Anthony Lee Collins

So, I’m still working on my next mystery story (“The Trinity Mystery”), and I’ve written quite a bit, but right now I’m kind of stuck, so I’ve been thinking about my third novel, which I never finished.

I got to the end of a first draft (so, it did have an ending, and a pretty good one), but it had some significant problems (internal and external), and I got distracted by writing mystery stories.

So, I decided to go back and give the third novel another look. And I couldn’t remember where it was. I knew it had been online, but I couldn’t find it, and clearly I removed links to it on this blog (or at least most of them).

Well, that was embarrassing. One advantage of having your writing online is that you always know where it is, and if you back up the website(s) then you also have backups of the writing.

I searched, and I couldn’t find anything on this blog. Or the other blog.

I finally found it, or fragments of it, and I’m starting to collect all the pieces and sort them back into their proper order. It needs some streamlining (it emerged from chaos even more than some of my other work), plus some punctuation improvements, and it has way too many characters (fifty? sixty? — but I’m probably stuck with that). So, I’m going to assemble the pieces and then bring it to the point of being a second draft.

It will be fun to put all the pieces back together, and when I’m done I’ll link to it from here, probably with some caveats. (You know when you have a DVD of a movie, and there’s a menu item called “Deleted Scenes” and one of those deleted scenes is actually an entirely separate movie? Okay, I’ve never seen that either, but this is like that.)

And (to mix metaphors) when I’m done, this time I’ll remember where I parked the car.

Oh, and I just remembered that the third novel had a title also. It was “Throwing Stones.”

First: I was very sorry to read about the death of Joan Acocella.

As I’ve said before, I always enjoyed reading her writing, particularly about dance (although I have no real interest in dance).

And now, on to the regularly scheduled blog post.

 
I am not, so far, excited by, or even interested in, artificial intelligence (except in a very general way). By the way, I do not think that artificial intelligence will end the human race. If that happens, at least in my lifetime, it will be accomplished by human beings.

Would I use artificial intelligence to help me write my stories? To paraphrase Orson Welles, the stories might end up being better, but they wouldn’t be mine.

Also, even if my writing could be improved by artificial intelligence, where would be the fun in that?

If writing was my business, of course, that might make a difference, but obviously it isn’t. I do want my writing to be read by an audience of more than one — that’s why I make it publicly available for free — but I wouldn’t do it if it wasn’t fun.

But there is another, and more decisive, reason I won’t use artificial intelligence to write stories. The question that really hangs me up is not the question of fun — important as that is — it’s the question of ownership.

If I went to ChatGPT, or whatever, and developed a prompt to get it to write a story in my style and with my characters, who would own that story? Maybe there’s some fine print somewhere which says that I would own it, but what if tomorrow that fine print was changed to say the opposite?

Not worth the risk.

[Later: For an interesting article on the current legal situation with ownership, go here: “Is A.I. the Death of I.P.?“]

Now, it has been a while since I’ve started a new story, but that’s up to me to do. I’ve written some scenes, but until now they haven’t started to fit together.

But now, I think something is starting to come together. The turning point for me is usually a title. As I’ve talked about before, if you write a story in the conventional way, you can write it first and then title it later. When you write and publish serially, you need the title before you start posting, and now I think I may have a title…

One paragraph in this article in The New Yorker popped out at me:

Before the show opened, Hüller read an essay that portrayed “Hamlet” as a critique of the conventions of Renaissance revenge tragedy—and of the society from which those conventions emerged. “Shakespeare wrote the play at the edge of these times when blood revenge was still a thing,” she told me recently. “Shakespeare’s showing it one more time, but in the most absurd way—because everybody’s dead at the end. The play is saying, ‘This can’t be the way.’ ”

It’s rather embarrassing that I never thought of this (or perhaps I did, way back when I studied Hamlet in school*). I’ve read and seen some of the classic “revenge” plays (The Duchess of Malfi is the one which sticks in my mind, although ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore may also qualify).

Rounding around to my actual point (and I do have one 🙂 ), this is something I haven’t seen commented on about Quentin Tarantino’s film The Hateful Eight.

[SPOILERS (obviously)]

As with Hamlet, The Hateful Eight takes the form of a revenge plot to its natural conclusion: Everybody dies. As has been pointed out, the eight characters break down into an obvious series of icons of the United States at that time (and in general): White/Black, North/South, Mexico, England, Cowboys (and no Indians, which is interesting). A bunch of men and one woman, but (to take the charitable view) this does make sense for a movie about male violence. And these various characters mostly seem to know each other, or at least know of each other, to a degree which would be unusual if they were intended to be real and/or random.

(The question of male violence also makes me think about Once Upon a Time… In Hollywood — how even the violence of Charles Manson’s female acolytes is fundamentally his violence. To quote from Kill Bill, “I could see the faces of the cunts that did this to me and the dicks responsible.”)

I’m not entirely endorsing Tarantino’s approach, by the way. I think his enthusiasm for wild violence — and his skill at it — does get the better of him sometimes, but I think he does have his deeper purposes and points to make.

But I think that this is the point of The Hateful Eight: to step back and look at the revenge framework, which Tarantino has used, less critically, in other films. As with Hamlet in the quote above, I think his point is “This can’t be the way.”

 
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* I studied the play in both high school and college, and in high school we got so caught up with it — dissecting it week after week after week — that we ended up having to blast through Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales in just a few days (the semester was supposed to be fifty-fifty between the two).

I learned some important things from my father (and also some things which are not important, or even true, but that’s for another time).

For example: “When you sign something, always make sure you get a copy.”

Good advice.

And, of course, as I’ve quoted before: “There is only one rule in writing. Write well.”

But recently I’ve realized that I learned something else important — and this one I learned from his example, not from anything he said.

I thought of it when I read this article from WIRED magazine, and then saw a little of the online aftermath: “Brandon Sanderson Is Your God“

The article is basically about the fact that Brandon Sanderson is 1) an enormously successful fantasy author, 2) whose writing nobody ever writes about, 3) who is, for some reason, nowhere near as well known to the general public as J. R. R. Tolkien, J. K. Rowling, or George R. R. Martin (all also fantasy writers), 4) a Mormon. (Actually, the article specifically classifies him with the writers who are “weirdo Mormons,” as opposed to the writers who are regular Mormons, and there’s no indication of why, or even why the distinction is being made. For me, that’s the most annoying part of the article.)

Anyway, the general Sanderson-loving public took this article (not totally without reason) as an attack on Sanderson, and on them, so of course everybody immediately made YouTube videos about it, and I’m sure they posted various things on social media and so on.

This made me think of two things.

(But first, a disclaimer: I’ve never read anything by Brandon Sanderson. I don’t have a dog in this race, or whatever the cliche is.)

1) I like various things. I’ve never particularly cared what anybody else thinks of the things I enjoy. I think I learned that from my father’s example. Amazon is always trying to get me to join Goodreads to find out what my friends are reading, and so they can see what I’m reading. Why would I care?

There are no guilty pleasures (well, unless your hobby is clubbing baby seals or something like that). Sometimes people are offended if I say that I prefer the Resident Evil movies to Star Wars or Marvel or Star Trek, but that’s fine.

(Increasingly, of course, a major point of attraction is that the Resident Evil series was six movies and then it ENDED.)

2) Also, another thing about the WIRED article is that the writer seems puzzled by the fact that Sanderson’s sentences and words are very ordinary (which even Sanderson admits), but people read his work anyway.

Duh.

My father had a friend who was in the theater world, and he said that theater people all knew that Franchot Tone was a better actor than Cary Grant (I don’t know what led up to this discussion). My father’s response, as he reported it to me, was that your audience is the public (“civilians,” as a former bass player of mine always referred to them), not people in the industry.

Now, for myself, I do care about words and sentences (and commas, and parentheses, and dashes, and commas). But I write, so it makes sense for me to care. And the writer of the WIRED piece is also, by definition, a writer. But why does it take until the end of the piece for him to realize all this doesn’t apply in the same way to civilians?

I’ve been writing about James Joyce recently. Like many Joyce fans, I have my favorites between Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and Ulysses, but I’ve never made a serious attempt to read Finnegan’s Wake. There are some people who admire it tremendously, and who perhaps even enjoy it, but most readers seem to find it impossible to get into.

Joyce apparently promised that, after Finnegan’s Wake, his next novel would be a simple novel.

David Lynch has not made a feature film since Inland Empire (2006). I hadn’t seen Inland Empire until recently, maybe because it was generally reported to be very difficult to follow, even by the standards of earlier Lynch films, or maybe because it’s three hours long, or both, but now that I have seen it I still prefer Mulholland Drive, which seems to be (this is not an original idea with me) a somewhat more traditional approach to the same general themes (specifically around Hollywood and its relationship to actresses).

William S. Burroughs started off with fairly conventional novels (Junkie, Queer), hit it (relatively) big when he went more “out there” in his style and techniques (Naked Lunch), proceeded to go way more “out there” (in The Nova Trilogy, for example), and then pulled back and integrated all of these into a final style (Cities of the Red Night).

I haven’t read Burroughs in a while, but Cities of the Red Night was always my favorite. It has the general structure and affect of a hard-boiled noir detective novel, and Burroughs builds on those conventional elements while going increasingly bonkers, much the same way David Lynch did in Twin Peaks and elsewhere.

The consistent thread here is not these artists, specifically, but my understanding of my own preferences, which are apparently very consistent.

This also makes me think of John Coltrane. I read an interview once with a jazz critic/enthusiast/musician (I don’t remember who, obviously) who said that it would have been interesting to see, if Coltrane had lived decades longer (he died at 40), if he would have continued to take his music further and further “outside” the traditional forms and modes, which was the trajectory he was on, or if he would have at some point moved back to more conventional forms, as Burroughs (who lived to be 83) did, and as Joyce (who lived to be 58) was apparently planning to.

The idea was that if you break things down beyond a certain point you just get complete chaos, and where could you go beyond that, in any art form? For a writer, would you start inventing your own alphabet?

All of this, of course, applies to me (this is my blog, after all 🙂 ).

I started out quite a bit more “outside” than I’ve ended up. (“Lee” in my name is for Burroughs, by the way.)

At one point, in writing the first version of Utown, I had one chapter (called “Eyes Wide Open,” if I remember correctly) which was quite “out there.” It was considered enjoyable (by some) and baffling & annoying (by others), and I realized that this was a dead end for me.

I do still have some of the “cut-ups” still available, and they make me laugh out loud (the highest praise possible, in my opinion).

Also, since I’ve been re-reading Across the River and into the Trees, it amused me to remember that I’d written this: Papa.

1) I miss director’s commentary tracks.

One thing that I miss about DVDs is the director’s commentary tracks (or commentary tracks in general, although, in general, directors and writers are — in my experience — more interesting than actors to listen to). Not that DVDs don’t exist anymore, but in a lot of cases they no longer have commentary tracks, presumably because more and more people watch movies on streaming services and fewer and fewer on DVDs, so it’s not worth the effort.

So, it was pleasant to find that Rian Johnson recorded a commentary track for Glass Onion, a movie I enjoyed a lot. (I enjoyed Knives Out, too, and I have no interest in thinking about which is better, but Glass Onion is much more full of cameos and funny background details, so the commentary track is fun.)

 
2. Writing.

I’m holding off on starting a new story for the moment, since the four I’ve posted so far all needed a little sprucing up.

I’m not rewriting or anything like that — just a little tweak here and there. Mostly swapping out words for better words, and adjusting (and, I hope, improving) punctuation. “The Marvel Murder Case” and “The Town Hall Mystery” are done. I’m currently about halfway through “The Deacon Mystery.”

I know, that leaves out “The Heron Island Mystery.” That’s the longest of the four, by far, and it’s the only one which needs more than tweaking. I was constantly aware when writing it that it was going to end up much longer than I’d hoped. It’s 35,000 words, definitely a novella, and longer than “The Town Hall Mystery” and “The Deacon Mystery” put together.

But stories find their own length, and in worrying about how long it was becoming, I see now that I left out at least two small scenes which should be there. So, in addition to the tweaking, I’ll be adding a couple of things. Ironically, despite being, so I thought, “too long,” it’s actually been, until now, a bit too short.

 
3. Reading.

This article caused a bit of a stir earlier this year: “The End of the English Major.”

Here are a couple of responses from the New York Times:

• “I’m What’s Wrong With the Humanities“
• “How to Get Kids to Hate English“

I think this is interesting, but not, for me, personally compelling. Of the enduring cultural enthusiasms of my life, none of them were acquired at school. James Joyce comes the closest, since I did study that in college and I don’t think I’d read much Joyce before, but that’s not a top tier passion. My experience of formal education is that it has squashed more possible passions than it ever encouraged (to this day, I cringe at the idea of ever opening Moby Dick again).

That being said, I do like the idea of college as a way of educating people, rather than just training them for some future job. I had a friend when I was in college who wanted to become a doctor, and he said that a lot of his fellow future doctors had chosen a pre-med major very early on, but he’d chosen another major (I forget what), partly because he wanted a broader education, and partly because his research had shown that a lot of top medical schools were leaning toward applicants who had a more general undergraduate education, because there was a theory that they made better doctors.

I thought of this when I was considering the movie Eyes Wide Shut recently. I hadn’t liked it much when it was in theaters, but I’ve been watching some videos about it recently, and that’s made me think about it again. The central character is Dr. Bill Harford, a very successful M.D., and it suddenly struck me that he might be a perfect example of what happens when you focus throughout your higher education on the single goal of becoming a doctor.

Being a doctor is clearly his entire identity. He flashes some sort of medical ID card at everybody like it’s a badge, he barely interacts with his daughter, and it’s clearly never occurred to him that his wife is a three-dimensional human being. Has he ever read a book or seen a play? He treats the rich and powerful, but he has no idea how money or power actually work. He is amazed and alarmed to find out that his wife has a history and an interior life. He’s like a boy from junior high school who was yanked from the playground, given medical training and a degree, and who has been completely insulated from reality ever since by lots of prestige and cash.

So, yes, let’s focus some energy on the “humanities.”