Re: RARA-AVIS: Re: BOSTON GLOBE review essay on THE BIG BOOK OF PULPS

From: Nathan Cain ( IndieCrime@gmail.com)
Date: 10 Dec 2007


I read this essay the other day, and I think the author misses the point, and tries to blame pulp fiction for the problems in the American media today, which is beyond ridiculous. He asserts that pulp stories are emblematic of so-much of the black and white thinking that people tend to do. While this is true of many pulp stories, it's certainly not true of all of them. (Find the black and white in the Maltese Falcon, I dare you.) And this impulse is a basic human one. To say the Lewinsky scandal fascinated people because of its pulp fictionesque storyline is silly. ( He maintains Ken Starr was cast as a hero. Did I miss that?) Every event gets worked into some sort of narrative. People have been telling stories since they've been able to do so. In journalism, there's a term called "Framing a story." In short, it's deciding what the narrative arc is going to be. You have a bunch of information and you can't just present it as a laundry list of facts because no one will read it. We're wired to look for patterns. If there isn't one wemake one up. You have to shape the information into something people will recognize. Outside of journalism, people do this all the time. I mean, what is religion other than an attempt to impose a storyline on existence? The author hit on a pretty deep subject there, but he didn't really think it all the way through. Pulp fiction hasn't shaped how we see the world. It reflects how we see the world.

On Dec 10, 2007 12:17 PM, jacquesdebierue < jacquesdebierue@yahoo.com> wrote:
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>
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> Thanks, Todd. I think the essay can give the uninitiated the wrong
> impression about the pulps. They were not as crude as he depicts them.
> And the enormous variety of pulps (not to mention the thousands of
> writers, offering plenty of variety within each genre) makes it
> difficult to pinpoint exactly what the attraction was, and for whom.
> Detective, fantasy, weird tales, horror, science fiction, romance,
> spicy, aviation, war, sports, western... surely not all of them aimed
> for the same readers? Surely not all of them used the same methods?
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> Lastly, the idea that pulp stories need to be legitimized by Michael
> Chabon or Quentin Tarantino is silly.
>
> Best,
>
> mrt
>
>



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