Why Anna Faris will never take a wrench to the face.

For a while I kept up, in addition to this blog and the Sea Water Bliss website, a third web presence, the Spokesmonster Blog, where I talked about my gig in software marketing. This was back in the early days of my marketing career, when I was paid to make funny cartoons. (Nowadays I spend the bulk of my time writing press releases, and it’s pretty hard to blog about that. So the Spokesmonster Blog hasn’t been updated since late last year.)

In a post in 2008, I speculated about why, despite my best efforts to create a gender-balanced roster of cartoon monsters, my cartoons kept on coming out male.

Why is it so much easier to come up with male characters than female characters? I’m not the only animator with this deficiency. Look at the old Disney or Warner Brothers cartoons. Disney had Minnie Mouse and Daisy Duck, but they were stuck in minor supporting roles. Warner Brothers had Bugs Bunny in a dress – that’s about it. The Simpsons, Family Guy, and South Park all have girls in them, but I’d reckon there are ten male characters for every female one.

Why aren’t animators more interested in drawing female characters? Perhaps they’re limited by a sense of decorum. You needn’t have seen too many episodes of The Simpsons to summon up examples of Homer being dropped from great heights, having heavy weights dropped on him, or losing his pants. Those things just don’t happen to Marge or Lisa. If the definition of comedy is inflicting pain or physical humiliation on your characters, and if our culture is uncomfortable with seeing women brutalised in those ways, that’s a powerful disincentive to drawing female cartoons. Why use Daisy Duck if we can’t clunk her over the head for laffs? We’ll just use Donald instead.

I was reminded of these speculations while reading this profile of the comic actress Anna Faris in the April issue of the New Yorker. Why is the funny Faris wasted in so many unfunny movies? Perhaps because the men in charge of making movies aren’t interested in casting funny women:

David Zucker, the director of Airplane! and The Naked Gun, says that the recipe for classic comedy is to pair a dumb, thin guy with a smarter fat guy: Laurel and Hardy, Norton and Kramden, Rubble and Flintstone. “That wouldn’t work with two women, because…” he trailed off, then suggested, “Maybe women have a built-in dignity, and if a woman slips on a banana peel…” After a moment, he concluded, “You know, maybe it’s just that I’ve never tried it.”

…The director Keenen Ivory Wayans says that vanity impedes most actresses’ efforts at humor. Referring to the scene in Old School of Will Ferrell streaking, he said, “If Will Ferrell was a girl, and she’s got a belly and a hairy back, she’s not running down the street naked.”

I think Zucker and Wayans, in their floundering way, are onto something. This “built-in dignity” that Zucker refers to isn’t exactly built-in; it’s imposed. It’s a by-product of our culture’s protective attitude toward girls. Perhaps this attitude is old-fashioned, but human biology is pretty old-fashioned too. As Faris acknowledges:

“I felt like I was born with a disadvantage – not only female but small, and not particularly athletic. If there is a God, it’s so confounding why he made a physically weaker gender, but one that was just as smart. Couldn’t we just be dumb, and weak, and happy?” She smiled. “Such were the thoughts of a fourteen-year-old girl.”

Since Faris was a young girl there’s been a proliferation of ass-kicking Ripleys and Xenas and Buffys in our popular culture – characters intended to subvert our assumptions about female helplessness. Yet in some ways we’re actually more protective of the “physically weaker gender” than we used to be. Take 1940′s The Philadelphia Story – #5 on the American Film Institute’s Top 10 Romantic Comedies list. In the very first scene, Cary Grant grabs his soon-to-be-ex-wife Katharine Hepburn by the face and pushes her roughly to the ground. The accompanying musical cue tells us it’s meant to be funny.

Take that, uppity female!

Nowadays, you’d never show the hero acting so brutishly. In the 21st century, the surest way to make an audience hate a movie bad guy isn’t to show him kicking a dog – it’s to show him abusing his wife.

Even the most cro-magnon Hollywood producer must see that Anna Faris is funny. But he probably also recognizes that there’s a narrower range of funny that she’s able to occupy. Audiences are happy to watch Faris bumble around and trip over her high heels, but we’re not so keen on seeing her get stabbed with a fork, or hit in the face with a wrench, or threatened with anal rape – punishments routinely meted out to male comedians.

Much of modern comedy – especially the kind of comedy favoured by moviegoing teenage boys – is centered on violence. Should we feel bad about that? Maybe we should; I don’t, really. But so long as we laugh at Charlie Day getting fork-stabbed while cringing at Cary Grant’s comedic domestic abuse – so long as that double standard endures – funny women will always be at a disadvantage.

M.

Sea Water Bliss voted off The Duo; other competitors somehow find the will to keep going.

Last night Andrew and I wrapped up our unsuccessful run in a battle-of-the-bands competition called The Duo, at Saskatoon’s Staqatto Lounge. I predicted in advance that we would be undone by the ’60s theme of Week Two, and that’s how it turned out.

We did Adelaide for Week One. We were pretty shaky, but good enough to get into the next round. (Actually, if we hadn’t entered into an ethically-dubious vote-sharing pact with another duo, we mightn’t have made it even that far.)

For Week Two we settled on the “Alabama Song” from Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht’s opera Mahogonny – not strictly a ’60s song, but it was covered by the Doors.

We had six days to learn the song and come up with an original arrangement, and it never quite came together. We might have crept through to the next round if we’d made another pact, or if we’d goaded a few more friends and relations to come out and vote for us. But if the 19 supporters we managed to corral for Week Two weren’t enough to save us from elimination, it’s not like we had some untapped reservoir of fans who might have buoyed us through subsequent weeks.

So it’s okay. These battle-of-the-bands and open-mike gigs are kind of a pain anyway. First you have to pester all your friends to schlep out and pay the $5 cover charge to support you. Then you sit around forever waiting for your turn to play. Then you lug your equipment onstage, set up, and do a hasty soundcheck, all for the chance to do one or two songs.

I’m not saying we deserve better. But there’s a reason Andrew and I have spent most of the last decade playing in his empty basement. We’ve never cared much for hanging around bars, making small-talk with fellow musicians.

Given the dearth of alternative venues in Saskatoon, we’re probably stuck in the basement for a while. Hopefully we can come up with a new project to keep us busy. My girlfriend Liz has been joining us on keyboards on a couple numbers; the expanded lineup debuted at a friend’s wedding party last weekend, to modest acclaim from the half-dozen small children in attendance. Now we just have to put together a whole set and find someplace that will let us play. Suggestions?

M.

PS. Now that we’re out of the running, I’m pulling for Jody and Kiera in The Duo. They’ve got the chops, and the good taste not to abuse them. Good luck, guys.

Noise pollution and negative externalities.

On a train journey across Austria this spring, seated in the “quiet car”, I found myself across from what I can only describe as the world’s gayest Chinese boy. Dressed in pink capris, with shiny waxed legs, he occupied a four-seater with his mother and sister and began unwinding an endless soliloquy in high-pitched Mandarin. His family sat nodding and smiling in an encouraging way as he piped his spiel throughout the carriage. After a few minutes I moved a few seats away, but his sing-songing voice continued to irritate me. I put in earplugs but they still didn’t muffle him. Finally I removed myself to the far end of the carriage where, with earplugs in, his chatter was muted enough that I could almost forget he was there.

It got me thinking about negative externalities. That’s the name economists have given to the costs of activities that are borne not by the people engaging in them, but by innocent bystanders.

The classic example is pollution. A guy builds a factory that pumps acrid smoke into the air. He enjoys the profits from the factory, but the costs of living with the pollution are borne by the people living downwind.

Another example occurred in the years running up to the 2008 financial meltdown, in which investment bankers trading in risky and poorly-understood securities enjoyed huge profits, while the costs of the resulting economic crisis were borne by taxpayers.

The thing about these kinds of negative externalities – pollution and financial risk – is that they are not entirely external. They’re shared, at least to some degree, by the people who generate them. Those people are therefore sensitive to suasion by moral or governmental authority.

The guy with the factory might not care about the people downwind from him, but he’s not enthusiastic about toxic clouds per se. They’re an unfortunate side effect of the profit he seeks. He might be convinced to sacrifice a part of his profit in order to create a cleaner atmosphere which he and his family can breathe along with everyone else.

Nor is the banker with his profitable but risky securities keen on destabilizing the whole economy. He doesn’t want vagrants throwing rocks at his BMW as he drives to work through streets lined with derelict shops. Nor does he desire the higher taxes that must eventually be implemented to pay for the bank bailouts his actions necessitated. He might be convinced to give up some profit now in order that in the future he and his children can walk the streets without fear of being mugged.

But then there’s the negative externality of noise pollution, as exemplified by that Chinese kid on the train.

The thing about noisy people is that they don’t regard noise as an unpleasant but unavoidable side effect of doing something else they enjoy. The noise is what they enjoy. They’re not just unsympathetic to the argument that their noise makes bystanders unhappy, but uncomprehending. To them it seems paradoxical. If the sound of my chattering voice is so pleasant to me, that Chinese boy would argue, how can it be unpleasant to everyone else?

If the sound of my motorcycle engine echoing down a city street gives me such a thrill, thinks the biker, mustn’t it give a similar thrill to that lady sipping tea on her balcony?

If the sound of my shrieking children fills my breast with maternal contentment, thinks the mother, mustn’t it have an equivalently heartwarming effect on everyone else in the restaurant?

If the sound of Blink 182′s Greatest Hits help me to concentrate on my homework, thinks the college student, mustn’t my stereo’s muffled reverberations be just as soothing to the folks in the apartment downstairs?

We can’t suggest, “Let’s all enjoy the silence together,” because silence is not something they would enjoy.

In the absence of arguments that appeal to their sense of rational self-interest, our only options are to wheedle or threaten the noisemakers. Naturally they’re resentful, and ignore or flout the rules whenever they can.

It’s therefore not surprising that in the last hundred years, while we’ve enjoyed considerable success at reducing pollution, and moderate success at regulating finance, the world has gotten noisier and noisier. I see no prospect of reversing the trend. As so often happens, the loudest voice wins.

M.

Under weigh? Right away!

(Some observations on language in Charles Dickens’ American Notes.)

Shortly after landing at Boston, and installing himself at a “very excellent” hotel, the author encounters an unfamiliar turn of phrase:

“Dinner, if you please,” said I to the waiter.

“When?” said the waiter.

“As quick as possible,” said I.

“Right away?” said the waiter.

After a moment’s hesitation, I answered “No,” at hazard.

“Not right away?” cried the waiter, with an amount of surprise that made me start.

I looked at him doubtfully, and returned, “No; I would rather have it in this private room. I like it very much.”

At this, I really thought the waiter must have gone out of his mind: as I believe he would have done, but for the interposition of another man, who whispered in his ear, “Directly.”

“Well! and that’s a fact!” said the waiter, looking helplessly at me: “Right away.”

The expression right away is now so ubiquitous that it’s practically un-Googlable, like the or and. Answers.com asserts that,

This idiom uses right as an intensifier and away in the sense of “at once,” the latter usage dating from the 1500s and surviving only in such phrases as this one and fire away. It was first recorded in 1818.

No citation is given for the 1818 appearance. I assumed, from Dickens’ confusion, that right away originated in the States and took a while to spread overseas. But the correspondents of the journal Notes and Queries – “devoted principally to English language and literature, lexicography, history, and scholarly antiquarianism” – in 1880 investigated the phrase in response to an enquiry by an English reader named “Hermentrude”:

This expression is so familiar to me that until this moment I was not aware there was anything peculiar about it. If Hermentrude lived in these parts she might hear it every hour of the day. “Now, then, children, run off right away to school”; “She has been crying right away”; “It rained right away till tea-time”; “He has been working right away.” Even now I do not see much wrong about it. I should say it means not so much immediately as earnestly, directly. I think many of these forms of expression are very old.
– R.R., Boston, Lincolnshire

This is good North Lincolnshire. “It’s taken root and it’ll grow right away”; “I’m mending [recovering] right away, thank you.” It does not mean immediately. The young lady behind the counter meant that the boy was going straight past and along the road.
– J.T.F., Winterton, Brigg

This expression is a very common one in Liverpool, and always means immediately. I have never heard it used in the sense of a long distance, which Hermentrude seems to think the correct meaning.
– J.Y.W. MacAllister

This expression has for generations been used all over the south-west of Ireland in the way in which the Yorkshire shop girl applied it. “Right away” in Munster = immediately.
– Mary Agnes Hickson

Although there seems to be some vagueness about its precise meaning, these testimonies suggest that the phrase originated in Ireland or the north of England and spread via emigration to the United States, where Dickens mistook it for an Americanism and introduced it to the wider British reading public.

***

Note this weird spelling in Dickens’ description of a voyage by steamer on the Potomac River:

I wake, of course, when we get under weigh, for there is a good deal of noise.

Of course, I leaped to the assumption that Dickens, being nearer the wellspring of “pure” English, must have known what he was talking about, and that our word underway had derived from this extinct sailor’s term. But like right away, this is another example of a phrase that doubled back on itself: under weigh, it turns out, evolved from underway via the convolutions of folk etymology.

From Michael Quinion’s terrific website World Wide Words (the Notes and Queries of our time):

What happened was that the Dutch, who were European masters of the sea in the seventeenth century, gave us – among many other nautical expressions – the term onderweg, meaning “on the way”. This became naturalised as under way and is first recorded in English around 1740, specifically as a maritime term (its broader meanings didn’t appear until the following century). Some over-clever individuals connected with the sea almost immediately linked it erroneously with the phrase to weigh anchor. [...]

It’s easy to find a myriad of examples of under weigh from the best English authors in the following two centuries, such as William Makepeace Thackeray, Captain Marryat, Washington Irving, Thomas Carlyle, Herman Melville, Lord Byron, and Charles Dickens [...]

It was still common as recently as the 1930s … but weigh has dropped off almost to nothing now. This paralleled another change, starting around the same time, in which the two words began to be combined into a single adverb, underway (though many style manuals still recommend it be written as two words). It may be that the influence of other words ending in -way, especially anyway, encouraged the shift in spelling back to the original and in the process killed off a persistent misunderstanding.

M.

It’s 2011 and I’m still lazy.

David Mamet, in his 1996 collection of “Essays and Remembrances”, Make-Believe Town:

Writing, in my experience, consists of long periods of hanging out, punctuated by the fugue of remorse at the loss of one’s powers and wonder at occasional output in spite of that loss.

…

I hear, as do we all, of those people who spend eight to ten hours a day at their typewriters, and I think, has no one told them of the Nap?

I’m on “sabbatical”, which is what my employers and I agreed to call the six-month unpaid leave I negotiated in order to concentrate, I claimed, on “projects of my own”, which have so far amounted to four weeks of fuck all.

For the last few years I’ve been telling myself and my friends that when I was again free of the obligation to stare at a laptop screen for eight hours a day in the service of commerce, I would again have the energy to create: to make music, to write scripts, to craft animated short films. But I have no energy, none. Like David Mamet, I nap, I hang out, I regret the loss of my powers. But in contrast with Mamet, my inactivity has yet to be justified by the slightest manifestation of genius.

Last weekend I attended an opening at the Mendel Art Gallery and ran into an acquaintance, Andrei Feheregyhazi, a local filmmaker and animator of increasing renown. He described how in addition to his full-time day job he devotes four or five hours every evening, and twelve hours on Saturdays and Sundays, to working on his own projects.

I can’t imagine ever being that ambitious. Sometimes I wonder if there’s a chemical or hormonal imbalance that makes me incapable of working as hard as Andrei and people like him. Perhaps I’m just not getting enough protein, or zinc, or omega-3 fatty acids. A friend browbeat me into joining him at the gym three times a week, promising that it would boost my energy level, but after almost a month it has only left me more exhausted. I return from the gym around noon and crawl into bed for an hour or two.

It would be convenient to blame my inertness on a deficiency of nutrition or brain chemistry, but the plain fact is I’m lazy. Perhaps someday, by some chance, I’ll discover a mantra or a magic compound or a psychiatric cure that will restore me to vitality, but in the meantime I must overcome my laziness through old-fashioned dragging-my-ass-out-of-it.

M.

PS. Check out Andrei Feheregyhazi’s animated short films.

John Howard Griffin and other people’s music.

Midway through John Howard Griffin’s Black Like Me, the author finds himself in a rundown boarding room in the black quarter of Hattiesburg, Mississippi.

It’s 1959. Griffin has used drugs and dye to darken his white skin in order to experience firsthand life as a black man in the south. After a week in cosmopolitan New Orleans, enduring segregation, discrimination, and the “hate stares” of random whites, Griffin deems himself ready to explore the racist heartland of Mississippi.

Hattiesburg is tense. Not long before, a white mob lynched a black prisoner in neighbouring Poplarville. The grand jury refused to return indictments against the mob. Within minutes of Griffin’s arrival, some white punks in a passing car throw a tangerine at him. When another car roars down the road, he notices that everyone retreats indoors. He learns that in the last few days several blacks have been beaten by hooligans or framed by police.

Safe in his room, Griffin looks into the mirror and sees “tears slick on his cheeks in the yellow light.” He attempts to write a letter to his wife, but he’s brought up short by the incongruity of a black man writing a tender letter to a white woman. He goes outside and buys a barbecued meat sandwich. As he is handed his food, he imagines he can read the thoughts of the black woman at the barbecue stand: “Her eyes said with unmistakable clarity, ‘God…isn’t it awful?’”

Griffin sits down on the steps of his building to eat. “I felt disaster,” he writes. “Somewhere in the night’s future the tensions would explode into violence.”

Finally, for the first time in his adventure, he gives in. He calls some white friends in Hattiesburg and asks to be rescued. “I’m scared to death,” he says into the phone. The friends pick him up and take him to a comfortable house in the white section of town.

Griffin’s outrage and frustration are understandable, and yet he seems carried away by his imagination. Why not just hide out in his room? Why not strike up a conversation with the woman at the barbecue stand, or one of the several friendly blacks he’s talked to since arriving in Hattiesburg?

I think I know why Griffin really broke down. It was the music.

“Canned jazz blar[ing] through the street with a monstrous high-strutting rhythm that pulled at the viscera,” audible through the walls of his room.

“Music from the jukebox, a grinding rhythm,” which he transcribes as, “Harangity hangity hangity hangity oomp oomp oomp.”

“The music consumed in its blatant rhythm all other rhythms, even that of the heartbeat,” he writes. Hearing the “hoots and shouts” from the taverns of the black quarter, he speculates:

I wondered how all of this would look to the casual observer, or the whites in their homes. “The Niggers are whooping it up over on Mobile Street tonight,” they might say. “They’re happy.” Or, as one scholar put it, “Despite their lowly status, they are capable of living jubilantly.” Would they see the immense melancholy that hung over the quarter, so oppressive that men had to dull their sensibilities in noise or wine or sex or gluttony in order to escape it? The laughter had to be gross or it would turn to sobs, and to sob would be to realize, and to realize would be to despair. So the noise poured out like a jazzed-up fugue, louder and louder to cover the whisper in every man’s soul. “You are black. You are condemned.” This is what the white man mistook for “jubilant living” and called “whooping it up.” This is how the white man can say, “They live like dogs,” never realizing why they must, to save themselves, shout, get drunk, shake the hip, pour pleasures into bellies deprived of happiness. Otherwise, the sounds from the quarter would lose order and rhythm and become wails.

This is condescension – not the condescension of a white man to blacks, but of a quiet man to the loud. As Griffin sees it, when blacks listen to music that irritates him, it can only be to cover the whispers in their soul. If their conditions were a little better, their souls wouldn’t have to whisper so loudly, and they’d listen to something less irritating – a little Beethoven, maybe.

That’s not how it turned out. Fifty years later, if they’re to be judged by the music they listen to, black people’s souls are whispering more loudly than ever. How would Griffin react to the news that the first black president has Jay-Z on his iPod?

I know how antagonizing other people’s music can be. I remember living in a bachelor apartment in Vancouver, depressed and unemployed, moaning in anguish whenever the upstairs neighbour turned on her stereo. I would put in earplugs, and put headphones over the earplugs, and watch inane sitcoms that I had no interest in watching, just to escape the music. I would put off eating because in order to make food I would have to remove the headphones and hear the music.

As I worked on this blog post, a white kid pulled his car into the parking lot beneath my window and sat there for five minutes pumping hip hop, which I felt as a steady pulsing in my sternum. I typed out Griffin’s sentence, The music consumed in its blatant rhythm all other rhythms, even the heartbeat. I sat here grinding my teeth, wishing death on the young, until the car pulled away.

That’s how it goes nowadays. In place of music we have beats. And in place of jukeboxes we have kids with 5000-watt subwoofers in their cars.

But the kids don’t install those subwoofers because they’re consumed with melancholy. They do it because they have shitty taste in music. Their shitty music isn’t a reaction to racism or poverty or poor living conditions, and neither was the music that John Howard Griffin heard in the black quarter of Hattiesburg in 1959.

But it makes sense that this was the only night of his experiment where Griffin chickened out. He was suffering under a double dose of oppression – the oppression of racism amplified by the oppression of other people’s music.

M.

Finding myself in a book.

I lose myself in books all the time. So it’s a relief occasionally when I find myself; when I encounter a character who shares with me some quirk or fixation that it’s never occurred to me to put into words.

***

I’ve been known to kill time, among the back shelves at my favourite used bookstore, patiently separating the Kingsley Amises from the Martin Amises, the Henry Roths from the Philip Roths, the precious and solitary Henry Green from among the heaps of Graham Greenes, all for the benefit of my fellow browsers.

I believe I share this habit with the great English writer of ghost-stories, M.R. James. At any rate, he bestows it on the narrator of “A Neighbour’s Landmark”:

Those who spend the greater part of their time in reading or writing books are, of course, apt to take rather particular notice of accumulations of books when they come across them. They will not pass a stall, a shop, or even a bedroom-shelf without reading some title, and if they find themselves in an unfamiliar library, no host need trouble himself further about their entertainment. The putting of dispersed sets of volumes together, or the turning right way up of those which the dusting housemaid has left in an apoplectic condition, appeals to them as one of the lesser Works of Mercy.

Mind you, I don’t spend much time in the kind of houses that contain large private libraries, let alone the kind where careless housemaids are likely to invert the volumes. I can better identify with furtive Tommy Clay in Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay:

Three days later, on a Monday, Tommy stopped in at Spiegelman’s Drugs to arrange the comic books. This was a service he provided at no charge and, so far as he knew, unbeknownst to Mr. Spiegelman. The week’s new comics arrived on Monday and by Thursday, particularly toward the end of the month, the long rows of wire racks along the wall at the back of the store were often a jumble of disordered and dog-eared titles. Every week, Tommy sorted and alphabetized, putting the Nationals with the Nationals, the E.C.s with the E.C.s, the Timelys with the Timelys, reuniting the estranged members of the Marvel family, isolating the romance titles which, though he tried to conceal this fact from his mother, he despised, in a bottom corner. … He did all his rearranging surreptitiously, under the guise of browsing. Whenever another kid came in, or Mr. Spiegelman walked by, Tommy quickly stuffed back whatever errant stack he was holding, any old way, and engaged in a transparent bit of innocent whistling.

In my twenties I worked for a while in an adult video store, and I took great pleasure in sorting the dirty magazines by genre and title. This brought me into conflict with the manager of the store, who had his own obscure standards of taxonomy that I was frequently in violation of. After a few months I was fired – not exactly fired, but the manager made it clear that we’d both be happier if I sought other employment. The event that precipitated this ultimatum had nothing to do with magazines, but I think his dislike for me originated with my attempt to “straighten out” the magazine rack. Perhaps two obsessive alphabetizers are doomed to quarrel.

***

In a short story called “Making Love In 2003″, from Miranda July’s collection No One Belongs Here More Than You:

It doesn’t really feel like driving when you don’t know where you’re going. There should be an option on the car for driving in place, like treading water. Or at least a light that shines between the brake lights that you can turn on to indicate that you have no destination. I felt like I was fooling the other drivers and I just wanted to come clean. But the more I drove, the more I felt like I had somewhere to go. I was making difficult left turns that no one would ever do unless they had to. Sometimes I would make left turns all the way around a block, and when I returned to the original intersection, I would feel disappointed to find all the drivers were new.

As someone who’s been blessed with long stretches of unemployment, I know all about aimless driving. I’ve often had that sense that I was “fooling the other drivers” – all these busy people rushing off to the supermarket or the airport, and here I am, taking up a lane of traffic to no purpose. When I’m driving aimlessly, I try to be as unobtrusive as possible. Unlike the heroine of July’s story, I avoid left-hand turns; I worry that the length of the green light was optimized by some computer program for a certain amount of traffic, and that my unnecessary left-hand turn is throwing off the timing; and that because of me, some poor hardworking mom is going to be late for her appointment with the chiropractor.

***

Vladimir Nabokov describes, in his memoir Speak, Memory, an early attempt at composing poetry:

An innocent beginner, I fell into all the traps laid by the singing epithet. Not that I did not struggle. In fact, I was working at my elegy very hard, taking endless trouble over every line, choosing and rejecting, rolling the words on my tongue with the glazed-eyed solemnity of a tea-taster, and still it would come, that atrocious betrayal. The fame impelled the picture, the husk shaped the pulp. The hackneyed order of words (short verb or pronoun – long adjective – short noun) engendered the hackneyed disorder of thought, and some such line as poeta gorestnïe gryozï, translatable and accented as “the poet’s melancholy daydreams”, led fatally to a rhyming line ending in rozï (roses) or beryozï (birches) or grozï (thunderstorms), so that certain emotions were connected with certain surroundings not by a free act of one’s will, but by the faded ribbon of tradition.

The particular challenge of escaping the conventions of Russian poetry is, of course, unfamiliar to me. But “the husk shaped the pulp” perfectly sums up a failure I’ve experienced too often; the weary sense that, rather than having written what I wanted to write, I wrote what I was able to write; rather than choosing the words and images that best communicated my thoughts, I have deformed my thoughts to make them fit these unsuitable vessels, the words and images that were ready to hand.

The husk shapes the pulp. Thank you, Mr. Nabokov.

M.

PS. I don’t really write reviews any more because it turns out I’m pretty bad at it. For what it’s worth, all the above authors, as unlike each other as any four authors can be, are excellent.

“A Neighbour’s Landmark” can be found in The Collected Ghost Stories of M.R. James, which every civilized reader of English should own.

Solzhenitsyn, funnyman.

Here’s the funny thing about Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: he’s funny. You’d expect Gulag Archipelago to be a slog, but the very first lines of the preface, where the author describes some starving prisoners “flouting the higher claims of ichthyology” to wolf down a prehistoric fish they’d discovered frozen in the Siberian ice, made me laugh. Knowing that he survived the slave-camps himself, one would expect Solzhenitsyn to be embittered, indignant, aflame with righteous rage – and he is. But above all he’s a great writer with a keen ear for absurdity and a Siberia-sized index-card file full of astounding stories about life under the Soviets. *

Here’s one. A new prisoner arrives in camp and the guard raises an eyebrow at his long sentence. “Twenty-five years! What did you do?”

“Nothing at all,” comes the sullen reply.

“You’re lying!” says the guard. “The sentence for nothing at all is ten years.”

I laughed because it has the structure of a joke – and in fact, its tidiness and rim-shot pacing suggest to me that it is a joke. But whether or not the actual words were spoken by an actual guard, the joke is true. Consider (I open Volume One randomly, to page 82) the “traitors of the Motherland”, tens of thousands of ex-soldiers slapped with prison terms at the conclusion of World War II; their crime was to have spent time in German prisoner-of-war camps. (Their real offense, Solzhenitsyn points out, was to have been “witnesses to humiliating [Soviet] defeats.”) Their sentence? Ten years.

Here’s another one. The Solovki camp, on an island near the Arctic Circle, was getting some unwelcome publicity in the West. To put a stop to rumours that Solovki was something other than a socialist paradise in the making, in 1929 Moscow sent the famous proletarian writer Maxim Gorky on a fact-finding mission to the camp. The administrators scurried about preparing for Gorky’s visit, “hid the monstrosities and polished things up for show”, but…

Only in Kem was there an oversight. On Popov Island the ship Gleb Boky was being loaded by prisoners in underwear and sacks, when Gorky’s retinue appeared out of nowhere to embark on that steamer! You inventors and thinkers! Here is a worthy problem for you … a barren island, not one bush, no possible cover – and right there, at a distance of three hundred yards, Gorky’s retinue has shown up. Your solution? Where can this disgraceful spectacle – these men dressed in sacks – be hidden? The entire journey of the great Humanist will have been for naught if he sees them now. Well, of course, he will try hard not to notice them, but help him! … The work assigner ordered: “Stop work! Close ranks! Still closer! Sit down on the ground! Sit still!” And a tarpaulin was thrown over them. “Anyone who moves will be shot!” And the former stevedore Maxim Gorky ascended the ship’s ladder and admired the landscape for a full hour till sailing time – and he didn’t notice!

Gorky stands in for all those farsighted intellectuals who praised the Soviet experiment, eyes locked on the horizon while the victims of the regime huddled half-naked under their tarps. It’s a metaphor, and it’s funny, too!

M.

* Even Solzhenitsyn’s footnotes are funny. Consider the unlucky peasant given a ten-year sentence for stealing a spool of thread – or as the authorities grandiosely described it in their indictment, “200 meters of sewing material.”

Peter Watts is a jerk.

He’s a crank too. But I’ll get to that.

First let me tell you about his brilliant novel Blindsight.

I first heard of it two days ago in this article in io9′s Mad Science blog, Six scientists tell us about the most accurate science fiction in their fields. Terry Johnson, a bioengineer at UC Berkeley, volunteered the following:

I thought that Peter Watts’ Blindsight did a great job of reinventing vampires as an extinct subspecies of humanity. Humanity pieces together what the vampire genome must have been and then resurrects them using genetic engineering.

As Johnson’s endorsement would suggest, Watts has obviously put a lot of thought into his scientific account of vampirism. In the novel’s detailed Notes and References it’s explained that vampires acquired their “Crucifix Glitch” as a result of

a cross-wiring of normally-distinct receptor arrays in the visual cortex, resulting in grand mal-like feedback seizures whenever the arrays processing vertical and horizontal stimuli fired simultaneously across a sufficiently large arc of the visual field. Since intersecting right angles are virtually nonexistent in nature, natural selection did not weed out the Glitch until H. sapiens sapiens developed Euclidean architecture; by then, the trait had become fixed across H. sapiens vampiris via genetic drift, and – suddenly denied access to its prey – the entire subspecies went extinct shortly after the dawn of recorded history.

The novel’s main vampire character counteracts the effects of the Crucifix Glitch by injecting himself with “anti-Euclideans”, drugs that alter his brain chemistry so that he can glance at the rungs of a ladder without foaming at the mouth.

The funny thing is, it turns out Blindsight isn’t about resurrected vampires as much as it is about brain chemistry. Particularly, it’s about the nature of consciousness. What does it mean to be self-aware? Does self-awareness necessarily correlate with intelligence? Is it even an adaptive advantage, when so many species get along just fine without it? The vampires play a crucial but only a small role in Watts’ exploration of these questions.

All that, and aliens too! Blindsight is a top-drawer example of the subgenre ably taxonomized by an Amazon reviewer named Conrad J. Obregon:

There is a sub-genre of science fiction that I like to think of as the alien-encounter procedural. Among its most famous of members is Arthur C. Clarke’s Rendezvous with Rama. Humans meet a new species of alien and must figure out what procedures to follow to make some kind of contact. Emphasis is on the technology of contact, with suspense created by the unknown nature of the aliens.

But forget about the literary antecedents. Forget about the science. The main thing is, Blindsight is a hell of a lot of fun. I scanned the opening pages after supper on Thursday, with the intention of maybe putting it next on my reading pile. Suddenly it was midnight, and I had to force myself to stop reading so I wouldn’t be a zombie at work the next day. I sped through the remaining hundred pages in a few hours on Friday night, stopping only once to use the bathroom.

Go read it. Thank me later.

***

Blindsight (and other novels and stories) are available on Peter Watts’ website for free download under a Creative Commons license.

***

I’m glad I read Blindsight before I read Peter Watts’ blog. Because based on his blog, I’ve concluded that he’s kind of a jerk. If I’d known that in advance, I might not have read the novel.

Watts was in the news recently. Last December he had a scuffle with US border guards during an “exit search” while trying to cross back into his (and my) native Canada at Port Huron, Michigan. From his blog:

If you buy into the Many Worlds Interpretation of quantum physics, there must be a parallel universe in which I crossed the US/Canada border without incident last Tuesday. In some other dimension, I was not waved over by a cluster of border guards who swarmed my car like army ants for no apparent reason; or perhaps they did, and I simply kept my eyes downcast and refrained from asking questions.

Along some other timeline, I did not get out of the car to ask what was going on. I did not repeat that question when refused an answer and told to get back into the vehicle. In that other timeline I was not punched in the face, pepper-sprayed, shit-kicked, handcuffed, thrown wet and half-naked into a holding cell for three fucking hours, thrown into an even colder jail cell overnight, arraigned, and charged with assaulting a federal officer, all without access to legal representation (although they did try to get me to waive my Miranda rights. Twice.).

(I have no reason to disbelieve the above account of the incident. Although one of the border guards alleged that Watts choked him, that claim was apparently discredited in the trial. Here are more details of Watts’ arrest and eventual conviction; in the end he was fined a couple thousand dollars and banned from entering the States.)

I’ve driven across the Canada-US border a bunch of times since 2001. (Including, I think, at least once at Port Huron.) I’ve crossed into the US from Mexico twice. On several occasions I was stopped while driving alone on south Texas secondary highways by border agents who pawed through my luggage for traces of heroin or Mexicans. Through all these interactions, American authorities were unerringly friendly, even when obliged to shunt my vehicle to a side lane for more detailed disarraying of my underwear.

So when I read about Peter Watts’ experience, I wondered, Have I just been lucky? Or was Watts especially unlucky?

Then I read this anecdote from a recent appearance at a sci-fi convention in Toronto:

At some point I – as is my wont – used the word “fucking” as an adjective.

Exhibit A sat in the front row, two sprogs in tow (one 5-10, one possible preteen – my expertise in the age-determination of human larvae is not all it could be). She took strong exception: “Could we keep this PG? There are children in the audience, and if I hear that again I’m out of here.”

I explained that the word “fuck” has a 900-year history, throughout most of which it was considered completely inoffensive. “It only became offensive 100-200 years ago, when a bunch of bible-thumping prudes who couldn’t get laid decided to stigmatize anything with an orifice.” Sadly, this cut no ice: “Well, I find it offensive.”

Watts soon let fly another PG-13 adjective, and the woman gathered her sprogs and huffed out. This led to an encounter between the author and four convention organizers who reprimanded him for, basically, being a jerk.

All because Peter Watts just had to say the word “shit-kicking”. Now, how would a non-jerk have responded to this situation? Being one, I can tell you: with an inward eye roll, a deferential head nod (calibrated to convey a shade of irony without being overtly offensive), and a mental note to sprinkle some sugar on the salty language.

I don’t think this is a symptom of undue servility. It’s just a sense of proportion. No-one should be forced to kowtow for the mere maintenance of social harmony. But in the absence of overt coercion, when the stakes are so comically small – we make a slight bow.

Watts doesn’t bow. When someone waves a sceptre in his direction, he hops up, grabs the sceptre, and, well…jerks. That’s when coercive methods are applied. Authorities are summoned. Things spiral.

It’s worth mentioning that Watts is a bit of a crank, too. (This is another way of saying he lacks a sense of proportion.) He’s the kind of crank who writes about how we live in a “soft dictatorship“. Who posts a picture of Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper with rifle crosshairs superimposed over his forehead. Who composes measured passages like,

British Petroleum – a criminal corporation with countless infractions and convictions already notched onto its bedpost – is already a serial murderer. It kills entire ecosystems as we speak, ruins countless lives. If any of us little people tried to repay even a fraction of that in kind the whole weight of governments and armies would try to squash us flat. I know first-hand the righteous outrage that inflames such cocksuckers when anyone tries to do to them the merest fraction of what they do to us on a daily basis. We all know the overwhelming force that would be brought to bear on the “anarchists” and “criminals” who dared to “take the law into their own hands”.

(In a comment below his original post, he clarifies that he’s “not advocating anything”.)

None of the foregoing is necessarily relevant. His arrest in Port Huron predates all the above comments; perhaps the incident radicalized him. Anyway, I know people who say even more intemperate things, yet are nevertheless meek and mild when approached by folks in uniform.

But if you’re the kind of guy who believes things like the above, and you’re a jerk to boot, is it a surprise when you get into a tussle with authorities?

I’m not minimizing the injustice of what Watts went through. No-one should be punched in the face, or pepper-sprayed, or prosecuted, let alone threatened with two years in jail in a foreign country, just for being a jerk.

I’m just saying I can picture how it happened. Border guards surround Watts’ vehicle. Instead of quietly rolling his eyes, the author – a big guy, not a weedy Carl Sagan type – jumps out to protest. A guard politely but firmly orders him back into the car. Watts mutters something ill-advised. The guard barks an order. Events spiral. Pepper is dispersed.

Now, we need border guards. (Not as much as they think we need them, but still.) They protect us from people far more dangerous than Peter Watts. But there aren’t many such dangerous people around, so the border guards have a lot of time on their hands. They use this time to peer up our tailpipes, to poke suspicious fingers into our shaving kits, and occasionally to pull over some random Canadian because something about his posture or haircut looks suspicious.

It would be better if border guards were astute enough to display a sense of proportion when dealing with jerks like Peter Watts. But they’re not always that astute.

Some of them, in fact, are real jerks.

M.

Caveat.

I used to be a leftist – not in any organized way, but in my heart. And often I would find myself getting angry when I read or heard something that contradicted the worldview I’d adopted.

Later I realized my anger didn’t come from being contradicted. It came from fear – fear that I was wrong, fear that I didn’t have the slightest whiff what I was talking about. Out of fear, I insulated myself from viewpoints that challenged what I believed.

Gradually I began to force myself to read those challenging viewpoints, and I began to doubt many of the things that I’d previously accepted as true. And I thought, “At last I can be honest with myself! I no longer have to fear being exposed to contrary opinions! I’m a free man!”

So here I am, a free man. Yet still I find myself getting angry. Still I find that I have to force myself to read and listen to opinions that cast my preconceptions into doubt. Still there’s this ever-present fear that I don’t have the slightest whiff what I’m talking about.

I don’t think there’s any escaping it, this fear. The world is complicated, and the human brain is just an oddly-shaped lump of permeable meat. Excepting a few geniuses, most of us can’t possibly memorize the blueprint of the whole structure of arguments and proofs that comprise a coherent philosophy. We select a few arguments that seem convincing to us, bolt them together as best we can, fill the gaps with putty, and hope that no-one pushes too hard on the seams.

I think we’d be better off, we’d abet fewer falsehoods, we’d spend less time being angry at each other, if we acknowledged our weaknesses. So I’ll do it right here: every time I express an opinion on this blog – whether it’s about something trivial, like the ending of the movie Splice, or something small but important, like whether a certain restaurant in Brooklyn is involved in sex trafficking, or something enormous but trivial, like who was primarily responsible for the Allied victory in World War II, I’m frightened that I’m wrong.

The internet sets a low bar for accuracy, and a lot of people stumble onto this site through Google searches, and some of them may see what I’ve written as authoritative. I hate to think that I’m misleading my visitors, so I strive to be thorough and truthful. But I abide by blogging standards of accuracy, not journalism standards. I have a full-time job. I can’t phone up sources to verify quotes. I don’t subscribe to Lexis-Nexis. I can’t afford to buy a whole book every time the few crucial pages I want to consult happen to be missing from the Google Books scan (which happens with exasperating frequency).

I’ve spent the last two days reading up on Rigoberta Menchú, the Guatemalan human rights activist and Nobel Peace Prize winner whose memoir I, Rigoberta Menchú was shown to contain several falsehoods and distortions. Specifically, I’ve been looking into the controversy surrounding the confrontation at the Spanish embassy in Guatemala City in 1980, in which the group of leftist protesters who’d occupied the embassy were killed, along with most of their hostages, during the assault by police.

I’ve been trying to compose a measured and comprehensive post on the topic, but I keep bumping against my awareness of my ignorance. I don’t speak Spanish, so I have to rely on Google Translate to help me interpret the documents; even some of the English-language resources I need are unavailable online or at my local library; and anyway, most importantly, what do I really have to contribute to the debate?

On the other hand, maybe I can help some poor chump who, like me, had his curiosity sparked by an article he read online, then was discouraged to discover, on investigating further, that most discussions of the topic are either distorted by ideology or buried in out-of-the-way corners of the internet. Maybe at least I can bring together the information I’ve gathered, and save the next chump the trouble of gathering it himself.

So I haven’t decided yet. Maybe I’ll throw out all my notes and keep my big yap shut. Or maybe I’ll post my conclusions in a few days, and take the risk, yet again, of being wrong.

M.