Diversity Fridays

Full disclosure: I am a cisgender white male who can only be referred to as “middle-aged” by exercising more charity than Andrew Carnegie and J.K. Rowling combined. (Even fuller disclosure: I’m 63.) I have always tried to treat others as I would like to be treated and I think I succeed more often than not. Cisgender white men have a lot to answer for in this country. I try not to add to the pile, and to chip away it at when I can.

My reading tastes, as are those of most everyone, were shaped by my background. I grew up in a working class family in a working class town; the first writer to capture my imagination as I moved past adolescence was Mickey Spillane. Anyone who reads this blog or my books knows my reading tastes run toward procedurals and private investigators. That’s a polite way of saying my reading is not as diverse as it might be.

I’ve made efforts to rectify this with limited success. Personal taste and knows and cares little or nothing about the background of the artist who created a work; we know what we like. The reasons may be no more than what I told The Beloved Spouse™ once when she asked why I didn’t like broccoli: “Because I think it tastes like ass.” That’s too harsh for (most) books, but still true at its core; we like what we like. I have a post dedicated to this topic that I’ll publish as soon as I polish it to my satisfaction and have the nerve to make it public.

It occurred to me a while back that just because my reading tastes run strongly toward white males doesn’t mean I can’t do some little thing in the interest of diversity. I don’t have a big enough footprint in the industry for anyone to care if I stage a protest. I’m not in a position to demand Bouchercon have at least one woman and one person of color on any panel they assign me; they’ll just put someone else there and not give me a panel. (Which is as they should. Who the fuck do I think I am?) I am proud of my affiliation and support of the Creatures, Crimes, and Creativity Conference, which is as diverse as any I am aware of.

What I can do is provide a forum. This blog isn’t exactly HuffPo or TMZ, but people do see it and share links. The word gets out. I post three times every two weeks, on alternate Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. I can devote some of that time to women and writers of color, preferably in the crime fiction community but if I’m to be diverse in one regard I should be so across the board, so I’m not locking anyone out.

Here’s my offer: Fridays are diversity days here at One Bite at a Time. If you are a woman or a writer of color and would like to provide a guest post or submit to an interview, please let me know by sending an email to danakingcrime (at) gmail.com. Let me know if you have a general time preference, the title of your book, your web site address if you have one and anything else you’d like me to know at first blush. I will do my best to schedule you as close to your preferred date as I can, and if you request an interview will gin up an admittedly generic version for you, though the more information I can get about you and your book the less generic it will be.

Please understand, my time and space is limited, but I will do the best I can to accommodate as many folks as I can, though I can’t guarantee space for everyone who asks. (Assuming anyone does. See above: “Who the fuck do I think I am?”)

If you’re interested, let me know. If you’re not but know someone who might be, let them know. I’ll keep it up as long as interest is shown.

Keepers of the Flame

The Beloved Spouse™ and I watched Saturday Night Live a few weekends ago and were solidly unimpressed with the show. This is where it’s hip and groovy to say, “I remember SNL when it was funny.” I’m not going to do that because

1. There are still people around (me, for instance) who remember when it debuted and can speak from experience about the caliber of the show over time, and not just from “When I started watching around 1993.” Hold that thought, Junior.
2. It was always so.

 

Sturgeon’s Law says, “ninety percent of everything is crap.” Absolutely. Go back to the Golden Age of Anything: TV, movies, music, art, literature, dance, pipe fitting, sun bathing, breast augmentation surgery, you name it. We remember what’s good. The rest falls by the way.

Here are some examples, chosen by picking a year more or less at random. 1950 saw the release of what some consider the greatest film noir: Sunset Boulevard. (When I say “some,” I mean, “me,” though I am not alone in this assessment.) The Oscar for Best Picture went to All About Eve. Below are some of the other timeless gems released in 1950, with their iMDB descriptions:

• The Flying Saucer. Both the CIA and KGB investigate UFOs in Alaska: friend or foe?
• Prehistoric Women. Tigri and her stone-age girlfriends hate all men, but realizing they are a necessary evil, capture some for potential (strictly business, no recreation allowed) husbands.
• Radar Secret Service. G-men track stolen Uranium-238 shipment using new radar technology; they also recruit the girlfriend of a gang member as an informant. Radar helps, but it takes an undercover blonde to really get the goods on criminal masterminds.
• The Invisible Monster. Evil villain plots to take over the world using an army of invisible soldiers.
• The Silver Bandit. Tycoon Van Fleet Stooglehammer, owner of the Green Valley silver mine, sends his mild-mannered, milquetoast bookkeeper out to investigate the robberies of his silver-wagons... (Editor’s Note: I swear on the heads of my grandchildren I did not make that up.)

Those are five that people remembered well enough to write even a brief description about, and rated in iMDB. How many others weren’t even that good? How many were so bad the studio didn’t bother to release them?

A few months ago SNL did a sketch about alien abduction. Kate MacKinnon had everyone

on stage breaking up; host Ryan Gosling was in tears. It’s a bit that should go into the 50^th anniversary special when the time comes, along with the Killer Bees and Bass-O-Matic and Gumby and “I gotta have more cowbell” and whatever your personal favorite SNL sketch is. What I’m tempted to do sometime is to go back to the 1975 shows—or whichever year you like best—and watch all the sketches, not just the ones we all know and can recite lines from. I dare say that, while some years will have higher peaks, the percentage of gold to quartz is pretty close to the same from year to year.

Outliers

I see a lot of Internet postings lamenting the sad state of American culture. Seems a lot of bloggers are upset over the quality of books that get published, televisions shows that get aired, or movies that make it to the multiplex. The lack of public standards is sometimes taken personally, not only as an affront to good taste, but actively hindering talented people from making the living they deserve.

Get over it, folks. You want to bitch about something, get into a snit over the sun rising in the east. It's about as likely to change.

What we too often forget is that those of us who take the time to read and write (hopefully) thoughtful blogs are the outliers. No one is going to wager large sums of money on our tastes and preferences, because there aren't large numbers of us. It's a sucker's bet.

Another thing to keep in mind is that is has always been this way. We look back at writers who have stood the test of time and forget that 99.9% of their contemporaries were shit. We all know the stories of artists who starved in their lifetimes, only to find an audience, and redemption, after their death. Fat lot of good it did them. There are similar artists among us now; we just don't know who they are. We're too busy wading through the 99.9% contemporary shit quotient.

An elevated state, appreciative of art and the finer things in life, is not the normal human condition. Most people spend too much time holding things together to worry about whether Dan Brown's latest potboiler passes muster as literature. The average guy wants to come home after work and read something--if he chooses to read at all--that doesn't require a lot of mental heavy lifting. He's tired, bills have to be paid, and the kids are making too goddamn much noise in the other room for him to concentrate on David Foster Wallace or Gabriel Garcia Marquez, or even James Lee Burke. He doesn't want to have to draw cosmic conclusions from veiled inferences. He might be willing to play at putting together a puzzle if it's not too demanding, but probably not if he just did his taxes and found out the thousand dollar refund he'd hoped for is actually a five hundred dollar bill owed, and he doesn't have the five hundred.

That doesn't mean we outliers shouldn't try to meet our own standards, or to seek out those who share them. It does mean that if we choose to lament the state that makes us outliers, we're never going to be satisfied. Let people enjoy what they're going to enjoy. They will, anyway.