Have Tracer, Mark, and Alan not heard Margaret Berger?

[koganbot]

In relation to Episode Three of the Resonance FM series A Bite Of Stars, A Slug Of Time, And Thou:

(1) Results 1 - 10 of about 1,940 for "margaret berger" "robot song". (0.04 seconds)

(2) How would you compare Mark's and Alan's accents as to class, geography, and personality?

(3) Mark mentioned that the field of science fiction has been and to some extent still is anxious about its quality in relation to supposed real literature. (Frank: And well it should be.) Two questions:

(3a) Does this anxiety manifest itself in an attempt to raise the genre (say by infusing more literary or social elements) or just to do it better? (The field of mystery stories probably suffers from a similar anxiety, but back in its great days there were some writers - G.K. Chesterton and Raymond Chandler and Rex Stout come to mind - whom I'd put into the "do it better" category in that they had writers chops but didn't think they had to monkey with the conventions they were given, so they didn't come across as adding "superior" elements [except maybe when Chandler got to The Long Goodbye, which is his most overrated novel anyway].)

(3b) Does popular and semipopular music (incl. indie and alternative and noise) feel a similar anxiety, and if so, how does it act out the anxiety? I think it's shot through with anxiety, but unlike science fiction, it doesn't have an established "real music" that's equivalent to "real literature" to compare itself to, given the abandonment by so much of the intelligentsia of "classical" and "serious" music as the measure of quality. So pop and rock can be obsessive about their search for the real, but the real always remains provisional, because you don't know where to locate it.

Comments

[martinskidmore.livejournal.com]

SF has often taken to absorbing lessons or ideas from 'serious' literary writing - most obviously at the end of the period the radio show is covering, when the new wave of writers took a great deal from contemporary literary figures, especially the more outre ones - lots of Burroughs, for instance. There's also always been the problem of having to leave the genre for your genre works to get attention - Dick was just managing this at the end of his life, after he finally got one of his mainstream literary novels published; and after Ballard wrote Empire of the Sun, there were loads of top critics saying they had always loved his work, but he certainly didn't get a fraction of the hype for his SF novels. These days there are writers whose literary qualities far exceed the levels of praise they get outside SF circles - I don't think there are many living writers of prose as beautiful as that of M. John Harrison, for example. Then again, plenty of SF fans have no interest in someone whose writing is aspiring more to poetry than adventure or thrill power.

That last example highlights why 'doing it better' is not an easy idea to sort out - nor is it in crime fiction, where Jim Thompson did it superbly without adopting very much in the way of obvious literary values. Someone like Chandler did aspects of it very badly - his mysteries and resolutions sometimes made no sense, as in the famous case of the chauffeur's death in The Big Sleep, and this is regarded as the heart of the genre by a lot of readers - but he had lots of other qualities. Someone like James Lee Burke is a good contemporary parallel.

The place where the anxiety is most powerful, and most justified, is surely in superhero comics. Since the '60s I've seen people trying to claim that the great Kirby Marvel comics should be compared to Shakespeare and Michaelangelo, and other idiotic claims, and it goes on. A more apt attempt might be comparisons with Chandler or Fred Pohl or crime or western movies by the likes of Howard Hawks, not that many superhero comics deserve that. (I do think the comparison of the work of Kazuo Koike and Goseki Kojima to Kurosawa's samurai movies is not only justified but unavoidable, to take another example - or Gilbert Hernandez and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, moving outside genre fiction.)

[koganbot]

I'm going to jump off-topic in this post and get obsessive and trivial to say that yes, The Big Sleep was in some ways a cut-and-paste and Chandler definitely had his flaws but - SPOILERS - the chauffeur confusion is not a good example, in that who killed the chauffeur does not remotely matter to the plot and only slightly to the theme of the book, and actually the book gives us two solid choices: (1) Brody swiped the photos and then killed the chauffeur, or (2) Brody swiped the photos and then the chauffeur committed suicide out of remorse for not being able to protect his beloved Carmen, or out of his realization of what Carmen was, or... who knows, and he's a minor character we never meet, and his tiny role in the novel is to reinforce that Carmen is used to people falling for her and taking care of her, which Chandler communicates very well no matter who killed the guy. The book hints at suicide as an explanation, the movie leans towards Brody, and again since Brody is shortly killed himself there's no loose end to tie up. Of course, in the book a half sentence on Marlowe's part as to why the chauffeur's death might have been suicide would have made things clearer, but again, who cares. The main question of the novel is what does Eddie Mars have on the Sternwoods, and the main issue is that nothing dissuades Marlowe from finding out (and then having to figure out what to do with his knowledge while doing his best to protect the people he cares about, which is Mrs. Regan a little and General Sternwood a lot), and the book makes this clear; whereas the movie fudges this, because its main concern isn't Marlowe's fierce and bitter and unrelenting eye but Marlowe's protection of Vivien and his redressing the murder of Harry Jones. And actually, if I'm to give an example of where Chandler technically screws up, it's in his treatment of Harry Jones. In an odd way, aided by Elisha Cook Jr.'s strong performance, Jones becomes the moral focus of the movie. I don't mind that the novel, unlike the movie, fails to really redress his murder. (They both kill his murderer, but the movie also takes out the ultimate bad guy, Eddie Mars, the man responsible for the evil machinations: in fact Marlowe compares Mars' fear at the end to little Harry's stalwartness in the face of death, Harry deciding to take his medicine rather than rat on Agnes; Marlowe to Eddie: "You look at this. What's the matter? Haven't you ever seen a gun before? What do you want me to do? Count three like they do in the movies? That's what Canino said to little Jonesy." Mars: "Now don't go crazy." Marlowe: "And Jonesy took it better than you're taking it." Whereas the novel leaves Eddie's evil power in the world pretty much intact, just gets the Sternwoods out from under it.) The novel's view and the movie's view are different, so that's fine. I might ultimately rate the movie higher, despite its obscurity and incoherence on so many plot points. But in any event, what both the novel and movie fail to make any sense of at all is why Canino kills Harry. No reason is given at all. Canino is bad. He kills people. He's a killer. So why didn't he kill Marlowe when he had the chance? Because he needed instructions from the boss, first. But then why wouldn't he have needed the boss's instructions as to what to do about Harry? And killing Harry was stupid, since without Harry alive Canino and Mars had no way of finding out what Harry knew about Mrs. Mars or whom he'd told. Again, this isn't major, but it's a better example than the chauffeur of what's slapdash about the novel, since why Canino and Mars do what they do is more important than why Brody or the chauffeur do what they do. But unlike the movie, the novel isn't obscure and incoherent on most of its plot points.

[koganbot]

Marlowe compares Mars' fear at the end to little Harry's stalwartness in the face of death

Compares unfavorably, that is.

[koganbot]

(Where I'd point at the book's flaws would be that Carmen just isn't very interesting. She's infantile and oversexed and so what? Also, though this isn't as important, but as a character, Silver Wig as Eddie Mars' deluded but noble wife never makes sense. First her role in the plot: Mars' spreading the story that she'd run off with Sean Regan is really dumb! Yes, it makes people think that Regan is still alive, but it also unnecessarily makes his wife a point of vulnerability, since if she ever resurfaces it would make the authorities wonder, Hey, if she didn't run off with Regan then maybe someone killed Regan; let's look into this! This is an awful lot of effort and risk just to keep a tiny part of Eddie's operations (the blackmail of a rich man) going. And also, Silver Wig putting her husband at risk by helping Marlowe escape just doesn't make sense. Well, it does to the extent that it keeps her delusion alive, that Eddie isn't behind all this killing, which maybe would be interesting if she were a character we got to know. But she basically is an inexplicable bit of goodness dropped into the bad world. I thought that Farewell My Lovely did a better job of similar themes, though also it goes too soft and gushy in a way that The Big Sleep doesn't.)

What you have to say about the Kirby comics and about Fred Pohl and Kazuo Koike and Goseki Kojimo could be pretty interesting. I assume it's written down in a lot of places. Unfortunately I know only a little Pohl that I read maybe 43 years ago, and I don't know anything by the other two. And I'm pretty damn ignorant on comics, too, unfortunately.

[martinskidmore.livejournal.com]

I wasn't really suggesting that I was bothered about the chauffeur, but the fact that Chandler didn't have an explanation when asked, after a magazine story, a novel and then the movie, all featuring it, bothers those who especially value a clever mystery and its convincing, logical resolution as key criteria for good crime fiction (not important points for me at all). I think the different perspectives of different kinds of fans are really important here.

I am reminded of another comic example. I was drawn into a DC war comics discussion group some years ago by a friend. I was immediately astonished at their tastes - no time for Kanigher and Kubert, who are huge favourites of mine, but they loved Russ Heath, who I found dull and lazy in ways that mattered to me. Before long I had sorted out the reasons for this: Kanigher and Kubert were unrealistic, whereas Heath got every rivet in the right place on a tank. I couldn't care less about that, and wouldn't know anyway, but they did.

This is all about that 'doing it better' point: different groups have very different ideas about what qualifies as better, and I think genres that aren't highly regarded seem to offer us extreme examples of this, perhaps because fan groups have had to construct their own critical criteria in the absence of the more canonical paradigms - and indeed in opposition to these, since they have virtually nothing to tell us about what makes a good superhero fight scene, for instance.

[koganbot]

These are really good points, the different types of "doing it better." I don't get the impression that any Chandler fan or anyone else gave a damn about the chauffeur until maybe twenty-five years after the book was published, when the Chandler cult and the Bogart cult brought the movie back into circulation. And at that point it was just a funny story, that the screenwriters supposedly asked Hawks to ask Chandler who killed one of the characters and Chandler didn't know. But this wasn't something that, in my experience, people were pointing to as a flaw in the book. It was almost always brought up in context of the movie, which was had so many more crucial intelligibility problems than that one. But maybe I just wasn't talking to the right people and there are people who are really excercised by the book's refusal to explain this point. What people say about the unintelligibility of The Big Sleep seems to take on an urban legend character. I recall someone on ilX claiming that the screenwriters found the book so unintelligible that they basically made up their own story, so Faulkner brought in plot elements from Sanctuary. This is total nonsense. (Actually the first half of the movie does hew relatively close to the book, it just leaves out info on who was sleeping with whom and the nature of a bookstore (it was a front for a porno operation), who was found nude where, so you don't get any info that would explain why various people were clearing out book stock and shooting each other etc.)