/11". In such an environment, how can any "icon" emerge? Their voice, shouted only once or sporadically, drowns in an ever-sweeping cultural tide.
Frequently authors today are touted as "voices of a generation", yet how often is such a claim justified? Are enough ears (and brains) attuned to what the author is actually saying? Or are these the assertions of lone critics and academics, speaking as they are for generations who have since turned away from novels towards reality shows, American Idol, the fifth remake or reboot of a certain movie franchise, or, if they read at all, cookie-cutter memoirs? How often do you see a novelist talking with Jay Leno? Truman Capote used to be a regular on Carson's Tonight Show. Some might say we're just missing an author with larger-than-life personality, a real party-hard rock star, gifted at polemic and gut-thudding shenanigans. But I think we've just shifted our attention elsewhere. How detrimental or advantageous, depending, such a circumstance might be remains to be seen.
