What's the story, "Sound Space"?

I started drafting "Sound Space" when we lived in the house on 1st Avenue in Fort Lauderdale, surrounded by feral cats and orchids, across the street from Daryl, the guy with a huge always-accurate clock ticking away on the front of his house and a sign in his yard that warned against letting your dog "go to the bathroom" on his lawn. Those were days when we might think, on a Saturday afternoon, "let's have a party," and a few hours later 15 amazing people whom I love would fill our house, playing guitars and singing and laughing under the light of the moon.

At that time I had a room for writing and creating. The house only had two bedrooms, but one of them was mine to use to create. It's something I miss. I had things taped up on the walls, and weird little things I'd made piled up on the shelves. I tend to collect "interesting garbage" -- like custom-cut cardboard packaging materials that make interesting shapes -- thinking that someday I'll make it into something. And maybe someday I will. I still have it all. But now it's crammed in the corner of a room that Brian uses to process orders of "Write Like a Motherfucker" mugs, behind a baby gate to keep our two little barbarians from destroying everything -- or getting hurt themselves. Our lives are less loose and jolly than they used to be, not that I would trade it for the world.

I had the idea at that time for a character who could hear the sounds of other lives -- other selves who had made different choices or been affected by different acts of chance. And that by the time she was an adult, this character would be able to hear so many different possible selves, so many so similar to her, that much of it would mush into white noise, and the only ones should would *really* be able to hear would be the ones so desperately horribly different that they have nothing in common in at all. I imagined Penelope hearing June. 

I first imagined the story written non-linearly. In fact, that's how I originally composed it: right into inDesign, in chunks of text free-formed and variously floating. I tried to get it published like that for a very long time. I took it with me to an artists' residency for experimental literature, and worked on it there, too. But years passed and the story wasn't getting anywhere. Finally I stripped it all out of its inDesign boxes and sent it out in paragraphs, as a normal-looking story, and it was accepted. It's currently printed in the Spring/Summer 2016 issue of Louisiana Literature.

I am overjoyed to see this story in print. The day it was released I received a facebook message from someone who'd read my story and had taken the time to let me know how much she loved it (always do this: every writer wants -- needs! -- to hear this!), and that feeling of being acknowledged and appreciated for something you've poured your soul into is, well, utterly beyond words. In that moment, I am made of gratitude, the greatest thing a person can become. But when I look it it spelled out in clean left-right lines from margin to margin, well groomed into its tidy paragraphs, I can't help but feel like something got lost in the process.

The question is: was this a good loss or a bad loss? As the creator, I am biased and blinded, but I can try to assess it objectively, and when I do, I think I come to the conclusion that although the story needed to be written the way it was, in the end, the story was more about sound than sight, and the visual aspects may have actually been working against the musical qualities of the story. The story is very rhythmic, very auditory. Just as a song with an unusual melody benefits from a steady beat, maybe my odd story needed the structures we take for granted -- the shapes of the "standard" page, the blocks of paragraph -- to come together. The character, Penelope, lives in a disordered world of auditory overlap, a near-chaos that makes it difficult to think. Perhaps in trying to reflect that on the page, I was making it hard for my reader to think.

Nonetheless, those are the shapes in which the story was born. And so as the author, when I look at this story, happy as I am to see it in print, the loss will always stand out to me.

Readers often want to turn to the author as the "authority" on stories -- tell us what it means, tell us why you wrote it. Writers rarely know. Writing a story is such an amazingly complex process that at the end of it I usually sit back, read the story, and ask, wow, did I really do that? Especially once a little time passes, the author is as much a "reader" of the work as anyone else.

And then there are a cases like this, where the author has an insight into her own work that nobody wants, or needs.

Sippy Cup

What does a writer look like?

Cruelty, Then and When...

WE THINK OF THE PAST as this awful place where people suffered and died from physical ailments that we no longer fear: tooth problems tortured before they killed, there was no real treatment for earaches, gastrointestinal problems, complicated childbirth, on and on. Things that today we treat, then were horrific ordeals. It's obvious: in the past people suffered, lived short brutish lives, because they lacked the medical knowledge we have today. IN THE FUTURE, people will think the same thing about us today and mental health. They will look back on us and think, "those poor people, it's obvious: they suffered and died, their lives were stressful and short, their society was all f*ed up, because they lacked the universal medical knowledge we have today..."

IN THE PAST, when people suffered from illnesses that were, because of medical ignorance, "mysterious," it was chalked up to God and demons -- moral causes. The sick person was being punished for something. TODAY, it's obvious: that's a cruel thing to do to a sick person, to tell him he's sick because he's been judged by God and found unworthy. But today WE DO THE SAME THING with mental illness: we lack the science to understand the biological causes, and so we tell the ill they lack character or moral strength, that they only suffer from a bad personality.

Cruelty.

Electronic Girls Alive and Well and Going to Miami

This video is making the rounds:


Which goes to show that Electronic Girls are alive and well on the internet. Most of the video's online iterations don't credit the artist, Jordon Wolfson, let alone mention that his seductive stripperbot will be featured this summer at Art Basel. I had to work a little to find that. If you're in South Florida, go to 14 Rooms and experience this in person. I would if I could.

The rumor is that she has been programmed to locate faces, make eye contact, and dance "at" or "to" you, attempting to seduce you, with her sexy robot moves and goblin mask.

Make no mistake: the stripperbots will gain sentience and rise up against us. But until then, enjoy the show.

[noun]-porn

In today's NYTimes Frank Bruni used the phrase "hardship porn" to describe "fetishized misfortune," or the cheap use of sob stories to lend seeming-emotional-substance to what are clearly callously manipulative, calculated narratives: American Idol performer stories, politician's tales about their ancestors or past difficulties, and the like.

For years I've been using the phrase "horror porn" to express my inability to watch genre horror films -- or more to the point, what I see and feel when I watch them. The phrase sums up the "emptiness" of the experience for me. However, if you google "horror porn," you're more likely to find videos that combine elements of both genre horror films and actual pornography. My usage hasn't quite caught on.

"Food porn" on the other hand was an established internet visual genre even before Pinterest came along to cement its popularity, and before that the phrase had an earlier life as a statement of feminist disapprobation of a fetishized woman-food connection, and criticism of the food-ad industry. 

The dictionaries I checked (with the exception of Urban Dictionary) make no reference (yet) to this use of "porn," as a noun (modified by another noun), centralizing the negative connotations of the word "porn" while the modifier tells us what category of thing is being disapproved of.

There does seem to be the possibility of confusion -- even "food porn" could be misinterpreted to mean standard pornography that uses food in a sexual way. However, it's interesting to think that someday people might say "sex porn" to refer to what we would just call porn, and use the word "porn" in general to refer to any empty, meaningless, or manipulative narrative fragment designed to illicit an emotional response without an honest or decent (moral) purpose.

Evo / Cog Science and Lit

I decided to start off the summer with a flurry of essays about brain science and literature: Steven Pinker, John Tooby and Leda Cosmides, Denis Dutton, and a few others. I still have much to read, but a few initial thoughts:

These authors are quick to scold Literature professors for not being open enough to the Sciences and the ways scientific thought can enlighten the understanding of literature and the Humanities in general. It's a fair statement and I'm sure there are many Lit profs who could stand to be more open to the sciences. What's ironic though is that the same authors who are doing the scolding are clearly publishing essays about writing and reading fiction without seriously consulting someone who actually writes, closely reads, or teaches the writing of fiction. If they had, they might have avoided giving the impression throughout their essays that writing and reading fiction is something our brains do easily. 

Those of us who teach story and the writing of stories can tell you quite confidently that constructing a clear and engaging narrative, whether fictional or nonfictional, is a skill that many very smart people struggle with. We can also assure you that people are very capable of reading a book or watching a film without formulating a hypothesis regarding its meaning -- or they might formulate an understanding that is demonstrably illogical, but persist in believing it, etc.

Perhaps if these essays had been written with the difficulty and rareness (what percentage of any population are its storytellers?) of the deed in mind, they might have begun to tackle the question of why people devote themselves to narrative-building and meaning-making (rather than procreation and resource acquisition). 

They might also have addressed the fact that while fiction can be seen as a "safe space" for would-be dangerous vicarious experiences, people very often seek out fiction that is not "safe" for them. There are novels banned because people think the ideas contained in them are dangerous, and there are stories that genuinely freak people out and make them uncomfortable -- sometimes through content, but sometimes through structure! There are many highly acclaimed and admired books and stories that disturb our understanding of the real and unreal and muddle the line between them. I would suggest that the thinkers I've read so far are speaking primarily about children's stories, but children's stories seem "safe" only to adults, or perhaps to children who know the story by heart. The way we talk about fiction is different depending upon whether we are close to it or looking at it from the outside, and I don't think outsiders have an advantage in their understanding here.

None of the essays I've read so far are as interesting as the 11th chapter of Richard Dawkins's The Selfish Gene, written in the 1970s, where he introduces the concept of memetics as an analog to genetics and suggests that information in the form of ideas can behave just like information in the form of DNA. Ideas (memes) that are longer-lasting and more prone to replication will be over-represented in the ecosystem, compared to ideas that lack these traits.

I'd like to read a continuation of this idea, rather than mush about poetry lending a male status among females or that imagination is just a side effect of the survival-relevant ability to anticipate the future. Or even the story-aggrandizing theories that place fiction on the high altar of vicarious wisdom. 

Stories, like genes, can seem to have a life of their own. To what extent are there units of thought floating around in the "cultural soup" of our minds (and in the shared mind-soup created by our communications -- our shared experience of the world) and how do these ideas persist, and how do they replicate? How different, really, is the idea of "star-crossed lovers" from a chemical unit of information: a gene for skin pigmentation or long legs or a well-structured heart? The essential difference is that one is physical and the other is not. 

But DNA, while physical, is hardly tangible like a toad or a tomato. We learn about it indirectly, through instruments. Perhaps people are instruments through which stories can be known? I don't know. I'm going to keep reading... 

Still Banffing After All These Days...

I came to the Banff Centre In(ter)ventions program very certain about my project: I knew exactly what I was going to do and how I was going to do it. Within two days I was completely back to square one. This felt awful, of course, but it is a good thing in the long run. If I'd done what I'd planned I would have created something sorta neat and not terrible. But now I have a much better chance of creating something that really does what I want it to do. It's just going to take a lot longer. I've spent the last week so deep in the throes of this creative trauma, and so diligently re-writing away, that I haven't been able to articulate what's going on with my story in a big picture way. But this morning I bumped into one of my fellow artists while getting a coffee, and in the course of chatting, the whole problem just came out of my mouth in the form of a simple sentence that I hadn't known was true until I said it:

The new medium didn't make any sense until I exposed the hidden themes.

There it is. And that's what I've been doing for the past week-plus: exposing the hidden themes.

Which raises the questions, what where the themes, and why were they hidden?

When I was about four years old, I was attacked by a dog. It was a doberman, and it was as tall on all fours as I was on two. The man sicked the dog on us and it came right for me. I remember trying to run and get away, I remember the dog knocking me on the ground, pinning me down, barking over and over again in my face. I could see all its teeth and down its throat. By some miracle, this dog didn't bite me.

[To answer your questions: we were Jehovah's Witnesses, the man was a sick fuck, the dog went after the smallest target, and I can only imagine he didn't bite me because that dog, even though he was abused and trained to attack, had a measure of decency in him that his owner did not -- or, more likely, it was just luck.]

But none of this is where the story comes from. The story comes from the fact that I've always felt a little disfigured. My internal image of myself is a girl with a scar on her face. Like if I went into the Matrix, I'd be scar-face girl (with awesome leather duster and kung-fu skills). Or you could call it a mild body dysmorphia, mild because I've never felt the need to act on it; I'm just mildly surprised when I look in the mirror and see myself.

And because I've been exposed (through both science and sci-fi) to M-theory and p-Branes, the concept in string theory of alternate timelines a.k.a. higher dimensions (#6 does it, apparently) where all possible things (but contrary to popular delusion no impossible things) are true, I started to wonder if it's possible for echoes to resonate on the branes and get through -- sending suggestions to other realities that might creep into your subconscious and influence you.

What if it was more likely the dog would bite me than not? Then I'm living in a minority world. What if that information could be sensed? Then that might screw with my head a little.

Not that I believe this is necessarily true. It's just a compelling idea. I write fiction. My favorite things aren't true. :)

Anyway, I invented this character named Penelope, who can hear all her alternate selves. She can't hear any/all alternate worlds, just the infinite set (within that infinite set) predicated on other hers, whom I defined genetically, because genes/molecules are a concrete physical reality. So this egg, this sperm, this zygote -- and from that moment of beginning, the branching and breaking infinite possible worlds, which she hears.

So I decided to write this into a story. But I felt weird putting all the science stuff in there, so I left it all out. In the story as I wrote it, Penelope hears these things and there's no real explanation -- perhaps she's got a chemical imbalance, who knows? She and her husband, a wealthy music producer, receive an mp3 in an email with a song on it, which is very sad and poorly produced but super-compelling, and the song leads to a series of supernatural-seeming events. Also, there's a lot of stuff in there about wanting to have a baby.

As a narrative, the story holds together. What's missing is everything that inspired it -- the meaning of it -- everything I hid. Which is why, I think, I wanted the story to become electronic and interactive in the first place: information was missing, and I wanted the medium to stand in for the missing message.

What I realized when I got here and started to talking to people is that the medium can't stand in for the message -- I realized, in fact, that the medium seems random and unnecessary unless I expose those underlying themes.

So I went back to the drawing board. Literally. I set the story aside and pulled out my sketchpad and started drawing. Then I got back to writing: way back, back to the source of the story, the reason I wrote it in the first place. I re-imagined the characters from that point in the past. I cut most of what happened and let new events fall on a brand new timeline. I worked through why I used the images and events I had in the first version. Once I understood, I used those reasons to develop new, better images and new more communicative scenes -- images and scenes truer to my intent. I found new language for the things I needed to say. And I was able to explain to myself why this character is interested in a baby, and genetics.

It was a lot of work -- but it didn't result in anything presentable. In fact, I came to Banff with a finished story ready to be transformed into an interactive experience. What I have now isn't even a finished story. It's an amorphous blob of half-finished story, written in fragments, many of which have no place. It definitely feels like I've taken a big step backwards.

And it's a new story, at least to anyone else. To me it's the same story with it's armor plating removed, so you can see its flesh. But I recognize that to anyone else, this would seem like a completely different story, in no small part because it means something completely different now.

Which is, above all, what I needed.

I've worked my butt off for the last week-plus, and it would be really great to be able to come home the (in my head, anyway) conquering hero with a pretty prize to display for my triumph. Instead all my work has been to dig myself a whole new batch of work -- but with better prospects in the end.

Hard cheese to swallow, but I like it.

Writing. Archaeology.

The more I think about my own writing and look at the literary works I admire, the more it occurs to me that what I'm seeing is the careful reconstruction of fragments.

A memoirist takes sherds of life and pieces them into something recognizable, something with an attractive shape -- and something hopefully true, neither ideal nor grotesque, not a Romantic portrait nor some sideshow monkey-fish mermaid, but a reconstruction of objects that once were, and by the artist's hand become knowable.

A translator picks apart fragments of meaning, or through damaged ancient scrolls, examining the text for its possible relationship to a new language, a new culture, accepting the losses of lacunae and all the poetry which is lost to translation, encouraging the poetry that may be born of it, creating pages that are not reconstructions but approximations and associations.

And then there's fiction, where mosaics are made of the jagged ceramics and tattered papyrus and human remains and ancient roadbeds and debunked theories and irrational numbers and cave paintings and bite marks on bone in the garbage midden -- but what is being made? It's not a re-construction of what was. It's not a re-imagining of what is.

It is a first imagining of what can be.

An experimentalist examines the functions and forms, examines the fragments themselves, pulls them apart and formalizes their function, exposes the processes within. In finished form, much of fiction looks similar to non-fiction or translation, but when we examine the process, there is something, in fiction, missing: a guide. Something that exists outside the process and that the writers are "held to" -- which the fiction author is not.

What becomes the guide? What stands in that spot? The author's "vision." Ideas. Concepts. Vague and hazy abstracts. "What I want to the reader to get." A scene that obsessed me. A phrase someone said. A character got in my head: I had to know where she led. In fiction the roots of the work are random, subjective, and ultimately unaccountable. Only the finished form can be held to task. And so form controls function in a way that is unlikely -- or at least, undesirable -- in a non-fiction text. Effect controls content in a way that is impossible -- or at least, unfaithful -- in a translation or adaptation. What is debatable in these other modes is, in fiction, de rigueur.

Writers of fiction are less fixed. We know that having many choices, while it sounds desirable, actually leads to pain (Dan Gilbert). And so in fiction all is pain, even the ideas at the center of a story, which necessarily evolve as the process of creating a story goes on. Everything is ether, until the form-final end. All fragments are optional and discardable, until the form-final end. All truths may be better told, until that form-final end -- and where is that end? Lost in the swells of this roiling sea, how can I see the shape of the ocean? Does a writer need someone to drag her away from the canvas, like Picasso said he did?

The archaeology metaphor breaks down. The scientist can't choose to discard the bones that undermine her theory, but the fiction writer can (and does) reshape the world to suit her vision. I can discard History, Language, Physics itself.

It's not without consequence, though: each omission leaves a space, some little nicks, some vast as lakes. I can remove Physics from my story, but the omission is an addition.

All I can do is get back to work.

Banff!

When the border officer asked me what my business was in Canada, and I told him I was doing a residency at the Banff Centre, he glanced around and held his face very still, as though he didn't want to be caught emoting on the job, and said, "you're in for a real treat. The Banff Centre is something special. You enjoy that now." And he sent me on my way.

And yes, this place is incredible. It's hard to believe that this beautiful location and these amazing facilities have been dedicated to artists -- artists! -- for the better part of a century. It's hard for me to believe, I guess, because I'm accustomed to thinking of artists as outcast from the material comforts of the capitalist-dominated world, where a lump of dung that gets you a dollar is held in higher regard than a dance that saves your soul, dollarlessly. But it's inspiring to discover that such a place as the Banff Centre exists, and that it is appointed in a way that so clearly respects and supports the work the artists do, and that it is doing this year round, and year after year, giving creatives a place to live and work in comfort and beauty.

I've been here for less than two days, and I've already experienced both a low rise of confidence and a shallow pit of despair as a series of revelations about my art and current project washed over me, pecked at me, and smashed me in the face. This is the kind of trauma that's necessary, I think, if you want to make progress and do something new. But it's not the kind of trauma you have time and space for in your day-to-day life. "You." I mean me. :) In my day-to-day, I rarely have time to fall apart and rebuild myself a piece at a time.

If I hadn't been offered this residency, if my employer hadn't been so generous and wonderful to support my coming, where would this project be? Still in a holding pattern: little to no trauma experienced, little to no progress made. Instead of an interactive story, I'd have an idea sitting on the backburner, screaming to be executed, being ever put off until I can find the time. And then, when I do find the time, I move forward carefully, according to plan, because to question the plan, to re-examine the start of things, that would be madness: what if I discovered something wrong?

Today I reacquainted myself with the dark, slippery center of my story, a handful of questions and concepts and connections that are just beyond my knowing, things I can't be sure of, the things I have to dig in and write and build to try to know. They are not the story I came here with, but the story as it genuinely wants to be -- it's wider and deeper than I'd given it credit for, it's wider and deeper than what I've written, or planned.

So I'm not just making progress on a project, not just finding the time to execute the necessary actions that lead to the final form -- which is what (to my shame) I expected to do. But instead I've discovered the time and space to do something harder, and scarier, but more important: I'm going in big and finding out more about my art and hopefully creating something that needs to be in the world. AND I'm going to execute the necessary actions that lead to the final form. Both. All. Every. Down the rabbit hole.

Or at least so I say on day two. We'll see where this goes...

More Blessings of Atheism

Susan Jacoby wrote an op-ed for the NYTimes called, "The Blessings of Atheism," in which she argues that atheists need to move away from "defensive" campaigns asserting that you "can" be "good without God," and move towards a more positive vision of what the atheist worldview has to offer.

I agree with her.

But I don't think she does a very good job.

So I want to try.

I want to try because I live happily, every day, in a world that does not contain a deity, and it is, from what I can see, a much happier place than the worlds inhabited by others that do contain a deity. Sometimes this is a coincidence, of course. And sometimes it seems the causation is reversed (a difficult life has led the person to need a consoling/explicatory narrative, true or not, which makes life feel worth living). But often it seems to me that the causation works in the other direction: that believing in the deity is harming them, is making them miserable; meanwhile, it is precisely my deity-free world that has enabled me to experience many of the things that religions claim to offer -- like a throbbingly powerful sense of the transcendent, precious, near-magical beauty of life itself, for example.

So:

Let's talk about death. Let's say some total jackhole decides to murder some children. This worthless sack of crap gets a gun, goes to a school, and shoots and kills children. This is horrific. This is crushing. Those deaths are horrible deaths. There are no words. Those deaths require dramatic displays of emotion, of political action, of everything we can muster. We are not going to forget or "get over" those deaths. Injustice. Atrocity. Pain. Anguish. Howling in our hearts, long into the night.

Okay.

Now, let's say some disease decides to murder 50,000 children a year. This horrible disease alters the DNA of the children, so they're born with a progressively degenerating muscular system. The kids will be mentally sharp -- more so than average, actually -- so they'll understand everything that's happening to them. The children will live short, painful lives, unable to run and play or even talk -- unable at the end to even smile at their mothers, whom they love.

The first situation, the guy with the gun, is much more horrible to us -- just look at how society reacts. The disease, we are more willing and able to understand and accept -- and, through reason and science, do something about. We're working on curing it, doing everything we can -- and someday we'll have a cure, and children will no longer have to suffer and die like this. Until then, here is the truth: hundreds of sweet, beautiful children died of Spinal Muscular Atrophy today, but you don't know their names, their faces, and you never will. Instead you know the names and faces of the children murdered in Newtown, Connecticut, because that was horror, that was atrocity.

Numbers of human lives lost aside. Length of suffering aside. Degree of pain aside. It's worse when someone does it on purpose. 

(Please don't mistake me here: I am not suggesting we should be just as upset about children dying of SMA or that we should be less upset about children murdered by jerks with guns -- I'm just pointing out the reality of our experience: it hurts us worse when we know it's on purpose.)

To a theist, any theist, the world is in the hands of the guy with the gun. Everything that happens is at some level on purpose. In the extreme forms of this madness, every tragedy -- a mass murder or a hurricane -- is "God's wrath," retribution for not sufficiently persecuting gay people, or some other asinine thing. But even for the normal non-extreme religious person, this means that every bad thing that happens contains a measure of agony that wears on the believer -- in a way that cannot be met even by tragedies that objectively do far, far more damage in the world, to a non-believer. Only a believer can ask, in honesty and anguish, why do bad things happen to good people? As though being good should get you out of bad things.

As an atheist, I care deeply about curing diseases and stopping mass murderers -- especially deeply because I know that those children (whether shot or smothered by their own DNA), do not still exist (in "heaven" or whatnot), they are gone, and their loss is a pure loss, without consolation, forever and never to be undone. But these occurrences do not stress me in the way they would if I believed they were happening under the watchful eye of an intentional, omniscient god. Instead, I understand these occurrences as the results of influences, events, available actions, and random chance. They still suck, they're still sad, and we damn well better do something about them! But they're not on purpose.

To a theist, every victim of accident or disease is a victim of a mindful, purposeful God with a cruel and heartless "grand plan" that does not make exceptions for the pain and suffering of innocent babies -- it is a plan that may in fact require the pain and suffering of innocent babies. And while I've used as my example the most terrible thing I could think of -- the death of a child -- this concept applies to every little thing that happens in life. This is a universe of belief, a whole way of seeing the world, and it's one that causes believer undue stress and torment. It's a way for bad luck to cause existential struggles, for blind chance to cause howling in their hearts, long into the night.

But the clearest and most direct benefit of atheism is the one that Jacoby does nail in her essay, and that is that "the absence of an afterlife lends a greater, not a lesser, moral importance to our actions on earth."

Now of course I'm not the first person to point out that most people don't seem to really believe in an afterlife anyway: people who genuinely believed in life after death would not mourn the deaths of children they don't know at all -- they'd just say, oh how nice that little so-and-so got to go to heaven early! And people who mourn the deaths of kids they know would be regarded as selfish -- hey, man, I know you miss little Jessica, but she's with Jesus, and you'll see her soon, you selfish sourpuss!!

But the very common half-belief in an afterlife -- the illusion of eternity we carry with us, allowing us to live our lives unmindful of our short time here -- that is a very harmful thing. Awareness of the shortness and fragility of life -- and of the fact that once it is gone it is gone forever -- is the key to living a full and happy life. Once we understand that every moment is precious, we're more likely to start treating every moment as precious -- to become more understanding and forgiving (because we don't have time to dick around with stupid arguments and endless grudges), to say yes to the rare and beautiful opportunities that arise in life, to live in the moment instead of rushing on to the next thing.

This is not to say that there aren't happy religious people. There are. But I, personally, would be miserable if I believed in a god. If I believed in a god, I would have to believe in a jerky god, a real asshole who doesn't care about anything or anyone. If I believed in such a creature, I'd refuse to have anything to do with it. I'd feel morally superior to it. I'd say, "throw me in your hell, you cretin -- I'd rather suffer forever than be aligned with a big old jerk like you. Because if I play along with your game and try to win your favor, I'm just as bad as you -- who has the power to end suffering but does not." Well that would be terrible, to be stuck believing anything like that. Even worse would be to believe and decide to toady up to this awful creature, trying to win the rewards it promises, trusting in its authority in defiance of evidence and one's own moral sense. I can think of no worse form of moral corruption. A person so compromised would have no moral center, no idea what to think. Unless told. (Shiver.)

Fortunately I'm a realist-atheist, living in a godless universe, and I am very happy. Life goes well, and when it doesn't, it doesn't, but the elements of chance that intervene in things are not on purpose, and don't unduly bother me. Those things I can control and make better, I do. Existence is amazing and precious and beautiful -- and mysterious, but mysterious with the promise of scientific discovery along the way -- and it's all the more beautiful for arising from the cosmic dust without a guiding hand, without a plot or plan, just physical things interacting over inconceivable expanses of time to create complex beings that are more than the sum of their parts, who are the universe of matter regarding itself and saying, wow: let's figure this shit out.

Unbridled Contempt

Over the summer I've been a part of various workshops and working groups at Drake, in which faculty from multiple departments (and colleges) get together to work on being better teachers and professors all around.

These often require endurance -- some of them are a bit like a college class that lasts all day long, with a sandwich provided and a couple of 5 minute bathroom breaks -- but they're very much worth it. Not only do they dedicate you to working on improving your teaching, but you get to meet and talk to people in other fields, get some insight into their practices and challenges, a fuller picture of what your students are experiencing across the various classrooms that make up their academic world.

But I was not prepared for the unbridled contempt some faculty members in the sciences possess for my discipline entirely.

Contempt, I say, because they seem to think we operate in a universe where there are no rules, standards, or even facts. Unbridled, I say, because they tell you so to your face or in broad public statements, and seem puzzled when you don't happily agree.

The prevailing sentiment seemed to be: you English professors have nothing to say to me, your discipline's work on student writing or critical thinking means nothing to me, because in my discipline "there are wrong answers."

The people who have asserted this view seem unaware of the offense. During one of the workshops, a faculty member asked me to help her with her syllabus. I was glad to do so, until I got to the sentence in which she singled out English majors (not the discipline, the actual students) for ridicule, with an "English majors, your flowery prose is not welcome -- here we value accuracy in language!" sort of line.

As though precision in language were not one of our concerns, as though puffery were something we encouraged, rather than work every day to stamp out.

When I told her that I didn't think it's a good idea to call out a whole group of students like that, she smiled and explained it to me, like I didn't get the joke. 

I genuinely like this person, and it was clear she was not malicious, but simply oblivious to the insult and potential ill-feelings she might evoke with these words. The bias seems to run deep, is persistent, and is resistant to amendment: this week I ran into someone I'd met earlier in the summer at another workshop. She'd made her bias against English known at that time, and I thought the group (and she) had worked past that. But no, just this week she said, directly to me, that her field "isn't English. There are wrong answers."

I feel awful even wanting to say to a colleague the line I must so frequently say to students: just because there is more than one right answer doesn't mean there aren't wrong ones. In fact, the number of wrong answers is infinite, while the number of right answers is limited.

By way of illustration, I offer you a small selection of wrong answers from the world of literature, limiting myself to just one major work:

• "HAMLET is an exploration of social justice issues from the 14th century." 
• "When Hamlet and Ophelia get married at the end of the play..."
• "King Polonius tells Laertes, 'don't go into debt, bro!' "
• "Shakespeare's focus on women's rights..."
• "...shows what Shakespeare learned in his college classes..."
• "The final scene, influenced by the anti-royal sentiments of the French Revolution..."

And this could go on infinitely.

"Right" answers, on the other hand, are limited by the factual reality of the author, his era, and the text-evidenced details of fictional world he created (for example, who is king, what Polonius actually does tell Laertes, and whether or not there is a marriage at the end of the play, or anyone alive to be married). Interpretations may have some latitude, but they must still make sense; they are limited by reason itself. If they are infinite, they are infinite in the way that prime numbers are infinite: not every number is a prime; most numbers, in fact, are not primes. And the higher you go, the longer it takes to find them. It is probable that most of the things you can conceivably say about HAMLET ("Ophelia impaled herself on a unicorn!") are in fact not accurate, reasonable things to say. Right answers are a limited set, tricky in the sense that they are defined by boundaries both absolute (French Revolution) and ambiguous (women's rights), and include things that are both absurd (unicorn) and things just a little bit off from right: "alas, poor Yorick, I knew him well!" is not quite what Hamlet says.

It's not all just about right and wrong, though. There are also, in addition to wrong answers, insufficient answers. This is akin to getting the right final answer on a math test, but not showing any of your work -- to randomly guessing (or just looking up) the precise number of milliliters you must titrate into the solution to get a reaction, without actually performing the experiment. In our discipline, this often takes the form of broad sweeping statements that are not particularly informed, explained, or supported -- statements like, "Hamlet has unresolved issues," or "the play reveals the inefficiencies of monarchy as a system of government" -- these propositions may or may not work out; it depends on where they came from and what you do with them.

If the proposition is the writer's original thought, and is explained with logical reasoning and supported with evidence, it is probably sufficient -- there remains the question of whether the argument holds together and is reasonable, in the end. The point is, these are arguments that can be made, but they must be made sufficiently: informed, explained, supported. The writer must "show the work." A "right" answer, a "sufficient" answer, and certainly a "good" answer in the world of literary interpretation requires a tremendous amount of understanding, creativity, rigor, and work -- many answers can and will be "wrong," "insufficient," and even "bad": this reality in no way conflicts with the coincident fact that there is myriad and diverse answers in each set.

But the statement "there are no wrong answers in English" isn't just insufficient, it's back to the unicorn, just flat out wrong. I just gave an example that had to do with interpreting ideas from a work of literature, which is probably the most "open to opinion" area in English -- but we do a lot more than that, operating in an unbroken spectrum that runs from themes to phonemes, with theories and practices that go back to the beginning of civilization and are still evolving today.

Which brings me to this: when I was an undergraduate, I majored in the hard sciences. I was especially good at organic chemistry, and pictured myself pursuing graduate work in organic or perhaps biochem. I loved difficult problems, I thrived on difficulty. Every class I took made me want to move into something harder, more sophisticated, more advanced.

And then one day I took a poetry class.

And I realized that poetry was the hardest thing I'd ever encountered.

Poems are like formulae that do not begin and end, but instead spiral inwards and outwards simultaneously into worlds of meaning. They are influenced by innumerable mysterious things, sometimes inscrutable, sometimes more clear. They live, like organisms, moving through time and place and human events, and meaning differently in each new environment. Understanding this was the trickiest puzzle I'd ever put my mind to: it was a puzzle that did not end; it was irresistible. I dove into this world and have never stopped encountering mysteries and marvels -- I will never "figure it all out," no one will. But I know that the lack of a single, unambiguous answer doesn't remotely imply that this work is meaningless: to the contrary, to the contrary.

At this point in my life, I am unwilling to dismiss any field of inquiry. A university brings together people with various fields and interests, but none of them is "better than" the others -- and none of them, I should add, is truly "separate from" the others. At bottom we're all philosophers -- lovers of wisdom -- and it is not wise to mock or dismiss things other people love. They may have a very good reason for loving it -- even if it's not a reason that you, at present, fully understand.



Note: I've revised the wording in places and expanded a few sections at the request of friends, but the spirit of the blog post remains unchanged.

The Student Who Scared Me

Enough time has passed, I think I can tell this.

I was about to start teaching a 6-week summer class at FAU: Advanced Exposition, one of my favorite classes to teach, a writing class focused on applying Classical Rhetoric to modern contexts, the logos in your blog post, that sort of thing.

A day or two before the term started, I got a weird email. It came in through my website's contact page, which generally attracts two parts spam to one part fan mail. The fan mail comes in for my creative writing, and is generally along the lines of, "I read your story in {X} and just wanted to send you a note telling you I loved it..." I usually reply, "thank you for reading," and, "it's gratifying to hear back from readers -- I appreciate it."

But that one summer right at the start of the term I got something weird: poetry. Creepy deathy love poetry. Very, very bad poetry. No context, no message. Was an old student sending me recent work? Was this a message intended for someone else? I had no idea. There was a return email (it contained the word "diamond" and a number), and I considered inquiring to get some context ("did you send to this to me by mistake?"), but in the end I decided to just ignore it.

Then summer classes started.

There was a man in my class who was very uncomfortable. It was really my only initial thought. He was touchy and flinchy. No matter what examples of rhetorical technique I showed them, he got angry. He would question everything. He tried to ask me catch questions "who translated that?!" but they happened to be ones I could answer ("it was translated by Theo Cuffe in 2005"). The fact that I could answer upset him visibly.

He stormed out of the room a lot, but always came back. The day we analyzed Sojourner Truth's short but effective "Ain't I a Woman?" speech, he stormed out three times, and came back after about 10 minutes each time. It was clear that a lot of his objections came from a religious and conservative place, but the origin had little to do with the objective. There was this strange energy in him, sudden and violent, and a complete discomfort in the world, like he were being nipped by little invisible alligators all the time.

The first time I had the students work in groups, he declared himself the group leader, came to a very quick, very wrong conclusion, then tried to bully the others, so completely unwilling to hear any other opinion or even allow the others to talk amongst themselves without his interference that for that group the project was pointless. He had the attitude that he was completely above this class and the material, that the other students were mere children, utterly beneath him and unworthy of voicing opinions, and yet his competence was blindingly low. He'd look at the problems, intuit a random answer, and then go forth with full confidence that the random gibberish that welled up from his subconscious was God-given genius.

I knew he would be a difficult student. But then they submitted their first assignment.

When I opened his, my gut fell through the floor. It was the same bad poetry, the same deathy love song that had appeared in my inbox before the term, only now it was pages long: "We were meant to be together" was the gist of some of it, but he didn't just mean him and me, he was talking about the whole class. According to his weird poem-essay-philosophy, all of our lives were just excuses to get us into this classroom with him right now so our true fates could begin. There was more: actually, the majority of it I truly could not decipher, because it was too incoherent.

I have never shown any of it to anyone, but I believe it's okay to provide a small taste:

Do we pass under our doorway and immediately conform to the wind, or do we harness our wind, forging an alliance, procuring a confidant. Does reason recommend acknowledging the present, or forebearing today in order to secure tomorrow? The future breathes not, its birth is contingent upon my presence.

Optimize potential,
ruminate profound,
eliminate adventure,
Sorrow Sealing Sound.

Captivate enchantment,
model purity,
sanctify existence,
snowflake Sanity.

If it weren't for the weird pre-term poem email, and if I hadn't already met him and gotten a sense of how impulsive and aggressive he could be, I wouldn't have found this anything but nonsensical, weird, and inappropriate, and certainly not what he was assigned (the assignment was to tell the straightforward narrative of an important event in your life).

But by now I was starting to find this a little scary. It's never fun telling a student that his work was unacceptable and must be done over, but in this case I didn't know what to expect. Would he blow up? He didn't. He just asked over and over what was wrong with it. I focused on the assignment and explained what the assignment was supposed to be: practice at narrating events in a clear way. He left saying he would do it over, but he didn't -- this was the last piece of writing he submitted.

He did stay in the class for two more weeks, though, struggling the whole way, getting more and more agitated. I actually asked my partner to come sit in on my class, something I'd never even considered before, but I backed out of that plan; I don't like the idea of seeming or being "weak" and bringing a man to class to sit and play police seemed like the ultimate show of weakness. Still, this student was starting to scare me.

The last day I saw him he was as uncomfortable as he'd been in my class. He stormed out a lot. He barked out a lot of inappropriate questions. I had to address him directly and explain that we were focusing on a certain subject today, and that we had to stay on that subject. At one point a fellow student of his, who I believe was also a youth minister, went after him to counsel him. According to that student, he didn't even know why he was upset, he just was.

At the end of that class period several students wanted to talk to me, and the angry student just sat and waited. I realized he wanted to get me alone. He'd been getting angrier and angrier for all of a three hour class period. I should have had my partner come sit in the class with me, I thought with a sinking stomach. And then, when the last student left the room and it was just him and me, he did the scariest thing he'd done all semester: he smiled.

His personality changed like the closing classroom door had flipped a switch. Suddenly he wanted to flatter me and make small talk. Then he started revealing that he knew details about my life: "so you went to school in Fayetteville? How did you like it there?" I tried to keep it light. I answered his questions. I told him Fayetteville was peaceful, that if you liked peaceful places, you'd like it there. That seemed to stop him and make him think. He started talking about peace and how he liked that. I got all my stuff together and moved towards the door. He had a few more things to say, and followed me to the stairs. When it looked like he was going down the stairs too, I faked left and said I needed to get something from my office. 

When I got to my office my heart was pounding. It was a few days before the mid-term drop date, so I sat down right there and sent him an email suggesting that, since he'd turned in no work, he should withdraw. The weekend ticked by. I was scared at home, now. I was sitting on my couch watching TV, but I wasn't thinking about Mythbusters: I was looking at the windows. Could he be out there, watching me? Ready to do something crazy? I decided that if he didn't drop the class before the W date, I was going to have to talk to someone: ask someone to come and sit in my class, do something.

But the next week came, and he was gone. After class I checked: he showed up on my roster as withdrawn -- welcome news. But I was still feeling the fear, especially when I was home alone. The things he'd said and written seemed so personal -- he'd looked up where I'd gone to school! And he was so impulsive, so angry, so unhappy and uncomfortable. Everything in me said this is the kind of guy who snaps and "does" something. So even though he wasn't in my class anymore, I was still nervous. Finally the last week of class came. My students finished up their final projects and I went online to register their final grades.

His name was still on the roster -- that's normal, it should have had a "W" next to it. But it didn't. Next to his name it said, DECEASED.

I immediately googled his name. This student had a very unusual name, so the news story about his death popped up right away. Apparently, right after I'd spoken to him, he'd hitch-hiked north to Fayetteville North Carolina (the school I went to was in Fayetteville Arkansas, but a lot of people get them mixed up). The police just outside of Fayetteville NC found him in a roadside ditch, injured and dehydrated. It's possible someone attacked him, or that he was thrown (or jumped) from a car.

They took him to the local hospital, and when he regained consciousness, he attacked the doctors and nurses and ran to the nearest window -- probably not realizing that it was 7 stories up. He forced the window open (it was supposed to stop at 1 inch, but he busted it way past that), and jumped to his death. His body landed right in front of the hospital's main entrance: they had to close it off for some time.

I read the story, and I was overwhelmed with relief. Yes, that sounds awful, I'm sure, but it's true. I'd been in a constant low-level state of fear for weeks. Death is tragic. The self-inflicted death of a troubled soul is perhaps more tragic. But knowing that he didn't take anyone with him? That's not tragic, that's something else. Weeks and weeks of tension slipped from my body. I was so grateful! He was troubled and unhappy and he clearly needed help that he could not get -- but he didn't take anyone with him. This seemed to me like a small, precious miracle.

Making an eBook

Today The Rumpus Original Poetry Anthology was released by iTunes and is available to buy in their bookstore for 9.99.

This is the first eBook I've designed, and I'm writing this post for anyone who might be interested in taking on a similar project.

The concept that we started with was of a simple, elegant eBook that represents "poetry as you find it on The Rumpus," but adds a few things you don't get on the site: the clean, glossy feel of a book, a tidy organization that brings all the poems and poets together into a cohesive and beautiful (ad-free) piece, and some media features (which actually you could get on the site, and sometimes do).

It doesn't sound like a terribly tall order for an ebook, does it? And yet, it is.

There are certain "market pressures" that are keeping certain ebook formats from being as media friendly as they should be. The epub format is open and accessible, but it's remarkably difficult to integrate video. (It's not impossible, but it requires near-hacker-grade skills to get around all the things you have to get around.) Amazon apparently wants to keep their old text-based b&w Kindles relevant, so they are not friendly to media, despite their new Kindle Fire.

We spent a few months fighting with epubs (and making good progress) when Apple released iBooks Author: a free wysiwyg app designed to make it easy to build books for Apple's iTunes bookstore, iBooks. I downloaded it because it was free and spend a few minutes playing around with it, and decided right on the spot to scrap everything and start over with this new program.

Seriously.

Because it's that much better. Because it makes integrating media that much easier.

"Easy" is a relative term, here. If you're used to making media, working in programs like inDesign or Dreamweaver for example, you will find iBooks Author to be not just "friendly" but cuddly-sweet. If you are a complete novice and have never done any design/publishing work, iBooks Author is still your best bet, but expect a learning curve.

Still, this is a good program: the design of the design tools matters, and iBooks Author wants you to make a book with integrated media. It wants you to include audio and video and nice, glossy images, and links and games and all the rest. It's set up to accommodate these options. And this makes all the difference. You can integrate media into an epub, but you have to fight and scratch and force the issue. iBooks Author invites you to please integrate media, right this way, and all but gives you little kisses as you work.

iBooks Author is not a perfect app. I think that's why it's free: essentially all users are beta testers right now. But it is possible to make a really attractive interactive masterpiece with it. Expect to spend hours and days and weeks of your life on it, yes, that's true of any book, but the results will pay off and look gorgeous, which is not necessarily true of epub.

Fiction

The difference between fiction and nonfiction is our expectation.

The thing we expect is fact rather than truth.

We live in a world of facts.

We imagine a world of truths.

In a world of facts, things are what they are.

In a world of truths, everything means something bigger than itself.

A world of truths is a world of symbols and signs.

Language is also a world of symbols and signs.

Language is a doorway into the world of truths.

(There are other doorways: image, gesture...)

To believe fully in a world of truths would require an irrational leap of faith.

Religions require belief, an irrational leap of faith.

Religions are worlds of truths which people fully believe, trust, have faith.

If we fully believe, trust, have faith in a world of truth, it is our religion.

(It is religion to believe a world of fiction is real.)

Yet imagine life without fiction, without its guiding truths, vicarious wisdoms.

In the beginning was the word (logos: reason).

Symbols and signs are keys to reason: they unlock meanings, chest within chest.
Without "the word" (our symbols and signs) we have no reason.

To reason we need our world of truths, separate from our world of facts.

To reason we need fiction.

If we cannot reason without it, we cannot perceive the facts without it.

If we cannot reason without it, we cannot be human without it.

To reason is the central fact of human existence, our reality.

Our reality depends on the world of truths, symbols and signs.

Our reality depends on the world of fiction.

Without fiction, facts are meaningless.

Fiction is our God.

Believe in it.

1/18: The Day I Didn't Use Facebook

Unposted 1/18 Status #1:

I'm re-reading < 3 Huckleberry Finn < 3 but having trouble pushing through the ending because Tom Sawyer is an insufferable jackass.

Unposted 1/18 Link: I would have posted link to the Bittman Twinkie piece, which I think is awesome because he blames the company for failing to observe and react to the changing marketplace and keep themselves profitable. It's an argument not made often enough. Who is to blame for the sinking of the American auto industry? The jackasses who kept cranking out the cars of the past instead of pursuing the cars of the future. Twinkie. Pontiac. Tomato. Potato.

Unposted 1/18 Status #2: 

Watched my kitty play with his mousy toy for half an hour thinking, aw isn't he the cutest? before I realized IT'S A REAL MOUSE.

Unposted 1/18 Status #2 Follow-Up:

1. Made Brian clean it up and throw it away.

2. Made Brian vacuum the entire room too.

3. Oh, Wally, thou murd'rous beast! Why, why, why?

4. Don't you dare lick me with that guilt-stained tongue, kitty. :-\

Unposted 1/18 Link: I would have posted this news story on Brian's wall (or "timeline" what-evs), because he's always concerned that the Alzheimer's that runs in his family will ruin the later years of his life. I like any discovery that puts more of our fate in our own hands. Also this seems to justify all the long walks through the snow we've been making lately.

Uposted 1/18 Status #3:

I have gear that effectively keeps every part of my body warm in a snow storm except for my cheeks, nose, and eyes. I think I have to start walking to work in a blast shield. 

Blast Shield Down.

And of course I would have posted this story, about the issue that has me, like so many people, not using Facebook for a day. Looks like the good guys are winning this one. Woohoo!

Now I'm going to publish this blog post, which will send it to Twitter, which will send it to Facebook, but that's not really posting on Facebook, at least not by the logic of the Shabbat Elevator, or some similar form of BS-logic, and by the way, that link to the Shabbat Elevator won't work until Wikipedia finishes its protest tomorrow, which somehow makes me feel even more justified in posting something that I know will eventually end up on Facebook before midnight. =D

Is English a Discipline?

Since coming to Drake, I've twice heard someone say that English doesn't really have a subject (once by someone within the English department, once by someone outside it). I found this curious but welcome, since I too have long wondered at the undefined borders of my "field." But I've tended to look at it the other way around -- that English is too large and sprawling a discipline, that its subject is everything. Perhaps these are just two ways of saying the same thing.

English departments are, as the name implies, interested in a particular language. And so our realm seems to begin with a specific combinatorial set of symbols deemed to have meaning when arranged according to a certain set of rules. But this study isn't possible without the study of other languages, since the roots of English lie in other languages living and dead, and since comparisons between languages are a basic and vital core of understanding language itself, and since translation as an art and as a universe of theory depends on a knowledge of these transitional spaces.

So before we've left the small-scale study of the symbols themselves, "English" as discipline has already crossed into Linguistics, Grammar, Communications, Psychology, Foreign Languages, and Translation.

But Translation is a form of writing, an art, which opens the "English" discipline even further: it is Writing, Rhetoric, Composition, and an endless universe of Aesthetics subject to Cultural values and customs.

And Translation is just one form of writing -- original writing in English is of course a major natural concern of English study. But the study of texts in English is a incomprehensibly vast field. It is necessary to break it down by era or genre or theme, or in some cases by author.

But each of these specializations invites the scholar to become an expert in an area that itself overlaps tremendously with other areas: one cannot be a Shakespeare scholar without becoming quite the expert in British Royal History, not to mention the History of Theater and Drama, the sartorial customs, the intra- and inter-state European conflicts, the slang, the medical and biological dangers of the day, and so on.

And any study of story structure will invite the scholar into the universe of myths (and theories about monomyths, and theories of religion...) not to mention the study of the human mind (and by extension, brain) and how it reacts to various stimuli.

I could go on with this, but you get the point: English studies starts with the clever combinations of symbols going back to the Phoenicians (or perhaps earlier) and ends up swallowing the world and, bigger still, the mind.

If you're a writer, you live this ouroboros. Writing is the only art that is customarily discussed using the medium of the art itself. There is no discipline called "Paint" -- there is a discipline called "Art" and "paint" is merely one of many possible media which is discussed by the discipline "Art" using language. But for a writer, the medium is his or her language, English in our case. And while a painter can leave the paints behind and discuss his paintings using language, a writer, a language artist, can't discuss her art using anything but the very material of her art, language.

It's a bit of trap. You can't ask a fish to analyze water until he's broken through the surface and seen it from above. We need distance to see. We need perspective to understand. Yet language is in many ways the matter of the world -- it is, at least, the matter of our comprehension of the world. So how do we see language?

It seems, whether this is the best possible solution to the problem or not, that we try to see language, its purpose, its function, its meaning, by running desperately away from it, hoping that we will be able to jerk our heads back for a quick glance and finally see the thing we've been after all this time. Which is why, I believe, English departments come off as loose associations of people madly running away from their own subject in 100 different directions.

When I was a kid I used to lay in bed at night and try to think without language. I realized that I'd have a thought in words, but that before the words came into my head, I knew what I was about to think. I would lie there and try to skip the part with the words, and just know what my thoughts were, without language.

I'm fairly convinced that if I hadn't spent all those hours doing that, I wouldn't be a writer today.

And I'm fairly convinced that you can't have an English department that doesn't spend most of its time focused on History, Culture, Philosophy, Linguistics, Psychology, Brain Science, Rhetoric...

Quick, LOOK! Did you see it? ;)

Today I finished reading Steven Pinker's Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. It took me about three months: I read slowly, the better to mull over and digest the ideas in this remarkable book. Over that time, I also had plenty of time to notice how controversial this book is, and how odd the controversy: this book isn't controversial because of the things is says but rather because of the things people think it says (that we live in a happy fun-land and war and violence are a thing of the past), or in some cases, think it implies (that serious crimes "don't really matter").


Pinker, to his credit, anticipates these criticisms and addresses them both throughout his book and outside of his book. He has a page on his site devoted to "frequently asked questions" about Better Angels, and, having just read the book, I can tell you that his answers are simply taken from it, and usually contain a page reference. For example:

How can you say that violence has declined when we continue to murder millions of unborn babies? 

As I discuss on pp. 426–428, the rate of abortion worldwide has been in decline. I also discuss the question whether people perceive abortion as a form of violence, given the evolving understanding of the locus of moral value over the centuries. 

What about all the chickens in factory farms? 

I discuss the chickens in a section on Animal Rights in chapter 7, pp. 469–473.

What about the American imprisonment craze?
As unjust as many current American imprisonment practices are, they cannot be compared to the lethal sadism of criminal punishment in earlier centuries (pp. 144-146). For a discussion of the causes and effects of today’s imprisonment binge, see pp. 121–123.

I sympathize with Pinker's situation; in a weird way, I've experienced it for him. He introduced some of these ideas to the cyberpublic with a 2007 TED talk titled, "The Myth of Violence," and I used that video in my Advanced Exposition course at Florida Atlantic University last year and the year before. My course focused on Classical Rhetoric in modern contexts, and I chose his video not particularly to advocate his thesis, but to give my students an example of a speaker who must advocate an unpopular position, who must therefore genuinely persuade his audience to consider something they are disinclined to consider. His argument is tightly organized and based upon explicit reason and copious evidence. Other speeches I showed them had a more emotional bent, more showmanship -- Pinker's speech was our example of a solidly logos-based approach.


When I chose it, I didn't anticipate that my students would have a bit of a meltdown over it. They couldn't articulate why, but they were just sure he was wrong. And they were so short-circuited by their angst over his argument that analyzing it became very difficult for them. They were emotionally driven to prove that he was "wrong" at all costs, and were unwilling to even acknowledge that he'd done anything right -- and they even, sadly, descended into ad hominem attacks, asserting that they couldn't take Pinker seriously because he's stiff and has funny hair and says "um" a lot.


I came to the conclusion that even though Pinker's speech is a great example of a certain kind of persuasive argument, it's also an example of how such arguments fail in the face of the human animal. Ideally, we would be a race of beings who were primarily driven by logic and reason, but we aren't. Reason is a big part of who we are, but we are driven more strongly by our emotions and our loyalty to certain cultural norms. And one of the strongest, most abiding, most universal, and most pervasive norms is the belief that the past was better and we're all going to hell in a handbasket.


This...

“The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers.”

...is attributed to Socrates (~400 years BCE), and the Ancient Greek myth of the "Golden Age" seems to sum up the problem: once upon a time, long ago, men were made of gold. Then, they were made of silver. Then they were made of bronze. And finally, today, men are made of soft and worthless flesh. Had Prometheus not crossed the gods to give us fire, we'd all be dead by now.


The myth is a metaphor for what all people at all times come to believe: the past is a better, simpler, more noble and meaningful time. The politically conservative version of this dreams of a pastoral heyday of order and authority -- "and you knew where you were then, girls were girls and men were men..." the comfort of a small country town, conformist in-group rules. The politically liberal version goes back even further to dream of Man in a State of Nature, living rule-less but cleanly and in harmony with his environment, all noble and wise and peaceful.


Cut from fantasy past, meanwhile, the present is a chaos, as a learned dinner guest in Candide (1751) says,

"I find that all in this world is set the wrong end uppermost. No one knows what is his rank, his office, nor what he does, nor what he should do. With the exception of our evenings, which we generally pass tolerably merrily, the rest of our time is spent in idle disputes and quarrels, Jansenists against Molinists, the Parliament against the Church, and one armed body of men against another; courtier against courtier, husband against wife, and relations against relations. In short, this world is nothing but one continued scene of civil war."

As for the future, we can only imagine some kind of dystopia, for what else could result if the world is run by these half-witted young'uns? Or worse, an End Times scenario. We imagine our "great" forebears would roll in their graves if they knew what a mess we were making of things. Humans have been experimentally shown to suck at imagining the future with any accuracy, but we suck just as hard at imagining the past: we can't smell London and Paris before plumbing, and when animals were slaughtered on city streets. We can't imagine enduring the minor pains of life without aspirin or novocaine. We know that when we are hungry or have a stubborn back-pain that it makes us irritable and unpleasant for the short time we must endure it, but we fail to imagine how an entire planet of people who are hungry and pained and unable to find any lasting relief would behave.


The reason people are responding so badly to Pinker's book is that his book sets out to prove that the past was far more violent than the present; this is a reversal and a violation of a cherished cultural norm. We don't have many taboos left in the Western world, but this is one of them.


Perhaps if his methods weren't so logos-based. The Daily Show managed to make a much lighter version of the same point through comedy, but they only explored backwards in living memory -- they show the psychology of it, the theory: of course I remember the 1970s as a peaceful happyland, but that's because I was no older than 4 years old in the 1970s. If you were an adult then, you'd recall a violent and chaotic and desperately polluted world, near-hopeless and plagued by wars, riots, hijackings, gas lines, deep and hate-soaked divisions between the various demographics, and leadership associated with words like "tricky," "crook," and "malaise."


So Steven Pinker comes along with his facts and his figures and his documents and he shows you that this goes far, far beyond just living memory. The past just keeps getting more and more violent, the further back you go. Whatever is wrong with our world today, we should be grateful that we live now, and not any time in the past, for now is more peaceful. How dare he? Does he not take seriously the wickedness that is so clearly in our midst? Does he think the world is perfect now? That we are inevitably marching towards a utopia?


There's a second part to the psychology that the Daily Show didn't tackle: as the world has become less violent, we've become less tolerant of violence, and so every instance of violence we see makes us react strongly -- we are genuinely alarmed, go into emergency mode, and feel we have to do something! Or, all will be lost! We feel it. And that sense of emergency is what motivates us to act, and when we act, we make the world even safer, and this safety-feedback loop probably shouldn't be sabotaged by the knowledge that past people saw far worse far more often and didn't care half as much.


As just a random example, in 2009 a teenage boy was brought to trial in Miami accused of being a "cat serial killer" (he was aquitted when it was scientifically determined that at least some of the cats had been killed by dogs). It was international news (that link is to the UK Guardian). So think about that: in 2009 one boy in one city believed to be killing cats is worth, to our society, the expense of a trial, and the attention of people around the world. For most of human history, killing cats has been considered completely okay, a mainstream entertainment.


We should acknowledge we live in the better world. 


But does acknowledging that we live in the better world now make us less likely to keep pushing for a safer, less cruel and violent future? I think with many people it probably does. And I believe this sense of Pinker-as-saboteur-of-the-Good is what motivates a lot of the negative reaction to his ideas. We sense that he's going to undermine our desire to make the world a better place by convincing us that it's "good enough."


And I think that lies at the heart of most people's problem with this book: we are afraid that if we're not always screaming as though the handbasket ride to hell is a breath away, we're doomed. That might be right. Pinker gives a lot of external reasons why the world has gotten less violent, but internally, non-violence breeds non-violence, and people raised in a more peaceful world have higher standards of peacefulness, a "new normal" that they're willing to fight to maintain. They want animals slaughtered painlessly or not at all. They want children to get a "time out" instead of a spanking. They want criminals to get fines instead of whippings. They don't want their children sent off to fight in wars.


Personally, I think that the truth is an inherent good, and so worth the risk. But not everyone will come to the same conclusion.


I also think that we should take account of the successes of the past the better to repeat them. Learning from History isn't all just learning from mistakes.


Most importantly, though, I think that we should be careful of living in crisis-mode all the time, especially when that crisis-mode is combined with a false nostalgia: if we're erroneously convinced that the past is better than the present, we may foolishly attempt to re-structure the present to make it look more like the past. (Consider how many political positions are structured "we should go back to..." -- in economics, education, everything.)


The arrow of time points in only one direction -- we can't go back to the past. More importantly, we shouldn't want to. The past is a hell, and the handbasket is nostalgia. If we want a better world, we're going to have to keep working for it, but we need to push ourselves into the future, not the past.




PS: I recommend this book.

2011

It's the time of year when people "look back," and I'm afraid I'm no exception. 2011 was an eventful year for me: among other significant events, I got married, took a position as a college professor, and moved to Des Moines.

All of those are really one event: accepting the professor position meant moving to Des Moines, and moving to Des Moines while staying partners with my one true love Brian without condemning him to the immoral abyss of the uninsured meant getting married. We'd previously agreed that we had no interest in getting married until marriage was equally available to our gay & lesbian friends -- being part of an institution that's about love sounds great; being part of an institution that's about perpetuating archaic hetero-normative traditions sounds like total bullshit that can go fuck itself. But allowing my one true love to risk living without insurance again wasn't acceptable.

He and I have both been there: in 2004, my last full uninsured year, I had a dripping, painful ear infection. After a month of hoping it would go away, I had to spend $100 to see a mystery doctor at a walk-in clinic who couldn't help me and couldn't refer me so she prescribed me a $200 course of antibiotics that did nothing. Out of money, I was screwed. So in 2004 and early 2005 I lived life with constant pain and a constant stream of pus oozing out of my ear, unable to do anything about it.

In the Fall of 2005 I got a job that came with insurance and went to a doctor ($15) who sent me to a specialist ($20) who found a tear in my eardrum and fixed it on the spot, then prescribed me a course of antibiotics to clean up the residual infection ($25). My ear hasn't bothered me since, but if I hadn't gotten insurance through that job, this year would probably mark my 7th year of stinky pus constantly dripping out of my ear. I'm sure I would've eventually lost some hearing too. And that's just a little eardrum tear. Imagine if something serious had happened.

Tying health insurance to employment is moronic. It's like separating toilets according to sex: we do it because it has always been done that way, not because there's any good reason for it, and we should be smart enough and original enough to do better. I found this quote recently for Brian, for an essay he's working on: "It ought to be the first endeavor of the writer to distinguish nature from custom, or that which is established because it is right from that which is right only because it is established" (Samuel Johnson, The Rambler #156).

Not just writers!

But we don't get to make the world we live in. Letting Brian go without health insurance when I could do something about it wasn't an option; we married. And that marriage was also our farewell and adieu to a South Florida full of dear friends and family. In our six years in Florida we met some amazing people and had some amazingly good times. It's pretty hard to go from a place where you are constantly surrounded by love and fun to a place where you don't know anyone -- I'm meeting people every week, and have no doubt that I will, over time, make great friends in Iowa too, but people are unique, not interchangeable. Thank goodness for Facebook. :)

This is of course one of the perils of a life in academia: you don't exactly get to pick where you live. I got incredibly lucky, because Des Moines is a perfect place for us: a medium-sized city with lots to do (and, significantly for a person moving from South Florida, virtually no traffic!). There are no good bagels here, but holy frijoles what these people can do with hashbrowns! It's also pretty laid-back, open, walkable, and small-business-oriented, at least downtown. And it's really interesting to be in the center of the country after living most of my life at its extreme South-East tip. I've gone from living in a place where it took 10 hours just to get to Georgia (nowhere else in the US, just Georgia), to a place where in just a few hours I can be in eight different states. That's different.

The biggest transitional shock from South Florida to Iowa will be the "Continental" climate, which includes extreme temperatures, Arctic winds, and massive snowfalls. So far, it hasn't come. I like to think that I dragged a little Florida up here with me, and that, while it probably won't last too much longer, for now the winter weather is warded off by the power of my tropical blood! In the meantime I'm collecting winter clothes: coats, sweaters, socks... I started from near-zero. I feel like 90% of my wardrobe was spaghetti-strapped sundresses. Maybe 80%. It was a lot.

Then of course there's the transition from "Instructor" to "Professor." At my old FAU job, they treated us pretty well. I was teaching 8 classes a year for 30k, which was too much for too little, but I can't complain about the working conditions. On the whole, I worked with really wonderful people, had great students, and I found the classes I taught to be rewarding and challenging. Now that I'm at Drake, I find that I'm working with different really wonderful people, have different great students, and still find my classes rewarding and challenging, although in different ways.

FAU students are extraordinarily diverse and people are individuals first and foremost, so it's hard to generalize meaningfully, but (salt grains flying) Drake students are on the average much more "advantaged." I don't think that's necessarily a money thing -- but I do think that they have, on the whole, benefited from real, robust support systems, be they financial or emotional or civic (solid public school systems with small classes and involved teachers, for example).

There are a lot (not all, but a lot) of students at a university like FAU who are there against all odds. They have had hundreds of bad breaks, and have fought their way to where they are; for them, success looks like FAU, because they have had to work like hell just to get where they are. We live in a society were someone with every advantage who sleeps through four years of Yale on "gentlemen's Cs" and graduates to run gifted-business after gifted-business into the ground can become president, while someone whose life from 14 to 25 was a horror show of hardships and instability, who gets back into school and works her way through college on smarts alone will be lucky to land a job as a grade-school teacher. And heaven forbid she got through any of it by stripping, she'll be morality-policed out of running for School Board, let alone anything higher.

Working at a school like FAU puts you in real-time contact with some of the most heroic and inspiring stories you'll ever encounter. At Drake I'm seeing something pretty different: it looks like "talent," but I think we are all born creative geniuses and the only question is whether we are subjected to a life that beats it (or just discourages it) out of us, or to pressures that pervert our creativity into strange containment. The students I've had so far seem to me to be examples of what is possible when we take a precious new-born creative soul and don't fuck it up. If these students seem to be a barrel of shinier apples, it may simply be that they are the apples who haven't been bitten, bruised, and left on the ground for the worms -- they are the apples that were cared for.

This isn't to minimize how wonderful they are. Despite their relative lack of real-life experience, I'm encountering students who by study and/or empathy and/or imagination have tremendous insight into the world. For them, being at Drake may not be the same kind of major life success, but they have dreams of bigger successes "out there" -- and let's face it, the shiny, unbruised, intact fruit are going to do far better at the marketplace. These students have not had their talents blunted, they have not had their ambitions delayed, and so they are not only "capable of" doing great things, they're getting a leg and a push on the way there. They're going to see their dreams made real, a lot of them. Being a part of their educations is, as I said, rewarding and challenging... just in a very different way.

The ups and downs of my own non-traditional life path certainly incline me towards the amazing students I used to teach. But these new students are working on creative projects far more in tune with what I want to do. It's probably not worth laboring the comparison. Before I did that, and now I'm doing this.

And this is me talking about something I've been exposed to for three months -- a single semester. This, for me, is the start of a new adventure, and there's much more to discover. And that's what 2011 has been: a bunch of changes, a new start. Year (two thousand plus ten plus) One. :) Happy New Year!

PS: Thanks, Mom, I'm sure you're the only one who read this far. ;) Love you!

#KlingonXmas -- A Klingon Christmas Carol

If you act quickly, you can see the familiar Christmas Carol in the original Klingon at the Greenhouse Theater in Chicago this year -- of course, if you miss it this year, there's always next year: it's in its second year in Chicago (it played for a few years in Minneapolis before that), and it's sure to return as it is incredibly popular, and with good reason.

Here on Earth, we tend to regard the "original" version of this story as the one penned by Charles Dickens in 1843. But we're not particularly married to the original. A Christmas Carol has been adapted a remarkable number of times, and is probably one of the most adapted stories in all of stage, film, and television history. Last year's Doctor Who Christmas Special was a version of A Christmas Carol that included a crashing space ship, cryogenic chambers, and flying sharks (it also included time travel, but with "ghosts" of past, present, and future a de rigeur part of most productions, combined with the entire time-traveling premise of Doctor Who, it's hardly worth mentioning...) The "Scrooge" theme has become such a part of our storytelling culture, though, that when I first watched it, I actually missed that it was an adaptation of A Christmas Carol at all (yes, yes, the title: I didn't look). I discovered it was an adaptation of Dickens's story only when a student pointed it out to me.

Anyone familiar with the Star Trek universe knows that the Klingons are an aggressive people who take what they love by force. This is why you haven't truly experienced Shakespeare until you've read it in the original Klingon (2:55 if you want to skip to the toast), and this is also why the Vulcan who narrates the Klingon Christmas Carol refers to this production as the predecessor of the Dickens version. To do otherwise would be to challenge the honor of an entire Kronos-full of Klingons and no good can possibly come of that -- or, at least, it would be harder to get around to the actual play, what with all the oaths and bat'leths and bloodshed.

More important than "who came first," though (and I admit, if any Klingons are reading this, that the Klingon version surely came first), is the remarkable adaptability of the story itself. Abstracted from its cultural specifics, it's a story of an old person who has fallen so far from the values of his people that he has become something alien, something between a joke and a monster. Through an examination of his own past, the present of those who know him, and of the future world without him (in which no one has a good thing to say or a drop of respect for the rotting heap that once he was), this old person is renewed, and finally (and joyously) connects with the others of his kind: he reaches out to them, and in return they love him -- whether with toasts and kisses or toasts and sparring.

Whether we particularly value "generosity" (Humans) or "honor" (Klingons) is almost beside the point. The Scrooge (or SQuja') cannot connect with his own people until he sets aside his desire for financial (or physical) security and parts with some of his money (or safety). What is really valued is not the generosity or the courage, but the willingness to change oneself to become a part of the larger group, the community. (What great Klingon warrior once said, "no man is an island...?")

It's hard to imagine a time and place where the specifics don't ring true: Dickens's 1843 Scrooge asks why the poor children can't all be sent to prisons and workhouses. The Klingon SQuja' suggests that the children of fallen warriors can be sent to Rura Penthe. In 2011 Newt Gingrich thinks poor children should be set to work as janitors. In 1793 Marie Antoinette suggested (or didn't) that they just eat cake, and today I've heard there's also a man with equally reasonable advice for "poor black kids." In other words, being a jackhole knows no time and place. But this story, unlike any other, holds out hope that even the most unredeemably repulsive fool could come to understand his culture's values, and be redeemed.

To a person who values his own wealth above all, Scrooge's actions at the end of the story are foolish -- he throws his money around, and at people who he knows (for the ghosts have shown him) talk bad about him and make fun of him when he's not around. To a person who values his own health above all, SQuja' is just as foolish: an old man, hunched and weak, he willingly throws himself into a fight he can only lose terribly. Rather than continuing to lie, he admits he never truly passed his rites of ascension, and goes through them again beside (tiny) TimHom -- he admits, in short, that he is a child. But this is the only way he can become anything more.

He must lower himself in order to rise.

This isn't a particularly Christian or English belief -- it's universal. It's so universal that, far out beyond the stars, across the starry expanses of our galaxy, each year on the Feast of the Long Night, Klingons too celebrate in part by reminding themselves of this story of a man called SQuja', who was a coward and liar, without honor, who sat counting gold like a Ferengi while his wife died in glorious battle, who continued counting while others sang her songs, who did not seek out her deserved revenge, who was, in short, no Klingon at all -- and yet, to him Kahless came, three times during the night, and given this chance to redeem himself, he did.

There would have been silence upon his death; now, the warriors will howl.

--

Next year, the Commedia Beauregard is producing Bard Fiction: Pulp Fiction translated into Elizabethan English. :)