Moby-Dick as science fiction

In the Kessel/Kelly anthology The Secret History of Science Fiction is a story by Carter Scholz called "The Nine Billion Names of God", which is a series of letters between Scholz and an SF magazine editor to whom Scholz keeps submitting a word-for-word duplicate of the Arthur C. Clarke story..."The Nine Billion Names of God".  It is a replay (as it vaguely admits) of the Borges theme from "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote" (a good chunk of the literary end of SF consists of various attempts to reify and extrapolate themes taken from these parable-like stories), and is intermittently amusing.

"Pierre Menard" involves a word-for-word duplicate of at least part of Don Quixote.  Both Borges and Scholz fiddle with context and interpretation.  How much of the meaning of the words is there on the page, and how much comes from elsewhere?

I've been thinking about genre lately, particularly stimulated by Secret History (which I will be writing more on).  So here is my own exact duplicate experiment.

Herman Melville's Moby-Dick was published in 1851, and has bizarrely motivated characters in a realistic setting Melville himself experienced, that of a Nantucket whaler.  What if, instead, the book had been written, word for word, in 1751, when none of the technology, society, and practices described in the book existed.  Would that book have been science fiction?

I pick Moby-Dick for this thought experiment, rather than, say Middlemarch, because of its obsession with process, with group activity, and with specific technical detail--and perhaps because of its entirely male cast.  If all that had been made up, rather than observed, it might read like a work of Golden Age science fiction.  What about that work, the 1751 work, would not be like science fiction?

I don't have an answer right now.  So I will come back to it at some later time.

Index cultural fossils: music and cars

An index fossil is one that lets you date a stratum, since the conditions under which it was laid down may vary, making it otherwise hard to identify.

In historical movies set in the United States after the end of WWI, popular music and cars serve the same purpose.  Other things (like radio newscasts, or a popular TV show in the background) might do the same, but their use usually requires some plot or character action.  Music and cars are everywhere.  Music has the additional benefit of generating a soundtrack which can be marketed for little additional cost.

I recently saw Me and Orson Welles, which has a fairly extensive playlist of music from around its date, 1937. 

(Short review:  okay movie, a bit obvious, great performance from Christian McKay as Welles, Zac Efron as Richard is is too pretty and is no way suitable to the adorable lit geek Gretta Adler, and James Tupper really does look like the young Joseph Cotten--but could we avoid the coming-of-age cliche of the beautiful and talented woman who dumps you for the connections offered by a powerful older man, despite your overall wonderfulness?  Maybe she dumped you because you are an annoying dweeb.  I'm saying this as a friend.  That's why you wrote the book/movie/blog post to get back at her, right?  Get over it.)

Anyway I seem to remember something about music and cars.  Oh, of course, Manhattan 1937.  The index fossil of index fossils is Benny Goodman's "Sing, Sing, Sing", so that is here, along with some other old standards.  But it isn't as bad as a Woody Allen soundtrack, which all indicate Allen's abiding fear that if we hear a tune we can't instantly identify, we will go into convulsions, bad for ticket sales.  For some reason, the one I liked best, was Jimmy Dorsey's (brother of Johnny and Latissimus) performance of  "The Music Goes Round and Round", under the credits.  Only tunes that are both 1) big pop hits, and 2) get listened to or revived later are suitable as musical index fossils.

As usual, the round-fendered cars are all gleaming and perfect, even the taxicabs.  In real life these are owned and maintained by auto enthusiasts, who don't seem interested in keeping cars in a state of arrested decay, say, five years past their prime.  And, also as usual, only cars from immediately prior to the movie year are visible.  No surviving Model T delivery truck, held together with spit and baling wire, putts by in the background.  I noticed this particularly in Hollywoodland, set across the 1950s, where every car is gleamingly perfect.  Sure, it's LA, but the seedy detective playbed by not-quite-seedy-enough Adrien Brody has a beautiful car too.

Would we accept a period movie in which the cars range from nice new ones to miserable heaps from two decades before, and a sound track of miserable novelty songs and romantic ballads by people no one ever heard from again?  Probably not:  movies are about dreams, not reality.  But it's interesting to note how close to reality different movies feel like getting.

The benefits of silence

I just got back from visiting my mother, who had bypass surgery a few weeks ago.  She's doing fine.

There is no internet connectivity at her retirement community, and it proved difficult to get anywhere I could get some.

On the other hand, I'm not as comprehensively mentally connected as most other people.  I often read people complaining about shortened attention spans, distraction, etc., and I certainly feel that when I have connectivity.

When I don't, however, I'm perfectly happy.  Her apartment is looks out over the roofs of the other buildings into a Midwestern oak forest.  It is utterly silent.  So, while my mother napped, I read, alternating Middlemarch and Victor David Hanson's analysis of the Peloponnesian War, A War Like No Other.  No, I didn't discern any deep connection between the two works.

Now I'm back, and catching up.

Westerns and space operas

Every genre writer's dream (or at least this genre writer's dream) is to write a work that attracts readers from outside the genre, without compromising its essential genre nature.  In fact, to bring them in, to show them what the point of the genre really is, and get them to appreciate it.

I've not read enough Westerns to know whether McMurtry's Lonesome Dove is a representative Western, but it sure is a great novel.  It's pretty elemental:  men and women in rough, hard-to-survive country, hard because of the unsparing environment, and hard because of other human beings.  Some characters you have invested real feeling in get killed offhandedly, the way real people did, and do, die.  Victories are local and temporary, and savored all the more for that.  Defeats are large, and often final.  The characters are compelling, and often funny as hell.  They understand what many of us have forgotten:  our most important duty in this life is to entertain each other.

McMurtry does it without elaborate literary references, mythic structures ("mythic" in contemporary fiction means "unbelievable characters with tortured syntax"--run if you see the word used in a review), or "fine writing".

Now, McMurtry is not purely a writer of Westerns, though he is a Western writer, so it's not like he's clawing his way out of the corral.  But he's decided to play to what makes the genre appealing (particularly a stoic nobility brought out by the harshness of circumstance), commenting on it at the same time (Call, the most stoically noble of the characters, is disliked and suspected by all women, who tend to perceive too clearly what it is he had to give up to be who he is), while letting us share in the genre's inherent energy (you can see why the men respect Call, obey him, and instinctively want his approval, while understanding why someone who does not depend on his skill and authority might be less taken in--even Darth Vader eventually identifies himself to his son, and Call...well, you'll just have to read it and see what Call does with his own unacknowledged son).

Science fiction is a much bigger playground than Westerns, so it's natural that many more writers can play there and nowhere else, and have successful, productive careers.  But sometimes it's worth trying to take your ball and play somewhere else, using the skills you learned there.

That was my ambition with Brain Thief, certainly.

Genre as a community of practice

Genre writers of ambition sometimes start to wonder why the rest of the world does not take them as seriously as it should.  "Isn't my work as valid as some damn sensitive coming-of-age story?" they wonder. "Isn't a charge of Comanches or a crash landing on an ice planet or a body discovered face down in the koi pond as significant an event as an adulterous encounter during a grant-funded year abroad?"

I'd say they are, but not because all of those things exist in some kind of common literary space.  I think there really are genre boundaries, because genres are communities of practice, sets of agreed-upon techniques and tropes, and market segments aimed at audiences with certain already existing characteristics.  They exist, not in the same sense the chair I'm sitting in exists, but certainly as definitely as, say "left-liberal urbanites with a need to feel compassion" or "Red Sox fans" or "model railroad enthusiasts" exist.

There is lately a bit of buzz about this in my own field, shown, in one instance, by a book edited by my friends John Kessel and James Patrick Kelly, The Secret History of Science Fiction, ably reviewed by Paul Witcover here.  Is science fiction part of a continuum of literature, or is it somehow separate?

Is "Thai food" part of the continuum of food, or is it somehow separate?  Is "big band swing music" part of the continuum of music or....etc.  You get the idea.  And I think you already know my answer.  These are communities of practice, sets of agreed-on techniques and tropes, and productions that appeal to a certain market segment.  Many of us like responding to our fellow writers, like being able to test ourselves against great writers of the past, like having some standard techniques available to us so that we can focus on experimenting in other ways, and like knowing something about who our audience is and what it cares about.  These are not pathetic weaknesses.  In genre there is strength. 

I was going to start this entry writing about Lonesome Dove, which I just finished--Western being another genre.  Some other time!

Genre reading: Lonesome Dove

Do writers of Westerns have the same discussions about mainstream acceptance that (some) science fiction writers do?  That is, if there are any of them left--it's not exactly a jumping genre just now.

And I don't usually read it, though over the past couple of years I've learned to enjoy Western movies (with Rio Bravo a particular favorite).  But I'm reading Larry McMurtry's Lonesome Dove, and enjoying it a great deal.  Is it because it somehow transcends its genre?  I don't know enough to say.  But readers of a genre like its particular flavor, and will consume even inferior examples to get it, while non-genre readers wanting to try the flavor need a dish that includes ingredients they're more used to getting, in terms of plot, characterization, or presentation of information.  McMurtry lets us in gently.

And it's a long book, usually something that irritates me.  But it gives me stuff I like, like this bit.  Call, a sober former Texas Ranger who is recruiting young men for a big cattle drive, has lunch with a mother whose sons he wants to hire:

"This is my varmint stew, Captain," Maude said.

"Oh," he asked politely, "what kind of varmints?"

"Whatever the dogs catch," Maude said. "Or the dogs themselves, if they don't manage to catch nothing.  I won't support a lazy dog."

"She put a possum in," one of the little girls said.  She seemed as full of mischief as her fat mother, who, fat or not, had made plenty of mischief among the men of the area before she settled on Joe.

"Now, Maggie, don't be giving away my recipes," Maude said....

Humor, disappointment, suspense, and ambition, with a mix of characters and eccentrics.  Just like what I try to achieve in my own genre.

How fragile is technological civilization? We'll probably get a chance to find out.

Over at FuturePundit, Randall Parker spent some time a couple of weeks ago to go over all the large-scale disasters that shook the 19th century (everything from gigantic volcanic eruptions to solar storms).  His question:  what happens when one of these hits our more complex and interconnected civilization?

In a different, but conceptually related analysis, Charles Stross  asks How Habitable is the Earth, and answers "only in extremely limited places and times":  humans evolved under an extremely specific set of circumstances--circumstances that could easily change. (Amusingly, Stross fools around and uses decerebrate meat puppets as his planetary explorers, and discovers that many of his blog readers take even his jokes with grim seriousness:  clearly a cult in the making, though Stross seems unwilling to lead it).

Years ago, in his novel A Gift From Earth, Larry Niven postulated a planetary probe poorly programmed to seek "habitable areas".  On Mt. Lookatthat, a plateau rises out of an otherwise Venus-like atmosphere, and so humans are sent to settle what is really an island.

The farmers and city dwellers of the dry Southwest take the maximum rainfall ever recorded as the standard, and base their plans on it, though "plans" is an exaggerated word for what they do.

There are always Black Swans, big out-of-norm events.  But there are, more importantly, a larger number of gray swans of various darkness, mostly uncorrelated with each other. Our technological civilization seems to have grown rapidly in a period unusually empty of such events, and treats this unusually wide zone of habitability as normal.  And, aside from a catastrophic black swan (e.g., a major asteroid strike), it can now probably deal with any such event.

But what happens when there are a few gray swans in close succession?  Regular readers know I've been reading about the fall of the Roman Empire (as in this discussion of Ward-Perkins, and this one on Heather).  It's hard to really get clear, because a large number of negative events (plague, tribal reorganization, internal political chaos) came together, not one gigantic one.

We could get a large volcanic eruption and a major solar storm that knocks out communication, during a time of political instability and financial disruption.  Our civilization is not a fragile flower, but it certainly has its breaking point.  With one big disaster you have something to fight and unite against (and write disaster novels about).  Is a group (flock?  herd? --swans don't seem to have been hunted enough for a nifty collective noun to be agreed to) of gray swans a conceptuallly different situation than a black swan?

If we stay in the game long enough, we'll have a chance to find out.

The Savannah Disputation

The other night I went with my playgoing friends to see The Savannah Disputation, by Evan Smith.  As I mentioned a few months ago, we have been regular attendants at one of our two large local theaters, the Huntington Theater Company, and have been dismayed by the hash of expensively produced mediocre-to-bad new plays, and respectful treatments of classics that we have been served.

So far, going to the SpeakEasy Stage Company has been a great decision:  this play was crisply written, funny , and even profound.  Which is to say, it was not an embarrassment.  Going to the Huntington Theater was often just plain embarrassing.

The setup of The Savannah Disputation sounds kid of sitcommy, perhaps unavoidable in a world where TV has sucked up all the best talent, and has the resources to relentlessly explore every even vaguely realistic narrative form: two older Catholic sisters, one grumpy, one sweet, are visited by a perky Evangelical missionary, find themselves unable to justify their faith against her relentless talking points, and so drop a priest friend into a theological cage match without warning him.

This isn’t one of those “stories about nuns” Catholic plays (quite popular in Catholic Boston).  This is a genuinely funny examination of what we base our faith on, and how we all use facts to bolster what we already believe.  There is real loneliness, real desire for connection, and real fear of death under the humor.

I don’t know who Evan Smith is, and there is little about him online.  He doesn’t even have a Wikipedia entry.  No web site.

Evan Smith is a throwback, in other words: a literate younger person (I think he’s in his 30s) who actually enjoys writing plays and, what’s more, is good at it, quite unlike the majority of new playwrights produced by the Huntington Theater Company. 

Through October 17 here in Boston, but it seems to fairly popular in various places:  a one-set four hander with two good roles for older women, one for an older man, and one for a younger woman, and so easy to put on.

The urge to nerd

The comments on my reaction to Anathem highlight my anomalous location in the science-fiction universe.  Both responses (thanks Jim Cambias and oldhousegeek!), indicate that, while they understand my position, they are sucked into Stephenson's intellectual machinery anyway.  Why was I able to resist the seductions of nerd world?

In large part, science fiction is about thought and rationality.  Victory goes, not to the most passionate, committed, or lucky, but to the smartest and most process perceiving.  A science fiction character develops by Learning How.

I always wanted to learn how. When I was a kid, I wanted to be a nerd.  This was odd then—the cultural niche didn’t have the validity it does now.

Only one problem.  Aside from not really thinking like a nerd, I’m not actually smart enough to be one, either.  And I tried, believe me.  I tried through a Masters in Engineering from the Thayer School of Engineering at Dartmouth.  I tried through a number of professional engineering positions.  I tried until I just couldn’t try any more.

That’s just crazy, a colossal waste of time.  I try to be proud of it, but it made no sense, then or now.  I should have studied Byzantine history, like Harry Turtledove, or economics.  Or gardening.

I’ve wandered off the point here.  Neil Stephenson!  Smart enough to be a nerd, even too smart to be one.  Maybe I’m just jealous.  You’d think I could think vicariously through his writing, like learning to dance from those foot diagrams that now survive only in cartoons.

But I can’t.  I don’t think that way.  That’s a problem—I write science fiction.  What do you call a science fiction writer who can’t think like a nerd, or even truly appreciate someone else who writes like a nerd?

Remaindered.

But there might be a solution.  Over the next few months maybe we can find it.  After all, my book comes out in January.  We have to figure it out before then.

 

How to read Anathem

I’m a big fan of Neil Stephenson, and enjoyed much of his massive Baroque Cycle.  And I read it.  If you don't know, that's pretty high praise from me:  I am easily irritated and give up on a lot of books.

But I didn’t read all of it.  And that is the secret to reading Stephenson, and, particularly, his latest, Anathem: when things get tedious or confusing, just skip them. 

Anathem is set in a subculture on an alien world settled by something indistinguishable from human beings.  This subculture is a cross between monasteries and research universities, with some element of Classical philosophical schools thrown in.  But as an Avout, you live your entire life within these Concents (there is a lot of technical terminology, all cleverly defined).

The book starts unpromisingly:  a detailed description of winding a gigantic clock.  Then there is a fair amount of background exposition, until something like a plot starts developing about 150 pages in.  I almost threw in the towel, but the fact that it was Stephenson kept me going.  Eventually things started to happen.

But while the massive Baroque Cycle had reasons for its heft, there is absolutely no excuse for the length here.  The book is grotesquely too long.

It took me half the book to figure out the solution, so I’m going to save you quite a few hours by telling you what to skip.  The best part of the book is near the end, and you want to get there while you still have all your teeth and can still stand up unaided.

So here’s what you do:

Whenever a bunch of intellectualoid characters are gathered in a room, or a vehicle, or some other defined space and start talking about something, skip it.  Just start flipping pages, until someone does something.  You can tell from whether there are a lot of quotation marks.  Sure, there are a couple of occasions where you might miss something plot-related, but not very often, and you can pick up what’s going on pretty quickly.  Grit your teeth and do it.  You’ll thank me, unless you're one of the people who think that's the best part, in which case you're not going to listen to me anyway.

Here’s what you will miss if you do that:

• A lot of intra-and-inter-concent politics, none of which prove to have anything to do with what happens.  It feels a bit like Stephenson thought that was what the book was about, found something more interesting for it to be about, but couldn't bear to give up on all his work.
• A lot of Platonic/Aristotelian cognitive style discussions which aren’t any clearer when described as Procians and Halikaarnians.
• Some discussions of religion by characters who never seem particularly religious.
• Many other somewhat relevant intellectual notions, like the quantum mechanical basis of thought, many worlds hypotheses, etc. etc.

The encyclopedia definitions incorporate most of what you need to know.

Here’s what you won’t miss:

• Characters.  There really aren’t any, and they certainly aren’t developed in these philosophical dialogues.  Reading more won’t let you know them any better.  Even in the first few hundred pages, which is set in the school, you don’t get a sense of any of them.  Don’t worry about it.
• Plot development.  Most stuff in the book just happens.  Knowing more doesn’t make the events make much more sense.
• Any notion of how this world actually works.  I certainly never figured it out.  It doesn’t really matter, because Stephenson dumps all that Avout/Concent stuff partway through, brings everyone together for a gigantic meeting, and after that it’s just a bunch of ubergeeks figuring things out, organized by some superbrilliant council whose authority everyone accepts, and all the smart kids get assigned to the Big Mission.  You’ve been here before, lots of times.

When you’ve jettisoned the overhead, you actually have a pretty good First Contact novel, involving some academic plotting, a trip across the ice cap, an erupting volcano, and a fun journey into space with a well-realized set of decoy operations.  Not worth 1000 pages, but certainly OK at 500, using my method.

The next best thing to an editor is a guide like this one.  Don’t let my sacrifice be in vain!

 

Harakiri: individual honor vs. institutional corruption

The valor and honor of warriors is a given in fiction.  Otherwise what you have is a bunch of violent thugs acting for immediate interest:  sometimes entertaining, but not genuinely moving.

Honor requires that others are aware of your honor.  Fiction would have it that this is automatic, that honorable acts are clearly visible to all, dishonorable acts likewise.  Most works involving honor posit that honor transmits itself without barrier, like gravity.  But, of course, this isn’t true at all.  PR is always important, and often absolutely necessary.  Without a Homer, an Achilles is nothing.

Harakiri is a savage story of private honor and institutional corruption, with a clear-eyed view of the requirements of running an enterprise that has honor as an important balance-sheet line.  It was made in 1960, coincidentally the same year as the action of yesterday’s movie, In the Mood for Love, and takes place in 1630, the era when the Tokugawa Shogunate was tightening its grip on Japanese life, and beginning the process of turning the islands into the samurai theme park they remained until Commodore Perry kicked over their carefully balanced house of cards.

The movie, directed by Masaki Koboyashi and written by Shinobu Hashimoto, the writer of the better-known Rashomon, among others, is an impressive work, and must have hit its postwar audience, anxious to remind themselves of their past glories, like a katana blow.  This is no slice-‘em-up samurai movie (though it does have some great fight scenes, one an atmospheric duel, the other a many-against-one fight that is as realistic-seeming as any such unequal contest I’ve ever seen).  This is an almost mathematical analysis of honor and responsibility, and highly recommended.

Hairy, basso profundo, and sardonic, Tsugumo arrives at the gate of the Iyi palace and announces that he wants to use their courtyard to commit ritual suicide.  He is an unemployed samurai, who came of age in a high-demand civil war environment, and is now excess to requirements with a central power that needs enforcers more than it needs warriors.  He turns out to be the second masterless samurai to show up at Iyi Palace—and the samurai managing the palace in his master’s absence, a politic man who clearly knows all about honor and its limitations, tells Tsugumo the story of the earlier suicide, which we see in brutal flashback.  Then Tsugumo tells his own story, seen in flashbacks alternating between rising stress in the courtyard as various events are seen to be intimately connected.

Sharp, well-structured, without a wasted move, this movie was previously unknown to me.  Highly recommended, particularly for anyone wanting to write more adult fantasy, as this manages to mix exciting local color and dramatic action, the daily life of people just trying to get by, and sharp ethical conflict, all in one tight package.

In the Mood for Love: a homeopathic dose of narrative

The family's away for a week, so I'm reading and watching movies.  It's an Asian weekend, for some reason, and first off was Wong Kar-Wai's In the Mood For Love (2001).

What's it about?  Primarily, Maggie Cheung's hips.  Also cigarettes and stairways, but mostly the hips, displayed in a kind of dress called a cheongsam, sometimes going down and up stairways, and sometimes while Tony Leung smokes to a romantic melody heard many times during the film.

And that's OK.  I'm totally sold on the dress, and willing to move to Hong Kong, circa 1960, even if I have to listen to Nat King Cole sing in phonetically learned Spanish (the oddly charming popular music heard over several scenes), if only I can watch Maggie go out to get noodles.  Why she doesn't cause a riot every time she does it is beyond me.

There's not a lot of plot, by a narrative addict's standards anyway.  Maggie and Tony (not their character names) each rent a room in adjoining apartments.  Each also has a spouse (never seen), who take up with each other, leaving Maggie and Tony to look longingly at each other.  Tony wants to write narrative--martial arts serials.  He may or may not be trying to lay out some narrative in this relationship (he has them act out possible scenes from their spouses' adulterous relationship), but if so, he fails, what might be a Signal From Fred to the director/writer.  Maggie also has something going on that never makes it to my consciousness, at least:  as one character says, "She dresses that way to get noodles?" What is she trying to do?  She aids and abets her boss's affair, like a good PA should, so does she do the same for her husband?

Kar-Wai is a bit elliptical for me.  The spouses are only caught in glances, and he likes showing only one side of a conversation.  I'd prefer just a couple of grab bars to let me save myself from narrative confusion:  if I hadn't read some reviews, I might have been at sea for much longer.  Did the spouses meet when they moved next to each other by chance, or did they know each other before?  And does Maggie really travel to all the way to Singapore to smoke one of Tony's cigarettes?  And what in the world does Charles DeGaulle have to do with anything?

Worth seeing big screen, I think.  I saw it on DVD, and the scenes are so textured I felt I was missing out.  Plus, the hips would be much clearer.

This excerpt will tell you all you need to know about whether you'll like seeing it.  This isn't an interlude between more narratively active parts of the movie, though there is real dialogue elsewhere, this is the movie:  hips, stairs, noodles, music.  No cigarette smoke here, you'll have to rent it for that.

Next up, the somewhat less elliptical and dreamily romantic Harakiri.

Book response: Dr. Neruda's Cure for Evil

I picked up Dr. Neruda's Cure for Evil, by Rafael Yglesias, on a recommendation I read from Tyler Cowen on Marginal Revolution, and enjoyed it a good deal.

I don’t usually like books about therapy and therapeutic cures, but this one held me, and, I think, educated me a bit about therapy, its uses, and its limitations. Written in a straightforward, almost deadpan style, I read it with a pleasure I don’t get as often from novels as I used to. It’s long because it has a lot to say, not because the author can’t bear to edit his own work. The various sections of the book have strong narrative lines, and build suspense in a way that isn’t as typical of literary fiction as it should be.  I recommend it also.

And it certainly should have gotten more attention from people who like fun books with ideas, as Mr. Cowen says.  That said, I think Yglesias flubs a lot of the issues the book has put in play when he reaches his third section.

And the book is sectional. The first is a psychological biography of Dr. Neruda, explaining his personal issues and behaviors. The second is about Dr. Neruda’s professional career, centered on the analysis of one particular patient, but also dealing with the issues of the 80s mass child abuse trials and the introduction of psychoactive drugs like Prozac (the book was written in the mid-90s and much of its action takes place a few years before). This section ends with a crisis that propels Dr. Neruda into becoming something like a corporate trainer. He works for a computer design company and solves the psychological problems of its employees.

This section manages to drop all the interesting issues raised in the middle third, and additionally has things like a long technical description of a doubles tennis game, showing Neruda’s control of all things psychological.

I’m not sure why Yglesias made this choice. Neruda drops his life to counsel the various people at this company (two in particular), and drops all the issues he had worked so carefully and subtly to raise for investigation.  What we get in return is nowhere near as significant.  And it's interesting, because writers usually flub the middle third, between setup and denouement.

It might be because Yglesias picked an odd emotional progression:  in the first third, Neruda is deeply involved (it's his own childhood), in the second almost as deeply involved (it's his adult life, and a patient that he cares a lot about), while in the third he's as involved as any committed corporate trainer would be (OK, maybe a bit more than that).  Tension drops.

Now, if someone had rained on the last part of Dr. Neruda’s parade like this before I read the book, I might not have started it—which would have been a mistake. There aren’t enough good books out there to miss this one.  And even the third section suffers mostly by being in contrast to the first two.  Find it, read it, and tell me what you think.

District 9: The epiphany of the everyday Eichmann

I don’t usually like science fiction movies—an odd prejudice, not shared by most other readers in the genre.

I do have a teenage son though, so we went together to see District 9 this week.

As usual, I liked it better for what it might have been than what it was. It had a good vomitcam/found-media look to it, and the scenes were well structured, timed, and acted. The special effects weren’t ludicrous. The landscape and setting were solid.

But, looked at as a whole, the movie was incredibly creepy--and not in the way I think the director and writer intended.

I’m sure you know the story by now. Backstory: refugee aliens get dumped in Johannesburg and everyone hates these lowlife scum but doesn’t know what to do with them.

Story: Eichmann-like resettlement bureaucrat (played with entirely inappropriate charm by Shartlo Copley) who loves his wife and petit-bourgeouis life has something terrible happen to him and, in trying to escape what has happened to him, inadvertently helps someone else. The movie sets him in a hero position, but he is an awful human being.  First he lies and manipulates uneducated aliens to move them to an unpleasant camp out in the desert, eliminating their unhatched eggs in the process. Then, when the bad thing happens to him and his organization turns against him, he murders dozens of his former friends and colleagues without a whimper or sign of grief, and then betrays a friend and tries to kidnap his friend’s child in order to cravenly save himself. Only when that attempt fails does he return and kill many more of his former colleagues so that there can be some kind of hopeful ending (the basic “put the battery into the flashlight” or “attach the gardening hose” denouement that makes up a good chunk of both SF and fantasy).

I’m not even going to go into the it’s-a-dessert-topping-it’s-a-floorwax black ichor that can changes a human into an alien and power a spaceship, all at the same time, or the alien weaponry that litters the landscape that the aliens never use, even against each other.

How do we end up rooting for this guy at all? We marketers know to offer you an unpalatable product, or one clearly too expensive, before we offer you the product we want you to buy, which then seems quite reasonable by contrast. This is known as the “irrelevant alternative”. Character sets in fiction can serve the same purpose. Just as Eichmann might seem better compared to Himmler or Heydrich, so this guy seems better compared to his shaven-headed irrelevant alternatives (one a sinister supervisor, the other an overarmed thug).  And one of them practices a terrible betrayal of his own.

The more I think about it, the more startling the whole thing is.  Do we pay attention to anything anymore?

Tragic waltzes and satirical marches

One notable cultural success of the Soviet period was co-opting talented and even brilliant composers.  Prokofiev, Shostakovich, Khachaturian, and many others wrote marches, oratorios, movie music, and popular tunes that celebrated and supported the regime.  Stravinsky, perhaps the most brilliant of them all, escaped to the West, but Prokofiev and Shostakovich were two of the greatest composers of the twentieth century.

This is not in accord with our "artist as revolutionary" ethos: current dogma is that all artists are in opposition to the state, and to what is accepted and respected.  So we look for subversion in their works, as we do in the works of all artists. So the musical production of that time seems to be covertly subverting its ostensible purpose.

Prokofiev died the same day as Stalin, and so did not have the opportunity for ex-post-facto justification, but Shostakovich lived until 1975, and so was able to attempt to rehabilitate his reputation in a less-brutal time.  Was he trying to point out subversive elements that weren't originally there?  Music's meaning is notoriously contextual.  Most of what we think we perceive in it is just our own expectations.

Still, the waltzes of the Soviet period have a distinctly end-of-the-party mournful quality.  And some of the marches seem almost absurd in their satire, so much so that you can't believe Party functionaries commissioned them and paraded to them.

One tragic waltz was used by Stanley Kubrick in Eyes Wide Shut.  Here is a good version.  Another is Khachaturian's, from the Masquerade Suite from incidental music to a Lermontov play, here.  The mood reminds me, maybe weirdly, of the Christmas song that manages to catch some of the tragic sense of evanescence that is an essential part of the holiday, Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas.

Then there are the satirical marches, best of which is from the master of genre satire, Prokofiev:  the innocuously named "March for Military Band in Bb".  The first half of it is here.  All of it is in the soundtrack of this horse video, starting at 4'33".  Shostakovich wrote a "March of the Soviet Police" which can be played straight, I think.  I can't find a version online.  But I can't really imagine any collection of serious Soviet types marching toward the future to the Prokofiev.  How did they really perceive these pieces?

Wordless compressed narratives

I mentioned yesterday that I would be back to Up. Near its beginning Up uses an interesting self-contained narrative block, a “wordless compressed narrative” that gains emotional power by what it leaves out. Up uses it to good effect by showing the unremarkable life of a married couple and giving it heft by compressing it into a series of moving snapshots.

WALL-E did this, in a relatively uncompressed form, showing the robot’s routines before they are interrupted. And Saving Private Ryan did it in the Omaha Beach scene that starts the movie. There it is a few hours over a wide area compressed into a tight series of scenes.

Aside from their impressive quality, these three sections share something else: they are all much better than their succeeding movies. Saving Private Ryan becomes a fairly routine WWII movie, with a few annoying Hallmark Card intrusions by the manipulative Spielberg. WALL-E turns into a limp satire of consumerism with cute anthropomorphic robots. I think people were seduced by that first half hour and neglected to be bothered by its other problems. And Up...

Up, I would say, does not fall down as badly, but does tie itself up into mundane narrative knots by the need for an evil protagonist, in this case a lost explorer who, by the order of events, has to be at least a century old, and murders other explorers so he can be the first to find a specimen of a large bird. All that takes a lot of narrative time which would have been better spent just exploring and having adventures. And developing the characters of Karl and Russell, who really could have handled it.

This method has been used interstitially, as in the snapshot flips in Run, Lola, Run, and the character bios Jean-Pierre Jeunet used in Ameilie and A Very Long Engagement, but those were all short.  I'm sure the method has been around for a while, but I can't remember seeing it before, particularly at the same length ( something like half an hour in the case of Ryan).  I’m not up on recent cinema (except, obviously, those I take my kids to).

When bad henchmen happen to good villains

I saw Up the other night, with my wife and daughter. I liked it fine, but certainly did not think of it as one of the great works of art of our era, as others seem to have.

I’ll deal with some of those issues later. Right now, I want to point out a recurrent character arrangement that is characteristic of most children’s films, and seems to have crept into books as well. It certainly appeared in this one.

It’s this: the evil character, villain, criminal mastermind, bully, whoever, always has two moronic, clueless sidekicks. The leader doesn’t have sinister henchmen, resentful slaves, or co-opted intellectual ideologues. He has buffoons, always two.

I first noticed this in the weirdly complex and deranged Thomas and the Magic Railroad (2000). The evil Diesel has doofus locomotives to admire his evil, provide comic relief, and execute commands poorly and incompetently, giving the heroes a chance to succeed. Its plot ease and comic relief that are the real functions.

In wartime propaganda, the enemy leader’s minions are often portrayed as incompetent toadies, cowards, sexual perverts (not common in children’s versions, at least openly, though sometimes appearing as fetishistic attachment to some object or procedure), cross-dressers, and sufferers from obscure and embarrassing maladies. Think of Goebbels, Himmler, and Goering in WWII propaganda.

What’s interesting about this scheme is not whether or not it makes sense in real life (Goebbels and Goering were evil, but far from comical and incompetent), but how stereotyped and unvarying it is. It ranges from Crabbe and Goyle in the Harry Potter books to the shark Bruce in Finding Nemo, with his hammerhead and mako companions. You could lift the pop-culture-laden, befuddled dialog from one movie and plop it down in another and not even notice.

Ticklish tasks: setting up a reader and a writer

You know how it is. If you mention a writer you like to someone without suggesting a specific work, your friend will invariably be drawn to the worst hackwork that writer has ever perpetrated—some Scooby-Doo tie-in book, or a late completely unedited doorstop bestseller dedicated to a much younger third spouse, or the subsequent comic novel set in academia with a recognizable grudge character based on that unfortunate late-period spouse.

But recommending the best, or most representative work might not be a great idea either. Any more than the first book of a series is always the best choice. Some writers get worse as the series goes on. Others get better. Some hit slumps and then come back stronger than before.

For example, I discovered the mystery writer Reginald Hill’s Dalziel/Pascoe novels midway through, with Bones and Silence. That turned out to be an excellent choice. That middle period of D/P novels, from that book to On Beulah Height (including Recalled to Life, Pictures of Perfection, and The Wood Beyond) are a perfect blend of detective novel and literary game playing. Before that they are more standard, though still good; past that the literary game playing takes over and they make less and less sense as actual detective novels.

Sheer luck on my part. Otherwise I might not have taken to him like I did.

When Robertson Davies’ The Rebel Angels came out, a reviewer said it was fine, but that Fifth Business was much better, and the best place to start. The reviewer was right, and I’ve since read almost everything Davies has ever written. Even the less-good stuff is great, but I might not feel that way if I’d tried to start with The Rebel Angels.

One collection of recommendations for mystery novels I saw posted in a mystery bookstore recommended starting the Lord Peter Whimsey books with Gaudy Night, possibly the best way to put someone off Sayers for life. I started with Strong Poison, perhaps not the best place, but it worked for me. I’d say start before Harriet Vane appears, probably Murder Must Advertise, and work your way toward her. Not Five Red Herrings either, unless you have a fetish for train schedules.

Pynchon? The Crying of Lot 49 is an obvious choice (short!), but I’d say V.: if you can’t take the length, stay out of the Pynchon.

David Foster Wallace? The Broom of the System (TCOL49 updated), his two great early travel essays “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again” and “Getting Away from Already Being Pretty Much Away from It All”. Try a story, and if you don’t like it in a few pages, try another, because it’s not going to change. Wallace short stories are weirdly isotropic, no matter how long they are. They’re the Red Queen’s Read: you’ll run through a lot of words but you’ll end up in the same place.  If you like that place, great.  If you don't, leave.

And Jack Vance, mentioned in several other posts?  I'd say The Star King, then into the Demon Princes series, though The Blue World is a good standalone.  And here's where reader preferences really do need to be consulted.  Someone with a bent to fantasy might prefer Lyonesse.  But the wrong choice can really put someone off him.  That's actually what started me thinking about this.  Years ago I recommended Vance, and a friend went to The Gray Prince, a weird and twisted little work, a precursor to his later "cosy genocide" manner, which I found a bit off-putting, for Vance completists only.

So, if you can, ask.  And heed warnings as well as recommendations.

When is it worth updating a classic?

This week I went to a performance of Pirates! (yes, the exclamation point is in the original), a "modernization" of Gilbert and Sullivan's The Pirates of Penzance.  It was not as bad as you might think, largely because the performers and orchestra were good, and most of the music (if not the book) remained.  They even bootlegged in the Lord Chancellor's nightmare song from Iolanthe to open the second act, to good effect.

The modernization involved pretty much what you might think:  sexual references, throwing up, references to colonialism, some more sexual references, including jokes about virgins and the difficulty of finding them older than the original operetta, and some "topical" mentions.  The Pirate King was played as Johnny Depp doing Jack Sparrow, something I'm sure even Johnny Depp is tired of.

Since Gilbert was always topical, it makes sense that those of us not enamored of the cultural details of the Victorian Era would enjoy having references updated. But there is an inherent problem of cultural production here.

Since Gilbert was a genius, you have to be pretty good for your modern patches not to seem even dimmer than they are by contrast to the bright intricacy of his language.  But if you're good enough to match Gilbert's quality, you're good enough to be doing your own work.  So such updatings are either the leisure exercises of people known for other things, or second-rate work by those who have nothing original to contribute.  In this case, it is very much the latter.

All in all, not the root canal of an experience that some recent Huntington productions have been.  But my friends and I have decided not to resubscribe next year, and instead explore a selection of other performances around town.  That's our power in this case:  exit.