The Teeming Brain

Last November when I was at the World Fantasy Convention in Austin, I attended a panel discussion about the current state of the horror genre. One of the panelists was anthologist and editor Stephen Jones, who needs no introduction to anybody who’s paid serious attention to horror fiction for the past twenty years or so. As the longtime editor of one of the industry-standard annual anthologies, The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror — as well as literally dozens of additional books — Steve has helped both to gauge and to establish horror fiction’s constantly shifting identity. His stature is only enhanced by the string of high-level credits he’s amassed over the years as a publicist and consultant for various prominent horror films (e.g., Hellraiser, Nightbreed).

Given all this, I was thrilled when my boldness in introducing myself to him after the panel led, via a series of post-convention emails, to his agreeing to be interviewed by me. The interview stretched over a long series of emails spanning several months and, I’m pleased to say, will be appearing in a future issue of Cemetery Dance magazine (issue #59, which I believe may be published late in 2007). I’m also pleased to say that Steve was quite happy with the way the interview turned out, and in fact said he felt it was one of the best he’d ever done.

What led me to crave an interview with him was the things he said during that WFC panel discussion about the precipitous decline of reading and literacy in contemporary society. Readers of The Teeming Brain will know that this parallels a concern I’ve been pursuing for quite some time. But I was previously unaware that Stephen Jones shares many of my thoughts. It goes without saying that his status in modern publishing lends an extra weight to his views on such matters.

Below is a snippet from my interview/conversation with him. If you find it interesting, then I urge you to keep an eye out for Cemetery Dance #59 later this year.

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MC: I was absolutely riveted at WFC when I heard you talk about the declining levels of readership across the board in Britain and America, and about the way this is affecting the writing and publishing industry. Then just a week or two after I returned from the convention, I read your year’s-end summary in the new edition of The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror and was again riveted when I saw you take up the same theme. You even speculated there that given current trends, the profession of “writer” might one day, in a logically foreseeable future, become a quaint historical curiosity along the lines of other defunct professions like the lamplighters in gaslit cities of a bygone era. Obviously, this is an issue that’s of great concern to you, and it’s a concern that’s shared by many other people as well. Would you please share your thoughts about these matters? Maybe restate what you said in your year’s-end summary? Or even just quote yourself wholesale if you want, since your words deserve the largest possible audience.

SJ: It’s simple, really. You only have to do the math. Most kids are leaving school sub-literate these days, whatever the official figures claim. Exams are being dumbed down. The days when I left school with a solid grounding in Shakespeare, Dickens, Jane Austin and Geoffrey Chaucer are, apparently, long gone. How many kids read Mark Twain anymore, let alone L. Frank Baum?

Almost nobody reads these days. There are too many other distractions: cell phones, Playstations, reality TV. It’s exactly what Aldous Huxley predicted in Brave New World: it’s all a form of “soma” to keep the masses happy so they don’t complain while the troops are sent off to fight pointless wars—which seem to be planned like video games themselves—crime rates rocket out of control, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, animals are driven to extinction and the planet is gradually destroyed by a couldn’t-care-less mankind.

In the old days, we used to get our information from words. For instance, we would read a book about global warming and understand its implications. Or, at the very least, we would look at an article in the newspaper that would present the salient facts, which we could think about and maybe discuss with others. Nowadays, in Britain, at least, newspapers have become part of the “dumbing down” process. Here we now have “lite” newspapers that are more like MTV newsbites for people who don’t want to read about anything in-depth. And what they read about is the latest gossip surrounding such empty vessels as Paris, Britney, Lindsay or Angelina. They aren’t actually learning anything—except how not to behave in public and what the latest fashion accessory is. Television is no better, with most major news programmes now presented as if they were a coffee afternoon.

Now apply all that to fiction. With successive generations leaving school unable or unwilling to read, progressively fewer people are buying books—except, of course, much-needed self-help volumes and witless biographies about people who have barely lived a life yet. That attrition applies to all books. Now remember that horror is just a very, very small part of the overall industry, so the percentage of people who actually pick up a horror title—and, God help us, anthologies account for an even smaller percentage of that figure—is probably miniscule compared to worldwide sales. To make matters worse, figures seem to indicate that publishers on both sides of the Atlantic are publishing more titles in a vain attempt to capture that elusive reading public. So now you have the publishers dumbing down their books for a dumbed-down readership. Add to that the fact that corporate takeovers have consolidated the number of major publishers into a handful of mega-corporations around the world, which means that choice is ever more limited, and the book chains will only discount those titles that are pre-ordained to be “bestsellers.” And you can see how it’s all a recipe for a disaster waiting to happen.

The publishing industry simply cannot sustain its current level of output forever. More books and less readers means that, eventually, the industry will implode. They can’t keep throwing money at “celebrity” biographies or facile how-to books in the hope that one title may become a best seller. In the end, the whole pack of cards will come tumbling down and that’s when the cutbacks will begin. And guess where those cuts will happen first? That’s right, not with the bloated volumes of disposable garbage that they have over-hyped and over-paid for, but with the genre titles, the new writers, the collections and anthologies. All those areas that they perceive to be losing money on because they’ve never supported them as they should have.

It’s a depressing scenario, but more than likely to happen at the moment. Of course, the small presses can and will pick up some of the slack but, let’s face it, most writers and especially anthology editors can’t survive on the kind of money paid by the smaller publishers. And you can forget print-on-demand—there’s no money in that at all. So I can foresee a time when the writing of genre fiction will have reverted to a “gentlemanly” hobby, much as it was in the 19th century, to be indulged in only by the independently wealthy or a dedicated few who can squeeze it in after work or while bringing up a family.

Of course, it could be worse. You could be a poet!

As I had previously announced here, I was the subject of an author chat last Monday, November the 13th, at The Lost and the Damned. It went pretty well, I think. I certainly enjoyed myself, and a small crowd showed up to pick my brain about topics that proved quite interesting to me. I just hope my answers proved equally interesting to them.

A full transcript of the chat is now available at the site, and I thought I’d excerpt a portion here in which a couple of questions elicited from me some thoughts that have been playing on my mind a lot recently. For years I’ve been positively fascinated by issues relating to the creative process and the nature and origin of art. Having suffered through several years of a really agonizing creative block — which, ironically, felt supernally peaceful when I allowed myself to relax into it (and the sense of quasi-enlightenment was confirmed after a fashion by the palpably increased clarity of the Buddhist books I read during that period) — having suffered, I say, though such a thing, I’ve been drawn to devote considerable attention to what’s going on inside a person’s psyche when the creative waterworks are shut down (or are in motion, for that matter). Portions of last week’s chat dwelt on things like this, so I reprint them here on the chance that you might find the issue as interesting as I do.

M - What made you decide to start your blog, The Teeming Brain?

Matt Cardin - I was at the end of a period of savage writer’s block that started in late 2001 and early 2002, right when I was correcting the galleys for my Divinations of the Deep collection. I still don’t know for sure why my psyche retracted so violently. But I pretty much went mute, except for quite a lot of private journal writing, for several years. In truth, it felt last summer like I had gotten so sick of my own sickness, my own muteness, that I just wanted to create a public place to vent, to assert my ego. So far it’s going well. It seems to have unlocked the word mill within me. And this also was bound up with my return to composing music a couple of years ago.

L - I was going to ask what started or precipitated the block….I think most writers go through phases like this…since you answered, Matt…you might want to comment on another aspect or getting out of it or whatever…

Matt Cardin - The topic itself fascinates me. I have a long shelf full of books on writing, and the parts on creative block are well-worn. I think my own block might have had something to do with my wife’s precipitous descent into terrible illness, which had started in the late 1990s. I entered a depression I didn’t realize was active. So that had something to do with it. Plus — and this feels stupid to say, but I’ve returned to the thought — I think the deep shock of 9/11 may have had something to do with it. On that day, I had been thinking a lot about my current writing projects, and that shattering sense of realizing that my little world of creative endeavor might not really amount to crap in the face of such events kind of marked me.

[snip]

L- [Would you] comment about the similarities and differences between composing and writing?

Matt Cardin - I find that writing words and composing music use different aspects of the personality or self, but the creative act itself is very similar, in that the best approach, the one for really producing art, is never to try actively to achieve this or that effect. As in, you hear a bit of real-life dialogue, or witness an incident, or encounter a beautiful scene, and think, “I’m going to write a story about that (or a song)!” I’ve been dwelling a lot lately on the fact that the best approach is to develop an inner watchfulness for the things that really inspire you, for the fiery thread of your passion, and to let those outside influences and ideas — many of which may validly be good material — come to you through that inner conduit, after they’ve been thoroughly appropriated by your subconscious mind, your “secret self.”

[snip]

L- You mentioned that sometimes in the actual “execution” of the work you find that you’re not actually writing what you had in mind…how do you handle that? how do you “listen” to your inner voice to change it so that it works so well?

Matt Cardin - I’ve written myself into a blind alley or two by not listening attentively enough to my inner voice. I work almost entirely on intuition and gut instinct when I’m writing fiction. I try to follow the swell of my passion, of the initial impulse that made me want to write to begin with, and I try to pay attention to the feeling that may occur when I’ve gotten off course. I find Stephen King’s analogy of writing as an archaeological project, in which you try your best to uncover a shape in your psyche without damaging it, to be marvelously accurate. So I always feel that a given story idea, or even a nonfiction idea like an essay, comes with a kind of genetic blueprint that reveals itself only in the actual execution, in the actual writing, and I just use my gut to feel out that shape.

I’m pleased to announce that my interview with Thomas Ligotti, which I published here at The Teeming Brain last July, has been picked up by The New York Review of Science Fiction. For those who aren’t famliar with it, NYRSF is a prestigious, long-running critical journal edited by, among others, David Hartwell, whose editorial work has been of great importance to me.

The interview appears in the October 2006 issue (Issue 218, Vol. 19, No. 2), where — as I was not aware of until just today — it is featured as the main cover piece. So this certainly makes for a nice sense of gratification. There’s a page at Locus Online where you can see a summary of the issue’s contents, along with a miniscule cover scan.

For the record, Jason Van Hollander deserves a major thanks here, because he’s the one who suggested to me that I ought to consider submitting the interview to David and NYRSF in the first place. My relationship with Jason has proven to be most pleasant and productive over the years. His cover art for my fiction collection Divinations of the Deep was exquisitely perfect, and went on to play a part in his winning the 2004 World Fantasy Award. He is currently designing a cover for my forthcoming debut album from Daemonyx, “Curse of the Daimon.” Now he’s been instrumental in helping my Ligotti interview to achieve considerably wider exposure. So here’s to you, Jason..

I’ve just posted an interview with British horror writer Mark Samuels that I conducted over the past couple of weeks. Mark gave some fascinating responses to my questions, and I’m proud to be one of the only people he’s consented to have interview him. If you’re at all interested in horror fiction, or religion, or H.P. Lovecraft, or Arthur Machen, or genre and literary theory, or the contemporary Western political and social situation, or a great many other subjects, then you’ll really be interested in what Mark has to say.

You can access the interview here or from the link on the sidebar under “pages.”