Hitchcock faces THE BIRDS

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THE BIRDS. A few observations....

-- I have never been a fan of Hitchcock. I see him as a technician who sometimes focused on superb set-pieces at the expense of the film as a whole (FOREIGN CORRESPONDENT), or as a director who often shied away from the implications of his films and sabotaged their endings (VERTIGO). Something must have changed by the 1960s; I consider PSYCHO and THE BIRDS easily the best of his films, and ones that embrace their implications with courage.

-- THE BIRDS also vindicates the slow and methodical approach of Hitchcock's technique. By the time of the first bird attack at 25 minutes into the film, we have a good preliminary sense of the characters, of their circumstances, of the setting and its layout, of how one place connects (by road or by sea) to another. As the escalation occurs, the film can speed up transitions without our losing any sense of where we stand.

-- Jessica Tandy had the perfect eyes for a horror film. Alert, searching faces and skies, always glistening with anxiety to the point of near panic, they tell us almost everything we need to know about her character. I wish the horror field had recognized this quality and used her more often.

What Do I Want?

As I sit here to stare at the blank page and to worry about the upcoming book, I ask myself: What do I want?

What do I really want?

I want to show different ways to write horror fiction. These ways are not better than approaches used by other people, and -- I hope! -- not worse, but they are my ways, and they do the work I ask of them.

Along with methods, I want to show an imagery that is mine, based on dreams, on hillside wanderings near midnight, on things half-seen beyond the pines and aspens but felt right down the spinal chord. I trust my obsessions, even as they force me to question my competence in describing them.

I want to satisfy readers impatient with easy tricks and cliched concepts, readers with no tolerance for show-offs, bores, and fakes. Readers who toss books aside in disgust at such things are the people I respect as my friends and allies.

Above all, I want to be known as a writer who did his best even if the odds were against him, even if he had no patience for the postmodern smog or the zeitgeist of corporate consumerist fairy tales that guarantee public acceptance. I want to make other people with similar allergies and doubts feel less odd, less isolated, less alone. You are not the only ones who feel this way.

De Heredia versus Dr. Seuss

Click for a better jpeg, but don't expect a better parody.

"Quelle est l'ombre qui rend plus sombre encor mon antre?"
-- From LES TROPHEÉS, 1893.

As much as I respect the sonnets of José-Maria de Heredia, I do find some of his lines (unintentionally?) funny. That question from "Sphinx" would fit right into a translated book by Dr. Seuss.

I can admire his economy of means, his control of language, his refusal to pad the sonnets with images or metaphors that do not contribute to his planned effect, but at the same time, I don't sense any person behind the words, and I feel as if his focus on classical topics were an evasion of modern life.

In contrast, when Leconte de Lisle writes about distant cultures and distant places, I do get a sense of who he is, and this impression is reinforced whenever he denounces the modernity of his time, or stares into the future and sees a world without human beings. For all of the distance and objectivity that he shows in his work, Leconte de Lisle is there in his poems, while de Heredia seems absent in the sonnets

Am I being unfair? Am I missing a nuance of personality in the work? Perhaps I am... but I can't shake this feeling of concealment, of refusal to stand forward and to be himself.

Never Put Yourself Down

A friend of mine once told me, "Mark, you should never put yourself down, because there is a long line of people ready and waiting to do it for you."

If There is Any Reward at all to Writing....

For me, there is no challenge to understanding why a story falls apart; the mystery is to understand how a story moves beyond competence (in itself, easy to explain by technical terms) into the mysterious realms of truth and beauty that mean so much to the individual reader.

Anyone can learn to write with an acceptable degree of clarity, as long as that person understands the value of clarity. A few other people can learn the tricks of construction, pacing, euphony, tonal consistency, economy of means, all of the methods that bring fire to clarity, that make a story worth reading to the final page. Again, these techniques can be recognized, studied, and learned, but only if a writer wants to learn. Many, it seems, have no desire to gain this competence.

Beyond competence lies the realm of personal resonance, and writers have no control over their choice of readers. Even the best writers and the most attentive, thoughtful readers can fail to connect, because they simply do not share the same emotional tonality, because their sensibilities are not quite aligned, because they have lived utterly different lives with different experiences.

Given the troubled circumstances, what can competent writers do?

They can study themselves, know themselves. They can remain faithful to their memories, their moods, their tastes, obsessions, and outlooks. They can speak to themselves while writing as clearly and as engagingly as they can for strangers. They can pull up dreams and threads of their lives, while adding a narrative context that might help readers to see and think and feel in similar ways.

The odds are against them. Sometimes very good writers can fail to gain readers, and this might sour their efforts; it might even compel them to stop writing. But even as they strive and fail, writers can meet the challenge of being themselves. If there is any reward at all to writing, it might be this.