This is my first non-art, non-fiction book. It’s a little book (7″ x 7″) available through Blurb.com. The book summaries forty plus years of wisdom I’ve borrowed, evolved, and stolen from a large number of sources. It’s meant to be an informal guide to THINGS THAT WORK in everyday communication, especially with couples. The acronyms and phrases are simple, some merely “common sense” (which seems to disappear in daily communication), and some you may not have heard before.

Send me more and I’ll credit you in Book II.

Click on the Blurb logo and it will take you to the book. You can actually buy it!

Thankfully I live in world half ignorant of media. I miss a lot of things, occasionally I follow a thread to some discovery only to realize that only three million people watched this. Ah, so. and So it goes.

This was my experience with JFC (John From Cincinnati.) Wikipedia could fill in some of the blanks, but after my experience of “discovering” the show I didn’t want to read what other people had said about it. I had been looking for a new series to watch on DVD. I am in the middle of the (5th?) season of THE WIRE, which I love, but THE WIRE is tough for me to sustain an interest in. Why? It’s so realistic, it’s depressing. I’ve heard the authors are liberal guys, but where is the hope? Damn. It paints a picture of corruption and human frailty that makes every character an anti-hero. Bare bones comic relief. Mostly just hardcore living in a world of greed, betrayal and failure. It’s just something I’m always prepared to watch and call it fun.

I’m waiting for the next season of BREAKING BAD to come out on DVD, as it hasn’t reached the addictive stage where I have to download it from iTunes, like I do for MAD MEN and LOST. Yes, I confess. I love BREAKING BAD, but again, it’s pretty damn dark. A guy with terminal cancer, with a pregnant wife and no money decides to supplement his high school chemistry teacher salary by becoming an (excellent) meth cooker. I can’t even make that sound light by telling saying there are tons of fun, quirky characters. Dark, dark, dark.

I looked around Netflix and IMDB.com to see if I had missed anything and I saw JOHN FROM CINCINNATI pop up. Old or new I didn’t know, but I remember being surprised that I liked the surf history film RIDING GIANTS. I grew up in Detroit during the 60’s and the surfer scene had already been diluted and popularized by the Beach Boys and their blond upbeat whiteness reminded me of the Christie Minstrels who I had long grown out of. (I had a brief involvement with all forms of folk music when it felt indie and rebellious.) No big waves in Michigan, so surferism seemed a distant, irrelevant phenomenon. One of the interesting aspects of RIDING GIANTS was the cultural connection between the beatniks, the surfers and the next incarnation, the Flower Children who I was definitely interested in. The Flower Children, or hippies, offered a complete lifestyle overhaul, not the frat boy hijinks of a small beach culture of even the urban coffeehouse angst of the beats. Once the hippies came on the scene, my radar fixated upon them. The rest were merely wanabes.

Sidebar. I was never a big fan either of surfer music, even the more raw pre-Beach Boys guitar stuff. I noted Quentin Tarantino’s wider appreciation of music history on the soundtracks for Pulp Fiction and the Kill Bill movies, but it never got farther for me that that, what quirky people in Hollywood dredge up to play with. Then one day, I was sitting in a (yes) coffeehouse (yes a Starbucks) in Manhattan talking with a fellow writer and they were playing a compendium of surfer guitar music that, well, struck me as odd and compelling. I shrugged and bought the CD from them with my latte.

NOW SOMETHING ABOUT THE SHOW

If I had never watched a David Lynch film (or series: Twin Peaks) there wouldn’t be much context for what I think they were trying to do in JOHN FROM CINCINNATI. At this point I am nearly at the end of the nine episodes and have tried not to read anything anyone else has written about the series. I have to say the first disc (three episodes?) fascinated me more than the rest of the series sustained my fascination. Still, there is something I like very much about the show. After watching it, I walk away in a sort of dream state that is oddly accurate to the way (I at least) experience the world. We “know” that magic doesn’t exist in a literal sense (at least most of us) but the way our minds work it FEELS very much like we live in a magical world. One example would be coincidences or as the surrealists (and Jungians) say synchronicity. I think about something odd and obscure (say, Popeye) and the next moment I see a reference to it on television or somewhere else, even a “Popeye revival.” Was the reference always there and I hadn’t noticed it or was it “activated” in my perception by my first thought? In any case what it feels like is that there is a magical correspondence between one’s inner life and the “real” world, like there is another reality just under the surface that plays by totally different rules than our “real” non-magical world.

In JOHN (JFC) this magical reality is coming through, not only for individual characters who find themselves levitating, healing knife wounds, and coming back to life from kissing a telepathic parrot, but the community is beginning to realize that they are all experiencing an altered reality, en masse. Ostensibly that’s because “John” the idiot-savant surfer who has strange powers like astral projection, healing, and communicating with his unknown “Father” has arrived in this downwardly mobile surfer community. The show focuses on the Yost family: Mitch the expert surfer who suffered a knee injury and slumped into a selfish mysticism; Cissy, his wife and mother of Butchie who is an attractive slightly over the hill woman with a spitting-nails rage that is directed to nearly anyone in her path; Butchie, another world class surfer who hit the wall of fame and bounced back into drug addiction, even “signing over” guardianship of his son to Mitch and Cissy. Shaun, Butchie’s fourteen year old son, is feeling the power of the Yost line in his expert surfing and becomes the person the show revolves around, more in the sense of what happens to him than what he does himself.

Mitch is the first one to experience magic, he’s the main levitator, which he originally mistakes for a perceptual sign that he’s dying of a brain tumor until Butchie (for the moment not high on heroin) witnesses. Butchie experiences a drying out from drugs without cold turkey though his hair plugs (?) smoke for a while. Sean experiences the biggest juju when he is revived from a broken spine and vegetative existence from a surfing accident by a magical parrot brought into the hospital by Bill, an ex-cop adopted “uncle” who talks to his dead wife and breeds, well, some pretty exceptional birds. Other characters experience magic, too: spontaneous mystic trances, healing powers, prescient dreams of winning lottery numbers, and talking to ghosts. In fact, the whole town of Huntington Beah seems caught in a viral mysticism probably attributable to the mysterious “John” from Cincinnati. Of course, we don’t know anything about John. Butchie decides he’s from a town “like Cincinnati” because he seems unfamiliar with walking in traffic. Like they have no traffic in Cincinnati, I guess Californians don’t get to the hinterlands much. John agrees with Butchie because he agrees with nearly everyone in an autistic “little boy” style. Cincinnati doesn’t explain why John can surf at the expert level, pull wads of cash and a credit card with no limit from an empty pocket and instantly heal from self-inflicted knife wounds.

The language of the show in remarkable in its own way. People talk and muse in Shakespearean monologues like they do in DEADWOOD, apparently by the same production team. The language is rich, hard to follow, fun, but also distances us from reality aspect to the show. In real life how many people talk like this? Even the swearing is expert, arcane, and over the top.

One of the only people not to avoid the direct experience of magic is Cissy. In some ways this makes her the “main character” though her constant rage is difficult to be around. Maybe she’s rageful because she’s not getting any magic and all the undeserving around her, Butchie her ‘moron’ son, Mitch her unfaithful solipsistic husband, and now the mysterious John who talks her out of killing herself when he’s astral traveling (and talking normal for a change).

There are, needless to say, too many characters. I haven’t even mentioned (though now I will) the millionaire promoter who is repenting how he destroyed Butchie, Shaun’s porn star mom who comes back to make him a tuna sandwich while Cissy barely holds herself back from shooting her; Ramon, the “wise” Mexican who hopes one of these mystics would only cough up one more winning lottery number; “the Hawaiians” an odd couple, vaguely homoerotic in a brutal homophobic sort of way, who come to live in the haunted motel for vague reasons of drugs debts owed by Butchie and some strange interest in becoming more guardians (like he needs more) of Shaun the golden boy. There’s also Kai, the tough surfer girl sometimes employed in Sissie’s (and Mitch’s?) surf shop who also is compelled to watch over Shaun.

There are Christ themes here and Stephen King themes and they overlap. The last name on John’s magical credit card is Monad, a term used the Gnostics for the first aspect of God. Curiously, Gnostics also believed that “this reality” was not the real reality, but the real reality lurked underneath the perceptual reality, accessible only via signs. Gnostic Hollywood writers would explain a lot. At times, John appears to be a Christ figure, though being obviously “challenged” affects our perception that his “Father” is really God. And Shaun is some kind of hero figure that the community is invested in, though he’s too young to have done much other than outshine his peers. The Stephen King aspect (which is more overt in a show like Carnivale) would be if a cosmic Evil vs. Good fight to the finish erupted spontaneously in a little surf town. It could, couldn’t it? Why not? Still, we’re not clear who, other than possibly the sweet John, might truly represent a Manichean dark side. A more likely scenario is the “mystic virus” that may do as much damage as good. The fact that many of the characters have used drugs in the near or distant past makes them more amenable to hallucination, though many are “clean” when the new magic kicks in.

Before I decided to read anything more about the show, I saw that it came on HBO after the Sopranos and got cancelled fairly quickly. Clearly its makers had hoped to cast a wide net of characters to prepare us and them for a long, multi-season development of subplots. Will Shaun’s mom who abandoned him for world class porn stardom become a “loving” mother? Will Cissy allow her? What will happen to Cissy and Mitch who clearly love each other in a Elizabeth Taylor/Richard Burton brutality? Will Butchie rise from the squalor of his druggy life to compete again? What will happen to the crazy gay man, Mr. Cunningham, who walks around talking Shakespearean therapy jargon to his teddy bear and various ghosts? What about the neurologist who quit his job to hunker close to the Yost clan because he couldn’t explain the miracle of the parrot’s kiss? And what about those Hawaiians? And Butchie’s webmaster, Dwayne the harelip? (They call him “the harelip.”) Surely exploring these questions could take many seasons.

It’s a noble effort which now we know has “failed” in the sense that it was cancelled. The difficult part is that none of these questions can now be answered and we have to live with that. It did make me want to go back and give Deadwood another try, though. The first time I tried to watch it, I just couldn’t get into it. But now I get it. Listen to the language. Think Shakespeare is some weird unexpected venue. We’ll see. Stay tuned.

2. Compare cover art on the various editions. Which made you want to read the book least?

3. Discuss whether your inability to read this book is specific to this book (expound on this) or had to do more with “life conditions.” If the latter
please share the most amusing anecdote from you life that illustrates why you couldn’t read this book.

4. Discuss xenophobia and how it may have contributed to your inability to read this book. What books by other international authors are you unlikely to read. Why?

5. Could you suggest an antidote to this experience (of not reading this book)? If it was a book what would it be? Discuss.

6. If you had read the book, would you feel smarter now? Why or why not?

7. Discuss shame. Do you feel it now?

So why in God’s name would this be a good time to be an artist or writer?

Let’s start with Bush or should I say Bush-hating. Artists and writers have been a disproportionate amount of effort “fighting the man.” The stance, however justified, made it easy to structure plots and feel good about poorly realized efforts because the artist was focused on the urgent need to topple the evil regime. How much subtlety was required?

With a new dynamic Democratic administration firmly gripping power in Washington, there is no longer a need to waste any more effort haranguing the public about the war in Iraq, and his other unpopular positions. Soon “his” mistakes will be “our” mistakes as Democrats innovate and/or borrow from the previous administration and we will only have our own to blame. Only the farthest left of us (like the ones already unhappy with Obama’s practicality) will continue to use artistic outrage as their main source for inspiration.

I am hoping the whole concept of “artist as politician” phase will come to an end. Sure, we can still support our causes of global warming, corporatism, land mines, and nuclear disarmament if we like, but adults in Washington will be doing their best to represent the constituencies that have promoted these causes. We no longer will have to shout at them, though there is no guarantee that we will like their solutions or pace. Nevertheless, artists will find the protest stance somewhat emptier, somewhat less compelling and, hopefully will be moving on to new, less knee-jerk, less repetitive, less strident content.

Back to the issue of business failures in the art community. It’s not that I think the art world is too fat and will benefit from a crash diet, but it’s worth thinking about who the market for art has been and who it might become. Art has been, in a sense, also feeding at the trough of the high finance world. How many people can afford a painting over say $10,000 (and I’m stretching here). Clearly the middle class doesn’t buy much original art. Why not? Because the content (often incomprehensible but supported by museums and academics) is largely non-compelling to average people.

In the literary world, where the readership is shrinking, agents and publishers are running scared. They want another J. K. Rowling phenomenon but aren’t sure where and how to find it. Meanwhile a tsunami of self publishers and bloggers are going around the publishing world for their reading. Both the sellers and makers of art need to accept this challenge. If they have something to say, how should they say it and where? New forms, hybrids and experiments are springing up and the world of criticism (e.g. The New York Times Book Review) are holding up their noses in hopes that the riff-raff will all go away soon and everyone will return to network television, Broadway shows and industry-picked “geniuses” in the print world. That’s not going to happen. People are entertaining themselves in new ways, from YouTube, to bloggers, to game designers, to “low-brow” art that embraces illustrators, graffiti artists and tattooists as “real” artists. Some see this as a devastating collapse of “high” culture, I see it as evidence that in many ways the arts have not been doing their job.

Music might be an exception as well as an example. While mainstream media continues to site declining CD sales something we’re supposed to fret about, an explosion of interest in music is happening all over the world. The internet is allowing us to create our own custom radio stations (e.g. Pandora), iTunes is making it easier to buy exactly what we want, and portable music devices have freed us from Big Radio and Big Music companies. This is partly because, unlike say painting or the literary novel (the bad ones not the good ones), the general public has never given up its love of music and never will. So music will lead the way. Will there be fewer superstar groups but more people creating the music they love? I hope so. Will it be difficult to find the new geniuses if they are not picked out of the crowd and promoted by Big Music? Maybe, maybe not. Most likely the internet will evolve forms of self criticism which will allow more diverse music to survive as the cost of getting that music to the public continues to decline. Overall will less money go to music because people are used to getting it free? Maybe. Inevitably good stuff costs money, think organic produce. People pay more everyday for both the label and the confidence in its quality and taste, even if they can’t prove it or taste it.

People will pay to be entertained. Collecting original art on a small scale could conceivably be something people do again once their more confident of their taste. How many people worry about their taste in music needing outside experts to tell them whether or not it’s good? I know what I like is the rule. In fact, for millions, if its popular it’s already time to dig deeper and find the creatives (the new new) that have already been there and done that and are now doing something altogether new.

So we might be on the edge of a burst in creativity. I’ll make my final point be referencing an economically difficult but extremely creative period another country experienced: The Weimar Republic. This from Wikipedia:

“The 1920s saw a massive cultural revival in Germany. It was, arguably, the most innovative period of cultural change in Germany.
Innovative street theatre brought plays to the public, the cabaret scene became very popular. Women were americanised, wearing makeup, short hair, smoking and breaking out of tradition. Music was created with a practical purpose, such as Schoenberg’s ‘atonality’ and there was a new type of architecture taught at ‘Bauhaus’ schools. Art reflected the new ideas of the time with artists such as Grosz being fined for defaming the military and for blasphemy.”

There’s plenty of opportunity out there, folks, stop whining and get busy!

The voice of Paul Reyment in SLOW MAN is very similar to the main character in Iris Murdoch’s novel THE SEA, THE SEA. They are both older, white, Brit (empire), educated, artistic, lonely men who have strong feelings, clear thoughts, but don’t hold to a certain philosophical structure (say, Christianity or leftist politics) that color everything. They are intelligent freelancers in life, aware that, given their age, it is highly unlikely that they will ever get answers to the philosophical questions they continue to ask (mostly of themselves) and nearly all the time.

The voice is similar to Philip Roth’s (EXIT GHOST) voices and Richard Ford (INDEPENDANCE DAY, and THE LAY OF THE LAND), but much more compelling for me. Roth is irascable, smart, and cranky. Ford is opinionated, human, realistic, and ultimately boring. Neither Roth nor Ford, though highly intelligent, I would call philosophical novelists. A philosophical novelist (or character voice) is one that questions the meaning of life more or less constantly at the same time he or she goes through their series of mishaps that constitute a plot. Some of Graham Greene’s characters have this philosophical approach, though it’s often in the context of a worldview (shared by many around him) that is crumbling, a worldview that once attempted to explain life. So his becomes a cynical voice–life has no meaning, at least not in THAT (old) sense. Paul Rayment (SLOW MAN) is always questioning at every moment — what does that mean? is that all there is to (human) life? It might sound irritating, and it is when the narrator is too young– Holden Caulfield being an exception there. When an older person still questions the meaning of life without falling completely into victimhoood (why did my kids and wife and etc. abandon me?) I find it interesting. The character who steps back, watches his life while remaining totally in it (not “alienated” or depressed) is interesting to me. It’s a person who I want to follow. I enjoy seeing/hearing them interact with the mundane events tossed more or less randomly at them.

The device in SLOW MAN of adding a character from an earlier novel (which, oddly, I haven’t read yet), Elizabeth Costello, creates a very mild form of magical realism. The characters, Paul and Elizabeth, seem pushed together by (almost) mystical forces but in world where no one particularly believes such mystical forces are possible.

All the voices, Roth, Ford and Coetzee deal with love, unrequited mostly, but only in Coetzee is the yearning elevated to what the Tibetan Buddhist Pema Chodran calls “unrequited love is the heart of the world.” Bummer. Can this be true? Only Coetzee’s characters (in a completely non-religious style) could contemplate this as a visceral possibility. In other words, like the song Blasphemous Rumors by Depeche Mode, “I think that god’s got a sick sense of humor… and when I die, I expect to find him laughing.”
Either that or reading Coetzee.

What show did I see of Philip Guston’s work? It’s the prerogative of the amateur to neither care nor remember, however, I do remember not being particularly excited about his work. I saw it in Chicago and for some reason I thought he was a professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (where some of my friends still teach). Even if I got all my facts wrong (and who knows, he could have been a visiting artist there) he was solidly IN MY MIND in the school of Chicago Imagism which I still revere. This school includes Roger Brown, Jim Nutt and H. C. Westermann. Given that kind of company, artists unabashedly “pro-image”, Guston’s work seemed uninteresting. Sure I could see there were social critical themes underneath (why else all the Klansmen?) but they weren’t painted in a way that shouted at you (like Diego Rivera shouts “Marxism Good!”) nor were they interesting to me as images. I didn’t even like his signature “flesh rose” or whatever it was. So, I dismissed him. Wrong!

I’m surprised Googling “apocalyptic ennui” didn’t deliver much, just a few quirky blogs and song lyrics. Maybe that means it’s a really meaningful connection of the two words. I realized when writing my review of “Boys Adrift” that apocalyptic ennui is a significant part of my psychology and inevitably my politics at the moment. Growing up in the 60’s (fear or nuclear war) then switching to “hippie” fears (global cooling, nuclear war, the draft, American culture generally, unhealthy food and religion) was exhausting enough. I wasn’t ready to get on the next bandwagon: global warming, global capitalism, American culture–especially overseas, antibiotics in food leading to new killer bacteria, killer viruses like Ebola, terrorism at home and abroad, destruction of species, inequality of wealth–leading to revolutions, crash of the dollar, depletion of oil, ethanol destroying the food supplies, and the inevitable Islamic takeover of Europe–perhaps leading to an imminent crash of the West. Forgive me if some of your favorites aren’t on the list. What to do? It’s all very POLITICIZED (rather than POLITICAL) now. By politicized I mean people listen for their catch phrases, for the language that tells them if you’re a good guy or a bad guy depending on what side you’re on. Liberals listen for a disparaging attitude on global warming, or “too strong” a fear or Islam to tell them not to listen to you. Conservatives listen for key phrases like “social justice” or “economic equality” to help them identify a person as someone not to listen to. That’s politicized. Political is talking. Too bad it’s almost dead here in the states. (Talking as opposed to “chattering” I suppose. There’s plenty of chattering.

My theory (apologies to my friends who enjoy being skeptical of evolution) is part of my “Monkey Mind” theory. I suspect we, the primate part of us, is programmed to be fearful, to “react” to danger to the community. This is amateur sociobiology to be sure (which means you fantasize monkey scenarios to explain stuff, lots of fun for monkey lovers), but it does explain why we are constantly looking for NEW ways our lives and/or civilizations will be destroyed. The difficult part is that no matter how long your list is, some of the things on the list will kill you. Depends on your list, of course.

I like Bjørn Lomborg. OK that makes me what politically? Anyway, his attitude if I may summarize is: YES, global warming is real, yes human activity is responsible for the bulk of it, BUT it will be very difficult and expensive to have ANY impact at this point on the trend. HENCE if you want to help the earth, save people, etc. he gives a list of things to do (like help get drinking water to millions of people, flood and hurricane damage reduction, malaria control, address starvation) that would show an immediate positive impact for the dollars spent. Problem is, solving extensive, endemic “old/boring” problems like this doesn’t do anything to address our sense of PANIC (monkey panic) that we are IMMINENTLY going to die. It’s much to rational and slow and methodical to help our panic.

It’s not that the writing is so bad, it’s not. It’s OK. But if a white male (without proper credentials via biography) wrote this, it would never have been published. Though ostensibly fiction, what seems inherent in the attraction of the book is the authenticity of the story. This is a person who’s “been there” not unlike the book A LONG WAY GONE by Ishmael Beah (which my son is reading now). Here’s the thing: one can’t suppress the sense that it is the STORY these people (or people close to them) have lived that makes us read on. These are tragic and dramatic stories. That does not mean, however, that this is necessarily “good writing” (in the same way Graham Greene is good writing, or Patricia Highsmith, both favorites of the moment).

Has it always been so? One imagines some “True Stories from Africa” written by an upper class twit in Victorian times. Ah, but such books did not survive the ages.

Will The Dew Breaker survive? How does it even stack up against “fiction about Haiti”? There’s a sense that the literary establishment is doing a subtle form of affirmative action–promoting “authors of color” especially where, given the dramatic content of their stories, there can be no denying they are rich in something. But what? Danticat knows the territory alright, knows Haiti and the Haitian diaspora, but is she a decent storyteller? The New Yorker (the old artiber of taste, now bowing to it’s political agenda like most of New York) thought so apparently.

But one suspects we supposed to appreciate these stories within a context of (a) the “unheard voices” of diverse people of color; (b) damage done to the Third World probably directly caused by capitalism, especially Republicans, especially the “current administration”; (c) a debt, a literary reparations where we have to allocate a certain percentage of our publishing/reading to stories like this; (d) other pluses: a survivor, an [attractive] young woman who can write!

It’s hard even to bring up these questions.

The reviews of the book are gushing positive from the Amazon and Barnes and Noble sites. I need a reality check. I need someone to read this that is not afraid to say, it’s not good writing. Ah, but if it were memoir (mem-wa!) we could forgive the lack of subtlety in drawing character, we could say–it is true, how amazing this poor woman survived. This is part of the draw in books like A Long Way Gone. You continually are amazed: this really happened! To a boy! To THIS boy/author!

But what happens when dramatic stories are revealed to be “made up” – what if Mr. Beah was an adult living in Brooklyn. What outrage. (One thinks of James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces controversy). His book was presented as memoir and when revealed to be (largely? what percentage?) fictional, the outrage poured on him. We were lied to, yes, but how many stopped to say: was a it a good story, with good characters, does it work as fiction?

Besides race and our debt to the underprivileged of this world, the other issue here is youth. Like Zadie Smith, Ms Danticat is a attractive young woman of color. What if she were old, ugly? One senses the book (and I assume visits with Oprah) would be less compelling. We like youth; we like beauty. We like the fantasy (in theater, films, art, literature) that a young (hopefully attractive) person can be a genius. I suspect there is something innate in us that looks for a (recently born) savior. Old saviors are merely nags or tiresome. Young “genius” doesn’t NEED aging to help us appreciate their message. Their passion is more than compensation for any lack of wisdom, or lack of understanding of human relationships, or errors attributable youthful brashness. One thinks of Michel Basquiat, the young (also Haitian-American) who became overnight the darling of the New York art world (no small thanks to Andy Warhol who elevated him from street artist to ‘genius’). While it’s true his paintings (years after his premature death before the age of 30) are still fresh, one wonders what would it have been like to see him age, mature, ala Jasper Johns, or DeKooning? Would our fascination fade or would his skill continual to evolve and amaze? Would he be merely forgotten (his 15 minutes of fame long gone) as another “genius young street artist” took his place?

What complicates all of this is our de-valuing of wisdom and aging. There are exceptions, of course, but the world we live in tends to like to ogle the physical attributes of our geniuses, better yet if they have, ala Danticat, exotic stories. On so many levels we are entertained and titillated. But not on the level of literary achievement!

There, I said it.

The first shock, besides how amazingly rare it was to read a book with a REAL PLOT that had fully developed characters. It made some of my recent attempts to pull stuff off the shelves at the airport bookstores (both literally and so to speak) so pathetic. Is it so hard to write like her? What I suspect happened is that the “tree” of writing broke somewhere along the line and “literary” people went one way and plot people another. The plot people were less fussy about the quality of their characters and the mysteries and thrillers (I’m making this up) drifted toward “genre” writing, with a heavy reliance on stock characters. Tremendous financial success of many of these writers (Stephen King, John Grishom, Micheal Crighton, etc.) made it seem like they had struck gold. On the other hand, the literary people, bolstered by a whole new industry of “MFAs” in writing, drifted toward a small, snobbier audience. The books more and more positioned character against plot, or made plot necessarily so “mundane” (or it’s twin “diverse and exotic”) that these books were not attractive cross-overs to the “genre” markets. To justify themselves, the literary industry has taken on various causes: women writers, gay writers, disabled writers, people of color writers and now “global literature” and soon to come “the green writers.” It’s all well intended (isn’t nearly everything, though?) but it has been devastating to the success of the “literary novel.” Soon, as Updike predicated, literary fiction will go the way of poetry: its readers and writers will be the same (small) population.

Back to Patricia Highsmith. It didn’t have to be this way–that’s what I get from reading her.
On top of it, she “should have” been (maybe she was, what do I know?) discovered by and included in the feminist/lesbian pantheon for her early lesbian themed work. But one suspects that writing under a pseudonym and writing in the 1950s might have worked against her, also the bisexuality of her biography. Clearly she had some explaining to do. But one suspects that the deeper problem is that she was an early genre crosser, with a deadly toe in mystery, the lit crowd didn’t need to be bothered by her.

In a recent trip to two Barnes & Nobles, this is what I found. The first store (Maplewood, MN) had two books but her, but they were not in fiction (where I looked first) but in mystery. The second store (Highland Village, St Paul, MN) didn’t have her at all! Yes, I, too, was shocked. How could it be that I finally find a writer that excites me and Barnes & Nobles, who carry SO MUCH CRAP, didn’t have the space, interest or market for her. And worse, what does this tell me about writing, even my writing?

A quick note on movie adaptations. I was shocked (God, I’m shocked a lot in this entry) to see how much Hitchcock (who I respect) had changed her story. Why did he change the main protagonist from an architect to a tennis pro? It made so sense. Most seriously, the entire book is built around the premise that a normal person could be lured by circumstances to commit a murder. In Hitchcock (yes, brave Hitchcock!) the good guy doesn’t even commit his murder! Was this part of the censorship issue in Hollywood at the time? Perhaps. But it shifted the story completely from a fascinating character study to a good guy/bad guy story. True the fight on the merry-go-round is breathtaking cinema, but it’s still just a fight and we know from the beginning who is going to win.

John Lecarré’s adapted movie “The Spy Who Came in From the Cold” had a similiar problem. In tone and character the movie was fairly accurate (though watching people talk is innately less interesting than being inside at least one of the talkers), but in the book, a very key scene occurs when the spy, Leamas, kills a guard. There is very little explanation about why he kills the guard in the book even though you are in “close third” and have access to his thoughts. One suspects it is frustration, it’s a sort of breakdown, but the victim is only half guilty. True he’s stalking Leamas (probably not to kill) but Leamas is already in a low security prison. In any case, Leamas’ murder of the guard reminded me of Camus’ character murdering the arab in “L’Etranger.” It’s an existentialist act, meaning to me, it’s complex, partly random, partly insane, partly a statement that killing and not killing are the same thing (which of course they aren’t). But in the movie, the merely skip that scene entirely and throw Leamas into a more serious prison without explanation. Of course, as a viewer we understand that his captors (bad communists) are capable of exacerbating his punishment by whim. We accept it. But again, at the core of the book is the mystery of who is Leamas and his impulsive murder makes distances him from our sympathy and understanding. In the movie, we see him more as a broken down and disillusioned man, not a man who could or would rise to sudden intense action. So, he is much less mysterious, hence less interesting.