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| The Burden of Memory http://horrorworld.org/msgboards/viewtopic.php?f=44&t=8903 |
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| Author: | Grymmscape [ Tue Oct 26, 2010 6:50 pm ] |
| Post subject: | The Burden of Memory |
“The theory seems to be that as long as a man is a failure he is one of God's children, but that as soon as he succeeds he is taken over by the Devil.” -- Henry Louis Mencken “Hear no evil, speak no evil - and you'll never be invited to a party.” -- Oscar Wilde You know, I really don't do much blogging. I suppose I should, it's apparently de rigueur for authors in the Age of the 'Net because it supposedly "lets your readers get to know you" and is a good advertising tool, (meaning if I like your blog, then I'll like you, and if I like you, I'll buy your book), but I choose not to fall for that. It's not only a bad business plan, it harkens back to the desperation of adolescence and high school social climbing and wanting to be one of the "cool kids". Well, the so-called "cool kids" weren't cool to me. And I never identified with the counterculture potheads or the jocks, the science nerds, the drama/music nerds, or the student government nerds or any other kind of nerd, but I do realize, then and now, that I am some kind of classification of nerd. I never belonged to a clique. I went my own way. Still do. It's not some kind of intentional sociopolitical rebellion, it's just the way I am. And this carries over into the whole social networking experience. Okay, that being said, I have, in the past three or four months, read the blog pages of quite a few other burgeoning writers, people far more socially connected on the 'Net than myself and many of them part of a circle or network of writers, as they decided they'd talk about their reading lists. I found myself very distressed at the outcomes. Now, understanding that they are predominantly concentrating their reading to books within their chosen genres, in this case horror, it was shameful to me that so many of them displayed they had absolutely NO sense of history when they blogged they'd never before read some of the genres major authors and admitted, in a few cases, that they'd actually never HEARD of some of those authors before. I'm talking about people who are old enough to know better, a group of writers in their mid-thirties through mid-forties. They'd read E.A. Poe and H.P. Lovecraft, (unfortunately with many of them thinking that August Derleth's Lovecraftian pastiches actually WERE Lovecraft), but had never read Poe's contemporaries Ambrose Bierce, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry James (I'd assume most had been forced to at least read Ralph Waldo Emerson and Herman Melville while in high school), or Lovecraft's contemporaries Clark Ashton Smith, Frank Belknap Long, Robert Bloch, Lin Carter, Fritz Leiber or even Robert E. Howard (no doubt omitting Howard because of the macho "Conan the Barbarian" sword-n-sorcery thing and swords 'n' sorcery is for Dungeons and Dragons geeks and knuckle-dragging mouth breathers, right?). They did, however, know a lot about actor Jeffrey Combs and the Stuart Gordon movie "Reanimator" and some of them even knew that actor Dean Stockwell, (that guy who played "Al" the hologram from the TV show "Quantum Leap", don'tcha know), had once been in a film version of "The Dunwich Horror" back in the 1970s. Stuart Gordon movies were cool. Quantum Leap was cool. And then there's the group who never even heard of post-Lovecraftian modern authors like Charles Beaumont and Shirley Jackson and William F. Nolan. Let's not even mention Ira Levin... who? That guy from the NYT bestsellers list? He's not cool, he's not "down". What horror novels did HE write? Anything with zombies? HA! We thought not! I mean, really, who cares about "Rosemary's Baby","This Perfect Day", or "The Stepford Wives", or "The Boys From Brazil"? THAT ain't horror! And then there was this one schmuck who'd never heard of Ray Bradbury until he'd seen the motion picture adaptation of "Something Wicked This Way Comes" on a cable-TV back channel. Really. He knew who Jonathan Price was, though, because he'd seen Terry Gilliam's "Brazil". And he knew a buttload about Gilliam because he knew about Monty Python. And Python was cool. But he was very vocal in bemoaning the fact that the various magazine editors he'd sent his horror short stories and novellas to never "got" his work. His stuff was too scary. He was too radical. He was of the opinion they wanted some literary bullshit or other. They didn't "get" real horror stories. He knew Stephen King, though. And Anne Rice. Didn't know Peter Straub. Never heard of Robert McCammon or John Farris. SLAP! Douchebag. Yeah, I said that. Not apologizing, either. Dumbass douchebag. You owe it to your chosen genre to do better than that. Diverse minds, different P.O.V.s. All wanting to be taken seriously as writers, but not taking their craft seriously as readers. No historical reference and no sense of reverence. And what is a common denominator among these uninformed writers (besides "I want it all and I want it now"... extra points if you can identify THAT reference)? Well, they blog. And (just ask them) they're cool. Note to readers checking out my blog: you just might not like me. |
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