Still Educating Sam Hasler: Writers: Advice; Thomas Mann & Colm Tóibín; Charles Portis; Chester Himes +

Another collection of things I have read, watched, listened to recently about writing, or writers. I hope they help you with your writing, that they encourage you to write, or any combination of the two.

My Favorite Book About Writing is Not a Book About Writing

Back in the late 1980s when I was younger and more impressionable, I was riveted by the PBS series The Power of Myth. For those who remember, it was simply journalist Bill Moyers and academic Joseph Campbell sitting in the Skywalker Ranch’s study-like setting, talking about ancient cultures and their beliefs. The graphics, what few there were, were amateurish by today’s standards. Campbell, who had only a year or so left to live, was prone to long, storytelling tangents. Moyers was a curious questioner, sometimes knowledgeable about the subject at hand, sometimes a neophyte, and always in awe of his interviewee. Not the kind of stuff one is likely to find these days.
The series was recently rebroadcast by my local PBS station (which may not survive much longer due to NEA budget cuts). It was based largely on Campbell’s book from 1949, The Hero With a Thousand Faces. Nearly 40 years later, and hopefully more mature in my ability to understand, I found it even more fascinating. The breadth of Campbell’s knowledge about myth—particularly cultural origin stories—was even more inspiring than I remembered. He knew and could recite stories from dozens of cultures.

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Later on in the book Campbell discusses the concept of the annihilation of the ego, so important to The Hero’s Journey. That’s an aspect of the journey that is rarely followed these days. So much of our literature, and particularly motion picture making, is devoted to the exaltation of the ego rather than its sublimation. But that was a characteristic necessary for the survival of the culture, because its underlying message was that a hero is not an egotist—far from it. A hero was devoted to the welfare of the people. And the hero was one of the people. Contrast that to much of today’s “strongman” politics, or mainstream entertainment, in which heroes are not just heroes, they are superheroes, an entity none of us can become.2

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1 Although most writers are familiar with the twelve-step Hero’s Journey, according to Wikipedia, Campbell’s original version contained seventeen steps, and was trimmed to twelve for screenwriting purposes by Christoper Vogler, a Hollywood executive. The Joseph Campbell Foundation website doesn’t list the journey as individual, chronological steps, but expresses it as a circular path of interrelated actions. This representation is more closely related to what is in the book.

While cleaning out, organizing my Watch Later list on YouTube, I found the following videos related to Thomas Mann.

There is this rather short documentary, which touches more on his personal life than delving into his writing:

Colm Tóibín | The Magician is an hour-long discussion of Mann and Tóibín's novel about Mann:

The Blog Of The South (Defector) discusses Portis's novel, Dog of The South. If you have not read Portis, you should. If you want to know why you should read Portis, then click on that link. No American writer is like Portis.

Write Conscious brings together David Foster Wallace and David Pynchon, both writers who have left me bewildered.

The Nation highlights the work of Chester Himes and his life in Chester Himes’s Harlem Noirs; which sounds like it only touches on his Harlem police stories. Like the man, it is more than that. I read his Harlem novels when I was young; If He Hollers, Let Him Go, when I was in prison. No, he has not the grace of Ralph Ellison or James Baldwin, but he has his own bag - an imagination, an honesty, a certain sort of fine madness. Ignored for too long, America needs to face up to him.

Lost Literature: On “Picket Line,” Elmore Leonard’s Remarkable, Long-Unpublished Novella (Crime Reads) - anybody who has not read Leonard should; I see him as one of those guys who straddle the genre/literary line. He writes great dialog.

sch 10/21

Not sure what I expected from a site calling itself The Art of Manliness hosting a podcast on Hemingway, but The Writing Life of Ernest Hemingway does a very good job, steady on the writing, intelligent questions by the host.

Fiction as an Exercise in Sabotage by Xiaolu Guo (Words Without Borders)

I conceived this film after reading Walter Benjamin’s essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Since my film school years, I have deeply felt that the collaborative nature of filmmaking changes the notion of originality, as John Berger has stated in his Ways of Seeing. So when I read “The Death of the Author” by Barthes, I understand what he means when he says that in writing it is language that speaks, not the author. And it is important to realize that to write is to reach, through a preexisting impersonality. This is a perfect explanation behind both Borges’s and Kathy Acker’s retellings of Don Quixote. To write is to reach out, through a preexisting work.
Language is a superstructure, as Noam Chomsky said. It has a universal grammar that is beyond linguistic difference. Language is a system through which we writers move back and forth, travel within and beneath. But never truly beyond. Language is an infinitely vast code that cannot be destroyed, it can only be played with. A semiotic sabotage suggests that a certain narrative can be challenged, rewritten, and reconstructed, but it may not be replaced entirely. And the role of fiction, as radical it may be, is also inherently traditional and sentimental, therefore it is deeply humanistic.
Fiction is the art of narrative, it comprises the ever-changing human stories. It is the Dharma wheel that a Buddhist monk has to constantly turn, or a herd of deer in the wood that a Daoist would follow, wherever that path might take. Human life is spontaneous and risky; fictions have proved that. In that sense, all of us are warriors. We are at once saboteurs and builders, we destroy and we create anew.

Think about that. Read the entire essay. Think about these paragraphs some more. I am.

sch 10/23

Something more practical, Free Talk: How Write a Satisfying Final Act for Your Novel (With Ley Taylor Johnson) from Authors Publish.

This video addresses one thing that has bothered me since getting out of prison - sensitivity warnings. The word anodyne is used in the video, and that seems to me to be a valid worry about our current literary output. It seems impossible to know what might set off an unknown person's sensitivity. Well, other than the obvious - sadism, brutality for the sake of brutality, racism and its related isms - which do not seem to be literary subjects in and of themselves. That they might be tools for a literary purpose is possible, but also damned tricky. See Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita, and its history, for how the unpleasant can be handled in a literary way, while showing the problems for such works.

David Foster Wallace on the uses of irony may seem like an unlikely video for me. I may have my doubts about his Infinite Jest, I have no doubts about his skill and respect for his ideas.