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Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt

31 May 2015 by 24 Comments

I confess that I am unsure whether I should continue my posts on M*A*S*H, or whether I should just keep my notes to myself and take the existing posts private.

On the one hand, I seem to have found the perfect method for making my 3.6 Loyal Readers’ eyes glaze over. I certainly don’t mean to be boring, and it always dismays me when I succeed.

On the other hand, while I don’t know what constitutes a quorum of 3.6 Loyal Readers according to correct parliamentary procedure, I do know that a quorum of one writer is… one writer. So I might just take the attitude of the apazine editor quoted by Frederik Pohl in The Way the Future Was:

‘Wow, gang, you really slammed the last ish, but wotthehell, we’ll keep plugging.’

Your comments are important to me, even if you have nothing more to say than ‘I read this and it was OK’. They help me decide what is worth writing more of and what isn’t, and when they dry up, I find myself rather at sea.

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‘Par is a live patient’: a P.S.

22 May 2015 by 2 Comments

My own serial in (occasional) progress, which I depreciatingly call ‘the Orchard of Dis-Pear’ and hope to resume work on some time soon, was actually inspired partly by my revisiting of M*A*S*H. It was the idea of the three double acts that sired Where Angels Die upon my imagination; though my serial will have, I imagine, nothing like the felicity and depth of humour that M*A*S*H had. We cannot all be Larry Gelbart, but we can at least be ourselves.

In Where Angels Die, the three double acts are (1) the two paladin/exorcists, Revel and the Badger; (2) Baron Vail and his steward Greyhand; (3) the chief Paladin and Angel at Angel Keep, Master Herison and Lady Swan, whom you have not yet met. They bear some resemblance to the duos of Hawkeye–Trapper, Col. Blake–Radar, and Frank–Hot Lips, but of course their stories, and the kind of stories to be written about them, are quite different.

In other news, when I simply cannot brain at all, I have occasionally been reduced to watching an episode of Gilligan’s Island: after which the grey matter rebels, and insists upon either functioning or going to sleep – either of which is an improvement. Gilligan is every bit as stupid as I recall from my childhood; it is deliberately stupid, but endearingly stupid, an art form that has since been lost and may well remain so. I could say that Gilligan’s Island is the dumb blonde of American sitcoms. However, it has redeeming points – chiefly in the fine comic performances of the actors, above all Bob Denver and Jim Backus – and two areas of genuine excellence. For one, it was a fertile vehicle for parody; in its three-year run, the show did sendups of every genre of film and popular fiction under the sun, from Westerns and monster movies to Hamlet and The Count of Monte Cristo. For another, the incidental music was far superior to the show itself; it was only on this latest revisit that I fully appreciated just how good the score was (excluding the idiotic theme song, which was composed by another hand). From the credits, I discovered that the score was written by an up-and-coming young composer named Johnny Williams.

Yes, that John Williams. This may be old news to everybody else, but my mind was sufficiently boggled; and somehow I find myself fonder of Williams than I was before.

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Isaac Bashevis Who?

4 February 2015 by 2 Comments

From The Daily Beast (hat tip to The Passive Voice):

John Glusman, vice president and editor in chief at W. W. Norton, can still remember his first job in publishing. It was the summer of 1980 and he was fresh out of grad school, working as an intern at Viking. One of his duties was to file carbon copies of each week’s typewritten rejection letters. One Friday, as he burrowed into a filing cabinet, Glusman came upon an ancient rejection letter, written back in the 1950s. The book under consideration was a collection of short stories by an unknown author—in Yiddish.

The editor, obviously displeased at having to consider such an obscure book, scrawled on the typed rejection letter: “WHO IN HELL IS I. B. SINGER?”

Answer: the writer who would go on to win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1978.

It’s nice to see that the Official Curators of Literary Culture in New York have always been doing the same bang-up job that they are doing today.

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Reasons for books

19 January 2015 by 27 Comments

It occurs to me (in such a way that I may write a future essai about it, or then again I moutn’t) that there are four major, common, and abiding reasons why particular books get written, and that one can rank them by how likely they are to produce books that stand the test of time. From least to most likely:

1. Books written solely for money – often in a genre for which the author had no particular liking or affinity. (Such books are usually unpublishable. There is an art to being a successful hack, which the would-be get-rich-quick artist can seldom master.)

2. Books written chiefly to please the author’s fans. (This is a good and worthy motivation. The trouble is that so many fans want the same book again and again under different titles. Such work is seldom good to reread; and it is rereadable books that most often endure.)

3. Books written because the author had an itch to tell a certain story, and the itch would not go away. (Often these are the books that win large number of fans, who then clamour for more and give rise to category-2 sequels.)

4. Books written because the author very much wanted there to be a certain kind of book, and could not find it. Sometimes there is a book-shaped hole in human literature, and someone sets out to write a book to fill that hole.

(Note that a single writer’s oeuvre may span all four categories. Robert Silverberg has written seminal books of science fiction, and he also used to write quickie porn novels to pay the rent.)

The Inklings had an uncanny knack for finding book-shaped holes and filling them; which largely accounts for their enduring fame. Owen Barfield’s Poetic Diction fills what was then a massive gap in literary theory. C. S. Lewis frankly admitted that he wrote his works of Christian apologetics only because none of the clergy (who he considered ought to have written them) were doing the job. And of course there is Tolkien, who found an entire genre-shaped hole and, not being immortal or infinitely productive, only got as far as to lay the book-shaped cornerstone of the wall that has since filled the gap.

I myself get all kinds of ideas for books, but they don’t stick with me unless I can at least delude myself that they fall into category #4. Nothing else seems worth my extremely limited working time and energy. (I have never even been tempted with #1 or #2: nobody has offered to buy my soul with money, fame, or even fan-letters. Whether I could resist such temptations is anybody’s guess.)

But then I feel ashamed for my presumption. If there is a book-shaped hole in literature, surely it is because better writers than I have tried and failed to fill it. Who am I to try what the real experts could not do?

Looking at things in this manner, I am morosely convinced that this dissonance or antinomy accounts for a good deal of the writer’s block with which I am so often afflicted.

 

In other news, I have been tired and unwell yesterday and today. No new writing of any account, alas. I think I shall try to get some extra sleep and see if that helps.

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Why ‘the tsunami of crap’ doesn’t matter

13 January 2015 by 1 Comment

Andrew Updegrove offers some gloomy prognostications about the difficulty of finding books one wants to read, and the continuing necessity of gatekeepers: reblogged at The Passive Voice.

Actually, his fears are groundless, and his prescriptions wide of the mark. Chiefly for my own records, I reproduce here what I had to say about the matter, with slight additions:

 

Discoverability is not linear, but logarithmic.

That is to say: Finding what you want out of 100 different choices is not 10 times as hard as finding what you want out of 10 different choices. It is only twice as hard. The difficulty of choice increases not in proportion to n, but in proportion to log n. (This is why decimal notation was such a brilliant invention. One digit is enough to specify a number from 0 to 9, but two digits will specify a number all the way up to 99. With just six digits, you can choose one particular number out of a million.) [Read more…]

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Just so we know where we stand—

24 July 2014 by 3 Comments

—Larry Correia presents The Official Alphabetical List of Author Success.

For what it may be worth, I seem to be an S-list writer in the process of moving onto the N-list.

Smiggy McStudge is a rising young Q.

If I ever collect the whole alphabet, I shall let you all know, because then I shall be able to take my 3.6 Loyal Readers out to lunch.

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The logic of corporatism

24 June 2014 by 1 Comment

Fragment of a conversation, overheard:

‘The second oddest thing about the Yintulites is that most of them volunteered to be eaten by the Imperial Dragon. You see, they were so afraid of the ordinary man-eating dragons, they could imagine no other way to protect themselves than to make friends with the Imperial Dragon. But in point of fact, the Imperial Dragon never promised to eat the other dragons, or even to eat its human servants last. It merely had power over the other dragons, because they were its offspring and its pets; and so the silly Yintulites imagined that it would use that power to benefit them.’

‘But why did they have to be eaten by any dragon? Why didn’t they just run away?’

‘That, my dear, is the first oddest thing about the Yintulites. In their minds, the best possible thing in life was to choose which dragon to be devoured by. The idea of not being eaten never occurred to them.’

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Autonomous

16 June 2014 by 10 Comments

A comment I left at The Passive Voice, reproduced here for possible discussion:

Look at any dysfunctional corporate culture (and I use ‘corporate’ in the broadest sense; this applies to governments, churches, and armies as well), and there are at least two things you are certain to find:

1. Systems that are inadequate because they are autonomous. Nobody can design a set of rules to cover every possible contingency, and if they ever did, someone would immediately come up with a new contingency that the rules did not cover. (Call it Gödel’s Law of Bureaucracy.) But when the system and its rules are allowed to make the decisions, when people say to sensible proposals, ‘We can’t do that because it’s against policy,’ the whole organization becomes frozen in the way of doing things that was enshrined at the time the rules were written.

2. Systems that are autonomous because people are lazy and afraid. Rocking the boat requires effort and courage; doing anything new requires effort, courage, and creativity. It’s easier and safer to just show up, put in your hours, do your job as defined by the existing rules, and collect your pay. So people hire out bits of themselves – their employable skills, narrowly defined – and leave the rest at home: not only their courage and creativity, but their enthusiasm, their best efforts, and in too many cases, their conscience as well. How many people do things at work that they know are stupid, because they are going along to get along? How many people acquiesce in doing things that are downright wrong? If they brought their whole selves to their work, they would not do these things; but they leave behind whatever part of themselves might conflict with the system and the rules, and — we see the results.

‘When the means are autonomous, they are deadly.’ —Charles Williams.

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