B.R. Meyers again:

A Bright Shining Lie - Magazine - The Atlantic

Underlying the hype [about Denis Johnson's Tree of Smoke] is the silly notion that if a work introduces plenty of characters and traipses after them for enough years and pages, it is ipso facto ambitious. The true mark of an ambitious work is its style and depth. We would recognize Anna Karenina as such a novel even if only its first few pages had survived, because they depict characters with extraordinarily rich and complex inner lives.

I scarcely need to defend the proposition that SF&F make the same mistake: a bigger book, a longer series is by definition a more ambitious one or a better one. It's easy to confuse scope or sprawl with depth.

Adam Roberts tried to cut into the heart of this problem back when he was forcing himself to read the whole of The Wheel of Time and figure out for himself the appeal of such a derivative, repetitive, one-dimensional series where a great deal goes on but not a whole hell of a lot actually happens. The conclusion he came to was that the books are not so much stories as they are environments for the reader to swath themselves in, so they can forget about all the crap going on around them for a little while: literature as anesthetic, or as Jacques Barzun put it, "art as the detergent of life".

Is it unfair to wrinkle my nose at this? Maybe, but wrinkle I do, if only because the sheer amount of such detergent is having a detrimental effect on our literary water table, so to speak. Not in the sense that people should read the classics instead of all that newfangled crap, but in the sense that bad writing of any grade, high-art or low-, begets more bad writing. When Lester Del Rey found he could repackage third-rate Tolkien and sell it over and over again, he kicked off the Big Book Fantasy boom of the Seventies and Eighties via the Shannara series. The result was not just that a whole generation of readers came into existence thinking a five-book series was automatically better than a single book, but that a whole generation of potential writers also came along primed to believe the same thing, and who cheerfully repeated the same mistakes. I've mentioned before how Dale Peck argued something of the same thing had happened with Joyce's Ulysses: in his purview, it was the book's flaws and shortcomings that were most widely imitated and had the greatest influence, and the end result has been an astonishing amount of Big Fiction that is all but unreadable. (More on this again in the future.)

I have to be careful about who I single out for criticism here, as there are series I have enjoyed despite their flaws: the Vampire Hunter D books, the Elric novels (those in particular serving as a great deconstruction of a lot of common fantasy tropes), Harry Harrison's Stainless Steel Rat and Deathworld books, the Mardock Scramble cycle, Yoshikawa's Musashi novels, the Foundation cycle, etc. I should not make it sound as if I am attacking the idea of a series of books. What bothers me is when the storytelling becomes distended, pumped full of air to fit the container, as it were, and everything that was good about one story becomes smeared across multiple books like someone trying to economize the use of a single pat of butter across several pieces of bread.

What I resent is not the writing of multiple books alone, but the conflation of size with scope and length with depth, which in SF&F is most symptomatic in books that come in multi-volume containers. I am not going to convince anyone that a given book could have been trimmed by hundreds of pages and lost nothing, because it's always possible to find a retroactive justification for why a book is a given length, whether courtesy of the reader or author. Readers who band together and swap notes about the details of a given work (e.g., George R.R. Martin's fans swapping Westeros trivia) create an atmosphere where it becomes that much harder to consider leaving anything out — even the things that might well be left out for the sake of telling the one story that truly matters instead of the twelve that don't. Good writing is about selectivity, "about what's in the frame and what's out" as Scorsese once said about movies, and just because an author can cater that much more completely to his fans by flooding them with goodies doesn't mean it's going to be a positive thing for either one of them.

I suspect the reason why is because of the above-described thirst for an environment rather than a story. These parallel needs — one for environment, one for narrative — serve different functions and are expressed in different degrees. MMOers and RPGers play a game not just because of the backstory, but because of the immersiveness of the game: it gives them something to get conveniently lost in for a little bit (and sometimes for not such a little bit). People don't just want a good yarn, they want something they can lie down inside too.

Is that so bad? No, not at first. But the long-term consequences on the culture of books they have access to is another story.

Zal Batmanglij, director of the new Sound of my Voice (among others), has a beautiful metaphor for the creative process as it applies to filmmaking.

Ain't It Cool News: The best in movie, TV, DVD, and comic book news.

I think that filmmaking is like digging more than anything else, and it starts with Brit and I. We start digging, we see the shape of something, the outline, the top of something, and that keeps us going. Then the cinematographer comes and he picks up a shovel, and the production designer and the costume designer and then the actors come. In both SOUND OF MY VOICE and THE EAST, we’ve been extremely lucky, so Patricia Clarkson comes and she picks up a shovel. Ellen Page comes and she picks up a shovel, and then Skarsgard comes and picks up two shovels, and by the end of it we are all sweaty and tired, and we’ve uncovered something and we spend most of our energy doing he digging, so you don’t really have time to worry about budgets and constraints and “I wish I had that. I wish I had this.”

This is completely consistent with my own observations: the creative process is more akin to archaeology than architecture. It's less a matter of building something than unearthing something, one jagged piece at a time.

A Reader's Manifesto - Magazine - The Atlantic

The notion that contemporary fiction possesses greater relevance for us because it talks of the Internet or supermodels or familiar brand names is ridiculous. We can see ourselves reflected more clearly in Balzac's Parisians than in a modern American who goes into raptures when his daughter says "Toyota Celica" in her sleep.

I'm going to be quoting a great deal from Meyers's excellent essay (even better in its full-length book-sized incarnation) in the near future, but I wanted to start with this particular snippet.

"Relevance" is a buzzword, and I sincerely wish it wasn't. When we say this or that work of fiction is "relevant", we typically leave off the phrase to our lives as they are now or something of that ilk. We tend to think of Gravity's Rainbow or better yet something like Charles Stross's Rule 34 as "relevant" because they are about things that are immediate or of our current moment in time. It's reassuring to read fiction (or anything at all, really) that understands what kind of world we currently live in and makes some attempt to address its vagaries and difficulties.

I managed to sneak away from my desk — okay, I was dragged away — and see The Avengers the other day. In deference to all those who have not yet seen it, I won't discuss it in spoileriffic detail. Rather, I'll discuss a few things that the mere fact of the movie brought to mind.

The first is something that was brought up by, of all people, Ross Douthat of the New York Times (the last person I would have ever expected to weigh in on this issue). He noted that the success of something like The Avengers means it is now that much harder for anything not a "property" to get made in Hollywood. I agree, up to a point: it's not possible to spend $150-200 million on something that isn't a proven property, because Hollywood executives were not born yesterday and are not about to blow that much money on something that comes entirely out of the blue. (Cf.: John Carter.)

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High schooler Takao Kasuga has two ways of coping with life in the backwater known as Hikari City. Both should be innocent, but they turn out to be anything but. The first is books — the more esoteric and offbeat, the better, and that includes Charles Baudelaire’s poetry (which the title of this series references unambiguously). The second is his classmate Nanako Saeki — “my muse, my femme fatale,” as he rhapsodizes over her. So smitten is he for her, and so intoxicated has he become with Baudelaire’s hymns to lordly indecency, that when Nanako forgets her gym clothes at school one day he hastily swipes them and takes them home with him.

No, even he doesn’t know what he’s doing. He’s a lethal admixture of two normally incompatible impulses: a guilty conscience and an impulsive heart. Stealing Nanako’s shorts and tank top will take him the rest of his life to pay back; this he is positive of. And yet he went and did it all the same … and, worse, he finds out has a witness to his crime: Nakamura. This is not one of the other boys in his class, who rib him about his love of weird books and his moon-eyed feelings for Nanako. Nakamura is another girl, and if the text for Takao’s spirit is a hesitantly-read Baudelaire, hers is an enthusiastically-devoured Marquis de Sade.

In a previous post I mentioned the quote: "Every pixel you take out of the imagination and put on the screen is a pixel you are taking responsibility for."

I swapped a few words in that sentence and got something even more relevant to where I stand: "Every word you take out of the imagination and put on the page is a word you are taking responsibility for." This goes way beyond "show, don't tell" (which I think should be "show and tell in the right measure").

By "the imagination", I'm referring to the imagination of the reader, not just the writer. Every time you call attention to something, describe something, you are asking the reader to surrender that much more of their imagination for the sake of yours.

Philosophical fiction can do much to improve genre : The Rebel Yell

I think there can be a philosophical novel in this day and age, and it’s more important than ever that one is published. But it faces challenges, which Erdal says are essentially “balance” and the question of what it would look like to consumers.

On the balance of it, SF&F seem to be the most likely place to find the philosophical novels of the age. So much of what they have been preoccupied with for so long has been philosophical discussion of things that affects all of us: artificial intelligence, extraterrestrial sentient life, the impacts of technical progress, etc.

That said, very little SF&F is reminiscent of what I would call the "big novel of ideas" approach, the sort of thing the author of the above piece attributes to folks like "Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Sartre, Camus and countless others". I will most likely surprise no one when I say I love such books. I'm in the middle of re-reading The Brothers Karamazov now in one of its new translations, and I see firsthand (doubly so in this new translation) what a novel of ideas can do at its most unchained and vivacious.

Recipe for a bestselling book - Salon.com

A person who can’t fathom why the public fell in love with Lisbeth Salander or Edward Cullen is probably not going to be able to write something they’ll like just as much. Whiling away a couple of summer afternoons reading a trashy novel is a harmless way of wasting time. But writing a book even you wouldn’t want to read? That’s just killing it.

There's some good meat in this article, but the presumptions at the end are ludicrous.

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The last time I went record shopping — hole-in-the-wall record stores still proliferate in New York City, thank goodness — I walked out with an armload of film soundtracks: Le Grand Bleu, Taxi Driver, and a French SACD edition of Terminator 2 that I found in someone’s cut-out bin for $4. It’s not as if I have it in for actual albums from actual bands; there’s plenty of those to be talked about in time. It’s just that film soundtracks seize my attention in a way that most “regular “ albums don’t, and in a way can’t. They’re not just things unto themselves, but part of something larger that demands one’s full attention.

In most cases the film soundtracks I love are for films I know, but Music for Films is the exact opposite, and all the more fascinating for it. It’s a compilation of film music where the music preceded the films: Eno created the music in 1976, and then sent copies of a limited edition of the album to filmmakers so they could consider using it in their movies. In time, some of the music ended up in films as diverse as John Woo’s A Better Tomorrow, Rock ‘n’ Roll High School, and Derek Jarman’s Jubilee. Then again, Eno composed the classic Windows 95 startup and shutdown themes, so I’m used to him popping up in places where his name wouldn’t normally appear.

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We are, I think, finally beginning to see the full flowering of a literature of true native Western Buddhism. By this I mean works written by Buddhists who are Westerners first and foremost, and whose understanding of both Western life and Buddhism complement each other. Brad Warner was one such writer: it was hard for an Akron, Ohio-born punk rocker turned ordained Soto Zen Buddhist not to have both his Buddhism and his Western-ism speak to each other. His books document all of that in a fun, accessible way for beginners, and perhaps also for experts who have gotten lost along the way.

Rebel Buddha is another well-written general introduction to Buddhism, by way of Tibetan Buddhist Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche, and for that reason alone is worth checking out for beginners. What makes it doubly interesting is how it attempts to approach Buddhism as something that is inherently transplanted from one culture to another. Buddhism has migrated from India to China, Korea, Japan, the rest of Asia, and into Europe and the United States, and along each step of the way has found ways to become a living part of the culture that accepted it.