Hildegarde

So, here’s the thing–I think the problem with the therapeutic culture is bigger than excusing murderers because they couldn’t help themselves.  If that was all this strain of the culture was doing, it would be far more benign than it actually is.

What it’s mostly doing, however, is redefining undesirable personal traits–especially in children–as somehow “pathological.”

The most notorious instance of this is in the use of  Ritalin to treat “attention deficit disorder” and “attention deficit hyperactivity disorder,” which may actually exist on some level–and I’ve heard stories from parents with children whose behavior is apparently extreme, so I don’t rule it out–but in practice is usually foisted on a kid (almost always a boy) who is either not much interested in paying attention to class and homework and is thereby bugging his teachers, or doing the same and giving his middle or upper middle class parents the vapors that he won’t get into a “good” college.

To get back to one of my favorite points–the fact that you can learn more about human nature, and human psychology, from literature than you ever will be able to from a psychology textbook–Mark Twain knew better, and we should know better, too, but we don’t anymore.

Young boys have lots of pent up energy.  They almost always would prefer to be outside doing something than sitting in a classroom studying stuff that bores the hell out of them.  And they are often bored.  That’s why  Tom  Sawyer spent so much time skipping school, and  Tom  Sawyer’s people had a single prescription for his “problem”–he should grow up.

These days, though, a boy who is bored and restless in class isn’t just a boy, doing what boys do.  He has a “disorder,” and if his parents resist putting him on a daily does of speed to “fix” him, they’re likely to be turned into the juvenile authorities and forced to dose him.  Never mind the fact that this has been one of the largest pharmacalogical experiments in history and we as yet have no idea how taking speed for a decade while your body develops will affect you in the long run.

It goes beyond Ritalin and ADHD, though–remember rebellious teenagers?  They don’t exist anymore.  There’s “oppositional defiant disorder” instead, so if your sixteen year old hates your politics and won’t let anybody tell him what to do, he’s mentally ill and can be required to attend therapy sessions to “manage” his “disorder.”

The best one I’ve ever heard, though, is this:  it’s a symptom of “mental illness” in young boys and adolescents if they’re slobs.

I’m not making that up.

You throw the kid in the bath in the morning, you dress him in nice clean clothes, you make sure he looks beautiful and you send him out to the bus stop or drop him off at school–and, of course, by the time he hits home room, his shirt has come out of his pants, his socks are down around his ankles, and he’s somehow acquired a weird mustard yellow stain on the right leg of his pants.

This, I’m told, is a “symptom,” a sign of schizophrenia, even–not caring about your appearance is a big indicator of “mental illness.” 

As far as I can figure out, my father was “mentally ill” as an adolescent by this criteria, as was my brother, my husband, and both my nephews.   All the adlescent male characters in literature at least through the 1950s were similarly mentally ill, as were most of the ones in movies and on television. 

If you point out the silliness of all this to people committed to the therapeutic view of reality, you get told that it’s all about extremes–you have to look for the “extreme” cases.

But “extreme” is in the eye of the beholder, and what looks extreme to one person does not look extreme to another.  A lot depends on how you define the “problem” you’re looking at.   If I’m primed to see adolescent boys as immature slobs who ditch class and homework for videogames if they get half a chance, then all I’m going to “see” when they do that is a normal kid who needs to mature some, or even a lot, and get his act together.  If I’m primed to see a “pathology,” on the other hand, then a few weeks of bad hair suddenly become a “symptom.”

What really bugs me, though, in all of this, is the extent to which predominantly female behavior has been defined as “normal,” leaving what boys do naturally as “pathological.”

Girls commonly sit still in class and pay attention.  Girls commonly care desperately about their appearance.  Girls tend to like to make nice to authority and make a show of doing what they’re told.

What the therapeutic culture seems to want is for boys to act like girls–and if they don’t, then there must be something wrong with them.

Back to Mark Twain again, in literature we know better.  The rebellious adolescent has been a staple of every literary tradition since the beginning of time–a sure indication that what we’re looking at here is completely normal.  In no literature anywhere are adolescent males portrayed as polite, obedient neat freaks who want only to do their homework well and make their teachers love them.

Yes, okay, I know, individual girls and individual boys are often more like the other gender than their own.  But my point remains, I think, valid.  The therapeautid culture defines as “normal” a set of traits largely only normal in female children and adolescents, and brands anybody who strays from those traits as “ill,” and not only as “ill,” but as needing to be fixed, forcibly if they or their parents will not cooperate.  

Okay, I’ll admit it.  My animosity to this goes even further.  It’s not just that the therapeutic culture defines female behavior as “normal,” it’s that it defines as normal the behavior of the kind of female I never could stand even as a child.  Prissy, obedient, eager to suck up to people in authority, obsessed with appearance over substance, unimaginative and conventional–the perfect picture of the sort of girl who Gets  Good  Grades because she’s so utterly unoriginal she doesn’t threaten anybody, ever. 

Of course, some of this is the triumph of the culture of the school–as school coming to be seen as something “normal” that most of us do most of the time, for most of our lives.  Even many workplaces have been redefined as school-like, complete with regularly scheduled report cards called “performance reviews” and the expectation that middle management will be obedient and conventional, if it wants to stay employed.

Maybe the other problem with this is that it seems to me to be so insidious.  Our elected representatives are not installing laws to implement these ideas–if they were, there would be some public discussion of them.   Instead, these are the trends and fads in teachers’ colleges and schools of social work, and they’re implemented as departmental policy in public institutions.  You’re unlikely to know what’s going on until you crash right into it. 

I don’t know how it can be undone, or if it can be undone, but lately I’ve thought that I might know a place to start trying.

Maybe it’s time to eliminate the centrality of schools.

And more on that later.

Okay, that was unfair.   It snowed yesterday for about an hour and a half, then stopped, then snowed for another hour and a half, and it didn’t stick.  But it was still annoying, especially as we’d had all the heat off for two days, then had to put it back on, then turn it off again…

Okay, never mind.  Back to novels vs genre novels.

I still say the novel is something, designed to suit a particular purpose.  That may not be a purpose you’re much interested in–the way we live now, the full range of human nature–but that’s what a novel does and what it is for, and it is a good novel or a bad novel based first and foremost on whether it serves its purpose.

Once again leaving out science fiction here–because as far as I can tell, SF people think SF is everything–genre fiction is usually designed to do something else altogether, and n ot necessarily the same something else for every genre.

Genre mystery fiction is first and foremost a declaration in favor of civilization in the basic sense–of the rule of law, the rejection of random violence, and the importance of intelligence and the use of reason to solve problems and keep us all going.

Look back at the classic detective fiction and you’ll find that that definition fits–Sherlock Holmes, Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers,  Rex Stout, even  Dasheill Hammet.

There are exceptions, of course–Mike Hammer comes to mind–but the exceptions, at least at that period, are not so far from the core as they might at first appear.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with what a genre novel is, it’s just that, in order to fulfill its purpose, it may–and I think it often does-have to jettison some of the qualities of a novel.

For one thing, such a genre mystery is almost required to present a world the background of which is largely static.  When a change occurs in such a world, that change is almost always for the bed–it’s a murder, for instance–and a good part of the story from then on out is engaged in getting rid of it so that life can go back to being what it was.

This is not an entirely wrongheaded view of the way the world works.   In more areas than we like to admit, nothing has and nothing will ever change.   Human nature is fixed by genetics and evolution.  The therapeutic society is wrong.  We will never get rid of “addictions,” or “self destructive behavior,” or envy, jealousy, violence or greed.  None of these things is a “pathology” that can be fixed with therapy, drugs, or anything else.  All of them are a part of being human, and we’re more likely to have the poor no longer with us than the human drive to be stupid in pursuit of selfishness.

The problem, of course, is that in order to provide a framework for this particular insight in a very short book, a lot of things that do change have to be largely ignored, or somehow acknowledged and made to look as if they don’t actually change.

Miss Marple has some interesting little speeches about change over the years, but most of the changes that actually occurred in British society never made it into either the Marple or the Poirot books, and the New York  City of Nero  Wolfe is frozen in time from the beginning of that series to the end.

The genre murder mystery requires not only a relatively changeless society, but a relatively changeless socity of a certain type–that’s why somebody like Hitchcock, steeped in modern psychological theories, never produced one.  The world of such a mystery is first and foremost one in which human nature is assumed not to change in any significant way, and assumed not to be changable.  Second, it is a world in which people are assumed to have the power to direct their own actions–habits are strong, but they’re not “addictions,” they’re not beyond the power of the person to manage or control; drives like greed and lust are strong, too, but indulging them is assumed to be a decision, consciously made, and within our control if we want it to be.

The genre mystery makes no sense in a world in which human behavior is considered to be deliberate only when it is good, and assumed to be beyond the conscious control of the perpetrator when it is anything else.

In the therapeutic society, eating broccoli and broiled fish for dinner, studying hard for your chemistry exam, and carefully putting away a tenth of your income every month in savings are “choices.”  Eating fifteen taco bell tacos and a giant sized Coke for dinner, ditching your homework for yet another Renaissance Fair, and blowing your entire paycheck (including the rent money) on lottery tickets are evidence of “addictions.” 

That’s why the anti-drug programs run in so many schools are so annoying, and so infuriating to so many teenagers.  “We’re just trying to help you make good choices!”  the “facilitators” of these things cry–but, of course, they’re lying.  They’re not interested in their students making “choices” at all, since there is only one right choice, and that is not to use recreational drugs. 

There are plenty of studies out there purporting to show that kids who take these drug programs are actually more likely to use drugs than kids who don’t take any program at all, and it wouldn’t surprise me if it were true.  You’re not free unless you’re free to make the wrong choice, and that little insight occured to me before I was ten. 

The world of the classic detective novel is a world in which people make decisions which they were fully free to reject, not one in which they are driven by blind forces over which they have no control without ten steps and rehab.

Maybe the real reason why nobody publishes this stuff any more–or few people publish little of it–is that for readers who have grown up in the therapeutic ethos, for anybody under the age of thirt-five, say, the assumptions of the genre mystery would make no sense.

Okay, I’ve looked at the comments, and I think there are a few things I need to straighten out here.

First, for those of you who wandered in here not because you already read my books, I already have a book contract with a major New York publishing house, St. Martin’s Press.  They also publish  the Stephanie Plum books, and they’re very nice people, and I love them.  They put out the Gregor Demarkian books.

The problem with getting a classic mystery published is the definition of classic mystery.  It’s not just that Christie or Sayers are “fair play,” but that they’re thoroughly and uncompromisingly genre and nothing else.  There’s not a load of character development–in fact, in some of them, there isn’t any–and there’s no reference to social or political issues.

A standard Christie is 90,000 to 120,000 words long, and it consists of the puzzle, period.   There are no side plots, no complicated ironies, nothing but pretty much stock characters and the Great Detective.  Murder, investigation, solution, over.

Mysteries published these days–and I’m talking about detective novels, not “crime” fiction, but it suits that, too–are expected to be much more like “real” novels.  Character development is key, side plots are endemic.

Every  Gregor  Demarkian mystery contains not only the mystery, but usually at least one or two side plots centering on the suspects and another centering on the continuing story of Gregor and Bennis and Cavanaugh Street.  Any random Poirot or Marple contains the mystery, and neither detective is developed at all except to get older and frailer as the books go on.

It’s this second thing that publishers don’t want now–if they’re going to publish a novel, they want to publish a novel.  Standards are higher for the genre as a whole in areas like plot development, character development, and complexity of theme.

I can read a Christie in two hours flat, assuming I’ve got the two hours to sit and do it.  I can’t read a Dennis Lehane even in three times that time, and a  P.D. James or a Ruth  Rendell can take me days.  There’s just a lot more there, a lot more I have to pay attention to.

There is no question in my mind that P.D. James is a better writer than Agatha Chrstie, on every level.  But grilled Dover sole is a better food than cotton candy on every level, and yet there are times when I want cotton candy. 

There are books published these days that do in fact have the sort of skeletal construction of a  Christie, but almost all of them are “cozies.”  In spite of her  rep, Agatha  Christie never wrote cozies.  A cozy is first and foremost cutsey–people have weird names, and everything is jokey, and there are big arguments over things like Cutest Christmas Tree  Constests and Possum Pie Bakeoffs.

Cozies drive me crazy, and I can’t read them at all.  And they can often rack up decent sales, so major publishers publish them.  I don’t know if classic detective novels could do that at this point–rack up the sales, I mean–but even if they could, the simple fact is that editors and publishers now demand books that are far more sophisticated. 

Beyond that, there is the issues of print on demand (POD) and small publishers.  The world is changing, of course, but it remains the case that you do not want to release anything POD if you want a career.  Oh, I suppose if you’re Stephen King you can do what you want and nothing much will hurt you, but the tag of “self published” is the kiss of death for most ordinary writers.  It tends to make people important to us–reviewers at the major print organs, for instance, and book buyers for the major bookstore chains–think that we aren’t “real” writers at all. 

A book published POD, like any other self published book, is not eligible for any of the prizes given out for writing–no, not even the Edgar.  It isn’t considered a qualifying publication to gain entry to any of the professional writers organizations.  

Self publishing is a little like, um, cooties.

Small presses are fine, of course, or at least some of them are–companies have reps of their own–but I’ve had experience with those on and off over my life, and what I’ve found is not only that they don’t pay very well, but that they often don’t actually send the money when the time comes.  Of course, major publishers do a fair amount of that last thing, too, but the major publishers actually have the money they’re not giving you, and small publishers sometimes don’t.  

This brings me to the format problem–UI had thought that what I would do with a book I published online was a) make it printer friendly so that you could run it off and read it like that if you  wanted and b) make it available both chapter by chapter and, when the chapters were done, in total in one fell swoop.

That seemed to me to cover all the bases, except, of course, that a book you printed out would be on big annoying paper instead of a small format like a paperback.

Anyway, I have no idea why  I’ve started to think about this now.  I’ve got enough to do, and more keeps coming in every day, and I’ve got a book to finish that is definitely going to be late.  And there are lawyers coming.

But, still.  I think it’s an interesting idea.   And I want more Christie to read.   There gets to be a point where reading the books over and over and over again doesn’t quite do it.

So, I have a question.

I was thinking that, when I finally finish this book I’m working on, I’d post to the web site–not the blog–one of these things I work on for fun that I know no modern publisher would ever touch.

That is, fairly straightforward fair-play classic detective stories, complete with amateur detectives and that kind of thing, no politics, no philosophy, no anything except the exercise of it.

And I’d publish them one chapter at a time, at a cost of say a quarter a chapter.

Would anybody out there pay for that?  I’m not just talking about people on the blog, but people that people on the blog know–IS there a market for classic detective stories at all?

Okay.  That’s all for now.

So, it’s been a week, and the situation is nowhere nearer resolved than it was, bu I seem to have reached a point of emotional exhaustion where I just can’t stress any farther past where I am, so I can read again.

Sort of.

In terms of this level of not being able to read, I’ve been there before–there come times when maybe I’ve just been doing too much of it, and it all feels stale, or I have a cold and I’m not thinking too well, or I haven’t been able to sleep.

When II’m at that particular stage, the best thing for me is polemicist nonfiction of about a middlebrow level–linear thought, clear writing, straightforward exposition, interesting subject.  I can find these books on both the right and the left, but whichever side they’re on, I always argue with them.  Most of the “new atheist” books fit into this category, but so do James Hitchcock’s What is Secular Humanism? and Mary Pride’s Coming Home, both of which are, well, let’s just say they’re not in favor of attheism.

It used to be easy to find books like this.  All sides of the political spectrum regularly put these out–Thomas Franks’ Whatever Hpappened to Kansas, Bruce Bauer’s While Europe Slept–although the right tends to be more diligent about producing books for a “broad general audience” than the left does these days.

What gets to me is that, over the last few years, I’ve been running more and more into books that seem to be of the sort I want, but that are instead exercises in repeating platitudes with little or no content involved.

A satisfying book of the kind I’m talking about often has a predictable thesis–Islamofascism is going to take over the world by stealth; the working classes of America have been hoodwinked into voting against their best economic interests; the welfare state is causing crime, illegitimacy and homelessness in the inner cities–but it takes this thesis and does something with it.  It provides extended arguments.  It presents evidence of various kinds. 

The new kind of book, the one without content, does none of these things.  It states its thesis, and then it states it over and over again.  What there is otherwise than the restatement tends to come down to repeating varoius kinds of “conventional wisdom” without attributing it to anybody or anything, as if we all knew it, the way we know the earth is not flat.

Back at the beginning of h is career, Dinesh D’Souza wrote one of the best of the books of the kind I like in these moods, Illiberal Education: The  Politics of Race and  Sex on Campus.  Anchored on D’Souza’s experienes as a conservative undergraduate at Dartmouth, it was a partisan but extremely interesting approach to a subject I am always interested in, and it provided me with lots of information I didn’t have before.

Contrast this to another book, also by a staffer at National  Review, Ramesh Ponnunu’s The Party of Death:  The Democrats, the Media, the Courts, and the  Disregard for  Human Life.

When I say this book is thin, I don’t mean it’s short, although it’s that, too.   I mean it’s literally thin.  There isn’t a single thing in it that I didn’t already know, in the sense that I’d already heard it a hundred times on television.  

These books always get me going on some point or the other, because, being partisan, they always get some things wrong, but in this case the wrong items were also all over television, so that it felt sort of silly to be yelling at them. 

I can’t imagine a single person anywhere on earth who would have been informed about anything by reading this book.  It’s a book for people who already think and know everything in it and just want a rehash, although why anybody would want that, I don’t know.

As I said, these books have begun to appear all over the political/religious/philosophical spectrum, so just to show that I don’t mean to be one sided, I give you The Christian Right and the Rise of American Fascism, by Chris Hedges.   If the Ponnuru book sounds as if he’d “researched” it by watching television, the Hedges book sounds as if he’d “researched” it by spending a couple of weeks smoking dope with the University of North Carolina chapter of the Very Indignant Indeed Left Wing Students Association.

Nobody who knows what the word “fascism” actually means, noone who knows the first thing about the history of the twentieth century, can read Hedges’s book without getting a headache.  It is one screed after another based on a set of assumption Hedges apparently doesn’t realize that most of his fellow citizens don’t share.  A lot of it is what I call the “shock! horror! grass is green!” school of journalism.  You know what I mean.  “Do you realize,” the writer asks breathlessly, “that they’re actually mowing their lawns in Dutchess county?”

The tone of voice, narrative or actual, is of someone delivering the news that the sherrif’s department is running a sex slave ring out of the town jail, but the actual content is more on the order of “cats breathe air.”  To the fifteen or twenty people for whom cats breathing air is a scandal, the announcement is probably very satisfying.  For the rest of us, the exercise is just confusing.

Here’s my problem–I don’t get the point here.  Why do people write these books, and why do people read them?  I understand the middlebrow stuff I do like–you can in fact get information from those books, and a window on a point of view that may not be your own.   Besides, looking at the evidence from the other side is a good way to understand the issue more fully than you do. 

But this second kind of book seems to me to be a complete waste.   If you know nothing about the issue in question, these books will not convince you.  They don’t provide enough information, and they don’t provide much in the way of logical argument.  If you already hold the point of view they favor, you’ll do nothing but hear it repeated in a way you can get from many other sources without spending money for them. 

Cheryl says she can’t read Ann Coulter because of the toen, and I sympathize, but I think that what got me started on this entry is the fact that  Coulter has written both of the kinds of books I’ve been talking about.

This latest one is, alas, of the second kind.

I’ll admit it.  I’ve spent the last couple of days trying to think of something to say.  Part of it is The Thing, which is ongoing as we speak, and still in a very bad place, but it’s also that it turns out that I respond very badly to stress physically.  The cold, or whatever it was, is back, or half  back, and I’m so tired most of the time I can barely think.

And I can’t read.  I actually lost the Milosz book.  I was only about half way through.  I’ve tried some other things, but I keep sort of drifting–I gave a shot to Ann Coulter’s new thing, and I keep forgetting to put a bookmark in it.  It’s the oddest thing.  I don’t often agree with Coulter, but she tends to be easy to read and a big fan of linear thought, so it shouldn’t be difficult, but it is.

So I just thought I’d say I’m sorry for being out of the loop for so long.

This has been a long, bad week-end, possibly one of the worst in my life, and I’ve had a couple of doozies.

And at some point, I will write about this in detail–in fact, I fully intend to, in escruciating detail–but at the moment I’m not sure I should, and even if it doesn’t matter, I don’t feel like it.

But thtere’s something I  can’t stop thinking about that has been going through my head for all this time, and I want to say it.   The only problem is that it’s going to sound very cryptic.  

I’m going to say it anyway, because what the hell. 

I tend to become deeply and thoroughly committed to people, places and things–well, organizations, that kind of thing.

I tend to love things absolutely or hate them absolutely.  And when  I love something, I’ll do pretty much anything for it. 

I have come to the end of my relationship to a place and an institution, one I’ve spent the last fifteen years of my life putting in considerable time and effort, blood and sweat and tears supporting.

In doing this,  I’ve known a small set of people connected with this place on an ongoing basis, some of them since before the fifteen years.

I was thinking today about the first time I saw it, and how incredibly overjoyed I was to find a place that was so perfectly suited to who and what I was, and Bill was, and our then only son Matt was–how perfectly suited, after months of looking at places that weren’t suited at all.

And the thing is,  I’ve known for several years now that this place is not the same as it was when I first got there.  People whose involvement there was near the top of my list of what made this place great got fired, and the people who came in were of a type and a set of personalities I’m not very comfortable with.

Possibly the worst thing has been the change in the avenues of communication.   When I first got to this place, if there was somebody I needed information from, I went and talked to them directly.  If there was somebody who had something to tell me, he told me, also directly.

For some years now, this procedure has changed so that, if there is something somebody needs to say to me, he says it not to me, but to an administrator, and the administrator relays the message.

But the administrator doesn’t necessarily say anything to me about who made the comment, only “concerns have arisen” or “several people have come to me.”  

Sometimes I get the feeling that there are no such concerns and that the “several people” are actually just one, or maybe two.   And this feeling has not been diminished by the fact that the one time  I did manage to make an end run around the administrator to talk to some of the people possibly expressing the latest “concern,” those people did not back up the report of their feelings the administrator gave to me.

The result of all this, added to a natural shyness–I’m about the least social person you will ever meet–has resulted in the fact that, with all these new poeple coming in, I’m known as an actual person to nearly none of them.  It’s possible to say anything about me to anybody at this place these days, because nobody knows me well enough to counter the portrayal.

And that gets down to something I can never quite get over–and that is the extent to which some people are willing to simply, bald facedly lie.

I’m not saying I never lie at all.  Of course I do.  It was worth my life to tell my mother what I really thought of her taste in clothes, and I’ve made enough polite little noncommittal noises to get out of things I haven’t wanted to do. 

But I find it absolutely startling that there are people out there who will say things about other people that they know are untrue, that are damaging to reputations and more, and that they intend to cause such damage.   I can’t imagine doing it.

And I keep thinking about that line from T.S. Eliot I quoted near the beginning of this blog, “All bad things are caused by people trying to be important.”

Or something like that.  I keep forgetting the exact wording.  But at the base of what has just happened is a woman whose only driving force in life is her rock-hard determination to be the most important creature in any room, or situation, or organization.  

I wish I could write a character like this–write it so that the full fury and meanness, the depth of arrogance, the endless sense of entitlement-to-power would come through, a character who would be as thoroughly frightening as this woman is in real life.

Well,  I’m really not a genius.   I can’t seem to do it.  I always make the character more rational than the person is.  I always fail to anticipate the ingenuity of the cruelty.

Whatever.  It’s not the woman I’m minding so much, as it is the fact that the institution of which she and I are a part has apparently bought into the entire game she’s playing, or at least decided that it wasn’t particularly important to stop her.

Ten years ago, I would never be sitting where I am now, becuase half a dozen people would have come up to me to report onf what they’d heard and ask me what the real scoop was.  I’d have known anything, and nobody would have considered it acceptable to assume that what I thought and what  I did was what somebody else said it was.

Last year, a set of incidents occured that, had they occured at any other place, would have sent me straight for a lawyer.   As it was, I came very close to making what would have had to be a criminal complaint against this woman, and then I stopped myself. 

It seemed to me impossible that I would ever involve this place in a lawsuit, never mind a matter for the police–my God, what would something like that do to its repuation?  How could I do that when it had been so good to me, and to mine?  I could destroy the place, or seriously hinder its continued existence.

Now that entire mental pathway seems quaint to me–I’ve been looking through the window at an Ebola virus and thinking it musts be a fawn.

I’ve got no idea how many of the people in this place know what’s going on, how many approve or disapprove, but I find myelf not really caring.  There are limits beyond which decent people do not go, and this is well past it.

So I’m sitting here, you see, mourning it–mourning this place, and what it was.  There was a time when it was one of the truly great places I had ever known, and one of the truly great organizations,  and truly great at what it had set out to do.

And now it’s not.

Requiescat in Pacem.

I have to get lawyered up.

I still think the most interesting thing, to me, about this blog, is finding out what conclusions people jump to, and what assumptions they hold, that would never have occurred to me in a million years.

Let me start by saying that I was not talking about giving high end writers “a place” in the sense of giving them a job–the issue is not some official position somewhere, paid for by taxpayer money or otherwise. To an extent, we already have that, and I’d say it’s worse than useless.  It combines all the bad news about the capitalist response to high end writers with all the bad news about the Socialist response to the same. 

No, that isn’t what I was talking about.

But let me get to Lymaree first, who said that she didn’t know who was creating our narratives now, but it wasn’t literature, etc.

First, no single person creates a narrative, at least not usually.   I can think of one or two exceptions over time, but by and large a society’s narrative is a compendium of many things and many sources.  A novel, a film, a television program embodies such a narrative, but it does not in itself invent it.

That said, to the extent that a society’s narrative is shaped by its high end writers–and it always is–the process is indirect.   You may not read Gore Vidal, but the professor at the local community college does, and he passes Vidal’s ideas on to his students, who recognize them in the Bratt Pitt movie they see this week-end, and transfer them to the news story they read afterwards.

Narratives are the great example of trickle down economics.  No society anywhere has had a mass base with an interest in, or even glancing acquaintance with, high culture, but every society’s mass culture is shaped by its high culture. 

So literature is shaping our narrative today, and it is shaping it in ways consistant with the history of the liberal democracies in the West in the twentieth century.  That is, it is shaping our literature in a direction that tends to attack those very liberal democracies, to expose them as flawed and worthless. 

And it does that because large hunks of high end writers across the Western world, in the US and out of it, need liberal democratic culture to be worthless.  They need it to b worthless because it treats them as worthless, and what we’re looking at here is a fight for survival.  If it’s a question of us and them, we tend to pick us, if only to go on breathing.   In a world in which the present social order seems to promise nothing but contempt and indifference, we tend to want a new social order.

Several million posts ago I complained about a subgenre of the thriller field in which the Big Bad Corporation is the cause of all the troubles in the world, despoiling the environment, contracting murders for hire against its critics, stealing the public blind.   As trite as that plot is, it has become part of our national narrative, so much a part that my students often make such assumptions about large businesses even though they’ve never been in contact with such businesses and really know nothing about them.

My students are not reading Gore Vidal, to go back to the most important present example, nor are they reading Noam Chomskey–but their professors are, and the people who make the movies they see are, and the ideas trickle down in forms that are far more palatable than a plow through Chomskey’s Manufacturing  Consent could ever be.

High end writers–the most technologically accomplished, the most intellectually rigorous, the most educationally broad–always write our narratives for us, even though what they actually write is often difficult to read and therefore reaches few people.

It’s which people it reaches that matters, and the biggest bang for the buck doesn’t come from admirers in academe.  Being turned in to a CAT (course adoption text) is very nice, and can be lucrative, but most college students these days don’t bother to do half their reading and even the ones that do forget most of what they hear in class before they’ve gotten their first pay check.

The biggest bang for the buck comes with the influence of high art on popular art–readers may reject James Joyce as experimental, but a generation of detective novelists and horror novelists loved him, and now his techniques (and many of his attitudes about people) are so much a part of the mainstream we no longer recognize them as experimental.  Maybe they’re not experimental any more.

Certainly a book that is sufficiently popular can, if it’s popular long enough, drive a general narrative in the population at large. That is definitely what has happened with the novels of Ayn Rand, and they spawned a political movement that has had significant results across the US.

But Ayn  Rand is a popular writer, not a high end one, and her ideas have had little or no impact on the broad range of movies and television that we see.  The ideas in those are almost always a reflection of the high art their writers loved but coldn’t produce themselves–the  Rod  Serlings of this world are almost always people who start out wanting to be Hemingway and Faulker and then find that they have to settle for less.   They import as much as they can of what they love into the popular work they do, and their audience takes “their” ideas and move them into the culture at large.

The primary narratives of the Western world have, at least since 1900 or so, been increasingly shaped by what Paul Hollinger called an “adversary culture,” a high art culture in direct revolt against the very basis of the societies it exists in.

And this antagonism, this adversary culture, filters down.   It gets into our music, our movies, our popular novels, our television shows, even our fashions.   People pick it up automatically, whether their schools teach it or not. 

The antagonism comes, I think, because this group of people not only sees no place in these societies into which it can fit, but because, to the extent that it is recognized at all, it tends to be ridiculed and insulted.  “Eggheads.”  “Pointy headed intellectuals.”  Even the “nattering nabobs of negativism.”

The solution isn’t to install official jobs for high end writers.  As I said earlier, we already do that, to an extent–writers in residence programs operate on most elite campuses, there are foundations with grants, etc–and the result is predictably dismal.  

It’s dismal, in the first place, because such arrangements are counterproductive to writing on any level.  The French film industry has not been helped by decades of  French government support.  It’s been largely hurt, because government support has made it possible for those filmmakers to avoid the work of figuring out how to actually communicate with people. 

The writer in residence racket is similar.   A writer installed at Edenic University has a nice office and can often afford a nice house in the area.  He’s got health insurance.  He’s got money in the bank.  What he doesn’t have is any incentive to make himself understood, or to himself understand the culture in which he lives.  

Writers in the high art tradition almost never have huge sales figures, and wouldn’t even outside writers in residence programs, but in the long tradition of intellectuals being outside academia, not in it, there was a discipline imposed by the little magazines and the publishing companies that said the writer had to participate in the world in which he was living in order to write about it.

So no, I’m not talking about giving writers official government-paid positions, or even more university positions.  If it was up to me, I’d get rid of the writers in residence programs entirely and get these guys out into the world.  You can complain a lot about Gore Vidal, but he’s a writer, not an academic.

When I say that this society needs to find a place for its high end writers,  I mean it needs to learn to understand and value what they do.  In a society in which the watchword is the old anti-intellectual “if you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich,” where the arts are considered matters of “taste” with no objective standards of good and bad to judge them by, where knowledge and art and the Great Conversation are just “hobbies” with no particular importance to the world at large–

Well, the people who engage those things are likely to show us just how every important those things really are, if only by kicking us in the ass with them.

Here are a couple of snapshots, from the week.

The second one:  I was trying to show a class how to structure a standard compare and  contrast essay.  Forget the fact that this is the sort of thing they’re supposed to learn in middle school, I was slogging away at it, doing my best, and trying to think of pairs of terms they’d both recognize and find it interesting to compare.

I’ve got it, I said.  Britney Spears and Albert Einstein are similar and different in many ways.

Okay, it was silly.  But I was right, everybody in the room seemed to have heard of both Spears and Einstein.  Or I thought they had, until I called on a girl to ask her to read her paper and got,

“Albert Einstein said that people were descended from monkeys, and Britney Spears looks like a monkey.”

And then–this is the kicker–when I tried to untangle her problems with both Einstein and evolution, she was mad at me, because announcing her mistakes in front of the class like that embarrassed her, and what did it matter anyway?

But here’s the thing.  She’s eighteen or so.  And she at least knew Einstein was a scientist, which is better than I sometimes get.  The really depressing thing happened before class, while I was waiting to get into the room.

That was when I overheard part of a lecture by the professor who had the room before I did, a tenuted PhD teaching a management course for kids definitely not academically disadvantaged in the way mine are, who told his class that:

Seven million American boys went to Viet Nam AND

More than three hundred thousand died there.

Now, I’ll admit that I’m not really all that good with numbers, but even I know that 300,000 is more than the number of American casualties in WWII, and that war had a somewhat higher rate of service than Vietnam did.   But just to make sure, I went and checked the VA, which keeps a list of these things–7 million is almost twice the number that saw service in Vietnam, and deaths “in theater,” combat or otherwise, totaled fewer than 60,000.

And this is only part of what I heard all the time.  I heard a professor tell a student she ought to self publish her poetry–a friend of hers self published, and his book was right there in Barnes and Noble. 

Of course, your local B an N will definitely carry your self published book, but the B and N national buyer won’t touch it, you won’t be eligible to join any of the professional organizations (because they don’t consider self-publishing legitimate professional work), you won’t get reviewed by any of the national organs–in other words, it’s a really bad idea.

Before some of you jump up and down on my head, I want to point out that the professor with the silliness about Vietnam is militantly pro-capitalist and economically right wing–the first mistake I ever caught him in was in a lecture on just how awful socialized medicine is, using England as an illustration, except it was clear in no time at all that he had no idea  how the English National Health Service actually worked.  He thought it was a form of health insurance, sort of like Canada’s.

I complain about students a lot, and I should, but it’s becoming more and more clear to me that nobody knows anything anywhere anymore.  We all seem to live in our little coccoons of “facts” that aren’t really facts.  We all, as Will Rogers said, know things that ain’t true.

And once a popular teacher has said it, it can be damned near impossible to convince a student that the bogus information is wrong.  Which makes the increasingly frequent existence of professors who hold conspiracy theories about the Kennedy assassination, insist that vaccinations cause autism and silicone breast implants cause breast cancer, and a whole host of other nonsense more than disturbing.  It’s downright frightening.

I am, as I’ve said dozens of times, all for challenging authority as much as possible–but we’ve come to a point where people feel entitled not only to their own opinions, but to their own facts. 

And what gets me about that is this book I’m reading, called The Captive Mind, by a Polish writer named Czeslaw Milosz.  And if you want to know how to pronounce that, good luck.

I first heard about Milosz back in 2002 or so, when his essays were released in book form–he had defected from Poland in the 1960s and spend the rest of his life as a professor at Berkeley, but he’d always written, both poetry and prose, in his native language.  There’s  no indication he could not speak English.  In fact, from all reports, he seems to have been able to speak fluently.  But he wanted to write in Polish, for Poles, and he did.

The Captive Mind is a book about how and why intellectuals in the Eastern Bloc ended up supporting Communism, in spite of the fact that it was obvious to them that it was different from Naziism mostly in rhetoric and not in action.  And the first interesting thing about this man is that he managed to get a Nobel Prize for work saying that Communism and Naziism were pretty much clones.

There’s a lot that’s interesting in this book.  At one point, Robert said that the Communists had no trouble teaching the literary canon–The Captive Mind contains a ton of information on just how thoroughly the Communists censored the works of the Canon, how they manipulated what they did allow, how people went to enormous lengths to get hold of such banned works as Wordsworth’s poetry and James Joyce’s novels.

But it’s the way Milosz tries to get inside the heads of the different kinds of “party writers” he knew before he left–including the kind of party writer he was, since he was one–that I find fascinating.

It confirms me, however, in a feeling I’ve had ever since I read an essay by George Steiner called “The Archives of Eden”–the big mistake capitalist societies make is that they find no useful place for their high-end writers. 

If narrative is important to all of us, if we can’t live without it, then brushing off that segment of your population that’s going to be writing yours is probably not the best idea.

I have no idea if I’m making any sense here.

So here is  Theodore Dalrymple on “ideology,” which sounds a lot like what I was calling narratives

http://www.city-journal.org/2009/19_1_otbie-ideology.html

And that should make up for the fact that my week has gotten a little complicated.