Half Past Noon

First, a disclaimer. Davey tends to rebuke my criticisms of localism with these words: “But Frank, I don’t know any localist who believes that.” Hopefully I do a better job this time.

Austin recently re-tweeted a link to this, a write-up about an author doing his best to save, or at least “treasure,” local bookstores. For the record, I think this is cool. A good independent bookstore is a wonderful thing. Like many others, I rarely enjoy a visit to Barnes and Noble, Chapters, Books-a-Million, etc. They’re sterile places with a counterfeit sense of familiarity and comfort. Their book selection is rarely interesting, and I generally find their books overpriced. (Though, in their defense, publishers are probably more to blame for that.)

Yet, I confess that I’m tired of hearing people complain that big-box stores like B&N killed the local bookstore. (Or, for that matter, that Amazon is carrying on that trend.) I don’t really believe this storyline, and in the words of the immortal Calvin, I wish they’d shut up and stop whining.

That sounds harsh, I know, so let me explain myself.

I understand that big-box bookstores have often received tax benefits and other such incentives not available to smaller bookstores. And I agree that this is unfair, even wicked. I’m as anti-interventionist as any of you.

But why should this be the last word? Too often, I think that local bookstores use this as a crutch. Instead of thinking, “How can I be better than Barnes & Noble?” they resign themselves to a fate of dying relevancy. “I’ll never compete be able to compete with them!” To give this a concrete example, we tend to assume that You’ve Got Mail captures this scene with truth: The Shop Around the Corner just can’t stand up to Fox Books. It’s impossible. So let’s shed a tear, share stories about our Spanish lovers, and wait for the big bad businessman to bring us flowers.

I also find it odd that in all the articles I’ve ever seen (and I’ve seen a lot of them), I’ve never seen anyone ask, “What have local bookstores done wrong?” As someone who’d like to start my own little bookstore one day, I’ve got more than a few opinions on this matter; but they’re not founded upon anyone else’s insight. I’d be much more willing to believe the “bad big box store” line if I saw more self-examination on the part of the independent bookstore. People who complain instead of looking to grow usually will only see their problems grow, so it’s no surprise that more local bookstores have closed in the past several years. After all, who wants to go and buy books from someone who’s going to share their gripes with you?

Before you jump all over me and call me a greedy capitalist pig, remember what I said at the beginning: I love a good local bookstore. Really, I do. The trouble is, I don’t believe that a local bookstore is good in and of itself. I’ve been to plenty of bad ones, and a bad local bookstore is much, much worse (imho) than any Barnes & Noble or Borders. Heck, it’s even worse than a Waldenbooks.

I’d love to see local bookstores blossom. And if I ever get a chance to do a book tour, I’d love to do local bookstore stops. But two things need to happen first: one, I have to write something worth reading again, and two, local bookstores need to start viewing their “predicament” as a “challenge.” There are ways around this problem, if only you try and tackle them.

An endnote. I’ve dropped a lot of generalizations. I know this. I did it on purpose. I know there are top-notch local bookstores out there. Good on you, all of you. I wish I could visit you. I just wish you didn’t have so many siblings that are the opposite. That’s really all I’m getting at.

James K.A. Smith posts an extended passage from The Guardian which takes genre writing to ask, quite harshly. A sample:

One doesn’t wants to decry authors who are certainly outstanding in their field (constructing a page-turner requires narrative skill); neither does one want to sneer at the tastes of book-buyers, for whom reading at all in this age of distraction is an increasingly fought-for pleasure. …. But genre fiction is, by definition, generic. Mina’s disdain, in her comments, for pushing boundaries of form is palpable. The genre writer’s first responsibility is to the genre itself: they must fulfil readers’ expectations for convention, or they have failed. It’s easy to see how this becomes part of a capitalist enterprise, which requires market ‘product’ and fears innovation as a ‘risky sell’. At a time when capitalism is scouring livelihoods, however, we must empower writers such as Kelman to speak out against it, and put forth new ways of expressing and thinking about ourselves. This is far from being just a Scottish issue.

Austin should hopefully have more to contribute here, but I wanted to jump in and offer a few comments first.

To begin, I don’t really understand how writing, say, a fantasy novel is any different than writing a sonnet. Both forms are bound by a set of rules that may be bent but not truly broken. And since both forms are “abstract” (to a degree), they can be easily abused by bad writers. (We’ve all seen trashy novels and heard terrible poetry.) But in the hands of a skilled writer, both forms can be used to illuminate something new and something beautiful in our world.

Moving on, my experience with “literary fiction” has been anything but “empowering” and “illuminating.” Aside from the acclaimed “great authors” (i.e. Alice Munro, Marilynne Robinson, etc.), the literary fiction I’ve encountered has tended to be liveless, dull, and far too heady. I say this not to knock literary fiction: there are many great writers in that scene, and I know that my experience does not speak to the whole. However, I do take issue with the assumption that “literary” writing is by definition superior to genre writing. Could it be, for example, that J.K. Rowling is better at speaking to the human condition than James Kalman? Does being a “fantasy” writer limit Rowling’s abilities? Does being a “literary” writer enhance Kalman’s?

Finally, and what I always come back to, is the historical record of “classic” authors whose works could be fairly slotted into genres. The list is a very long one, but all I really need to do is throw out the name “Jane Austen” and my case is made. Could it be that dismissing others’ writing as “genre writing” is merely a capitulation to our times? To a modernistic impulse to categorize everything?

Gabe – I’m right there with you. A new book called “Shop Class as Soulcraft” has raised some interesting points along these lines. A favorite blog (Front Porch Republic) just did a week-long symposium on it.  This summary of the book touches on a surprising amount of your questions – the value of the craftsman, how we got here, and where do we go from here. I’d be very curious to know what you think of it.

But in the meantime, perhaps this will cheer you up. It’s my new favorite (click to expand):

In the middle of the room stood a long table of plain boards placed on trestles, with benches down each side. At one end of it, where an arm-chair stood pushed back, were spread the remains of the Badger’s plain but ample supper. Rows of spotless plates winked from the shelves of the dresser at the far end of the room, and from the rafters overhead hung hams, bundles of dried herbs, nets of onions, and baskets of eggs. It seemed a place where heroes could fitly feast after victory, where weary harvesters could line up in scores along the table and keep their Harvest Home with mirth and song, or where two or three friends of simple tastes could sit about as they pleased and eat and smoke and talk in comfort and contentment.
–Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows

Joseph O’Neill (Netherland) takes on O’Connor in The Atlantic, calling her a misanthrope — and still enjoying her for it.

The repugnancy of O’Connor’s characters is, in her portrayal, connected to their poverty and backwardness. Yet in the essays, she is anguished by, and fundamentally hostile to, the forces—ostensibly progressive—that ask us “to form our consciences in the light of statistics.” She is hostile, in other words, to the enlightened disturbance of the culture of which the poverty and backwardness are part, and in which characters repugnantly find themselves. Some readers may find that here O’Connor is herself repugnant: that they are faced with one of those people for whom the misery and injustice of human affairs is chiefly a source of egocentric intellectual gratification, and whose political and moral instincts are distorted accordingly. However, it is precisely this troubling feature that gives O’Connor’s work its strange power.

Yes, this is a ploy to get Frank back into HPN.

A recent New York Times article covers the recent rise of book piracy on the interweb. It’s an interesting read, full of the normal corporate fear that surrounds any discussion of e-piracy. And it also has this amazing quote from Stephen King:

For some writers, tracking down illegal e-books is simply not worth it.

“The question is, how much time and energy do I want to spend chasing these guys,” Stephen King wrote in an e-mail message. “And to what end? My sense is that most of them live in basements floored with carpeting remnants, living on Funions and discount beer.”

HT: The Afterword

Cool story: while working for Faber & Faber, T.S. Eliot rejected George Orwell’s Animal Farm (HT: The Afterword @ the National Post) Why?

“We have no conviction that this is the right point of view from which to criticise the political situation at the current time,” wrote Eliot, adding that he thought its “view, which I take to be generally Trotskyite, is not convincing”.

Eliot wrote: “After all, your pigs are far more intelligent than the other animals, and therefore the best qualified to run the farm – in fact there couldn’t have been an Animal Farm at all without them: so that what was needed (someone might argue) was not more communism but more public-spirited pigs.”

Interesting, to say the least.

Davey, what have you to say in defense of a hero?

A couple quotes from Clay Shirky, whose article on the newspaper publishing industry has a very high level of face-melting insights-per-paragraph:

Revolutions create a curious inversion of perception. In ordinary times, people who do no more than describe the world around them are seen as pragmatists, while those who imagine fabulous alternative futures are viewed as radicals. The last couple of decades haven’t been ordinary, however. Inside the papers, the pragmatists were the ones simply looking out the window and noticing that the real world was increasingly resembling the unthinkable scenario. These people were treated as if they were barking mad. Meanwhile the people spinning visions of popular walled gardens and enthusiastic micropayment adoption, visions unsupported by reality, were regarded not as charlatans but saviors.

When reality is labeled unthinkable, it creates a kind of sickness in an industry. Leadership becomes faith-based, while employees who have the temerity to suggest that what seems to be happening is in fact happening are herded into Innovation Departments, where they can be ignored en masse. This shunting aside of the realists in favor of the fabulists has different effects on different industries at different times. One of the effects on the newspapers is that many of their most passionate defenders are unable, even now, to plan for a world in which the industry they knew is visibly going away.

Later…

Print media does much of society’s heavy journalistic lifting, from flooding the zone — covering every angle of a huge story — to the daily grind of attending the City Council meeting, just in case….

The newspaper people often note that newspapers benefit society as a whole. This is true, but irrelevant to the problem at hand; “You’re gonna miss us when we’re gone!” has never been much of a business model. So who covers all that news if some significant fraction of the currently employed newspaper people lose their jobs?

Also…

It makes increasingly less sense even to talk about a publishing industry, because the core problem publishing solves — the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something available to the public — has stopped being a problem.

“The medium is the message.”

I’ve wanted to dislike Marshall McLuhan because of this quote for a very long time. The only thing stopping me is that I’ve never actually read McLuhan, only heard him quoted. So really, my complaint isn’t with McLuhan, but with the folks who use his quote to condemn rock music (because it’s performed by childish men with long hair, yellow sunglasses, and who tend to scream on stage while dancing something that can’t be anything but perverted).

But I realized something today: this quote describes one of the reasons why I have a tough time liking postmodern fiction.

Watch a postmodern movie (say, Broken Flowers, or Happy-Go-Lucky, or The Darjeeling Limited). Maybe this is just me, but I’ve left these films (and countless others, not to mention the stories) dissatisfied. I keep searching for an indicator of where we are in the story, but it never comes. It’s just suddenly over, and then I’m left to figure out just what was going on after the fact.

This doesn’t inherently condemn them. What does, however, is that all too often they a) don’t have a coherent message and b) have very little resembling a consistent storyline.

What’s a storyline? Well, let me put it this way. I’m all about focusing on characters and plots. Without both, a story is usually sunk. But let’s face it, we (as humans) are cerebral beings. We need a theme. Just having the same person in every scene, or a similar problem over and over again isn’t enough. There needs to be an overarching question, and by the end of the story, there really ought to be an answer which displays some sort of growth. (Are the exceptions to the rule? Of course. But they’re almost as rare as third nostrils.)

Which brings us to the message bit. I’m not looking for a neat and tidy moral—not every story needs to (or should be) a replica of one of Aesop’s fables. But with every theme goes a message. Or, put another way, the answer. Which is where many postmodern stories get in trouble. They just don’t have one, and their inability to properly end a story shows it. They don’t have any other option than to crash land a story because they don’t understand themes or storylines.

This probably doesn’t all make sense, but I’m working on it. And not to take down postmodernism, or even postmodern stories. Simply just to extol the simple story, the one that even a child could love. Because life is anywhere near as confusing as many postmodern pagans would have us believe.