RARA-AVIS: Subject Matter

Jack Saunders (jls@akddoa.ak.lucent.com)
Sun, 23 Nov 1997 10:06:34 -0000 I belong to two lists, NWU-Chat and Rara-Avis.
NWU-Chat discusses issues of interest to freelance writers. Rara-Avis is about hard-boiled fiction.
Recently, at NWU-Chat, a member started carrying on about satanic ritual abuse (SRA). When he was asked to stop taking up people's time on the subject, he got defensive, and insulted anyone who criticized him.
The same thing happened with a woman who asked members to write their representatives about legislation that would put vitamins and health foods in the hands of drug cartels and organized medicine. Some members didn't see how that subject was related to writing.
In the case of the medical profession and the pharmaceutical industry, Linus Pauling wrote, in his book about Vitamin C and the common cold, how Adelle Davis's books had been pulled off library shelves. Academic astronomers were able to get Immanuel Velikovsky's book dropped by his publisher, even though it was a bestseller, by threatening to boycott the textbook sales division of the house.
So censorship and freedom of expression issues are very much concerned with health reporting, and the way the media, which depend on drug companies for advertising, relate to the sponsors of ads, compared to how they relate to an individual writer, acting alone.
You could say the same thing about satanic ritual abuse, I suppose.
I tend to monitor such conversations and answer individual participants directly, rather than take up the list's space with my contributions.
I do the same thing at Rara-Avis. Answer individuals directly, rather than address the entire list with comments that many members will not feel are relevant to their primary interest. I do this out of courtesy, and because I don't like to be lectured, by people who feel that I have violated the punctilio, or etiquette, or whatever it is they feel compelled to chide me in defense of.
Recently, Rara-Avis has discussed the relation of jazz to the movie adaptations of PI novels and how faithful, or effective, the casting of films was to the characters in the books they were adapted from.
Surely these are subjects that bear on hard-boiled fiction.
I commented at rather more length that I usually do on the subject of casting, and discussed instances that don't have anything to do with hard-boiled fiction, but illustrate what I was talking about in a more general way. I did this because I felt that there were readers, like myself, who are interested in books other than the ones we can easily pigeonhole, even though we may have favorite categories of books, and in books as only one way of apprehending and making sense of life, although books are a congenial and favorite way of doing that for many of us.
No, what Tom Clancy thought of Harrison Ford doesn't have anything to do with hard-boiled fiction. But what Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler were trying to do when they invented hard-boiled fiction was make the genre they were writing in more realistic, more vernacular, less sentimental, less refined. They transcended the limitations of the genre they inherited, as writers do. It would be foolish of us to sanctify what they wrote and deify them if doing so kept contemporary writers from following their example. Encouraged living writers to rely on formula and cant. As Hammett and Chandler did not.
If anybody else feels this way, say a word on my behalf. To the pecksniffs and dogmatists who would ding my helmet.
If no one does, I'll stay off the line. And sorry to have bothered you.
Ex-cuse me.
Whether or not Clint Eastwood will play the romantic lead in the movie of The Bridges of Madison County may have a greater effect on whether the book will be published than we like to admit. Whether the book will be published on whether it will be written. And whether it will be written on what kind of a life we have, what range of choices we see as possible to us, as a society, what individual choices we see as viable, in our lives.
I see writing as a way to open that up. Not close it down. And the writer's job as to do that. Not find a niche to hide in.

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