THE SAME OLD STORY

At a recent conference when discussing publicizing of books, a publisher admitted that they sell books by promoting the author as much or maybe more than the books.  It's not just that authors are sent on tours as in the past, but that the private information of their lives are revealed, but shaped so as to make them sound enticing.

I admit that I can get interested this way.  When I found "Flicka's Friend", the autobiography of Mary O'Hara whose books ("My Friend Flicka", "Green Grass of Wyoming") where so beloved by me and so many others, I was both excited to realize that O'Hara was using her own life and daunted to see how much she had romanticized and excused a painful situation.  Something like the same was true of Lucy May Montgomery's journals and the truth of Louisa May Alcott's painful struggle.  Both of them were not lifted up by their books, which made money, but trapped in repetition of what would sell and in presenting a certain presence that probably prevented them getting help for their lives. 

In our cultural version of the tension between the group and the individual, we are always celebrating the individual, even when that person is crushed or evil, and we are suspicious of the group.  This is as true of politics as popular books.  We sort-of know this but still always want to know the person behind the organizations and institutions, imagining that we will know something key about Russia by investigating Putin's private life (which he KEEPS private) and something that might give us control over Trump as a representative of government when he's only a bingo caller.  The trouble with him is not that he's private -- he seems to have no private life -- but that he throws up a prefab ersatz imitation and we go for it.

What we WANT interferes with what we've got.  

In the days of O'Hara, Montgomery, and Alcott, the facts of sex were entirely displaced by "romance" and "love".  But today's "private life" is often code for sex, particularly if there is some hint of deviance in the specifics or blackmail-able departure from the mainstream.  As previous generation's scandal (gay?) becomes a merchandizing target (they dress so well, live with style, take care of their bodies) we move on to the shocks of torture-sex or pedophilia.  Both become connected somehow to being rich and powerful, though one would think that money and privilege might be used to avoid pain and exploitation, even to others.  But they are connected to secrecy and being above everyone else.  So you might not be able to handle the truth, but you could handle a little kid no one cares about.  One indiscretion leads to another and pretty soon one is being pumped of the secrets that protect the nation.

All this is in books, movies, conversation, social media.  It has even crept into the previously innocent and even "Christian" romance novels that throw back to earlier times.  Mysteries have suffered the same fate.  Life-threatening and impossible action as well.  High adrenaline, male-centered, and once an antidote for a boring gray flannel life.  No more.  Drugs give anyone entry to fantasy.

Major shifts have happened in our knowledge of the world.  We are radically embedded in existence as we know it now, not separated out by a Protestant Christian demand to scour one's soul for the sake of afterlife.  Our sins and even our sex lives, even our prosperity, are all conditional on circumstances and patterns we don't seem to take time to worry about.  Overpopulation, famine, oppression, constant war, pandemics -- to the set of people who used to read books, it's all just a TV show that no one can affect anyway.  

First people realized that even God had been personalized, and kept Him a person even as a corpse, like Lenin's corpse kept as a reminder.  Then they began to demonize and relativize the whole idea of "Theos".  But they never went on to admit that it is the existence of being itself that is the radical oneness, and that the terms of preservation might depend on the whole.  Nature bats last and she favors the simple and pervasive, like Covid19.

A Venetian mask

But we love a story, something dramatic and naughty like the tales of the Black Plague recorded by Boccachio, more fun than Chaucer.  Masks were big during the Plague.  I particularly like the one with the long beak that is the face of the ineffective doctor who brings death as much as wellness.  He echoes carrion birds and is part of a stock of old men who dedicate themselves to destroying young people's romances.  The mask is showing up again on media.  The storyline has always persisted.

Because of the change over time between the generations, particularly when marked by inconceivable catastrophes or transitions, are the mutations of culture, just like the mutations of living bodies -- they are the engine of evolution.  Our female writers now often take up imagining where the culture is going, whether Margaret Atwood or Ursula LeGuin.  Elizabeth Warren is not afraid of forced innovation; that's why she's able to say, "I have a plan for that."

Mentioning these names is a way of personalizing to escape the long-nosed old men who pretend the past -- which they know and have largely controlled even as it rewards them -- is the only way to go.  They are the force that demands stories be whatever it was that sold before.  That the politics be whatever it was before.  Jesus is a personalization of God.  Gaea is a personalization of the planet.  That's the way humans think, as though existence was about each other.  They talk about Republicans in terms of individual presidents when it is likely that there is no more Republican party now.  Empty rigged machinery.

Writers are sometimes a little shocked when they send out books under a pseudonym, because it is considered by many to be a crime, a deliberate deception, an attempt to escape control.  The books will be completely trampled by the rush to snipe-hunt the author, hoping to find enough scandal to be another book.  

The same in politics.  I see that the backup for hunting Hunter Biden is to harrow Biden Sr.'s brother.  Unaffiliated investigators say they're looking for money, but no doubt they will be pleased to find sex.  They do not think of society or the endangered life of the planet.  They only know one story.