Literature – Page 11 – Into the Woods

J.B. Priestley

“An Inspector Calls,” BBC, 2015

J.B. Priestley had never particularly been on my literary radar screen. He should have been. I will work on that.

Last night, with quite a few gigabytes of satellite data to use up before my account does its monthly reset, I was determined to find something good to stream, which seems increasingly hard to do. On Amazon Prime, I came across “An Inspector Calls,” a 2015 BBC production of Priestley’s most famous play, with which I was unfamiliar.

It was one of the best films I’ve seen in years. The cast is superb. Who says that stagey productions are slow? I couldn’t avert my eyes or take a bathroom break. I was late putting the chickens to bed.

The play was written in 1945. It is set in 1912. I generally love films that are based on plays. I’m sure that this is because such films, of necessity, emphasize the work of the writer. There will be no special effects and no loud soundtrack. No effort will be made to hold the interest of those with short attention spans. Much will be demanded of the cast. Some exertion of the mind will be required. We will be reminded of why we love the English language.

For an overview of Priestley’s biography, I started with the Wikipedia article. By the third paragraph, Priestley had earned my permanent respect: “His left-wing beliefs brought him into conflict with the government, and influenced the birth of the Welfare State. The programme was eventually cancelled by the BBC for being too critical of the Government.” The program the article is referring to is Priestley’s radio program on the BBC in the 1940s. Here’s a short sample from Youtube, June 1940, in which Priestley is talking about the evacuation of Dunkirk.

Is “An Inspector Calls” didactic, as some critics complain? You bet it is. The headline on a review in The Spectator reads “An Inspector Calls is poisonous, revisionist propaganda — which is why the luvvies love it.” I must be a luvvie. Any play that after almost 75 years still gets under right-wing skin that badly is not to be missed. And that play’s writer is not to be forgotten.

Writers’ lives matter. As surely as odious propagandists such as Ayn Rand helped to pull us all into the right-wing swamp in which we are now mired, so also left-wing propagandists such as J.B. Priestley helped to prepare the world for the liberal policies and institutions that brought decades of shared prosperity after World War II. But in more recent decades, right-wingers have been winning the propaganda wars, and thus they have succeeded in reversing and rolling back the very policies that enabled the Golden Age that cranky old conservatives still glorify — the 1950s. I am at present reading a new book by Robert Kuttner, Can Democracy Survive Global Capitalism?, which tells the story of how those liberal policies came about in the days of the New Deal, and how they were reversed. I will review that book soon.

As the BBC understood in reviving “An Inspector Calls,” we have regressed, badly. Priestley’s Eva Smith, a poor factory worker who struggled for a better life but was blocked at every turn, is still very much with us. The wealthy Arthur Birling also is entirely recognizable, though I would have to say that Arthur Birling, in fictional 1912, shows a capacity for truth and kindness and transformation that I fail to detect in today’s rich lords of the universe — at least those who have political and media power.

“What a load of manipulative, hysterical tosh,” rants The Spectator. That’s what they always say about anything that disturbs their nasty little Ayn Rand world, and plenty of fine writers have vindictive 1-star reviews to prove it. May Priestley’s heirs write on, and may we somehow manage to find them out there in all the noise and bile and razzle.

J.B. Priestley, “Let the people sing.“

Ken’s third book is out

Ken’s third book is out. You can buy it in bookstores tomorrow (April 10, 2018) or you can order it from Amazon now.

I hardly need to say how proud I am of Ken, with his third book published at the age of 34. Here’s a link to the Kirkus review. And here’s a link to the Amazon page.

And as long as I’m feeling proud, check out the dedication in the photo below. I have been thanked in the back of many books. But this is the first that ever got me a dedication.

The murder of the inverted pyramid

Once upon a time, when newspapers were both noble and strong, editors and publishers regarded readers’ time as very valuable. Editors and publishers understood that newspaper readers were trying to absorb as much information as possible in the least amount of time. They knew that most readers would not finish most stories. Readers would read until they had absorbed enough of a story to meet their needs, then they’d move on to another story, or move on with their day. Once upon a time, editors and publishers did not try to manipulate readers to rip off readers’ time and attention.

These days, many publications — especially on-line publications — actually withhold information and tease readers with information in order to extract more attention and more clicks. Headlines promise much more than the story contains. There are far fewer editors these days to advocate for the reader. The closer a publication is to the lower end of the business, the harder it tries to gain clicks and attention with the least possible information. Reading a newspaper used to be an efficient use of time. But reading on line is increasingly a kind of warfare, in which the reader has to fight with the publication to get at the information (and there may not be much information, no matter how many paragraphs you read).

One of my pet peeves is the anecdotal lede. Everybody writes them now, and there is no bigger time-waster in the world. A lede is the first paragraph of a story. Editors spell it lede because lead has a very different meaning in publishing, a meaning that goes back to the days of Linotypes. Anecdotal ledes, though, go back at least to the 1980s, when they suddenly became a fad with every newspaper reporter in the world. It was claimed — it still is claimed, actually — that anecdotal ledes “pull the reader into the story.”

No they don’t. They waste about five paragraphs of reader time and give reporters a chance to show off what bad writers they are. And who says we want to be pulled in, even if an anecdotal lede could trick us into that? I keep a collection of anecdotal ledes. Here are a few examples:

The New York Times:

• On a Sunday in early December, Marcus Brauchli, the executive editor of The Washington Post, summoned some of the newspaper’s most celebrated journalists to a lunch at his home, a red brick arts-and-crafts style in the suburb of Bethesda, Md.

Aren’t we just dying to know what was served?

I’m an alumnus of the Winston-Salem Journal and have watched that once-great local newspaper, which once won a Pulitzer, shrivel into oblivion. My collection of bad ledes from that newspaper is particularly large, because they never would have gotten past the copy desk when I was there.

The Winston-Salem Journal:

• John Barr is sipping a cup of coffee in the kitchen as his wife, Alysse, finishes up the baths of their three children, Ty, 5; Hunter, 3; and Gionni, 1.

Wow. It was almost like being there.

• Hello Kitty was popular. So was soccer. Hannah Montana was there, but only slightly more common than a hammerhead shark fighting a swordfish.

Sounds like my high school, too.

• Elizabeth Nesmith couldn’t talk or eat Sunday afternoon.

Me neither.

• As the sky over Washington Park turned hazy Friday night, Joe Tappe strolled down the sidewalk from his house at Gloria and Park avenues, crunching over fallen leaves and carrying a plate of dip.

By the fourth paragraph, maybe we’ll know where he was going.

Der Spiegel:

• The blades of the wind turbine are made of plain wood painted red, and they measure exactly 1.2 meters (3.9 feet) long. Their curved edges are only roughly sanded.

I am so pulled into the turbine!

When I encounter anecdotal ledes, I skip immediately to the fifth paragraph to see if the story begins there. If it doesn’t, I move on. When I was at the San Francisco Examiner and the San Francisco Chronicle, whenever we had the perennial debate about why we were losing readers, I’d always say that it was because the anecdotal ledes were driving readers away.

It’s not uncommon these days, in on-line publications and even in Washington Post op-eds, to see the lede withheld until the very last paragraph. That is nothing less than abuse of the reader.

Maybe I’m hopelessly old-fashioned, but, as I see it, readers have rights. One of those rights, when reading for news, is the right to the inverted pyramid. But I’m just a voice in the wilderness, in a time when we need the inverted pyramid more than ever. I don’t have a clue what to do about it, other than not to give our attention to those who abuse it.

My first library book, rediscovered

I have a clear memory of the first book that I ever checked out of the public library. It was Space Cat, by Ruthven Todd. It’s a short (72 pages) science fiction children’s novel.

Whether I was in the second or third grade, I’m not certain. I think the book would have been within my reading ability in the second grade. I doubt that I could have been kept away from the public library until I was in the third grade. I would have been eight or nine years old, and the year would have been 1956 or 1957. I recall that it was a weekend afternoon. After we got home, I went straight to my room and read the book. I finished it well before suppertime. I believe I cried when the story was over. I begged to go back to the library for more books, but my father said, sorry, not today.

I’ve thought about this book often. For some reason, last week it was in my mind long enough that it occurred to me to check and see if the book could be bought from a used book seller on Amazon. Indeed, there were many copies available. They’re not cheap, because I saw from the reviews that I’m not the only person who remembers this book from childhood. I got a good copy that had been discarded from a school library. It cost me $44.20.

Ruthven Todd, I was not surprised to learn, was a Scotsman, from Edinburgh. He had a bit of a dissipated life, it seems, and became an alcoholic. Space Cat, which was published in 1952, made him some money, enough that he wrote a few sequels. The American version was published by Charles Scribner’s Sons in New York.

Tonight I think I’ll drink a toast to Ruthven Todd and read to the cat a few lines from Space Cat:

Slowly, ever so slowly, the bright moon started to climb up the sky, and Flyball twitched a possessive whisker toward it. That was his Moon. None of the others really knew anything about it. He purred gently to himself, basking in the admiration of the earth-bound. Then he burst into a cheerful song:

The Moon is only the start,
Says Flyball the flier.
We’ll reach the stars yet
Going higher and higher.
We’ll voyage right round space
To the ends of the sky.
Oh, no one ever can guess
How far we will fly!”

Illustrations by Paul Galdone

Ursula Le Guin

After the death of Ursula K. Le Guin this week, it was heartwarming to see so many beautiful eulogies and obituaries. Rarely is a fantasy and science fiction writer accorded so much respect in the mainstream. I can add very little, except to say that in addition to her fiction, she was a fine essayist and advocate for the science fiction and fantasy genres. It’s out of print now (and expensive), but I highly recommend her 1982 book The Language Of The Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction.

On a more personal note, Amazon sales of my novels spiked yesterday and today. I had a busy day, and I didn’t have time until this evening to try to figure out what might have caused the spike in sales. Then I figured it out. I owe it to Ursula Le Guin. I run ads for my books on Amazon. The ads are displayed when someone searches for certain terms. For each of my books, I have 100 to 200 search terms. For as long as I’ve been running Amazon ads (going on two years), by far the search term that sells the most books for me is “Ursula Le Guin.” People who read Le Guin seem to like my books. Obviously many people have been buying Le Guin’s books this week. In searching for her books, they came across mine. I don’t claim to be in Le Guin’s league, but I do think we are kindred spirits — heretics, take us or leave us.

Thank you, Ursula Le Guin, not only for your books, but for having helped my sales. I’m not sure how to return the favor, but I think the least I can do is to write your publisher begging them to reprint The Language of the Night.

If you haven’t read Le Guin, I’d recommend starting with The Left Hand of Darkness. It was outrageously head of its time, first published in 1969.

Are we all Buttercup now?

Buttercup

A couple of days ago, I finally got around to watching “The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 2.” It was good psychotherapy for trying to psychologically survive this week’s terrifying Republican train wreck in Washington.

I have been doing my best to avoid political posts. Partly this is because the mainstream media and the reality-based commentariat are now fully aware of what Donald Trump is and just how much danger the Republic is in. There is nothing I can add. But I do want to link to a piece by Dahlia Lithwick in which she writes about a question that I also have been gnawing on — that is, are we so far gone that the rule of law can no longer save us? The piece is at Slate with the headline Is It Too Late for Robert Mueller to Save Us? I also should mention a column by Andrew Sullivan at New York Magazine: America Is Trapped in Donald Trump’s Delusional World. Sullivan has a gift for describing the kind of criminal depravity with which we are surrounded.

I’ve also been painfully aware of the fact that sane and decent Americans no longer have a leader. Trump voters have their Hitler, but we have no one. We’re on our own.

All we’ve got to keep us sane and functioning is story and metaphor. “The Hunger Games” is a beautiful story for our times. But the characters of that story, unlike us, had their heroine to pull them through — Katniss.

The scene with Katniss and Buttercup near the end of “Mockingjay Part 2” is one of the most effective film scenes I’ve ever seen. It is the emotional fulcrum around which the entire story finally shifts from horror to relief. In the real world, we’re still waiting on tenterhooks, cringing like Buttercup, clinging to hope that the law will see us through.

The troubles of the 4th Century

Julian the Apostate presiding at a conference of sectarians. Edward Armitage, 1875.

Julian, by Gore Vidal. Vintage International, 1962, 502 pages.

On the Gods and the Cosmos, by Sallustius, mid 4th Century.

Paganism’s last stand occurred in the 4th Century. Early in the 4th Century, the Roman emperor Constantine established Christianity as the state religion. A few decades later, the emperor Julian did his best to reverse it. Julian did not succeed.

I think it would be fair to say that the pagan intellectuals of that era did not see the conflict as a competition between the old gods and Christianity. Rather, they saw the conflict as a rational and living philosophy versus lifeless doctrine and dogma. These pagan Romans spoke Greek. Julian was trained as a philosopher at Athens. To them, Christian doctrine was (to put it bluntly) hickish and childish.

I have found it remarkably difficult to read up on the 4th Century. The 4th Century is covered in many general histories, of course, but I have been looking for sources that are limited to the 4th Century in particular. There are some new books by university presses, but they’re very expensive and narrowly focused (for example, on the city of Rome as an urban center). The old references — Gibbon, for example — are outdated. There are oodles of biographies of Constantine. But I’m not very interested in Constantine. After all, we now live in Constantine’s world. I couldn’t figure out what to read first, so I settled on Vidal’s novel.

Vidal is a good writer, in that, unlike so many people who write for a living these days, Vidal has an excellent command of the English language. But Vidal is not a good storyteller. He seems to lack a sense of drama. It’s as though he’s just dutifully writing up his research. That’s a shame. I can’t help but compare Marguerite Yourcenar’s Memoirs of Hadrian, or Mary Renault’s Alexander novels. Yourcenar and Renault bring their subjects to life and make them human. Vidal is just not good enough as a novelist to do that.

Vidal, however, was a formidable intellect and a fearless heretic. I wonder if any other writers have ever really dared to write about the formation of Christianity as the cultural castastrophe it actually was in the eyes of philosophers such as Julian — the triviality of its texts; the depravity of its early bishops and theologians; its expropriation from the pagans of anything the Christians found useful; its lust for wealth, property and dominance; its habit of violence, persecution, and inquisition; its tendency toward quibbling and schism; its self-delusion about its absoluteness; the hypocrisy of its carnality vs. its other-worldly posturing; its imperial usefulness as a tool for subduing, pacifying, and, as necessary, exterminating the masses. “No evil ever entered the world quite so vividly or on such a vast scale as Christianity did,” says Vidal’s Priscus.

Gore Vidal died in 2012. I don’t think that we now have any public intellectuals who are quite like him or who can take Vidal’s place.

For a short, sweet read on how the last pagans saw the world, you probably can’t do better than Sallustius’ On the Gods and the Cosmos. Sallustius was a trusted friend and military leader in Julian’s army. What stands out in Sallustius’ writing is his sophisticated use of reason. He understands perfectly well that the pagan gods were myths and that the meaning of the myths had to be teased out with the tools of philosophy. Reading Sallustius, one becomes aware of how reason was smothered for centuries by Christian doctrine and didn’t get its head above water again until the Enlightenment. In many ways, it seems to me, this 4th Century conflict is playing out yet again.

Umberto Eco

Sean Connery and Christian Slater in “The Name of the Rose”

The Name of the Rose, Umberto Eco, 1980. English translation 1983.

What? I’m reviewing a book that was first published 37 years ago? Oh well. No one ever accused me of being au courant.

I have tried several times in the past to read Umberto Eco’s The Name of Rose, as well as Foucault’s Pendulum. I have always been driven back by the dry wordiness of Eco’s prose. This time I resolved to finish The Name of the Rose no matter how big a chore it might be, partly as an exercise in better understanding why some writers earn far more generous reputations than they deserve.

First, let’s talk about the film, from 1986. Directed by Jean-Jacques Annaud and with a superb cast including Sean Connery, F. Murray Abraham and the young Christian Slater, the film — I thought, at least — was one of the best and most memorable films of the 1980s. But the film didn’t make much money in the United States, though people in more intelligent parts of the world loved it. Roger Ebert wrote, “What we have here is the setup for a wonderful movie. What we get is a very confused story.”

I don’t agree with Ebert. The screenwriters actually did a brilliant job of stripping out most of Eco’s confusion, endless declamation and disquisition, and sticking to the plot — your basic murder mystery. It was said that Eco didn’t much like the screenplay, precisely because all that erudition got cut (as it had to be).

Eco was a scholar — no doubt a good one — with a wide range of interests. The Name of the Rose drew on his background as a medievalist. Obviously Eco was fascinated by the theological debates of the late medieval period. Also obviously, the setting and the plot for The Name of the Rose were chosen because they provided a basis for page after page of theological hairsplitting by monks of different orders. To Eco’s credit, these endless orations on Christian theology can be funny in their absurdity, and Eco leaves it to the reader to discern what fools his monks are. William of Baskerville, however, is at least a nice fool. And his teenage novice Adso (Christian Slater), with his naiveté and surging hormones, is a very fine foil for so much useless learnedness.

(Incidentally, the chief subject of Eco’s theological debate is whether Christ was poor. The Franciscan order certainly believed in the poverty of Christ, and they got crossways with some popes and with the Inquisition. If you’re interested in the details of all that, I’ll leave you to read The Name of the Rose. But it is worth pointing out, I think, how the church is still divided by the question of poverty, with a few Christians remaining who actually care about the poor, and with other Christians giving their money to birdbrain preachers who live in multimillion-dollar mansions like little popes and fly around on the Lord’s business in private jets. If this history repeated itself, then Christians who care today about the poor would be burned at the stake.)

But what I conclude about Umberto Eco is in many ways similar to what I conclude about Neal Stephenson, the science fiction writer. Both, I would guess, are somewhere well along on the autism spectrum. Both are fine thinkers — but without the least trace of feeling. Stephenson, like Eco, set one of his novels in a monastery (Anathem) and for the same reason — so that their characters can talk, talk, talk about abstractions that they find interesting. But their characters, like the authors, totally lack feeling. I also would argue that the best moments in fiction occur when a character is so driven to despair or ecstasy that the character is compelled to sing. When an author sings, that’s when you learn what motivates the author to write in the first place. For a fine discussion on moments in fiction that sing, see E.M. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel.

In any case, with writers like Eco and Stephenson, one of the most powerful and meaningful ingredients of good fiction is totally missing. Both Eco and Stephenson are so blind to the feeling element of fiction that they seem unaware of the flatness of their characters and make no attempt to simulate the missing ingredient. Adso knows how to suffer some where sex is involved, but Adso cannot sing.

That said, I love brainy fiction — Isaac Asimov, for example. I have great respect for (and considerable interest in) the erudition to be found in Neal Stephenson’s and Umberto Eco’s novels. But it’s not enough, and that’s a shame.

Game of Thrones

In looking through the blog logs yesterday, I noticed that someone searched for “Game of Thrones.” It seems odd in retrospect that I haven’t really blogged about the greatest achievement in fantasy since Tolkien, both in literature and in television. (I’m open to the argument that George R.R. Martin’s achievement has surpassed Tolkien’s.)

The reason, really, is that I’m so into Game of Thrones that, if I started writing here about Game of Thrones, there’d be no end to it. I would become a Game of Thrones boor. Besides, everyone writes about Game of Thrones. Each Monday morning after a new episode, the media cover last night’s happenings in Game of Thrones just like a news event. On a slow news day, Game of Thrones is a big story. The real world blurs into the Game of Thrones world. That in itself is tremendously exciting and serves as a reminder of the power of stories and the power of fantasy — not to mention our need for escape and distraction (especially on Sunday nights when so many hardworking people are dreading the reality of Monday morning).

Since the very beginning, with Season 1 in 2011, Ken and I have spent untold hours discussing each episode and developing what I would call Acorn Abbey’s theory of story analysis (which is pretty well developed and taken very seriously). If Ken is here, the discussion happens at the table, at breakfast and dinner. If Ken is away, the discussion happens in emails. Game of Thrones matters. If you’re a writer, you want to understand how Martin does what he does. You also become very attached to these characters. You have to know what happens to them.

Ken has pointed out how, in many ways, the genre of the two-hour movie is increasingly passé. Even when there are sequels, two-hour movies can’t accomplish what a series can accomplish — world building, character development, complex intertangled plots, a deep exploration of time, place, people and ideas. No doubt it was literature that led the way. Isaac Asimov started his Foundation series in 1951, and the Robot series in 1954. Though I think that Tolkien did not really think of The Lord of the Rings as a series when he wrote it, it was broken into volumes for publishing (starting in 1954). Now everyone writes series. Yes, most of them are bad. You’ve all heard Sturgeon’s law: “Sure, 90 percent of science fiction is crap. That’s because 90 percent of everything is crap.” Theodore Sturgeon was, of course, a science fiction writer.

If you’re a Game of Thrones fan, none of this needs saying. If you’re not, then it’s not too late. The books are as close as Amazon. Everything is available on DVD and Blu-ray. The two HBO apps, HBO Now and HBO Go, keep all seasons available for streaming.

And tonight at 9: Season 7, episode 5.

How to win: Torture the language and muddle the story

I pay very little attention to the science fiction and fantasy publishing industry anymore. Almost every book I try to read, I end up flinging away in frustration after the first few pages. Almost no one knows how to write, and almost no one knows how to tell a story.

Instead, what passes for “good writing” is innovation in quirkiness. Last night at the World Science Fiction Convention in Helsinki, the Hugo award for the best novel of 2017 was won by N.K. Jemisin for The Obelisk Gate. I have not read this novel, nor will I. Amazon’s “Look Inside” feature saves me a lot of money and time, because I can fling books without having to buy them.

The quirk that Jemisin applied in The Obelisk Gate was to write the narrative in the second person, and in the present tense. And there is just enough dialogue in Amazon’s free sample to reveal that the characters are jerks who talk just like the here-and-now people in television’s meanest sitcoms.

This is the kind of writing that will win you a Hugo these days:

And this is the kind of characters and dialogue that will get you a Hugo these days:

Who am I protest? N.K. Jemisin sells lots of books, and I don’t. But I have to ask: Why does jerks arguing make good dialogue? I stand my ground: The best writing style is a style that the reader never even notices, a window into the story that is as transparent as possible. And though villains are necessary, there had better be some characters to fall in love with.

Here’s yet another Hugo winner that will be completely forgotten, and good riddance, before the pages have started turning yellow.