Chris Blanc: Play and Projects: Blog

The same goes with authors: They come in every form and background imaginable, and the only way to judge them is by their writing. As I say in the book, the sole common denominator in great or successful writers is: none was born a congenital idiot.

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AC: You describe two key ways an editor can fail a book: through a defective sensibility and a lack of craft.

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In short words, if the editor is a fool — run. Say you need to think about it, and try to find someone better. If the next forty publishers turn you down, go back to the fool, courteously resist his foolish suggestions, and hope someone else in the house chain-of-operation recognizes the real value of what you’ve done. That someone could be the editor’s boss, or someone in sales, or, most likely, someone in subsidiary rights. ^{^}

Thomas McCormack, the author of these quotations, worked as an editor for 25 years before returning to his chosen love, playwrighting. As both an author and a publisher, he captures the balance of the trade in these brief quotations. Avoid idiots. Write what you know. Practice how you write. Inspiring.

Life imitates literature yet again:

Officers said they began searching for [the] car after a grocery store employee phoned authorities to report that a car leaving the store’s parking lot was missing a wheel.

Lt. Shaun McColgan said [the driver], who was behind the wheel of the car when police arrived, admitted to being intoxicated, but said it did not matter because “he ‘wasn’t driving.’”

The police said [the driver] did not know his car was missing a wheel, nor did he know where or why the crucial car part might have come off the vehicle. The officers said they retraced the path followed by [the driver] — aided by the scratch marks his car left on the pavement — but were unable to locate the missing component. ^{^}

And the original, as written by F. Scott Fitzgerald:

Half a dozen fingers pointed at the amputated wheel—he stared at it for a moment, and then looked upward as though he suspected that it had dropped from the sky.

“It came off,” some one explained.

He nodded.

“At first I din’ notice we’d stopped.”

A pause. Then, taking a long breath and straightening his shoulders, he remarked in a determined voice:

“Wonder’ff tell me where there’s a gas’line station?”

At least a dozen men, some of them little better off than he was, explained to him that wheel and car were no longer joined by any physical bond.

“Back out,” he suggested after a moment. “Put her in reverse.”

“But the WHEEL’S off!”

He hesitated.

“No harm in trying,” he said. ^{^}

Denial of responsibility seems an eternal trait.

Science fiction is the last great literature of ideas.

From where I sit, traditional “literary fiction” has dropped the ball. I studied literature in college, and throughout my twenties I voraciously read contemporary fiction. Then, eight or nine years ago, I found myself getting — well — bored.

Why? I think it’s because I was reading novel after novel about the real world. And there are, at the risk of sounding superweird, only so many ways to describe reality. After I’d read my 189th novel about someone living in a city, working in a basically realistic job and having a realistic relationship and a realistically fraught family, I was like, “OK. Cool. I see how today’s world works.” I also started to feel like I’d been reading the same book over and over again. ^{^}

Clive makes a juicy point here: literature that attempts to be realistic spends all of its time describing what we have today, which is observable by just about anyone. Its only way to make itself compelling is to show us details we haven’t seen already, but the question is really how informative are those details? The answer is not much, even if read in large doses.

Literature today, like music today, struggles with its own productification. There are people to buy it, so they’ve found a way to mass produce it, which is the realistic novel. In it, people write about the personal drama of individuals adapting to the current lifestyle. The problem is that there’s no struggle, journey or learning in that other than the most shallow questions of acceptance and social status.

With that in mind, we do not need realistic literature. Life will always be more real than literature. What we need is literature that re-invests language with meaning by showing us struggle, journey and learning. It needs to show characters have transformative, not cathartic, experiences that change the way they look at life itself in some fundamental way.

Another world for realistic literature is mundane literature. The stores are crammed with it. Each book tells basically the same story, so the authors dress them up the absurd and outlandish in order to make the book distinctive. This is why you can never read a book about normal people, only people with bunches of problems and awkward personal circumstances.

Very few people write about ideas.

If you run a realistic simulation enough times — writing tens of thousands of novels about contemporary life — eventually you’re going to explore almost every outcome. So what do you do then?

You change the physics in the sim. Alter reality — and see what new results you get.

Unfortunately, Clive makes the same mistake. He thinks we should write about alternative realities, or more external dressing up of the same character play, instead of doing what great literature does. Great literature goes inward. It writes about the struggle for the soul of individuals as they find their balance of adaptation with society, and with their own moral knowledge of the right path, even if the people around them do not acknowledge it.

The greatest novels have rejected the cathartic, or the idea that we can tackle a whole load of personal drama and release it somehow, then after our catharsis return to life as it is. The greatest novels are about people who struggle against things as they are and strive to make life conform to a vision only they can see. Even the Bible fits this description. The realistic novel has no such aspirations, and if it bores Clive, I’m sure it will bore you and me.

Famed novelist Thomas Pynchon had a sister, and she had a kid, and that kid grew up to be an attractive young woman who writes, directs, and occasionally stars in some very scary sounding pornography. Last year, she released her newest effort, which gives seven porn stars a chance to indulge in their wildest fantasies (even wilder than normal, natch). She invited Pynchon to the premiere. Details here.

No word if the famously-reclusive, Long Island-living novelist answered the call. He did attend her college graduation from Wesleyan. It’s uncertain he wants to be seen in public, much less be associated with whatever crazy stuff she’s doing now. But Pynchon fans are watching his moves with interest because he remains America’s great mystery of a promising novelist.

I’ve bought each of these books at least twice. For those who might appreciate them the first time online, here’s links to etexts of Neuromancer, by William Gibson and Naked Lunch, by William S. Burroughs.

Both Gibson and Burroughs have been featured on this blog before.

I discovered Tom Wolfe later in my reading career, mainly because the first book of his I picked up, The Electric Kool-Ade Acid Test, annoyed me stylistically so much I resolved never to read any of his terrible prose again. I still feel he often overwrites, but that he gets the concepts and characters correct, and so is more profound than many who are better at stringing together sentences. In this he reminds me of William Gibson and Michael Crichton, both of whom often write bready text that discusses the underlying and invisible issues of the day that most people don’t know how to tackle.

If you’re going to read Wolfe, in my view, the book to read is A Man in Full, which is about heroism as an alternative to the ethic of convenience that makes people think they’re succeeding and escaping the errors of our time, but really lays the fertile seeds for future misery.

But reading was the sort of thing you did in idle hours if you didn’t want to go out and play. I just read constantly. I’m sure if I was that age today, I would be watching as much television as anybody else, but it’s a huge advantage if you ever start writing.

I began to notice, when I was working on magazines years later, I kept looking over my shoulder for the new talent that would be coming along which would be competition for those of us who had reached the ripe age of 37 or 38, and it wasn’t there. It just never got there. And part of it is that today, I think, so many talented writers want to go into television, or they want to go into movie writing. Those are the hot industries. But without that reading, I don’t think anybody’s ever going to turn out to be much of a writer.

Now my daughter Alexandra, who’s 24 now, she went to a very tough all-girls school here in New York. And that school is so hard, she watched exactly one hour of television a week. Not because my wife and I said, “You can’t go near that set.” We never said that. She would watch Beverly Hills 90210. That was the only thing she ever watched on television. She read and read. And now– you don’t mind a father bragging a little, do you? So today she’s 24 and she’s got a book contract. She’s worked on two newspapers. She worked on the New York Observer, a weekly here in New York, and she was a reporter for the Wall Street Journal, and a publishing house approached her and gave her this book contract. And I think it’s partly because she read, she read, she read, she read, she read. It got to the point where she didn’t care about television.^{^}

I refuse to own a television, but like his daughter, I don’t even face the issue. There’s too many other activities on which I would rather spend my irreplaceable time than watching television. Every time I do watch a movie or TV, I end up sitting there afterwards with a slight depression, because I gave hours of my life to someone else’s (badly expressed) dream and it made me no richer.

The great project of literature has been to describe the relationship between the individual and society. This is most notable in the novel; in fact, it is almost a definition of the novel. In poetry, the relationship is more complex. Poetry often seems to be the individual testing how far they can remove themselves from society.

The situation now, it seems to me, is one in which the particular individualism that literature has depicted (and, in large part, created) is in the process of breaking down. There are a number of reasons for this: changes in society and advances in science are the most important. ^{^}

As the book publishing industry continues to hide how badly it is doing, many of us who want to write for a living find ourselves in the awkward position of wondering if the publishing industry will be around for us. While anyone who has ever stared at a residual check has mixed feelings about the death of the overhead-intensive record or book publishing industry, the truth remains that large, centralized corporations are the best way of concentrating power and getting books out to the rest of society.

It’s kind of like your liver, in a way. Somewhere in the body there needs to be a central chemical processing unit, and if there’s not one, it has to go on in each of the cells but this means that you trade efficiency for localization. While I like the idea of localization, I know it doesn’t apply universally. We need some form of “book liver” to spread the best of our works to the world.

There’s no polite way to say what most people who are not employed by the book industry are thinking. Books lately have very little to offer us. They’re a lot like the mass media, which seems to “miss” big issues like climate change while it’s busy covering Britney Spears, as Carl Bernstein just noted.

He said more resources are being devoted to the lifestyles of celebrities such as Donald Trump and Paris Hilton.

“The problems we have in news and journalism are about us not doing our job well enough,” Bernstein said. “The ideal of providing the best available version of the truth is being affected by the dominance of a journalistic culture that has less and less to do with reality and context.”

Bernstein, 63, said he believes an “idiot culture” is partly to blame for the dysfunction of political life in the United States.

“You can’t separate the appetites and demands of the people themselves and what they are given,” he said. “The blame simply can’t all be put at the feet of those who present news.”^{^}

Books now are written like blogs. They are generally about the author. We can justify this in terms of postmodern theory, but when every book is written in this style, it becomes less of progress and more of an excuse to do what is easy. Books now are not relevant to our lives, in that they do not explain the role of the individual in society, or even the individual in any context except a glorification of our neurotic little pleasures and pains. No big topics are covered. This makes books with a few exceptions totally irrelevant to their audience that isn’t looking for the literary equivalent of Paris Hilton.

If literature and sci-fi want to continue existing, they have to get more relevant to their readers’ lives. This means we have to get over all the social bullshit that we think is really important when it has caught us up in it, but years later we realize was just a distraction. We as writers must return to writing about the important issues in life, like our moral direction as individuals, the direction of our civilization, the future decisions we must take to make sure there’s beauty in our lives. This doesn’t mean I’m endorsing what Tom Wolfe calls “realism,” which is books that try to be gritty and realistic and end up being self-obsessive and neurotic. You can write about problems and complain about society all day long but unless you’re offering a different theory about how things should be done, your book is about life’s failings incoveniencing you, not changing your soul.

I have found that whenever a book comes out that rewards the experience of struggling for something that is not convenient in life, it sells in droves, and the publishers never expected it. They have become so accustomed to catering to the ethic of convenience that seems to propel our time, thinking it is what the audience demands, that they have forgotten what people have rewarded in stories for millennia. We want a sweet story. We want someone tackling life in an allegorical way, learning, growing as a result, and then returning to have success. We want the hero to get the girl and the lone artist to succeed, we want the mountain to get climbed, we want the single mother to rise above her circumstances and triumph. But you don’t get that kind of triumph without a metaphysical and moral learning that you find in the literary classics.

Publishing has failed because it has taken a detour into “realism,” forgetting that realism can be an aesthetic and not a topic. We don’t want to hear about every detail of life. We know. We want to see life’s details swept up in a tempest of metaphor that makes clarity of them, and gives us a reason to move on. Just like in sci-fi, we don’t want to see another post-apocalyptic world where everything is miserable. We want a reason to make our world better than that otherwise inevitable fate.

There are those clueless people who think that literature is stagnating because we have not developed the form of the novel enough. Form? Joyce went overboard with form, and few can read it, and among those that can read, few of them want to. The form of literature has changed little over the last three thousand years, because literature will always be first and foremost about the story. What happened, who changed, how’d they get the strength to do it, and finally did they triumph or fade away. That’s literature, no matter if it’s told by a talking postmodern unicorn made of unassociated string theory automata or an ancient Greek sailor with mud in his beard.

Almost all of the people I see published in book stores should not have been published, at least in literature and science fiction. They’re getting to enjoy rock star treatment for filling our minds with the neurotic self-indulgent ramblings of people who have never known moral struggle, or wanted something better for the world as a whole. It’s no surprise that people aren’t buying this stuff. If literature is to survive, it needs to reverse this direction and strike out again for the greatness in stories.

Many out there are not going to understand the fascination with William Gibson, because history will remember him as the coiner of cyberpunk as a genre, writer of two quality novels, Neuromancer and Pattern Recognition, and otherwise relegate him to the bin where they place over-intellectualized stoners who didn’t just get nose to grindstone for a “serious” job when they were in their 20s, like everyone else.

I think there’s more to him than that. Neuromancer, for example, is science fiction of that darker calibre that produces works like Blade Runner and is hinted at in Naked Lunch. The story is simple: humankind travels through technology to find its soul, only to see it nakedly missing and so to seize whatever spiritual sustenance it can from endurance and hoping for a better day. It’s an apocalyptic story in anticlimax, one where most natural species are dead and the earth is wrapped in concrete and steel, littered with plastic and the plastic remnants of human beings. We could read Gibson’s exuberance with this world as an endorsement, or as a way of finally getting us the reader engaged with what it might be like to want to battle an imaginary but probable future before it occurs.

Pattern Recognition could be seen as the prototype and parent for this year’s Spook Country, a journal of ratified paranoia in which Gibson looks at a new America he considers to be completely out of touch with reality, and living on a symbolic or emotional level that represents fear not rationality. This theme was illustrated most clearly in Neuromancer through the cheery “Freeside: Why Wait?” posters that promised a better life to those trapped in dreary industrial hellholes. He took things further in Pattern Recognition where he directly attacked brand names as Soviet in an Orwell-inspired symbolic juxtaposition between the clarity of mind found in Cayce Pollard, and the neurotic nastiness of her ad-agency tormentors.

“Politics has, like, jacked itself up to my level of weirdness,” Gibson acknowledges. “I can work with this,” he says, thinking of recent turns of events. “I like the sheer sort of neo-Stalinist denial of reality. That’s what makes it work. It’s interesting. I’d like to see it get less interesting. But I don’t know that it necessarily will.” ^{^}

Gibson sort of hops on the anti-Bush, maybe-progressivism-will-work bandwagon for Spook Country, but his heart’s not in it. Like his heroes Burroughs and Pynchon (and probably DeLilo), Gibson speaks from an entirely outsider’s voice, with the gravely tones of someone looking in at a disaster that will go unrecognized until it’s too late. He is Vonnegut’s canary in a coal mine, but how do you sing to people deaf to that one warning sign? A theme of Spook Country is the proliferation of signals meshing into noise, a warming of chaos and a consequent intensity of paranoia. Who do you trust, when everyone has an agenda outside of the acknowledged roles we serve in society?

A few gems:

A friend of mine was mining YouTube last month and he came up with footage shot in the street in New York on a particular day, in the evening. And he knew that this footage was shot the day before broadcast television began in New York. So this footage is of the last night that streets in New York were the way they were before everyone started staying home to watch television. All the footage that he’s been able to find afterward is dramatically different. It changed. It changed the night they turned it on. The night they started to broadcast television in New York, New York ceased to be what it had been before. Because everyone stayed home to watch television.
…
I think a lack of concern about virtual and real maybe telling us as much about what we used to call real as it is about what we now call virtual. I think that everything we’ve been doing since we sat around camp fires telling stories and started making cave paintings, everything we’ve been doing as a species seems to me to be part of this [desire and ability] to create prosthetic aspects of the self that are capable of surviving the death of the individual or indeed the death of an entire society. Other animals don’t do that. And we’ve been doing it forever.
…
You know, the Internet, for the first 25 years of its existence, has been almost exclusively text based. And so [people] are writing with frequency unseen since the Victorian heyday of the British Empire, when there were three mail deliveries a day, and people wrote and communicated constantly. We went back to it. It wasn’t new. Very few things in the last 45 years have caused me to go ‘Whoa! That’s new!’”
^{^}

Although Spook Country isn’t my favorite Gibson work, it’s not bad. Like those works by famed authors Pynchon and Burroughs that came later in their lives, it is aimless. It makes its points with its “the medium is the message,” by being chaotic and yet having all paths lead to a Mecca which points to an undiscovered reality in the sea of messages including the book itself, but then can’t tie the plot it’s glued to into something resembling a shape, so the novel deteriorates into loose string that ends in an almost Boolean yes/no to all the components of the book. But if you find meaning in Gibson’s work, it makes sense to study his body of work, including the two highly perceptive interviews linked here.