Suspense: One Hundred in the Dark (1947).

I think I've reached the point where I no longer quite understand pop culture.  A lot of it has to do with the fact that pop culture no longer seems to be quite know itself anymore.  Like, I can recall for the longest time there being this sort of homogenization thing going on, where it was this great repository of entertainment past, present, and future.  Everybody had their reference points and this was able to create what I can only describe as a shared language that everybody could join and be a part.  These days, however, I keep getting this sense of fragmentation, like it's all breaking down into niches and sub-cultures.  In some ways, I suppose there might be a possible sense of inevitability to this.  Perhaps its just the nature of the Internet in and of itself to create a kind of niche-ification of public knowledge, even where the books, films, and TV shows we all like are concerned.  My problem with such information siloing is that I'm never quite sure that's a healthy outcome.  Part of what made the analog form of pop culture so awesome was that it lead to this building of a greater sense of community.  In other words, it was something that brought us together, and could have even made us greater than we are now.  The problem of reducing pop culture to a series of mental cubbyholes is that this sense of shared vocabularies and and languages gets lost when you cram it all into this piece of digital shelf space which others can then shove out of sight, and hence out of mind.  It just seems to me like that's the kind of result where it becomes to easy to devalue a story or concept that brought others together.

For instance, I can remember a time when it seemed like J.R.R. Tolkien was everywhere.  Not just confined to an out-of-the-way weblog as the typical thing you expect to find nowadays, either.  I'm talking this guy was everywhere.  This was true not just in terms of the breakout impact of the original Peter Jackson trilogy, either.  Even before all that, right at the very turn of the 20th century into that of the 21st, it seemed as if Middle Earth was busy enjoying its own fan led pop culture renaissance.  You had an endless treasure hoard of popular fan studies, and various scholarly critical texts about Professor T and his writings being placed on retail shelves not just all over the American continent, but also in places like Great Britain, France, India, you name it.  In that sense it was a true international phenomena.  A case of fans worldwide coming together to create a grassroots phenomenon that worked as a shared pop cultural treasure that was able to unite myriads of people the world over in the celebration of nothing more than just a very good piece of literary art.  Are you kind of maybe starting to see what I mean when I talk about the difference between pop culture then from now?  The major difference seems to rest on the fact that the former version of it truly was inclusive.  This updated 2.0 model, however, just seems to exist for the sole purpose of creating a siloing effect on its users.

Forgive me for saying this, yet I don't think Tolkien's works would have stood a chance if this mainframe setup was in place way back when.  He might have still had his fandoms.  However, they would have been reduced to what they are now.  Just a few scattered pieces of get togethers in chatrooms and the odd occasional blog post here and there, and none of it would have reached the fever pitch that would have allowed Jackson and the rest of his cast and crew to mount not just a successful but impactful showing as they wound up with.  Of course, I'm sure others will argue that at least this setup would have meant that none of us would have to sit through the ongoing botch job that is The Rings of Power or whatever the Game of Thrones franchise has become.  I can't help thinking that all of this later stuff is the result of pop culture becoming corporatized a bit too much for its own good, however.  We seem to have stumbled upon a cautionary lesson in allowing our enthusiasms to get perhaps just a bit too popular.  Maybe the real education here is to know when to guard the stories that matter from getting too out of hand.  Whatever the case may be with all that, there are still some aspects of pop culture from the past that have a way of astounding you with their seeming resiliency.

For instance, I am still amazed to learn that there are a great many fans out there of the broadcast medium or format known as Old Time Radio.  I'm talking now about a very specific and identifiable period in the history of American entertainment.  For those who may not have a clue what I'm talking about OTR (for short) is best described as pretty much the first major breakout media format in an era before television or the net.  It belonged to an age when all of the world's news and entertainment was limited to to the contours of a small squat box with speakers in it wired to a transmitter powered often enough by what I can only describe as a variation of the electric light bulb.  It often lit the box up right well enough whenever it was turned on and working to full capacity.  However, the providing of light in a room wasn't the real purpose for this kind of fixture.  It was there to make the box talk.  That's how radio used to work in an pre-wireless era.  Rather, let's say that most of our grandparents did have a form of wireless.  There just wasn't a single scrap of anything digital about it.  It was all analog.

The particular drama I'd like to share with you now comes from the days when the radio was king.  That time was known as the format's Golden Age, when the Theater of the Mind served as America's idiot box of choice.  What's stunning to learn is just how much from that period still survives in archive form, and how much of it has made its way in and onto the digital realm.  It's seems that this easy availability is what accounts for the widespread awareness of a style of entertainment that doesn't even manage to get so much as a passing mention in the news anymore.  It seems to be a testament to the power of online fandom that it can help resurrect the reputation of a long forgotten form of storytelling.  With this in mind, I thought it would be fun to look into a sample offering from the Golden Age of Radio.  It's an episode of an anthology series known only as Suspense.  From what I can tell of this program, there might have been a time when it was the highest rated show on the airwaves.  Whatever the case, tonight, we offer, for our listening audience the story of Owen Johnson's "One-Hundred in the Dark".

Rudyard Kipling's Finest Story in the World (1891).

There are a lot of reasons this blog exists.  One of them is because there are a lot of good stories worth remembering out there.  So, it's like, I kind of want to make sure they at least stand a chance of not getting lost to time.  No matter how obscure the artist or the work may be, if the story is even halfway decent, then it deserves a shot at preservation in my book.  The best I know of how to do that is to give the artist and their work as good an article here as I can manage.  It's not much, yet perhaps it makes difference enough to one person out there.  Out of such things, dynasties can sometimes be built, after all.  A second reason for starting up this operation is a lot more simple and common among fandoms.  I just like sharing and (if possible) getting a chance to discuss my favorite books and films.  The desire to share an enthusiasm with others has got to be one of the oldest instincts in human nature.  It might not get as big a press coverage as the ability to hunt, gather, and form communal bonds, yet I'll swear such a drive has to be a natural part of what makes us human.  One final reason for posting articles up here on this site centers around one enthusiasm in particular.  For whatever reason, I'm fascinated with the way that stories are created.  I'm one of those behind-the-scenes junkies who can sometimes get just as great a deal of enjoyment in figuring out how The Hobbit was put together just as much as I do reading it as a story.

This fascination with how and why stories are made might be described as perhaps one of the guiding purposes of this blog.  It's all tied up with this unshakable curiosity I have.  The best way to describe it might be to form it in the shape of a series of questions.  Why do stories exist?  What makes them work so well when the writing is good?  Also, what makes it all fail in various ways?  In other words, I seem to be fascinated just as much with the craft and imaginative inspiration that fuels the art of writing every bit  as I am with reading a good example of the finished literary product.  To cut it all short, I seem to be a by now incurable bookworm.  The kind of guy who takes the full ramifications of that title seriously and without a trace of irony.  I suppose that in itself is ironic, yet it's just the way everything has turned out for me.  And so here is this blog, and the fascination still remains.  How do good stories get told?  It's one of the considerations that powers the engine of this meager little site, and I'll probably still be asking it long after this article is no longer in my rearview mirror.  Sometimes a reader like me gets lucky, and runs across an actual literary artist whose mind is caught up in the with the same fascination of where do the stories come from?  One famous name who shares this enthusiasm was an author by the name of Rudyard Kipling, of The Jungle Book fame.

I've written about him once or twice on this blog.  What's interesting about guys like Kipling is that there's a sense in which he can be said to conform to type.  He's a problematic mind with an undeniable well of imaginative talent and creativity sharing the same mental office space with the kind of small-mindedness of, say, an H.P. Lovecraft.  The key difference (however much or little this counts) is that Kipling never seems to have been as virulent in his opinions as Lovecraft, even going so far as to count the actual native inhabitants of both India and Arabia as among his closest friends.  The result is one of those studies in contrast, a natural sense of humanism and empathy coexisting somehow within the politics of the British Raj.  The result is this strange picture of the artist as a kind of borderline figure, someone with a foot in two opposed worlds, and always struggling with how to hold each in the proper balance.  There's plenty worth talking about on that score, and maybe we'll have a chance to discuss it here as we go along.  Right now, it is enough to repeat what I've said above.  Kipling is unique in being one of the handful of artists who are just as much fascinated by why and how stories are told, just as much as he is interested in getting as much of the finished product on the page as far as possible.

This topic of why and how stories are made held such a fascination for him, that it eventually resulted in one of those stories about the making of stories.  The difference is the interesting twist that Kipling brings to the table when it comes to describing the writing process.  I call it different, yet maybe that's not quite so much the right word.  Perhaps when you put the writer's thoughts on the art of writing into the plainest life-size terms as possible, what you get is no more than the same thoughts of theorists like Coleridge and Jung.  However, even if this is the case, it's the way in which Kipling describes the creative process, and most of all, the way he talks about where do the stories come from that makes for such an interesting idea to unpack.  This, then, is Kipling's tale of "The Finest Story in the World".