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Famous writers aren’t as famous as celebrities from other walks of life, such as actors or rock stars. There are exceptions to the Known By Looks stuff, such as Neil Gaiman doing a rock star image and Donna Tartt’s actor poise, but they’re hardly household names.
Most readers remember title and scenes while forgetting writer, let alone publisher, year of release, cover art, and all the rest us book people may know and chat about on Book Tube.
Art and artist are separate BUT: If a writer is a bigot or in some other way distasteful or opposed to humanism’s standards of acceptance and democratic inclusiveness, one becomes reluctant to give that writer money, which is tantamount to supporting them and their views.
So reading the work isn’t the same as buying the work.
Vetting writers before reading is like Nazis demanding loyalty tests. That’s vile. Readers should let the text speak for itself. If it fails, DNF it.
A good rule of thumb is to find out if the hate, the bad things, are in the text of the book. If so, maybe it needs to be discussed or discarded.
If it’s not in the text, we’re back to whether to buy a book and thus give a pay day to the cruddy writer is justified.
Warranted purchases are also distinct from innocent ones. You might buy, read, enjoy, and talk up a book only later to find the writer’s a thuggish prig spouting hate. That isn’t your fault, and if the work doesn’t contain the hate, it remains apart from its creator.
You mentioned Orson Scott Card. His homophobic remarks disgust and repel me. However, I dismiss and reject Ender’s Game on the grounds that it, in its text, in its storyline, in its emphasis, supports a fascist view of using children in war. It’s End Justifies Means and Categorical thinking, Us vs. Them At All Costs, and it’s revolting. The work itself gags me, quite apart from the pear-shaped little Orson gagging me.
As to Cixin Liu’s anti-democracy, pro-fascist views, consider the source. He’s from a society that represses unapproved views, a culture that literally commits genocide against groups that don’t toe the party line. That a writer from such a place is programmed in many ways to have views unacceptable among free, liberal human beings is no surprise.
Is it a reason to avoid his work? Depends whether the work is full of such attitudes and opinions, which seems inevitable given their plots. One can read Mein Kampf without becoming a Nazi. We can even learn from such screeds.
As to Only Good People Can Make Good Art, uh, no. LOL Not by a long shot. Brahms was a dirty old man who told rude jokes and copped feels from underaged girls. Liszt was a proliferate lover of anyone who passed near him, as was Picasso and so many others.
Of course, there is the example of Leni Riefenstahl, brilliant documentary film maker who worked in the Third Reich. Due to her Nazi affiliation, her work has been denigrated, dismissed, and ignored by cinephiles and cinema critics. They’ll concede it’s “technically” good, then demur.
Yet at the same time, under Operation: PAPERCLIP, the US Government whitewashed the records of Nazi scientists and sneaked them into America to work on rocket, missile, and space exploration design and development. Werner Von Braun was famous, one of Walt Disney’s pals, and on TV a good deal, or in newsreels. His good looks and confidence won many fans. He used Nazi slave labor, working and starving people to death, while he was in Germany during the war.
Double standards prevailed then, continue to hold sway now. Some get a pass, others are condemned for the slightest slip of tongue or typing.
In Victorian England, Oscar Wilde was jailed for a considerable time, convicted of having had an affair with a man whose father was rabidly anti-homosexual and rich and powerful enough to make his hate stick. Never piss off a British aristocrat would be the lesson, no matter how witty one may be.
Alan Touring, math genius, helped win the war against the Nazis by decoding, yet was hounded, persecuted, and eventually ended up dead for being gay. Talk about separating art and artist.
It’s certainly no better today, with extremists of all stripe shooting, burning, and bombing anyone toward whom their ire is raised by right wing hate speech and stochastic triggers. It’s so bad publishers are bowdlerizing work, such as that of Roald Dahl and Ian Fleming and who knows how many others, in order to strip out dog-whistle words that might, possibly, maybe spark a swarm of hate to descend on them, thus cutting their profits.
Money in the form of profit is always the soft spot when it comes to small loud groups bullying mammoth corporations.
Yes, we began by talking about books and have ended up knee-deep in the bloody gore of terrorism and political capitalism’s cynicism.
Slip-and-Slide, anyone?
Fascists will always use Art in culture war against humanism, democracy, and equality. Those ideas terrify fascists, who seek full control of everything and everyone at all times.
We by Yvgeny Zemyatin, 1984 by George Orwell, It Can’t Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis. So many detailed warnings ignore, and BOHICA – Bend Over, Here It Comes Again.
Art is either Good or Not Good and remains distinct from the Artist, who is either good or not. There have been any number of superb books written by people few could stand to be around. To be an Artist requires a certain amount of distance from society, for perspective, and a lot of solitude, giving time and space for creating, which will be seen as disdain.
If the work contains a creator’s flaws, then it falls short of art and collapses into shrill, strident, ignorable propaganda, so there y’go. That’s how we can tell, from what ever window through which our current social attitudes squint. Through a glass, darkly — Plato’s cavern shadows — we tend to impose modern notions on past work, and to insist contemporary work stay inside established lines of what’s acceptable.
When the French Academy first saw plein air art, Impressionism, paintings showing — gasp — views of landscapes and ordinary people instead of flattering portraits of royalty and rich patrons, it spasmed into instant rejection. Today, Impressionism, particularly Monet, is the most popular type of art, beloved globally. Forcing procrustean standards on Art renders it insipid, faltering, and inert.
For Art to live it must be free to roam any wilderness it can find.
Distressed because a familiar face from a media feed has gone dark?
Y’know, TV personalities, movie stars, online images, all are interchangeable. Having an emotional attachment to an image is self-sabotage, a sucker’s bet, notwithstanding “Pictures of Lilly” by The Who or “She’s Not There” by The Zombies.
You object, you defend your compassion for the hidden plight of an image taken off our feed? I say a given female discusser of news items, spin doctor, deliverer of approved stances, is possibly artificial.
“But she’s more than that.” You can’t stand thinking you’ve attached yourself to a manipulation. “She’s more than just cynical image.”
Uh, no, not necessarily. You do not know her. At ALL.
For all we know she’s an AI image. Might be legit, might be an actor, might not exist outside a digital program. No way for us to tell.
Often anchors are chosen, or created, because they will or are designed to tow the party line.
Making Max Headroom
I’m aware of CNN’s idiotic recent adoption of the False Equivalence Doctrine, which as lost them viewers even as it strengthens its link to the fascists and their rabid magat swallowers and followers.
So keep in mind, CGI newsreaders have happened already in Japan years ago. Idoru, or Idols, singer and actors who are entirely digital, have been marketed into tremendous profits, taking the Pre-Fab Four, The Monkees, who were designed and cast to appeal to a teenybopper pop music audience, into the computer age. Now they don’t need actors or wanna-be musicians.
When the unpopular ones are cancelled, mass suicides result. Japanese teenagers are sophisticated about high tech and well know the Idoru is not a real, living person, yet remain emotionally involved, in love, and desperate about their cravings for ever more connection from media feeds.
Idoru are on magazines, covered in news reports, hold concerts, make personal appearances, all via CGI and holograms. They star in videos and films, “date” other celebrities, and flirt endlessly with their fans. They’ll write to you, send you underwear, and take very yen you have of both kinds.
You don’t know for sure anyone on a screen or text is a person. Or a she. Or real in any way beyond a marketing algorithm that continually refines its media tsunami to adjust to your every slight change.
Factually, none of us receivers of propaganda know what we’re experiencing, especially via our electronic media.
This is how a rabbit hole becomes worm hole.
Doubt is all anyone has.
Let’s get PKD – am I real? Is this me? Are YOU real? Do we exist outside a digital simulation? What original is being simulated? Is it entirely fictional, based on and rooted in nothing more than corporate marketing needs for ever more desperate consumers?
I could go on but it won’t matter. We’re in a buried box.
What’s Wrong? Is It My Hair?
“Popular” = promoted TV shows all pull the direction the FedGov wants. Pro military, might makes right, violence is golden, it’s “important” to defend “family values” (meaning man/woman/kid ONLY), and so on. We’re hemmed in by messaging we don’t come up with or control. Misfits are demonized, often destroyed. Conform or else.
Feeling better about your favorite personality having abruptly vanished from your media feeds?
Regarding censorship and bowdlerizing older books etc. —
Correcting errors is necessary to present a better book and is not censorship or bowdlerizing. Copyediting is entirely ethical, and improves the work.
It is not ethical to change published work. If you don’t like a given book, don’t read it. Better yet, try to write a better one. Altering past work to conform to contemporary mores is ridiculous. It’s akin to the hare-brained plan to remove all the scenes with smoking from 1940s Noir movies. To what end? To protect people from seeing others smoking? Absurd. Also, be it noted that showing an old film with lots of smoking in it in no way whatsoever promotes or condones such a practice. It’s simply a record of how things were. Further, worse, as Orwell’s 1984 depicted, rewriting history and expunging any fact not approved hourly by a fascist regime is how they steal from us our heritage, replacing it with their ideology.
You don’t expunge racist hate by removing all mention of the KKK. Quite the contrary, as disgusting and infuriating as it may be, only the open acknowledgement of all the facts, appalling and despicable, can keep us from being led by haters into repeating the crimes and horrors of the past. We must remember the bad and own the past taints in order to avoid them in the future, in order to do better.
There is no such things as Positive Censorship.
Education, context, cognizance is necessary. When I was in fourth grade our teacher brought in a town cop dressed in full KKK regalia. He stood silently in front of us for five minutes, then left. We were told, “I just wanted you to know they’re still out there, protecting us.” Most of the kids didn’t know what had just happened, but I’d recognized both the KKK costume and the cop inside it — I spotted his voice trousers, which had a dark stripe down the outside of the leg, and his shoes. I knew the guy.
Anyway, I trudged to the public library after school let out and borrowed books on the KKK, to confirm that what we’d been shown was in fact evil, or at least dark. When the librarian tried to tell me I was too young to borrow such material, my mother marched in later that evening and read her the riot act, defending my right to read any book I wished and to inform myself on any topic that interested me. Brava for her, a great person, small as she was.
Yorick’s Dream
Incidentally, it was in fourth grade, same teacher, that racist geography texts taught us patronizing, condescending stereotypes such as Bunga of the Jungle and Nanook of the North. In later years such books would be taken out of curricula, but my town was in a backward region where old shibboleths prevailed. Even at the time most of us kids squirmed about those books and their antiquated depictions of various cultures. It was all very White Man’s Burden sort of thing, and disgusted those among us who had friends from all manner of cultural and ethnic backgrounds.
Was it harmful? To some, probably, but most of us exposed to it quickly saw it for the remnant chunk of out-dated hate it was and moved on. Most? Well, some of us, I guess, given that my home town and environs remains a place of shrieking fear, greed, and hate amidst economic decay. So, no, I don’t think learning how older people or older times thought and acted was a bad thing, and while removing the racist texts improved education, forgetting that kind of mental illness is a denial and a hiding of past crimes, a lie.
Look at current attempts by the TX school book committees, who control content, or by FL Governor DeSantis, and too many other far-right types, to remove from history all mention of the horrors committed in past times to benefit our contemporary hegemony and culture. History is His Story if He is a Rich White Male, in their warped view, and acknowledging racist genocide, sexist cruelty, and so on can’t be tolerated, lest their Hollywood Myth of Manifest Destiny become more wobbly than it’s always been.
That’s where books come in. Yes, you’ll find asides, passages, and full-book attitudes that strike modern readers as racist, misogynist, and hateful. In some cases, the writers were bigots, yes. In other books, received wisdom and unexamined social stances seeped into the work without malice on the part of the writer, who might be characterized as unaware.
Again, if a work, any kind of art, offends you, avoid it. Suppressing it only makes YOU into the fascist. Censorship is always futile and repugnant to cultured people. To defy and counter negative words, positive words are required. Shouting down or muzzling only creates higher pressure that builds until it explodes in a backlash. Words are water and water doesn’t compress.
To bowdlerize any work, be it removing words, rewriting passages, or hiding the penises and pubic hair on statues behind a carved fig leaf, is philistine thuggery. Burning books and destroying art carries such anti-intellectual hatred of art and culture to the logical extremes of pure madness.
The Fig Leaf Campaign arose from the Council of Trent in 1563 C.E., with each succeeding Pope joining in the defacing of art on homophobic and anti-sex grounds, until Pope Pius IX in 1857 ordered all statues of nudes destroyed, which led to statue penises being broken off and, strangely, not destroyed but hoarded in the Vatican. A room few would want to enter …
A state of mindless dismissal of human values few would wish to experience, the sort of actions only tyrants engage in.
Seems I stand foursquare against censorship and bowdlerizing in favor of tolerance, rational avoidance of what bothers, and assessments of art and literature based on long-term cultural context, not the strident shrieking of phony moral crusaders from this or any era.
If Hemingway hadn’t put that macho gloss on things, he’d have been revealed as an aesthete, something his upbringing didn’t let him admit, even to himself perhaps. He was at core sensitive, finely-tuned, and delicate, not attributes one associates with Ernest Expletive Deleted Hemingway. Therein lay his realm of suffering and self-destruction.
Read any of his short stories. You’ll see the soap-bubble delicacy of observation and the timid brevity of description, oblique dialogue, yet all somehow posed as strong and manly, if that old term can be allowed these days. There is a desperate discord to how he strives for maturity of tone.
Remember, Hemingway liked to be called Papa. He wanted to be a father figure. His own father was harsh, demanding, abusive, and committed suicide. A small town doctor with some rural practice, too. Hence Hem’s affinity for Chekov.
Hem defined courage as “Grace under pressure.” His mother’s name was Grace. Calling Sigmund Freud. Issues abound, yet for the most part he coped, managed to produce some world-class writing, and influenced, probably to good effect, maybe, generations of writers, who mostly misunderstand Hem’s concision for simplicity.
Hemingway cited Huck Finn by Mark Twain as the book on which modern literature pivoted. He was correct because it brought narrative out of ornate phrasing into how people talk. Vernacular discursive narrative has thrived since, with many excursions into abstract forms rooted in jargon and prepared audiences. Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio presented an early example of plain speech writing, too, and before that, Ambrose Bierce, particularly in his Civil War and Horror stories.
Probably the next innovation to affect nearly everyone is the unreliable narrator, usually presented to the reader seamlessly at first, only to unravel and show divots, chips, and flaws as the story expands. Naive, honest narrative turned into rube’s yawp, hick sincerity being instantly risible. Plain tales told plainly lost savor in favor of convoluted, twisted, layered meanings.
We’re stuck in that to this day, as writers seek new ways out of the buried box in which we find ourselves.
Read as much and as widely as possible, accepting what’s offered by the writing, bringing what’s experienced from your life, observation, and thought. Literature doesn’t mean fancy writing, it simply means written stories, and the ones written best speak most clearly and last longest.
My own stuff usually sprawls between Larson and Thurber, with the occasional Kliban influence.
Pup Meets Mantis
I’d also have to cite Schultz, to be fair, along with the Nine Old Men at Disney Animation, particularly during THE JUNGLE BOOK epoch, which was one of the rougher animations. I had an over-sized comic book of that movie and spent hours copying the characters and poses.
Yet another influence would be Jack “King” Kirby from Marvel Comics, with his square-jawed sketchy style, particularly in his art for The Fantastic Four. Then, to a slighter degree, James Steranko of Marvel.
For a brief time I tried for more realistic cartoons, such as The Phantom, Steve Canyon, and Batman most of all. That failed at the time. I lacked anatomy and had never had a life-drawing class.
A Visit From Krampus
When I was 8 or 10, thereabouts, my maternal grandmother gave me a half-sized paperback book, How To Draw Cartoons. It explained various techniques, from pencil sketches through inking, washes and paint, to caricature. Explained projectors and light boxes. It was helpful, although it didn’t imprint any particular style on me.
I was always able to draw recognizable things and to capture expression, which thrilled Gonga, my grandmother, who herself was an oil painter. She taught me 85 hours of painting instruction one week in exchange for me literally painting their living room ceiling. Best trade I ever made.
My style or styles arose from me as a toddler making recognizable things out of squiggles my mother did for me on scrap paper to keep me busy in waiting rooms, and at home as a game. Taught me emergent image, and how to handle squiggles, or mistakes, or simply to make a shape, then find what’s in it or develop it as part of something.
Shades of Grey
Dr Seuss’s Theodore Geisel described his style as Controlled Accidents. I think he was using squiggle approach, then refining. At times, he drew social commentary and sardonic looks askance at history’s idiocies.
My favorites along with Gary Larson and Kliban are Berkley Breathed’s BLOOM COUNTY, Watterson’s CALVIN & HOBBES, Mr. Fish, PEANUTS by Charles Schultz, Mark Tatuli’s LIO, and many others. It’s art, it’s joy, it’s play, it’s important: It’s cartooning.
Anyway, so much for my cartoon influence and history.
Literary writers often cherrypick tropes and topoi from pulp to spark plot, then fail to follow through. The Witches of Eastwick by John Updike is a good first third of a Stephen King novel, but he didn’t follow through on the plot implications for fear of straying out of academic favor. Smilla’s Sense of Snow by Peter Høeg has a science fiction thread running through the novel that, at the end, he ducks, balking at entering actual science fiction territory. This vitiates the whole story. (It’s corrected somewhat in the film.)
These examples emphasize how demonized pulp has become. Despite many fine writers now considered great literary beacons having come up through pulp and genre writing, anything smacking of genre is derided or ignored by academic critique, thus slamming the door against cross-pollinating.
To make it more galling, exceptions abound. Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale received academic blessings despite having a near-future setting and many tropes taken from genre. It’s science fiction, yet the critics refused to see it that way and call it literature. Why?
Science fiction writers, outraged at the slight, pointed out dozens of works as good as Atwood’s or better and asked how come those books weren’t elevated to the status of literature? Those works go begging and are dismissed as crap by sneering, willfully-ignorant academics.
This has the real-world effect of pretty much guaranteeing obscurity, while academic blessings can bestow lasting interest over generations.
Vonnegut took pains to shake off the science fiction flecks, even though he wrote SF outright, and shamelessly borrowed tropes and topoi for his best-regarded novel, Slaughterhouse-5. He even invented a satirical character, Kilgore Trout, who is the world’s greatest science fiction writer whose books are ill-published and never kept in print. Utter failure despite being brilliant because he inhabited a ghetto category of literature.
Vonnegut’s Kilgore Trout was a strong echo of Theodore Sturgeon, a superb writer whose work never escaped the SF ghetto, and who, consequently, died impoverished and without health insurance. Kurt Vonnegut’s Trout character is a depiction of what Vonnegut avoided by climbing out of the fish tank.
Again, in a galling exception, the work of Philip K. Dick, considered bilge when he was alive, got noticed for its brilliant conceptual content and philosophical underpinnings by academics, who by now have lifted PKD into a cultural phenomenon.
How many other writers of stature have been refused recognition simply because they wrote a kind of story dismissed by the narrow minds slithering through the dark halls of academia?
Write what you want how you want. Read the same way. Even those books that last across generations will be gone along with all else in a blink of geological or cosmic time, after all, so brevity of impact doesn’t matter.
In the Romantic Era, when artists and writers recoiled from some of the harshness brought by the Age of Reason, a beautiful, terminally-ill young woman, doomed, a tubercular Venus, was considered the most poignant of topics for art. Beauty and fragility, an irresistible urge to protect or save that can never be fulfilled, a sakura reminder of life’s brevity, inspired evocations of emotion, which Romantics elevated over phlegmatic factuality and materialism. Schubert’s Death and the Maiden is what you’re hearing.
This trope has survived into contemporary romance only rarely. Love Story by Erich Segal, 1970, is one that comes to mind. It was widely condemned as saccharine and manipulative. Naturally Barnum’s edict kicked in and both book and movie sold like sexy candy.
Brian’s Song reversed sexes and anchored itself in a ‘true’ story but was essentially mining the same open pit of exploitation.
Are there other tropes once popular, now neglected? Realism, perhaps?
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Yesterday, despite already reading several books as usual, as I walked past a bookshelf, one of the volumes caught my eye. Literal eye. So … I examined it and decided to read it, too. First sitting I read 126pp or 280pp.
The Snake by John Godey, 1978, in a used 1979 mmpb edition, probably nabbed at a library sale, isn’t necessarily compelling so much as appealing to me for its style, which is blunt 1970s realism. One forgets how much what’s acceptable in prose has changed in standard thrillers over time. It refreshes me to read the good old stuff warts and all, stories that include now-forbidden, yet still realistic, word use in dialogue, along with grit, grime, and ingratitude in depictions of Seventies NYC. It’s even set in a September heat wave, a wink from past to present.
Rather akin to old movies inadvertently capturing how it was in society in backdrops, locations, and attitudes. DEATH WISH, THE FRENCH CONNECTION, and BULLIT offer vivid glimpses of how we once lived.
So The Snake is about a sailor who smuggles a poisonous snake into NYC and, when he’s mugged in Central Park, it gets loose. Simple setup. Godey then follows procedural ripples political and personal, following the social pressure of panic and cynicism.
Godey wrote the superb, twice-filmed procedural, The Taking of Pelham-1-2-3, about a NYC subway train hijacked and held hostage for ransom. The earlier movie with Walter Matthau is the better, with the Denzel Washington version being overwrought and over-the-top rather than procedural.
Underplaying and showing real or realistic response is more compelling and dramatic than the bloated SFX and wild scenes in the Denzel iteration.
Modern films try to hard for spectacle at the expense of all else.
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On Book Tube, consensus condenses on certain books. Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry is generally either considered or conceded to be the best Western novel.
In science fiction, Dune generally rules. In epic fantasy, after Tolkien, living writers such as Brian Sanderson and George R R Martin prevail, while in Low or Urban fantasy the likes of Jim Butcher take precedence. Fifty to a hundred sub-genres of fantasy have been proposed by marketers and publishers so it’s difficult to categorize each work.
Mystery doesn’t seem to have a prime candidate beyond Agatha Christie, the best-selling fiction writer. Hammett, Chandler, P D James, Ruth Rendell, and scads of others follow close behind her.
Not all Book Tuber choices chime with me. It’d be amazing if they did, but I find many of their choices concordant with my tastes.
Book talk, lit chat, has always fascinated me. I’ve enjoyed books about books and writers all my life. This makes Book Tube a haven for me, where even dullards slogging through fumbling analyses offer insights on what not to do. As a writer this compels me. Seeing how people in a spectrum perceive writing with which I’m familiar lets me compare and contrast, giving insights into how fiction works and how it’s received.
As with radio on a stormy day, reception of fiction changes constantly as society shifts, winces, and dodges its own vicissitudes.
Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes …
Storytelling versus writing, song versus singer, is a key consideration. Good prose can make anything readable but many readers are tone deaf. They like a good beat. They read for plot points.
Most of us want a good story well-told. That balances story and prose. Strict commercial thrillers strive for pure story. Any poetics are considered distraction. Academic fiction sneers at plot and places emphasis on sentence, character, mood, psychology, social commentary parallels, detailed description, and other static aspects of fiction.
Few if any books achieve either extreme but not for want of trying.
Voice counts, too. Vonnegut, Hemingway, Twain, Wilde, Dickens, and others had voices that ring clearly even now. Yes, it can be argued every writer has a voice — it’s how one thinks and expresses thoughts — but most gravitate toward the fat part of the Bell Curve, an inevitable homogenizing due to statistics pressure-cooking culture.
Readers seek novelty within familiarity. They want to relate to people in stories, comfortable reactions that affirm their world views, and kept in context. This leads to stereotype, cliché, and hand-holding, those exposition capsules ensuring a reader is oriented. Word splatter is a serious proposal, realty’s glue.
Against this, writers struggle uphill agains the wind to inject originality and sophistication, subtlety and witty referents. Therein lies the fulcrum on which readable fiction must balance.
Reducio ad absurdum, as the sous chef muttered.
In doing a Tarot spread of reading fiction, I find a fortune of wonder, insight, and a touch of humanity’s higher potential by inclusive choices. From pulp to perfection, spanning the range of the written word broadens the mind and deepens the life. Take each era’s fiction flaws and all, consider context and source, and learn tolerance. Be kind to every kind of written work and it will return in kind with adventure, information, and camaraderie.
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Literary endeavor is a beautiful young woman, tragic and stoic, constantly fading yet continually rejuvenated by each generation of writer. Open the curtains, let light in, and watch as fiction blossoms, renewed.
Stalkers forget the touch of regard. Being observed is sensed as a spider web brushing across the back of the neck, a feather tickling the spine, an urge to look behind or around yourself. Gooseflesh spreads.
Special Ops troops are taught to go dark. If hiding in gillie suits they blank their minds and look askance instead of peering directly at their target. Some shut their eyes or stare at the ground. Some blur their gaze. They go inward. If they don’t, their target inevitably looks at them, notices the predator.
In wild animals, prey often freezes when observed. Big cats stare, pythons stare, and their meal is stricken, cannot fight or flee. Deer spotting makes deer wait for the poacher’s bullet. Headlights pin deer to the road when they could easily leap to safety.
Other animals hide, flee, or signal to others when spotted by potential predators. Squirrels, so acrobatic and active, become motionless but for their tails, which twitch code to other squirrels. If spooked, whitetail deer flash their tails, sparking flight in the herd.
What causes such responses? Are our senses more sensitive than we know? Is there an unidentified energy involved?
We’re hard-wired to notice eyes. Darkness, tangled foliage, or stormy weather may intercede, yet we’ll squint at any resemblance to eyes. We don’t like being watched because atavistic terror of becoming food kicks in.
In PSYCHO, Hitchcock filled Norman Bates’s interior spaces with stuffed and painted birds, all staring at him with beady eyes. This served both to prompt the disturbed character’s nervousness, sending him over inner edges, and to remind viewers they’re essentially voyeurs when they sit in the dark watching movies or TV screens. REAR WINDOW emphasizes this, too.
We like to watch but hate being watched. We enjoy invading privacy but crave privacy. We’re insulted, outraged if our privacy is invaded. We feel raped if our private spaces are ransacked by burglars. We teeter on a fulcrum of contradictory impulses, rarely poised between, mostly dipping into hiding or stalking, being watched or watching. Often it’s simultaneous.
A touch of regard is all it takes to galvanize us to action, to stun us into tableaux of terror.
Look around. Who’s there? Who is it? Is someone watching?
Expanded from comments posted to CarolynMarieReads on
Youtube’s book tube on 25 Oct 2527 —
My mother would give me a mmpb in my Easter Basket, and I believe the first one ever was Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens. From then on I was hooked on Dickens, and sharing his birthday didn’t hurt, either. Yes, I’m a writer. As if I ever had a choice, right?
I’d begun reading at age 3 and loved Brothers Grimm, H.C. Anderson, Aesop, and other imaginative tales. I savored the tinge of darkness in many of them, too, that drew me. In childhood, thanks to a great aunt who was VP at a bank, (she had money), I was introduced to the classics, and until about 13 or 14 read primarily classic books.
My second-grade teacher asked me what I was reading one day. It was Moby Dick by Herman Melville. She saw it was unabridged and asked if I understood it. Well, at the time I sure thought I did, and gave her a précis of what I’d read so far. I liked the adventure parts and glommed onto the nonfiction stuff explaining whaling. Fascinating book for a kid who, at that time, was hooked on nautical stuff like Two Years Before the Mast by Richard Henry Dana, etc.
In high school I balked at reading James Fennimore Cooper, just a chapter in a text, and offered to read three James Joyce stories instead. “No, write me an essay why you can’t stand Cooper.” So I did, and the teacher read what I’d written and said, “Oh, Twain.” I had no clue what she meant, so she showed me his essay, “The Literary Sins of James Fennimore Cooper” and turned out I’d recapitulated most of Mark Twain’s valid critiques. Hooray for me, I figured. She thought I’d copied.
I was the only kid in that class not afraid of the teacher, and who liked Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton.
As an adult my reading of Melville and other classics appreciates much I missed earlier, but I think it was good for me.
One day in Jr. High I borrowed two books, as was my wont, from the school library. Islands In the Stream by Hemingway and … The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury. That second one I borrowed on the off-chance it would be about Mars, a topic that, along with so many others, fascinated me.
It proved to be fantasy and led me to Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein, and so on. That’s how I discovered science fiction existed as a thing more modern than the works of Jules Verne and H G Wells.
Then came fantasy via Tolkien, at a stop at the Book & Candle Shop at the Station Mall in Altoona, PA after my paternal grandparents had been good enough to take me for new glasses, which my parents couldn’t afford. I recall squatting to examine the bottom racks and noting that three books went together to form one image, plus a fourth with a similar image. That’s when I purchased The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. I recall the ride up Cresson mountain in the back of my grandfather’s forest green Chrysler New Yorker looking at the maps in those books and wondering what this was all about.
Mystery of the Christie, Queen, and Gardner varieties came to me through my paternal grandmother, who was a Justice of the Peace and liked mystery novels and short stories. She also subscribed to EQMM and Hitchcock’s.
As a little kid I’d loved TWILIGHT ZONE, HITCHCOCK PRESENTS, OUTER LIMITS, ONE STEP BEYOND, CHILLER, and other spooky TV shows, even though my mother was unsettled by them. I recall being in a rocking chair, covered by a crochet’d blanket, watching such stuff in the orchard house, where my propensity for talking with trees upset my father. My tortoises were understanding, and the witch tree let a rabbit carry her spirit away before Dad cut it down. Boy did that freak him out.
Old pulp stuff I found in my grandfather’s closet in the sunporch hall, so Edgar Rice Burroughs and Max Brand and that ilk invaded my swirling mind.
At about 15 I found Harlan Ellison’s I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream, and it floored me. I’d not known you were allowed to DO that kinda stuff in writing. I threw it at the wall several times in sheer astonishment, no kidding. That was power.
Literary or mainstream works, John O’Hara and, later, Mailer, Vidal, and Capote, stayed on my radar too. On came Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon and so forth, and now I’m a ruin of eclectic books.
Sorry for having gone on, but I so adore books, reading, and learning to write. Yes, at 65 I’m still learning.
Began at age eight, “The Big Fish”, and have continued studying story and prose ever since, producing a mountain of material, some of it even published.
At 16 I was called by Esquire magazine, wanting to publish a story of mine, “Not Buzzard”, until Rust Hills, the editor, found out I was 16. Ageism, man.
At 22 or so I apprenticed, and made decent money, writing erotica and filling phony letter columns, often using Greek and Roman myths for inspiration.
At 32 Marion Zimmer Bradley bought and published my first non-erotic story, a fantasy, “Weal & Woe”.
Through the 1990s I published a lot of short fiction in a wide spectrum of venues but never managed to get enough to appear in close cluster that might draw publishers’ attention.
One of my novels was accepted by Baen Books but I yanked it when I learned, via a sub-editor, that Jim Baen himself was rewriting it to insert pro right wing crap. When I got the ms back, it was confirmed.
Withdrawing that submission got me blackballed and, although John F. Carr kept asking me for more War World novellas and filler, I ended up drifting away from others’ standards.
Health and family issues imposed a hiatus on me and, by the time I crawled out of those holes and began submitting again, I found the whole business had changed out from under me. Also found out I’d been bad-mouthed and wasn’t able to place stories any longer, so I stopped submitting.
You can see a lot of that stuff at genestewart.com by the way. Where you’re reading this, eh? Haven’t updated my sales list in donkey’s ears but I keep adding new content to this site.
This brings me to today, when I’m strongly considering print-on-demand self-published books, to put my work in front of people again. Look for mention of my titles coming soon to a virtual space near you, including a site devoted entirely to my new productions.
So, how did you discover books, or reading, or writing? What are your ambitions toward curating a collection or producing stories to entertain people? I’d ask you to let me know in the comments but, well, let’s just say I learned that allowing comments only encouraged vile trolling and viral swarm attacks. No time for that. None of us has time for that.
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