Category: Literature

Absurdity

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Okay, so I contributed to the James Cameron Self Love Fund and saw AVATAR. Yesterday we went to the 3-D showing (no way I would spend money on the normal view, I can wait for the DVD the way I do with 99% of the movies I see anymore).  I’ve had a day to think about it now and I’ve come to some conclusions, which are hardly profound, but I think worth saying.

Let me say up front that I wasn’t bored.  Visually, this is a stunning achievement.  But that’s what everyone is saying.  It is, in fact, the best 3-D I’ve ever seen.  Often in the past the effect is minimal and the cost in headache high.  This was neither.  And it fully supported the visuals rather than masking mundane or poor image elements.  Pandora, the planet involved, is magnificently realized.  Cool stuff.  Real gosh wow.

The biology is problematic.  You have a wide mix of lifeforms analogous to Earth.  Some big lumbering critters like hippos or rhinoceri that also have features of a dinosaur, and some small things that are clearly wolves, and one big nasty cat-like thing that’s like a sabertooth tiger.  It’s unclear if any of these creatures are mammalian, but it doesn’t matter much.  Dinosaur analogs.  Most of them apparently four-legged.  But the “horses” the natives ride are six-legged, reminiscent of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ thoats.  How does that play out in evolutionary terms?  Well, maybe that’s a quibble.

How then do you evolve humanoids out of this?  Well, maybe that’s a quibble, too.  This film is not about science on any level, regardless of the few bits of dialogue suggesting there are, you know, scientists, and that there is a studyable cause to any of this.

Because the story, basically, is hackneyed, cynical, and cliched.  I have to hand it to Cameron, he rips off the best.  Strong elements of Anne McCaffery’s Pern in here, as well as Heinlein’s Starship Troopers and a nod to LeGuin (The Word For World Is Forest), Poul Anderson (Call Me Joe), even Joe Haldeman (All My Sins Remembered).  If I dug through my memories I could probably come up with at least half a dozen more clear “borrowings” all mixed in.  There’s not an original idea in any two minutes.

The plotline, however, is straight out of post-colonial self-loathing and Western angst and while there is much to be mined from that pool that is legitimate for drama, its deployment here was purely sentimental button-pushing.  All the triggers were in place, with strong connections to the American Indian, Vietnam, and even a bit of Afghanistan just to bring it up to date.  And it was all thrown into the mix regardless of the logic behind it, which is profoundly flawed.  The few genuinely interesting touches are overhwelmed by the self-righteous indignation Cameron clearly wished to evoke.  We see Pocahontas, Dances With Wolves, and Custer’s Last Stand all in service to making a statement about…

The Big Bad Nasty Western Corporate Oligarchy Bent On Destroying Everything To Mine The Last Fragment Of Coal.

In this case, Unobtanium.

Which is somehow worth the cost of an expedition that would bankrupt the planet for the next century.

Which, if we buy the premise that interstellar travel is now practical, would be a pointless exercise in colonial assholery with no upside in terms of profit or prestige, because that one assumption means we’ve solved our energy and resource problems  and the scenario depicted rests upon a 19th Century mindset that would no longer be supportable—just as it pretty much isn’t now.

Which makes AVATAR a rather stupid movie.

Not that there wouldn’t be a way to actually sell this with a little extra work.  With a bit more imagination.  With less desire to beat up on a cultural motif that doesn’t actually need a half-billion dollar 3-D piece of propagandistic hyper sentimentalized derivative schlock movie to achieve.

Very simply posit that these trespassers are rogues.  It could be done in any of a number of ways and actually make a better story.  Not much better, perhaps, but it might be a little less cynical…

Why am I bothering to detail all this?  Because, beautiful as this film is—and it is beautiful—it pisses me off to see so much money dumped into a third-rate piece of hack writing when there are fine artists and projects begging for a little support, who have stories that would benefit the world much more than this dead-end preaching.

End of rant.

Art

2009…Assessment

Annual reassessments are dicey things.  If you have a terrific year, they can sound like bragging, which would be nice for a change.  If you had an absolutely lousy year, they sound like whining, something I do enough of as it is.

On the other hand, they can be autobiographical in instances where the possibility of anyone (including yourself) ever doing an “official” biography is next to nil.  In this instance, honesty is called for, the kind most people rarely indulge in public.  It gives one pause to consider the responsibility latent in such an enterprise.

But, as they say, it’s my blog and I’ll bloody well write what I want.

I don’t have many secrets.  A few, none so dire as to be prosecutable.  But I do have things I don’t wish to share generally.  One, I should get off my chest right now so everyone understands from whence I speak in what follows.  Ever since I was a kid, the one thing I wanted to be was famous.  You keep that secret for the most part for a couple of reasons.  One, it’s pretentious.  Two, if you fail, you look silly.  Three, if you don’t fail, it sort of comes across anyway, so there’s no point in declaring it.

It’s not in itself a worthy goal.  We all know people who are famous for being famous—Paris Hilton comes to mind, although she did try to beef that up with some media choices that, well, anyway there’s Paris Hilton.  I think there were (and are, but at the moment I don’t know who they might be because I frankly don’t pay much attention anymore) people who got famous for something substantial and then continued being famous just because they were famous and never weren’t famous.  Truman Capote comes to mind, unfortunately.  I actually talked to people who had no idea he’d been a writer.  He was just that weird old guy with the hats and the high voice who snorted coke with other famous people at Studio 54.  This is not the sort of fame I wanted.  I wanted fame based on product, on work and effort, on stuff I made.  Photographs, paintings, music, but mainly writing.  I wanted, in fact, the work to be the famous part, with me sort of attached by the fact that it was my work.

In any event, I am not famous.  Not widely.  Known, yes, but not so well known that I can rely on it for anything more than an occasional tip of the hat, as it were, so to speak, you know what I mean.  I can’t take it to the bank, an issue that presses any artist unmercifully from time to time.  You can’t keep making art if you can’t eat, house yourself, pay bills, etc and so forth.  Do we do it for the money?  You bet your ass.  Do we do it because of the money? Not at all.  If that sounds like a paradox, it’s not.  Dr. Johnson said anyone who writes for anything other than money is a fool.  I choose to read that as the act of creating art of any kind has no rational basis, but that human beings are not at base rational creatures, so there is no insult or derogation in being a fool for art.

But to do it publicly and not get paid…well, one should not carry one’s foolishness to the point of starvation.  Dr. Johnson may have considered himself a noble fool as far as that goes.

I have not secured a new book deal.

I have written book reviews, thus far for two venues—my hometown newspaper, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and an online mag called the Internet Review of Science Fiction.  The latter is becoming more reliable than the former.  The Post-Dispatch book section continues to shrink and aside from an essay requested of me this October past they’ve more or less stopped running my columns—which means I don’t get paid.  I had a couple month hiccup with IROSF, but they’ve just taken a new review so I hope to be back on track with them on a regular basis.  I need to find a few more paying review venues.

I have sold no short stories.  I wrote (and rewrote, at request) one novella, but that has not been taken yet.  Part of the problem here is that I’ve been in Novel Mode for the better part of nine years and I just can’t seem to find my way back into short story mode.  I have a handful of short pieces from Back Then that still haven’t sold—don’t have a clue what’s wrong with them, if anything, it may just be a matter of taste, and that’s what makes this game so difficult and unreliable.  You can’t do a damn thing about Other People’s Taste.  But I’d like to haul my brain back into short story space eventually, because at one time I think I was fairly good at it.  I’m disappointed that, after a few invitations several years ago, no one has asked me for a story, so maybe I wasn’t all that good.  New anthologies are appearing, but I learn about them after they’ve been filled, so…

I am working on a contemporary murder mystery.  (Still doing the genre jumping thing—since 2005 I have written a new space opera, an alternate history, a historical murder mystery/thriller, and now a contemporary MM, looking for something that will, you know, Sell.)  First draft is done, first rewrite nearly complete (just identified a whole thread that needs major repair, requiring the possible dumping of at least one chapter).  In the hopper?  Well…another big fat space opera that’s maybe tow-thirds done.  The sequel to the alternate history, half completed.  Assorted other projects in sketch form.  Once I finish the current project, I intend to rebuild my office and continue noodling on the alternate history sequel until Something Happens.

There was the possibility of my getting a contract position at a university mentoring undergraduates in putting together submittable novels.  A friend of mine was fairly confident I could get on.  That fell through.  For whatever reason, I didn’t make the cut.  It does solve a problem—the work load appeared to be large, so the time thing regarding my own work would have been a factor.  But that will be a factor if I end up having to get a day job again (which is looking more likely).

So did anything good happen this year?

Sure.  I achieved some personal goals.  I’m still going to a gym, lifting weights.  At age 55 I reached (for the second time) my goal of bench pressing 225 lbs.  It’s an arbitrary goal, yes, but it has represented a psychological barrier to me since I started working out, and I made it.  I go three times a week and do a very full workout and I feel enormously good about that.

I’ve started reading Dickens again.  This is a big deal for me.  I’d read several Dickens novels as a teenager (a few before I entered high school) and had thoroughly burned out on him.  Too much, too soon, or whatever, but I spent decades loathing him—unjustly.  I decided to get over it.  So I acquired a set of the Everyman’s Library edition of all his novels and set about reading them.  It will be fun.

As I said in an earlier post (somewhere) I stepped down as president of the Missouri Center for the Book last April.  I had actually achieved every goal I set for myself with that position.  A lot of it was serendipity and some of it may not even be permanent, but we have a vital organization again (for the time being) and we’re about to select our second state poet laureate.  I turned the reins over into good hands and we’re moving apace with the few necessary things left dangling when I stepped aside.  I’m proud of the work I did.

A very personal, though not private, set of accomplishments sort of garnish the year.  I finished my first historical novel back in March and sent it to my agent.  A departure, sure, but I think I have a solid idea for it and for a potential series.  It was very tiring but I’m proud of the result.  After completing it I attended a conference at Washington University, a symposium on Germaine de Staël.  Germaine figures in Orleans, the alternate history that has now been sitting at a publisher for three years now waiting on a decision.  (It has sat at another house for two years and a third has had it going on a year.  I have likewise experienced a similar hold-up with the last full-blown SF novel I wrote.)  The conference provided me with a number of academic contacts I may use when I get around to the third novel in that trilogy, which will be set back in the 1800s and feature de Staël through most of it.

I’ve also completed the first draft of the contemporary murder mystery.  I’ve been hacking away at it for the last month.  I hope to have a final draft ready for submission by February.  This is my first attempt to write and complete something completely contemporary, completely non SFnal, and so far it feels pretty good.  Given the molasses slow sales progress on my others, I feel the need to expand my horizons.  Who knows, at some point I may be writing Louis L’Amour westerns.

I just learned that one of my book review venues is closing down in February.  The Internet Review of Science Fiction has been running my pieces for over a year now, except for the last two months, but I’ll have a new one in the January issue.  My hometown newspaper seems to have stopped taking my reviews, which were all fantastic fiction anyway, something many newspapers continue to have an odd, uncomfortable reaction to.  So I’m back to looking for another market or two for reviews.

Occasionally, I feel like entropy is having its way with me.  This is a wholly personal, utterly subjective impression, but that doesn’t make it any less troubling.  But then I go to the gym and do what I do and walk out, sweaty and stressed, and can feel good about the fact that at 55 I’m stronger than I’ve ever been.  Perhaps this isn’t important in terms of all the rest of my goals, but it’s personally important to me.

I’ve read some damn fine books this past year.  I just finished Iain M. Banks’ newest, Transition.  I enjoyed it immensely, but it is flawed in a way that none of his other novels have been.  He’s playing with superhero motifs and it feels like a cheat.  Ultimately, I’d have to say it’s a failure, but it is a fascinating exercise.

China Mieville’s The City and the City is just plain impressive.

Cyberbad Days by Ian McDonald is a short story collection set in his future India milieu, which comes from the novel River of Gods, which I have yet to read.  I’m way behind on some of my favorite writers and McDonald is at the top of my always-recommended list.  This collection is wonderful.  I also read Charlie Stross’s Saturn’s Children , which turns a number of classic SF motifs inside-out even while remaining true to its sources.

I also read all three of the available volumes of Kay Kenyon’s new series from PYR, “The Rose and the Entire,” starting with Bright of the Sky.  A World Too Near and City Without End continue it and there will be a fourth volume this spring.  I was hugely impressed with the world-building.  She veers perilously close to a fantasy plot with destiny and fate and all that nonsense woven in, but never quite gets there, and in the near miss creates a compelling tale.  I’m looking forward to the last book.

A smattering of other recommendations: Gentlemen of the Road by Michael Chabon, This Is Not A Game by Walter Jon Williams, Bone Rattler by Eliot Pattison, House of Windows by John Langan, Love In The Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Blindsight by Peter Watts, The Wind Up Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi, The Greatest Show On Earth by Richard Dawkins…

Those are the highlights.  The last reminds me that I’ve paid more than a little attention this past year to the Culture Wars over evolution.  Dawkins, Hitchens, and a handful of others (plus regular reading of P.Z. Meyer’s wonderful blog Pharyngula) serve to remind that the idiots and numbnuts are ever with us and sometimes they can seem so reasonable.  We find ourselves driven to continually defend territory already won, revisit arguments already made, and engage fools for the sake of those who have not yet committed to one side of the debate or the other.  If anything will destroy us it is the ambivalence, indifference, and inattention directed toward a firm grasp of the real and a commitment to the truth that allows for those who want neither truth nor freedom to argue persuasively that the future is one clothed in chains we should willingly don.  To stand pat and simply say repeatedly “You’re wrong” doesn’t work because that is the same tactic the deniers and scientific ostriches use.  But to make the argument work requires that the audience know a few things, and our current state of education in the United States often makes that seem a continually receding goal.

I’m not sure I even want to get into the politics of the past year.  I am ever-so-grateful the Bush administration is gone and I am trying patiently to withhold judgment on Obama, understanding what a mess he has to deal with, but we have a Supreme Court that will be hearing cases this winter on whether the restraints we have placed on Big Money are constitutional and I fear that they will decide corporations really are the same as individuals.  In which case, as they used to say, Katy bar the door, the wolves will be out.  I am not sanguine.

Somewhat more than a year ago, close friends of ours challenged us to Be Happier by a certain date in 2010.  I’m trying to decide if that will happen.  On the plus side, I am no longer working at a day job I came to loathe.  My health has improved as a result.  Donna’s hours at her job decreased, giving us more time together.  I have been writing steadily and I am quite pleased with the work.  We’ve managed to adjust to my lack of income and we’re physically comfortable.

On the minus side?  I’m still waiting for a new book contract.  Without that, I don’t really know what will happen or how I will manage to be content much less happy.

I was told categorically in a job interview that my lack of college makes me unhirable in any academic institution.  Not because I cannot do the work—the job in question which led to the conversation was one I could do practically without any preparation, in photography—but because they could not in good conscience market me to prospective students.  “How can we ask them to pay for a degree their instructor doesn’t have?”  Naturally, I think that is shortsighted and stupid—expertise ought to matter more—but we live in an age of markets and advertising and spin.  Most people I’ve spoken to over the course of the year are impressed by my credentials and abilities, they whistle in admiration, but they won’t hire me.  “What,” they seem to be saying, “would we do with a dancing bear?”

So I’m exploring the possibilities of getting a degree.  There’s a way that it won’t take four years and a big loan.  In the meantime, though, I have little choice but to make my choice of careers work.  Do or die time.  Hence the murder mystery (and, possibly, the western).

So it is, as usual, a mixed bag.  A toss up what will happen in 2010.  When I do this next December I hope to report huge successes and breakthroughs.  But I think it’s safe to say that whatever happens, it won’t be anything expected.

Happy New Year.  Be safe.

Art

I Have Words

This week is all about the new novel, which I began cutting on Monday.  I’m almost through chapter five now and it feels…good.

I don’t know how else to put it, but it flows well.  Yes, there’s fixing needs doing and I’m rewriting swaths of it, but basically it looks okay.  As I hoped when I finished the first draft a week and a half ago, I mainly have to add detail.

So I’ve been working at it most of today.  By hand.  I’m going out tonight, despite the awful wind and cold, to see a friend of mine, Sharon Shinn, speak at a local library.  Depending on the weather tomorrow, the gym in the morning, then more words.

What would I do without words?  Words have dominated my life since I was old enough to talk.  Even when the dominant art of my life was visual, I talked about it (and other things) as much as I did it.

It would be awfully nice to be able to just keep doing this.

Art

How Do I Bio, Let Me Count The Ways…

I have to write a new bio.  I’ve been needing to do this for some time.  I had a few prepared bios for conventions and such, tailored depending on who I sent them to.  Magazine bios, con bios, conference bios…they all required a bit of tweaking.  But they’re all pretty much out of date.

I’m going to do this during the coming week.  Cull through all the details that would seem to make me an important person, someone people might wish to come listen to or see.  I have a difficult time with these, which is why I write most all of them in third person.  I have to put myself in a frame of mind that I’m writing about Someone Else.

Apropos to that, this past weekend I received my copy of the new documentary The Polymath: or the Life and Opinions of Samuel R. Delany.  In the course of watching it Saturday and Sunday, we heard him say that he considers himself a rather uninteresting person.  I found that resonant.

When I’m writing a new story, I tend to put myself in the character of the protagonist.  I see myself as That Person.  And almost always, when I start on the subsequent rewrites, one of the problems I have to fix is that the main characters of my stories are uniformly weak compared to the secondary characters.  A couple of years ago I had a revelation about why that is.  Mainly, because I don’t see myself as a particularly interesting person.  So that translates into the protagonist, who is generally interested in the other characters, who then become relatively more imbued by interesting characteristics.  I have to then go back and add in all the missing stuff the main character requires.

Which brings me to the writing of a personal bio.

What is it about me that  is interesting to other people?

Now, I’d like to be interesting and sometimes I think I am.  But in the course of the day, I don’t even think about myself much less what it is about me that makes me worth note.  This is perfectly sane behavior, as far as I’m concerned.  Who does go through the day cataloging their specialness besides narcissists, obsessives, terminally vain, or profoundly insecure people?  I stipulate that I’m vain, but it limits itself to personal grooming, physical fitness, and an attempt at erudition, none of which controls my life, and all of which are practices I think more people should embrace if for no other reason than a sense of public politeness.

But I’m always a bit dismayed when people actually pay attention to me or think I have something worth saying.  (I stress again, I want to be someone like that, I just don’t happen to “feel” it.)

So the personal bio usually becomes a list of things I’ve done.  It seems a common way to deal with the self-conscious aspects of a productive life, to place your credentials, as it were, Over There In That Box.  You can point to the file and say, well, if you want to know about me, look in there.  And in that file you’ll find my publications, my award nominations, and the work I’ve done, etc etc., and, oh year, I live in St. Louis, I have a dog, I’m in love with Donna and so forth—which are still components, in a way, rather than actual revelations.

I don’t think there’s anything wrong with this approach and I certainly don’t think strangers have a right to expect more, but it’s not exactly a biography, is it?  It’s more like a resume.

It doesn’t say anything about the fact that for me different music produces different kinds of writing, that if I’m trying to get inside the head of someone tormented I often listen to Ligeti and when I’m creating landscapes, I want Vangelis or Sibelius and when I need action, I find Last Fast or Joe Satriani or Bartok really helps.  It doesn’t cover the fact that I use much of my music to unlock a feeling I can’t quite identify just for myself.

It doesn’t say anything about how much I like late evening sunlight shafting through miniblinds (or how the same effect, late at night, from streetlamps, really turns me on); or how the late afternoon sunlight across open fields in September strikes a kind of heroic melancholy in my mind, like the atmosphere of final days or impending loss or the denouement after a mighty adventure; or the fact that I’ve never read a book that has made me weep, but there are certain films that do it to me almost every time…

In other words, bios like this don’t say much about me.

But my stories do, if you remember that they are not and never have been biographical.

A paradox?  Not really.  You put what you feel into a story.  How that feeling is evoked is unimportant as long as it’s true, and you don’t need personal revelation in terms of history to do it.   Everyone has these feelings, and they own them, and they were all evoked differently, so fiction that talks about the personal need not be about the author to work.

But you still ought to be able to say something in a bio about yourself that makes you at least seem interesting to total strangers.

I’m still working on all this.

Absurdity

The Paradox of Popularity

Over on her blog, Kelley Eskridge has a video of a “Bono Moment” in which you see two distinct types of fans interacting with U2’s lead singer.  Check it out and come back here.

Okay, the guy in the t-shirt obviously is carrying on a conversation.  he may be being a fan, but he hasn’t lost his mind.  The female is being…a groupie, I guess.  Though the groupies I’ve met in my time have been a bit more specific about what they wanted and had a better plan on how to get it.  In any event, the questions Kelley raises are interesting and relate on so many levels to so many different things.  The fan reaction—mindless adulation bordering on deification—looks to me, has always looked to me, like exactly the same kind of nonsense people put into religion.  Mindless, utterly uncritical adoration of an image and the set of emotions with which that image is connected in the mind of the adulant.  You can see the same thing in politics.  To a lesser degree with less public personalities—writers, painters, photographers (I never knew anyone who elevated a photographer to the level of sex god, but I have known people who got off on sleeping with painters, and of course there’s a kind of Nabokovian/Bellow/DeLillo-esque subculture of writer groupies…) and other creative types—but actors and musicians seem to get all the dedicated obsessives.

I’ve never had this happen to me.  I’m not sure if I’m grateful or resentful—having somebody want to associate themselves with you in a mindless swoon because your work has made them, I don’t know, climax maybe is on a certain level appealing.  But it’s appealing the same way porn is—something most people, if they’re at all sane and grounded, kind of grow out of and get over.  I know I would not find it very attractive now.  When I was twenty-five?  You betcha.  Bring ’em on.

But if I’d had that then I think I’m fairly sure I would have wearied of it very quickly.  I long ago realized that sex, to me, involved the other person—emphasis on Person—and the best sex I ever had included the good conversations before and, especially, after.  (There is a point, of course, where you realize that sex is a conversation, of a very particular sort, and takes on a whole new dimension, which one-night-stands, no matter how good they might be, just can’t provide.)

But the real problem with all this is that art is more than just any one thing and the artist is not the art.  The two are inextricably linked.  Here is a video discussing the question of artist-in-relation-to-muse which I find illuminating.  The notion that the talent “arrives” and you act as conduit through which creativity happens is not, as the speaker suggests, a new one, and it’s not one I’m particularly in sympathy with—it all happens in my brain, it’s definitely mine—but I certainly find her analysis of the psychology of following through intriguing and true.  Once the muse is finished with you on a given project, you do not continue to exist as though in the grip of the work.  There is a person there that pre-figures the work and who will be there after it’s done that has all the needs and wants and sensibilities of a normal human being.  To be treated as some kind of transcendence generating machine by people is in some ways disenfranchising.  For a writer, if the well from which inspiration and material are drawn is the honesty of human interaction, then the gushing idiot fan robs the writer, for a few minutes at least, of exactly that.

But it also sets the artist up to become a prisoner.  A prisoner of other people’s expectations.  Those expectations always play a part in anyone’s life, but certain aspects—the most artificial ones—get exaggerated in the instance of fan adoration.

Watch Bono shift from one stance to another when he finally acknowledges the female.  No, he doesn’t stop being Bono, but it’s almost as if he says “Oh, it’s time to do this sort of thing now” as he first recognizes her presence and then automatically poses for the camera, with this not-quite-disingenuous smirk.  Because he also recognizes that, however silly this person is being, what she’s feeling right then is her’s and to claim it is artificial is wrong.  Maybe an artificial set of expectations led her to this point, but now that she’s In The Moment, the emotions are real.  If he’d ignored her or told her something snarky in an attempt to snap her out of it, all that would have resulted would have been an ugly moment, a bit of cruelty, and a lot of confusion on the fan’s part.

Some—perhaps most—of us grow up to a point where, although our respect and admiration for certain artists is immense to the point of feeling like we have nothing meaningful to say to these people (and after all beyond “I really enjoyed your work” what do we have to say to someone we just don’t know?) we realize that they are human beings doing a job of work.  To idolize them is really a selfish act and blinds us to the possibilities in people who do not happen to occupy that slot in our pantheon of significance.

I was fortunate.  Way back when I was possibly susceptible to becoming a kind of mindless acolyte, I had an opportunity to meet a couple of musical superstars under circumstances that allowed for the human element to dominate.

The first was a chance encounter with Martin Barre, guitarist of Jethro Tull.  I worked at a camera shop and he came in when the band was in town.  He’d heard that the owner of the shop had a big camera collection, museum quality, and he was interested in buying all or part of it.  I had some of my own photographs hanging in the shop at the time and we ended up talking about photography.  Barre was a collector.  We had a ground upon which we could meet as rough equals and had a good conversation about it.  It lanced the boil of idolization for me (and resulted a couple years later in my being able to go backstage and talk to Ian Anderson and a couple of others, and because of the basis of my albeit small relationship with Barre, the interaction was satisfyingly ordinary in many ways).  Here was just a bloke who liked cameras and was a hobbyist and his talent, while I respected it enormously, didn’t get in the way of actually talking to him.

The other was with Rick Wakeman and was amusing in the extreme and I’ll save that story for later.  But in both instances, I was able to just talk to these men in a way that standing in an autograph line would never have permitted, and consequently gave me—I suppose I could say “inoculated” me against the mindlessness of fan adulation.

Make no mistake, I treasure both those encounters as peak experiences.  But I’ve never forgot that such people are gifted but ordinary.

Ordinary in the way that we all are and few of us are without special qualities and talents.  The circumstances that lead to “stardom” are just that—circumstances.  (Stephen King, for all his gifts as a narrative writer, benefited immensely from a publishing environment that simply does not exist anymore.  Not that he wouldn’t have been significant anyway, but his stature would have taken much longer to achieve and might not have become what it is today without that initial synchrony.)

(In an argument several years ago involving the president, my opponent kept pushing the position that criticizing the president was the same as insulting the country, to which I finally said “Damnit, the president is not the country—he’s an employee!  Well-paid, highly-placed, enormously powerful, but the son-of-a-bitch works for me!”  It was not a view my opponent had ever seemed to consider before.  It was for him a humanizing moment.)

I’m not sure what, if anything, to do about fan adulation.  As I said, you can see in this exactly what happens in religious conversion.  The mindlessness, the abandonment of intellect, the handing-over, as it were, of the Self to the momentary care of someone who is seen as Other Than Ordinary.  I think anything that robs people of their self-possession is a bad thing, which is why I generally dislike being in large crowds—there is something about that many people being synced emotionally by a single event that disturbs me deeply.  But it seems to be a human characteristic.

Which may be why I’m so very bad at determining the demographics of my own potential audience.  I can’t say who will want to read my books, not as a definable group to which marketing might be targeted.  I don’t buy books as part of a group, and if I did and I found out, I’d seriously re-examine my habits.  I’m not a commodity.  Either as an artist or as a fan.  And yet, to make a living at art, there’s a degree of having to cater to that kind of thinking.

Another paradox, I suppose.

Art

Remembering the Future: Why Science Fiction Matters

Recently, I was asked to write a short piece about what science fiction means to me for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.  I did and they published it the weekend of Archon 33, October 4th.  Not that anything was wrong with what I wrote, but as this is a topic I think about on and off all the time, I came up with a somewhat different version and, in some respects, a better version, which I couldn’t get in on time.  So here it is.
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We seldom realize what an amazing time we live in. Every time I see someone flip open a cell phone, I get a little thrill, and for a moment I feel the way I did at age 12, huddled in my room, reading Doc Smith’s Lensmen novels with their instantaneous communications. We are on the brink of building cars that do the driving for us—they already work with more computing power than an 80s vintage computer.

Going through the day reminds me of scenes from the works of Isaac Asimov, Poul Anderson, Robert Heinlein, scores of others. In many ways we have built the world envisioned in the pages of science fiction magazines of the 50s and 60s. The only exception appears to be space travel—it’s the 21st Century and we still do not have a colony on the moon or Mars. Space exploration is happening, just not in the way we expected, so it’s a minor quibble.

I grew up at a time when reading novels and magazines adorned by the garish and outre paintings of artists like Ed Emshwiller, Kelley Freas, Paul Lehr, or Richard Powers could earn you ridicule from peers or lectures from adults about wasting time with nonsense. I, and many others, stuck with it because something about it clicked and nothing else came close to providing the same thrill. For many, devotion lapsed with adulthood, but some of us came back, and today we feel a bit vindicated—the images of science fiction are everywhere.

It is, however, a mistake to value science fiction for its presumed predictions. While we have certainly arrived in The Future, the fact is that if a writer of the 40s or 50s or 60s has turned out to be correct in an extrapolation, it is purely serendipity. These are stories, not blueprints, and casting fortunes is for the tea leaf and horoscope crowd, not science fiction writers.

If utility in art must be found, then the benefit many of us derived from science fiction is simply this: it taught us not to fear change. Tomorrow is just another place to visit, and next year a new city or country. It shows us that things happen for reasons, that the best tool we have with which to face the world is our mind and the effectiveness of that tool is composed of the two most indispensable things—knowledge and imagination.

Things have gotten a bit darker in science fiction, as in the world at large. In some ways we’ve forgotten the 12-year-old to whom these tales should first speak. But at the core of the genre is an optimism and confidence difficult to find in any other literature. After all, most science fiction begins with the assumption that there will be a tomorrow.

For my part, I’ve never been frightened by the prospect of change. In fact, I’ve always looked forward to it. Every now and then, I see something new on the street, in science, on tv, in the world and I look at it and say “Oh, yeah, I remember that.” I can thank all those crazy stories that took delight in the infinite variety of the universe and showed me how to greet the future. For me, that’s why science fiction matters—and always will.

Art

Celebration 2009

Here’s a picture from our just past Celebration of the Book, at Stephens College, Columbia, MO, October 10th.  Shown is our special guest, Margaret Sayers Peden, who lives in Columbia and is a Spanish language translator.  If you are a fan of Isabelle Allende or Arturo Perez-Reverte, you may have read some of her work.  She’s something of a phenom and we were pleased to present her with a special award honoring her literature contributions.  Missouri First Lady Georgann Nixon presented it on our and the state’s behalf.  It was all very emotional and wonderful.

Also pictured, to the right, is Tom Dillingham, estimable member of the board, designer and Atlas of the Celebration (having in many ways lifted it onto his own shoulders and held it up).  The guy in the middle in the hat is me.

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photo by Eric Watkins

culture

Events and Events

Hard to believe it’s mid-October already.  Last weekend I was in Columbia, MO, for the MCB annual Celebration.  I’ve talked about this before—History and Fiction: Dueling Narratives—and all I’ll add here is that the programming for the day was marvelous.

Turnout was another matter.  It wasn’t embarrassing low, to be sure, but it wasn’t up where I’d hoped it would be.  We have a lot to learn about proper promotions.  But it was generally successful enough that there is no question about next year, which will be—

MISSOURI GENRE.

I sort of grabbed the title out of the air at the last board meeting, just so we could all start thinking about it and working toward it, and to make sure everyone understood that we have a program (even though we don’t, exactly).  I’ve already enlisted three writers to appear.  Katie Estill, who has two novels to her credit, the most recent one, Dahlia’s Gone, is quite a bravura piece of writing.  Not genre, not exactly, although it does involve a murder.  But in a way, mainstream is a genre insofar as it is recognized as distinct from all other “genres” like mystery or romance or science fiction.  John Lutz, a local mystery writer of considerable reputation, who wrote the novel on which the movie Single White Female was based.  And Robin Bailey, talented fantasy author and former president of SFWA.  I figured having them on the bill would be a good, solid foundation on which to construct the rest of the program.

This will be the last Celebration in which I’m directly involved as a member of the board of the Missouri Center for the Book.  Come April of ’11 I shall be leaving the MCB, per the by-laws.  So I hope this one will nail it up good.

I really enjoy being on panels and doing presentations.  I can’t claim to be exactly comfortable in front of an audience, but I like it, and occasionally I even do well.  So in future I hope to be doing more of that and less planning.

Assuming, of course, I also have some new novels to promote.  I’m still waiting to hear.

I’ve got another month or two of regular unemployment, then there seems to be some kind of extra rigomarole to go through to get the extensions.  I have a prospect that won’t come in till January.  We’ll see how that all works out.

I must say that all the presenters we had at this last Celebration were excellent.  The talks were first-rate.  We must solve this attendance problem, because people are missing out on some really great stuff.  Tenacity.  I’ve already put some things in place that I have to follow up on next year in terms of radio presence and such.

Meantime, I have one more major gig for the MCB this year—the book-to-film panel at the St. Louis International Film Festival.  I have obtained a copy of the novel in question—Woe To Live On by Daniel Woodrell, which is out of print—and I need to read it beforehand and make up my list of questions.  We’ll have Scott Phillips on stage to talk about converting novels to screenplays and a Civil War historian, Louis Gerteis, to do a little commentary on the subject of the novel, which is the Civil War in Missouri (which was particularly nasty).  Ought to be a great event.  The film is Ride With The Devil, of which a new director’s cut is being released in a couple of months.  Early Toby MacGuire work.  This will be on November 15th, probably at Washington University.

Then I will be immersed in my own work for the rest of the winter.

Oh, boy.

Art

John Adams and the Efforts of Time

We just watched the last episode of John Adams.  I got the DVD from the library and we went through it in one week, all seven installments.  I have to admit, the last episode brought tears.  The partnership between John and Abigail was well-portrayed and deeply moving.  The older I get, the more I find the strongest story resonance with depictions of deep, deep friendships, especially those that exist between lovers, spouses, life partners.  I cannot imagine losing Donna, who has become exactly that for me, in spite of the fact that I have friends of longer acquaintance, good friends, too.

The casting was incredible, the make-up superb, the writing first class.
What struck me most about this as well was the marvelously-nuanced dramatization of the fundamental differences in political philosophy between Adams and Jefferson.  I can’t help but think that when Adams declared that “the true history of our revolution is lost” he must have been thinking of the initial partnership and later dissolution of like-mindedness between himself and Thomas Jefferson, whom Joseph Ellis depicts an an American Sphinx.

Adams is here portrayed as an idealist who cannot separate his philosophy from his pragmatism.  In the first dozen years of the new republic, there was enormous public sentiment for France and when that country descended into the frenzy of its own revolution gone mad, that sentiment demanded that we support the revolutionaries.  The irony that France supported us when it was still a monarchy and now those very people that had backed us (granted, as a move in their own war with England) were the victims of the mob ascendant was lost on most people, and apparently even Jefferson, who wanted us to embroil ourselves immediately and deeply in support of the revolutionaries.  Washington—how lucky they were to have him—refused.  He was a militaryman by training and he understood how to assess the chances of success and how to go about surviving a conflict in which you are outmatched.  He had seen more than his share of defeat in a long career and knew well that ideology needed a strong hand to keep it in check, lest it carry you over the precipice.  He refused to side with France, believing that neutrality was the only way for the United States to survive.  Adams shared that belief.

Jefferson, and those like him believed that the rightness of the cause would win out.

Neither Jefferson or Adams had served in the military, but it appears that Adams at least had seen a bit of bloodshed.  He grasped an essential reality—that ideals do not win battles.  And yet, politically, he clung to his ideals in the face of an enemy who seemed capable of indulging any tactic in the cause of winning, namely Jefferson.  Almost a complete reversal of roles, at least in appearances.

Or was it?

Adams seems to have had a grasp of the long-term in a way that Jefferson, with his mercurial fixation on posterity, did not.  Adams grasped that the fields in which ideals must be left unsullied by pragmatism are different than those in which an immediate fight for survival is waged.  He would not interject himself where his loyalty to the Constitution said he ought not, even when it might win him another term as president.  Jefferson seemed willing to do work-arounds whenever his vision demanded.

I’m simplifying, of course.  Adams blundered in terms of ideals badly with the Alien and Sedition Act.  He knew he would be remembered more for that—and not well—than for having steered the country through the shoals of potential disaster by refusing to take sides in the squabble between England and France.  And the Alien and Sedition Act is a nasty, unAmerican piece of political offal.  Patently unConstitutional.

And yet Jefferson’s purchase of the Louisiana Territory was also patently unConstitutional, a violation of due process, and in many ways unleashed nastiness and ugliness by opening up all that land to American incursion, wiping out more Native American nations and people, bringing us into direct conflict with Spain and then Mexico, lent opportunity for future presidents to exercise the worst aspects of imperial ambition all in the name of the United States and in contradiction to the Founding Intent of the republic….and for that he is praised.

The essential element of the American Revolution, as it was happening at the time, is simply a group of talented men scrambling around trying desperately to make something workable out of a deadly situation.  They didn’t want a king anymore, they wanted to run their own affairs, but they were also terrified of their neighbors, so some legal wall had to be built to keep New York or Pennsylvania or Virginia from dictating to the smaller states.  The southern colonies operated as agrarian economies based on slave labor, and they wanted to maintain that, so something had to be done to make sure the abolitionists in the north couldn’t strip them of millions of dollars worth of property and labor.  In the tumult of ongoing war, they were working at a fever pitch to make sure they came out the other side with what they wanted, even at the expense of the unity that was to guarantee a victory, and they had no idea how it was all going to look.  It was bedlam.  It was panic-stricken intellectual jerrymandering.

And somehow out of this a framework evolved that, not then and not for a long time to come, but eventually emerged as a marvelous machine.

But there was little solidarity of invention, little conformity of vision.  They all knew that they had to fight to be severed from Great Britain.  That afterward they needed to erect a coherent government that wouldn’t take from them what they saw Britain trying to take from them.  How they were going to do all this, on that there was little agreement.

It was a mess.

The myth prevails.

But not so much that sound research and a little patient thought can’t recover what might actually have been going on, and sometimes the results are something wonderfully poignant, insightful, and honest as this miniseries.  It ought to be shown in grade school.  It ought to be part of any American history course.

At a book festival a few years ago, I attended a discussion by a historian who had just published a biography of Aaron Burr.  She’d taken the trouble to go back to primary sources and look at the man through the lens of his times rather than our modern, prejudiced view of a murderer and traitor.  She talked about the humanness of these people, who were an amalgam—hero and villain, coward and genius, self-serving and patriotic, publicly strong and privately weak—when someone stood up to condemn her for her scholarship.  His argument was that it wasn’t right to denigrate these people who had given us so much.

“I’m not denigrating anyone, sir,” the historian said.  “I’m simply showing them as they actually were.”

“What good does that do?  I don’t want to know that they were assholes.  I don’t agree with what you’re doing.”

I don’t want to know that they were assholes.

Understandable sentiment, perhaps, but without realizing how utterly human they were we risk deifying them.  And we’ve seen that process at work through most of our history, to greater or lesser degrees.  The temptation to cast the revolutionary era in bronze and hold it up as some ideal age is great because it seems so simple and honest and straight-forward compared to our present age of almost fractal complexity.  We can see the desire for that kind of simplicity and, we believe, dependability in the constant purges against politicians who prove themselves frail or hypocritical or simply too human.  We want paragons, walking talking ideals who never stray from the Philosopher’s Gold of which we think the Founding Fathers were composed.  We sacrifice a lot of talent this way.  Brilliant economists, diplomats, orators, legislators get harried out of office because they slept with someone out of wedlock or smoked pot in college or eschew a religious point-of-view.  The examination of private lives in search of the unstained, pure of heart, consistently noble character drives the best and brightest away from even putting themselves forward to serve.  As if any of these factors relate to competence or civic virtue or ability to lead.

Any examination of the Founding Fathers shows such a catalogue of human frailty that likely none of them today could get elected as small-town councilman much less to the highest offices of the land.  Among them were speculators, slave owners, philanderers, alcoholics, bigots, gamblers, and all manner of personal hypocrisy.

But look at what they managed to build.

I think more such dramatizations ought to be made.  We should know very well how human these people were.  We should know that, really, they weren’t so very different than we were, beyond those differences that time and circumstance inevitably produce.  It would do us good to get the idea that if these—uncertain, petty, churlish, hypocritical, frightened men—could do what they did when the opportunity presented itself, what can we not aspire to accomplish with all the benefits of their histories and our present abilities?  Knowing that we are more like them than not would be a good thing, I think.

Absurdity

Dante’s HMO

Now for something less sturm und drang (which is ironic, since just now it is thundering and raining outside) and more reflective.

We’re still attending the Dante reading group.  Yesterday we did Canto XIV of Purgatorio and indulged some lively conversation over the meaning and intent.  It’s become fairly obvious (long ago, back in  Inferno it was obvious) that Dante was not talking about the afterlife, not in any serious way.  All of this is a critique of the world and its denizens.  It is a thoroughgoing strafing and scourging of the component parts of the world through which he moved.  He was doing what science fiction does, talking about the present world through the distorting lens of the fantastic.

There are equivalent personalities in Inferno and Purgatory.  There seems to be a question of degree, however, and an additional component of self awareness that has put the denizens of Purgatory—the Purgs in our group shorthand—and the Infernals where they are.  We have just completed Pride and are in the midst of Envy, and certainly there are those in Inferno who suffer from the same faults.  The difference is the Purgs know they have a failing, the Infernals embrace their flaw as if it is only right and natural.  The person of Chaco for one is convinced he’s heaven-bound just as soon as the bureaucratic cock-up that’s put him where he is gets cleared up.  The Infernals, you realize, are exactly where they want to be.

This is a point I think Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle missed in their otherwise delightful take, Inferno.  They portrayed the denizens of hell as people being punished and are aware of being punished, unable to do anything about it.  But it becomes clear with close reading of Dante that this is precisely not the case.  Chaco, and his ilk, like the way they are, they have no problem with themselves, it is the world that they see as the problem.  They would tear down creation to make it conform to their view of how things should be.

Whereas the Purgs have no such conviction.  They are flawed and feel incapable of doing anything about it.  They know there is a problem, but can’t seem to identify it, or feel powerless to effect change.  Theirs is a more complex dysfunction, and it is compounded by a confusion with the systems they have lived and worked within.  They are loathe to drop the forms they have grown both comfortable and diseased embracing.

And Virgil, who is outside this entire construct being a pagan, pre-Christian, tells Dante:

That was the iron bit meant to hold man within his proper bound.  But you men swallow bait and hook and all, and then your ancient enemy yanks you in—small profit to you then, the rein or call.

Stepping outside for a moment, which is Virgil’s freedom, this suggests that mankind has been sold a bill of goods, a slick salesman has had his way with us, and we bought it.  Bought into it.  And we’re stuck with it.  There are wonders enough in life and elsewhere, but we’re too busy tending the Great Machine to pay attention—or to think we can abandon what doesn’t work in the hope of finding…better.

If Dante hadn’t written this in the 13th century, one might see it as an almost modern critique of the corporate system.  But why not?  The same flaws inform modern institutions, drive people to ignore their own best interests, create the same monsters of singular obessive control.

Seen from this perspective, I have to say—I can’t resist saying—that the entire health care debate seems custom tailored for a Dante-esque interpretation.  Kind of fitting.  And frightening.