WHAT SHALL WE DO TO BECOME RICH AND FAMOUS?

Writing is opportunistic, compensatory, advisory and voyeuristic.  It exists as the culture exists, entwined with it.  When the culture presents an opportunity, writing flows into the opening and fills it.  Sometimes it is the writing that changes the culture (culture is always changing) and that in itself is a writing opportunity.  Sometimes culture throttles writing.  Iconoclasm is always fun.

Examples.  The country is full of new immigrants, some of whom will be trying to bring their previous life along with them with as little change as possible (opportunity) while at the same time trying to present a positive front where they are trying to work and learn (opportunity) and their children are trying to develop a new life in this different place (opportunity).  They want to know about clothes, cooking and manners.

Emily Post says don't slurp.

In the heyday of soap operas, women worked at home with family.  Radio stories went with them all day, proposing strategy for relationship networks and as voyeurism.  Now the same stories are on tablets and iPods, but the content is the same.  The delivery system is able to keep the same women in daily contact with each other, making soap opera of their real lives.  The dynamics are the same advisory story telling as used to happen in kitchens or even doing laundry at a stream side.  

Suddenly there is a huge market for romances, esp those that provide a lot of information about how to establish a family or how to survive on the job or a combination of both.  The consumers listen on earphones or read on iPods while they commute.  Some of it is psychological management and some of it is how to become alluring.  For immigrants, housewives and line workers, clerks and commuters, the stream is both self-improvement how-to and consolation, mending after damage and defeat. 

"I love your hairdo, Shamus."

You already knew all this.  You know why you hunger for fiction and you know why you hunger for intimate views of other lives.  Once I was serving a congregation with a minister’s office that had been the stage in the building’s previous incarnation.  They simply put a wall where the curtain had been.  But one woman told me that she sat in the audience imagining that the wall were drawn like a curtain because she intensely wanted to see what I was doing in that office.  The door had no lock, so I installed one, which upset everyone.  What nasty thing was I doing in there that I would need a lock?  (Actually I was trying to protect my electric typewriter which I often found children pounding on.)  What secrets of my status were hidden there? 

Where do people get this sense of entitlement about access to the lives of ministers and writers?  They think such people are parents and they believe children are entitled to the lives and profits of parents.  This is cultural.  They are obsessed with the question of what one’s sexuality is.  That’s commercial.

Now we are finally getting around to taking a look behind the scenes of writing, the machinery of delivery, since we all have stories to tell (we’re told that all the time) and because the means of delivery have returned to the oral and even the ocular, which is wonderful for voyeurs, like people who watch travel documentaries and National Geographic cameras hidden in nests and burrows.  The drone of the narrator can be turned way down, but it’s necessary to support the idea that this is legitimate education.

And some people are realizing two things:  how much writing is controlled and distorted by the delivering businesses and how fantasy (a vital characteristic of writing) has provided those opportunistic businesses with an ocean of writing from people so grateful to be put into fugitive print pixels that they don’t need to be paid.  Merely having their names mentioned makes them walk tall.  

The trouble is having to sort a lot of narcissistic trash to find the worthy stuff.  And the problem with that is that the business is based on 19th century assumptions which are WEIRD —Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic.  They are also urban and hope to stay college-aged forever.  And they are hopelessly bourgeois.  Wikipedia:  “bourgeoisie”:  a social class oriented to economic materialism and hedonism, and to upholding the extreme political and economic interests of the capitalist ruling class.”

Writers are all over the map economically, educationally, aspirationally — but those who control publication are inevitably as described above.  Many writers have nothing but contempt for them, which they must disguise in order to make a living.  Others think that pleasing these controllers is a confirmation that they are special, deserving, no longer merely bourgeois, and if their writing sells well enough to make money for the producers, the producers will assure them they’re right.  They’re like starlets in Hollywood, sleeping with producers and believing that makes them excellent actresses.

Gordon Lish

Alexander Nazaryan ’s article in Newsweek offers Gordon Lish as an example of the interstitial editor who buffers the publishing poseurs from the writers still entranced by their own potential. He edited the undisciplined into "brilliance" and sold his opinion of the result to the checkbook keepers.  Lish has replaced Maxwell Perkins in the mythology of the fairy godfather who can spin straw into gold.  (Female editors who try to do this will be called castrating bitches.)

“Gordon Lish is a traveler from a country no longer extant, a country where editors were princes and writers kings. A country where the publishing fiefdoms of Manhattan were proud castles in the sky, where the desperate flailings of The Real Housewives of Pittsburgh never made the gossip pages, but the seating arrangements at Elaine’s always did.”  http://www.newsweek.com/2014/06/27/angry-flash-gordon-255491.html

A contrasting phenomenon of the now tech-dominated publishing is the idea of “cloud editing.”  That is, one posts one’s writing publicly, complete or not, and all the readers out there are welcome to advise, edit, and inevitably "improve" the work.  It’s the MFA seminar gone global.  What could go wrong?

First of all, no one who writes cares about what other writers are writing.  Second of all, there is such a huge crowd of wanna-be writers than any attempt to read a fraction of it is soon overwhelmed.  Let’s look at Medium, a platform of this sort.  Their answer to the first problem was to salt the gold mine with work by professional writers, which meant paying them.  No one paid the wannabes, who all innocently assumed they were on their way up and soon would earn money.

Their answer to the second problem was to subdivide the territory into types run by sub-editors who might actually act as the Lish/Perkins who created geniuses, a fantasy almost as potent as being writers.  Of course, they could publish their own work, too.  Actually, this worked rather well until the same two problems cropped up: the only writers who cared about other writers were the ones who had a focus in common, and there was just too much stuff.  Now as cyber code instead of ink on paper.

From the faraway safety of small-town prairie, I see this as part of the shift from individualism back to group.  The Post-War Fifties glamorization of the lone creative genius is fading. (Thoreau is their saint, though he never really was what they imagine.  But then, no one is.)  Consider that JFK’s son died with his wife and friend, flying alone in fog.  Suddenly the Truman/Eisenhower years of conformity and infrastructure seem a lot wiser.  No need to rehearse the Bush/Cheney paranoia.  It is still upon us.

So now we’ve got to figure out a cloud/fog that is actually a popularity contest like the ones that controlled high school.  Comments are no longer insightful analysis, but only the sums of cutsey thumbs and hearts.  I don’t care but the producers realize that numbers are economic.  The tech strategy is always to create a gimmicky startup, get a lot of people involved, then sell out to those producers who have the real venture capital — except that it’s turning out that the capital is not real at all --  it’s debt and stock options.  So Esquire “made” Gordon Lish and Gordon Lish “made” Raymond Carver.  That’s no reason to write "Walmart minimalism", as Nazaryan nails it.  Unless it's all you know.

I only put my stuff online because I compose on a keyboard and once the stuff is composed, it’s easy to post.  What happens then is fate.  And culture.  My part is done.

"PAINTED HORSES" by Malcolm Brooks

“Painted Horses” by Malcolm Brooks is being presented by Grove/Atlantic as a classic epic of the West so, of course, they drag Cormac McCarthy, Wallace Stegner, and Jim Harrison onto the blurb page of the dust cover, though the three writers have nothing in common in terms of themes, style, or essential nature.  In the past Grove has been notorious for publishing literary but obscene books, which confused me more since this book has no obscenity in it.  

So I went to the publishing house website to see what their position is now that they have merged with Atlantic Magazine, which was held up to my Enriched English class in 1955 as an example of high-minded respectability.  I was startled to see that Grove/Atlantic is the US publishers of Helen MacDonald’s “H is for Hawk,” one of the most esteemed British books of the year, one I love but hardly a Western epic.

Brooks’ book is in sections, beads on a string, and I suspected they were written at different times and possibly published in small magazines, as writers trying to make a name are advised to do, but I was wrong.  Only one section was previously published.  That was in “The Big Sky Journal,” which is indeed Western, even a product of the Montana writing craze of a decade ago.  (Now replaced by the Portland writing craze.)  The string that joins the beads is that a valley is about to be flooded by a dam (see Thomas King).  A secret feeder blind canyon is accessed only by the man who painted horses and his love, who is supposed to be doing the preliminary environmental study that would allow that destructive dam.  (See Zane Grey: “The Rainbow Trail.”)  

Other reviewers call the novel “layered” meaning that the back stories of the two lovers are in chunks.  One piece is the man’s friendship with a Basque sheepherder which expands to a sojourn in Basque country connected to military WWII mule-wrangling in Italy in places where wheels cannot go, esp. in rainy season.  Another “string” through his story is his saddle, which he never abandons -- if I told you why, it would be a spoiler.  There’s a sort of “A Farewell to Arms”  tale of a previous doomed love affair also connected.  And he has a doppelganger, a brutal man who rounds up wild horses to sell for dog food.

The woman’s story also starts in Europe, this time in London, where she turns away from the concert piano because of the thrill of archeology at a time when possibilities were literally opened by the bomb craters of WWII.  She takes a lot of personal damage in this story.  Her doppelganger is a teenaged Crow woman which is the excuse for a lot of indigenous stuff, including a strange ceremony about a horse that may or may not be authentic.  (I know very little about Crow.)  I see he doesn't know anything about "jingle dresses" which are adorned with the furled lids of snoose cans, NOT rifle cartridges.

The first jolt I got was that a character is named “Max Caldwell” which is the name of the husband Lorraine Scriver left in order to move in with Bob before I was quite out of the picture.  It's just a coincidence.  The character is not at all like the “real” Max Caldwell, who is dead now, and the name evidently also belongs to a friend of Brooks'. 

All through the book I ran up against strange little knots of metaphor and assertions that didn’t ring true.  One, the idea that a horse would trample a newborn lamb, was disturbing enough that I asked the advice of Sid Gustafson, horse vet and novelist.  He said the circumstances would have to be VERY unusual -- it is not normal behavior as “Miriam” claims on p. 240 as evidence of the innate wickedness of horses.  All through I kept suspecting that some information was coming from bar gossip and internet factoids rather than real experience.  The best stuff might be from National Geographic: cave art.

The charm of the book, endorsed by the cover art (Brooks is getting the full media promotion that “publishing” is supposed to be about), is the idea of "horse", of the ancient paintings of horses on the walls of caves in France, this protagonist's love of depicting horses on both stone and canvas, his merging of this with the Native American symbolism of painting on horses, and his desertion of the military (spoiler here) in order to save a group of horses which he gives to gypsies, refugees from the German holocaust.  Oh, romance!  

The main purchasers of contemporary novels are said to be single women in their thirties, generally educated, lovers of Indians, horses and handsome men who limp.  Brooks has said that one of his goals in writing this novel was to “successfully” capture the inner life of a woman.  (Zane Grey was good at this -- but then, his wife and “nieces” wrote much of his novels.)  In that interest he closely describes manicures and menstruation.  (His description of starting a fire by using a sanitary pad for tinder is highly suspect.)  This novel teeters on the edge between genre and "literary."  In the end the conceit of a secret valley where genetically pristine Barb horses can hide for centuries simply collapses in greed, violence, political corruption, and running away.  The prospect of the lovers reuniting is only a couple of sentences at the end, possibly demanded by the publisher.

The other function of publishers, besides promotion, has historically been editing, and some editors have been credited with making their writer’s pile of prose into something brilliant, notably Perkins pruning Thomas Wolfe and Gordon Lish cutting Raymond Carver down to famous minimalism.  I’m not sure how much editorial meddling there was in “Painted Horses.”  

What I want is to point out that today (maybe it was always like this) what is written by Westerners is often edited and promoted by Easterners, and most reviews are written by Easterners.  They are not at all troubled by things that a cowboy would question.  Brooks is a Californian, a carpenter, and a dweller in Missoula which is not exactly Montana.  I would like to hear what someone like Sid Gustafson might say, since he WAS raised on horseback, makes his living whispering to horses, and is core Montana.  I doubt that many Easterners or most Montana university townspeople would even notice the glitches.

How important is that?  I don’t suppose anyone could find an absolute measure.  I ought to have kept a list of the kind of  small metaphorical mismatches that Peter Matthiessen would have blue-penciled.  But that kind of editing is out of fashion now.  The list of acknowledgements at the end of the book gives the specifics of who helped Brooks, so it wasn’t arrogance on his part -- not defying expert advice.  Maybe I’m just picky.  For an antidote, go to http://oldgunkie.blogspot.com/2014/09/malcolm-brooks-reading-in-denver.html

Bill Anton, painter of horses

http://www.billantonstudio.com/AboutBill,001.html

But as a person who lived with horses as models for sculpture and painting, becoming personally acquainted with many painters of horses, there was something hollowed out or crowded aside in this tale.  Maybe Brooks should have looked for advice from an actual painter of horses, like Bill Anton. 

This Anton painting fits the story.

http://roycembecker.com/?page_id=651 is the designer of the cover, but probably not the painter.  The image refers to the two gentle "hills" of the line of the back of a horse with its head down which  Brooks suggested, but never really followed up, unless I missed something.