Need to Know

I spent yesterday afternoon rewriting chunks of my last novel. As alteraius pointed out, I'd included too much exposition, too much background material. It was making the texture lumpy.

A writer needs to know all that explanatory stuff, but only so  he can keep the foreground narrative clear and consistent. It's a mistake to burden the reader with it.

Michael and I

I have a beef with Michael Moore. My copy of Stupid White Men has some pages missing and others stuck in upside down and out of sequence. Shoddy goods- Michael- shoddy goods.

It's not a great book. Michael doesn't always know when to stop. He rants. I love rants- in their place, in bite sized portions on the Web- but a whole book of them? Naaah!

I liked Bowling for Columbine. The argument didn't altogether stack up (he didn't really make sense of Canada for instance) but I liked that. It made the film less like agit-prop, more like an opinionated essay. Doubt was allowed to creep around the edges of the arguments. And where there's doubt there's art.

I want to see the Iraq film. I can't get my head round the title though. Is it a riff on Fahrenheit 451? And if it is, how does that relate to the subject in hand? There's an idea there but it hasn't been properly honed. Michael's like that. He's smart but he's sloppy.

I could wish he was less sloppy. But if he were I guess he wouldn't charge in like he does. And we need someone who's prepared to charge in.

As for Disney- what goons! Now they look like George Bush's bitch and there's a whole new buzz around the movie. Moore is currently King of Cannes. I guess he would have been anyway, but thanks to them he's got a personal grievance to exploit on top of everything else.

I've been trying to think of cases where censorship has been a big success. I guess, in the nature of things, these are the cases we'll never hear about- where books, films, news stories, whatever, have been squashed so thoroughly they've completely disappeared. How often does that happen? Maybe more than I'd like to think. But on the other hand there are so many cases where the censor just ends up looking a fool. And if the work he tried to squash has staying power he's going to look a fool for ever and ever.

What do most people remember about Willaim Randolph Hearst? That he was the model for Kane and he tried to stop the movie. Fool! Bully! Philistine!