Oscar Wilde's "The Picture of Dorian Gray."

The Picture of Dorian Gray is one of those books you hear about over and over but hardly anyone actually reads.  I found it joyously well-written, with some incredibly nimble and poetic passages.  It is a profound work.  Here's the opening Preface, which is serious and philosophical, and at times, confusing.  It makes you think.

The Preface

 

The artist is the creator of beautiful things.

To reveal art and conceal the artist is art's aim.

The critic is he who can translate into another manner or a new material his impression of beautiful things.

The highest as the lowest form of criticism is a mode of autobiography. Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming.

This is a fault.

Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope.

They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only beauty.

There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written.

That is all.

The nineteenth century dislike of realism is the rage of Caliban seeing his own face in a glass.

The nineteenth century dislike of romanticism is the rage of Caliban not seeing his own face in a glass.

The moral life of man forms part of the subject-matter of the artist, but the morality of art consists in the perfect use of an imperfect medium. No artist desires to prove anything. Even things that are true can be proved.

No artist has ethical sympathies.

An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style. No artist is ever morbid. The artist can express everything.

Thought and language are to the artist instruments of an art.

Vice and virtue are to the artist materials for an art.

From the point of view of form, the type of all the arts is the art of the musician.

From the point of view of feeling, the actor's craft is the type.

All art is at once surface and symbol.

Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril.

Those who read the symbol do so at their peril.

It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors.

Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex, and vital.

When critics disagree, the artist is in accord with himself.

We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely.

All art is quite useless. 

----- ----- ----- ----- ----- ----- ----- ----- ----- ----- ----- ----- ----- ----- ----- ----- 

I'll try not to give it all away, since everyone should read it, and when they do, they will be changed. It's a Faustian story, about a young man who makes a devilish bargain to stay youthful his whole life, and to focus only on things of beauty.  Not in an artistic way, but in a materialistic way. The Gothic setting takes you back to old tyme London with carriages, private clubs, and exquisite manners.

Here are some of sentences and passages that stood out to me:

But beauty, real beauty, ends where an intellectual expression begins. Intellect is in itself a mode of exaggeration, and destroys the harmony of any face. The moment one sits down to think, one becomes all nose, or all forehead, or something horrid. Look at the successful men in any of the learned professions. How perfectly hideous they are! Except, of course, in the Church. But then in the Church they don't think.

* * * * *

The ugly and the stupid have the best of it in this world.  They can sit at their ease and gape at the play

* * * * *

"... the one charm of marriage is that it makes a life of deception absolutely necessary for both parties."

 * * * * *

The sunlight slipped over the polished leaves. In the grass white daisies were tremulous. 

* * * * *

The wind shook some blossoms from the trees, and the heavy lilac-blooms, with their clustering stars, moved to and fro in the languid air.

* * * * *

"You know we poor artists have to show ourselves in society from time to time, just to remind the public that we are not savages." 

* * * * *

"I could not get rid of her. She brought me up to Royalties, and people with Stars and Garters, and elderly ladies with gigantic tiaras and parrot noses."

* * * * *

"... none of us can stand other people having the same faults as ourselves." 

* * * * *

"We live in an age when men treat art as if it were meant to be a form of autobiography. We have lost the abstract sense of beauty."

* * * * *

"... there is no doubt that Genius lasts longer than beauty." 

* * * * *

 There was a rustle of chirruping sparrows in the green lacquer leaves of the ivy, and the blue cloud-shadows chased themselves across the grass like swallows. 

 * * * * *

And that's just in Chapter One!

Real Examples of Bestselling Garbage

I've railed before about the crap that is on bookshelves today, the garbage that the American public is hungrily consuming, thinking they are literate, since they are "reading" a book.  But there's hardly anything literary at all about most of these bestsellers.

Adding to that, a friend and colleague pointed me to a hugely successful new self-published author on the scene who is selling hundreds of thousands of copies of her book, and, well, why didn't I just do some of that?

So I looked into Amanda Hocking and her books.  First of all, hitting the USA Today Bestseller list is an accomplishment in itself. She's also a terrific self-promoter: she's a self-professed "obsessive Tweeter" and on ONE of her four blogs last year she did 182 posts! So she is all in when it comes to social media.

I'm pretty sure she does her own social media posts and I 'm also pretty sure that James Joyce or Hemingway or Faulkner or Flaubert would not have time for that.

The genre she writes in is "urban fantasy" and "paranormal adult romance" or whatever you want to call vampire fantasy romance.  It's not something I would ever get into, but there's a big audience for it.  A different audience. Mostly teenagers and young 20's.

It seems that most of her "books" are sold as 99 cent downloads, but some are as much as $2.99.  She stated that she uses iTunes a lot so the pricing made sense to her, and, quite smartly, she has grown her audience, and the "books" are serial, so when she gets a reader they can get another and another and another, reading about the same characters.

 Now, let's take a look at a sample of her writing. I previewed the first book that came up on Amazon.com and here's some from the opening page.

The summer air slid in through the windows, filling the car with the green scent of the park, and the frightening sound of highway traffic.

Not bad.  Some imagery, good rhythm, but perhaps a bit overdone at the end. Let's keep going:

The mid-afternoon sun shined brightly above us. Ordinarily, that sounds like the best time to drive, but sunlight made Jack groggy. He'd already started to yawn.

I'm yawning, in fact I'm nearly puking.

Jack is not like everyone else. I really like him, more than I should. He's attractive in his own right, with dancing blue eyes, perpetually disheveled sandy hair, and flawless tan skin, but he's not what I would call drop dead gorgeous.

Really?  At this point I feel sullied and need to shower after typing those terrible sentences.  This is so bad it sounds like a diary entry by a fawning teen, and it sells like crazy!  Too many adjectives, too trite. I wonder how much effort she put into polishing those colossal sentences.  Did she toil? Push the limits, find exactly the right words and arrange them lyrically with excruciating effort? I doubt it.

So, yeah, you can sell first-draft teen diary entry vampire crap for 99 cents and thousands will buy it.

Sorry, it's not my audience, and it's not exactly the direction I want to take.

Now, let's look at another example, and this is from New York Times bestselling author Vince Flynn.  My brother and millions of others apparently read his books. I borrowed "Pursuit of Honor" a counterterrorism blockbuster featuring "elite operative" Mitch Rapp.  Bear in mind he's written a dozen bestsellers and has a contract for at least 10 more.  Glen Beck says it is, "FANTASTIC" and Rush Limbaugh says it is "JUST FABULOUS" and Bill O'Reilly says, "Every American should read this book."

So it must be good, right?

Let's take a looksee.

On page 4 toward the end of the first paragraph:

The other man was a concern, to be sure, but Rapp was not in the habit of killing private citizens simply because they were witnesses...

And the beginning of paragraph three, same page:

Bad form, to be sure, but nothing had risen to the level of outright sedition.

All I can say is that using "to be sure" is trite, boring, and unnecessary, and using it twice on the same page is just plain lazy.  He should be shot.  And he's got an army of editors!  Garbage, pure garbage.

Maybe that was just overlooked.  Surely this "writer" is outstanding, since Dan Brown (Charlatan #1) says, he is "The king of high-concept political intrigue."  So I forced myself to read the next page, which felt like being fed through a tube.

Rapp casually took another drag from the cigarette and watched as the waiter placed two snifters of cognac in front of the men.  A few minutes earlier, Rapp had listened as the other man tried to pass on the after-dinner drink.  Rapp's coworker, however, insisted that they both have a drink.....

Now, with the rain softly pelting his umbrella, Rapp watched the waiter place two snifters on the table.....


Wait a minute!  The waiter placed the snifters down twice?  Four Rapp's in four sentences?  That is just lazy, lazy writing, pure garbage. I could not read another word.


And now, I just feel completely filthy and disgusted and I need a shower.

See why I am not impressed with contemporary best-selling writers?