The View may be Rosy, -but Reality?

The state of the community literature

Mere books present a rosy view sometimes, don’t they? What we are seeing all too often, in literature, are idealized versions of what actually happens. It is an idealized version of what really goes on in the world. So it is inaccurate. However primitive myths are not rosy, so here one may distinguish two thing. Staying on the subject of the two things (issues) now: First the consideration that what is being depicted is idealized, and then the second is that what is depicted does not accurately display itself. 1) idealized. 2) less accuracy. Now let’s talk about literature in general: Literature has power, but it show us whatever kind of life the author of it is desiring for us to see. Much literature today exhibits “interiority,” and that means the book goes into the details of what its characters are thinking. More so than what they are saying. So that is an example of a kind of an omniscient book and (somebody, somewhere) knows what all the characters are thinking. Novels can follow whole lives this way, starting with their protagonist, their hero or anti-hero, getting up in the morning, and ending when the character goes to sleep, after a long hard day and including all the complete thoughts these persons undoubtedly have, in between those bookends. (No: I am not talking about a Superman comic.)

The novelists -they are really the actual “interior voice” -can accentuate what they like but the books I see are usually idealistic and rather inaccurate in how they portray life. It is not an accurate description of life but a dress up job that makes the characters look good. Rather than inquiries based on accurate depiction, these are idealized versions of what goes on. Maybe it is what they would like to believe their lives are! So, anyhow, these books that I am seeing are books that depict an ideal society of amazing people.

Hey, most persons are not that amazing — who are we trying to fool — the world is not the rosy place the educated, liberal-minded writers who write most currently available novels are telling us it is. But it makes for a good story. Doesn’t it. Let’s wake up from living in the dream lands of unrealistic writers. Maybe we need someone else: we need, Like—Dostoevsky; he was totally different. He wrote depictions of life as it is lived. Yes, there are other writers. I suggest you seek them out if you are interested. You would need to seek them out. Why aren’t I seeing their books on the shelves—or sometimes I look on “little libraries” set atop posts, the ones that are outside houses in the neighborhood that I live in? That even works pretty well for me. I would like to see us reading things that are more relevant. This would not be our current crop of novels, which are usually written for -and by -people with comfortable, secure lives and really cool lifestyles (Um—supposedly okay).

How may we get away from that idealism? Stories are written for enjoyment. Is that idealism? They always dress things up. But it seems to me that that has nothing to do with it. Stories can at least dress things up in ways that reflect more or less the real pain and tragedy of the times and not some gibberish. Hey I just want to see more accuracy in literature. They do not always need to depict an ideal, experienced by—Like, maybe nobody? So think we’re kind of reading the wrong things. The comparison with an older literature shows us how one may do a little better at depicting life as tragedy. The ancient Greeks had comedy and tragedy, and that, I suppose, was that! The comedy was right over the top (ha ha: big laughs for the Greeks) and the tragedy was less optimistic than what we are discussing of literature today. Today our fictional books have it that everybody is a happy-as-pie superhero fighting against ignorance, or probably racial bias — Oh, whatever: I have had it.

I would prefer more a feeling of sobriety because we are experiencing a bad deficit in the truth. That is why I think novels we see are too optimistic, or too idealistic.

Now Willeford, for example, was something else. Here is the teaser that Substack’s computer program gives you that is like a teaser ( guess?), as usual senselessly interfering but maybe I am so good it comes off, I don’t know if you want to read this:

* * * *

I am tired of those kinds of books. Let’s stop looking at ourselves through this idealistic lens and get down to the nitty gritty and the real facts (rather than inaccurateness which is also a problem).

Let’s look at the gib dorps. (Ha ha: ‘big corps.’ Im losin’ it!) The big corporations now: What is seen in their advertising, as well as the idealists of the fictive world and what they all team up on is going to give us a rosy, optimistic view of life that is only creating danger. It comes through maintaining us in our ignorance about the world.

The problem is passed further on down the line. It is coming, all right. I would prefer to have literature that prepares us instead of literature that deceives us.

Nature does as Nature sees. What does Nature feel like doing? Make a circle, draw a tree, write a poem, and please prepare a “career” for me.

Being fake
And you can jump in the lake