The Fiction of American Fiction

So.  I watched American Fiction last night, as it was movie night with Mom, and both Rache and I had wanted to see it.  As a writer and author with four traditionally published books and three agents (fic/nonfic/book-to-film), this spoke right into my existence...and to the peculiar place intersectional orthodoxies inhabit in the contemporary publishing world. 

There were some excellent performances, some early moments of real feeling, and it was often entertaining.   But at other points it felt...off.  It frequently pulled punches, drifted into intermittent bathos, and had a logically incoherent ending.

As a satire of the publishing industry, it just didn't feel like it cut close enough to the mark.  For readers of fiction with a surface-level grasp of what it means to publish and be published, perhaps.  But for me, the satire didn't cut deep, and the further we got past the premise, the more shallow it felt.  

Much of that came from the "authors life" that was presented in the film.  Our protagonist is purportedly a "struggling writer," meaning his books are excellent but unsuccessful.  When he presents on a panel at a conference, his panel is attended by fewer than a dozen extras who have clearly been told to look like they'd rather be anywhere else.  He's rejected, over and over again.  His whole schtick is supposed to be that he's barely making it.

Yet when he arbitrarily goes into a franchise bookstore, there are a solid dozen of his books on the shelves.  The "black" shelves, which troubles him, but shelves nonetheless.  If you can walk into a random bookstore and it stocks multiple copies of several of your books, you're not struggling, honeychild.

He meets with his agent in a big shiny downtown office, because that's how all agents are, right?  I've got three, and while my LA-based book-to-film agent might have an office, I wouldn't know.  I've never met him in person.  My fiction agent...London-based, a successful and reputable agency...works from home.  We Skype.  My Austin-based nonfic agent?  Works from home.  We talk on the phone.  We Zoom.  We've met once in the last ten years.  Again, if you're a mid-list author, it's not 1997.  You don't get flown places or spend the money to do so unless you're in the very tippy top of the list.  Publishing doesn't work that way.

A substantial subplot thread involves the author asserting control over the title of the book, to the point where they can pitch a hissy and get it changed late in the pre-production process.  If you're a name, maybe.  But if this is your debut novel, ain't no way that's happening.  Just no way.  In the same way that you're not gonna be writing the screenplay for your novel, particularly if you don't have a clue how screenplays work.  Because screenwriting is an art in and of itself, as I've learned in conversation with the gifted show runner/screenwriter who optioned my own novel.  

And if your books are scraping by, is anyone you randomly meet...like the attractive and recently single public defender who lives across the street of your beautiful Hamptons-Vineyard beach house...likely to ever have read them?  O Lord no.  With three thousand new titles burping out of tradpub, POD, and self-pub outlets every single day?  Not gonna happen.  That space is too supersaturated.

Other things bugged me.  Like, does he even have an editor?  AN EDITOR?  Apparently not.  I mean, books don't have editors, right?  Or copy editors.  You just write it, and rich white publisher ladies publish it and give you tons of money. 

Then there's the money involved.  Seven hundred thousand dollars for an unknown author is a preposterous advance, a fantasy advance.  Yeah, it's satire, but c'mon.  And four million for the immediate purchase...not option, but purchase...of film rights?  The industry usual and customaries on that number are a set percentage of total production budget.  Four mil assumes, what, a final production budget in the hundred million dollar range?  Given the current market, and the nature of the film that would be made, that's preposterous.  You'd take a bath.  Maybe if it's a write-off, but jeez louise.  And the film gets made IMMEDIATELY?  

There's more, particularly around what actually happens to a book and movie deal if an author fundamentally misrepresents their identity.  Which, er, isn't what happens in the film.

Much of the dissonance in the film may be a factor of the vintage of the book upon which the film is based.  Percival Everett published ERASURE back in 2001, which means that the narrative was conceptualized, constructed and written in the late 1990s or very early 2000s.  That was, obviously, a very different time in the life of the publishing industry. 

Perhaps that's why American Fiction felt rather more...fictional...than I'd expected.

Bad Family Businesses

Having a family business can be a good thing.

Like, say, the humble hole-in-the-wall strip mall Chinese restaurant my own family has been ordering from for nearly two decades.  The food is classic American Takeout Chinese, cheap and abundant and generically tasty.  We've been their regular customers as management has passed among and between members of an extended Chinese family over those years.  We've watched extended family arrive from China, folded into community through the business.  We've watched the children of the family grow up, first diligently doing homework in the restaurant while their parents worked, and then helping with the business while juggling school and life.

Family farms and restaurants and businesses of almost all ilks can be a cross-generational blessing.  The bonds of blood and trust that unite extended families can add to the sense of purpose that rises from a shared labor.

But there are some lines of work that lend themselves poorly to that connection, where the expectations that rule family life and expectation clash with the reality of the vocation.

Pastoring, for pointed example.

Just because your Daddy was a preacher doesn't mean that you are, kid.  Call is a fiercely particular thing, and while it can run in your blood, it operates on a different plane from the logics of lineage.  When it becomes the family business, faith often goes awry, becoming less about being a servant of the divine encounter and more about social position and renumeration.

Because that works socially...human beings get attached to a name, to the story of a brand...it too easily loses authenticity, as the self-serving necessities of nepotism take precedence over all other considerations.  In churches, it creates a willingness to raise up too many of Eli's sons, too many of Samuel's sons, those who see the power that comes from that position, and who are eager to milk unearned social authority for their own benefit.

Church becomes a place of falseness, of self-serving plunder and profit.  But there's a place where social power plays even more freely.

Politics, if one believes in republican virtues, is another place where familial expectations are poorly applied.  I've always looked a wee bit askance at the various political dynasties that have arisen over the course of the short history of our republic, because dynastic thinking is antithetical to constitutional principles.

It's difficult to avoid, because political systems are systems of relationship and social influence.  Those connections inhere within family networks, in ways that must be warily watched. 

The more deeply a single family weaves its name and its brand into the political life of a constitutional democracy, the more danger there is that we will slide back into a functional monarchism.  I mean, sure, it was romantic and young back in the day, but Camelot wasn't the capital of a republic, eh?  

When we see leaders promoting family members to positions of power, approaching both party and nation as if they were the family business?  It's a red flag for a republic, a warning light on the dashboard of democracy, an alarm ringing in the ears, no matter what the party.

Dad's Garden

When my family returned to the States from London back in 1982, my father planted a garden.  

A five-by-ten patch of grass on the southeastern side of our back yard was dug up, soil amendments added, and every year in the late spring, he'd set tomato seedlings into the earth.  Better Boys, generally speaking, because they were the perfect complement to BLTs and burgers.

Dad was a single generation removed from actual farming-stock, as my paternal grandfather grew up on several hundred acres of family farm in upstate New York.  Hops were the primary yield of the family farm just outside of the little village of Chuckery Corners, but there we Williams grew everything, as most Americans once did.  

Connecting with the soil was a thing for Dad.  Not as important as music and performance, but still something that gave a sense of heritage.  It was part of his story.

Every summer from middle school onward, the tomatoes at home were fresh picked.  Rows were set out on our screened-in porch to sun-redden to ripeness, safe from the depredations of deer and squirrels and the occasional enterprising turtle.

As the years progressed, the tomatoes kept coming.  Eventually, gardening got harder.  Dad's knees started to go.  Then his hip.  Then, bit by bit, his heart.  By the time he was in congestive heart failure, the garden was too much for him.  My brother and I pitched in to help keep it going, and as the CHF progressed, we managed to keep a few tomatoes coming.  Dad took pleasure knowing they were there, as my brother tended the plants during the summers he spent caring for my folks.

When Dad died early last fall after a hard season, the garden sat fallow. With spring coming on, Mom asked that I pull the fence I'd put in a few years back, and take up the pavers that once sat between rows of plants.

So this last week, I did.  The fence, gone.  The paving stones, dug from earth. 

What had been a garden is now returned to grass.

The pavers, I took for my own gardens. 

They took their place in my eight by eight raised beds, where they will provide stepping stones between tomatoes and garlic and greenbeans, between the garden that is present and the garden that has passed.

Falun Dafa, Swastikas, and Fascism

Falun Gong...or Falun Dafa...is such an odd thing.  In the United States, they're perhaps best known for the inescapable Shen Yun show, a relentlessly hypermarketed spectacle of music and dance that retells Chinese history from their religious perspective.

Over the past several years, I've seen the adherents of that religious movement making their presence known at large, open social events.  They march in local parades, their floats festooned with signs proclaiming peace and love.   They're consistently present in the annual parade in the little town where my church resides.  They're there in my hometown Annandale Parade, as they were this last fall.

It was at that hometown parade that I accepted a flyer pressed into my hand, neatly produced and earnest.  Peace and Love, proclaimed the cover.  I opened it up, and there they were.  The symbols of their movement:

Swastikas.  Oof.

I'm not ignorant of the history of that symbol.  As an image, the swastika had a long history before it was co-opted by Hitler's National Socialist movement.  For millennia, it had none of the connotations of brutal, genocidal nationalism that now hang around it like a cloud in the West.  When someone from Asia or Southeast Asia uses it, I think rather differently about it than I might were I to see it flying alongside a Let's Go Brandon flag in rural America.

Still and all, there's a clumsiness to putting that front and center, an awkward failure to acknowledge the context you inhabit, like walking into a mosque with your shoes on and wearing a t-shirt that asserts that everything goes better with bacon.  "Hey, it's just my culture, get over it" doesn't quite cut the mustard.

And there's another, peculiar level to this story.

Falun Gong has been systematically and often brutally oppressed in their native China, with adherents subject to imprisonment, "re-education," and exile.  Because of this, they are vehemently opposed to the Communist party in China.  Like Sun Myung Moon's "Moonie" Reunification Church back in the 1960s and 1970s, their vociferous anticommunism overcompensates into something peculiar.

In addition the the ubiquity of Shen Yun, Falun Dafa is also responsible for the media content produced by The Epoch Times, which they own.  

That outlet, if you're not aware of it, is a "fair and balanced" news organization that aggressively promoted claims of election fraud in 2020, that sees communist influence everywhere, and that routinely casts doubt on the efficacy and safety of vaccines.  They're purveyors of "hard-hitting documentaries" produced by entirely "neutral and reflective" folks like Dinesh D'Souza, and proudly highlight the endorsements of thoughtful moderates like Sebastian Gorka, Pete Navarro, and Paul Gosar.

For entirely comprehensible reasons, they're pro-Trump, because Trump is performatively anti-China.  This position mirrors that of the Moon's Reunification Church, which purchased the Washington Times back in the day to both promote themselves and align with far right wing causes.

Which brings us back, in the deepest of ironies, to their use of swastikas.

Saying "the swastika is just our cultural sign of peace and love" feels a little off when your media outlet is championing the messages of the far right, and amplifying authoritarian voices that would overturn the constitutional foundations of this republic.

A Eulogy for the Alderman Stacks

I am a terrible alumnus.  This, I will freely admit. 

While my education at the University of Virginia profoundly enriched and set direction for my life, and I still maintain connection with the friends I made there, the culture of the school never jibed with me.

It's a culture that I find expressed every single time I receive my alumni magazine.  The alumni magazine that my William and Mary alumna wife regularly reads cover to cover is filled with long, substantive articles about the research of professors and unusual, creative work by W&M graduates.  

That's not what I get.  The slight, slick magazine that arrives for me is almost invariably a paean to wealth, privilege, and material success.  It's a magazine for strivers, stuffed full of advertising for Charlottesville area estates, most of which are priced either in the high seven digits or without a pricetag.  Because if you have to ask, eh?  

Most of the rest of it revolves around fundraising, which seems absurd for an institution that rests upon a thirteen point six billion dollar endowment hoard.  My wife holds it up as evidence that W&M is an institution more serious about its educational mission, and I have to admit she has a point.

I usually just recycle it.

But the magazine I just received was different.  On the cover, an image of the new humanities library, the former Alderman Stacks.  I spent a great deal of time in the Stacks, and my memory of them is strong.  Like so many things, it has been recently remade, the old facility gutted and "reimagined."  That reimagining was celebrated in a short article, filled with pictures of the new, light-filled spaces.  It began with this opening description of the old stacks:

"There was always that distinct experience when you headed to the back of Alderman Library.  You'd cross the connecting bridge, never looking down the barren window wells on either side, and confront cold steel--an old elevator beside the metal chute they called a staircase.  The ceilings lowered to half height.  The walls closed in.  Windows disappeared.  Time stopped.  Your internal compass lost its polarity.  You had descended into the dark night of the Stacks.  Retrace those steps today and it's like a morning-sun realization that it had all been a bad dream."

A "bad dream?"  Really?

I had the experience of entering those Stacks countless times, but my encounter with that space was completely different.

That bridge was liminal, a place of crossing over, of transition between the outside world and the Stacks.  Because the Stacks were dreamlike.  They felt like a different world, whose internal logics and peculiarities were like those that fill our time in the Land of Nod.

The Stacks were a little close and crepuscular, the low ceilings and tight, functional staircases creating a labyrinthine warren whose twilight aesthetics spoke quietly of deep reflection and intimate focus.  The study carrels were more than a little monastic.  It felt old, even back in the late '80s.  

But "old" isn't a pejorative.  It felt rooted, a part of the written history whose memories filled the volume within.  

It was a place created for books, defined by books, and seemingly comprised entirely of books.  Words on paper hemmed you in, around, below, and above.  The scent of ancient paper filled the air with a rich sweet must.  It felt peculiarly organic, a sanctum of deep soft quiet and distance from the world, separate from the rush and hum of life.  

It was the sort of place that felt worth exploring. It was a little magical, the sort of place where one wouldn't be entirely surprised to encounter Galdalf the Grey seeking a particularly obscure scroll.  It was a place where you could focus, where you could be undistracted, where you could lose yourself in words.  It was not a place of this scattered, Adderall age.

That soft magic is now lost, washed away from the University of Virginia...like the humanities, like the study of literature, like the arts...by a space that dazzles.

Speaking Without Words

The strangest thing about going on a cruise is how much effort goes into making it seem like you’re not on a cruise. I mean, here you are, right smack in the middle of the ocean, the vast deep of our two-thirds Water World suddenly very much in evidence. In every direction, our little planet stretches all the way to the subtle curve of the horizon, and beneath you lies a deep that…if the shipboard sonar reporting is at all valid…extends for thousands upon thousands of feet.

The surface of the ocean is ever changing, going from near-mirror-smooth one day to great rolling swells the next, to thirty foot seas and spray that dances over the roiling foam-flecked chaos in a driving gale.

Inside the contemporary floating city, though, there’s often no evidence that this exists at all. Instead, there are off-Broadway shows and cabarets, shops and restaurants, bumpercars and lasertag and pickleball and hot tubs and arcades. In the belly of the ship, a casino straight out of Vegas, windowless and sharp with the scent of nicotine. It’s all bright lights and amusements, and unless the seas are high, you’d never know they are there.

I find the lights and the endless overstimulation a little much.

Out on my balcony late on the second night of the trip, I was looking out across the blackness. It was still cold, in the low forties, and as I looked out at the honeycombed expanse of other balconies, I could see no-one else outside. I was reflecting on this when a loud, slapping splash caught my attention. It sounded like someone had flung themselves from the sixteenth level of the ship in a bellyflop, and I peered into the waves to see what might be going on. The slap came again, a wet percussive report, and staring out into the darkness, I spotted the cause.

Racing alongside the ship at nearly twenty knots was a single large bull bottlenose, whose streamlined form was visible beneath the surface, lit ghostly by the false daylight of the ship.

It wasn’t riding the wake, but running fast and close and amidships. Every five or six seconds, it would fling itself from the water, soaring for a sleek moment in the night air. When it reentered the water, it would strike the surface with the flukes of its tail, and the sharp crack of tail on water would echo against the side of the ship.

It was clearly a display. It was clearly meant for us. Not that we were paying attention. 

As best I could tell, of the nearly seven thousand souls aboard the ship, I was the only one seeing it.

I’d read enough about dolphins to understand what that bull bottlenose was saying as I watched it race across the water. A tailslap, among dolphins, serves a number of purposes. It’s forceful enough to stun prey fish, so it can be used in hunting. In male dolphins, the tailslap is a territorial and threat display, a warning to unwanted intruders…dolphin and otherwise…that the dolphin is not pleased with their presence, and a show of force.

That big bull was not just any of God’s creatures, but an animal that is scientifically recognized to be more intelligent than most of the humans in congress. It wasn’t putting on an impromptu Seaworld performance. It was letting us know that our 175,000 ton ship did not impress it, and that we were disturbing the peace.

We weren’t listening, of course. We are so good at not listening, particularly when creation speaks without words. As I let myself back into my cabin, I found myself wondering just how loudly creation needs to speak before we start listening. How fiercely does the wind need to roar, how swift do the flames need to burn, how quick does the water need to rise, before it catches our attention?

I suppose we’ll find that out.