At 02:23 PM 11/07/2006 +0100, Al wrote:
>Democratic? Can you explain that, Miker. Most
editorial decisions are made
>by no more than a handful of people.
Who then go on to use all sorts of appeals, including
literary merit, to affirm their decisions. Often they are
misleading, and, as Mark pointed out much earlier, they are
not always successful. Books, like many other products, are
sold (and often not) because they have well-designed covers,
because they are well advertised or good cover descriptions,
get good reviews, because they are well distributed close to
where people read (bus stations as opposed to book stores,)
because they have the momentum of
"buzz," and/or maybe because they appeal to something called
"the lowest, common denominator."
It's not that the "test of time" has no value, it's just that
it isn't any more objective as a measure of merit than any
other valuation. We could add in here that 60 years isn't
such a long time either, though it's certainly longer than
Jim was at Cal and that was a very long time indeed! There
should be a book coming soon about how Jim avoided becoming
an intellectual himself, I think.
I'm not going to knock Spillane. I think his appeal lies
largely in his strength at creating revenge fantasies. The
desire for revenge is a very durable human emotion, and
Spillane gets at it directly, without a lot of
self-justifying debate. You might say the book that precedes
the blow-away final act is all self-justification, but if
that's the case it's a one-sided debate. Real debate would
just get in the way of the emotion, which Spillane loads like
the gun he fires in the final scene. Like Jim said, Spillane
knows how to manipulate readers' emotions. The writing is to
the purpose and I suspect The Mick's stories will be read
long after the political context of his yarns have
faded.
That's just my subjective point of view, but I think you'd be
wrong to underrate it. I understand that Jim's Catholicism,
with an omnipotent God to decide right from wrong, leads him
to seek an other-worldly objectivity in the valuations that
apparently escape His notice, though you'd think that
single-deity thing would leave Jim more susceptible to the
blandishments of an elite. And democracy has it's merits, but
faith in the objectivity of numbers is foolish and
pointless.
Norms and averages are mathematical concepts, while finding
merit in a story is more humanistic. When it comes to
deciding what has meaning to me, 300 million Americans could
be every bit as wrong as a billion Chinese carrying little
red books, or for that matter, the opinions of 35 million
Canadians. I am an individual with my own existence and
experience to address with my reading.
There are more books published in a year than I could read in
my lifetime, so I rely upon the opinions of others, many of
those posted on Rara Avis, to help me find the really good
stuff. People who express opinions based on backgrounds or
citing reasons with which I can identify, point me in the
right direction, but in the end, I have to crack the cover
myself and form my own opinion. Jim says we've a right to our
own subjective opinions, but I suggest that is all we have.
There are no objective measures. Top-ten lists or literary
prizes, regardless of the number of people who agree with the
selections, their expertise, or how long they are in
agreement, are as fallible as the humans who create
them.
There is no such thing as the best book. If there was, if
objective valuation was possible, there would be no noir
fiction.
The Truth According to Moi, Kerry Schooley
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