Reading List Round Up: Part I of… a Million?

Tags

reading, fiction, academia, victorian literature, elizabeth gaskell

Right now my primary duty as a doctoral student is reading: lots and lots of reading. With 32 novels, 74 individual poems, 3 poetry collections, 4 plays, 20 works of contemporaneous non-fiction, and 27 books of literary criticism to finish for December’s Comprehensive Area Exam in Victorian literature, I have to find useful ways of synthesizing my material.

Every grad student, of course, has a different method: Some swear by binders filled with notes; some proselytize about mind maps; others suggest spreadsheets, and lots of them. I put together a database Thursday, and it’s useful enough in its own way–but it’s not me. That’s when I realized I already have a way to synthesize material. I write essays: lots and lots of essays.

I’m sorry to say, then, that you might just see a lot of doctoral studies posts around these parts for the next seven months.

I promise to try to make them relevant, though! Because, honestly, what’s the point of working through Victorian literature if I can’t adequately defend its relevance to reading and writing practices today?

Without further ado, then, attempt the first:

What We Talk About When We Talk About Social Realism:
Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton, Cranford, and North and South as Case Studies in Narrative Cohesion

We in the 21st century tend to think we know what a novel is (the things that keep cropping up on “Heather’s Picks” and Oprah’s Book Club lists, right?)–and further, we look back at the 19th century as a place where, surely, people understood what a novel was. How else to explain the tremendous tomes that emerged in the Victorian period–your Dickensian behemoths; your sprawling works of Hardy and Eliot; yea, the colossus of Vanity Fair?

But reading the works of mid-19th-century writer Elizabeth Gaskell, for instance, should provide an immediate rebuke to any notion of the novel emerging as a literary form wholly distinct from precursor texts. This should in some sense be evident just from the publication record for these and other writers: Gaskell–like Dickens, Hardy, Eliot, and Thackeray–published her works first in serial form, with weekly and monthly publications the norm for the period. Two- or three-volume collections (or, less frequently, the single-volume novel) followed soon after, but they did–far more often than not–follow.

This distended publication schedule meant that Gaskell (like other such writers of what we now experience as singular texts) had the double-edged sword of reader response throughout the production of her narratives: able, if not outright compelled, to shift the focus of her plot to suit readership demands.

The very form of serial publication also meant that chapter breakdowns–already somewhat episodic by virtue of their size–were further enhanced (intentionally or otherwise) to suit weekly or monthly lulls in the content. While one would certainly hope for readers who had attended closely to prior issues of a given story, clear and repeated references to previous plot points still proved useful in ensuring that an overarching through-line endured from one week (or month) to the next.

Conversely, there was also more leave to launch into an entirely different note with the next chapter (introducing, say, a new perspective or new group of characters), because the kind of immediate narrative continuity we often expect from texts when read in full simply did not apply to the serial form; there was already ample temporal and spatial distance between one chapter and the next [1].

The aims of the magazine or newspaper as a whole also had to be taken into account when deciding a story’s direction–and for Gaskell, publishing in Dickens’ Household Words, that meant two things: 1) Some of her work was directly prompted by the demands of the journal, with its express engagement in “the raising up of those that are down, and the general improvement of our social condition” [2]; and 2) the length of her prose–somewhat ironically, given the source of such directives–was curtailed at times by Dickens’ editorial limitations to that end [3].

Experience also plays a not-inconsiderable role in the strength of a given tale. Mary Barton (1848) was Gaskell’s first novel, and though this story of impoverished Manchester workers during the 1830s and early 1840s launched her into considerable contemporaneous acclaim, as a writer with something meaningful to say about the difficult tension between (Christian) morality, labour politics, the forward march of industry, and the generally appalling plight of the urban poor, it is surely her later revisiting of such themes, in North and South (1855), that stands the more coherent, stable narrative.

To be sure, the former charts a linear enough course for its protagonist, Mary Barton, whose father (John) is so aggrieved by the mounting rates of starvation, disease, and brute death among Manchester’s working class that his part in Trade Union politics escalates to the most desperate and irreparable of acts. Mary, a young woman, undergoes a familiar, dramatic love plot–carelessly thinking she might rise to the status of a lady under the courtship of a man of high society (Harry Carson); spurning the abiding love of her hard-working, heart-o’-gold childhood friend (Jem Wilson); and so inadvertently playing a part in the ruination of both men. And, indeed, the story gains clear momentum once the consequences of this love-plot reach their crescendo in a murder mystery, a plot device that provides the story an obvious sense of urgency through the amount of time left before the accused will hang (if not saved).

The trouble with this story’s stability, though, lies in how very much else the novel struggles to convey, with the first half of the text pitching forward at an inconsistent rate–sometimes hours, sometimes days, sometimes months, sometimes years at a time between narrative episodes. The topics of these sections also cant uneasily between attempts at direct commentary about the story’s surrounding historical circumstances; moral defence and pre-emptive caution (on the narrator’s part for upper class readers, clearly) about the nature and cause of working class behaviours; groundwork for the story’s central love plot; and various fixations on secondary characters, who sometimes fall away (particularly through death) in lone, off-hand lines.

One gets the impression, really, that Gaskell finds the cadence of episodic long-form writing as she progresses through this piece–although the path she takes makes it difficult to integrate all her earlier themes. All the socioeconomic and political discourse negotiated in narratorial asides throughout early chapters, for instance, all but falls away once the murder plot arises; only after that whole messy business has been settled does the narrator return to broader social causes. However, even then, the way these topics are returned to in the novel’s closing chapters suggests increased authorial restraint. Unlike the heavy-handed narratorial asides in the first half of Mary Barton, the characters themselves debate these issues, with the narrator providing little more than examples of enacted policies. (Readers of North and South will no doubt recognize this style of social commentary–the characters themselves forwarding various positions in debate–as more consistently present within that later text.)

The narrator of Mary Barton is also peculiar in other ways. I’m tempted to call her an “extremely limited third-person narrator”, because at times she narrates stories of working-class lives with often unworldly omniscience, but at other times she openly has the same knowledge (and no more) as Elizabeth Gaskell [4]. The narrator writes, for instance, as evidence for a given claim: “If you will refer to the preface to Sir J. E. Smith’s Life (I have it not by me, or I would copy you the exact passage), you will find that he names a little circumstance corroborative of what I have said” (p. 76). At another juncture, referencing the “Seed of the Soul”, the narrator further states that she forgets which (“The Jews or the Mohammedans”) believe in the indestructibility of a specific vertebra (p. 133). Gaskell/Gaskell’s narrator seems similarly interested in conveying how she might respond to a given situation, even if such a comment is not directly relevant to the narrative–for instance: “Many people have a dread of those mysterious pieces of parchment. I am one. Mary was another” (p. 313). What possible purpose might this alignment serve?

Gaskell’s next set of works for Household Words, a single story pressed by Dickens into a collection of linked stories that eventually get published as the episodic novella, Cranford, offers some insight. Here, too, we have a decidedly partial and limited narrator–albeit, in this case, a first-person construct named Mary Smith. Mary switches between direct accounts of goings-on in staid little Cranford, an isolated community of mostly spinster women living on precarious means while attempting (through eccentric social strictures) to retain the last shreds of class-based dignity, and descriptions of the various letters she receives detailing further aspects of daily life therein. This makes Gaskell’s narrator a slightly more empowered agent than those found in a popular form of Victorian narrative, the epistolary novel; Mary is at once approachable to female readers of the same class, and just authoritative enough to command their attention for an anecdote or two.

In the general pursuit of social realism enacted by great swaths of Victorian literature [5], this approach to narrative voice has its advantages–not just to the cohesion of various short stories within a single (eventual) collection, but also to the establishment of a given narrative’s function within the context of its medium. There is some sense in Cranford, even, that Gaskell anticipates cultural dismissals of serial fiction as a meaningful conveyor of social “truth”. Between the characters of Miss Jenkyns (the elder) and Captain Brown, for instance, we get express description of a possible form for such criticism, and a counterpoint that can no more be heard by the accuser than a solid exemplar of good serial writing will ever be read by the truly obstinate:

…by-and-by, Captain Brown sported a bit of literature.
‘Have you seen any numbers of “The Pickwick Papers?”‘ said he. (They were then publishing in parts.) ‘Capital thing!’
Now, Miss Jenkyns was daughter of a deceased rector of Cranford; and, on the strength of a number of manuscript sermons, and a pretty good library of divinity, considered herself literary, and looked upon any conversation about books as a challenge to her. So she answered and said, ‘Yes, she had seen them; indeed, she might say she had read them.’
‘And what do you think of them?’ exclaimed Captain Brown. ‘Aren’t they famously good?’
So urged, Miss Jenkyns could not but speak.
‘I must say I don’t think they are by any means equal to Dr. Johnson. Still, perhaps, the author is young. Let him persevere, and who knows what he may become if he will take the great Doctor for his model.’
…
She thought she would give a finishing blow or two.
‘I consider it vulgar, and below the dignity of literature, to publish in numbers.’
‘How was the “Rambler” published, Ma’am?’ asked Captain Brown, in a low voice; which I think Miss Jenkyns could not have hard. [p. 10-1]

In a subsequent narrative episode, Miss Jenkyns appears victorious when Captain Brown gets killed by a train after being “deeply engaged in the perusal of a number of Pickwick’” (leading Miss Jenkyns to “[shake] her head long and solemnly, and then [sigh] out, ‘Poor, dear, infatuated man!’ [p. 19]), but this is a rather sly misreading of the situation. Rather, as readers were already informed, Brown looked up from his reading, saw a child in the way of a train, and took immediate steps to save it. This alignment of reading practice with heroic moral action, while not expressly suggesting that a higher ethos necessarily follows from reading social criticism in serial form, certainly cannot be said to suggest that such reading dulls the moral senses.

If Gaskell once felt the need, though, to defend her use of such a medium to describe the lives of persons at the peripheries of English progress, by the publication of North and South a far surer tone (weighted, perhaps, by the greater extent of her own experiences among Manchester’s working poor) resounds in her work. A third-person narrative, North and South offers a more realistic excuse than Mary Barton for shifting attention from one class vantage point to another: the female protagonist, Margaret Hale, is raised among London’s gentry; hails from rural, middle-class comfort; and after her father’s decision to leave the clergy on moral grounds, is compelled to move to Manchester, where her rural work of comforting the downtrodden finds easy correlates among the ailing working class. (I myself am hard-pressed to imagine a more seamless invitation for female mid- to upper-class readers to step outside their shoes and consider the plight of England’s working poor.)

North and South is also not somehow exempt from the travails of sustaining a love plot, but here Gaskell finds a much more direct way of employing the text’s primary relationship–between young Margaret Hale (of genteel stock) and the somewhat older John Thornton (a ‘Milton manufacturer’ [p. 88] with a history of working in shops [the horror!])–to the book’s more central thematic concerns of what constitutes both sustainable and ethical socioeconomic policy in an era of disproportionate privations among England’s poor [6]. Margaret and John are perceived, after all, to belong to different classes–and beyond this, they hold decidedly different views about a) how the other regards their class divide (much to the aggregation of misunderstandings requisite to prolonged romantic tension), and b) what role good “masters” of industry should naturally play in the lives of the working class.

In these conversations, then–as in many a surrounding argument with the story’s other main characters, who hold differently conflicting opinions about appropriate socioeconomic policy–Gaskell manages to shift the burden of social realist commentary away from both the providence of Mary Barton‘s unevenly declarative “omniscient” voice and Cranford‘s tentative female pseudo-presence, and into the more immediately relevant, plot-progressing debates between central characters in North and South.

In so doing, Gaskell creates a mid-19th-century Victorian novel that, despite the inevitable complications of serial publication [7], achieves and sustains a more consistent balance between stories of “the individual” and of English society as a whole. Any writer hoping to effectively address the social issues of his time would be wise, then, not just to study the success stories of social realism in the English literary tradition–but also those works that, while certainly not failures, invite serious reflection on the import of narrative voice and cohesion in telling any tale with chops enough to stand the test of time.

—

[1] More on these broad assertions about production and reception once I get into my lit crit readings. (I’m especially looking forward to Laurel Brake’s Print in Transition, 1850-1910: Studies in Media and Book History.) These are place-holder observations drawn from general reading practice for now.
[2] Letter to Gaskell from Dickens, 31 Jan 1850, as recorded on xxv of my 2011 Oxford World’s Classics edition of Cranford.
[3] As Gaskell writes in an introduction to the two-volume 1855 publication of North and South, “On its first appearance in ‘Household Words’, this tale was obliged to conform to the conditions imposed by the requirements of a weekly publication, and likewise to confine itself within certain advertised limits, in order that faith might be kept with the public.” (p.5, Penguin Classics 2003 ed.)
[4] This is much different than even the fluctuating presence of Dickensian narratives, for when Dickens launches into a decisive social critique within his sprawling plot structures, there are no such tentative notes on his part.
[5] A pretty foundational consideration and concern for 19th-century writing, which I will expound upon more after completing my Dickensian readings (fingers crossed) next weekend.
[6] More on this, and related broad allusions to domestic policy and crises from the 1830s on, after reading selections from Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor, as well as the related comments of Thomas Carlyle and John Ruskin.
[7] Gaskell was compelled to compress components of this novel to fit Dickens’ demands at the time of first publication, and though “to remedy this obvious defect, various short passages have been inserted, and several new chapters added” to the two-volume 1855 publication (p. 5), the final text still bears some mark of the haste engendered by original production circumstances.

Can We Pity the Dreamers While Despising Their Dreams?

Tags

adaptations, baz luhrmann, film, reviews

The Great Gatsby
Baz Luhrmann
Warner Bros.

All great national novels are about failure. They have to be: Any attempt to describe a nation-state’s ideals without incorporating the folly of its myriad, competing realities cries out for ruination–if not from within, at least from without. So it is that a character like F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Jay Gatsby can seize a fragment of the American dream–the conviction that a man who owns nothing might through industry live to inherit the world–hold it too tightly, and lose all.

Yes, that was a spoiler. In the case of The Great Gatsby going without seems almost preposterous–like reviewing Titanic without suggesting the ship goes down at the end. But I will say this much: This review is not about fealty to the book, although I got the distinct impression while watching the film that director Baz Luhrmann (Moulin Rouge, Romeo + Juliet) understood how very much the major turns in his story arise first and foremost from the cadence of the written word. Why else would Luhrmann return with such frequency to scenes from his frame narrative, which has narrator Nick Carraway writing The Great Gatsby while describing it to his therapist? Why else, too, would Luhrmann allow CGI words to supplant visuals and subsume music when approaching some of the most iconic lines in Fitzgerald’s text? Simply put, Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby oozes internal crisis, and by cleaving so much to the source material, at times the film has no choice but to defer.

Like the book, too, this film is emphatically a lament, a eulogy–and ascertaining precisely what it strives to eulogize is a better route to evaluating its success than mere comparison with the source text.

To this end, we are given to understand that Nick Carraway (Tobey Maguire) is a not-exactly-rich man (though from monied stock) broken by the experiences he bears witness to one frenetic summer in Long Island, New York. There, in a modest cottage on West Egg, he neighbours the most extravagant home of the “nouveau riche”, a palatial estate owned by the elusive Jay Gatsby (Leonardo DiCaprio), and swarmed every weekend by city folk eager to bask in the excesses of wealth on prominent (yea, even blatantly phallic) display.

Across the water, on East Egg, lives Nick’s cousin, Daisy (Carey Mulligan), a “golden girl” married to a blatantly racist, philandering millionnaire (also of old money) named Tom Buchanan. As befits the times, Tom (Joel Edgerton) gets away with his racist commentary, and his philandering (and his egregious moustache, I might add), for Nick is no proactive interloper, but rather a watcher of surrounding events whose first articulated moral qualm with proceedings arises when it seems Gatsby has been gradually befriending him in the hopes of an opportunity to have tea with Daisy.

Such cultural double standards make bold and routine appearances in much of Luhrmann’s employment of Fitzgerald’s source material, and in conjunction with his choice to use decidedly contemporary music (rap, chamber pop, recent jazz re-workings of classic material), the reviewer may well wonder how much we both can and should take the socioeconomic hypocrisies of the 1920s as having direct correlates with hypocrisies today.

Whatever the answer, Daisy is offered no simple choice between two men. Rather, she’s made to choose between continuing a marriage with a man who was sleeping with another woman the day their daughter was born, and living with a man whose only request of her is that she completely recant ever having loved the man she married. An act of violence at one man’s hands brings about her ultimate decision–but it, too, is a conflicted moment for Luhrmann’s viewers, who at this juncture already know the other man, for all his talk of superior bloodlines, is also capable of brute force.

Similarly, while Tom’s regular lover remains a secondary character in this film, trapped in a lurid middle kingdom of the impoverished and downtrodden coal miners at a pit-stop between Long Island and the Big Apple, Luhrmann also takes a critical opportunity (through musical accompaniment as much as through visual attention) to align our sympathy at a vital moment with her.

And then, of course, there’s Gatsby: Gatsby, who believes himself a child of God in the most blessed of senses–a streak of cosmic brilliance destined to hurl ever upwards or else not at all. In his recollection of the past, he perceives that choosing to love Daisy was an act of choosing to inherit less than his full entitlement of the heavens. Even though a powerful vein of post-WWI PTSD ever lingers as a possible reason for his obsessive tendencies, how much are we really to sympathize with him in making all his future aspirations rely on another person’s complete concession of personal experience to his vision of her at that one, precious moment five years past?

Indeed, can we really sympathize with anyone in this world of big talk and fast riches? Does even our narrator, for all that we see he has been laid low with depression after the events that unfold that one extravagant summer, deserve our sympathy for being shocked–utterly shocked!–at the callousness and the cruelty of the company he keeps, after what we viewers are given to make of their deeply flawed characters from the start?

Certainly, Baz Luhrmann lines this adaptation with the kind of visual spectacles well befitting the circus-like excesses of the rich, the gaudiness of the urban working class, and the oppressive squalor of the abject rural poor. But as Nick stresses (over and over) that Gatsby was the most hopeful human being he had ever known, and ever would again, he (at least through Luhrmann’s directorial lens) hardly makes the point that this kind of hope was worth having or aspiring towards in the first place.

As many in the Occupy Wall Street movement just a few years back were not protesting the injustice and disparity of existing social structures, so much as the fact that they had not been given the opportunities they desired to come out on top of it, so too might Nick be said to be reaching for a green light on a distant shore that we should all have put out of mind… a long, long time ago. For a film expressly cautioning against living in the past, it’s difficult to tell how much Luhrmann’s opulent retelling of The Great Gatsby nevertheless relies on the hope that we will.

The Ghost of Writings Past (and Present)

Tags

genre fiction, literary fiction, poetry, speculative fiction, writing, writing process

I intended to go to sleep at a decent hour tonight–really, I did–but I took to reading outside, under a brilliant night sky, and started work on a kind of story I don’t often write anymore, and from there got to wondering about the weight of unpublished work, from so many genres, idling in digital archives.

Duotrope.com, one of the best tools a modern short-story writer could probably have, tells me I have submitted 36 different pieces (sometimes quite often) over the last four years. That’s about two-thirds of the work on this computer, with its three years of files; the other third are stories that never got quite so far in the production process. On a separate storage disc, as well as on Google Drive, lies a wasteland of works come long before–completed “trunk” novels and novellas that will stay where they are forever; myriad short stories and poems and plays of varying value to me; treatises that document many a sad occasion in an elevated register, as has always been my way with private essays and related correspondence.

What a strange, heaving morass is the weight of a writer’s past–and how fragmentary, how utterly selective, the output that eventually makes it to the published page.

I’ve spent the bulk of my last two years working on science fiction, for instance, and my moderate success in that arena has started to see me pegged as “the scifi writer”. This does not entirely accord with the range I’m writing–for instance, I submitted a mystery story in the past few months, and a literary fiction submission that was hanging in limbo got withdrawn, revised, and resubmitted thereabouts as well. The story that started coming to me tonight was in the “literary” register, too (whatever the heck that means: no aliens; no flying spaghetti monsters; but magical realist and speculative fiction devices can still pass depending on an author’s say-so?), and after sifting through the dregs of my mostly abandoned “literary” fiction submissions, I found one I felt comfortable dusting off and submitting again.

Other genres–like theatre and film–still haunt my writing; just yesterday I sent out a short story with a fragment of a screenplay nestled amid other detritus recovered from an imagined near-future world. Poetry does, too, but in a much more muted way–whispers in the prose, really. Though I miss writing poetry immensely, a set of iron bars came rather securely down on that whole form a couple years back, and I haven’t been able to navigate my way out of it since. I even catch myself writing story-length prose poems from time to time (I always catch it in the escalation of internal rhyme when I read a draft back)–and if I’m brave enough, I might just submit one of those to the right venue before the year is through.

Certainly, I have written a great many formal stories relying on tried-and-true genre tropes–stories which, whether or not they’re ever accepted for publication, feel to me as sound as they’re going to get at this juncture in my writing life. But I also seem to veer toward narrative forms that condense or upend narrative conventions, like the short story in the style of feature-length journalism that will be released later this year by Analog; or the short story I sent out yesterday, that melds IM conversations with broadcasts (TV, radio, screenplay), a description of a sixteen-panel comic, a letter, a memo, a religious text, and a two-part oral tale, in order to convey how cultural interpretations of a given event will gradually shift over time.

(I did similar with an earlier form of the story accepted by Analog, actually; it garnered the interest of another publication, and on the back of that personal rejection, I got some very fine encouragement to continue working in such an experimental mode. Suffice it to say, the editors of contemporary scifi magazines rock.)

Going through my old “literary” fiction works, though, and then cross-referencing them with relevant markets on Duotrope, I remembered with some sadness why I’d started working almost entirely on science fiction during these last two years: 1) There are few venues where a minimalist style of “literary” writing (sparse, terse, heavy on the dialogue) would even be considered in the first place, 2) the wait times are maddeningly long, and 3) relatively few journals offer anything more than token payment for one’s work. So while I did send off another work of “literary” fiction tonight, I did so with the knowledge that submitting such stories will not be anything but a tangential effort for some time yet (if at all).

The impulse to write diversely, however, is still strong in me: Form must follow function. The story that needs to be told must dictate the way it will be told–as a play, as a film, as a “genre” story, as a poem, as a piece of “literary” fiction. I’m very rarely the best person to tell the story that comes to mind, but I try–and hopefully I’ll keep getting better at it as I go along.

Meanwhile, whatever is to be done with all the pieces of my writing that demonstrate how wide my interests are, yet will likely never see the printed page? I worried my Smashwords page tonight, puzzling over this very question. I only have four stories there right now, with the express mandate that my short stories there will always be free, and already they make for strange company: Two are stories that never amounted to a greater series (and now likely will not, because I have little but deep sadness and regret surrounding my time with that whole, most excellent sport); two others are works that quickly ran out of possible scifi/spec-fic journals with relevant aesthetics. As “submission” pieces, then, they are dead in the water. One, “Uncle Remy’s Whizz-Bang Circus“, I see now as an exercise in the use of science-fiction-as-literary-backdrop; the other, “Fat of the Land“, was my attempt at conveying a very different social structure working with at least as much individual compassion as our own. Both stories are, I presume, failures in some critical way, and though I haven’t given up fealty to them just yet, perhaps that will come in time.

What I’d rather see emerge, though, is some measure of synthesis in my future work: to see the failed or otherwise aborted themes, cadences, and voices of old writings resurface–whole, wise, and well-integrated–in anything and everything I produce from here on out. That, to me, would demonstrate actual development as a writer to a stage worthy of even just these last two years’ accomplishments, which still feel rather incredible to me, and entirely undeserved. (At the very least, too, such development might just spare me from more of this writerly insomnia!)

For now, though, all I can say is that, while I have been actively writing for as long as I can remember, I still feel so damnably new to all of this. And I have, it seems, the digital paper trail to prove it.

Ah, well. What can I add in closing, except to invoke the old writer’s refrain: “Maybe tomorrow I’ll write better”?

Now there’s a thought to sing me (I hope) to sleep!

Familiarity as Filmic Virtue and Curse

Tags

film, genre conventions, genre fiction, science fiction

Oblivion
Joseph Kosinski
Universal

I came into this film having heard nothing but middling reviews: Great visuals! Predictable plot! Lousy script! And so forth. Consequently, my expectations were perhaps just low enough to appreciate the film for what it was: an action scifi. But to my pleasant surprise Oblivion was a more intelligent variation therein than I had imagined–and certainly, I don’t think enough credit was given this film for its self-awareness of scifi films come before. It’s this latter point that continues to interest me.

Cultural standards seem different, that is, for a scifi film and, say, a relationship drama. In the latter, if a disaffected male person wanders from a difficult romantic entanglement, goes on figurative or literal walkabout trying to figure out what it all means, and encounters a quirky female person who aggravates and unsettles him but ultimately makes him whole again, these moves are considered predictable conventions of the genre–interesting when subverted, but stable enough to be tangential to your viewing experience. The conventions don’t matter so much as what’s done with them.

The same does not seem to hold, though, for scifi, where the expectation of innovation is immense–and certainly, played upon by film producers themselves. I wonder, though, if this is necessarily going to have to change as more and more Hollywood output seems to hold to scifi/spec/scifantasy premises. Surely at some point we’re going to have to accept that certain plot devices are standard to the genre, and what matters more is how they’re used?

Oblivion, for instance, seems extremely cognizant of the traditions on which it was built. Following a two-person clean-up crew on a world shattered by a decades-long war with an alien race identified as the “Scavs”, the film opens with protagonist Jack (Tom Cruise) explaining a mandatory memory wipe five years back, and its relationship to dreams he is convinced are more than dreams. There is no intended trick, then, in his later discovery that these dreams are in fact predicated on a real memory, and that the memory wipe itself is not a good thing. Rather, these narrative outcomes are promised at the outset–an obvious incongruity that should immediately frame the expectations of viewers not to trust anything Jack takes as truth.

And yet some folks were disappointed that the memory wipe / lost memories arc is predictable? I’d argue that the writing of this film does not try to sell it as anything more grandiose; we’re in a position of dramatic irony when Jack informs us of his memory wipe, and we know then that this story is about Jack ascertaining (and fleshing out) what we already understand in theory. Oedipus Rex is by this same metric a “predictable” play, as original audiences would have already known at the outset what Oedipus takes the whole damn production to figure out–but such criticism would entirely miss the play’s point.

I saw mindful resonance, too, of quite a few scifi works in Oblivion: “Sally” (Melissa Leo), the voice greeting Jack’s mission partner, Victoria (Andrea Riseborough), should alert scifi viewers to Clarke’s SAL-9000 (from 2010), while the glowing red eye of drone bots (their very shape inspired, perhaps, by the Portal games?) should at least invoke 2001: A Space Odyssey for the general public. Jack being a lone maintenance worker on the planet’s surface, his nurturing of a flower smacks of WALL-E, while developments in his plot-line anticipate an audience familiar enough with works like Moon that the writing decidedly does not attempt to over-explain what’s happening. The human underworld promised by previews for this film (with Morgan Freeman as Beech) also invokes any number of dystopian/resistance societies (the bread-and-butter of countless scifi works), and of course, the ultimate plot device has many express correlates to Independence Day.

This is not to suggest that Oblivion is intended, either, as mere homage; it simply seems to be constructed in such a way that telegraphs to its viewers how mindful it is of its diverse scifi heritage. The plot devices and narrative crises in this film are in many ways a fairly coherent synthesis of scifi themes come before, so the pleasure arises in the variations this script brings to one and the same.

The drones in this film, for instance, are given a surprising amount of personality; we’re invited to spend multiple occasions actively wondering what the drones will do, and they’re constructed in such a way that makes their mood very clear from the positions of their “arms”. Moreover, when they’re put to combat purposes, they utilize a number of moves machines-with-guns in films rarely (if ever) do to win fights.

Fights in general in this film are intelligently constructed (a couple disorienting CGI location switches notwithstanding): Jack does not get easy wins, and incurs a lot of damage. There are no laughable shots, as with Looper, of people trying to shoot at close range and repeatedly missing. This is the kind of choreography, rather, that one should expect after Cruise’s long legacy in prominent action series. Even the final “fight”, a battle of wills that must be plausibly won by the human component, offers a reasonable risk of failure and relies on a judicious use of dialogue.

I was also left to wonder how much Oblivion might have been playing, quite consciously, on a kind of 1950s domesticity through its first third, where long shots of Jack and Victoria’s home in the clouds expressly situate Jack as the man-who-goes-to-work, Victoria as the woman-who-stays-home, and the whole situation as both idyllic and a direct threat to Jack’s individualism, his basic humanity. Certainly, for a time, the film invites viewers to be suspicious of Victoria (when really, they should just be suspicious of a giant pool in the sky, emptied and replenished at leisure in a time of water rations?), and I was worried that the film would go too far with this, Basic Instinct-style. It does not–and in how it reins in the fear earlier scenes invite, Oblivion does suggest a director and screenwriter mindfully playing on such structural expectations.

Suffice it to say, there are a finite number of plot types in any narrative genre, and when a film is about the survival of humanity, there are in turn a finite number of powerplays that might be explored therein. Are we exhausted as a culture with killing godheads on the big screen? Perhaps. But it remains a tried-and-true metric of scifi film–and in Oblivion, I don’t think it’s an exceptionally reductive one, either. Rather, what this film offers is familiar, but not insultingly so; the script does not suggest that every new development is meant to come as a great surprise to us, and director Joseph Kosinski (TRON: Legacy) further seems to anticipate an audience with some understanding of where this film exists in the history of scifi.

What emerges, then, is a fairly coherent variation on the theme, and a challenge, too: Can we appreciate a scifi film that negotiates the familiar with fresh faces, as we routinely do in other filmic genres? Or conversely, are viewers right to demand that scifi as a genre ever aspires to something more?

Non-Fiction Essay at Clarkesworld

Tags

clarkesworld, essays, reading, science fiction, short stories

As of today, you can read “When the Alien Is Us: Science Fictional Documentaries” at Clarkesworld Magazine. Touching on the work of Werner Herzog, Errol Morris, Edgar Allan Poe, and H. G. Wells, this essay was intended to address broader questions about truth and fiction, and I hope other examples of the kind of work I reference will pop up in the comments. Whatever happens, though, I’m just thrilled Kate Baker took a chance on this long-winded academic; I had a tremendously good time writing the piece.

Other non-fiction in the issue includes Jeremy L. C. Jones’ interview with Yoon Ha Lee, “Assassinating the Reader” (on the back of her short story collection, Conservation of Shadows), Craig Delancey’s “Another Word: The Singularity Is Dead. Long Live the Singularity!” (a fun romp through the work of Hilbert, Gödel, and Turing in relation to the unchecked optimism often embedded in the sci-fi trope of imminent Singularity), and a very happy word from editor-in-chief Neil Clarke in relation to how many fantastic award nominations Clarkesworld raked in this past year.

That said, Clarkesworld has fiction, too! (Who’dda thunk it?) Check out this month’s other offerings while you’re poking about:

In James Patrick Kelly’s “Soulcatcher“, a human named Klary is wreaking her revenge on a “xeni” named Harvel Asher, who has a “pet” Klary knows better as kin. Is the trap she sets too elaborate? What unintended consequences will there be?

In Andy Dudak’s “Tachy Psyche“, Wang Zhe is caught in a discordant temporal moment–the physical universe slowed to a crawl as he faces death in the fight to reunify China. Military experimentation? Tibetan spiritual journey? A matter, surely, of perspective.

In E. Catherine Tobler’s “(R + D)/I=M“, lessons in trespass and communion emerge through the story of two ethereal Martians stealing impossible grapes on a human settlement. The lessons in this story are as old as dirt–yet still so difficult to learn.

In Liz Williams’ “The Banquet of the Lords of Night“, a chef in a world ruled by the powers of Unlight is whipping up something… brilliant. A commentary on the power of art as resistance? Or just a really super reprint from Asimov‘s in 2002?

In Michael Swanwick’s “From Babel’s Fall’n Glory We Fled“, Rosamund (dead human/simulated record/survival suit) narrates the journey of a lone survivor, Quivera, in the wake of Babel’s destruction. Unsurprisingly, language itself comes apart at the seams in this reprint from Asimov’s (February 2008).

Happy reading!

A Different Kind of Acceptance

Tags

analog magazine, clarkesworld, documentaries, film, kate baker, science fiction, submissions, trevor quachri

I’m thrilled to be able to say that Clarkesworld Magazine will be publishing me again–this time for an article titled “When the Alien Is Us: Science-Fictional Documentaries.” Non-fiction editor Kate Baker runs a phenomenally thoughtful section, and it is a delight to be able to share a few of my greatest interests–documentary films, 19th-century speculative fiction, and the aesthetics of contemporary science fiction–in one go. (Thank you, Kate!)

This has been one heck of a month, with many lows in my personal life offset by some exhilarating ones in my professional/writing life. For one, my first story in Analog just hit the stands a couple weeks ago (the June 2013 edition), and there was something immensely humbling about being able to introduce my five-year-old nephew to the notion that behind all the glossy covers on bookstore newsstands are a whole bunch of people like me. We had a great conversation about all the things he could write about, too, and I have to say, while it feels wonderful to get paid for a short story, the intangible rewards can sometimes be out of this world.

I was also stunned to see a gorgeous two-page illustration for “Hydroponics 101,” care of Mark Evans. Trevor Quachri’s gone and spoiled me with that kind of an introduction to publication with the magazine; Evans really captured the mood I was hoping for when I first wrote the piece.

That said, I just received contributor copies yesterday, and it’s final paper season at the close of my first year as a doctoral student, so… I’ll be reading the other stories soon (but not soon enough!) and look forward to sharing word therein. In the meantime, Lois Tilton had praise for the issue as a whole, calling it the best of the magazine she’d read “since the changeover of editors”–and hey! she didn’t hate “Hydroponics 101″ either:

An unusual penal system designed for violent offenders: each convict, like Farmer, is sealed into a clear sphere in which a telepathic tree grows from nanites, reacting to his thoughts and emotions which, in most other cases, remain violent.

Farmer’s tree, however, has thrived, which presents a problem for the authorities, who haven’t figured a way to deal with the eventuality of their program’s success.

An intriguing concept, in which the prisoners are punished by their own thoughts. Although ill-conceived by authorities who design a system for rehabilitation without considering the possibility of it working. A cautionary tale against making assumptions about rehabilitation and redemption.

I agree with Tilton, too, that authorities are pretty darn lousy for designing systems “for rehabilitation without considering the possibility of it working”, which is why I take serious exception to the punishment-and-isolation-first approach employed by far too many penal systems in the real world–often while paying public lip service to notions of rehabilitation the entire time. Admittedly, though, this story still feels a touch didactic to me; I hope I can keep improving upon that aspect of my writing style in future works.

That said, I still can’t believe another story of mine will be out in Analog within the year. I feel very, very good about “We Who Are About To Watch You Die Salute You,” and I just hope others find the reading experience worth their time. (I guess we’ll just have to wait and see!)

All in all, then, for all that I find myself hit by severe obstacles from time to time, I know that I am extremely fortunate to get to see some measure of success as well. I sincerely hope that I never forget how lucky I am–or get lazy, which might be worse.

Speaking of “laziness”: I’ve been having some rotten luck trying to complete a handful of stories started during my last term as an in-class doctoral student. Once my last research paper’s been handed in (next Monday) I hope to rectify that situation as soon as possible, because my outstanding submissions are disturbingly few at present!

To that end, then, I hope that this little update finds the writers and other creators among my very kind readers here keeping up with their own goals, and facing as few impediments to personal success as possible along the way. I most certainly won’t say that days like these make the terrible moments “worthwhile”… but they do go a long way to making me think the terrible moments can be managed, which is almost as good.

Hugs and much love to you all.

On Being Understood

Tags

humanism, philosophy, religion

For all that I recognize how utterly contingent my personality is upon the slings and arrows of neurobiological fortune–the age of my brain, the rates of atrophy and related damage therein, the epigenetic variables mitigating the brain’s resilience and regenerative capacity at times of duress–there is little more pleasing to me than waking into a state of calmness and quietude, away from all expectations of discourse with other people. To reacquaint myself, as it were, with some anachronistic notion of an “essential self”.

In part this is because there is something of the chameleon in most of us: an attendance to the mannerisms, idiolects, interests, and aversions of those around us that often yields changes in our behaviour to suit a given crowd. For some of us, the accommodationist impulse can be especially strong–and in attempting to resist it, we can end up appearing unnecessarily abrasive, antisocial, or quite simply rude. It is frustrating enough to recognize how little control we have over how others view us, save by excusing ourselves from their presence, but to catch ourselves playing into those social personas without intending to can feel even more disempowering. We ask ourselves, Who is the me who keeps acting this way? Where is the me who would not?

We are a social species, of course, and as such often long for connection, but we are also individuals–and thinking individuals, worst of all! Thus the cry to be recognized as such–to eschew the seemingly inevitable pigeonholing of personality types and public performances, be they of an anticipated attitude, gender, ethnicity, age group, professional demographic, or body shape–can run very deep in our veins: so deep, even, that we routinely forget how much it runs through the veins of others, too.

My own, greatest sense of freedom from this chameleon life arises after long intercity bus trips. With the luxury of a window seat I drowse quickly and wake freed from whatever thought processes I was cycling through in prior hours–and excused, too, from the need to talk (and so adapt) to anyone else for a while yet. A tremendous feeling of anticipation comes over me in these rare instances, as if an opportunity to begin anew has just presented itself: as if, were I only to invoke the right word, or gesture, or action right then, I could set myself on an entirely different path, and so attain a more lasting freedom from the pressures of an intensely performative world.

The crushing offset to this exhilarating sensation, though, is how nigh on impossible it becomes to explain this feeling to others. In these scant few moments, I feel as though I hold the clearest understanding of who I am–what I truly want and what I do not; what I truly think, and enjoy, and aspire to do and be in my one and only life, irrespective of other people’s tacit demands and expectations–and yet almost intrinsically, I cannot, because the moment another person enters the picture who I am begins, once more, to change.

Five years ago, I tried to get around this paradox by writing my thoughts down in the middle of one such arrestingly calm, clear moment of self-awareness. On its surface, this letter, addressed to my closest friend, involved an attempt to describe the experience of emerging from a large, dark, near-empty theatre–having just watched Sunshine on my own–into the bright light of a warm June afternoon, and walking thereafter in the mottled shadows of sweet cherry and garry oak trees while listening to the breezy chatter of passersby. Beneath this description I was attempting, too, to convey how very much, in that singular moment, I seemed to have recalled the very sense of self–of purpose and perspective and a fundamental desire to stay alive–that I had moved all the way across the country to reclaim.

I never sent the letter. The haze of the moment was interrupted with Kubla Khan-esque bluntness, and I had the good sense not to attempt a return after the mood was lost. (My friend would likely thank me, too, for having spared him such prattle if he ever knew he had been at risk of receiving it, either, so: You’re welcome, and don’t say I never do anything for you.) More vitally, though, that sense of self had begun to slip through my fingers again; within minutes of the disruption I began to forget myself amid those subtly contrived performances of self that ever emerge around sites of human interaction.

There is nothing, of course, unusual about this quest for peace and surety of mind: meditation, prayer-as-meditation, and even more spiritually invested notions of aspiring to a “higher plane” are built upon this natural impulse to seek out mental reprieve: a momentary separation from the “herd” in order to reassert a sense of self, and with it, maybe even a sense of agency. Some, of course, seem to have less need of such exercise; some do not see themselves as adapting to the world at all (but rather, expecting the world to adapt to them), and so the moniker of the “chameleon” hardly fits–let alone the exhilaration of even temporary freedom from performative strictures.

The more significant component for me, then, is this notion of the “return”: The implausible hope that one person can ever really understand another person’s inner self–despite how unstable that sense of self always is, and how little that first person might understand it themselves, and however much that same person might simultaneously dread being truly understood.

For many, a belief in the existence of a god alleviates the sense of isolation that follows the recognition, however fleeting or half-formed, that when our brains cease to function, so too will all our personal notions of the world, our distinct experience sets and memories, never to be recalled again. How frightening it must be for some to imagine a lifetime of imperfect communion with other human beings, followed not by the preservation of all our hard-won experiences, but rather, the utter loss of everything that makes us who we are. So why accept it? some of us must surely reason. When even just a moment’s reprieve from the cacophony of social performance and the clamour of our inner conflicts can leave us feeling more in tune with ourselves than ever, why not extend that sentimentality to a conviction that we have glimpsed “something greater”–maybe a promise of continuity long after our bodies are gone, or a more perfect communion with the universe at large?

I do not hold to such notions, myself, of universal consciousness, life after death, or the existence of a god, but I do have to catch myself from falling prey to the wilful lie that we can still be perfectly understood by those in close proximity: by lovers, partners, friends, family, and on rarer occasions perhaps even by enemies. It is, of course, a compelling and an easy lie: So long as that assumption of perfect communion is never challenged, never set under the shadow of doubt, we need not feel so utterly trapped in ourselves, or in the fear of losing ourselves even before our bodies completely fail. (And indeed, if that assumption is never challenged by a given life situation, then for all intents and purposes it might as well have been true, no?)

It is, in other words, a useful lie if you prove to be one of the fortunate few who manage to maintain it for the full course of their lives, and not instead among the much greater number who fall out of that belief at one point or another, and thereafter find it impossible to embrace the lie anew.

I think, for instance, about how I can recall my “inner self” at 22, or 17, or 7, better than anyone else alive–but even then these are imperfect recollections, skewed by whatever narrative my 27-year-old self necessarily favours when reflecting on the past on a given day. Even the multiplicity of selves in a single human being is too much, too fluid, and most of them will be forgotten long, long before the rest of this body goes. If I am especially unfortunate, I will lose what remains of this multiplicity of selves (to dementia, or related neurological diseases) bit by staggering bit in my older age, but even if I am to some degree more fortunate, these younger versions of myself–and this me right now, writing these very words–will still be (and already is being) lost to the incessant, causally-related scattering and rearrangement of wave-particle probabilities we loosely term “the passage of time”.

I am not afraid of these ends–much as I do not wish, and will not tolerate, an old age filled with the rapid loss of self-awareness–but I very much grieve for the strange prisons of our respective brains, these fragile organs so incidentally honed to such a state of curiosity and inner life, of imagination and hope, of almost unbearable affection for our surroundings and our fellow creatures in them, that we can both bear incredible witness to the universe, and incredibly still recognize that our witnessing will likeliest come to a most permanent end. We can extend a figurative empathy to one another in the meantime, too–but by the simple fact of our physical selves, a truly complete knowledge of one another’s inner lives will never come to pass–and somehow we must live with that knowledge until we do.

That desire to be understood, however–to understand ourselves and to successfully translate that understanding to our nearest and dearest; to make something useful of our understood selves in the world while we can–is powerful enough, in its fleeting course, to override all knowledge of impending oblivion. It is a desire that drives us to cleave to one another, to write fruitless missives (like this) to one another, to contrive all manner of alternative realities to bridge those gaps caused by the sheer number of us competing as much with our own multiplicities as with the multiplicities of others–not just to be heard, but to be recognized as (what we hope will be) our fully realized selves. It is a maddening enough desire when not obeyed, and a crushing one when not fulfilled. And most of the time, it is not fulfilled.

“I am only one,” Helen Keller wrote, “but still I am one. I cannot do everything, but still I can do something; and because I cannot do everything, I will not refuse to do something that I can do.” To read these words as extraordinary solely because of the added challenges Keller faced through her deafness and blindness is to forget how fundamentally we are all trapped in and with ourselves. We can and do learn a variety of rough shorthands–languages of social performance as much as of written and spoken words–to try to attain some manner of shared understanding, of communion with ourselves and others. The gap persists, though, as doubtless it always will.

But if we can own up to its existence, well, at least we’ll have that in common while we strike out–however vainly, and inevitably–for more.

The Ends of Education

Tags

community, education, humanism

Last summer, I was working on a series of letters for my nephews to read when they’re older, under the guiding principles that a) prepubescence and early adolescence can be abysmally confusing times of life, b) kids in that age bracket can find it immensely difficult to talk with adults–especially adults they know and love–about feelings and uncertainties they don’t yet know how to put into words, and c) those transitional periods are nonetheless critical to a child’s development into a healthy, self-aware, compassionate, and purpose-driven young adult. Letters that were simply around for them to pick up or put down at their leisure; documents that could not interrupt their own, desperately personal stories to say “I know just how you feel” or “I felt a lot like that when I was your age”: These, I thought, might be just the way to be a helping hand for them.

I came to an abrupt halt with that series, though, when I reached what I thought would be an easy letter about the importance of education. As much as I wrote about the importance of critical thinking, of exploration and curiosity, of mindful reflection on what one cannot and should not expect from one’s elders, I couldn’t bring myself to post a word of it. None of it felt quite right. So I put it aside; I told myself I’d get back to it after I’d finished a bit of my PhD studies. I had so hoped to reclaim a sense of certitude through immersion in my own educational path.

The trouble is that my own sense of education–what it should do, what forms it should take–is in a constant state of flux, and I know not to what end. The more I progress through post-secondary education, the more I realize how much institutionalized learning is often at odds with genuine understanding–and the more I chafe at the hierarchical impediments to effective transformations of ailing programs and curricula. I follow studies and discussions negotiating how very much (and wrongly) universities are run as for-profit businesses; how bureaucratic roadblocks limit the average citizen’s direct access to research funded by their tax dollars; how laws intended to make access to post-secondary education available for all have allowed universities and third-party businesses to hyper-inflate student fees on the backs of loan programs that leave young persons with staggering debt loads after four-year degrees; how undergraduate degrees have preposterously become baseline qualifications for a variety of entry-level positions in workforces that often make use of entirely different skills.

There are, suffice it to say, a tremendous number of issues with the university system–just as there are a slew of different (but related) issues with the high school education system. I hold that one should never lose the desire to learn about the world, to challenge one’s deepest preconceptions, and to engage in conversations of meaningful use to the betterment of oneself and one’s society–but how? Through what metrics, practices, and institutions?

Sugata Mitra has run a few experiments that demonstrate the power of technology to provide learning opportunities fortified by the power of peer groups to self-educate. His talk is part of a series of TEDtalks about how to fix how we engage with education, and why. The latter point is also well made in this series by Sir Ken Robinson, who argues that our current systems kill creativity. At the heart of Sir Robinson’s argument, for instance, is this haunting observation:

Truthfully, what happens is, as children grow up, we start to educate them progressively from the waist up. And then we focus on their heads. And slightly to one side. If you were to visit [public] education as an alien and say, ‘What’s it for?’ … I think you’d have to conclude, if you look at the output–you know, who succeeds by all this, who does everything they should, who gets all the brownie points … who are all the winners–I think you’d have to conclude the whole purpose of public education, throughout the world, is to produce university professors.

He goes on to say “And I used to be one–so there”–but that admission really gets to the crux of the dilemma for me: a doctoral student in a post-secondary system that is at once radically changing and also not changing radically enough. By his own valuation, Robinson got to the top of this whole education racket, and now he’s not so sure this is a wise outcome. I’d agree. I’m operating in a system that wants to keep a certain number of “butts in seats” for purely financial reasons, and I’m trying to invite my students to decide for themselves (irrespective of social and familial pressures) whether or not this environment is right for them in the long run, while also trying to teach them critical thinking and communication skills I hope are more universally relevant whatever they choose to do in the years to come.

From where I sit, it’s a muddle of contradictions only further exacerbated by the knowledge that, while university isn’t the right environment for all of them (and indeed, an utter waste for some), a university degree has become almost socially requisite (particularly among marginalized persons) in order to participate meaningfully in the job market and democratic arena alike. Which, then, is more ethical? To encourage sustained, often financially crippling investments in an institution with debatable knowledge outcomes, so that this next generation won’t lose out on heavily skewed opportunities for social advancement? Or to encourage these students to follow their dreams and their passions, knowing full well how much a non-university track generally curtails social mobility and economic marketability, as well as how much harder it is for many extremely talented persons to have their voices heard?

I suspect this would all be easier to bear if curiosity, critical thinking, and purpose-driven action were more frequent outcomes of the high school system–if there were any point in the educational process, really, when one could be more or less certain that the majority of youth have enough of a knack for exploration to fill in the gaps for themselves. I see the rise of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), Khan Academy, and Codeacademy, and I think to myself, “Maybe we’re closer to this end than we think. Maybe we can do this after all.” But I also see compelling arguments for how fragmented our exposure to new media is, and I think, “How rampantly confirmation bias skews our lived realities, rhetoric, and jargon into such staunchly divided discursive spheres!” I hear examples, furthermore, of people cheating on online courses that have no benefit to them except individual understanding, and I wonder, “Is our need for status symbol accomplishments really so deeply ingrained?”

I ask myself, too, if I have even the foggiest notion of what an ideal education system would look like–and I honestly don’t. I want to lift institutional proclivities toward standardized testing and specific professional outcomes, but I also want protections against poor teachers–and worse yet, poor parents. I want a system that teaches children to be critical thinkers, to explore and appreciate their universe, to uphold the dignity of their fellow creatures in it, to look for enthusiastic consent in everything they do, to manage their own finances, to plan for families and be responsible parents, to be compassionate and attentive global citizens, to be meaningful contributors to their local communities, to know their rights and freedoms as much as their privileges and responsibilities, to manage conflicts respectfully and self-reflectively, and that being wrong or failing is not the end of the world.

I want, simply put, children who grow up to put previous generations to shame–young persons with more of a talent not just to survive but to thrive than I ever have. But how? How does one person cloaked in structural ignorance even begin to get another ignorant person to the next plateau?

I wonder if I’ll ever find an answer to such questions. I wonder if any of us ever does. Or does each in his own time simply resign himself to the performance of outward authority while these questions yet rage within?

I hope there’s something less contrived to aspire to, at the very least: If my pursuit of education brings me, in the end, to teaching for life, I certainly hope to manage the feat of educating my intended, future betters without all the hypocrisy native to the systems from whence I’ve come.

Acceptance! And Its Implications

Tags

analog magazine, genre fiction, submissions, writing

Analog Magazine has accepted “We Who Are About To Watch You Die Salute You” for publication.

I couldn’t be more thrilled–both because of the venue (no, the shaking-with-excitement feeling doesn’t go away the second time you’re accepted by an old-school major!) and because this story feels like one of my strongest to date.

It started in a markedly different form–a series of vignettes interspersed with multimedia accounts of an ongoing near-future disaster–but after some excellent feedback I zeroed in on a single component: a bit of long form feature-style journalism, which I then developed into a full article. In this format, I hoped to confront the dangerous didacticism of science fiction (oh yes, my own included) while playing with notions of cultural voyeurism and pervasive immaturity that should give us pause as our species expands its technological horizons in the coming years.

(Did that last bit sound overly wordy and pretentious? Yeah, explaining one’s own writing is never a good idea.)

The point is, I’ve been worked on a few such pieces in the last few months, all written from a publication called Screed Magazine, which gets off the ground in the 2040s. One article involves the building of a super skyscraper, as seen from interviews with a marginalized worker who lives at once “on top of the world” and also among the most neglected, ghettoized demographic of a given nation-state. Another involves celebrity murder in a world where reality programming and global monitoring systems give some people, truly, no choice but to spend their whole lives dealing with the slings and arrows of the spotlight.

When finished, I’d love to stitch these works together in a longer publication format, but I’ve been holding back on the project out of sheer uncertainty about whether or not this work could ever find an audience. This publication at Analog has gone a long way to giving me hope that there could indeed be a place for such a volume, tentatively titled Screed Magazine: The First Decade’s Best Feature Writing, 2043-2053, in the speculative community.

(Look, a working cover for this baby! Don’t you think it might make a nice hardcover coffee-table book from the future? Particularly if the articles were matched with some top-notch futuresque photography? It’s okay to tell me I’m barking up the wrong tree here; I can take it!)

“We Who Are About To Watch You Die Salute You” is about a near future where our collective ambitions for space colonization are on the verge of the most spectacular and grotesquely mass-publicized failure. This world is populated with characters struggling to find a sense of humanity amid cultural impulses to be disaffected, glib, or just plain superficial on a global scale. Whether any of them succeeds is a different question–but when the story hits the magazine stands in a forthcoming issue of Analog, I hope it proves at the very least a pleasing read.

Cheers and best wishes to the lot of you!

The Relative Contentment of Late Middle Age

Tags

documentaries, history, human behaviour, michael apted, reviews

56 Up
Michael Apted & Paul Almond
ITV Studios

It should come as little surprise that, at 56 years old apiece, the thirteen continuing participants in Michael Apted’s septennial documentary series have started to slow down. By and large, this lot of 7-year-olds drawn from different social classes and geographical backgrounds in 1960s Britain has grown into a group of happily married mothers and fathers (and even grandmothers and grandfathers)–some with considerable means, some with modest means, and some with no hope of restful retirement yet in sight. None of them, shock of all shocks, is currently planning a solo mission to Mars.

(And yes, spoilers abound below.)

Neil, of course, remains the exception–a politician in part due to his drive to fix things, and in part just to make ends (barely) meet; a writer who has yet to see any measure of recognition for his work, which he considers his real life’s pursuit; and above all else, an intelligent, frustrated man who expresses hard-earned incredulity at the thought that any viewer watching his life unfold from episode to episode would think they have any idea who he is, what he thinks and feels, and what his true life’s path has been.

These are important points to consider: 49 years of intermittent, interview-style documentary following thirteen (originally fourteen) people as they grew and changed under various life experiences, and what exactly do we have to show for it? A few participants observe, for instance, that the programme’s original premise was badly slanted around the idea that class strata were still alive and well in modern Britain. One such critic, Suzy, came from a wealthy background, dropped out of school, married a solicitor, had three children, and in 56 Up expresses a feeling of loyalty to this series she also hates. Another, the barrister John, first featured as part of a trio of pre-preparatory school boys in the rich London suburb of Kensington; in 56 Up, he criticizes Apted’s original class groupings on account of the fact that John’s father died when John was nine, and John’s mother had to work to keep him in school until such a time as he could acquire a scholarship to Oxford.

(And if I’m not mistaken, another of the Kensington boys, Andrew [a solicitor] also comments negatively on the classist bent of the original film, but I cannot recall anyone of a non-affluent background making similar complaint.)

Whatever its original aims, the series has certainly taken on a more diverse set of cultural functions. While Suzy, like Neil, chafes at the notion that anyone would presume to know any of them on the basis of a few soundbites every seven years, Nicholas, the boy raised on a farm who went on to study and work in nuclear physics (and who has since settled into teaching electrical engineering), suggests that the series is not really about any of them as individuals. Rather, to him, the whole programme is more a broad demonstration of how much any person will inevitably change–in appearance, in aspiration, and in outlook–when given little but the passage of time.

This, certainly, is the role the Up Series has played for me, and though director Apted clearly invites his characters to engage in more hard-hitting criticism of British political interests and public policy debates past and present, on that accord the series ever seems to fall flat. Not, of course, that the director is alone in trying to forward specific aims through this series: 56 Up finds Peter, for instance, who dropped out of the series after backlash for his criticism of Margaret Thatcher and politics in general in 28 Up, returned with the express purpose of promoting his “Americana”-style folk band, The Good Intentions. (He is married to a wife he met at his place of employ, the civil service.) Meanwhile, the barrister John only returned to this series in 35 Up to provide publicity for his charities, and such good works certainly hold a prominent place in his segment here, too.

Generally speaking, though, this iteration of the series finds folks well and truly established in whatever lives they’ve chosen. Bruce, long burned out from a hard stint teaching math to East End London and Bangladeshi students, is now a very comfortable, cricket-playing father of two who teaches a far more privileged class of children. Paul and his wife work at a local retirement village, where they are also quite settled. Sue, a university coordinator who never attended university herself, has been happily engaged for fourteen years. Symon, the lone racial minority in this series, has reconnected with three of the children from his first marriage, and has now been re-married long enough, and busily fostering children this whole past decade, that even with career regrets he has plenty to smile about. Tony, too (the East Ender with a childhood desire to be a jockey), is still a cabbie, but the precarious British economy didn’t keep him from making property investments in Portugal, and though his marriage went through hard times in previous episodes, he cherishes his long-abiding wife alongside various material comforts.

Sensing a pattern? It’s not exactly universal, of course: Lynn, a school librarian before her job got the axe under budget cuts, now focusses all her time and attention on helping her children raise their children. Jackie, meanwhile, has been on disability but was recently cut off under new guidelines; in the wake of her ex-husband’s passing from cancer, and her mother-in-law’s current battle with cancer, her three grown boys (and new grandchild) are a clear fount of strength, but Jackie has little confidence in her ability to hold down a much-needed job with severe rheumatoid arthritis.

Nonetheless, Apted has very much chosen to emphasize the role of family in relation to this notion of late-midlife contentment that marks the bulk of this film. Indeed, a puzzling amount of screen time is dedicated to what all the nearby children of the show’s original participants are doing, and questions one might reasonably expect to be answered by an original series participant him or herself are often met instead by the spouses. Is it really in keeping with the Up Series as a whole to treat these participants less as individuals at this age, and more as cohesive genetic/proximal family units? How about Apted’s choice not to ask participants this time around about future aspirations, instead inviting them to reflect on the lives they’ve lived to date? Doesn’t this interview style necessarily impose a sense of closure on each participant, even as individual story-lines suggest the end is far from near?

Perhaps this really is a time of great contentment for many of the participants in this series (and if so, so much the better for them), but aspects of ongoing life’s work in many of 56 Up‘s segments suggest that this note of complacency is also just one way of looking at these thirteen lives–and an oddly culminating one, at that.

But perhaps this tonal shift should come as little surprise either. After all, Michael Apted is now 72; even if all remaining participants are still alive in seven years’ time, will Apted be in any condition to keep filming? If not, is it any wonder that 56 Up, for all that it offers such pleasurable visits with thirteen 56-year-olds we know both so intimately and also not at all, feels more like a series of statements about Apted than about any of the bright-eyed, wild-hearted, goofy little 7-year-olds we once thought we knew?

I doubt there are easy answers to such questions, which has perhaps always been part of the Up Series‘ appeal. I hardly need mention that life is a strange, messy, too-short/too-long business, but I will contend that, for all the weaknesses in Apted’s directorial approach, 56 Up provides a significant peek into that strangeness. Not a satisfactory one, perhaps–but if you can tolerate huge doses of mid-life contentment, a rewarding one just the same.