Land of Hope and Gloria Saturday, November 08, 2003

Busy busy busy. Couldn't get to sleep till three last night, woke up close to embalmed, then scrambled around to get done the things I usually do before breakfast. My big project this vacation, along with the writing, has been ripping: I've been loading up the hard drive with songs, and giving the iPod an overhaul (ostensibly to make it more friendly to Mrs. WTJ, but also because I was getting kinda bored with the selections). I think I've figured out I can do about three dozen CDs in a day if I do nothing but sit at the computer, swapping them out as they finish. This probably isn't healthy for anybody involved.

On the other hand, I've rediscovered music. I lost it there for a while--because of the goddamn iPod! I ran out of energy and time to rip records, so the song selection stayed static...and I got tired of what was there (or hunting for something fresh). Now, searching through the stacks, I've found some gems I haven't touched since I bought them: Stevie Wonder, Scott Walker, even dear old King Crimson. (For Mr. BEK: "Power to Believe" is a pretty damned good record, even if the lyrics fall short. Discuss.)

There's a deeper post on all that, but I'm too dazed to write it.

What else: Bought art today. Mrs. WTJ and I went to an exhibit of drawings, hung like dripping photos in a darkroom. (One of the elves from the Last Homely House in Jersey City had a piece in the show.) You grabbed the pictures you wanted and took them to the register--just like the Borgias! I found a couple of postcard-size cartoony drawings that I could probably describe as "understated" or "unpretentious" or "affecting," but frankly I thought they were really cute. Mrs. WTJ bought an 8x10 of a caterpillar that turned into an object of controversy. Sign on the wall: "ANYTHING SMALLER THAN THIS [8x10] SIGN IS SUCH-AND-SUCH PRICE. ANYTHING BIGGER IS SUCH-AND-SUCH PRICE." Ah! But what if something's exactly the same size? Several heated discussions later, the gallery staff saw it our way.

Plus, some great quotes turned up, plus a buddy--the other elf from the Last Homely House--gave me a great suggestion for the Secret Thing, which is literally making it a whole new project. I owe him an indulgence!

@ 11:51:00 PM, ,

Of Current Interest Friday, November 07, 2003

James Lileks, blogger extraordinaire, has a great post on the new Matrix movie that touches on God, vacuity and Internet fatso Harry Knowles.

@ 10:08:00 AM, ,

The Wreck of the Arthur Lee

Universal forces are conspiring to keep me awake tonight, so I'll answer some e-mail.

A reader from Mayor's Income, Tennessee, asks:

I think there's a spiritual component to Brin. There's that Gaia thing happening in "Earth" and some sort of tangible 'soul' in "Kiln People". The idea that there is something *beyond* what science understands, which recedes as our knowledge expands.

Brin being David Brin, the sci-fi author, who I mentioned in an earlier post as being a godless rationalist (or thereabouts). I like Brin's stuff a lot, particularly the Uplift series. Nonfictionwise, he has interesting thoughts about civilization and how to sustain it, and his deconstruction of "Star Wars" is a must-read. (All available at his Web site.)

But I think he's got a tin ear for spirituality. He's a smart guy, and obviously understands there are questions science can't answer, but he still frames the search for answers in purely scientific terms. In "Earth," for instance, he has one of his main characters become the "Gaia spirit" at the end of the book, because the planet is fucked and needs a guiding genius to steer it back to health. So, in this formulation, god is basically one big EPA. It's a being that exists to answer purely temporal concerns (Farmer Jazmo better not step on that lizard!), and doesn't offer any wisdom beyond "Think Global, Act Local." Somebody's keeping even closer track of acid rain. Wonderful. So where do I go when I die? How should I treat people? Is war ever justified? Hello? Gaia? You in there?

Then there are the Uplift books, which I dearly love but they're built on a dishonest formulation: That you can take animals, screw around with their DNA, and make them sentient the way people are. Walker Percy has a great piece somewhere about Carl Sagan listening for aliens and scientists trying to teach monkeys sign language. The researchers, Percy says, do this because they're desperate to prove we're not unique. If space aliens show up, or if monkeys start talking, that shows science was right all along--nobody made us out of dust and spit, we don't have souls to set us apart. The trouble is, science is so busy looking outward, it keeps ignoring the fact that human language is a singular event in history. The difference between birds chirping and people talking is the difference between an atom and the universe. (To complete the point: The only institution that accounted for that singular fact, religion, has been unseated in the popular mind by science. Hence the horrors of the 20th century and the alienation of modern life.)

Like I said, I love the Uplift books. But the fact of Uplift is taken as a given, without any larger argument. And that shows a real blind spot. I feel the same way about cyberpunk stories where characters get new eyes, implants in their brains, etc.--what happened in the society when that stuff was first introduced? What were the arguments? How were they resolved? How did the "nays" lose out? I'm not saying you need to address the moral ramifications of every last bit of made-up science. But most writers seem to create worlds where the questions never even came up. That's a failure of imagination.

Our reader goes on:

You don't mention A Case of Conscience at all. How does that book fit into your spectrum?

"Conscience," by James Blish, is about two scientists and a Jesuit who travel to an alien world, where bizarro kangaroo creatures have created a utopia for themselves. But the Jesuit thinks the world is a trick, a trap set by the devil--because the kangaroos have never heard of God. They've created a paradise without the gift of grace. C'est impossible!

My reaction to "Conscience": schwing. It's one of the few sci-fi novels that assumes religion as we know it will still be around centuries hence, and it's one of the even tinier number that give religion credit for intelligence and relevance in the face of science. At the same time, it's not ponderous and makes sure to give you some rock-n-roll so you can move. The only downside is that it's more or less the only readable thing Blish ever wrote. As I learned the hard way.

I need to go back and re-read "A Canticle for Leibowitz," the other big Catholic sci-fi novel. (I guess "The Alteration" by Kingsley Amis counts: an alternate-history novel where the whole protestant thing never happened. And, duh, "Love in the Ruins," by you-know-who.) When I read it, I wasn't as churchy as I am now, and it struck me as smug and didactic. But Percy adored it, so what do I know?

Keep those cards and letters coming!

@ 2:20:00 AM, ,

Please Allow Me to See You Again Thursday, November 06, 2003

My buddy Pete, who asked me to write a hard-core sci-fi post, now instructs me to sing the praises of the movie Trancers. For my money, the movie is just the wrong side of dopey, and is notable mostly for the shameless appropriation of Ridley Scott's tropes and the appearance of Helen Hunt's ass.

Nevertheless, I can see Pete's point. I remember a film reviewer writing that America used to specialize in making "cheap, smart trash"--solid, unpretentious B-movies that you didn't make you feel like an idiot for watching. "Trancers" is definitely in that line (again, it's not a favorite but I can respect the effort). In a way, I think the only movies that follow that code these days are straight-to-tape efforts: The budgets are tight, so you have to do something to keep people's attention. Usually it's titties and dry-humping, but occasionally a great story and/or acting turn will slip under the radar (see "Velocity Trap," which I wrote about earlier, or the "Cyborg" series).

In that sense, I think straight-to-tape also offers the purest sci-fi around. I know I'm hard on movies like "Solaris" and "Contact," but the vibe they give off is that they're too good for the genre. They want to Talk About Big Ideas, and they're deigning to use sci-fi to do that. Say what you will about "Velocity Trap" or "Cyborg" or "Trancers," they don't think they're above sci-fi.

Just to embarrass Pete, I think he has one of the best noses for art--and bullshit--you'll ever come across. He has a patience for ambitious ideas but not for pretense, which draws him to artists all over the map, from Sam Raimi to Monte Helm, from the Go-Betweens and Marshall Crenshaw to (shudder) Eminem. Pete's blog, if he ever decided to start one, would be a fascinating thing.

@ 6:08:00 PM, ,

My Sweetheart's on the Barricade Wednesday, November 05, 2003

You are never bitter, deceptive or petty.
--a fortune cookie I got twice in five days

You're not deceptive!
--a wiseass friend

A day of conspiring. My buddy John, who has no blog I can point you toward but writes reviews occasionally, came over to lock lobes about Secret Thing #2. Our second visit in two weeks. Last time was a field trip to the scene of the crime. This time was the nitty-gritty stuff: How to make the crime, which nobody remembers and may not even have been a crime, compelling. We turned it over for a few hours, breaking only to add two new disk drives and a hard drive to my computer, which John carried out with the speed and cunning of a Nascar pit crew. XP was amenable to the grafts.

Over dinner we talked life. I'd run out of steam on the plots by then. So we went after the easy questions: Why are we doing this? What do we want to get? Who are we writing this for? No good answers, but it was fun slogging through the bullshit. The waitress forgot our forks.

Returning to work soon. Dreading it quietly. This may be why I've had a headache for four days now. But the Secret Things are progressing, even looking like the kinds of places I can lose myself. And it was nice to have some time to devote to work, not to mention taking it easy occasionally with Mrs. WTJ.

Grateful as well to have John as a collaborator. The Secret Thing has big political overtones, and he started laying out some of them during our talk today. I told him, "Look, I think we may be coming from opposite ends of the spectrum on this one." Fine by him. We kept on talking about Al Crowley and goatfucking.

It didn't hit me at the time, but I had just come over the other side of a mountain. Maybe life is normal again.

@ 10:31:00 PM, ,

The Gas Face Monday, November 03, 2003

My headache is now entering its third day. Compared to a migraine, it's more like a nagging idea than a real physical pain--sort of like knowing that you have a test coming up but you can't bring yourself to study for it. I took my nagging little buddy on a drive to South Brunswick today, to see my old offices (where, theoretically, I'll be returning in May). It was wonderful to touch base with my buddies, and the mallish offices looked altogether inviting.

I say this in full knowledge that within two weeks back on the job, I'll find a reason to bitch and moan and tear out my hair about how I'm not doing what I really want etc.

Damned if I know what that is anymore. I've been working on this game, and it's going well enough. Feeling cocky, I took a look at some old stories, which I've been sitting on for years without revising or submitting--and they're absolute shit. I can barely believe I wrote them, let alone thought they were my best work. The editor in me says: That's what revisions are for. Take a deep breath, find the core idea in those pieces, and get to work making them shine. The Hungarian in me says: You've coasted on bullshit for thirty-odd years. Enough already.

The latter is a bit of bullshit itself, I realize--an excuse for sloth and a way to lower my expectations so every little victory seems huge. Then again, I keep wondering what it's going to take to get my head screwed on straight enough to do what needs to be done.

Maybe writing this post? Stay tuned.

@ 10:57:00 PM, ,

And Five Coltrane Biographies Sunday, November 02, 2003

I have been asked to write a hard-core sci-fi post. I've been trying for some minutes now but I realize that I'm not sure how I feel about sci-fi anymore.

As a kid, I was mad for space. I tore through Time/Life books on the subject and big NASA photobooks about the Apollo program. At the same time, I was hot for mythology, everything from Edith Hamilton to Ray Harryhausen and his stop-motion skeletons. All of that came together as a love of superhuman characters who had galaxy-spanning adventures. (A great band name waiting to happen: Tom Swift and His Electric Ladyland.)

I spent my free time drawing spaceships shooting each other, racing around the neighborhood on my bike pretending I was a scout ship for Terra Prime and smashing around the house making laser-gun noises. At the same time, I went to great lengths to reconcile the space mishegais with my unreconstructed Catholic consciousness. My mother relates that as a boy I had two goals: I wanted to be an astronaut, and the first American pope. (The third goal, which I never related, was to get through one goddamn schoolday without an unprovoked priapism.)

Come high school, I discovered that I wanted to chart the vast reaches of my navel even more than deep space. In that light sci-fi stories where things "happened" and people "did stuff" seemed hopelessly childish. Didn't the world realize that all action was futile in the face of overwhelming cosmic nullity etc. etc. I read boring books, watched ridiculous movies and wrote unreadable stories. The common denominators: Depth and Message. If I'm yawning, I must be missing something important.

These days, after a bunch of psychic reversals, pretense in sci-fi drives me up a wall. Anyone who says they want to "reinvent" the genre by making it more character-driven or naturalistic is, on the whole, fooling himself. Sci-fi is crap art, as PKD put it: You've got to respect the inherent ridiculousness of it. Part of what made the original "Star Trek" gorgeous, for example, was the sheer goofiness of the accoutrements, the lingo, the mood. Green slave girls? Nazi planets? Ludicrous, all of it, but it touches something primal--the same way that the Greek gods are obviously absurd, obviously phony, but their stories ring true thousands of years later. Seriousness can be the enemy of truth.

PKD, who was working with some of the most serious ideas in sci-fi history, understood this. All of his stories had some element of the ridiculous in them, parodies of sci-fi conventions. The genre likes jargon? He had cars called flobbles and quibbles, alien money called crumbles. Or talking robots? He made refrigerators and toasters into characters. Psychic aliens? I give you the Wub.

Is that possible anymore? I look at the modern sci-fi landscape and it just all seems so goddamn serious. I'm so starved for goofiness that I nearly jumped out of my seat when I saw a preview for the movie "Supernova," which used the song "Mama Told Me Not to Come" as background music. (It turned out to be mostly shitty, leavened with a few nifty action-hero moments from James Spader (!).)

I'm going to go out on a limb and say that the overseriousness comes from focusing on science too hard. Which is to say: William Gibson is a great writer with a light touch. David Brin has moments of tremendous pathos and humor and irony. But both of them, ultimately, are coming from the Reason magazine/Wired school of thought that science is a be-all and end-all in human affairs. Their characters are defined by how they process data and react to the environment--not what they believe. They write about the end of the world, but as environmental catastrophe (Brin) or Grand Historical Process (Gibson).

I'm reminded of a line from "Childhood's End," in retrospect one of the most humorless sci-fi books ever. You know the story: The aliens show up and drag us into the future. At one point, they "prove" that religions are phony by using their Histor-O-Vision time machine to show people what various iconic figures "actually" did and said. Whereupon everybody gives up their beliefs and gets with the program. It's one of the most breathtakingly smug scenes in sci-fi; but even the subtler writers who followed Clarke drink from the same cup. If everybody just knew enough about string theory, and the environment, and artificial intelligence, and "bots"--and gave up on the God stuff already--we'd be able to leap to the next step of evolution. (Involving either vigorous group sex or brains in vats, depending on your kicks.)

PKD, I think, could laugh at that stuff because he believed in God--or at least a beer can that told him the future. Science is not an end. It is a way of understanding and mastering the world, but it's not the ultimate explanation for life. Too many sci-fi writers, I think, ignore that fact--they think that they're writing in the one genre that CAN explain life because it's all about science and technology. With that attitude, you lose satiric perspective. Believing in God, or at least a beer can that tells you the future, is one way of keeping things in proper focus.

In short, if you can't laugh at sci-fi, you shouldn't be writing it.

There's my hard-core post. LLPJ, the ball's in your court.

@ 4:52:00 PM, ,