The Supercollider
Thursday, August 27, 2009
Why The Show You're Watching Makes for Pretty Good Science Fiction, Part 2
(Con't)
Strike the weird outfits, the world-building sets, the outré cultural habits, references to "Gibsons" and scripted events far removed from our own time, and Mad Men, like DS9, becomes a pretty good drama about working in an office.
Right? I know I'm driving this thing home. I know you're probably thinking, sure, whatever, middle class people like to be "transported" by way eco-vacations to Brazil in the pages of Monocle magazine or into Flo Rida's bedroom through Cribs or among handsome 28-year-old novelists having meaningful spiritual crises in Manhattan through whatever book's on the cover of the NYTBR. So, why not to the 60's, why not to deepest space? Who's counting?
First, we have to distinguish between the promise of what's flatly impossible and what's merely improbable. The impossible requires a lot more information. From a creator's point of view, Science Fiction and Historical Drama share many of the same pitfalls, the dreaded infodump being foremost among them. Both of these shows show an artful dispatching of this background exposition. Roger Sterling's reference in last Sunday's episode to a “Yetta Wallenda-sized misstep," added nothing to the plot. And though it did evoke atmosphere, it was one potentially alienating to right-thinking people. Yet it was, thankfully, done without a lot of narrative hand-wringing, because "Yetta Wallenda" belongs to the sort of people who wear one-button suits and fedoras, and Matthew Weiner wants very badly for these people not to explain themselves but to simply be. They live within their own infodump. In this same way, the creators of Star Trek don't have to provide exposition when referring to potency of Klingon Blood Wine: if you don't know it's potent, you're simply not of that world.
To want things you can't have has become unbearable. I'm thinking this wasn't always so. I imagine that at one time, our attitude towards wanting things we couldn't have defined what it meant to be an adult. To have everything was the purview of a few mentally-ill half-children like Howard Hugues or Lee Iacocca, and the rest of us struck for a fair wage. Now, wanting to have a 64' flat screen television mounted above our bed is the basis of an unrelenting national ideology approaching the ubiquity and toxicity of Korean leader-worship (if you're able to afford both cable television and basic dentistry at once, you may be tempted to view the comparison as hyperbole -- come back to me when and if you ever fall behind that line). Even sexual pleasure has been reduced to the level of a Ponzi scheme. We have all failed to become Flo Rida, but if we put in a few extra Saturdays we may come a bit closer. What you think you need to survive, like science-fiction, is always just up the road, and the underpinning of this requires a communal exposition very like an infodump. Bernard Madoff, made sociopathic with information, required the same sociopathology of his victims. They had to be brought up to speed before getting fleeced -- they had to know that what Madoff was selling had every appearance of being a diversified investment. They had to be made smart first, and one gets, from their testimony, not only anger at financial loss, but the Flowers-From-Algernonian anger of one who has been made to look stupid after having just been made smart. Capitalism has been colonized by super-intelligent aliens such as these, aliens who now may be dying slowly of the common cold.
Given that very few can master the native ideology, it stands to reason that a good many of us would at least defect to another impossible-to-master ideology. Marxism won't do, of course, until whatever Marxists are left can identify as anything other than a bunch of weak totalitarian douchebags arguing amongst themselves about the disbursment of the world they've yet to win. I imagine that the post-scarcity, social-democratic, polyamorous world that DS9 and I am partial to is not to everyone's liking. For them, Mad Men must be a great relief. Mad Men takes place before the aliens have landed (try now to imagine Don Draper turning on the television to Star Trek's first season, just a few years down the road, in 1966, and huffily switching it back off). Ideological differences in Mad Men were real, and not just hypothetical.
The form capitalism took in Mad Men is utterly unlike the form it takes today: what could be more outrageous in contemporary terms than the scene in which Don Draper defeats Duck on the basis of a handshake deal he made with the partners many years back? What, not even a nondisclosure agreement? They may as well shoot phasers at one another. Peggy's heroic pre-feminism is far more interesting than Hillary's compromised post-feminism. Admit it -- Republican blackface aside -- the late fifties and early sixties were a high water mark for those who believe that capitalism is the tide that raises all boats. The only truly utopic moment of capitalism -- the southern and midwestern soul music industry -- rose (and quickly died) during this period. Their liberal-democratic, high-tax-base world, in which small firms could feel like they could make a big difference, in which not knowing the effects of alcohol did not in any way affect the pleasure of partaking of them, was worth working in. Competence -- either in liberal heroism or Republican stoicism -- was not a wasted effort in that world. There is nothing ignoble in the escape to this world. As any neoliberal can tell you, escape from unrelenting ideological systems has a distinguished history.
All that aside, look at the similarities. These characters are their jobs -- people like Betty Draper on Mad Men, or the Bejorans on DS9, languish for having too much time on their hands. It is in work that these characters find their identities. The open lobby of Sterling Cooper and the promenade in DS9 are constructed from some waystation in the art director's mind where present reality cannot enter. The spaces are perfect imaginings where every problem to be solved -- a march in Selma, Alabama, or the signing of a peace accord among old factions of Bejorans -- will be of the utmost importance. I've mentioned Benjamin Sisko's place in a long line of filmic middle-managers before him, and Don Draper stands at the head of that line. ¶ 10:59 PM 0 Comments
Strike the weird outfits, the world-building sets, the outré cultural habits, references to "Gibsons" and scripted events far removed from our own time, and Mad Men, like DS9, becomes a pretty good drama about working in an office.
Right? I know I'm driving this thing home. I know you're probably thinking, sure, whatever, middle class people like to be "transported" by way eco-vacations to Brazil in the pages of Monocle magazine or into Flo Rida's bedroom through Cribs or among handsome 28-year-old novelists having meaningful spiritual crises in Manhattan through whatever book's on the cover of the NYTBR. So, why not to the 60's, why not to deepest space? Who's counting?
First, we have to distinguish between the promise of what's flatly impossible and what's merely improbable. The impossible requires a lot more information. From a creator's point of view, Science Fiction and Historical Drama share many of the same pitfalls, the dreaded infodump being foremost among them. Both of these shows show an artful dispatching of this background exposition. Roger Sterling's reference in last Sunday's episode to a “Yetta Wallenda-sized misstep," added nothing to the plot. And though it did evoke atmosphere, it was one potentially alienating to right-thinking people. Yet it was, thankfully, done without a lot of narrative hand-wringing, because "Yetta Wallenda" belongs to the sort of people who wear one-button suits and fedoras, and Matthew Weiner wants very badly for these people not to explain themselves but to simply be. They live within their own infodump. In this same way, the creators of Star Trek don't have to provide exposition when referring to potency of Klingon Blood Wine: if you don't know it's potent, you're simply not of that world.
To want things you can't have has become unbearable. I'm thinking this wasn't always so. I imagine that at one time, our attitude towards wanting things we couldn't have defined what it meant to be an adult. To have everything was the purview of a few mentally-ill half-children like Howard Hugues or Lee Iacocca, and the rest of us struck for a fair wage. Now, wanting to have a 64' flat screen television mounted above our bed is the basis of an unrelenting national ideology approaching the ubiquity and toxicity of Korean leader-worship (if you're able to afford both cable television and basic dentistry at once, you may be tempted to view the comparison as hyperbole -- come back to me when and if you ever fall behind that line). Even sexual pleasure has been reduced to the level of a Ponzi scheme. We have all failed to become Flo Rida, but if we put in a few extra Saturdays we may come a bit closer. What you think you need to survive, like science-fiction, is always just up the road, and the underpinning of this requires a communal exposition very like an infodump. Bernard Madoff, made sociopathic with information, required the same sociopathology of his victims. They had to be brought up to speed before getting fleeced -- they had to know that what Madoff was selling had every appearance of being a diversified investment. They had to be made smart first, and one gets, from their testimony, not only anger at financial loss, but the Flowers-From-Algernonian anger of one who has been made to look stupid after having just been made smart. Capitalism has been colonized by super-intelligent aliens such as these, aliens who now may be dying slowly of the common cold.
Given that very few can master the native ideology, it stands to reason that a good many of us would at least defect to another impossible-to-master ideology. Marxism won't do, of course, until whatever Marxists are left can identify as anything other than a bunch of weak totalitarian douchebags arguing amongst themselves about the disbursment of the world they've yet to win. I imagine that the post-scarcity, social-democratic, polyamorous world that DS9 and I am partial to is not to everyone's liking. For them, Mad Men must be a great relief. Mad Men takes place before the aliens have landed (try now to imagine Don Draper turning on the television to Star Trek's first season, just a few years down the road, in 1966, and huffily switching it back off). Ideological differences in Mad Men were real, and not just hypothetical.
The form capitalism took in Mad Men is utterly unlike the form it takes today: what could be more outrageous in contemporary terms than the scene in which Don Draper defeats Duck on the basis of a handshake deal he made with the partners many years back? What, not even a nondisclosure agreement? They may as well shoot phasers at one another. Peggy's heroic pre-feminism is far more interesting than Hillary's compromised post-feminism. Admit it -- Republican blackface aside -- the late fifties and early sixties were a high water mark for those who believe that capitalism is the tide that raises all boats. The only truly utopic moment of capitalism -- the southern and midwestern soul music industry -- rose (and quickly died) during this period. Their liberal-democratic, high-tax-base world, in which small firms could feel like they could make a big difference, in which not knowing the effects of alcohol did not in any way affect the pleasure of partaking of them, was worth working in. Competence -- either in liberal heroism or Republican stoicism -- was not a wasted effort in that world. There is nothing ignoble in the escape to this world. As any neoliberal can tell you, escape from unrelenting ideological systems has a distinguished history.
All that aside, look at the similarities. These characters are their jobs -- people like Betty Draper on Mad Men, or the Bejorans on DS9, languish for having too much time on their hands. It is in work that these characters find their identities. The open lobby of Sterling Cooper and the promenade in DS9 are constructed from some waystation in the art director's mind where present reality cannot enter. The spaces are perfect imaginings where every problem to be solved -- a march in Selma, Alabama, or the signing of a peace accord among old factions of Bejorans -- will be of the utmost importance. I've mentioned Benjamin Sisko's place in a long line of filmic middle-managers before him, and Don Draper stands at the head of that line. ¶ 10:59 PM 0 Comments
Wednesday, August 26, 2009
Why The Show You're Watching Makes for Pretty Good Science Fiction, Part 1
Strike the weird outfits, strike the expensive, "world-building" sets, strike the outré cultural habits, references to exotic paraphernalia like "Bejoran Synth-Ale" and scripted events far removed from our own time, and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine becomes a pretty good drama about working in an office. This is mainly because other shows that take place in offices without such accouterments are always never more than just okay. The workplace is the liferaft which keeps us above a great ocean of dramatic circumstances we'd sooner avoid: mortgages, homelessness, methamphetamine. We don't require television programs to break that trust for an hour a week.
But there is an audience, and I suppose you'd have to call it a small but dedicated audience, that wants to see something that refers to daily experience without muddling it with phony mimesis, which transforms the poverty of reality into something rich and meaningful. We need this. One can only feel so good about, say, getting the spring brochure, with some 500 individual images, done, well under deadline, year after year. Nothing changes the fact that last year's competence is this year's redundancy. You may soon be taken off brochures. Competence these days means not being good at any particular job but being good at capitalism itself. Why pretend there's entertainment in it? There is almost something embarrassing about competence. In most cases it means you've taken on the extra burden of making your boss happy not because you were born to do it but because you've internalized it as a means of self-worth. You once wanted to dance in the street, run your toes through clean, soft grass, be famous, be counted along with your friends and lovers as being the freest and most interesting people one could have the privilege of observing. Now, you're competent. Just competent. You're probably competent at something no one needs you for.
Thus, the tradition of competence (a tradition in full swing when Howard Hawks was making movies and FDR was in the white house) has pretty much been erased by near-homeless blockheads jumping through fireballs and developmentally-disabled men -- grown men -- falling over backwards in elephant feces.
When those sets are up, however, and everyone's got their weird outfits on, something changes. Watch Chief O'Brien: he's competent. His major dramatic building block is that he's competent. He's a weird looking guy, but he's beautiful in his reliability. Commander Sisko is a great middle-manager: he knows when to cut the Gordian knot and when to let it go slack. Jadzia Dax is the person you want to talk to if there's "a sub-space plasma disruption" out near the wormhole or some such delectable nonsense. Everyone on DS9 received a job title and archetype when they walked on the station. Everyone there is not just useful, not just competent, but invaluable. Their job just happens to be the grass they brush with their bare feet.
This could be problematic. In this poor world we call real life, isn't the Prime Directive actually to screw the poor? To be competent but not necessarily to vote in one's own favor? To reward one's paltry competence with consumption? More or less, yes. Setting that aside, shouldn't our true Prime Directive be to build a better world, to dip our real feet into the real grass as soon as possible, after having possibly burned down the banks and the courthouses? If the answer is yes, we'll still require a few competent people to tend to the rutebega farm and fire shots above the heads of the Road Warriors, no? The lesson still stands. Competence is good. Competence also gets boring after a while. To be rewarded, competence requires an archetype: it requires a workplace drama of some displacement, something alien. And besides, isn't revolution always in the periphery in DS9? Doesn't Sisko always treat defiance of the utopic Federation order with some level of balanced inquiry? I'll stop there.
This balance is struck throughout Gene Roddenbery's universe. The same with the Whedonverse. Small collections of specialists getting the job done. They draw from very old models going back to L. Sprague deKamp and Cordwainer Smith. Simply put, they are worlds changed enough from our own that our best selves -- or at least, our other selves -- can have an audience.
Since DS9, the best of these has been Mad Men.
Part 2 coming up... ¶ 10:12 AM 0 Comments
Strike the weird outfits, strike the expensive, "world-building" sets, strike the outré cultural habits, references to exotic paraphernalia like "Bejoran Synth-Ale" and scripted events far removed from our own time, and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine becomes a pretty good drama about working in an office. This is mainly because other shows that take place in offices without such accouterments are always never more than just okay. The workplace is the liferaft which keeps us above a great ocean of dramatic circumstances we'd sooner avoid: mortgages, homelessness, methamphetamine. We don't require television programs to break that trust for an hour a week.
But there is an audience, and I suppose you'd have to call it a small but dedicated audience, that wants to see something that refers to daily experience without muddling it with phony mimesis, which transforms the poverty of reality into something rich and meaningful. We need this. One can only feel so good about, say, getting the spring brochure, with some 500 individual images, done, well under deadline, year after year. Nothing changes the fact that last year's competence is this year's redundancy. You may soon be taken off brochures. Competence these days means not being good at any particular job but being good at capitalism itself. Why pretend there's entertainment in it? There is almost something embarrassing about competence. In most cases it means you've taken on the extra burden of making your boss happy not because you were born to do it but because you've internalized it as a means of self-worth. You once wanted to dance in the street, run your toes through clean, soft grass, be famous, be counted along with your friends and lovers as being the freest and most interesting people one could have the privilege of observing. Now, you're competent. Just competent. You're probably competent at something no one needs you for.
Thus, the tradition of competence (a tradition in full swing when Howard Hawks was making movies and FDR was in the white house) has pretty much been erased by near-homeless blockheads jumping through fireballs and developmentally-disabled men -- grown men -- falling over backwards in elephant feces.
When those sets are up, however, and everyone's got their weird outfits on, something changes. Watch Chief O'Brien: he's competent. His major dramatic building block is that he's competent. He's a weird looking guy, but he's beautiful in his reliability. Commander Sisko is a great middle-manager: he knows when to cut the Gordian knot and when to let it go slack. Jadzia Dax is the person you want to talk to if there's "a sub-space plasma disruption" out near the wormhole or some such delectable nonsense. Everyone on DS9 received a job title and archetype when they walked on the station. Everyone there is not just useful, not just competent, but invaluable. Their job just happens to be the grass they brush with their bare feet.
This could be problematic. In this poor world we call real life, isn't the Prime Directive actually to screw the poor? To be competent but not necessarily to vote in one's own favor? To reward one's paltry competence with consumption? More or less, yes. Setting that aside, shouldn't our true Prime Directive be to build a better world, to dip our real feet into the real grass as soon as possible, after having possibly burned down the banks and the courthouses? If the answer is yes, we'll still require a few competent people to tend to the rutebega farm and fire shots above the heads of the Road Warriors, no? The lesson still stands. Competence is good. Competence also gets boring after a while. To be rewarded, competence requires an archetype: it requires a workplace drama of some displacement, something alien. And besides, isn't revolution always in the periphery in DS9? Doesn't Sisko always treat defiance of the utopic Federation order with some level of balanced inquiry? I'll stop there.
This balance is struck throughout Gene Roddenbery's universe. The same with the Whedonverse. Small collections of specialists getting the job done. They draw from very old models going back to L. Sprague deKamp and Cordwainer Smith. Simply put, they are worlds changed enough from our own that our best selves -- or at least, our other selves -- can have an audience.
Since DS9, the best of these has been Mad Men.
Part 2 coming up... ¶ 10:12 AM 0 Comments
Monday, August 24, 2009
Ugh
I get a real sadness somehow, watching these two go at it. I take a little satisfaction knowing that L.Ron Hubbard was a bad SF writer, too.
Will it suffice to just call this guy nuts?
¶ 12:33 PM 0 Comments
Will it suffice to just call this guy nuts?
¶ 12:33 PM 0 Comments
Saturday, August 22, 2009
Jim Krusoe at St. Marks: 8/20/09
Jim Krusoe looks like a denizen of the Old, Weird America, a midwesterner in steel-toed workboots, a faded flannel shirt, and with wild eyebrows two shades darker than the rest of his hair and pointing skyward like devil horns. Very friendly but with an inwardness which fell, unlike most people's inwardness, to the outside.
His latest novel is called Erased. He traveled from Los Angeles to read from it (a born Clevelander, he moved west while still in his teens). I had just finished the book and was still walking around in his world when I met him. His world, incidentally, is Cleveland: a very strange Cleveland that bears some resemblance to the afterlife, if the afterlife had been designed by the Big Boy franchise of restaurants . "I set out to take my revenge on the place," said Jim to me before the reading. "But I found myself writing something different, something sort of affectionate."
The reading was among our best, and featured Zachary Schomburg, whose new work bears an extraordinary love for jaguars, and Gary Lutz, about whose work you could say the same, except that for Gary Lutz words are jaguars. Gordon Lish was there, wearing an interesting hat.
Krusoe read from a section of his novel in which the citizens of this other-Cleveland go to war with the city's rats. It is the most plainly fantastic piece in a novel which otherwise trades in odd coincidences and uncanny nighttime epiphanies. Yet as he went along I could see why he chose it: read by him, in his flat, uninflected manner, one pokes and prods at the vibe of the story, asking whether it's funny or violent or philosophical before realizing, some time later, the plain absurdity of the situation. "When have you humans ever changed your minds about anything?" ask the rats of their human persecutors, just before getting creamed.
I don't tend to follow the contemporary fabulists: Kelly Link's worlds seem open to vast and frightening realms akin to the world of science fiction, but most other writers in that vein are sort of warm milk, an excuse to reify the world we've been given rather than deal with the consequences of making a new one.
I've been following Krusoe since Blood Lake, however, and I'll read anything he does. There is no "magic" in his world. He seems to write about bodies, imperfect, uncomfortable, which stand so rigidly against a loose world that the biological fact of human life becomes a sort of fabulism. "In this book, the character stands in place, and setting unfurls behind him, like a scroll."
He's also funny. ¶ 7:06 AM 0 Comments
Jim Krusoe looks like a denizen of the Old, Weird America, a midwesterner in steel-toed workboots, a faded flannel shirt, and with wild eyebrows two shades darker than the rest of his hair and pointing skyward like devil horns. Very friendly but with an inwardness which fell, unlike most people's inwardness, to the outside.
His latest novel is called Erased. He traveled from Los Angeles to read from it (a born Clevelander, he moved west while still in his teens). I had just finished the book and was still walking around in his world when I met him. His world, incidentally, is Cleveland: a very strange Cleveland that bears some resemblance to the afterlife, if the afterlife had been designed by the Big Boy franchise of restaurants . "I set out to take my revenge on the place," said Jim to me before the reading. "But I found myself writing something different, something sort of affectionate."
The reading was among our best, and featured Zachary Schomburg, whose new work bears an extraordinary love for jaguars, and Gary Lutz, about whose work you could say the same, except that for Gary Lutz words are jaguars. Gordon Lish was there, wearing an interesting hat.
Krusoe read from a section of his novel in which the citizens of this other-Cleveland go to war with the city's rats. It is the most plainly fantastic piece in a novel which otherwise trades in odd coincidences and uncanny nighttime epiphanies. Yet as he went along I could see why he chose it: read by him, in his flat, uninflected manner, one pokes and prods at the vibe of the story, asking whether it's funny or violent or philosophical before realizing, some time later, the plain absurdity of the situation. "When have you humans ever changed your minds about anything?" ask the rats of their human persecutors, just before getting creamed.
I don't tend to follow the contemporary fabulists: Kelly Link's worlds seem open to vast and frightening realms akin to the world of science fiction, but most other writers in that vein are sort of warm milk, an excuse to reify the world we've been given rather than deal with the consequences of making a new one.
I've been following Krusoe since Blood Lake, however, and I'll read anything he does. There is no "magic" in his world. He seems to write about bodies, imperfect, uncomfortable, which stand so rigidly against a loose world that the biological fact of human life becomes a sort of fabulism. "In this book, the character stands in place, and setting unfurls behind him, like a scroll."
He's also funny. ¶ 7:06 AM 0 Comments
Thursday, August 20, 2009
An Oversight
What? How had I not discovered May Swenson before?
QUESTION
Body my house
my horse my hound
what will I do
when you are fallen
Where will I sleep
How will I ride
What will I hunt
Where can I go
without my mount
all eager and quick
How will I know
in thicket ahead
is danger or treasure
when Body my good
bright dog is dead
How will it be
to lie in the sky
without roof or door
and wind for an eye
With cloud for shift
how will I hide? ¶ 2:04 PM 0 Comments
QUESTION
Body my house
my horse my hound
what will I do
when you are fallen
Where will I sleep
How will I ride
What will I hunt
Where can I go
without my mount
all eager and quick
How will I know
in thicket ahead
is danger or treasure
when Body my good
bright dog is dead
How will it be
to lie in the sky
without roof or door
and wind for an eye
With cloud for shift
how will I hide? ¶ 2:04 PM 0 Comments
Wednesday, August 19, 2009
First Line Mash Up 1
Another thing science fiction and poetry have in common are a peculiar dependent relationship to the effects caused by first lines:
Say you're a kid, and one dark night you're running along the cold sand with this helicopter in your hand, saying very fast witchy-witchy-witchy. Theodore Sturgeon, "The Man Who Lost the Sea."
Imponderable the dinosaur / sinks slow, / the mammoth saurian / ghoul, the eastern / Cape... Hart Crane, "The Bridge (IV, Cape Hattaras)"
"Look, Mother. The clock is running backwards." Phillip Jose Farmer, "Mother."
Is that dance slowing in the mind of man / That made him think the universe could hum? "Theodore Roethke, Four for Sir John Davies (I)"
Incomprehensible gaiety and dread / Attended what we did. Theodore Roethke, "Four for Sir John Davies (III)"
Athelsan Cuff was, to put it very mildly, astonished that his son should be crying. L. Sprague De Camp, "The Blue Giraffe"
The brown enormous odor he lived by / was too close, with its breathing and thick hair, / for him to judge. Elizabeth Bishop, "The Prodigal"
Listen Zombie. Believe me. James Tiptree, "The Girl Who Was Plugged In"
A pebble swells to a boulder at high speed. May Swenson, "Electronic Sound" ¶ 8:20 AM 0 Comments
Say you're a kid, and one dark night you're running along the cold sand with this helicopter in your hand, saying very fast witchy-witchy-witchy. Theodore Sturgeon, "The Man Who Lost the Sea."
Imponderable the dinosaur / sinks slow, / the mammoth saurian / ghoul, the eastern / Cape... Hart Crane, "The Bridge (IV, Cape Hattaras)"
"Look, Mother. The clock is running backwards." Phillip Jose Farmer, "Mother."
Is that dance slowing in the mind of man / That made him think the universe could hum? "Theodore Roethke, Four for Sir John Davies (I)"
Incomprehensible gaiety and dread / Attended what we did. Theodore Roethke, "Four for Sir John Davies (III)"
Athelsan Cuff was, to put it very mildly, astonished that his son should be crying. L. Sprague De Camp, "The Blue Giraffe"
The brown enormous odor he lived by / was too close, with its breathing and thick hair, / for him to judge. Elizabeth Bishop, "The Prodigal"
Listen Zombie. Believe me. James Tiptree, "The Girl Who Was Plugged In"
A pebble swells to a boulder at high speed. May Swenson, "Electronic Sound" ¶ 8:20 AM 0 Comments
Monday, August 17, 2009
Schadenfreude
A convincing case made by an independent bookseller, predicting the death of new economy Amazon at the hands of the nasty old economy.
Incidentally, the Kindle, besides being a perverse form of tax dodge, is obviously a stopgap on the way to something better. ¶ 11:33 AM 0 Comments
Incidentally, the Kindle, besides being a perverse form of tax dodge, is obviously a stopgap on the way to something better. ¶ 11:33 AM 0 Comments
Sunday, August 16, 2009
Alive in Joburg
In case you haven't seen the Neill Blomkamp short that inspired District 9 (which is terrific! I saw it last night!) here it is. Live in Joburg:
It's getting to the point now where you can judge the merits of a science fiction movie by its budget alone. 150 million or more? Transformers. 30 million or so? District 9, Children of Men, etc. ¶ 8:32 AM 0 Comments
It's getting to the point now where you can judge the merits of a science fiction movie by its budget alone. 150 million or more? Transformers. 30 million or so? District 9, Children of Men, etc. ¶ 8:32 AM 0 Comments
Saturday, August 15, 2009
Matter
I'm trying to fit in as much science fiction reading as I can before ICWG gets underway: I'm halfway through Iain M. Bank's Matter right now. Reading his prose reminds me of a time I recommended Charles Stross's Accelerando to a poetry colleague. His response was that he enjoyed it, but, he wrote, "I can only handle so many consecutive sentences in the direct assertion form in which someone does something."
Banks is solidly in this mode, and while I don't have a problem with straight ahead prose (event after event, coherently stacked, but still hard to "angle"--that's part of why I love science fiction), Bank's early SF, especially Consider Phlebas, wore me out with its grinding plot machinations. This style may be a natural, or rather default, aspect of writing about anything as large as Bank's ongoing Culture, which, after all, is a vast utopic civilization spanning an entire galaxy and several millennia, in which lots of things happen. Much simpler to bend the limits of prose when writing about something more specific: one June day in Dublin, 1904, for instance. And that was only done interestingly once. So Banks has his work cut out for him: you could say the same of anyone with a utopic vision, however vast and strange.
Still, in his latest novels, Banks seems to have figured out how to explain the Culture without wearing the reader down. He's thankfully taken his cipher-like shapeshifters and really weird aliens out of the narrative driver's seat. A sympathy with heterogeneity should not be confused with the desire to see ourselves (or our avatars) totally obliterated by weirdness. Bank's sympathies flit around from chapter to chapter, as expected, but gravitate toward characters constrained by limited worldviews and Earthling desires. Which serves to make the tiered, billion-year-old Shellworld they reside in -- described in the book as "a concentric succession of spherical shells, supported by over a million massive, gently tapering towers never less than fourteen hundred meters in diameter, layered out to the final surface" -- all the more frightening:
The characters who reside in this Shellworld are aware of the danger they face -- a danger, like ours, as remote as "centuries, millenia, and decieons" -- and are aware, too, of the vast bureaucracy that forms the galactic Culture, yet live their lives according to their custom anyway.
But! I have to set it down in order to start Jim Krusoe's latest, Erased, in time for Thursday's reading. ¶ 10:20 AM 0 Comments
Banks is solidly in this mode, and while I don't have a problem with straight ahead prose (event after event, coherently stacked, but still hard to "angle"--that's part of why I love science fiction), Bank's early SF, especially Consider Phlebas, wore me out with its grinding plot machinations. This style may be a natural, or rather default, aspect of writing about anything as large as Bank's ongoing Culture, which, after all, is a vast utopic civilization spanning an entire galaxy and several millennia, in which lots of things happen. Much simpler to bend the limits of prose when writing about something more specific: one June day in Dublin, 1904, for instance. And that was only done interestingly once. So Banks has his work cut out for him: you could say the same of anyone with a utopic vision, however vast and strange.
Still, in his latest novels, Banks seems to have figured out how to explain the Culture without wearing the reader down. He's thankfully taken his cipher-like shapeshifters and really weird aliens out of the narrative driver's seat. A sympathy with heterogeneity should not be confused with the desire to see ourselves (or our avatars) totally obliterated by weirdness. Bank's sympathies flit around from chapter to chapter, as expected, but gravitate toward characters constrained by limited worldviews and Earthling desires. Which serves to make the tiered, billion-year-old Shellworld they reside in -- described in the book as "a concentric succession of spherical shells, supported by over a million massive, gently tapering towers never less than fourteen hundred meters in diameter, layered out to the final surface" -- all the more frightening:
...long after a given Shellworld had been apparently de-weaponized and made safe, hidden defense systems could wake up centuries, millenia, and decieons later resulting in gigadeaths, teradeaths, effective civicides and near extinctions as interior stars fell, levels were flooded from above or drained -- often with the result that oceans met interior stars, resulting in clouds of plasma and superheated steam.
The characters who reside in this Shellworld are aware of the danger they face -- a danger, like ours, as remote as "centuries, millenia, and decieons" -- and are aware, too, of the vast bureaucracy that forms the galactic Culture, yet live their lives according to their custom anyway.
But! I have to set it down in order to start Jim Krusoe's latest, Erased, in time for Thursday's reading. ¶ 10:20 AM 0 Comments
Friday, August 14, 2009
Stuffed Crocodiles
SF and poetry share a certain garishness. That's one thing they have in common. At least, that's true of the stuff I like. Ordinary literature -- by this I mean anything that bears a close resemblance to the stuff written by Joseph O'Neill -- has as its goal a world we can depend on. It's a flawed world, displaying every knotty compromise the author has had to make with it. The chief encomium for these worlds is that they go unadorned. I'm not knocking it. But no art goes unadorned. Some of it just goes out in old khakis.
SF and poetry are defined by their adornments. So much so that a lot of modernism --which in the end, in its English-language form, is a defense of realism -- has erupted over the last century in an embarrassed attempt to disguise the fact. But the physical presence of adornment remains: both genres have in their past, and on public record, depictions of winged men. It suffers perfectionists: the type of unrealist who wears formal gowns, or cravats, or "furry" outfits, or cosplay.
And the fear in all this adornment is that something uncanny will be produced, that something that shouldn't talk will be made not only to talk but also to recite:
And, you know, if enough of these uncanny presences take voice, the world may disintegrate into a thousand factions. Or just plain look silly. ¶ 4:24 PM 0 Comments
SF and poetry are defined by their adornments. So much so that a lot of modernism --which in the end, in its English-language form, is a defense of realism -- has erupted over the last century in an embarrassed attempt to disguise the fact. But the physical presence of adornment remains: both genres have in their past, and on public record, depictions of winged men. It suffers perfectionists: the type of unrealist who wears formal gowns, or cravats, or "furry" outfits, or cosplay.
And the fear in all this adornment is that something uncanny will be produced, that something that shouldn't talk will be made not only to talk but also to recite:
And, you know, if enough of these uncanny presences take voice, the world may disintegrate into a thousand factions. Or just plain look silly. ¶ 4:24 PM 0 Comments
Here goes...
In September, I'm joining a group with four friends, called The Invisible City Writer's Group, devoted to reading and writing poetry and science fiction. It'll go through December. There's no agreed-upon ideology girding this combination of seemingly disparate genres, though I have my own ideas. The first being, obviously, that these genres are not so disparate.
This will be a public journal of what I'm reading, watching and writing over the next few months. ¶ 11:17 AM 0 Comments
This will be a public journal of what I'm reading, watching and writing over the next few months. ¶ 11:17 AM 0 Comments
