Notes, Comments, and Hatchets, Part 1A

There’s so much wrong with Malcolm Gladwell’s hatchet job on To Kill a Mockingbird that I’ve had to actually write a second blog post just to cover all the nonsense.  Here goes.

In yesterday’s post, I deconstructed the basic ideas that underpin Gladwell’s contentions concerning the book.  Today, I’m just going to quickly go over a couple of smaller points.

One of Gladwell’s later tactics is to draw a comparison between To Kill a Mockingbird and criticisms that George Orwell made of Charles Dickens.  First, he fails by assuming that simply because George Orwell said something that it is automatically true, that Orwell–who I think would have been disgusted by being used in this manner–was Christ returned.  The real problem that Gladwell encounters, though, is that when Orwell criticized Dickens for attacking “the law, parliamentary government, the educational system and so forth, without ever clearly suggesting what he would put in their places” and for showing “no clear sign that he wants the existing order to be overthrown, or that he believes it would make very much difference if it were overthrown,” he is not attacking Dickens the novelist, he is attacking Dickens the social satirist.  Again, To Kill a Mockingbird was not, is not, and was never intended to be a satire, social or otherwise.  The comparison is not valid.  Orwell, had he lived may have loved, hated, or ignored To Kill a Mockingbird, but he certainly would never have confused it for satire.

Next, as raised in a comment in my previous post, Gladwell’s interpretation of the sequence at the end of the book concerning Boo Radley is just plain wrong.  To Kill a Mockingbird is, at its heart, a meditation on some basic teachings of Jesus, such as “do unto others” and “turn the other cheek.”  Boo Radley, who is not merely “shy,” as Malcolm Gladwell would have it, but is either mentally retarded or just plain crazy, defends Scout and Jem not as a matter of civic duty, but in response to a series of small kindnesses.  He would derive no benefit from notoriety–a concept which leaves the well-known Mr Gladwell aghast–and would only, in the long term, suffer harm from it, probably ending up being institutionalized.  Since Mr Gladwell appears to be incapable of absorbing anything other than the most surface elements from a story, he takes the Sheriff’s reference to “angel food cakes” quite literally, and does not interpret it as a metaphor for the invasion of Boo’s privacy and the harm that can be done by the well meaning.  It means that Boo Radley sought no glory and deserves the right to have no glory thrust upon him.  In other words, good works are their own reward.

Finally, Mr Gladwell excoriates the book for presenting what his own research shows was a fairly realistic depiction of conditions in the South in 1936.  Harper Lee’s mistake, in his view, is in telling us the truth simply because that truth is uncomfortable and ugly.  He wants Atticus Finch to be something he was unlikely to be, a person who stood outside the society he lived in, immune from the values he was raised with and surrounded by, some sort of Nietzschian Superman, who is exactly the sort of person I’ve never come across in real life.  Mr Gladwell’s problem is that he doesn’t want a novel, he wants a fable, a fairy tale, in which things work out the way we want them to rather than in the way they actually happen.

It is true that Atticus Finch tends to get placed on too high of a pedestal, however, that is the fault of neither Harper Lee or To Kill a Mockingbird.  That is the fault of readers who tend to romanticize their heroes and wrongly so.  Atticus Finch was a good man, but not a great one, a person who sought justice where none was likely, but not a revolutionary.  And yet, when all is said and done, is there not something to be said for a book that preaches understanding and compassion as virtues?  Are these not, in fact, the same sort of virtues that Dr. King so often preached?  Why should Malcolm Gladwell and The New Yorker be so against compassion?  It’s because it is hard to find room for compassion when you are planning a hatchet job.

Notes, Comments, and Hatchets, Part One

This is the first in at least a two-part series concerning The New Yorker and the various hatchet jobs that it does on established literary figures and works.  For a place that’s continually published crappy fiction throughout my adult life, they like to get awfully uppity.

Today’s installment concerns Malcolm Gladwell’s knifing this week of the classic book To Kill a Mockingbird in honor of its 50th anniversary.  Gladwell’s approach to the novel is social rather than artistic.  In fact, even though it is a work of art and not a treatise on race relations, he makes no assessment of either the merits or demerits of the text.  His problem with it is that it does not make any attempt to overthrow Jim Crow and end racism as it was known in one fell swoop.  He attacks it for fostering what he calls “[o]ld style Southern liberalism,” an approach to Jim Crow and politics in the South that was destroyed in the battle between the Civil Rights movement and diehard segregationists in the late ’50s and early ’60s.  He calls old style Southern liberalism “gradual and paternalistic,” which seems accurate.  Further, he claims that Atticus Finch’s approach to race relations and dealing with justice in the South at the time of the novel was too namby-pamby, too paternalistic, too forgiving of people, and not committed enough to true equality between blacks and whites, and this is probably true too.

The problem is that the novel is not, in its essence, about race relations and was never meant to be a kind of manifesto.  Harper Lee set out to tell a story about certain people in a particular time-and-place.  She was trying not to change the world, but to describe it, as it was, as best she could.  Oh, she could have portrayed Atticus in the hero mode of the average boy’s adventure novel, righting wrongs and always following the true moral path.  Instead, though, she attempted to draw a portrait of a man. As someone who could have actually existed in space and time.

The primary mistake that Gladwell makes is a classic one.  He assumes that the point of art is to change the world, which it most assuredly is not.  In fact, he attacks both the novel and the character of Atticus for using the “hearts and minds” method, which is seen as being too slow, too incremental, too otherworldly.  The truth is that this is how all art works.  Art is about evolution rather than revolution, and anybody who thinks that the shackles of oppression will be broken and abandoned because of a book is out of his or her tree.  People have tried to do that and never has a one accomplished, at the end of the day, a damn thing.  In fact, most ended up being worth nothing more than recycling.  Pedantic and self-important books tend to end up in the dust bin, with the possible exception of Ayn Rand’s.  And, fortunately, most people, mainly boys, who grow enamored of Ms Rand eventually outgrow her.  Her work is juvenalia for juvenile minds.

No, the best that a novel can do is to get the reader to understand another person’s suffering and thereby increase the reach of that person’s compassion just a jot further.  And that is what To Kill a Mockingbird is on about:  compassion.

When Gladwell complains that Atticus is too forgiving of Walter Cunningham, the “poor, white farmer” who leads a mob in an attempted lynching, he misses (and so does the scholar he quotes) the entire point of the episode.  Here.  Let me let Malcolm explain his point of view for himself:

The mob eventually scatters, and the next morning Finch tries to explain the night’s events to Scout. Here again is a test for Finch’s high-minded equanimity. He likes Walter Cunningham. Cunningham is, to his mind, the right sort of poor white farmer: a man who refuses a W.P.A. handout and who scrupulously repays Finch for legal work with a load of stove wood, a sack of hickory nuts, and a crate of smilax and holly. Against this, Finch must weigh the fact that Cunningham also leads lynch mobs against black people. So what does he do? Once again, he puts personal ties first. Cunningham, Finch tells his daughter, is “basically a good man,” who “just has his blind spots along with the rest of us.” Blind spots? As the legal scholar Monroe Freedman has written, “It just happens that Cunningham’s blind spot (along with the rest of us?) is a homicidal hatred of black people.”

First, is it true that “Cunningham’s blind spot . . . is a homicidal hatred of black people”?  Is Walter Cunningham, in fact, going about killing blacks as he comes across them or is his leadership of this mob more specific than that?  Does he in fact lead “lynch mobs against black people” or lead one mob against one particular black person?  Are members of any mob a collection of psychopaths or are they groups of people who are under the sway of mass hysteria?  Do people quite often do things in groups that they wouldn’t dare do alone?  And shouldn’t the renowned writer on sociology be aware of that?

Cunningham’s blind spot is not “a homicidal hatred of black people,” but rather an unquestioned belief in an evil social system.  Again, Harper Lee could have painted him as merely a monster, a villain, but that would have taken her story in the fantasyland of melodrama.  In the real and complex world, good men can do evil things, quite often because they have invested their identities in a rotten system or because they get swept away in the hysterical moment.  Is it better to understand that person and their frailties or to condense them into a caricature of their real selves, all the better to hate them with?   For both Malcolm Gladwell and Professor Monroe Freedman are guilty of stereotyping.  They have to if they want to construct that straw man where the character of Walter Cunningham used to be.

As Jean Renoir said in The Rules of the Game, “The terrible thing about life is this:  Everyone has his reasons.”  This is not to imply a kind of leveling of reasons and actions, but to open the possibility in one’s mind that we are all human and fallible.  It is to imply that compassion is a virtue and that blind judgment is not.

As part of Gladwell’s attack, he says that To Kill a Mockingbird is “a novel set in mid-century Alabama,” and while I cannot carp about it being set in Alabama, I must complain about the “mid-century” part.  The purpose, of course, is to make sure that your straw man is set in the proper straw setting.  The meaning that Gladwell wants the reader to take away from “mid-century” is that the novel is set in the 1950s, the decade that saw the rise of the Civil Rights movement and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, just so that he can show how out-of-step the book was with the times that it sought to portray.  Which is nonsense.  The novel is set in 1936, a very different time in Southern history.  This “mid-century” business is misleading, just the kind of trick used when the author has few legitimate arguments to make.  And so much for The New Yorker’s fabled fact-checking department.

Attack To Kill a Mockingbird if you must, but at least attack it for what it is, not what it isn’t.  To do so should be beneath a writer of Malcolm Gladwell’s stature, and to print it should beneath a publication such as The New Yorker.  Unfortunately, as further entries in this series will show, the hatchet job is an accepted part of The New Yorker’s ethic.

UPDATE:  I have added a part two to this argument.

What’s That Smell?

J.D. Salinger has gotten himself involved in another lawsuit.  It is alleged that a new book is going to be published that takes up the story of Holden Caulfield some fifty years later.  It is further alleged that this book was written by one John David California, which is supposed to be a pseudonym.  It is also alleged that it will be published by a firm called Windupbird Publishing Ltd in England.  Mr. California is alleged to be an American living in Sweden.  For some reason, I keep thinking that this is going to turn out to be a hoax.

It’s more a feeling than anything.  Perhaps it was because The Telegraph, an undoubtedly British publication, refers to the publisher as “an obscure company allegedly based in London[.]“  Perhaps it is because the photo of Mr. California in the Telegraph looks like the picture of a Swede.  Maybe it’s because the pseudonym is supposed to be JD California, which has hoax written all over it.

Maybe I’m wrong.  I’ve been wrong before.  But I can almost guarantee that there’s going to be some twist to this story before the book ever comes out.  If it ever does.

The Dan Brown Conspiracy

With the release of the film Angels & Demons, the time has come again for op-ed pages all over the movie-going world to ask the burning question of the 21st century:  “Why does Dan Brown sell so many more books than I do?”  Many theories are posited, from Mr. Brown’s alleged proselytizing for some sort of suburban demi-Christianity to, I suppose, mass hypnosis.  The deeper sort of reader is puzzled by the enduring allure of drivel, and the more mercantile sort drips with envy over money being generated so easily and quickly by someone who is obviously no more talented, clever, or intelligent than they.  And yet, I think none of this explains the implausible popularity of  Angels & Demons or, more especially, The Da Vinci Code.

For many people, of course, it is simply a matter of–to use an old comedy nostrum–”buy the premise, buy the bit.”  It seems unlikely to me, though, that there’s 100 million copies-worth of the suspension of disbelief available in any one century.  If that is true, another explanation must apply.

Being a modern, frantic, beleaguered American, my mind leaps immediately to the conspiracy theory.  It’s not so much that I think that there is some hidden international conspiracy that is trying to sell Mr. Brown’s books–although that would explain a lot–it is that, I think, the appeal of The Da Vinci Code and its lesser brethren, all of which invent huge, unseen conspiracies, comes from a widespread need for the conspiracy theory as a way of understanding reality.  I would contend that, in a dizzyingly complicated and existentially fragmented world, a world in which most people feel themselves to be the victims of their lives rather than the heroes, the finding, keeping, and maintaining of conspiracy theories is a lifeline that people latch on to in an attempt to keep themselves functional, to keep themselves sane.

There’s a paradox in using something that is fundamentally paranoid and insane as a defense of one’s sanity, but desperate times call for desperate measures.  And the proof of the usefulness of conspiracy theories is in their very ubiquity:  Off the top of my head, I can come up with a great pile of popular conspiracy theories.  There is, of course, the granddaddy of them all, the alleged conspiracy behind the Kennedy assassination.  There’s the idea that someone besides William Shakespeare wrote his plays and poems.  There is a whole slew of them having to do with the Tri-Lateral Commission.  There are the ideas of the left-wing media, the mainstream media, and the vast conspiracy that uses right-wing radio as its mouthpiece.  There are conspiracy theories about 9/11, various recent elections, the Moon landing, Israel, Jews in general, the Queen of England, and a number of Popes.  There are conspiracy theories involving the Mormons, freemasons, Democrats, Republicans, Communists, and Fascists.  That’s the problem with conspiracy theories:  They’re everywhere if only you look hard enough.

We are taught to be rational.  In fact, one of the hallmarks of Western civilization has been its championing of the rational mind.  And rationality has led to many boons and wonders.  Unfortunately we live in an irrational universe, and when we are confronted with something that challenges the order that our rational minds have imprinted on the world–such as that a deluded loser can kill a President, that 3000 people can die in a lunatic’s idea of a publicity stunt, that a middle-class burgher in the Midlands of England can have the greatest ear for language and feel for character of any writer in English–we feel that we have to explain it in terms other than the obvious.  If the prejudices and biases we use to defend ourselves are wrong in this, how else are they wrong?  Without the shield of these biases, we are Lear on the heath and the world is a madness.

One of the lies of the conspiracy theory is that conspiracies are cloaked in an impenetrable secrecy.  The Bush Administration, to use a recent example, has shown us that this is not true.  They operated mostly openly, behind only a thin veneer of secrecy.  As the recent release of the so-called torture memos makes clear, they colluded and conspired and–most importantly–rationalized their way around and past laws both national and international.  They hid their intentions and lied to our faces to start a war on terror and a war in Iraq that they thought would combat–wait for it–a vast international conspiracy.  Perhaps it was a case of “it takes one to know one,” but I think it was just another collective delusion.

And so Dan Brown sells books.  It’s comforting to think that a rational explanation is readily available for something–the divinity of Jesus, for example–that doesn’t seem rational, that challenges our prejudices, that tests our biases.  If only Mr. Brown’s books were rational.  Or readable.  But I guess the appearance of rationality is better than no rationality at all.

The Elements of Style, Not Steel

In reading an article in The Times this morning concerning the 50th anniversary edition of The Elements of Style, I reflected on a blog post I wrote a little over a year ago in which I discussed the effect the so-called “little book” had on me as a writer.  It was a small stroll down memory lane inspired, at the time, by a slight detour.  I had read a blog post by Paul Krugman in which he danced a piroette on the wonders of George Orwell’s essay about clarity in writing, “Politics and the English Language,” and I ventured the opinion that not only might Orwell’s essay perhaps not have been “the best essay on writing ever written,” but was, at least in my case, one of the best sleep aids I had ever encountered.  Some days later, I noticed on the dashboard for this blog that there was a link incoming to that post.  It connected to some website devoted to Orwell, and the author of the link added one of the “rules” from The Elements of Style in which E.B. White enjoined the nascent writer to not “affect a breezy manner.”  Apparently my lack of enthusiasm had struck a nerve, and someone who lacked the courage to identify himself had constructed what he thought was a witty rejoinder to my slander against his hero.  That’s how things are done in the digital world.

Unfortunately for our Orwell-loving sniper, my piece, while playful in spots, was not written in a breezy manner, and he (or she; idiocy is not gender-specific) missed the point of a section that White referred to in the book as a selection of reminders.  This point was also missed in a recent article published in The Chronicle of Higher Learning by a professor from the University of Edinburgh called Geoffery Pullum, although, in fairness, Professor Pullum has more reasonable, compelling, and useful ideas to put forth.  Both seem (although I might be misinterpreting Professor Pullum) to be under the misapprehension that The Elements of Style is anything other than a collection of guidelines for the beginner and is not–especially after E.B. White got through with it–a polemic or manifesto.  Of course, they are not alone.  Too many thousands, including the folks who created the grammar wizard in Microsoft Word, have taken the Little Book too seriously.  They treat it as if it were holy writ, not merely some quick ideas that put forth the notion–the same one as put forth by Orwell, by the way–that clarity in the writing of English prose is a virtue.

Because Professor Strunk followed his own advice concerning the making of definite assertions, the early sections of the book do read like an extension of the Ten Commandments, but this can be overcome.  And the second section, the one dominated by White, is far less proscriptive, although, I guess, by the time that people get that far, they have been conditioned enough to jump when commanded that they unconsciously omit White’s advice to season one’s taste of his reminders with a pinch or two of salt.  It is long past time for everyone to relax a little and to remember that The Elements of Style is not a sacred text.  It began its life as a guidebook for college freshmen and not as a learned disquisition on the English language in all its complexity.  It is a style guide, and a decent one, I think, and entertaining to boot.

Now, two more things before I go.

First, I want to make it clear that I am not anti-Orwell.  1984 and Animal Farm are two of the best novels I’ve ever read, extraordinary in every way.  What I failed to make clear previously was that it was that one essay that put me to sleep.  If it is truly as great as Professor Krugman had it, then the fault is mine.

Second, Professor Pullum’s essay should be read by anyone who is infatuated with The Elements of Style and his words heeded.  I think he is right in just about everything he says except in his insistence on taking the book sooooo seriously.  It also seems to me that some of his notions, such as that “[t]he students who know which words are needless don’t need the instruction,” are logically flawed and detract from his overall argument.   (Not that he’s arguing with overalls.  Whoops!  There’s that breezy side of me rearing its ugly head again.  For shame!  For shame!)  I think it would be great to see his essay published with the standard text as an afterword or something.  Everyone would benefit from a bit of scoffing, for there is no animal duller than a sacred cow.

Reading (The Activity, Not the Railroad)

A while back, I announced a rather ambitious project in these–not pages, exactly, perhaps–pixels.  I had intended to make a reading pilgrammage across a shelf of one of our bookshelves of fiction in an attempt to educate myself better about current writing and the state of fiction.  In other words, I was attempting to carve away a tiny chip from the great block of ignorance that I call a brain.  Now, I started out in good faith.  I was rereading Travels with Charley then, and I did just fine with that book.  The reading project started to fall to pieces when I set myself to reread the next book, Don DeLillo’s White Noise.  Everything that had delighted me on my first reading grated on me the second time, so I put it aside. Next, I picked up The Bean Trees by Barbara Kingsolver, which I had never read before.  By the end of Chapter Three, I had set it aside as well.

At that point I began to suspect that the problem lay more with me than with the texts.  And the problem was that I now, being a novelist myself, approached the works of other living novelists as competitors, almost as enemies.  I couldn’t read a sentence without recasting it in my mind, without searching it for flaws, without scoffing at its techniques and meanings.  All of which is patently unfair to these authors and their works.  What a dreadful world it would be if everyone wrote the way that I did, and how much harder still would it be for me to progress in my chosen profession if my works were no more unique than a paperclip or a house in a subdivision.

And so, I have decided to lay off living authors.  They’ve got a right, and reading somebody’s work in that way does me no good either.  There’s just no percentage in it at all.

All of which has led me to come up with a new plan.  I will, from now on, concentrate on the works of the dead.  The classics.  All those books that I should have read and, with depressing frequency, haven’t.  I’ve begun by rereading another book of Steinbeck’s, Of Mice and Men.  In part, I am reading it because my son just finished it.  In part, I am reading it because I haven’t read it since I was 14, and I wanted to make its acquaintance again.  He’s currently reading The Red Badge of Courage, which I’ve never read, so that will be next on the list.  Beyond that, I’m not sure.  We’ve picked out some of the shorter classics for him, so I may just continue, as the suckerfish to his shark, to shadow his reading and survive on his crumbs.

But we’ll see.  Plans have a strange way of evolving.

The Book Industry

Over the last few days, most recently on The New Yorker website, I have read several blog posts heralding the end of the publishing industry, the death of the humble book, and the triumph of the electronic reader.  I find all of this to be hooey and all the wheezing and ranting going on to be nothing other than Henny-Pennyish panicking.

This is not to say that the publishing industry isn’t changing and morphing into a new entity that will include fully digitized books as part of their wares.  Of course it is changing, and I think there’s a chance that it might even improve.  Of course, the first canard in the “Death of Publishing” bag is the idea that these folks are talking, truly, about publishing as an industry.  These doomsayers all seem to be New York publishing professionals who confuse the occupants of certain office buildings in Manhattan as being “the publishing industry,” and, in fact, to be literature itself.  This is, of course, nonsense and is nothing more than egotism evolving into paranoia.  Random House and Bertelsmann can go the way of the do-do and publishing will continue very nicely thank you.  It just won’t be happening as much in the usual midtown Manhattan locations.

But before I go further with that thought, let me address a couple of the arguments that get made concerning “the death of publishing.”  (If I had any business sense, I’d come up with a way to trademark “the death of publishing.”  There’s a fortune to be made from this over the next several years.  Maybe I can form a corporation to be the owner and publisher of this blog.  I can then make the slogan for the company “The Death of Publishing Since 2008.”  I would go see my lawyer about this, only I don’t have one.)  The main argument that gets made is that electronic readers, such as the Kindle or the Sony Reader, will soon displace the forlorn hardcover and paperback book, just as the iPod has eliminated the CD, which it hasn’t.  In fact, every post I come across addressing this subject makes an analogy between the Kindle and the iPod, which would be fine if they were analogous.  But they’re not.

Let’s think about this.  What are the technological advantages of the iPod over portable CD players, which is what the iPod really replaced?  It eliminates skipping and other playback problems that occured with portable CD players.  This has never been a problem with books, and it isn’t improved by any electronic reader.  You can put your CD collection on the iPod and sample from your entire collection in a moment.  Although on its face this might seem to have an analogue in the Kindle, it really doesn’t.  You see, the dozens and dozens of books I already own, unlike the dozens and dozens of CDs I own, are not downloadable.  In order to get that content on a Kindle or other device, I would have to purchase each one anew.  The brilliance of the iPod is that it sprang from a fully digitized world.  It did not have to create one from scratch.

The other big advantage that I find with the iPod is that you can put it on shuffle and listen to an unexpected selection of music from a collection the listener already approves of in random order.  This adds the element of occasional small surprises.  Would you want to put a Kindle on shuffle even if you could?  Of course not.  What would that be anyway?  Random chapters or even pages of books thrown at you one after another, each out of context and therefore without meaning?  No.  That’s an absurd process, even though I am sure that there are a few people out there who would find it quite keen.

So there you have it.  The iPod and the Kindle are not in any way analogous.  And further, the humble book has certain other advantages over electronic readers that just aren’t going to go away.  For example, if you leave your book on a bus, your entire library doesn’t go with it.  You can run over a book with a car, and it will probably still be readable.  And your book is never going to run out of electricity when you’re trying to read at the beach or on the bus or at the airport or on a plane or in a park or in any of another thousand sorts of places where recharging a battery is difficult or impossible.

No, the humble book is a sturdier piece of technology than the publishing paranoiacs would have you believe.

But back to the development of the publishing industry.  Unlike the newspaper industry, whose future is going to end up almost entirely online, publishing houses have a future in producing traditional books.  The publishers who are in for trouble in the coming years are the giants.  They are the dinosaurs of the industry and a meteor is heading for the Gulf of Mexico.  They will die because they have become corporatized and are run by nimrods with business degrees instead of people who are passionate about books.  Like the owners of baseball teams, they compete with each other by spending too much money up front on talents whose past performances are no guarantee of future success.  They tie up too much money in paying advances–even to lower-tier authors–that will take them years to recoup in an industry where every book published is a crapshoot.  They have become moribund and top-heavy and too dependent on bestsellers.  They have no idea what readers want or how to attract new customers.  Every now and then, they get lucky and publish something new that strikes a chord with the populace at large, such as the Harry Potter series or The Da Vinci Code, and then they proceed to flog the living daylights out of it and start trying to find every clone of that thing that they can in order to publish it, regardless of its value.  They look at the community of readers as a bunch of suckers instead of as a pool of customers.  And hucksterism is not replacement for knowledge, passion, and guts.

And so the big houses may die, one-by-one.  Perhaps some of the imprints that have been gobbled up by conglomerates will be spun off again, and Viking and Knopf and others of the old vanguard will be left to roam the landscape unfettered.  It’s the smart way for these companies to go, to break up their conglomerations and to let what are now known as imprints go back to being smaller, independent publishing houses.

Because the future of publishing is with the independents.  That’s where its past was, too, and the era of these huge firms is an anomaly and not the norm.  The smaller publishers can’t throw around money, but they do have flexibility.  Since they cannot pay large advances, they must work with their authors as partners, rather than as pets or possessions, and since they cannot afford a large number of failures, they have to work that much harder to make of each title a success.    They do what they do for love, not for prestige or an expense account or for a meeting with a high-powered parasite who calls himself an agent.  They know that publishing is not a business, but a quest, that it is not an industry, but a calling.

Even venerable Random House started as a couple of guys who “were going to publish a few books on the side at random” and not as a publishing titan.  It is a business that has been left a hulking shadow of itself by mere corporatism, and it shall be reclaimed by those who should be running it:  the lovers.

The Means of Distribution, Part I

Over the last few days, after the broadcast of “Phil’s Deli” and in reaction to a post and comments on Baby Got Books, I’ve started thinking about how works of art get distributed, particularly in regards to books, movies and TV shows, and audio plays.  Each is being affected by the Internet and the digitized life, but none, it seems to me, has caught up with technology yet.  What finally pushed me over the precipice to write this post was getting an email forwarding a link to Michael Moore’s new film, Slacker Uprising.

Moore is trying something different here.  He’s giving his movie away.  (And, just for the record, I’m not endorsing, condemning, exfoliating, or cleansing the film.  I haven’t watched it and haven’t decided whether I will or not.  If you don’t care for Michael Moore, I would suggest that you not watch it and that you don’t bother leaving angry comments on this post.  I’m concerned here with art, society, and technology, not politics.)  He’s not the first show biz figure to try giving some content away; Radiohead got some very nice news coverage doing so, and a couple of others have apparently tried it out.

What is occurring to me is that we are about to see a vast–and quite possibly useful–change in the way that works of art are distributed.  I don’t claim that this is some kind of original insight; I’m just trying to work through this, and this blog has become the medium through which I think through these things.

Let’s start with movies.  Film, as an art form, is all but dead.  Oh, sure, you can see loads of violence, trillions of dollars-worth of special effects, and computer animation out the wazoo, but precious little of it even aspires to art.  The economics of the movie business have gotten to the point where, not only would Citizen Kane not get made today, neither would Stagecoach, On the Waterfront, The Hustler, or Five Easy Pieces.  And yet, there might be hope.

The most public face of this hope is, of course, YouTube.  People are already making short films and releasing them on YouTube or its equivalents and hoping that viral marketing will get them the attention they desire.  And now we’re getting a feature film.  And some TV shows.  People are starting to figure out how you can make money–and show business is, in the end, a business–by doing things online.

This is a major change in the means of distribution.  And being the means of distribution is the whole point of being a movie studio or a TV network.  If someone takes that away from you, your goose is cooked.  Just look at the record companies.  iTunes and iPods and programs like Garage Band and Audacity have made it possible for anyone to produce music and to distribute it without a record company.  Paul Simon discusses this and the evolution of recorded music from the vinyl album to the mp3 in a discussion with Charlie Rose (starting at minute 43:00 of the video).  He indicates that he’s no longer thinking in terms of making another CD, but instead releasing new songs individually and less as groups of songs and more as lone items.

The implication is that the record company is no longer a part of the equation.  The means of distribution have changed.

Reading Project Update

One down and 24 to go.

I finished rereading Travels with Charley, which was just as rewarding as always.  (My review of it can be seen at Baby Got Books.)  I then proceeded directly to White Noise, the first book on the shelf I plan on working my way through.

Unfortunately, I have had to put White Noise aside, and I think that the problem is that I’ve read it before.  My wife put it best when she said, “It’s very readable; it’s just not rereadable.”  Because the thing about it is this:  White Noise is definitely a post-modern novel, and while that’s all well and fine, it also means that, instead of Don DeLillo telling me about life, he’s telling me what he thinks about life.  Which is like being stuck at a party with that acquaintance who has one interest in life and never stops flogging it.  The first time you hear the diatribe, it’s fine.  It might even be extremely interesting.  However, the next time, it is less so, and it will never get better no matter how many times you are so exposed.

Now, the argument might be made that this is true of any novel, but it most certainly is not.  Books that are written in a less intellectualized way, books that are less related to lectures, have an almost endless set of meanings.  The meaning comes from that particular reader intersecting with that particular text, and each reader will come away from a book with a different experience and therefore interpretation of it.  Post modernism wants nothing of that, however.  Just like some political hack on a Sunday morning “news” program, the point is to control the message.  We see this when we attend installation type art shows.  In some cases, small light blue cards appended to the exhibit tell us what it means.  In other cases, the message is spelled out quite plainly in words in the work itself just so the artist can be assured that no viewer has the temerity to think for themselves or to have their own experience of the work.

And I found myself feeling the same way about White Noise.  Throughout the first part, I kept saying to myself, “I get it.  Jack’s a phony.  I get it.  There’s always a TV on or an announcement at a store or some kind of white noise in the background of modern lives.  I get it.”  I had gotten to a point, rather early on, in which the main character, Jack, has a conversation with his son, Heinrich, that no one has ever had or will ever have.  It was all too thought out, too intellectual.  It was that guy with the jabbing finger making the same point that he made that time at the barbecue.  I got it then, I get it now, and I’m not going to get it any more tomorrow.

Because there is no more to get.  It’s all made plain because there is no faith in my ability to interpret and no interest in the subtle game that less insistent authors play with readers.  I look in a mirror and instead of seeing myself, I see Don DeLillo.

Now, I say all this not to insult Mr DeLillo.  He is a great writer, and I’m glad I read White Noise.  Once.  I’m even more glad that I read Libra, which I think was a phenomenal performance.  I wish him nothing but the best.  Really.  I’m just losing whatever interest I once had in post modernism and am ready for post post modernism to begin, whatever that might be.

I have moved on to The Bean Trees and will replace White Noise with Straight Man by Richard Russo, which my wife is currently reading and which seems to be just up my street.

The Great American Novel

I stopped in at the Prairie Home Companion website this morning to catch up on Garrison Keillor’s column, The Old Scout, and most of all to see if any new Posts to the Host had been made. Now, it’s funny that I should do any of these things, because I haven’t really listened to A Prairie Home Companion purposely in years. Oh, there was a time. I’m one of those people who found it in the early years, back in the very early ’80s. When I started listening, one of the fictional sponsors of the show was Bob’s Bank (“Save at the Sign of the Sock”). And time went on and the show grew in popularity. Eventually, Garrison became involved with a Danish woman he had gone to high school with and publicly humiliated the woman he had been living with–the show’s producer, Margaret Moos. It seemed to me to be ungentlemanly behavior, so I stopped listening. Besides which, every episode now featured commercials for an album fictionally called “Songs of the Cat” at Bertha’s Kitty Boutique, and while that might have been humorous the first forty or fifty times, the whole concept had begun to wear on my nerves, and every Saturday night not spent listening to the recitation of the locations of Bertha’s Kitty Boutique stores or commercials for the Fearmonger’s Shop was time well spent.

And yet, as with any early love, interest may fade, but it never completely dies. And so I check in each week to see what the good middle and upper middle class folks in the heartland have to say and to see what Garrison is on about in his syndicated column. It helps fill up the week, and you never know what you’re going to come across.

Lately the trend in the Posts to the Host section has been for people to vilify Garrison for one reason or another. One was from a guy who was upset because Garrison used the word “fruitcake” in a Guy Noir sketch, which he took to be a slur against gay men. Of course, this is absurd. The term “fruitcake” refers to crazy people, not gayboys. No, had he been insensitive enough to want to slur gay men, he would have used the term “fruit.” Or Nancy. Or nancyboy. Or swish. Or Mary. Or sissymary. Or many others far too plain spoken and ribald for the typical audience for A Prairie Home Companion.

Another came when Garrison apparently had the nerve to suggest that the Baby Boomer Generation (a group from whose upper echelons he hails) were ever anything other than a collection of Christs-on-Earth. How dare he? Doesn’t he know that we came out of the ’60s (somewhere around 1975) living in a paradise on Earth where all problems were solved? How else could we have gone into the ’80s (somewhere around 1975) without descending into a narcissistic hash of drugs, greed, and meaningless sex? Oh, wait. We did.

And now, this morning, he is being excoriated for not considering The Great Gatsby “The Great American Novel,” and instead preferring something–anything–by Faulkner. Keillor’s response is inspired. It’s in moments like those when I remember why I loved him and his show so damn much all those years ago.

Now, my first question is this: How wealthy do you have to be before this is your concern in life? I mean, I like books and all, but I’m too busy paying bills and trying to survive to be able to spend too many hours building an imaginary hierarchy out of the corpus of American literature based solely on my own prejudices and limitations.

My second question is, why can there only be one Great American Novel? Aren’t there really hundreds? Can all the vast realities of American life be summed up in a single volume? And can that vastness really be summed up in a 40,000 word book about a bootlegger and a bunch of people with too much time on their hands? I’m not trying to dis Fitzgerald, either. The Last Tycoon, his final, unfinished novel, is an extraordinary performance, a great book written by a great writer who was finally in complete control of all of his gifts.

I haven’t read much Faulkner, which is more a sad comment on me than it is on him. I read “The Bear” in my literature book in 7th grade, even though–perhaps especially because–it wasn’t on the syllabus. I’ve also read snippets over the years, and the man was clearly a master. And you really don’t get a Nobel Prize for making sausage. He was a modernist, which is always going to alienate some readers, but I have a tip for them. Read it slow. Read it word-by-word and not sentence-by-sentence or paragraph-by-paragraph or page-by-page. I tried this with Ulysses, and it took over my brain. And I would have sworn before that that it was nothing but pretentious drivel.

Finally, my goal is not to write The Great American Novel, but to write A Decent American Novel, which is probably about all anyone can aspire to. There is not one greatest. I’ve had this thought for years. It started back when everyone was comparing Magic to Bird. Who was greater? And I thought, “What does it matter?” If you were choosing teams on a playground, would you pass up either? It was a meaningless question. And then I thought, you know, there’s a level in any field of endeavor that only a few can perform at, and once someone reaches that level, the whole concept of hierarchy loses its meaning. Deciding which is best is a matter of picking nits and relying more on prejudices than facts. It’s possible to love them all, and much more meaningful and enriching if you do.

Not that I have an opinion on any of this.