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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