When the Author Gets Lost Up Lucy Mancini’s Hoo-Ha

Posted on January 24th, 2019 by Adam-Troy Castro

You’re reading a novel.

Great, good, indifferent; in any event, one that provides enough incentive to keep reading. And then you hit the chapter where the author lost track of what he was doing.

This is not to be confused with the mere interesting controlled digression, like a red herring character in a murder mystery, or the unrelated crime scene in a cop story, or even the side-chapter like the brilliant one Joe Lansdale once did about an aggravating conversation with a stupid dude who flushed his dentures. Those are grace notes. (And they’re all over Dickens.)

I am talking about actual evidence of authorial flailing.

It can be that chapter in the middle of Dan Simmons’s THE BLACK HILLS where, showing off his research, he gives us many thousands of words on the engineering attributes of the Brooklyn Bridge. (Defeated me. I never returned to the book.)

Or it can be that section of THE STAND, set in Boulder after the Plague, where by his own admission Stephen King got caught up with the minutiae of rebuilding a community, of governing the place, of cleaning it up so people could live there. (It served a story function, to be sure, but he had to put the book aside for a few months, utterly stuck, before realizing that he quite literally needed a bomb to go off. Until then, he was just playing a game that had not been invented yet, SIM CITY.)

This false trail can just as easily be the character who shows up who your author cannot drop, who he circles for twenty-thirty pages before finding his thread again.

Or the plotline that he really should have dropped, that Mario Puzo kept returning to just out of self-gratification. THE GODFATHER, the novel, tells us that Sonny Corleone had a monstrously huge cock and introduces us to Lucy Mancini, a woman with a cavernous vagina capable of accommodating him. Long after Sonny is dead and Lucy has departed from his family’s orbit, whenever Puzo needed to fade away from the Corleones before returning to them after some time had passed, he kept giving us updates on the travels of Lucy, the girl whose vagina came equipped with an echo. By the time the book was done, so much of it had disappeared up Lucy Mancini’s wazoo that to delete her chapters would have seriously impacted the word count.

Reading novels, you can tell when the author is pursuing false leads down blind alleys. They’re often edited out. But sometimes they are left for us, fascinating evidence of the author’s helpless wandering. This happens to great writers. It is all over HUCKLEBERRY FINN, for instance.

So I’ve got to tell you.

Tom Bombadil is Tolkien’s Sonny Corleone cock.

Tags: Charles Dickens, Huckleberryt Finn, Joe R. Lansdale, Lord Of the Rings, Mark Twain, Stephen King, The Godfather, The Stand, writing | Category Books, Writing

The Emptiest Goddamned Thing You Can Say About Any Work of Art, Ever

Posted on January 21st, 2019 by Adam-Troy Castro

Originally published on Facebook.

The emptiest goddamned thing you can say about any work of art is, “It’s over-rated.”

This is a statement often dropped into a conversation like a turd, sometimes without any elaboration: just those two words, which are modified if at all only with the word “really.”

These thoughts are prompted by an internet list of the ten most over-rated movies since 2000, and I was weak and I clicked, and damned if it didn’t just irritate me because I hold that at least five of them are masterpieces.

But the differences between my taste and the taste of the guy who wrote the article are not the point.

The point is that the word “over-rated” doesn’t critique the art, it critiques the enthusiasm others have for the art.

What happens is that people are talking about their love for this book, or this band, or this TV show, or whatever, expanding at length for the reasons for their enthusiasm, and then, popping up out of the murk, comes “it’s over rated”, often without the intervening hyphen or any other punctuation, and that is just…graffiti, a dismissal without content. It says, “Whatever you saw in this sailed by me and I think you enjoyed it too much.”

Notably, it is often presented without criteria.

It is dropped in the middle of a long appreciative conversation, as a declaration that cannot be parsed or modified.

This is quite distinct from offering a general negative critique, with reasons; at least then you are contributing to the discussion. I could box your ears off with reasons why I hate Movie X, why it’s stupid, and so on, and they are related to the movie, not to the fact that some people love it; they are critically relevant.

And you know what?

“It’s over-rated” is ALSO distinct from its opposite, “I think it’s under-rated.” In the same way that the prior is an empty negation, “under-rated” offers the intelligence that you have reasons, that you can advance elements you’ve seen that you can defend.

Tell me that you think the Beatles are “over-rated” and I think you’re just a grump shitting on the love people have for them. I think you honestly have nothing to say. It’s possible that you heard one song, recoiled, and then didn’t investigate any further.

Tell me that you think the Beach Boys are “under-rated” and I will think you can discourse at length on the better attributes of their music. I may disagree with you but I sure as hell know you have something to say.

This is I think built into the statements.

Tags: Life Wisdom, The Beach Boys, The Beatles | Category Life Wisdom, Movies, Writing

Tolerance for Cthulhu

Posted on January 20th, 2019 by Adam-Troy Castro

Origingally pulished on Facebook in 2015.

My mind just drew an interesting mental parallel between the Lovecraftian protagonist exposed to some cosmic terror so vast that it drives him mad, and the crusader who claims to have injured by exposure to offensive language in fiction, or depictions of gay people on movies or television.

The sanity of the poor Lovecraftian protagonist shatters because his skull is not large enough to accommodate the vast implications of, let’s say, a giant guy with bat wings and an octopus for a head.

Put any fondness you might have for Lovecraft aside and think about how LAME that is, by today’s standards.

We have lived to see Bart Simpson *skateboard* off Cthulhu.

You can buy a Cthulhu plushie toy.

The *sight* of Cthulhu is no longer terrifying to us.

The crusader claims that his skull is not large enough to avoid injury from the use of language or the depiction of human beings who may off-screen engage in practices counter to his religious beliefs, even if those practices are not actually shown in the dramatic presentation in question; i.e. Mitch and Cam on MODERN FAMILY, who bicker like the old married couple they now are, but are also never actually shown in bed. (Or for that matter doing anything beyond the sweetly romantic; you will, for instance, never see a funny episode driven by Cam’s trip to the store to buy lube.) Still, their existence implies great horrors, and so the crusader feels the wound created when an alien premise tries to fit into an aperture too small for it. (Speaking of lube.)

This is not just about depictions of gay people; it is about anything the crusader considers shocking.

The crusader does not want to be exposed to alien thoughts, alien cultures, alien religions, alien premises, alien vocabulary, even in implication, because just the exposure, itself, is a wound; therefore, such things must be removed from the culture at large, to protect any who share his own personal lack of elasticity.

It’s a cry that the crusader’s rigidity needs to apply to the rest of us.

I suspect that the crusader is doomed, though, because the more any mind is stretched to accommodate new premises, the more welcoming it becomes to new premises after that.

Hollywood used to cut out any scenes involving black people who weren’t toadying servants from movies intended to be shown in the deep south. The very *sight* of them was considered more than many white audiences could handle. The race problem in the United States is far from resolved, but by God you can sure go see a Denzel Washington movie at the mall in the most regressive white enclave in Alabama. And if it misses your local multiplex, you can sure buy the DVD. The culture’s mind got stretched, by that little bit. As a result, THE DEFIANT ONES and IN THE HEAT OF THE NIGHT, which were once considered hard-hitting and shocking, are now merely very good movies, because the stories work. Skulls and the minds inside them became more elastic, more accepting of premises they were once too small too accommodate. Which is why the crusader, the one who looks at the mild antics of MODERN FAMILY and screams, “They’re shoving their lifestyle down our throats!”, the one who objects when he finds some mild questioning of religion in a work of fiction, is arguing only to retain his own paralysis in the face of changing data …which renders him more and more irrelevant, and sickened by changing times, as the world evolves around him.

Or to put it another way: a Lovecraftian protagonist might gibber in insanity at the very first glimpse of a giant octopus man, and I suppose many of the fantasy-adverse would have the same reaction….but I suspect that those of us who have spent much of our lives watching STAR TREK and reading Heinlein and Stephen King and Harlan Ellison and whatnot would just say, “Oh. Look. A giant octopus man. That’s *interesting.* Here I am, not going insane. I can deal with this. Now, tell me more.”

Tags: Denzel Washington, H.P. Lovecraft, Harlan Ellison, Movies, Race, Star Trek, Stephen King, The Defiant Ones, The Simpsons | Category Comics, Commentary