One ought always to play to one’s audience.
“This is not the grousing of a verse-writer; publishers are generous to verse, apparently because it looks well in the catalogue, and it gets a good deal of space in reviews, apparently because people who don’t read poetry still like talk about poetry, and there are always corners needing to be filled in the magazines. But of the people I come across and like, I doubt if anybody reads much modern verse who doesn’t write it. You could pick out in Conquistador a series of authors who had been borrowed from and used, and I felt rather critical about this at first, but of course if you have a public to write for it is an excellent thing to use the existing tools (compare the Elizabethans). The English poet of any merit takes, I think, a much more clinical view of his own products. The first or only certain reason for writing verse is to clear your own mind and fix your own feelings, and for this purpose it would be stupid to borrow from people, and for this purpose you want to be as concentrated as possible. Mr. Eliot said somewhere that a poet ought to practice his art at least once a week, and some years ago I was able to ask the oracle whether he thought this really necessary, a question on which much seemed to hang. After brooding and avoiding traffic for a while he answered with the full weight of his impressiveness, and I am sure without irony, that he had been thinking of someone else when he wrote that, and in such a case as my own the great effort of the poet must be to write as little as possible.” —William Empson
Doppelgäng agley.
Ego-surfing, as one does (forgive me; my name makes it all too easy, you see), I tripped into one of those grey-flannel rabbitholes, an uncanny corner filled with dollops of AI slop about hole after hole in the wall joints, locally famous diners, rib joints you want to put miles on your odometer for, steakhouses that bring them from Rehoboth Beach all the way out or down or over to Hockessin, a trip that I or at least a Kip Manley once made, to take a photo of the sort of golden walls and white tablecloths and warm lighting that create that rare atmosphere where you instantly know you’re in for something special. Needless to say, I’ve never been to the Little Italy neighborhood of Wilmington—I’m still not entirely convinced that the entire state of Delaware isn’t entirely a fiction, only as real as the thousands of corporate headquarters that each somehow manage to fit precisely within the confines of a post-office box, I did drive through it once, or was driven, the particulars of the trip escape me, it was some time ago, and very, very late at night, or early in the morning, and we needed to cross the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel for some reason, going from New York or New Jersey to points south, again, I don’t remember why, maybe, probably, on our way to drop Charles and/or Sarah off in North Carolina, maybe, or to pick one or both of them up, though I think Sarah was there, or maybe it was Emily, not that Emily, but why were the rest of us? Where were we going? But: that’s the second time I’ve crossed the Chesapeake Bay by that disconcerting route; the first time I did so is one of my very earliest memories (wait—we’re going to drive? Underwater? and my father grinning like a genial madman, oh, oh yeah, and are you sure this is safe? I wanted to know, and he shrugged, let’s find out, I’m embellishing here, I don’t really actually remember what was said, precisely, or even at this point any exact or precise details, I’m constructing the scene around the vibe that remains, that’s summoned when I call it up, of bright light on endless water, a ruthlessly improbable stretch of pavement laid over nothing at all, over air, the sudden darknesses that swallowed the car entire, my wonder, my anxious terror)—but it’s possible to cross the Bridge-Tunnel without ever setting foot or tire in Delaware, so that later exhausted midnight ride is the only chance I’ve ever had to verify the existence of the First State of this great country, but I blew it; we were on our way to somewhere else, and didn’t have the time, we didn’t have the cash, either, for the toll, as it seemed like it was going to turn out, until we doubled back to a rest stop or a gas station parking lot and a frantic search turned up change enough from the back seat of one of our cars. —Maybe it’s the same Kip Manley I’ve bumped into before, who’s left Yelp reviews of Sherwin-Williams joints in New Jersey, who really enjoyed that luau in Maui, maybe he really does exist; maybe he did enjoy a steak once, in Wilmington, or something else, one of the meals under twenty-two dollars, maybe, the burger, that gave him the opportunity to snap that photo, which, granted, looks real enough, an actual if digital record of real photons bouncing about a definite space in that precise moment of time, early in the sitting, maybe, nobody else in that corner yet, all those empty tables and booths waiting patiently for the plates to come, the wine glass, there, on his table, the sort a good joint leaves out for show and maybe fills with prepradial ice-water as you’re sitting down, I don’t know, is Delaware conserving water these days? Do you have to ask for it? Is that more a West Coast thing?—but if you were to order wine with your steak, that glass would be discreetly swept away and replaced with an actual wine glass, shaped properly to properly shape the nose of whatever varietal you’d ordered, Tempranillos are trendy with steaks these days, aren’t they? I don’t know, I never go to steakhouses. —Maybe he did, is the point, this other me, the website’s looking for photographers, it says, and writers, too, they list an impressive roster, but I have to imagine if anyone did take up their offer, and actually yourself typed up the 40,000 words a month they expect of their contributors, you’d wither away into a single AI-generated JPEG of yourself to join all the others LLMing away in there, one hardly imagines they’d pay for anything more than what they already get. —Why does every paragraph generated by a chatbot read like an introductory paragraph? Every sentence a thesis statement. —They just keep starting, kicking off over and over until they just stop, never developing, never following through, nothing but ceaseless sizzle. It’s one of their most glaring tells.
Bubbles of Earths.
There were good reasons to disregard the technological details involved in delineating intercommunication between Terra the Fair and our terrible Antiterra. His knowledge of physics, mechanicalism and that sort of stuff had remained limited to the scratch of a prep-school blackboard. He consoled himself with the thought that no censor in America or Great Britain would pass the slightest reference to “magnetic” gewgaws. Quietly, he borrowed what his greatest forerunners (Counterstone, for example) had imagined in the way of a manned capsule’s propulsion, including the clever idea of an initial speed of a few thousand miles per hour increasing, under the influence of a Counterstonian type of intermediate environment between sibling galaxies, to several trillions of light-years per second, before dwindling harmlessly to a parachute’s indolent descent. Elaborating anew, in irrational fabrications, all that Cyraniana and “physics fiction” would have been not only a bore but an absurdity, for nobody knew how far Terra, or other innumerable planets with cottages and cows, might be situated in outer or inner space: “inner,” because why not assume their microcosmic presence in the golden globules ascending quick-quick in this flute of Moët or in the corpuscles of my, Van Veen’s—
(or my, Ada Veen’s)—bloodstream, or in the pus of a Mr. Nekto’s ripe boil newly lanced in Nektor or Neckton.
It’s a terribly little thing, not even most of a sentence, and hardly the most unique of images: a world, a cosmos, this particular scheme of things entire, pinpricked in a tiny bubble, in the wine—but it’s such a specific image, specifically deployed (then heightened, and parodically degraded, in carbonated blood, and liquor puris), that now I can’t help but imagine the master excursing the hills above the Montreux Palace Hotel, a butterfly net in his hands, and a Barbara Remington painting reproduced on the cover of the paperback tucked away in his pocket.
“By all accounts, ’twas to give him line only,” said Amaury; “and if King Mezentius had lived, would have been war between them this summer. Then he should have been boiled in his own syrup; and ’tis like danger now, though smaller, to cope the son. You do forget your judgement, I think, in this single thing, save which I could swear you are perfect in all things.”
Lessingham made no answer. He was gazing with a strange intentness into the wine which brimmed the crystal goblet in his right hand. He held it up for the bunch of candles that stood in the middle of the table to shine through, turning the endless stream of bubbles into bubbles of golden fire. Amaury, half facing him on his right, watched him. Lessingham set down the goblet and looked round at him with the look of a man awaked from sleep.
We don’t stop here.
Well, the way they pick teevee shows is, they make one show. That show’s called a pilot. Then they show that one show to the people who pick shows, and on the strength of that one show, they decide if they want to make more shows. Some get chosen, and become television programs. Some don’t, and become nothing. She starred in one of the ones that became nothing.
Mulholland Dr. was originally intended or devised or dreamt up or at least pitched as a television series, a serial along the lines in more ways than one of Twin Peaks (as a for instance)—the film we got was cut together from and with additions made to what had originally been a pilot: a show for the people who pick shows, to see if more such shows would at all be what they’d want.
Turns out, not so much.
But that original pilot is available via the Internet Archive:
The quality’s not stellar, but it’s worth watching. At an hour-and-a-half (just enough time for a two-hour movie premiere, with commercials), it’s an hour shy of the film’s runtime, but a large part of the story’s largely there, scenes playing out much as they do in the film, some cuts here, some extensions there, an extra scene with Robert Forster’s laconic anti-Cooper cop, a phone call with a procrastinating writer whose dog, Murph, is mysteriously menacing, there’s some different musical cues, perhaps the most notable difference: some brashly atonal percussive stings adjacent to the Castigliane brothers; the director, Adam, tools up to the corral at the top of Beachwood Canyon to the drum solo from “Take Five”; there’s a stab at a light-hearted theme for Betty, all tremulous strings and tinkling piano, best perhaps left behind—but, nonetheless, the basic beats play out as they do in the film, right up to the discovery of Diane Selwyn’s body, Rita’s attempt to cut her hair, “Let me do it,” and then the revelation of the blond wig in the mirror: “You look like someone else.” There’s no Club Silencio, and there’s no Winkie’s, though there is the dumpster behind the Winkie’s, and the figure behind the dumpster, far more melancholic, almost placid, than terrifying, sat there, waiting, as the pilot ends.
Not so different insofar as that goes, and yet completely different, because of the context, because of how it’s situated, because of the haunting expectations that cling to it, the mighta beens and what would theys. —A television show, a series, a serial, of which this might’ve been the first installment, it’s episodic, it continues, it’s therefore open-ended, expansive, not elusively claustrophobic, not hermetically sealed, not done-in-one, not—a film. We would have gotten more—but with the terrible foreclosure of the film’s ending, it’s tantalizingly impossible to make any kind of a guess as to much of what any of that more would’ve been.
More behind-the-scenery of the movie industry, sure; more to limn the shadowy armature of power stretching from Mr. Roque and the Cowboy through the Castigliane brothers, and all those unknown, unseen phone callers to the bumblingly competent Joe Messing; director Adam Kesher would’ve been more of a co-protagonist with Betty and Rita—but Rita probably wouldn’t’ve been Camilla, and Betty almost certainly wouldn’t’ve been Diane. The tension of that sort of doubling and reveal, that’s not a long-haul sort of mystery. There’s a necessary finality to it, that just doesn’t fit in a serial shape.
And I really don’t know how Naomi Watts’ incandescently saccharine performance would’ve worked in weekly installments, without that counterbalance. Her audition—closer to the end of the pilot, rather than the middle of the film—suggests a direction, of course, but the plucky kid detective, at once Laura Dern and Kyle McLachlan, becoming in her own way very much like the woman who stumbles, injured, from the woods, is a very different story than the one in which the pluck turns out already to have stumbled, on her own, and no detective anywhere in sight.
I like a continuing story. There’s something about a soap opera that’s fantastic because it just keeps going and going. Theoretically, you can get very deep in a story and you can go so deep and open up the world so beautifully, but it takes time to do that.
How the sausage gets made.
“The Passport Bros are one of those phenomena confected at the intersection of rumor and aspiration, lent substance on TikTok and Reddit, consolidated through T-shirts and stickers sold on Etsy, Redbubble, and Shopify, with e-books and conferences and paid consultations over Zoom, until finally they have become what we call a thing.” —Adrian Nathan West
The sin of empathy.
“Do not commit the sin of empathy,” he exhorts us, this mustachio’d Utahan; “This snake” (referring to a photograph of the Right Reverend Mariann Edgar Budde)—
This snake is God’s enemy and yours too. She hates God and His people. You need to properly hate in response.
She is not merely deceived but is a deceiver. Your eye shall not pity.
As a bit of bait, his exhortation did the trick: ten thousand replies, ten thousand retweets, four point seven thousand likes, two and a half thousand bookmarks, twenty-one point nine million views, as of this morning, to the extent those numbers mean anything anymore. And certainly, I now know far more about Ben Garrett, Deacon, candidate for Elder, and podcast co-host, than I ever would’ve intended otherwise. Screenshots have washed up at Bluesky, racking up thousands of likes and retweets of their own; people will gawk at the Nazi bar’s grafitti. “Commit the sin of empathy,” these pass-alongs exhort in turn. “It’s actually the most important emotion of all.” “If your religion says ‘Do not commit the sin of empathy’ you chose the wrong religion.” “Google search ‘The Sin of Empathy’ and you’ll see Evangelicals using it unironically.” “Probably time to talk about fascism and moral inversion huh.” —Which, leaving aside for the moment the all-too-real shortcomings of dunk culture, is all well and good—fuck him up socrates, as Darryl once said—except, I mean, for one fundamental flaw—
Empathy is a sin.
Oh, not the way he means it, this aspiring patriarch, this amateur demonologist. He’s a misogynist fascist, lashing out at a woman in a position of traditionally male power, a woman who’d recently dared to embarrass his chosen Daddy-come-home figurehead by asking the President to have mercy. —It’s important to note that Deacon Garrett isn’t responding directly to anything the Right Reverend Budde said, with his exhortation not to commit the sin of empathy—she spoke of unity, dignity, honesty, humility, diversity, and of course and most controversially mercy, but said nothing of empathy: the closest she gets to that is compassion. —No; his interest in warding us off empathy is purely instrumental. He’s only here to gin up his outsourced two minutes of hate against a designated target. Empathy makes it harder to hate, and so it must be done away with. Your eye shall not pity.
When pressed on his echthroic ethic—how can empathy be a sin?—Garrett directs his audience to the writings of Dr. Joel Rigney, ex-president of a seminary and devotee of Idaho pastor Doug Wilson. Rigney’s been a Main Character before, for precisely his writings on empathy, and compassion: cod-Letters from an ersatz Screwtape on how best to twist these supposed virtues from the Enemy’s loathsomely benevolent purpose. —Rigney posits empathy as a totalizing perversion of compassion, a complete immersion in the feelings of others that overwhelms one’s own judgment, one’s fundamental sense of right, and wrong, one’s very self, a feeling-with fusion that terrifies his puerilely pathetic individualism: thus, a sin.
He, of course, has it all completely and utterly backwards.
Namwali Serpell, writing about the shortfalls of empathy as a saving grace of literature, has much more interesting insights into what might be sinful about it all. She quotes a passage from Remainder, by Tom McCarthy, in which the narrator hires two black men to shoot at him with blanks, re-enacting the murder of a black man with which he’s become, shall we say, obsessed:
My two assassins took their time in killing me. The slowed-down pace at which they raised and fired their guns, the lack of concern or interest this seemed to imply, the total absence on my part of any attempt to escape although I had plenty of time to do so—all these made our actions passive. We weren’t doing them: they were being done. The guns were being fired, I was being hit, being returned to the ground. The ground’s surface was neutral—neither warm nor cold… When I let my head roll slightly back, a bollard hid all these words except for one of the two Escapes. Would my man have seen this, just before the life dribbled out of him towards the puddle? Escape?
and then uses it to question the utility, the very purpose of empathy:
The possessives, “my two assassins” and “my man”; the conscription into a willful passivity; the mechanical quality of the sequence, absent of concern or interest or survival instinct; the supposed neutrality of the usurped ground; the ironized “Escape”: Isn’t this creepy, fugue-like occupation of the dead a truer picture of contemporary empathy than the older cliché of walking a mile in another’s shoes?
The fact that it’s a rich white man taking a poor black man’s death for a spin is no coincidence. The empathy model of art can bleed too easily into the relishing of suffering by those who are safe from it. It’s a gateway drug to white saviorism, with its familiar blend of propaganda, pornography, and paternalism. It’s an emotional palliative that distracts us from real inequities, on the page and on screen, to say nothing of our actual lives. And it has imposed upon readers and viewers the idea that they can and ought to use art to inhabit others, especially the marginalized.
The sin of empathy, then, is not that one will lose oneself, and the crucially God-given sense of right and wrong one would impose on some other, by indulging the notion that one ought try to feel the feelings of that other—it’s that one’s imagined sense of those feelings, licensed by the indulgent term of empathy, risks overwriting the actual feelings and experiences of that other. —Unless tempered, by experience, by some of those other virtues mentioned above, humility, honesty, dignity, mercy, then empathy all too easily slips over the brink into something one might well call sin.
Rossumovi divoci roboti.
I found myself in a darkening theater last week, about to see a movie I’d been previously unaware of, based on a book I’d never heard of, which, as a practice, has a lot to recommend it. I’d figure out how to do it more often, maybe, the seats were comfortable, those new recliner-thingies they’re putting in, but wearing a mask for a couple-three hours is never fun, so I don’t know.
It’s not entirely true to say I knew nothing: we were there because the Kid and the Spouse and Barry, the Cartoonist, they all wanted to see the new Chris Sanders movie, and I’m adjacent enough to the fields of cartooning and animation to know that Chris Sanders co-designed an co-directed Lilo & Stitch and How to Train your Dragon, both of which I’ve quite enjoyed, but also that Harrison Ford Call of the Wild, which I haven’t seen, but yikes. —And of course I knew the title of what it was we were about to see: the Wild Robot.
And it’s a very very very pretty movie, and there are stirring and thrilling bits, and I will aver it’s the most #nodads film I can think of, recently, but nonetheless none of this happens to make it a terribly or even a rather good movie. (I should note I was in the minority among our viewing group with this particular take; Kid, Spouse, Barry all enjoyed it much more than yr. humble curmudgeon, grain of salt and all that.) —Thrilling and stirring moments happened because at this or that point in this sort of movie something thrilling or stirring is supposed to happen; convictions appear, but, lacking attention, much less courage, wander off; foundational metaphors are cracked, poorly mixed, introduced in a muddle and then abandoned, as plot or logistics require. It is, on the whole, a sumptuously gorgeous, thoroughly half-baked mess.
But here I am, thinking thoughts about it.
(As I’ve nibbled at this, it’s been pointed out to me that Film Crit Hulk went and made some cogent points, so go, read that, come back, I’ll talk about some other bits.)
So, yes: gorgeous, but that’s part of the problem. —There’s some cartoonish expressionism in the various animal-forms, especially when they start in with the talking (crossing the obscure limen from set-dressing impediment antagonist to CHARACTER); the backgrounds are rendered with flawlessly painterly art direction; but—the light, the air, the water, the weight, it all moves and shifts and changes with such unnoticeably uncanny verisimilitude that one is lulled, despite those expressionist touches. It’s quite a triumph.
And yet but also: there’s, at the start, a refreshingly clear eye toward animals, and danger, and death—the eponymous wild—things get eaten, and stay et, and what did the eating isn’t villainized, or even wrong, it just—is. Death is quotidian—
—but then there’s the swarm of raccoons that chases our protagonist, Roz, the eponymous robot, up a tree that bends, precipitously, with their combined weight, until our protagonist is able to lightly step from the bent-low tip-top of the tree, and the mass of raccoons, suddenly aware of their predicament, beg and plead as the weight shifts, lifts, lets go, the tree, suddenly unburdened, springs upright, and dozens of raccoons are flung across the island over a cliff into the crashing sea, and this is a classic Warner Bros. Tex Avery gag, right? Only, the waves crash, the stone’s weightily there, the afternoon light is perfect and the trees sway as they would (only excepting the one bent alarmingly low for the bit) and death, as we’ve noted, the wild, has a presence—all very much at odds with expressionistically classic Warner Bros. Tex Avery slapstick. Expectations and reactions must be constantly recalibrated, because mimesis and cartooning get in each other’s way, and the movie never bothers to realize it has to reconcile them.
Tonal disjunctions like this extend throughout the movie, catharses unfounded, as Hulk notes above: one of the (several) climaxes, say, hinges on the rescue of the animals on the island from an unprecedented winter storm, dragged whether they will or not to the shelter Roz had built for herself, piled cheek-by-jowl, predator with prey, a powder keg already sparked by this fight, that tussle, and Roz finds her (solar-powered) energy dangerously depleted—an unbearable tension resolved with an inspiring speech pulled from the ass of nowhere by our deuteragonist fox, Flick—a speech as cringe as Morgan Freeman’s astoundingly inadvertently hilarious “Be decent” speech from (the film version of) the Bonfire of the Vanities: the foundational basis of eat and get eaten overturned by a plea for common sense; wildness tamed, and thus, forgotten.
(I should’ve been—I was—clued in by an earlier, tossed-off joke, the opossum mother and her hilarious litter of tagalong infants, all pretending quite theatrically to die [“Meningitis takes time!” insists one], all to lampshade the importance of motherhood, or rather parenting, by pretending this role is thrust upon all of us equally, a thing to which to become inured, like the weather, never noticing, much less questioning, the labor demanded to reproduce what of ourselves is necessary for the labor. —“Here I am,” says the opossum mother, “with my seven children,” and there’s a bloodcurdling offscreen scream, “my six children,” she sighs, without missing a beat, and it’s bleak and it’s funny and it works in the moment, to be undone in the next: “I’m okay, Mom, I didn’t really die,” says the opossum kid, almost unseen—a suit’s note scribbled in the margins of the screenplay, realized as imperceptibly as possible, still managing to wreck the bit.)
And that’s not something they do to protect kids (i feel like it mostly makes kids feel weird and that feeling feelings is stupid). I think it’s something they do to protect adults.
As for #nodads, well. I mean. #nodads. —Fleeing a bear (don’t worry, they’re friends later), our protagonist robot falls, smashing a nest and its resident geese, and is left with an egg that soon enough hatches into the sole survivor, for which Roz takes responsibility: task oriented, she breaks this monstrous burden into three tidy, realizable goals: teach the gosling how to eat, how to swim, and how to fly, and inadvertently brings him up between and among what she does to set about fulfilling them. This isn’t coded as motherly, or mothering (Brightbill’s occasional modes of address notwithstanding); it’s just the work that needs to be done, when an infant is about. There’s no hint of authoritarian discipline, or patriarchal diktat, or any juvenile rebellion thereagainst. Other role models and caretakers abound among the animals on the island, all of them played by men, but not a one gets anywhere near striking distance of a father-figure: big brothers, tutors, mentors, rapscallions, nary a dad in the bunch.
But I can’t say the movie comes by its #nodads honestly: Roz, short for ROZZUM Unit 7134, is played by a woman, Lupita Nyong’o, and while there’s nothing remotely gendered or sexed about Roz’s design or presentation, femmebots are nonetheless very much a thing in the current imaginary: our AI assistants and helpful robots are coded as female far more often than not, clearly subservient, chipperly servile, selflessly available, and though Roz very much grows out of this role, the role is nonetheless there to grow out of. The movie can’t present a father-figure directly to Brightbill; it would throw Roz and that role into stark relief, and so what #nodads might be found isn’t by design; it’s at best an epiphenomenon of good intentions, a reflexive reaction to having slipped without thinking into another trope altogether (rather like the unfortunate echoes that ring in the only other roles played by women: the aforementioned opossum mother, and the slinkily manipulative third-act villain). It’s not anything the movie was trying to say; it’s what the movie didn’t realize it was saying, as it didn’t rise to the irony of stranding a soi-disant wild robot in such a domestically comedic situation.
But, that third-act villain—
The migration of the geese off the island and south, Brightbill in tow, was the first time since the opening, before the animals got verbose and the plot kicked in, that the movie took a breath and delivered some pure goshwow eyekicks. A shot of the weathered Golden Gate Bridge, deck aslosh with seawater, beautiful and wordlessly, terrifyingly implicative (that’s a 75-meter rise in sea levels): the movie cannily gives us a taste of what we hadn’t realized we’d wanted from it, in one of those moments thrilling, and stirring, but also earned. And the few-enough other hints we get, as to the state and condition of, well, us, in this world, ROZZUM robots crossing the oceans on container ships, headed for idyllic Syd Mead suburbs, the isolated and terribly compact farming outpost, that deploys a robot SWAT team to deal with an incursion of geese, the unindicated entity—Universal Dynamics? some nation-state, or city-state? an aggrieved, gunned-up farmers’ cooperative?—that sends an overpowered dropship with another robot SWAT team and the aforementioned slinky manipulator, all to fetch back a single stray ROZZUM unit: it would appear that human civilization, reeling from the ravages of a far more destructive warming of the globe than predicted, has retreated into heavily militarized enclaves, lashing out with overwhelming firepower to bigfoot the slightest hint of threat or variance. It’s not unrealistic when you put it like that, I suppose. But the movie does seem to present us with the first known example of solarpunk dystopia.
And yet, here’s the thing: all this tech? It all just, works. The various artificial intelligences, and Roz’s limitless power supply (unless the plot requires an outage), and the wingless levitation of the dropship and the villain, and the radio transponders (mostly), and the water-logged marketing decks, and, and, and I know, this isn’t what the movie is about, it’s all set-dressing and atmosphere and the occasional plot-point, it’s fine just to trust the tech as you let it enable you to tell the story you want to tell, but, but: that catastrophic sea-level rise, the isolated farm in the middle of a desert: isn’t just trusting the tech how we get to there?
Let’s face it: robots these days, in the current moment, are bartending mechanical Turks operated by untipped mixologists backstage at an Elon Musk launch party; artificial intelligence is a power-gobbling nonsense machine in some occulted service to the scammy shell games of ludicrously paper-wealthy fintech bros. They very clearly don’t just, y’know, work, not at all, and to a ruinous degree, and it’s not that every story with a robot in it has to address this fact, puncturing or at least punctuating the hubris of such tinpot Titans, but it’s nonetheless weird that a story so otherwise suffused with climate anxiety would, when it comes to the tech that’s shoving us into all this hot water, would just, y’know. Trust it?
It’s of a piece with the lashing out, sending a laser-powered SWAT team to take down a flock of geese: a default setting, unthinkingly assumed, a disjunction in the final work. So, when Roz sat herself down in a gorgeously rendered clearing to listen and observe the interactions of the animals about her, grinding away until she could learn how to talk to them, the better to sell herself and her services, all I could think of was the LLM she presumably depended on, hosted in some distant cloud-computing center, and all the power and water flowing to support it as it trained up on this vibrant new dataset. It was distracting. Exhausting, even. Dispiriting. —It’s all very pretty while it’s happening up on the screen, there. But.
As robot forces lay siege to the factory, Helena reveals she has burned the formula necessary to make new robots. The characters lament the end of humanity and defend their actions, despite the fact that their imminent deaths are a direct result of their choices. Busman is killed while attempting to negotiate a peace with the robots. The robots storm the factory and kill all the humans except for Alquist, the company’s Clerk of the Works (Head of Construction). The robots spare him because they recognize that “He works with his hands like a robot. He builds houses. He can work.”
Bookkeeping.
While we’re on the subject of money, and things people have said, let’s note these all together, shall we?
It sounds so odd to phrase it this way that I’m a bit nervous about saying it, but here goes anyway: fantasy doesn’t make different stories possible, but sometimes it makes different outcomes possible, through the literalization of metaphor that is one of the key things fantasy does. Moral strength can change the real world—and a good thing, too—but in a fantastic story it can make dramatic, transformative, immediate changes. The idea that such transformations always have a price is what keeps fantasy from being morally empty—magic may save time and reduce staff requirements, but it offers no discounts.
The magic in any particular story will do what it will do, regardless of what it ought to do. Sometimes I like a magic that brings order and redistributes resources in almost exactly the same way money does, and sometimes I like a chaotic magic that’s reminiscent of another effect of money… (If we’re going to look at power dynamics within fiction at least let’s keep an eye on all sources of power!) So it all depends.
When I was writing the book and trying to build a framework for how magic might operate, I found myself thinking about how often magic feels like a metaphor for access to a lot of money. Money and power. I don’t love this idea—that magic functions as a kind of credit card—but you can’t get rid of it.
This is why Fantasy is filled with aristocrats and warriors, or at the least of hobbits of independent means: with travellers and questers (which is to say: with holidaymakers) and so on—as, also, with rascals, thieves, rogues etc. And I suppose sometimes with students, at Hogwarts’ or the Unseen University and whatnot. The point is that Fantasy cannot be written in the John Berger, or even the Zola mode: not because of the generic mismatch of Fantasy as le naturalisme, or not only for that reason, but because Fantasy is a realm where work as such is always transmuted magically into magic.
Wealth management.
Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald, “The Rich Boy,” 1926
I am getting to know the rich.
—Ernest Hemingway, to Mary Colum,
lunch with Max Perkins
The only difference between the rich and other people is that the rich have more money.
—Mary Colum, to Hemingway, ibid.
The rich were dull and they drank too much or they played too much backgammon. They were dull and they were repetitious. He remembered poor Scott Fitzgerald and his romantic awe of them and how he had started a story once that began, “The rich are different from you and me.” And how someone had said to Scott, Yes, they have more money. But that was not humorous to Scott. He thought they were a special glamorous race and when he found they weren’t it wrecked him just as much as any other thing that wrecked him.
—Hemingway, “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” 1936
If I choose to write de profundis sometimes it doesn’t mean I want friends praying aloud over my corpse. No doubt you meant it kindly but it cost me a night’s sleep. And when you incorporate it into a book would you mind cutting my name?
Riches have never fascinated me, unless combined with the greatest charm or distinction.
—Fitzgerald, to Hemingway, correspondence, 1936
They have more money. (Ernest’s wisecrack.)
—Fitzgerald, notes
Fitzgerald had said, “The rich are different from us.” Hemingway had replied, “Yes, they have more money.”
—Edmund Wilson, footnote explaining Fitzgerald’s note,
The Crack-Up, 1945
Everyone knows the famous exchange between Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway (Hemingway refers to it in his story, The Snows of Kilimanjaro, and Fitzgerald records it in his notebook) in which, to Fitzgerald’s remark, “The very rich are different from us,” Hemingway replied, “Yes, they have more money.” It is usually supposed that Hemingway had the better of the exchange and quite settled the matter. But we ought not to be too sure. The novelist of a certain kind, if he is to write about social life, must always risk a certain ambiguity in his social attitudes. The novel took its rise from a sense of a disrupted society and from the interpenetration of classes, and the novelist must still live by his sense of class differences and must be absorbed by them, as Fitzgerald was, even though he despise them, as Fitzgerald did.
—Lionel Trilling, “F. Scott Fitzgerald,”
his review of The Crack-Up, 1945
And, for an instant, she stared directly into those soft blue eyes and knew, with an instinctive mammalian certainty, that the exceedingly rich were no longer even remotely human.
—William Gibson, Count Zero, 1986
Foreword.
There’s this cartoon by, oh, let’s say Don Martin: a comedian on stage holds up a sign that says I’M FUNNY. —Noncommittal titters from the audience.
Next panel, the comic’s swapped signs for one that says YOU’RE FUNNY. The audience hisses and boos. (“It’s interesting to note,” says critic Marjorie Garber, “that the entities most usually described as ‘hissing,’ in the early modern period as also today, are devils, serpents, and audiences.”)
Third and final panel: the comic, dripping flop sweat, swaps signs one more time: THEY’RE FUNNY.
Cue the gales of laughter.
Every text is written in the first person.
Yes, all of them: even soi-disant experimental second-person narratives; especially those ostensibly in the third: every text is a first-person text. (Yes, and also those in the fourth. Hush, you.) —Every narrative must have a narrator, somewhere—did you check behind the curtain? If you’re still unclear, approach it as you would any other criminal enterprise: ask yourself, cui bono? Who chose the matter, wrangled the theme, pondered characters and angles of approach, began as they meant to go on? Such a constellation of considerations can’t help but cohere into a point of view, and that’s where, much as a sniper in a nest, you’ll find your narrator. (And if you shrug and say, with a quizzical cock to your brow, you mean the author? I’ll sagely shrug and answer back, perhaps.)
Once you’ve found the narrator, you’ve found your I in the sky: first mover, first shaker, first person.
“Did you notice?” said the Classicist. I don’t talk about the Classicist much, do I. And I have to be honest, here: while I remember having had the conversation, I don’t remember what we said, exactly, or where we were, not even a general sense of the circumstances, anymore. So let’s say we were having coffee in what I think was the only diner in town. “She pulled the whole thing off,” said the Classicist, with an emphatic gesture of her cigarette (menthol, which she would’ve bought next door, at what might’ve been called a bodega if we’d been in New York, but was called a bakery when the protests erupted years later), “the whole thing, without once telling you what was going on in anybody’s head.” —The SHE in that statement being Patricia McKillip, and the WHOLE THING being PULLED OFF the Riddle-Master books, and the statement itself not entirely correct, or right, or true: after all, when Morgon wakes up after the shipwreck, we’re told:
He tried to answer. His voice would not shape the words. He realized, as he struggled with it, that there were no words in him anywhere to shape the answers.
That’s from the first page of chapter three, and while it might be the first time we’re told something about someone’s state of mind that couldn’t be directly observed, or inferred from what’s been shown or told, it’s not the last. (And if you’d aver that the struggle described and the insight realized might well enough be inferred, perhaps by someone especially empathetic, I’d invite you past the next paragraph to read what follows: “A silence spun like a vortex in his head, drawing him deeper and deeper into darkness.”)
No, what the Classicist meant, if you’ll trust me to speak after all these years for her (and I’m not getting her voice right, not at all): in the writing of the Riddle-Master books, concerned as they are with identity, and selfhood, McKillip nonetheless eschews the free indirect: she never once presumes to speak for her characters, by making like their interiority’s seeping through the narrative. —You know. The bits Stephen King puts in italics. (Talking about King is probably how we got to this emphatic statement in the first place.) —Anyway. True or right or correct or not, it stuck with me.
Every narrative has a narrator. This may seem a ravelled tautology, but tug the thread of it and so much comes undone: a narrator, after all, is just another character, and subject to the same considerations. What might we consider, then, of a character who strives with every interaction for a coolly detached objectivity that’s betrayed by every too-deft turn of phrase? Who lays claim to an impossible omniscience, no matter how it might be limited, that’s belied by every Homeric nod? Who mimicks the vocal tics and stylings, the very accents of the people in their purview—whether or not they’re put in italics—merely to demonstrate how well it seems they think they know their stuff?
It’s only those texts that admit, upfront, the limitations and the unreliability of their narrators, that are honest in their dishonesty. —The third person, much like the third man, snatches power with an ugliness made innocuous, even charming, by centuries of reading protocols: deep grooves worn by habits of mind that make it all too lazily easy for an unscrupulous, an unethical, an unthinking author to wheedle their readers into a slapdash crime of empathy: crowding out all the possible might’ve beens that could’ve been in someone else’s head with whatever it is they decide to insist must have been.
The first few sketches of what would become (distractedly expansive gesture) all that were written on a clunky laptop lifted from an unlit room, filled with abandoned computers, just off the elevator lobby where I worked for a couple of weeks as a temporary receptionist. They were scraps of scenes, beginning after a beginning and never finding much of an end, but suggesting strongly where they’d come from, where they might go: our protagonist, Jo Maguire, already surly and underemployed, out for a night on the town with Becker, her gay best friend (making a stab or two at what would become his “epitome of mediocrity” speech); staggering back from the bathroom in time to see Ysabel, our protagonist, winding up the dancefloor with the slow-burn opening of Cassilda’s Song—only it was YSABEL, and BECKER, and JO, because these sketches all were written in screenplay form.
I was already writing a screenplay—it was why I’d stolen the laptop; some folks I knew were vaguely acquainted with a pot of techbro proceeds, and thought maybe a micro-budget horror film might prove an attractive tax shelter. It only made sense, when I was procrastinating the one, to sketch this incipient other in the same medium, and anyway, there’s room to play, in a screenplay, with voice, with performance, because the performance isn’t the point: it isn’t the final product, it’s instructions for assembling the final product. And who knew? Maybe I’d find some techbro money of my own (it was thicker on the ground, in those days), that might want to shelter itself in a micro-budget pilot for a syndicated television show. —My dreams were so much larger then, if simpler.
But the money went in another direction, and all I had to show for it was a screenplay no one would ever watch, and this, this thing that, if it was ever going to be anything, would have to become something else.
As I was considering how best to go about getting done what I wanted to do, I thought once more of the Classicist’s emphatic statement—maybe because these things had started as screenplays, concerned with the movement of bodies and objects in space, with words spoken out loud, not left to echo in somebody’s head—but I’d already played once or twice with the techniques suggested, in other, shorter pieces, elsewhere (much as writers today come up through fanfic, I’d done some time in the graduate seminars of alt.sex.stories.d). The strictures they impose—the pragmatics of blocking, the seamless exteriority, the relentless focus on precise, specific moments—that make it necessary to deal only by implication with what it is prose is supposed to excel at, by talking outside the glass: they can’t help but appeal to a scrupulous fool like me. So I decided to pull the whole thing off without ever once telling you what’s going on in anyone’s head.
But now I’m worried: having said this out loud, have I tipped my hand? Given the game away?
“I just don’t get it,” I said, and here we can suppose I gestured at the magazine on the table between us with a cigarette of my own (clove, filterless, bought at the drug store on the corner, where they kept the porn under a shelf behind the counter, so you had to ask for it).
“What’s not to get?” said the Classicist, and you have to understand, I would never have actually left such a thing lying out like that, but I have to have something to point to. Still: I did speak to her about this. This is another conversation that happened. Trust me.
“Well,” I said, and took a crackling drag. “If you had a sister. A twin. Would you do something like that?”
“Depends,” she said. Let’s say she sipped her coffee. “How much are they paying us?”
“But,” I said, “I mean, to, to take something, like that. I mean, whether you really feel it or not—actually, I think it might be worse if you faked it—but to take something like that and put it on display?”
“Honestly,” she sighed, “worse things happen at sea.”
Second seasons are where television programs typically hit their stride, confident in their logistics, but still gripped by their originating dreams. Second albums are sophomore slumps. Second movements are when things take a turn, get contemplative: usually scored andante or adagio, between fifty and seventy-five beats per minute, depending on your metronome. I’m not sure what can be said yet, about second series of epic urban fantasy webserial ’zines. There aren’t that many around from which to generalize.
This one is for the usual suspects, I suppose, but it’s also for the Classicist, who gave me if not the original idea, then a notion around which an idea might articulate itself. (You mustn’t blame her for any more than that.) But also, it’s for you. You’re the one reading this, after all.
In the Reign of Good Queen Dick
Portland, Oregon
2015 – 2019
1. THEY’RE FUNNY
2. I know you are
∴ But what am I
Three little words.
There was an episode, one of my favorite moments in Star Trek, when Captain Kirk looks over the cosmos and says, “Somewhere out there someone is saying the three most beautiful words in any language.” Of course you heart sinks and you think it’s going to be, “I love you” or whatever. He says, “Please help me.” What a philosophically fantastic idea, that vulnerability and need is a beautiful thing.
EDITH
And you don’t want to talk about it? Why? Did you do something wrong? Are you afraid of something? Whatever it is, let me help.KIRK
“Let me help.” A hundred years or so from now, I believe, a famous novelist will write a classic using that theme. He’ll recommend those three words even over I love you.
—The City on the Edge of Forever
The difference between “please, help me” and “let me help” is fairly dramatic. In Fry’s mismemory, Kirk seems almost to ghoulishly relish this cry for salvation, this opportunity to exercise his own benevolent power over someone in peril. In the actual quote, Kirk cites a novel we’ve not yet read, and the phrase itself is not a ventriloquised cry of need but a personal offer to serve.
KIRK
Why do you say that?EDITH
Sometimes you seem, well, disoriented, Jim, like a man just in from the country.KIRK
Iowa?EDITH
Further away than that.KIRK
“When night begins to fall, all men become strangers…”EDITH
It’s true. Who said it, I don’t recognize it.KIRK
Wellman 9. An obscure poet. Someday people will call his work the most beautiful ever known in the galaxy.EDITH
That’s a lot of territory.
Even the bull puts in some effort.
This piece—pleasant, but slight, ending just as it feels like it’s run through the pre-flight check for a much longer trip—does, at least (as it two-steps from of all things Paper Moon to the 48 Laws of Power), manage to articulate an essential, implacable truth of the Age in Which We’ve Found Ourselves Deposited: how on earth is it possible to speak as we so often do of Donald J. Trump as a grifter, when he can’t even be bothered to begin to pretend to try?
Mere strokes, interposed by a copyist.
There are rules to punctuation, of course, much as there are rules of grammar; the thing to keep in mind is that they’re descriptive, not prescriptive: technical documentation outlining specs, protocols, and use cases for an ancient system kludged together by oh so many divers hands, and as anyone can tell you, who’s ever had to document—and maintain said documentation for—anything at all: it’s forever going to be incomplete, inadequate, contradictory on the face of it, inexplicably controversial at unexpected points, and always always woefully out of date.
I mean, sure, yes: one uses a semicolon when joining two independent clauses that aren’t quite sentences of their own, given the broader context, when they can’t for whatever æsthetic be joined by a coordinating conjunction—but when I’m assembling sentences from key-clacks, I never not once do find myself thinking, ah, here’s two independent clauses, and no conjunction will do; let’s reach for a semicolon, shall we? —No: it’s the way the words fit one after the other, the heft of the passage in my mind’s hand, the lilt in my mind’s voice as it’s read back to my mind’s ear: this is what decides, for me, whether and when I reach for a semicolon, or an em-dash, or damn the torpedoes and splice the fuckers with a comma.
(A comma is where you take a breath, a semicolon is how the Welsh hedge the ends of declarations; a colon is more purposive: and thus turns neither up, nor down—the em-dash is a violent interruption, incorporated—and as for the ellipsis, well: it coyly trails…)
With the advent of the web, as writing and publishing carelessly merged, mixing the (supposed) iron science of grammar with the (presumed) mere craft of typesetting, use cases multiplied, and whole new arguments raged: whether to put two spaces after a full stop (if you’re displaying in a monospaced typeface? Sure!), or to italicize the punctuation at the end of an italicized phrase (opinions differ, as do fonts), or how best to set one’s em-dashes: there’s a school that would have spaces placed to either side whenever they’re deployed — like so; but to my eye that’s too much of an irruption in the color of the text on the page. Better by far to set them snug—like so; the flow, stuttered, is nonetheless maintained. Now: if you wished to use the en-dash instead (the width of the capital N in the font, or thereabouts, a touch more narrow than the width of the capital M: thus, em, and en, in dashes), you would deploy spaces to either side: the en-dash, being a touch more demure, would otherwise read as merely a hyphen. This technique, of an en-dash with spaces, is better than the em-dash in maintaining a consistency of color in blocs of text, but it’s not as versatile: the em-dash, if usually deployed without spaces, might here or there be employed with a space to the one side, or the other, at the end of a sentence, or the beginning: joining thereby sentences that aren’t quite separate paragraphs in much the manner a semicolon joins clauses that aren’t quite separate sentences. —But I digress.
This broader divagation we return to stems from a bit by Clive Thompson on “weird 19th-century punctuation marks you should try using,” which turn out not to be unusual new marks, but mere combinations: em-dash with comma, with colon, with semicolon. Thompson’s excited by the idea of playing with these ungainly chimeræ, and ordinarily I’d be as game as the next dingbat to put inconvenient extravagance to whatever use, but the commash, the colash, the semi-colash: or rather, perhaps:—or perhaps,—perhaps;—I just don’t feel it? Or rather, I do, I can, but the nuanced subtleties of the differences between each—and the constituent parts of each—it’s just too faint, too esoteric, to be worth their clumsy interpellations; I just, I’m afraid, don’t see—the point?
Thompson finds himself enchanted by the abrupt disappearance of these widespread, well-used hybrids, vanishing as they pretty much entirely did with the onset of modernism. He quotes the thirty-year-old (and rather better, because doubtless more amply compensated) Nicholson Baker essay that occasioned his bit:
What comet or glacier made them die out? This may be the great literary question of our time. I timidly tried to use a semi-colash in a philosophical essay for The Atlantic Monthly in 1983: the associate editor made a strange whirring sound in her throat, denoting inconceivability, and I immediately backed down. Why, why are they gone? Was it—and one always gropes for the McLuhanesque explanation first—the increasing use of the typewriter for final drafts, whose arrangement of comma, colon, and semi-colon keys made a quick reach up to the hyphen key immediately after another punctuation mark physically awkward? Or was it—for one always gropes for the pseudo-scientific explanation just after McLuhan—the triumphant success of quantum mechanics? A comma is indisputably more of a quantum than a commash. Did the point-play of the Dadaists and E. E. Cummings, and the unpunctled last chapter of Ulysses, force a scramble for a simpler hegemony against which revolt could be measured?
I mean, y’know, yeah? Sure. Why not? —It’s not as if there’s a single cause for this particular effect, a grand narrative here to be untangled and assembled beyond, I mean, you know, like we said: modernism. Even their names—commash, colash, semi-colash—are obvious excrescences easily trimmed in any drive to simplify, streamline, regularize and (yes) modernize. So they no longer fit with the heft of our words as we put them together, did nothing we found we needed to tune their lilt. They fell out of fashion. Which is no reason of course not to use them yourself, if you find you want to.
—As for myself, I’m much more taken by the notion mentioned in passing, in Baker’s essay, of punctuation as an emendation not by the writer, or the editor, or the publisher, but the reader—confronted by a bloc of monochromatic, undifferentiated, unspaced text, as it was written of old, might well take it upon themselves to
decorate a work with dots and diples and paragraph marks as they read it and then proudly sign their name on the page: “I, Dulcitius, read this.” Punctuation, like marginal and interlinear commentary, seems at times to have been a ritual of reciprocation, a way of returning something to the text in grateful tribute after it had released its meaning in the reader’s mind.
Well, that, and also a lingering puzzlement with those who insist on using guillemets as quotation marks. The hell is up with that? Seriously. It’s like, kkkttcht, every line of dialogue’s being spoken over a walkie-talkie or something, kkkttcht. —Over.
Kinematograph.
Then, what do we mean when we say “this is so cinematic!” There is of course the implication of the visual rendered in prose, but there is also, anecdotally, sometimes a level at which cinematic fiction also implies something about pacing or narrative rhythm or narrative composition—things that for my convenience I’ll group and condense into the term narrative depth. To be clear, I do not mean depth in the modern sense of a value judgement. I mean it in the sense of the distance between what is occurring in the narrative foreground and what is occurring in the narrative background, giving a sense of relief or contrast. In cinema, this contrast seems diminished. That is, in cinema, things are happening and there is less ostensible commentary upon the events or the psychology of the narrative. This is due to the nature of film as a medium. In prose fiction, there is a greater potential for contrast between event or incident and commentary, and one might say that cinematic fiction is fiction that emulates this lessened narrative contrast: the flattened narrative relief of cinema.
That’s from Brandon Taylor’s Miserly Eye, which makes some interesting points in the matter of cinematic fiction, and in a manner that doesn’t make me twitchy. I’ll continue to maintain, myself, that the primary distinctions ultimately stem from their respective mediums—that cinema’s dependence on images fixes it on specificities that prose’s narrow channel of one word after another can only approach with great effort—but I’ll spend some time thinking with this notion of depth of field, and Bellardi’s notion of foreground and background tenses, maybe.
In the meanwhile, it’s an excuse to index a number of old posts hereabouts on the matter: a couple of extended quotes from John Fowles; a brief divagation on why it is I might tend to twitch when the subject comes up; a disquisition on, well, it has more to do with comics and serialization, but it’s still pertinent to the work of translating the techniques of one medium into another; some consideration of less-than-obvious implications of a cinematic mode; and what I might maybe call the keystone piece. —So there’s that.
Hydriotaphia.
All these people everywhere whittering over how Midjourney AI and ChatGPT and whatnot mean computers or machine learning or artificial intelligence or whatever we’re calling it this week is on the verge of surpassing us all the rest of us when it comes to drawing or writing or pontificating or illustrating or designing or coding or bullshitting or doing our homework, and to be frank also all those people cheerfully playfully wickedly teasing the networks or inputs or weighted averages, or however it is it works, it’s all starting to remind me of nothing so much as what happens at the end of “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”—and you know what that means. Go on revising, in the quiet of the days; work as if you do not intend to see it published.
A good reality will parry the blow.
I don’t recall how I first heard of Helen DeWitt’s Last Samurai; I don’t have any longer that first copy (a Tina Brown Talk Miramax edition, I say, with an air of vaguely smugness); I think one of the many many times I lent it out it never made its way back, or I hope that’s the case, and it’s still vagabonding about, from hand to reading hand. (I’ve got a Chatto & Windus edition these days, which imprint was founded in 1855, then bought by Random House the year I graduated high school, then unceremoniously dumped under Vintage Books somewhere in the drafty halls of Penguin UK.) —I trust, at any rate, that the esteem in which I hold DeWitt is well known about these parts, and so you’ll understand I’ve just put in an order for Lee Konstantinou’s The Last Samurai Reread, about which I’ve only just found out.
