9/15/09 - Slate.com on Dan Brown's superawesome protagonists

http://www.slate.com/blogs/blogs/browbeat/archive/2009/09/14/dan-brown-s-awesomely-attractive-smart-affable-and-athletic-protagonists.aspx

When people asked me if I liked The Da Vinci Code and I told them that the terrible writing was hard to get past, I'm talking about passages like this from Mr. Dan Brown:

"The youngest full professor at Georgetown University and a brilliant foreign-language specialist, he was practically a celebrity in the world of academia. Born with an eidetic memory and a love of languages, he'd mastered six Asian dialects as well as Spanish, French, and Italian. His university lectures on etymology and linguistics were standing-room-only, and he invariably stayed late to answer a barrage of questions. He spoke with authority and enthusiasm, apparently oblivious to the adoring gazes of his star-struck coeds."
--from Angels and Demons

I remember at one point in The Da Vinci Code where Brown describes Langdon as Indiana Jones-like, which struck me as a pretty bold simile, considering that a) Langdon basically is Brown's attempt at writing an Indiana Jones type character, and b) Langdon seems to have none of the flaws that make Indy interesting. The failed/strained relationship with his father, the complications in his romantic life. No, Langdon is like Brown's dream version of Indiana Jones - the version that I used to pretend I was as a 10-year old, all superintelligence and rugged good looks.

All of which is to say that although I read the whole book I decided Brown isn't my cup of tea. I've got nothing against popular works of art, and I've got nothing against genre fiction, and I don't even have anything against workmanlike prose, but I don't have a lot of interest in following patently unrealistically awesome protagonists. The guys that grow up to be symbologists (which is no one, since the scholarly field as far as I can tell does not exist) are not the ones that are dominating swim meets in between World of Warcraft bouts.

And geez, if they guy is Indiana Jones, who cast Tom Hanks to play him? Ball: dropped.

7/18/08 - Why Writers?

My significant other read "Flight" by Sherman Alexie, and, while impressed, had a complaint that I often share - namely, the main character was obsessed with books. As she put it, it's not really realistic to think that this kid is obsessed with books, but it's eminently believable that the author is obsessed w/books and reading, because, well, he's an author. This is symptomatic of a widespread epidemic - literature obsessed characters in literature.

The truth is that most people are not book-obsessed, and the overt concerns about literature are reserved for a subset of self-selecting individuals. There are eight million stories in the naked city, as the saying goes, and surely 7,999,000 don't involve protagonists carrying around dog-eared copies of the Book That Changed Their Life. Stephen King is a good example of this - his stories are varied and his plots are remarkably diverse (much more so than reputed), but he has an abundance of writers as central characters. It's an insular world in which books are loved so fiercely, but the fact that belonging to this world is practically a requirement for a writer of literature gives the aggregate landscape of novel protagonists a protruding hump in the topographical category of "Writer/Book Lover".

Because writing is what writers do, the vagaries of the activity/profession often bear a greater weight of scrutiny than other professions and art forms. After all, communicating one's ideas through painting requires a specific set of skills involving brush and palette, but it is rare to find a painting that documents or critiques brush selection, or stroke technique, or what have you. In music, phrases are sampled and quoted, and lyrics can be used to critique other bands/artists (see Pavement, "Range Life", re:Smashing Pumpkins). It is not common for a band, in wanting to criticize or critique another band, to use certain chords as criticism. In hip-hop, maybe, when the form of attack is delivered in the form of that which attacks, but that's the closest to the solipsism of the writing profession.

Look no further than the overheated rhetoric accompanying season 5 of "The Wire", in which David Simon extended his critique of the modern city to journalism. All of the sudden, journalistic work on "The Wire" was everywhere, much of it delving into the question of the specific axe that Simon had to grind with his former colleagues at the Baltimore Sun. The consensus among journalists was that Simon's animus towards his former editors led him away from the shades-of-gray approach so evident in the first four seasons of the show, and that season 5's depiction of the newsroom storyline was too simplistic narratively.

Something about a lady and protesting? Oh, what was that quote...

The truth is that "The Wire" featured characters drawn in harder shades of gray approaching black or white in previous seasons (Officer Walker in S3, the Lester Freamon of S1), but where the hell was the impulse to devote the whole journalistic machine to analyzing Simon's treatment of cops (S1), union workers (S2), city government (S3), or schools (S4). Nowhere, because it wasn't their own being scrutinized. Cops, union workers, municipal employees, and teachers all have jobs that don't entail commenting on TV's views of their chosen profession, nor do they have a place to share those thoughts in a way that is looped into the public megaphone. Journalists do. So all of a sudden when Simon's acid vision was turned onto the fourth estate he's got all kinds of hidden biases in his way that hurt his narrative. A little too suspicious, methinks. "The Wire" has an axe to grind, and that's clear from the opening episode of the first season. To cry foul when it trains its harsh gaze on those with the loudest voice seems more than a little off.



Off it may be, but such is the power of written work - it priviledges and empowers the point of view of the person wielding the pen, for good or ill. So it may not be the worst thing in the world that writer's champion reading in the written word, but it does lend a little less credence to attempts at versimilitude, to the representing modern life's vast indifference to most literary endeavors.