Critical Apprehensions & Intemperate Discourses

Kip Manley, proprietor

Triskele.

Three tangents make a triskele—which is not, you’ll note, a triangle, and thus not nearly so stable as that shape would have it. —Ethan Robinson says:

This goes a long way toward explaining why I love her work so much, I think; often it fixates—again I think the word is accurate—specifically on the question, what makes this work different from any other? what makes it “fantasy” (or, more rarely with her, “science fiction”) rather than otherwise? and answers: one is allowed neither the luxury nor the irresponsibility of taking anything for granted.

Vajra Chandrasekera says:

When I was very young that sort of thing was frightening because it represented a breakdown of the logic of the world. A worldbuilding incompatibility that cast doubt on the author’s grasp of the narrative, as it were. Eventually I grew up and saw the invisible world as a rhetorical device to avoid ever talking about violence, cruelty, and responsibility, and that didn’t make it any better. That’s just another way that the world breaks down.

And some time ago, John M. Ford went and said:

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.

—Filed 3501 days ago to Paralitticisms; Comment.

Diseffected.

I’m always on the lookout for groups or schools or clubs that might, if they knew of me, have me as a member, so that I might Marxily walk away before they think to ask; so when the Millions teased the heralding of a New Modernist age (with a parenthetical invocation of Josipovici), well—I had to go take a peek.

More recently—say, in the last 20 years or so—numerous so-called postmodern novels have contained this distinctly non-postmodern quality—not that the characters feel so much as the reader. The cumulative effect isn’t necessarily a fully fleshed-out character but a fully emotional experience. Think of Jonathan Safran Foer’s strong sentiments in the face of the Holocaust and 9/11; think of the alligator-wrestling family at the heart of Karen Russell’s Swamplandia!; think of the way Ali Smith works her linguistic magic in order to convey the complexities of love and relationships; or the heart-breaking wallop of David Levithan’s The Lover’s Dictionary; think of Reif Larsen’s I am Radar, of Zadie Smith’s NW, of Téa Obreht’s The Tiger’s Wife. Can these books truly be considered postmodern when the most prevalent aspect is emotion rather than thought?

Consider the way even genre fiction has been infiltrated by humanity and feeling. Science fiction is no longer merely speculative, adventurous and pure fabulism. Now we have Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, and myriad others. Fantasy is no longer characterized simply by lengthily described worlds and political intrigue; now we have Karen Thompson Walker’s The Age of Miracles and almost everything David Mitchell has written. These so-called genre books now aspire to human heights.

So, well, yes—careful with that cricket bat, Eugene—not so much of a there there. —I drew what amusement I might from the idea of a return to modernism’s warm emotional core, a repudiation of the chilly formal games of postmodernism, but it’s weak tea at best, and then there’s the evocation of Franzen. (Turns out postmodern tropes are like thermal curtains: not as embarrassing as one first thought.) —I mean, I did then pick up the Attebery I’m leafing through, for reasons, turned the page, and laughed at the juxtaposition of the previous with this paragraph—

John Barth has described the reductio ad absurdum of the Modernist movement in his essay “The Literature of Exhaustion”: “Somebody-or-other’s unbound, unpaginated, randomly assembled novel in a box.” According to Barth, Modernism’s program of “disjunction, simultaneity, irrationalism, anti-illusionism, self-reflexiveness, medium-as-message, political olympianism, and a moral pluralism approaching moral entropy” was accomplished by the middle of this [past] century. Readers had been educated, had grown wary of literary illusion, could no longer take narrative or narrator for granted. Nothing remained for Modernist writers to exercise their irony upon, and so Modernist fiction had nothing more to say.

—but that smacks entirely too much of pulling Marshall McLuhan out from behind a fern, and anyway, a page earlier Attebery was summing up Edmund Wilson’s take on modernism as “essentially mimetic reporting striving to turn into lyric poetry,” and would you look at that? I’ve been a modernist all this time.

I suppose I shouldn’t be too unkind—charity, and resounding gongs, if nothing else. It’s understandable that modernism and postmodernism are so easily confused: postmodernism’s merely what modernism gets up to in our bedroom after the war, and you know me: I’m a partisan of that small country, mindful of death, disinclined to long journeys, ever since the war and all, you know. —Which may not explain to you why I eagerly clicked on the link to an article titled, “For the future struggle: what is science fiction?” but trust me, I was eager to read something with a tagline that read, “The science fiction that is most important is that which situates itself at a point of struggle.” (—I want to be wrong. —Doesn’t everyone?)

I was eager, but I read it with a deepening frown, a weightening sigh. It isn’t so much a paean or a how-to or even a why-we-must on revolutionary SF; it’s just a minor jeremiad against utopia, which, I mean—

The originating Utopia of Thomas Moore’s 16th century novel was founded by King Utopos, who cut off the peninsula from the mainland, making it into an island. Utopias are, like their primary ancestor, closed systems, functioning perfectly without class, oppression or struggle. As islands, cauterized from the world, proper utopias are resided in by unchanging, eternal societies, a conception which is both absurd and bordering on fascism in its undemocratic and unquestioning existence.

Utopias then are in fact antithetical to science fiction. They are more like a blueprint of a future society, instructions and pictures of a post-revolutionary world rather than stories set in those worlds. Narrative relies on change, process and struggle, all things that cannot happen within a utopia in which struggle, need and desire have been banished.

—sure, if you define it like that. —Utopia is when our lives matter, dammit, and if you can’t make that storyable, God help you. —Inept utopias are bad, to be sure, but these future worlds the mode demands as backdrops for its narratives and struggles—when the action pauses for a moment, and you take a breath, and look around, and see just how it’s different, the then and there, from the here and now, that such difference is imaginable, possible, that it’s amazing, frightening, thought-sparking, utterly uncanny, the home you never knew you could have—this is what breaks hearts, cracks heads, keeps Plato up at night. (It’s also what can bring on the abjunct, yes. I mean, I know I’m wrong. It’s impossible. Look around you.)

So maybe we wouldn’t disagree, Stupart and Dillon and me, ends and means, broadly speaking and all that, it’s just how we marshal our arguments, but still, details matter, I mean theirs or to again be charitable the constraint of wordcounts or something leads to a tendentious misreading of Delany’s Triton: Some Informal Remarks toward the Modular Calculus, Part One—

On this heterotopia on Neptune’s moon, Triton, the lead character Bron attempts to live in a post capitalist world where anyone can change gender and sexuality at will and structural oppression appears to no longer exist. However, despite living in a world ruled by individual freedoms, religious mania, the threat of war and violent subjectivities still exist, as typified in the main character themself.

—by way of demonstrating that Triton is one of the good ones, the not-a-utopias, see? Struggle! —But Triton is a utopia, where all our stupid petty bullshit misunderstood and -standing lives matter. —The war, the very real and not at all threatened war, comes from outside Triton, from way back down on Old damned Earth, and maybe I cling to this because these days when I think of the book it isn’t Bron’s shaggy-dog of a story that sticks, or the New York City I can see in it now that I’ve lived there (once, and long ago), or even the game of vlet; what looms over everything else in the book now comes at the very end, Appendix B: Ashima Slade and the Harbin-Y Lectures: Some Informal Remarks toward the Modular Calculus, Part Two, the part that begins:

Just over a year ago, at Lux on Iapetus, five million people died. To single out one death among that five million as more tragic than another would be monumental presumption.

One of the many, many to die, when gravity and atmosphere were stripped away from the city by Earth Intelligence sabotage, was the philosopher and mathematician Ashima Slade.

And, I mean—

—Filed 3504 days ago to Paralitticisms; Comment.

Falling will fall, fell.

The Fall, okay, but did anything ever actually fall? Did the story ever scale vertiginous, dizzying heights, only then to plunge? Or the characters, or a character? An action? —Not as such, no. —Mostly I’m left with a lingering confusion with Tarsem Singh’s spectacular 2006 film whenever I try to talk about it, which is annoying, but mostly to me. —Oh, this: I wrote this a few months back, as part of a conversation with Lili Loofbourow about why I’d liked it, and she hadn’t, and why I’d ended up coming rather forcefully around to her side of the matter; she’s the “you” in what’s below, and this piece in particular is what it’s responding to—treat this post, if you like, as an off-brand badly xeroxed fanfic installment of Dear Television, or something, with parenthetical interruptions from the show itself as it was being written about. —Anyway; enough prologue: with the announcement of season three, and with the occasional bits of praise I’ve been seeing from others (who really ought to know better), here’s the matter as it began the beguine back when:

The Fall, okay, but nothing ever fell, as it were. Except, y’know, the bad guy, I guess, at the end? —And oh for God’s sake Milton? —I’m typing this as the last episode is playing on the other screen, so there’s another piece of evidence to add to the snack-grabbing and beard-shaving you noted.

But first maybe why I liked it, or was liking it, or was thinking it was something I was liking. (Gibson’s one technique is to play on, or instruct others to play on, the desires of her subjects, and welp, here’s Spector looking right at the camera in the interview room and calling our attention to precisely how clever this is.) —Sorry. —The first season was appointment television for us, in the sense that Jenn and I made appointments to sit down and watch an episode or two together, when we got a chance, between day jobs, childcare, and creative enterprises. (And now Gibson’s proxy with Katie, the handsome young detective she requested before she knew she’d need a handsome young detective, has just made a mess of getting any actual information from Katie, and made a hash of treating Katie in any sort of a humane fashion, but has of these two mistakes made what was supposed to be a dramatically satisfying moment.) —Other appointments were made for Hannibal, and Top of the Lake, and (in theory) The Good Wife, and Orange is the New Black, but: appointments are hard to keep, and it’s easy to watch television while you’re doing something else, like coloring comics, or running maintenance routines on a database, which is why she’s watched all of Orange herself, and I’m caught up on Good Wife, and we never did finish Top of the Lake, which I’m tempted to go and take up again now, and feel a little guilty about that.

(The mannequin in the trunk. I admit I’ve completely lost track of where that was supposed to’ve come from.)

But! The Fall! Gillian Anderson rocking her cool, severe British accent! Rainy grey cinematography! (Oh, and here’s the daughter’s interview, to remind me where that damn mannequin came from, though damned if I can actually remember it myself. And Gibson, tearing up, telling her proxy precisely why she’s tearing up, thanks.) —What’s not to like, really. (Oh for God’s sake the miscarriage.) —Sorry. That first season of The Fall we did finish, is the basic point, I guess, and there’s a there there: the aforementioned, plus a slow, steady, controlling hand in the direction, a keen eye for place, and a fascination with the minutiae of process—as opposed to the sterile gestures of the procedural, which I should mention as another media-consumption data point: the fucking procedural, the Castle and the Bones and the House and the Elementary and the Person of Interest and the Psych and the Leverage and yes also the Miss Fisher’s and that dam’ Good Wife, each with its rhythms, its shorthands, its conventions, and though they may play with them, some better or at least with more evident joy than others, or mutate them over the course of their run or even once or twice upend them utterly, they’re still there, implacable skeletons that mean you can queue one up on the one window of your computer set-up and go about your business in the other and surface three or four hours later having watched four or five episodes without ever really seeing one, you know? —So when there’s a show that doesn’t immediately tip its hand, that takes its time, that buries the lede, I suppose, I tend to sit up and take notice, but also to cut it some slack.

(And here we are, the confrontation we’ve been slow-burning our way to through ten previous episodes: Gibson v. Spector, cara a cara! —I paused the playback to put some additional fillips on clauses, here and there.)

One of the procedurals I was watching in and around the same time was Criminal Minds, which, ick. —I watched some of it in small part because of Mandy Patinkin, but mostly because there’s a webserial by a group of genre writers, some of whom I’ve been a fan of since high school, such as Emma Bull and Steven Brust and the infamous Will Shetterly, who was once more firmly on the rails (“It is utterly compelling, compulsive,” is not the language of someone speaking about a thing they’ve experienced themselves, but of someone attempting to describe what they’ve seen someone else experience, which—oh, never mind)—Criminal Minds, yes. The webserial’s a game of procedurals—it’s called Shadow Unit; the authors take turns writing short stories which are (sort of) thought of as episodes of a television show, sort of horror, sort of urban fantastic, about a semi-occult task force in the FBI—I had something of a professional interest, as well as enjoying the stories, and seeing what the writers were getting up to with something of a new-media experiment. —Anyway: they’d talk about enjoying this program, Criminal Minds, which they’d based Shadow Unit on, so I finally got around to watching some episodes, and wanted to take a long hot shower after: Bones is full of deeply unpleasant, self-absorbed people, and Castle’s awfully blasé about death and civil rights violations, and House is just plain mean, but Criminal Minds is the foulest moral pornography, a terrifically ugly example of reveling in what you pretend to condemn, ideology they don’t even bother to rinse off much less gussy up, which is why, I’m sure, it’s on its tenth season or whatever over on CBS.

I mention (all) this because what was compelling, what was compulsive about the first season of The Fall, for me, was how it handled Spector. Unlike a procedural’s monsters-of-the-week, he’s very much a part of the world: he has a job, he has appointments, he has a family, and a family has him, and this humanized him—in a very frail, limiting, deflating way, deftly making the point that Gibson rather stentoriously makes to Burns just before this climactic interview: he’s just a man, a person, a human being. No monster, not in any sense of the word. Not empowered; not invincible. Arrested.

The attention paid to the logistics of his activities, the lack of attention that seemed to be shown for any attempts at patly explaining or reasoning through the why of what he was doing—it’s not, of course, that this has never been done before, but it was such a welcome change of pace from the Criminal Minds approach that, well, I mean. If you’re going to watch shows about serial murders and rapes and such.

And none of this is to take away from Gillian Anderson and her Gibson, about whom so much ink has been spilled—though dear Lord, to insist she doesn’t pursue self-destructive sexual relationships? Every single one we see either risks or damaged, long ago, some aspect of her professional life, which is the only life we see. —But I digress. I was talking about Dornan’s blithely pathetic Spector.

(“The people who like to read and watch programs about people like you,” says Gibson, and fuck you, show; you just blew the last of my good will right out the window with that direct punch on the nose.)

—There’s two moments, in the first season, that jolted like electric shocks, and fixed it in the plus column for me. —There once were, I should say. —The first was when Spector crept into his sleeping daughter’s bedroom, climbed up on her bed, pushed away the bit of ceiling and tucked his book away in the attic: brute force, perhaps, but still: the mean logistics of his evil, how it had to be folded into and worked around the quotidian, how—and I’m gonna digress for a moment, but: I did a lot of babysitting, in high school? And one thing I discovered, after making sure the kids were asleep, when I went snooping about the houses, as one does when one babysits, one thing I discovered was almost every single house had a stash of pornography, and sometimes it was under the bed, and sometimes it was in a nightstand, and quite often it was on a shelf high up in the closet; anyway. This little depth charge of someone else’s desires, squirreled away. —The moment had resonance. There was a shivery horror to it that stuck.

The second moment was that first phone call between Spector and Gibson. It’s the first time he gets to perform as the monster he’s supposed to be; it’s the first time we’re privy to any attempt to explain why he does what he does, and, well, as with any of these shows or stories, it’s bullshit, utter adolescent cod-Nietzsche bullshit. But: the show knows it’s bullshit. And astonishingly, electrifyingly, for that one moment Spector gets to know it’s bullshit. He falters, he hesitates, there’s a look in his eye—that feeling, when you’ve been living with an idea, holding it in your head, telling it to yourself, and you finally get a chance to say it out loud to someone, and you hear yourself, the words coming out of your mouth, and you realize it’s all crap, the magic’s gone, it was never really there in the first place—to have that basic interaction applied to serial-killer nonsense was beyond refreshing. It felt revelatory. The weirdly anticlimactic structure of the first season, with no actual confrontation as such, with him getting away, as it seemed—it felt deliberate, as if the show wanted to say forget catharsis, forget quote-justice-unquote, this, here, this moment, this is the important thing to take away: he’s pathetic, he’s feeble, he’s destroyed real people and that makes him contemptible, he’s just a person himself, and there’s no deep insight into rage or fantasy or desire here. Go home.

So, y’know. I liked it.

(And yes, of course, Rose is alive! God, what a weirdly desultory bit of plot that was. I will say that a show that has become this fetishistic about process and detail is nonetheless and of course terribly squeamish about what and how a person might excrete, trapped in a trunk for was it three episodes? Or four?)

There were a number of ways the show could’ve carried on into a second season; what I’d thought—Stella Gibson moves on to another

(—oh for FUCK’s sake extrajudicial execution ex machina—)

where was I? —How it could’ve carried on, yes. The continuing adventures of Stella Gibson as she moves on to another town where she’s had an inappropriate relationship with someone in the police hierarchy that might compromise yet another investigation of a sadly all-too-human fuck-up drunk on patriarchal power, haunted every now and then by the one that got away, in Belfast—that wasn’t going to happen. Spector retreating, doubling down on his bullshit in isolation, resurfacing to try and make another go of it, okay, there’s possibilities there, and the fact that he does find someone he can articulate his bullshit to, who’ll validate it and egg it on, and it’s a teenager, there’s potential there, too, dicey, but. (Oh, Katie! I really hope you end up in a Kelly Link short, so you can finally become the whacked-out Nancy Drew you so desperately want to be.) —Anyway. Second season, I was still on Team “Aw, I liked it” through the first episode and into the second. I’m a sucker for brooding on ferries, what can I say.

But! That third episode. Two moments, again: first, there was the dizzying bewilderment that came when, almost immediately after Gibson gives a distraught-for-her tirade about how it’s the task force’s fault that Rose was taken by Spector, Archie Panjabi’s M.E. (I nip over to another tab to Google—her name was Reed Smith? What?) rather firmly informs Gibson that it’s highly likely Spector found Rose because of the task force, and Gibson nods, considering, yes, this is likely true. It was like two scenes from two alternate takes on the story slapped into the same show without anyone realizing the causality breach, and while I’m as big a fan of kicking over the traces of story-logic as the next fellow, they don’t need to be so carelessly Brechtian. —So that was the first moment I sat up and said, wait, show, what?

The second comes at the end of the interminable sequence in Gibson’s hotel room, after the bit in the bar, and the wildly, desperately obvious fanservice-kiss and flirtation. —We get Spector’s infiltration of the hotel, which is insultingly contrived: the waiter’s just put down a tray right by the service entrance! He’s left a master key-card on the tray! Spector knows what a master key-card looks like, and can do! Look, room-service orders, hanging on the wall right there! And that one, right there, it’s from Stella Gibson! See, how cleverly he hacks the script? I mean, the hotel? —And all of it done in one shot, too. I’d‘ve found it far more “realistic,” far less noticeable and off-putting, if the show had just made it clear he’d broken into her room somehow, who cares, let’s not bend over backwards to justify how. —So there’s that. There’s Burns, dropping by to whinge drunkenly about the B-plot of the first season, and since there’s no further fallout from this the only reason he does so is to get punched, which, okay, good moment there, and then he gets cleaned up, and more discussion of this or that explicative point, and then we shifted somewhere else I think? Long enough for Stella to change out of her suit into a robe just like the one she was wearing in the dream sequence, huh, and then she boots up her computer to see what Spector’s done to her desktop, and—she leaps for her gun!

Which is an impulse I can totally understand, if one were used to guns, and had one at one’s disposal. But in the flow of the episode, the tonal shifts, the way everything intervening had been strung out to such lengths, how we’d already had the one confrontation in that hotel room just minutes before, it felt wildly out of place. I laughed, when I should’ve jumped. A definite stumble.

And then things start to snowball, and where I might’ve cut some slack before, I now shook my head. Spector’s wrestling with logistics becomes instead superhumanly smooth urban-ranger skillz, to the extent that he seemed to be colluding with the writers to get away with stuff. The minutiæ of process becomes fetishistic, calling attention to precisely how much labor and money was being poured into this task force that can’t seize actual evidence from a house they’re destroying to surveil. (Though I did initially like the murmuring Greek chorus effect of the surveillors all checking in with dispatch, it got numbingly repetitive after a bit.) —You mentioned the slow-motion shots of his being hauled into the police station; I found the sullen gotcha! of his arrest to be, well, arresting: let him go from the scene of the officer-involved shooting, as if he’s not a person of interest in any other matter, let him walk half a block away, look about, and then let someone else march up out of nowhere to arrest him for Rose’s abduction—why? What on earth was the point of that?

I’d like to think the show itself was aware, just for a moment, of just how far it had fallen when the abusive husband got the phone call from his mate, oh, hey, I just saw your wife, the one you’ve been looking for. —But I can’t be certain.

Looking however briefly into the production history it’s easy to take what I think I know of the making of these things and run some diagnostics: the first five shows were ordered in one batch, and proved so popular a second batch were ordered, and not everyone could come back for them, including the director of the first batch, so the writer directed the second run, and voila! And now there’s going to be a third. —But this reading is awfully generous to my own half-considered initial impressions of the show, a decent-enough first outing run into the ground by a thoughtlessly extended second, so I distrust it, because what the hell do I know. —I’m left with a point Sady Doyle made about Agent Carter, about how feminism is just a button to be pushed now by multinational corporations, a niche to be pandered to, and that’s kind of what this feels like: hey, that misandry’s pretty popular with some folks, let’s see if we can make a splash. —But that’s uncharitable, and I do try to have some charity, so I’ll walk that back; it’s not worth it as a punchline.

So. Anyway. —Thoughts! I had some.

—Filed 3510 days ago to Paralitticisms; Comment [3].

Done did read.

I figured it out on the way there, the intro, which I had to mostly scrap because when I timed out what I was going to read it took eight minutes when I’d thought it was only going to be five and we only had ten, each. But if I just jumped right into it, which I did, when I first moved to Portland, twenty years ago, the first article I read in the Sunday Oregonian was a Randy Gragg column about the Moonday T-Hows, does anyone remember the Moonday T-Hows? And it’s a young crowd, so I don’t have much hope, though it is a ’zine crowd, so maybe, and there, at the back, a nod, a yes, okay. —This amazing space, built out of scrap lumber and windfall and like eighty-five dollars’ worth of supplies [ed. note: it was $65] that hosted parties and get-togethers and just hanging out being in a place stuff, community stuff, that came together and tore itself apart all in one summer and was gone before I even got here. It, seized my imagination, and when I started to write City of Roses, it couldn’t help but work its way into a story about magic in Portland, this fantasy—

And I’d like to blame it on a certain blogospheric kerfluffle, I would, the deprecating shove I gave that word, “fantasy,” the irony with which I larded it, but that would be wholly unfair; I would’ve done it anyway. It’s a ’zine crowd, and of all the worlds I flit about, gadfly-fashion, comics and genre, fandom and criticism, politics and self-publishing, it’s the ’zinesters where I feel the least at home? —For all that I, y’know, make ’zines, pretty much the only necessary and sufficient condition for being considered as such—certainly far more than I do comics or fandom or criticism or anything else. —Oh but there’s more to it than that; there’s all the myriad unspoken ways and means, and beyond the staples and the xeroxing, well. —I always feel off-kilter, doggedly serious where light-fingered irony is called for; digging for sarcasm when the mood’s gone earnest, and off-kilter makes me defensive. I lard. I shove.

—this fantasy, I said—

And the thing was, this was the transition in the introduction, shifting deftly from the personal history of the thing to how it’s situated in the story, the excerpt I was going to read, which is about Luke, and Jessie, and the ghost of a memory of a teahouse, but leaning on that word, defending what it might leave open, betraying it to reach out to the audience, hey, we both know what’s what, right?

This would be why preparation and ritual are essential to any proper working, and also why you don’t whip up a bit of untested oratory half an hour before you go on.

—I botched the transition, is the thing. Got tangled up in Luke and Lake, Thursdays and Mondays, continuity hobgoblins, what-happened-last-week-on, losing the feel of it in the handful of all the facts, and tripping over my feet, as it were, in my haste to get on with it. —The reading itself went well enough; it’s got some swing to it, the excerpt I read, builds a head of steam under an adolescent tantrum, and I do all right with something like that. But I’d lost them, with the shove, and the stumble. The applause was polite.

—Filed 3514 days ago to Indulgences; Comment.

Reading into.

Well it’s been a while since that sort of thing went on.

And as usual during the writing it got to the point that anything I meanwhile read could’ve been folded in, and I honestly couldn’t say whether you ought to then mistrust the writing that I do, or the reading? —Like as a for instance this piece by Anna Zett on Jurassic World (and what is it with the ice-cold takes on this godawful sequel, damn) which keeps sending up offhanded flares that briefly, brightly, coldly light up just how many and how big, the consequences that depend from the central image-premise, the dragon-like dinosaur-sylph, their skeletons the remnants of an age before a history-ending time-splitting world storm of extinction, and O the FANTASY of using SCIENCE to conjure them once more, spiced with a dash of HORROR at our hubris, thinking we could bring back something so long lost, and all because we wanted, we wanted to justify, we wanted to punish ourselves for wanting just one shivering glimpse—

—but that, that’s the first film, and we’re on, what, the fourth iteration?

There is only one thing that is new in Jurassic World: it is the lack of references to paleontology or what they call prehistory—in fact to any history from before the 1990s. Whatever happened before the supposed “end of history,” before digitization, before the creation of the brand, does not matter anymore. These dinosaurs are no longer creatures of a prehistoric time. They have changed their genealogy, become 250 million years younger and entirely virtual. Therefore they look exactly like they did in 1993, despite the fact that in the meantime the look of many dinosaurs has changed significantly. According to recent research, now mostly based on dinosaurs found in China, these bird-like animals may have had bright feathers and multicolored skin. But feathered raptors and colorful T-Rexes are missing from the American theme park of the present. The filmmakers decided to just stick to the brand. So despite the ubiquity of up-to-date smartphones and smart watches, despite its slick corporate aesthetics, Jurassic World is a spectacle of nostalgia.

The goal has become to conjure a(nother) dinosaur—not to reach for that desire, doubt, belief by conjuring a dinosaur. —And oh but this is such a jejune, an anodyne reading—instead, instead: you remember when Kristen McQueary wrote that column which will forever hang about her neck, about how she wants Chicago to have a Katrina of its own, a world storm that might (okay, figuratively) wash away the old bad union-haunted world and usher in a shining post-apocalypse of neoliberal ahistory? (McQueary has since nopologized.) —Anyway, while that was raging, I ended up reading this profile by Carrie Schedler of chef and restauranteur Iliana Regan, Queen of Midwestern Cuisine—

In the woods, Regan sees a lot of things people miss—and what she sees has become the basis for one of the most distinctive restaurants in the city, a scrappy tasting-menu-only spot in an unmarked storefront on Western Avenue, sandwiched between a soccer store and a tire shop. The 35-year-old opened Elizabeth in 2012, and in her first gig as head chef, she has garnered (and maintained) a Michelin star and been named a semifinalist for a James Beard Award for best chef in the Great Lakes region. The first round of tickets for her last menu, a foraged riff on the foods of the Game of Thrones books, sold out in two hours. “What she’s doing is completely unique,” says one of Chicago’s most celebrated chefs, Schwa owner Michael Carlson. “She’s clever, smart. Totally innovative.”

Elizabeth often draws comparisons to Noma, the restaurant in Copenhagen headed by René Redzepi and considered one of the world’s best, in part because of how it revels in the not particularly celebrated bounties of the Nordic countryside. Regan does the same with the bounty of northwest Indiana. And in doing so, she has accomplished the unthinkable: She’s taken the food of the Midwest and made it sexy.

And, I mean, yes, but, there’s a lot in here for me to like, to find her likable, this Regan, quiet, bookish, inked and buzz-cut, speaking in paragraphs, sharp dry wit and ready smile, but mostly her cantankerous persnicketiness, her inability to sum up, her indisputable drive, that’s found such a constructive outlet, recreating and reinventing flavors from her family, and I’d try a piece of that smoked watermelon, hell yes. But; but—

Prepping for this summer’s menu—an exploration of the foods of the American Indians who lived in the Great Lakes region in the 18th and 19th centuries—was a months-long labor of love. Spare moments were spent poring over articles about the eating habits of the Ojibwa tribe and scouring cookbooks for tips on how to make pemmican, an energy-bar-like blend of meat, fat, and fruit consumed by the native people of North America. Diners can choose from two categories: the meat-heavy Hunter or the vegetable-focused Gatherer. Edible ants will make an appearance. “I’m approaching it from a scholarly standpoint,” Regan says.

The world storm’s long since gone, here, but its effects are everywhere you look, in how it is she’s come to find herself in Northern Indiana, summoning up authentic local flavors rooted away off in Scandinavia and Eastern Europe, in how she’s left to scour a scholarly apparatus of cookbooks for hints of the food that was eaten by people who yet live all about the Great Lakes—though mostly further north now, granted, up in Michigan, and Canada. —There’s nothing of the sylph about food; it’s either there, on the plate, or not—but flavor’s the very essence of a sylph, half-made or more as it is of the stories we tell about where it came from, what was done to it, who figured that out, and when, and how it’s best eaten when served up before us, and this fantasy of reaching back to half-understood notions of the food of an utterly other, othered world—but all these conclusions I’m drawing, from a single paragraph written by someone as tangentially involved as any journalist. —And I’d have to admit to some curiosity, on my part? —Certainly more than for a Game of Thrones menu, say.

Oh but maybe this old appreciation of Kate Bush that I tripped over on Twitter?

Although [Wilhelm] Reich’s writings found favour in more occult circles, mysticism and hippy platitudes get short shrift in Bush’s songs. Images of trees, mountains, skies and waves—romantic clichés on the surface—are militantly material. For both her and Reich, nature in all its chaos and danger is the energy required to be fully human, from the kick inside to Aboriginal “dreamtime.” This theme has been explored since “Them Heavy People,” her 1978 tribute to Gurdjieff and whirling dervishes. As with the momentum of so many of her songs, the modern subject tends to retreat from this energy under the fragile armor of contrived personæ (“Wow,” “Babooshka”) or technological hubris (“Breathing,” “Experiment IV”). Since the industrial revolution, unmetered energy has been treated like some ineffectual ghost, yet her lyrics often read like open invitations to it. The Red Shoes alludes to the dangers of unleashing dormant ecstasy as much as Wuthering Heights. However they may be the kind of energies that don’t need to be harnessed so much as embraced, the knowledge that is “sat there in your lap”—

—and I was going to I don’t know get excited about that move there being a way through and out the recognition and return of Clute’s idea of fantasy, for the here-and-now, the reading-into impulse gibbering full-speed behind my wide unblinking eyes, that to be human is to be destroyed by extremes, of Light, of Dark, of that very energy, so it’s only human to turn away, “modern subject” or no, and remember what John Henry Tyler said, about how it is we’re all connected, so we’re all contaminated, every last one of us is tainted, purity is the last thing we can stand, but Christ, why was he pointing a gun at her? What the hell was that about? —But then I remembered it’s essentially the endgame of any nominally mimetic text that dips a toe in the shallow end of the numinous—recognize, return, retreat, refuse, restore. —I can be quite slow, sometimes.

(A train of thought is not unlike a story, in that so much depends on where you manage to stop.)

I could point back to this possibly alternate take on the Triskelion, as I’ve been noting it, our paranoia positing (and fomenting) actual and imagined dynamos, frantically striving for some sort of order; the idylls our dreams, those high-water marks we can see with the right kind of eyes, both the aims of and threatened by the dynamos; the decoherence event lying necessarily in wait, to tumble whatever houses of cards either might toss up, almost by accident—or maybe just admit, here and now, between ourselves, that these Great Weird (Boy?) Theories are just the work of idle hands at dynamos, inimical to idylls, and, I dunno. Go do the work, instead of pretending to have thought about the work yet to be done?

So, go. Read this instead.

—Filed 3518 days ago to Paralitticisms; Comment.

Phantasia.

Never trust—no, wait, always, always—always trust someone who cites Buffy Sainte-Marie:

One of the many interesting responses I got (see note below) was from David Hebblethwaite, who among other things said “Whenever I read a folk tale, I’m struck by how little resemblance genre fantasy bears to it”—an experience I share. Now, in some respects this is only to be expected, as the world that produced these folk tales has by and large departed, but in other respects it is a damning critique of a “genre”—and here I think that often ridiculous word applies—that wants to have it both ways, to claim a continuity with that world and to stand in a position of superiority over it: to colonize these abandoned landscapes at the same time as the positivism they share sets them on fire.

And it’s, it’s—it’s not that I don’t agree with him, because he’s right, you know, but he’s wrong, right? So we’re on the same page? I mean—wait. I mean—

—and the reason I’ve got so much wry in my grin is we both want the same thing, Ethan and I, after all: the cold clear water, the clean pure hit, to use self-consciously inopportune phrases I’ve used before: the good text (for want of a better). (You did go read his post already, didn’t you? And you followed the links, like this one, and this?) —It’s just that, for him, the wellspring’s in the hills of SF:

And it occurred to me that all this may be a pointer as to why I find myself drawn more to SF than to fantasy: for while the best SF brings the inexplicable to the world of explication and finds the cracks in rationalism through which the irrational (which never really went away) returns, fantasy, perhaps, tends to do the reverse: it brings reason to the irrational, puts magic into a “system.” And this is a movement I find, well, distasteful at best.

And I agree! Dear sweet Lord do I agree. —It’s just, it’s only that I tend to lay the sins of that systematization at the feet of the S in SF—

Therefore, then, URBAN FANTASY is functionally and structurally inimical to the ineffable, the numinous, to magic, to, well, fantasy; is, in point of fact, that singular vulture Poe mistook for SCIENCE, glowering at us all from the rim of a bone-dry glass.

And, well, yes, I am talking about fantasy there, but a specific kind, I mean, that particular, I don’t know, idiom let’s say, URBAN FANTASY as opposed to, y’know, /urban fantasy/ or «urban fantasy», y’know, because, and I mean it’s easy to miss, sure, you haven’t been here in a while, or before, but that was the culmination, the apotheosis even, of that long and winding argument to prove or at least demonstrate that URBAN FANTASY qua urban fantasy as it is spoke in this day an’ age is really, y’know SF, which is, and maybe it would help if I weren’t steering into the skid I’m trying to warn you about, I don’t know, but, but—

—it’s tempting, it is, to handwave any difference away: to agree and accept, to say, yes, we each recognize the kernel of what we’re after in that which the other exalts—and so, then, they must be the same thing! And that which we each disdain, and of which we try to wave y’all off, that’s also all one thing, the other thing, against which what we want’s defined. —There’s even a rhetorical move I could make, reaching back to what I’ve called Clute’s triskelion, his grammar of fantastika, to clock the moves that fantasy’s supposed to make, turning away from the new thing in its world (seen as a wrongness, but anything not right is wrong) and returning, retreating into what it recognizes; that SF reaches for that conceptual breakthrough the new thing allows, demands, and pries open enough of a crack to let us see beyond the fields we know, just for a moment—“A great deal of science fiction is about what the field’s insiders often call ‘sense of wonder,’” says Patrick Nielsen Hayden—

a quality not entirely unrelated to the good old Romantic Sublime. Many of the genre’s classics are in essence carefully-tuned machines designed to attract readers whose primary conscious loyalty is to rationalism, and lead them by a series of plausible contrivances to a sudden crescendo of mystical awe.

And “sense of wonder,” wow, and “Romantic Sublime,” indeed, that presque vu, where words do fail, and couldn’t we just scratch out “science fiction,” lightly, bluely pencil in something more inclusive, like, oh, “Fantastika”? And call it a day? —Oh but no, no, and not just because I’ve gone and reductio’d a gross oversimplification well beyond ad absurdum, but also because we cannot always be celebrating; because elegies can be cold and clear and pure; because the recognitions and returns of fantasy as Clute has set it out (as I’ve read Clute’s setting out) can be such shiveringly awful, terrible, powerful, necessary moves. Because while an argument can sermonize and a sermon can argue with the best of them, still: an argument with the universe is not a sermon on the way things ought to be. Sorry, no, as the man says: if people remembered the same they would not be different people. It’s much the same with modes, or idioms, or genera.

(Or reading protocols, I suppose.)

Two households then, in—what is this, Verona? Yeesh—break out an ancient grudge once more, and in his post (remember that post? This is a post about that post), Ethan throws down on how, exactly, the two are not alike in dignity:

science fiction is written by people who do “believe in” science, while fantasy fiction is written mostly by people who so axiomatically disbelieve magic that they describe what they themselves are writing as fantasy!

And while I do not bite my thumb at this, y’all, still do I bite my thumb, y’all.

—I should note I do not mean for Mr. Hilary’s “you” to be Ethan—though it could be, it could well be; for the purposes of this essay I’m the one standing squarely in Hilary’s sights—myself, or any fantasist who so axiomatically might be said to disbelieve in magic. —Belief, and disbelief, is such a complex snarl, as Ethan goes on to point out in a footnote, and complicating the question thusly spares me the (relatively trivial) task of finding fantasists who do believe, who profess to believe, in astrology, who’ve spoken to angels, who’ve divined the future, who’ve however successfully or otherwise importuned gods of wealth and luck for help in landing their next gig, who’ve bowed down before a snake-puppet. (The world storm’s ravaged what went before, leaving us shivering naked before a positivist, scientifactual universe, cutting us off from any but the dimmest tinny echoes of those since-lost sylphs—if only all these woolly-headed superstitious demon-haunted God-bothering fools could wake up enough to see that!) —I say “relatively trivial” not only because it’s easy, but because it’s a sideshow, a distraction, not germane: that a fantasist believes in, wants to believe in, doubts that anyone could believe in magic—the mere fact of that BELIEF is itself no marker of an ability to gift us sylphs, or dancing mountains, any more than an author of SF who, believing with the most current data that this universe of ours must eventually putter out in an unimaginable Big Freeze, could yet not write a moving meditation hingeing on a Big Crunch.

Belief, «belief», BELIEF is not enough: it’s, well, it’s not the quality or the nature of that belief, oh no, dear no, nor is it what might be believed, per se, to pretend for a moment any of that could meaningfully be separated from the rest of it, ha, it’s—well, it’s the thinking-through of that belief, and how that process-of-thinking is reflected in the work, and how much the work itself is part and parcel of that thought, and would you look at how the words start chipping away at themselves? —If this axiom is accepted, that we speak not of belief as a brutally simple binary but rather as a contradictory, tangled, frustrating thinking-through of desire and doubt and determination, and if we further accept that this process can be applied either to that which we think or want or doubt could ever be be true, or to that which we all know is false (and please, do note how provisional and contingent are the TRUE and the FALSE and the WE), then what I think becomes of the argument in “Magic is afoot”—which I do not disagree with, mind!—is that a BELIEF in that which is more likely to be congruent with the positivist, scientifactual detritus of the world storm is thus more likely to result in works that, well, that will—

attract readers whose primary conscious loyalty is to rationalism, and lead them by a series of plausible contrivances to a sudden crescendo of mystical awe

—than, y’know, a BELIEF in that which does not.

(Do I believe in magic? Do I BELIEVE in magic? —I dunno. You tell me.)

We’re getting to the point where words fail, is the thing. —The weak lies, and the strong.

I am a fantasist; I fantasize, though you should understand how hard it is for me to say such a thing: I can’t even say I am a writer (which I manifestly am) without an eye-roll, a sigh, a deprecatory chuckle, and then the equivocations. —I hesitate before I tell you what I write is urban fantasy, for all that what I write is squarely within that conversation, so much so that I went and wrote a whole (yet uncompleted) series of blog posts, trying to figure out what exactly had become of urban fantasy, or URBAN FANTASY, and how and whither and why, and also Clute and Mendlesohn; Mendlesohn and Clute—

The Great Work – Further up; further, in – What we talk about when we talk about what we’re pointing to – Ambit valent – Obversity – Anent the preceding – You can add up the parts; you won’t have the sum – Black hearts and coronets – Clews

And that’s mostly just there for the sake of convenience. What you need to take away from that to begin to follow what and how and why here is the (sigh) (self-deprecatory, equivocating) axiom that—

Urban fantasy is SF.

And of course it’s ridiculous and of course it’s contradictory and of course it’s a paradox and of course it’s patently silly and of course it’s something I’d latch onto. And part of what I’m getting at is the shade I can throw on what I’ve seen is—wrong, I hesitate to say, perhaps I’d rather say it’s not to my liking, but, I mean, you can see it’s wrong, right? The urge to systematize and gamify, to taxonomize, solutionize, to formulate, to demonstrate one’s mastery of wonder by engineering plausible contrivances to render, as Benjanun Sriduangkaew once put it, “the unusual—magic, etc.—into ordinary, comfortable majority terms”? To try to approach the sublime through faux-world–weary ironic mimesis, to use the voice of a jaded detective, a solver of mysteries, to conjure mystery itself? This category error that mistakes recipe for meal, prescription for cure, a map for the world about us, and a gesture for the deed? That brings every sharp and grasping vulture-claw of SCIENCE it can find to bear on bringing MAGIC down?

—So you can maybe see why I was laughing in terror and delight to see FANTASY damned as the wellspring of these scientifictional crimes. (—Which, I’d argue, are merely more easy to commit, and easier by far to see, in a fantastic mode.)

But! But, but, but. —There’s a second meaning to the motto. (It’s a paradox. How could there not be.) —Urban fantasy is, or can be, SF in a more strictly definitional sense: it doesn’t, or doesn’t have to, follow the Cluthian triskelion’s track for FANTASY: to begin in wrongness, proceed through thinning, have a moment of recognition, and then return; it can rather (though it doesn’t have to) take as a new thing in our world the actual presence of this or that bit of the fantastic, proceed through the cognitive estrangement this engenders to some sort of conceptual breakthrough that leads, sublimely, to a topia—the SCIENCE FICTION track, you see—

And I sigh, I chuckle wryly, I begin to stammer equivocations. (We will leave off, for the moment, the fact that urban fantasy can easily be HORROR; that horror is quite often URBAN FANTASY. I’m getting dizzy enough as it is. I’ll forget which shell the pea is under.)

So if UF is SF (which it isn’t, come on, don’t be silly), why am I even moved to make this argument? Much less at such length?

Science fiction readers know in their bones that there’s a big universe out there, and that science increasingly changes everyday life.

Which is from this, a fine-enough piece of bang-zowie boosterism from Ken MacLeod, and I quote it mostly so I can strike some poses against it: sure, I say, it’s a big universe out there, but that doesn’t prevent SF from smearing it over with the same old operatic empires propped up by Hornblower’d starships filled to the brim with battle-armored interstellar jump troops on a bug-hunt; and hey, what FANTASY readers know is what it is that’s in our bones, and the bones of the very stories that make us make those satrapies, over and over again. —And I could go on, spinning equivalencies, matching move for move, but—

But.

—to claim a continuity with that world and to stand in a position of superiority over it: to colonize these abandoned landscapes at the same time as the positivism they share sets them on fire.

That’s what’s kept me up at night, what gnaws at me; the difference I can’t wave away.

I started to get at it way back when, digging into the rhetorics of fantasy, and its necessary, othering split of everyday HERE and numinous, ineluctable THERE (abandoned, aflame), the fraught congress between (which simplicity gets complicated, say, when you read contemporary fantasy, gently working that mode of ironic mimesis, whose HERE is not the here that you assume). —I got closer to it, rather cluelessly, some years before, when I attempted not to say something about Racefail:

I can’t think of another contemporary genre whose tropes are so nakedly the fruits of cultural appropriation. Whose toolkit is so openly dependent on the tactics of cultural appropriation. —We go to write about the fantastic, and so we sauce our pastoral dish with a biting dash of Other, because what is more strange or fantastic than the Stuff from Beyond the Fields We Know? —And more: we appropriate our appropriations, cannibalizing the books our books are made of until Fantasyland begins to take on its own dim shape, with folklore and folkways we all agree on that nonetheless have never existed anywhere in the REAL world. Miles and miles of books and not a TRUE or AUTHENTIC moment in any of them, and how proud we are of that!

SF appropriates, sure; but it doesn’t have to. Fantasy, to do what it does, must.

“I was like, I hate acting.” Pause. “I kind of always hated acting!” Pause. “I hate fantasy.” Pause. “I kind of always hated fantasy!”

—Rose McGowan

—Filed 3520 days ago to Paralitticisms; Comment.

Sighting; Thickening; Revel and Aftermath.

I was going to, I don’t know; I’ve been reading Cyclonopedia and also old Frank Herbert, which proves something or other about the shortcomings of holistic systems that admit there are inevitably shortcomings to holistic systems? —The ()hole system is, of course, a system that demonstrates systems can’t possibly demonstrate anything about the world because of all the, you know, holes, that systems and worlds can’t help but have, or, as Lewis Orne might’ve put it, had he existed—

Part of our problem centers on the effort to introduce external control for a system-of-systems that should be maintained by internal balancing forces. We are not attempting to recognize and refrain from inhibiting those self-regulating systems in our species upon which species survival depends. We are ignoring our own feedback functions.

—which passage prompts any of a number of gobsmacked retorts, foremost of which might be, who died and made you God? (—The Author, but we digress.) —So the Herbert (from which that’s snipped) is not what I would call all that good, per se; I first read it years ago, and didn’t much get it then, and mostly have it now for the cover, and re-reading it was struck by how the first draft of the Bene Gesserit is a small mean ugly thing indeed, this ethnically and genderly essentialist conspiracy of the country club’s women’s auxiliary, and if the moment when Lewis Orne winks slowly and deliberately at the two men isn’t the first time I wanted to punch this ersatz kwisatz hard in the snoot, it’s definitely when I wanted to punch him the hardest. —But: the broader context: the system-of-these-symptoms: the Golden Age trope of the fallen empire, slowly rebuilding itself, the Lost Colonies drifted from the glorious Galactic Mean, the labor of bringing them back to the fold being the four-short-stories’ traffic of our fixup: it only just occurred to me, this patronizingly pat justification for benignly cultural imperialism must’ve been drawn from various collective experiences with implementing the Marshall Plan, and the Allied Occupation(s).

All of which, of course, must fail:

The polytics of the ()holey complex defies existing models of the harvesting of power correlated to the logic of the ground and the politics of whole. For the world order, inconsistent events around the world are failures or setbacks for the dominant political models. According to the politics of poromechanical earth, however, inconsistencies and regional disparities across the globe constitute the body of polytics. The emergence of two entities (political formation, military, economic, etc.) from two different locations on the ground is inconsistent, but according to the logic of ()hole complex, they are terminally interconnected and consistent. In terms of emergence, consistency or connectivity should not be measured by the ground or the body of solid as a whole but according to a degenerate model of wholeness and a poromechanics of the event.

Which together with what went before mostly goes to show how much better Herbert got when he added some Spice to his model.

Petro states aren’t like other states for several reasons, says Karl.

For starters, their dependence on oil profits breaks the necessary link between taxation and representation. Instead of extracting state funds from citizens, wealth magically comes from the ground. This makes governments unaccountable; it means that people don’t demand to see how money is spent.

And oil governments, in turn, tend to treat their citizens like subjects, either paying them off or, when necessary, repressing them. Wedded to boom and bust cycles, oil-dependent regimes are either overspending to keep themselves in power or accruing debt to mask problems with seemingly no ability for fiscal reform.

Oil and highly centralized rule go together. Oil wealth permits governments to dismantle accountability mechanisms, weaken bureaucracies and undermine the rule of law.

Karl further found that although petro states appear strong, and some governments last for long periods of time, these oil infused regimes are highly vulnerable. When they collapse, they fall apart very quickly. Neither autocracies nor democracies are immune.

But now I’m just sticking things to the wall pretty much at random; I might as well point to the future of Rome, or idylls and dynamos; instead, I’ll just ponder the irony of finally having upgraded my CMS to fix the behind-the-scenes PHP errors only to discover it’s borked some of my lovingly hand-crafted title effects. —You fix one damn thing, three others break…

—Filed 3744 days ago to Paralitticisms; Comment.

There were still a number of these little fragments of glass floating about in the air, and now you shall hear what happened with one of them.

I wasn’t going to see it. —The ads looked atrocious: more of the same grim bonhomie that’d soured me on Tangled, and do they even give a damn about how ugly this participial trend in titling comes off? Like they’re steering into what otherwise would’ve been an unavoidable Tony Awards skit, Neil Patrick Harris shouting Frozen! Tangled! Tattered! Feathered! Sorcelled! Fired!

I wasn’t gonna see it, and then I saw this:

So, yeah. Well.

This snow-flake grew larger and larger, till at last it became the figure of a woman, dressed in garments of white gauze, which looked like millions of starry snow-flakes linked together. She was fair and beautiful, but made of ice—shining and glittering ice. Still she was alive and her eyes sparkled like bright stars, but there was neither peace nor rest in their glance. She nodded towards the window and waved her hand.

“It was the best movie ever that I ever saw,” pronounced Taran as we left the theater. We’d talked beforehand, to let her know how it was going to be in a theater, and loud, and there would be scary bits, and she promised to be as brave as a bumblebee and not yell. She did yell: “I want to watch something else!” which is what she says at home, whenever a show gets too intense. —Not so much at the spills and thrills, the wolves or the roaring snow-beast; these she took in stride. But when actual stakes were on the line, however quietly: Anna, betrayed by clever Hans, left to die by the unlit fire. —You know this won’t be allowed to happen, and so do I; there are Rules. But Taran’s only five. She doesn’t know the Rules yet, and can’t bear what knowing the Rules makes bearable: the possibility of what might happen, if. What might be lost if not. —She wants to watch something else.

You know this, and I do, and for sure and certain they know the Rules: that Good, imperiled, will recover, restored with the help of True Love; that Evil will be vanquished, and if not plunged to its death will at least be roundly humiliated, kicked in the butt on the way to the brig. Way of the world. Well, a world. This world. —Oh, there’s some little flexibility to the Rules, changes that might be rung, and they are, most notably in the form and fashion True Love takes (though they telegraph their punch with constant emphasized references to it as an Act thereof). But: Good, triumphant; Evil, vanquished; swell to the chorus of the theme and: credits.

He told her he could do mental arithmetic, as far as fractions, and that he knew the number of square miles and the number of inhabitants in the country. And she always smiled so that he thought he did not know enough yet, and she looked round the vast expanse as she flew higher and higher with him upon a black cloud, while the storm blew and howled as if it were singing old songs.

You know this, and so do I—but I’d seen that song, remember?

A mostly generic new-model Disney princess belts through a radio-friendly rip of “Defying Gravity” (it’s okay, they got Idina Menzel to sing it) and blows her way through a magical-girl transformation into something of a different genre, if not richer and more strange: something of an actual, maybe, antagonist? (—Not that the Snow Queen is all that much of an antagonist in her own story; not that her own story even has that much of an antagonist, aside from cosmopolitan sophistication, or maybe atheism; any given intellectualism, really, and also robbers.) —But: a Disney princess? An antagonist? —She sheds her cloak, her glove, her tiara, her (as the lyrics make painfully clear) past, but: look at the joy, as she finally lets it go, unleashes the magic that’s been leaking frightfully from her all along thus far, learns what she can do with it, and how far it can take her, and how (through that scrim of Disney CGI) beautiful it is—but also how cold, how inimical, inhuman, how—therefore—villainous? —And the transformation, the (yes) sexualization, through that same scrim—a sure sign of villainy, in Disney. —But the va-va-voom slink, the precisely flawless makeup under the artfully touseled hair, it’s all a bit too studiedly much, isn’t it? A Disney, a Barbie-doll idea of sophistication, a perfectly realized burst of adolescent excess, of someone trying something new, of trying the very act of trying something new, of succeeding wildly in that first wild flush, giddily heedless of the cost they know they don’t, can’t know.

I may have watched it a few times.

So I knew, but I was starting to think that maybe, this time, I didn’t, I wouldn’t know. A glimpse of a possible if, a might-maybe. The Rules were creaking, bending, those serried ranks of Good and Evil muddling, confused: would she be triumphant? Or vanquished? I didn’t know! Or thought maybe I didn’t, anyway.

As Anderson-Lopez recalls, “Let It Go” was the first song she and her husband wrote that ended up staying in the movie. Its composition also led the film’s team to rethink its entire approach to the character of Elsa, a.k.a. Frozen‘s take on Hans Christian Anderson’s Snow Queen. In previous drafts, Menzel’s character had a villainous bent. Once the couple penned “Let It Go,” though, they finally began to understand what really made Elsa tick: She’s a scared, repressed teenager, not a malicious ice queen. “As the movie got rewritten and rewritten around ‘Let It Go’ to earn that moment,” Lopez explains, “she became more and more the protagonist along with Anna” — Elsa’s younger sister, voiced by Bell.

If I’d read that before I’d gone to see the movie, I would’ve.

The very idea that a scared, repressed teen could ever become the most malicious of wintry metaphors. That a malicious ice queen could ever be identified with, could possibly be sympathetic, could be a protagonist. I mean really.

X’s first novel, title, was rejected by a publisher because its female protagonist didn’t “triumph over all adversity,” thereby providing the requisite happy ending. XX’s title sold to a German publisher for six figures, but American publishers refused to buy it unless she made her lead character “more remorseful” for having a passionate fling. An editor of XXX’s title said that although readers would be “haunted and moved” by her protagonists, she should turn them into characters that readers would regard with “genuine affection.”

The original soundtrack album for Frozen includes a number of demos, drafts of tracks that didn’t make it into the (currently) final version, that suggest directions and misdirections in the revising and rewriting Kristen Anderson-Lopez refers to, herrings kippered and otherwise. —One of these demos is for “Life’s Too Short,” and in its introduction, Robert Lopez tells us, “One of the songs we knew we had to write was, the song between Elsa and Anna, at the end of which, Elsa had to freeze Anna’s heart with a blast of magic.”

Anderson-Lopez chimes in: “This first attempt was more confrontational than what ultimately ended up in the movie, but we enjoyed going to that drama place.”

It’s an oddly sprightly track, for a confrontation—

—but there’s still a charge there, an anger, on the parts of both our protagonists: a drama: they sing at each other, to each other, and what they want—who they are—is set in direct conflict: Elsa, terrified she’s the prophesied unending winter, giving in to her frozen power anyway, hiding her fear with spite and rage; Anna, who in another cut song refers to herself as the spare to the heir, eager to save their little realm, even if it’s from her own beloved sister—until the song climaxes with that magical strike: “I’m not the prophesy!” cries Elsa, as she fulfills it.

But conflict is confrontational; people get hurt, and people do hurt, and when it’s over someone will have won, however provisionally, and someone will have lost, something. Unless it’s muddled, confused, someone will be triumphant, however muted; someone will be vanquished. The story will have chosen, because there are Rules, and the logic of them works backwards as well as forwards: someone will turn out to have been Good, and someone will have been Evil all along.

And so in the revising, and the rewriting, to soften, remove, erase her villainous bent, to make her more likeable, to earn that moment—of sympathy, of identification, of grace—the conflict is ducked, dodged, leashed, concealed, not revealed:

They sing past each other, now, in this final version: choruses and recitatives that interlock musically, but don’t respond to, don’t struggle with, don’t even acknowledge each other. When Elsa learns that in letting go she’s released enough power to freeze the realm, she doesn’t retort; she crumples into a muttering despair that Anna’s soaring refrain doesn’t even notice. And when Elsa lashes out, the blow that freezes Anna’s heart, it’s unconscious, accidental; she doesn’t even notice. —No intentional villany, here—just misunderstanding: regrettable, yes, but once explained, easily enough forgiven. Swell, and: credits.

(It’s not just our Snow Queen’s possible-maybe villainy that’s softened, of course. In that unused demo, Anna’s insisting Elsa put her gloves back on, to stop eternal winter—the gloves she’d let go. And this is a demand more specific, more actionable than her vague if plaintive cries of don’t shut me out, don’t live in fear, just unfreeze it, you can do it ’cause I know you can! —A stifling, smothering, repressive demand, a frightening demand that directly opposes what Elsa wants, what we’ve been told Elsa needs, and thus a hurtful demand—and while a protagonist, a hero, can deliberately hurt a proper villain, a malicious ice queen, with no mark or stain or blemish to her character, hurting a fellow protagonist is, well. Tricky. Not likeable. So soften; so leash; conceal, don’t feel, don’t reveal. Rewrite. Revise.)

One day, when he was in a merry mood, he made a looking-glass which had the power of making everything good or beautiful that was reflected in it almost shrink to nothing, while everything that was worthless and bad looked increased in size and worse than ever. The most lovely landscapes appeared like boiled spinach, and the people became hideous, and looked as if they stood on their heads and had no bodies. Their countenances were so distorted that no one could recognize them, and even one freckle on the face appeared to spread over the whole of the nose and mouth. The demon said this was very amusing. When a good or pious thought passed through the mind of any one it was misrepresented in the glass; and then how the demon laughed at his cunning invention. All who went to the demon’s school—for he kept a school—talked everywhere of the wonders they had seen, and declared that people could now, for the first time, see what the world and mankind were really like. They carried the glass about everywhere, till at last there was not a land nor a people who had not been looked at through this distorted mirror. They wanted even to fly with it up to heaven to see the angels, but the higher they flew the more slippery the glass became, and they could scarcely hold it, till at last it slipped from their hands, fell to the earth, and was broken into millions of pieces.

Protagonist, antagonist, villainy, Good, Evil, Rules—I hope the soaring refrain hasn’t misled you as to whatever point it is I think I’m making with these muttered divagations. —I’m not, mind, arguing that Elsa should more properly have been a villain, any more than I’m pleased with Anna as a plucky, fiesty-pants protagonist. I mean, Good, Evil, anti and pro—what are we really on about, here?

Frozen is a fantasy, which means (broadly, crudely) it’s about restoration and return: of proper summer, undone and overwhelmed by the unnatural winter that Elsa embodies, had been holding back by force of will and gritted teeth and gloves, and closed doors now thrown open, now relaxed, now, at last, herself—and there, right there, that’s the kernel: in threatening what’s seen as natural, usual, expected, Elsa’s turned against what’s Good; in trying to restore and return, Anna’s doing the story’s work, fixed against Evil, as ineluctably as the tide. The efforts the movie must go to, to face them both in the same direction, as jointly likeable protagonists, according to the calculus of these Rules; the Evil the story requires, thus unmoored, has only clever Hans to bear its weight, and while his heel-turn’s admirably, literally chilling, he’s far too slight for the existential threat of eternal winter, of summer forever forgone. —No, that’s resolved almost as an afterthought, an accident: “Of course!” cries Elsa. “Love!” —And just like that the power she’d let go, the existential threat, is leashed; can now be let out, on holidays, and state occasions, as lovely sheets of skating ice and charming flurries, rather than snow-beasts and threatening, phallic spikes.

That’s all it took; that’s all the conflict required: the restoration, the mere expression of a love that was never really in jeopardy. Elsa’s rejection, her letting go, her moment, her song, the one I saw, up there, is all undone; was undone, when she crumpled at the first sign of opposition, the first indication of hardship. In an older version of the story, in an earlier draft of this story, she’d’ve been a proper villain, and fought for what she wanted. It would’ve meant something, to her, to the story, to us. It would’ve been earned. —But in that story she would have to lose, would have to have been vanquished, would have hurt someone, would not have been likeable, could not have been a protagonist, or a Disney princess.

Good, this Good, according to these Rules, because there can be no real dissent among its partisans, is necessarily univocal: we all of us good people want the same thing, right? Essentially? The restoration of the natural order, the return, undisturbed, of the safety of our realm. And so there is no contest. There can be no contest. Not if you want to be triumphant.

And the buttercups sparkled gayly, and looked again at Gerda. What song could the buttercups sing? It was not about Kay.

But that’s according to those Rules. —What I’d seen? That moment, above, the one they wanted to earn? What I’d hoped that maybe this time I wouldn’t know? That maybe this time the Rules themselves were being questioned? The kernel, cracked? That more than one vision of Good was in play, on the surface, explicitly, rather than desperately read into the cracks and fissures, the what-ifs and the mightabeens? And none of them wrenched into the role of villain, of antagonist, of Evil, despite their differences? That—instead—forged somehow between them some actual forgiveness, however fleeting? One that meant something because of what it cost, to give, and to receive? That this might be the 102 minutes’ traffic of our screen?

I mean, I guess what I’d been hoping for was a post-Brave princess movie, and what I got instead was post-Wicked. —And this, this wandering argument, this glib anti-climax, none of this is meant to take away from what Frozen manages to accomplish, and even do well; there’s good stuff in there for you. Go, see it, if you haven’t.

But still. —I wanted to watch something else.

—Filed 4107 days ago to Paralitticisms; Comment.

Just the place for a Snark! I have said it thrice:
What I tell you three times is true.

David Auerbach’s review of Pynchon’s Bleeding Edge introduces (to me, at least) three structural motifs in reading this book, and Pynchon: the dynamo; the idyll; the decoherence event. —Each is a response to the irreality of the real, the fundamental meaninglessness of it all, call it what you will: our paranoia positing (and fomenting) actual and imagined dynamos, frantically striving for some sort of order; the idylls our dreams, those high-water marks we can see with the right kind of eyes, both the aims of and threatened by the dynamos; the decoherence event lying necessarily in wait, to tumble whatever houses of cards either might toss up, almost by accident. (Go, read; I’m seeing it with veiled eyes, and he says it better, and anyway there’s diagrams. Go.)

I’m seeing it with veiled eyes because I couldn’t help but sketch out another map on onionskin, lay it over this, and hold them both up to the light: Clute’s triskelion, his three modes of organizing fantastika as responses to the all-swallowing world storm:

• Science Fiction begins with the novum, the new thing, proceeds through cognitive estrangement on its way to a conceptual breakthrough, and ends up in some topia somewhere, in the eye of the storm perhaps, or somewhere through it, past it, beyond;
• Fantasy, as noted, begins in wrongness, proceeds through thinning, has a moment of recognition, and then returns by turning away from the world storm;
• and Horror, which begins with a sighting, then thickens about our protagonists until it can revel in the moment when we cannot look away, and leaves us shivering in its aftermath.

Or: the dynamo; the idyll; the decoherence effect.

Anyway. —There’s all manner of means whereby this conjoint model goes wrong (distinctions between ends and means but the first of them); still. The hairs stood up, on the back of my neck.

—Filed 4195 days ago to Paralitticisms; Comment.

Revolution no. 80.

In fact it will be amazing (only to us imagining it now) how quiet a world it will be. A woman awakes in her house in Sitka, Alaska, to make tea, wake her family, and walk the beach (it runs differently from where it runs today). After meditation she enters into communication with the other syndics of a worldwide revolving presidium, awake early or up late in city communes or new desert oases. Nightlong the avatars have clustered, the informations have been threshed: the continuous town meeting of the global village. There is much to do.

—John Crowley, “The Next Future”

So many little countries, all mindful of death, each disinclined to long journeys. I want to go to there.

—Filed 4486 days ago to Indulgences; Comment.

Progrestasis.

In 1964, Nikolai Kardashev, an astrophysicist involved with the Soviet SETI effort, devised the Kardashev scale: a method of measuring, on a cosmic scale, a civilization’s technological advancement based on the amount of usable energy that civilization has at its disposal.

A Kardashev Type I civilization has at its disposal all of the energy that impinges on its home planet. Using an equation suggested by Carl Sagan, humanity could be rated as a Type .7, as of the 1970s.

Not much has changed in forty years. On a cosmic scale.

A Type II civilization is any civilization capable of harnessing the total energy output of its home star. If we were to unravel the clouds of Jupiter, for instance, we could spin a globular shell one astronomical unit in radius that would be five meters thick, and trap every erg the sun beamed forth thereafter.

A rigid sphere that large would require materials far stronger than any currently known, of course. We might, instead, use swarms of orbiting solar panels to sop it up.

A Type III civilization is any civilization in possession of energy on the scale of its home galaxy. —Those civilizations which originate in dwarf galaxies or irregular clusters are at a significant advantage, here.

Type IV civilizations arbitrage speculative crises in what are to them immaterial commodities, selling short whole Local Groups. They can be detected by sudden changes in the redshift values of various economic indices.

Type V civilizations subsist entirely on the notional energy of Type I civilizations, scheming to become Type IIs. (Civilizations of Type II or better have mastered the art of radiating notional energies at frequencies too low to be heard.)

Type VI civilizations are indistinguishable from nature, and spend their time dreaming of butterflies, or are themselves butterfly-dreams—or the nearest local equivalent, of course.

(Nothing is known of Type VII civilizations. It is best not to consider them.)

When you finally come to understand dark matter, you will have the merest glimpse of the capabilities of a Type VIII civilization.

A Type IX civilization is any civilization that can successfully conceive of a Type X.

—Filed 4560 days ago to Indulgences; Comment.

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