Well, we’ve all heard all those things over and over again from both sides. Genre people saying how Literary folks hate their guts and think they’re lesser fictions. And then you have some sick genre response, saying that literary fiction people are all snobs, and that genre fiction is “fiction of the people” and they like their ripping yarns and that’s that, and why don’t they respect us? It’s like their is a mutual hatred on both sides, through some of the fans, and to be frankly honest it makes those of us who read both and enjoy both to become very conflicted.

I know. I’m conflicted a lot of the time about the whole thing. It’s why you see me throwing up my hands from time to time and claiming I don’t want anything to do with genre ever again. Which, I realize most of the time, is a silly thing, and it’s what I write (or part of what I write) and I should just be okay with it and not care about it. But it’s hard to just ignore it on either side. It’s basically like listening to the Tea Party argue with Democrats. The arguments are all straw man arguments, and this idea of books for snobs and books for the people are silly ones at best.

So I read that article in the New Yorker, and I thought, hey look it that, more of the same. And why oh why when anyone makes this argument on either side, do they always go back and pull out musty old books that aren’t a part of today’s direct conversation? I mean in the New Yorker article it’s a line from Ford Maddox Ford versus a line from Agatha Christie. Yeah, that really speaks to the divide in literature today, good show, all that stuff.

This article seems to ignore the fact that minimalism has been a part of literature for well over half a century now. So that when he goes on and on about how simple and straight to the point and minimal the construction of the Orient Express passages are, you have to wonder, has he even read Hemmingway? Paris was nice this time of year. That’s a simple construction even more straight to the point and no flourish than in any mystery novel. Or Camus, or Sartre, who both wrote with powerful yet simple sentences. Or hey, let’s go straight to the modern day- what about Murakami? What about Tao Lin?

And to go on the otherside of the fence- has he even read Valante? Or Le Guin? Rolling flowing poetic sentences that burst and bubble and strangle and sing. The argument is null. The only divide that exists really truly has nothing to do with plotting plot plot or simple constructions or the fact one has world building and one doesn’t or any of that stuff. It all boils down to one thing: readers and fans and the fact they like to argue and fight and throw balls at each other and scream.

I won’t even get started on Lev Grossman’s response to this (http://entertainment.time.com/2012/05/23/genre-fiction-is-disruptive-technology/). He seems to act like the argument is all one sided and it’s just literature being mean to the poor old genre people. And yet- look at the comments in his article. Genre people are exactly the same way in reverse. They hate those snooty smarty farty types, they do.

And yet, through it all, there is a large number of people that sit in the middle of the divide, watch all this pointless fighting and arguing and they just want to say, “Who cares already? This is all pointless.”

The play was interesting too, reading over it now, discovering how much of my writing had changed, how much had stayed the same over the years. Also, there were some poems (some were bad, some were good) and my first epic poem (Beware the Glass Rabbit which I actually am happy with, looking back, for the most part) as well as a bunch of my early attempts to mesh prose/narrative/poetry into some sort of strange short story/novel/proem hybrid. I had quite a few of those, and they were actually pretty good.

I had a huge problem back then with everything being so extreme and emotional and weeping and crying and oh the sun! Oh the sun! and all that sort of stuff. Cliche highschool stuff, I guess you could say, but also delving into philosophy and some sad attempt at mimicking the Beat writers.

Still, it was a nice gift. Time capsule of sorts.

As for the website- redesign needs a few more things- an actual links page and the bibliography links to work. But that’s for later. Was going to do it tonight, but I’m emotionally and mentally beaten to the core and strung back up together again and beaten apart again.  I’m going to try to start blogging weekly again. Although I want to do it daily, though I don’t think I can stomach that.

it will be will be it

Secret in the House of Smiles (Clarkesworld Magazine):
Jack cut up pictures of girls with thin razors and then glued the most pleasing body parts together onto a single white sheet of paper.
http://clarkesworldmagazine.com/jessup_06_08/ 

Apple Magick (Farrago’s Wainscot):
 I blamed Chloe for their disappearance. Chloe, and those birds that used to haunt the city.
http://www.farragoswainscot.com/2007/applemagick.html

A Word Without Ghosts (Fantasy Magazine):
Wendy was wrapped in an old green blanket. She smelled the musk of it, the smell of mold-eaten clothing hovering on the edge of her awareness. She was trapped in the blanket, suffocating in the blanket.
http://www.fantasy-magazine.com/fiction/a-word-without-ghosts/

Mr. Waterbones and His Wife (Farrago’s Wainscot):
Tarak worked day and night, his limbs falling off one by one. He would have to stop for a moment, stop and re-attach a finger or an arm, or a toe or a leg. Sometimes he would spend an hour, completely submerged in his work, only to come out and notice his ear was gone and would need to be sewn back on
http://www.farragoswainscot.com/2008/5/waterbones.html 

Later today, I’ll post links to favorite short stories by other authors online that I’ve read

• In a way, cults, utopian societies, etc, are trying to take secondary worlds and make them real. Scientology more so than anything else, since it was created by a science fiction writer, and the cult reads like an sf-novel turned reality.
• I remember Burroughs saying something like that, after he left Scientology. That he was amazed someone had created something like that, something that became a whole other universe, a whole other world, an entity in itself that everyone believes in
• It becomes reality to those inside of it. It makes me think of M. John Harrison’s The Course of the Heart, or maybe his short story One Man’s Journey to Viriconium- the idea of yearning to other worlds, other worlds encroaching onto this one
• The human mind is showing to be such an interesting creature these days- it literally creates a mirror world inside of our head to what we experience on the day to day. In this way, it’s another universe inside of us, constructed out of what we experience, and it can draw on this experience and fake new experiences. And do it in such a way that our mind believes it is real
• It’s why fiction can consume us so well, we become immersed in the text because our mind creates a reflection of it, it creates a reality of it, it thinks it is actually happening
• It’s easy to see how cult can bring people on, have them believe this is their reality, no matter how off the wall and unreal it sounds. The mind can fill in the blanks, it can create the reality of it internally
• And that then becomes an emotional reality, an internal reality, it becomes something inside of us that is as real as the world outside of us
• Side note: I’m addicted to novellas these days. I can’t stop reading them. They seem to be the perfect length of what I want to read. Takes as long to read one as it does to watch a long television show or a short movie. And the length is very satisfying

I’ve had my brush with quiet a few of them in real life, almost joined one or two, had friends raised in them, etc, etc. I think part of the draw for me is the fact that I could be in one at any moment, I find myself pulled and drawn to them and know that deep down inside, I could easily slip into that other world and drown in it.

I’ve written about them before- the Werewolves book sees the pack as a cult. I have several short stories involving those 1890′s utopian societies, which were cults at the basic level.  (Those are interesting too- but in different ways). Maybe that’s it- maybe there is some part of me yearning for the new age appeal of these things- the giving oneself over to a larger dynamic, to seeing the world with spiritual eyes. Of giving oneself over to every aspect of it…

In a way its’ fantasy, in a way it’s reality, in a way it’s a dream or walking through unseeing things. I’m not sure. But the rituals of them and the appeal of them is pulling and yanking, a tide at the center of me. Some days being an atheist is more difficult than I like to pretend. Doesn’t some part of us just want to escape from the rational world?

Even Conan the Barbarian (the first movie) was about cults. Cults hang around in our mind. We see violent things inside of them. We compare them to Manson and Aum Shinrikyo. I wonder if all cults lead to violence like this. A lot of books I’ve read in the past few decades talk about kids of hippy cults, being raised in communes in the sixties. Like Shampoo Planet, where the kid even goes and sees his dad who still is trying to live that life out on a farm by himself. This one seemed the most unique- there wasn’t violence or terror in the cult. Just an existential realization of the myth of his childhood and his father.

Or The Saskiad.  This one ends with the father, who was the leader of the cult, showing himself to be unhinged yet charismatic. How he committed seppuku and wished he’d died. It’s always like most of these stories are warnings about that life. Warnings about cults gone wrong, cults gone bad.

I think in reality things are more complicated than that. That not every cult exploded or want mad or turned to violence or madness. I wonder sometimes, thinking about things. What about ones that do good and no harm? Did they ever exist? Or like communism, they never reach the last stage and only create monsters out of the people they wished to free?

Scientology of course is the worst example of a cult still lasting. It seems to be horrible and degrading and dehumanizing. But what about beyond all of it? What about at the core of it? How complicated can I make things? How sympathetic can things be?

I’m thinking about fiction here, of course. I’m thinking about looking at it, looking at books and novels and movies from so many different angles. I wonder if there is all darkness. I wonder if there is any light. It’s an interesting thought, and a very dangerous one at the core of it all.

Personally, I don’t agree with anything she says. She seems to take insult at experimental writers (something I see a lot of in genre fiction readers as well) as if the writer- by handing her the freedom of personal interpretation, and giving her equal ground in the writer/reader relationship, has somehow slighted her or insulted her. It’s as if experimental fiction is attacking her personally…and I find that odd.

The fact that she calls herself a realist makes her no different than the genre folks who feel the same way about experimental fiction. This refusal to open a mind, to accept the freedom and responsibility for creation of your own symbols within a text, seems to be a common fate to a culture spoon fed their thoughts and imaginations via a drip feed of hollywood block busters and television shows that dictate visual signals that override the richness that textual symbolism has to offer.

In other words?

PTHBTH.

Just because she has “tens of thousands of dollars in student loan debt towards an English degree” doesn’t mean she knows everything and anything about literature itself. Experimental fiction is as old as fiction itself. Unlike art, which went through phases of experiments making things more and more abstract, fiction has had works like Tristam Shandy from the get-go. The fact that she calls Joyce and Stein experimental (with disdain) shows how broadly she lumps everything together.

Personally, I like what Murakami said in an interview somewhere, when asked about his fabulist/magical realist elements in his narrative- that he considered himself a realist writer. Even in those sections, he considered himself a realist writer.

I loved that. It rings true, and challenges the notion of how textual symbolism can be real or not.

I’d have to say,  Christopher Higgs is putting into words things I’ve been thinking about for the last few years. I’ve noticed a tendency for writers to be only concerned with writers, and the writing side of things, and not seeing the reader as a part of the experience of a novel. It seems odd to me that writers assume readers will have this exact experience that they wanted to have, and if they don’t have it, then the reader is reading wrong.

Or if I try to discuss literature, all of a sudden I have a ton of writers telling me what they do  and why they do it and the whole aspect of the reader is missing. It seems to me that writers see the reader as some ghost, who will listen and obey.

This is wrong. Experimental fiction, IMHO, is partly trying to free the reader of the dictatorship of the writer. It fills the stories with holes, with empty spots for the readers to fill. It makes shadows out of normal, linear text, it creates places of anarchy, places of fire and light. The reader isn’t forced along a simple thread, their hands tied behind their backs, blinders on either side of their head, looking forward…forward…

In experimental fiction the chains are dropped and freedom is let loose. The reader has no choice but to participate in the act of the novel/story/narrative. The reader brings the book to life, to light, inserts their own thoughts and imaginations.

Here’s the thing: fiction, writing down as forms of poetry, stories, etc, are not visual mediums, they are not physical mediums. They do not have one single image the reader must envision. Even if it’s non experimental- the communication is done with signs, with symbols, with scratches of thoughts in the form of empty signposts. The reader brings in their own memories, thoughts, and images, they fill in these signs, putting in their own experiences into the novel.

An experimental writer acknowledges this, and gives them even more freedom than they probably ever wanted. Readers: Throw off your shackles! Writers: let your readers breathe. Don’t tell them everything, don’t tie everything up, don’t force them from point to point b. Leave holes in your text, leave shadows for the reader to wander down.