We am a camera.
Why have I got it in for the novel? Because it has been shifted away from life, whatever, as Wittgenstein put it, is the case, these last fifty years. Circumstances have imposed this shift. It is not the novelists’ fault. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the novel was at one remove from life. But since the advent of film and television and sound recording it is at two removes. The novel is now generally about things and events which the other forms of art describe better.
All the purely visual and aural sequences in the modern novel are a bore, both to read and to write. People’s physical appearance, their movements, their sounds, places, moods of places—the camera and the microphone enregister these twenty times better than the typewriter. If the novel is to survive it must one day narrow its field to what other systems of recording can’t record. I say “one day” because the reading public still isn’t very aware of what I call mischanneling—that is, using the wrong art form to express or convey what you mean.
In other words, to write a novel in 1964 is to be neurotically aware of trespassing, especially on the domain of the cinema. Of course, very few of us ever get the chance to express ourselves on film. (Having one’s book filmed is equivalent to having a luxury illustrated edition; it is not expressing oneself on film.) So over the novel today hangs a faute de mieux. All of us under forty write cinematically; our imaginations, constantly fed on films, “shoot” scenes, and we write descriptions of what has been shot. So for us a lot of novel writing is, or seems like, the tedious translating of an unmade and never-to-be-made film into words.
—“I Write Therefore I Am,” John Fowles
A charge that all of us who sell film rights have to answer is that we wrote our books with this end in view. What has to be distinguished here is the legitimate and illegitimate influence of the cinema on the novel. I saw my first film when I was six; I supposed I’ve seen on average—and discounting television—a film a week ever since; let’s say some two and a half thousand films up to now. How can so frequently repeated an experience not have indelibly stamped itself on the mode of imagination? At one time I analyzed my dreams in detail; again and again I recalled purely cinematic effects: panning shots, close shots, tracking, jump cuts, and the rest. In short, this mode of imagining is far too deep in me to eradicate—and not only in me, but in all my generation.
This doesn’t mean we have surrendered to the cinema. I don’t share the general pessimism about the so-called decline of the novel and its present status as a minority cult. Except for a brief period in the nineteenth century, when a literate majority and a lack of other means of entertainment coincided, it has always been a minority cult.
One has in fact only to do a film script to realize how inalienably in possession of a still-vast domain the novel is; how countless the forms of human experience only to be described in and by it. There is too an essential difference in the quality of image evoked by the two media. The cinematic visual image is virtually the same for all who see it; it stamps out personal imagination, the response from individual visual memory. A sentence or paragraph in a novel will evoke a different image in each reader. This necessary cooperation between writer and reader—the one to suggest, the other to make concrete—is a privilege of verbal form; and the cinema can never usurp it.
Nor is that all. Here (the opening four paragraphs of a novel) is a flagrant bit of writing for the cinema. The man has obviously spent too much time on film scripts and can now think only of his movie sale.
The temperature is in the nineties, and the boulevard is absolutely empty.
Lower down, the inky water of a canal reaches in a straight line. Midway between two locks is a barge filled with timber. On the bank, two rows of barrels.
Beyond the canal, between houses separated by workyards, a huge, cloudless, tropical sky. Under the throbbing sun, white facades, slate roofs, and granite quays hurt the eyes. An obscure distant murmur rises in the hot air. All seems drugged by the Sunday peace and the sadness of summer days.
Two men appear.
It first appeared on March 25, 1881. The writer’s name is Flaubert. All I have done to his novel Bouvard et Pecuchet is to transpose its past historic into the present.
—“Notes on an Unfinished Novel,” John Fowles
There’s more; enough to make me want to go back to A Maggot, especially since it wasn’t because I wasn’t liking it that I ended up putting it down. —I’m not saying I agree, mind, but I don’t disagree; Fowles is appealingly cranky, and here I am at the end of a long day thinking about Scott McCloud’s point that comics as a source of Saturday-morning glee no matter how well done face an uphill battle against the goshwow that movies (and videogames) can supply today that they couldn’t in the far-off Golden and Silver Ages, and I’m not saying I agree with that, either, but I don’t disagree, which is I think what I mean when I say “I’m thinking.” I mean, I’m thinking of other stuff, too. Anyway. Wormholes: my current commuter book.
Negative space,
or, Why I don’t trust æsthetes.
Which is funny, y’know, since I’ll forgive an artist almost anything if they can give me a clean pure hit of what it is I’m jonesing for. —This has been kicking around the back of my brain for over a week or so, ever since Miriam swore off Orson Scott Card, books unread. (And that has been kicking around for a while—ever since at least that Salon interview, y’know?) A discussion spawned; hell, a discussion went on a mad bender and woke up the next morning in Tijuana with a donkey because, you know, politics and art, and so trying to keep track of it all goes rapidly by the board. And anyway, the sort of person who says things like—
I’m perfectly willing to accept the label of “æsthete,” although I know it’s meant to be a term of horrible abuse. Speaking as one of these aberrant creatures, I will state categorically that my expectation that art will be “æsthetic” has no political content at all. None. It’s not a disdain for politics, just a recognition that politics and æsthetics aren’t the same thing. I have political views about politics and æsthetic views about art. You can mix the two if you wish, but don’t tell me that in refusing to do so I’m doing it anyway. And I don’t have any political views that are covert or unconscious. They’re all out in the open (in the appropriate forum), and I happen to feel strongly about them. The assertion that they must be unconscious is just Freudianism smuggled into politics.
—keeps showing up, and I end up shrugging and walking away, because, you know, it’s a perfectly alien point of view; I’m sure he’s a nice chap, puts his pants on just the same as anybody else, loves his significant others and doesn’t kick dogs in public, but what are you going to do? How can you respond?
Well, a couple of ways. First, you can point out that science fiction is largely a fiction of setting: the bulk of the iceberg that’s unseen, underwater, is the act of world-building, and in that act, politics is paramount. (One is building a polis, after all.) (Oh, hey, look! World-building again!) —Therefore, it’s all-too-appropriate to keep in mind an author’s politics when considering their science fiction: an author who, say, considers homosexuality to be an aberration, is un- (or perhaps less) likely to build a world that would appeal to a reader who does not. There’s an assumption clash: one of his fundamental, foundational bedrocks is abhorrent to me, and vice-versa.
One can respond: well, yes, but there’s nothing about aberrant homosexuality in Ender’s Game, so how can it clash? Heck, there’s nothing in that book about homosexuality at all! And I will resist the urge to say oh, you think so? and I will even resist the urge to say precisely! (It profits us not to contemplate the implications conscious or otherwise of Spartanly sexless boys playing at war; we will be accused of reading into the text that which manifestly is not there, and again we would have to say oh, you think so? and precisely! and it gets us right back to who’s on fucking first.) —Instead, I’ll allow as how there’s frequently large gaps in the jerry-rigged polis left as exercises for the reader: one can hardly describe every kitchen sink, after all; one must make assumptions, and count on the reader doing likewise (which among other reasons is why fan fiction [and slash fiction] is so popular in science fiction). But that’s precisely why when those assumptions suddenly clash, it’s unsettling, even violently dissonant; as an admittedly extreme example, it’s why Bill Lind’s militant musings are either utopia or unthinkable hell, with very little room in the middle for a take-it-or-leave-it reading.
But Lind’s polemicising; it’s the sort of political art Green is dismissing above, when he thinks he’s dismissing the point of view that says all art is political. Politics as she is spoke is just another map: it’s what we say is our understanding of how we all get along with each other, and as with anything we say, we lie, we cheat, we fuck it up, we contradict ourselves, we project and dissemble and misspeak. Art is one of the ways we get over ourselves: this is what we mean when we twitter on about fundamental truths and the like. We all have a little polemicist in us, some more, some less, and if it ever comes to a fight between the author and the polemicist I’m going to root for the author every time, and this is why you can read and enjoy and fiercely love art created by artists whose politics you abhor.
But that’s hardly accepting the term “æsthete,” and recognizing that politics and æsthetics aren’t the same thing is hardly asserting that never the twain shall meet. To so rigidly divide politics from art, to blind oneself so willfully to the political connotations and consequences of art, is as short-sighted and foolish as to insist that all art must agree with one’s own politics or forever be damned. Miriam isn’t looking to validate her world-view, after all; she just wants a pleasant reading experience (for several values of “pleasant”), and she thinks such a blatantly homophobic author as Card is less likely to provide that experience, and so why bother? Thus does she winnow her chaff. (And anyway, there’s some nice socialist realist stuff out there. Recontextualize it; you’ll see what I mean.)
But what I really wanted to do before I went on too long was quote some Delany, and so that’s what I’m going to do, dammit, at the risk of landing us right back on first again: I love my significant others, after all, and I know how to put my pants on both legs at once, and I never kick dogs in public, but this, this—
...for the poststructuralist critic, this oppositional tale between thematics and deconstruction is an old story. It is the story of two opposing forces whose right and proper relation is one of hierarchy, of subordination, of supplementarity. It is the story of the battle of the sexes, the antagonism between man and woman whose right and proper positionality is for woman to stand beside, behind, and to support man. It is the story of the essential opposition between white and black whose proper resolution is for black to provide the shadows and foreground the highlights for white, for black to work for white. It is the story of evil that finds its place in adding only the smallest of necessary spices to a pervasive, essential good. It is the story of nature and her cup-bearer, the primitive, posing a bit of relief for the rigors of civilization and its flag-waver, culture. It is the Other as the locus, as the position, as the place where the all-important Self can indulge in a bit of projection (i.e., can throw something forward into the place of the Other—or simply hurl things at the Other). It is the story in which the frail, fragile, and erring body is properly (as property, as an owned place) a vessel for the manly, mighty, and omnipresent mind; where masturbation (or, indeed, homosexuality or any of the other “perversions”) is a fall-back only when right and authentic heterosexuality is not available; where the great, taxing, but finally rich literary tradition, with its entire academically established and supported canon, occasionally allows us to give place for a moment to those undemanding (because they are without the power to demand) diversions (those objects we find when we turn from our right place of traditional responsibility) of paraliterary production—mysteries, comics, pornography, and science fiction. It is the story where the conscious and self-conscious subject occasionally discovers (i.e., uncovers the place of) certain inconsequential, or even interesting, slips of the tongue or sudden jokes that can be explained away by an appeal to an unconscious that is little more than a state of inattention. It is the story of the thinking, speaking, acting subject for whom the way to consider objects is as extension, property, tool; of presences merely outlined and thrown into relief by the otherwise secondary absences about them; of the authoritative voice that knows and speaks the truth, prompted by a bit of suspect writing whose proper use is only as an aid to memory; of primary creative work that, from time to time, may rightly, if respectfully, be approached through some secondary critical act; of the mad who can be heard to mention as they shamble past a few amusing or even shocking truths, here and there among their mutterings—truth that, alas, only the sane can really appreciate.
And you might say, why, that’s riddled with nothing but political assumptions! And I’d say, oh, you think so? And I’d say, precisely!
Braiding.
Perhaps the most singular thing about Tom Waits as an artist—the thing that makes him the anti-Picasso—is the way he has braided his creative life into his home life with such wit and grace. This whole idea runs contrary to our every stereotype about how geniuses need to work—about their explosive interpersonal relationships, about the lives (especially the women’s lives) they must consume in order to feed their inspiration, about all the painful destruction they leave in the wake of invention. But this is not Tom Waits. A collaborator at heart, he has never had to make the difficult choice between creativity and procreativity. At the Waits house, it’s all thrown in there together—spilling out of the kitchen, which is also the office, which is also where the dog is disciplined, where the kids are raised, where the songs are written and where the coffee is poured for the wandering preachers. All of it somehow influencing the rest.
—“Play it Like Your Hair’s on Fire,” Elizabeth Gilbert, GQ, June 2002
Here’s the thing:
So I read Crooked Timber last week, and Kieran Healy’s post on the problem of women in philosophy sticks in the corner of my mind: it seems there aren’t that many, not that many at all, and why is that? And some people say women just can’t argue in the rarified way that philosophy calls for, and others point out that’s bullshit—linguistics, say, and the cognitive sciences overlap philosophy in terms both of rarefaction and bare-knuckled barroom advocacy, and yet women aren’t nearly so underrepresented there. So why? What’s up? —Like I say, it sticks in my mind.
Then on Saturday, at our weekly gaming session, there’s a lull for my character, and I lean over and pick up a magazine. (I know I shouldn’t do this because it’s rude; when you’re not “on stage,” you’re effectively in the audience, but gaming as a medium is long on exposition and loves dialogue not wisely but too well, which is one of the reasons I do like it so, but when you’re not “on stage,” and you’re playing a rather dim or shall we say instinctual character and you don’t want to be tripped up by trying to forget stuff you learned when watching other people’s scenes your mind tends to wander and, oh, hell, all right, I picked up the magazine, okay! I just browsed. I still had an ear out for how making an open box was pretty much the same as making an open box.) —Anyway. The magazine: Discover, the September 2003 issue. (It was the one to hand.) And idly browsing the short and breathless pieces up front, my eye was caught by a title: “Girls Are Better at Math, But…” It was about some research conducted by Jacquelynne Eccles and Mina Vida at the University of Michigan, and you can read about it here, but that doesn’t have the punchline that caught my eye, so I’ll quote Mathematical Digest’s short, sharp summary, which does:
The data [based on interviews and questionnaires] indicate that girls’ math abilities outpace boys’ through high school, but the girls eschew math-oriented careers because they do not believe such careers are valuable to society.
Which bumped into Kieran’s post, still stuck in that corner of my mind. Ha! I said to myself. That’s why there’s so few women in philosophy! It isn’t valuable! It isn’t important! Y’all don’t rate, boys!
But then I started reading some of the posts that are littered about this issue, and it didn’t seem so funny, anymore. —And anyway, Michael Cholbi already made this point in the comments.
To find another life this century as intensely devoted to abstraction, one must reach back to Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951), who stripped his life bare for philosophy. But whereas Wittgenstein discarded his family fortune as a form of self-torture, Mr. Erdős gave away most of the money he earned because he simply did not need it…. And where Wittgenstein was driven by near suicidal compulsions, Mr. Erdős simply constructed his life to extract the maximum amount of happiness.
—“Paul Erdős,” The Economist, 1996
Erdős (pronounced “air-dish”) structured his life to maximize the amount of time he had for mathematics. He had no wife or children, no job, no hobbies, not even a home, to tie him down. He lived out of a shabby suitcase and a drab orange plastic bag from Centrum Aruhaz (“Central Warehouse”), a large department store in Budapest. In a never-ending search for good mathematical problems and fresh mathematical talent, Erdős crisscrossed four continents at a frenzied pace, moving from one university or research center to the next. His modus operandi was to show up on the doorstep of a fellow mathematician, declare, “My brain is open,” work with his host for a day or two, until he was bored or his host was run down, and then move on to another home.
—The Man Who Loved Only Numbers, Paul Hoffman
His language had a special vocabulary—not just “the SF” [The SF is the Supreme Fascist, the Number-One Guy Up There, God, who is always tormenting Erdős by hiding his glasses, stealing his Hungarian passport, or worse yet, keeping to Himself the elegant solutions to all sorts of intriguing mathematical problems] and “epsilon” [children] but also “bosses” (women), “slaves” (men), “captured” (married), “liberated” (divorced), “recaptured” (re-married), “noise” (music), “poison” (alcohol), “preaching” (giving a mathematics lecture), “Sam” (the United States), and “Joe” (the Soviet Union). When he said someone had “died,” Erdős meant that the person had stopped doing mathematics. When he said someone had “left,” the person had died.
—ibid.
Don’t get me wrong. Paul Erdős sounds like he was a great guy, fucking brilliant, had a devastating effect on mathematics, there’s the whole deal with getting your Erdős number and what that means.
But he wasn’t just moving from one university or research center to the next in a restless quest for mathematical talent. He was on the move so much because he was holy hell as a house guest. —He “forsook all creature comforts—including a home—to pursue his lifelong study of numbers,” the blurbs will tell you. Bullshit. He forsook the bother and worry of creature comforts. Other people cooked his food. Other people washed his clothing. Other people kept him from wandering into traffic. Other people woke him in time for his “preaching” appointments. Other people filled out his paperwork. And he was an incredibly generous man, gave money away like water, was always available to poke and prod at somebody’s truculent problem till it gave up its mathematical beauty, then collaborate on a paper and on to the next, but to pretend he was somehow above the domestic fray, divorced from the daily grind, is to mistake his suitcase and his orange shopping bag for his home; to fail to note that women are underrepresented in mathematics is to miss who might well have been doing a lot of the washing and the cooking and the picking up after when he showed up suddenly on the doorsteps of married colleagues saying, “My brain is open”; and if you don’t pick up on that, you’ll miss the ugly little subtext in all that talk above about “bosses” and “slaves” and “captured” and “liberated,” for all that he did notable work with a number of female mathematicians.
That sort of domestic obliviousness is something men (as yet) find a lot easier to get away with than women. Where’s the toilet cleaner? What did you do with the light bulbs? Do I put the liquid bleach in before or after the rinse cycle? I couldn’t find the baking powder—I thought baking soda would work just as well. Don’t you like your shirts folded that way? —And this has nothing to do with hunting giraffes on the veldt and what that did to our brains, either, and it has everything to do with who does what chores when, growing up, and who’s expected to keep things clean and fill the glasses, and truth be told there’s more than a little of that trick where you break a couple of plates and they never ask you to wash dishes again in there, too. And the extent to which men (broadly) are allowed to get away with this and women (broadly) are expected to pick up the slack is the extent to which men will (broadly) have an edge in fields that call for such extended grinds of rarified, abstract thought, best left uninterrupted by more mundane concerns such as paying the electric bill on time, and women will (broadly) be more inclined to seek out fields that are more, or are at least perceived as being more connected with day-to-day life. (Like linguistics, and cognitive science? Well, keep in mind we are talking philosophy and mathematics, here. Everything’s relative, and anyway, all generalizations are wrong, etc.)
Now, I’m not here to set Waits against Erdős in some titanic battle of the shambling weird old geniuses, art versus science, specialized compartmentalization versus kitchen Zen holism. For one thing, Elizabeth Gilbert never saw the kitchen she waxes so rhapsodic over, up there at the top of this thing. She interviewed him in the dining room of an old inn “somewhat near the mysterious, secret rural location where Tom Waits lives.” And if that kitchen Zen is nonetheless something that lights up my heart when I think about it (“Come on up to the house,” he’s singing somewhere, and I smile: there’s the secret, the mystery, the answer to how to get more women into philosophy: it’s a trick question), well, Gilbert never meets Kathleen Brennan, Waits’ partner in crime, the life he doesn’t consume: “I know nothing for certain about her,” writes Gilbert, “except what her husband has told me. Which means she is a person thoroughly composed, in my mind, of Tom Waits’ words. Which means she’s the closest thing out there to a living Tom Waits song.”
And Erdős lived by all accounts a rich and happy and fulfilling life, and Hoffman’s book, a sort of oral history of everyone, mathematicians and not, who hung out with him and solved problems with him and cooked for him and cleaned up after him, is full of love and joy.
So I’m here, now, and I’m lost. I’ve gotten sidetracked. It started as a joke, and became something darker, and—where am I now? I have paperwork to do and the cat has a thyroid problem and the back stairs need mending as soon as my elbow is better and I have no idea what I’m going to make for dinner tomorrow and I’ve got to figure out how I’m going to get the tabouleh set up for Wednesday what with the day job and the luncheon date that day and I don’t want to think about the dentist because all I want to do is write and yet.
Here I am studiously ignoring that tangled mess by nattering on about—braiding.
Maybe it’s just an excuse to quote Waits some more. Well, Gilbert, but it’s mostly Waits:
I ask Tom Waits who does the bulk of the songwriting around the house—he or his wife? He says there’s no way to judge it. It’s like anything else in a good marriage. Sometimes it’s fifty-fifty; sometimes it’s ninety-ten; sometimes one person does all the work; sometimes the other. Gamely, he reaches for metaphors:
“I wash, she dries.”
“I hold the nail, she swings the hammer.”
“I’m the prospector, she’s the cook.”
“I bring home the flamingo, she beheads it…”
In the end, he concludes this way: “It’s like two people borrowing the same ten bucks back and forth for years. After a while, you don’t even write it down anymore. Just put it on the tab. Forget it.”
Sketching.
So if I had the time, I’d write something that started with Jim Henley’s “literature of ethics”—his enlightening apologia for the capecapades set—then whipsaw through John Holbo’s posts on imaginative resistance (here, and here), moving quickly so you couldn’t tell I hadn’t done the relevant reading, and then bring it on home with Dylan Horrocks’ new essay on art as world-creation, and what that means for comics and gaming, those squallingly disreputable media-children. —But nothing’s gelling yet. And anyway, there’s other stuff I need to be up to. So.
(But hey: if you get there first, I’ll happily crib whatever you’ve got to say.)
How to destroy P2P.
Let’s say when you were younger than you are now that you went to your girlfriend’s senior-year prom and when she was occupied elsewhere (this would be after the thing with the fountain outside, so maybe she’s in the bathroom with her best friend, laughing as she peels off her damp stockings), you screw your courage to the sticking point and sidle up to the band between songs and say hey, you know, could you maybe play, you know, that song? The one by that band, Modern English? “I’ll Stop the World and Melt With You”? You know? And he laughs and says sure, in a couple of songs. And in a couple of songs they do and the way her face lights up when they do and you grin and hold out your hand is something to see.
Even if there’s a dozen other people at least lighting up all across the dance floor for the very same reason.
So you go online years later because, you remember that TV commercial Michael Palin did for that decent radio station in Chicago? Where he’s holding the pizza the whole time, going on about how on W-whatever, we don’t play songs over and over and over again until they lose all meaning and become a mockery of themselves like every other radio station in town, and then he looks down at the pizza and looks mournfully up at the camera and says, to think this was once “Stairway to Heaven”? I mean, yeah, “I’ll Melt With You” is total pizza, but her face lit up. You know? And when you were in high school everybody bought that Modern English album for that song but they all bought it on cassette and who has cassettes nowadays? And who can find the 4AD retrospective in their local record shop? So you go online and you fire up your favorite P2P filesharing software and you plug in Modern English and sure enough, presto! There’s a whole slew of copies of “I’ll Melt With You.”
Only just about every single one of them is that ghastly early ’90s remake they did as “the 80s Modern English” or some such shit after that goddamn Burger King commercial.
(Then again, Gilmore Girls used the La’s original version of “There She Goes” on its soundtrack or something, apparently, so hey, the filesharing thing wasn’t a total loss.)
Chestnut.
Between Sebbo’s digression into the Bloggerhans triumphalism that really isn’t the point of my homeschooling post below at all, and this genteel dustup over in Johnathon Delacour’s always-excellent journal, I’ve found myself falling backwards into thoughts of generalizations, and why we do them, and when, and how, and when they’re well done, and when they aren’t, and how, and why, little stuff, you know, so instead I’m going to talk about this quote, and this bit from the Tao Te Ching, which maybe have something to do with generalizations, what doesn’t, after all, but really they more sort of back into some really big stuff that kept trying to squeeze its way into the aforementioned homeschooling post no matter how many times I tried to wave ’em off, since, you know, really fuckin’ long, and if after reading this the connection isn’t so clear to you, keep in mind it’s only rather moreso to me; my muse, it sems, is a magpie. (Ooh! Shiny!)
The quote:
Anyone who is not a liberal at 16 has no heart; anyone who is not a conservative at 60 has no head.
Which has been said in a lot of different ways by a lot of different people at a lot of different times, so let’s take it, glib though it is, as if there were hidden inside a kernel of truth. —Because I’m starting to think there is, and not of the liberal-who-gets-mugged or the liberal-who-pays-property-tax-for-the-first-time variety. (After all, what of the conservative who gets arrested? —But are they really becoming liberal? Or have they merely found something new to conserve?) Let’s take as our text “Freedom,” the 80th chapter from Ursula Le Guin’s rendition of the Tao (she doesn’t call it a translation, and we might as well respect that):
Let there be a little country without many people.
Let them have tools that do the work of ten or a hundred,
and never use them.
Let them be mindful of death
and disinclined to long journeys.
They’d have ships and carriages,
but no place to go.
They’d have armor and weapons,
but no parades.
Instead of writing,
they might go back to using knotted cords.
They’d enjoy eating,
take pleasure in clothes,
be happy with their houses,
devoted to their customs.
The next little country might be so close
the people could hear cocks crowing
and dogs barking there,
but they’d grow old and die
without ever having been there.
And the 60-year-old says after a thoughtful pause, yes, I can see: this would be the best of all possible worlds; this is the solution at the other end of the moral calculus; this is the good life for the greatest number of people, with a minimum of pain and suffering. Utopia. Nirvana. On a clear day, you can just barely see it from here.
The 16-year-old? The 16-year-old blinks and shrugs and says, yeah, sure, but what the fuck do you do on a Saturday night?
South Park Agonistes.
“Conservative Punk Rockers?” I said, befuddled. “Well shit, Toby. It must really just be all about the clothes and the belts at this point, huh. I mean, if some kid can listen to a top ten pop song that sounds just like the other 9 top ten pop songs, support the regime occupying the white house, comb his gentleman’s Mohawk down into a respectable hairdo when it’s time for school and still call himself a punk, then it really has nothing at all to do with the ideas and ideals that got me into this whole thing when I was a kid. You know what Toby. Let’s give those fucking Simple Plan listening, Paul Wolfowitz supporting, spiky belt wearing conservative kids the word ‘punk’. It’s pretty useless at this point anyway, and I think that we could come up with a much better and less saleable word for a community based around songs inspired by anger and frustration and played by untalented musicians. Don’t you think, Toby?”
—Brendan Kelly, of the Lawrence Arms
Indeed. But:
Hippie was ten years old when punk was born—and that was 25 years ago! At least hippies don’t identify themselves as hippies—let alone whine about weekend hippies—anymore. I think you can safely call punk the far more conservative pattern of subcultural self-identification through the purchase, display and consumption of the proper commodities.
It’s kinda nice, how those two quotes talk to each other. Then you have to go and follow the links and realize that yes, Virginia, there is a conservative punk movement, and no, Virginia, it’s not bleeding-edge satire.
I was never punk. (Everybody who knows me done giggling up their sleeves? Thank you.) I was never punk; in high school I ended up with the Eclectics, who straddled the divide between art geeks and drama geeks. We didn’t dress any funnier than your average high school student in the late ’80s—okay, there was the fad for hospital pants, and I was famous for my Clint Eastwood serape, and Cith had a thing for porkpie hats. We listened to a lot of Prince and Joe Jackson and Robyn Hitchcock, and I still remember the day I stood in whatever it was we had before Sam Goody’s, staring at the wall display of Lifes Rich Pageant and The Queen is Dead, wondering which to buy (and now I wonder what might have happened if I’d bought the other); X and the Dead Kennedys and the Butthole Surfers and the Sex Pistols and the Violent Femmes didn’t come to me till later, and even so, you can tell: I wasn’t punk. We danced badly on purpose at homecoming and put out one issue of a pseudonymous student paper and worshipped spoons and swore we’d never forget each other. (Of course it all goes back to high school! For God’s sake, when we die we’re going to wake up in heaven and it’s going to be the fucking Westerburg cafeteria.)
I was never punk, but I can tell you this with great authority and a straight face: Stavros is punk. The chumps linked above? Not.
For all the good that does. —Now that I’ve drawn my silly little line in the sand, let’s admit it: DIY is profoundly attractive to the sort of libertarian who walks what so many people would rather talk, and there’s a certain conservative thrill to standing athwart the nasty brutishness of the world and yelling right back at it, and this day and age, if you’re on campus and silly enough to be duped by Horowitz’s moonshine, you might actually think you’re speaking truth to power. (One could also think of the characters in Repo Man as role models, to be perfectly snarky.) There’s no doubt that punk can vote Bush, or fight to repeal the estate tax, or post laudatory galleries of our soldiers at work in Iraq. But there’s a definite divorce of sign and signified here, one that rings some heavy-duty cognitive dissonance on anyone who went to high school back in the day. The plaid pants and the T-shirt panels safety-pinned to the backs of leather jackets, those deliberately ugly haircuts and the fuck-off sneers, the music (because it was always about the music, wasn’t it?)—it didn’t mean much, at least not coherently, but it did mean something, and it meant whatever it was that it meant with great fervor, and now it means—what? Let’s eat sushi, and pay a fair market price?
For fuck’s sake, remember when drawing Reagan with green hair was a sign of disrespect?
(Satire? ’Fraid not. But I still haven’t ruled out astroturf, myself.)
Sexing the pronoun.
A friend’s been going on about a recent inamorate: “Zie sent me a mix CD,” he’ll say, or “I can’t wait to see zir.” And on the one hand, I’m looking on with the bemusement of the comfortably entwined: gosh, aren’t they cute at that stage? On the other, my teeth are slightly on edge. Kids these days, with their hopped-up language, haring off after the latest fad without the least concern for tradition. Zie? Zir?
What the hell is wrong with hi and hir, huh?
At least, those are the gender neutral pronouns I recall as having (relatively) broad circulation, back in the day. But: as I teased my way back toward the day in question, trying to pin down the where and the when of how I’d first come across them, I was finding them decidedly slippery. I’d used them, of course, in a fanthing from 1987 or so—the androgyne sidekick of the steely protagonist of some third-generation xerox of Neuromancer: “Hi yanked hir ceramic throwing knife from the plastic telephone case and climbed out the window, lowering hirself into the neon-stained night,” that sort of thing. But I hadn’t invented them: who had? Who’d been using them? (I’d been reading a lot of Orbit , sure, but can we get more specific?) Had they just been in the air? Why had they gone away? Where had this zie and zir come from, and when, and was I out getting a beer or something while it happened?
And so we Google.
Our first stop is the vaguely dismissive Wikipedia entry, which doesn’t list my remembered set (hi, hir, hirs, hirself), but does inform us of two warring pronoun factions: sie, hir, hirs, hirself, and zie, zir, zirs, zirself, which was coined to address the possible confusion some saw in sie/hir’s overly femme tilt. But Wikipedia is criminally light on etymology and morally deficient when it comes to sourcing. “Some science fiction writers,” it says, helpfully hyperlinking science fiction, “have been known to use the sie and hir pronouns for fictional hermaphrodite characters.” Which authors, though? And what other pronouns? (Like hi, instead of sie?) —Trust me, in a herd of cats like “science fiction writers,” there’s no consensus. Especially for something so small as a pronoun.
(Wikipedia does list the first recorded usage of hir on Usenet, back in 1981—but the nominative form of this variant seems to be heesh.)
From there we move on to Dennis Baron’s “The Epicene Pronouns: A Chronology of the Word that Failed.” We have, it seems, abandoned the vagueness about our dismissal. —Baron’s list gives us a glimpse of how far back the quest for a gender-neutral English pronoun has stretched; how many have been tried; how none have caught on. He cites science fiction—we learn that LeGuin’s 1985 screenplay for Left Hand of Darkness used a, un, a’s (the novel, written in 1969, used then-generic he, his, him); we’re told that Klingon has the gender neutral ghach, and that Vulcan has no common gender pronouns—but that’s just ice skating over deep water, there. He does note the sie/hir faction (listed here as se/hir) is common on alt.sex.bondage in 1992.
(Baron also gives me at least a word that would probably have been useful all along: epicene. But: take a look at its dictionary definition, and you’ll start to get some idea of the problems we face when tackling something like gender and neutrality and pronouns. How can a thing which has characteristics of both the male and female also be sexless? How can it as well be effeminate and unmanly? —Baron also lets us know hi was indeed in use: in 1884, but as part of hi, hes, hem.)
From there we move on to the motherlode: the admirably monomaniacal Gender-Neutral Pronoun FAQ. The history page starts with William H. Marshall’s observation of the English epicene pronoun ou in 1789 and hares off into an impressively extensive listing. But again: light on the science fiction authors (then, why look to the words science fiction authors use? We want to know what real people say when they really talk about these things), and hi is still only noted as part of that 1884 set. I’m no closer to figuring out where my “broadly circulated” set came from, and when.
(It occurred as I was typing this up that maybe I’d been thinking of Medea: Harlan’s World; it’s about the right time, and the fuxes have a sexless if not entirely gender-neutral life-stage. But a quick browse through the usual suspects turns up no hits, and there’s no bloomin’ index. —Then again, maybe it was Alan Dean Foster?)
So why are all these attempts to give our language something it rather desperately needs doomed? (Are they doomed?) Well, it’s an attempt to consciously hack the way people speak and think, and the hack has a more-than-vaguely hectoring air about it: the way you normally think and speak is wrong, it says; this is the right way. That the champions of epicene neologisms do have a point exacerbates the effect. And we all know how popular Puritans are at parties. Call it the problem of utopia; like vegetarianism and dress reform and suffrage and free love and anti-vivisectionism and a fascination with esoterica and Asian religions, epicene pronouns bubble up every now and then, here and there, and when they recede yet again, well, maybe the high-water mark is a little higher than it was last time.
Progress.
Anyway: epicene pronouns aren’t enough. In a system of two genders, you need five sets of pronouns to cover all the bases properly demanded by an egalitarian politesse:
- male;
- female;
- androgynous, or epicene;
- sexless;
- assuming no gender at all, or non-specific.
The epicene pronouns, after all, still privilege gender (and sex): the person in question is assumed to partake of both. (This is how, by the way, epicene can at once mean “partaking of both sexes” and “effeminate, unmanly”: masculinity, after all, is a pure state of grace, from which one can only fall.) It would be best to have as well a pronoun set that one uses when it would be if not inappropriate then unnecessary to refer to a person’s sex (or gender) in the capacity in which one is addressing them: presidents and police officers, reporters and handyfolk, letter carriers and committee chairs. But it would be rude to say it: to deny their gender and imply they had no sex. Best to assume nothing.
(That’s the meaning of peh, the Spouse’s contribution to the field. —A modulation of penn, coined by Chas for use by his aggressively egalitarian Siblinghood of Wreckers and Freebooters, in our off-again on-again joint fantasy world. Saying “penn” in the game to refer to a hermaphroditic character got to be second nature rather quickly; unlike a lot of the aforementioned attempts at epicenery, it’s put together with an ear towards speaking: based on one rather than he/she, it runs penn, penn, penn’s, pennself.)
But if an epicene can’t make it, what hope has a true non-specific?
And anyway, we’re no closer to who planted hi and hir in my brain. Not that it’s all that pressing an issue: hi and hir might solve the bias problem that the overly effeminate sie and hir has, and it isn’t nearly so aggressively ungainly as zie and zir (the words, not the person): but say “hi” out loud, in the sort of context where one uses pronouns, and it’s all too quickly confused with “I.”
I think I like Delany’s game with pronouns best. In Stars in my Pocket like Grains of Sand—after an opening set on a grimly “normal” world (that is one of the most heartbreakingly beautiful pæans ever to the sheer power and beauty and necessity of reading) he rolls us into Marq Dyeth’s first-person narration, where she, her, hers, herself is the pronoun set of choice for addressing everyone you meet—except someone you desire. —Then it’s he, him, his, himself.
(And anyway, there’s always they. Are you not legion? Do you not contain multitudes?)
Mars
or, Misunderstanding.
Helene Smith went there, first.
“There,” being Mars. Not the Robinson Mars, or the Bradbury Mars (she might quite have liked that one, though English was the lingua franca), not the Wells Mars or the Burroughs Mars or the Marses of Bear or Bova or MacDonald, and not the Mars of Burton or DePalma or Moore. In the end, of course, Mars is what you make of it (ask not what it is about Mars, Red Planet, Bringer of War that so many human societies worshiped it as a blood-caked, vengeful deity: ask instead what it is about humanity)—and Helene Smith’s Mars was made of newspaper columns feverishly entertaining the possibility of life on the Red Planet. Its perihelic approach in the last quarter of the 19th century coincided with an error in translation: Giovanni Schiaparelli wrote of the streaks of color he saw while observing Mars, naming them “canali,” or channels; this was misread by the English and Americans as canals (surely, had French, Queen of languages, been involved, this whole misunderstanding might have been avoided), and on so slim a premise was hung the breathless tale of an ancient civilization, their planet wasting slowly but inexorably into desert, striving against all hope to draw the last water from dying seas to crumbling, mausoleum-haunted cities in an engineering feat the likes of which the Earth had never seen. (Why ancient? Why a desert, when Flammarion had written not twenty years before, “May we attribute to the color of the herbage and plants which no doubt clothe the plains of Mars, the characteristic hue of that planet…”? Mumford, of course, tells us the graveyard is the first sign of cities; it is also the last they leave behind. Still: Why such an air of death, and decadence, and genteel despair? —It is worth noting that Schiaparelli named many landmarks [seas, and canali, but also plains and mountains] after the Classical geography of Hell, but this may have no more to do with it all than the then-recent completion, after much heroic effort, of the Suez Canal through the ancient, mausoleum-haunted deserts of Egypt, or perhaps the decision made by Percival Lowell to build his great observatory in the bone-dry deserts of Arizona, where the air was clearest.) When Clara Gouget Guzman, a wealthy French widow, tried in 1891 to foster peace and harmony among the worlds by offering a prize of one hundred thousand francs to the first person to communicate with extraterrestrials, she excluded Mars from consideration; it would prove, she felt, too easy to contact. —Better to try for the shier off-worlders: those tall and blond Venusians, the squat, fungoid Lunarians, perhaps the as-yet unknown creatures that might brave the Great Red Spot just recently discovered on far-off Jupiter. (The Greys of zeta Reticuli and the reptilian Draconids from the constellation Draco were more shy still, hiding as yet in the wings; we were terribly provincial in those days. —Though one might well remark on the remarkable coincidence, that aliens from the constellation Draco are, themselves, draconic, the wise pattern-maker will smile benevolently, or roll his eyes in exasperation, as may be his wont, and explain, patiently, or through gritted teeth, that there is nothing to remark upon; there are no coincidences. Propter hoc, ergo post hoc; the constellation Draco is so named because we have always known that the aliens from that quarter of the sky are reptilian—here there be dragons. We have merely chosen to forget.)
I say Helene Smith went there first, but this is, in the end, sheer conjecture. She herself went nowhere, of course, except the offices of Theodore Flournoy, Professor of Psychology at the University of Geneva, Switzerland. He was interested in her claim to have been a medium or “channel” (canale, in the Italian spoken just over the Alps) for Marie Antoinette (though her handwriting, when under the influence, in no way resembled the former Queen’s, and Smith—which, of course, was not her real name—was more than willing to familiarize her royal chum with the latest contrivances of the Steam Age, so that Marie’s messages from Beyond might refer to telephones and steamships with no evident confusion); he was astonished to discover that, when put under hypnosis, Smith did not renounce her claims, but produced more, many more, as if from a bottomless well: she had lived in ancient India, and on Mars, and proved still literate in the Martial language when entranced, recording a number of messages in the Martial alphabet (for, in the late Victorian era, the sentient inhabitants of Mars were referred to as often as not as “Martials”). —Today, her curious and lovely curlicue script, which corresponds on a one-for-one basis with the twenty-six characters of the Roman alphabet, can only be found in James Randi’s Encyclopedia of Claims, Frauds and Hoaxes of the Occult and Supernatural, which fact reminds me of a pithy moral, though I cannot find the scrap of paper on which I jotted it down. —The French were delighted to discover that the ancient and advanced language of the Martials was structured identically to their own, which they had always held without peer in grammar or syntax. How nice to find such incontrovertible proof! We can, perhaps, ignore the fact that French was Mlle. Smith’s native tongue. The Parisians were more than happy to do so, and marveled at the sketches of Martial fashions she produced: unisex styles, with loose blousy pants and long, embroidered shirts cinched at the waist by broad belts, quite sensible attire for hot, dry days in the desert. (And we see again how advanced the Martians were, how ahead of their time. Unisex styling, almost a hundred years before the advent of the pantsuit, or the burning of bras!)
She was under hypnosis, and incapable of consciously lying, but Flournoy (unlike the French) was never swayed to believe she had actually lived on Mars, or in ancient India, or had preternatural contact with Marie Antoinette. Instead, he made a crucial distinction: While he did not believe what she said, he believed that she believed. For her part, Smith, who had come to realize Flournoy had been her husband in long-ago India, was furious at this perceived betrayal. She demanded a divorce—easily enough granted, as Flournoy had never recognized the marriage, no matter how much she might have believed in it. She never spoke to him again. By the end of her life, Catherine Elise Muller (for that was her real name, if ever there were one) had come to live full-time as the Virgin Mary.
Flournoy’s slippery concept of the truth, of course, plagues us to this day. (What else could lie behind the undergraduate’s favorite exit strategy from an inconvenient relationship? “I love you, but I’m not in love with you.” What you believe to be true is as valid as what I believe—unless, of course, your idea of love inhibits mine, much as her idea of Mars subverted his of a rational, logical universe. —No wonder she asked for a divorce!) So much so that, in an attempt to explain how Muller, or Smith, could so fervently have believed what was so patently untrue—or how Virginia Tighe could have so vividly remembered her life as Bridey Murphy of Cork, Ireland when she had never left the continent of North America—some researchers have coined the term “cryptomnesia,” for that which we know, but do not know we know, and so must remember in other ways. Virginia Tighe’s nurse, when she was an infant, was from Ireland, and told her many stories of the old country; surely it is easier to believe these stories might have permeated the malleable wax of her unformed mind, only to surface later as vivid memories she could not explain, than it is to believe in reincarnation! —Yes, well, sigh the pattern-makers, with a sardonic edge to their grins, it’s not called Draco because it looks like a dragon, now, is it? Look at it. Does that loose rope of stars with a noose at the end look like a dragon to you? No, it’s Draco because we know the Draconids come from those stars. We just don’t want to remember. (Or, says a dissenting voice, they won’t let us remember.) But all nod their heads and agree: cryptomnesia; QED. —Thus do the master’s tools chip away at the foundations of his very house.
But one should not laugh at the concept of cryptomnesia. Otherwise, one might have to believe a little green man really did climb through George Ellery Hale’s window late one night to give him an idea as to how he might build the world’s largest reflecting telescope, by far, on Mount Wilson in Los Angeles. Whether or not one chooses to believe, we must believe that he believed; one cannot argue with the enormous reflecting telescopes he built: three of them, two on Mount Wilson and one on Mount Palomar, much larger by far than any previous. —The little green man continued to climb through his window late at night and advise Hale on the quotidian details of running the Mount Wilson observatory until his—Hale’s—death, in 1938.
I say Catherine Elise Muller went there first, but isn’t the lesson to be learned rather that we all might have been there, at one point or another? (Cryptomnesia, perhaps, but what early childhood experiences could possibly have suggested to her what life on Mars was really like? A critic once described the compositions of Phillip Glass as sounding “like a high mass on Mars.” How did he know?)
Some time ago I picked up a book which purported to outline the curious societies springing up across America, support groups for those who are “walk-ins,” alien entities who, whether accidentally or with a deliberate agenda (always peaceful, of course, or so they tell us, and why should they lie?), have chosen to incarnate themselves as humans on the planet Earth. I was disappointed to learn that the author was not so much a bemused and gregarious skeptic as an enthusiastic fellow-traveler, and soon put it away, though not without gleaning what entertainment I could, much as a churlish man might kick a dog already lying at his feet, simply because he has nothing better to do. I was amused to discover that the symptoms of being a “walk-in” include a profound feeling of alienation, and were, in fact, remarkably similar to the symptoms of Young People who are Having Problems with Drugs. This might begin to explain the rather ambitious estimates of the number of “walk-ins” in the United States alone: some two or three million, in various states of self-awareness and confusion, with perhaps ten times that many still “asleep” to their true selves. Imagine! One in ten of us is from another planet! Does the possibility not fill you with wonder? —Bored, I aimed one last kick at the dog’s belly by flipping to the back of the book, where the author’s afterword promised to detail his own slow and painful journey to the “admittedly incredulous” realization that he was, in fact, an alien. I was not unrewarded. I can only ask you to imagine the peals of laughter which rang out when I discovered that the first inklings of his profound alienation, his questioning of his very identity, began during his freshman year at a small, private, liberal arts college in Oberlin, Ohio.
Diagrammanomicon.
Momus is one of my favorite pop stars, which should surprise no one: a lycanthropic formalist, a jet-setting dilettante, a gadfly in the best possible sense of the word, he writes fiendishly stylish pop songs about pirates and Beowulf and Wendy Carlos and Tokyo neighborhoods. I mean, how can you not love a song like “MC Escher”?
The conventions of rap dictate that every MC who takes the mic
Claims to be the best, fills his set with hype
It’s OTT.
But if we imagine a world where every MC really is badder and fresher
Than every other, it just gets madder and madder
One of those rooftop salmon ladders
Drawn by …
MC Escher
The impossible rapper
Ain’t nobody does it better
Under pressure
MC Escher
He’s so clever
Gives you pleasure
Forever…
His website’s always been a go-to for those coffee breaks when you want to spend fifteen minutes playing with ideas that might end up going nowhere, but so what. And, well, now he’s got a LiveJournal; more coffee, please! —Today’s entry starts out with one of the reasons why (un-neo-)conservatives today might well distrust the CIA beyond all expectation: the CIA, it seems, heavily subsidized abstract expressionism in the 1950s, as a cultural front in the cold war: macho, cerebral, muscular art, the art of capitalism and liberty, going toe-to-toe with socialist realism. (Following up on yesterday’s playful entry, which was in part about how pop art came along and yanked the tablecloth out from under abstract expressionism.)—The CIA pulling NEA duty? Horrors. But! From there, we skate into the fascinating work of Mark Lombardi, whose beautiful diagrams of money and power look like old skool uggabugga.
Anyway. Commended to your attention, and all that.
A creation myth.
There were, by most accounts, two Priest-Kings at the Theocratic seat of Aqiir. These accounts claim variously that they were brothers or cousins. The Efendi claim that they were father and son; that the one known as Efend (named posthumously—the Priest-Kings had little use for names) made up the one known as Bel, fashioning him solely for the purpose of shattering the Demiurge’s hold over death. There is even a rather fashionable heresy among the Efendi that Bel was a Steward, remade by Efend into a Priest-King as a test of the limits of Demiurgic power. The San of the Sanût archipelago claim that the Priest-King known as Bel did not hold the seat of Aqiir jointly with Efend, but was instead the Priest-King of San. His seat, they claim, was the mountain known as Mfirifir, and that when he was killed his realm died also, and within the space of a few years had become the Erg, driving his people, the San, into the sea. This is a believable story of itself, but the San consort with djiin, and follow Besor, the Mother of Lies; they also claim that San and Aqiir were lovers, and that the example of their love served to bring Love into the world—but slowly, like a drop of dew growing on a blade of grass suspended over the throat of a thirsty man; that the sudden shock of San’s death let in cold Reason like a glaring beam of light through the crack his passing left in the world; and that the giant eli, the island-squid, are intelligent, in their fashion, and that if you listen to the songs the San say they sing, you will learn one of the four truths left to us all.
These are variations, though, on the theme that runs throughout the Aqiirian lands—from the Sanût isalnds along the 700 miles of coast to the deep northern desert, throughout the Erg and the mountain ranges of the Efendiit and the Lekiimût. This story is the bedrock of Aqiir, and it sets the stage for all that follows.
In the beginning was the Demiurge, and the Demiurge was the world, and it was not good. The Demiurge created the world according to a great pattern, and is the world, and the pattern, all at the same time: that there should be a finite number ever to the people in the world, and that when they died they would be brought back into the world to live their life over again. Over this endless chain were set the Priest-Kings and their Stewards, given land and power to do as they saw fit, to no further purpose, or pattern. Bel and Efend (or San and Aqiir) were two of these Priest-Kings. Bel was, by all accounts, tall and strong and beautiful to look upon, and also quite fond of hunting. Efend was quite ugly in appearance, and stunted in his growth, and his back was hunched, and he did not have all his teeth, but he was fiendishly clever, and his creations were second only to those of the Demiurge, and even the God-Emperor was, they say, envious of Efend’s intellect.
Bel came to Efend one day, bored of his sport, desiring a new beast to hunt. And Efend, who could deny nothing to Bel, went away into his rooms in the great citadel at Aqiir to think on this problem. As he did so, Bel amused himself in another quarter of the citadel, which, from what little evidence survives, must have been one of the largest examples of Theocratic construction—eight miles to a side, with, in its center, a dome a mile in diameter and a quarter-mile high, floating above sixty-four great pillars like planed and polished mountain-roots. Efend’s rooms were at the top of the sixty-fifth pillar, which rose through the center of the dome and climbed another quarter-mile yet into the sky.
After some time Efend came to Bel with an egg—an egg made of clear glass, filled with swirls of color and light. Bel took the egg and smashed it, and out flowed so swift a creature that Bel could not catch its shape. Crying joyfully, he called to his hounds and set off after it.
And a year and a day later, he returned with its broken body. It was beautiful, all sinew and wings, and its feathers were all the colors of a sunrise, and its scales were the colors of all the moods of the ocean. Its blood, the color of rich wine, still dripped from Bel’s hands and lips, and from the muzzles of his hounds. “It was magnificent,” he said, with a touch of sorrow in his voice, “and I have never seen an animal that could run so fast, or swim so, or fly so high and far. But an animal that flees so becomes tired, and an animal that tires will make a mistake, and when it did… Please, Efend. Make me a new beast.”
And Efend smiled a small and curious smile, and swept the remains of the egg into one hand, and took up the glittering body of the beast in the other, and went away to climb the eight thousand steps to his rooms. And while he was gone, Bel called some people together and formed them into armies, and gave them weapons, and he built a citadel by the sea for himself and his hounds and five of his favorite Stewards, and he ordered the armies to lay siege to him, but he made short work of them with his marvelous sword. He raised up a second army, and gave them the citadel, and he had his hounds and his Stewards lay siege to it, and for a time he was distracted, but not for long. And when he came back to the seat at Aqiir he found Efend, who gave him an egg made of lapped leaves of copper riveted together, and Bel cried with joy and took the egg and lifted it up and smashed it down on the ground. And out sprang an enormous creature armored all in metalled scales so strong that Bel’s marvelous sword could not pierce them, and it leaped straight for Bel’s throat like a river, and Bel was bowled over. Their wrestling was clamorous, and raised great clouds of dust that blotted out the sun, and in their tumbling they brought down eight of the great pillars like planed and polished mountain-roots, sending the ceiling of a quarter of the dome crashing to the earth. But after a year and a day Bel came up out of the rubble bearing the sullen weight of the beast over his shoulder, and his eyes were downcast. “It was magnificent,” he said, “and I have never felt so weary, or had my strength tested so—no matter which way I turned and thrust, I could not find a weakness! But then, I noticed that before shifting its weight, it would squint one eye at me, taking my measure, and the very next time it did so I braced myself and twisted its neck until it cracked. Even an animal with so much tireless strength will make a mistake, and when it does… Please, Efend. Make me a new beast.”
And Efend smiled a small and curious smile, and swept the shards of the second egg into one hand, and took up the tremendous body of the beast in the other, and went away to climb the eight thousand steps to his rooms. And while he was gone, Bel called some people together and assembled them into work-gangs, and set them to rebuilding the great pillars that had been destroyed by his wrestling, and to raise the roof that he had brought down to the earth. But this was dull business, and he left it in the charge of one of his Stewards, and took some of the people down to the sea and made ships for them, and taught them to sail, and then swam out to fight them by himself. And for a time he was distracted, but not for long. And so he came back to the seat at Aqiir, where he found Efend, who did not give him an egg, but instead held something behind his back.
“What do you have for me, Efend?” asked Bel. Efend said nothing. Behind his back he did hold a third egg, it is true—a cool and blemishless egg of obsidian. But as he had come down the eight thousand steps from his rooms, he had felt it jump, once, in his hands, and this filled him with dread. He said to Bel that it was nothing, really.
“Oh, but it is,” said Bel. “It is something which you are holding back from me, and you are playing with me, and you are trying my patience. Give it to me. Please.” And Efend gave the egg to Bel, whom he could deny nothing, and Bel took the egg and smashed it. Out of it crept a cautious creature, sinuous and black, neither cat nor lizard, though it perhaps took equal parts of both. Bel stared at it, fascinated. He drew his marvelous sword and struck, and the beast reared up and struck back, and they sparred there until a careless blow by Bel—who, truth be told, was becoming bored with this sport as well—that left his arm open to the beast’s claws. They marked him with three perfectly scored lines of blood.
Bel left off the attack he had been half-heartedly planning and resolved to do away with this, the most disappointing of Efend’s gifts. And then the beast did a most curious thing: it raised its spade-like snout and sniffed the blood that oozed down Bel’s arm and, so quickly that he almost did not have time to interpose his marvelous sword, it leaped, so that even as his sword pierced its belly to the hilt, and even as its blood like cold black water spilled over him, it took his wounded arm in its mouth and worried at it with its teeth. Bel felt his own blood flowing into the beast. They stood there, Bel stooped backwards from the weight of the dying beast, the beast motionless save for the pulsing of its throat, and Bel stared, fascinated, into the beast’s dumb eye. He saw light growing within it, an eye that was for a moment so glossy and black that he could see himself, clearly, before it clouded over. And then it shuddered, swiping his side with its claws, and that was when he threw it from him with a shrug of his marvelous sword.
“It was,” he said, and he paused, and turned to look at Efend directly. “Magnificent…” He wiped the blade of his sword, thinking. It had not been a swift beast. Nor terribly strong. And he had been wounded before, many times. But something, something about this time, this beast, had started his heart so that it still battered itself against his ribs.
Efend smiled then, a broad smile, and not at all curious. He had knocked out two of his teeth. He explained that he had given them to the beast, and that with those teeth, the beast had had the power to kill.
Bel shook his head at that, and interrupted. “I cannot die,” he said to Efend. “I am a Priest-King.”
Efend shook his head, and his smile was now so small as not to be noticed. “With those teeth,” he said, firmly, “the beast could have killed you.”
Bel frowned, and looked away, at the dome of the great citadel and the dust still hanging in the air where his people labored to raise one of the great columns. He looked out at the mountains beyond, and up at the sun in the hazy white sky. He took a deep breath of hot dry wind blown over hundreds of miles of empty desert and he looked down at the beast like a puddle of tar at his feet. And he smiled suddenly, and leaped into the air, laughing. “Make me another!” he cried. And Efend swept the shards of the egg into one hand, and the limp body of the beast in the other, and went away to climb the eight thousand steps to his rooms. “And another!” cried Bel after him as he went. “And another! And another!”
And that is how the lekiim were born.
On magic—
An upside to dead hard drives and digging through old backups, hoping against hope you stashed file X away on that dusty 250 meg Zip: you run across old correspondence. This, then: part of a four-year-old exchange with a prosepctive player in a role playing game that never quite got off the ground. I was trying to explain what it was I wanted from magic, in this ambiguous other world, and explain my dissatisfaction with the name-the-spell-and-roll-the-dice mechanics of the magic systems available in most commercial games, and in the course of laying it out, well—read for yourself, if you like. —I’m not “back” yet, by the way; you’ll know when I am: there’ll be a whole re-design and everything. A sleek new front end and some tinkering under the hood. And yes, it’s been two years since I started this blogging thing (hereabouts): thanks to wood s lot and language hat, who noticed, and where were the cards and flowers from the rest of you? And I was going to say something about the monumental effort that is the Koufax Awards, but cutting and pasting old correspondence is easier. Enjoy; I’m off to wrestle with CSS and figure out what I’m going to do with six whole header tags.
I’d like to know more about the magic. Not just about the “system” (if there is one) that your character learned, but how she came to learn it, and the story behind it. I don’t want to know it, or all of it, before we begin play; I’m perfectly comfortable letting it be something that develops as we go along—but it is something that I want to be privileged in the character’s narrative. Is seeing auras something that she can just do? Or is it a formal school of Liannan magic? Does everyone take on, or at least invoke, aspects of their deities? Although we do need to think of it in a list as a starting point, and to prevent the dreaded Assumption Clash (at the start), I’d like very much to as quickly as possible move past it, to the point where the magic is more holistic, organic—magical.
Of course, she is your character. Not mine. (And you know all this.)
My other point: my own preference for the invocation of magic would be to keep it as naturalistic as possible. (I think that’s the word I’m looking for.) Since we want to keep things ambiguous—and we do, trust me. Thus, instead of saying, “I want to use Waters of Vision to try and figure out what Huxtable’s up to today,” saying “I stand up suddenly, walk over to the dresser, and peer into my reflection. Then I pick up the pitcher and pour some water into the bowl. [Imagining as I am the pitcher and bowl that grace the guest rooms of every decent house in Western movies, say.] I splash some on my face, rub my eyes, flick some water over both shoulders to slake My Lady’s thirst, mutter ‘Wongoti rhanun maah affata maah,’ under my breath, and think dark thoughts of Huxtable. Where is he? What is he doing?”
Re-reading all that, it comes across as a bad White Wolf “how to pose” essay. Sigh.
I know you know all this. And yet I feel compelled to say something about it: to avoid Assumption Clash, and also to forewarn (and thus forearm) us both against taking the magic for granted, relying on the system, instead of trying to elicit that which the system is designed to facilitate. Relying on the system has the paradoxical effect of making the magic both more and less real: on the one hand, it removes everything from the realm of concrete action and physical description, distancing everyone from what’s really going on; on the other hand, by invoking rules, one lends an air of authority if not verisimilitude to the proceedings. “I’m using Waters of Vision to try and see what’s going on” implies that the magic is real; “I’m peering into the water in the bowl on my dresser to see what I can see in the ripples” leaves crucial room for doubt and ambiguity.
(The paradoxical epistemology of rpgs: precisely because they are so subjective—based almost wholly on the subjective cause-and-effect dialogue between players and referee—they end up being much more objective than the real world.)
Am I making any sense? Is this in any way helpful? Or am I worrying enormously over nothing at all?
I do intend to start compiling a list of Liannan linguistic terms any day now. (I did find chapters of Lowell’s book on the Martian canals, with pencilled maps and catalogs of canal names—so we can name features on Mars what the original Victorian areologists would have named them, and not base it on today’s names. But that’s a different matter entirely.) And again, your character doesn’t have to be from the Liannan culture; make up your own. (Somewhere in there, the Liannan morphed from being all Canal Martians to being a specific culture of same. Sorry for the confusion; it’s all still a tad bit in flux.) Feel free. Once we know some specifics, we can start to build the bigger picture of Mars/Melender. But I’m liking the Carolinian/Indonesian feel so far, so I think I’ll run with that, myself. “Wongoti rhanun maah affata maah,” roughly translated, would mean “Wring the tears from my eyes that my sight be clear.” Though I’ve probably mangled the grammar horribly.
But like I said: there aren’t any linguists playing. (Unless you’re holding out on me.)
Yes, I intend to pick at everyone’s characters to some extent. You just had the bad luck to a) pick a role which is crucial to one of the main themes I want to toy with (and dissatisfactions I’ve had with games in the past); and b) you got the most in the fastest. I’m going to have a knock-down, drag out fight with K next on the not-so-fractious South.
Magic.
I have, as you’ve probably gathered, a profound ambivalence towards the subject.
Magic is something that I’ve always wanted to believe in, rather like God or an afterlife, but for the longest time I was never quite able to bring myself to make the leap of faith required. I have, sort of, on the point of magic at least (and it is, somewhat, related to, if not God, then some of the questions God was created to answer). —Though it has been pointed out that I am making that leap on the word of a known pathological liar.
Then, I always thought Sherlock Holmes got it wrong—when you’ve discarded the improbable, whatever’s left, no matter how impossible, is usually the truth.
But magic isn’t something to believe in, to my mind. It’s a way of thinking, a way of perceiving, a way of being; not something that is or is not, not something one does. Magic, to my mind, is essentially passive; it is almost entirely about perception. (Which makes it incredibly powerful; knowledge, after all, is power.) (And perception, as any student of management skills will tell you, determines reality.) Still. Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water; after enlightenment, chop wood, carry water.
Healing? I tend to ascribe most of it to the placebo effect, I’m afraid—which is not to denigrate it at all. The placebo effect is incredibly powerful (1 in 3 is better odds than a lot of medicines being sold for two and three digits a gram), and knowing how to elicit that and use it is a necessary skill to being a healer—one given terribly short shrift, these days. And it can be argued that to successfully harness the full power of the placebo effect, the healer must know that what he or she is doing isn’t a placebo him or herself; the idea that the sole purpose of the trappings of ceremonial robes and eldritch tomes and magical words and angels and devils is to convince the magician that she is capable of doing this thing that all experience says is impossible. Ego boost. Not that I’m going to quibble if I ever find myself with a mysterious ailment unresponsive to the usual treatments. There is no objectivity in a foxhole.
Wealth spells? Synchronicity; coincidence (which is not a dirty word); the old trick of remembering the hits and forgetting the misses. Divinatory preparation of one sort or another which leaves one better able to grasp opportunity when it knocks; psychological reprogramming, almost, to deal with whatever mental blocks might be present. —And did you notice what I’ve tried to do? Already, I’m sliding out the back way, trying to explain one mindset in terms of another: magic in a scientific sense. As if there is a deeper reality, an objective cause-and-effect relationship underlying the outward skin; a backstage to sneak into, waving my press pass, where the band is hanging out with gorgeous groupies and good booze and the Truth. Doomed from the start.
(A wealth spell is performed; a recalcitrant creditor sends a long-overdue check the next week. Are they related? Did the one cause the other? More to the point: would it have happened if you hadn’t? What-if games; endlessly fascinating, ultimately futile. I, myself, am ultimately agnostic on the subject—who can say?—but Descartes’ wager is awfully enticing. Might as well believe there’s a connection; what have you got to lose?)
Maybe I’ve just been reading too much Lao Tzu.
Did Crowley really practice what he preached, with regard to wealth spells? Somehow, I doubt it, but that’s probably just my terribly prejudiced (if terribly fond) view of the cantankerous old prankster. “Do as I say, don’t do as I do,” he says, eyes twinkling; “Say boots without shoes.” Indeed.
What don’t I believe in?
The numinous. I don’t believe the spirit realm or astral plane or whatever you want to call it is somehow separate from the physical; there is only one place, and that’s inside my head where I remember and process the impressions I receive from my senses. Period. (You might be real; then again, you might be a figment of my imagination. It’s an overactive one, honest.) The physical/spiritual split is one of many unfortunate remnants of the 18th century, when we first approached these ideas and concepts with a rigorous scientific mindset (or at least what passed for same at the time). (I do tend to find it odd that so many people who profess to hold holism in such high regard never question this ultimate dichotomy. Then again, I have a profound mind/body split to deal with myself—I can never get used to the fact that me, this point of consciousness in space and time, depends so utterly on this sack of meat and water and cascading chemical reactions. Gives me the willies, it does. Peoples is a paradoxical lot…)
Which actually takes care of a hell of a lot of it, I think.
I also tend not to lend much credence to fields, auras, brainwaves, action at a distance. Yes, I know such things have been measured and detected (by objective means; I’m sorry I keep falling back on that, but I do)—Kirlian auras and such (and I remember the lovely photos of Bowie’s hand before and after snorting cocaine)—but much, much too small, both in terms of power and in terms of information-carrying capacity, to account for the phenomena they are generally supposed to cause and/or influence and/or account for. Though and at the same time I don’t rule out the possibility that in some fashion picking up cues from someone’s electromagnetic field—dueling kinesthesiæ, perhaps—is a part (and perhaps even an important part) of the general ability we have to synthesize sometimes astonishingly accurate (and sometimes ludicrously wrong) overviews of someone’s current state from tiny cues in body language, facial expression, vocal tone.
Feh. Could I qualify it any more, you think?
Where do I stand, then.
Yes, I do believe in magic. Though putting it that way is deceptive. One doesn’t believe or not believe; one is either capable of perceiving the world in those terms—or at least appreciating that perception—or one isn’t.
(Say I’m in an apartment that is empty, and I hear my flatmates bounding up the stairs from outside, animatedly discussing something. Some time passes, and I realize that the front door never opened, and the apartment itself is silent. I poke about. It’s still empty; no one stands on the steps, waiting for the door to open. Later that evening, it turns out neither was anywhere near the apartment at that time. Perhaps we ought to whip out Ockham’s razor at this point—but which way should it cut? In the end, “intense auditory hallucination” is no more simple nor explanatory than “premonition.” Whichever way you slice will ultimately be determined by your prejudices and perception—things you bring to the table. The skeptic will find the idea of “premonition” distasteful, and feel that some hallucination or intensely relived flash of memory a far more simple explanation [though he couldn’t point to the specific mechanisms and parts of the brain involved, or the specific stimulus that resulted in the response in question]; the magician would find the idea of premonition far simpler—or, given that others had similar experiences in that apartment throughout the summer, that there’s something about the location itself, the apartment, perhaps, which causes temporal or psychic echoes [though she would be hard-pressed indeed to cite the specific mechanisms whereby these things occur, nor would she be able to ascertain directly whether the echoes heard ever “actually” happen in the “real” world, at some other time].
(Me? I generally shrug and leave well enough alone.
(And if you believe that, I’ve got a lovely bridge to sell you. All right. I generally try to appreciate both sides of the equation, and take up one or the other as it suits me, and keep my back to the wall and my eye on the door and plenty of wiggle room all around.)
Okay. So I heard people who weren’t there, pretty clearly.
I’ve thought thoughts I’m pretty sure were being thought by the person next to me, and not the thoughts that would ordinarily be flowing through my stream of consciousness at the time. (I tend to lose patience with most descriptions of telepathy—that’s not what thinking’s like, at all.)
I’ve seen someone’s vague premonitions come rather startlingly to pass, in a way which pretty much rules out subjective interpretation. (But not lying, to be sure.)
I once wore an eyepatch for a live-action game (I was playing Peter Norton, a part Cherokee riverboat gambler—ah. It’s a long story) and experienced some rather intensely odd visions through the covered eye throughout the day.
People who were close to me—and people who weren’t, especially—have told me they come from Other Places or Other Times. My response has varied from guarded acceptance to having a difficult time keeping a straight face. I have been embroiled in their personal mythologies, and wrapped up in crises I couldn’t begin to explain today, but certainly seemed terribly important at the time. (A summer’s afternoon, a crown in a tree—okay, I wasn’t there for that bit. I’m sorry; I’m being maddeningly vague. To say nothing of coy. Perhaps I should just move on.)
What else?
Well, there’s the guy in Amherst, Massachusetts who took an ex of mine under his wing. They both fight psychic evil in their sleep, and he’s both summoned the Christ spirit down to officiate at a handfasting and banished Set from this plane of existence. (Ever notice how the most powerful wizards are almost always working at the mall?) (Of course, they could just be taking Crowley at his word. I really think that sort of thing worked much better at his class level in an Edwardian English economy. But I’m teasing, now. Slap my wrist.) I later learned that the mythology of the whole fighting-psychic-evil-in-one’s-sleep thing was based on a then-popular series of trashy fantasy novels…
And yes, I once sat on a couch and felt someone elicit some impressively tangible sensations in my hands without touching them. Suggestion? Hallucination? Supercharged Kirlian auras? Ancient Chinese secret? Magic?
Obviously, I’m rather skeptical. I would even call myself a skeptic, to a certain extent, except that it clashes with my boyish charm and gee-whiz enthusiasm, and most people who call themselves skeptics give skepticism a bad name. (Rather like those die-hard atheists unable to wrap their brains around the idea that they could be clinging to the lack of God through faith and faith alone…) My classic example being Tarot cards: while I won’t ascribe to them any supernatural or paranormal powers (seems rather silly to do so to something mass-produced by US Games Systems and distributed willy-nill across the country—how many people and machines have fondled that pack before you picked it up, smelling of incense?), I do find them terribly useful in a, well, magical sense. By focusing on a problem, question, or situation, and then interpreting and reinterpreting it through the symbolism and structure of a Tarot layout, I can be forced into thinking about it in new ways, gain new perspectives, make connections I hadn’t made previously. Magical—and yet not at all supernatural or paranormal. Useful—but not every time, and not always to the same degree. But most skeptics will dismiss Tarot cards and Ouija boards and the like out of hand as piffle, as nonsense, as things only fools and weak-willed simps would believe in—strictly out of prejudice. Terribly irrational on their part, don’t you think?
I adore The Amazing Randi; I think he’s doing a terribly important thing, and I wish more people paid attention to him. But he’s a complete asshole, and as fanatical and dogmatic as the people he’s arrayed himself against. Makes a person sigh, it does.
Science and magic aren’t incompatible in the sense that it is possible for individuals to appreciate both. Magic is lovely, dark and deep, and it does work; science is one of our most impressive collective accomplishments. I see both of these statements as true, without snapping my rhetorical neck. (And scientists are just as capable of bad science as neo-pagans—or pagans of any stripe, to be sure—are of bad magic.) Rather like general relativity, and quantum theory: both work in their respective milieux, though both are contradictory, and fail when they cross to the other side.
Christ. Stop me before I start quoting Zen koans. Please.
I suppose, then, that my view of magic is ultimately passive. Will in accordance with change, not change in accordance with will. Might explain why I’ve gotten so little done with it.
(I do quite like the dictum that one must, of course, buy a lottery ticket to be able to win the lottery. Chop the wood. Carry the water.)
The $64,000 question, of course, is what does this have to do with your character, and her magic?
I believe rather firmly that there is no power inherent in systems of magic, pantheons, words, wands, rings, etc. These are merely the tools used by our brains to work with some terribly numinous stuff, metaphors which enable us to grasp otherwise slippery, preverbal and postlogical concepts. (Which is why these things are all so damned hard to talk about.) Thus, there’s nothing more real or true about, say, Martian magic than Hermetic. Both are means to a similar end, rather like Islam and Christianity. (Actually, that’s a terrible analogy.)
Your character will be speaking with something when she speaks with her god, but her god is, ultimately, a mask. It remains to be seen how much of that mask is created by the thing in question, and how much by your character.
This does not in any way lessen the importance or even reality of the systems, pantheons, words, wands, rings, or masks. In fact, learning the “truth,” coming to see the reality, may very well destroy your ability to work with it in the first place.
Okay. Given that it’s been almost a week now since you sent me the letter in the first place, I should probably wrap this up and whip it back.
One hopes this hasn’t been too deadly dull.
B’s been in touch and has expressed a guarded interest. He’d prefer a Monday or Tuesday night slot. Sigh.
And Jenn’s reading a biography of Alice Roosevelt (Teddy’s eldest daughter).
And I’ve just got my hands on Luc Sante’s Lures and Snares of Old New York.
This thing could take off yet.
More later.
Know what you know you don’t know.
It’s one of those paradoxes that help make this such an interesting time: collectively, we know more than ever before; the facts at our fingertips double and redouble at a faster and faster pace, yet ignorance—appallingly smug, triumphal, aggressive—brazenly, stubbornly keeps up. Neal Gabler indulges in hyperbole when he calls the Bush administration a “medieval presidency,” but it’s judicious hyperbole. There’s a blatant disregard for facts (which are bunk and “stupid things”) that get in the way of truth (which you just, you know. Know). Call it an all-too-human turning away from the terrifying spectre of the things we know that we don’t know getting bigger and bigger every year, clinging to signals of our own devising, when signals grow so thick and furious we can’t begin to tell them from the noise. Call it an all-too-mendacious embrace of post-modernism at its slippery worst by a fatherly crew that self-righteously claims to know best. —But you can’t deny it’s true.
Well. I suppose you could. Rather the point, really.
So I commend this post over at The Early Days of a Better Nation to your attention. You might not agree with the conclusions reached by some of these struggling (and ex-) creationists, and you might think the drive to reconcile the Bible and science is doomed from the start, but I’d like to hope you’d be moved by anyone’s honest attempts to seek out the stuff they know they don’t know, to aggressively take in as many facts as they can find and hold their truths up against them and see what they can make of the mess.
Ne raillons pas les fous; leur folie dure plus longtemps que la nôtre… Voilà toute la differénce.
It’s not a perfect match. Then, what is? —But it’s well known, the love the Norquist-Rovian axis has for Mark Hanna and William McKinley and that golden Gilded Age of yore, and dire prognostications as to what the world will look like if they get their way (nasty, brutish, and Darwinistic) doubtless fueled the savage glee which attended a recent viewing of Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd (George Hearn, Angela Lansbury, the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, 1982). “There’s a hole in the world like a great black pit and it’s filled with people who are filled with shit…” Yeah! you think. And Sweeney’s just the person to do something about it!
Um.
But it’s important, you know, not just to look to your own nightmares, but also the other side’s dreams. (Accepting for just this one quick moment the arrant fiction of a monolithic “other” “side.”) What sugar plums dance in Karl Rove’s head when he lays it on a 550–thread-count silk-and-cotton pillow? I couldn’t begin to guess with accuracy. But I can go searching for biographical information on Robert W. Chambers (in an unrelated matter) and stumble over the text online of perhaps his most famous story, “The Repairer of Reputations,” part of the King in Yellow sequence, regarding the effect that a rather disreputable play (“The King in Yellow”) has on those who read it:
If I had not caught a glimpse of the opening words in the second act I should never have finished it, but as I stooped to pick it up, my eyes became riveted to the open page, and with a cry of terror, or perhaps it was of joy so poignant that I suffered in every nerve, I snatched the thing out of the coals and crept shaking to my bedroom, where I read it and reread it, and wept and laughed and trembled with a horror which at times assails me yet. This is the thing that troubles me, for I cannot forget Carcosa where black stars hang in the heavens; where the shadows of men’s thoughts lengthen in the afternoon, when the twin suns sink into the Lake of Hali, and my mind will wear forever the memory of the Pallid Mask.
But we were talking about dreams, and not dire prognostications. —This is standard stuff, 19th c. metafiction and pulpy Edwardian horror, all coy unspeakables and things seen in a glass, darkly, and indeed, Lovecraft swiped quite a bit from Chambers, who was (though this is not saying that much) the better writer. (Lovecraft was the better storyteller, and this made all the difference. —We later learn what became of the author of this play:
“I only remember the excitement it created and the denunciations from pulpit and press. I believe the author shot himself after bringing forth this monstrosity, didn’t he?”
“I understand he is still alive,” I answered.
“That’s probably true,” he muttered; “bullets couldn’t kill a fiend like that.”
(O! What author wouldn’t kill for this immortality?)
Dreams, then: Chambers launches “The Repairer of Reputations” with a utopian vision to be troubled by the undercurrents he roils to its surface with that infamous, unseen play, and whether it’s a deeply personal idea of utopia, a carefully constructed utopia of people whose politics he wishes to disparage, or a utopia slapped together from random memes plucked from the Zeitgeist, I couldn’t tell you—nor does it matter. For it is definitely a utopian vision of a 1920 to come, a clean and shining 1920 on a hill, as seen from Gilded 1895:
Toward the end of the year 1920 the government of the United States had practically completed the programme adopted during the last months of President Winthrop’s administration. The country was apparently tranquil. Everybody knows how the Tariff and Labor questions were settled. The war with Germany, incident on that country’s seizure of the Samoan Islands, had left no visible scars upon the republic, and the temporary occupation of Norfolk by the invading army had been forgotten in the joy over repeated naval victories and the subsequent ridiculous plight of General Von Gartenlaube’s forces in the State of New Jersey. The Cuban and Hawaiian investments had paid one hundred per cent., and the territory of Samoa was well worth its cost as a coaling station. The country was in a superb state of defense. Every coast city had been well supplied with land fortifications; the army, under the parental eye of the general staff, organized according to the Prussian system, had been increased to three hundred thousand men, with a territorial reserve of a million; and six magnificent squadrons of cruisers and battle-ships patrolled the six stations of the navigable seas, leaving a steam reserve amply fitted to control home waters. The gentlemen from the West had at last been constrained to acknowledge that a college for the training of diplomats was a necessary as law schools are for the training of barristers; consequently we were no longer represented abroad by incompetent patriots. The nation was prosperous. Chicago, for a moment paralyzed after a second great fire, had risen from its ruins, white and imperial, and more beautiful than the white city which had been built for its plaything in 1893. Everywhere good architecture was replacing bad, and even in New York a sudden craving for decency had swept away a great portion of the existing horrors. Streets had been widened, properly paved, and lighted, trees had been planted, squares laid out, elevated structures demolished, and underground roads built to replace them. The new government buildings and barracks were fine bits of architecture, and the long system of stone quays which completely surrounded the island had been turned into parks, which proved a godsend to the population. The subsidizing of the state theatre and state opera brought its own reward. The United States National Academy of Design was much like European institutions of the same kind. Nobody envied the Secretary of Fine Arts either his cabinet position or his portfolio. The Secretary of Forestry and Game Preservation had a much easier time, thanks to the new system of National Mounted Police. We had profited well by the latest treaties with France and England; the exclusion of foreign-born Jews as a measure of national self-preservation, the settlement of the new independent negro state of Suanee, the checking of immigration, the new laws concerning naturalization, and the gradual centralization of power in the executive all contributed to national calm and prosperity. When the government solved the Indian problem and squadrons of Indian cavalry scouts in native costume were substituted for the pitiable organizations tacked on to the tail of skeletonized regiments by the former Secretary of War, the nation drew a long sigh of relief. When, after the colossal Congress of Religions, bigotry and intolerance were laid in their graves, and kindness and charity began to draw warring sects together, many thought the millennium had arrived, at least in the new world, which, after all, is a world by itself.
But self-preservation is the first law, and the United States had to look on in helpless sorrow as Germany, Italy, Spain, and Belgium writhed in the throes of anarchy, while Russia, watching from the Caucasus, stooped and bound them one by one.
No, it’s not a perfect match; one doubts Norquist’s America would have a Secretary of Fine Arts, and we all know what Rove’s cadre thinks of being represented abroad by other than incompetent patriots. But it is a glimpse of the roots of the light at the end of the tunnel through which some seem determined to drive us.
Information wants to be free, fine—but art isn’t information.
Clay Shirky, an information and technology guru who’s written some really interesting and insightful stuff, has a mad-on against micropayments. For whatever reason, he doesn’t like the idea of charging users a small amount for content delivered over the web—his essay, “The Case Against Micropayments,” has been the go-to piece since it was written in 2000 for the camp that insists information wants to be free, and paying for content over something as immediate as the web will never work. Of course, no workable micropayment system has emerged since then—certainly nothing to match the grandiose dreams of 1998—so there’s been no need to say anything more on the subject.
Until BitPass. This simple system, still in its beta test, is gathering steam and making noise, so Shirky has updated his stance with an essay entitled “Fame vs Fortune: Micropayments and Free Content.” Here’s the entirety of his argument against BitPass:
BitPass will fail, as FirstVirtual, Cybercoin, Millicent, Digicash, Internet Dollar, Pay2See, and many others have in the decade since Digital Silk Road, the paper that helped launch interest in micropayments. These systems didn’t fail because of poor implementation; they failed because the trend towards freely offered content is an epochal change, to which micropayments are a pointless response.
The failure of BitPass is not terribly interesting in itself. What is interesting is the way the failure of micropayments, both past and future, illustrates the depth and importance of putting publishing tools in the hands of individuals. In the face of a force this large, user-pays schemes can’t simply be restored through minor tinkering with payment systems, because they don’t address the cause of that change—a huge increase the power and reach of the individual creator.
He then goes on to say some interesting and insightful things about blogs and news, but almost nothing at all about art, and artists, and the power of fandom.
Shirky’s argument fails ultimately because he seems to see an audience’s need for art as a hole that can be filled by any old content: and if you can fill it with free content, why on earth would you pay? Sure, blogs will (rarely) be important enough to inspire their audience to plop down a dime for every entry—but a Firefly fan isn’t going to just as happily sit down and watch Fastlane just because they want some entertainment on a Friday night.
Luckily, Scott McCloud and Joey Manley are both there in the clench, with eloquent, powerful rebuttals. Dirk Deppey says he’ll have something to say on Monday. —But I’ve got to go to work at my day job right now, so that’s all you’re going to get from me at the moment.
Rising again.
Can we add “Utterly incompetent” to Fox’s new motto of “Wholly without merit”? I’m talking about the entertainment division, here, not the news division—though Lord knows there’s hardly been a difference, really. (Surely the only value derived from the Fox News Channel is a jagged, adrenaline-laden form of entertainment? Calisthenics for one’s rage? Like being chased by a pit-bull on one’s morning jog…) —After a couple of years of pre-empting Futurama at the drop of a second-string quarterback’s helmet, running new episodes unannounced in the dead of summer, at a 7 pm (or was it 7.30? No, wait, it’s 7 again. I think) timeslot that fit it about as well as its usual companion show, King of the Hill (a fine enough show in its own right, but what was the rationale? That they’re both cartoons?), after showing it so infrequently that the final season was stretched out over two broadcast years, Fox finally decided Futurama just wasn’t going to cut it. So they canned it.
The Cartoon Network picked it up. Showed reruns at the same time on a regular day. Promoted it. It’s a huge hit for them. Re-runs on TNT ain’t doing too shabby either. The DVDs are selling like hotcakes. “I think we came in ninth place twice in the past few weeks on just a random rerun at 11 pm on Cartoon Network,” said executive producer David Cohen to TV Guide recently. “And this is including broadcast TV. It’s astounding what a little promotion and regular airing will do for you. Maybe Fox is feeling a twang of remorse. Hopefully.”
Perhaps moreso, now that the Firefly movie is good to go.
Sci fi (and I use the Ellisonian bête-noir advisedly) is in a slump on television right now; westerns (horse-operas? oaters?) are non-existant. So the times perhaps weren’t auspicious for a sci-fi–western hybrid, for all that it came from the pen of (little director’s viewfinder-thingie of?) fanboy god Joss Whedon. Nonetheless, that’s precisely what Fox put out last year: and then they shelved the original pilot, ordering Whedon and his partner Tim Minear to whip out a Great Train Robbery riff instead, over a long weekend; then they proceeded to pre-empt episodes at the drop of a baseball glove, showed them out of order, skimped on promotion, and when they decided the ratings just weren’t impressive enough, they killed it with three finished episodes yet to air.
Firefly has since become a hit in Canada and England (and Mexico, and Denmark, and Australia, and South Africa, and…). The DVD collection of all 14 filmed episodes hasn’t officially gone on the market, but available pre-orders have sold out at Amazon—where it was apparently no. 3 on the sales ranking chart for a while. And there is the aforementioned movie deal. Over at Universal, instead of Fox. Cue Nelson-esque “Haw haw!”
I’m of two minds on the subject. On the one hand: yay. Firefly was just about the best SF television had produced in, well, a hell of a long time—only Farscape can give it a run for its money, but it took Farscape a year to hit its stride, and Firefly only got 11 (aired) episodes. (Deep Space 9—far and away the best of the Treks—had trouble sustaining runs of good shows, and only occasionally hit Firefly’s mark, much less the mark of Firefly’s potential. —Being unable to stomach wooden acting and leaden Arthurian parallels, yr. humble correspondent cannot adequately assess Babylon 5’s impact. Though he will allow as how those two alien ambassador guys had their moments.) The look of the show was a bracing mix of soleil noir—sort of what The Fifth Element was trying to do to Blade Runner—spaghetti-lite western, and Alien’s lived-in industrial æsthetic. Whedon’s ear for dialogue (and, by extension, that of his usual stable of thoroughbreds) proved as adept at folksy westernisms (in space!) as it had at his patented whip-smart teenspeak. And the ensemble cast did an impressive job of keeping the nine main characters and their interwoven relationships sharp and clear. (Unless, of course, muzzy ambiguity was called for. Which it was.) The episode “Ariel” was an engagingly messy look at betrayal and its consequences; “Objects in Space” had some truly impressive stream-of-consciousness treatments of murky psionic powers (or madness?); “Out of Gas” is just triumphant; and that pilot Fox shelved, casting a pall of doom about the whole enterprise before it ever got out of the gate—I already said something about the best SF television has produced?
But at the same time, I worry that it’s a television idea, not a movie idea. For all that the details weren’t carefully worked out—were there hundreds of colonizable planets circling a single star? Or hundreds of star systems with a never-specified faster-than-light drive?—it was a world to be explored. The ship itself was a world: those nine interwoven characters require a broad canvas to have some give and take; someone is going to get short shrift in a mere feature-length movie. And Whedon was edging up, in his usually sneaky, self-deprecatory, junk-culture kick-ass way, to a Really Big Idea.
Whedon has cited in a number of interviews the effect his professor Richard Slotkin had on him at Wesleyan, and Slotkin’s book, Regeneration Through Violence. With Firefly, I think he was starting to play directly with those ideas in an edgily dicey manner. —Set 500 years in the future, the show’s political setting was a none-too-subtle recreation of our own post-Civil War Reconstruction: the Alliance of rich, industrialized central or core worlds had fought a war to quell the rebellious, rural, economically disadvantaged outer planets. The rebel “brown coats” had been put down, the frontier overwhelmed, the Union cemented, and now all our heroes can do is scrape by from job to job, keeping a low profile. It’s a standard western setting, troped up into the future, yes—but that doesn’t account for the chill that went down my spine when, in the (second) pilot, as our heroes engineer their last-minute getaway, Mal (the captain of the ship, a former rebel who still defiantly wears his brown coat), smiles and tosses a bon mot at the villains of the set-piece: “Oh,” he says, “we will rise again.”
Jesus, I thought. Does Whedon know what he’s playing with here?
After all, playing by the rules of the metaphor, Mal maps onto the Confederacy—the rebellious, rural, economically disadvantaged butternut-coats that lost. And he’s stubborn, proud, independent, self-reliant, a rugged, gun-totin’ he-man, whose moral gut regularly outvoted the niceties of his ethics, and who nicely filled out a tight pair of pants. He is, in many ways, the sort of ideal idolized by reactionaries and conservatives, and his beloved brown-coat rebellion was everything the neo-Confederates claim of the poor, put-upon, honorable South.
“Oh,” he says. “We will rise again.”
But! Mal was also rather explicitly something of an antihero. Whedon calls his politics “reactionary”—oh, heck, at the risk of derailing my sputtering argument, let me quote him at length:
Mal’s politics are very reactionary and “Big government is bad” and “Don’t interfere with my life.” And sometimes he’s wrong—because sometimes the Alliance is America, this beautiful shining light of democracy. But sometimes the Alliance is America in Vietnam: we have a lot of petty politics, we are way out of our league and we have no right to control these people. And yet! Sometimes the Alliance is America in Nazi Germany. And Mal can’t see that, because he was a Vietnamese.
And there’s the world Mal and his crew and fellow travelers play in, where the folksy talk is peppered with Cantonese slang. Women work as mechanics and fight in wars. The frontier isn’t romantic; it’s hardscrabble, nasty and brutal. The Alliance isn’t Evil, just banal, mostly—and what conflict and oppression we see is driven not by race or religion or (admittedly homogenized) ethnicity, but class and economics, pure and simple.
Whatever it is that’s going to rise again, it sure as hell doesn’t look like the neo-Confederate dreams of the South.
The last batch of westerns—Peckinpah, Leone, et al (and yes, I know morally ambiguous began with John Ford, at least; let’s keep this simple)—rather famously took the straight-shooting archetype of the morally upright western hero: the cowboy, the marshal—and turned his independence and integrity and self-reliance rather firmly inside-out. And that was a good and even necessary thing to do, and anyway it made some kick-ass movies. But in savaging the happy macho myths America had told itself back in the 1950s, in trying to cut away the swaggering pride and racism and cocksure aggrandizement that landed us in Vietnam, among other things, we went too far. Hokey as it might seem, there was a baby in that bathwater. And what I think Whedon was doing with his SF western was very deliberately walking up to the other side of the kulturkampf and taking their idea of a good man—the independence, the self-reliance, the folksy charm, the integrity (cited more in breach than practice by the Other Side, whose idea of self-reliance means I got mine, screw you—but I grow partisan, I digress)—he was taking that idea of a good person, a person capable of doing good things, and giving it back to us.
And that sort of dramaturgical working is big enough you want the long wide canvas of a TV show, you know? Not so much two hours at the multiplex. Which is why I worry.
(On the other other hand, the relative luxury of a filming schedule, as opposed to the hurry-up-and-on-to-the-next-week schedule of television production, could prove a boon; I’m keen to see what Whedon can do when he really stretches himself.)
There was more, but it’s late. I was going to point out the episode where Mal fights the duel for Inara’s honor on the planet with the swords and the courtly manners and the genteel chivalry and how that plays into all of this, but it deals with the weak point of Inara and my brain’s muzzy, and anyway the ep while zippy and fun wasn’t one of Jane Espenson’s finer moments. So I’ll end with a smattering of links: here’s the Nielsen site. It’s hard to say what part the noted deficiencies in their methodology might have played in undercounting Firefly’s audience; they weren’t facing a language barrier, after all. But there are stations revolting, and viewers as well, fed up with the damage wrought by the admitted shortcomings of their monopolistic methodology. (Yr. humble correspondent had at one point considered a comparison of the beleaguered television fan, unable to watch the shows she loves, with the beleaguered voter, unable to vote for the candidate she needs. This will, perhaps, be left for another day.) —And I’ve saved the best for last: here’s Tim Minear, executive producer, writer, and director, who months ago posted a brusquely moving elegy about the last days of filming the show.
Anyway. It’s late. I’m for bed.
Looking forward to collecting what would be recollected later.
How could I have forgotten where to find that marginal note? Because I am a dolt, that’s how.
(I wonder, Van, why you are doing your best to transform our poetical and unique past into a dirty farce? Honestly, Van! Oh, I am honest, that’s how it went. I wasn’t sure of my ground, hence the sauciness and the simper. Ah, parlez pour vous: I, dear, can affirm that those famous fingertips up your Africa and to the edge of the world came considerably later when I knew the itinerary by heart. Sorry, no—if people remembered the same they would not be different people. That’s-how-it-went. But we are not “different”! Think and dream are the same in French. Think of the douceur, Van! Oh, I am thinking of it, of course, I am—it was all douceur, my child, my rhyme. That’s better, said Ada.)
Context is everything (“p. 120. parlez pour vous: speak for yourself,” offers Vivian Darkbloom). —Speaking of which, I shall now remedy the grave disservice of failing to note the delicious synchrony of wood s lot marking Diane di Prima’s birthday scant days after I picked up Memoirs of a Beatnik on a (prurient) whim. There’s frequent delicious synchronies to be found at wood s lot; this is but the latest, which leads us to di Prima’s website, and leads me to add One Too Like Thee to my list of Phantom Books to be Tripped Over Someday if I’m Lucky. (And one does get lucky: why, look! From a year-old number of the Nutmeg Point District Mail:
UNHISTORY AT LAST!
Tor Books will publish Adventures in Unhistory. The last book published during Avram Davidson’s lifetime will once again be available for the edification and pleasure of readers. Not a month goes by but your editor receives multiple inquries from would-be readers, collectors, librarians, and even booksellers seeking what has become a genuine rara avis among recently published books.
Further details, including publication date, will be announced as they become known.
(And though said details have yet to forthcome, this mere hint of an announcement is itself enough to kindle hope in a breast long since inured to stoney disappointment. My breath is yet bated, if not wholly held.)
So: to repair this divarication, I’ll return for a moment to Ada, or Ardor and note an instance of prior art, to be found on p. 86 (“strapontin: folding seat in front,” offers Darkbloom) of the Vintage International trade paperback edition:
Being unfamiliar with the itinerary of sun and shade in the clearing, he had left his bicycle to endure the blazing beams for at least three hours. Ada mounted it, uttered a yelp of pain, almost fell off, googled, recovered—and the rear tire burst with a comic bang.
Well. Okay. Maybe not. But still.
