Bad People - Good Art; Good Artists - Bad Writing

I do not know if I am doing good writing. Some rejections like my writing, some like my stories, but never do they like them enough for publication. KH thinks I am unfashionable; Stephanie suggested my stories need more depth. It is never far from my mind, I am a felon and a moral leper.

If we (or, as you will see "I"), want to elevate ourselves morally by what we consume as art, as if aesthetics and morality are intertwined, then should we not throw into the bonfire the poetry of Byron, the paintings of Caravaggio, the plays of Christopher Marlowe, the prose of William Burroughs; the works of anyone who is a gay or lesbian artist, musician, or writer (and then we need to take a long look at those Greeks and Romans); the same for those who do not profess to the religion of their homeland - or who deny any Higher Authority; then let us not forget the drunks and the drug addicts who practiced some art. 

The Millions published Love Ruins Everything: On Claire Dederer’s ‘Monsters’ by Sophia Stewart, which I found interesting and for more than feeding my own biases. Particularly, that expecting perfection from us humans is blasphemous.

“There is no longer any escaping biography,” writes Claire Dederer in her brilliant new book Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma, out today. “Biography used to be something you sought out, yearned for, actively pursued. Now it falls on your head all day long.” There was a time when learning about the private lives of public figures took effort. What little information you could get your hands on—magazine interviews and profiles, memoirs and biographies, liner notes and museum labels—was mediated by a third party. Today, you can access every detail of an artist’s biography—their schooling, career, awards, personal life (the only thing you care about anyway)—while watching their movies or listening to their music. The search for information is easy, instantaneous, and reliably yields results; every day you can learn something you didn’t know you didn’t know. What’s more, public figures are more willing and able than ever to volunteer information about their lives, unmediated by handlers or publicists or studios.

“The problem is, we don’t get to control how much we know about someone’s life,” writes Dederer. “It’s something that happens to us.” I did not pursue information about the screenwriter’s sexual proclivities and ensuing legal woes—the information happened to me. And when it did, emotion preceded thought. Gradually, a coherent question formed: How did this guy make something so perfect? In retrospect, Moonstruck’s male protagonist had already answered this question just a few hours before: “The snowflakes are perfect; the stars are perfect,” he declares to his beloved on a snowy evening, walking home from an opera written by a womanizing philanderer with fascist sympathies. “Not us. Not us!”

Monsters centers on a question that’s both timely and trite: Can you—should you—separate art from the artist? In answering, Dederer wisely abstains from the third-person plural. “Who is this ‘we’ that’s always showing up in critical writing?” she asks. “We is an escape hatch. We is cheap. We is a way of simultaneously sloughing off personal responsibility and taking on the mantle of easy authority.” We suggests that there is some universal truth that will put this whole thing to bed, for all of us. But this tension between art and artist can’t, and indeed shouldn’t, be resolved collectively. There is no single, correct conclusion to which Dederer can lead the reader. She sure wishes there was—she imagines an online calculator, in which “the user would enter the name of an artist, whereupon the calculator would assess the heinousness of the crime versus the greatness of the art and spit out a verdict: you could or could not consume the work of this artist.” No such machine exists because this is a problem not of logic but of love.

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Still, it’s tempting to use taste and fandom as moral indicators. Each artist’s offense is a referendum on your principles, and a chance to put them into practice. To defend or disavow? The choice is yours, and it feels good to have a choice. Much of contemporary life is spent feeling powerless amid a circus of horror and injustice, but in the attention economy, viewers and listeners and readers, i.e. consumers, can be powerful agents. Is it possible to wield this power for good, to actually practice a form of ethical consumption under capitalism? Most products—cosmetics, cleaning supplies, running shoes, frozen dinners—can be easily substituted, swapped out for an offering from a more “ethical” company (if there is such a thing). But there are no substitutions for a work of art that moves you. Dederer and I agree: When it comes to cultural products—i.e. art—you have no obligations beyond your own affinities.

Which I agree with. I have never been tempted to read but two of Norman Mailer's books, the others are too long for me to want to stay with him. Hemingway I can read for all of his posturing (the puncturing Kurt Vonnegut gave him Happy Birthday, Wanda June), because I see now a pain to them undercutting the bluster.  A feeling I did not get from Mailer's The Naked and the Dead. I wonder why Mailer had the impact he did, and why no one noticed Hemingway was going to blow out his brains. 

I have tried reading Philip K. Dick's novels without feeling much in the way of attachment. I have read Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep twice. I prefer Blade Runner. 

Also from The Millions came Philip K. Dick and the Pleasures of Unquotable Prose by Michael H. Rowe, and I wondered about the effects of good writing against the immorality of a writer.

What does it mean when a great writer like Philip K. Dick is considered to have an occasionally terrible prose style? Even so brilliant and well-regarded a defender of Dick’s novels as author Jonathan Lethem has referred, in a 2007 interview with the online journal Article for example, to Dick’s “howlingly bad” patches of prose. Lethem also made these sentiments clear in an interview that accompanied the publication of Philip K. Dick: Four Novels of the 1960s by the Modern Library of America. (Lethem edited this and subsequent volumes.) In that interview, Lethem says [pdf] that Dick’s style is not a sentence-level style at all, but has more to do with scene construction and wild and crazy tonal shifting. Like any reader of Dick’s anxiously inventive fiction, however, Lethem knows that the writing is generally fine and occasionally excellent. It’s just that there are spots (sometimes lengthy) of distractingly awkward description, or silly interior monologue, or creaky exposition. As a genre writer who produced over 44 novels and something like 121 short stories, Dick’s prose style seems to disappoint, at least a little bit, his literary-minded devotees, myself included, of course. What are we to do?

But what made Dick a great writer?

In other words, the plot of Ubik is not a function of fantastic prose. There are funny, incredible passages that would, of course, be worth quoting. But that would be to miss the point of Philip K. Dick’s particular charm. If you take a writer like Annie Dillard, you can be constantly amazed. She can and does write single paragraphs so beautiful and diamond-sharp that to read them is to feel finished. That, I have thought more than once while going back over a passage of Dillard’s writing, is the absolutely conclusive statement about the metaphysical significance of giant water bugs.

But with Dick it’s different. With Dick, you have no conclusive statements, not really. Instead, you read unending reports about the casual imprisonments—emotional, spiritual, and pharmaceutical—that organize human experience. So many characters take mind-altering drugs in Dick’s novels that he manages to explore the crossover between addiction and conscious commitment. That is one of the key dilemmas in The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. Likewise, Dick’s plots require something more than just attention. You keep track. You lie in wait for the next quirk of invention, ignoring all the times Dick uses a tinny “Jeez!” as expression of a character’s interior turmoil. Pithiness was not Dick’s bailiwick; his work, I think, was in honor of confusion, not answers.

Dick’s paragraphs are sometimes scintillating, but rarely in the representative-feeling way that a more lyrical author might write. Dick isn’t out to crystallize a particular sentiment. He does not aim to be quotable—to be, in a word, reducible. Instead, his novels feel like labor, as though they are tabulating the results of some desperate experiment. So, it isn’t the prose style, but the plot assembly that gases up the moving parts of Dick’s fiction. This isn’t to say that his characters, dialogue, and description are somehow mere tools of the greater narrative, but rather that you don’t quote Philip K. Dick. You read him.

And what human being has not felt confusion - about existence, if nothing else. If not, then I congratulate you. If you have not tried to contain a passion greater than yourself, then you cannot understand what drove Caravaggio to murder. That's my view, any way. When I was younger, I found Shelley a bit wan, but Byron going mad about life. I wish Jack London had not been the drunk he was, or he might have been a better writer. The lesson from Hemingway's treatment of women is not to give up reading him, but not to emulate him.

sch 4/28

The Guardian excerpted part of Claire Dederer's book, ‘Can I still listen to David Bowie?’ A superfan’s dilemma, which is reviewed above:

This is what I tell the students: consuming a piece of art is two biographies meeting: the biography of the artist that might disrupt the consuming of the art; the biography of the audience member that might shape the viewing of the art. Your biography, your feelings are important. Not just your feelings of abhorrence for the deed, but your love for the work. The sense of beauty it brings into your life. Beauty is a fragile principle. It looks silly when it’s brought up against utility – or morality. When we mull over what to do about the art of monstrous men, beauty seems like a dandelion puff – the merest nothing – next to the loud j’accuse of saying how awful these men were in their personal lives. And yet. Beauty matters too. We don’t make decisions about beauty. Like the stain, beauty happens to us.

The Los Angeles Review of Books has podcast interview with Claire Dederer.

 sch 5/7