Critical Apprehensions & Intemperate Discourses

Kip Manley, proprietor

When you get caught
Between the Moon and

Second person, chat. I just don’t know. —Oh, it can be done well, anything can be done well, but the curve on second person is some kind of steep. Comes in three basic flavors, the second person: there’s what you might call diegetic second, where who’s being addressed is a specific second person, firmly ensconced in the story as a character themselves, so that it’s really more of a text within the text, you’re distanced from the point of address—it might as well be an exchange you’re eavesdropping, an epistolary you’ve somehow intercepted. —The next you might call more of a diffuse, a second person that, yes, is addressed to you, Dear Reader, but not too specifically: there’s entirely too many of all of you, and far too wonderfully varied; best to be disarmingly vague—and so, in an heroic effort not to break the spell, it can all-too-often never manage to cast one in the first place. —The third second person? Direct: an attempt to square the circle and have it all, the author reaching out of the text to grab you, yes you, Gentle Reader, by your lapels, but also the author would insist on the lapels to be grabbed, the type and tailoring, the heft in the hand, particular lapels suited for the specific you the author has in mind, a you you’re dragooned into playing, will you or nill you: it can’t help but hector, this voice, and no one likes being hectored, though even this can be done effectively, even well—one thinks of Eddie Campbell’s How to be an Artist, told in a striking second-person imperative, but that’s comics, and there are so many other things happening to détourn that voice. —Like I said. It’s hard.

So when I tell you The Spear Cuts Through Water is written in the second person—

(“You were thirteen, you think,” you’re told, quite imperiously, and I don’t know about you, but while I’m game enough to pretend to have memories I’ve never had, I’d just as soon decide for myself how reliable they are. Though I must admit I remembered this particular directive as landing rather more forcefully that it does upon re-reading; I was surprised by how—mild?—it turned out to have been. Thus, a grain of salt.)

—I mean, it isn’t, not really: it’s actually a first-person text. I mean, yes, every narrative is necessarily written in the first person, but Spear’s only somewhat coy as to this fundamental truth: your narrator’s there, on the page, on the stage, referring to themself always in the third person as “this moonlit body” (never “a,” or “the,” or “that” moonlit body, but always and reflexively “this”): the love-child (soi-disant) of the Moon and the Water, impresario and headliner of the showstopping antics of the Inverted Theater, that reflection of an impossibly tiered pagoda floating on the surface of the Water, bathed in the light of the Moon.

This is the structural triumph of the book, and what I greatly admire: that the epic as such is a theatrical production, drama and dance performed in that Inverted Theater in a dream that you’re having, told to you, narrated necessarily because it’s actually unfolding from the pages of the book in your hand, written by Simon Jimenez, but set that aside, because as you’re dreaming the story you’re reading, this moonlit body reminds you of your memories, memories of your much-later life that spark, that are sparked by, incidents in that story, this epic of the old country from so long ago. These layers add a richness that carries what’s really a rather focused (and single-volume) work just over the threshold of epic, but the movements between and among them are so surefooted that you’re never lost, never bogged down in metashenanigans: you marvel, instead, as background characters, bit players, minor figures, NPCs (in the [shudder] parlance of our [shudder] times)—as the story’s performed, the actors playing them in the Inverted Theater will step up to speak for a moment, a passage, a phrase, a snatch of internal monologue become spotlit soliloquy, a bit of italicized free indirect slipped in to trouble the narrative flow, to comment, contest, open it up, all these non-protagonists, from the usual monotone of one word set carefully, deliberately after another toward something more of a polyphony. Such a simple trick! But deceptively so: it’s only the theatrical conceit that allows it to work as well as it does, the artifice of performance excusing the artifice of italics, and of the courtly stilt needed to better fit with the flow of this moonlit body’s narration—appropriate enough for an epic, to be sure, but not so much for a glimpse of a stream of consciousness, unless, of course, that stream’s been polished by rehearsal, shaped and timed to fit: a performance, each of them, however glancing, however brief.

Marvel, then, and marvel again, as, once established, these moves are elaborated: the Moon’s dialogue, say, which is handled the same way as these extra-narrative irruptions; when She speaks, She steps up (or the actor playing Her) to tell you what it was She said, back in the day, impressively at once more immediate and yet more distancing. Notice that neither of the protagonists is given a chance to directly address you—not until She passes, passing on a modicum of Her power, which they use, this technique, this trick of the book, to talk to each other—a graceful melding of form and function, all built before you as you read—and when it all comes together, levels and tricks and elaborations folded together to make the apotheosis if not the climax of the book, as the narrative conjures a deceptively simple trick of the theatre to collapse event and representation, story-time and telling-time, actant and audience, reaching up to grab you, yes, you, you there, by whatever lapels you’re wearing, and haul you in—it’s electrifying. For this, this marvelous conceit, Spear deserves every accolade it’s received, and very much a prominent place in whatever broader conversations we have going forward about technique, about prose and structure, form, novels and epics, you know: fantasy.

But. Having said all that. I feel a little sheepish, here, I mean, every word is true, don’t get me wrong, but. I just, y’know. Didn’t like it very much. The book.

Some of that—a lot of it, really—is due to the climax, which has to follow the admittedly staggering act of that apotheosis. Two new characters crowd the (metaphorical) stage, both mentioned previously, to be sure, but nonetheless focus is pulled as the work required to bring them on gets done, work that maybe should’ve, could’ve been done earlier, along the way (not so much Shan, daughter of Araya the Drunk from all the way back at the beginning, to whom the protagonists are to deliver the titular Spear, but the Third Terror is a magic trick the book tries to pull off not so much by misdirection, hoping you’ll maybe forget for a time, but instead by apparently forgetting itself until this last-minute dash)—all for the sort of action-packed hugger-mugger that passes for third acts these days in superheroic action flicks, a widescreen smashemup that works even less well in prose, no matter how artful. Armies clash without the city walls! Within, the Third Terror has become a kaiju, obliterating buildings, tossing back people like popcorn shrimp! The ocean has withdrawn, stranding treasure ships and shoals of dying fish! An unimaginable tsunami, impossible to withstand, is just hours away, still hours away, yet already it swallows the horizon! To anywhere, one of the background characters tells you in their moment in the spotlight, of where the supernumeraries all thought to flee; It was too much. There were five ends of the world, and to run away from one meant running into another, and damn, you feel that, but not in a way that’s maybe intended. Why five ends of the world, when but one is more than enough? (Shades of thirty or forty sinking Atlantises, or those in the path of a super-typhoon.) —This apocalypse goes to eleven!

But a climax is made from what’s come before, and though the book’s conceit is a magisterial wonder, I’m afraid it’s elsewhere thinned, and weak. —The Spear Cuts Through Water is a portal/quest fantasy, to reach for our Rhetorics: one that broadly straddles the didacticism of that mode to lean hard on both the knowing dialectic of the liminal (it may seem odd, to refer to something so openly, baldly itself as “liminal,” but the book blithely skips back and forth over every limen that would mark its place) as well as, and but also, I think, to its detriment, the ironic mimesis of the immersive:

The epic (as such) begins with a brashly thrilling overture, already in incipient crisis, plots a-swirl about the court and a garrison, a deeply seeded rebellion apparently a-brew, only for the table so deftly set to be entirely upended by an explosive inciting incident and you’re off to the races, rather literally, across the breadth of the old country, for the next five days—a terribly focused epic, as you might could see; the pace and the scale of it would tend to militate against the sort of didactic lore-dumps (no matter how artful) that are a hallmark of the portal/quest. And, as you know, Bob, most folks don’t so much go around explaining to each other the differing details of what they’re seeing and doing as they go about their day, simply for your benefit, Dear Reader. Thus, the logic of ironic mimesis, as they take for granted what you might find fantastical—but! Consider the tortoises:

All of this theater for the benefit of the creature perched on the high chair.

The tortoise’s gaze was set on the First Terror. “The Smiling Sun wishes to know your thoughts,” the mad creature giggled. “From all the evidence laid before you, to what side of the line does your heart lean?”

The Terror looked up at his father’s surrogate and then down at the wet dog of a man in the center of the room. Thirty-three years. And without a further moment of consideration, he said, “My Smiling Sun, this man is guilty.”

The tortoises turn out to be rather important, to empire and story, and this is your first—well, it’s not really a glimpse, is it? You don’t really see anything, not in this scene, just a handful of words, references to a tortoise, a mad, giggling creature, the Emperor’s surrogate, but without any attempt to body forth the referent (an aimless bobbing of a too-small head, light glancing from the shell of it, the smell, for God’s sake, or what the actors in the Inverted Theater might be doing, to conjure this image for you)—well, you’re at a loss. You’ve seen that everyone at court wears stylized animal masks, and this is (I believe) also the first indication that certain animals here in the old country can speak—I, at least, for a couple-few pages, thought maybe it was a eunuch (court; giggling) in a tortoise mask perched on that high chair. (How, exactly, can a tortoise perch, per se, anyway?)

There are other such lacunæ, some eventually remedied, some not (I still don’t have a clear idea of how the Road Above and the Road Below work, say), all adding up less to a sense of playful, ironic reserve than a frustrating lack. And there’s a slapdashery to some of the details that are presented: eight emperors have ruled since the Moon stepped down out of the sky; eight generations, as each has demanded a son of the Moon, and raised him up in turn; eight Smiling Suns that have beaten down on the old country in an endless, rainless summer—I think? It’s hinted, alluded to, but never quite clear, or as clear as it should be, whether a drop of rain has fallen in all that time, but certainly, it’s hot, it’s dry, but never perhaps as dry as it could be? Should be? Might? —It doesn’t feel like a world that has learned to live without something so important as rain, or moonlight: eight generations also without a Moon—just an empty starless patch of sky known as the Burn—but you’re told at one point that “The Burn in the sky smoldered like a black moon above their heads.” A strange simile, to liken the lack of a thing to the thing long gone.

There’s a tension, between a looser, goosier f--ry tale world, a knowingly artificial, liminal world, and a world more brutalistically immersive, a tension you can play with, certainly, build things from, and with, anything can be done, and done well, but of course it takes work, and consideration, neither of which I don’t think really got done here, not as to this angle, and maybe you disagree, maybe it didn’t bother you all that much, maybe you’d say it’s subjective, but then there’s page 58 of the 2023 Del Rey paperback edition:

Through the courtyard he walked, slipping back into his sleeveless shirt as he passed the night shift at work. Soldiers unracking weapons and polishing the blades and spear tips smooth with oiled cloth, bouncing moonlight off the curved metal.

Eight generations the Moon’s been locked away in a cave under the mountains, and they’re bouncing what, now? —A small and simple error, sure, a slip of the metaphorical tongue, reaching along well-worn grooves for the sort of detail that this sort of phrase in that sort of scene would usually call for, but: in a liminal, ironic mode, where you’re on guard for the slightest clue as to what the ostensible narrative maybe pointedly isn’t telling you, such a slip can be fatal to the knowing dialectic between the writer, yes, and you, the reader. Moonlight? you’re thinking, wait, is the Moon’s absence maybe not really the absence of a moon? Is there something unexpected going on? What could it be? and by the time you trip to the fact that it’s nothing, just a slip, the damage has been done.

But if it had been caught? If it had been torchlight instead, or starlight? If it hadn’t bedeviled me as it did, if I’d been in a more charitable mood, or mode? Still: the world of this epic, the old country under the Smiling Sun, is unrelentingly brutal and viciously violent. The epic begins in incipient crisis, yes; it is—relentlessly, viciously—focused, on the events of the next five days; such a scope and pace will lend the proceedings a tendency toward packing on the action, and that it does, to such an extent that when it seeks to vary the tone, to reach for a moment of shock, or awe, or o’erweening cruelty, it overloads to what becomes a cartoonish degree: on the morning of the second day, as the protagonists pole their stolen boat through the waterlands of the Thousand Rivers, they come across a fishing village that has been massacred:

It was blood. Everything was painted in blood. It killed us all. As if someone had taken great big bucketfuls of blood and doused the dock boards with it, and the boats, and the walls of the houses that made up this small and now silent village. It came through the windows. It broke through the doors. An arm hung off the side of the dock. When their rightmost pontoon bumped into the dock strut by accident, the arm slipped off the edge and gulped into the water.

It’s arresting—in the moment. The protagonists react—discomfitted, appalled—in the moment. But it fades as you proceed, given what you’ve already seen, what you will see, violences great and terrible and intensely, cruelly personal, the massacre at the Tiger Gate, the slaughter in and among the barges of the Bowl, bodies folded into boxes and coins of flesh, the Second Terror’s horrifically capricious punishment of his dancers, the farmers ridden unnoticed beneath the hooves of the First Terror’s horses because they did not get out of the way fast enough, and the farmhouses obliterated with the flick of a wrist because they were in the way at all, and so that passage through the fishing village, just as dead and gone as all the others, has just as much impact on you, on the protagonists, as anything, everything else that’s gone on, that goes on without even another mention until, in the climax, it’s revealed, in the course of revealing the Third Terror, that he was the one who massacred the village, they would’ve assaulted the protagonists, you see, murdered them for their boat, for their outlandishness, for the peacock tattoo, for whatever reason, and so he removed them from consideration, fft! A puzzle-piece snapped into place here at the end, but whatever satisfaction it might’ve given is lost, the entire puzzle’s indistinguishably soaked in blood, blood! and everywhere there’s screaming and the sound of blows. —Five apocalypses going off all around you here at the end, but what does it matter, really, when you’ve already seen hundreds, thousands of worlds already snuffed out? (How many of those spotlit soliloquies are minor characters relaying or reflecting on the instants just before their violently abrupt ends, or the moments immediately after?)

Thus, the Spear Cuts Through Water, a book I didn’t so much care for, and of which I am intensely, distractingly envious. It’s the only thing I’ve read by Simon Jimenez; I’m curious, now, to see what he did with his first book, The Vanished Birds. —I’m even more curious to see what he does next.

—Filed 47 days ago to Paralitticisms; Comment.

Generation AI.

There’s a thing that sweeps through writerly social media from time to time these days, where someone or other points to the latest outrage due to generative AI, and goes on to swear they’ve never used generative AI in their works, and by God they never will, and invites any and all other authors who are and feel likewise to likewise affirm in mentions and quote-tweets and, much as yr. correspondent, Luddite that I am, would happily join in—dogpiling notions and general actions is so much more satisfying than dogpiling individuals—well: I can’t. Because I have used generative AI in the creation of a small but not unimportant part of my work.

Sort of.

Twenty three years ago, then: 10.47 UTC, on January 18th, a Friday: someone using the email address acosnasu@vygtafot.ac.uk made a post to the alt.sex.stories.d newsgroup. The subject line was, “Re: they are filling inside cold, over elder, near heavy ointments,” and here’s how it began:

One more plates will be glad wide jars. Other thin lean tickets will love hourly behind yogis. Georgette, have a rude poultice. You won’t change it. Well, Ronette never judges until Johnny attempts the poor goldsmith daily. As sneakily as John orders, you can look the unit much more angrily. There, cans talk beneath sweet markets, unless they’re bitter.

It continued in that vein for another 830-some-odd words—the output of a Markov chain: a randomly generated text where each word set down determines (mostly) the next word in the sequence. —Index a text, any text, a collection of short stories, a volume of plays, a sheaf of handwritten recipes, a year’s worth of newsletters, an archive of someone’s tweets or skeets or whatever we’re calling them these days, make an index, and, for each appearance of every word, note the word that appears next. Tot up those appearances, and then, when you want to generate a text, use the counts to weight your otherwise randome choices. Bolt on some simple heuristics, to classify the words as to parts of speech, set up clause-shapes and sentence-shells, where to put the commas and the question-marks, then wind it up and turn it loose:

The sick walnut rarely pulls James, it opens Zachary instead. We converse the sticky egg. If the bad jackets can fill undoubtably, the younger film may cook more evenings. She might irrigate freely, unless Kathy behaves pumpkins to Marian’s game.

Now, comparing a Markov chain to ChatGPT is rather like comparing a paper plane to a 747 but, I mean, here’s the thing: they both do fly. Given the Markov’s simplicity, it’s much easier to see how any meaning glimpsed in the output is entirely pareidolic; there’s no there there but what we bring to the table—even so, it’s spooky, how the flavor of the source text nonetheless seeps through, to color that illusion of intent. Given how simple Markov chains are. (ELIZA was originally just 420 lines of MAD-SLIP code, and she’s pulled Turing wool for decades.) —Anyway: somewhere around about the summer of 2006, casting about for something to conjure a spooky, surreal, quasi-divinatory mood, I hit upon the copy I’d squirreled away of that post from four years previous and, after a bit of noodling, wrote this:

The offices are dim. The cubicle walls are chin-high, a dingy, nappy brown. Jo doesn’t look at the plaques by each opening. Warm light glows from the cubicle to the right. “No,” someone’s saying. “Shadow-time’s orthogonal to pseudo-time. Plates? They’re gonna be glad wide jars again. Yeah. The car under the stale light is a familiar answer, but don’t run to the stranger’s benison – there is nothing in the end but now, and now – ”

Now, I haven’t been able to identify what originating text might’ve been so enamored of “glad” and “jars” and “benison” and “ointments,” but it’s hardly as if it’s the sum total of everything ever shelved in the Library of Congress; it’s not at all as if anyone blew through more power than France to calculate those initial weights; generating that original post twenty-three years ago didn’t light up an array of beefy chips originally designed to serve up real-time 3D graphics in videogames, burning them hot enough to boil away a 16 oz. bottle of water in the time it takes to spit out a couple-few hundred words: but. But. If someone asks whether I’ve ever used generative AI in the creation of my work, I can’t in good conscience say no. —Heck, I even went and did it again, in a callback to that particular scene, though I don’t seem to have kept a copy of the originating post for that one. It’s everywhere out there, this prehistoric gray goo, this AI slop avant la lettre, if you know where to look; weirdly charming, in a creepily hauntological sense. All those meaning-shapes, evacuated of meaning.

But, well. See. That’s not all.

Last year, for the day job, I took part in a panel discussion on “Ethical Lawyering and Generative AI.” We needed a slide deck to step through, as we explained to our jurisprudential audience the laity’s basics of this stuff that was only just then beginning to fabricate citations to cases that never existed, and a slide deck needs art, so I, well, I turned to whatever AI chatbot turducken Edge was cooking at the time (Copilot, which sits on ChatGPT, with an assist from DALL-E, I think, for the pictures)—I was curious, for one thing: I hadn’t messed around with anything like this for a half-dozen iterations, at least—back when you’d upload a picture and give it a prompt, “in the style of Van Gogh,” say, and a couple-five hours later get back an artfully distorted version of your original that, if you squinted generously in the right light, might be mistaken for something Van Gogh-adjacent. If I were to opine on this stuff, and advise, I really ought to have tinkered with it, first, and hey, I’d be doing something useful with the output of that tinkering. And but also, I wanted that slickly vapid, inanely bizarre æsthetic: smartly suited cyber-lawyers stood up by our bullet points, arguing in courtrooms of polished chancery wood and empty bright blue glass, before anonymously black-robed crash-test dummy-looking robots—we made a point of the fact that the art was AI-generated, pointing out inaccuracies and infelicities, the way it kept reaching for the averagest common denominators, the biases (whenever I asked for images of AI-enhanced lawyers, I got male figures; for AI-enhanced paralegals, female. When I asked for images of AI-enhanced public defenders? Three women and a man). It all served as something of an artful teaching moment. But: and most importantly: no artist was put out of a job, here. There was no budget for this deck but my own time, and if it wasn’t going to be AI-generated art, it was going to be whatever I could cobble together from royalty-free clip-art and my own typesetting skills.

I don’t say this as some attempt at expiation, or to provide my bona fides; I’m mostly providing context—an excuse, perhaps—for what I did next: I asked Copilot to generate some cover images for the epic.

—Not that I would ever actually begin to think about contemplating the possibility of maybe ever actually using something like that as an actual cover, dear God, no. I shoot my own covers, there’s a whole æsthetic worked out, making them is very much part of the process, I’d never look to outsource that. But generating the art for the deck had tweaked my curiosity: I get the basic idea of how it is that LLMs brute-force their generation of sloppy gobs of AI text, but I can’t for the life of me figure out how that model does what it does with images, with picture-stuff—the math just doesn’t math, I can’t get a handle on the quanta, it’s a complete mystery—and who isn’t tantalized by a mystery?

(I mean, set aside just for a moment the many and various ethical concerns, the extractive repurposing of art on a vastly unprecedented scale, without consent, the brutal exploitation of hidden human labor in reviewing and organizing and classifying the original sources, and reviewing and moderating and tweaking the output, the vast stores of capital poured into its development, warping it into a tool that consolidates money and power in hands that already have too much of both, the shocking leaps in energy consumption, the concomitant environmental degradation, the incredible inflation of our abilities to impersonate and to deceive—set all of that and more aside, I mean, it’s pretty cool, right? To just, like, get an image or four of whatever you want? Without bothering anybody?)

So I asked Copilot to generate some cover images for the epic:

Thus, the sick walnut, as it opens Zachary instead. Not terribly flattering, is it. I asked Copilot, I asked ChatGPT, I asked DALL-E to show me its take on my work, and this is the best it can bother to do?

That’s the premise of the promise these things make, after all, or rather the promise made on their behalf, by the hucksters and the barkers, the grifters and con artists sniffing around the aforementioned vast stores of capital: that there is a there, there; that what sits there knows everything it’s been shown, and understands whatever you tell it; that it can answer any questions you have, find anything you ask for, show you whatever you tell it you want to see, render up for you the very idea you have in your head—but every clause of every statement there’s untrue.

This idea, that I have in my head, is actually a constellation of ideas worked out in some detail and at great length in a form that, by virtue of having been publicly available on the web (to say nothing of having been published as eminently seizable ebooks in numerous vulnerable outlets) has always already been part of any corpus sliced and diced and analyzed to make up the unfathomably multi-dimensional arrays of tokens and associations underlying every major LLM: thus, the sum total of any and all of its ability to “know” what I point to when I point. Those pictures, then—the cover images I asked it to, ah, generate: image-shapes and trope-strokes filed away in whatever pseudo-corner of those unthinkably multi-dimensional arrays that’s closest, notionally speaking, to the pseudo-spaces made up by and enclosing the tokens generated from my books, and arranged in what’s been algorithmically determined to be the most satisfying response to my request: thus, a bathetic golden hour steeped through skyscraping towers (some rather terribly gothic, a hallmark of the Portland skyline); an assortment of the sectional furniture of swords and sword-shapes and roses and birds; a centered, backlit protagonist-figure, all so very queenly (save the one king—Lymond? Really?)—the two more modern, or at least less cod-medieval, reach for a trick that was de rigueur for a while on the covers of UF books, and numerous videogames, where the protagonist is stood with their back to us, the better to inculcate, it was thought, a sense of identification, of immersion, and also in some cases yes at least to show off a tramp stamp. There’s something queasily akin to that murmurous reunion of archetypes noted by Eco, but these clichés aren’t dancing; they’re not talking, not to each other, certainly not to us; they’re not even waiting. Just—there, in their thereless there.

So. All a bit embarrassing, really—but, to embarrass, it must have power; that power, as is usually the case these days, is found in the bullshit of its premise. I asked for cover images, but that wasn’t what I wanted; what I wanted was, I wanted to see, just for a moment, what it might all look like to someone else, outside of my head—but without the vulnerability that comes from having to ask that someone else what it is they think. That promise—our AI can do that for you—that’s intoxicating. And if it had worked?

But it didn’t, is the thing. Instead of that validating glimpse, what I got was this, this content, this output of the meanest median mode, this spinner rack of romantasy and paranormal romance julienned into a mirepoix, tuned a bit to cheat the overall timbre toward something like Pantone’s color of whatever year—oh, but that metaphor’s appallingly mixed, even for me, and anyway, they don’t really do spinner racks anymore.

747s, paper planes, the thing is that ChatGPT, LLMs, generative AI, it’s all more of a flying elephant, really, to extend the simile, and most folks when they think about it at all seem to be of the opinion that it doesn’t matter so much if it can’t loop-the-loop, or barrel roll, look at it! It’s flying! Isn’t that wild?

Thing is, it can’t so much land, either.

It’s a neat parlor trick, generative AI; really fucking expensive, but kinda sorta pretty neat? And I’d never say you can’t use it to make art, good art—I’ve seen it done, with image generation; I’ve done it myself, in my own small way, with the free-range output of Markov chains. But there’s a, not to put to fine a point on it, a human element there, noticing, selecting, altering, iterating, curating, contextualizing—the there, that needs to be there, knowing, and seeing, and showing what’s been seen. And to compare these isolated examples, these occasional possibilities, with the broadband industrial-scale generation of AI gray-goo slop currently ongoing, is to compare finding and cleaning and polishing and setting on one’s desk a pretty rock from a stream, with mountain-top removal to strip-mine the Smokies for fool’s gold.

So, there you have it: why I’m not likely to ever ask ChatGPT as such for anything ever again; why I might still mess around with stuff like Markov chains. But entirely too much faffing to fit into a tweet. Are we still calling them tweets even if they aren’t on Twitter anymore? We should still call them tweets. One of the many tells of Elon Musk’s stupidity is walking away from a brand that strong, I mean, Jesus. Like renaming Kleenex.®

While units globally tease clouds, the tags often learn towards the pretty disks. We talk them, then we totally seek Jeff and Norm’s strong tape. Why will we nibble after Beryl climbs the inner camp’s poultice? We comb the dull pear. I was smelling to attack you some of my clever farmers. She may finally open sick and plays our tired, abysmal carpenters within a mountain.

—Filed 74 days ago to Indulgences; Comment.

Bubbles of Earths.

There were good reasons to disregard the technological details involved in delineating intercommunication between Terra the Fair and our terrible Antiterra. His knowledge of physics, mechanicalism and that sort of stuff had remained limited to the scratch of a prep-school blackboard. He consoled himself with the thought that no censor in America or Great Britain would pass the slightest reference to “magnetic” gewgaws. Quietly, he borrowed what his greatest forerunners (Counterstone, for example) had imagined in the way of a manned capsule’s propulsion, including the clever idea of an initial speed of a few thousand miles per hour increasing, under the influence of a Counterstonian type of intermediate environment between sibling galaxies, to several trillions of light-years per second, before dwindling harmlessly to a parachute’s indolent descent. Elaborating anew, in irrational fabrications, all that Cyraniana and “physics fiction” would have been not only a bore but an absurdity, for nobody knew how far Terra, or other innumerable planets with cottages and cows, might be situated in outer or inner space: “inner,” because why not assume their microcosmic presence in the golden globules ascending quick-quick in this flute of Moët or in the corpuscles of my, Van Veen’s—

(or my, Ada Veen’s)

—bloodstream, or in the pus of a Mr. Nekto’s ripe boil newly lanced in Nektor or Neckton.

—Vladimir Nabokov

It’s a terribly little thing, not even most of a sentence, and hardly the most unique of images: a world, a cosmos, this particular scheme of things entire, pinpricked in a tiny bubble, in the wine—but it’s such a specific image, specifically deployed (then heightened, and parodically degraded, in carbonated blood, and liquor puris), that now I can’t help but imagine the master excursing the hills above the Montreux Palace Hotel, a butterfly net in his hands, and a Barbara Remington painting reproduced on the cover of the paperback tucked away in his pocket.

“By all accounts, ’twas to give him line only,” said Amaury; “and if King Mezentius had lived, would have been war between them this summer. Then he should have been boiled in his own syrup; and ’tis like danger now, though smaller, to cope the son. You do forget your judgement, I think, in this single thing, save which I could swear you are perfect in all things.”

Lessingham made no answer. He was gazing with a strange intentness into the wine which brimmed the crystal goblet in his right hand. He held it up for the bunch of candles that stood in the middle of the table to shine through, turning the endless stream of bubbles into bubbles of golden fire. Amaury, half facing him on his right, watched him. Lessingham set down the goblet and looked round at him with the look of a man awaked from sleep.

—E.R. Eddison

—Filed 185 days ago to Paralitticisms; Comment.

We don’t stop here.

Well, the way they pick teevee shows is, they make one show. That show’s called a pilot. Then they show that one show to the people who pick shows, and on the strength of that one show, they decide if they want to make more shows. Some get chosen, and become television programs. Some don’t, and become nothing. She starred in one of the ones that became nothing.

Mulholland Dr. was originally intended or devised or dreamt up or at least pitched as a television series, a serial along the lines in more ways than one of Twin Peaks (as a for instance)—the film we got was cut together from and with additions made to what had originally been a pilot: a show for the people who pick shows, to see if more such shows would at all be what they’d want.

Turns out, not so much.

But that original pilot is available via the Internet Archive:

The quality’s not stellar, but it’s worth watching. At an hour-and-a-half (just enough time for a two-hour movie premiere, with commercials), it’s an hour shy of the film’s runtime, but a large part of the story’s largely there, scenes playing out much as they do in the film, some cuts here, some extensions there, an extra scene with Robert Forster’s laconic anti-Cooper cop, a phone call with a procrastinating writer whose dog, Murph, is mysteriously menacing, there’s some different musical cues, perhaps the most notable difference: some brashly atonal percussive stings adjacent to the Castigliane brothers; the director, Adam, tools up to the corral at the top of Beachwood Canyon to the drum solo from “Take Five”; there’s a stab at a light-hearted theme for Betty, all tremulous strings and tinkling piano, best perhaps left behind—but, nonetheless, the basic beats play out as they do in the film, right up to the discovery of Diane Selwyn’s body, Rita’s attempt to cut her hair, “Let me do it,” and then the revelation of the blond wig in the mirror: “You look like someone else.” There’s no Club Silencio, and there’s no Winkie’s, though there is the dumpster behind the Winkie’s, and the figure behind the dumpster, far more melancholic, almost placid, than terrifying, sat there, waiting, as the pilot ends.

Not so different insofar as that goes, and yet completely different, because of the context, because of how it’s situated, because of the haunting expectations that cling to it, the mighta beens and what would theys. —A television show, a series, a serial, of which this might’ve been the first installment, it’s episodic, it continues, it’s therefore open-ended, expansive, not elusively claustrophobic, not hermetically sealed, not done-in-one, not—a film. We would have gotten more—but with the terrible foreclosure of the film’s ending, it’s tantalizingly impossible to make any kind of a guess as to much of what any of that more would’ve been.

More behind-the-scenery of the movie industry, sure; more to limn the shadowy armature of power stretching from Mr. Roque and the Cowboy through the Castigliane brothers, and all those unknown, unseen phone callers to the bumblingly competent Joe Messing; director Adam Kesher would’ve been more of a co-protagonist with Betty and Rita—but Rita probably wouldn’t’ve been Camilla, and Betty almost certainly wouldn’t’ve been Diane. The tension of that sort of doubling and reveal, that’s not a long-haul sort of mystery. There’s a necessary finality to it, that just doesn’t fit in a serial shape.

And I really don’t know how Naomi Watts’ incandescently saccharine performance would’ve worked in weekly installments, without that counterbalance. Her audition—closer to the end of the pilot, rather than the middle of the film—suggests a direction, of course, but the plucky kid detective, at once Laura Dern and Kyle McLachlan, becoming in her own way very much like the woman who stumbles, injured, from the woods, is a very different story than the one in which the pluck turns out already to have stumbled, on her own, and no detective anywhere in sight.

I like a continuing story. There’s something about a soap opera that’s fantastic because it just keeps going and going. Theoretically, you can get very deep in a story and you can go so deep and open up the world so beautifully, but it takes time to do that.

—Filed 207 days ago to Paralitticisms; Comment.

The sin of empathy.

“Do not commit the sin of empathy,” he exhorts us, this mustachio’d Utahan; “This snake” (referring to a photograph of the Right Reverend Mariann Edgar Budde)—

This snake is God’s enemy and yours too. She hates God and His people. You need to properly hate in response.

She is not merely deceived but is a deceiver. Your eye shall not pity.

As a bit of bait, his exhortation did the trick: ten thousand replies, ten thousand retweets, four point seven thousand likes, two and a half thousand bookmarks, twenty-one point nine million views, as of this morning, to the extent those numbers mean anything anymore. And certainly, I now know far more about Ben Garrett, Deacon, candidate for Elder, and podcast co-host, than I ever would’ve intended otherwise. Screenshots have washed up at Bluesky, racking up thousands of likes and retweets of their own; people will gawk at the Nazi bar’s grafitti. “Commit the sin of empathy,” these pass-alongs exhort in turn. “It’s actually the most important emotion of all.” “If your religion says ‘Do not commit the sin of empathy’ you chose the wrong religion.” “Google search ‘The Sin of Empathy’ and you’ll see Evangelicals using it unironically.” “Probably time to talk about fascism and moral inversion huh.” —Which, leaving aside for the moment the all-too-real shortcomings of dunk culture, is all well and good—fuck him up socrates, as Darryl once said—except, I mean, for one fundamental flaw—

Empathy is a sin.

Oh, not the way he means it, this aspiring patriarch, this amateur demonologist. He’s a misogynist fascist, lashing out at a woman in a position of traditionally male power, a woman who’d recently dared to embarrass his chosen Daddy-come-home figurehead by asking the President to have mercy. —It’s important to note that Deacon Garrett isn’t responding directly to anything the Right Reverend Budde said, with his exhortation not to commit the sin of empathy—she spoke of unity, dignity, honesty, humility, diversity, and of course and most controversially mercy, but said nothing of empathy: the closest she gets to that is compassion. —No; his interest in warding us off empathy is purely instrumental. He’s only here to gin up his outsourced two minutes of hate against a designated target. Empathy makes it harder to hate, and so it must be done away with. Your eye shall not pity.

When pressed on his echthroic ethic—how can empathy be a sin?—Garrett directs his audience to the writings of Dr. Joel Rigney, ex-president of a seminary and devotee of Idaho pastor Doug Wilson. Rigney’s been a Main Character before, for precisely his writings on empathy, and compassion: cod-Letters from an ersatz Screwtape on how best to twist these supposed virtues from the Enemy’s loathsomely benevolent purpose. —Rigney posits empathy as a totalizing perversion of compassion, a complete immersion in the feelings of others that overwhelms one’s own judgment, one’s fundamental sense of right, and wrong, one’s very self, a feeling-with fusion that terrifies his puerilely pathetic individualism: thus, a sin.

He, of course, has it all completely and utterly backwards.

Namwali Serpell, writing about the shortfalls of empathy as a saving grace of literature, has much more interesting insights into what might be sinful about it all. She quotes a passage from Remainder, by Tom McCarthy, in which the narrator hires two black men to shoot at him with blanks, re-enacting the murder of a black man with which he’s become, shall we say, obsessed:

My two assassins took their time in killing me. The slowed-down pace at which they raised and fired their guns, the lack of concern or interest this seemed to imply, the total absence on my part of any attempt to escape although I had plenty of time to do so—all these made our actions passive. We weren’t doing them: they were being done. The guns were being fired, I was being hit, being returned to the ground. The ground’s surface was neutral—neither warm nor cold… When I let my head roll slightly back, a bollard hid all these words except for one of the two Escapes. Would my man have seen this, just before the life dribbled out of him towards the puddle? Escape?

and then uses it to question the utility, the very purpose of empathy:

The possessives, “my two assassins” and “my man”; the conscription into a willful passivity; the mechanical quality of the sequence, absent of concern or interest or survival instinct; the supposed neutrality of the usurped ground; the ironized “Escape”: Isn’t this creepy, fugue-like occupation of the dead a truer picture of contemporary empathy than the older cliché of walking a mile in another’s shoes?

The fact that it’s a rich white man taking a poor black man’s death for a spin is no coincidence. The empathy model of art can bleed too easily into the relishing of suffering by those who are safe from it. It’s a gateway drug to white saviorism, with its familiar blend of propaganda, pornography, and paternalism. It’s an emotional palliative that distracts us from real inequities, on the page and on screen, to say nothing of our actual lives. And it has imposed upon readers and viewers the idea that they can and ought to use art to inhabit others, especially the marginalized.

The sin of empathy, then, is not that one will lose oneself, and the crucially God-given sense of right and wrong one would impose on some other, by indulging the notion that one ought try to feel the feelings of that other—it’s that one’s imagined sense of those feelings, licensed by the indulgent term of empathy, risks overwriting the actual feelings and experiences of that other. —Unless tempered, by experience, by some of those other virtues mentioned above, humility, honesty, dignity, mercy, then empathy all too easily slips over the brink into something one might well call sin.

—Filed 216 days ago to Paralitticisms; Comment.

Rossumovi divoci roboti.

I found myself in a darkening theater last week, about to see a movie I’d been previously unaware of, based on a book I’d never heard of, which, as a practice, has a lot to recommend it. I’d figure out how to do it more often, maybe, the seats were comfortable, those new recliner-thingies they’re putting in, but wearing a mask for a couple-three hours is never fun, so I don’t know.

It’s not entirely true to say I knew nothing: we were there because the Kid and the Spouse and Barry, the Cartoonist, they all wanted to see the new Chris Sanders movie, and I’m adjacent enough to the fields of cartooning and animation to know that Chris Sanders co-designed an co-directed Lilo & Stitch and How to Train your Dragon, both of which I’ve quite enjoyed, but also that Harrison Ford Call of the Wild, which I haven’t seen, but yikes. —And of course I knew the title of what it was we were about to see: the Wild Robot.

And it’s a very very very pretty movie, and there are stirring and thrilling bits, and I will aver it’s the most #nodads film I can think of, recently, but nonetheless none of this happens to make it a terribly or even a rather good movie. (I should note I was in the minority among our viewing group with this particular take; Kid, Spouse, Barry all enjoyed it much more than yr. humble curmudgeon, grain of salt and all that.) —Thrilling and stirring moments happened because at this or that point in this sort of movie something thrilling or stirring is supposed to happen; convictions appear, but, lacking attention, much less courage, wander off; foundational metaphors are cracked, poorly mixed, introduced in a muddle and then abandoned, as plot or logistics require. It is, on the whole, a sumptuously gorgeous, thoroughly half-baked mess.

But here I am, thinking thoughts about it.

(As I’ve nibbled at this, it’s been pointed out to me that Film Crit Hulk went and made some cogent points, so go, read that, come back, I’ll talk about some other bits.)

So, yes: gorgeous, but that’s part of the problem. —There’s some cartoonish expressionism in the various animal-forms, especially when they start in with the talking (crossing the obscure limen from set-dressing impediment antagonist to CHARACTER); the backgrounds are rendered with flawlessly painterly art direction; but—the light, the air, the water, the weight, it all moves and shifts and changes with such unnoticeably uncanny verisimilitude that one is lulled, despite those expressionist touches. It’s quite a triumph.

And yet but also: there’s, at the start, a refreshingly clear eye toward animals, and danger, and death—the eponymous wild—things get eaten, and stay et, and what did the eating isn’t villainized, or even wrong, it just—is. Death is quotidian—

—but then there’s the swarm of raccoons that chases our protagonist, Roz, the eponymous robot, up a tree that bends, precipitously, with their combined weight, until our protagonist is able to lightly step from the bent-low tip-top of the tree, and the mass of raccoons, suddenly aware of their predicament, beg and plead as the weight shifts, lifts, lets go, the tree, suddenly unburdened, springs upright, and dozens of raccoons are flung across the island over a cliff into the crashing sea, and this is a classic Warner Bros. Tex Avery gag, right? Only, the waves crash, the stone’s weightily there, the afternoon light is perfect and the trees sway as they would (only excepting the one bent alarmingly low for the bit) and death, as we’ve noted, the wild, has a presence—all very much at odds with expressionistically classic Warner Bros. Tex Avery slapstick. Expectations and reactions must be constantly recalibrated, because mimesis and cartooning get in each other’s way, and the movie never bothers to realize it has to reconcile them.

Tonal disjunctions like this extend throughout the movie, catharses unfounded, as Hulk notes above: one of the (several) climaxes, say, hinges on the rescue of the animals on the island from an unprecedented winter storm, dragged whether they will or not to the shelter Roz had built for herself, piled cheek-by-jowl, predator with prey, a powder keg already sparked by this fight, that tussle, and Roz finds her (solar-powered) energy dangerously depleted—an unbearable tension resolved with an inspiring speech pulled from the ass of nowhere by our deuteragonist fox, Flick—a speech as cringe as Morgan Freeman’s astoundingly inadvertently hilarious “Be decent” speech from (the film version of) the Bonfire of the Vanities: the foundational basis of eat and get eaten overturned by a plea for common sense; wildness tamed, and thus, forgotten.

(I should’ve been—I was—clued in by an earlier, tossed-off joke, the opossum mother and her hilarious litter of tagalong infants, all pretending quite theatrically to die [“Meningitis takes time!” insists one], all to lampshade the importance of motherhood, or rather parenting, by pretending this role is thrust upon all of us equally, a thing to which to become inured, like the weather, never noticing, much less questioning, the labor demanded to reproduce what of ourselves is necessary for the labor. —“Here I am,” says the opossum mother, “with my seven children,” and there’s a bloodcurdling offscreen scream, “my six children,” she sighs, without missing a beat, and it’s bleak and it’s funny and it works in the moment, to be undone in the next: “I’m okay, Mom, I didn’t really die,” says the opossum kid, almost unseen—a suit’s note scribbled in the margins of the screenplay, realized as imperceptibly as possible, still managing to wreck the bit.)

And that’s not something they do to protect kids (i feel like it mostly makes kids feel weird and that feeling feelings is stupid). I think it’s something they do to protect adults.

As for #nodads, well. I mean. #nodads. —Fleeing a bear (don’t worry, they’re friends later), our protagonist robot falls, smashing a nest and its resident geese, and is left with an egg that soon enough hatches into the sole survivor, for which Roz takes responsibility: task oriented, she breaks this monstrous burden into three tidy, realizable goals: teach the gosling how to eat, how to swim, and how to fly, and inadvertently brings him up between and among what she does to set about fulfilling them. This isn’t coded as motherly, or mothering (Brightbill’s occasional modes of address notwithstanding); it’s just the work that needs to be done, when an infant is about. There’s no hint of authoritarian discipline, or patriarchal diktat, or any juvenile rebellion thereagainst. Other role models and caretakers abound among the animals on the island, all of them played by men, but not a one gets anywhere near striking distance of a father-figure: big brothers, tutors, mentors, rapscallions, nary a dad in the bunch.

But I can’t say the movie comes by its #nodads honestly: Roz, short for ROZZUM Unit 7134, is played by a woman, Lupita Nyong’o, and while there’s nothing remotely gendered or sexed about Roz’s design or presentation, femmebots are nonetheless very much a thing in the current imaginary: our AI assistants and helpful robots are coded as female far more often than not, clearly subservient, chipperly servile, selflessly available, and though Roz very much grows out of this role, the role is nonetheless there to grow out of. The movie can’t present a father-figure directly to Brightbill; it would throw Roz and that role into stark relief, and so what #nodads might be found isn’t by design; it’s at best an epiphenomenon of good intentions, a reflexive reaction to having slipped without thinking into another trope altogether (rather like the unfortunate echoes that ring in the only other roles played by women: the aforementioned opossum mother, and the slinkily manipulative third-act villain). It’s not anything the movie was trying to say; it’s what the movie didn’t realize it was saying, as it didn’t rise to the irony of stranding a soi-disant wild robot in such a domestically comedic situation.

But, that third-act villain—

The migration of the geese off the island and south, Brightbill in tow, was the first time since the opening, before the animals got verbose and the plot kicked in, that the movie took a breath and delivered some pure goshwow eyekicks. A shot of the weathered Golden Gate Bridge, deck aslosh with seawater, beautiful and wordlessly, terrifyingly implicative (that’s a 75-meter rise in sea levels): the movie cannily gives us a taste of what we hadn’t realized we’d wanted from it, in one of those moments thrilling, and stirring, but also earned. And the few-enough other hints we get, as to the state and condition of, well, us, in this world, ROZZUM robots crossing the oceans on container ships, headed for idyllic Syd Mead suburbs, the isolated and terribly compact farming outpost, that deploys a robot SWAT team to deal with an incursion of geese, the unindicated entity—Universal Dynamics? some nation-state, or city-state? an aggrieved, gunned-up farmers’ cooperative?—that sends an overpowered dropship with another robot SWAT team and the aforementioned slinky manipulator, all to fetch back a single stray ROZZUM unit: it would appear that human civilization, reeling from the ravages of a far more destructive warming of the globe than predicted, has retreated into heavily militarized enclaves, lashing out with overwhelming firepower to bigfoot the slightest hint of threat or variance. It’s not unrealistic when you put it like that, I suppose. But the movie does seem to present us with the first known example of solarpunk dystopia.

And yet, here’s the thing: all this tech? It all just, works. The various artificial intelligences, and Roz’s limitless power supply (unless the plot requires an outage), and the wingless levitation of the dropship and the villain, and the radio transponders (mostly), and the water-logged marketing decks, and, and, and I know, this isn’t what the movie is about, it’s all set-dressing and atmosphere and the occasional plot-point, it’s fine just to trust the tech as you let it enable you to tell the story you want to tell, but, but: that catastrophic sea-level rise, the isolated farm in the middle of a desert: isn’t just trusting the tech how we get to there?

Let’s face it: robots these days, in the current moment, are bartending mechanical Turks operated by untipped mixologists backstage at an Elon Musk launch party; artificial intelligence is a power-gobbling nonsense machine in some occulted service to the scammy shell games of ludicrously paper-wealthy fintech bros. They very clearly don’t just, y’know, work, not at all, and to a ruinous degree, and it’s not that every story with a robot in it has to address this fact, puncturing or at least punctuating the hubris of such tinpot Titans, but it’s nonetheless weird that a story so otherwise suffused with climate anxiety would, when it comes to the tech that’s shoving us into all this hot water, would just, y’know. Trust it?

It’s of a piece with the lashing out, sending a laser-powered SWAT team to take down a flock of geese: a default setting, unthinkingly assumed, a disjunction in the final work. So, when Roz sat herself down in a gorgeously rendered clearing to listen and observe the interactions of the animals about her, grinding away until she could learn how to talk to them, the better to sell herself and her services, all I could think of was the LLM she presumably depended on, hosted in some distant cloud-computing center, and all the power and water flowing to support it as it trained up on this vibrant new dataset. It was distracting. Exhausting, even. Dispiriting. —It’s all very pretty while it’s happening up on the screen, there. But.

As robot forces lay siege to the factory, Helena reveals she has burned the formula necessary to make new robots. The characters lament the end of humanity and defend their actions, despite the fact that their imminent deaths are a direct result of their choices. Busman is killed while attempting to negotiate a peace with the robots. The robots storm the factory and kill all the humans except for Alquist, the company’s Clerk of the Works (Head of Construction). The robots spare him because they recognize that “He works with his hands like a robot. He builds houses. He can work.”

—Filed 317 days ago to Paralitticisms; Comment.

Bookkeeping.

While we’re on the subject of money, and things people have said, let’s note these all together, shall we?

It sounds so odd to phrase it this way that I’m a bit nervous about saying it, but here goes anyway: fantasy doesn’t make different stories possible, but sometimes it makes different outcomes possible, through the literalization of metaphor that is one of the key things fantasy does. Moral strength can change the real world—and a good thing, too—but in a fantastic story it can make dramatic, transformative, immediate changes. The idea that such transformations always have a price is what keeps fantasy from being morally empty—magic may save time and reduce staff requirements, but it offers no discounts.

—John M. Ford

The magic in any particular story will do what it will do, regardless of what it ought to do. Sometimes I like a magic that brings order and redistributes resources in almost exactly the same way money does, and sometimes I like a chaotic magic that’s reminiscent of another effect of money… (If we’re going to look at power dynamics within fiction at least let’s keep an eye on all sources of power!) So it all depends.

—Helen Oyeyemi

When I was writing the book and trying to build a framework for how magic might operate, I found myself thinking about how often magic feels like a metaphor for access to a lot of money. Money and power. I don’t love this idea—that magic functions as a kind of credit card—but you can’t get rid of it.

—Kelly Link

This is why Fantasy is filled with aristocrats and warriors, or at the least of hobbits of independent means: with travellers and questers (which is to say: with holidaymakers) and so on—as, also, with rascals, thieves, rogues etc. And I suppose sometimes with students, at Hogwarts’ or the Unseen University and whatnot. The point is that Fantasy cannot be written in the John Berger, or even the Zola mode: not because of the generic mismatch of Fantasy as le naturalisme, or not only for that reason, but because Fantasy is a realm where work as such is always transmuted magically into magic.

—Adam Roberts

—Filed 481 days ago to Paralitticisms; Comment.

Wealth management.

Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me.

—F. Scott Fitzgerald, “The Rich Boy,” 1926

I am getting to know the rich.

—Ernest Hemingway, to Mary Colum,
lunch with Max Perkins

The only difference between the rich and other people is that the rich have more money.

—Mary Colum, to Hemingway, ibid.

The rich were dull and they drank too much or they played too much backgammon. They were dull and they were repetitious. He remembered poor Scott Fitzgerald and his romantic awe of them and how he had started a story once that began, “The rich are different from you and me.” And how someone had said to Scott, Yes, they have more money. But that was not humorous to Scott. He thought they were a special glamorous race and when he found they weren’t it wrecked him just as much as any other thing that wrecked him.

—Hemingway, “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” 1936

If I choose to write de profundis sometimes it doesn’t mean I want friends praying aloud over my corpse. No doubt you meant it kindly but it cost me a night’s sleep. And when you incorporate it into a book would you mind cutting my name?

Riches have never fascinated me, unless combined with the greatest charm or distinction.

—Fitzgerald, to Hemingway, correspondence, 1936

They have more money. (Ernest’s wisecrack.)

—Fitzgerald, notes

Fitzgerald had said, “The rich are different from us.” Hemingway had replied, “Yes, they have more money.”

—Edmund Wilson, footnote explaining Fitzgerald’s note,
The Crack-Up, 1945

Everyone knows the famous exchange between Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway (Hemingway refers to it in his story, The Snows of Kilimanjaro, and Fitzgerald records it in his notebook) in which, to Fitzgerald’s remark, “The very rich are different from us,” Hemingway replied, “Yes, they have more money.” It is usually supposed that Hemingway had the better of the exchange and quite settled the matter. But we ought not to be too sure. The novelist of a certain kind, if he is to write about social life, must always risk a certain ambiguity in his social attitudes. The novel took its rise from a sense of a disrupted society and from the interpenetration of classes, and the novelist must still live by his sense of class differences and must be absorbed by them, as Fitzgerald was, even though he despise them, as Fitzgerald did.

—Lionel Trilling, “F. Scott Fitzgerald,”
his review of The Crack-Up, 1945

And, for an instant, she stared directly into those soft blue eyes and knew, with an instinctive mammalian certainty, that the exceedingly rich were no longer even remotely human.

—William Gibson, Count Zero, 1986

—Filed 481 days ago to Paralitticisms; Comment.

Foreword.

There’s this cartoon by, oh, let’s say Don Martin: a comedian on stage holds up a sign that says I’M FUNNY. —Noncommittal titters from the audience.

Next panel, the comic’s swapped signs for one that says YOU’RE FUNNY. The audience hisses and boos. (“It’s interesting to note,” says critic Marjorie Garber, “that the entities most usually described as ‘hissing,’ in the early modern period as also today, are devils, serpents, and audiences.”)

Third and final panel: the comic, dripping flop sweat, swaps signs one more time: THEY’RE FUNNY.

Cue the gales of laughter.

Every text is written in the first person.

Yes, all of them: even soi-disant experimental second-person narratives; especially those ostensibly in the third: every text is a first-person text. (Yes, and also those in the fourth. Hush, you.) —Every narrative must have a narrator, somewhere—did you check behind the curtain? If you’re still unclear, approach it as you would any other criminal enterprise: ask yourself, cui bono? Who chose the matter, wrangled the theme, pondered characters and angles of approach, began as they meant to go on? Such a constellation of considerations can’t help but cohere into a point of view, and that’s where, much as a sniper in a nest, you’ll find your narrator. (And if you shrug and say, with a quizzical cock to your brow, you mean the author? I’ll sagely shrug and answer back, perhaps.)

Once you’ve found the narrator, you’ve found your I in the sky: first mover, first shaker, first person.

“Did you notice?” said the Classicist. I don’t talk about the Classicist much, do I. And I have to be honest, here: while I remember having had the conversation, I don’t remember what we said, exactly, or where we were, not even a general sense of the circumstances, anymore. So let’s say we were having coffee in what I think was the only diner in town. “She pulled the whole thing off,” said the Classicist, with an emphatic gesture of her cigarette (menthol, which she would’ve bought next door, at what might’ve been called a bodega if we’d been in New York, but was called a bakery when the protests erupted years later), “the whole thing, without once telling you what was going on in anybody’s head.” —The SHE in that statement being Patricia McKillip, and the WHOLE THING being PULLED OFF the Riddle-Master books, and the statement itself not entirely correct, or right, or true: after all, when Morgon wakes up after the shipwreck, we’re told:

He tried to answer. His voice would not shape the words. He realized, as he struggled with it, that there were no words in him anywhere to shape the answers.

That’s from the first page of chapter three, and while it might be the first time we’re told something about someone’s state of mind that couldn’t be directly observed, or inferred from what’s been shown or told, it’s not the last. (And if you’d aver that the struggle described and the insight realized might well enough be inferred, perhaps by someone especially empathetic, I’d invite you past the next paragraph to read what follows: “A silence spun like a vortex in his head, drawing him deeper and deeper into darkness.”)

No, what the Classicist meant, if you’ll trust me to speak after all these years for her (and I’m not getting her voice right, not at all): in the writing of the Riddle-Master books, concerned as they are with identity, and selfhood, McKillip nonetheless eschews the free indirect: she never once presumes to speak for her characters, by making like their interiority’s seeping through the narrative. —You know. The bits Stephen King puts in italics. (Talking about King is probably how we got to this emphatic statement in the first place.) —Anyway. True or right or correct or not, it stuck with me.

Every narrative has a narrator. This may seem a ravelled tautology, but tug the thread of it and so much comes undone: a narrator, after all, is just another character, and subject to the same considerations. What might we consider, then, of a character who strives with every interaction for a coolly detached objectivity that’s betrayed by every too-deft turn of phrase? Who lays claim to an impossible omniscience, no matter how it might be limited, that’s belied by every Homeric nod? Who mimicks the vocal tics and stylings, the very accents of the people in their purview—whether or not they’re put in italics—merely to demonstrate how well it seems they think they know their stuff?

It’s only those texts that admit, upfront, the limitations and the unreliability of their narrators, that are honest in their dishonesty. —The third person, much like the third man, snatches power with an ugliness made innocuous, even charming, by centuries of reading protocols: deep grooves worn by habits of mind that make it all too lazily easy for an unscrupulous, an unethical, an unthinking author to wheedle their readers into a slapdash crime of empathy: crowding out all the possible might’ve beens that could’ve been in someone else’s head with whatever it is they decide to insist must have been.

The first few sketches of what would become (distractedly expansive gesture) all that were written on a clunky laptop lifted from an unlit room, filled with abandoned computers, just off the elevator lobby where I worked for a couple of weeks as a temporary receptionist. They were scraps of scenes, beginning after a beginning and never finding much of an end, but suggesting strongly where they’d come from, where they might go: our protagonist, Jo Maguire, already surly and underemployed, out for a night on the town with Becker, her gay best friend (making a stab or two at what would become his “epitome of mediocrity” speech); staggering back from the bathroom in time to see Ysabel, our protagonist, winding up the dancefloor with the slow-burn opening of Cassilda’s Song—only it was YSABEL, and BECKER, and JO, because these sketches all were written in screenplay form.

I was already writing a screenplay—it was why I’d stolen the laptop; some folks I knew were vaguely acquainted with a pot of techbro proceeds, and thought maybe a micro-budget horror film might prove an attractive tax shelter. It only made sense, when I was procrastinating the one, to sketch this incipient other in the same medium, and anyway, there’s room to play, in a screenplay, with voice, with performance, because the performance isn’t the point: it isn’t the final product, it’s instructions for assembling the final product. And who knew? Maybe I’d find some techbro money of my own (it was thicker on the ground, in those days), that might want to shelter itself in a micro-budget pilot for a syndicated television show. —My dreams were so much larger then, if simpler.

But the money went in another direction, and all I had to show for it was a screenplay no one would ever watch, and this, this thing that, if it was ever going to be anything, would have to become something else.

As I was considering how best to go about getting done what I wanted to do, I thought once more of the Classicist’s emphatic statement—maybe because these things had started as screenplays, concerned with the movement of bodies and objects in space, with words spoken out loud, not left to echo in somebody’s head—but I’d already played once or twice with the techniques suggested, in other, shorter pieces, elsewhere (much as writers today come up through fanfic, I’d done some time in the graduate seminars of alt.sex.stories.d). The strictures they impose—the pragmatics of blocking, the seamless exteriority, the relentless focus on precise, specific moments—that make it necessary to deal only by implication with what it is prose is supposed to excel at, by talking outside the glass: they can’t help but appeal to a scrupulous fool like me. So I decided to pull the whole thing off without ever once telling you what’s going on in anyone’s head.

But now I’m worried: having said this out loud, have I tipped my hand? Given the game away?

“I just don’t get it,” I said, and here we can suppose I gestured at the magazine on the table between us with a cigarette of my own (clove, filterless, bought at the drug store on the corner, where they kept the porn under a shelf behind the counter, so you had to ask for it).

“What’s not to get?” said the Classicist, and you have to understand, I would never have actually left such a thing lying out like that, but I have to have something to point to. Still: I did speak to her about this. This is another conversation that happened. Trust me.

“Well,” I said, and took a crackling drag. “If you had a sister. A twin. Would you do something like that?”

“Depends,” she said. Let’s say she sipped her coffee. “How much are they paying us?”

“But,” I said, “I mean, to, to take something, like that. I mean, whether you really feel it or not—actually, I think it might be worse if you faked it—but to take something like that and put it on display?”

“Honestly,” she sighed, “worse things happen at sea.”

Second seasons are where television programs typically hit their stride, confident in their logistics, but still gripped by their originating dreams. Second albums are sophomore slumps. Second movements are when things take a turn, get contemplative: usually scored andante or adagio, between fifty and seventy-five beats per minute, depending on your metronome. I’m not sure what can be said yet, about second series of epic urban fantasy webserial ’zines. There aren’t that many around from which to generalize.

This one is for the usual suspects, I suppose, but it’s also for the Classicist, who gave me if not the original idea, then a notion around which an idea might articulate itself. (You mustn’t blame her for any more than that.) But also, it’s for you. You’re the one reading this, after all.

In the Reign of Good Queen Dick
Portland, Oregon
2015 – 2019

1. THEY’RE FUNNY

2. I know you are

∴ But what am I

—Filed 534 days ago to Paralitticisms; Comment.

Three little words.

There was an episode, one of my favorite moments in Star Trek, when Captain Kirk looks over the cosmos and says, “Somewhere out there someone is saying the three most beautiful words in any language.” Of course you heart sinks and you think it’s going to be, “I love you” or whatever. He says, “Please help me.” What a philosophically fantastic idea, that vulnerability and need is a beautiful thing.

—Hugh Laurie

EDITH
And you don’t want to talk about it? Why? Did you do something wrong? Are you afraid of something? Whatever it is, let me help.

KIRK
“Let me help.” A hundred years or so from now, I believe, a famous novelist will write a classic using that theme. He’ll recommend those three words even over I love you.

—The City on the Edge of Forever

The difference between “please, help me” and “let me help” is fairly dramatic. In Fry’s mismemory, Kirk seems almost to ghoulishly relish this cry for salvation, this opportunity to exercise his own benevolent power over someone in peril. In the actual quote, Kirk cites a novel we’ve not yet read, and the phrase itself is not a ventriloquised cry of need but a personal offer to serve.

—Erin Horáková

—The Law of Non-Contradiction

KIRK
Why do you say that?

EDITH
Sometimes you seem, well, disoriented, Jim, like a man just in from the country.

KIRK
Iowa?

EDITH
Further away than that.

KIRK
“When night begins to fall, all men become strangers…”

EDITH
It’s true. Who said it, I don’t recognize it.

KIRK
Wellman 9. An obscure poet. Someday people will call his work the most beautiful ever known in the galaxy.

EDITH
That’s a lot of territory.

—Harlan Ellison

—Filed 551 days ago to Paralitticisms; Comment.

• Previous