Why Genre Fiction Is Better Than Mainstream Fiction

That title is my opening salvo, bound to be contested by writers invested in believing that the mainstream literary realistic fiction that they compose is not itself actually a genre. It is a genre: the genre that refuses to label itself as such. Because to do so would mean that it is not inherently superior to the "genre fiction" so derided by critics, and self-anointed Literary Critics & Arbiters Of Taste, who deal only with mainstream literary realistic fiction.

Mainstream literary linear-narrative fiction is a genre. It just happens to be the privileged genre. Privilege is where you don't have to defend your existence, and wherein your tropes and idiosyncrasies are taken as normative rather than highlighted as Other, as exotic. It is the no-genre genre, often written in what has been called the no-style style: that bland form straightforward linear prose that is storytelling stripped down to plot without digression, cinematic description without interesting lighting, and characterization more often based on type than idiosyncrasy (although "the eccentric best friend" is such a cliché that it's become a literary trope on its own). Even when mainstream literally fiction is written in a more poetic style, rather than the no-style style it is identifiable by those other characteristics.

Here's another salvo: The quality of writing and storytelling, overall, is often much better in "genre fiction," story per story, than is the case in literary "realistic" fiction. One may place numerous examples side by side and, barring personal taste regarding what you find exciting to read, just on the quality of writing alone many examples of genre novels are better-written than many in the mainstream. Writing that has substance as well as style. There is contemporary science fiction writing that is far more original in terms of style and narrative experiment than anything on the literary best-seller list.

Ignoring for the moment that "realism" in the novel is itself a construct, itself contested as a construct, itself subject to fashions of style and trends of subject matter: in fact the conventions of the Romantic/Victorian "realistic" novel were exactly what such writers as Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and even E.M. Forster rebelled against. That was at the root of the Modernist literary rebellion, after all. When Woolf used interior monologue and stream-of-consciousness in her fiction, it is precisely a reaction against the stifling mannerisms of the staid literary novel. As much as I think Willa Cather did in fact write one or two examples of the Great American Novel (I would nominate some of Stephen King's less supernatural fiction as well); as much as I agree that Jane Austen, Henry James, and Edith Wharton were great stylists who brought to life characters that we all still care about; as much as I agree that Victor Hugo was a great, great writer of fiction which he intended to be realistic in its depiction of natural and psychological life, real dialogue, and characters true in motivation to the psychology of real people: as much as all of that is true, once you've absorbed the literary innovations of Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, and, yes, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, and Samuel Beckett, you can't go back. You can't stuff those horses back in their barns.

What most critics of the contemporary literary novel do is pay lip-service to the artistic greatness of those older Moderns, while in practice rolling back every new idea they brought to the writer's table. The literary novel these days owes more to Henry James and Jane Austen, or Nathaniel Hawthorne, than any other writers. Even writers such as Mark Twain are considered to be genre writers, and not taken seriously as Authors; which is proven by the typical reverence paid to Huckleberry Finn as one of the Great American Novels, but looking askance at most of the rest of Twain's explorations, such as Letters from the Earth.

In response to critics who like to dismiss this literary-critical dispute as having been settled long ago, I retort that obviously it's not, else the Critics of the Literary Novel wouldn't feel a need to keep setting up straw men to knock down, on the on the topic genre quality. Those self-anointed Critics who would present themselves as the gatekeepers of literary merit and literary taste are fond of building canons, of lists of Great Books, and debating what works should be included in The Canon, and which should be rejected. Meanwhile the average voracious reader just keeps reading whatever they can get their hands on; as always.

Literature remains an artifice. It is art, but it is also artifice. It is made by artists, but also by artisans. It is a made thing, like a sculpture, a painting, a beautiful building. (Music and dance are a bit different, as artforms, because they also involve time. Duration is part of their performance, and they must be performed.) Literature is neither inherently natural or realistic: "naturalism" is itself artifice.

Some of the rise of no-style no-genre fiction can be blamed, and has been, on the increasing professionalization of literature: the authors and critics who make their living by working in academia, or in hosting and teaching writer's workshops, make up a de facto professional class. Writers exist outside the professional-writer mainstream, of course. And it can be argued that writing styles, genres, and indeed approach, stretch across all other boundaries between writers. But professionalism does have an influence on writing style. Robert Bly lamented as early as the 1970s that writer's workshops (which even he taught; you gotta pay the bills) had generated a stylistic (no-style?) sameness among so many poets, in terms of both approach and content. How many MFA programs in writing are there now? Several hundred, scattered around the nation and world? Lots of people write; more than ever. That's only a bad thing if there are more imitators of the sameness than not.

As to the quality of genre fiction writing, I find writers like Gregory Benford, a physicist who writes "hard science fiction," i.e. SF based on speculative science from astrophysics to biology, to be stylists of a high order. Sometimes it's as though the writing style is part of the experience, which style at its best ought to be, enhancing the reading by getting you deeper into the ideas organically. Not telling you about the ideas, but embodying them. Other hard SF writers who have stylistic chops include Kate Wilhelm, Greg Bear, Samuel R. Delany, Roger Zelazny, Ursula K. LeGuin, and several others I could name. The point here is that SF is not just about the ideas, it's about exploring the ideas in a literary way, with prose that involves the reader. The language envelops and immerses one rather than just being a tale told. On the fantasy side of the speculative fiction genre, great stylists include Patricia Mckillop, Neil Gaiman, and of course J.R.R. Tolkien, whose works helped establish the modern genre.

I would add Charles Williams, a friend of Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, one of The Inklings, whose "spiritual fantasy" novel are amazing works of fantastic fiction. In Descent Into Hell, one of his characters is gradually losing his mind in a kind of spiritual/psychological damnation, and the way Williams describes his inner world is compelling and frightening. His novel All Hallow's Eve is a masterpiece, beginning when the protagonist and hero of the novel has just died, and finds herself in an astral version of her beloved city. Throughout this novel, Williams' prose is amazing, perfectly tuned to the emotional pitch of the characters yet original and strange.

I could go with several examples. Suffice to say, one of the reasons I read speculative fiction is because it is a literature of ideas, yet if those ideas were told in the no-style style, they would be dry and boring indeed. The storytelling matters greatly.

I have few grand conclusions to offer, and I know the salvos I have shot across the bows of mainstream literary criticism will be greeted equally with derision and agreement. I do believe it's more than just a matter of taste and preference, though. I believe that it matters how you tell a story. And I further believe that the manner of the telling should reflect what is being told. That is the whole point of literary style, it seems to me.

Novels Are Not Non-Linear Enough

(This rumination was inspired by an essay by Jim Murdoch on how long it should take to write a novel.)

I love reading novels, although I think the ideal length for a novel is the novella, and most of what we get these days is pretty bloated. I read and re-read certain authors on a regular basis, and many of these are authors of novels. I'm pretty much always reading at least one or two novels at any given time. I read faster than most people, I have discovered, so I can read a lot more than many people do. I read broadly, with no loyalty to any genre of novel-length fiction except that which excites, illuminates, stimulates, and surprises.

I'm drawn to Virginia Woolf's least "narrative" novels, such as "The Waves," but also to "To the Lighthouse," one of the greatest novels ever written about the tension between the artist's temperament and the non-artist's inability to comprehend that temperament. I've read all of James Joyce, and most of Samuel Beckett. I've read all of E.M. Forster multiple times. I watch Doctor Who. I read theoretical physics, for fun, and because I'm interested in it and can understand the concepts if not all of the math. Richard Feynman is not over my head, but that's mostly because he was such a gifted teacher and thinker. I've read many of Michael Moorcock's books, including his literary criticism essays. I've read pretty much all of Nikos Kazantzakis, fiction and non-fiction alike, drawn to it because of his courageous encounters with the unknown mysteries that some call mysticism and others call existentialism. I read Peter Matthiessen's novels as well as his creative nonfiction, since he is a master of both. I read all of Jim Harrison's books, finding a voice therein that I feel kinship to out of similar experience and background, who is also different enough that I am stimulated with new ideas and directions of thought.

I read a lot of novels. Yet I don't read many bestsellers, as I find them very predictable. I don't many thrillers, which is what we call adrenaline-inducing suspense fiction written in the very plain "no-style style" of naturalistic narrative nowadays. And I don't read much "literary fiction," the genre of "naturalistic" fiction set in the present day, usually set in The Big City, that defines itself as being the only genre of narrative fiction that is not in fact a "genre" (as opposed to those categories booksellers use to help you find the books easier on their shelves: mystery; science fiction; self-help; etc.). In most thrillers and many mystery novels I usually figure out Whodunit well before it's revealed to the reader; the only time I don't know in advance of the reveal is when the perpetrator is deliberately concealed behind a screen of distractions, as I find most Agatha Christie type of mystery novels to do. I find John D. McDonald's and Raymond Chandler's mystery novels to be far more compelling, because they are character-driven rather than puzzle-driven, wherein sometimes their plots aren't very linear, their heroes and villains neither one-dimensional nor easily predictable. In most mainstream literary fiction, I am drawn to the outliers (Matthiessen, Kazantzakis, etc.) almost because they are considered outliers, a little bit odd, not quite in the mainstream. I was originally drawn to the Beats for the combined reasons that they were literary outlaws, and because several of them were openly practicing homosexuals. We find our (literary) role models where we can.

I do like to read stylistically experimental fiction (William S. Burroughs, Samuel R. Delany, Richard Brautigan, etc.), and metafiction (Jorge Luis Borges, etc.), but not because it's obscure and difficult—indeed, if I find it to be obscure mostly for the sake of being obscure, a kind of stylistc mannerism rather than form dictated by content, I throw it away—but because experimental fiction uses language poetically, in ways that shapeshift your mind into different ways of perceiving and experiencing reality. (Which is something that science fiction written from an alien species' viewpoint does too, at its best.) I like to experience thinking from inside the alien mind, even if that alien is a human from a different culture, or from a radically different psychology. I like to be surprised, and to experience new ways of thinking, of being.

So I read a lot of speculative fiction—which is usually called science fiction, or fantasy—because it puts your inside a completely different way of thinking about life better than any other literary genre. Speculative fiction is by definition a literature of ideas. Speculative fiction at its best gets my emotions engaged, because it is still telling a human story, even those told at a distance of centuries in the future, which actually is no more alien a territory than the profoundly human stories given us by Shakespeare centuries in the past. I've heard some critics argue convincingly that some of Shakespeare actually could be called science fiction, for the same reasons that Mary Shellley's "Frankenstein" is considered by many to be the first modern science fiction novel: fabulist tales told of incredible and amazing adventures in places not quite real, either in time or space, in which human beings act out the archetypes of story which such gripping writing that we are captivated and find ourselves mirrored in those distant and strange lives. Speculative fiction engages my intellect and sense of wonder, as well, because it is the literature of ideas. Sometimes it can be literally "wow!" mind-blowing, and you finish a novel that makes you think about things in ways you never had before. It can literally "change your mind," if you're receptive and open to that.

I read a lot of "regional" fiction, stories in specific times and places, stories written by writers strongly associated with particular places on the North American continent that happen to be neither New York City nor Los Angeles, the self-involved centrifugal linear accelerators of anointed Literary Establishment mainstream linear narrative novel writing. I like to read stories in places I know well, places I have lived in, places I love; places like San Francisco (which is always a character in any movie filmed there), Wyoming, New Mexico, Chicago, Ann Arbor, the Great Lakes region including Michigan's Upper Peninsula and Wisconsin. Fiction set in places where you nod your head in recognition of both name-checked street names and locations, and the habits and customs of the local inhabitants. Of course, by this criterion New York City fiction is very much a regional fiction sub-genre (albeit often a very provincial one), and so is fiction set in Los Angeles. One of the things that draws me to "regional fiction" is, again, that it is marginal, not in the mainstream of the East Coast Literary Establishment. I have lived a significant portion of my life in the "flyover zone" between New York and Los Angeles, and I find that writers living and writing from within the heartlands of the continent often have much more to say to me than do writers of the New England or Southern California literary circles.

I also read a lot of shorter fiction, poetry, and creative non-fiction. I probably read (and write) more essay and poetry than anything else.

So I read a lot of novels.

But of all literary forms, the one I am least, LEAST interested in writing is a novel.

Some of that is because I'm not patient enough to want to write something that might years to complete. It's not that I don't work at making art, and work hard at it, and give my complete concentration and dedication to everything I write. It's that I like seeing a project completed, and another one begun. As a writer, the creative process is what engages me, more than does the artistic product.

And there is also the issue of my fundamental mindset: I simply don't think in terms of narrative. I am science-trained and can think very logically and sequentially, but perhaps that's the problem: a carefully constructed linear plot doesn't engage me very deeply because it's too easy to skip ahead logically and figure it out in advance. I don't even think in terms of linear time (between theoretical physics, a lot of reading in mysticism, and Doctor Who, my experience of time hasn't been linear in a very long time), so making a story conform to the norms of a linear narrative simply does not work for me. I liked how Richard Brautigan used to break up narrative into small vignettes, not always strung together in linear sequence. I like Kerouac's stream-of-consciousness in books such as "Big Sur" and "The Dharma Bums," which is more like Virginia Woolf than anything on the New York Times bestseller lists. As a writer, I have no natural "feel" for plot, narrative, or even linear time.

I am not really a storyteller. Well, I am, because every teller of stories is a storyteller, but I'm not a "storyteller" in any conventional meaning of the term. Thomas Merton was a storyteller, so was Kazantzakis, but their stories were told in ways that no one invested in linear narrative fiction would ever really like. The kinds of stories I most like to tell, or to hear, loop around and around themselves, explore ideas from multiple directions, and step "outside" the linear narrative to look at it from a different angle. (Samuel R. Delany's "Empire Star" is a science fiction space opera that does this unlike almost any other, expanding the narrative viewpoint from straightforward linear narration to multiply-layered causal time-loops that drive the original story by making it happen after it had happened.) So when I act as a storyteller, I almost always get bad feedback from people who want easy, linear, narrative stories—I suspect because on one level they're comforting and affirming, a hedge against the chaos of life that gives comfort by giving chaos structure and order and narrative.

Yet Virginia Woolf said, and experience has brought me to emphatically agree: “Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end." E.M. Forster in most of his fiction has some sense of unexplainable mystery, a break in the ordinary plot of everyday life, which often cannot be explained but which always has a profound effect on the people involved, from his "The Story of a Panic" culminating in "A Passage to India." Beckett, well, Beckett is actually very funny, people miss that about his writing; but it's gallows humor, hospital humor, the humor of those who have survived the unthinkable void at the center of destroyed lives and need to laugh because it's better than crying. Joyce experimented with stream of consciousness, but in a different direction than Woolf; some say he went too far into the terrain of the unreadable, and some have tried to come up with pat explanations for why he might ventured off the edge as they perceive it.

I am having some short stories published early nest year in a literary journal. But really they're prose-poems, and pretty nonlinear. That's how I think, that's how I write. Not in any normative traditional linear narrative style.

But I'm an artist. I'm heavily trained in science, and I know how to think like a scientist, and think logically and sequentially, but I am an artist.

Art is not engineering.

Engineering can be creative. My favorite uncle was an engineer, an inventor, a builder; I helped him build a deck on his house one summer, which he designed himself, and the deck is still there forty years later. He had a very creative attitude towards all aspects of life, which manifested as a problem-solving approach to many things, and which worked.

I see a problem when artists start to think that what they are doing is problem-solving first and foremost. (I see this a LOT among designers and graphic artists, who are also very creative people but whose work tends to consist of more problem-solving than inspiration.)

One of the reasons I don't read many mainstream literary fiction novels is that I find them depressingly predictable, especially the ones oriented more towards plot than character. I find many substitute style for actually having something worth saying. I've read Don DeLillo, I've read John Updike, Saul Bellow, and many other darlings of the East Coast (meaning New York) Literary Establishment.

So I'll probably never write a novel. It's just not a form that works for me as a writer.

Well, actually, I might. I have it in me to write a science fiction novel, maybe two. I've had the basic idea and plot in my head for years, and someday I might write it. I've started writing it two or three times over the years, only to leave it unfinished due to other things becoming more urgent and important.

Novels are generally not non-linear enough for me. The novelistic fiction that I am most drawn to breaks those "rules" of "naturalistic" narrative rather than affirms them. Like certain theoretical physicists and mystics, I view that entire form of linear progressive narrative to itself be a fiction. Or as Doctor Who once said: "People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect, but ACTUALLY from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint, it's more like a big ball of wibbly wobbly timey wimey . . . stuff." Yeah. Exactly.

RIP Ray Bradbury

One of the grand masters of fantasy and science fiction, Ray Bradbury, has just passed over at age 91. It's all over the literary news, although I doubt many who aren't readers or writers will notice. Bradbury was a writer's writer, revered by writers and readers alike, who impressed and captivated everybody from generations of science fiction fans who later became writers themselves, to Christopher Isherwood, who thought Bradbury to be one of the most original writers he had ever read.

One mark of a great writer is that you can go back to their books years later and still have the same experience, be immersed in the same feelings and images, that you had the very first time you read them. They endure. The list of writers I can honestly say this about, that each time I read them is like the first time, is a very short list; it includes, among a few others, Virginia Woolf, Jorge Luis Borges, and Ray Bradbury.

For me, there have been only a few writers who ever successfully conveyed the experience of being a young teen boy in small-town Midwestern towns in summer as well as Bradbury did. His novel Dandelion Wine is one of the best novels I have read more than ten times, each time as fresh as the last. Something Wicked This Way Comes was a novel that actively terrified me when I read it as a teenager; and it remains compellingly scary. His essential short novel for young adults, The Halloween Tree, is a great adventure story that also is a detailed history of the roots and origins of the festivities of All Hallow's. Many people know Bradbury best for his themed collections of short stories, many of which have been made into movies, including The Martian Chronicles and The Illustrated Man. And then there's Fahrenheit 451, an Orwellian novel about a repressive future society in which literacy itself is banned.

Bradbury has often been ahead of the literary curve, writing in styles or exploring subject matters that other writers only came to decades later. His short story "A Sound of Thunder," about the dangerous changes in history that can be caused by tiny careless mistakes made by time travelers, has been adapted into more than one movie, has turned up in the literature again and again, been the premise of TV shows, and even has a connection to the origins of chaos theory and fractal mathematics. The principal known as the butterfly effect is what I'm talking about here. This is so common a theme in speculative literature now that it's become an archetype itself.

When I was a young reader, already having read lots of Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, and other "hard SF" writers before encountering Bradbury, and already having had some science training myself, I was at times put off by Bradbury's relaxed interest in accurate scientific detail; he openly admitted that he was interested in the human stories first and foremost, and often skated on the technical details. But my initial doubts about the details of his stories were quickly overwhelmed by the sheer intense and powerful beauty of his language, and I was quickly won over. What Bradbury was, was a master storyteller. Sometimes his stories were set amidst the trappings of science fiction, such as rocket ships, and trips to other planets, but they were always human stories. He made you think, and his stories remain in memory long afterwards. I can think of several of his stories that are clear in my memory still, in many different genres.

Dandelion Wine is technically magical realism—written long before that term was coined to apply to Latin America authors such as Garcia Marquez; so in a way Bradbury invented the style—but what is so incredibly engaging about Bradbury's novel is how emotionally real it is. It is incredibly personal. You know people like the characters in Dandelion Wine. Perhaps you've even been those people, at some point in your life. The episode in the novel, that was originally published as a short story called "The Sound of Summer Running," is one absolutely vivid in my imagination, because it perfectly conveyed the total experience of getting new sneakers at the beginning of summer, and what that meant to a boy just freed from school for the season—right down to the smells.

So I'm feeling sad tonight. I will miss not seeing more new stories from Ray Bradbury, who wrote every day for decades. I will miss Bradbury not only for his fiction but also for his commentaries on life. His book on writing, Zen in the Art of Writing, is essential reading for every writer. It's one of the most genuinely inspirational books on writing that I've ever read.

Finally, I will let the master speak for himself. Here is an excerpt or two from Bradbury's Paris Review interview:

INTERVIEWER:
Why do you write science fiction?

RAY BRADBURY:
Science fiction is the fiction of ideas. Ideas excite me, and as soon as I get excited, the adrenaline gets going and the next thing I know I’m borrowing energy from the ideas themselves. Science fiction is any idea that occurs in the head and doesn’t exist yet, but soon will, and will change everything for everybody, and nothing will ever be the same again. As soon as you have an idea that changes some small part of the world you are writing science fiction. It is always the art of the possible, never the impossible.

Imagine if sixty years ago, at the start of my writing career, I had thought to write a story about a woman who swallowed a pill and destroyed the Catholic Church, causing the advent of women’s liberation. That story probably would have been laughed at, but it was within the realm of the possible and would have made great science fiction. If I’d lived in the late eighteen hundreds I might have written a story predicting that strange vehicles would soon move across the landscape of the United States and would kill two million people in a period of seventy years. Science fiction is not just the art of the possible, but of the obvious. Once the automobile appeared you could have predicted that it would destroy as many people as it did.

INTERVIEWER:
Does science fiction satisfy something that mainstream writing does not?

BRADBURY:
Yes, it does, because the mainstream hasn’t been paying attention to all the changes in our culture during the last fifty years. The major ideas of our time—developments in medicine, the importance of space exploration to advance our species—have been neglected. The critics are generally wrong, or they’re fifteen, twenty years late. It’s a great shame. They miss out on a lot. Why the fiction of ideas should be so neglected is beyond me. I can’t explain it, except in terms of intellectual snobbery.

Those End of the Year (Reading) Lists

Those bloody end-of-the-year lists. Top Ten lists of the "best" of everything. The annual ratings and beratings and appropriations and dismissals. Lists of good things, bad things, nothing special, personal lists masquerading as definitive critical statements. It's just the annual ritual to make lists. It's the thing people expect of you, expect of each other. It's what expected. It's one of those end-of-the-year rituals that people do without thinking about it overmuch. They just do it.

I'm not very big on just doing something because you've always done it. I'm not big on living life by rote, by habit, without thinking about it very much. I'm not big on not-thinking, on received wisdom that is accepted without being examined first. Ironically, of course, those people who most cling to their opinions as being their own are often those same people who don't really have any ideas of their own, but thrive instead on parroting received wisdom. "Everybody knows. . ." is the phrase that most often precedes a flurry of thoughtless, unexamined opinions.

Most lists are pointless. It's not even that they're predictable, dull, and always the same sort of thing as they were last year. It's that they change nothing. The world doesn't ripple with their passing. So lists, especially Top Ten lists, don't seem very useful. Nothing changes: mostly the status quo is affirmed. (I'm not alone in this opinion.)

Far more interesting are lists of things people have accomplished during the past year, including such lists as Stephen Mills' list of what books he read. That's an appealing idea. It's actually the only idea for an annual list that appeals to me right now.

Yet when I thought of compiling a list of what I've read in 2011, to be honest I was daunted, as it's a huge list. People who know me know that I'm a voracious reader, usually reading more than three books at any given time; I read quickly, and retain most of it. I actually couldn't give you a complete list of what books I read in 2011, because I didn't count or keep track; and to be honest, a couple of months are blurry in my mind, following the surgery at the end of June, when the anaesthesia was still fogging my memory and cognition pretty badly. At the same time, when I was first recovering from the surgery, I wasn't very mobile, and sat around reading a lot for a few weeks. In fact, I had laid in lots of unread books on my sun-porch table, to read as I was moved while recovering. I got through some of those, but not all of them. Well, there's another surgery to get through in the coming year, so it's good to stack on hand for then, as well.

And then there's the long list of books I've re-read, read again, read for the umpteenth time—because as unfashionable as it is in many critical circles I do read for pleasure as well as for edification; so I come back to re-read some books every so often. Every couple of years or so, I re-read two or three of Raymond Chandler's novels. This past year also includes a lot of Virginia Woolf, especially To the Lighthouse, which I've been thinking about a lot this year, as a work of fiction that tells much truth about what it is to be an artist and a person.

I also re-read, as I usually do, some favorite novels in the science fiction and fantasy genres—as problematic as I find the whole literary-critical situation around "genre," especially in the way mainstream "fine art literary fiction" tradition tends to look down its nose at SF, claiming literary quality for itself and denying it to "genre" fiction, which is bloody nonsense—including a couple of SF series by C.J. Cherryh and Chris Claremont. I also read a series new to me, by Jack McDevitt. And some other SF classics that I hadn't actually had the chance to read before, like Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash.

Notable reading this year in poetry has been getting further into Kenneth Rexroth, re-reading Jim Harrison's Letters to Yesenin and In Search of Small Gods, and a few other things. I've found a number of small books by poets I hadn't heard before which I quite enjoyed, for example, Elizabeth Dodd's Archetypal Light and Brendan Galvin's Whirl Is King. There's been more, both critical reading and pleasure reading of actual poetry, as heretical as that seems to be in some quarters nowadays, a list too long to detail without having to spend an hour compiling it. I did re-read a poetry classic, Love Alone by Paul Monette.

I read a lot of non-fiction. I get a lot out of good creative nonfiction writing, on the level of John McPhee and Barry Lopez. This year I read a couple of Michael Pollan's books on botany and our human interaction with it. I re-read some Henry Petroski, who is one of my favorite creative nonfiction writers, taking delight in the things that people make and unmake. One of my favorite reads this year was Annie Proulx' Bird Cloud, her memoir about her home in rural Wyoming, which she built on land full of wildlife and beauty. I enjoy reading writer's books on writing, both memoirs of life and of writing; it's not that writers make better or more self-aware critics of writing, but when they speak as artists talking about art, it often leads to insights about creativity itself.

There's more, of course, but I'll stop there. Needless to say, reading is a continuous activity in these parts. I don't apologize, though, for being well-read. It adds a lot of layers to living. And makes life more interesting.

A Few Memorable Books

In the spirit of self-assessment and annual overview one nearly drowns in this time of year, I have put together a very casual, incomplete, and idiosyncratic list of books that I've read over the past year, which I enjoyed, which linger in memory, and which in one or two cases I have already re-read. This won't be another list of best books.

(A small disclaimer: People who know me already know that I am a very fast reader, and retain most of what I read. It's my secret superpower, if you will, and I exercised it a lot this past year, when illness forced me to spend more time in a chair than I was able to spend out hiking or camping or traveling. It's not an exaggeration to say that this year, I estimate I read some tens of thousands of pages with no special effort. I'm not even sure I can discuss everything I read here, without droning on and on for far too long. So this will be incomplete.)

I can give little higher praise to a book than that it lingers in memory and is worth re-reading. My shortlist of favorite books of all time would consist of those I've re-read numerous times, always re-enjoying them, in many cases always finding something new in them. The complete works of Raymond Chandler fall into this category; I re-read Chandler every few years.

This year I re-read large amounts of Virginia Woolf, including the short stories surrounding Mrs. Dalloway, some of the essays, and one of my two favorites of her novels, To the Lighthouse. The part of this novel that is so resonant for me is its close look at the lives of artists, the choices artists must make, the price they pay sometimes for being an artist instead of a "respectable member of society." This is my own dilemma, and it speaks to me in this novel directly, as I'm sure it has for many other artists.

This past year I also re-read Robert Heinlein's Stranger In A Strange Land, in the complete, uncut edition. When Heinlein originally wrote this novel, the publishers insisted he cut it by about a third, for length, and probably also a bit for content. After the author died, his wife rediscovered the original uncut manuscript, and it was published in uncut form for the first time. The general consensus between Mrs. Heinlein, the publishers, many readers, and myself, is that the uncut version is a much, much better novel. It reads like a charm, smoothly and effortlessly, and the added details and scenes make the experience a much richer, much more immersive reading experience. I had originally read this a few years ago, when it first came out, but my copy of the novel was lost in a move, along with some other books I've missed. I finally found another copy of the uncut Stranger this past autumn, and enjoyed reading it all over again.

During the summer, I also re-read large portions of Tolkein's The Lord of the Rings. Not the entire saga this time, I just skipped around and read some favorite sections. This time through, I focused mostly on the chapters featuring the non-Hobbit characters, mostly Aragorn and Gandalf.

My science fiction "discovery" for the past year—an author new to me, who I hadn't read before, although he's had quite a career so far—was UK author Peter F. Hamilton. I am thoroughly engrossed in his Void Trilogy, having devoured The Dreaming Void and The Temporal Void, and eagerly awaiting my chance to read the concluding book in the trilogy. I also went back and read the Commonwealth duology that came before the Void Trilogy, of which the Void books are set later on in the same universe. These two novels are Pandora's Star and Judas Unchained. The latter novel was particularly thrilling, building to a climax of both action and concept that really soars. Hamilton is writing modern space operas, full of imaginative technology, culture, and characters that move with varying degrees of success through their milieu. I like science fiction sagas in which the concepts are mindblowing, which really make you think, and in which even the human characters can seem quite alien at times—such fiction makes you think, it stretches your thinking outside the usual boxes, and at its best it creates in you that "sense of wonder" which is hallmark of great fiction of all eras, be it speculative fiction or otherwise. Hamilton's Commonwealth series of novels, which I mention here, succeed on all those fronts.

There seems to be a contemporary revival of cosmically-vast and wide-ranging space opera going on right now, coming especially from the UK. Alastair Reynolds is another author, like Hamilton, who has been writing really amazing stories. One aspect I find fascinating about this current wave of space operas is that the scientific speculation contained in the novels is cutting-edge, exploring the implications of current theoretical physics, nanotechnology, biological discoveries, and so forth, to create a sense of wonder I haven't experienced in SF on this expanding cosmic scale for quite a few years. I like this trend because these novels think big, as in cosmically big. Since I trained as a geologist, I got used to thinking, as geologists do, in two kinds of time: everyday time, and deep time, or geologic time, in which the mind must take in literally millions of years. When I read a contemporary SF novel that makes me think in deep time, across thousand or more years of human cultural and technological evolution, it's quite a treat.

William Gibson: Spook Country. Gibson doesn't write trilogies, but he does tend to write books in groups of threes, each novel individual but set in the same basic conceptual universe, and often with secondary characters appearing in the related group of novels. Spook Country is the second in the current group of three; the first was Pattern Recognition, which I read in the previous year, and which I thought was Gibson's most compelling and absorbing novel since his Neuromancer. The third book in the current set of three is Zero History, which I look forward to reading soon. Like Neuromancer, Pattern Recognition rewrote all the rules. This current set of three novels are all linked by being set in the very near future, exploring artistic trends on the bleeding edge of artistic technology, and examining the world as it has come to be since 9/11 when the Twin Towers were brought down. Many of the characters in this set of novels were directly, personally affected by 9/11. Gibson isn't writing SF of the distant future, he is turning his extrapolator's eye on the present, and showing us ourselves in a clarifying mirror. Pattern Recognition, in one or two of its climatic scenes, actually made me put the book down and weep a little. I cared that much, I was that deeply affected. Spook Country didn't affect me quite as deeply, but its thinking about culture and cutting-edge art was, if anything, more resonant, more lingering. Some of the ideas about art in this novel are so far ahead of the groove that they fall into Björk or Bill Laswell territory—two musicians who are always ten years ahead of everybody else. It makes for fascinating speculation about where technology and art meet and converge, and how new media generates new art, in a feedback loop of mutual discovery.

•

Jim Harrison: Letters to Yesenin. This is one of the great book-length poems of the latter half of the 20th C. I originally first read these poems in an earlier collection of the poet's work, Selected & New Poems, 1961-1981/ More accurately, I read through the Letters back then, but not that carefully, and they didn't leave that strong an impression on me. In 2007, Copper Canyon Press republished Letters to Yesenin as a separate paperback again, along with the newer poems "Postscript" and "Return to Yesenin." This is the edition I acquired and read twice this year. The second time, I sat down and read it all the way through. I have already written about how this book has inspired and influenced my own series of poems begun this past summer. I love the language and tone of these poems, which are basically prose-poems. They wander, they include a great deal of the everyday. They're not exactly lyric poems, they're not really elegies. If you read the entire book at one sitting, it reads almost like a mid-length narrative poem, with page after page accumulating to add depth to story and feeling alike. These poems were written at a time in Harrison's life that was hardscrabble, living poor on a dirt farm in northern Michigan, during which depression and suicide were never far away. This context is part of the poems' resonance, and it's also why they speak to me, in my own extremis this year, brought on by illness-caused nearness to dying. This edition of Harrison's Letters is also a clean, elegant book design, making for a whole experience of reading that comes highly recommended by me.

Sofia Cheviakoff, editor and co-author: Minimalism: Minimalist (2008). This is a thick overview of the minimalist style in fashion, design, architecture, and interior design, including a history of the style, and also some of its related history in fine art. If I had my life to do over again, if I were 20 years old right now, I would seriously consider studying architecture. I love design, and I love architecture. I would apply to Taliesen, the school of Prairie architecture founded by Frank Lloyd Wright; which is one of my favorite styles. But minimalism as a style also speaks to me very strongly. Ando Tadao is another favorite architect. I also love the work of Santiago Calatreva. I have visited Marfa, TX, the small town that became a center of minimalist art under the direction of sculptor Donald Judd. I would like to visit there again, and spend more time in silence with the art. This book, which is an overview, is also a bit of a manifesto, in that it explains a lot of the ideas behind minimalism. It took me a long time to read, as I savored it, and only took in a few pages at a time. Each section is dominated by photos with captions, with the occasional commentary by the people involved. It's quite thorough, and quite international, and quite compelling.

Two books new to me from Federico Garcia Lorca, one of my favorite poets. One is a newer translation of Poet in New York, by Pablo Medina and Mark Statman (2008). This is a luminous new translation of these incredible poems, en face with the Spanish originals. There is also an illuminating Introduction and Notes. This is probably the third or fourth different translation of Poet In New York that I own. It is a set of poems that moves me deeply every time I read it, because of the intensity and emotion. These were also the poems in which Lorca first began to be open about his homosexuality in his poetry; the "Ode to Walt Whitman" is one of the great poems of the 20th C., and I have read it many times, and responded to it, as a poet, in a poem or two of my own. My best response is often to write a poem, rather than a book review.

The second Lorca book is A Season in Granada: Uncollected poems and prose, trans. and ed. by Christopher Maurer, who is one of Lorca's most important translators. Many of these were poems and other texts I'd never seen before, so you might imagine my excitement. (This year I also acquired Maurer's Collected Poems of Federico Garcia Lorca, in the revised bilingual edition which also contains these poems.) This was an exciting couple of new reads, and almost-re-reads, that I am still going back to savor. Lorca means a great deal to me, on several levels.

Oliver de la Paz: Furious Lullaby (2007). I discovered this book of poems by accident, picked it up and enjoyed skimming it in the store, and found it to be one of the most exciting poetry discoveries I've made lately. I've written a review of this book of poems, so I won't repeat that here. But this book also inspired me to write several aubades this summer, as part of the new series of poems. So it influenced me, and inspired me, and re-reading it I still find amazing and powerful turns of phrase on almost every page. Truly de la Paz writes with his language on fire, writing eros in the complete sense of life-force and passion and engagement.

•

At this point I find myself wanting to include everything I read in the past year, somewhat obsessively prowling my shelves to remember. And then stopping myself, knowing full well I'm going to leave most things out. The best I can do is sample a few memorable reads here, that I would recommend to other readers. So you have to be selective. I mean, why do we read anyway? Not just for pleasure? Not just for edification. Not just for the purposes of engaging with the literary world. (The latter reason least of all, to be honest.) Not just because we're interested in everything, and have the long habit of reading everything in sight. All of these are true. I choose not to sort between them for which might be most important, or least. So I'll just dip in and sample some more.

•

Two books by and about the late, great Kenneth Rexroth, poet, translator, poetic champion, host of salons and readings, one of the reasons there ever was a San Francisco Renaissance in poetry. I found two different books at, believe it or not, thrift stores, the past summer, one by Rexroth, one a festschrift. The latter is The Ark 14: For Rexroth (1980) a book-periodical edited by Geoffery Gardner, a hefty 400-page hardcover. The first half is writings "On Rexroth," consisting of critical essays, discussions, memoirs, assessments; the second half of the book is "For Rexroth," mostly poems dedicated to and/or inspired by the poet. In the center is a small chapbook of a Rexroth poem accompanied by Morris Graves illustrations. It's quite a diverse anthology, with familiar and less familiar names comingling. I found this to be a valuable and useful read, opening some doors to aspects of Rexroth's poetry I hadn't encountered before; it deepened my appreciation both of his own achievements, and the impact he has had on 20th C. poetry in general. Rare and out of print, good luck finding yourself a copy; I got lucky, myself, in stumbling across this one.

The book by Rexroth is his book-length overview and essay, American Poetry in the Twentieth Century (1971). This is mostly a history, and a useful one, putting into sequence who influenced who, what little magazines were important to poetry in each period, and creating a narrative of 20th C. that any general reader would find helpful. Rexroth was ever the cheerleader for poetry, and there are many names he recommends that one goes and reads here, some of whom I intend to seek out since they were new to me. When Rexroth pauses to make a commentary or an assessment of a poet, or movement, or period, I find his writing extremely convincing. Most of the time I was pleasantly surprised to find myself agreeing with his assessments, as in many cases they were what I already thought for myself but hadn't yet articulated. He points out exactly what's right and what's problematic with the strain of inherited Surrealism in American poetry. Rexroth's assessment of Yvor Winters, to pick only one example, struck me as dead on target, both as poet and as teacher, and clarified many things in my own mind about Winters, whose poetry I have often liked but whose opinions on poetry, and poetry teaching, have often struck as incredibly, astoundingly wrongheaded. This was a very useful overview for me; again, though, it's long out of print, and you might have to go find it in a university library to read it for yourself.

Speaking of poetry teaching, I also read this past year the third, posthumous collection of writings about poetry and teaching from William Stafford: Crossing Unmarked Snow: Further views on the writer's vocation (1998). The book itself is a hodgepodge, mostly uncollected and previously unpublished articles, lectures, interviews, and poetry, all associated with writing as a craft and a way of life. Long associated with the Iowa Poetry Workshop, with writing workshops in general, and also known as a poetic heir of Theodore Roethke, Stafford is still controversial in some quarters, although almost always respected and admired. What I like about Stafford is his quiet insistence that the best reason to write is because you want to, rather than to impress the masses or achieve some kind of award-winning standard. There is a lot to criticize about poetry workshops and the poems that come out of them, and I among others have been critical, but Stafford manages to make it all seem effortless and inviting. He also addresses the role of critique and criticism (they're not the same thing at all) in teaching writing, and I think argues well for the supremacy of writing as a way of discovering the self, finding out what sort of person is writing the poem, rather than the emphasis (often presented in workshops and MFAs) on craft that teaches you how to write to get published. Stafford is actually critical of many habits of teaching in poetry workshops. I found this book quite refreshing.

•

Bernard-Henri Lévy: American Vertigo: Traveling America in the footsteps of Tocqueville (2006). Explicitly calling on the spirit of de Tocqueville as his guide, Lévy herein tours around the USA, meeting people, making interviews and observations. He particularly examines American patriotism, religiosity, and the return of ideology in its relationship to "the tyranny of the majority." I found this a fascinating read, as it's an outsider's viewpoint, but also a lover's viewpoint. The comparisons between American and European culture are very interesting. One recurring theme examined here is Neoconservatism and its political and social fallout, about which Lévy can be scathing in his questions. A very revealing look at ourselves, and a very valid heir to de Tocqueville's original study of American democracy. I know some people who will hate this book, which is a good recommendation in itself.

Brenda Wineapple: White Heat: The friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson (2008). This was very informative and interesting. I learned a bit about Emily, and her family and close friends, but I really learned a great deal about Wentworth Higginson, who was not only Emily's friend but her first editor and publisher. Some of her current fame must be given credit directly to his efforts to publish, and publicize, her poems. Even though he quite admittedly didn't really understand them, or her. (I wish contemporary poetry editors had such faith in the work, even beyond their own understanding; a lot more non-boring poetry might have a chance at seeing the light of day.) The history here is fascinating, but one of the best aspects of this book is how personal it gets; the excerpts from the correspondence are luminous and fascinating. There is a lot in here. I will probably re-read this book in the near future, and respond to it all over again.

•

I've been hearing a groundswell of reappraisal about poet Jack Spicer in the past year or two. This is partly because a major Collected Poems was published in 2009. It's also because of renewed discussions about how Spicer's being gay affected his art. Spicer is highly regarded as part of the San Francisco poetry renaissance in the 1950s and 60s, and he spent most of his life in the SF region. The book I found at a used book store, and paid a bit dearly for, is an old Collected, not the new one: The Collected Books of Jack Spicer (Black Sparrow Press, 1975), edited and with a long essay by Robin Blaser. This is long out of print; you might know Black Sparrow as the publisher of several West Coast poets, some of them not highly regarded by the critical elite but all of them quite popular (ranging from Wanda Coleman to Charles Bukowski and Diane Wakowski among others) among readers. Blaser was Spicer's friend and executor, whom Spicer gave his manuscripts to even before his death; I like this book in part because it is well-edited by Blaser, and because Blaser's own essay and commentaries are superb. I still can't account for Spicer, or why he is so often claimed as a poetic ancestor nowadays; in part this is because he is so revered by contemporary schools of poetry for whom I have little interest or respect (LangPo, the post-avant, et a;.). So I was challenged by Spicer's poetry; and Blaser's commentary helped me a great deal. But I don't think I read this book successfully. I will probably have to read it again, awhile later, to get more out of it. I want to understand why Spicer is so important to so many people; and I'm not there yet.

By contrast, the last book I'm going to mention here (I can hear the sighs of relief) is about a poet and a poem to whom I have always felt connected, personally and politically. The Poem That Changed America: "Howl" fifty years later (2006), edited by Jason Shinder, who was an assistant to the poet. Of course we're talking about Allen Ginsberg and his poem "Howl." I have argued elsewhere that "Howl" along with Jack Kerouac's stream-of-consciousness novel On the Road were the two mid-century works of writing that both reflected and galvanized the zeitgeist. Fiftieth anniversaries of both works have been prevalent in the past decade. (Although my favorite Kerouac novel is The Dharma Bums, which I think might be a better book.) This book is a festschrift, a long meditation by many writers on why the poem is so important, and why it was important to them. Even Ginsberg's memories are included here, but the most interesting essays are those that tell us why the poem changed the writer's life. If you want to get a sense of how poetry can blow your mind, and excite you, and change your life, this collection is a good place to start. Poetry here is not a cerebral, safe, unoffensive thing: many contributors to this collection talk about the Dionysian aspects of poetry. There's history here, about the poem, the poet, but also about poetry in general. I very much enjoyed reading this book, and have written about it earlier. I mention it again here because I think it's so worthwhile a book to read, and quite a bit of fun.

The Sweet Despair of End-Culture Snark

Finally having found and skimmed a copy of David Denby's book Snark, it has crystallized some things I've been thinking about for many months. Here, in no particular order, are some observations, not intended to be snarky themselves, but also not intended to pull any punches. Not that anyone cares, or ought to.

I am not a political commentator, and I don't intend to start. That is not my purpose here. I am going to make some general comments here about political discourse itself, but these are comments about style, about argument, about rhetoric, and are not linked to any given political position or ideology. Although one does feel it necessary to point out that the very values held by the progressive end of the political spectrum prevents most progressives from using the rhetorical tactics employed by some on the extreme right, and in some cases prevents effective rhetorical responses; this differing viewpoint can skew political discourse from the outset, purely on the grounds of style and values.

It's taken me a long time to work up the personal momentum to say all this that I have written here, and now it's done. For my own sake, just to get it off my chest. These are things I've been wanting to articulate for some time now, and now I have.

What truly concerns me here is how the corrosion of public discourse hastens the entropic collapse of the general cultural climate—this collapse itself being something I strongly believe ought to be resisted in every possible way.

•

1. First, I must disclose that I didn't do more than skim Denby's book before shelving it. Although I admire him as a writer, and have heard him interviewed on NPR with pleasure, and read other interviews with him with equal pleasure, the topic of this book is itself a seeping black hole of internet-cultural negativity. It's not something I intend to go wading in. I dip my toe into the edge of the event horizon, but I don't intend to let myself get sucked in. (The gods know I have had enough personal bad craziness in my life this past year and more, not excluding medical near-death experiences, that I feel permanently cured of going looking for snark and drama elsewhere.) The topic intrigues me; dwelling on the negativity of human affairs does not. The topic intrigues me because it is symptomatic of so many other related cultural phenomena.

Another, perhaps deeper book on this topic, Deborah Tannen's The Argument Culture, which I also finally found a copy of, and will also dip only my toe in for the moment, is a more general look at the erosion of civility in public discourse that has been developed in the public arena in the past decade or so. This has happened, specifically, because of the rise of new media, which makes it easier for everyone to get their views in front of the microphone, or on their blog. Including the internet, but also including talk radio as a format, in which opinionated argument based on neither fact nor evidence has taken over public political discourse, this growth of general-citizen media access has created a parallel universe in which people are content to repeat lies as facts, repeating and repeating them until they take on the weight of authoritative truth simply by sheer force of volume. more and more fringe elements step up to the microphone. The shouting ever increases in volume, while listening to opposing viewpoints, much less factual corrections, has not only been lost as an art, but in some quarters is actually viewed as traitorous. As Tannen shows in her book, this pattern of polarized argumentative opposition has infected every form of discourse in our culture, including academic study and classroom debate.

It's no wonder political action itself has become gridlocked. It's no surprise that compromise has become labeled as ideologically traitorous, when uncompromising ideologues control the discourse. The vast majority of observers, especially those who own values require them to be honest about all matters, are disheartened, despairing, and dismayed, unable to find a way out of the gridlock. As Tannen writes:

Staging everything in terms of polarized opposition limits the information we get rather than broadening it. For one thing, when a certain kind of interaction is the norm, those who feel comfortable with that type of interaction are drawn to participate, and those who do not feel comfortable with it recoil and go elsewhere. If public discourse included a broad range of types, we would be making room for individuals with different temperaments. But when opposition and fights overwhelmingly predominate, only those who enjoy verbal sparring are likely to take part. Those who cannot comfortably take part in oppositional discourse—or choose not to—are likely to opt out.

In other words, those for whom heated argument is not their default mode of communication often go unheard in public discourse nowadays, precisely because heated argument is not their default mode. I place myself in this category: while I am able to speak truth to power, when power is being abused or waylaid by disinformation, I am not a competitive soul. I am not a natural arguer. I don't enjoy it. I find myself unable to keep silence mostly when I run across something that is so blatantly misinformed that someone, anyone, needs to speak up to correct the facts. Most of the time the result of such speaking out is personal attack, ranging in type from verbal bullying to ostracism. When it becomes clear that no good deed goes unpunished, in venue after venue, one learns not to make the effort anymore; no one is listening, so why bother. Of course, this means that those who like to shout down all opposition win in the end. At least in the short term.

2. "Bread and circuses while Rome burns."

Most of the things I see people arguing about with the apparent full force of their fierce convictions are, bluntly, distractions. None of it will matter in a 100 years. Most of it won't matter in a month. Most of what people defend as political or literary Absolute Truth is easily shown to be provincial, personal taste, local and subjective and defended so vociferously mainly because the heat of argument is supposed to get one to overlook its hollowness.

This is just as true in literary-critical circles as it is in the political arena. A poet friend who is now a former poet friend—former because he had a paranoid meltdown precisely along these lines of discourse, ending up by un-friending me—used to be fond of pointing out that the reason poetry criticism can be so very vicious is precisely because there's so very little at stake. It does indeed seem to be a general trend that argumentative viciousness is inversely proportional to its necessity for living. Argumentative public discourse is in some ways a sign of a decadent culture, but its also a sign of a culture of leisure, in which an entire class of people have the free time to argue, rather than attend to more basic needs.

So-called "reality TV" is blatant bread and circuses. Not to mention that it's not very real, since programs are edited to create maximum drama, maximum conflict, even when there wasn't much really. Most of TV is bread and circuses, for that matter, entertainment designed to keep us from thinking too hard or too long about the real problems faced by the world. 500 channels and nothing on.

But what sweet distraction it all is. How honey-rich to avoid having to think about what frightens us. How sweet to feel helpless rather than empowered.

People will go a long way towards avoiding solving the problems facing the world. Sometimes bread and circuses is what people turn to when they feel overwhelmed by the real problems. It is escapism, it seems soothing in the short term. although it is in fact entropic in the long.

Denial is rampant. Denialism is particularly unforgivable when it's in the face of observed and recorded scientific data; at that point it becomes ideological denial, not experimental or procedural dissent. People don't want to hear what they don't want to believe.

3. One must indeed stand up for a good cause when one finds one. There is always good reason to speak out against injustice and hatred, including hate speech; to speak out against bullying; to speak out against those who cite inaccuracies, factual distortions, and outright lies to make arguments, to call them on their shit. As rabbi and mystic Abraham Heschel once said, A prophet interferes with injustice, often by speaking out against it when all others seem afraid to. Talking back to the bullies is sometimes unavoidable because keeping mum is worse.

However, not every encounter requires anger and an aggressive response. You don't have to turn every statement you make into militancy. There is room, in critical discourse and in general human relationship, for conviviality and cohesion, for compromise and agreement. It doesn't all have to be disagreement for disagreement's sake, and it doesn't always have to be stated aggressively from the very start. Civil disagreement is one of the first casualties of the climate of snark in public discourse: being able to say "I disagree, and here's why," and know you'll be listened to rather than vilified merely for your disagreement.

The culture of snark is frankly, blatantly manipulative. It preys upon, and relies upon, emotional reaction in preference to reasoned, nuanced discussion. Shouting down the other guy is considered good form, and ad hominem personal attacks are just tactical. If you can't knock down the other guy's logic, knock down his personal integrity. Go quickly for the jugular, avoiding even the pretense of rational rebuttal.

4. This entire problem in public discourse is deeply symptomatic of late-culture decadence. The old culture is dying: postmodernism is really Late High Modernism, not a new cultural movement but the end of the High Modernism cultural movement, its death throes. This is reflected by how the arts have become mannerist rather than genuinely original.

Reactionary conservatism, no matter what topics it chooses to be reactionary about, is always symptomatic of the dinosaurs fighting to stay alive even when they know they're about to become extinct. They fight all the more fiercely when they know it's too late. They try to turn the tide of change back, stridently proclaiming ideologies both regressive and oppressive. These are the death-throes of the old, not harbingers of the new. The lessons they have to teach us about going forward into the Unknown are, paradoxically, lessons about fearlessness: about how you can't grasp the future with a tightly-closed fist.

5. I have little respect for (post-)apocalyptic fiction, in novels and movies—what my friend Frank Wilson defined as "the pornography of despair," an incredibly rich and useful coinage—which has become so commonplace and popular now that people don't even realize it's a symptom of cultural decline. Movie after movie, novel after novel, year after year, the stories are all the same: the end of the world approaches, and the protagonists struggle to survive, to overcome, to stay human while everything falls apart around them. Most apocalyptic fiction is predictable in both plot and outcome. Most of these stories are familiar tropes, recycled again and again.

I began reading science fiction at age 13. There has always been a sub-genre within science fiction of apocalyptic fiction, of post-apocalyptic fiction. The current run of mainstream fiction and movies that are on apocalyptic themes seem manifestly unoriginal and repetitive to me, having read the originals many years ago. Most post-apocalyptic movies and novels these days are original only in their details, not in their grand themes. The classic post-apocalyptic satire novel is Walter M. Miller's A Canticle for Leibowitz. Cormac McCarthy's much-over-praised novel The Road was nothing but a rehash. (Both Roger Zelazny and Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, for example, wrote better-written precursors. And Gordon Dickson wrote more than one novel that serves as antidote, his stories ending not in nihilistic despair but in hope.)

I had a realization in 1973, when in the news yet another small cult had gone up to a mountaintop to await being evacuated by the flying saucers. I remember distinctly sitting in 7th Grade civics class. It was a sunny spring day in Ann Arbor. We were sitting in class, discussing the latest cult going to the mountaintop that had made the news. I suddenly had a brainstorm, a vision, a realization, whatever you want to call it, everything suddenly falling into place and becoming clear to me.

I knew with utter certainty that this latest cultish event was only the ramping-up to the Millennium. It would be followed by more and more similar events, culminating in mass hysteria around the term of the Millennium, and take another 25 or 30 years to taper off and fade away. I gave this overall trend, a few days after having this realization, the general name Millennial Fevre. (Yes, I made that phrase up myself; I've since heard others use similar phrases to describe their similar insights; although I must add that most of the discourse of any clarity on this topic has come from science fiction writers and the so-called futurists, social scientists engaged in speculation about large historical trends.) (By the way, I don't give a fig if anyone disbelieves this narrative of realization. It's in my civics class notes and journals from that time. So I know it to be accurate and factual, but if anyone wants to disbelieve it, feel free.)

The many little millennial and apocalyptic cults and small-time cultural crazy fads going on in the early 1970s were the first slope up the peak of a curved hill, a perfectly curved Gaussion-distribution hill, centered on its peak at the turn of the Millennium, and would take just as long to fade out on the other side. Millennial craziness was going to get worse before it got better. And it would take a long time to fade away.

I do not claim to be a prophet (although Rabbi Heschel's quote has become deeply meaningful to my personal life as an anti-bullying activist) but I was right on every point: things have gotten a lot worse, even though there are already signs that they will get better. We are already on the other slope of the Gaussian distribution—we just have to get through a few more manufactured and overheated Millennial predictions and events. The changeover of the Mayan calendar from the Fifth World to the Sixth World in 2012 is just the next in the Millennial Fevre sequence, following on the heels of the apocalypses predicted for Y2K, etc., none of which actually were the end of the world. There's already been a disaster movie blatantly titled 2012 made to titillate the masses with more pornography of despair, so that they remain entertained while Rome burns.

Fantasy writer Neil Gaiman and artist Dave McKean collaborated on a brilliant graphic novel in the 1990s titled Signal:to:Noise. This is one of the better novels of its decade. Gaiman and McKean dealt directly with the coming Millennial Fevre in this graphic novel, which depicts a film director dying of cancer, who begins to write his last movie script about the end of the world that was predicted for the year 1000. The lead character says at one point in the novel, and this is a quote worth inscribing permanently in your memory: "There is no big apocalypse. There is only an endless succession of little ones." Every personal death is a personal apocalypse. Gaiman managed to write here, in my opinion, a potent antidote to the pornography of despair: there is no big apocalypse, only an endless series of little, personal ones. That's serious food for thought. It is an empowering thought, because it frees us from fear of the end of all things by helping us realize that everyone faces the same end, in their own time.

This graphic novel introduced me to the concept, and the word, apokatastasis, which has become central to my own personal cosmology and spiritual belief system. Apokatastasis is the opposite of apocalypse: it is the realization that there is nothing, not one thing, that cannot be redeemed, given enough time. It is redemption, at the end of all things, not destruction.

There is an entire literature of apokatastasis, which serves as an antidote to the pornography of despair. This is a profoundly anentropic literature, rejecting both despair and hopelessness as erroneous choices.

J.R.R. Tolkein's The Lord of the Rings is not an apocalyptic story, as it has often been misunderstood; it is in fact a story of apokatastasis. 20th century novelist, mystic, existentialist, poet and playwright Nikos Kazantzakis wrote a manifesto of apokatastasis in his short poetic book The Saviors of God, and also in his play Buddha. Fantasy and science fiction author Diane Duane's entire cosmology, represented in many novels ranging from her Young Wizards series of young adult fantasy novels, to her lyrical and uplifting Star Trek novel The Wounded Sky, to her adult fantasy series that began with the novel The Door Into Fire, is explicitly and openly a cosmology of apokatastasis.

So, you see, indulging in the pornography of despair is a choice for entropy, for death and dismal hopelessness. It is a luxury that we can't really afford. The pornography of despair is explicitly and implicitly bread and circuses, because its message is that all we can do is stand by helplessly while Rome burns and the world winds down. It encourages us to do nothing. The message is: Don't form a bucket brigade to put out the fire. Bliss out on your daily dose of distraction, of soma (as in Aldous Huxley's dystopian satire Brave New World). Don't try to fix things, because all the problems are insoluble, and too huge to be solved anyway.

And this entropic lassitude, this encouragement to do nothing, to stand by and watch the world die, is why the pornography of despair is, to be blunt, a force for evil.

6. One excuse that is often trotted out for snarky public discourse is that we live in the Age of Irony, that public access to the revelations of the processes of political and social power, thanks to 24-hour media reporting on it, has made us all cynical. But cynicism is an excuse, not only in the artistic arena, but even more corrosively in the political arena. Cynicism is not a default state of being, it is a choice. Cynicism is entropic because it's easy: it's easier to be cynical than optimistic, because cynicism is like sliding downhill, following the pull of gravity, while optimism requires you to keep walking uphill.

Ben Lewis writes in his important article on contemporary artistic mannerism, "The dustbin of history":

Contemporary artists and their curators and theorists concede many of these [mannerist] faults [in postmodern art], but invoke in their defence a critical attitude towards their material. Yes, [Jeff] Koons’s shiny balloon dog is kitsch—but it thereby subverts hierarchies of taste in art. Yes, [Damien] Hirst’s gold-plated cabinets containing grids of industrial diamonds are glossily vacuous, but they are a critique of the society that admires them. Other artists have made works about their own shortcomings. One of Maurizio Cattelan’s brilliant early works, in 1993, was the installation of a live donkey and a chandelier in a New York gallery, to thematise his inability to come up with a good idea. The German artist Martin Kippenberger (1953-97) spent much of his (now acclaimed) career making art that described his frustrating quest to make important works of art. A surprisingly honest sense of failure, hopelessness and a bankruptcy of ideas are fundamental components of this end-phase of modernism.

This is despair presented as process. It is cynical in its self-recursive presentation of meaninglessness: art is meaningless, so we're going to mock you for knowing that by presenting meaningless works of out. Postmodern vacuity. Despair about not having any point to art-making—as Yeats wrote in his great early-Modern poem The Second Coming, "Things call apart, the center cannot hold. . . ."—leads to cynicism about the entire art-making project. We have nothing to say, therefore we'll pretend that everything we make is about not having anything to say.

It's not hard to analogize this mannerism from contemporary art history to contemporary political and social discourse. A sense of failure, of hopelessness—and of high expectations that generate more despair and anger when promises of hope are not instantaneously gratified. Never mind that change takes hard work, and can take some time: we as Americans are addicted to instant gratification, and this is fueled by the media.

We get impatient and surly when our politicians make promises that take time to enact: we retaliate by "getting rid of the bums," voting in a whole new crop of new bums who can do no better, and may know even less about governance. Impatience with the political process breeds amateurism—which is not necessarily good for the body politic in the long run. Amateurs ignorant of the process may be quick to resort to ideology rather than negotiation, because it's all they know, and all they are familiar with.

7. I used to be an activist for LGBT rights. I co-founded an organization in Madison, WI, in the late 1980s, titled Madison Bisexuals & Friends. We gathered in part because of the very first Pride event, a march and public gathering, that was organized in Madison. (The history of Madison Pride events is checkered. I've become involved again in the past two years, but Pride events themselves were sparse in the intervening years.) I was active for some years. Eventually, about the same time I moved West from Madison, I changed my activism to be more artistic than political; following the model of certain other queer poets, artists, and musicians, I made social justice and social change priorities in my artistic life. i joined the gay men's chorus of the Twin Cities in Minnesota, and later the famed, original chorus in San Francisco; moving back to Wisconsin a few years later, I eventually joined the gay men's chorus in Madison.

Now I find myself becoming an activist again, specifically on the topic of bullying, hate crimes, and the suicides of young men and women who have been bullied and attacked forced into suicide simply for being different. Young people committing suicide because they have been bullied for being different is something that raises my ire. I take it very personally, because I was bullied for many years, myself, when I was young. I am getting involved with anti-bullying and anti-suicide organizations and movements as time permits. (I am still coping with a serious chronic illness, so my energy has limits. I do more by writing than by marching, therefore, at the moment.)

This is necessary activism.

Not only because kids are committing suicide, but because the cultural environment promotes tacit support for those who hate them. The cultural climate of snark in public discourse is a default state of bullying. Think about it: public discourse based on yelling at each other promotes, guess what, more yelling at each other. So those who feel empowered by the argument culture to publicly voice their every prejudice, bigoted opinion, and hateful speech will feel no constraints. Idiotic televangelist Pat Robertson, who has a long track record of hate speech and parallel-universe illogic, has managed to blame in his own mind the post-Christmas blizzard that crippled the East Coast in 2010 on gays and lesbians traveling to have decadent holidays in Florida. People of like mind feel empowered by such examples to not only verbally harass others merely suspected of being gay or lesbian, but also to physically bully them. if you can blame a blizzard on gays and lesbians, it's only a small step towards stringing them up on a fence outside Laramie, Wyoming.

The verbal bullying of public discourse that hates and fears the Other creates a climate in which the Other is attacked, just for being Other. The psychotic fringe is always empowered by such rhetoric. Timothy McVey was no Islamic terrorist, the new boogeyman of those who need an Enemy to fear: McVey was home-grown, and his rhetoric closely paralleled the rhetoric of the current politically ascendant Tea Party. Think about what that means.

So anti-bullying activism is more necessary than ever.

8. Now, notice that the rhetoric of cultural bullying is symptomatic of end-times panic. Notice that artistic mannerism is closely parallel in its tropes and patterns to political despair. Notice that literary reactionary conservatism and verbal bullying share the same rhetorical language.

All these topics I have raised in this essay are not disparate, they are in fact all linked at root level. That's because they are all based on the same emotion: fear.

Fear. Pure and simple.

Fear of the future. Fear of the past. Fear of personal responsibility for the outcomes of our actions.

Fear of change, fear of what the future might bring, fear of having to be held accountable in the future for one's current selfish choices and actions—these lie alike at the root of reactionary conservatism, of the denial of global climate change, and of the pornography of despair as expressed in apocalyptic fantasies.

Xenophobia, the fear of people who are not like us, fear of the Other, fear of people who are different—these lie alike at the root of hate-crimes, of bullying people who are different from the cultural stereotypes of what is represented as "normal," and of political ideologies that promote conformity and intolernace at the expense of liberty and diversity.

Xenophobia and the fear of the implications of liberty together combine to ignite fascism. That which threatens must be repressed. That which exhibits manifest otherness must be made to conform.

Fear of one's own helplessness, fear of being ineffectual, fear that is really overwhelm—these lie alike at the root of the pornography of despair, of bread and circuses (and Emperor Nero playing his fiddle while Rome burns), and of the choice to avoid addressing both social justice issues and environmental issues.

These are all the same at root.

And they are all a choice.

A choice which can be rejected. Even if the Universe must eventually wind down to nothing, finding a deadly entropic equilibrium, we are not required to be complicit. We have the choice to resist entropy, to choose to bring more life into the Universe rather than let what life there is drain away to nothing.

We don't have to let that happen. Living with fearlessness is possible. It takes some courage, certainly. But mostly it takes the stubborn refusal to let the hateful, fearmongering, anti-everything, anti-life bastards have the last word. Speak up. Life needs you.

Dreams With Sharp Teeth: Harlan Ellison

Last week I watched an excellent documentary about writer's writer Harlan Ellison titled Dreams With Sharp Teeth, directed by Erik Nelson. I found it exhilarating, exciting, and inspirational. One thing you can say about Ellison: he's energized, he's alive, he's never been seen among the typically conformist creative undead. Watching the documentary led me to some deep inner reflections about my own life and creative work. I found myself, not for the first time, mirrored in Harlan Ellison; not an exact reflection, but surprisingly a lot more things in common than I had realized. Here's the documentary's trailer:



There's a lot of additional content on the documentary's website, also called Dreams With Sharp Teeth.

Later that night, after watching the documentary, doing some household chores, making dinner, I wrote a lot in my journal. I was inspired in part by watching Harlan's boundless energy. I decided to leave this in stream-of-consciousness format, as it was written that way, with everything all jumbled together. It's not artless to write this way, nor does it show a lack of attention, or intention. It does all tumble out this way, at times. Most writers choose to make it Look Pretty, later. But in the spirit of Harlan Ellison, uncensored and unequivocal, here is what I wrote. Call it a response, call it a personal review, call it crap, I don't really care.

•

I never went out today. I am experiencing a full-blown relapse of the ulcerative colitis, and it’s kept me down all day today. I spent most of the day thinking, reading a little, writing a little, watching TV. Watching a documentary on Harlan Ellison, a very good one, full of great quotes I wish I could remember. I realize that he was bullied as a boy even worse than I was, and that seems to be one root of his perpetual anger at the world’s stupidity. I recognize something similar in myself. I also recognize that Harlan is almost always the smartest person in the room, and he long ago lost patience with that; one of the things that really ticks him off is when people do not live up to their full potential. I understand that impatience. Have I lived up to my own potential? I’m not sure that I can say that I have. I have certainly tried to, and struggled with it. I’ve felt held down and held back, the way the bullies used to hold me down when they were beating me up, my whole life, and I’ve certainly not had the career success of a Harlan Ellison. His anger does hold him back, too, in that he is incapable of even necessary compromise, personally or artistically, and so some projects that should have happened never have. And maybe never will. I can say the same. I can also say that only now, in my aging, do I feel like I am approaching my own height of creative ability, my own peak, and getting closer than ever before to my own potential. I still don’t know if I’ve ever lived up to it, or ever can. And I feel extremely frustrated by feeling held back: by stress, by family drama, by this annoying illness, by being surrounded by stupid people or at least people seemingly unable keep up with me, and by the sucking black hole of negative depression and ugliness that I feel surrounded by so much, these past few years. People seem almost willfully to reject their highest potentials, their biggest growths and evolutions, their highest goods. Yesterday I wrote another Spiral Dance essay, which ended up being titled from what inspired it, The Most Excellent Human Quality, as usual only realizing what it was when it approached completion, writing as usual for that group of essays writing at white heat; I am always so focused on the writing that I never think about it till it’s done, which is as it should be. It’s wrong to call the Spiral Dance essays a series, they’re not; they’re more like a class, or genus, a gathering of related species under one taxonomy. I wonder if I have been too passive in life, too outward and other-directed, not driven or ambitious enough. Probably that’s true. Probably I could have made more of myself, if I’d fought harder for it, been more ambitious, more debonair, more in-your-face; in other words, more like Harlan. I don’t know if that would have made a difference though, and I don’t know if that other person would have been me. Are all writers introverts? I don’t think they are, but I know I am. There are times I wonder about all of this, and it only makes me depressed and mad at my limitations, my own failings. So I can’t afford to think about it that much; or it will kill me. I may have been made to be a monk rather than a writer or an artist, and everything that I make creatively is for me, only for me, in my lifetime, with the world never caring about any of it. Which is a Victim whine, of course, which I am also bored with. So I spent some time this week sending out writing submissions to various publications. Most of those will no doubt disappear into the void. Harlan is one of those writers who quite rightly says, and lives by way of example, that what matters is not the person, but the creative legacy. I’ll probably never know if anyone cares about my creative legacy, when I’m dead. I’ll probably never have any fame or success as an artist. Many days, that’s more a cause for depression than ambition; which is one way I’m different than Ellison. Yet I’m getting better about what Ellison says a writer needs, that ability to not care if no one else in the room agrees with you, or agrees with you, or what they think of you: when you’re right about something, and you know it, you just have to speak up. You simply must. I’m getting better at realizing that rejection, even personal attack, tells me so much more about the person doing the attacking than about the work under attack. I’m perfectly clear that when I write in certain kinds of styles, some people think it must be a mistake—but let me be clear: if I put it out in that form, saying what it says, you can be sure I meant it, I meant every word of it, and I meant to present it exactly as intended. The limitation is with your expectations, your filters and ignorance, not my intentions. But then, you’ll never make a lot of friends by speaking the truth. Any sort of truth, not merely that sort of truth. Ellison lacks a self-censor on his mouth, it all just spills out; even he knows there are some things that he probably should have sat on. I’m not as bad as Ellison about letting it all hang out—but maybe I ought to be. Maybe I need to be less Norwegian Bachelor Farmer, and more Harlan Ellison Uncensored. So consider this a warning. The gloves are off, the candy jar is full, I’m dealing with a chronic illness that saps most of my physical energy leaving me frustrated and isolated and lonely, and furthermore saps all of the energy I usually put into being Nice, being Polite, being civil even when it’s pointless. My lack of strength right now makes me less patient with stupidity, less willing to sit on my mouth, and far less willing to let my valuable time be wasted by the claptrap of others. Do I offend you? If so, perhaps it’s overdue, and you needed to be offended anyway. The thing is, you can tell that everything that spills out of Harlan’s mouth is sincere and honest and well-crafted, even when spontaneous. He is THAT good a writer, that good a speaker. I do not subscribe to the critical theory of snark, in which invective is what the professor uses to humble the students till only the tough and non-dilettantes are left. Yet I do see the value, at times, of telling people the honest truth about their work, and their attitudes towards life. I’m actually a very good writer. I can write circles around many people. And Ellison is a far better writer than me. So are most of the writers he thinks are great writers. It’s not a hierarchy of talent, it’s a tier of inspirations. In a way, I missed out on having a living writer as a mentor, because no writing mentor ever felt strongly enough about my talent to threaten me physical harm if I did not dedicate myself to making art. I’ve had some great creative mentors in my life, but they were guides, not goads. They cajoled and inspired and enticed. I never had a goad, not like Ellison is often a goad, in the writers’ workshops he’s taught, in lecturing life, and elsewhere. I never had anybody care enough about my art to threaten to hurt me if I stopped doing it. I feel that as a loss, right now, when I am struggling to have enough energy to even stand upright all day long. I have to force myself to do it. I have to take action. I have to take responsibility for goading myself. I usually prefer to cajole. But now I’m angry, and I feel like being a goad, and being goaded myself. If someone who reads this tries to fulfill that need for me, having read this, it won’t mean anything, because they only made the threat after reading this, which makes it non-real. When I recognize that Ellison was almost always the smartest guy in the room, I’m admitting that has often been true for me, too—but that I didn’t respond to it the way Harlan did, by trying to raise everyone else up. Most of the time, I’ve just felt isolation and inward loneliness, and even though I refused to let myself be dragged down, I still didn’t try to goad everyone else up towards being their better selves. I realize my goading is sometimes disguised as cajoling, though. I know that sometimes I write something inspirational, but there’s a fist inside it, an “or else!” that they’d better hear, or they’re going to fail, and fail hard, and it won’t be anybody’s fault but their own. I can speak hard truths, and hard spiritual truths—I exchange this all the time with my closest friends—and still make people want to hear them. I can be blunt to the point of rudeness, if it’s called for. So I’m a little bit like Harlan that way. Perhaps I just don’t think I always see it, or accept it, or act on it—and I have a better self-censor on my mouth. Better, in the sense of not alienating so many people, of keeping to the social contract; but maybe not better for art, for my art, for their art, for anybody’s growth and survival as an artist. When I choose to write in this manner, it’s not really a choice, I’m necessarily just letting it all spill out, and letting it be what it is. I don’t care what anybody thinks about it, because it’s the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. My responsibility stops at my skin, my job is to better myself, to take care of myself, not to be Nice to others. (Minnesota Nice or otherwise.) At the moment, being nice is in direct conflict with my own survival, and I will not lie down and die, just to make everybody not hate me. Where do we learn to do that, anyway? At our mothers’ knees? In school, getting beat up every day by bullies? In church, being told to sit quietly and conform in thought to what we’re being told is true? (Especially when it’s not.) Where do we learn to just take it and lie down and die, just to make everybody love us? Of course, that’s not really love, that’s just a lack of disapproval, an absence of malice. Sometimes the bullies have no reason for why they want to beat you up, you didn’t make them do that, and not even your mother will understand. And that’s a major revelation in the frontier of self-awareness and the dawning light within. I’m more like Harlan Ellison than I ever realized, and at the moment, that makes me happy.

Genre vs. Mainstream Fiction: a critique of criticism

As genres, science fiction and mystery/suspense have suffered a great deal of adversity in this century. They have been dismissed, variously, as “trash,” as “second-class literature,” as “entertainment for juveniles and juvenile minds”; they are the victims of such base canards as “Science fiction is a lot of nonsense about rocket ships and bug-eyed monsters” and “The mystery is a mindless celebration of death and despair.” The struggle of one is the struggle of the other: to abolish these ridiculous labels, to command acceptance as serious art forms, to prove to the world-at-large that work of quality and significance can be and is being done by writers who have chosen these fields—not been forced into them because of limited talent and limited vision.

It is the writers of mystery/suspense and science fiction, of course, who best understand this common cause. While some of them in each genre may be indifferent to the work of their counterparts, there is an almost universal respect for the professional of their respective endeavors. (Good writing is good writing, after all, no matter what the subject matter, style, theme, intent, or vision. And bad writing is no more prevalent in one field than in the other; in fact, it is my opinion that, on the whole, there is less of it in science fiction and mystery/suspense than in other categories and even in the so-called “mainstream” of fiction.)

This respect and kinship between the writers of the two genres is evident in the remarkable number who work, frequently or occasionally, in BOTH fields with considerable success. Every year, prominent figures in one category publish first-rate stories and novels in the other. Some of these are wholly mystery/suspense or wholly science fiction; and some of them are an amalgam of the two—the crime story as seen through the eye of the SF writer, the SF extrapolation as envisioned by the mystery writer.
—Bill Pronzini, from the “Introduction” to Dark Sins, Dark Dreams: Crime in Science Fiction, edited by Barry N. Malzberg and Bill Pronzini.

•

The mystery and science fiction . . . two genres born as discrete categories in America almost a hundred years apart but from the advent of the pulp magazines following rather parallel courses. Two genres which have yet to win full academic acceptance (although they are getting closer for reasons which give no credit to the academy). but whose best practitioners—Chandler, Hammett, Woolrich, Bester, Knight, Silverberg—have always done work to equal or surpass the best work done anywhere. There are quite a few stories which are fusions of the genres, among which we hope we have found some distinguished examples.

Genre fiction by definition operates with parameters, plays by certain rules. In the mystery it is crime, in science fiction it is an extrapolated technology or social system, in both (if the work is to successfully meet the criteria of the genre) the plot must turn on these central elements. Certain writers, Raymond Chandler being the most notable example, chafed at the restrictions; others like Alfred Bester gloried in them exactly as J. S. Bach found the greatest freedom within the tightest limitations of those ancient forms, the canon and the fugue. In specificity, in rigor, is the greatest freedom perhaps: one can thus at least attempt an argument that the most important fiction of our time is being done within these two genres.
—Barry N. Malzberg, from the “Afterword” to the same anthology

•

This is perhaps one of the better descriptions of the tension between “genre” writing and “mainstream” writing that I’ve ever encountered. These essays were written in 1978, but remain entirely relevant today—perhaps more so, because if anything has changed, it’s that the literary mainstream has become even more defensive and prickly as it feels itself more and more embattled. The dismissive nature of literary-critical rhetoric against the genres is if anything more vitriolic than ever, nowadays. It’s very easy, however, to try to raise oneself up by knocking others down; except that it never works.

Whenever you read a literary critic, or Critic—think of Harold Bloom, James Woods, or any number of high-profile litbloggers with academic ties—marking a rear-guard defensive position against the barbarians assaulting the gates of taste, quality, and virtue, just remember the concluding line of Constantine Cavafy’s great poem Waiting for the Barbarians, which reads: “Those people were a kind of solution.” It’s true that few things unite antagonistic opinions than finding something to disparage in common. The enemy of my enemy is my friend, as the saying goes. But these temporary alliances of mutual hatred, especially in a game with so little at stake as literary criticism, are fragile and cannibalistic. It takes nothing to turn on each other, once the common enemy has fled or been trounced. “Those people” are a solution only if they agree to be antagonists when you need them to be. A great deal of literary-critical gesticulating is centered on the "Us vs. Them" paradigm so common to manifesto scribes and defenders of one literary -ism or another. (Most of the rhetoric of the "post-avant" theorists in poetry is Us vs. Them, with Them being anyone they dismiss as not worthy of being Us—which is almost everybody.)

The default position of literary criticism, most of the time, is defensive, rather than appreciative. It tends to be the more defensive-minded critics, too, who tend to play the game of canon-making. That is, when conservation becomes preservative conservatism, and description yields to prescription in any artistic matter, not how often the tactics are identical. They are the mark of an ideology in play, rather than an open and observant mind with no particular agenda. Ideologues tend to build canons is support of their ideas. Most readers just read eclectically for pleasure, and don’t care about making lists, except perhaps personal lists of favorite books.

Why is a list of favorite books to be rejected in favor of a generated canon? Perhaps it’s the academic cloak of authority, the voice of doom speaking its pronouncements with so much heat and so little light, that it’s enough to fool the rubes.

In all this, appreciation and responsive reviewing all too often is lost, or often just rejected.. What happened to reading for pure pleasure? A well-written, idea-generating, imaginative scenario opens the door to reading pleasure no matter what style or topics are involved. This is as true of the literary avant-garde as it is of more mainstream writing. Good writing is good writing, no matter where it appears.

The influence of Modernism and its more avant-garde authors on science fiction stimulated the New Wave of the late 1960s and early 1970s, which brought to prominence in SF several authors whose work was as ambitious in terms of literary style as it was in terms of content. Robert Silverberg was only one of these. (This was also the first wave of SF stories that didn’t tone down overt sexuality, as was the rule in the pulp magazines, but in fact viewed sex as one more aspect of life to extrapolate upon.) One of the greatest SF anthologies of this period, Dangerous Visions, edited by literary enfant terrible Harlan Ellison, helped set the tone for the New Wave, and is a record of many successful literary SF experiments. In terms of influence, this was a generation of writers to whom Finnegan’s Wake was what had shocked their parents, not themselves; they read Joyce (and Stein and Beckett and that generation of writers who invented literary Modernism) as accepted literature, not as avant-garde. Some writers within the New Wave, notably Samuel R. Delany, went on to overtly incorporate advanced literary and philosophical critical theory into his SF and fantasy stories—which remain intensely readable, often stunningly beautiful, moving, and mind-blowing. Perhaps one ought to say, demi-monde-blowing. Other writers, such as Roger Zelazny, were lifelong fonts of imaginative exploration in which the style of the writing matched what was being written about, making reading into a visceral sensory immersive experience, rather than a cerebral parlor one.

It’s the self-appointed conservator of literary taste, in literary criticism, who is most toxic of all. This sort of critic—excuse me, Critic, especially a Critic with a Grand Theory—is often quickest to reject personal pleasure as any measure of a good read. This is de facto Puritanism, a basically anti-sensual attitude about reading: it’s supposed to be good for you, perhaps especially if you don’t actually enjoy it. It’s the castor oil school of Criticism: you don’t have to like it, but you need to read it, because it’s good for you, because you need to know about it. It is moralizing disguised as literary theory. (Zelazny for one pointedly and often hilariously parodied this critical attitude in numerous tales.) I’m sorry to say, Mr. Critic, but even though it was supposed to be hard going and hard to understand, I actually enjoyed reading Finnegan’s Wake; in fact, it made me laugh out loud a few times. (I am constantly amazed at how many opinions float about on books that the critic hasn't actually read, especially "difficult;" in my own case, if you hear me discuss a book, even a difficult one, you can be sure I've read it, unless I stipulate otherwise.)

Which is why canon-making is so fraught with disasters. The endlessly compiled lists of “great” or “best” or even “good” books will be always controversial because taste and pleasure are not as separable as some academic theorists would surmise. (The word “taste” is itself as sensory word.) In fact, the chief weakness of canon-building is that it is fraught with concealed and denied subjectivity, choices made on extra-literary matters of just plain liking the book, or what the book was about.

Don't get me wrong: what I object to is not that a canon-builder liked a work; what I object to is that simple pleasure is concealed as grand theory. Perhaps it is too easy when wielding Grand Theories to give in to the temptation to justify and rationalize matters of taste as matters of Quality; tempting, but also dishonest. When a book reviewer presents a list of books he or she enjoyed reading, there's no pressure to defend the choices made on the grounds that they are Great Art. This is by far the more honest approach to literary recommendation. It is almost always possible to discover a hidden agenda, usually a moral stance, behind the choices made in a Canon of Great Books; and the moral agenda is all too often the castor oil school of Criticism.

The simple pleasure principle of enjoying reading is underrated, it seems to me, by most serious literary critics. The Harry Potter books have brought so many children back to the pleasures of reading precisely because they’re fun, they’re fizzy, and they contain deeper, darker truths under the fizzy surface. What literary merit they might have, if any, is secondary to the fact that they inspired an entire generation of kids raised on TV and computers to discover anew the simple pleasures of reading a book. Yet can you imagine Harold Bloom admitting that he actually enjoyed reading a Harry Potter novel? (Assuming he ever would.) When one wears the mantle of literary-critical authority, self-appointed or otherwise, one must never reveal that the man behind the curtain is no wizard, but a snake oil salesman. So it's not pleasure in reading that I object to, it's the hardcore-adult notion that one mustn't admit to it.

Hardcore adults, who have forgotten that once too were children (at least theoretically they were), and have forgotten how to play, often reject the uses of pleasure. if you encounter a Serious Critic with a list of pronouncements in hand, you can be sure most of them will be Serious, rather than playful. How dreadfully dull.

Reading is supposed to be fun.

Malzberg concludes his “Introduction” with:

But not to be pompous. This is a genre book, a category book if your will; it will go into bookstores and libraries, it will go out of print, but ten or twenty years from now someone will have been reached by this book just as I was reached by genre or category hardcover books which were mine to behold a quarter of a century ago. . . .

And that’s the only true test of literature—keeping in mind that “mainstream fiction” can be categorized as just another genre, with its own inherent rules and limits—which is the test of time, of endurance, of resonance down the years to keep re-exciting another new generation into the pleasures and perils of reading.