Cultural masochism

Happened on an amusing sting just now: a buncha authors tricked a vanity press that doesn't like to call itself a vanity press into revealing its nature--something the authors achieved by getting said press to offer a contract for a singularly bad manuscript. The authors just created and submitted said travesty of writing to the publisher and then posted the manuscript and the results (including the vanity press' offered contract) on the web.

The manuscript, Atlanta Nights, they created in a single weekend. Several writers working independently each wrote a chapter or two on very limited information (it looks they were just given the setting, the characters, and maybe a skeleton of the events), and then they stitched it all together. Apart from not being given much to go on, the writers were also told to write poorly.

The result is, as you'd expect, awful. Hackneyed cliches, cardboard characters and ugly, ugly, ugly writing abound. There are dialogue scenes which are so wildly disjoint you can just barely work out what's supposed to be going on. The conclusion that this is an incredibly bad, amateurish work would be inescapable, I'd think, for any reader who read pretty much any excerpt--the manuscript contains, so far as I've observed, hardly a paragraph that doesn't scream 'garbage'. More details of the sting are on a page at the Critters Workshop site.

Yep, it was awful.

And I read a fair bit of it, actually. Wincing the whole time.

Sometimes, I wonder what's wrong with me. I seem to be developing a taste for really, really bad entertainment of late... or not so much a taste for it (since I can't actually claim to like it) as a taste for watching or reading it, suffering the whole time.

Do we need a term for this phenomenon?

Cultural masochism, perhaps?

I mean, the other evening, before dozing off, I watched a bit of Virus on the Space channel.

Now, Virus is really a thoroughly bad film. I mean, bad enough, it's extremely unlikely I'd have ever paid to watch it. And, if for some odd reason I had ever actually paid to see it, I'd probably have walked out early and demanded my money back.

It's bad. And I know this, because I've seen bits of it before. No, this isn't the first time I've subjected myself to said truly mediocre (at best) film.

I find myself worrying, times like these, that these may be symptoms that I am becoming a truly cynical person. That, doubting I'll actually find much in contemporary literature or film to excite me, I've stopped caring altogether, and thus read intentionally bad manuscripts, and (possibly unintentionally, who knows) bad films for entertainment, thinking this is about the best I'm going to do in any case.

Perhaps this is the terminal result of just too much to read, too much to see, too much available at all times--and of exposure to too much PR insisting such and such a work is a mighty achievement, when, in fact, it's just the latest over-promoted, vapid, derivative attempt at yet another global cultural product brilliantly engineered to separate viewers and/or readers from their hard-earned money, but otherwise unremarkable.

There's probably something here I should connect to my earlier thoughts on global culture and bad, barely-funny running internet gags--but I'm not sure I've worked it out yet.

I'll have to look into that. Maybe when I'm done reading Paul Clifford.