the Scott Stein

In an insightful post today about a stage production of Crime and Punishment, Frank Wilson writes:

Why do people in the arts think something has to be relevant to, of all things, the day's headlines? Dostoyevksy isn't relevant. He's perennial. As the play itself notes, human nature hasn't changed, doesn't change, isn't about to change.

Advice to artists: Turn off the news. Cancel your subscription to the newspaper. Relish human character for its own sake in all its myriad variety.

In a separate post yesterday, Wilson linked to Terry Treachout's review of Alan Rickman's "My Name Is Rachel Corrie." Treachout's head and subhead sum it up nicely: "Bulldozed by Naiveté: Terror advocate dies in accident. Atrocious drama ensues."

I haven't seen the Rickman play and don't plan to, but I generally agree with Wilson and Treachout that politics makes for bad art. Wilson's words excerpted above are particularly on target. I've been telling students of fiction writing the same thing for years. Dramatic art is about story, and character, and human nature. Steven Pinker has some interesting things to say about this in his book The Blank Slate, which refers to a story by Isaac Bashevis Singer as an example of literature showing us the truth of human behavior. Crime and Punishment is perennial because of its exploration of human nature that is irrelevant to a particular era, not because it attempted to be relevant to its own time, even if it is full of culturally specific references.

This presents a challenge to writers, like me, whose work is largely satirical. If you read older satire and comedy, even if it was the most highly regarded humor writing of its time, you find that it is rarely perennial. To me, Shakespeare's comedies clearly do not hold up as well as the tragedies. Even work from only 40 years ago often does not hold up. Part of the problem is that humor--satire in particular--is connected to time and place. When the writer Ha Jin came to speak at Drexel, a colleague introducing us told him that I write satire. Ha Jin said that he wasn't comfortable enough with American culture--though he'd been here for many years--to write satire. He thought that writing satire required a keen understanding of your own culture. To the extent that Ha Jin is correct about this, satire is less likely to translate well to other times and places and cultures, less likely to be perennial. Memes in humor might have a harder time surviving than memes in drama and straight fiction, just as straight fiction that depends on current events or political winds is not likely to last as long as Crime and Punishment. Jokes, in general, depend to some degree on surprise and audience expectations and have short shelf lives.

If the satire is aimed at human nature and behavior, it might have more chance of lasting. Satire is always making a comment, sometimes political or ideological, and that comment may be relevant to some place or time in a way that limits the satire's survival. Go back and watch old comedies, stand-up routines, even episodes of The Simpsons or South Park from only a decade ago, and you will see how much of the content depends on time and place and specific knowledge. What are the chances that an episode of South Park will be funny a hundred years from now? Will people even understand it?

To the extent that satire uses that time and place as a device for getting at something permanent--human nature, power's corrupting influence--it might have some chance of lasting. For example, "Harrison Bergeron," a short satirical story by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., exaggerates to make a point. It clearly is making a comment, a rather specific one, with political ramifications and relevant to its times. But the comment is also intimately connected with human nature, with large questions that go beyond the political moment. Whether this will help it survive is anyone's guess.

It's been a couple of weeks since I've posted anything at all, let alone anything of substance. Where the hell have I been, you ask? Just dealing with the challenge that many bloggers face--time.

I started this blog because I thought it would be fun and because I wanted an outlet for my writing that didn't fit a form that could be submitted for more formal publication. And I wanted to rebuild an audience for my writing--for several years, before nearly anyone was using the word "blog," I ran the (now resting peacefully) online magazine When Falls the Coliseum: a journal of American culture (or lack thereof), which I founded and which at its peak had more than 25 regular writers from across the nation and thousands of readers (one highlight included being profiled by New York magazine's Surf Report). Though we didn't have blog technology, we posted reader responses and arguments following articles much as blogs do today.

Editing the articles, writing my own pieces, operating the site, posting all of the material, and participating in the arguments with readers all demanded lots of time. A few years ago, I realized that if I devoted the time to running an online magazine and advancing in my teaching career, I'd have no hope of writing novels. Writing novels was more important to me than arguing with strangers online all day. Something had to give. So When Falls... had to go (though before it did, we managed to put together a "best of" book). I started this blog, the Scott Stein, this past summer, as I said above, because in part I missed the outlet that When Falls... had given me. I named this blog after myself to avoid all temptation to turn it into a journal that would make me an unpaid full-time editor again. I had no ambitions for the blog beyond my own scribblings.

Part of the problem, though, is that I am a writer, and I decided that mine was not to be primarily a list-and-link blog. I really enjoy Frank Wilson's Books, Inq. and visit many other such blogs, like Instapundit.com, and I do sometimes post a one-liner with a link to something interesting. But I am a writer, and I want to write. I want readers who enjoy reading my writing, not who visit me to see if I found anything interesting that someone else wrote. (And I learned that finding interesting stuff all day long--a service I value highly--is hard work, and I couldn't keep up.) I don't just--can't, really--dash off most of my blog entries. I revise them several times and make corrections even after they're posted.

I started posting almost every day, or at least a few times a week, because it was summer and I'm a college professor and wasn't teaching in the summer. Then I slowed down to one post a week, or two, with the idea that each would have substance and be worth reading. But now the academic year is in full swing. I just collected 60 freshman papers that require reading and grading. And I have lectures to prepare. And Powerpoint slideshows to create for my department. On top of this, I have a new novel, Mean Martin Manning, coming out in February, and I'm designing four separate Web sites to promote the book. Two of the book's characters will have their own blogs and will be "visiting" other people's blogs to leave comments. I'll be posting about it on the Scott Stein to give you all the details, but I think it's unlike any other book promotion effort out there. Obviously, blogging as fictional characters will compete with the time to blog as myself. All of this is in addition to other writer-blogger conflicts, like whether I should use an idea I have for a blog entry, or whether I should develop it as an essay and try to get it published elsewhere. And, of course, whenever I start writing a new novel, everything else on the priority list slips one position.

Take heart, though. This blog isn't going anywhere--I will continue to write for the Scott Stein regularly, with the goal of one real entry each week. Still, if a couple of weeks go by without substantial new content, now you'll know that it isn't because I've given up on it or that I'm on a bender in a motel somewhere. More likely, I've just got papers to grade or fictional characters whose blogs demand attention.

There's probably a really good quote about time that would end this piece perfectly, but I don't have the time to look it up.