Genre 2013: The John Pierce Experiment
You remember John Pierce: his Bell Labs team invented the transistor, and he coined the term. But, like the rest of us, he had his little gaps. When in his eighties, he met up with author Dan Levitin, who was busy writing that complicated puzzler of a book, This Is Your Brain On Music. Much to Levitin’s dismay, Pierce revealed that he had never knowingly heard any rock music. Now, as to how one can live in a developed nation and achieve this, I don’t know, but once Levitin discovered this curious deficit, the two had a little heart-to-heart, and Pierce asked Levitin to provide six –– count ‘em, six –– prime examples of rock and roll from which he might form an opinion and make appropriate generalizations about the whole.
What does this have to do with Black Gate and fantasy literature? Trust me. Read on.
Levitin’s six tunes were as follows:
- “Long Tall Sally” by Little Richard
- “Roll Over Beethoven” by the Beatles
- “All Along the Watchtower,” by Jimi Hendrix
- “Wonderful Tonight,” by Eric Clapton
- “Little Red Corvette,” by Prince
- “Anarchy in the U.K.,” by the Sex Pistols
Scary choices, methinks, especially those last two. But regardless of my opinion (or yours), Pierce’s request poses two dilemmas.
First, if faced with this same conundrum, which songs would you choose?
Second, what if this situation were applied to fiction? Or better yet, to the ongoing divide in genre vs. literary fiction?
One of the oddest, most esoteric regrets in my life is that I long ago gave away my collection of the now defunct American Film magazine. Most of these, purchased primarily from sidewalk vendors in Manhattan, I do not care to recover; but I would give a great deal to have again the October issue from 1986. It contains a dialogue with film producer David Puttnam, and one small paragraph in that interview taught me more about collaboration than any other single event I know.
Just as an older generation recalls with perfect clarity where they were when they heard of Kennedy’s assassination, I know precisely where I first saw Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975): perched on the floral-print sofa in my parent’s house, watching the film on a poor, weather-impacted PBS broadcast. I also remember falling right off that sub-par couch in paroxysms of laughter when the animator saved King Arthur’s band by conveniently suffering a heart attack.
I didn’t know it at the time, but back when I was ten and surfing through horrendous Tarzan movies on rainy Saturday afternoons, The Horseman On the Roof (Le Hussard Sure le Toit, 1995) was the film I was actually hoping to see. Not that I would have understood much of what was going on, but the kinetic energy of it –– the film’s unswerving certainty that these events matter –– would have transported me right out of my seat.
Once upon a very suspect time, a human being by the name of Terry Pratchett conjured up a space-traveling sea turtle by the name of A’tuin, and proceeded to make a sizable fortune from the disc-shaped world he emplaced upon her. In Pratchett’s Discworld novels, magic of the most unpredictable kind is the norm, and so it should come as no surprise that, eventually, somebody had to commit his unique brand of literary lunacy to celluloid.