Archive for the Writing Category

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

MLA 08 paper: Corruption and Sameness in the Twenty-First-Century Oil Narrative

Posted in papers, Writing on 24 February 2013 by Ben

I’m forever bumping into old work that, while interesting to me at the time and even today, simply never went anywhere in terms of publication or as part of  a longer term project. I had been focused for a couple of years on a project called Corruption and Sameness, before I turned my attention to media and science fiction (separately and together. This was to be part of that, but it never got past the conference paper stage.

The first three sections are fairly coherent, even if they do not naturally transition into and out of one another. At the end, as is the case when I write anything, but especially conference papers, there is some miscellaneous stuff that I never had a chance to get into the body (for whatever reason–thanks Agamben). It breaks down a bit at the end of the second section and then again at the end of the third, during which I extemporized a bit–relying on my natural charm to see me through. I added in the two videos for this post.

——————————————–
I can only refer to this as a “paper” in the loosest sense of the term. It’s more a series of ideas. Or perhaps three propositions in search of an argument.

Part I: Technologies of the Same

The present state of affairs with regard to US energy policy/oil dependency, is, to me, untenable. That point is, it seems, unexceptionable in reasonable contexts, as demonstrated in documentaries such as A Crude Awakening: The Oil Crash, A History of Oil, An Inconvenient Truth, and Enron: The Smartest Guys in The Room. Of course, those contexts that count are, it seems, hardly reasonable, and, given those contexts, these texts are able to do little more than document problems; that is, they in no way set or even advise energy policy. This issue is not so much tied to this issue of rightness or wrongness, but rather to the fact that these truths are inconvenient.

The means by which these inconveniences are overcome, ignored, reconciled with other truths upon which they can gain no purchase, are what I call technologies of the same. They do nothing but sustain, even in the certain knowledge of, in fact the demonstration, unsustainability. I will discuss shortly Syriana, a film in which these technologies are on full display. Let me first mention an anecdote from the book upon which Syriana is based, ex-CIA field operative Robert Baer’s See No Evil. What’s odd about the fact that the film is based on the book is that the book has almost nothing to do with oil and is only at times about the Middle East. It is, instead, a personal history of time spent as an agent in CIA: recruiting assets and trying to get Washington to pay attention to what is actually happening in the world. Of such a moment, Baer writes: “But the point was that Washington’s fantasy about a nonviolent overthrow of Saddam helped the big thinkers there to sleep at night, and since we had no human resources inside or even near Saddam’s circle—none—there was nothing to bring them back down to earth” (175). Here Baer is not referring to the relatively recent “greetings with flowers” Cheney and Rumsfeld described, but rather to the political climate in 1995. Later, in reference to a coup attempt in Iraq that same year, one that failed largely because of a US refusal of support, Baer writes, “I knew enough about the way Washington worked to know that when it didn’t like some piece of information, it did everything in its power to discredit the messengers, which in this case were Chalabi and the general. So the corporate line in Washington was that nothing had happened in Iraq on March 4, nothing at all. Frankly, at that point, I wondered if Washington was right” (205). Perhaps it is, after postmodernism, too easy to state that these examples demonstrate yet again that representations often trump materiality, that discourse shapes the world. However, it cannot be said often enough that such representations clearly serve the interests of those with power. Most important, what must also be thought is the nature of these interests, which are not interests in the sense that they will pay actual dividends. That is, they are not financial interests, so to speak, just as we are not here discussing energy futures but rather the future of energy. We must think of these interests as something like what Ralph Ellison calls, in one of my favorite lines, “those lies [the] keepers keep their power by” (439). In other words, these present no opportunity for gain, as Washington’s inaction in 1995 demonstrate—whatever you think about outsing Saddam Hussein, you must recognize that such an event would have represented progress of some sort for Washington in 1995; rather than gain, they merely present the opportunity for more of the same, for the powerful to do what they do: congratulate each other for being powerful for the sake of being powerful over cognac and cigars.

Continue reading →

Leave a comment »

A paragraph from my essay on Watchmen, about Dylan, superheroes, and nostalgia

Posted in Writing with tags , , on 20 February 2013 by Ben

Even as it reveals the always already fragmented nature of the ideal nostalgia takes as its object, Watchmen’s preoccupation with Dylan underscores its own, ironic perhaps, nostalgic dimension. The novel makes use of three Dylan lyrics. The first two, from “Desolation Row” and “All Along the Watchtower,” Moore and Gibbons explicitly attribute to their respective sources. (I shall have more to say about “Desolation Row” below.) They serve as epigraphs for two of the novel’s twelve chapters, and therefore operate outside of Watchmen’s fictional world, as if perhaps Dylan himself never existed there (indeed, he is never referenced by name in the story itself). Much as the novel posits an American nostalgia for the simplicity of superhero morality, these references to Dylan to suggest a nostalgia for Dylan himself, for a time when Dylan made sense, or perhaps for a superheroic Dylan who could make sense of the world by simplifying its problems into anthemic songs. The novel seems to long for a world which never existed even as it demonstrates the fact that, had superheroes existed, they could not have created a better future.

Leave a comment »

more notes on Parable of the Talents: entering history and the books of the living

Posted in Here at the End of All Things, Teaching with tags , , , , , , , on 10 February 2013 by Ben

Some more thoughts on the Butler novel. Still thinking about the relationship between history and media, with some implication of how SF fits into this whole thing.

taking part in history

  • last time we defined history not as what happened but rather the account of what happened
  • today, we refine that definition
    • history is not simply the account of what happened, but specifically human progress
    • while history as a concept has a long history, most contemporary understandings of history owe at least something to Hegel’s theory as described by Alexandre Kojeve
    • Kojeve, following Hegel, argued that History is the “space” of meaning
    • history is human conflict and the meaning that derives from that conflict
    • only in history is there meaning
      • animals exist outside of history because they have no meaning and they have no meaning because they are outside of history
    • Kojeve, again following Hegel, understands history to be progressive, that humans are working towards the fulfillment or end of history, a time when there will be no more conflict and therefore no more meaning (no more art, etc)
      • things will still happen but they will no longer be meaningful because human destiny (not his word or concept) will have been fulfilled
      • Hegel understood this to have happened after the Battle of Jena in 1806
      • more recently, Francis Fukuyama understood this to happen with the end of the Cold War, which Butler had thematized quite dramatically in Xenogenesis
  • in any case, we must understand the context in which the events of this novel take place
    • the glory years to which Jarret refers are the 1950s, which we have discussed as being uniformly white in their representation and in our “memories”
    • more that that, they were also the start of the Cold War and the start of American world dominance
    • in part that dominance came about because America was competing with the Soviet Union
      • we put a man on the moon to make sure we were the first to do so
      • spending on defense drove the national economy and educational initiatives in science, engineering, and later computer science
      • we have the Cold War to thank for the Internet
  • Jarret becomes president in 2032, some four decades after the end of the Cold War
    • Butler writing in 1998 was well aware of the problems that the fall of the Berlin Wall meant for the US, which found itself for the first time in half a century without an enemy and therefore without an identity
    • history was over with the end of this conflict and with it went meaning
    • we might speculate that this is the reason that Bankole says the Pox began in the late 20th century, because it was at that moment that the US had lost its identity, its reason for existence
    • it took forty years in this fiction, but Jarret comes along to give America its identity back
  • one of the primary questions facing Americans generally and Acorn specifically is whether to re-enter history
    • people debate whether they should use the truck they acquire to trade or if they should withdraw further into the mountains
    • Lauren believes that they need to trade
      • of course, Lauren also believes in a sort of destiny, although whether her goal involves re-entering history or surpassing it is an open question
      • as is whether there is any difference between these two ideas is another open question
  • and here we can revisit Butler’s thematization of the connection between past and future, and the way that Bankole and Lauren come into conflict with regard to this issue
    • see 62 – 64
    • see also 66: looking back/looking forward discussion
    • B and L argue because he thinks the world used to be good and is getting worse
    • she thinks it can get better, but the idea that it was better in the past is something of a fiction
      • hence her personal dislike for Jarret, who to her lies about past greatness
    • see 133 where Lauren describes Bankole’s anger with her
      • she is “unrealistic”, in contrast with what she thinks of herself
    • we will come back to the question of realism at a future date, but note that the conflict here has to do with how one re-enters history
      • Bankole wants to return to history, to the past, to what no longer exists
      • that is meaning to him
      • Lauren wants to shape the future, to MAKE history (again, maybe to leave it behind altogether or to surpass it in some way)
    • see also 215: Bankole’s trust in law and order
      • he is afraid of the world and believes that adhering to old standards will save them
      • could be returning to town
      • could be having a will
      • one of the things Butler has always known is that text is inconsequential when one does not have power
      • but see 234: element of horror: should not have happened here
        • the rational belief in law confronts the law’s lack of power
  • there is a similar tension between Lauren and Marcos
    • see 109
    • he thinks that the world WAS better, got worse, and can return to past glory
    • Lauren thinks that it can only get better by leaving that past behind
    • see 111, where daughter calls Marcos a “realist”, in tension with Lauren’s claim to the same earlier (page 97)
    • Marcos also wants to return to the past, but unlike Bankole wants to shape the future into that past where Bankole only wants to return
  • also note that “god is change” is predicated on the notion of looking forward and the painful truth that Lauren often refers to is related to the issue that humans want things to remain the same, to NOT change, to not progress or move forward
    • see page 72 for example of this
      • one of the conflicts of the novel has to do with to what extent Acorn should be a part of human history
    • one of the thing that the west is about is progress, and history has often been the story of that progress
    • however, times change but times do not always progress
      • see 75: things will settle into a NEW norm
      • see also 86: negative change
      • 87
      • 115: how much it hurts to change
    • sometimes they get worse, or they might get better for or in the opinion of some people even as they get worse for or in the opinion of others
      • history is uneven
      • see 67 and discussion of what civilization is
      • also see 69 where some people buy into older notions of progress
      • it may be that Lauren also buys into progress, as she buys into SF and the notion of progress it implicitly contains
      • see 70 where Lauren imagines Acorn much as the founding fathers imagined America
  • as I mentioned, one of the conflicts in the novel is whether Acorn should take part in history
    • this is expressed by those who wish to remain apart from society and to ignore the world in the hopes that the world ignores them
    • we have seen that the world will not ignore them, that the world often if not always insists that everyone take part in history either as the master or the slave
      • and, it should be noted that Hegel developed this idea along with our most prominent theory of history
    • 81: news media; related to whether Acorn should join history (some people do not want detailed news, which is the stuff of history, perhaps feeling it’s not important to their situation)
    • and it is here that we should
      • first, note that Lauren wants to enter human history but also transform it
        • (although perhaps only augment it)
      • and second that we can see a connection between the issue of history and that of media in the novel

Earthseed: books of the living

  • the writings on Earthseed are referred to as “books of the living”
    • we should note that it’s not clear whether only the verse from the start of each chapter comes from the Earthseed books, or if all of each chapter does
      • thus it’s unclear whether these books are compiled solely by Lauren or if Larkin has a hand in them as well
    • in any case, it’s an important reminder that we are reading a book (called Parable of the Talents) and that this book is itself composed of a number of fictional books, including: Lauren’s journal, Bankole’s journal, Marcos’ journal, and Larkin’s editorial notes
  • and it’s important to note what books are: they are, first and foremost accounts of what has happened
    • of course, SF speculates about what will happen, but it does so based on the present, which to say the very recent past
    • this is something Butler more or less tells us when we read Bankole’s introduction
      • PotT may be about the 2030s, but it begins in 1998, or very shortly before 1998
    • thus we may say that books are always looking back
    • and we might say that they are part and parcel of truth, that which shapes and creates the truth of the past
    • books are, in some sense, always books of the dead
  • among the many books mentioned in PotS, perhaps the most important is the King James Bible
    • on one hand, like all books, the Bible is a book of the dead
    • it is about times past
    • but, I think that the Bible as a book does not so much refer to death in the strict sense as it does to the eternal
    • thus the books of the living, Earthseed (which refer of course to a sort of groundedness as well as life, which is never eternal) are opposed to permanence, to transcendence, to timelessness
  • Earthseed is about building a future, about shaping change, about embracing change (no matter how difficult it may be to do so)
    • it is therefore about leaving the past behind
    • it has no business with what has come before, whether it’s Jarret’s vision of the 1950s or Bankole’s notion of safety (which itself is very similar to Jarret’s vision of the 1950s
    • 260: Earthseed not very comforting
  • 185: a record of what Earthseed has survived
    • for the future
    • is this a history? a looking back?
    • or is it an opportunity for learning?
    • is there ever a book that is not a history?
    • is Earthseed rather humanist then?
    • it does seem that Lauren is at least as driven (what we would have once called monomaniacal) as her brother or Jarret
    • she buys into SF and SF-logic, which I think you could say is that of the book with its forward looking based on present conditions
    • see also 213: Lauren making copies of her writing

Leave a comment »

Further notes on Parable of the Talents

Posted in Here at the End of All Things, Teaching with tags , , , , , , on 10 February 2013 by Ben

Some further thoughts on Butler’s novel, with regard to the question of entering history.

taking part in history

  • last time we defined history not as what happened but rather the account of what happened
  • today, we refine that definition
    • history is not simply the account of what happened, but specifically human progress
    • while history as a concept has a long history, most contemporary understandings of history owe at least something to Hegel’s theory as described by Alexandre Kojeve
    • Kojeve, following Hegel, argued that History is the “space” of meaning
    • history is human conflict and the meaning that derives from that conflict
    • only in history is there meaning
      • animals exist outside of history because they have no meaning and they have no meaning because they are outside of history
    • Kojeve, again following Hegel, understands history to be progressive, that humans are working towards the fulfillment or end of history, a time when there will be no more conflict and therefore no more meaning (no more art, etc)
      • things will still happen but they will no longer be meaningful because human destiny (not his word or concept) will have been fulfilled
      • Hegel understood this to have happened after the Battle of Jena in 1806
      • more recently, Francis Fukuyama understood this to happen with the end of the Cold War, which Butler had thematized quite dramatically in Xenogenesis
  • in any case, we must understand the context in which the events of this novel take place
    • the glory years to which Jarret refers are the 1950s, which we have discussed as being uniformly white in their representation and in our “memories”
    • more that that, they were also the start of the Cold War and the start of American world dominance
    • in part that dominance came about because America was competing with the Soviet Union
      • we put a man on the moon to make sure we were the first to do so
      • spending on defense drove the national economy and educational initiatives in science, engineering, and later computer science
      • we have the Cold War to thank for the Internet
  • Jarret becomes president in 2032, some four decades after the end of the Cold War
    • Butler writing in 1998 was well aware of the problems that the fall of the Berlin Wall meant for the US, which found itself for the first time in half a century without an enemy and therefore without an identity
    • history was over with the end of this conflict and with it went meaning
    • we might speculate that this is the reason that Bankole says the Pox began in the late 20th century, because it was at that moment that the US had lost its identity, its reason for existence
    • it took forty years in this fiction, but Jarret comes along to give America its identity back
  • one of the primary questions facing Americans generally and Acorn specifically is whether to re-enter history
    • people debate whether they should use the truck they acquire to trade or if they should withdraw further into the mountains
    • Lauren believes that they need to trade
      • of course, Lauren also believes in a sort of destiny, although whether her goal involves re-entering history or surpassing it is an open question
      • as is whether there is any difference between these two ideas is another open question
  • and here we can revisit Butler’s thematization of the connection between past and future, and the way that Bankole and Lauren come into conflict with regard to this issue
    • see 62 – 64
    • see also 66: looking back/looking forward discussion
    • B and L argue because he thinks the world used to be good and is getting worse
    • she thinks it can get better, but the idea that it was better in the past is something of a fiction
      • hence her personal dislike for Jarret, who to her lies about past greatness
    • see 133 where Lauren describes Bankole’s anger with her
      • she is “unrealistic”, in contrast with what she thinks of herself
    • we will come back to the question of realism at a future date, but note that the conflict here has to do with how one re-enters history
      • Bankole wants to return to history, to the past, to what no longer exists
      • that is meaning to him
      • Lauren wants to shape the future, to MAKE history (again, maybe to leave it behind altogether or to surpass it in some way)
  • there is a similar tension between Lauren and Marcos
    • see 109
    • he thinks that the world WAS better, got worse, and can return to past glory
    • Lauren thinks that it can only get better by leaving that past behind
    • see 111, where daughter calls Marcos a “realist”, in tension with Lauren’s claim to the same earlier (page 97)
    • Marcos also wants to return to the past, but unlike Bankole wants to shape the future into that past where Bankole only wants to return
  • also note that “god is change” is predicated on the notion of looking forward and the painful truth that Lauren often refers to is related to the issue that humans want things to remain the same, to NOT change, to not progress or move forward
    • see page 72 for example of this
      • one of the conflicts of the novel has to do with to what extent Acorn should be a part of human history
    • one of the thing that the west is about is progress, and history has often been the story of that progress
    • however, times change but times do not always progress
      • see 75: things will settle into a NEW norm
      • see also 86: negative change
      • 87
      • 115: how much it hurts to change
    • sometimes they get worse, or they might get better for or in the opinion of some people even as they get worse for or in the opinion of others
      • history is uneven
      • see 67 and discussion of what civilization is
      • also see 69 where some people buy into older notions of progress
      • it may be that Lauren also buys into progress, as she buys into SF and the notion of progress it implicitly contains
      • see 70 where Lauren imagines Acorn much as the founding fathers imagined America
  • as I mentioned, one of the conflicts in the novel is whether Acorn should take part in history
    • this is expressed by those who wish to remain apart from society and to ignore the world in the hopes that the world ignores them
    • we have seen that the world will not ignore them, that the world often if not always insists that everyone take part in history either as the master or the slave
      • and, it should be noted that Hegel developed this idea along with our most prominent theory of history
    • 81: news media; related to whether Acorn should join history (some people do not want detailed news, which is the stuff of history, perhaps feeling it’s not important to their situation)
    • and it is here that we should
      • first, note that Lauren wants to enter human history but also transform it
        • (although perhaps only augment it)
      • and second that we can see a connection between the issue of history and that of media in the novel

Leave a comment »

some notes on media and history in Octavia Buter’s Parable of the Talents

Posted in Here at the End of All Things, Teaching with tags , , , , , on 10 February 2013 by Ben

These are some half-finished teaching notes on Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Talents. I write lots of teaching notes, but I am posting these because they are becoming central to my thinking for my upcoming SFRA paper on genre and media as well as to my ongoing project on genre, Here at the End of All Things. What follows in this post are part of the notes for a class last week. In the next post I will continue some further thoughts on history that intersect with the issue of writing and media.

Again, these are notes. I fill in a lot when I speak and skip some stuff that does not work with the direction class discussion takes.

reading, writing, and media in PotT

  • I noted last time that this is a somewhat more complex novel than many of Butler’s previous ones
    • many if not all of her novels to this point were narrated by a single person from a rather consistent point of view
      • some of these characters were men and some women (one was neither)
      • some were human and some were not (most were something in between)
      • all of these texts were narrated, but none of them (to my recollection) were WRITTEN (except for PotS, which was entirely Lauren’s journals and Earthseed writings)
    • but this text is comprised of various WRITTEN texts (by Bankole, by Lauren, now by Marcos, and by Lauren’s daughter) and compiled by an editor (Lauren’s daughter
      • we can go even further and distinguish between Lauren’s journal and her Earthseed writings as well
    • other texts thematize writing
      • Dawn deals in part with Lilith’s need to write and the fact that the Oankali won’t let her at first
        • and it MAY be that that book is written, but not clear that this is the case
      • Kindred is very much about writing, but it does not make clear that the book is written
  • in any case, the fact is that this novel is composed of writing, and this is very significant for both what it means and for how it works, the latter being relevant for your paper
    • the question that springs immediately to mind is, who are we in this novel?
      • that is, how does the novel position us as readers?
      • WHEN are we reading this novel, given that it has been written down and edited?
  • we are, in fact, FUTURE readers of these texts, no?
    • and we are future readers after an era of mass illiteracy
      • we know that illiteracy is widespread in 2032 and 2033, when the novel takes place
      • 19: mass illiteracy (related to fantasies theme of decline in which skills are lost)
      • relates to the “horrible and ordinary”: 56

 

history in PotT

  • Butler often thematizes history, perhaps most obviously in Kindred and Wild Seed but also in Xenogenesis (which is a novel that takes place after history in several respects)
  • when we hear the word “history” here we should not understand it to refer to WHAT happened, but the writing down of what happened in the form of a narrative
    • history is, by one definition, human time
    • what is recorded is history, and what is not is prehistorical or ahistorical, before or outside of history
    • when we refer to history we are referring to the human construction of time and the time in which meaningful events take place
      • meaning only takes place within history and for those who take part in history
      • for example, according to Western thought animals do not take part in history because for them the world has no meaning; things simple happen
  • and because history is involved with meaning, it is always involved with interpretation, bias, choice, and power
    • history is never simply “true”
    • we can see examples of conflicting and conflicted histories at several points early in the text
      • Jarret on “a simpler time”: 19
      • mythical golden age of mid 20th c: 52
    • history here is subject to interpretation and the person with the most power has the greatest authority to interpret history, has the greatest ability to make that interpretation stick

Leave a comment »

some thoughts on sf, horror, fantasy, genre, technology, magic, and other made up stuff

Posted in Here at the End of All Things, Writing with tags , , , , , , , , on 9 January 2013 by Ben

No time to write today as I have been prepping for the coming term, taking notes on The Natural and The Wind-up Bird Chronicle. Thinking about the latter in the context of my class on the Nigh Fantastic brought me back to some thoughts I have had on the connections amongst the genres of SF, fantasy, and horror. I had been discussing these connections with a colleague last year and wrote up the following explanation. I don’t pretend that these are perfect definitions–all definitions of genre are fraught with inconsistencies. They are just speculations, useful for my current project on genre, media, and history in which I am thinking about the ways that these three genres allow us to imagine the future. Specifically, I am thinking about Stiegler’s notions of disbelief and discredit and how sf creates each and how fantasy might, if read according to terms other than those that derive from sf, foster belief rather than merely suspending its opposite. In any case, in lieu of actual writing for the day, here are some thoughts. I was specifically addressing my colleague’s concerns about the unreality of magic and therefore the problematic and unuseful nature of fantasy.

—————————-
Bataille cites Breton (this is in The Accursed Share vol 2) on the need of some men to create an authentic humanity that overcomes the inauthentic humanity that precedes it. keep this in mind.

so, my thinking on these three genres (which i won’t claim to be perfect, nor is it total given how slippery genre is) goes like this:

  • sf is about what cannot happen in the reader’s world but plausibly could (with the recognition that this plausibility derives from a certain episteme, probably related to a Hegelian notion of progress).
  • fantasy is about what cannot happen in the reader’s world and doesn’t. that is, the reader *knows* it cannot happen (again, where this knowledge is conditioned by an epistemological ground).
  • horror is about what cannot happen in the reader’s world and shouldn’t. i think for this reason we see more slasher/torture porn now than Lovecraft-style horror. the latter does not frighten us because we have no strong understanding of knowledge and it’s practices, thus we cannot be frightened by the revelation that we know nothing (which is the primary horror of At the Mountains of Madness). thus what “should not* happen in the reader’s world is reduced to the gruesome, rather than the existential. this may be why Prometheus fails–too much of the former with little of the latter. the existential fear is what is great about the first and even the second Alien film.

the three are thus connected by this “cannot happen” and disconnected by way of our understanding of possibility. further, we can also consider the genres with regard to the attitudes of characters in the narratives. in sf, characters tend to accept the existence of whatever technology (which we accept with them as possible, if not actual). in fantasy, characters tend to accept the reality of magic (although often this acceptance is not primary; in many fantasy texts, magic has only reappeared for the main characters, who then struggle with this reappearance). in horror, characters do not accept what happens in much the manner that we do not accept it as possible in our world, for the simple fact that it *should not* be possible. i can’t push much harder here without these neat distinctions falling apart, but i will mention a couple of things.

  • first, fantasy and sf have a connection insofar as characters accept as real what is for us impossible, although there are differences in how long this acceptance takes.
  • horror and fantasy connect insofar as they both deal with things that cannot happen for us. the difference between them seems to be in the way they deal with the past. whereas fantasy has the wizard, who may be a crank but tends to be respected, horror has the gypsy or similar character, who is not so much a crank as shunned altogether. both characters warn the present about the supernatural (Gandalf warns Middle Earth about Sauron, the gypsy about the werewolf or whatever). more on this in a second.
  • horror and sf connect in that they both posit a rational world to begin with. sf deals with an extrapolation of the rational into a superrational, whereas horror deals with the revelation that the rational was only ever a mask for something else. the stripping away of the rational is horror.

so this all leads to a few more points that might begin to address concerns about magic, in the context of the Breton above. all three genres, it seems to me, deal in some way with questions of knowledge, history, and humanity–which are terms that are, in some sense, closely connected with one another. so try on this alternative explanation of what the three genres do:

  • sf deals with the forward movement of history and the possibility of an authentic humanity in the future. the path to this humanity is knowledge. of course, much sf finds that knowledge is problematic and that too much an lead to decadence or destruction or something equally bad.
  • in fantasy, the authentic humanity is in the past. much fantasy takes as its starting point a present that can no longer accomplish the great works of the past (Gondor cannot do magic to counter Sauron, whereas 3000 years earlier the Last Alliance of Men and Elves could defeat him in open battle; Aragorn is the descendant of Men, but is perhaps the last of them; etc.). the past is a time when magic was understood, when it was useful and could do things. in the present, magic, if there is magic, is poorly understood, or understood only by anomalous mystics who seem to be utterly ahistorical. thus magic becomes magic through decadence. in this way, fantasy can be understood as the *future* of science fiction, a time in the future after the decadence that sf posits as the outcome of rationality in which technology is no longer understood and therefore becomes magic.
  • horror, finally, is about the present. authentic humanity has been achieved and the rational world rules all. however, that authenticity is then challenged by a discovery (as in At the Mountains of Madness or, for that matter, Prometheus) that reveals rationality for a facade. whereas sf would deal with the same sort of thing as the outcome of a rational project (even if that project leads towards irrationality at some point), horror posits something completely unexpected, to the point of being impossible. that discovery is not subject to falsifiability, is not a failed experiment so much as something that happens outside of the context of failure/success (a binary of science, both terms of which are equally scientific and rational).

so, sf is about the future becoming a kind of past–insofar as knowledge can lead to decadence. fantasy is about the past becoming a sort of future–in which rationality is lost due to exactly that sort of decadence. horror is about the present opening onto both a past (the return of the repressed, what rationality had to always ignore and obfuscate) and a future (in which what might be repressed is humanity itself). it seems then, to me, that magic and technology are not so far away from one another. in sf tech might become magic; in fantasy, tech *has* become magic (and note here that for Mieville tech and magic are very close to one another insofar as he situates them both within political economy, rather than positing magic as a force that is always outside and forever unexplained). horror might not deal with this binary at all, but rather might be about a challenge to knowledge in any form. for a world more comfortable with sf, horror is the disruption of rational knowledge, the introduction of that which cannot be known into knowledge. for a magical world, horror is less this epistemological problem than an ontological one. the character in fantasy knows that what we would call the supernatural exists, but that knowledge is hardly comforting as all it provides is the knowledge of what might happen to that character (she could lose her soul, be enslaved, etc.). these sorts of horror do bleed over (fear of the bomb in sf; coming to know of a darker magic heretofore unknown in fantasy).

so, in short, magic is the past and future of technology and thus fantasy is the past and future of sf. horror is the generic element necessary to introduce this pastness or futurity.

to paraphrase Arthur C. Clarke: any insufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology.

Leave a comment »

Something is better than nothing: more Watchmen (Page a Day day 7)

Posted in Page a Day, Writing with tags , , , on 8 January 2013 by Ben

The following is part of my Page a Day project and some rough writing from my forthcoming essay on Watchmen, music, and nostalgia.

Another lite day of writing–although I got tons of work done today. I was going to skip this altogether, but I am glad I did something, however litter. This follows directly from what I wrote yesterday.

The contrast between these images of death and the self-assured, good-natured interviewee of the interchapter that immediately follows is jarring. In the interview Veidt discusses his past as a costumed hero, his conflicts with his peers (especially that with the Comedian, a man Veidt refers to earlier in the novel as “practically a Nazi”), and his interest in electronic music. He comes across as a humanitarian and, perhaps above all else, as a sort of “sensible liberal”—a believer in social justice but a hard nosed businessman nonetheless. In short, he appears to be the sort of person who had been, in the historical United States, a hippie in the 1960s before finishing college and then becoming a captain of industry. (He had even been a world traveler upon coming of age and, subsequently, a student of Eastern religions and ancient mythology.) However, we know that in the 1960s Veidt was a costumed hero, following in the footsteps of others, especially Dr. Manhattan. Again, Dr. Manhattan is perhaps the reason that there is no counterculture and therefore no hippies. What’s strange, or perhaps not so strange suggests Watchmen, is that despite not being a hippie in the 1960s, despite having no Bob Dylan to draw inspiration from and then reject, Veidt becomes a businessman and himself begins to draw upon and deploy imagery very close to Nazi propaganda. To be clear: despite the presence of superheroes, and despite the absence of the counterculture, America winds up, in the 1980s, very much as it would in reality.

2 Comments »

A review of I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts: Drive By Essays on American Dread, American Dreams

Posted in Writing with tags , , on 7 January 2013 by Ben

I wrote the following as a review that will, it seems, never appear anywhere else. I find it hard to believe that it can be so difficult to place a review, but there you are. I won’t get into the specifics, but some journals suck. Anyway, here is the review. (Note: Minnesota provided me with a gratis copy of the book, but my understanding of that provision was that it was not contingent on an actual review. I wrote the review because I enjoyed the book and wanted to discuss it.)

by Mark Dery
University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis and London, 2012
336 pp. 15 b/w illus. Trade, $24.95
ISBN: 978-0-8166-7773-3.

We sense Mark Dery’s presence throughout I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts, but it’s in “Cortex Envy,” the collection’s final essay, that his subjectivity is clearest. Earlier in the book, we glimpse Dery as a former high school classmate or cultural tourist, but mainly he remains there an invisible, contemporary Virgil, showing us what lies beneath and behind the façade of Disneyfied Americana that precludes our acknowledgement of this beneath and behind.

Dery frames this final essay with a discussion of his submission to an adult IQ test, an ordeal he undergoes partly because he wants “to banish the spectre of unfulfilled promise” he feels as his parents’ legacy to him and “partly because guinea-pigging yourself makes for good stunt journalism” (p. 268). Despite the fact that the essays that comprise I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts are, rather than journalism, essays, this late moment is crucial for understanding Dery’s predicament: writing within and for a culture whose shifts, despite arriving faster each day, possess, to we the affectless, less and less consequence.

Dery tells us that the Verbal Comprehension subtests (on which he scores high) of this IQ test include a quiz on cultural literacy. Dery demonstrates his own cultural literacy throughout the book. It’s best moments are often those in which he cuts to the heart of the matter with an erudite one-liner whose resonances exist in gross disproportion to the number of words he uses to create them. Early in the text he approvingly notes how Camille Paglia “comes to any firefight with a speedloader full of zingers,” (p. 30) before dispensing his own. He describes Lady Gaga as looking “permanently agog, like Paris Hilton after a ministroke” (p. 36); Imus as “Rooster Cogburn reading The Turner Diaries” (p. 57); self-help guru Anthony Robbins as “Saturday Night Live’s ‘Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer’ reading from Mark Leyner’s Et Tu, Babe” (p. 170); and the all-too-real Church of Euthanasia as “God’s revenge on Operation Rescue, in a universe ruled by Abbie Hoffman” (p. 241). No doubt anyone who might read Mark Dery possesses the cultural literacy to understand the what of many of these references, but how many, through no fault of their own, grasp their depth? Moreover, what of the people who don’t even grasp the what as yet?

Perhaps most importantly we might ask if these zingers in fact teach us anything or if, rather, we simply wish that they could. After all, doesn’t Paris Hilton already look like Paris Hilton after a ministroke? Does Lady Gaga add anything here?

I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts is not simply a set of zingers, nor are these zingers the most important aspects of the book. The book is, however, something of a throwback to a style of writing, the essay—as practised by a Twain, Mencken, or Sontag—that seems increasingly less relevant today for the fact that cultural literacy, while still very much alive, can no longer be understood as something centralized or common (if it ever was). We have the meme, the viral video, etc., but these things are so many, so ephemeral, and so difficult to simply discover (there are lots of sites on the Internet, after all), that no two people are likely to have knowledge of the same ones even within a relatively narrow American context.

And in the face of this shift, Dery gives us the essay, a form of writing that came into its own alongside our modern conception of the human subject and all the centrality it entails. A Bacon or a Montaigne might welcome these essays as essays (even as they remain perplexed—try explaining the humorous aspects of fascism, or simply fascism, to the author of The New Atlantis). At the same time these are new (drive-by) essays for a new age. They are occasional, yes, but not in the manner we might expect. Dery rarely references 9/11 or our reactions to it, nor does he spend much time on the evangelical right. They’re there, but to Dery they are either obvious in what they tell us about American magic and dread or they are not what’s important. Through these personal essays—personal in that their subject matter is what caught Dery’s eye and are, therefore, what he can best read for us—Dery shows us the consequence of the apparently small and therefore truly hidden. In that, his cultural literacy remains valuable, especially to a culture in which literacy itself, once a standard of education, has become so varied.

Leave a comment »

And more Watchmen (page a day day 5)

Posted in Page a Day, Writing with tags , , on 6 January 2013 by Ben

The following is part of my Page a Day project and some rough writing from my forthcoming essay on Watchmen, music, and nostalgia.

Not a great day for writing, but here is something. Some of this is the same as yesterday (the first two paragraphs), but I think I have found the thread: 1) deal with Adrien Veidt, nostalgia, Nostalgia (the cologne), and Veidt’s weird idealization of the past and how it connects to Nazism; get into Dylan and the way “The times they are a-changin'” and “Desolation Row” frame the novel and especially the way that “Times” connects with Veidt and his cologne); get into the fictional music in the novel and its apparent connection to fascism; bring it back to Dylan who may not exist in the world of the novel because of the way the counterculture failed to get off the ground or find traction with the public in the wake of the US victory in Vietnam).

In any case, here it is:

This essay discusses the intersection of music and nostalgia in Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ Watchmen, a graphic novel published in serial form from September 1986 through October 1987. Watchmen reimagines the United States of the mid-1980s and late Cold War. That US is a nation that has repealed the 22nd amendment to its constitution to allow Richard Nixon to run for (and win) a third term (and a fourth). This alternate history was made possible by Dr. Manhattan, the one “costumed hero” amongst the novel’s menagerie of superheroes with actual superpowers—superpowers that led to an American victory in Vietnam under Nixon.

As a result of this victory, the counterculture of the 1960s celebrated and deplored (depending on one’s point of view) for its resistance to Vietnam and the military industrial complex, seemingly fails to impact the public imagination of Watchmen’s ersatz America. For example, while there are several references to historical musicians such as Elvis Presley, Bruce Springsteen, and Devo within the novel’s world, the most explicit references to the music of the counterculture of the 60s, here the lyrics of Bob Dylan, come in the epigraphs to two of the novel’s chapters and in advertising copy for a fictional cologne, Nostalgia by Veidt. I will turn to Dylan in a moment, but for now suffice it to say that the novel at once celebrates Dylan as a prophet of the historical counterculture and deconstructs simplistic understandings of his music that reify him as such. Without him, the novel suggests, popular rock music becomes merely the province of hoodlums and takes on a fascist bent, as made clear by the two bands that perform at Madison Square Garden in the novel’s climactic moments: Pale Horse and Kristallnacht. I shall return to this concern later when I focus on fascist and Nazi imagery in the novel and connect that imagery to the conflict between progress and nostalgia at the novel’s center.

For while the novel’s narrative moves inexorably toward this concert and the destruction that occurs simultaneously with it, Dylan, more than any other musician fictional or historical, informs Watchmen’s themes. The novel’s first chapter, “At midnight all the agents,” takes its title from a lyric to 1965’s “Desolation Row,” which also provides the chapter with its concluding epigraph: “At midnight all the agents, and the superhuman crew/Go out and round up everyone that knows more than they do.” Likewise, a later chapter takes its own title, “Two riders were approaching,” from 1967’s “All Along the Watchtower.” A longer excerpt of this song’s lyrics also appear as an epigraph at the end of this chapter: “Outside in the distance, a wild cat did growl, two riders were approaching, the wind began to howl.”

I will begin with the novel’s final reference to Dylan, less explicit than the two just mentioned. Where the lyrics to “Desolation Row” and “All Along the Watchtower” are attributed to Dylan, the title to “The Times They Are A-Changin’” appear unattributed and very slightly altered as advertising copy for a fictional cologne: Nostalgia by Veidt. The advertisement in question appears in a sort of interchapter the follows the narrative section of chapter eleven. After each of the novel’s chapters, save chapter twelve, appear various fictional documents—psychiatric case files, autobiographies, history, etc.–that provide backstory for characters and events. This interchapter is an interview conducted by a reporter from a fictional left-wing newspaper, Nova Express. The subject of the interview is “the world’s smartest man” Adrien Veidt, also known as the costumed avenger Ozzymandias and the man behind, among other things, the aforementioned cologne.

Chapter eleven, “Look on my works, ye mighty” (a reference to Shelley’s “Ozymandias”), focuses on, first, Veidt’s backstory, narrated by him to the servants he just murdered to protect his secret and horrifying plan to save the world from nuclear war. Second, it focuses on the nature of that plan. It concludes with Veidt telling his former costumed hero colleagues Nite Owl and Rorschach that the plan has already been carried out. The last images we see are of death and destruction as a large part of Manhattan is destroyed.

The contrast between these images of death and the self-assured, good-natured interviewee of the interchapter is jarring.

1 Comment »

More on Watchmen (Page a Day day 4)

Posted in Page a Day, Writing with tags , , on 4 January 2013 by Ben

The following is part of my Page a Day project and some rough writing from my forthcoming essay on Watchmen, music, and nostalgia.

What I have here is probably closer to the introduction I need. I always seem to flounder a bit at first before I realize that I need to be a lot more straightforward at the beginning of a given essay so that I can mention all of the stuff I will talk about and then immediately begin the process of making connections between things.

Here is the new writing:

This essay discusses the intersection of music and nostalgia in Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ Watchmen, a graphic novel published in serial form from September 1986 through October 1987. Watchmen reimagines the United States of the mid-1980s and late Cold War. The US is a nation that has repealed the 22nd amendment to its constitution to allow Richard Nixon to run for (and win) a third term (and a fourth). This alternate history was made possible by Dr. Manhattan, the one “costumed hero” amongst the novel’s menagerie of superheroes with actual superpowers—superpowers that led to an American victory in Vietnam under Nixon.

As a result of this victory, the counterculture of the 1960s celebrated for its resistance to Vietnam and the military industrial complex, seemingly fails to impact popular culture in Watchmen’s ersatz America. While there are several references to historical musicians such as Elvis Presley, Bruce Springsteen, and Devo within the novels world, the most explicit references to the music of the counterculture of the 60s, here the lyrics of Bob Dylan, come in the epigraphs to two of the novel’s chapters and in advertising copy for a fictional cologne, Nostalgia by Veidt. I will turn to Dylan in a moment, but for now suffice it to say that the novel at once reifies Dylan as a prophet of the historical counterculture and deconstructs simplistic understandings of his music that reify him as such. Without him, the novel suggests, popular rock music becomes merely the province of hoodlums and takes on a fascist bent, as made clear by the two bands that perform at Madison Square Garden in the novel’s climactic moments: Pale Horse and Kristallnacht.

Watchmen is a mosaic of competing nostalgias. Each of the novel’s costumed heroes nostalgizes the past—none of these nostalgias fits with one another. Moreover, the novel reveals and critiques the nostalgia American culture felt for its past during the 1980s, as the Cold War was drawing to a close but the threat of mutually assured destruction figured prominently in public discourse and imagination. What might have happened, the novel asks, if we had had a superhero who could do anything? Would such a figure, the product of a simplified if not childish understanding of the past and desire for wholeness, prevent the end of the world? These questions imply an uncertain future, one closed to the world epistemologically and, if the missiles launch, ontologically. In such a world, which is to say the world of the late twentieth century, nostalgia provides refuge from this future by liquidating the past of its complexity. This past grants the nostalgic an origin, one that explains his or her present, one that makes sense of a world fraught with complexity.

However, as the novel takes pains to make clear, nostalgia does not intervene in the past so much as color one’s perception of it. Nostalgia restructures the past into a simpler form, one devoid of the complexity of the present. This constructed simplicity belies the complexity of the past. For example, Watchmen’s costumed heroes’ origin stories involve multiple threads. Rorschach does not become Rorschach because of a single event, nor does his morality derive from a simple source (even if that morality is itself brutally simple). Such origins stand in contrast to more popular comic book heroes such as Batman (who’s fate seems to be sealed after the young Bruce Wayne witnesses his parents’ murder) or Superman (who arrives from Krypton already fully American1).

1See Red Son for an interesting contrast to this origin story

Leave a comment »

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »