It's quite remarkable, and I am sure I will forever be feeling the transformative effects of the crystal splinter it's left in my heart.
Saturday, June 22, 2013
The Ocean at the End of the Lane . . . and at the Heart of Everything
If only . . . someone had given me the text of this book and said "Here
is a lapidary fable, not a magnum opus, but so much more than a jeu
d'esprit, by an author you are very conversant with and who has meant a
lot to you. Read it, live with it a while, and consider whose it might
be." After quickly dismissing A. S. Byatt on the grounds of tone and
Rushdie on syntax, I would have become permanently paralyzed, unable to
decide whether it was Neil Gaiman or Stephen King. This dark and glowing
center of universes has been visited by both of them, and they both
speak so powerfully of that which is both meltingly elegiac and
eternally present. The tenderness says "Neil," but Uncle Stevie no
longer writes only with the driving vigor of his early work, and the
love that fuels and radiates from this story could come from either of
them.
It's quite remarkable, and I am sure I will forever be feeling the transformative effects of the crystal splinter it's left in my heart.
It's quite remarkable, and I am sure I will forever be feeling the transformative effects of the crystal splinter it's left in my heart.
Wednesday, May 8, 2013
Brainy Specs
It’s a small thing, but close to my heart: glasses. Spectacles. Could all of us owl-eyed glasses-wearers just stand up for a moment to salute the wearing of the Brainy Specs?
Despite the fact that three-quarters of Americans wear corrective lenses, and the majority of those wear glasses instead of contacts, glasses are almost never featured in books or movies. Sure, specs aren’t very action-oriented--Indiana Jones didn’t want his glasses sliding down his nose while he was clinging to the edges of cliffs. Mainly, of course, glasses don’t photograph well. They reflect the light, and if they are actually functional, they distort the eyes and face behind them.
So, we generally see them only when they are trying to signal that a character is smart--like Dr. Indiana Jones in his university classroom or Dr. Spencer Reid on Criminal Minds. For a female character, this is not usually a good thing. Criminal Minds’s Penelope Garcia is supposed to be smart and quirky, so she gets cool glasses. Garcia is decidedly unglamorous, though, and normally female characters who even have glasses get them taken away as part of a makeover; we’re supposed to think they look a lot better without them. To go really old-school, the ultimate girl-with-glasses moment is in It’s a Wonderful Life, when George Bailey sees what would have become of his wife Mary if he hadn’t been there--she is shown wearing glasses and she’s a . . . librarian!
So, when the Doctor peers through his brainy specs, my little bespectacled self just cheers! He doesn’t even need them, says the Tenth Doctor in Time Crash; he just thinks they make him look smart. The Doctor wants to look smart--he wants to look like us, when hardly anyone else does--huzzah!
The only other highly authentic spectacle spectacle in books and film that comes to mind is someone who can be costumed simply with the addition of specs--Harry Potter. What is so great about Harry and his glasses, though, isn’t even that they are his signature look and have made the image of a glasses-wearing kid universal and heroic. It’s how real his use of them is. In the books and the movies, when Harry first wakes up, no matter if it’s dark, if it’s a crisis, if it’s just a normal day--he sits up grabbing for his glasses. If you need glasses, that is what you do--you need them both to manage at all in a practical sense and also to feel like yourself. Your glasses are part of you, and having Harry’s connection with them be so authentic is extremely gratifying.
The only other highly authentic spectacle spectacle in books and film that comes to mind is someone who can be costumed simply with the addition of specs--Harry Potter. What is so great about Harry and his glasses, though, isn’t even that they are his signature look and have made the image of a glasses-wearing kid universal and heroic. It’s how real his use of them is. In the books and the movies, when Harry first wakes up, no matter if it’s dark, if it’s a crisis, if it’s just a normal day--he sits up grabbing for his glasses. If you need glasses, that is what you do--you need them both to manage at all in a practical sense and also to feel like yourself. Your glasses are part of you, and having Harry’s connection with them be so authentic is extremely gratifying.
Tuesday, February 19, 2013
One Does Not Simply Walk Into Pagford
Well, that title may be a little too light-hearted for what I have in mind. Let’s forget about hilarious little jpgs of Boromir. Let’s instead think about Mordor--really think about what Mordor is like and what it would have meant for the Shire, Gondor, and everyone else if Sauron had triumphed. Got that picture in your head now?
Tolkien was playing a lot of games simultaneously, not least of which was inventing a world in which to use the languages he had created--but one of his more unsubtle purposes was to wage an epic war between wood and metal, between agriculture and industry. Gandalf’s wooden staff defends a pastoral land of wholesomeness and harmony against a misbegotten, misshapen factory of death that mindlessly consumes trees and creatures in the manufacture of destruction and for the good of no one but the sole proprietor at the top. Tolkien's veneer of Norse saga of Good versus Evil barely disguises his vision of an idyllic, agrarian Britain crushed and crunched and utterly consumed by the mechanized monster of industrialization (and he definitely didn’t want to disguise it--the Scouring of the Shire coda amplifies it for anyone who had been distracted by all the shiny things). His horror is the same as that of William Blake’s at the dark, Satanic mills that so befoul and profane England’s green and pleasant land, as that of George Orwell’s at the colorless ashes of daily life in Airstrip One (or in Wigan).
That dark devastation was spreading over the land in the lifetimes of those three writers who cried out at its successive victories in the Industrial Revolution, the Enclosures, the Highland Clearances, the World Wars, and each new method of industrializing aspects of life previously unimaginable as being mechanized or standardized. Now, here at the dawn of the 21st century, we indubitably live in the world that Blake, Tolkien, Orwell, and many others saw as essentially the end of humanity. A new kind of creature, some sort of Uruk-hai, must evolve to live in this Factory, this land of interchangeable parts, of the uselessness of the individual, of electricity and petrol, of consumption and destruction.
Someone has written a novel depicting this new world--not a warning of its coming, but a portrait of life in Mordor. That person would be J. K. Rowling.
Her first adult novel, The Casual Vacancy, was reviewed and discussed by people who wanted her to succeed and people who wanted her to stumble, but apparently not by anyone who could see and hear what was right in front of them. Whether the novel is “good” or not, I cannot say--it was certainly difficult to read because it is so grim--but I closed it with no doubt about what Rowling was saying. She could not have spoken more clearly:
Pagford and the Fields are Mordor Triumphant. The industrial era has rendered--and I do mean rendered--everyone’s lives meaningless. People whose grandparents were agricultural laborers now live on public assistance in the Fields, a community of junkies and thieves, and Rowling deftly makes clear the complicated thoroughness of the severing of human life from meaningful activity that has turned these people into society’s garbage. The good burghers of Pagford, though, the people whose ancestors were shopkeepers and teachers, are also brutalized by modernity. (We cannot infer whether Rowling herself romanticizes an arcadian British past of honest yeoman farmers and jolly merchants and publicans, though if she does, it is a small sin compared with wilful blindness to the ghastly cost of rendering those people redundant.) The monstrous pettiness of the villagers is almost as horrifying as the savagery of the Fields, perhaps more so. The small scope that the modern world of consumer capitalism, the Siamese twin of industrialization, offers for personal agency creates a village of grasping, desperate, snarling meanness--meanness in both senses. Pagford is a town of Dursleys and Pettigrews come alive in our own world, and without the distance and the conventions of a world of magic and epic events, it is an ugly sight.
J. R. R. Tolkien created a beautiful allegory of the human spirit wresting, with great courage and at great cost, a world of integrity and connectedness from the talons of mechanized destruction; J. K. Rowling has shown us, without the veil of metaphor, a Britain that lies, bleak and soulless, at the dark base of Barad-dur. The Casual Vacancy is a horror novel.
Tolkien was playing a lot of games simultaneously, not least of which was inventing a world in which to use the languages he had created--but one of his more unsubtle purposes was to wage an epic war between wood and metal, between agriculture and industry. Gandalf’s wooden staff defends a pastoral land of wholesomeness and harmony against a misbegotten, misshapen factory of death that mindlessly consumes trees and creatures in the manufacture of destruction and for the good of no one but the sole proprietor at the top. Tolkien's veneer of Norse saga of Good versus Evil barely disguises his vision of an idyllic, agrarian Britain crushed and crunched and utterly consumed by the mechanized monster of industrialization (and he definitely didn’t want to disguise it--the Scouring of the Shire coda amplifies it for anyone who had been distracted by all the shiny things). His horror is the same as that of William Blake’s at the dark, Satanic mills that so befoul and profane England’s green and pleasant land, as that of George Orwell’s at the colorless ashes of daily life in Airstrip One (or in Wigan).
That dark devastation was spreading over the land in the lifetimes of those three writers who cried out at its successive victories in the Industrial Revolution, the Enclosures, the Highland Clearances, the World Wars, and each new method of industrializing aspects of life previously unimaginable as being mechanized or standardized. Now, here at the dawn of the 21st century, we indubitably live in the world that Blake, Tolkien, Orwell, and many others saw as essentially the end of humanity. A new kind of creature, some sort of Uruk-hai, must evolve to live in this Factory, this land of interchangeable parts, of the uselessness of the individual, of electricity and petrol, of consumption and destruction.
Someone has written a novel depicting this new world--not a warning of its coming, but a portrait of life in Mordor. That person would be J. K. Rowling.
Her first adult novel, The Casual Vacancy, was reviewed and discussed by people who wanted her to succeed and people who wanted her to stumble, but apparently not by anyone who could see and hear what was right in front of them. Whether the novel is “good” or not, I cannot say--it was certainly difficult to read because it is so grim--but I closed it with no doubt about what Rowling was saying. She could not have spoken more clearly:
Pagford and the Fields are Mordor Triumphant. The industrial era has rendered--and I do mean rendered--everyone’s lives meaningless. People whose grandparents were agricultural laborers now live on public assistance in the Fields, a community of junkies and thieves, and Rowling deftly makes clear the complicated thoroughness of the severing of human life from meaningful activity that has turned these people into society’s garbage. The good burghers of Pagford, though, the people whose ancestors were shopkeepers and teachers, are also brutalized by modernity. (We cannot infer whether Rowling herself romanticizes an arcadian British past of honest yeoman farmers and jolly merchants and publicans, though if she does, it is a small sin compared with wilful blindness to the ghastly cost of rendering those people redundant.) The monstrous pettiness of the villagers is almost as horrifying as the savagery of the Fields, perhaps more so. The small scope that the modern world of consumer capitalism, the Siamese twin of industrialization, offers for personal agency creates a village of grasping, desperate, snarling meanness--meanness in both senses. Pagford is a town of Dursleys and Pettigrews come alive in our own world, and without the distance and the conventions of a world of magic and epic events, it is an ugly sight.
J. R. R. Tolkien created a beautiful allegory of the human spirit wresting, with great courage and at great cost, a world of integrity and connectedness from the talons of mechanized destruction; J. K. Rowling has shown us, without the veil of metaphor, a Britain that lies, bleak and soulless, at the dark base of Barad-dur. The Casual Vacancy is a horror novel.
Sunday, February 17, 2013
Saving the Universe
If I could only live at the pitch that is near madness
When everything is as it was in my childhood
Violent, vivid, and of infinite possibility:
That the sun and the moon broke over my head.
--Richard Eberhart, 20th century American Poet
If Frodo doesn’t get that ring to Mount Doom, it will be the end of Middle-Earth!! If the X-Men don’t defeat Magneto, all Earth will be enslaved to his will!! If Picard doesn’t convince Q that mankind has value, he’ll destroy all humanity!! If the Doctor doesn’t stop Davros, all of space and time will cease to exist!!
The highest of high stakes usually drive the tales we love. Epic, heart-lifting stories demand epic settings--we don’t long for the telling of the stirring saga of the struggle of Nicholas, Son of David, to get his homework done on Tuesday night. You’d think the High-Stakes Story would become a dull cliche (And we can all think of the times we’ve groaned at things like Armageddon or risible Bond villain Max Zorin. What are we going to do tonight, Brain? The same thing we do every night, Pinky--try to take over the WORLD! Mine is an evil laugh!!), but apparently we have a boundless not only tolerance but appetite for life-or-death challenges.
Some of that appetite is physiological. Military personnel and journalists can come back from war zones turned into adrenaline/dopamine junkies. Our bodies put the high in “high stakes.” Physically, mentally, and emotionally, we feel good when we are pressured to respond to extremely demanding stimuli. And when those stimuli are fictional, we don’t even have the negative aspects of stress and anxiety to take the edge off--just the thrill of having saved the world! Call of Duty? Nazi Zombies? Oh, yeah!!
The real problem, though, is the problem of civilization. For many people, life is made up of two intractable situations: everyday life can be mastered, but the stakes are low (Nicholas is in fact going to get that homework done on Tuesday night. And Wednesday night. And Thursday night. And next week. And next year.) and humanity’s larger problems carry very high stakes, but they cannot be mastered (I personally can’t stop global warming. Or save the whales. Or end economic injustice. Or reform factory farming. Or stop human trafficking.). Both of these situations are depressing--the scope of our personal lives can seem small and tedious, and the gap between our understanding of vitally important crises and our ability to address them is anguishing. All of a sudden, hopping on a rocket and trying to deflect an asteroid before it hits the Earth looks like a relief--at last a problem I can solve! Yippee-kai-yay!
That said, I am not trying to dismiss the romance of Saving the Universe as escapism for people who are discouraged by reality. On the contrary, I think many of us would in fact be willing to walk into Mordor, and long for the chance to be that heroic, to show our quality. And, in our adult lives where heroism is so abstract and the colors are muted and the unicorns and glitter can be hard to find, tales where the stakes are no less than all of space and time let us become again our mad, mad child selves, burning in the fire of infinite possibility, with the sun and moon breaking over our heads.
When everything is as it was in my childhood
Violent, vivid, and of infinite possibility:
That the sun and the moon broke over my head.
--Richard Eberhart, 20th century American Poet
If Frodo doesn’t get that ring to Mount Doom, it will be the end of Middle-Earth!! If the X-Men don’t defeat Magneto, all Earth will be enslaved to his will!! If Picard doesn’t convince Q that mankind has value, he’ll destroy all humanity!! If the Doctor doesn’t stop Davros, all of space and time will cease to exist!!
The highest of high stakes usually drive the tales we love. Epic, heart-lifting stories demand epic settings--we don’t long for the telling of the stirring saga of the struggle of Nicholas, Son of David, to get his homework done on Tuesday night. You’d think the High-Stakes Story would become a dull cliche (And we can all think of the times we’ve groaned at things like Armageddon or risible Bond villain Max Zorin. What are we going to do tonight, Brain? The same thing we do every night, Pinky--try to take over the WORLD! Mine is an evil laugh!!), but apparently we have a boundless not only tolerance but appetite for life-or-death challenges.
Some of that appetite is physiological. Military personnel and journalists can come back from war zones turned into adrenaline/dopamine junkies. Our bodies put the high in “high stakes.” Physically, mentally, and emotionally, we feel good when we are pressured to respond to extremely demanding stimuli. And when those stimuli are fictional, we don’t even have the negative aspects of stress and anxiety to take the edge off--just the thrill of having saved the world! Call of Duty? Nazi Zombies? Oh, yeah!!
The real problem, though, is the problem of civilization. For many people, life is made up of two intractable situations: everyday life can be mastered, but the stakes are low (Nicholas is in fact going to get that homework done on Tuesday night. And Wednesday night. And Thursday night. And next week. And next year.) and humanity’s larger problems carry very high stakes, but they cannot be mastered (I personally can’t stop global warming. Or save the whales. Or end economic injustice. Or reform factory farming. Or stop human trafficking.). Both of these situations are depressing--the scope of our personal lives can seem small and tedious, and the gap between our understanding of vitally important crises and our ability to address them is anguishing. All of a sudden, hopping on a rocket and trying to deflect an asteroid before it hits the Earth looks like a relief--at last a problem I can solve! Yippee-kai-yay!
That said, I am not trying to dismiss the romance of Saving the Universe as escapism for people who are discouraged by reality. On the contrary, I think many of us would in fact be willing to walk into Mordor, and long for the chance to be that heroic, to show our quality. And, in our adult lives where heroism is so abstract and the colors are muted and the unicorns and glitter can be hard to find, tales where the stakes are no less than all of space and time let us become again our mad, mad child selves, burning in the fire of infinite possibility, with the sun and moon breaking over our heads.
Wednesday, January 30, 2013
In What Way Do You Resemble a Means for Keeping Oneself Cool?
“Hello! I’m Jane, and I’m a . . . fan.”
(Support Group : “Hello, Jane!”)
I’m not asking what’s going on with people who feel an icy shock when the Doctor realizes that he not only can’t save Pompeii but in fact must destroy it; who debate for hours how the Romulans’ concept of honor differs from the Klingons’; whose email password is ash_nazg; who really don’t mind when things don’t end as hoped because it’s so much fun to have a legit opportunity to put your hands on top of your head and say “Well, that went well!”; who know that hiding something with a Somebody Else’s Problem field actually works great in real life; whose circle of friends all call each other names from the X-Men, Organization XIII, ST:TNG, or Winnie-the-Pooh (and the names of course fit their personalities); who have a lararium set up to Neil Gaiman with offerings of lime and falafel; and who stay up nights trying to rework Blade Runner in light of the Three Laws of Robotics.
I do want to know what’s going on with the people who are too cool to be excited about any of that--or worse, too incurious. How can people not be fans? of something? The world is full of the fantastic artifacts of the human imagination--Lascaux, Asgard, the Nautilus, the Forest of Arden, Tales from the Crypt, Sir Lancelot, Totoro--bursting with every emotion, glimpses of the transcendent, great ethical quandaries, unspeakable epiphanies. What kind of a life does someone lead in which they either never encounter anything entrancing or don’t invest any emotional energy in it? Are there people whose lives are so complete that they don’t need Mal or Jean-Luc or Henry V? Who are so sure of reality that Ford Prefect and Alice have nothing to reveal about negotiating the chaos beneath? Who don’t want to run away to sea or hide in a blanket fort or fly out of their bedroom window or journey there and back again?
My life has been enriched beyond all measure by enlisting in Starfleet, stowing away on Serenity, fighting for Narnia, and training my mutant powers. I’ve put sarcastic Wonderlanders in their place, made a huge mess with paradoxical time travel, represented the human race to Martians with John Carter, and fought alongside three-thousand-year-old Elves. I’m also under contract to take over Transfigurations when McGonagall becomes school head. Not only has this meant getting to have many lives besides the one I was dealt, most especially it has meant getting to know wonderful, wonderful people. Most are fictional, some are authors, but making an emotional connection with Commander Data or Gandalf, Neil Gaiman or Douglas Adams, is a source of knowledge, insight, growth, and joy, and that is the real engine that turbocharges fandoms. Then, the connections spill over into real life, and we find our tribe, our karass (Thanks, Uncle Kurt--you’re on the list too) when someone spots our Wolverine spiral notebook or lights up when we pronounce something to be “Shiny!”
And lastly, what could be better that liking things? Be the person who is excited about stuff! The one who always looks like they were just told they were going to a party and there were going to be cupcakes! With sprinkles! Let’s see some enthusiasm for enthusiasm! Fun is good--more fun is better! (Name, rank, and mission? The Doctor . . . doctor . . . fun) One of the most appealing things about the Doctor, in fact, is that he always looks completely thrilled to be wherever and whenever and with whomever he is.
Yeah, I’m a fan. And I’m going to write about what I like and how I think it functions and what connects to what and what it all might mean. Look for fun-sized snack essays, not massive dissertations that no one wants to read. It’s going to be heavy on the Doctor, because that’s what’s on my mind right now, but I’m looking for themes and connections and emotional drivers and heading into a big, postmodern web of ideas. I read a lot, I use the interwebz, I watch things, I know some stuff, and I know I don’t know all the stuff and hope people will have some thoughts to share. Come with! This is the blog you’re looking for . . .
(Support Group : “Hello, Jane!”)
I’m not asking what’s going on with people who feel an icy shock when the Doctor realizes that he not only can’t save Pompeii but in fact must destroy it; who debate for hours how the Romulans’ concept of honor differs from the Klingons’; whose email password is ash_nazg; who really don’t mind when things don’t end as hoped because it’s so much fun to have a legit opportunity to put your hands on top of your head and say “Well, that went well!”; who know that hiding something with a Somebody Else’s Problem field actually works great in real life; whose circle of friends all call each other names from the X-Men, Organization XIII, ST:TNG, or Winnie-the-Pooh (and the names of course fit their personalities); who have a lararium set up to Neil Gaiman with offerings of lime and falafel; and who stay up nights trying to rework Blade Runner in light of the Three Laws of Robotics.
I do want to know what’s going on with the people who are too cool to be excited about any of that--or worse, too incurious. How can people not be fans? of something? The world is full of the fantastic artifacts of the human imagination--Lascaux, Asgard, the Nautilus, the Forest of Arden, Tales from the Crypt, Sir Lancelot, Totoro--bursting with every emotion, glimpses of the transcendent, great ethical quandaries, unspeakable epiphanies. What kind of a life does someone lead in which they either never encounter anything entrancing or don’t invest any emotional energy in it? Are there people whose lives are so complete that they don’t need Mal or Jean-Luc or Henry V? Who are so sure of reality that Ford Prefect and Alice have nothing to reveal about negotiating the chaos beneath? Who don’t want to run away to sea or hide in a blanket fort or fly out of their bedroom window or journey there and back again?
My life has been enriched beyond all measure by enlisting in Starfleet, stowing away on Serenity, fighting for Narnia, and training my mutant powers. I’ve put sarcastic Wonderlanders in their place, made a huge mess with paradoxical time travel, represented the human race to Martians with John Carter, and fought alongside three-thousand-year-old Elves. I’m also under contract to take over Transfigurations when McGonagall becomes school head. Not only has this meant getting to have many lives besides the one I was dealt, most especially it has meant getting to know wonderful, wonderful people. Most are fictional, some are authors, but making an emotional connection with Commander Data or Gandalf, Neil Gaiman or Douglas Adams, is a source of knowledge, insight, growth, and joy, and that is the real engine that turbocharges fandoms. Then, the connections spill over into real life, and we find our tribe, our karass (Thanks, Uncle Kurt--you’re on the list too) when someone spots our Wolverine spiral notebook or lights up when we pronounce something to be “Shiny!”
And lastly, what could be better that liking things? Be the person who is excited about stuff! The one who always looks like they were just told they were going to a party and there were going to be cupcakes! With sprinkles! Let’s see some enthusiasm for enthusiasm! Fun is good--more fun is better! (Name, rank, and mission? The Doctor . . . doctor . . . fun) One of the most appealing things about the Doctor, in fact, is that he always looks completely thrilled to be wherever and whenever and with whomever he is.
Yeah, I’m a fan. And I’m going to write about what I like and how I think it functions and what connects to what and what it all might mean. Look for fun-sized snack essays, not massive dissertations that no one wants to read. It’s going to be heavy on the Doctor, because that’s what’s on my mind right now, but I’m looking for themes and connections and emotional drivers and heading into a big, postmodern web of ideas. I read a lot, I use the interwebz, I watch things, I know some stuff, and I know I don’t know all the stuff and hope people will have some thoughts to share. Come with! This is the blog you’re looking for . . .
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