Gregg Fedchak's Amazon Blog

It's almost impossible to write satire, or fiction of any kind, really, given the world that we live in today. Here's an example of why this is so.

The Weekly Standard magazine recently reported that the State of Virginia was considering closing the majority of the state's highway rest areas – that's “toilets” to you and me – in order to save money at this time of great financial upheaval.

This is nothing new. I remember that during the '91-'92 recession, I was surprised, dismayed, inconvenienced, and even pained to discover, at a time of great personal need, that the rest stop on New York State's Rt. 17 expressway near Owego was locked up. Only later did I find out that my lawmakers thought that closing Owego and other rest areas was the best way to save taxpayer dollars.

Actually, closing rest areas is the best way for passive-aggressive and angry politicians to vent their frustration at an electorate that seems increasingly unwilling to spend a trillion dollars here or a trillion dollars there. How best to get voters' attention? Hit them in the bladder.

The amount of money spent on (barely) maintaining (scummy and dangerous) public bathroom facilities is piddling. It's a way to get back at the public in the most visible and aggravating way possible, as well as to prove that lawmakers are hard at work.

It's important to keep in mind Martin Mull's adage that Hollywood is simply high school with money. Well, that's all politics is, too. The same student council drones are now in state capitals and in Washington, hard at work on their adolescent fantasies of controlling your life and mine as if we were Sims on their computer monitors. The ultimate control? The keys to your toilet.

This rest area news goes hand-in-hand with budget cutbacks at public libraries, another handy area for the passively-aggressive and narcissistic set to show their budget-cutting skills. Rather than can entire state agencies, fire civil servants, and cut back public service employee pension benefits, politicians close local libraries on Saturdays, more to get your attention than anything else.

So it ends up not only being difficult to write humor in humorless times, it's getting harder and harder to get the books to the public, especially if you have to get there by car via public highway.

A good policy for any writer or artist to have, courtesy of singer/songwriter Suzanne Vega:

 

"If you were to kill me now
  Right here I would still
  Look you in the eye.

  And I would burn myself
  Into your memory
  As long as you were still alive.

  I would not run
  I would not turn
  I would not hide.

  I would live inside of you
  I'd make you wear me
  Like a scar.

  And I would burn myself
  Into your memory
  And run through everything you are."

           - from the song "In the Eye" on the album "Solitude Standing," Suzanne Vega, 1986.

     I'm 51 years old, and very much a child of the 1960's and the 1970's.  As such, I was badly misled into believing that Americans would be a lot more liberated about sex by now than they are.

     I recently saw several episodes of the relatively innocuous 1970's sitcom "Sanford & Son."  These shows were replete with sexual references and innuendo that were vastly hotter than what you get on TV today.

     In fact it was in reference to 1970's TV series such as "Sanford" that my father gravely said, about 1973, that, "Before long, people will be having sex in the village park."

     Well, in Germany, perhaps, but not in the USA.  He said it in all seriousness, with mixed emotions of regret and hopeful anticipation.  But, alas, it hasn't come to pass.

     And why not?  Why have we gone backwards from the peak Hotness Days of the late 1960's and the 1970's?

     Some blame Ronald Reagan and the whole modern conservative movement.  Some blame the Hollywood blockbuster mentality, the "Jaws" -- "The Exorcist" -- "Star Wars" thing, whereby mass entertainment can find no place for off-putting (and adolescent-endangering) sexual content, at least beyond the most infantile.  Others say that the trend simply wore out, or that Woodstockers grew up and had families, or whatever.

     These arguments are all true, but I think the root of the "problem" if it even is one, is that sex easily distracts from the selling of products -- and the work required to attain them -- in a mass consumer/consumption society.

     The maxim is, "sex sells."  We like to say that and believe that, but, except in its mildest forms, the truth is that "sex distracts."  And the one thing that you can't take your eyes off of, in a consumer society, is the product.

     And beyond that, why would the average American want to be continually titillated by what he or she can't have?  You can have the Toyota or the underarm spray; just whip out your credit card.  What you can't have is the handsome gentleman with his hands all over the steering wheel or the nubile young woman spritzing herself.  So he's not too-too handsome.  And she's not too-too attractive or too-too scantily clad.  At least not like in the 1970's.  Oh, maybe in Italy, or on those Greek or Russian TV channels that I subscribe to on DirecTV. But not on your TV set or the local movie screen.

     So, other than in the most tightly controlled of ghettos such as "The Playboy Channel," the 1960's and 1970's, and their exciting promise, are long gone.  Most are relieved.  Some are gravely disappointed, and are doing their best to keep that spirit alive.

Ever wonder why characters on TV shows never watch TV or spend much time on the internet?  Ever wonder why characters in novels - including mine - seldom do, either?

The answer is that if they did, there would be no plot. No story.  No forward motion.

Which tells you something about the nature of both television and the new and improved television, the TV substitute, the internet.  Specifically, it tells you something about internet forums.

And what it tells you is that the participants of internet forums have no lives.  At least no life going forward, no life with real growth or motion, or no life of any interest.  Once heralded as a great, interactive replacement for the Boob Tube, internet forums are now widely seen as places of repetitive, obsessive, "Cheers"-style vapid conversations where the same banal advice, the same feuds, and the same intrigue goes on day after day after day.

I'm talking mainly about hobby or interest-centered forums here.  The ones I'm most intimately familiar with, much to my detriment, are tomato, audio, and automotive websites.  But the same holds true for websites devoted to wine, gourmet cooking, dogs, model trains, or whatever.

There are four traits or problems with all internet hobby forums, four distinguishing characteristics that absolutely guarantee that the inmates ensconced there will have the life sucked out of them in no time flat: 

1)  All forums exist to foster an illusion, meaning that if the activity the group was concerned with was meaningful and self-sustaining in and of itself, no group support for it would be necessary.

2)  Hobbies are an inherently regressive area of life activity, inasmuch as they're a way to escape boring daily life rather than a way to change it.

3)  Most hobbies and their forums rest upon nostalgia, or a love for an idyllic past or past experience or activity that never really existed (except in memory) and which cannot, in any case, ever be repeated.

4)  Most hobbies seek perfection - the perfect model train layout, the perfect home weather station, the perfect-tasting heirloom tomato.  This is an inherently narcissistic activity.  It's also doomed to failure.  Only a nitwit would undertake it.

As for point number one, in the world of tomatoes, for example, the predominant focus of websites is heirloom tomatoes.  Heirlooms need all the help that they can get.  Heirloomers would claim that their tomatoes taste better than modern hybrids, but the truth is that only a handful of heirloom tomatoes have better taste than heritage hybrids. In reality, heirlooms, with their cracking and disease-proneness and late-ripening and their softness and squishiness, were the tomatoes that our grandfathers ran screaming from after World War II.  They couldn't wait to wrap their arms around hybrid Big Boys and Supersonics.

Heirloom tomatoes, today at least, are an illusion. Wrapped in myths.  It takes support groups to support a weak concept.

The better hybrids need no support; a good-tasting, easy-to-grow, and rampantly productive Better Boy speaks for itself, thank you.

The sort of people who, just a bare decade ago, might have spent their time watching reruns of "I Love Lucy," now get to live an only slightly more active illusion (if you count feebly tapping out occasional lines on their keyboard "active").  Says Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel in her book, THE EGO IDEAL:  A PSYCHOANALYTIC ESSAY ON THE MALADY OF THE IDEAL, "the group will only accord the seal of reality to that which tends in the direction of illusion."

Let me repeat: groups tend to form around lies, not the "good."  Lies need all the help that they can get.  Inasmuch as the group life of any forum is a life spent living a lie, life spent on most forums is a life ill-spent.  Exactly like laying on a sofa all day, eating chocolate, smoking a cigarette, and watching Harry Potter on HBO for the tenth time.

As for the second point, the one about hobbies being regressive, I direct you to Stanley Cohen and Laurie Taylor and their classic text, ESCAPE ATTEMPTS:  THE THEORY AND PRACTICE OF RESISTANCE TO EVERYDAY LIFE.  I especially recommend their description of the banal attempt of gardening hobbyists to try to grow the largest leek.  Or, quite frankly, sticking to tomatoes, my favorite area, as the title of my novel LOVE AMONG THE TOMATOES indicates, the banal (and narcissistic, and perfectionistic, and entitled) attempt to grow the best-tasting tomato.

As Cohen and Taylor indicate, "hobbies are the purest types of free area."  Hobbies are spent "organizing, classifying, arranging, recording....it is obsessive and ritualistic."  It involves the rating of objects by score, it involves seeking the rare or ephemeral, and it often involves trying to impress the unwary or mere passersby.  ("Look at my purple tomato!")  Such activities and areas are "ways of making prison time pass in a more relaxed and easy-going way."

The problem is, of course, that the synonym of Cohen and Taylor's "prison time" is "your life."

Most people would rather spend their time rearranging the deck furniture on the Titanic than preventing the boat from sinking.  And most gardeners would rather contemplate next year's Grow List than actively seek a new job, move to Greece, divorce their spouse, or actually get up and do something truly dramatic (other than grow "Lillian's Yellow Heirloom") with their lives.

Hobbies are regressive.  They keep you puttering.  Putt-putt-putt to the grave.  And talking about them, online, is one more repeat, one more box of candy.  For more on hobbies, check out Werner Muensterberger's COLLECTING:  AN UNRULY PASSION and Steven M. Gelber's HOBBIES:  LEISURE AND THE CULTURE OF WORK IN AMERICA.

The gist?  We make fun as much work as possible.  And if we can make it perseverative and obsessive-compulsive as well, so much the better.

Svetlana Boym's THE FUTURE OF NOSTALGIA and Celeste Olalquiaga's THE ARTIFICIAL KINGDOM:  A TREASURY OF THE KITSCH EXPERIENCE, are part of the burgeoning academic literature on nostalgia, kitsch, and melancholia.

Boym mentions that Michael Kammen says that nostalgia is "an ethical and aesthetic failure" defined, Boym herself says, as "a longing for a home that no longer exists or has never existed."

Ah, that glass of wine that you had in that Paris cafe. The car you had as a teen.  In my case, that tomato sandwich my mother fed me while I was mowing the lawn one hot summer's day about 1970.  Or that incredible cup of coffee I had at the Chateau Laurier in Ottawa about fifteen years ago.

If you're not careful, feelings of nostalgia will keep you trapped in a "Groundhog Day"-like attempt to repeat these idyllic moments, rather than living your life today.

Such attempts are "hopeless" says Olalquiaga, since memory is out of time and approximation to the dream is never possible.

Think of the people who spin vinyl LPs today, or who still use vacuum tubes in audio amplifiers.  Think of the aforementioned heirloom tomatoes.  Think of people who contre-danse, or who spin their own wool, or pour their own candles.  David Riesman talked about these regressive activities in his bestselling THE LONELY CROWD over a half century ago.  After Riesman got through with folk dancing, it was hard to believe that anybody would ever dare folk dance again without dying of shame.  Today, there are internet forums devoted to all of these.  (So much for the notion that technology is progressive.)  And all are more an indication of how much alienation the participants feel from daily life as it is actually lived today than it is anything else.

And, finally, what about the psychological aspects of all these forums?

Inasmuch as they all seek perfection - some ideal, as Chasseguet-Smirgel calls it - in their areas of interest, Arnold Rothstein's THE NARCISSISTIC PURSUIT OF PERFECTION is the book to turn to.

Seeking perfection is a "depression-motivated quest," Rothstein says.  For "the entitled hedonist . . . pursuit is more important than the real object." Which is why, in audio, you'll see enthusiasts with "Past Equipment" lists a mile long, or why on tomato forums you'll quickly discover that last year's "great" tomato is regularly discarded for this season's FOTM, or flavor-of-the-month fad variety.  Life is all about "unique" or "special" varieties and a constant Kierkegaardian rotation, all the better to make you feel unique or special in a life where, truth be told, you feel pretty run-of-the-mill.

If pressed, equipment-hoppers and variety-discarders will protest, saying, as Rothstein does (quoting from Tolstoy's novel, ANNA KARENINA), "What am I to do?  I'm made that way.  And really, one does so little harm to anyone, and gives oneself so much pleasure."  It's often, at this point, that forum-goers will also laugh, saying, "at least I don't drink" or "at least I don't gamble."

But they are, still, depressed addicts, limiting their lives to where to tuck in an extra couple of plants or scheming how to get the wife to give up the guest room for the next track layout.  Life revolves around the "pursuit of perfect pleasure."  If you look at any tomato tasting gathering, the group photos will show the great girth of the participants, even greater than pictures of most Americans in today's inflated times.  Addiction is addiction, and constriction is constriction, and no matter how you cut it, a tomato is just a tomato.

I feel the gravitational pull of the internet and its forums in my own life.  Just as "The Beverly Hillbillies" is still comfort food, the internet is comfortable.  Too comfortable.

As the late social historian Christopher Lasch said in THE MINIMAL SELF, Americans today want small lives.  They just want to get by.  They want to survive, not thrive.

For survivors, the forums beckon.  For thrivers, there's something better.

      Think we don't have a manic, money-grubbing, half-human society?

      A friend recently mentioned that someone that he knows makes a living by going from factory to factory, fine-tuning the machinery so that paper diapers can be made faster and faster, resulting in lower costs and higher profits.

      The question that I have is, what does that do to the quality of the diapers?  Ever had baby poo fall on your slippers because of a massive diaper-ial failure?

      America, and capitalism in general, is all about speed and profits, not quality.  And it's certainly not about overall quality of life.

      It's at this point that some fathead feels obliged to say, "But those extra profits go to the shareholders.  And you, like all Americans, have the potential to become one of those shareholders, and to profit."

      First of all, when you look at wayward boards of directors and CEO salaries and compensation, I don't think it's possible, with a straight face, to suggest that shareholders do all that well.

      Second of all, as a shareholder myself, I often wonder if I can be happy with all the money in the world, if that money can't buy a good diaper.  Or a good kleenex.

      It's the kleenex that I've long noticed.  In the 1960's and even the frighteningly hideous 1970's, kleenex were solid, substantial, well-made things.  You could blow your nose, wipe the side of your shoe, pick up ladybug carcasses, squash spiders, and pick up spilled noodles with wild abandon, and the tissues maintained their integrity.

      Starting about 1995, you ended up with spider guts, linguini, and snot on your bare hands.  It's at that point that $12.95 of Proctor and Gamble dividends per quarter seems as insubstantial as their products.

      Another consideration:  wouldn't you rather die than be the guy who travels from factory to factory fine-tuning the profit-making processes?  Wouldn't you rather give up your life than book yet another flight to Toledo to speed up the machinery?

      My friend said, of the fine-tuner, "Isn't it amazing how many things that you can do as an adult to make a living that you never knew about or imagined as a kid?"

      It isn't amazing.  It's pathetic.

      He said it in wonder, but I recoiled in horror.  After all, children dream of becoming doctors, firemen, astronauts.  Has any four year old ever dreamed about becoming a fine-tuner of anything arcane or grim or prosaic or banal or money-grubbing?

      I create characters who want to grow up to be the kind of people who put the integrity back into tissues.  Maybe not at the beginning of the books, but by the end.

      Nuts to the Total Quality Management types and other efficiency experts.  These are the soulless drones who have to compensate for their hollow lives by jetting off to Croatia for the weekend or the Adirondacks for the cross country ski trails.

      These are their versions of recess:  time off for good behavior, weekend passes from prison.  Show me a good efficiency expert, and I'll show you a good, compliant kid who never outgrew the mindset that he or she had when four years old - about the time his or her parents said that they could never make enough money as a fireman.

      Jack, Sara, and Marty, characters all, want better lives.  They want to live on the trails, not just visit them as a way to recharge dead and depressed batteries.  Rather than being in perpetual, efficient, yet empty motion, they learn to let the world come to them.

      It's an option for all of us, and, in my experience, well before any socially-approved retirement age.  But it takes what nobody seems to have any more:  Tillich's or Fromm's courage.  And a little imagination.

      Although it sure would be easier if the diapers and the kleenex held up better.

      Ever heard of "The Borscht Belt"?

      I was startled by some photos that I saw recently on the internet.  They showed the abandoned, rotting complexes of Grossinger's and The Concord, two famous resorts - virtual mini-cities (Grossinger's had its own Post Office!) - in the Catskills.

      These resorts flourished in the mid-to-late 20th Century.  But the rise of cheap air travel, the ascendancy of Atlantic City, and the gas crisis of the 1970's, combined with the stodgy image of the resorts themselves, led to a declining business model.  Grossinger's went into bankruptcy in the late 1980's.  The Concord followed in the late 1990's.  They await salvation, hopefully in the form of new upstate gambling casinos.  (Casinos, combined with prisons, form the new American "service economy" that we've heard so much about.  Half the people that I know seem to work at casinos or else prisons.)

      Like Mayan cities, both resorts were literally abandoned, left to the weeds, the elements, and yahoos with rifles who shoot out windows.

      Both resorts were huge, and still are.  They had indoor and outdoor ice skating rinks and swimming pools, high-rise hotel towers, ski slopes, massive auditoriums and theaters, private airfields, laundromats and beauty parlors and power plants, dormitories for the hired help, and zillions of other structures.

      Sounds like the physical plant of a modern university, eh?

      As I saw the frightening pictures of indoor swimming pools covered in ice, rusting Tennant riding vacuum cleaners, moldy shower curtains, and vines growing through guest room windows, I thought of my alma mater, possibly abandoned and rotting away at some point in the near future.

      Why not, after all?  Business models - and educational ones - do change after all.

      Ever heard of a little thing called the internet?  I suspect more and more students will be attending school online in the future.

      No more cold walks across campus on frosty November morns for substandard cafeteria food.  No more grogginess at 8 am classes, unless that's when you want to "attend".  No more blaring stereos keeping you awake at night, no more rubbing shoulders with the masses in cold showers, no more fighting for good parking spaces.

      And also, most importantly, no more $50,000 a year tuition and room and board bills.

      It's only a matter of time until students and their parents catch on.  An economic downturn will help them catch on sooner.  Then, all of a sudden, the foggy haze that surrounds the myths of what a higher education should look like - and cost - will fly out the window.  Overnight.  The way the notion of a "weekend in the Catskills" did.  Like the mythical "Homeville University" in my novel THE BROCCOLI EATERS, the flood waters will rise, metaphorically.

      I'm currently taking some courses from a place called The Teaching Company.  They're great.  They prove that there's absolutely no functional reason to physically relocate to something called a "campus" in order to learn.  Get a couple dozen blue chip profs, plug them in, and off you go.  Service the whole nation.  Nuts to tenure.

      I suspect this is why so many universities are now doing what the Catskills resorts so frantically did in the 1950's and 60's, which is overbuild, particularly when it comes to wildly inappropriate sports and entertainment facilities.

      Just as the resorts realized that good food and a clean room could be had at any roadside inn, and that they therefore needed to glitz up their joints with pools and pomp and glitz, so colleges are now realizing that they'd better build the things you can't get from a solitary, monkish internet higher education.

      Hockey arenas.  Five star dormitories and food courts. Student centers that rival the United Nations building in size and splendor.  All-weather tracks, all-weather football fields, all-weather lacrosse facilities.  Major league sports programs.  Top-notch landscaping.  The finest architecture.

      After all, if I take classes off the internet, I can't take my own Gregg Fedchak Skating Weevils hockey team to the ice.  I have no food court.  Who will I toss a football to?

      And so universities are morphing into what they feel that they have to become:  social centers, entertainment centers, sports complexes.  Places to meet.  Places to socialize.  Places to buy stuff, do stuff, and, most importantly, not be lonely.

      I suspect, in the end, that it won't work.  The "finest architecture" is now rotting in the Catskills.

      The weakest colleges will be abandoned first.  Those with losing basketball teams, for instance, or the grubbiest physical plants.  The small places, the Mom and Pop colleges, so to speak.  The endowment-challenged.  Those stuck in the era when the liberal arts mattered, and mattered just for their own sake.  Just like in the Catskills, the weak shall perish first.  And then the Grossinger's and Concords will follow.

      I don't think that this is what we want to have happen.  And, as always, the moneyed elite will have their private colleges, their pampered clientele, their special rituals and ways of being.

      But the writing is on the wall.  And the vines are coming through the windows.

      If you live near a military base, airport, hospital, or university, when there's a blizzard or a flood you may hear on the radio that "only essential employees should report to work today."  Essential employees amount to a very small percentage of the American work force.  The "essentials" consist of such folks as emergency room medics, the folks who plow the access roads, air traffic controllers, certain security personnel, and so on.

      It's on those snow days that we get a hint of the ugly truth:  most of us are unessential people.  Expendable. Dross.

      I read recently, in THE WEEKLY STANDARD magazine, I believe, that one expert guesses that something like two- thirds to three quarters of Americans have "BS jobs" or "nonsense jobs", totally superficial employment that, should it (or we) disappear, would have little or no effect upon the world or, more darkly, might make the world a better place to live in.

      Think about the folks who redesign websites on a regular basis.

      As best I can tell, their job is to "improve" (change) a website once you've finally figured out how to navigate the (inevitably cluttered) previous iteration.  I refer to this, in my novel THE BROCCOLI EATERS, as "ceaseless change, constant innovation."  We might get a tad bored if websites or cars or TV schedules didn't constantly change, rotate, or mutate, but life would be a lot better if they didn't, at least not so often.

      What are the ramifications of the essential meaninglessness of so many of our careers?

      Well, for one thing, there lurks the constant thought, deep in the recesses of our brains, that at any point our employers could catch on to our illegitimacy.

      For a great take on that feeling, just look at George's or Elaine's various jobs on "Seinfeld."  Kruger Industrial Smoothing?  The world can live without smooth public statues. Outdoor apparel catalog copy?  The world can live with outlet warehouse underwear.  Part of the joy of "Seinfeld" is how it nervously fed upon our deepest fears and insecurities about our not-so-essential careers and not-so-essential selves.

      Secondly, the unessential nature of many of our work lives mean that we're in "meaning jobs" or "helping professions", where "helping" is defined as "advising", and advising consists of such things as telling people what kind of SUV they need, how they should do a squat thrust or belly tuck, how many and which calories to consume each day, the best routes to take to (our unessential) work each morning, what to wear on the daily commute, what pants look best with which sock, what insurance to buy, who to sue, whether or not to get teeth capped or breasts enlarged, what color ambient cockpit lighting should be, and so on.

      Sara Moxley in THE BROCCOLI EATERS has a BS public relations job.  Almost by definition a job in public relations or marketing or advertising is a BS job.  The novel I'm currently working on will deal with this theme even more than BROCCOLI does.

      Here's the problem:  if we're advisers, we get frustrated when our "clients" or customers fail to take our advice.  As they inevitably do.  I know a person who runs a health and fitness center.  She says most clients get extremely unhappy when, at the end of the month, they haven't lost any weight despite not following dietary guidelines.

      So we give advice, and people ignore it.  We are ineffective.  We are frustrated.  It's one of the basic truths of any "helping" profession that patients aren't compliant, customers are deaf, and we are thus rendered impotent.

      And when we ourselves are given advice, we resent that advice, too.  More frustration, on the opposite side of the fence.  Who wants the advice of a "sales associate"?  After all, we know how useless most of what we dispense is.  How good, therefore, could anybody else's advice be?

      Since the Great Depression, we've built an entire economy and an entire world upon the quicksands of marketing, information, advice, opinion, and trivial entertainment and diversion.  We know how gassy and vaporous all this is, at least unconsciously.  We know that the wizard behind the curtain - like ourself - has very little legitimacy and probably no pants.

      Let's face it.  Very few of us count.

      The only people who count are the trauma surgeons, the folks who plow snow off the highways, the men and women who shoot down incoming missiles, and the terrorists who launch those incoming missiles.  (See my novel BAD APPLE JACK for an interesting take on the always humorous topic of international terror.  Terrorists are ordinary people who have made themselves much more important than they were when they served ordinary fries at an ordinary McDonald's.)

      The rest of us can stay home in our jammies and watch "Seinfeld" reruns.

      And not just when it snows.

If you're ever going to write sex - or even just have it - there's a delightful book that you should check out:  THE JOY OF WRITING SEX - A Guide for Fiction Writers, by Elizabeth Benedict (Story Press 1996).

And if you ever do actually write sex, don't expect a lot of people to accept or understand that fact.

Whether it’s out of misplaced discomfort in an age when naked Woodstockians are turning 70 and celebrated ex-Presidents claim having oral sex on White House rugs isn't really sex, or whether it's out of sheer envy that someone that they know might have a better grasp of such an important subject than they do, I really don't know.  I do know that you'd better have a thick skin, though, since virtually no one is going to be happy with your on-page antics.

To put this in context, Benedict quotes John Updike as saying, "Writing my sex scenes physically excites me, as it should."  Having read Updike extensively, I'm not surprised. And it's something that he should be proud of.

I remember being assigned his late 1960's wonder, COUPLES, when I was in college.  It's hard to believe that anybody, anywhere, could find discomfort in literary sex of any kind after COUPLES, and that was published - hold onto yourselves, so to speak - over 40 years ago.

If you write sex scenes, the greatest approbation will come from those loosely termed your "loved ones."  It will turn out that the world's greatest supporters of Planned Parenthood have really very little clue as to the deep human motivations that make such a great organization necessary.

Benedict mentions her grandmother, who said to her, "I just finished your book . . . and I am not impressed," meaning with the more deeply human parts.  "This book you're writing now, is this going to be a book your grandmother will like?"

My first thought was - and I may write on this in a later post - thank god grandma at least read and commented on your book, Elizabeth, since, in my experience, most close friends and relatives either won't read it at all, or if they do, won't make anything but the most superficial comments (generally along the utilitarian, one-dimensional, mainstream Main Street Protestant-type questions such as, "How is it selling?"  "Are you making much money?"  "How long did it take you to write it?"  "What color pants do you wear when you write?"  Etc.  There will never be any discussion of the actual contents of the fiction.  That would cause their brains to melt.)

My second thought comes from Benedict's succeeding comments, which are on "how we handle the internal and external censors in our writing lives, now that paid censors have been forced into new lines of work."

Precisely.  How do we handle those censors, the voices of friends, family, and the larger society, much of which will never catch up to Updike, let alone Houellebecq?

We kill them.

All we need to do is relax and bide our time.  As Benedict explains, of her grandmother, "She was too frail to read the next novel and did not live to read the third."

Without being too melodramatic about it, it's either the unpaid, unofficial censors in our lives or else us.  One or the other has to go.

You can't write while looking over your shoulder at malignant gawkers, as Bonnie Friedman makes abundantly clear in WRITING PAST DARK.  Those people want us dead.  Not our bodies, but our spirits, our real selves.

Why?

They want us dead so that we'll better resemble them. Or at least their psychic lives.

The physician-novelist-philosopher Walker Percy, among others, have called this blindness to life, liveliness, and spirit "death-in-life."  It facilitates late capitalism and its various and sundry banal exchanges, and it keeps life on the shallow, comfortable, church basement supper, "moviegoer" level that Percy wrote about in his award-winning first novel, THE MOVIEGOER.

Me, I throw my hat in with the (incredibly beautiful, by the way, based upon the dustcover photo) Benedict.  My experiences align with hers.

I cannot claim that I have a clue what I'm writing about, but I understand that having the courage to do so sets me apart, however modestly (or immodestly) from the crowd.

The crowd is the censor.  So are your friends, neighbors, and relatives.  Like Updike, write for yourself, and you may, serendipitously, find yourself writing for the select few who get it.

And that's when the fun begins, a kind of pleasure that the censors will never, ever understand.

Yeah, sure.  Just try it.  Even Thoreau broke down.  He had his relatives deliver him pies on Walden Pond.