Hildegarde

I’m going to glide over Cheryl’s comment that somebody once told her that The Da Vinci Code was a great way to learn history, because if  I think about it too much I’m going to cry.

But Robert says that I want three very different things that are not necessarily even compatible with each other, so let me start there.

First, as to everyone having wisdom–yes, of course I want that, anybody sensible would, but I don’t expect that it can ever be achieved.  If there’s anything you learn from being deeply immersed in the Western Canon, it’s that human beings have very little wisdom to share among them and they often seem determined to get rid of that.  Seek the mean in all things, the Greeks said, and then they executed Socrates and took on Alexander the Great.

The other two things I definitely do want, but although  I don’t think attaining either of them will lead to the other, I don’t think they’re incompatible.

The first and most important thing, of course, has to be that civility, that respect for each other and for what we owe each other without which there can be nothing called civilization. 

I think we think of civilization, too often, as something we have.  We live in a civilized country, we tell ourselves, and then we sit back and wait for it to deliver safety, security, prosperity, and enough entertainment to keep us amused.

In reality, civilization is not something we have, but something we do.  It exists to the extent that each and every one of us chooses to go on doing it.   The young mangiving up his seat on the bus to a pregnant woman, the old lady in the store being courteous to the clerk who is waiting on her, are just as important, in the long run, as the rule of law.  In fact, without them, the rule of law cannot exist.

Obviously, we’re not going to convince our fellow citizens to do civilization by “a course of reading,” which is how I vaguely remember Robert putting it.  The habits of mind that produce civilization need to be taught out of school as well as in, and in practice as well as in books. 

On this score, I think it’s less important that a child learn to read  Shakespeare than that he learn that bullying will make him a pariah, cheating will ruin his education, and helpig the weak and unfortunate even at significant cost to himself is an imperative–and that he learns those things not by reading about them in books, but by having them played out in his own life by the people around him.

I’m not saying schools have no place in forming such habits of mind, only that they help to form them not in the contents of their curricula but in the policies and practices of their day to day operation.   A child caught cheating should fail the course he cheated in, absolutely, without question, no reprieve.   A bully should be penalized for bullying, and he should not be validated by seeing his victim sent off to some mandatory course of ‘therapy,” as if the victim is the one who has a “problem” that needs to be “fixed.”

On one level, it would be possible to teach these particular lessons without reference to the Canon at all.  Many good and decent people are both good and decent while knowing almost nothing of the Canon.  Many bad ones know a lot about  Chaucer and  Blake.

But the Canon isn’t negligible either, because there’s something else we have to do if we are to “do” civilization, and that is to know what it is and who we are.

I get a little prickly at the idea of “a course of reading,” maybe because I’ve never thought of the Canon in that way.  I haven’t read what I’ve read because it was assigned to me.  I was well into my doctoral program before a teacher ever gave me an author I hadn’t already read at least something of, and even then the new-to-me books tended to be relatively minor works of history and philosophy from Italy, Spain and Greece.

There’s a lot to be said for reading just to read, which I did, and many of the books I read even as a child were ‘classics.”  Nobody told me to.   They were just there.  And the stuff we were asked to read in school, and the “new” stuff I talked my father into buying for me, often seemed terribly thin in comparison.

The point of introducing people to the Canon, however, is to help them understand who and what they are.   Robert sent me notice of a column by Ralph Peters in  yesterday’s New York Post in which he says that he thinks of the Taliban and other fundamentalist Muslims sort of like aliens–he is sick of hearing about how they are “just like us” and want the same things we want, when they are neither.

I don’t much like the idea of thinking of my fellow human beings as anything but fellow human beings, and I don’t think that doing it goes to places we want to get to, but I do take his point.  We have a very hard time accepting the fact that there are people in the world whose ways of thinking are radically different from our own.  For all the blather about respecting other cultures that has made the rounds in the last couple of decades, the “respect” demanded of us has been largely superficial.  Faced with real differences, we tend to proclaim that anybody who notices them is a racist scumbag who doesn’t deserve to be listened to.

Western civilization is a particular thing with a particular set of ideas and principles that exist noplace else on the  planet, and that are often in contradiction to what does exist.  The idea that each individual human life should be treated as important, that individuals have rights and must be allowed to choose their own “values,” that everything must be examined and questioned, that men and women are morally and should be politically and economincally equal, that sex is a private matter between two consenting adults that should not be interfered with by any third party for any reason whatsoever–I could go on with this list, and it’s very long.

None of these ideas has been accepted in any other culture anywhere, except in so far that compromise with them seems to be necessary in order to participate in the global market.  Some cultures–and that of the Taliban is among them–reject these ideas so strongly that they’re willing to forgo the market, too. 

Robert said once that he did not think that we and Europe still shared a common culture, but we do–we shared that entire orientation with “rights” and “choice” that is Western and nothing else.  That there are differences between Anglo Western culture and the Western  culture of  Europe proper there is no doubt, but we are still all more like each other than we are like the Taliban, or China.

For the sake of m ost of us reading this blog, however, Anglo Western culture is the issue, and it has some particularities we want to hold onto, not least of which is a concentration on the political and moral equality of all citizens that is honored more in the breech than the observance almost anywhere else. 

Of course, to an extent, it can be honored only at least somewhat in the breech even in those countries where it arose and where it is still a vital principle.   Complete equality of condition is achievable only by abandoning m ost of the rest of what we find valuable in the culture in qustion.  You can have liberty or equality, but not both.  The  Anglophone sphere tends to err on the side of liberty, and I think it’s made the better choice.

But it has been a choice, and right now we have a situation where many of the citizens of Anglophone countries don’t know that that’s the case.  They don’t actually know what the founding principles of Anglophone civilization are, they don’t realize that these principles were reached through long and difficult struggle, and they’re completely unaware that most of the world finds them incomprehensible and repugnant.

“Of course there must be freedom of speech,” one of the imams in  London said in the middle of the anish cartoon controversy, “but freedom of speech can’t be absolute.  Nobody has the right to insult cherished religious beliefs.”

Part of the reason I want as many people as possible to be familiar with large areas of the canon is that I want those people to understand what their civilization is and how it differs from others, and because I want to recruit them to a defense of its maintenance.  Western civilization does not posit particularities–“this is true for us, but it may not be true for you.”

In fact, no civilization posits any such thing.   It couldn’t and survive.   The Taliban do not think that their brand of fundamentalist Islam is ‘true for them.”  They think it’s true for everybody and should be imposed on everybody who does not voluntarily agree to get with the program.

Western civilization posits universals–that women and men should be politically and socially equal, that speech should be free of government coercion on any topic at all, that religion is a matter of personal choice and should be left to the conscience of each individual–and therefore also posits that societies that do not accept and practice these universal principles are objectively wrong. 

Contrary to what some people claim to believe, knowing and accepting all this does not require us to invade other people’s countries and impose these principles on them.  It does require that, for the same of the people hurt by injustices like forced conversion, forced abortion, female genital mutilation and all the rest, we understand what we’re supposed to stand for and advocate for it, not just as ‘ours,’ but as univerally applicable, as loudly and as long as we can.

The greatest accomplishment in the history of human life ever achieved was the abolition of slavery across the planet, almost entirely at the will and behest of the British Empire.

In the last three decades or so, as we’ve more and more been declaring that all cultures are the same and equally valuable, slavery has been creeping back, defended by its practitioners as “their culture” that we have no right to judge or interfere with.

We need both the habits of mind thar insure civility and the knowledge of history and ideas that make it possible for us to understand who we are and to defend our principles not as something  “just for us,’ but for all human beings, everywhere.

A world where men and women are political equals, where freedom of expression and conscience are honored, where slavery does not exist–is better than all the other options.

Okay, that’s a really old song that a lot of people I knew in college used to sing, usually right before expressing confusion as to whether or not it was a joke.  I still don’t know.

But Lee suggested reading Susan Jacoby’s book The Age of  Unreason, which  I have, and that line from that song sort of explains why I was disappointed with it.

First, let me say that I got ahold of a copy of that book as soon as I could, because I was hoping that a) it wasn’t really a new take on Hofstadter’s Anti-Intellectualism in American Life and b) that it would be a critique of cultural relativism from the left for once. 

I got both my wishes.   Hofstadter’s book is not about anti-intellectualism as we have been discussing it here, but about the resistance of large segments of the American public to rule by “experts.”  To Hofstadter, thinking that your local elementary school principal has her head up her ass because she wants to use “see and say” instead of phonics is “anti-intellectual.”   Personally, I think resistance to “expert” opinion in things like this is one of the great strengths of American society. 

Jacoby is not on that particular rag, however, and she is trying to talk about the anti-intelligence thing I started out talking about myself about a hundred or so posts ago. 

And I wasn’t even upset by the fact that, after excoriating the Right for page after page for swallowing a lot of nonsensical crap wholesale as if it were Holy Writ, she then swallows a lot of different nonsensical crap herself, just “liberal” nonsensical crap instead of “conservative” stuff.  If we want a poster child for critical thinking and reational thought, Jacoby is definitely not it.

(I didn’t know what to do with her ringing defense of the loonier segments of the Sixties Left as being motivated by high ideals and a passionate commitment to justice and right.  I mean, for God’s sake–the Black Panthers?  The Weathermen?)

But, like I said,  I could live with this, because we desperately need a critique of the “everything is just as good as everything else” school from the left.  After eight years of a  Republican culture that had so far departed from the principles laid down  by  William F. Buckley that it seemed to be running on the assumption that “stupid is better,” a defense of education, expertise and high culture was just what I was looking for.

Jacoby’s book ended up failing for me, however, because throughout it all I could never figure out what it was she wanted–other than the end of the Bush era, which she got.

We do a lot of the same things here.  We spend a lot of time complaining about students and the general literacy level of the public at large, but we don’t ever seem to come to any kind of decision about what we want the world to look like instead.

And I’m not too sure I know, exactly.  There are some specific points that I’m sure of.  I’d like more people to be more skilled at reading, whether they chose to do it often or not.  I’d like more people to know the basics of their own history and the workings of their government. 

A lot of times, however, I’m very conflicted.   Decadence is ore a habit of mind than a set of specific policies, or even events.  It consists in the decision that the only standard by which we need to judge our behavior is whether or not it gives us what we want.  Homosexuality is not decadent.  The attitude that the only thing we need to consider in deciding whether to extend government recognition to gay marriages is how gay people will feel about it (or its lack) is.

I am a big supporter of government recognition of gay marriage, by the way.  I think there are good, practical reasons for such recognition, and there are getting to be better ones every day.  The purpose of government recognition of marriage has always been, first and foremost, to ssecure the rights of children to their father’s property, and these days, with adoptions and sperm donors and what all else, it is sometimes the case that the “father” in a relationship is another woman, or that there are two fathers.  To exclude Jack and Sally from the benefits–Social Security suvivor benefits, for instance–guaranteed to one of their parents because that parent’s marriage to their existing adoptive parent wasn’t recognized in law, even though it had been going on for twenty years, seems addled to me.

But the argument that “you can’t legislate love” does nothing for me, because I do not consider marriage, as the law does not consider marriage, to have anything to do with “love.”

What I want, I think, is to shift this culture away from the assumption that right and wrong, good and evil, acceptable and unacceptable are to be determined by what we “want,” and to move it back to a place where we understand that what we want is not a definitive answer to anything. 

I mean, even when the question is what to choose from the desert menu, we’re usually smarter to think about health issues and cost issues and who knows what else.

I suppose what I’m trying to say here is that anti-intellectualism, for me, the anti-intelligence kind, is about sloth, mental and spiritual and moral and intellectual sloth.  We don’t read long books because they take a certain amount of effort.  We don’t read James  Joyce or The Iliad or (in the case of many of my students) Terry Pratchett’s Small Gods because they’re “too hard.” 

I can think of big scale plans for making sure my next round of students–or the round six or seven years away–knows the things my present students do not, but I don’t think it will matter much of they still have the attitude that the only thing that matters is what they feel. 

“Some people may like writing because it gives them a chance to express their feelings,” one of my students wrote once, and then he couldn’t think of any other reason why people would like to write. 

He couldn’t think of a single reason why people would like to read.

It’s a change in the habit of mind that I think is my ultimate goal in all this, and I think too many of us, including me, substitute superficial manifestations for the deeper issue.

Once, pregnant with my younger son, I got on an overcrowded bus near Camden Town just behind a tall young man with piercings all over him and a rainbow mohawk of truly epic proportions.  He sat down in the only seat available, looked up, saw I was pregnant, got out of his seat and gave it to me.

“You sit down, miss,” he said.  “You’re going to do yourself harm if you try to stand up when you’re that way.”

I like Theodore Dalrymple a lot, but he makes a lot of fuss about piercings and tattooes and other body art.  I don’t care about the body art if I can have the civility and the courtesy and the sense that we owe each other something as human beings. 

And I think that’s the first step on the way to figuring out what my goal in all this is.

It’s Monday again, and that means  I’m not going to have access to a computer after the next hour or so, so I’ve decided to start this early.

I’ve been looking at the comments, and a couple of things occur to me.

First is that it’s absolutely true.  Even twenty years ago, the students I teach would mnever have seen the inside of a college classroom, and in all likelihood neither would the students in the tier just above them.

Besides the remedial, make-up-for-what-you-should-have-learned-in-high-school stuff, we have “associate degree” programs in things like auto mechanics and licensed practical nursing, occupation with little or no connection to academic work, or academic talent, of any kind.

But I wasn’t asking that we should turn any of these people into even baby literary scholars.  Nobody has to be a scholar to read James Michener’s Hawaii or Irving Wallace’s The Chapman Report.  You don’t need an extensive knowledge of cultural context or a sophisticated understanding of literary forms.  You don’t even need a really large vocabulary.  These are what publishers call “commercial fiction”–as opposed to both genre fiction and literary fiction–and the entire point of them was to reach a mass audience of general readers with no particular expertise in literature.

Several people have suggested that the absolute number of readers in the country has grown over the last forty years, not shrunk, andthat the percentage of people who read is probably similar to what it was in 1960.  But I think it’s undeniable that these are not the same kind of readers as existed then.  

Publishers are in the business of making money, not supporting literature, and they seem to be convinced that no serious market exists for books like these.  And it’s not a matter of people not liking this kind of story, because similar stories do enormously well as movies or HBO miniseries.  The Sopranos was a lot of things, but it wasn’t a genre anything.  It had more in common with The Forsyte Saga than with crime novels. 

People are still more interested in people than in anything else.  The Higher Gossip is still the main draw of narrative.  It’s just that the Higher Gossip has disappeared from our bookshelves.

Robert suggests that slapping a genre label on a book–it’s a mystery! it’s a romance!–will tell the readers something useful and that only minor repercussions will result when they find out Scarlet doesn’t end up with Rhett.

I don’t think slapping a genre label on a book that doesn’t really belong in a genre tells us anything useful, and I do think that it tells lies that have much broader repercussions than just one or two unsettled readers.  Genre does not just tell us how the book ends, it tells us many other things about it.  GWTW is not a genre romance novel not only because Scarlet and Rhett don’t end up together, but because Scarlet is neither virginal nor admirable.  She’s a scheming, conniving, selfish sociopath who’s buried two husbands by the time she marries Rhett.   There is room for such characters in genre romance, but they’re always the evil Other Woman, not the heroine.

If you want to see just how much trouble such expectations can cost, I give you the one and only time I ever had a book picked up by the Mystery Guild.  That was Somebody Else’s Music, and I can only assume that nobody at the Guild read it, because when it appeared in the catalogue it was promoted as a cozy and was without the little warning note they append when a book contains graphic violence, explicit sex or “strong language.” 

Unfortunately for me, and my chances of ever having another book in a book club, SEM is not a cozy and it contains all three of the things forbidden in cozies–there’s plenty of strong language (inludeing the f-word), a fair amount of graphic violence and, yes, some explicit sex.  Readers, having counted on the genre label to insure certain things about the book, were furious.

I also don’t see what’s so difficult about telling readers what a mainstream novel is about.  The Thorn Birds?  It’s the story of a young woman growing up in Australia who has an affair with a priest and how that impacts her life, his life, and the lives of all the people around them.  The Chapman Report?  It’s the story of how this big sex survey comes to town and interviews all these women, and the impact those intervies have on their lives and their marriages.

I’m very aware of the fact that I’ve chosen a couple of chick lit volumes above, but I could do the same with any other mainstream novel.  And, like I said, it’s not that readers would have difficulty with such descriptions, since they seem to be able to handle them when they’re appended to television programs and movies.  From the evidence of box office receipts and DVD rentals, there’s an enormous audience for this kind of story out there, it just isn’t translating into an audience for books.

Nor do  I think that the popularity of the Harry Potter books is necessarily a hopeful sign.  Harry Potter is a series for children, and because it is a series for children it is restricted in both vocabulary and plot complexity.  Granted, the later books are less so than the early ones, but even with the seventh and last volume we are dealing with work that has consciously been aimed at readers assumed to be less sophisticated than grown up ones.  It’s also the case that every book in that series has pretty much the same plot, and the plot is a genre fantasy plot that has been with us at least since  Tolkein, if not before.

What’s worse, the numbers for the Harry Potter series, although stunning in book sales terms, or abysmal by any other measure.   A Harry Potter hardcover now sells through at around 850,000 copies.  The paperbacks do two to five million, and many of those are repeat sales, books sold to readers who have the hardcover but don’t want to damage it, or who have lost it, or whatever.

A movie or a television show that did this kind of business would be considered an utter failure, and even if we assume (wrongly) that every single copy sold represents a distinct reader, 6,000,000 out of 300,000,000 is only 2%.  This is not evidence of a nation of readers.

So the question comes down to this:  what does it mean to say somebody “knows how to read?” 

At the very least it should mean that the person understands the words on the page in their most straightforward sense, that he doesn’t read “there are two kinds of thinking, religious and scientific, and the religious is wrong’ as if it said “there are two kinds of thinking, religious and scientific, and everybody should pick the way that’s right for them.”

I didn’t make that one up.   It’s a response I get from students over and over again after I’ve asked them to read a very short essay by Richard Dawkins.  I think that what’s  happening, in this case, is that they are sure they know what the article is going to say, and stop paying attention to it after the first line or two.  

This is also, I think, what they are able to do with genre fiction, what many people are able to do with genre fiction, and what might account for the fact that it has gained so much more support against mainstream fiction than it used to have.

If you already know what the book is going to say, you need to put ery littl effort into “reading” it, and you don’t ven need to ‘read’ it at all in any sense in which m ost of the people who read this blog would define “read.”  When the book breaks the rules a little you don’t notice it.  When the book breaks the rules a lot, or comes without rules, you declare that you don’t “understand” it.

And maybe you don’t.  But I would say that anybody–including the nurse and the garage mechanic–who can’t follow the plot of Gone With The Wind or  Hawaii cannot be said to be able to read in any sense at all.

And the problems they have with books like that will show up as problems elsewhere, in books that are not fiction.

Because part of this seems to me to be a case of not being able to pay attention.

Oh, ack.

In the first place, I didn’t say that a genre was a book with a “pat” ending, and although the endings of genre novels are predictble in the sense that they are predermined–the heroin will marry the hero who will turn out not to be the brutal thug he’s appeared throughout the entire book; the detective will solve the murder mystery–that’s a long way from saying that they are always predictible in their details.

What’s more,  I don’t agree that a genre can be defined only by its scene or setting.   I left some fudge room for  SF, because in my experience SF writers and readers like to claim just about anything, no matter how tenuous its connection, as SF.  So I’m giving them the rope they seem to want to hang themselves with.

What’s more, I don’t think that the mainstream novel is “about” the “interior lives” of the characters.  Saying that a novel allows us to enter into a character’s head and think the way he thinks for a while is not the same thing as saying that the novel is about anybody’s “interior life,” or even that the character is self aware enough to have an interior life.

A genre is a predetermined narrative structure into which the writer fits whatever else she wants to do or say.  There is nothing pejorative about the term, and there are genre novels in the canon–Frankenstein and 1984 among others.

Gone With The Wind is a mainstream novel.  So are The Hunt for Red October, Peyton Place, The Da Vinci Code, To Kill a Mockingbird, Exodus, Little  Women, Valley of the Dolls, Foucault’s Pendulum, The Way We Live Now, War and Peace, August 1914, The Razor’s Edge, Magnificent Obsession, The Robe, Moby Dick, The Portrait of a Lady, The Great Gatsby, Seven Days in May and The Bridges of Madison County.

Some of those books are good, some of them are bad, none of them are genre, and none of them are literary.  Most of them have plenty of action and incident. 

What’s more, the simple fact that a mainstream novel has one element or another that might appear in a genre, or even several, dones’t stop the novel from being mainstream or make it genre. 

And Cheryl is right–all these distinctions are, and must be, fuzzy around the edges.  What’s more, genres and subgenres come and go. When Scruples was published, it was a mainstream  novel.  Ten years later, after a couple of dozen novels all written on the same pattern, we had a new genre, usually calling, in the business, the “shopping and effing novel.”  The plot elements had solidified, and dozens of writers created books to fit them.

The mere fact that a book fits into a genre does not disqualify it from the canon, nor does it disqualify it from being a good book.  Some genres, or more usually subgnres, become so rigid that working within the guidelines makes it close to impossible for a writer to write a good book–the serial killer novel is getting very close to this–but that’s because any predetermined form necessarily limits a writer’s choices and those limits are necessarily artificial in the sense of being outside the writer’s own judgment.

But Cheryl is right that it’s hard to think of mainstream fiction on the market now, because there’s nearly none of it.  

To the extent that there was disrespect for the genres in publishing, that disrespect came from the fact that up until recently genres sold very little relative to mainstream.  Books by Irving Wallace and Leon Uris were huge best sellers.  Horror practically didn’t sell at all and science fiction sold in paperback and that only in limited quantities.

Genre novels didn’t become the big sellers in publishing until the Eighties, and by now they’ve nearly wiped mainstream off the shelves.

And the question is why.   I can certainly understand why contemporary literary novels don’t sell.  Halfway through a book by Ann Beattie I’m likely to start muttering, “stop whining already!”

But something like Iriving Wallace’s The Man. about a freak accident that kills several members of the US government and puts the White House in the hands of its next black President, or Leon Uris’s Exodus, about the founding of the state of Israel, or any of the Michener books–it seems to me that there was certainly enough action and incident, enough varied and surprising characters, to interest any ordinary reader.  And none of these books is in any way hard to read.

I am beginning to wonder, though if  the problem is that I set the bar too high when I think that somsthing is not hard to read.  All the books mentioned in the last paragraph were enormous best sellers in their time.  They sold to and were read by plenty of people who had not gone to college.   Even my mother plowed her way through Valley of the Dolls, and she resisted reading the backs of cereal boxes. 

But I deal more and more with people who can’t understand Terry  Pratchett’s Small Gods–and I don’t mean they can’t understand the extended metaphor, or the references to religious history.   I mean they can’t follow the plot, and it’s not that hard a plot to follow. 

John sent me a series of links to a three part article about students and reading.  If you go here

http://popecenter.org/clarion_call/article.html?id=2126  

you’ll find Part Three, with links to parts one and two. It’s best to start from the beginning. 

John complained that the writer was ‘too highbrow” for him, and he definitely comes out of the high art tradition, and the works he’s talking about are definitely canonical (The Odyssey, The Aeneid), but the question of reading comprehsnsion remains no matter what the books you’re talking about. 

And there does seem to be some kind of weird problem going on with linear thought, with putting one idaafter another and following it to a third. 

And I’m not talking just about students here, either. 

That’s a far cry from worrying about whether or not people can read truly difficult books in or out of the canon, or whether they can benefit from a writer’s ability to let them experience the way other people think–which is not a parlour trick, but the very purpose of fiction, and the only thing that makes a book worth anything as fiction.

Of course, a book may be worth a lot on other standards of value–as entertainment, for instance, or as a cultural artefact–but the real stuff of fiction is in the way it expands our understanding of the full range of what it means to be human.\

But I’m not asking for that now.

I want to know if there’s become a problem in “getting it” on a much more basic level. 

Maybe the reason that genre fiction has taken over the place mainstream fiction used to have–the commercially most viable place, the most widely read place–is that there are many more people now who are unable to follow a story if it isn’t largely predetermined, if it isn’t already familiar and predictable.

And that makes me a lot more worried than Indian casinos and the John  Edward show–and maybe they’re all connected.

I think we need to do a little defining of terms here.

Robert says he thinks a lot of people think “mainstream” fiction is a genre, but I’m willing to bed he doesn’t mean mainstream, but contemporary literary fiction.  There is certainly a strain of American contemporary literary fiction–the stuff stemming from the Updike/Salinger tradition, like books by Ann Beattie–that fulfills the definition of genre, but mainstream by definition does not.

Mainstream fiction is first and foremost that fiction for which there are no hard and fast rules of form or content. 

The Sun Also Rises is mainstream fiction, but then so is Gone With The Wind and Valley of the Dolls. 

Mainstream fiction is fiction aimed at a general reader (experimental fiction, like Finnegan’s Wake, is always literary) for which no certain statements can be made about the content, the settings, the narrative arc before we’ve read it.

In genre romance, for instance, we know before we start that the heroine and the hero will end up happily married–but although GWTW has many of the markers of a romance novel when it starts, the hero and the heroine do not end up happily married, and don’t even end up together.  

In the same way, we know in a mystery that the bad guy will be caught and punished and that somebody innocent but wrongly accused will be vindicated in the end.  In The Brothers Karamozov, which in many ways is a classic detective novel, complete with dramatic courtroom confession, the guilty party goes free and a man innocent of the murder is punished for it.

It’s like the difference between poetry written in a standard form, like a sonnet, or in terza rima, and poetry written without such a commitment.   In a sonnet, the octet will be followed by the sestet, the rhyme scheme will be a-b-b-a c-d-d-c e-f-f-f-g-g, the whole thing will be in iambic pentameter and you can count on it all from off.  If I underake nothing but to write a poem in the way that seems best to me, the octet in iambic pentameter may give way to a ten-line second stanza in trophic trimeter and rhymed couplets.   The reader can’t know what will come next, except by reading.

Genres come in stricter and looser forms, of course.  I’m not sure what categroizes “science fiction” these days, except that a lot of it takes place in the future, or in space, and has something to do with technology.   Mystery is somewhat stricter, but only somewhat.  We do expect the bad guys to be caught and punished, but beyond that there seems to be a mystery reader audience for almost anything.  Romance is a much stricter genre, because not only must the hero and heroine end up together, but they must endure a set of mostly predictable obstacles to their love–and especially, the hero must for some reason be cruel and dismissive to the heroine, so that she thinks that she loves in vain and to her own misery for most of the book.

Genres have virutues as well as vices.  Their greatest virtue is that they provide–at least in the looser forms–a framing device that will in and of itself provide an audience for material it would otherwise be impossible to get them interested in.   Lymaree said that she was disappointed when Gregor showed up in  Somebody  Else’s Music, because she knew that meant going back to the same old same old.  I know from having been involved in trying it that no publisher would be the least interested in putting out a straight book about a bunch of ex-high-school queen bees still determined to screw over the one person they hated when they were seventeen.  

And that brings us to the one big drawback of genres, and that is that, in becoming familiar to readers, they also become old.  The other drawback is that the forms always limit the scope of the book.   Maybe it’s just been so long since we’ve seen anything like a mainstream novel with full scope, that we can’t remember what that was like.

I’d like to suggest–for those of you with access to library systems that hold onto their books instead of trash them–a series of mainstream novels by the author Allen Drury published in the Fifties and Sixties.  I actually own a complete set of these, in hardcover, because Bill went out and got them and even managed to get a few signed by  Mr. Drury himself–after I’d practically forced him to read the first one.  Before then, he was convinced that he “hated” “mainstream” fiction, and he was confusing “mainstream” with “literary” too.

The first of these novels is one you might have heard of, because it won a Pulitzer prize and was a New York Times number one best seller.   It was also made into one of those movies with a cast made up of practically everybody you’ve ever heard of.  This was Advise and  Consent, a political novel thinly based on the Alger Hiss case, sort of. 

For those of you who’ve never heard of Allen  Drury, he was widely considered a “conservative” by the end of the Sixties, but it was “conservative” in the old East  Coat Liberal Republican Establishment sense. This is not a man who would have put up with the Reverend  Jerry Falwell for a minute and a half, and the sympathy with which he was able to portray homosexual and bisexual men in an era when being such was illegal and admitting to such was social and political death is truly stnning.

The series concerns US politics in general and the  US response to Soviet expansionism in particular, and it comes with a stirring cast of recurring characters.  The books follow these characters down the years, from the rigidity of Fifties sexual dramas through the mess of  Sixties radicalism through the projected results of al this–and that’s where we get to my point.

The series consists of several novels, ending in two different and alternating “last” ones.  That is, Drury brought the overarching conflict of the series to a final crisis, and then wrote one novel as if the crisis had been resolved one way, and another novel as if the crisis had been resolved the other way.

Since there was no genre imperative here, it was possible for this story to end either way.   There was no way to know in advance which way the story would go.  

The Drury novels now seem to have been out of print for many years, and I  can’t find the ones we have in the house at the moment, but I wonder at the fact that we don’t see more of this kind of thing, more of actual mainstream fiction.  We have literary novels and mystery novels and romance novels and science fiction novels, but nobody seems to be doing any more what Allen Drury did.  Or, for that matter, what Rona Jaffe, Leon Uris, and Irving Wallace did.  

It’s this, I think, that has me going back to nineteenth century novels over and over and over again.   I miss the scope and the openendedness that used to mean fiction to me.  Drury wrote decently good novels, but I liked even bad novels of this kind–I’ve run through three or four copies of The Best of Everything.  

And I have no idea why Drury’s novels are no longer in print when other and less well writtenmainstream novels are (think Valley of the Dolls again, or the anniversary edition of Peyton Place).  Maybe publishers think that the concentration on the Cold War will seem like old hat to too many readers.

But I come back, again, to the fact that novels like thse don’t sem to be published at all any more.  And I think it’s a good idea to ask why not.

But in the meantime,  I’m going to get back to Lady  Glen and Ferdinand Lopez, who is about to get totally, righteously and satisfyingly screwed.

I really wish I could say I’d invented the phrase I used for a title this morning, but it’s actually been around a long time, usually as a way to describe the nineteenth century novel in both  Frrance and England.  I was thinking about it, though, because of what somebody said about characters with goals. 

First, let me get back to escape.   I understand just how Janet feels about the word, because it repels me, too–there’s something about it that just feels wrong.   I willl say with some of the rest of you t hat there are times when my life is very unsatisfactory.  I don’t think it’s possible to avoid that in any life.  People get sick, people die, jobs don’t an out or turn out not to be what you expected them to be, relationships fail–and that’s assuming that you’re very lucky and nothing truly serious hits the fan.

But “escape” for me always has a tinge of mindlessness–of shutting down my ability to think.  I don’t think  I’ve ever actually wanted to do that, but even if I had,  I’m not sure I would have been able. 

And I do like arguments, at least political and religious and aesthetic arguments, and, like Janet,  I can be driven crazy by people who freak out and get hysterical at the first sign that anybody is disagreeing with anybody else.  If you go to the main web site this blog is on and look on the left side of the main bag, you’ll see an essay called “Jane’s Rules of the  Road.”  I wrote that in response to an incident of just that sort.

But I will reiterate what I said yesterday, and agree with Cheryl a bit here–there is something about focusing on my own problems that makes them worse.  That was true of writing journals, which, as I said, is why  I don’t write them any more.   But it is also true of the one or two times I tried “therapy.”

For me, there are two things wrong with therapy, at least as  I experienced it.  First was certainy the necessity of thinking always and forever on what was wrong with my life and what I felt about it.  Second was the need to define myself as sick, a requirement that was almost self fulfilling.

In that one period when I was severely depressed–so depressed that I couldn’t write, and it was long before I was publishing, so I didn’t have writing income (or lack of it) as an incentive–the one thing that helped was Doing Something, and what I did that time was to volunteer at  a call in help line. If you ever want a really fast dose of  “there but for the grace of God,” I’d suggest that you volunteer at a call in help line in Detroit.  And that was in the days when Detroit was still a viable city.

But the characters help as well, these days, and I still don’t know if they help anybody else but me.  Not only can I write about characters who have my problems and yet feel better about those problems as they have to do with myself, but I can read about them as well.  Writing is better, but the mere fact that the relative dying of cancer belongs to  a friendless young woman in Victorian London is enough to distance the issue from me.

That this is not true for everybody is obvious from those letters I get from readers who complain that they come to fiction to relax, not to read about all these terrible things they’ve got enough of in their own lives.

But the fact is that most of my reading isn’t in the genres any more, and it never was in any genre outside the mystery.  Most of my reading of fiction tends to be in those nineteenth century novels I mentioned, when the point of the novel was assumed by everyone to be, as Trollope put it, showing the reader The Way We Live Now.

At the momen, I’ve just managed to get started with the book I meant to read for Christmas, Trollope’s The Prime Minister.  This is the second to last in a series of books usually called “The Palliser Novels,” because the have to do–sort of, and I’ll get to that in a minute–with a man named Plantagenet Palliser and his career first in the House of Commons and later, once he’s entered the House of Lords, as Prime Minister.

And yes, I know. In these days, nobody in the House of Lords could be Prime Minister.  But  Trollope is dealing with a period in English history before Memebers of Parliament were even paid.

Anyway, Trollope’s two main obsessions were Parliament and the Church of England.   He stood for Parliament, but his career was not successful.   His more famous series of novels concerns the Church, and many college students over the years have been forced to suffer through The Vicar of  Wakefield because of it.  If that was all I had known of Trollope, I’d never have gone back.  But in graduate school I got the second of the Palliser novels, called Phineas Finn, and I loved that one so much that I went actively looking for more.

It wasn’t easy.  For a couple of decades there, most of Trollope’s novels were out of print.  For the graduate course I mentioned, we had to read Phineas Finn in a “miniature classics” edition so tiny it almost fit in the palm of my hand, and with those paper-thin pages that pocket Bibles used to be printed on.

In each of the Palliser novels, there are two threads.   One is the specific focus of the book, a set of characters who will appear in detail only in this particular volume.  This thread in The Prime Minister concerns a young woman named Emily Wharton and her family, thrown into difficulties because Emily insists on marrying a man–called Ferdinand Lopez–about whom her family knows nothing, and in spite of the fact that she is being sought by the nicest, finest, richest man in her circie, who also happens to be a man she grew up with.

Needless to say, Lopez turns out to be everything her family tries to toll her he is, and worse, and the novel follows the arc of the marriage and of Lopez’s career until both of them end in ruin.  Whether Emily will then get to live a decent life, I can’t tell.   In  Victorian England, a woman once married tended to be a woman thoroughly stuck.  But I’m interested to know what happens, and that’s what I was getting at about The Higher  Gossip.  This is the kind of information we are concerned about among the people we know, and sometimes for some of us about “celebrities.”  I don’t know that there is a goal here, but I also don’t think the characters just drift, as they do in a lot of contemporary literary fiction.   There’s a narrative arc, it’s just not about somebody achieving something.

The other thread in the Palliser novels concerns the Pallisers, and that amounts to The Higher Gossip, Extended Version.  I have by now followed Planty Pall’s career through four books.  This is the fifth, and there’s a sixth still to come.   The very first novel in the series traced the difficult early days of his marriage to the greatest heiress in England.  Once that settled down and the couple became committed to each other in every way possible, the books followed the careers of the two of them together, because Lady Glencora definitely “helps.”  She’s also a force of nature, which is fun.

The thing is this–I definitely perk up whenever one of the regular series characters shows up or has a more than passing part in the proceedings.  I like reading about Lady Glen because she’s Lady Glen and I know her, and that’s true by now of Plantagenet himself, some of their friends (like Phineas Finn and his wife, and a complete little tramp with money called Lizzie Eustace), and even some of the minor personalities who have popped in and out over time.

Trollope’s idea of a “political novel” is not what we usually think of it.   He wasn’t interested in the great issues of the day, but in the personal lives and careers of ambition of political persons.  You don’t have to know anything about the history of Home Rule for  Ireland or the county suffrage to understand what is going on in these books, and you don’t have to care.  What you’re supposed to care about is the people, and I do.

But that’s the question of the day–lots of people write to me to tell me that what they like best about the Gregor books is Cavanaugh Street and the community that lives on it.  These are the elements in the books that have the least to do with the mystery.   I did set a murder there once, in Bleeding Hearts, but I’ve always been wary of Cabot Cove Syndrome.   I mean, for God’s sake, it was a small town in Maine and it had a higher murder rate  than Beirut.

But why is it that I get excited to find series characters reappearing, and that other readers do, too?  What is it about the mere reappearance of such characters that can perk up an otherwise not very interesting book?  I do think The Prime Minister is very interesting, but there are a couple of volumes in that series that are less so, and they’re always redeemed by the re-emergency of Planty  Pall and  Lady Glen and company.  I know more about the domestic arrangements of the Duke of Omnium than I know of my own, and I’m more interested.

What is it about series characters that matter so much to readers?  Why will readers go on reading a series that has really fallen apart–and I know of some mystery series that have completely imploded–just to get to the continuing plot lines? 

“I love your books,” people write to me, “but I especially love te people on Cavanaugh Street.”  And I don’t care what the rest of the book is like, books set on Cavanaugh Street or with a heavy Cavanaugh  Street presence always seem to do better than books without it. 

I don’t understand this quite even as a reader.  As a writer, I find myself blowing h ot and cold on series characters.  Sometimes they’re just there and alive in front of me.  Sometimes I’m so sick of them I want to kill them all off in some literary version of the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre.

So, first, an update–at eleven o’clock yesterday morning, common sense somehow reached the vital core of the administrative brain, and all classes were cancelled for the rest of the day.  I wouldn’t put it past the state police to have raised a fuss–the idea of students and teachers slipping and sliding in what was by then a major ice storm, on top of the snow, probably had the Smokies completely frazzled.  And I don’t blame them.

I do wonder if my need to meet my obligations no matter what shouldn’t undergo an overhaul.  At some point, I have to admit that doing that is stupid and dangerous, which driving would have been yesterday.  Especially driving by me.

But–let me get back to murder mysteries for a bit, and to something people have said here on and off all throughout this blog, and that is that they read to “escape.”

It started to occur to me that I was taking this to mean something it might not mean–that is, that people read in order to shut down their minds and stop thinking.  That’s the sense in which I tend to think of “entertainment’ as ‘escape.” 

But most of the books I like do not allow me to shut down my mind, and it occurs to me that, depending on what a reader wants to escape from, he might not be shutting down his mind, either.

Let’s start with the biggies–I have looked in on a number of e-mail discussion lists, Usenet newsgroups, and Listservs in my time, and I have dropped out of all of them that allowed for “moderation.”  By “moderation” is usually meant that there is a topic for the list, and a moderator or two who will step in and end discussions if they go off topic.  Some lists specifically put some topics–religion, say, or politics–off limits.

In practice, “moderation” never works as advertised.  What usually happens is this:  Poster A zings off a round condemnation of Political Party B, and his post is applauded by Posters C, D, E, and F.  So far, there is NO sign of moderation.  None.  Then Poster G writes in to say that Political Party B is actually the most wonderful thing on the planet, and the posters who have been knocking it are not only wrong but misinformed.  Then Poster G lists the misinformation in the prior posts, and provides corrections.

THEN, and only then, do the “moderators” step in to stop the discussion.  They almost always complain that Poster G has been “uncivil” to the other posters.

Contrary to what this often looks like when you’re in the fray, it’s almost never the case that the moderator or moderators are avid opponents of Political Party B.  It’s not that they’re taking sides in a political discussion, except by default.

In fact, if ithad been Poster G who started the discussion and then received a lot of concurring e-mails for the opposite position, and Poster A who had written in to complain, the discussion would have been shut down then.

What the moderators of these groups object to is not one political or religious position or the other, but the mear fact of conflict of any kind.

It’s conflict that these people–and not only these people–find objectiionable, uncomfortable, and insupportable.

Many of the lists I have looked in on over time have been devoted to books, and some of them have been devoted to mystery books.  But it seems to me that conflict is at the heart of any crime novel of any sort.  A murder mystery can’t exist without a murder, and a murder can’t take place without somebody being in conflict with somebody else over something. 

So my first question is this–is conflict per se what most readers want to excape from?  And if so, why doesn’t the conflict between the characters in a mystery usually count?

Some readers obviously do want to escape from political and/or religious arguments, like that reader who wrote in to me to say that she’d returned my book because she read to leave all that behind her.  I’ve had other readers over time who have written in to say that a novelist has no right to put any political discussion at all in her books.  I wrote back and pointed out that the world is full of political novels.  She wrote back to say I shouldn’t write her ever again.

So is that the issue?  is the present day political world so distasteful and distressing that readers are coming to books to imagine their way out of it, or to imagine a world where those conflicts do not exist?

What about the personal problems of the characters?  At least somebody writing in here suggested that one of the things readers might want to escape thinking about is the bills–but money problems are often a motive for murder, outside the murder mystery as well as in it.  Does a character who is drowning in bills or has a gambling problem or is on the brink of foreclosure–all of which are solid reasons for killing off his rich father in law so that his wife can inherit–is that something that would break the hold of the fantasy and make the book no longer an escape?

Money problems was what were mentioned in the comment, but I can think of others–nasty divorces, custody battles, downsizings and firings, bullying at school.

If readers really are trying to escape from all these things, if the mention of them makes the book distasteful, I can almost understand the lure of cozies.  The world they present is fluffy and fake.  The conflicts they present are stylized and trivial. 

But cozies are not the best selling branch of mystery fiction out there, and in fact they do less well than several of the other subgenres.  So maybe I don’t understand what readers mean when they say whty want to “escape” into fiction. 

Is it all right for the characters to have the same problems readers have, because it’s a relief to look at somebody else in the same position?  or because if that character finds a way to triumph over the problem that would give the reader hope?

And then there’s that thing that somebody–Lee?–said about how the characters in mystery fiction have a goal they’re striving to achieve and that they do achieve, in contrast to the aimlessness of characters in more mainstream fiction.  Is what readers want to “escape” from just that sense of aimlessness in their own lives?

I have been beating the crap out of the prologue for the 2010 Gregor the last few days, and there are several characters there who are drowning in the kinds of problems I have, or have had, myself.  But I like to write my way through those things.  When I’m in the middle of them and the experience of living with and through them is fresh in my mind, I find it helps to funnel them into a character.

And that’s strange, in a way.  When I was  younger, I used to keep very long and detailed journals, “writing it out” every single day on every single thing that was going right or wrong in my life.  I gave it up in graduate school when I realized that those journals were the only things that had ever made me feel honestly and pressingly suicidal–for some reason, concentrating on expressing my problems made me feel so hopeless and overwhelmed that I couldn’t see the point in going on.

Giving my problems to characters, however, seems to have absolutely the opposite effect.  The only explanation I have for that is that, in the writing, the problems belong not to me but to somebody else, and that’s enough to create enough distance for me get some kind of a grip on them I can’t get otherwise.

A while back I said that I sometimes found myself rereading my own books, that I sometimes find things in those books I do not remember and do not expect.

The book I’ve reread most often has been Somebody Else’s Music.  I think I repressed a lot of what happened to me in junior high school, so thoroughly repressed it that it not only came up from my subconscious while I was writing that book but that it managed to bypass my conscious mind while doing so. 

In the book, I moved myself and that group of girls from junior high to regular high school and then dragged us all into another state, but other people who went through all that with me recognized it without a problem, and I’m only now beginning to get it all sorted out.

Mosst books don’t have that kind of an impact on me, of course, but I also reread Skeleton Key on occasion, and True Believers.  And lately I try to reread all of them just about the time they come out, because I usually think they’re absolutely terrible, and then I change my mind. 

Maybe my problem is just that I “escape” into politics and religion–arguing for fun was a big deal in my family, and if I’m excoriating  George Bush or beating up “the new atheists” for knowing as much about the religion they criticize as I know about the internal combustion engine, I’m not thinking about whatever happens to be on my mind for the day. 

Personal trouble makes me hyperventilate.  The Great Issues of the Day just get my metabolism moving.

I am writing this sitting in my office at home, and outside the snow is coming down steadily as it has been for hours.  Everything in the northern two thirds of this state is closed, except, of course, for the place where I teach.  That has declared itself open as f some time later this morning, which is going to be interesting.  The snow is supposed to be followed by freezing rain.  Even if I make my twelve forty five class–and if they tell me to, I will, because I’m like that–the chances that I’m going to have m ore than one or two students are close to nil.  But this place is like that.  The first year I was there, it waited until after noon to close on a day when the snow started around nine, leading to a situation where it took my forty-five minutes to make my way from school to the neartest Interstate exit, usually a trip of less than two minutes.   And I’m n ot ven factoring in the number of cars, almost all of them from our place, left spun out and disabled on the way. This is not the kind of thing  I understand.  Yes, certainly, there are some institutions and businesses with vital work to do that cannot wait.  The hospitals have to stay open and so do the fire departments.  Colleges and niversities can almost always take the day if the weather is prohibitive, and exactly what is gained by insisting on opening in conditions that endanger students and staff is beyond me.  

It is, however, the start of another idea in my head, so let’s go with it.

I was rather bemused at the responses to yesterdays post, which were mostly concerned with showing me how everything has become much more expensive.  I know that, really. What I was wondering about was why we are increasingly unwilling to pay whatever it costs to get certain kinds of work done and done right.   I think that the reason lies largely in what we expect to have in our private lives–that the Boomer generation and those that follow it simply expect to have a larger amount of money to spend, a larger number of consumer goods, and all that sort of thing, than our parents’ generation did.   It’s not that we don’t sacrifice.  It’s that we find even th idea of “sacrifice,” even the “sacrifice” of the trivial, to be unthinkable.

As to mass entertainment, I’m not sure what the responses mean–is it the case that it is no longer financially possible to produce entertainment that is to our present population what the movies of the Thirties were to that one?  My mother’s father was ruined in the Great Depression, literally.  He spent some time selling pencils on street corners.  She could still go to the movies.  It would seem to me that there ought to be something like that–something available to everybody, except maybe the homeless living on the streets–and yet there isn’t.  Even NASCAR and professional wrestling seem to get more expensive by the day.

I was thinking, though, that one of the things the Thirties had, and the Fifties had, was books, and most importantly mystery books.

For one reason or the other, those two eras coincide with “golden ages” of the mystery story.  In both of those periods, mysteries outsold every other genre, and mysteries were taken semi-seriously by the wider culture in a way in which no other genre was. 

In the periods between those periods–in the periods of much greater prosperty–mysteries tended to recede and horror and romance gained more ground.  In the Sixties, this was joined by science fiction, which has become the only genre other than mystery that intellectuals will admit to reading and/or writing.

But I wonder what’s going on here exactly.

For all the screaming and yelling about percentages of rising incomes and whatever, we’ve just been through one of those periods of our history that was just full of money.  A lot of this money seems to have been fake money, but while it seemed to be there we spent it as if it were real.

And in this period, as in similar periods that came before it, we saw a rise of books and other entertainment that focussed on magic and the supernatural–horror novels, certainly, but also “documentaries” about psychics and Nostradamus, claims made for mediums and mystics, a renewed popularity for Tarot cards and Ouija boards. 

Then there are the really bizarre new crazes in subgenres–vampire romance novels, for instance–coupled with the mind-numbing silliness of John Edward and the more extroverted of the faith healing preachers, the latter coming complete with prophecies of the AntiChrist and the end of the world.

I’ve never been particularly interested in claims of the supernatural, or stories about it, either.  I’ve read Dracula, more or less, and there are some horror novels I rather like, but I almost always like them in spite of the supernatural parts.  My favorite Stephen King novel is The Shining, and it’s a plus for me that you can go through two thirds of the thing unable to figure out if there really are supernatural things happening, or if it’s all in this guy’s crazy head.   I thought Interview With The Vampire was incredibly well done, but I tended to see the vampire as a metaphor and the rest of Anne Rice’s novels make my eyes glaze over.

And superpowers?  Please.  I’ve got two sons, so  I tend to get dragged to every superhero movie on the planet, but I  fall asleep in the fight scenes. 

I like the rational and the real world, if not necessarily the exact real world that I happen to be living in right this minute.   People do not have superpowers, so superpowers tend to diminish the interest of the story for me.  Vampires do not exist–except metaphorically, where I sometimes think they’ve had a population explosion–so I’m not much interested in that, either.

And as for vampire porn–well.   I mean, I’ve wanted a lot of differint things from sex over the course of my life, but, I mean…okay.   I was never interested in getting from sex a complete obliteration of my mind and my will.  And that’s a subject for another time.

But back to murder mysteries for a moment–why is it that murder mysteries seem to flourish in periods of relative scarcity and to recede in periods of relative prosperity?  Who reads murder mysteries, and why?

Let’s back up for a minute from that thing so many of you said–yes, you read to relax and to forget your troubles and to be entertained.

There are lots of different genres out there.  Why pick this one, why pick murder mysteries, to do all those things for you?

I want to talk now about murder mysteries in particular–not action thrillers or blood and gore Mafia crime novels or caper fiction–the kind of thing produced by  Agatha Christie, Rex Stout, Ed McBain, even Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett.  I know, I should pick more modern novelists, but I’m sitting her watching the snow fall and getting distracted.   It’s already nine o’clock.   I have no idea how I’m getting the car out of the driveway by quarter after twelve.

At any rate, some of you oug there must read murder mysteries, detective novels, that kind of thing.  Why do you think you do it?

I’d supposed that very few of you are like me.   I’ve only ever been much interested in the one genre.  I’ve read a book or two in other genres over the years, but nothing every grabbed me for very long.

So if you read other genres besides murder mysteries, what makes you pick up a murder mystery this time?

And what is the relationship between increased interest in the detective novel and decreased economic prosperity overall?  I sound like I think the field is actually bringing recessions with it, but of course I don’t think so. 

But there’s yet another question in all this, and that is the fact that the giants of the first golden age of mystery fiction are often still with us.  Christie, Stout, Sayers, Hill, Chandler, Hammett, Gardner are all still in print, and Christie at least sells much better than the vast majority of modern novelists in her field.

Logically, there must be a market out there for classic detective fiction.  Readers arre certainly reading a lot of it, and writers–almost all dead–are certainly selling a lot of it.

And yet, it is very hard to get a classic detective novel published these days.  By and large, if you want to do that and see yourself in print from a major house, you need to be writing cozies.  If you’re not, then you need to go in for a lot of very graphic violence, at least some very graphic sex, the sort of vocabulary that would have gotten you arrested in 1954, and an “action” plot that includes car chases, kidnappings, stalking perpetrators through sewers and at least one really good no-holds-barred shoot out. 

Robert has suggested a couple of times that people aren’t buying fewer books, there are simply more writers out there forced to share a still limited readership.  That may be true, but it doesn’t explain the present situation.

In point of fact, there are very few modern writers of classic detective novels, much fewer now than there were in the first golden age.   And they’re mostly n ot doing very well.  If the same people who were keeping the Christie estate more than solvent were also reading contemporary detective fiction when it appeared, there would be more of it published and more of it available more cheaply.

So–who reads murder mysteries?  Murder mysteries, not crime novels.  Novls of detection.

Why are more of such people to be found when the economy is tanking?

And why do they read the old stuff but not the new?

And why do they read dective novels in particular, instead of some other form of entertainment, relaxation and escape?

Here’s a question, related to nothing at all we’ve been talking about so far:  where did all the money go, and what happened to mass entertainment to make so much of it cost as much as a mortgage?

I’m not talking about the financial meltdown now.  If we’d been experience a financial meltdown for the last thirty years, what I’m talking about here would still not make sense to me, but at least some of it would make more sense than it does.

Consider the following:  in the year I was born, when my late husband’s father was making $35 a week and newly hired associates in my father’s law firm got $100, when the top tax rate was 90% and started at a hundred grand–when, to put it bluntly, we all had a lot less money than we do now and kept a lot less of it after taxes–the town in which  I lived built a new educational complex.

It was shiny and state of the art and spacious.  A whole slew of new teachers were hired to go with it.  There were new textbooks, new labs full of new equipment, even new sports facilities, which in New England is like saying “new unnecessities.”  Class size was set at no more than fifteen in the lower grades and no more than twenty in the junior high and high schools.   German was added to a language curriculum that already included Latin, French and  Spanish.

Five years ago, well before the meltdown, when salaries were twenty times as high and taxes considerably lower, that same town has found it impossible to raise enough money to do necessary repairs on that same school complex.  They’ve kept up with textbooks, but they’ve had to cut most sports in order to pay for new lab equipment, and class sizes start at twenty-five in kindergarten and go to thirty-five in high school.  German is gone, as is Latin, and French is offered for only two years, less than is acceptable for most college admissions. 

Where did the money go?  Why did we feel that, having very little and only limited means in the 1950s, it was feasible and right and proper to spend it on schools and other public projects, but now, having much more and much lower taxes, such projects are all “too expensive” and it doesn’t matter a damn what happens to our schools and roads and bridges?

Or take what I think must be a related phenomenon, although  I don’t know how the relation works.

When I first went to the movies, it cost a quarter for a child’s ticket.  Five or six years later, it cost sixty cents.   Movies were, from their beginning, an entertainment form aimed at people with very little ready money.  Now movie tickets cost nine dollars in the evenings around here and seven at the matinees.  If you’re an adult taking two children, it would make more financial sense for you to buy the DVD than to go tho the theater.  The cost of food and drink at the theater is high enough so that the total of three small popcorns and three small drinks would get you all lunch at McDonald’s.

And it isn’t just movies–try going out to see a baseball game.  Prices for season tickets for any professional team are crippling, single tickets for single games are nearly impossible to find, and good tickets have price tags that look like car payments.  The days when “subway series” meant that all these working class guys in Brooklyn and Queens got a few days out at the ballgame are over.  If you’re not working for  Goldman Sachs, you can pretty much forget it.

Virtually everything that was, in my childhood, an activity for people who didn’t make much money is now too expensive for most of those people to afford, or at least to afford on a regular basis.  When my mother was a child, in the Great Depression, when her father had lost all his money and there wasn’t much in the house from day to day, she could still afford to go to the movies every week.  These days, somebody in her position couldn’t go at all.

The mass entertainment thing is related to the public projects thing because in both cases, people who don’t have much are being deprived of something I grew up taking for granted that everybody would have.   There are still world class school systems in pricey suburbs, but next door, in Danbury or  Waterbury or Bridgeport, the schools are worse than hopeless.

And I’m not talking about pedagogical methods here, I’m talking about schools without enough textbooks for all the students, without enough chairs in the classrooms, with inadequate heat, with bits and pieces of floors and ceilings missing.

Yes, schools in rich towns were always better than schools in poorer towns, but the fact is that most schools in this state were at least adequately built and maintained right on up until the seventies.   Now it costs “too much money” to do that, just as it costs “too much money” to fix the potholes in the streets or get the snow cleared well enough so that old ladies don’t fall down and break their necks or put in a new sewer system.

Where did all the money go?  Why, when we had much less than we have now–or at least much less than we had a year ago–do we think it’s “too expensive” to keep up our roads and schools and bridges and parks? 

And what happened to “mass entertainment” that so much of it has become financially off limits to most of the mass?

Sometimes on this blog and in the comments to this blog, we talk about senses of entitlement and I don’t know what else, but it seems to me that we have development a sense of entitlement about trivialites–I deserve a $600 PlayStation 3–and lost any sense of being entitled to, never mind responsible for, the important stuff.

Okay, this isgoing to be short.  I was supposed to be writing this at eleven o’clock in the morning in a nice computer lab on the same floor where I teach, but I’m beginning to wonder if incompetent nutsiness is some kind of virus that’s catching.

Back up a little and look at last week, when, during my first class of the term, it turned out that our room had also been assigned to another class for the same time. Then we were told to use a room on the first floor, which turned out not to be a classroom at all but the Writing  Center, which is the place students go for tutoring. The tutors, obviously, objected.    We were then moved across campus to another building, but only for the single session.  The session after that, we were moved yet again to yet another building.  Why couldn’t we have stayed in what was a perfectly adequate and perfectly empty classroom from the first day?  If you figure that out, get back to me.

But really, that day was better than this one, by miles.  You have to understand that one of the buildings on this campus is actually used by three different divisions of the same university system, which explains why, when I showed up today, the room where I  was supposed to teach was locked.

This was on order of one of the other divisions, the one that technically has responsibility for that particular room, and the teacher who taught in that room before me made a  BIG play of locking the door behind him when he left–nope, nobody uses the room without getting a digital key from the division in question, which can only be had by walking halfway across campus to yet another building where that division has its offices.

And the computer lab?  Nope.   Open to that division and its students only.  How about the cmputer at the desk in the classroom?  Nope again, only accessible with a special code only given out to that division and its students…

And on and on and on.  I ended up sitting on a floor in a hallway trying to access and send e-mail from my cell phone, which aside from being expensive isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.  In other words, the experience sucked dead rats.

If I’d had access to weapons and the personnel in charge of all this, there would have been dead people.  I taught through a haze of frustration and anger that couldn’t have helped my delivery any, and I came home as exhausted as if I’d been cross country skiing.

No, cross country skiing is relaxing.  Or it used to be.

Somewhere on this campus, there are people getting paid a lot of money to “manage” all this.

I think  I know where we could make some targetted budget cuts in case the financial crisis starts to hit home…