The horse named Golgotha hung between the trees

Unsurprisingly (or, perhaps surprisingly if you only remember him for his old TV shows and Beyond the Valley of the Dolls), Roger Ebert is well read. Scroll way down for his reading of Cormac McCarthy's Suttree:

The most recent time I read those words, it was 10 o'clock at night in the rehab center. Dead quiet, in the dead of winter. My room chilly. I was holding the book while seated in a wheelchair by the side of my bed. The wheelchair tilted back to ease the pain of my shoulders, where flesh had been removed to try to patch the hole in my chin. I had a blanket wrapped around me, even covering my head and the back of my neck.

When I was drinking, I went to O'Rourke's on North Avenue, which was heated in the early days only by a wood-burning stove. Dress warmly and drink in a cool room, was my motto. Now in the hospital those cold, cold words of McCarthys' transported me. At a point beneath desire, I was there on Suttree's leaking houseboat in the hopeless dawn, sharing the ordeal of Suttree, the general, and Golgotha. It was an improvement. I was not trapped in a bed and a chair. I was not hooked up to anything. I was miserable, but I was alive, and McCarthy was still able to write that perfect terse dialogue. That is the thing about McCarthy. He is both the teller and the subject of Suttree. I do not mean anything so banal as that the book is autobiographical. It is the merciless record of a state of mind, the alcoholic state of mind, even when Suttree is not drinking but is white-knuckling it.

Get better

[Kung Fu Grippe]

Steely Dan

I've been enjoying Merlin Mann's recent posts on Steely Dan. It's good to know that I'm not alone in thinking that they're secretly awesome.

Is there gas in the car? Yes, there's gas in the car.

Update and, heh!

Obsession + Topic + Voice

Merlin Mann and John Gruber have incredibly smart things to say about how to be creative.

• Find your obsession - the thing that your friends want you to shut up about
  
• Imagine your ideal audience - your first, best reader - or ideal self
  
• Do not try to replicate the success of others
• Be better at what you do than 80% of everyone else
• Be the go-to person for whatever your obsession is - what happened, what it means, what you should think about it
  
• Value and Opportunity are greater than pursuit of page views and ad dollars
• Give your stuff away for free
  

Listen to their SxSW talk.

Merlin also had this excellent talk on how to stop spinning your wheels and just get started with whatever it is you want to do.

Also, this talk called Inbox Zero on how to manage your email.

Issues Based Religious Differences

TNR notes:

Whereas differences in ethnic background and religious practice and doctrine once determined the religious identity of Americans, it is now far more common for this identity to be determined by one's position on issues tied up with the culture war: abortion, euthanasia, the breakdown of order and authority in the family, the banning of school prayer other public expressions of piety, the rise of a popular culture saturated with sex and violence, and the push for homosexual rights. To oppose these trends automatically places oneself in the traditionalist bloc within a given church, while reacting to them with resignation, indifference, or enthusiasm aligns oneself with modernist elements in the same church.

This is an interesting point, but I'm not sure it paints a full picture. For one thing it's not a new trend but a recapitulation of the Red State/Blue State divide created by reactionary forces within the Boomer Generation, the Religious Right, and the Republican Party. After all, it's not the "modernist elements" that are splintering off and creating their own denominations or attempting to rein in or oppose change. It also doesn't say much about those "modernist elements" who rather than reacting with resignation or indifference, simply walk away from the whole church paradigm altogether. Those are the people that quit for a life spent reading Dostoyevsky or Kierkegaard.

What you have left in a lot of these churches are the complacent and the crackpot which doesn't speak well for the spiritual lives of any of these denominations.

(What I'm really waiting for is this trend to show up in Sports. Then you'll really see something. In Scotland, for example, the football clubs in each of the major cities are divided between Catholic and Protestant, and so your background determines which team you were for. Now imagine if that were true of Yankee fans and Mets fans. Or imagine if there was a schism between conservative Red Sox fans and liberal Red Sox fans. I'm a Buckeye fan, but there's also a lot of conservative red neck types that support OSU -- what am I supposed to do? Cheer for Michigan?)

New Lost Promo Almost as Exciting as Vulture's Excitement Over Said Promo

Vulture says:

With a little more than a month before the show is set to relaunch, ABC just released a brand-new promo that features tons of tantalizing new footage that will surely get Losties worked up into a tizzy. A monk scribbling formulas on a blackboard! A man plummeting off a balcony! Some dude completely engulfed in flames! But best of all, the clip features someone who sounds suspiciously like Locke … wait for it … talking backward*! Did turning that frozen donkey wheel make the island merge with the Black Lodge from Twin Peaks? We can't wait to find out!

Neither can I.

The Problem of the Problem of the Future

Or, Science Fiction, What is it Good For?

I don't agree with everything Nick Mamatas has to say about Benjamin Kunkel (I tend to be about 40/60 with regard to his highly enjoyable blog anyway), but this is a pretty interesting line of argument:

SF, or the SF worth writing about anyway, also problematizes politics and love and whatnot. And unlike literary novels, these books often manage to proselytize. Thus, all those ugly people who nonetheless have a dozen lovers at a time thanks to Heinlein, or the Freeze Your Body types, Sea-Steading Libertarians, folks who just don't shower because it's selling out to society's rules not to smell like landfill somehow, or even that wag whose novel for young boys detailed the plans for making an atom bomb out of household goods and mail-order uranium. Everything is historicized in SF: morality, love, what it means to be human (and thus a human character) and often these things are not historicized in a way amenable to the politics of the middle-class social democrat, especially not one terrified of both socialism and democracy.

The Singularity of the novel Kunkel is discussing is an issue primarily for the sort of novel he wrote, and those he mentioned in his essay. The novel, the "literary" novel anyway, is still the venue of choice for the emergent middle class and the thing about middle classes is that they generally have it pretty good until someone rolls out a guillotine. As Thomas Disch pointed out long ago, SF has a different audience and serves a different function. SF appealed to historically (and still does today), the self-taught weirdo who would be middle class were a world a bit fairer, or more of a meritocracy, or better appreciated the subtleties of the slide-rule and the pun. Now that the present has caught up to the future though, a few of these techno-nuts have managed to become crazy zillionaires, while the Kunkels of the world have been demoted to talking about wine and the semiotics of thongs. SF is still the house organ of Technocracy as Charles Stross has pointed out, and though Technocracy has failed so too has pre-postmodern-double-reverse-Enlightenment thought of the Dissent crowd. But SF people know how to reboot Windows. Kunkel knows how to pitch an essay over drinks.

What I like is the characterization of the ideal Sci Fi reader as that "self-taught weirdo who would be middle class were a world a bit fairer" which is perhaps the way many genre writers see themselves sometimes, and the majority of their readers as well. But where he sees an emergent Technocracy, I just see the same old tiresome Libertarians, Randian Objectivists, and loosely identifed right-wing para-militarist reactionaries. Moreover, there is no "Dissent" crowd beyond the popular straw man of said Libertarians, Objectivists, and Reactionaries. Either way, not my crowd.

And its sort of striking that Mamatas finds fault with Kunkel's argument where they should agree the most. That is, Mamatas sees sci-fi readers as highly individualistic, and Kunkel argues that great literature is about complex highly individualized characters. Kunkel's complaint is that dystopic novels are always about clones, zombies, or characters stripped of their individuality. In his view (and this is problematic in itself) there is no social, moral, or political argument without the fully-formed individual perspective. There can be no future without the idea of the heroic individual to inhabit it. I'm not sure I agree with this either (this argument echoes those over Gladwell's Outliers - do great men make history, or do historic moments make men great?. It seems sort of old-fashioned and overly dependendent on James Wood's ideas regarding the great Tolstoyan Realist Novel. There's no room for postmodernism - and the entire history of literary sci-fi mash-ups - in Kunkel's view, much less post-humanism).

Mamatas's complaint seems to be that Kunkel is an entitled little bitch who should just shut up. EOS:

Literary writers of the sort Kunkel discusses in his essay can't handle the future very well, so they end up falling into the pop culture traps of televised SF. (Thus Kunkel's conflation of the two is correct, but not self-aware.) More interesting SF takes swings at the centrality of the individual subject in a way which smells to Kunkel and his fellow travelers as the liquidation of the middle class. The new world to be born is absolutely terrifying—it's the killing fields, run!— and thus Kunkel did what Kunkels always do—he wrote a long essay in a minor left journal.

The whole thing falls apart with the ax-gridingly annoying reference to "fellow travelers" (whoever they are), but he's right about Science Fiction's capacity for asking the big po-mo questions.

For me, the larger point is that we shouldn't confuse the problem of how we think about the future with arguments over genre fiction vs. literary fiction, or autodicats vs. ivy leaguers, or cyber punks vs. cyper preps, because at this stage of the game we're all on the same side. We're all on the outside looking in. And what's really screwed up is that there is no longer a center. There is no longer a middle class. There is no power structure against which we struggle. Our entire society has been hollowed out and emptied. What we're up against (and boy are we up against it) is not a common enemy or some sort of mystic elite, but mass inertia. Mass incompetence. Mass irresponsibility. We're bogged down by everything that is douchy and infantile in our society. Consumerism. Christianism. Celebritism. It's this whole self-centered soup of entertainment that's keeping us from thinking or writing intelligently about anything, much less the future: the waste and detritus of the never-ending now.

So when we do think of the future it is no real future at all. These dystopic futures are a blending of Horror and Science Fiction. We become steampunks or retro-futurists, because we are haunted by the past, seduced by its glamour, burdened by its nightmarish history. Science Fiction becomes not a literature for technocrats but a system of nostalgic associations, signs and countersigns, to which we always return. In this way Science Fiction cedes its most defining feature, cool logic and reason, to the irrationality of horror fiction, where we are free to revisit that which is repressed and painful or to relieve our broken-hearted selves through the romantically and Romantically doomed. As a result, the future is given over to apocalypse, pestilence, zombies, war, and sometimes, the return of ancient squidlike gods. The future is punk (or punk'd) and there is no future, no future for you.

Horror, as a genre, is the literature of despair. It is the literature of an obsessive engagement with the pain of the past that refuses healing. If the goal of art is transformation, if its purpose is to take the past and make something new, or as David Milch says, to transform the pain of the past, in its pastness, into the future tense of joy, then what horror and dystopic science fiction gives us instead is a frozen vision of postponement, deferral, and refusal. The pain always remains, the future does not arrive. It's Lovecraftian and Beckettian.

What I think is missing from our fictions, or has been lost, or abandoned, or has become unfashionable is this ability to imagine joy. Optimism. Utopia. Tomorrowland. Not technocracy, but faith or something like it. This is perhaps where individuality and character intercede.

All Dogs Go To Valhalla

I just like this Marvel Comics looking drawing of the Rainbow bridge. Click all the way through for the true meaning of crazy.

That's Me, The Race Car Driver

Typealyzer says I'm a "Mechanic." Must be something weird about the way I type:

ISTP - The Mechanics

The independent and problem-solving type. They are especially attuned to the demands of the moment are masters of responding to challenges that arise spontaneously. They generally prefer to think things out for themselves and often avoid inter-personal conflicts.

The Mechanics enjoy working together with other independent and highly skilled people and often like seek fun and action both in their work and personal life. They enjoy adventure and risk such as in driving race cars or working as policemen and firefighters.

Staying Equal With The Joneses

John Holbo has a lively discussion going on over at Crooked Timber. He quotes David Frum:

Where you find many different lifestyles and races; where you find singles, immigrants, and gays; where you find high-rise buildings, country estates, and really great take-out – there you find inequality. After all, what is inequality but another form of “diversity”? And what is “equality” but another word for homogeneity? Communities with lots of married families, lots of single-family homes, and low proportions of nonwhite minorities and single people – communities that Democrats and liberals would inwardly disparage as “white bread” – are communities in which people tend to earn similar amounts of money.

Here's the simplified version:

diversity = inequality (boo!)
homogeneity = equality (yay!)

It's very clever doublespeak when you can pitch the Republican-dominated suburbs as the road to egalitarianism. Just think how great everything would be without all those darn nonwhite minorities and single people. Has anyone suggested this as a talking point for Mitt Romney yet?

Now how do we know that Frum is arguing in bad faith? Because he begins with this pleasant thought:

It’s an observable fact that those voters who care most deeply about equality – deeply enough to organize their lives to live in egalitarian communities – overwhelmingly vote Republican.

Yes, that's right. The suburbs were established not out of white flight but because white people and white Republicans "care most deeply about equality." It's all about the common good and happy go lucky communal living out here in the suburbs. Republican Communism. That's got to be the response to Goldberg's Liberal Fascism. Right?

The debate in the comments is pretty intense: Michael Bérubé puts in his very welcome two cents and someone called Lemuel Pitkin and someone called Grand Moff Texan go at it with tooth and claw. You can also learn about something called the Gini index which measures income inequality (or at least I think it does).

Led Zeppelin Animation

Ectomo directs our attention to artist and animator Steve Scott, who in addition to be an excellent illustrator also did the background projection for Led Zeppelin's "Kashmir" during their recent reunion.

No Outlines

A series of lectures given in December by David Milch are now available online. Milch is famous for his work on Hill Street Blues, NYPD Blue, Deadwood, and most recently John From Cincinnati.

These lectures are brilliant, challenging, hugely entertaining, and sometimes maddening. There's no question that Milch is a talented writer, but his real gift is telling stories in the old-fashioned mode of the raconteur. He's the loudest guy in the bar and he can talk all night to anyone willing to listen. And of course it has to be bar because Milch comes from the school of writing for tough guys -- hard drinkers, drug abusers, wife beaters, guys with "boundary issues." If you want to be a writer you better come from alcoholic parents who beat you to sleep every night while they gambled away the family fortune and left you with a child molester for a baby sitter. If you're going to write, you've got to get down and dirty, and bring it, because Milch is the kind of guy who will wrestle you to the ground and beat you with his words until you cry uncle. This is serious stuff here.

There's a lot of psychologizing in Milch's thought process. For him, the writer is a deeply wounded person who through childhood traumas has been made to feel apart from the world. Writing is the process the writer uses to bring himself back into the community by transforming those wounds into art. The goal is to be authentic. To be honest and true and not use your writing to bury those wounds or disguise them. You've got to bring them right out into the harsh light and make what's personal and hurtful to you, universal and profound to the reader.

But Milch is not just lecturing, he's telling stories, and the wilder and more obnoxious he gets the more you realize that he's putting on a demonstration. He's proving a point. Your reactions to him are the Q.E.D. of his method because he wants to provoke you. That's what good writing is supposed to do.

No outlines!

That's the thing that gets you, as you sit there listening, trying to be a good student of the "How To Write" school. He offers up no paradigm, no thoughts on 3 act, 4 act, 5 act structure. No recommendations on how to break a story down into beats. For Milch that's the Ego's way of keeping you from writing. You have to get past all of that and write. Writing is writing. Thinking about writing is NOT writing. You've got to dig down into your Id and let it speak.

It's a nice antidote to Dramatica and the Hero's Journey and all of the Structuralist methods you're likely to encounter out there in the marketplace. On the other hand, I remember a lot of wannabe writers from my student days who shared Milch's personality but none of his talent. They wanted to be Beats, to write from their hearts, experience everything, tap into the wild untapped imagination of the world, and sing, sing, O muse. But their work was sloppy, unedited, and often unreadable. They had no discipline, no willingness to rewrite, to critical eye for murdering darlings. Everything they wrote, they assumed, was good, because it had come in the heat of inspiration. Going back would just kill it.

In the end, they failed Milch's last test which is to take what's meaningful to oneself, and tell it in a way that's meaningful to others. He borrows from Coleridge's distinction between Fanciful associations which are mechanical and personal and Imaginative associations which are organic and communal.

Milch also has interesting things to say about St. Paul, Kirkegaard, Melville and many other poetic theories that I didn't quite catch the first time. Well worth another listen.

[via Jill Golick's Running With My Eyes Closed]

BloggingHeads and Media

A really good BloggingHeads episode on indie rock, media fragmentation, iTunes, the death of CDs, reality television, the writer's strike, and the end of scripted television. It's got everything.

Highlights:

• Indie music was once difficult to hear about, and difficult to get ahold of even if you knew what it was. In the age of media fragmentation everyone already knows everything so there are no surprises, it's easy to hear new bands, and so there's no coolness factor.
  
• Baby Boomer Pathetic Fallacy: "It [music, movies, TV, etc.] no longer speaks to me, I no longer understand it, therefore it's not as good as it used to be."
• iTunes did not curb illegal downloading. It killed off CDs.

The guy from Viacom seems like a nice guy but everything he says about the TV industry is evil:

• Television survives because people like it and they hate doing other things like reading.
  
• Staffing on most shows is bloated and people who make their careers doing it probably won't last.
• Once the writer's strike is settled, companies will hire fewer writers.
• Scripted TV survives because advertisers think it's classier than reality TV.
  
• We're down to 4 sitcoms from 30, and they aren't very good.
  
• Reality shows are the new profit centers in TV. Reality show celebrity tours are the new back end profit (as opposed to the old model of reruns through syndication).

It would be nice to hear them say more about things like TiVo, TV on DVD, the HD DVD wars, etc. In the meantime, this was very enlightening stuff, especially for people who like things like indie music, reading, and scripted TV and movies.

Crooked Timber vs. The Little Dictator

Crooked Timber has a great post today on Jonah Goldberg's ridiculous new book Liberal Fascism. Of the many, many good points in the essay, this is one of the best:

Now we get to what is maybe an actually half-interesting point. There are two reasons why ad hitlerem arguments tend to be rude and crude. (Everyone knows Godwin’s Law is law. Here’s why, more or less.) First, the Holocaust. It’s pretty obvious how always dragging that in is not necessarily clarifying of every little dispute. Second, a little less obviously, ad hitlerem arguments are invariably arguments by moral analogy. Person A espouses value B. But the Nazis approved B. Not that person A is necessarily a Nazi but there must be something morally perilous about B, if espousing it is consistent with turning all Nazi. The trouble is: with few exceptions, the Nazis had all our values – at least nominally. They approved of life, liberty, justice, happiness, property, motherhood, society, culture, art, science, church, duty, devotion, loyalty, courage, fidelity, prudence, boldness, vision, veneration for tradition, respect for reason. They didn’t reject all that; they perverted it; preached but didn’t practice, or practiced horribly. Which goes to show there is pretty much no value immune from being paid mere lip-service; nominally maintained but substantively subverted. Which, come to think of it, isn’t surprising. How could a list of ‘success’ words guarantee success, after all?

What's highlighted here is the triviality of comparing anyone to the Nazis at anytime. It's basically meaningless.

But it works well as a smear, which is all Goldberg's interested in. His rewrite of the history of Liberalism in America is exactly the sort of believer's skepticism and critical thinking we were warned about. Goldberg doesn't really care about what fascism is or what it means to us today; he's just trying to attack his enemies and defend his own entrenched positions. It's not history or political science: it's political creationism.

Gawker goes Sci-Fi

Gossipy haters + nerdy shut-ins = my favorite new blog of 2008.

E.G., reasons Star Trek should stay dead:

3. It's no longer looking ahead. Like Star Wars, Trek is trapped in prequel-land. Enterprise bored us by filling in pointless backstory on the early days of Starfleet, but the J.J. Abrams movie looks to be twice as pointless. We already know everything we need to about young Kirk and the other Trek tots. Mining your own past is a prime symptom of idea bankruptcy.

That last sentence should be carved into a public building or something.

30 Best Blogs (Not this one, obviously)

More fun with lists, only this time it's blogs. I only recognized 3 of the 30 so I have some reading to do.

Meta-Blogging So You Don't Have To

Blogging about blogging before lunch:

• Pharyngula reads a stupid religionist screed in the New Republic so you don't have to.
• NY Mag Vulture reads AICN's review of Cloverfield so you don't have to.

That was easy.

Welcome Robot Overlords

Kung Fu Monkey's latest lunch with Tyrone:

John: ... no. We can still control our destiny, through elections.
Tyrone: Like those voting machines are attached to anything --
John: You always say that. But look,the Democrats won in 2006!
Tyrone: Suuuuuuuure they did.
John: What are you -- Congress changed parties! We took over!
Tyrone: Absolutely. Remember when the Democratic Congress ended the war?
John: Ummm ...
Tyrone: How about when they changed the Bankruptcy Bill, so middle class people didn't get reamed. When they passed that children's health care plan over the lame duck president's veto. Or when they finally reclaimed America's moral high ground when they bravely stopped the approval of an Attorney General who thought waterboarding was a grey area. When they shut down Gitmo ...

Exactly. The "Democrats" are just Republicans in disguise. Or, something. Either way, the Robot Overlords won't mess around.

The Great American Blog Novel

The Smart Set has some interesting ideas for making fiction, and particularly short fiction, work on the internet:

The great American blog novel — yet to be written as far as I know — will not be a novel written on a blog but instead be the blog of a compelling fictional character, or a community of interacting invented literary personas, the online equivalent of the Portuguese Fernando Pessoa, who invented poets from various schools with clashing manifestoes. This approach would take fiction back to one its sources in the 17th century, the “jest biography,” such as The Life of Long Meg of Westminster. Somebody wonderful has already done this in comic form with the “blog” of the Incredible Hulk.

Another strategy that publishers could resurrect for digital media is Victorian-style serialization. Episodic structures with very brief chapters for browsing or downloading in bite sized chunks might work well online if they managed to retain the larger shape of a full-blown book. Charging for episodes or individual titles, as Stephen King once tried to do online with “The Plant,” is wrongheaded. An HBO style buffet, or annual subscriptions to an array of publishers, would work much better. In addition, publishers probably ought to consider reviving another old idea — producing preview anthologies with excerpts from their upcoming books as if they were magazines, not just single-publisher PR newsletters like The Borzoi Reader. Made available for free online, these would act like the old Works in Progress and New World Writing to generate pre-publication buzz. The motto of the latter, “Today’s New World Writing Is Tomorrow’s Good Reading for the Millions,” now seems almost unbearably touching, especially when one learns that the 1952 issue peddled works by William Gaddis and Flannery O’Connor: paperback price, fifty cents.

I've long been a fan of the idea that blogs could evolve into serial novels. The trick is to keep each "episode" short and punchy like a blog entry. 200-300 words.

The Pros and the Wannabes

Here's a charming post from Seriocity, a television and screenwriting blog:

As everyone knows, one of the truly awful things about the internet is that anyone can throw up a website and act like they know what they're talking about. This used to happen in the old AOL days all the time, when some know-nothing would wander in and bleat about screenwriting like their opinion was just as valid as a professional's. If one of the pros told them that their opinion was uninformed, the shit would inevitably hit the fan. It was almost a weekly event. Because they could type, the fact that they'd written a novel/screenplay/pilot meant they were writers.

Yeah, way to ingratiate yourself with your readership. It's one thing if you want to disagree with someone's blog. Fine. Argue it out. Prove them wrong. But to invent this whole caste system of those whose opinions matter and those who don't just stinks of fear and insecurity. Maybe if my "professional" credits were Millenium and Dead Zone, I'd feel a bit insecure, too.

It's also interesting that a lot of these "professional" writers are too broke and too working-middle class to actually be able to afford to support the strike. They fear the short term pain. So, apparently it's no better than working in IT. Of course in IT, you're not unionized, so you're just working from contract to contract or severance package to severance package. Either way, at least you're not writing spec scripts for Stargate Atlantis.