University of Western Ontario is starting a History of Philosophy roundtable, discussing, as the name implies, various topics in the history of philosophy. I’m of two minds about studying the history of philosophy – my attitude towards the practice is a mixture of enthusiasm, dread, dismissal. The reasons why are a little complex, but that’s what blogging is for.
In my time as a graduate student, I've come across two approaches to the history of philosophy that seem pretty mainstream. One is history of philosophy as antiquarian studies: philology on writer X that seeks to get X right. One is understanding historical developments in current terms: asking if Aristotle was a functionalist on philosophy of mind – that question makes no sense to me. It applies the concepts of a long-ago philosopher to current debates with little heed to the radically different context of two writings.
I did my first few years of training in philosophy in a very historically-minded department, and I think I came out better for it. When I engage the work of a complex, difficult philosopher, I put a lot of effort into understanding their terminology, concepts, historical context, and the reasons why they thought the problems at the focus of their work were worth the trouble. I emerged with the ability to read a complex work in a very deep and careful manner rather quickly. You might think this leaned toward the antiquarian definition, and to a degree this was true.
But the individuals who played the biggest role in my education treated their historical subjects as their specialties, but they had no particular loyalties to them. At Memorial, I never worked on history of philosophy with any professors who said their specialty writers were the apex of philosophy, or that those writers were the only ones to get the universe really right. I’ve come across that attitude among some students who work on history of philosophy, and I hope that disappears from them.
My friend Jeremy once came up with the perfect definition of such a slavish historical philosopher: For a devoted X-ian, the only time X was ever wrong was when X himself said some element of X’s own corpus was wrong.
However, I’ve discovered over the past few years that I don’t want to work on history of philosophy, or secondary material generally, as my main specialties. I didn’t want to use my intellectual capacities in the service of illuminating the work of another writer. I didn’t want to spend the bulk of my time arguing over interpretations of another writer, with other writers whose careers were also spent commenting on the same writer as me. I’m just not humble enough to be that subordinate, even to someone who had proven themselves as remarkable as Aristotle, Descartes, Hume, Kant, Heidegger, or Russell. I find secondary material to be writing about philosophy. But I want to write philosophy.
For me, the history of philosophy is a tool for creating concepts and working through contemporary social and ethical problems in philosophy. For example, I’m interested in Spinoza, but not just exegesis of Spinoza’s writings. He’s one of the few philosophers in the Western tradition for whom ontological matters – questions about being and what is – are closely integrated with ethical questions. This kind of reasoning is very important for my own work, but it’s difficult for mainstream philosophers to see this kind of convergence as legitimate. Being able to say that a big name like Spinoza did it too grants my ideas at least a small grasp on that legitimacy.
More than that, I engage with philosophy’s history to find the hidden subtlties of thought and strange concepts in dark corners that we usually don’t mention to undergraduates in the field. I’m looking for peculiarity that can inspire, or strange elements that could have sparked a completely different revolution in philosophy but never caught on because of some social or institutional factor beyond the writer’s control (this is my view of why Johann Fichte didn’t invent phenomenology in 1801).
I’m interested in taking part in this roundtable at Western, provided I can get transportation to London three or four times during the next term. I revere no one, although I respect them very much. And my applications of past to present are very indrect and convoluted. But I hope to find welcome, or at least sympathy. I’m not exactly someone who fits in.
Showing posts with label Writing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Writing. Show all posts
Sunday, February 20, 2011
Monday, January 17, 2011
Overcoming the Sentimentality of My Country
The last two weeks have been quite heavily packed with activity, most of it having to do with work. I’ve been so busy with teaching, writing philosophy essays and thesis chapters, and taking part in the hiring process for our department’s new position that I haven’t had time to blog, and hardly had time to drink. I even missed the New Years Day edition of the Craig Charles Funk and Soul Show, and when I miss Craig Charles, you know I’m working seriously hard.
But I came across an article that has gotten me rightfully upset, or at least a tad cross. The Sentimentalists is the novel that won the Giller Prize last year, and its publication history seemed at first to be an uplifting tale of the surprising success of a nearly defeated underdog. Johanna Skibsrud wrote a novel, and couldn’t get it published by any of the big houses, so she eventually went with the small Gaspereau Press, who printed a limited run. The book was sent to a few influential critics who liked it enough to include on the Giller longlist, and it found itself on the shortlist, then took the top prize. There’s a softcover run on a major publishing label, and triumph was had.
This article sums up all the underhanded dealing that has resulted in this remarkably corrupt Giller win. I think I have something to add to this debate, however, which has less to do with the corruption of the Giller judges and the idiocy of Skibsrud’s publishers, and more to do with my ideas about Canadian literature generally. I didn’t know much about The Sentimentalists when it initially won the Giller, but having this accolade made me at least slightly interested in reading it. The books that I picked up on the gift card Mother sent me for Xmas (Bolaño’s Antwerp is done, Berlin Alexanderplatz is in progress, and Finnegans Wake looms before me, and I might blog my thoughts on it, like I did with Proust last year) are still not read yet. But once I read that article, The Sentimentalists stopped being interesting for me. Here’s why.
It’s rural, it’s cold, and its central character is a Canadian stereotype, the cruel buffoon. In other words, The Sentimentalists embodies everything that I’ve come to hate about Canadian literature, and that everyone else in the world who knows anything about Canadian literature hates about it too. I think this image of Canadian literature as being about rural, isolated existence is popular, but I think it’s exactly what keeps people from being more attracted to Canadian literature. The article I linked is right when it says that the rural Canadian novel doesn’t even represent the country anymore, now that Canada is more urban and suburban. Canada is also far less white, less Christian, and far more technologically savvy than the traditionally defined ‘Canadian novel’ makes it out to be.
The most interesting point of view for me is trying to work out how a fiction with a Canadian identity can reflect that urbanity without sounding like an American big city novel; or how we can reflect our multiethnic population without becoming a typical immigrant novel. I don’t really have a program, and I don’t want one, because I no longer believe that programs and manifestos really inspire creativity. They’re just easy to follow in a superficial history course.
Creative experimentation is probably the best route, but I do have ideas about basic ground rules of what not to do, and an inkling of what the most productive paths of development might be. Very clearly, what not to do is rely on the old stereotypes of the Canadian novel, the kind of survival themes that Margaret Atwood talked about in her thematically eponymous book, or the rural settings that aren’t as important to the lives of Canadians anymore. And it’s best not to fall too much in line with the major American fiction archetypes like the urban decay novel or the Western. Books about the underbelly of downtown Vancouver or the exploration of the Rockies or the North could definitely be interesting, but maybe not the most progressive.
Science fiction elements might end up being interesting, because sci-fi life is the kind of direction human civilization is moving in right now. We may not have underwater bubble cities, but we do have Wikileaks and hacker culture.
There’s a political attitude in Canada that I think is best called necessary humility. We’ve always been politically independent, but we live in the shadow of the United States. So while we’re part of the former dominating class of Earth’s powers, Canada has never really dominated anyone. I think that gives us a perspective on the shifting alignment of the world that’s more of a detatched observer than an angsty falling empire, like the USA. A Canadian can take a more ironic perspective on the shift of global power to China, India, and Brazil than any of the former world powers like America, Europe, or Russia could. They’re all losing something, but we’re not.
And there’s enough people of Asian and African descent in Canada for several generations that immigrant narratives don’t apply to them, but they’ve diversified Canada to the point where they can’t be known as the traditional culture of the majority. A third-generation Indian or African living in Toronto, Montréal, or Vancouver is part of a very different kind of settler community than the white folks were. So I don’t really know what’s going to turn up out of Canada in the future. But as long as it’s not more rural pablum like The Sentimentalists, I’ll probably be happy.
•••
I heard Imelda May’s music on the Craig Charles Funk and Soul Show for the first time this weekend, and I was suitably impressed by a fiery smart beautiful Irish woman who sings ridiculously frenetic rockabilly. She also does a cover of “Tainted Love” that blows Marilyn Manson AND Soft Cell away, along with the versions by Inspiral Carpets, and definitely better (and better looking) than the Pussycat Dolls version.
But I came across an article that has gotten me rightfully upset, or at least a tad cross. The Sentimentalists is the novel that won the Giller Prize last year, and its publication history seemed at first to be an uplifting tale of the surprising success of a nearly defeated underdog. Johanna Skibsrud wrote a novel, and couldn’t get it published by any of the big houses, so she eventually went with the small Gaspereau Press, who printed a limited run. The book was sent to a few influential critics who liked it enough to include on the Giller longlist, and it found itself on the shortlist, then took the top prize. There’s a softcover run on a major publishing label, and triumph was had.
This article sums up all the underhanded dealing that has resulted in this remarkably corrupt Giller win. I think I have something to add to this debate, however, which has less to do with the corruption of the Giller judges and the idiocy of Skibsrud’s publishers, and more to do with my ideas about Canadian literature generally. I didn’t know much about The Sentimentalists when it initially won the Giller, but having this accolade made me at least slightly interested in reading it. The books that I picked up on the gift card Mother sent me for Xmas (Bolaño’s Antwerp is done, Berlin Alexanderplatz is in progress, and Finnegans Wake looms before me, and I might blog my thoughts on it, like I did with Proust last year) are still not read yet. But once I read that article, The Sentimentalists stopped being interesting for me. Here’s why.
It’s rural, it’s cold, and its central character is a Canadian stereotype, the cruel buffoon. In other words, The Sentimentalists embodies everything that I’ve come to hate about Canadian literature, and that everyone else in the world who knows anything about Canadian literature hates about it too. I think this image of Canadian literature as being about rural, isolated existence is popular, but I think it’s exactly what keeps people from being more attracted to Canadian literature. The article I linked is right when it says that the rural Canadian novel doesn’t even represent the country anymore, now that Canada is more urban and suburban. Canada is also far less white, less Christian, and far more technologically savvy than the traditionally defined ‘Canadian novel’ makes it out to be.
The most interesting point of view for me is trying to work out how a fiction with a Canadian identity can reflect that urbanity without sounding like an American big city novel; or how we can reflect our multiethnic population without becoming a typical immigrant novel. I don’t really have a program, and I don’t want one, because I no longer believe that programs and manifestos really inspire creativity. They’re just easy to follow in a superficial history course.
Creative experimentation is probably the best route, but I do have ideas about basic ground rules of what not to do, and an inkling of what the most productive paths of development might be. Very clearly, what not to do is rely on the old stereotypes of the Canadian novel, the kind of survival themes that Margaret Atwood talked about in her thematically eponymous book, or the rural settings that aren’t as important to the lives of Canadians anymore. And it’s best not to fall too much in line with the major American fiction archetypes like the urban decay novel or the Western. Books about the underbelly of downtown Vancouver or the exploration of the Rockies or the North could definitely be interesting, but maybe not the most progressive.
Science fiction elements might end up being interesting, because sci-fi life is the kind of direction human civilization is moving in right now. We may not have underwater bubble cities, but we do have Wikileaks and hacker culture.
There’s a political attitude in Canada that I think is best called necessary humility. We’ve always been politically independent, but we live in the shadow of the United States. So while we’re part of the former dominating class of Earth’s powers, Canada has never really dominated anyone. I think that gives us a perspective on the shifting alignment of the world that’s more of a detatched observer than an angsty falling empire, like the USA. A Canadian can take a more ironic perspective on the shift of global power to China, India, and Brazil than any of the former world powers like America, Europe, or Russia could. They’re all losing something, but we’re not.
And there’s enough people of Asian and African descent in Canada for several generations that immigrant narratives don’t apply to them, but they’ve diversified Canada to the point where they can’t be known as the traditional culture of the majority. A third-generation Indian or African living in Toronto, Montréal, or Vancouver is part of a very different kind of settler community than the white folks were. So I don’t really know what’s going to turn up out of Canada in the future. But as long as it’s not more rural pablum like The Sentimentalists, I’ll probably be happy.
•••
I heard Imelda May’s music on the Craig Charles Funk and Soul Show for the first time this weekend, and I was suitably impressed by a fiery smart beautiful Irish woman who sings ridiculously frenetic rockabilly. She also does a cover of “Tainted Love” that blows Marilyn Manson AND Soft Cell away, along with the versions by Inspiral Carpets, and definitely better (and better looking) than the Pussycat Dolls version.
Thursday, December 16, 2010
Crippled By Moral Sensitivity
A very funny moment happened during my first public reading of my short fiction. A friend was outside stumping for me, trying to get passersby along the Hamilton Art Crawl where I was performing to come inside and listen to me. One person asked my friend who I was, and she said that I was a PhD student in philosophy. This person then walked away faster.
I can understand that reaction. Academics and literature rarely go well together. It’s a very strange development to watch university MFA programs become the thriving new home for American short fiction. But those programs are actual creative writing programs, there to teach people how to write literature itself. They’re more like trade schools than academic institutions. And the MFA creative writing programs I’ve visited myself are free of a lot of the pretention and elitist attitudes of high-level academic institutions. Academics are often taught to keep their language dry, free from controversy, easily understandable, unchallenging, to stay away from ambition or broad scopes of meaning. I’ve never gotten along well with these academics, and I’ve worked best with philosophers who are just as hostile and apathetic toward the boring aspects of academic writing as I am.
But now that I have enough stories for a full set list myself, I’ve actually looked at my completed works so far and noticed an interesting trend. Half (or more, depending on whether you include writing about students and not just academic professionals) of my completed stories so far are about philosophers. Perhaps I’ve internalized the stereotypical adage of ‘Write what you know,’ because I’ve definitely gotten to know university and academic culture pretty well over the last few years. However, I think there’s a larger point that has snuck into my thoughts, which has to do with what kind of stories and what kind of characters I find interesting.
I’m most intrigued, as a writer, with hypocrisy. I’m not against hypocrisy per se; I never explicitly denounce hypocrisy in any of my fiction works – neither the stories or my novel. I’m a hypocrite myself. But I find that hypocrisy and inconsistency of character makes for the most intriguing literature. I’ve never been all that interested in literature about characters who have no internal conflicts and just deal with problems that arise around them. I’m not into plots. I don’t like narratives structured around things happening. I’m far more fascinated by narratives that reveal strange, multifaceted characters. Inconsistency in the beliefs and desires that are most important to your character makes for an amazing literary exploration.
I think this is the more profound reason why my ideas for stories keep coming back to philosophers. We’re the so-called lovers of wisdom. It’s in the etymology of the name of the fucking profession. A wise person is supposed to be a person without serious internal conflict, a person without hypocrisy. We call people wise who can guide people out of personal conflict and into more harmonious lives. Philosophers study ethics itself, so our own ethical beliefs we often hold to a higher standard than those of people outside the profession.
The ethical and personal obligations of a philosopher for consistency in living and freedom from internal conflict are at their highest intensity. A philosopher who becomes aware of his or her own hypocrisy or inconsistency of character is going to have the most intense conflict, because of all professions, philosophers have more skills to analyze these concepts and so understand their own internal conflicts more deeply than others who may not have been trained to be as articulate with ethical concepts. “Mobilization of the Oppressed,” which I just submitted to University of Toronto’s Echolocation fiction journal this afternoon, explores the disconnects from reality that can happen when you firmly believe that knowledge makes one moral. “My Perfect Lover” explores the hypocrisy of a man whose desires and emotions lead him to use his skills of reasoning and argument to defend a regime of slavery that he knows to be wrong. I have an untitled story in draft form about a professor whose drive to discover through philosophical argument the nature of a perfectly benevolent God turns him into a bitter old man incapable of love.
I thought of another idea today about a philosopher, the idea that made me realize that my profession was such a frequent subject for my fiction. This philosopher is so deeply committed to his utilitarian ethical beliefs and arguments, that the rich should give almost all they can to alleviate poverty, that the North is morally obligated to bankrupt themselves to feed the South. But as he comes to this ethical stance, he realizes that the institution of the university is incorrigably inegalitarian: according to his deeply held ethical beliefs, he shouldn’t hold a position that trains upper class elites of affluent North Americans and be paid from the profits gained from forcing thousands of young people each year into crushing student loan debt. But by the time he figures this out, he has his own family to support: children to feed and put through school. By his own philosophical beliefs, he should sacrifice the well-being of his three children to alleviate the pain of suffering millions. But when he goes home to see his own kids, he can’t. So he goes back to a job he hates every day.
Perhaps one day, I’ll publish a collection of stories about philosophers and their conflicts and hypocrisies. I might call it Thinkers. Perhaps it will be valuable.
I can understand that reaction. Academics and literature rarely go well together. It’s a very strange development to watch university MFA programs become the thriving new home for American short fiction. But those programs are actual creative writing programs, there to teach people how to write literature itself. They’re more like trade schools than academic institutions. And the MFA creative writing programs I’ve visited myself are free of a lot of the pretention and elitist attitudes of high-level academic institutions. Academics are often taught to keep their language dry, free from controversy, easily understandable, unchallenging, to stay away from ambition or broad scopes of meaning. I’ve never gotten along well with these academics, and I’ve worked best with philosophers who are just as hostile and apathetic toward the boring aspects of academic writing as I am.
But now that I have enough stories for a full set list myself, I’ve actually looked at my completed works so far and noticed an interesting trend. Half (or more, depending on whether you include writing about students and not just academic professionals) of my completed stories so far are about philosophers. Perhaps I’ve internalized the stereotypical adage of ‘Write what you know,’ because I’ve definitely gotten to know university and academic culture pretty well over the last few years. However, I think there’s a larger point that has snuck into my thoughts, which has to do with what kind of stories and what kind of characters I find interesting.
I’m most intrigued, as a writer, with hypocrisy. I’m not against hypocrisy per se; I never explicitly denounce hypocrisy in any of my fiction works – neither the stories or my novel. I’m a hypocrite myself. But I find that hypocrisy and inconsistency of character makes for the most intriguing literature. I’ve never been all that interested in literature about characters who have no internal conflicts and just deal with problems that arise around them. I’m not into plots. I don’t like narratives structured around things happening. I’m far more fascinated by narratives that reveal strange, multifaceted characters. Inconsistency in the beliefs and desires that are most important to your character makes for an amazing literary exploration.
I think this is the more profound reason why my ideas for stories keep coming back to philosophers. We’re the so-called lovers of wisdom. It’s in the etymology of the name of the fucking profession. A wise person is supposed to be a person without serious internal conflict, a person without hypocrisy. We call people wise who can guide people out of personal conflict and into more harmonious lives. Philosophers study ethics itself, so our own ethical beliefs we often hold to a higher standard than those of people outside the profession.
The ethical and personal obligations of a philosopher for consistency in living and freedom from internal conflict are at their highest intensity. A philosopher who becomes aware of his or her own hypocrisy or inconsistency of character is going to have the most intense conflict, because of all professions, philosophers have more skills to analyze these concepts and so understand their own internal conflicts more deeply than others who may not have been trained to be as articulate with ethical concepts. “Mobilization of the Oppressed,” which I just submitted to University of Toronto’s Echolocation fiction journal this afternoon, explores the disconnects from reality that can happen when you firmly believe that knowledge makes one moral. “My Perfect Lover” explores the hypocrisy of a man whose desires and emotions lead him to use his skills of reasoning and argument to defend a regime of slavery that he knows to be wrong. I have an untitled story in draft form about a professor whose drive to discover through philosophical argument the nature of a perfectly benevolent God turns him into a bitter old man incapable of love.
I thought of another idea today about a philosopher, the idea that made me realize that my profession was such a frequent subject for my fiction. This philosopher is so deeply committed to his utilitarian ethical beliefs and arguments, that the rich should give almost all they can to alleviate poverty, that the North is morally obligated to bankrupt themselves to feed the South. But as he comes to this ethical stance, he realizes that the institution of the university is incorrigably inegalitarian: according to his deeply held ethical beliefs, he shouldn’t hold a position that trains upper class elites of affluent North Americans and be paid from the profits gained from forcing thousands of young people each year into crushing student loan debt. But by the time he figures this out, he has his own family to support: children to feed and put through school. By his own philosophical beliefs, he should sacrifice the well-being of his three children to alleviate the pain of suffering millions. But when he goes home to see his own kids, he can’t. So he goes back to a job he hates every day.
Perhaps one day, I’ll publish a collection of stories about philosophers and their conflicts and hypocrisies. I might call it Thinkers. Perhaps it will be valuable.
Friday, December 3, 2010
Publication Diaries: The Problem with Subtlties
So I just sent in the publishing contract for my second essay to come out in the International Journal of the Book, “The Danger of Institutional Conservatism in the Humanities.” It will be available in the 2011 edition of the journal, and I’m quite proud of it. I’m not sure if I’d say it’s the best work I’ve done so far, but it’s definitely my most experimental so far that’s being published in an academic journal.
As I learn more about the peer review process, especially its problems and difficulties (for details, see my article in the Book Journal last year), I think interdisciplinary journals are best suited for a lot of my work writing philosophy articles. I’ve come to this conclusion for reasons that will sound very self-serving, if you want to interpret me maliciously. But I think my reasons are actually very insightful, if you interpret me charitably. I personally think it’s a very self-serving insight, but quite insightful nonetheless. I've noticed in academic culture, that the more specialized one’s knowledge is, the more zealously one tends to guard one’s perspectives from critique. In learning more and more about an increasingly specific subject matter, one tends to acknowledge one’s own expertise: At a particular point, different for everyone, one tends to presume that one’s own perspective on the subject matter is the right perspective. “I am the expert,” says the expert, “so my own knowledge is the standard of my field. If it wasn’t the standard, then I wouldn’t be an expert.” These people are very often submission reviewers for the academic journals in their specialty.
This attitude creates a potentially terrible problem for creative thinkers, especially people who are younger and/or less experienced, still trying to establish themselves in their field. Such a young person, a new entrant, may have ideas that differ from the established experts. Being newer to the field, they don’t yet have the experience or prestige that a long career in a specialized field offers. But they may also have innovative new ideas and approaches to their field, which may not be compatible with the approaches of the experts. And if the established expert has come to identify their own way of thinking as the only way of thinking, then that new writer will be rejected. The expert will hold them to be wrong, when the new writer may just be in disagreement or holding a different approach than the expert. The expert will reject their work, preventing an innovative approach from being disseminated.
At this point, I think it should be clear that the person I’ve been calling a specialized expert is better titled an academic curmudgeon.
I think this attitude becomes more prevalent, or at least more likely to encounter, in highly specialized academic environments. This, right now, is just a matter of anecdotal evidence, but the anecdotal evidence is beginning to stack up. What this has to do with my mutually beneficial relationship with interdisciplinary journals is that one is less likely to encounter this attitude in a less specialized academic environment. So my own strange ideas and approaches are more likely to be given a chance than they would be in a highly specialized journal with a greater probability of curmudgeonliness.
My forthcoming essay is a more experimental in form than any essay I’ve attempted to put in the public view. Read by one of my former professors, he described it as uncategorizable into any typical genre or division of philosophy. I took this to be a compliment. He also called it cranky decades beyond my years, which I considered a backhanded compliment. When I presented it at the Book Conference in Switzerland last month, it was received with gaping mouths, and it took a while for the ideas to sink in to the audience. It’s a very dense essay for 4,000 words, and has some subtlties in its tone and language that may not be noticed.
The essay is a continuation of my critique of how academic knowledge is generated, and contains potential solutions to the ways in which a field of knowledge can become moribund, uncreative, and boring. Key to the solution, which I note – there and here – is much easier to talk about than actually to achieve, is an attitude of humility. One of my reviewers had no critiques of the content of my essay, but often told me to remove what s/he called ‘self-referencing,’ sentences starting with ‘I.’ I will admit that I didn’t follow this direction in every case, because I didn’t want to give the essay a tone of pure objectivity and distance that is one of the signs of the arrogance of the expert. When I describe the attitude of humility, the reviewer annotated that I should re-write my introductory sentences to display more of this attitude. It was cheeky, and I laughed, but s/he also didn’t understand the subtle point I was trying to make with my cranky tone.
The most difficult part about inculcating an attitude of humility into academic professionals is that our personalities, and academic society generally, are shaped to make it immensely difficult to have actual humble attitudes. We’re rewarded for being distinctively smarter than our colleagues, and especially the general public. There’s a casual disdain for undergraduates and ordinary students in academic culture that I never really noticed in universities until I was no longer one of those ordinary students. And I’m still uncomfortable with bragging in a non-professional context. It’s difficult for me to accept compliments about my work in philosophy and literature, because of the conflicts it gives me: I want to be a humble, easily-relatable person, but I also want to produce remarkable, superior, inspiring writing.
I tell my friends in the philosophy department how many different and intriguing ideas I have in the course of a week, and I feel awkward when they tell me they don’t have nearly so active a brain. If there’s one thing I don’t want to become, it’s an insufferable genius, even though I can see myself eventually heading for near complete Rain Man territory as I get older. Academics are not humble people, and our increasingly exclusive social circles of other graduate students and eventually other academics and highly educated professionals only encourage that attitude of superiority to everyday people.
So I wrote my essay about encouraging humility in a very superior, bordering on arrogant, tone. It’s an illustration in the tone of the writing itself of how genuinely difficult the task of humility is. It’s written by an arrogant man who knows, despite his own instincts, that his goal of encouraging innovation and works of brilliance (of which he considers much of his own work), will only be achieved by inculcating widespread attitudes of humility. The paradox unfolds along many different levels of articulation.
Brilliant, isn’t it?
•••
In other news, the new Kanye album is absolutely fantastic, and I don’t use the word absolute in a positive sense very often. It’s a very appropriate clip to end a post that talks about the importance of humility.
As I learn more about the peer review process, especially its problems and difficulties (for details, see my article in the Book Journal last year), I think interdisciplinary journals are best suited for a lot of my work writing philosophy articles. I’ve come to this conclusion for reasons that will sound very self-serving, if you want to interpret me maliciously. But I think my reasons are actually very insightful, if you interpret me charitably. I personally think it’s a very self-serving insight, but quite insightful nonetheless. I've noticed in academic culture, that the more specialized one’s knowledge is, the more zealously one tends to guard one’s perspectives from critique. In learning more and more about an increasingly specific subject matter, one tends to acknowledge one’s own expertise: At a particular point, different for everyone, one tends to presume that one’s own perspective on the subject matter is the right perspective. “I am the expert,” says the expert, “so my own knowledge is the standard of my field. If it wasn’t the standard, then I wouldn’t be an expert.” These people are very often submission reviewers for the academic journals in their specialty.
This attitude creates a potentially terrible problem for creative thinkers, especially people who are younger and/or less experienced, still trying to establish themselves in their field. Such a young person, a new entrant, may have ideas that differ from the established experts. Being newer to the field, they don’t yet have the experience or prestige that a long career in a specialized field offers. But they may also have innovative new ideas and approaches to their field, which may not be compatible with the approaches of the experts. And if the established expert has come to identify their own way of thinking as the only way of thinking, then that new writer will be rejected. The expert will hold them to be wrong, when the new writer may just be in disagreement or holding a different approach than the expert. The expert will reject their work, preventing an innovative approach from being disseminated.
At this point, I think it should be clear that the person I’ve been calling a specialized expert is better titled an academic curmudgeon.
I think this attitude becomes more prevalent, or at least more likely to encounter, in highly specialized academic environments. This, right now, is just a matter of anecdotal evidence, but the anecdotal evidence is beginning to stack up. What this has to do with my mutually beneficial relationship with interdisciplinary journals is that one is less likely to encounter this attitude in a less specialized academic environment. So my own strange ideas and approaches are more likely to be given a chance than they would be in a highly specialized journal with a greater probability of curmudgeonliness.
My forthcoming essay is a more experimental in form than any essay I’ve attempted to put in the public view. Read by one of my former professors, he described it as uncategorizable into any typical genre or division of philosophy. I took this to be a compliment. He also called it cranky decades beyond my years, which I considered a backhanded compliment. When I presented it at the Book Conference in Switzerland last month, it was received with gaping mouths, and it took a while for the ideas to sink in to the audience. It’s a very dense essay for 4,000 words, and has some subtlties in its tone and language that may not be noticed.
The essay is a continuation of my critique of how academic knowledge is generated, and contains potential solutions to the ways in which a field of knowledge can become moribund, uncreative, and boring. Key to the solution, which I note – there and here – is much easier to talk about than actually to achieve, is an attitude of humility. One of my reviewers had no critiques of the content of my essay, but often told me to remove what s/he called ‘self-referencing,’ sentences starting with ‘I.’ I will admit that I didn’t follow this direction in every case, because I didn’t want to give the essay a tone of pure objectivity and distance that is one of the signs of the arrogance of the expert. When I describe the attitude of humility, the reviewer annotated that I should re-write my introductory sentences to display more of this attitude. It was cheeky, and I laughed, but s/he also didn’t understand the subtle point I was trying to make with my cranky tone.
The most difficult part about inculcating an attitude of humility into academic professionals is that our personalities, and academic society generally, are shaped to make it immensely difficult to have actual humble attitudes. We’re rewarded for being distinctively smarter than our colleagues, and especially the general public. There’s a casual disdain for undergraduates and ordinary students in academic culture that I never really noticed in universities until I was no longer one of those ordinary students. And I’m still uncomfortable with bragging in a non-professional context. It’s difficult for me to accept compliments about my work in philosophy and literature, because of the conflicts it gives me: I want to be a humble, easily-relatable person, but I also want to produce remarkable, superior, inspiring writing.
I tell my friends in the philosophy department how many different and intriguing ideas I have in the course of a week, and I feel awkward when they tell me they don’t have nearly so active a brain. If there’s one thing I don’t want to become, it’s an insufferable genius, even though I can see myself eventually heading for near complete Rain Man territory as I get older. Academics are not humble people, and our increasingly exclusive social circles of other graduate students and eventually other academics and highly educated professionals only encourage that attitude of superiority to everyday people.
So I wrote my essay about encouraging humility in a very superior, bordering on arrogant, tone. It’s an illustration in the tone of the writing itself of how genuinely difficult the task of humility is. It’s written by an arrogant man who knows, despite his own instincts, that his goal of encouraging innovation and works of brilliance (of which he considers much of his own work), will only be achieved by inculcating widespread attitudes of humility. The paradox unfolds along many different levels of articulation.
Brilliant, isn’t it?
•••
In other news, the new Kanye album is absolutely fantastic, and I don’t use the word absolute in a positive sense very often. It’s a very appropriate clip to end a post that talks about the importance of humility.
Thursday, November 25, 2010
Switzerland Diary 4: Computers Exist, So Get Over It
About a month ago, I was talking to my friend Alanda for the first time in over a year. She was visiting her old friends still at McMaster philosophy after having moved to Barrie, gotten a teaching job at a college, and gotten married. One part of our conversation was about a new set of theories floating around educational circles about how to teach Millennials. This was a generation that had an entirely different perceptual understanding of computers, the internet, the temporal structure of the day. Millennials understood privacy, social interaction, how to behave in a classroom, how to learn, entirely differently than the generations before, because of their different relations to computer technology. She described them as a very alien society. It was then that, to her horror, I informed her that, having been born in 1983, I was a Millennial.
Normally, I don’t think this Millennial generational difference is that big a deal. But I saw some stuff at the Book Conference that made me think differently. The Book Conference had a different title when it began eight years ago, The Conference on the Future of the Book. The conference as I’ve come to know it in the last two years has covered many aspects of the phenomenon: literacy, education, book history, publishing business, the analysis of literature itself, intellectual and academic culture, and combinations and convergences of all these disciplines. But among them is a holdover from those early conferences: people who shook in their boots about the destruction of the book.
Their concerns were not Taliban-like anti-literacy movements, which exist and should be taken seriously and combatted. No, they were people scared of ebooks. Any new medium, like the electronic book, is going to have benefits and limitations. One advantage of ebooks is that they can be carried easily in large numbers. A library will be able to fit on an iPad. A limitation is the difficulty of controlling commerce in ebooks. They’ll be easy to download without financial recompense to the writer, so the economy of writers and books will have to change.
But I saw presentations and read essays about the popularization of ebooks that were conservative bordering on hysteria. I saw presentations that sought relevance for the physical book as a figure of fetishized pleasure, the turning of pages and the smell of ink deeply eroticized for the sake of preservation against the onslaught. I reviewed an essay for the journal that used Lacanian psychoanalytic concepts to villify the ebook as destructive of the individual human subject itself.
Every one of these people who were so afraid of ebooks was over thirty years old. They were all pre-Millennial, members of the generation less used to dealing with electronic media, generally less comfortable on the internet, those who find reading from a screen more difficult, an alienating process. It’s such a stupidly hysterical point of view that I can’t really take it seriously. It reminds me of those people who thought the advent of television would destroy cinema. But I’m not going to argue by analogy, because an analogy can be easily argued against: that’s A and B, but this is X and Y, with very different characters.
I still think this point of view, the defense of the paper book against the onslaught of electronic media, is utterly counter-productive to the best thinking on the topics of books and writing. The ebook is a different kind of medium for writing, one that is more mobile, easily distributed, copied, and stored. It will no more destroy literature and publishing than digital video has killed filmmaking. I think, like digital video, the ebook will offer a cheaper distribution method that will allow even more independent writers and presses to flourish, and encourage experimentation with literary techniques and tools. People who don’t understand this, because they’re too old and set in their ways to be comfortable with a new medium of artistic expression, should be quiet and let presentation slots at prestigious conferences go to creative people instead.
Normally, I don’t think this Millennial generational difference is that big a deal. But I saw some stuff at the Book Conference that made me think differently. The Book Conference had a different title when it began eight years ago, The Conference on the Future of the Book. The conference as I’ve come to know it in the last two years has covered many aspects of the phenomenon: literacy, education, book history, publishing business, the analysis of literature itself, intellectual and academic culture, and combinations and convergences of all these disciplines. But among them is a holdover from those early conferences: people who shook in their boots about the destruction of the book.
Their concerns were not Taliban-like anti-literacy movements, which exist and should be taken seriously and combatted. No, they were people scared of ebooks. Any new medium, like the electronic book, is going to have benefits and limitations. One advantage of ebooks is that they can be carried easily in large numbers. A library will be able to fit on an iPad. A limitation is the difficulty of controlling commerce in ebooks. They’ll be easy to download without financial recompense to the writer, so the economy of writers and books will have to change.
But I saw presentations and read essays about the popularization of ebooks that were conservative bordering on hysteria. I saw presentations that sought relevance for the physical book as a figure of fetishized pleasure, the turning of pages and the smell of ink deeply eroticized for the sake of preservation against the onslaught. I reviewed an essay for the journal that used Lacanian psychoanalytic concepts to villify the ebook as destructive of the individual human subject itself.
Every one of these people who were so afraid of ebooks was over thirty years old. They were all pre-Millennial, members of the generation less used to dealing with electronic media, generally less comfortable on the internet, those who find reading from a screen more difficult, an alienating process. It’s such a stupidly hysterical point of view that I can’t really take it seriously. It reminds me of those people who thought the advent of television would destroy cinema. But I’m not going to argue by analogy, because an analogy can be easily argued against: that’s A and B, but this is X and Y, with very different characters.
I still think this point of view, the defense of the paper book against the onslaught of electronic media, is utterly counter-productive to the best thinking on the topics of books and writing. The ebook is a different kind of medium for writing, one that is more mobile, easily distributed, copied, and stored. It will no more destroy literature and publishing than digital video has killed filmmaking. I think, like digital video, the ebook will offer a cheaper distribution method that will allow even more independent writers and presses to flourish, and encourage experimentation with literary techniques and tools. People who don’t understand this, because they’re too old and set in their ways to be comfortable with a new medium of artistic expression, should be quiet and let presentation slots at prestigious conferences go to creative people instead.
Sunday, November 14, 2010
Similarity Is Not a Sign of Intention
After performing a reasonably successful public reading of my short fiction, some misconceptions about my work have arisen in a manner typical of the Ontarian chattering classes. To set the record straight, I’ve spoken with literature and film critic Albert Nikos of Fictional Magazine.
Nikos: I’ll cut right to the chase, Riggio. Your story, “Mobilization of the Oppressed,” contained a central character who was very obviously satirizing your professors.
Riggio: That was most certainly not the case.
Nikos: Come on! The professor in that story runs his class like a dictator, utterly convinced of the power of his own ego. He’s totally condescending to all of his students, especially the women. He’s completely ignorant of any critique of a philosophical idea that isn’t strictly about the argument and its logical structure. He’s a pure ivory tower academic of the worst kind. Now who is he!?
Riggio: Professor Winchester is Professor Winchester. It’s as simple as that. I didn’t even think of a first name for him. He didn’t need one for the story, so I didn’t give him one.
Nikos: Well, where did the name Winchester come from? Surely it’s a reference to the British background of some of your professors at the McMaster philosophy department?
Riggio: He’s named after Dr Charles Emerson Winchester III, who David Ogden Stiers played on MASH. Actually, some of the folks in the audience thought I was making fun of the philosophy of law chair in the department, because the character talked about legal theory, and I read his lines with a deep voice. But I wasn’t making fun of any individual person. I was making fun of an attitude, showing the limitations of a particular way of thinking.
Nikos: And who among your professors demonstrates this way of thinking?
Riggio: You’re not going to catch me so easily, Albert. Everyone does, at some point in their thoughts. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a professor, graduate student, undergrad, secretary, janitor, or whatever. Anyone, when there’s any career path in which they can say that they were more knowledgeable than others, can think that they’re better than others. If we don’t check ourselves, or the outside world doesn’t check ourselves for us, we can all become as arrogant and dismissive as Dr Winchester. It’s the mind set of anyone who’s come to believe their own hype, someone who believes that they’re always right, and obviously right. So anyone who disagrees with them is either just plain wrong, or else they’re talking from a perspective that doesn’t count.
Nikos: What do you mean by that? A perspective that doesn’t count.
Riggio: Well, look at the character of Roshan in “Mobilization of the Oppressed.” She’s actually the central character, by the way, not Winchester.
Nikos: But Winchester has the most lines.
Riggio: But Roshan is the catalyst of the action, the knife that punctures his balloon of hot air.
Nikos: Or in this case, puts a bullet in it.
Riggio: Let’s not spoil the entire story.
Nikos: Sometimes, I can’t resist. It was just so delightfully weird.
Riggio: See, that’s the heart of the conflict right there. Roshan is delightfully weird, an event that shatters the illusions of perfect rationality and security. “Mobilization of the Oppressed” is just as much a critique of philosophy as it is a skewering of that kind of arrogant personality. Roshan is a contrarian, someone who isn’t comfortable kowtowing to authority because she’s seen legitimate authority at its most oppressive and violent. She’s left the oppression of Tehran, which was responsible for the death of her father, as I insinuate in that line where I describe him as having been disappeared.
Nikos: That was a clever touch.
Riggio: Thank you. But philosophy is a tradition that worships reason. That’s why Winchester always refers back to Plato, because we still think of ourselves, still too often in my opinion, as footnotes to Plato. We’re good democrats and liberals today, even the conservatives. So we always disagree with Plato’s Republic when he writes about a totalitarian dictatorship of the wise, Philosopher-Kings as society’s great planners. That’s because we’re uncomfortable with authoritarian political systems. That’s one way in which Roshan’s experience is put into tension. But philosophy as a tradition still believes in reason as being the paramount virtue. We always ask people to be reasonable, we believe that smart people should be in charge, that having the best knowledge results in the best political action when those people with the best knowledge are in charge. What Roshan does is problematize knowledge, call its value into question when she talks about political corruption and abuse of the vulnerable in society. You must have great knowledge of a political and legal system in order to manipulate it to your advantage. It’s that dark side of knowledge that Winchester doesn’t see, even as he’s an agent of it.
Nikos: You’re talking about the way he always talks down to Roshan, how that’s a kind of abuse of his power as a professor to control debate. He cuts her off, puts words in her mouth, even calls her questions nonsense.
Riggio: And it’s not just Winchester! She’s the only girl in that seminar, and I included lines insinuating that the male students in the class are always staring at her, and never sticking up for her or helping defend her against Winchester’s abuse. That’s the more insidious kind of oppression that we have in the West. In Tehran, if you’re undesirable, they come to your house and shoot you. It’s very honest. In Chicago, where the story takes place, or New York, or Toronto, or Dallas, or anywhere, undesirables are slowly worn down. People who are different think they have space to live as they want, think they’re respected and accepted by their neighbours, who are all fellow democrats. But they're wrong, because when they need help, their pleasant and smiling neighbours will often let them drown. Our democratic habits let us convince ourselves that we care about people who are different from us, they force us to hide our disgust at different ethnicities, different genders, different languages, different social classes. We even hide it from ourselves. But no one sticks their neck out for the town freaks. The really singular individuals will always be isolated, on their own. Roshan is different in so many ways. She rebels against her own culture’s traditions for how a woman should dress and behave, and she rebels against her professor’s condescension, and she rebels against the indifference or the objectivizing stares of her classmates. And her rebellion isn’t pure reactivity, pure resentment. She doesn’t rebel against Iranian standards of female dress by slutting it up. She dresses in dark colours, tight jeans, sweaters that show off her shape, but none of her skin. She’s creating her own definitions of modesty and confidence, without fully surrendering to the icons that are her reference points: the modest woman, the American feminist.
Nikos: Did you think of all this as you were planning the story, or did it occur to you after you wrote it? Because most fiction that’s written with those kinds of ideas in mind usually stinks.
Riggio: It does usually stink, because you end up with ciphers for philosophical concepts rather than singular characters. And you end up with a book that’s more like a disguised version of Hegel’s Logic, with characters interacting in ways perfectly determined by their concepts.
Nikos: Now you’re talking like a philosophy doctoral student. I’m going to have to ask you to stop.
Riggio: Yeah, a person walked right on by my reading when my friend told him that I was a PhD student in philosophy. I told her not to mention that again, if she stumps for me. She should say something pretentious about Borges instead.
Nikos: This will be my last question, but where did the story begin? What was the thought?
Riggio: My thought was my indignation about Raz’s idea in philosophy of law, that we defer to legal authorities the same way we defer to experts. Winchester articulates what I think is the natural evolution of that point of view to its extreme. Again, the tradition of philosophy worships reason, makes it into a moral virtue. Socrates said that knowledge makes someone morally good, and that’s just laughable. So I had this idea, that the account of legal authority as expert authority is secretly very fascist, very oppressive. But I also had a suspicion that I couldn’t argue against it as a philosophical essay. I wasn’t expert enough on actual theories of legal authority. And that kind of felt like I was playing into my opponent’s hand. So I decided to demonstrate the blind spots of pure reason, rather than arguing reasonably for them. Roshan was that demonstration.
Nikos: Will we see her again?
Riggio: Maybe one day. I hope so. I think there’s a lot more to her than comes across in this one story. There’s a novella I had an idea for a while ago, where I think she could be very useful. But I have no problem bringing someone back. I brought you back, didn’t I?
Nikos: No fourth wall tonight, sir. Thank you very much for sitting down.
Riggio: Thank you for having me.
Nikos: I’ll cut right to the chase, Riggio. Your story, “Mobilization of the Oppressed,” contained a central character who was very obviously satirizing your professors.
Riggio: That was most certainly not the case.
Nikos: Come on! The professor in that story runs his class like a dictator, utterly convinced of the power of his own ego. He’s totally condescending to all of his students, especially the women. He’s completely ignorant of any critique of a philosophical idea that isn’t strictly about the argument and its logical structure. He’s a pure ivory tower academic of the worst kind. Now who is he!?
Riggio: Professor Winchester is Professor Winchester. It’s as simple as that. I didn’t even think of a first name for him. He didn’t need one for the story, so I didn’t give him one.
Nikos: Well, where did the name Winchester come from? Surely it’s a reference to the British background of some of your professors at the McMaster philosophy department?
Riggio: He’s named after Dr Charles Emerson Winchester III, who David Ogden Stiers played on MASH. Actually, some of the folks in the audience thought I was making fun of the philosophy of law chair in the department, because the character talked about legal theory, and I read his lines with a deep voice. But I wasn’t making fun of any individual person. I was making fun of an attitude, showing the limitations of a particular way of thinking.
Nikos: And who among your professors demonstrates this way of thinking?
Riggio: You’re not going to catch me so easily, Albert. Everyone does, at some point in their thoughts. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a professor, graduate student, undergrad, secretary, janitor, or whatever. Anyone, when there’s any career path in which they can say that they were more knowledgeable than others, can think that they’re better than others. If we don’t check ourselves, or the outside world doesn’t check ourselves for us, we can all become as arrogant and dismissive as Dr Winchester. It’s the mind set of anyone who’s come to believe their own hype, someone who believes that they’re always right, and obviously right. So anyone who disagrees with them is either just plain wrong, or else they’re talking from a perspective that doesn’t count.
Nikos: What do you mean by that? A perspective that doesn’t count.
Riggio: Well, look at the character of Roshan in “Mobilization of the Oppressed.” She’s actually the central character, by the way, not Winchester.
Nikos: But Winchester has the most lines.
Riggio: But Roshan is the catalyst of the action, the knife that punctures his balloon of hot air.
Nikos: Or in this case, puts a bullet in it.
Riggio: Let’s not spoil the entire story.
Nikos: Sometimes, I can’t resist. It was just so delightfully weird.
Riggio: See, that’s the heart of the conflict right there. Roshan is delightfully weird, an event that shatters the illusions of perfect rationality and security. “Mobilization of the Oppressed” is just as much a critique of philosophy as it is a skewering of that kind of arrogant personality. Roshan is a contrarian, someone who isn’t comfortable kowtowing to authority because she’s seen legitimate authority at its most oppressive and violent. She’s left the oppression of Tehran, which was responsible for the death of her father, as I insinuate in that line where I describe him as having been disappeared.
Nikos: That was a clever touch.
Riggio: Thank you. But philosophy is a tradition that worships reason. That’s why Winchester always refers back to Plato, because we still think of ourselves, still too often in my opinion, as footnotes to Plato. We’re good democrats and liberals today, even the conservatives. So we always disagree with Plato’s Republic when he writes about a totalitarian dictatorship of the wise, Philosopher-Kings as society’s great planners. That’s because we’re uncomfortable with authoritarian political systems. That’s one way in which Roshan’s experience is put into tension. But philosophy as a tradition still believes in reason as being the paramount virtue. We always ask people to be reasonable, we believe that smart people should be in charge, that having the best knowledge results in the best political action when those people with the best knowledge are in charge. What Roshan does is problematize knowledge, call its value into question when she talks about political corruption and abuse of the vulnerable in society. You must have great knowledge of a political and legal system in order to manipulate it to your advantage. It’s that dark side of knowledge that Winchester doesn’t see, even as he’s an agent of it.
Nikos: You’re talking about the way he always talks down to Roshan, how that’s a kind of abuse of his power as a professor to control debate. He cuts her off, puts words in her mouth, even calls her questions nonsense.
Riggio: And it’s not just Winchester! She’s the only girl in that seminar, and I included lines insinuating that the male students in the class are always staring at her, and never sticking up for her or helping defend her against Winchester’s abuse. That’s the more insidious kind of oppression that we have in the West. In Tehran, if you’re undesirable, they come to your house and shoot you. It’s very honest. In Chicago, where the story takes place, or New York, or Toronto, or Dallas, or anywhere, undesirables are slowly worn down. People who are different think they have space to live as they want, think they’re respected and accepted by their neighbours, who are all fellow democrats. But they're wrong, because when they need help, their pleasant and smiling neighbours will often let them drown. Our democratic habits let us convince ourselves that we care about people who are different from us, they force us to hide our disgust at different ethnicities, different genders, different languages, different social classes. We even hide it from ourselves. But no one sticks their neck out for the town freaks. The really singular individuals will always be isolated, on their own. Roshan is different in so many ways. She rebels against her own culture’s traditions for how a woman should dress and behave, and she rebels against her professor’s condescension, and she rebels against the indifference or the objectivizing stares of her classmates. And her rebellion isn’t pure reactivity, pure resentment. She doesn’t rebel against Iranian standards of female dress by slutting it up. She dresses in dark colours, tight jeans, sweaters that show off her shape, but none of her skin. She’s creating her own definitions of modesty and confidence, without fully surrendering to the icons that are her reference points: the modest woman, the American feminist.
Nikos: Did you think of all this as you were planning the story, or did it occur to you after you wrote it? Because most fiction that’s written with those kinds of ideas in mind usually stinks.
Riggio: It does usually stink, because you end up with ciphers for philosophical concepts rather than singular characters. And you end up with a book that’s more like a disguised version of Hegel’s Logic, with characters interacting in ways perfectly determined by their concepts.
Nikos: Now you’re talking like a philosophy doctoral student. I’m going to have to ask you to stop.
Riggio: Yeah, a person walked right on by my reading when my friend told him that I was a PhD student in philosophy. I told her not to mention that again, if she stumps for me. She should say something pretentious about Borges instead.
Nikos: This will be my last question, but where did the story begin? What was the thought?
Riggio: My thought was my indignation about Raz’s idea in philosophy of law, that we defer to legal authorities the same way we defer to experts. Winchester articulates what I think is the natural evolution of that point of view to its extreme. Again, the tradition of philosophy worships reason, makes it into a moral virtue. Socrates said that knowledge makes someone morally good, and that’s just laughable. So I had this idea, that the account of legal authority as expert authority is secretly very fascist, very oppressive. But I also had a suspicion that I couldn’t argue against it as a philosophical essay. I wasn’t expert enough on actual theories of legal authority. And that kind of felt like I was playing into my opponent’s hand. So I decided to demonstrate the blind spots of pure reason, rather than arguing reasonably for them. Roshan was that demonstration.
Nikos: Will we see her again?
Riggio: Maybe one day. I hope so. I think there’s a lot more to her than comes across in this one story. There’s a novella I had an idea for a while ago, where I think she could be very useful. But I have no problem bringing someone back. I brought you back, didn’t I?
Nikos: No fourth wall tonight, sir. Thank you very much for sitting down.
Riggio: Thank you for having me.
Sunday, September 5, 2010
The Future of Television - Lost. In Space
I thought of an excellent idea for a new science fiction television show that would follow a similar pattern of Battlestar Galactica, at least as far as revamping seriously a laughably camp old sci-fi hit from the 1970s. I’m thinking about Lost in Space. Consider the basic premise of the show: An exploration ship is sabotaged and crash-lands on an unknown world, the crew being forced to work with the very saboteur who caused the mess in the first place. Of course, apart from the first and last episodes, the original series executed this premise as if it was Gilligan’s Island in space (with a comparable budget). But with a few tropes lifted from recent critically acclaimed hit sci-fi programs, and a few ideas of my own, I think I have a pretty good pitch. It could be worth developing further, at least.
The Ship and Its Crew.
The setup of the original show was too simple: The Robinson family of scientists and their best friend are the crew of the ship, and the only foreign entity in the crew is the villain-turned-walking-joke Dr Smith. What we’ve learned from shows like Lost and Stargate: Universe is that a larger, more diverse cast can constitute more complex storylines simply by their being stuck together. A large ensemble cast of singular characters with diverse histories and many different reasons for being on the ship provides a comparatively large potential for different character arcs as individual stories are developed, and different people come into different kinds of conflict as they try to survive on an alien world.
How to Travel in Space.
I only thought of the idea this afternoon walking back from the market, so I haven’t yet considered all the details of how this technology would work. I’m imagining some kind of wormhole creation and manipulation technology. This is partly why they’re stranded so hopelessly for quite some time into the series. Only ships carrying a wormhole generator can travel faster than light; signals can’t. So they can’t send a decent distress signal at all, because they’re too far away from human worlds, and can only signal them at light speed.
Key to the narrative is that humanity didn’t invent the wormhole technology - they discovered and reverse-engineered it on a sublight expedition several centuries ago. So a major narrative arc of the series would be that the cast slowly discovers evidence that they are wrecked on the homeworld of the beings who invented the wormhole technology.
The Villain.
I’m a pretty big Doctor Who fan, as regular readers will have discovered by now. And one of the Doctor’s favourite aliases, especially when he was stuck on Earth working for a planetary defence task force, was Dr John Smith. So I thought of making the central villain, the saboteur, a remixed version of our favourite Time Lord. The Dr Smith of the regenerated Lost in Space would be a manipulator of the rest of the characters, with his own nefarious ends regarding the planet's mysteries.
No one, not even the audience, would know he sabotaged the ship, and engineered it to crash on the Mystery Planet. Dr Smith would be a brilliant, eccentric, manipulative asshole. He would, effectively, be the charming rogue scientist at the centre of the show, using his considerably wide-ranging expertise to take at least partial charge of the cast.
There would probably be some other characters who would take charge of the day-to-day problems of survival for the cast on an alien world. And those characters would drive ongoing power struggles with Smith because they’re more obviously helping the cast survive on the planet. The cast also grows more suspicious of Smith over time, as they become conscious of his manipulating them, and his investigations into the planet’s mysterious nature.
One idea I had for the character is that he would be an older man, with some echoes of the Hartnell and Pertwee versions of The Doctor. And a story arc for the first couple of years would involve him discovering technology on the island to build an android body that would eventually resemble a young man, and eventually copy his own personality into it, cloning himself into a practically immortal body. This brings me to my favourite idea for the new Lost in Space.
The Android (or, Danger Will Robinson My Ass!)
At the 24 Hour Art Marathon in St John’s this summer, I wrote a short story about a future society that has invented a race of android servants and companions, whose brains were powerful computers and scanners based on chaos mathematics. Their long lifespans and incredibly fast learning curves make them intellectually and perceptually superior to humans. Because the intellectually successful androids were built as companions, they were basically T800 style robots with flesh that repaired itself by absorbing ultraviolet light, and couldn’t eat or drink, because the light would recharge their power plants as well. Pretty much every power source built to work in terrestrial environments, of course, would be solar or wind based by this point in human civilization, androids included.
By the time of Lost in Space 2.0, the androids will have long ago won their rights to self-determination, integrated into society, and to some degree have been forgotten. The android character from my story, Alice Chesterton, would be on the ship. A major narrative arc for her would be the crew’s eventually discovering that she is an android. Her immensely powerful brain would cast her as a rival to Dr Smith, and his envy and conflict with her would be partially what drives him to create his android replica.
Probably the most important element of Alice that the writers would have to keep in mind throughout the show is that Alice’s intelligence and learning speed is beyond the greatest of human geniuses. All androids are this way. Probably a very fascinating part of the Lost in Space 2.0 mythology is discovering the history of how the prominence of androids in society would have disappeared over the previous centuries. They are intellectually and physically superior to humans in every way. So one of the great mysteries about human history in this universe would be how and why the androids disguised themselves, or hid themselves away. Perhaps there's a secret society of androids somewhere in the human worlds, something like the Freemason conspiracies.
After Dr Smith created his android replica, he would have to be written with the same caveats as Alice. After that point, both Alice and Dr Smith can perceive all the possibilities of every object they see, giving them a fantastically fast learning curve. But Alice, unlike Dr Smith, is already centuries old, and was built by a corporation that became massively successful building high quality android companions. Android Smith, however, would not be built by such experts, and would be hampered by mechanical problems.
One of these would be impotence, because Alice was originally designed as a sexual companion for a professor on Earth, and so the physical processes for sexual activity would be an integral part of her brain. Her sexual relationships with other members of the cast would be excellent narrative fodder as well. Dr Smith's android would be something of a patch job. This would just add to the conflict between them, even as Android Smith begins to sympathize with Alice more than the human crew as he learns to exercise the immense potential of his brain. Alice has always been an android, so comes from a much more enlightened ethical perspective. Smith built his android self for egocentric human reasons, like envy of Alice and yearning for immortality. The breakdowns of his mechanical body would be quite ironic, given his advanced age as a human in the first two seasons of the show.
The Planet.
This is where the direct analogue to Lost comes into my idea. A mandatory feature in the hypothetical show’s bible would be that nothing like the God-ish aspects of Abrams and Lindelof’s island would ever come into play in Lost in Space 2.0. It’s a standard trope that most stories about stranded people take place in some jungle environment, but I’d prefer to set the crash site on a steppe near a mountain range, the kind of environment that would make shooting in British Columbia or California fairly easy.
All the long-range arcs of the story, again riffing from Lost, would have to do with the mysteries of the planet where they’re wrecked. Over the course of the first series, the cast, particularly those more loyal to Alice, would discover that human expeditions have visited the planet before, and evidence of these prior investigations (and perhaps some of their sticky, violent ends).
The steppe-mountain setting departs from the tradition of stranded stories, and would give the writers extra flexibility in setting. Some episodes would take place on the steppe, some at a nearby lake, and some exploring the mountains. Another narrative arc of the show would be a quest by some characters to discover the sea on the other side of the mountains, and that would probably integrate with the reveal of the indigenous species, described a bit later.
Most important about the planet’s mythology is that there is an alien race that lives there, the descendents of the inventors of the wormhole technology. And I would have them be as absolutely unlike humanity in every way possible. Perhaps they’d be a species something like amphibious cephalopods. The most important scientific consultant on the show would be the biologists who would brainstorm ways that intelligent amphibious cephalopods could evolve and become the dominant technological species on a planet.
The cephalopod culture would have to be immensely detailed as well, because the major narrative of the show would be the cast discovering their technology, culture, and mysteries, eventually learning to communicate with them. This would probably be the most difficult part of designing Lost in Space 2.0, even more than having one (and later two) major characters who are advanced android geniuses. At least androids and humans share a common history. The cephalopod culture would have nothing at all in common with Earth, but with a history just as detailed, and ethically complex, as humanity's.
There could also be conflicts because some of the humans (probably Smith and his cronies) would catch small cephalopods to eat at the beginning of the series. But because androids can perceive all the possible states of an object as well as its current actual state, Alice would stop the cast from eating them, and provoking the adult intelligent cephalopods. The human-cephalopod misunderstandings and conflicts would be another central story arc of the show.
I think this show sounds like a really cool idea. Let me know if you have any character ideas for anyone other than Alice and Dr Smith, because they’re the only people I’ve thought of so far. I don’t really want to see anyone who is too much like a character from Lost or BSG. If this whole academic career doesn’t work out, or it turns out that I can make more money as a tv producer, I know I at least have a good idea I can attach my name to.
The Ship and Its Crew.
The setup of the original show was too simple: The Robinson family of scientists and their best friend are the crew of the ship, and the only foreign entity in the crew is the villain-turned-walking-joke Dr Smith. What we’ve learned from shows like Lost and Stargate: Universe is that a larger, more diverse cast can constitute more complex storylines simply by their being stuck together. A large ensemble cast of singular characters with diverse histories and many different reasons for being on the ship provides a comparatively large potential for different character arcs as individual stories are developed, and different people come into different kinds of conflict as they try to survive on an alien world.
How to Travel in Space.
I only thought of the idea this afternoon walking back from the market, so I haven’t yet considered all the details of how this technology would work. I’m imagining some kind of wormhole creation and manipulation technology. This is partly why they’re stranded so hopelessly for quite some time into the series. Only ships carrying a wormhole generator can travel faster than light; signals can’t. So they can’t send a decent distress signal at all, because they’re too far away from human worlds, and can only signal them at light speed.
Key to the narrative is that humanity didn’t invent the wormhole technology - they discovered and reverse-engineered it on a sublight expedition several centuries ago. So a major narrative arc of the series would be that the cast slowly discovers evidence that they are wrecked on the homeworld of the beings who invented the wormhole technology.
The Villain.
I’m a pretty big Doctor Who fan, as regular readers will have discovered by now. And one of the Doctor’s favourite aliases, especially when he was stuck on Earth working for a planetary defence task force, was Dr John Smith. So I thought of making the central villain, the saboteur, a remixed version of our favourite Time Lord. The Dr Smith of the regenerated Lost in Space would be a manipulator of the rest of the characters, with his own nefarious ends regarding the planet's mysteries.
No one, not even the audience, would know he sabotaged the ship, and engineered it to crash on the Mystery Planet. Dr Smith would be a brilliant, eccentric, manipulative asshole. He would, effectively, be the charming rogue scientist at the centre of the show, using his considerably wide-ranging expertise to take at least partial charge of the cast.
There would probably be some other characters who would take charge of the day-to-day problems of survival for the cast on an alien world. And those characters would drive ongoing power struggles with Smith because they’re more obviously helping the cast survive on the planet. The cast also grows more suspicious of Smith over time, as they become conscious of his manipulating them, and his investigations into the planet’s mysterious nature.
One idea I had for the character is that he would be an older man, with some echoes of the Hartnell and Pertwee versions of The Doctor. And a story arc for the first couple of years would involve him discovering technology on the island to build an android body that would eventually resemble a young man, and eventually copy his own personality into it, cloning himself into a practically immortal body. This brings me to my favourite idea for the new Lost in Space.
The Android (or, Danger Will Robinson My Ass!)
At the 24 Hour Art Marathon in St John’s this summer, I wrote a short story about a future society that has invented a race of android servants and companions, whose brains were powerful computers and scanners based on chaos mathematics. Their long lifespans and incredibly fast learning curves make them intellectually and perceptually superior to humans. Because the intellectually successful androids were built as companions, they were basically T800 style robots with flesh that repaired itself by absorbing ultraviolet light, and couldn’t eat or drink, because the light would recharge their power plants as well. Pretty much every power source built to work in terrestrial environments, of course, would be solar or wind based by this point in human civilization, androids included.
By the time of Lost in Space 2.0, the androids will have long ago won their rights to self-determination, integrated into society, and to some degree have been forgotten. The android character from my story, Alice Chesterton, would be on the ship. A major narrative arc for her would be the crew’s eventually discovering that she is an android. Her immensely powerful brain would cast her as a rival to Dr Smith, and his envy and conflict with her would be partially what drives him to create his android replica.
Probably the most important element of Alice that the writers would have to keep in mind throughout the show is that Alice’s intelligence and learning speed is beyond the greatest of human geniuses. All androids are this way. Probably a very fascinating part of the Lost in Space 2.0 mythology is discovering the history of how the prominence of androids in society would have disappeared over the previous centuries. They are intellectually and physically superior to humans in every way. So one of the great mysteries about human history in this universe would be how and why the androids disguised themselves, or hid themselves away. Perhaps there's a secret society of androids somewhere in the human worlds, something like the Freemason conspiracies.
After Dr Smith created his android replica, he would have to be written with the same caveats as Alice. After that point, both Alice and Dr Smith can perceive all the possibilities of every object they see, giving them a fantastically fast learning curve. But Alice, unlike Dr Smith, is already centuries old, and was built by a corporation that became massively successful building high quality android companions. Android Smith, however, would not be built by such experts, and would be hampered by mechanical problems.
One of these would be impotence, because Alice was originally designed as a sexual companion for a professor on Earth, and so the physical processes for sexual activity would be an integral part of her brain. Her sexual relationships with other members of the cast would be excellent narrative fodder as well. Dr Smith's android would be something of a patch job. This would just add to the conflict between them, even as Android Smith begins to sympathize with Alice more than the human crew as he learns to exercise the immense potential of his brain. Alice has always been an android, so comes from a much more enlightened ethical perspective. Smith built his android self for egocentric human reasons, like envy of Alice and yearning for immortality. The breakdowns of his mechanical body would be quite ironic, given his advanced age as a human in the first two seasons of the show.
The Planet.
This is where the direct analogue to Lost comes into my idea. A mandatory feature in the hypothetical show’s bible would be that nothing like the God-ish aspects of Abrams and Lindelof’s island would ever come into play in Lost in Space 2.0. It’s a standard trope that most stories about stranded people take place in some jungle environment, but I’d prefer to set the crash site on a steppe near a mountain range, the kind of environment that would make shooting in British Columbia or California fairly easy.
All the long-range arcs of the story, again riffing from Lost, would have to do with the mysteries of the planet where they’re wrecked. Over the course of the first series, the cast, particularly those more loyal to Alice, would discover that human expeditions have visited the planet before, and evidence of these prior investigations (and perhaps some of their sticky, violent ends).
The steppe-mountain setting departs from the tradition of stranded stories, and would give the writers extra flexibility in setting. Some episodes would take place on the steppe, some at a nearby lake, and some exploring the mountains. Another narrative arc of the show would be a quest by some characters to discover the sea on the other side of the mountains, and that would probably integrate with the reveal of the indigenous species, described a bit later.
Most important about the planet’s mythology is that there is an alien race that lives there, the descendents of the inventors of the wormhole technology. And I would have them be as absolutely unlike humanity in every way possible. Perhaps they’d be a species something like amphibious cephalopods. The most important scientific consultant on the show would be the biologists who would brainstorm ways that intelligent amphibious cephalopods could evolve and become the dominant technological species on a planet.
The cephalopod culture would have to be immensely detailed as well, because the major narrative of the show would be the cast discovering their technology, culture, and mysteries, eventually learning to communicate with them. This would probably be the most difficult part of designing Lost in Space 2.0, even more than having one (and later two) major characters who are advanced android geniuses. At least androids and humans share a common history. The cephalopod culture would have nothing at all in common with Earth, but with a history just as detailed, and ethically complex, as humanity's.
There could also be conflicts because some of the humans (probably Smith and his cronies) would catch small cephalopods to eat at the beginning of the series. But because androids can perceive all the possible states of an object as well as its current actual state, Alice would stop the cast from eating them, and provoking the adult intelligent cephalopods. The human-cephalopod misunderstandings and conflicts would be another central story arc of the show.
I think this show sounds like a really cool idea. Let me know if you have any character ideas for anyone other than Alice and Dr Smith, because they’re the only people I’ve thought of so far. I don’t really want to see anyone who is too much like a character from Lost or BSG. If this whole academic career doesn’t work out, or it turns out that I can make more money as a tv producer, I know I at least have a good idea I can attach my name to.
Saturday, September 4, 2010
How to Read Philosophy, and Be a Philosopher
In the course of preparing a presentation I’ve been invited to give at a conference at University of St Gallen in Switzerland later this Fall, an intriguing idea came to me about the history of philosophy. It’s too complex to fit into the space I have for the presentation, but it’s promising enough that I think I can work with it for a while. It’s also connected to a conversation I had Friday evening about how philosophy is taught at the introductory and undergraduate level.
My friend has begun to find it ridiculous that we are teaching undergraduates philosophy by having them argue against or otherwise try to attack the works and ideas of the giants of our fields. If a philosophical work or corpus has survived with a prominent role in the history of ideas for hundreds or thousands of years, it seems absurd that we would teach people by demanding that they refute Aristotle at age 19. It trivializes a work of monumental scope and power. It demeans the concepts that have revolutionized thinking over the millennia. I didn’t recall being taught that way.
My first philosophy instructor was (and still is) an old Cambridge man, who waxed to me this summer about the old way of teaching philosophy, where you truly know your history, can genuinely understand the thoughts and social milieux that shaped the thinkers you’re studying. You can’t start refuting all over the house until you know why every word is just the way it is. This is philosophy as serious scholarship, the meticulous investigation into a way of life that in most cases no longer exists, so that one can understand most deeply how a great piece of work was produced, and how it was meant to affect its own time, its own readers.
However, there is a different way to read philosophy which I consider equally legitimate as serious scholarship, but is easier in some respects, but far more difficult in others. Werner Herzog talks about how the meaning of his films, particularly Aguirre The Wrath of God, changes depending on who is watching them. The work is no less great, even though the people who receive it transform its meaning significantly and radically. In fact, it’s greater because it can have all these different meanings in different contexts of culture and history. Philosophy has such a long tradition that its great works have undergone similar transformations. It is easier than scholarship because it doesn’t require so much historical and contextual work. But inspirational readings are more difficult because the work stands out as even more alien when it is transplanted into a new context.
It’s difficult to read philosophy well, or indeed any great work, when you are part of the community. Every filmmaker, the Hollywood hacks, commercial directors, no-budget indie directors with a stolen digital camera, is in the same community as Kubrick, Murnau, and Herzog. Writers are in the same community as Eliot, Joyce, and Cervantes. Philosophers are in the same community as Plato, Russell, Deleuze, and Kant. The danger of the trivializing attitude of refutation being your only engagement with a work is that you make a mockery of the giants of your field. The scholarly attitude becomes dangerous when it becomes worship, and you sterilize your own creativity in a terrible inferiority complex.
The inspirational attitude is to pick up a work and a philosopher as if you are talking to an old, strange friend. This friend will shock and terrify you, and also mystify you completely. But if you can engage your alien friend in a respectful conversation, a productive dialogue, then you can become a great figure yourself.
My friend has begun to find it ridiculous that we are teaching undergraduates philosophy by having them argue against or otherwise try to attack the works and ideas of the giants of our fields. If a philosophical work or corpus has survived with a prominent role in the history of ideas for hundreds or thousands of years, it seems absurd that we would teach people by demanding that they refute Aristotle at age 19. It trivializes a work of monumental scope and power. It demeans the concepts that have revolutionized thinking over the millennia. I didn’t recall being taught that way.
My first philosophy instructor was (and still is) an old Cambridge man, who waxed to me this summer about the old way of teaching philosophy, where you truly know your history, can genuinely understand the thoughts and social milieux that shaped the thinkers you’re studying. You can’t start refuting all over the house until you know why every word is just the way it is. This is philosophy as serious scholarship, the meticulous investigation into a way of life that in most cases no longer exists, so that one can understand most deeply how a great piece of work was produced, and how it was meant to affect its own time, its own readers.
However, there is a different way to read philosophy which I consider equally legitimate as serious scholarship, but is easier in some respects, but far more difficult in others. Werner Herzog talks about how the meaning of his films, particularly Aguirre The Wrath of God, changes depending on who is watching them. The work is no less great, even though the people who receive it transform its meaning significantly and radically. In fact, it’s greater because it can have all these different meanings in different contexts of culture and history. Philosophy has such a long tradition that its great works have undergone similar transformations. It is easier than scholarship because it doesn’t require so much historical and contextual work. But inspirational readings are more difficult because the work stands out as even more alien when it is transplanted into a new context.
It’s difficult to read philosophy well, or indeed any great work, when you are part of the community. Every filmmaker, the Hollywood hacks, commercial directors, no-budget indie directors with a stolen digital camera, is in the same community as Kubrick, Murnau, and Herzog. Writers are in the same community as Eliot, Joyce, and Cervantes. Philosophers are in the same community as Plato, Russell, Deleuze, and Kant. The danger of the trivializing attitude of refutation being your only engagement with a work is that you make a mockery of the giants of your field. The scholarly attitude becomes dangerous when it becomes worship, and you sterilize your own creativity in a terrible inferiority complex.
The inspirational attitude is to pick up a work and a philosopher as if you are talking to an old, strange friend. This friend will shock and terrify you, and also mystify you completely. But if you can engage your alien friend in a respectful conversation, a productive dialogue, then you can become a great figure yourself.
Sunday, April 25, 2010
My Kind of Waking Life
A couple of weeks ago, I came across a very interesting movie called After.Life. It’s an intriguing premise that apparently resulted in a wretched film. Christina Ricci is a woman (a spoiled, horrid, difficult, self-absorbed, idiotic woman) who is in a car accident and wakes up on Liam Neeson the undertaker’s slab. Apparently, Ricci is a spirit who hasn’t been able to understand that she’s dead, and Neeson has the power to convince her to accept her fate. As their conversations continue, she gains an increasingly deathly pallor, her body catching up to her actual situation of being dead.
This fancy little idea is not the actual point of the movie, however. I don’t mind spoiling it for you, because the movie is supposed to be pretty terrible, and the movie itself isn’t why I’m writing. It turns out that Neeson’s character is just a creepy serial killer who’s using the ‘confused souls’ story as a cover: He’s slowly injecting Ricci with chemicals to make her appear as if she’s dying, cutting off more and more pieces of her clothing for no good reason, and will end by burying her ‘alive.’
After reading the reviewer’s dismissal of the film as “veering into Saw territory,” I was pretty disappointed too. I thought the idea of an undertaker who had to deal with his self-reanimating corpses was pretty brilliant in itself. There’s no need to turn it into a samey serial killer story. In fact, this could make a brilliant black comedy. Consider this: What kind of person would die and refuse to believe that they’re dead. The character Ricci plays in the movie is actually quite like what one of those people would be: Someone so self-absorbed, so convinced that the world revolves around them, that they would find it incredible that the world would go on without them, or that they would die in an absurd accident, that their deaths would be anything other than epic or noteworthy. Can you imagine having to talk someone like that into humility?
That’s where the comedy comes in. This poor undertaker, who I would imagine as a bit more nebbishy, or at least a little less fit, than Liam Neeson, just wants to get on with his business of dressing the dead for their funerals. It’s fine when it comes to the nice old ladies and well-adjusted people dying of sudden heart attacks or terminal illnesses. But so much of his time is filled with exasperating conversations with utterly wretched people. Plus, he has a funeral deadline to convince them to make.
I think I’ll put this on my list of short stories to write. It will finally give me a chance to use Erin May, this reporter character I developed a couple of years ago for a novel treatment that went nowhere (too pretentious). She can investigate his funeral home after the Ricci character starts walking and talking during her own funeral, cajoling people about how little they appreciate her. I've been wanting to write something articulating her plucky jadedness for a while now, and this story might suit it perfectly. It would be a good practice for writing irrealism too.
This fancy little idea is not the actual point of the movie, however. I don’t mind spoiling it for you, because the movie is supposed to be pretty terrible, and the movie itself isn’t why I’m writing. It turns out that Neeson’s character is just a creepy serial killer who’s using the ‘confused souls’ story as a cover: He’s slowly injecting Ricci with chemicals to make her appear as if she’s dying, cutting off more and more pieces of her clothing for no good reason, and will end by burying her ‘alive.’
After reading the reviewer’s dismissal of the film as “veering into Saw territory,” I was pretty disappointed too. I thought the idea of an undertaker who had to deal with his self-reanimating corpses was pretty brilliant in itself. There’s no need to turn it into a samey serial killer story. In fact, this could make a brilliant black comedy. Consider this: What kind of person would die and refuse to believe that they’re dead. The character Ricci plays in the movie is actually quite like what one of those people would be: Someone so self-absorbed, so convinced that the world revolves around them, that they would find it incredible that the world would go on without them, or that they would die in an absurd accident, that their deaths would be anything other than epic or noteworthy. Can you imagine having to talk someone like that into humility?
That’s where the comedy comes in. This poor undertaker, who I would imagine as a bit more nebbishy, or at least a little less fit, than Liam Neeson, just wants to get on with his business of dressing the dead for their funerals. It’s fine when it comes to the nice old ladies and well-adjusted people dying of sudden heart attacks or terminal illnesses. But so much of his time is filled with exasperating conversations with utterly wretched people. Plus, he has a funeral deadline to convince them to make.
I think I’ll put this on my list of short stories to write. It will finally give me a chance to use Erin May, this reporter character I developed a couple of years ago for a novel treatment that went nowhere (too pretentious). She can investigate his funeral home after the Ricci character starts walking and talking during her own funeral, cajoling people about how little they appreciate her. I've been wanting to write something articulating her plucky jadedness for a while now, and this story might suit it perfectly. It would be a good practice for writing irrealism too.
Friday, February 26, 2010
Wisdom Only Comes With the Falling of Dusk
I can now consider Lisa Moore to have officially made it, because she’s been reviewed in the New York Times. I first met her when I interviewed her for The Muse, either just before or just after she became writer-in-residence at Memorial University. I can’t quite remember the exact chronology. She filled the job incredibly well, becoming a popular fixture on campus and deeply integrated with the literature student community. I had given up on writing of my own when she was writer-in-residence, so I wasn’t really an active member of that scene. If I could go back now that I self-identify very differently, I don’t really know what would change. But this post isn’t about other possible worlds.
Her second book is called February, the story of a woman who has taken decades to deal with the traumatic death of her husband at sea. The Times article, by Sylvia Brownrigg, is a very positive review, and it looks like an intriguing book. But there’s an element of the story that the Times doesn’t notice, which is very important for understanding the particular resonance of the book. The book takes place in St John’s, and Brownrigg notes that the protagonist’s husband had died in the collapse of an ocean oil platform in a severe storm in the early 1980s, where none of the crew survived. To a typical New York Times reader, this is all you need to know, and you can appreciate the story for its craft and emotional power at the individual level just fine with this context. But if you’re from Newfoundland, once you know this, the story takes on a deeper, much more traumatic meaning. Because a Newfoundlander reading the description of the husband’s death knows immediately that it was The Ocean Ranger.
The impact of this incident can’t be underestimated. The closest analogue I can see for a more widely known event is difficult to find. The best example I could think of is that The Ocean Ranger is to Newfoundland what The World Trade Centre is to New York City. It’s the greatest single shock of national trauma which that society experienced, and national trauma is the best way to understand its social, cultural, and psychological impact. It was the climax of centuries of deadly terror inflicted on working people by the sea. I don’t want to explain it any more, because my words in a blog post won’t match the place this event has in Newfoundland’s national psyche.
Mindful of this, here is what I think Moore was trying to do. She’s trying to make a national catharsis, a work of art to process the inconceivable. It seems an indirect method, which is probably best, because of the magnitude of the event itself. I don’t know how well she pulls this off, because I haven’t yet read the book. But I admire the project, even while I remain ambivalent.
The particular role of national art in depicting and processing national trauma is important and fascinating, and remains incredibly difficult. An artist has to be very careful not to trivialize the event through the required particularity of a narrative. There also has to be enough distance in time that the event can be properly understood without the immediate pain intefering with thought. Her story takes it as a remove as well, since it’s more specifically about the mourning process for the Ocean Ranger, rather than the event itself. This can be effective, but also very dangerous. If her protagonist, Helen O’Mara, comes to stand too literally for the ‘People of Newfoundland,’ then Moore risks sliding into hokum. But it would only be hokum to someone already familiar with the trauma itself, only a Newfoundlander. This particular kind of hokum would be pretty much invisible to someone not from the island, such as a New York Times book reviewer. I think Moore has the talent to prevent this, but I’m going to have to read the book myself to see. When does it come out in softcover?
(Is this a sign that a national trauma has been overcome? When a citizen can ask when the first major attempt at artistic catharsis is coming out in softcover?)
Her second book is called February, the story of a woman who has taken decades to deal with the traumatic death of her husband at sea. The Times article, by Sylvia Brownrigg, is a very positive review, and it looks like an intriguing book. But there’s an element of the story that the Times doesn’t notice, which is very important for understanding the particular resonance of the book. The book takes place in St John’s, and Brownrigg notes that the protagonist’s husband had died in the collapse of an ocean oil platform in a severe storm in the early 1980s, where none of the crew survived. To a typical New York Times reader, this is all you need to know, and you can appreciate the story for its craft and emotional power at the individual level just fine with this context. But if you’re from Newfoundland, once you know this, the story takes on a deeper, much more traumatic meaning. Because a Newfoundlander reading the description of the husband’s death knows immediately that it was The Ocean Ranger.
The impact of this incident can’t be underestimated. The closest analogue I can see for a more widely known event is difficult to find. The best example I could think of is that The Ocean Ranger is to Newfoundland what The World Trade Centre is to New York City. It’s the greatest single shock of national trauma which that society experienced, and national trauma is the best way to understand its social, cultural, and psychological impact. It was the climax of centuries of deadly terror inflicted on working people by the sea. I don’t want to explain it any more, because my words in a blog post won’t match the place this event has in Newfoundland’s national psyche.
Mindful of this, here is what I think Moore was trying to do. She’s trying to make a national catharsis, a work of art to process the inconceivable. It seems an indirect method, which is probably best, because of the magnitude of the event itself. I don’t know how well she pulls this off, because I haven’t yet read the book. But I admire the project, even while I remain ambivalent.
The particular role of national art in depicting and processing national trauma is important and fascinating, and remains incredibly difficult. An artist has to be very careful not to trivialize the event through the required particularity of a narrative. There also has to be enough distance in time that the event can be properly understood without the immediate pain intefering with thought. Her story takes it as a remove as well, since it’s more specifically about the mourning process for the Ocean Ranger, rather than the event itself. This can be effective, but also very dangerous. If her protagonist, Helen O’Mara, comes to stand too literally for the ‘People of Newfoundland,’ then Moore risks sliding into hokum. But it would only be hokum to someone already familiar with the trauma itself, only a Newfoundlander. This particular kind of hokum would be pretty much invisible to someone not from the island, such as a New York Times book reviewer. I think Moore has the talent to prevent this, but I’m going to have to read the book myself to see. When does it come out in softcover?
(Is this a sign that a national trauma has been overcome? When a citizen can ask when the first major attempt at artistic catharsis is coming out in softcover?)
Tuesday, February 9, 2010
Proliferating Television and Visions of Airships Over the Jungle
A by-product of my trip to Ecuador was another idea for a novel, which I think is the most promising I’ve had, with at least equal or higher potential than Write My Name In Hangul, my story about English teachers in South Korea. Travelling around Ecuador from city to city seems rather difficult, because it’s such a mountainous country with wide swaths of protected jungle area. So land transportation consists of tricky mountainous roads, which often take an entire day to travel the distance which would be only a few hours’ journey on Canadian highways. The most efficient way of getting from one city to another is by plane. Ecuadorians are very ecologically minded people, so this high carbon footprint of travelling around their country is a little paradoxical.
I realized the best kind of inter-city transit industry for this country would be airships, blimps, zeppelins. Helium gasbags with large passenger and crew cabins, spacious enough for a small ferry with the capacity of a standard inter-city plane, but much more comfortable. It would move at maybe half the pace, but could still get you from Quito to Cuenca to Loja in three hours. And it would be much more comfortable than a cramped airplane.
I don’t really have the entrepreneurial acumen to start this business myself, but I definitely have the creative mind to write a book about it. I already have most of my main characters, a couple of which I’ve used already in other projects, and the bare outlines of a story. Really, in terms of story, I just have the framework of everyone’s lives bumbling along while they fly from city to city on the flagship, L’Altavida. And there’s one incident that I want to include.
There’ll be a drunken documentary filmmaker, Norberto Krieger from either Argentina or Chile, who basically makes a home out of the airship, specifically the airship bar. About two-thirds of the way through the book, he’ll be comically thrown out of the airship over the jungle, but about a week later, he’ll walk back onto the airship when it stops in Cuenca. When asked how he survived the fall, he’d say “You have to tuck and roll.” When asked why he came back, he’d say, “I left my laptop in my crew cabin.”
And I have a title: The High Life.
•••
One of the things that I find pretty cool about television today is the degree and obviousness with which a franchise migrates from country to country. Now, this has happened pretty much ever since television existed in multiple countries, with executives licencing remakes of shows that have been successful in other countries, and the success rate of the new shows being reasonable at best. The Office is probably the most obvious example, with eight versions now existing (the original UK, the United States, Quebec, France, Germany, Chile, Russia, Brazil). I find it interesting how differences between the shows can reflect the differences in culture between the different countries, but that’s not the piece of news I’ve discovered now.
No, what I found out is that a much more mediocre American sitcom, The Big Bang Theory, has been ripped off almost exactly by Belarus. The characters even have the same name, the scripts are practically translations, and the actors are disturbingly old compared to their US counterparts. It’s completely unlicenced and absolutely impossible for anyone to get them to cease production. All television in Belarus is owned by the authoritarian state, which exists outside all international legal systems.
I realized the best kind of inter-city transit industry for this country would be airships, blimps, zeppelins. Helium gasbags with large passenger and crew cabins, spacious enough for a small ferry with the capacity of a standard inter-city plane, but much more comfortable. It would move at maybe half the pace, but could still get you from Quito to Cuenca to Loja in three hours. And it would be much more comfortable than a cramped airplane.
I don’t really have the entrepreneurial acumen to start this business myself, but I definitely have the creative mind to write a book about it. I already have most of my main characters, a couple of which I’ve used already in other projects, and the bare outlines of a story. Really, in terms of story, I just have the framework of everyone’s lives bumbling along while they fly from city to city on the flagship, L’Altavida. And there’s one incident that I want to include.
There’ll be a drunken documentary filmmaker, Norberto Krieger from either Argentina or Chile, who basically makes a home out of the airship, specifically the airship bar. About two-thirds of the way through the book, he’ll be comically thrown out of the airship over the jungle, but about a week later, he’ll walk back onto the airship when it stops in Cuenca. When asked how he survived the fall, he’d say “You have to tuck and roll.” When asked why he came back, he’d say, “I left my laptop in my crew cabin.”
And I have a title: The High Life.
•••
One of the things that I find pretty cool about television today is the degree and obviousness with which a franchise migrates from country to country. Now, this has happened pretty much ever since television existed in multiple countries, with executives licencing remakes of shows that have been successful in other countries, and the success rate of the new shows being reasonable at best. The Office is probably the most obvious example, with eight versions now existing (the original UK, the United States, Quebec, France, Germany, Chile, Russia, Brazil). I find it interesting how differences between the shows can reflect the differences in culture between the different countries, but that’s not the piece of news I’ve discovered now.
No, what I found out is that a much more mediocre American sitcom, The Big Bang Theory, has been ripped off almost exactly by Belarus. The characters even have the same name, the scripts are practically translations, and the actors are disturbingly old compared to their US counterparts. It’s completely unlicenced and absolutely impossible for anyone to get them to cease production. All television in Belarus is owned by the authoritarian state, which exists outside all international legal systems.
Tuesday, February 2, 2010
The Infamous Case of John Yoo, the Perfect Lawyer
Over the years, I’ve become intrigued by the lawyer. Among all my friends who have gone to law school, I’d say seventy per cent of them either didn’t finish, or did and chose not to become lawyers. For some, it was a matter of the workload, and the very long hours poring over legalese for hire. For others, they would be restricted from doing what they wanted to do with their lives, forced into taking positions that they might not want to take. This is what fascinates me most about lawyers.
Last month, I watched Jon Stewart interview John Yoo on The Daily Show, expecting to see him catch Yoo in some moment of hypocrisy, to display him in the infamy he deserved. This would have been a Jim Cramer moment for a genuinely influential figure in the Bush Administration. Yet Yoo never became ideological - he didn’t seem to have an ideology for Stewart’s questions to describe. Thinking on this and reading some of the analyses periodically over the following weeks, I realized that it was because John Yoo actually had no ideology. He had no beliefs.
What was he doing working in the Bush Administration? He was hired for the job. Why would he author a memo of legal advice that gave the Bush Administration the space to make a mockery of the Geneva Conventions, commit acts that American people generally consider morally reprehensible? Because it was part of his job to do so. Yoo’s bosses asked him if he could write a legal document giving them grounds to carry out particular acts. He acted according to the wishes of his client, finding the grey areas in the relevant legal documents to make their explanations.
This is what fascinates me about lawyers. The ideal lawyer is one who always acts in the best interest of their client, who becomes a tool of the client. The ideal lawyer empties their own personality and belief system, moral and political, and takes on that of their client. The wishes of the client become their wishes. This is why I think a lot of my more politically active friends left the legal profession, because they would have found themselves in this bind. In an economic climate where a young lawyer needs to take the jobs they can get, there is no guarantee that someone at the start of their career will work at a firm or represent clients who share at least some significant part of their belief system. If you’re not comfortable with that, then you won’t be comfortable being a working lawyer.
These kinds of empty personalities are what I find fascinating, the people who completely subsume themselves, who make themselves a figure for the action of others, an implement. I had an idea for a novel a while ago about a lawyer. I might have written about it here, but I don’t feel like going through my archives to check. The central character would be a lawyer who was completely indifferent to the actual guilt or innocence of his client, who cared only that his case was successful. I first thought of him as being a totally amoral egomaniac, someone for whom victory in a case is the paramount good, a validation of himself as a person.
But that’s not actually how these personalities work. The lawyer who cares only for the concerns of the client is more a mechanism than an ego. If he had an ego, it would only get in the way of his client’s own ideologies. This lawyer would have to be completely neutral, in every sense of the term. It’s a character I find scarier than the egomaniac centred on victory at all costs. The egomaniac’s victories would always be for him, achievements against sometimes impossible odds. He would be a supervillain with an amazing zest and vitality. The neutral would be a pure mechanism, the absolute servant. I wonder what kind of story could be centred around a person with no desires of his own, who exists only as a cipher.
Maybe I need to read some Phillip K Dick before I write this one.
Last month, I watched Jon Stewart interview John Yoo on The Daily Show, expecting to see him catch Yoo in some moment of hypocrisy, to display him in the infamy he deserved. This would have been a Jim Cramer moment for a genuinely influential figure in the Bush Administration. Yet Yoo never became ideological - he didn’t seem to have an ideology for Stewart’s questions to describe. Thinking on this and reading some of the analyses periodically over the following weeks, I realized that it was because John Yoo actually had no ideology. He had no beliefs.
What was he doing working in the Bush Administration? He was hired for the job. Why would he author a memo of legal advice that gave the Bush Administration the space to make a mockery of the Geneva Conventions, commit acts that American people generally consider morally reprehensible? Because it was part of his job to do so. Yoo’s bosses asked him if he could write a legal document giving them grounds to carry out particular acts. He acted according to the wishes of his client, finding the grey areas in the relevant legal documents to make their explanations.
This is what fascinates me about lawyers. The ideal lawyer is one who always acts in the best interest of their client, who becomes a tool of the client. The ideal lawyer empties their own personality and belief system, moral and political, and takes on that of their client. The wishes of the client become their wishes. This is why I think a lot of my more politically active friends left the legal profession, because they would have found themselves in this bind. In an economic climate where a young lawyer needs to take the jobs they can get, there is no guarantee that someone at the start of their career will work at a firm or represent clients who share at least some significant part of their belief system. If you’re not comfortable with that, then you won’t be comfortable being a working lawyer.
These kinds of empty personalities are what I find fascinating, the people who completely subsume themselves, who make themselves a figure for the action of others, an implement. I had an idea for a novel a while ago about a lawyer. I might have written about it here, but I don’t feel like going through my archives to check. The central character would be a lawyer who was completely indifferent to the actual guilt or innocence of his client, who cared only that his case was successful. I first thought of him as being a totally amoral egomaniac, someone for whom victory in a case is the paramount good, a validation of himself as a person.
But that’s not actually how these personalities work. The lawyer who cares only for the concerns of the client is more a mechanism than an ego. If he had an ego, it would only get in the way of his client’s own ideologies. This lawyer would have to be completely neutral, in every sense of the term. It’s a character I find scarier than the egomaniac centred on victory at all costs. The egomaniac’s victories would always be for him, achievements against sometimes impossible odds. He would be a supervillain with an amazing zest and vitality. The neutral would be a pure mechanism, the absolute servant. I wonder what kind of story could be centred around a person with no desires of his own, who exists only as a cipher.
Maybe I need to read some Phillip K Dick before I write this one.
Thursday, January 28, 2010
What Kind of 91 Years Is Spent in So Much Anger?
So here’s my thing with J. D. Salinger. For me, it all started with how irritating Holden Caulfield was. His character development didn’t really matter, though understanding the character as an ironic commentary on the quest for sincerity alleviated this somewhat. Despite my detatched view of Holden, I can never avoid holding him in contempt myself. He has a vision of a perfect world, and then holds the world in absolute contempt because it won’t conform to his vision. And I can’t get past the stupendous immaturity of that worldview.
And also, there’s Mark David Chapman.
The reclusiveness of his life was a major irritant for me as well. Now, I’ve also become a big Thomas Pynchon fan, so you may ask about any hypocrisy between my love of Pynchon and my irritation by Salinger over the reclusiveness. There’s a difference between the two in their hiding. Pynchon isn’t belligerent about his reclusiveness. He lives in New York state like a normal person. He just isn’t photographed. I mean, Pynchon was on The Simpsons making fun of his own reclusiveness. His animated self was wearing a paper bag over his head standing next to a huge sign that directed you to his house, while he flagged people down on the highway to “Get your picture taken with a reclusive author!” Pynchon could joke about his hideaway along with you.
Salinger didn’t just hide in his house; he hid with a snarl of contempt for anyone who would even approach him. He refused to publish anything, despite it eventually becoming general knowledge that he was still working even while he lived off the substantial royalties still collected from Catcher. If it was perfectionism, it infested him to the point where it became almost pointless. Despite writing huge amounts, no one ever saw it, and there were doubts that anyone ever would.
Oh yeah, and Mark David Chapman.
This is the other, more sympathetic reason Salinger never published. From the very moment when Catcher was published, people sympathized with Holden Caulfield, to the point where they sincerely took on his contempt for the phony, for hypocrites, into their own lives. But they didn’t realize that the whole point of Holden’s character was to show the futility of a life that refuses to compromise with even the minor hypocrisies and inconsistencies that are necessary for life in the world. Now here were people taking Holden Caulfield of all people as a role model?
The worst of these worshipers of Holden, if we’re talking about consequences unintended by the author, was Mark David Chapman. This was a mentally disturbed man who needed help and guidance, and found it in a directly literal understanding of Holden Caulfield’s acidic contempt for phonies, for people who say they have one belief, but live according to another. The paradigm phony for Chapman was John Lennon, who professed values of peace and love while living the high life in a New York penthouse and going through long periods of Hollywood lifestyles and drug abuse. Chapman considered himself a hero worthy of Holden, and Salinger, when he rid the world of that ultimate phony.
Mark David fucking Chapman.
If I’ve learned anything about literature, it’s that great literature has no ideology. Whatever instruction manual you find in a genuinely great work of art is whatever you bring there yourself. You can read Oliver Twist entirely accurately as a condemnation of exploitation in the name of profit, and a celebration of the self-made capitalist working his way up from the bottom. And you’d be right both times, no matter what Dickens himself might have thought. A writer can only be responsible for the words s/he writes, but never how those words are understood, taken up, and carried forward. Maybe Salinger really did intend to indict Holden for his myopically selfish idiocy, but there were a lot of people who came to Catcher struggling for a way of living that could approach authenticity, consistency, coherence, and truth without hypocrisy. Holden may have been an egotistical fool to me, but he was a mirror to millions more. Really, Holden Caulfield and a self-absorbed teenager just reflect each other.
That, I think, was Salinger’s goal in writing. He saw a kind of innocence in youth that was washed away by the compromises of adulthood, and all his books tried to capture that adolescent innocence. But the innocence of youth, the innocence of a life that doesn’t yet have to make deals in a tough and messy world, is an innocence of extremism. It’s a refusal to compromise, a demand that the world be just as I want it to be because it is right that it be right and I am right to make it right! To deal with that world, to move among it and negotiate it, is just that: a negotiation. Life in the world entails compromises, and in the second half of his life that Salinger spent away from the world, he compromised nothing.
Really, Salinger will always be associated with Holden for just this reason. It wasn’t just that Holden is his most iconic character in popular consciousness. Holden was a character whose very existence, A Catcher in the Rye, was defined by his incredible sincerity, consumed by his yearning for a perfect and totally fair world. That’s an incredible dream to have. But learning to let go of that dream and understand the universe as being great precisely because it can never be perfect, because it is a place of disorder and craziness and compromise, that’s the sign of a mature personality, of someone who can be joyful in the deepest, strongest, most true sense.
And also, there’s Mark David Chapman.
The reclusiveness of his life was a major irritant for me as well. Now, I’ve also become a big Thomas Pynchon fan, so you may ask about any hypocrisy between my love of Pynchon and my irritation by Salinger over the reclusiveness. There’s a difference between the two in their hiding. Pynchon isn’t belligerent about his reclusiveness. He lives in New York state like a normal person. He just isn’t photographed. I mean, Pynchon was on The Simpsons making fun of his own reclusiveness. His animated self was wearing a paper bag over his head standing next to a huge sign that directed you to his house, while he flagged people down on the highway to “Get your picture taken with a reclusive author!” Pynchon could joke about his hideaway along with you.
Salinger didn’t just hide in his house; he hid with a snarl of contempt for anyone who would even approach him. He refused to publish anything, despite it eventually becoming general knowledge that he was still working even while he lived off the substantial royalties still collected from Catcher. If it was perfectionism, it infested him to the point where it became almost pointless. Despite writing huge amounts, no one ever saw it, and there were doubts that anyone ever would.
Oh yeah, and Mark David Chapman.
This is the other, more sympathetic reason Salinger never published. From the very moment when Catcher was published, people sympathized with Holden Caulfield, to the point where they sincerely took on his contempt for the phony, for hypocrites, into their own lives. But they didn’t realize that the whole point of Holden’s character was to show the futility of a life that refuses to compromise with even the minor hypocrisies and inconsistencies that are necessary for life in the world. Now here were people taking Holden Caulfield of all people as a role model?
The worst of these worshipers of Holden, if we’re talking about consequences unintended by the author, was Mark David Chapman. This was a mentally disturbed man who needed help and guidance, and found it in a directly literal understanding of Holden Caulfield’s acidic contempt for phonies, for people who say they have one belief, but live according to another. The paradigm phony for Chapman was John Lennon, who professed values of peace and love while living the high life in a New York penthouse and going through long periods of Hollywood lifestyles and drug abuse. Chapman considered himself a hero worthy of Holden, and Salinger, when he rid the world of that ultimate phony.
Mark David fucking Chapman.
If I’ve learned anything about literature, it’s that great literature has no ideology. Whatever instruction manual you find in a genuinely great work of art is whatever you bring there yourself. You can read Oliver Twist entirely accurately as a condemnation of exploitation in the name of profit, and a celebration of the self-made capitalist working his way up from the bottom. And you’d be right both times, no matter what Dickens himself might have thought. A writer can only be responsible for the words s/he writes, but never how those words are understood, taken up, and carried forward. Maybe Salinger really did intend to indict Holden for his myopically selfish idiocy, but there were a lot of people who came to Catcher struggling for a way of living that could approach authenticity, consistency, coherence, and truth without hypocrisy. Holden may have been an egotistical fool to me, but he was a mirror to millions more. Really, Holden Caulfield and a self-absorbed teenager just reflect each other.
That, I think, was Salinger’s goal in writing. He saw a kind of innocence in youth that was washed away by the compromises of adulthood, and all his books tried to capture that adolescent innocence. But the innocence of youth, the innocence of a life that doesn’t yet have to make deals in a tough and messy world, is an innocence of extremism. It’s a refusal to compromise, a demand that the world be just as I want it to be because it is right that it be right and I am right to make it right! To deal with that world, to move among it and negotiate it, is just that: a negotiation. Life in the world entails compromises, and in the second half of his life that Salinger spent away from the world, he compromised nothing.
Really, Salinger will always be associated with Holden for just this reason. It wasn’t just that Holden is his most iconic character in popular consciousness. Holden was a character whose very existence, A Catcher in the Rye, was defined by his incredible sincerity, consumed by his yearning for a perfect and totally fair world. That’s an incredible dream to have. But learning to let go of that dream and understand the universe as being great precisely because it can never be perfect, because it is a place of disorder and craziness and compromise, that’s the sign of a mature personality, of someone who can be joyful in the deepest, strongest, most true sense.
Monday, December 7, 2009
A Not Too Long Journey in Search of a Method
My pleasure reading over the last month or so included mostly Bolaño, as you could probably tell from the previous few posts. After reading 2666 again, I started Nazi Literature in the Americas, his fake encyclopedia of the mostly melancholy and marginal lives of the men and women who constituted a century-long literary movement built around fascist ideas. Of course, these people were all fictional. It was, as I’ve considered everything else I’ve read by Roberto Bolaño, brilliant.
But after finishing Nazi Literature, I started The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner, and the transition between the two authors in my reading was jarring. It’s made me think about the development of my own writing style, which, even though I owe a lot to the modernists like Joyce and Woolf, now is more aligned with the easier language of Bolaño and Nabokov. The idea I had today was that the reason for this transition has to do with my philosophical development more than my tastes as an author.
What fascinated me about modernist literature when I first discovered James Joyce and Virginia Woolf was the technique of stream-of-consciousness writing, language that inserted the reader into the thoughts of the character as they drifted along an associative train through time and space, sometimes focussed on the colloquial, sometimes on flights of memory, sometimes intimate moments of self-reflection, and sometimes into fragmentary thoughts that completely dissociated one from reality and could lose track of what is typically thought of as the narrative altogether. Plot became secondary to character study with this technique.
And it had none of the irritating omniscience that so annoys me in so much nineteenth century literature. The narration of Jane Austen, Gustave Flaubert, and Maryann Evans (George Eliot) knew everything about their characters and displayed them on the page for you to read. Every facet of their characters were laid out in the text like the terms of an anatomy lesson. It wasn’t so much character study to me as character explanation. The narrator displayed all the psychological properties, and they collided in the mechanical necessity the parts dictated. I could almost call it mechanical realism.
This stream-of-consciousness technique offered a teenager with pretentions for a career in writing a way of exploring a character-constituted narrative, but kept the mystery and paradoxes that I saw in actual people. The mechanical realist technique put every facet of their characters’ psychologies on display, each one fitting together into a consistent whole. A character revealed through stream-of-consciousness could embrace inconsistency, as the character itself could become just as lost in its own stream as the reader. Surprise was possible.
My philosophical development began just as I was turning 19, with my first course in the subject from Jim Bradley, to whom I owe lifelong thanks. When I first began, I was fascinated by the problem of how the subjective could be bridged with the world, how thought could become objective and no longer distort the world in order to understand it. But over the following years, I began to understand how flawed this entire philosophical setup was. If a human subject’s knowledge of the world was so radically distorted as this setup says it is, then no creature with such a flawed perceptual apparatus could survive. In all the ways I had studied of how people tackled the question of how we could overcome the distortion inherent to subjectivity, no one had seriously questioned whether subjectivity was inherently distorting of reality at all. And I abandoned most of the philosophy that refused to pose this question.
And this is why, as I’ve developed this stance of radically rejecting the subject-world problem and all the ways this pseudo-problem crops up in other philosophies (mind-body, thought-reality, certainty-doubt), I’ve come to abandon the stream-of-consciousness as a fruitful literary technique. Reading Faulkner has just made this even more clear to me. I’m only reading him for the first time this year, having picked up a box set of three novels cheaply at a used bookstore in Windsor this March. He’s a master of the technique, taking it to what looks to be an extremity of fragmentation. The story of The Sound and the Fury is nearly impossible to discern from the constant shifts in time, mood, event, perception, and thought. These shifts are structured along the narrative of the decline and fall of the noble family of Compson. But that narrative is far from apparant in the words themselves and their organization.
The stream-of-consciousness technique is a story told from deep within a single character’s subjectivity. And taken to its extreme in Faulkner, I can see now the presumption in the technique as to the nature of a subjectivity: a distortion of the plot playing out in the real, outside, world. There is no place for the world itself to be mysterious in its constitution of itself, no place for a conspiracy between a character and her world, no way to turn a narrative into a plot against the reader. The only way for confusion and mystery to arise in stream-of-consciousness writing is in the distortion consciousness creates in trying (and inevitably failing) to apprehend the world.
The realism of Nabokov, Bolaño, Vonnegut, DeLillo, and Pynchon (these are my favourite examples; I know I must read more women) can create grand structures of multiplicity through a simple structure: realist writing with a narrator who doesn’t know everything, and who sometimes might not know anything. A stream-of-consciousness can flow in only one direction: down the black hole of a distorting subjectivity. Myserious realism can build an entire world with a quick suggestion.
But after finishing Nazi Literature, I started The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner, and the transition between the two authors in my reading was jarring. It’s made me think about the development of my own writing style, which, even though I owe a lot to the modernists like Joyce and Woolf, now is more aligned with the easier language of Bolaño and Nabokov. The idea I had today was that the reason for this transition has to do with my philosophical development more than my tastes as an author.
What fascinated me about modernist literature when I first discovered James Joyce and Virginia Woolf was the technique of stream-of-consciousness writing, language that inserted the reader into the thoughts of the character as they drifted along an associative train through time and space, sometimes focussed on the colloquial, sometimes on flights of memory, sometimes intimate moments of self-reflection, and sometimes into fragmentary thoughts that completely dissociated one from reality and could lose track of what is typically thought of as the narrative altogether. Plot became secondary to character study with this technique.
And it had none of the irritating omniscience that so annoys me in so much nineteenth century literature. The narration of Jane Austen, Gustave Flaubert, and Maryann Evans (George Eliot) knew everything about their characters and displayed them on the page for you to read. Every facet of their characters were laid out in the text like the terms of an anatomy lesson. It wasn’t so much character study to me as character explanation. The narrator displayed all the psychological properties, and they collided in the mechanical necessity the parts dictated. I could almost call it mechanical realism.
This stream-of-consciousness technique offered a teenager with pretentions for a career in writing a way of exploring a character-constituted narrative, but kept the mystery and paradoxes that I saw in actual people. The mechanical realist technique put every facet of their characters’ psychologies on display, each one fitting together into a consistent whole. A character revealed through stream-of-consciousness could embrace inconsistency, as the character itself could become just as lost in its own stream as the reader. Surprise was possible.
My philosophical development began just as I was turning 19, with my first course in the subject from Jim Bradley, to whom I owe lifelong thanks. When I first began, I was fascinated by the problem of how the subjective could be bridged with the world, how thought could become objective and no longer distort the world in order to understand it. But over the following years, I began to understand how flawed this entire philosophical setup was. If a human subject’s knowledge of the world was so radically distorted as this setup says it is, then no creature with such a flawed perceptual apparatus could survive. In all the ways I had studied of how people tackled the question of how we could overcome the distortion inherent to subjectivity, no one had seriously questioned whether subjectivity was inherently distorting of reality at all. And I abandoned most of the philosophy that refused to pose this question.
And this is why, as I’ve developed this stance of radically rejecting the subject-world problem and all the ways this pseudo-problem crops up in other philosophies (mind-body, thought-reality, certainty-doubt), I’ve come to abandon the stream-of-consciousness as a fruitful literary technique. Reading Faulkner has just made this even more clear to me. I’m only reading him for the first time this year, having picked up a box set of three novels cheaply at a used bookstore in Windsor this March. He’s a master of the technique, taking it to what looks to be an extremity of fragmentation. The story of The Sound and the Fury is nearly impossible to discern from the constant shifts in time, mood, event, perception, and thought. These shifts are structured along the narrative of the decline and fall of the noble family of Compson. But that narrative is far from apparant in the words themselves and their organization.
The stream-of-consciousness technique is a story told from deep within a single character’s subjectivity. And taken to its extreme in Faulkner, I can see now the presumption in the technique as to the nature of a subjectivity: a distortion of the plot playing out in the real, outside, world. There is no place for the world itself to be mysterious in its constitution of itself, no place for a conspiracy between a character and her world, no way to turn a narrative into a plot against the reader. The only way for confusion and mystery to arise in stream-of-consciousness writing is in the distortion consciousness creates in trying (and inevitably failing) to apprehend the world.
The realism of Nabokov, Bolaño, Vonnegut, DeLillo, and Pynchon (these are my favourite examples; I know I must read more women) can create grand structures of multiplicity through a simple structure: realist writing with a narrator who doesn’t know everything, and who sometimes might not know anything. A stream-of-consciousness can flow in only one direction: down the black hole of a distorting subjectivity. Myserious realism can build an entire world with a quick suggestion.
Sunday, November 15, 2009
Because, as You Know, Time Is Unreal
This is something funny I say lately when people ask me to be philosophical, even if it’s after 8.00 in the evening or I’ve had my second pint or equivalent wine or liquor. That’s the subject of an essay I read a couple of weeks ago by John McTaggart Ellis McTaggart, which was incredibly controversial at the time, because no one could deal with the idea that time wasn’t real. He wrote that we can never identify time itself, only the relative succession of events in order. Once I realized that was the point of his essay, I understood that it wasn’t controversial at all anymore, and that he only anticipated the conceptual leap of special relativity physics, just without the math. When I use that phrase at a party, I usually follow it up with, “But that doesn’t matter anyway.”
The reason I bring it up is that I started reading Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 again just after I got back from Edinburgh. The story had stuck with my memory, involuntarily popping up in my consciousness ever since I read it last winter, and no novel had done that to me before. I’ve been able to see a lot more of the interconnections and callbacks among the different parts now that I hadn’t noticed the first time, which has made it a much more rich reading experience. But just now, I was thinking about why the parts are arranged out of chronological order as they are in the book, and I came to an idea that makes an incredible amount of sense. Whether it was Bolaño’s or not doesn’t matter, but it’s a fascinating idea.
The Chronological Order of 2666
One: 1998-late 2003
Two: 1980-2000
Three: early 2003
Four: 1993-1997
Five: 1920-2003
I never really understood why a writer would arrange their work out of chronological order (unless it was actually a time-travel story, in which case the concept becomes kind of laughable, or at least it should) before I wrote A Small Man’s Town, which is told out of chronological order. You could say that I organized the events of my book not in chronological order, but in emotional order. My book is organized in a series of arcs in which my characters mature emotionally. Some of them move more chronologically than others because those characters don’t have as many setbacks in developing their maturity. I found that kind of structure to be more significant than a simple order of events from 2001-10, because none of the events in that book are really all that significant. So that’s why I never adhered strongly to chronology.
Just before I started writing this, I had this idea about why Bolaño didn’t adhere to chronology. 2666 is a novel about the abyss, a maelstrom of violence and death bubbling underneath the surface of the ordinary life we think is so secure, but that when we least expect it can swallow us whole (or chomp us up in pieces) and spit us back out days, months, years later reduced to a bloody pulp. This is not an uplifting Mitch Albom style story where everything is alright because we love each other. The problem with the abyss is that it’s a void, it’s so terrifying that it’s unspeakable. So all we can do is approach as close as we can without falling in.
And that’s what the order of the five parts of 2666 do. The protagonists of each part, as you progress from part one to part five, become better able to approach, perceive, and understand the abyss. The four literary critics of part one- Jean-Claude Pelletier, Manuel Espinoza, Liz Norton, and Piero Morini - are sheltered, cultured western Europeans of the 1990s and 2000s. They understand it only through art, particularly the literature of Benno von Archimboldi (whose work we never actually read or have described in any detail), and perceive it only through their incomprehensible dreams.
Oscar Amalfitano, the protagonist of part two, is a philosophy professor in Santa Teresa, the ficionalized Juarez where the killings of hundreds of women takes place. He perceives the abyss through his estranged wife’s madness and death from AIDS, and the voices he hears as he edges into madness himself. Oscar Fate, the American journalist visiting Santa Teresa by accident to cover a mediocre boxing match for his magazine, meets up with some low-level gangsters in the city, one of whom is dating Amalfitano’s daughter Rosa. He sees the violent criminal culture that renders the murder of hundreds of women so ordinary, and understands it well enough to know that he and Rosa are both in way over their heads.
The fourth part is about the killings themselves, or at least the first few hundred of them, and the investigations that the police, narcotrafficers, and gangs get involved in. This part puts us in the thick of the massacre itself, with only one young cop, Lalo Cura, standing out among a large ensemble cast this time, as the only one who believes that the police can solve the crimes, and actually working towards this himself.
And part five tells the life story of Benno von Archimboldi: how a young German boy who loves to swim gets enlisted in the Nazi army, fights on the Eastern Front, is shot in the neck, recuperates in the reclaimed cavern of a long dead Jewish sci-fi writer whose works inspire him to begin his own literary career, plucking his pen name from random thoughts at the time, falling in love with a slightly mad girl after whose death he wanders Europe as an itinerant even as his books becomes increasingly famous, while he himself embraces life for its impermanence, instability, and finitude, and all the small moments of joy that come throughout it if you’re ready to receive them, until one day he hears from his sister, an ordinary woman with a son who moved to America to start a business and found himself roped into this terrible matter of these murders in Santa Teresa. So Archimboldi flies to Mexico to help.
I think it’s intriguing that the character of Prof Amalfitano turns up in the most parts. I think, and this is entirely unfounded speculation, that if the rumours that a sixth part of 2666 exists or was planned or prepared, it would feature Amalfitano finally succumbing to complete insanity. It would perhaps involve Archimboldi as well, and perhaps an older Lalo Cura, though I cannot say if he would be jaded by then or just as determined to stop the killings even if he understands them as deeply as my reading suggests.
The reason I bring it up is that I started reading Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 again just after I got back from Edinburgh. The story had stuck with my memory, involuntarily popping up in my consciousness ever since I read it last winter, and no novel had done that to me before. I’ve been able to see a lot more of the interconnections and callbacks among the different parts now that I hadn’t noticed the first time, which has made it a much more rich reading experience. But just now, I was thinking about why the parts are arranged out of chronological order as they are in the book, and I came to an idea that makes an incredible amount of sense. Whether it was Bolaño’s or not doesn’t matter, but it’s a fascinating idea.
The Chronological Order of 2666
One: 1998-late 2003
Two: 1980-2000
Three: early 2003
Four: 1993-1997
Five: 1920-2003
I never really understood why a writer would arrange their work out of chronological order (unless it was actually a time-travel story, in which case the concept becomes kind of laughable, or at least it should) before I wrote A Small Man’s Town, which is told out of chronological order. You could say that I organized the events of my book not in chronological order, but in emotional order. My book is organized in a series of arcs in which my characters mature emotionally. Some of them move more chronologically than others because those characters don’t have as many setbacks in developing their maturity. I found that kind of structure to be more significant than a simple order of events from 2001-10, because none of the events in that book are really all that significant. So that’s why I never adhered strongly to chronology.
Just before I started writing this, I had this idea about why Bolaño didn’t adhere to chronology. 2666 is a novel about the abyss, a maelstrom of violence and death bubbling underneath the surface of the ordinary life we think is so secure, but that when we least expect it can swallow us whole (or chomp us up in pieces) and spit us back out days, months, years later reduced to a bloody pulp. This is not an uplifting Mitch Albom style story where everything is alright because we love each other. The problem with the abyss is that it’s a void, it’s so terrifying that it’s unspeakable. So all we can do is approach as close as we can without falling in.
And that’s what the order of the five parts of 2666 do. The protagonists of each part, as you progress from part one to part five, become better able to approach, perceive, and understand the abyss. The four literary critics of part one- Jean-Claude Pelletier, Manuel Espinoza, Liz Norton, and Piero Morini - are sheltered, cultured western Europeans of the 1990s and 2000s. They understand it only through art, particularly the literature of Benno von Archimboldi (whose work we never actually read or have described in any detail), and perceive it only through their incomprehensible dreams.
Oscar Amalfitano, the protagonist of part two, is a philosophy professor in Santa Teresa, the ficionalized Juarez where the killings of hundreds of women takes place. He perceives the abyss through his estranged wife’s madness and death from AIDS, and the voices he hears as he edges into madness himself. Oscar Fate, the American journalist visiting Santa Teresa by accident to cover a mediocre boxing match for his magazine, meets up with some low-level gangsters in the city, one of whom is dating Amalfitano’s daughter Rosa. He sees the violent criminal culture that renders the murder of hundreds of women so ordinary, and understands it well enough to know that he and Rosa are both in way over their heads.
The fourth part is about the killings themselves, or at least the first few hundred of them, and the investigations that the police, narcotrafficers, and gangs get involved in. This part puts us in the thick of the massacre itself, with only one young cop, Lalo Cura, standing out among a large ensemble cast this time, as the only one who believes that the police can solve the crimes, and actually working towards this himself.
And part five tells the life story of Benno von Archimboldi: how a young German boy who loves to swim gets enlisted in the Nazi army, fights on the Eastern Front, is shot in the neck, recuperates in the reclaimed cavern of a long dead Jewish sci-fi writer whose works inspire him to begin his own literary career, plucking his pen name from random thoughts at the time, falling in love with a slightly mad girl after whose death he wanders Europe as an itinerant even as his books becomes increasingly famous, while he himself embraces life for its impermanence, instability, and finitude, and all the small moments of joy that come throughout it if you’re ready to receive them, until one day he hears from his sister, an ordinary woman with a son who moved to America to start a business and found himself roped into this terrible matter of these murders in Santa Teresa. So Archimboldi flies to Mexico to help.
I think it’s intriguing that the character of Prof Amalfitano turns up in the most parts. I think, and this is entirely unfounded speculation, that if the rumours that a sixth part of 2666 exists or was planned or prepared, it would feature Amalfitano finally succumbing to complete insanity. It would perhaps involve Archimboldi as well, and perhaps an older Lalo Cura, though I cannot say if he would be jaded by then or just as determined to stop the killings even if he understands them as deeply as my reading suggests.
Monday, November 2, 2009
Strikes and Music Leads to Thoughts on My Political Art
The expectation after my post last week was that this would be about some of the rest of my University of Edinburgh trip, but I’ve found myself in the middle of a labour action by the McMaster teaching assistants this week. I’m doing my twenty hours per week on the picket lines, though despite the university administration’s stonewalling, I don’t think the strike will last very long. This is more of a tangent about my art and the ideas that motivate it than the strike itself, which is being covered to death.
When I talk to people in cars giving them news about the negotiations and what our demands are, one piece of information that I’ve found especially compels them is the amount of money that TAs with families of their own have to pay for their family-rate health insurance. It’s too high, and TAs’ pay scales are mediocre enough without having these expenses on top of it. I can afford it, but I have no dependents, cheap rent, and no real expenses other than basic life.
So even though I’m on the picket lines to help the TAs who need help more than I do, I can’t help but feel disingenuous precisely because I’m fine. Who am I to speak for people in genuine financial trouble? Who am I to speak for people who go to sleep every night wondering if they’ll be able to feed their kids the next day, or next week? It’s condescending for a comfortable person to speak for someone in that situation.
Tonight, I’ve been listening to a free mixtape K’Naan (in my view probably the best rapper in Canada) and J.Period made, The Messengers. It’s a series of remixes of songs by Fela Kuti, Bob Marley, and Bob Dylan, interspersed with K’Naan discussing the role these artists played in his life, and in the political, social, and personal movements they sparked at the height of their careers. I downloaded it a while before I left for Edinburgh, and its music has stuck with me for weeks. K’Naan has crafted these remixes into duets, linking the African democracy movements, global anti-poverty activism, and the civil rights movements of the twentieth century to the political conflicts of the current time.
Among of the most affecting and powerful songs are a duet on “A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall,” where Dylan’s verses alternate with K’Naan’s raps about global poverty, African gangsterism, and endless cycles of violence; and his remix of Bob Marley’s “Jonny Was a Good Man,” where K’Naan creates new verses between Marley’s chorus, describing a traumatized Iraq veteran who refuses to follow his orders and return to yet another tour, including graphic scenes of children mutilated and killed by the bombing raids of the soldier’s own army.
K’Naan grew up in Somalia through the collapse of the government. He fell in with gangster life in Baltimore, and only survived after the American INS chased his family to Toronto, where he discovered his musical talent. He can tell these stories because these are stories of genuine violence and hardship that he overcame. As a novelist, I want to write about these stories: these are the stories that matter today. Just as Bolaño can write about the crimes of the Latin American dictators because he lived there, and fled from there; just as K’Naan can write about the violence of Somalia because he lived that violent life: these are the stories of our era.
Contrast this to me. I’m a white male from an upper middle class background. The only stories that I can legitimately write about are breakups and love stories, tales of other rich white people who don’t get what they want. This is the situation of a great many artists in the West who want to tell important stories about the violence and injustice of our world. But our affluent lives insulate us from this injustice: we don’t have the rights to tell stories that really matter. The only pain in our lives comes from breakups; we know nothing of violence. I would be condescending to try to tell these stories, and I would probably get it all wrong precisely because I haven’t lived it.
I understood my solution as I wrote my first novel, A Small Man’s Town, my book about Newfoundland. My characters, especially in their youth as leftist student activists, interacted with people from genuinely violent regions like Palestine and Colombia. And I worked out how a person like me, who has never known violence or had to overcome it, can write about that violence. The very quest to avoid condescension itself, striving to escape being part of the problem, straining against the indifference that comes with wealth, is the awakening political consciousness of the wealthy.
It’s a kind of political shame that we have lived for so long without knowledge of our luck, and our unwitting roles in the exploitation of others. The political task of the affluent in this world is to become mindful of the suffering of others, and accept that this cannot be our world. I don’t think I’m articulating this concept well, but I want at least to try, to make one first attempt to understand this political consciousness the longs for redemption for his mindlessness to suffering, yet accepts that it is impossible.
When I talk to people in cars giving them news about the negotiations and what our demands are, one piece of information that I’ve found especially compels them is the amount of money that TAs with families of their own have to pay for their family-rate health insurance. It’s too high, and TAs’ pay scales are mediocre enough without having these expenses on top of it. I can afford it, but I have no dependents, cheap rent, and no real expenses other than basic life.
So even though I’m on the picket lines to help the TAs who need help more than I do, I can’t help but feel disingenuous precisely because I’m fine. Who am I to speak for people in genuine financial trouble? Who am I to speak for people who go to sleep every night wondering if they’ll be able to feed their kids the next day, or next week? It’s condescending for a comfortable person to speak for someone in that situation.
Tonight, I’ve been listening to a free mixtape K’Naan (in my view probably the best rapper in Canada) and J.Period made, The Messengers. It’s a series of remixes of songs by Fela Kuti, Bob Marley, and Bob Dylan, interspersed with K’Naan discussing the role these artists played in his life, and in the political, social, and personal movements they sparked at the height of their careers. I downloaded it a while before I left for Edinburgh, and its music has stuck with me for weeks. K’Naan has crafted these remixes into duets, linking the African democracy movements, global anti-poverty activism, and the civil rights movements of the twentieth century to the political conflicts of the current time.
Among of the most affecting and powerful songs are a duet on “A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall,” where Dylan’s verses alternate with K’Naan’s raps about global poverty, African gangsterism, and endless cycles of violence; and his remix of Bob Marley’s “Jonny Was a Good Man,” where K’Naan creates new verses between Marley’s chorus, describing a traumatized Iraq veteran who refuses to follow his orders and return to yet another tour, including graphic scenes of children mutilated and killed by the bombing raids of the soldier’s own army.
K’Naan grew up in Somalia through the collapse of the government. He fell in with gangster life in Baltimore, and only survived after the American INS chased his family to Toronto, where he discovered his musical talent. He can tell these stories because these are stories of genuine violence and hardship that he overcame. As a novelist, I want to write about these stories: these are the stories that matter today. Just as Bolaño can write about the crimes of the Latin American dictators because he lived there, and fled from there; just as K’Naan can write about the violence of Somalia because he lived that violent life: these are the stories of our era.
Contrast this to me. I’m a white male from an upper middle class background. The only stories that I can legitimately write about are breakups and love stories, tales of other rich white people who don’t get what they want. This is the situation of a great many artists in the West who want to tell important stories about the violence and injustice of our world. But our affluent lives insulate us from this injustice: we don’t have the rights to tell stories that really matter. The only pain in our lives comes from breakups; we know nothing of violence. I would be condescending to try to tell these stories, and I would probably get it all wrong precisely because I haven’t lived it.
I understood my solution as I wrote my first novel, A Small Man’s Town, my book about Newfoundland. My characters, especially in their youth as leftist student activists, interacted with people from genuinely violent regions like Palestine and Colombia. And I worked out how a person like me, who has never known violence or had to overcome it, can write about that violence. The very quest to avoid condescension itself, striving to escape being part of the problem, straining against the indifference that comes with wealth, is the awakening political consciousness of the wealthy.
It’s a kind of political shame that we have lived for so long without knowledge of our luck, and our unwitting roles in the exploitation of others. The political task of the affluent in this world is to become mindful of the suffering of others, and accept that this cannot be our world. I don’t think I’m articulating this concept well, but I want at least to try, to make one first attempt to understand this political consciousness the longs for redemption for his mindlessness to suffering, yet accepts that it is impossible.
Wednesday, July 1, 2009
Fictional Inspiration Can Come from Anywhere, Even a Dog
I spent last weekend in Toronto housesitting and dogsitting for a professor of mine, in exchange for money. Overall, it was a pleasant experience, as I got to hang out with an old friend who did her MA at Memorial and is at York now, and I experienced what it’s like to be a dog owner for four days. The dogs were pretty charismatic, and were well-trained enough to follow my orders after I was introduced. I’m rather glad it’s over, as this means I’m able to sleep past eight in the morning again. I think dogs are a bit too high maintenance for me.
One thing I did pick up was some interesting material I can use to structure the story of Undesirables, my suburban story. I’ve decide to give Michael, the male protagonist, a dog, and have him interact daily at the neighbourhood park with other morning dog walkers that are his main network of friends in the community. The park can be a place where some actual conversations can happen, even though most of the story won’t actually happen in the text, because my central character, Michael’s girlfriend Jen, won’t directly see any of the events that are driving the plot, just the effects of those events. But the park would be a great place for the events to reverberate around the community.
A chance comment by one of the regular dog walkers, a middle aged mother Wendy from British Columbia originally, also gave me another facet of Jennifer, the antagonist. She mentioned that she never lets her dog near the playground in a corner of the park shaded by a large copse of trees, and prefers to stay around the rarely used soccer field. The reason is not because she’s afraid her dog might hurt an overeager child; but she’s afraid of paranoid mothers who themselves are afraid of dogs near their children. After getting to know the rambunctious and placid dogs of this neighbourhood, the idea of someone being afraid of them was laughable. But that paranoia is a key part of her character, and her distrust of the dogs can be the major sign that Jen sees of the general hostility that consumes her over the course of the story.
•••
For a book as mannered as In Search of Lost Time, every now and then I find some passage that is utterly out of place in its weirdness. The last hundred or so pages of this chapter of Volume Four, Sodom and Gomorrah, took place at this snooty dinner party hosted by an older woman who had shown up in Swann’s Way as the host of snooty dinner parties that weren’t quite so well-connected to the nobility as this current one.
On the way back to his hotel room after coming home from the party late at night, the following chapter opens with the page operating the lift ranting to him about his sister. The page’s sister is married to a rich man, and she continually demonstrates her newly elevated position in society by taking a dump in every carriage and hotel room she visits for the driver or the maid to clean up. And she blatantly gloats to her brother about her habit of leaving a “surprise” in dresser drawers of hotels and underneath carriage seats. Then the narrator leaves the elevator, and there’s a passage about the way sleep plays with memory.
One thing I did pick up was some interesting material I can use to structure the story of Undesirables, my suburban story. I’ve decide to give Michael, the male protagonist, a dog, and have him interact daily at the neighbourhood park with other morning dog walkers that are his main network of friends in the community. The park can be a place where some actual conversations can happen, even though most of the story won’t actually happen in the text, because my central character, Michael’s girlfriend Jen, won’t directly see any of the events that are driving the plot, just the effects of those events. But the park would be a great place for the events to reverberate around the community.
A chance comment by one of the regular dog walkers, a middle aged mother Wendy from British Columbia originally, also gave me another facet of Jennifer, the antagonist. She mentioned that she never lets her dog near the playground in a corner of the park shaded by a large copse of trees, and prefers to stay around the rarely used soccer field. The reason is not because she’s afraid her dog might hurt an overeager child; but she’s afraid of paranoid mothers who themselves are afraid of dogs near their children. After getting to know the rambunctious and placid dogs of this neighbourhood, the idea of someone being afraid of them was laughable. But that paranoia is a key part of her character, and her distrust of the dogs can be the major sign that Jen sees of the general hostility that consumes her over the course of the story.
•••
For a book as mannered as In Search of Lost Time, every now and then I find some passage that is utterly out of place in its weirdness. The last hundred or so pages of this chapter of Volume Four, Sodom and Gomorrah, took place at this snooty dinner party hosted by an older woman who had shown up in Swann’s Way as the host of snooty dinner parties that weren’t quite so well-connected to the nobility as this current one.
On the way back to his hotel room after coming home from the party late at night, the following chapter opens with the page operating the lift ranting to him about his sister. The page’s sister is married to a rich man, and she continually demonstrates her newly elevated position in society by taking a dump in every carriage and hotel room she visits for the driver or the maid to clean up. And she blatantly gloats to her brother about her habit of leaving a “surprise” in dresser drawers of hotels and underneath carriage seats. Then the narrator leaves the elevator, and there’s a passage about the way sleep plays with memory.
Monday, June 22, 2009
A Creative Sideline in Standup Storytelling
Every now and then, I wonder about other possible careers if the whole academic philosophy thing doesn't work out, and sometimes a life as a stand up comedian is among what I consider. The only real problem with that is that I'm not very good at writing jokes. Most of the funny things I do and say in real life are witty remarks specific to situations I'm in (sitcom humour), and telling increasingly ludicrous, strange stories filled with digressions and non-sequiturs. Neither of these, I thought, would really work on stage at a comedy club.
But I realized today that I could actually make the stories work. It wouldn't be anything close to ordinary stand-up, with people making pithy observations and threading them into complex analyses of society and life. I noticed this while I was walking to the liquor store tonight (LCBO goes on strike Wednesday, and I had to stock up) after reading some In Search of Lost Time. I'm on volume four now, Sodom and Gomorrah, and I had just finished a sequence where the narrator described this really irritating bellhop in his hotel, and did this for no apparent reason. The story wasn't advanced, the bellhop is never going to show up again. And I realized that the whole seven volumes of this book is an extended story that the narrator tells about what he remembers of his life. I could design stand up routines as if I was narrating a series of cartoonish stories. That way, I could invent characters and insert a lot of blatant and subtle critiques and ideas into them, while getting laughs. Imagine Bill Bailey or George Carlin doing his own version of In Search of Lost Time, and that's basically where I'm going with this.
As I walked down the street, I began imagining routines, long stories about my encounters with an effete homosexual older businessman known only as The Baron. We would go from discussing wine in a sparsely decorated penthouse with entirely white furniture to a shady monkey knife fight coordinated by his Filipino friend Pablo, who he knew from "the war." But when I asked him which war it was, he said that he never fought in any wars, and that it was more like a dispute in a restaurant in Manila over who was going to pay the bill. And it wasn't in Manila; it was actually in Oakville. But tempers certainly did come to flair, let me tell you.
And so on.
Most of my ideas were about The Baron, but I had other ideas too, during my walk to the liquor store. They included an encounter with a singer-songwriter whose lyrics are incredibly clichéd and painful to listen to, but she's completely oblivious; an array of The Baron's young Asian lovers; a series of mix-ups between Beaver gas stations, beaver the animal, the term for a vagina, the sitcom Leave It to Beaver, and The Baron's refusal to have anything be left to him on a matter of general principle. Ok, so most of my ideas do involve The Baron, but this is a character with a lot of potential, and I only thought of this idea a few hours ago.
One story I would save for the end of a longer routine is an amusing, yet also touching, story of visiting the liquor store to stock up before an impending strike (following a long strange digression on last-minute races to the liquor store and buying wildly absurd liquors – scotch, Cointreau, creme de banane, Wild Turkey bourbon, Ouzo – because you were in such a hurry) and overhearing a girl at the register tell her co-worker, a thirtysomething man serving me, that she was planning to get a ring to wear just to stop obnoxious guys from hitting on her as they were buying their vodka coolers, probably to lace with rohypnol and give to underage girls. I would answer her on my way out with one piece of wisdom: that the guys who would pay attention to the ring are too nice to have hit on her in the first place, and a guy that obnoxious wouldn't care if she had a husband in the room. "They're the quiet ones," says the co-worker. As I walk out the door, I answer "And the quiet ones never say what we want to."
Everything in that last story except for the strike happened almost word for word last month.
But I realized today that I could actually make the stories work. It wouldn't be anything close to ordinary stand-up, with people making pithy observations and threading them into complex analyses of society and life. I noticed this while I was walking to the liquor store tonight (LCBO goes on strike Wednesday, and I had to stock up) after reading some In Search of Lost Time. I'm on volume four now, Sodom and Gomorrah, and I had just finished a sequence where the narrator described this really irritating bellhop in his hotel, and did this for no apparent reason. The story wasn't advanced, the bellhop is never going to show up again. And I realized that the whole seven volumes of this book is an extended story that the narrator tells about what he remembers of his life. I could design stand up routines as if I was narrating a series of cartoonish stories. That way, I could invent characters and insert a lot of blatant and subtle critiques and ideas into them, while getting laughs. Imagine Bill Bailey or George Carlin doing his own version of In Search of Lost Time, and that's basically where I'm going with this.
As I walked down the street, I began imagining routines, long stories about my encounters with an effete homosexual older businessman known only as The Baron. We would go from discussing wine in a sparsely decorated penthouse with entirely white furniture to a shady monkey knife fight coordinated by his Filipino friend Pablo, who he knew from "the war." But when I asked him which war it was, he said that he never fought in any wars, and that it was more like a dispute in a restaurant in Manila over who was going to pay the bill. And it wasn't in Manila; it was actually in Oakville. But tempers certainly did come to flair, let me tell you.
And so on.
Most of my ideas were about The Baron, but I had other ideas too, during my walk to the liquor store. They included an encounter with a singer-songwriter whose lyrics are incredibly clichéd and painful to listen to, but she's completely oblivious; an array of The Baron's young Asian lovers; a series of mix-ups between Beaver gas stations, beaver the animal, the term for a vagina, the sitcom Leave It to Beaver, and The Baron's refusal to have anything be left to him on a matter of general principle. Ok, so most of my ideas do involve The Baron, but this is a character with a lot of potential, and I only thought of this idea a few hours ago.
One story I would save for the end of a longer routine is an amusing, yet also touching, story of visiting the liquor store to stock up before an impending strike (following a long strange digression on last-minute races to the liquor store and buying wildly absurd liquors – scotch, Cointreau, creme de banane, Wild Turkey bourbon, Ouzo – because you were in such a hurry) and overhearing a girl at the register tell her co-worker, a thirtysomething man serving me, that she was planning to get a ring to wear just to stop obnoxious guys from hitting on her as they were buying their vodka coolers, probably to lace with rohypnol and give to underage girls. I would answer her on my way out with one piece of wisdom: that the guys who would pay attention to the ring are too nice to have hit on her in the first place, and a guy that obnoxious wouldn't care if she had a husband in the room. "They're the quiet ones," says the co-worker. As I walk out the door, I answer "And the quiet ones never say what we want to."
Everything in that last story except for the strike happened almost word for word last month.
Tuesday, June 16, 2009
Philosophy and the Essential Ambiguity of Film
To begin, an example of how my thought processes work. Monday night, after Conan was over, tv inertia found me switching over to Bravo and watching the last half of an old episode of Without a Trace. The plot was about a missing teenager whose girlfriend had been involved in a near-daily series of sex parties held at his best friend's house. The girl had been a regular at the parties until she met her boyfriend, when she stopped going. But after the host started spreading rumours that the boyfriend had cheated on her, she returned, and the fight they had when he discovered this fact happened right before his disappearance.
The actors playing the party host and the girlfriend looked incredibly familiar, but I couldn't remember the name of the episode, or the names of the actors. But this morning, as I woke up, I remembered where I had seen the party host before: Canadian teen sitcom Student Bodies, which I used to watch semi-regularly when I was in high school. The actor was Jamie Elman, and on his imdb page, they had listed the name of the Without a Trace episode, "Sons and Daughters." The girlfriend in that episode was Kat Dennings, who starred last year in Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist with Michael Cera.
Now, here's the idea I had in the shower this morning, after looking up this thread of interconnecting movies. I noticed another item on Jamie Elman's filmography, When Nietzsche Wept, in which he played a young Sigmund Freud. After searching through some reviews on the internet of this movie, I discovered that there were none, except a couple of forum posts on nytimes.com, one of which was a one-sentence endorsement, and the other of which said it was fit for MST3K. Apparently, Armand Assante had a decent performance, but the film was a gross oversimplification of his views.
It reminded me of an opinion I've held for some time about philosophy movies: that they should not be made. Why they shouldn't be made is a matter of the very different form of philosophy and film. Philosophy is a clearly written argument or exploration of an idea. Philosophy is largely making declarative statements and arranging them to articulate a concept or an argument. It is a matter of words, and occasionally illustrative diagrams, but mostly words. The purpose in philosophy is to explain, and interpret those explanations.
But film is a medium of images, and images don't declare anything: they just are. Sure, you can film a lecture, but a fascinating lecture is a boring film, and attempts to represent philosophies in film are best done through characters whose motivations can be understood as being rooted in or inspired by particular philosophies. If characters actually talk about their philosophical motivations, usually in long, ludicrous speeches, it becomes boring. Philosophy strives for clarity, but films strive for ambiguity. A well crafted image is a display that can consist almost entirely in interpretation. Interpretation in philosophy only begins after the text has been clearly stated. Philosophical interpretation must begin from a clear standing point in the text, and if the starting text itself is obscure, the interpretation will collapse. This is the key difference between the image and the text.
This is why novels work so much better in stating philosophical ideas. The works of Marcel Proust, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and Milan Kundera are three examples that come immediately to mind. The adaptation of Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being is an excellent example of the difference between novels and films when it comes to philosophy. The novel was largely an exploration of Kundera's philosophical engagement with Nietzsche, and his interpretation of Nietzsche's eternal return concept. (I think Kundera committed the common mistake in Nietzsche readers, thinking of the eternal return as the sameness of repetition, when it's actually the repetition of difference, but that's neither here nor there.) The characters were cyphers for the philosophical exploration. The novel was a philosophical exploration that happened in a political and personal narrative context, and as such, it was a brilliant success.
In his adaptation, Philip Kaufman understood exactly what to do with his film. To have the characters state explicitly Kundera's philosophical engagement with Nietzsche and have the film revolve around that would have sent the audience to sleep. Instead, Kaufman's film focussed on the articulation of these ideas in the actions of the characters themselves. The audience sees the characters engage with the world, and we can work out through their actions the ideas that animate them. There are some wonderful images of Daniel Day-Lewis in the film that illustrate his philosophy of being's lightness much better than any speech ever would. Wondering whether he should rejoin his wife Juliette Binoche, who has fled the superficial and selfish society of Zürich for Prague, he stands in a pond playing with ducks, his arms outstretched on a foggy afternoon. After finding tranquility together working on their farm in rural Czechoslovakia, Day-Lewis, driving a tractor, raises his arms in mocking thanks to God, sitting on a line between the brightnesses of blue sky and green fields, Binoche watching and laughing. These images are ambiguous in themselves, and their explanatory content depends centrally on the audience.
After first conceiving this idea, I thought of a narrative inspired by that Without a Trace episode that would be an excellent philosophical novel, and if I eventually decide to pursue it, would be the first genuinely philosophical novel I write. I hope you don't mind my spoiling the end of a six year old episode of Without a Trace. At the end of the episode, we discover that the county sheriff was engaged to Kat Dennings' mother, and had discovered that his own daughter from his previous marriage was a participant in Jamie Elman's parties. Irrational with rage over seemingly having lost his biological daughter to a nihilistic lifestyle, he follows his soon-to-be-daughter-in-law back home. That night he sees the boyfriend visit and try to reconcile, only for Kat Dennings to turn him away. Dennings had told her mother that she was raped to cover up her involvement with Elman's parties. The sheriff, thinking the boyfriend was Dennings' rapist, captures him as he leaves Dennings' house, and takes him into the woods where he strangles the boyfriend to death. The end of the episode sees him confessing to Anthony LaPaglia and being led away to jail.
I wondered what could the motivations possibly be of a lawyer who would try to get him off, someone whose defense strategy would have to consist in badgering the highly traumatized witnesses to force them to break down on the stand and tricking them into contradicting themselves. This lawyer would have no ethical values other than his own power in convincing people that his desires were the truth that should motivate them. I can think of no motivation for anyone to convince a remorseful confessed killer to plead not guilty and allow his lawyer to destroy the psyches of the prosecution's witnesses. This lawyer would go ever farther than not believing in an absolute good, because you can believe in a plurality of good and still be ethical. That's me. This lawyer would have to believe that there is not, and cannot be, any good at all. Each case would be, for him, an expression of his own power. He would be a living exercise in what we could call, paraphrasing Nietzsche, a monstrous nihilist, a man happy to have overcome the values of the society in which he lives, but who sees no need to create new values.
The actors playing the party host and the girlfriend looked incredibly familiar, but I couldn't remember the name of the episode, or the names of the actors. But this morning, as I woke up, I remembered where I had seen the party host before: Canadian teen sitcom Student Bodies, which I used to watch semi-regularly when I was in high school. The actor was Jamie Elman, and on his imdb page, they had listed the name of the Without a Trace episode, "Sons and Daughters." The girlfriend in that episode was Kat Dennings, who starred last year in Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist with Michael Cera.
Now, here's the idea I had in the shower this morning, after looking up this thread of interconnecting movies. I noticed another item on Jamie Elman's filmography, When Nietzsche Wept, in which he played a young Sigmund Freud. After searching through some reviews on the internet of this movie, I discovered that there were none, except a couple of forum posts on nytimes.com, one of which was a one-sentence endorsement, and the other of which said it was fit for MST3K. Apparently, Armand Assante had a decent performance, but the film was a gross oversimplification of his views.
It reminded me of an opinion I've held for some time about philosophy movies: that they should not be made. Why they shouldn't be made is a matter of the very different form of philosophy and film. Philosophy is a clearly written argument or exploration of an idea. Philosophy is largely making declarative statements and arranging them to articulate a concept or an argument. It is a matter of words, and occasionally illustrative diagrams, but mostly words. The purpose in philosophy is to explain, and interpret those explanations.
But film is a medium of images, and images don't declare anything: they just are. Sure, you can film a lecture, but a fascinating lecture is a boring film, and attempts to represent philosophies in film are best done through characters whose motivations can be understood as being rooted in or inspired by particular philosophies. If characters actually talk about their philosophical motivations, usually in long, ludicrous speeches, it becomes boring. Philosophy strives for clarity, but films strive for ambiguity. A well crafted image is a display that can consist almost entirely in interpretation. Interpretation in philosophy only begins after the text has been clearly stated. Philosophical interpretation must begin from a clear standing point in the text, and if the starting text itself is obscure, the interpretation will collapse. This is the key difference between the image and the text.
This is why novels work so much better in stating philosophical ideas. The works of Marcel Proust, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and Milan Kundera are three examples that come immediately to mind. The adaptation of Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being is an excellent example of the difference between novels and films when it comes to philosophy. The novel was largely an exploration of Kundera's philosophical engagement with Nietzsche, and his interpretation of Nietzsche's eternal return concept. (I think Kundera committed the common mistake in Nietzsche readers, thinking of the eternal return as the sameness of repetition, when it's actually the repetition of difference, but that's neither here nor there.) The characters were cyphers for the philosophical exploration. The novel was a philosophical exploration that happened in a political and personal narrative context, and as such, it was a brilliant success.
In his adaptation, Philip Kaufman understood exactly what to do with his film. To have the characters state explicitly Kundera's philosophical engagement with Nietzsche and have the film revolve around that would have sent the audience to sleep. Instead, Kaufman's film focussed on the articulation of these ideas in the actions of the characters themselves. The audience sees the characters engage with the world, and we can work out through their actions the ideas that animate them. There are some wonderful images of Daniel Day-Lewis in the film that illustrate his philosophy of being's lightness much better than any speech ever would. Wondering whether he should rejoin his wife Juliette Binoche, who has fled the superficial and selfish society of Zürich for Prague, he stands in a pond playing with ducks, his arms outstretched on a foggy afternoon. After finding tranquility together working on their farm in rural Czechoslovakia, Day-Lewis, driving a tractor, raises his arms in mocking thanks to God, sitting on a line between the brightnesses of blue sky and green fields, Binoche watching and laughing. These images are ambiguous in themselves, and their explanatory content depends centrally on the audience.
After first conceiving this idea, I thought of a narrative inspired by that Without a Trace episode that would be an excellent philosophical novel, and if I eventually decide to pursue it, would be the first genuinely philosophical novel I write. I hope you don't mind my spoiling the end of a six year old episode of Without a Trace. At the end of the episode, we discover that the county sheriff was engaged to Kat Dennings' mother, and had discovered that his own daughter from his previous marriage was a participant in Jamie Elman's parties. Irrational with rage over seemingly having lost his biological daughter to a nihilistic lifestyle, he follows his soon-to-be-daughter-in-law back home. That night he sees the boyfriend visit and try to reconcile, only for Kat Dennings to turn him away. Dennings had told her mother that she was raped to cover up her involvement with Elman's parties. The sheriff, thinking the boyfriend was Dennings' rapist, captures him as he leaves Dennings' house, and takes him into the woods where he strangles the boyfriend to death. The end of the episode sees him confessing to Anthony LaPaglia and being led away to jail.
I wondered what could the motivations possibly be of a lawyer who would try to get him off, someone whose defense strategy would have to consist in badgering the highly traumatized witnesses to force them to break down on the stand and tricking them into contradicting themselves. This lawyer would have no ethical values other than his own power in convincing people that his desires were the truth that should motivate them. I can think of no motivation for anyone to convince a remorseful confessed killer to plead not guilty and allow his lawyer to destroy the psyches of the prosecution's witnesses. This lawyer would go ever farther than not believing in an absolute good, because you can believe in a plurality of good and still be ethical. That's me. This lawyer would have to believe that there is not, and cannot be, any good at all. Each case would be, for him, an expression of his own power. He would be a living exercise in what we could call, paraphrasing Nietzsche, a monstrous nihilist, a man happy to have overcome the values of the society in which he lives, but who sees no need to create new values.
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