On negativity.

[Y]our thoughts on the sex of your drawings are boring and naïve, take a first year psychology class and leave the hard thinking to someone else.

–commenter on the Spokesmonster blog

I’ve been on the internet long enough to know that people who may be perfectly polite to strangers they meet at a party or in a bar will say outlandishly hostile things to strangers online. It’s not that they feel like they’re protected by some kind of Cloak of Invisibility; the commenter above left his or her email address. It’s just that the internet is a coarse environment. It doesn’t require a first-year psychology class to realise that if you hang out with smart, well-spoken people, you will become smarter and better-spoken, while if you hang out with the commenters on fark.com, you will become a snarky negative bastard. I can lament this coarsening effect, but if I want to keep my sanity and still participate in the modern world, I had better get used to it.

But there’s a difference between insults that are merely moronic (my favourite comment on Garson Hampfield: “Typical Jewish bullshit!”) and the ones that hint at some kind of withheld intelligence. What’s aggravating about the “boring and naïve” comment is that there may be some truth to it. I never studied psychology – never went to university at all – and there’s probably a lot I could have learned from it that would have given my rambling speculations on the gender of stickmen greater dimension. I would be happy to be taught something new. It’s possible the commenter really has some insight to share. But he doesn’t share it – just says, “Your ignorance is too obvious to bother explaining. Seeya!” Very unhelpful.

Similary unhelpful (I apologise for going back to this yet again) were most of the comments on AgentGenius about the first Spokesmonster cartoon. After a round of monster-bashing, Benn, the originator of the thread, finally intervened to say,

What I find interesting is no one is being specific as to why it should or shouldn’t be changed. Are we being polite, or do we just not like it because it isn’t pretty?

(But Benn, what do you mean, “it isn’t pretty”?)

I don’t quite see how comments like “This is really really bad. Really bad. Nothing good about it at all so nothing salvagable. Scrap scrap scrap” qualify as polite, but I was interested, too, to see what, specifically, the complainers were complaining about. Some of them were obviously offended by the “hillfolk” reference. Others seemed to be irritated by the lack of specific information about the service (it not having been made clear that the cartoon was a teaser for a product that was still early in development). But still, I was baffled by the intensity of the negative reaction. It just seemed disproportionate. Was there, as Benn implied, something the critics were holding back, something that was obvious to everyone but completely mysterious to me?

I worry about this kind of thing a lot, and here’s why: I sometimes think that I might be a little autistic. My interpersonal skills are, to put it mildly, underdeveloped; my tastes are a little obscure; I’m far more comfortable with a book than I am with most humans; when people speak of common sense I often think, maybe so, but it’s not common to me.

People who are at ease with other people, I think, must be more certain of their shared sense of normality, of what is held in common. They can disregard a critic who says, “It’s obviously bad”, because they feel they already have a grip on what’s obvious and what’s not. I can’t really do that. What is and isn’t obvious is not obvious to me.

It’s tough to be a critic, though. Most of the things we feel strongly enough about to bother criticising, we do so precisely because our objections are so immediate that they can’t even be articulated. Do I need to tell you why a line of dialogue like this one (from Dan Simmons’ The Terror) is badly written?

“Cook is preparing roast beef tonight, my darling. Your favorite. Since she’s new – I am certain that the Irish woman was padding our accounts, stealing is as natural as drinking to the Irish – I reminded her that you insist that it must be rare enough to bleed at the touch of the carving knife.”

It’s just – bad. Unrealistic. That little aside about the Irish – forget about whether the character would really say it, just look at the way it’s phrased. People don’t talk like that. Isn’t it obvious?

Well, no, it’s not. If people don’t talk like that, how do they talk? If they don’t talk like that now, isn’t it possible they did talk that way back in the 1840s, when the novel is set? Even if they never did talk like that, what about all those movies and books I love where the dialogue is even less realistic? How do I account for those?

All those questions can be answered, but only with a lot of hard work. And as I’ve said elsewhere, I’m a pretty lazy guy. Speaking to other lazy people, all I’d ask is that if you’re going to go negative, put in that extra bit of effort. Reason, argue, explain. You might think you’ve already made your superior intelligence apparent to all. I’m sorry to inform you – you haven’t.

***

As an example of criticism whose vehemence is all out of proportion to its subject, here’s Andrew Orlowski ranting in The Register about Malcolm Gladwell:

He’s better known for his Afro than any big idea, or bold conclusion – and his insights have all the depth and originality of Readers Digest or a Hallmark greeting card.

On one of Gladwell’s speeches:

Gladwell blathers at great length about an obscure market researcher called Howard Moskowitz. Who? On his own website, Howie calls himself “a well-known experimental psychologist in the field of psychophysics”. Yet Gladwell describes Moskowitz’ market testing of varieties of soup as if he was an unsung genius of the 20th century.

All this takes up 15 minutes, but it’s so repetitious and predictable, it seems to take about three times as long. (So much for the dazzling oratory Guardian leader writers admire.)

That “so much for the dazzling oratory” sums up the “my point is too obvious to waste time explaining” school of criticism that I so dislike. For those of us who enjoy watching Gladwell speak, his gift is precisely that he can make fifteen minutes on market testing varieties of soup seem compelling. Obviously it’s not as compelling to Orlowski. But the words “repetitious and predictable” – let alone the contemptuous “Who?” with which Orlowski dismisses the soup-tester – don’t triumphantly prove the critic’s point; they barely begin to make it.

I happen to agree with Orlowski’s larger argument, that Gladwell’s driblets of scientific wisdom often seem meagre in comparison with the vast apparatus of anecdote and digression required to render them down. But one doesn’t read Gladwell for the science, any more than one reads Dickens for his political platform or Chesterton for his religious conclusions. I’d put them into the category of writers for whom the journey is the destination.

M.

–

Why can’t I let this subject go? I wrote more on the Spokesmonster mini-controversy here.

The Terror (Dan Simmons).

Often I’ll read a book and think, Damn, I wish I could force my friends to read this. Does everyone feel this way? It’s not simply an innocent wish to have someone with whom to discuss the book. It’s also a braggart’s need to manifest my awesomeness to my friends. See how I have discovered this awesome thing! Read it and admire its, and consequently my, awesomeness!

The problem with my book club is that it doesn’t permit me to propose books that I’ve already read. We have agreed that the books we choose will be fresh to everyone in the group. This rule has proved frustrating. I wish I could force the other book club members to read Kingsley Amis’ The Alteration, Richard Price’s Clockers, Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop, Jonathan Lethem’s Motherless Brooklyn. I’m pretty sure they’d all fall down on their knees and worship me. Instead I must suggest books whose awesomeness I’m fairly confident of before reading them.

This has never quite worked out. I love Philip Roth, but his The Plot Against America was probably not the best way to introduce my fellow book clubbers to his canon. Much of the fun (if that’s the right word) of that novel was encountering the themes and tableaux of Roth’s Newark boyhood, familiar from forty-odd years of thinly-disguised Rothobiographies, juxtaposed against an unfamiliar alternate-history backdrop.

Having already read Lethem’s back catalogue, I tried starting my friends out on his latest novel, You Don’t Love Me Yet. It was enjoyable, but too flimsy to justify my enthusiastic pre-endorsement. Nor was The Third Man the ideal book to kindle a love of Graham Greene in my fellow readers. (I should have started with Brighton Rock.)

So it was probably unrealistic of me to have such high hopes for The Terror, by Dan Simmons, an author I’d never read before. But the reviews were great and the premise was unbeatable. What really happened to the crew of John Franklin’s ships Erebus and Terror on their 1847 expedition to find the Northwest Passage? Did they really die on the ice from starvation and scurvy? Or were they…stalked and devoured by a demon from the snowy wastes?

All the elements are present for a great horror story. Priggish officers. Salty sea dogs. Howling winds. A mysterious Eskimo with her tongue torn out. Cannibalism. A little buggery. Why doesn’t it work?

The problem is that Simmons isn’t content to write a taut little period thriller. The Terror is a sweeping historical epic that takes in the entire history of polar exploration, British mores in the mid-19th century, and Eskimo mythology, with a side trip to colonial Tasmania and cameo appearances by prominent contemporaries:

“Charles Babbage?” said Peglar. “The fellow who tinkers up so many odd things including some sort of computing engine?”

“The same,” said Bridgens. “Charles tells me that all these years Mr. Darwin has been working on a quite interesting volume discussing the mechanisms of organic evolution. Apparently it draws in information from comparative anatomy, embryology, and paleontology…”

And on in that manner. The novel sprawls to nearly 800 pages. Halfway through, when the surviving expedition commander, Captain Crozier, makes a mental tally of his men upon abandoning their frozen-in ships for a camp on a nearby island, Simmons takes us through a full roll call:

Of his primary officers, Crozier had lost his first mate, Fred Hornby, to the beast during the Carnivale debacle, Second Master Giles MacBean to the thing during a sledge trip the previous September, and both his surgeons, Peddie and McDonald …

Of Terror’s twenty-one petty officers – mates, quartermasters, fo’c'sle, hold, maintop, and foretop captains, coxswains, stewards, caulkers, and stokers – Crozier had lost only one man …

Terror had lost two of its rated sailors …

On down the list, recounting the names and ranks of all the crewmen whose deaths Simmons has already described as they occurred in the narrative. This continues for five full pages (pp 427-432).

A few months later, with the crew encamped on the southern shore of the island, having failed to escape across the ice to the mainland, Simmons has Crozier plod through the roll again:

Of the thirteen original officers on HMS Erebus, nine were dead: Sir John, Commander Fitzjames, Lt. Graham Gore, Lt. H.T.D. Le Vesconte, Lt. Fairholme, First Mate Sergeant, Second Master Collins, Ice Master Reid, and Chief Surgeon Stanley. The surviving officers consisted of …

This time the list drags on for a mere three pages (pp 613-615).

One has to admire Simmons’ attention to detail. Although it’s been awhile since I’ve read a non-fictional account of the Franklin expedition – Berton’s The Arctic Grail is the one I’m familiar with from Simmons’ list of acknowledgements – I’m quite confident that in his story he has accounted for the final disposition of every skeleton, brass button, and rusty tin can that has ever been discovered in the vicinity of King William Island. There’s no doubt that the author did his research. I just wish he’d done the research and then left a lot more of it out of the damn book.

When it’s not testing your patience, The Terror can be pretty fun. I sped through the last 400 pages or so in a single Saturday afternoon reading session. Still, I find myself looking forward to the movie adaptation, which should chuck out a lot of the superfluous backstory and concentrate on the good stuff. Cold so intense that to touch a brass telescope barehanded is to lose all the skin on your hand. A fight to the death in the rigging of an icebound ship. A frequently naked Eskimo girl. A lottery to decide who eats and who gets eaten. A hundred scurvy sailors manhauling all their food and supplies on wooden sledges across a windswept desolation of frozen gravel, with something following in the fog behind…

***

At one point in the tale, Captain Crozier has a prophetic dream in which he sees the future of the doomed expedition and its aftermath. (This is one of those passages that tests the patience.) The dream sequence includes the following familiar scene:

He sees a boy with black hair and greenish skin curled up in a fetal position against a brick-tile wall the colour of urine. Crozier knows that the boy is an epileptic in an asylum, in some bedlam somewhere. The boy shows no movement except for his dark eyes, which constantly flicker back and forth like a reptile’s. That shape am I.

As soon as he thinks this, Crozier knows that this is not his fear. It is some other man’s nightmare.

Having recently seen it quoted in an essay by Graham Greene, I recognised this as a vision suffered by William James, described in his Aspects of Religious Experience. But I was perplexed by its inclusion here. The asylum nightmare isn’t really contemporary with the Franklin expedition – the vision occurred about twenty years later – and there seems to be no reason for Simmons to drag William James into his mess of a novel along with Babbage and Darwin and the rest.

My best guess is that Simmons was thinking of William James’ bear:

In 1884, James published a seminal paper titled What is An Emotion in the philosophy journal Mind (there were no psychology journals around then). In this paper, he reasoned that human emotion followed a sequence of events beginning with an arousing stimulus … which then triggered the corresponding emotion. In other words, do we run from a bear because we are afraid or are we afraid because we are running from the bear? While the commonplace assumption is that the bear is the source of our fear, James argued that this commonsense interpretation is wrong. It was James’ contention that bodily changes result from the perception of the “exciting fact” which in term leads to the psychological sensation called emotion.

In writing a novel concerned with polar bear attacks, among other terrors, I suspect Simmons was eager to work in William James and his terrifying bear any way that he could. The bear wouldn’t fit – but with a little rending and stretching of the story, James’ famous green-skinned asylum child could be jammed in.

Find yourself a more ruthless editor, Dan Simmons.

Sincerely,

M.