Books, words, authors, and all that jazz

There have always been poorly-written books. The penny dreadfuls, the sappy romances, the Westerns of a century ago, were the staple of the average readers. They sold in the thousands and rarely made their authors rich.  Most have vanished without a trace-- all the better--but they have left a legacy of something we could call the $20-dreadful, the truly awful books that in turn become truly awful movies that somehow make bad authors into respectable writers, while earning them millions.

Since you ask, here’s what I think is wrong: We’ve created a population of bad readers willing to accept awful plotting, dismal grammar and two-dimensional characters. Our schools have brought forth people who have never really been taught to read properly, i.e. to appreciate that a good book is not necessarily an adventure without bruises or scrapes. It will take more effort to get through War and Peace than it will to read The Da Vinci Code but in the end Leo Tolstoy is more satisfying than Dan Brown.

What increasingly bothers me is that trivial writers are being feted as if they were good ones, and merely good ones are being treated as if they’re extraordinary. I recently read a book by Dennis Lehane, an author whom I generally like and whose career has included best-sellers and motion pictures, and it was disturbingly obvious that, in spite of the praise amassed for his latest opus, he was coasting on past glory. The lead character was not so much poorly drawn as without substance. The story was at best uninteresting and without much of a plot, and though Lehane prides himself on his historical accuracy, in this book it was lacking. Or perhaps not so much lacking as undeveloped…

Even one of my favorite writers, James Lee Burke, can err on the side of the unreadable. Consider this sentence: “Twenty four hours later, at sunset, the sky turned to turquoise; then the strips of black cloud along the horizon were backlit with red brilliance that was like the glow of a forge, as though the cooling of the day were about to set into abeyance so the sun’s heat could prevail through the night into the following dawn.” I think what this 59-word epiphany means is, “The sun was setting and it was still hot.” Burke is a man with an uncommon liking for stringing words together in unending streams. He likes overwrought images, confusing palettes of bright colors, and pages of introverted meanderings. Sometimes it works, most times it does not.

Maybe I’m being unkind. Certainly I believe in writing as universal therapy. Whether as a writer or a reader, words take us from the dismal to the godly and back. But poorly arranged, thoughtlessly pasted together, they can also confuse, frustrate, anger and annoy. Sometimes I even gnash my teeth.

Me, I have a great respect for words. I think they’re one of mankind’s best inventions, allowing us to communicate the felt and the unseen and oput meanings to emotions that otherwise would remain undisclosed.  I suppose this is why I get exasperated when they’re used shoddily.

 

 

WTF Part 1

Three or four times a day I stop moving, stand stock still and ask, “What happened?” It’s not a metaphorical question but a real expression of wonder. “What happened?” How did I end up living in the suburbs of Washington DC in a post-Korean War bungalow that originally sold for $22,000? How did I end up by myself in the United States of America after spending the first few years of my life quite contentedly in Paris, France?  How is it that none of the plans worked out as they were supposed to and that the immediate future, if not bleak, appears at best unpromising?

I’m not the only one asking questions. Many friends I’ve surveyed whose ages range from very early 40s to mid-60s seem to be struggling with this existential angst. The stuff that has happened in one brief lifetime is staggering, almost too much too handle for a lot of folks in my age range. I grew up without computers, with a single corded phone in the kitchen, with daily shopping for foodstuff. The apartment where I lived in Paris had no television or refrigerator. There was a small icebox that was replenished daily by a delivery from the iceman and there were times when we were hungry and ate soup made from yesterday’s bread.

When I first came to the US, my parents bought a house in nearby Maryland. There was no air conditioning; fans barely stirred the air in summer and in winter a central oil burning furnace tried to keep away the chill. Gasoline cost thirty-five cents a gallon and my first car was a 1953 Buick Roadmaster, a monster of an automobile with a giant visor over the windshield. The tiny refrigerator my mother was so proud of had two aluminum ice trays with levers to crack the ice and one of the bigger household sin was using the ice and not refilling the trays.

I’ve had the amazingly good fortune of living here. I’ve written books, had songs recorded, and played my music on stage. I’ve written for some of the nation’s best newspapers and magazines, interviewed a host of luminaries that have included Margaret Meade, Lou Reed and Jesse Owens. I’ve been almost killed three times, and am waging my second bout against cancer. I’ve been married and divorced twice and now live by myself with a cat in a house I will soon have to sell. What happened?

The career, not too meticulously planned, involved leaving a well-paying but increasingly stultifying job with a UN organization, and picking up my writing where I’d left it a few years before.  I’d published three books to pretty good reviews and anticipated little difficulties writing more. I was wrong. The proposals I sent out to my agent were met with less than enthusiastic response. The market had changed, and we were on the edge of the on-line publication phenomena. No one, it seemed, was particularly interested in the fiction I had to offer. Nor was there a great demand for an Addiction for Dummies book I was sure would find a home.  Other projects began with great excitement and either did not have the necessary legs or simply stagnated.

When the recession hit in 2008 I was caught unaware. Not the most brilliant businessmen--I have come to terms with the fact that my knowledge of finances rests on buying high and selling low--I had too many properties whose values dropped like stones into a bottomless pond. No one wanted to buy my lovely wooded lots in Southern Virginia, or the land I owned on the Chesapeake Bay, or the assisted-living apartment originally purchased as a hedge against inflation.  And still no books sales.

I went back to school, got a degree to become a substance abuse counselor, and spent an unpaid year as an intern in a rehab specializing in medical personnel who’d misused controlled substances. Five years later I was working in a methadone clinic. Mostly, I sat behind a sheet of bulletproof glass, handling soiled dollar bills passed through a thin slot, and buzzing methadone users into a nurse’s office. There was minimal counseling; this was first and foremost a money-making venture, and make money it did.  A dose of methadone bought wholesesale and in bulk costs approximately twenty-eight cents and sells for five dollars. There was little effort to free the clients of their methadone dependency. Some people had been coming to one clinic or another for more than a dozen year and had no desire to change habits. I met strippers, war heroes, roofers, prostitutes, housewives and bikers. I got severely depressed and, a year later, I was burned out and eventually fired.

Still no book sales.   What happened? Or, more succinctly, WTF?

Books

I have a love-hate relationship with libraries. They're a haven of quiet in an increasingly raucous world; an invitation and encouragement to readers of all stripes; a  repository of information both useful and not. On the other hand, they're also a warehouse of literary tripe; a reward and incentive to writers of god-awful books; a reason for furthering the production of written works that should never, ever, see the light of day. Let's face it: any place that has 50 editions of The DaVinci Code and not one single copy of  The Elegance of the Hedgehog  really does not deserve our tax dollars.

Nevertheless, I go to the library at least once a week. The head librarian and I have a nodding acquaintance. She is a large lady who rules her domain with heavy-handed fairness and does not brook talking, cell phones, too-loud iPods, or laughter larger than a snigger. Occasionally, she look over my selection of books and nods, a high accolade. She has been at my library 18 years and wisely has no other ambitions.

I once asked her what she thought of most of the recently published works displayed on special tables right near the entrance.  She looked around to see if anyone could overhear, then said in a hoarse whisper, "Vulgar."

And she's right, of course.

Last week I checked out five books, each by a 'New York Times Best Selling Author.' The titles were catchy--the trend for some time has been a geographical/historical name followed by a word like 'sanction,' or 'covenant,' or 'convention,' or 'pledge'--and promised exciting reading.

The first book I gave up on by page two. The hero, a black belt mountain-climbing martial artist archeologist who discovered  Something of Frightening Importance was being chased by a Beautiful Woman With a Gun.  "Why are you doing this?" our hero asked his pursuer. "Because I must," she pouted. Buh bye...

The next book has our hero--same general type as hero number one--kill a foreign spy and throw his body off an Austrian ski-lift, then rappel down a conveniently placed telephone tower and escape in an Expensive Hand-built Italian Sportscar.

In book three, a super-secret submarine sinks after having discovered Atlantis beneath the ice-cap. Can you guess where this tale will go?

Book five opens with: Matt Dingleberger thought he might use his gun, but used his fists instead. This is about as close as one can get to "It was a dark and stormy night" and remain reasonably comfortable.

I can admit to making poor reading choices. All these books were whodunits and I should know better. But the fact is, they were all bad books, all poorly written, all designed to give the reader strong visuals without accompanying thought, instant gratification as satisfying as instant replay. They were books that shouldn't have been published, or, if published, done so only for the writers' immediate families and friends.  Instead, they had been picked by the library board because they were the favorites of lazy, indolent readers and critics fond of bad imagery.

Books--and reading--have always been about escapism, and we learn from them by default. What we really seek is a different world to which we can travel again and again. A good book takes us to places perhaps familiar, perhaps not. A bad book leaves us at the station. We read to remember and we read to forget.

There are far more bad books than there are good ones, and unfortunately it is true that you can't judge a book by its cover. Would that we could; there'd be fewer disappointments.

But then, sometimes you get a surprise. In the history section, I came upon a three volume set called The Cartoon History of the Universe.  Conceived and written by cartoonist/mathematician Larry Gonick, the black-and-white drawings tell a long yarn of discovery, war, peace, nation-building, inventions, sex, and cruelty, all recounted with gentle clarity and borscht-belt humor. Every home should have this collection. It'll delight adults and familiarize younger readers with a past now only rarely taught.

These are, as Amos Alcott would say, "Good books which [are] opened with expectations and closed with profit."

 

Book Sale

The librarian who works weekends and whom I'm slightly scared of wasn't at the book sale on Sunday.  She's a largish woman with a port wine stain on her forehead, and in a decade of going to the library, I have never seen her smile. Children do not run, shout or cry in her library. In fact, they barely breathe. When she's on the job, the loudest sound is the thin hum of  computers that have replaced the index cards, and the faint rustling of turning pages.  I suspect she's not a fan of the tri-annual sale, when the library rids itself of surplus books.  For seven dollars, you get a grocery bagful of fiction, reference, photo books, children's classics and as many back issues of National Geographic's as one family could  sanely handle.

It's as raucous a scene as can be found in any library, and I suppose it's not the weekend librarian's cup of tea. I go there even though I don't need more things to read, indeed, I donate books three or four times a year, and this time around found some items for sale that came directly from my shelves.  I was tempted to buy back my Doonesbury collection--I had donated it in a moment of weakness--but resisted the impulse. 

Still, I bought a few things. The complete works to date of  David Guterson, a writer whose Snow Falling on Cedars I admire. A replacement King Rat because the middle 60 pages of my copy vanished some years ago during a move. Two *** for Idiots that need no explanation, nor does a mint Pocket Book edition of Harold Robbins The Piranhas.

Pawing through the stacks and boxes, I found myself in competition with immigrant families that, while their command of English might have been limited, displayed unbridled enthusiasm for the treasures offered. Asians and Latino children raced through the hallways while their parents filled grocery bags with everything from romances to Readers' Digest collections. An ancient man who might have been Vietnamese had appropriated a grocery store cart and filled to the brim with travel and computer books; the library volunteer at the checkout table had to call a staffer to decide how many bags equaled a shopping cart.

One stack caught my attention--twenty-or-so volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica, circa 1999. A sign wedged between two tomes read, "Complete Set, $10." Someone had scratched out the ten and replaced it with a five. Twenty-three years ago, I bought a complete set of the  EB for almost $1,000. It still presides over my small collection of reference works. I was tempted to buy this one too, so I'd have a separate set in my basement office. While I pondered, a brown-skinned little girl took the top volume, opened it randomly and started reading aloud, one small index finger tracing the line of print. Her mother, wearing a burnt-orange and green sari stood behind her.

"Did you want to buy these?" the mother asked me. I said no, I already had a set at home.

Did I use it much?  I had to admit that I didn't any more. Like almost everyone, I relied on computers now.

"They are no longer printing them, you know," the woman told me and I answered that yes, I had read a few months ago that the Britannica people had decided to forego printed editions in favor of digital ones.

"Very sad," she said. "In my home in Delhi, we had these books and my father made us read 10 pages every day."  I told her that when my family first came to the United States, my father had decided that, pound for pound, the World Book Encyclopedia was a better bargain, so we'd gotten that instead, one volume at a time from the Giant Food store that sold the set at a discount.

Soon the woman's husband appeared, a whip-thin man with a white short buttoned all the way to the neck. The family spoke a minute or two, and the father nodded. "I will purchase these if you do not." He and I found cardboard boxes to stack the books in; he paid for them and I volunteered to help carry the Britannicas to his car.

The weekend librarian of whom I am a little scared would have been proud.