Books? Nah

A new way of getting out the word, and a new way of distribution, is needed; ask any writer.

Okay, why do people buy books?

Impulse accounts for many sales. A bright cover and a cool blurb at the grocery store and wham, a paperback sells.

Curiosity explains a good many. Generate a buzz, the publicists all say. This means get people talking about it. If a new celebrity biography comes out and all the sudden talk show hosts, coworkers, and bloggers are blathering about it, that book will sell. People want to see what all the fuss is about, even when they know it's fake buzz stirred up by publicity flacks.

Most books don't get this treatment, though.

Oprah proved a long time ago that merely mentioning a decent book on TV can affect sales. It helps when the show is as popular as hers, and it also helps when an audience seeks to emulate the host, as hers does, but still, any exposure boosts sales.

Most books do not get promoted. No ads, no sales reps talking up the book to buyers from franchise bookstores, and no peddlers bribing booksellers the way record companies bribe DJs to play songs.

Most books are published, sit on very limited shelf space for three days to three weeks, then get remaindered. Paperbacks have their covers torn off to be mailed back to the publisher for credit, while the books themselves are pulped. It's cheaper to throw them away than store or ship them. Secondary sales at a later time don't factor into such profit-loss calculation.

Remaindered hardcovers are bought at cost and sold at discount to recoup as much as possible.

So how can a book that is getting no promotion, and causing no buzz, sell?

Sheer chance.

The average print run is between 1500 and 5000 copies. Random luck might place the book in front of 1500 - 5000 people who just happen to be interested in it, and have the money for it.

Chances are slim that print run will equal number of interested customers, though, let alone find all of them. Sales decline steeply when it's hardcovers, which are going for an average of $25 each, but mass market paperbacks now cost the best part of ten bucks each, too, so even they have a sticker shock factor.

What is lacking?

Word of mouth has no time to make the rounds, when a book has a shelf-life that is often shorter than that of cottage cheese. Creating a buzz needs to be done before the book hits the shelves. That means advance copies, and lots of marketing nonsense, such as phony jabber about how it's the book that did this, or made someone say or do that.

Wouldn't you buy, "The book that made the President scream"? Sure you would.

But of course, you’d have to manufacture a fake incident on which to hang such grandiose claims. Perhaps write a fat book, take a galley proof to the President, and drop it on his foot. "Made the President dance with outrage," would then be available.

No time for such things? No access? No money for travel? No stomach for pranks?

Beginning to see the difficulties stacking up like a log jam?

What else is lacking for the average book? It is born in obscurity into a world that neither asked for it nor wants it now that it's here. It means nothing to anyone, having not caused even a minor celebrity flap. And its contents are mysterious because no one has read it yet. People prefer sure things. They want what they already know. Reinforcement, not surprise.

It's lacking an advertisement. No one's going to seek it out if they don't know about it, what ever it is. Especially a book.

People try all the time to use the internet to get out the word. Look how blogging has blossomed from a cottage industry to a kind of flash flood threatening to overtake print journalism. People have something to say and by damn they're going to say it.

Trouble is, they say it so much. With so many words. Look at this piece. It's overly long and has no bullet statements in it. Bo-ring. No one will get this far. I could put in a recipe for currant jam and no one would notice.

So is it hopeless? Is the average know-nothing book doomed to be pulped after selling to the writer's parents and the few of his cousins deluded enough to think sucking up to a writer will get them anything worthwhile?

It is hopeless, in the current system, yes. Unless it's a genre novel, in which case there is a chance it'll sell a certain base number of copies automatically to those who buy books by category. It happens often enough to sustain some publishers.

A new way of getting out the word, and a new way of distribution, is needed.

Everyone will immediately think of the internet. Everyone needs to go lie down 'til that thought passes. The internet is not a magic solution to anything. It's too crowded, too clogged, and entirely too splintered. No way exists to ensure reaching even your best IM friend, let alone masses of people who might like the book you've forced upon the world.

Sure, it can help. You can now have a website, and you can write www.genestewart.com on your book, your stickers, your posters, and your children's tee shirts. Why not? A few who see it might even be stirred to check it out. Not many, though.

If you came here for answers, I have one for you. You want to be a writer?

Pick up a camera.

Do a video blog or make a movie.

Books, outside the corrupt publishing industry, aren't the way to fame, fortune, or influence. No one reads anymore. Oh sure, more books are published and sold than ever before in history, but that’s a function of population density. The same percentage of people read in any given age as in all the others. Higher literacy doesn’t equate to higher book sales. Not in a direct way.

Unless the Republicans pay you to write propaganda, you won’t make money and no one wants the book you’ll write. Worse, it requires reading. Who’ll bother? Why should they?

Answer those questions and you might have a chance of finishing your book, getting it past iditors, getting it published, getting it distributed, and selling a few copies.

Then what?

Unless you genuinely enjoy putting words in order, there is no reason to write. Writing is thankless. No one cares, there is no feedback or even reaction even when something is published, and the only thing you will ever be asked for is free writing and more free writing. Oh, can you write an article for our newsletter? Oh, can you please sign this?

No pay, no respect, and no chance of figuring things out so that writers are suddenly profitable again.

Only the exploitative, lying publishers can squeeze profit from books. And they neither admit this nor share.

So let’s step back. Are you writing in order to have a book in hand? To make a physical object? Or are you telling stories? Do you care about the fiction delivery system used to get your voice to the audience?

Audience means those who listen. It’s about storytelling, which predates writing and is based on the oral tradition. People sitting around campfires at night listening while one of them talks. And the one talking learned to tell stories in a way that kept people listening.

If that’s what you care about, then how your story reaches others is immaterial. An CD is as good as a movie or book. It does not matter, except of course that each format has different requirements. Something intended to be spoken must be different from something intended to be studied on a page. Movies and even plays are entirely different, again.

If you can separate fiction from its format, you may have a chance of making some kind of dent. You could find a job writing ad copy for TV voice-overs. Or telling stories to kids at camp-outs. Not much money in either, but it’s at least making money by using words. Isn’t that what you want?

Why, then, do you write?

Is it really to see a book on a shelf with your name on it? Is it really to fulfill some dim fantasy of celebrity writer, jetting from convention to bookstore, signing autographs and being interviewed by jovial TV hosts?

Are you really that naive?

Not even the rich, famous ones live that more than a few weeks out of every few years, and even they have to court it to get it. Mostly, if they have books out there being sold, it’s because they wrote them. They put words into order.

Which brings us to content. We’ve decided the kind of bottle doesn’t matter, and the label is easily changed. What people who actually read the books they buy ultimately want is content.

What does that mean? A books content is what the words in it add up to. For a reader, it’s an experience. People read books for the fun of it, and to get something out of it. Often, that latter part means they learn things. A book that combines interesting facts with a fun experience will sell. Ask Dan Brown.

Many criticized The Da Vinci Code as a movie in book form. They cited its cinematic attributes, and spoke of its lack of literary ones. There is some validity to this. And it explains why the book is so popular. People reading it enjoyed the experience because it replicated many of the things they enjoy about movies.

Movies immediately involve viewers. Sight and sound, faces and voice, people, places, and things all captivate us.

Put those things into your book and it helps draw an audience.

Literary snobs will sniff and point to one of Proust’s paragraphs as if it’s sculpture. They’ll speak about how one must sift through it over and over to glean all its meanings. They’ll claim literary values, meaning references to other books, allusion, and book-rooted metaphor are somehow more valuable than movie echoes.

This is categorical thinking at its most bigoted.

Fiction changes with every epoch, usually with technology. Cinema has long influenced the written word. Fiction has adopted many cinematic techniques, and vice versa. The two have grown toward one another like spouses in a good marriage.

Denying this is absurd. Embracing it, and seeking further to bring in other kinds of influences, from the internet for example, will expand fiction’s vocabulary and lead to new forms. This will keep it pertinent and allow it to flourish even as conventions change.

Producing a book is only one small way to deliver fiction to potential fans. Those of us who grew up with books, and who love books, will always cherish them, but we who write must realize there are other modes.

We can create those elusive, naive things mentioned at the start of this disjointed, rambling essay: A new way to publish, and a new way to distribute.

We can create such new opportunities for writers by trying new things, exploring new ways of reaching people, and letting each other know what works. By doing this, we can bring fiction with us into the future, no matter how changed and strange it may be.

/// /// ///

Who's Bad?

When I saw the second plane hit, my first thought was, They’re coming out of the woodwork. Masks off. They want us to know.

This is why they lied about how it happened, instead of just lying about who did it. They want thinking people to know it was an inside job.

This delivers the unspoken threat: If we’re willing to do this, do you dare think anything you can do will even slow us down? This is chilling to free thought, free speech, and free action. It’s a direct threat to shut up or else.

Then they covered up the physical evidence as quickly as possible, to foment doubt. Not probable, nor even feasible doubt, but a species of doubt propagandists know well.

It’s the anxiety of having to choose between going along with an absurdity endorsed by the dominant group, or risking being ostracized by trusting reason, logic, and observation.

The Emperor Has No Clothes, but only the naive little boy, alone in the crowd, dares say it, because social pressure forces everyone to go along with the absurdity.

This is how religion works, and why propagandists choose this method. If they can force you into believing an absurdity, they know you’ll fight to the bone to keep hold of it. Once they have you suckered, you stay suckered unless and until there is a major social change, or some other compelling reason, forcing you to shake off the illusion.

Who is angrier than a letdown former believer? Is not a true believer unshakable and, once shaken, shattered?

We need to understand the process we’ve been put through. They did something so outrageous, few could credit it. They covered up the physical evidence and lied about who did it and how it was done. They scapegoated a marginalized targeted enemy, demonizing Others. People Not Like Us did this, they claimed.

Despots all do this.

Pick a scapegoat and pick on that scapegoat unrelentingly. Blame everything on a marginalized, demonized minority. Persecution focuses hatred. It excites bigots to action and rallies mobs to act on false beliefs.

Once that happens, it locks in the lies.

That is why they did it so sloppily, so badly, and so baldly.

After all, they can’t be that incompetent, can they?

Because if they really are as bungling as they seem, and we have responded as flatfootedly, gullibly, and stupidly as we have, what does that make us?

Ahem.


/// /// ///

What Can You Do?

Vonnegut died. What can you do?

He was old, famous, and rich. He was talented, depressive, and cynical. He was amazing, predictable, and prone to repeat himself. I love many of his books. Reading his work never fails to make me want to go write something of my own.

If we think hard, maybe we can think of another writer who meant as much to us. Who influenced us as much. Who inspired us to do better. Hemingway, for older people, did much the same. Vonnegut was our Hemingway.

Now we’re without either. What can you do?

As I wrote the paragraphs above, iTunes played a digital version of an old recording of Glenn Miller and his band performing “Tuxedo Junction”. This fit, somehow.

Much was made of Vonnegut’s resemblance to Mark Twain, both in writing and looks. Attitude played a big part of the writing resemblance. Wild hair, a hook nose, and a big mustache explains the physical echo.

There are many worse writers to resemble, in any way.

To the extent we’re blunt, focused on big issues that matter to individuals, and piss against the wind of control, fascism, and death and destruction, we writers left alive resemble Vonnegut.

He was famously liberal. Eugene V. Debs was a hero of his. Standing up for the common person mattered to Kurt. Not being pushed around by bullies with money, power, and connections. Speaking up for the ones whose voices could not be heard from under the layers of shit they’d been buried in by the propaganda machines of the right.

If we writers left alive learn one thing from Vonnegut, it should be kindness.

That, he figured, was all that mattered, in the end.

Kindness to each other, he meant. Individuals, taken one at a time, and given the respect each deserves simply by being alive, were Vonnegut’s champions. He wasn’t much for collective singulars like The Nazi Party, the Mafia, or the GOP.

Everybody mentions how Vonnegut survived the fire-bombing of Dresden, Germany in 1945. Few mention that his mother had committed suicide just before he’d shipped out for the European theater. He was tough in ways few can ever understand.

Now he’s dead. What can you do?



/// /// ///

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.


/// /// ///

Monsieur Verdoux

You should watch this movie if you haven't yet. It stars Charles Chaplin, in a film the original script for which was written by Orson Welles, based on the real life serial killer Henri Landru. Chaplin refused to be directed by Welles, bought and rewrote the script, and shot it in 1947. It's got sound, and is full of dark humor and blunt statements.

What's remarkable is its thesis: That capitalism leads to mass and serial killing. Simple as that.

Chaplin plays a mild-mannered bank clerk, loyal and competent, who is abruptly fired. He is shown no respect, loyalty, or appreciation by his bank. To find money for his wife and kids, he falls almost inadvertently into the habit of charming, marrying, and killing rich widows until a pair of them prove unpredictable and blow his cover. About this same time, he is ruined in a stock market crash, and meets a woman he’s been kind to twice -- his only moments of compassion and kindness -- who plucks him off the street, as he once did for her, and feeds him lunch. This bucks him up and, persuaded by her, he faces up to his crimes, all without batting an eye.

At his trial, he is calm and articulate. He refuses to seek clemency or excuses for his actions. He argues that business and soldiers kill for profit, so he is merely emulating capitalism. He says it’s a matter of numbers: If one man does it, it’s murder; if an army or a nation does it, it’s heroic and fine.

He ironically apologizes for not having done better.

Had he killed for anything other than money, then it might be a crime, he says. But because he was doing it strictly for business, the same as corporations, politicians, and armies do it, it should be sanctioned by society. Certainly much of it is, indeed, sanctioned; he makes oblique reference to Guernica, a war crime in which the Nazis strafed and bombed an entire village of innocent men, women, and children out of existence as they pursued their agenda. All sides do the same basic thing, he observed.

It's a disturbing, unsettling argument, especially in these horrible days of the Bush ascendancy.

At the end of the movie, when Verdoux is caught, tried, convicted, and sentenced to be guillotined, he says: For thirty years I lived by my intelligence. When that was no longer needed, or wanted, I went into business for myself. As to being a mass killer, does not the world encourage it? Are w not making weapons of mass destruction as fast as possible? Have we not used them to kill innocent women and children, entire towns and cities? By contrast my efforts pale to insignificance. But I will leave you with one thought: I will soon lose my head, but I will see you , all of you, very soon."

Prescient and creepy, MONSIEUR VERDOUX rings like a damning indictment, and it is Welles's insight and Chaplin's eloquence that pegged us even that far back.

Rent or catch it on cable, it is well worth seeing, and perhaps the most modern of Chaplin’s films due to its unusually dark, ironic tone. Many blame that tone for the movie’s poor showing stateside when it was released. It did better in Europe, but has never been among Chaplin’s celebrated films. Yet it should be. Without the sentimentality and endless silliness typical of Chaplin’s movies, it makes points elegantly, and offers a portrait we all know too well, in these days of Hannibal Lector and George W. Bush.

/// /// ///

Ghost Hunters

Kohi, Hai

Ghost Hunters: William James and the Search for Scientific Proof of Life After Death, by Deborah Blum
The Penguin Press, NY, 2006
ISBN: 1-59420-090-4
321pp plus Notes, Sources, and Index - $25.95 hardcover

Just read Ghost Hunters by Deborah Blum, an account of the search for evidence of life after death at the turn of the last century. William James, the philosopher and psychologist, is a central figure, as are a host of other prominent Victorian scientists, writers, and experimenters on both sides of the Atlantic.

What is stingingly obvious is how bigoted and closed-minded the science establishment has been from the start against even the search for spiritual evidence, let alone the analyzing of it or the conclusions it forces. We see it still. And knowing that it has remained a howling gaffe in science to pursue paranormal evidence makes the account that much more poignant. These very intelligent, very fair men and women stood up for what was right in the face of strident criticism that destroyed careers and, sadly, continues to do so.

The book is slender but dense. It is well-written, vivid, and full of personal detail. One learns much about the times and circumstances of those brave people who pioneered parapsychology. We see so many instances of elusive results and suggestive hints being decried, ignored, and ridiculed by those pleased to call themselves scientific. Some of these scoffers sneered proudly even as they refused to read the reports, let alone assess the experiments’ protocols or the evidence.

We begin to understand how unsure genuine science is to this day. Far from the body of absolute dogma it pretends to be, science is in fact selective and biased, a thuggery more than an academy. And when science is a bully, then the few who persevere in the face of withering hostility become heroic.

This is not a book for true believers of any stripe. Those convinced of either a religious doctrine or personal system aren’t likely to find confirmation. Anyone seeking answers will find frustration and open-ended arguments that never resolve. Rather than be upset, they are advised to avoid this book.

If one prefers questions to answers, and if one wishes to know how attempts to understand what, if anything, lies beyond, then read Ms. Blum's excellent book. You'll learn how science fails miserably at many things human, even as it shoulders its way into the inhuman with unnerving success and ability. You'll also see that some of the very best minds a century ago concluded that there was something in all the seances, table-tippings, and ectoplasmic pokes and prods.

William James, his wife Alice, and his brother, novelist Henry, along with members of the British and American Societies for Psychical Research, were convinced telepathy had been established as fact. When it came to surviving the body’s death, and communicating between the living and the disembodied, agreement was not so readily found.

One fascinating experiment involved women in England, the United States, and India simultaneously using automatic writing ostensibly to communicate with a recently-deceased Society member. Like a jigsaw puzzle, coherent messages and direct, specific answers to questions posed to one or another medium came through. It took weeks, months, but when it was all assembled, the conversation was convincing to those conducting it; they seemed to be talking with someone they knew well, who had died.

This reminded me of John G. Fuller’s excellent book, The Airmen Who Would Not Die, in which a series of unconnected spirit communications among many people over a course of years revealed what had happened to a group of airmen who had vanished over the Atlantic during the war. It was later confirmed, and the communications remain one of the most convincing cases of spirit survival of bodily death ever recorded. I had not known there were other such cases and was glad to read of another.

Ghost Hunters is excellent for anyone thoughtful about what comes after all this, if anything. Many suggestive pieces of evidence conclude something is there for us after all.

Not as fun as Will Shorr Vs. The Supernatural, but much more sober and systematic an account by a world-class science writer, this book is recommended.

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