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As I’ve written often, our wired or wi-fi world allows us now to locate increasing numbers of widely separated compatible human beings, or at least humans who share one or more of the same marginal traits.
But there must still be tens of thousands of writers and artists the world over who haven’t yet found their most potentially appreciative audience. (Nobody ever finds their ideal audience, but some writers don't find any.)
Yesterday I was reminded by chance that Phillip De Poy’s mystery novels might be of interest to some joculum readers: the Flap Tucker series in which the Atlanta detective fulfills most of the requirements of noir fiction except that he solves his cases via a method of trance-based intuition that he explains in a wash of Jungian and Zen concepts: an improbable character if he were not so much like people that all of us know. Flap's infrequent feats of theoretical exposition are appropriate for the attention span of the people to whom he is talking, and his intuition is based on but not entirely limited to the standard detective-novel strategy: he has perceived more than he has consciously been able to put together, so he lets his unconscious do the ratiocination for him.
Philip’s more recent series has involved a failed academic folklorist who has gone back to his roots, where he finds himself involved in solving crimes that take us back to themes of Southern folklore. This is, of course, how genre fiction works, giving us such wonderful hypotheses as the bibliophile librarian detective, to cite another series that an aunt of mine loves but that I never get round to reading because I read few novels.
Anyway, yesterday's encounter has set me to thinking of just how many people there must be with geographically restricted reputations who would delight the hearts and minds of readers who don't know they exist. Amazon.com’s algorithms of “other readers bought this obscure title when they bought the well-known one you’re buying” help, but not entirely.
So many of them will have produced only one thing of genuine interest (I do not say this is the case with Phillip, but it is certainly so with other novelists and theorists). I am not sure that those writers are done any favor by having their complete works collected, especially when they earned much of their income by turning out work for hire that ranged from the brilliant to the utterly lackluster.
But it is always worthwhile to link authors with potential fans.
I regret (on a related topic) that the teachers whose best maxims I still cite were teachers, not writers. The published works of Thomas F. O’Dea and Gregor Sebba give almost no idea of their genuine wisdom.
Then there are folks like Walter Benjamin who gained global fame posthumously for their few superb essays and whose fragments and for-hire potboilers have been sifted endlessly in search of further revelation.
But there must still be tens of thousands of writers and artists the world over who haven’t yet found their most potentially appreciative audience. (Nobody ever finds their ideal audience, but some writers don't find any.)
Yesterday I was reminded by chance that Phillip De Poy’s mystery novels might be of interest to some joculum readers: the Flap Tucker series in which the Atlanta detective fulfills most of the requirements of noir fiction except that he solves his cases via a method of trance-based intuition that he explains in a wash of Jungian and Zen concepts: an improbable character if he were not so much like people that all of us know. Flap's infrequent feats of theoretical exposition are appropriate for the attention span of the people to whom he is talking, and his intuition is based on but not entirely limited to the standard detective-novel strategy: he has perceived more than he has consciously been able to put together, so he lets his unconscious do the ratiocination for him.
Philip’s more recent series has involved a failed academic folklorist who has gone back to his roots, where he finds himself involved in solving crimes that take us back to themes of Southern folklore. This is, of course, how genre fiction works, giving us such wonderful hypotheses as the bibliophile librarian detective, to cite another series that an aunt of mine loves but that I never get round to reading because I read few novels.
Anyway, yesterday's encounter has set me to thinking of just how many people there must be with geographically restricted reputations who would delight the hearts and minds of readers who don't know they exist. Amazon.com’s algorithms of “other readers bought this obscure title when they bought the well-known one you’re buying” help, but not entirely.
So many of them will have produced only one thing of genuine interest (I do not say this is the case with Phillip, but it is certainly so with other novelists and theorists). I am not sure that those writers are done any favor by having their complete works collected, especially when they earned much of their income by turning out work for hire that ranged from the brilliant to the utterly lackluster.
But it is always worthwhile to link authors with potential fans.
I regret (on a related topic) that the teachers whose best maxims I still cite were teachers, not writers. The published works of Thomas F. O’Dea and Gregor Sebba give almost no idea of their genuine wisdom.
Then there are folks like Walter Benjamin who gained global fame posthumously for their few superb essays and whose fragments and for-hire potboilers have been sifted endlessly in search of further revelation.
