Furor Scribendi: A Passion for Writing

This book is about the creative process and also offers readers insights into what it is like to be a writer. When I was young, I never could have imagined the career I would have, but it turns out, I was afflicted by the Furor Scribendi and was to spend much of my life writing books and articles as well as writing 106 journals (which I started writing in 1954).

In this book, I discuss my experiences with editors and publishers and also offer excerpts from the books I discuss so you can see what I write about and how I express myself.

Not all my books were well received.  My favorite review of my books was written about my book The TV Guided America, published in the mid-seventies.   The reviewer, who did not like my psychoanalytic and semiotic perspectives, wrote:

Berger is to the study of television what Idi Amin is to tourism in Uganda.

 At that time, Amin was killing thousands of people in Uganda who were against his regime.

Another book was reviewed by someone who wrote:

How do you review a book that never should have been published?

 A colleague of mine at San Francisco State University once told me that my books were all unpublishable and that I only got them published because my editors were naïve.  When I asked him why he had never published a book, he explained, “My books would be too good to be published.”

Fortunately, I found any number of naïve editors who published my books.  My experiences as an author as reflected in my books are the subject of this book.  I don’t deal with all my books but discuss enough of them for you to see what it is like dealing with editors and publishers. 

After reading it, you will have a better idea of what is like to write a book and be an author. 

The Secret Agent

A Micro Bio

Fifty years ago, I was at a party given by a literary agent in San Francisco, when a young woman, noticed that I was standing by myself, came over and asked me:

“Are you literary?”

“Yes,” I replied.

“Have you published?” she asked.

“Yes,” I said.

“Fiction or non-fiction?” she asked.

“Non-fiction,” I answered, “But most of my colleagues at San Francisco State University, where I teach, think my books are fiction.

Images of the Author and Seal

The seal, in which I describe myself as a writer, artist and secret agent, was useful when I could stamp paper with it, but in the computer age, an image of the seal has to do the job.  I call myself a “secret agent,” because that is the title of an article I wrote for George Gerbner, who was the editor of The Journal of Communication.  I wrote a long essay which had three sections.  He deleted the first two sections and kept the last one, “The Secret Agent,” in which I explained I try to reveal the hidden significance of many aspects of everyday life and popular culture that most people don’t recognize or pay any attention to.  I did a drawing for the article of myself as a secret agent and even took a photo of myself, with a plastic gun, and wearing dark glasses, as a secret agent.

I should add that when I was writing about popular culture, some of my colleagues thought it was a trivial and unimportant topic.  Things have changed in recent years and now many scholars in different disciplines are interested in it and its impact of society and the socialization of our children.

I know when I first thought about writing what can be described as a “literary memoir,” but I don’t know why I decided to write it.  In the middle of the night, on St. Patrick’s Day, 2023, the idea of writing the book suddenly popped into my head.

I had just finished polishing a draft of a book I wrote on choices and decided to find an image of a labyrinth, an image involving choices, and I wrote a note in journal number 106 on page 160, about doing another memoir.

Journal Note on Writing Memoir

What I wrote was:

In the middle of the night an idea popped into my head for a new book, Berger on Berger, similar in nature to R. Barthes by R. Barthes.  I also decided to look for a photo of a labyrinth for Choice.

Why I got that idea is a mystery. I had been listing the images I am using in Choice and was thinking about future projects. 

In 1954, I made an important choice:  I was admitted to the University of Iowa in two schools: to get an MFA in art or to get an MA in journalism.  My brother Jason was an artist and I wasn’t that interested in being one, so I chose to enroll in the School of Journalism and got an MA there in 1956.  While there, I took courses in Iowa’s writer’s workshop and studied with a writer named Marguerite Young. 

 I can recall thinking to myself and complaining to my wife Phyllis at breakfast the day before that I was out of ideas as far as future books might be concerned.  And then, in the middle of the night on St. Patrick’s Day, somehow Roland Barthes came to mind and his book made me think about doing a similar one, myself. 

I had made a St. Patrick’s day dinner of corned beef and cabbage, had not slept well that night, and somehow something bubbling away in my unconscious came to light.

It is possible that I used an image of him that I drew in Choices or in another book of mine that was recently published, Taste, to illustrate the book.  My drawing of Barthes is one of my better drawings of literary figures, theorists, and writers.  I illustrate my books with all kind of images, such as the labyrinth I used in choices.

I have quoted Barthes many times in my books—mostly from his book Mythologies.  But I’ve read many of his books.

Roland Barthes

I have been keeping journals since 1954 and am almost finished with journal number 106.  I give them all names.  This one is called “Differential Diagnoses and Sleep Journal.”  I also give them covers.

I do a lot of brainstorming in my journals and sometimes devote an entire page, divided into four columns, for my thinking about what might be in a book. 

Below, I offer a typical four column brainstorming page from my journals—in this case, my thinking about topics I might want to deal with in Choices.  Most of the pages in my journals are a combination of written material and images, but every once in a while, I devote an entire page to brainstorming.

I come back to that page when I have new ideas and I also sometimes use just a part of a page of making four column brainstorming sites.

So, when I write a book, I speculate in my journal about topics to cover and I more or less talk to myself about how the book is progressing.  So I write and I also write about my writing at the same time.

Because I am immunocompromised (I’ve had a very slow acting form of Lymphoma for thirty years) and elderly (I just turned 90) I have had to isolate myself and avoid people, so I’ve been stuck in the house for three years and have done a great deal of writing during those years.

Before Covid-19 appeared, my wife and I went to  gym three mornings a week, belonged to two theater companies and saw a dozen plays a year, and took three long trips a year.  On some trips, we would take a cruise and on others, find somewhere interesting and spend three weeks wandering around. 

I kept travel journals as well as my regular journals and wrote some tourism books about the cultures of the countries we visited. 

Since Covid, and my confinement (imprisonment?) to our house, I’ve devoted much of my time to writing and am now writing a book on choices we make in life.  My brainstorming page in my journal, shown below, is an example of some of the work I do in my journals when I’m working on a book.

Brainstorming Page for Choices

I have finished writing the book, which will be published by the Vernon Press. I sent my editor the final version of the book on May 18th.

When my wife and I were traveling, I always thought that it was good that we were traveling now because one never knows what will happen and one of us could have an accident or become disabled and never travel again.  I never thought a virus would put an end to our travels.

Our last cruise was from Dubai, and we visited half a dozen “exotic” countries in the Mideast.  Our last land vacation was in Andalucia and we spent time in three cities: Malaga, Cordova and Granada.

Mosque at a Stop on Dubai Cruise

It’s rather curious but, for one reason or another, I only have fragmentary memories of my life until 1954, when I started keeping a journal and documenting my daily activities, thoughts, obsessions—what you will—in considerable detail.

A friend of mine recently said to me, “my life has sort of disappeared.”  He was lamenting his inability to remember much about his life.  I feel the same way about my earliest years, until I started keeping my journal in 1954, when I was a graduate student at the University of Iowa in Iowa City, the “Athens of the Midwest,” as it calls itself.

I doubt that there are many days when I didn’t write in my journal since 1954 and all of my books have come out of my journals.  I usually get an idea for a book while writing in my journals and I do a lot of writing and brainstorming about my book ideas in my journals.

Eleven days after I received my MA from the University of Iowa, I was drafted and spent two years as a writer in the Military District of Washington’s Public Information Office.  I also wrote high school sports weekend nights for The Washington Post, and with the money I made from being in the Army and from the Post, I had enough money to go to Europe and spend a year wandering around there.

I enrolled in the University of Paris and stayed in the Fondation Etats Unis for few months, but I only enrolled because it was cheap housing.  While in Paris, I started writing novel but didn’t get very far.  At the Fondation, I made friends with Stanley Milgram, who was to go on to be one of most important social psychologists of recent years.

When I returned to New York, I got a job writing for a union newspaper—The Seafarers Log, but it was only temporary for I had decided to get a Ph.D. and become an academic.  I wanted time to pursue my intellectual interests and the rewards of an academic life.

I was accepted in the American Studies program of the University of Minnesota and went to study there.  I found it intellectually stimulating and was impressed by the quality of the professors there.  One of them, David Noble, became a friend of mine and we corresponded for thirty years after I graduated.  My dissertation advisor, Mulford Q. Sibley, turned me on to popular culture.  When I went to see him, I had ideas about doing something “serious,” on utopian thought or something like that.  He had other ideas.

“You wrote an excellent paper on Li’l Abner in my American political thought course,” he said. “Just expand on that for your dissertation.”  So, I walked in with utopian thought and left with Li’l Abner.  That decision changed my career, and I was to write about popular culture from that time, in 1963, until the present time.

In 1963-64, I was awarded a Fulbright and taught at the University of Milan.  In Milan I met Umberto Eco.  We were both interested in popular culture and I socialized with him, and his colleagues, off and on, that year.

I met my wife Phyllis in Minnesota.  She had graduated from Barnard College and went to Minnesota to get an MA in philosophy.  We got married in 1961 and had a daughter in 1962.

We returned to Minnesota, where I taught Freshman English and later technical writing.  I wrote my dissertation on Li’l Abner and got a job teaching at San Francisco State University.

Li’l Abner

I submitted my dissertation to a publisher in New York, where it rested on an editor’s bookcase for two years.  I happened to be in New York for a conference, went to see the editor. 

“Li’l Abner?” he said, when I was ushered into his office.  “Let’s see what we are going to do with it.”  He reached for the manuscript, opened it up, and said, “Yes, we’re going to publish it,” and that was my first book. 

At the time, I had no idea that I’d ever write another book, though I was busy writing papers for academic journals and even wrote short pieces for San Francisco Examiner.

My dissertation on Li’l Abner was, I believe, the first Ph.D. dissertation written about a comic strip.  When I graduated and was called up on the stage to receive my degree, the president of the University of Minnesota announced my topic and everyone in the audience laughed.

It is, as I think about my career as a writer, very difficult to get any sense of what the future will hold.  I could never have anticipated that I would write ninety books over the past fifty-five years or that I would write about the topics I would deal with.

When I write, I write quickly and make many mistakes.  My theory is:  get it down and then you can make corrections. 

I also don’t have detailed outlines of what will be in each chapter, so each book is an investigation in which I find answers to questions I have about a topic, which means, in many respects, my books are all surprises for me.

Li’l Abner.

Pop Culture

A colleague of mine told me about an interesting publisher at lunch, one day….a publisher in Dayton, Ohio named Pflaum. This conversation must have taken place in 1973. I got in touch with the editor and asked him whether he’d be interested in publishing a book of articles I’d been working on dealing with pop culture.  He asked me to send some of my articles.  A few weeks after I sent them I got a letter from him.  “I like your articles and I think a book of them will sell,” he wrote.

I sent him my articles and his staff produced a visually interesting book of my essays, which was titled “Pop Culture.”  There are very few pages in the book that do not have an image on them, and from it I got the idea of making sure that, to the extent possible, my books would be visually interesting. 

The book was designed by Joe Loverti and it had photographs added to it by Paul Tucker.  They had a field day with my choice of topics: fast foods, blenders, pizza, comics, etc.

The book was published in 1970 and cost $4.25.  So, I’ve been writing about pop culture for 53 years and there’s always something new going on in the field, and in the media that carries it, to write about.

I start the book off as follows:

One of the curious things about pop culture is that, though most almost everyone spends his life in it, nobody seems to be able to agree about what it is.  We glance at the comics daily.  That’s popular culture. We watch television a great deal. (Statistics reveal the average family television set is on five hours a day.)  That’s a heavy dose of popular culture.  We go to the movies, buy rock and roll records, eat snacks, and dress in certain ways.  All of this is popular culture, as I think of it.

Pop Culture Cover

The back cover if the book is also visually exciting and from the book I became convinced that books should have lots of images in them.

Statistic reveal that we spend something like a dozen hours a day involved with media, of one kind or another.  I see media as part of popular culture, as well as the gizmos that bring up the media and also enable us to participate in social media.

Back Cover of Pop Culture

This is the back page of my book, which is a pastiche made by my book editors and designers, that deals with some of the topics I write about in the book.

In my chapter “What is Popular Culture, and Why is it Important for to Understand it?” I write:

Regardless of whether or not you like popular culture, the fact that millions of people do, and spend a great amount of time and money on it, means that it is significant.  It offers us a useful way of understanding one’s society, and, indirectly, oneself.  In addition, studying popular culture (That is… looking at it critically) in an attempt to interpret it, evaluate it, and understand its impact on society) is fun.  Whatever else you may wish to say about popular culture, it has an intoxicating dynamism to it; it is vital, and it is immediate.  We’ve all been affected by it, whether we recognize this or not.

Although I wrote these words more than fifty years ago, I believe my argument about the need to study popular culture is still valid and I still write about it and media.

I contrast popular culture with elite culture.  Elite culture requires a certain amount of sophistication to enjoy.  I am talking about serious novels, poetry, classical music, ballet, opera, works of “serious” art, and so on. 

There is reason to argue that elite culture often has an effect on popular culture and vice versa, that popular culture often affects elite culture.

Mikhail Bakhtin

Mikhail Bakhtin, a Russian communications theorist, argued that all conversations are affected by previous conversations and shape future conversations and we can say the same thing about all the arts. 

He writes, in a book of his essays (Michael Holquist, ed. Transl. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist.  The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M.M. Bakhtin. 1981:279-281.  Austin, TX: University of Texas Press).

The word is born in a dialogue as a living rejoinder with it; the world is shaped in dialogic interaction with an alien word that is already in the object.  A word forms a concept of its own object in a dialogic way…The world in living conversation is directly, blatantly, oriented toward a future answer-word: it provokes an answer, anticipates it and structures itself in the answer’s direction.  Forming itself in an atmosphere of the already spoken, the word is at the same time determined by that which has not yet been said but which is needed and in fact anticipated by the answering world.  Such is the case in any living dialogue….

Bakhtin (1875-1975) was an influential theorist of communication from Russia, elaborated a theory of language called “dialogism,” wrote important works on Dostoevsky and is probably most famous for his book Rabelais and His World.

Mikhail Bakhtin

Dialogism focuses on the two-way aspects of communication—taking dialogue as its main metaphor for the communication process. 

While it is an oversimplification to say that communication is dialogue, the statement is not too far from the truth.  Dialogue, we must recognize, is basic to understanding communication, not monologue—in which we are talking to ourselves, so to speak.  When we speak with others, we must keep in mind what has already been said and anticipate what will be said.  And this property is true of all discourse, of all kinds of communication in all media.  That is, communication must take into account cultural norms and beliefs and use them, just as it must consider future responses to that communication.

This dialogic perspective, which takes into account previous utterances and texts in all media, implies another of Bakhtin’s theories, one known as intertextuality.  What this says, in brief, is that there are strong relationships between texts being produced at any moment in time and other texts that were previously produced.  In some cases, as in parody, we are conscious of these earlier texts, but in many other cases, artists in all media who are creating texts (movies, television shows, novels, songs, and so on) are not always conscious of the way these previously produced texts influence them—either stylistically or in terms of their content.       

Intertextuality

Thus, the famous television commercial for Macintosh, “1984,” broadcast during a Superbowl, is intertextual in that it is based on George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984.  And many films and novels are intertexual and use themes and other material from other texts for various purposes.  Sometimes this borrowing is conscious, as in parodies, but it other cases it is not consciously done by creative personalities who make films and write novels with intertextual elements.

Scene from Ridley Scott’s “Macintosh 1984” Commercial

This image, at the conclusion of the commercial, shows a sledgehammer thrown at a giant screen which destroys the ability of the brainwasher, shown on the screen, to control his victims in the 1984 commercial.  The scene in which a beautiful blonde woman throws the sledgehammer at the giant image recalls David and Goliath and is also intertextual in nature.

I was a visiting professor for a year at the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Southern California for a year and had someone from the advertising agency that made the commercial come in to talk to my class—of 200 students about the success of the commercial. 

It was directed by Ridley Scott, a well-known film director and it was only by a miracle that it was broadcast during the super bowl since the people at Apple didn’t like it.

I might add that intertextuality applies to my use of ideas and material from my books to various articles and books I wrote.   It is not unusual for authors to “borrow” from themselves, though I always rewrite/revise any material I am borrowing..

The Comic-Stripped American

In 1974, I returned to the comics and published a book, The Comic-Stripped American.  The cover is remarkable because the president of Walker Publishers chose to put his photograph on the cover.  Its subtitle, “Wht Dick Tracy, Blondie, Daddy Warbucks and Charlie Brown Tell Us About Ourselves,” suggests that I used some of our more important comic strips to suggest what they revealed about American character and culture.

It came out during my “purpose” prose period and its text focuses on the values and beliefs of the characters in our most important comic strips of the seventies.    

The titles of the chapters reveal my perspectives on the comics and their relation to the American psyche and American culture. 

One thing that is interesting about the cover of the book is that the face on the cover is that of the publisher of the book who inserted himself into the book.  I have published many books but this is the first time a publisher put his face on the cover of one of my books.