Notes Toward A Career Suicide

He desperately tried to do something, exerting incredible effort, using every trick he could think of.

He was hammered, though, and driven back, completely at wit’s end, and defeated, nearly destroyed.

Then, rallying his inner strength, he gave it one last tremendous grunt and triumphed, prevailing against incredible odds to achieve a victory that transformed his and everyone’s life for the better.

The. Fucking. End.

That is the pattern wanted. Fill the pre-labeled bottles with word goo of a certain consistency, made from a limited and controlled number of ingredients, and be paid, if you’re lucky, slave wages that haven’t changed in a century, on spec. Meaning you do the work first and they’ll then decide if they want it. And if they want it, then they’ll decide what to pay you, if anything. And contracts are made to be broken, by them.

Lump it or leave it, loser.

Dickens changed Great Expectations to a happy ending because his friend Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton, also a writer, assured him it would sell better that way. The original, more tragic ending would have anticipated Thomas Hardy and proven far more a landmark in literature, of course.

Can’t have innovation.

Of course, Dickens also fought all his life against piracy and in favor of intellectual property laws and copyright enforcement, because the American and other publishers outside Britain simply made copies of his works without permission, and without paying him a penny. Piracy of the sort Hollywood and the hardcopy music industry rails against these days.

But we’re discussing not theft but the cultural bullying of the crass, the greedy, and the naive. Even though, technically, the free-for-all attitude exploited by intellectual property piracy is rooted in the same cultural bigotry against anything that rises above the mediocre, commonplace, and easily understood.

Lennon put strings on songs, and rendered them saccharine and sweet, so they’d sell, after PLASTIC ONO BAND, a stripped-down, minimalist recording decades ahead of its time, was rejected by the public despite his Beatle status. Paul’s McCARTNEY album, and RAM, on the other hand, both managed somehow to sell pretty well while also being something of a precursor for Lo-Fi, which would, incidentally, make the Wings WILD LIFE album critically reviled.

When McCartney wanted to do a James Bond 007 theme song, he sent the movie people his recording “Live and Let Die”. They liked “the demo” and wondered when they could hear the finished version. That meant they hadn’t heard strings.

McCartney added an orchestra.

When the Impressionists dared show their work at public shows, there were riots. The most popular painter in the world, Claude Monet, was once considered so radical as to be scandalous.

When Marcel Duchamp painted “Nude Descending a Staircase” in 1912, the painting shocked experts and viewers accustomed to more realistic, or representational, paintings. This preference for the representational continues to this day, as anything cubist, abstract, or in any was not immediately recognized, is considered a mockery of the viewer. Insecurity and resentment keep art at the level of “Dogs Playing Poker” and velvet Elvises.

In 1913, the debut of Igor Stravinski’s ballet The Rite of Spring caused a riot requiring police intervention, so unexpected were its rhythms and scenes.

The public is LCD. The Lowest Common Denominator dominates art, just as the public defines the fat part of the Bell curve. This means art must be familiar, expected, and predictable, or the public turns on it. Be reassuring, comforting, and lulling, or they will rile. Thwart them and they’ll anger.

Hummel, good. Picasso, bad. Abstract expressionism, worse. That is how the public feels.

Same in music: Chromatic melodies, three-chord harmonics, and standard progressions are fine, but if you try BeBop or serial music, it is considered torture. Make it pretty and nice, or they will reject it most hatefully.

This is why groups seeking to rebel against the norm, or squirm out from under the fat part of the Bell curve, have always embraced the ugly and mean. Nasty things repel squares, so the self-defined well-rounded hipsters cultivate the nasties.

This is itself a conformity.

Just as the Black Mass is an invention of rebellious Roman Catholics, and thus quite Christian, so too are today’s nonconformists, such as, say, the Goths, actually a subset of the Establishment they seek to detach from.

Very few individuals achieve independence. Very few can live without either conforming, or choosing to reject conformity. And, since it is the conformist society that defines what shocks and repels it, it supplies the approved list of things that will piss it off and mark one as a rebel. They hand their own rebels marching orders, in other words.

Living unaware of such things is the only way to be one’s self. That means finding one’s true self and opting out of society entirely, and that’s not an option for most of us.

They, the societal collective singular, like neat and clean, so we’ll be unkempt and dirty. The very term Dirty Hippie demonstrates how basic the mutual contempt can be, balanced at either end of the same seesaw of public opinion. In a carnivorous, predatory, and warmongering society controlled by a death cult profiteering on dead bodies and destruction, the obvious rebellion would be a vegetarian peacenik who means no harm to anyone, is passive and tranquil and happy just to be, and glad to opt out of consumerism in a handmade, home-brewed folk festival. Add in creativity -- someone who makes things instead of breaking them -- and the rebel will be impossible to ignore.

However, the groups are mutually exclusive because they are so much a part of the same thing; a magnet’s north pole can never be its south pole, yet both define the single, whole magnet. What are bullies without victims, or vice versa?

Muzak cuts out the high- and low-end of the audible spectrum of sounds, and emphasizes the part of the scale in the middle, considered less likely to offend any ear. In this way, extremes are dampened and eliminated. Pat Boone singing Little Richard’s compositions, for example: No passion, no excitement, and no intensity. Just bland tune tones.

Styles seek to define and exclude, too. Country music’s twang, fake accents, and big dumb hats allow it to steal outdated rock and roll music -- once its anathema -- and make it acceptable to its audience. Rock musicians tended to have long hair in order to show they couldn’t live by society’s primpy rules.

Rebels and outlaws, by conformity.

And those few who didn’t fit into any category either had one develop around them, or were marginalized and ignored.

As always.

The wilder the shaman, the farther from the campfire he or she had to live. And the wider he or she could roam, too.

And periodic visits back to cave or village produced alarm, distress, and, often, hostility. The wandering shaman, unfamiliar to everyday things, was seen as a monster. Werewolf, bigfoot, or hungry ghost; the people who huddled together, the ones who’d cast the shaman out in the first place, found labels that let them reject anything too different, too strange, and too far-fetched.

Fetched from afar is exactly what individual art must be, because each of us exists separate and apart from the other. We desperately try to overlap, and cling together in terror of the dark around us. John Donne erred. He should have written, No man is allowed to be an island. Those few who are islands unto themselves anyway are bashed and battered by the world from all sides, and often pulverized, or sunk under conformity’s waves.

A career is a headlong stumble through confusion. The word is both a noun and a verb. As verb, it means moving forward at high speed. A car smashing through a crowd of people is careering.

That’s what people with professions -- activities they have said interest or motivate them -- are said to have, a career. It means the progress of their actions cuts a swath through the rest of us. That’s where that usage comes from.

Which is why one must be in the midst of others to have a career, and why the crowd gets to describe it, define it, and proscribe it.

And the crowd is attracted only by things that draw the attention of a majority of the people making it up. If you catch the eyes of only a few, your art is said to have failed. Some things one does will make the crowd attack, or run away, or turn its back. And some, using Lowest Common Denominator appeal, will prove popular, and appeal almost universally among the crowd’s denizens.

And for many, this is rewarding. It validates them, to be embraced by the group. Hugged by the masses, some artists, such as Norman Rockwell or Barry Manilow or Harold Robbins or Tom Selleck, are justified by acceptance.

They are said to have the common touch, or folk appeal.

Us pariah shamanic werewolves can’t stomach that stuff, and prowl for rougher fare. We seek knowledge, truth, and other impossible ideals. We lurk in shadow, come alive in darkness, and howl alone at moons only we can see.

So whether to do things acceptable and comfortable to the crowd, or to leave the crowd behind and explore the outlying edges, is an artist’s main choice. This is tantamount to choosing whether or not to have a career.

Is it any wonder some artists struggle so hard to force acceptance of their fringe work? Or grow bitter about rejection until hate and bile is all they spew? Or give up altogether and dive into the self-abuse of chemicals or perversions?

I’m an artist, he realized.

He desperately tried to do something, exerting incredible effort, using every trick he could think of.

He was hammered, though, and driven back into himself, completely at wit’s end.

He was defeated, nearly destroyed.

Then, rallying his inner strength, he gave one last tremendous grunt and...

Either:

...triumphed, prevailing against incredible odds to achieve a victory that transformed his and everyone’s life for the better.

Or:

...triumphed, achieving something no one else could understand, something that transformed his life for the better.

Or:

The. Fucking. End.


/// /// ///

Go Dark

I didn't hire on to be a factory worker, and that's what genre iditors want.

They want cookie-cutter patterns, the same old setups, setbacks, and resolutions, just like Hollywood movies, and they want everything presented in standard formats.  Vary at all from kittens with wings or dragons or fairies and they can't grasp it, it threatens them, and they bounce it.

This is why genre fiction is stagnant.  It is determinedly mindless.  It refuses to grow.  Innovation is punished.  Disguise it well enough and you might be allowed to play, but that way lies marginalized careers such as Norman Spinrad's, or James Sallis's, or even, yes, Harlan Ellison's.  They might even admit it's good, but they'll punish it just the same.

If one is content cranking out the same old shit time after time, in the same old ways, then genre fiction's for you.  If one is content filling in a paint-by-number format, using the assigned colors, and staying well within the lines, genre fiction's for you.

If you aspire to anything more mature, adult, real, or just relevant, go play elsewhere.  If you can find a place.  And you won't.  The destruction of the mid list by the corporate profit, zero sum mentality has mercilessly rooted out hiding places for genuine self-expression in fiction.  That way lies art and publishers are hostile to art.  They want commerce, pure and simple.  Give them product and shut up about creativity or expressing humanoid primate constants.

You might be able to find a way to address your compulsions and imperatives within the fill-in-the-blank formats genre publishers force upon you.  You might be able to elbow out a corner where you can fake creativity by rearranging things, as the likes of Jeff Vander Meer has done recently by taking a jigsaw approach to accepted topos, tropes, and motifs.

People say, "I want to be a writer," or, better yet, "I want to write," or best of all, "I write."  They never say, "I want to fill in the blanks established long before I was born, and paint slavishly by number so I know I'm safe."  RAH to one side, an exception proving the rule -- and look how self-indulgent he ended up, they also never say, "I want to produce commercial product, like dog food, of a certain consistency, so they can sell it like canned goods, and pay me a pittance for it, using pay scales that haven't changed since the Pulp Era of the 1930s."

That, however, is what "being" a writer amounts to, in the genre markets.

And is there real literary fiction being produced?  Not much, anymore.  Most of what passes for it is simply conforming to the corporate-established Literary Genre.  It's just another label for just another product.  Each year's crop of New, Improved, Advanced, and Amazing litfic is the parallel to each year's "new" car models, which are the same as every other year's models, with some new chrome or plastic or paint on them.

Remember all this if you "want to be a writer".  A writer is, as Jack Warner of Old Hollywood said 80 or so years ago, "... a schmuck with a typewriter".  In other words, a writer is just a volunteer asshole paid slave wages on spec to fill the already-labeled jar with word goo of a certain consistency.

The other arts, such as painting, music, and even acting, are the same.

The real stuff never sees the light of publication, or so rarely does that each exception proves the rule.  And thinking you'll be the exception is the sucker's bet that keeps it all going on.

Go dark.

The dark's where the real stuff thrives, in samizdat privacy, in personal truth.

And the disgust cuts both ways: If I see through the patterns so well, and can do them, why can I not write a few best-selling bits of fluff and have some money & success from which to kvetch?

Self-sabotage is the answer and that's were we step into deeper waters.


/// /// ///