On Writing, Page 7
Missteps and Pitfalls (continued)
As stated previously, it is not my purpose to attempt to act as a self-appointed moral censor, and I fully affirm the right of such individuals to publish such sophomoric fare. However, I simply don’t feel a corresponding obligation to aid and abet such paladins of societal decadence. I will and have reviewed (often favorably) publications which contain profanity beyond my personal tastes. (Indeed, one would otherwise be almost restricted to religious publications.)
However, reading about a degenerate fifteen-year old girl nonchalantly discussing oral sex (and not in those terms) with her middle-class, white collar father is beyond the Pale of the British intrusion into the Irish ancestral homeland of the maternal side of my family. To quote Lord Harry Wotton in Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray: “I can tolerate sordid people and sordid surroundings, but not both at the same time.”
Some reading this might find it ironic in that some find the beginning of “Pride’s Prison,” my only story, to be also “disturbing,” notwithstanding the fact that the piece contains no sex, violence (of any consequence) or profanity. Some are not the brightest bulbs in the metaphorical chandelier, a contingency that all writers must bear in mind in regard to potential readers of their works.
Although the primary focus of my story is school bullying, as explained within my Author’s Commentary (and further elaborated upon on page two of my essay “Slush” (under “Links”)), the beginning of my story is peripherally intended as social commentary. I was attempting to vividly contrast two different time periods; two periods but a relative eyeblink away in time, but seemingly light years apart in substance.
The changes within societal mores since 1968—that watershed year when the incipient winds of radical change collided with reaction to tragically claim the lives of Dr. King and Sen. Kennedy in quick succession—have perhaps been more profound than any in all history, in so brief a span, short of a military invasion or total economic collapse. Yet, this fantastic transformation is rarely even commented upon. (The writers of the movie Blast from the Past took a hilarious stab at it.) This is partially the point of how the beginning of my story is framed.
I am well aware of the tendency of middle-aged folks like me to wax nostalgic, sentimental for the “good old days” of yore. And perhaps the time period from the onset of the Great Depression through 1967 was more of an historical aberration than the typical state of societies that folks like me assume it to have been; it having been born of tremendous adversity, resulting in utilitarian mores demanding regimentation and conformity. Click to continue:
