Wax Banks

an argument approached.

[notes from a project abandoned but not forever.]

the self misperceives itself (as eternal, coherent, unique, centre of the world, etc.). this central misapprehension and distortion is ‘allegorized’ or mirrored in every arena of our experience:

• essentiality/essentialism (‘dogs are essentially different from cats’ is only a thumbnail for ‘dogs and cats can’t interbreed due to interactions at a level (macromolecular) we couldn’t even perceive until the 19th century’)
• narcissism of small differences (nationalism, racism, etc.)
• behavioural intertia/addiction (bad habits are a damaging abstraction of experience; we fall into patterns without even perceiving them, and relinquish the ability to monitor our own behaviour)
• myopia continuing even after we know of it (stubborn resistance even to knowledge we already possess!)
• causal scale (look for problems’ causes at the problems’ site and scale – related to essentialism, e.g. ‘racial/culural differences must be due to race, which maps to skin colour, so look for skin colour first’)

it’s vital to understand the distortion that is the coherent ‘self’ in order to perceive the true relations of things without demanding comfort (e.g. in egocentric religious myths). life without lies will NOT reduce to life without fiction – when we understand what fiction does (allow for emotional/cognitive action at a distance, consciousness-alternation in other words, via a complex symbolic compression/encoding scheme) we will be prepared to experience it lovingly in its time and place, while not wrongly demanding fiction’s distorting/abstracting comfort in places like, say, the nightly news, or a tense conversation with family, or the concept of ‘true love.’

this mode of ‘scale-free thinking’ leads to an understanding of the purposes of the Self’s fictionalization, and sheds light on one of the most crucial ideas ever conceived by humans: sustainability. this term is more potent than is generally understood.

consider (in a goofy semi-related thread maybe): is the myth of santa claus sustainable? no. (eventually all kids figure it out, or are told.) does it hurt when we let go of it? yes. is the hurt a long-term problem? we don’t know. (no one’s ever studied the psychology of the santa claus myth, that i know of.) the fiction of santa claus scaffolds a complex belief system about the magical nature of life – but is that metaphor (‘magic’) necessary to perceive the beauty and, yes, ‘magic’ of the mere natural world? of mathematical equations and scientific concepts? of fiction in general? i’m not sure, but i doubt it.

in any case the point of the santa claus example is that LOTS of cultural myths are like that: as soon as the kid cares one way or another about finding out the truth, the kid’ll find out, and great pain and anxiety will result. (your parents lied to you for years, after all, about something as basic as ‘where good feelings and presents at christmas come from.’) but it really does take years – kids WANT to believe in santa claus. the myth is comforting: among other things, santa will never run out of presents. but mommy and daddy might…

ironically, the unsustainable myth of santa claus is in part a myth about sustainability itself: about the possibility of an experience, a force, a story, existing outside of time. santa claus invests the year-end holiday season with glorious anticipation. it amplifies feelings. but what if those feelings could be arrived at another way? what if the snow and cold were enough? the lights, sledding, decorating trees? what if the rituals of year’s end could function autonomously?

without lies underpinning them, i mean.

the Self demands the lies and retreats into ritual.

You are probably better off without 'social networking.'

Frictionless pseudoconnection impairs real empathetic connection. Effort at socializing is not wasted; indeed it's essential.

Some folks can't connect with other humans without tools like Facebook. I feel bad for them but I imagine they don't care. Good luck to them.

The rest of us are better off picking up the phone.

Collected worlds of...

[An excerpt from my current big project, whence came also the Sasquatch thing a while back. Dedicated respectfully to A.R.R.R.R. Roberts, an obvious Bilbo Baggins manqué, who bears no resemblance to anyone in this piece, my hand to God, except in terms of one coincidental isophony -- and Englishness, of course. Oh, oh, dude's got Englishness coming out his ass.]

* * *

Collected worlds (complete with scholarly annotations) of authors famed for what the donnish corpse with the tobacco pipe called ‘subcreation’: chief among them Dandrel’s horrible but influential Helion trilogy (Apogee, Perigee, Anapsis). God I spent so many hours wishing I could live there. The interstellar-travel-by-giant-solar-trampoline conceit was more or less the cognitive soundtrack to my ages 13–15. Play and dissipation. So much wanting to believe that swashes would in the spacegoing future still be buckled, planks (airlocks, probably) nervously walked (or the equivalent) by those richly deserving of such mistreatment – or heroes sure suuuuuure c’mon c’mon! to make it Outta This Scrape in one piece. Back then there was this growing idea that outer space was at once a solved problem, ready to fade from dream to waking like a Christmas present turned out to be socks, and an increasingly distant/inaccessible bureaucratic zone, cowboys being replaced by factory farms, except the cowboys were never actually real, not in my lifetime anyhow. Machines all the way down. Nah. That tentative/reckless phase of early space exploration was done by the time I popped out. Or in, I guess.

So in order to get at the shared pre-Sputnik awe and aspiration of limitless space, indeed the recognition or belief that a place could still somewhere exist which was limitlessness itself, a dark principle, well ironically enough you had to turn back the clock a little. Big-time thing with kids all throughout history, probably: realizing first that time passes, then finding a way to escape into a new present which was the past’s future, today what shouldabeen. You dreamed of being an astronaut, but always as somebody’s angry libertarian writer grandpa had imagined it: the spacesuits less marshmallow, more race car; rocket ships like big sleek motorcycles, or just nuclear-powered flying cocks pretty much (because of course that – the implied parallel term, ahem – was the other forbidding limitless void to focus on, back then, after you’d learned that babies come from there but before you really internalized that holy shit babies really actually come from there; and maybe that’s the moment Cthulhu awakens?); laser guns actual guns, instead of…

Come to think of it, that was the worst part. The further along time went, the harder it was to convince ourselves that we’d be able to defend against whatever Inevitable Menace might rear up out of the frigid wastes to, not eat us probably, but digest, or cognitively-scramble, madden, suffocate, poison, freeze, unmake us…the way grief manifested in those days was I was never going to geta laser gun because by that point it’d be utterly pointless. You didn’t need one to deal with your fellow man, and even low-slung hip-holstered laser pistols (such as F.R. Dandrel’s interplanetary gunslinger Tubby Crozan might wear) would be no match for bacteria that turned flesh to slime, or movies so entertaining that to look at them was to will yourself suddenly toward death by consumption (by consuming – just looking into the staticky whatever it was supposed to be, forever). Fuck grownup literature. And fuck the Department of the Galactic Interior or whatever for spending all its astronaut time making minute adjustments to the lenses of telescopes, as if slightly clearer pictures of nebulae were some kind of substitute for the immensity, impersonality, the divinity of the frontier. It was UN-AMERICAN.

Tubby Crozan comes in for it hard in the footnotes, is one of the additional childhood-beshittenings awaiting the grownup SF fan here. The greatest of all mechanical-engineers–9th-class-turned-pistol-packing-mercenaries, the first man to make a solar trampoline jump in just a suit (not even a ship! the unmitigated gall, the titanic fucking balls on that guy!)…and all editor Avram U.N. Robers wants to talk about is ‘Crozan, a too-obvious Heinlein manqué, comes close at times but never quite breaks with the dreary juvenile misogyny of his author, not to mention his thinly-veiled SFnal homage-referent; the lasting popularity of the Helion cycle is testament to the guilelessness and vivacity of Dandrel’s prose and his just-left-of-the-familiar plotting rather than any psychological insight. Like C.S. Leavis’s Hornea books, Dandrel’s novels grow more difficult to like as their readers grow older; though perhaps – like reactionary family members sinking into familiar, almost comforting gesture, thereby losing their power to wound – for the very same reason they grow easier to love.’

Robers won an award for the annotated edition, not a big deal award but enough to feel good about being, at death’s door, a SF scholar of all things; and it’s hard to separate gratitude for his hard, revelatory biographical work (Dandrel collected butterflies but refused to kill them, adding them to his library only after they’d died natural deaths in captivity?!) from frustration at the characteristically British is-it-really-ironic-after-all-these-centuries snippy melancholy which pervades his scholarly work. Robers (an obvious Franklin C. Kitzis manqué if you must know) deserves his reputation, though perhaps we can with a wink-n-nudge admit to one another, right here and now, that that’s not meant solely as a compliment. Fa!

…

Oh, shit. Damn. That felt good. I can’t tell you how much I hate Frank Kitzis. And no, it’s not because he dated one of my grad school professors for a while and was cheating on her either before, during, or after the worst of all time guest lecture he gave in our SF-and-feminism class, which I think he actually had the stones to call ‘Criminal, Liminal, Subliminal: something something something Rosetti something something rape.’ I liked that class well enough for most of its run, but maybe it’s testament to every thinking human being’s overall feelings about grad school in the humanities – so long, fuckers – that that really is all I can remember of the talk’s title. And nothing whatsoever of the content. Kitzis had fashion hair, you know? The kind you’re supposed to look at and maybe notice without recognizing outwardly that you’re noticing it, like Wow that guy’s got Cool hair, it’s just messy, but then it’s only hours later you’re supposed to realize that he must’ve spent ten minutes and five dollars in product (people just call it ‘product’ now) to get his hair into that ‘artful’ dishevelment, only my curse – talk about First World Problems so to speak! – is that I always notice the time/’product’ costs of hairstyles right in the moment. Right there in that instant. Or like how someone’s courier bag is brand new but he’s walking around like he’s King Hardcore Biker of Bikerville, complete with the clip-in shoes and everything, but also brand-new sunglasses that he takes off super carefully because while he wants you to think he doesn’t care about the money, He cares. About. The Money. Wouldn’t you? That’s why they call it money.

Or how all the pronouns are ‘he’ and all the metaphors are balls this and stones that, and there’s some racism maybe, plus weird nationalism? And who actually thinks it’s awesome that spaceships look like dicks? I notice that stuff too. But since they severed my corpus callosum in the course of an otherwise routine cranial probe, prefatory to my first Saturn trip (boooooooring!), even when I see my worst impulses as if secondhand, even in moments of what pre-AI cultures called ‘self-awareness,’ I’m powerless to prevent such heedless action.

And you know what?

‘I’m a man,’ Crozan said, and aimed the laser blaster at Freia’s heart. ‘You’re a monster,’ she replied. Her eyes were defiant but she shrank back. Crozan laughed then. ‘A distinction without a difference, Your Highness.’ He pulled the trigger, and as warm blood splashed his handsome face – her blood, his lover’s blood, royal blood – he found that he could not stop laughing. He laughed and laughed, and in his triumph he grew larger, and darker, and more joyful…

I’m a monster.

Snobbery.

[Wrote this a while back. Deleted names and links; the post's point isn't ultimately about the specific writer in question.]

A fella whose best writing I continue to greatly value reviews a gamebook:

I'll admit that I was quite prepared to dislike [this book]. Being a big fan of Westerns, I tend to be more than a little snobby about the way the genre is so often misused and caricatured, especially in crossovers with other genres. And while a post-apocalyptic setting is a very good fit for Western themes and esthetics, I was nevertheless apprehensive. I've seen too many poorly executed Western-influenced creations not to assume the worst.

(My emphasis.)

I see and SAY this kind of bullshit all the time, and it deserves to be called out. This is childish nonsense and he should be embarrassed by it.

Snobbery about Westerns has nothing whatsoever to do with Westerns. It happens because you are (or in this case, because the writer is) a snob.

This stance is willfully ignorant because he cares about the 'correct' way of doing a genre, and anyone with a basic understanding of how literary genre works knows that this brand of ignorance springs from private anxieties rather than the text-system itself, but he's smart enough and educated enough to know that -- to know better;

It's self-regarding, because he spends breath preemptively defending what is a totally personal, idiosyncratic, indeed possessive feeling about 'Westerns,' which is a matter of ego rather than critical analysis;

Reactionary because he's railed time and time again about 'revisionist' understanding of 'classic' texts -- his particular hobbyhorse is interpretive deviation from the letter and spirit of the original Dungeons & Dragons rules and, weirdly, Gary Gygax's private intentions -- and because, in this particular case, he's also an unabashed cultural reactionary, expressing next to nothing but contempt for 'new-fangled' cultural texts. (re: Westerns, he is particularly bothered by Firefly -- you can probably guess why.) Preserving the past for the future is not the same thing as fetishizing pastness.

Throw in some acute status-consciousness -- he was a young nerd apparently raised, if his religious callouts and bits of churchly Latin are any indication, in a hierarchical cultural environment -- and you've got some pretty conventional snobbery in a man old enough to know better.

Millions of people enjoy Westerns without feeling the need to apply private criteria to determine whether they're WESTERN ENOUGH. These people have a healthy relationship to the pleasure of viewing/reading these stories, even if they persist in ignorance about the history and source texts of the genre. Ignorance isn't much of a sin. Willful ignorance is.

I'm a snob about plenty of things, and I HATE IT. It is a failing to be addressed -- to grow out of.

One of the many differences between him and me is that I don't try to pass off my snobbery as an inevitable result of really really caring about things. It's pure ego, I know just enough to know it (arguably nothing more!), and I wish to be able to overcome that adolescent insecurity. If you go into a reading/viewing experience expecting -- i.e. WANTING -- to hate it, in order that your prejudices will be confirmed, you and you alone have fucked yourself up.

This writer isn't an idiot -- quite the contrary, he's a damned fine writer when he surpasses himself. But snobbery is a problem, maybe one of his biggest problems as a critic, and it saddens me (and pisses me off) to see it. His fans and regular readers don't mind, of course -- and that's an even bigger problem, which presumably no one needs me to explain.

Sample of Crowley's Little, Big audiobook; and James Ellroy, alas.

Heard it. Oh, no. I couldn't hear Crowley read the book on tape. Maybe live, to hear him experience the thing as we the listeners did; maybe that way. But judging from the sample, the audiobook is like so many others: it takes an unusually fluid, heightened-naturalistic text -- one that rings just right in the ear, nicely balancing flights of lyrical (and specifically literary) fantasy with the easy syncopations of American English as she is spoke -- and makes it into A Reading. Hard articulated T's between words, words proceeding at a sliiiiightly unnatural andante.

I hate to 'hear books,' but I like to hear stories told from books, as if from prompts. To me, the best audiobooks capture that energy -- particularly variation in tempo and dynamics. Jim Dale is one of the masters, no question. Hitchens too (he developed a writerly voice that more or less was his speaking voice -- no mean feat, whichever way the arrow points). I saw James Ellroy speak at MIT once, and he read aloud from one of his later, more 'telegraphic' books. ABSOLUTE BULLSHIT. It was...wrong, in a way I could never put my finger on. I've never been so forcefully reminded that the Author isn't the god of the text -- and more to the point, that folks who write for a living shouldn't be expected to be master vocal performers too...

I bow at Crowley's feet but I couldn't listen to his Little, Big. Maybe not anyone's, come to think of it. And that's me for you. Maybe you could though? And bless you, if so.

Little, Big : Aegypt :: Hobbit : LotR?

Per ARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR's recent (wonderful) post about The Hobbit and its welcome, welcoming lightness of spirit:

Does John Crowley's Little, Big relate to his later, longer, darker Aegypt roughly as The Hobbit relates to Lord of the Rings? I'm thinking specifically of the way Little, Big plays its Secret History line for wonder laced with a kind of Old World[*] melancholy, while Aegypt, which like LotR is written against a Great War (WWI-WWII in Tolkien's case, the cultural revolutions of the 60s-70s in Crowley's), grounds its more cosmic/cosmological topics in a bittersweet depiction of modern life lived among the wreckage of the past's unfulfilled (or neglected) promises. Great Wars left as unfinished business, leaving behind cultural and mythological fragmentation for the survivors...

Plus there's something Shire-like about the Faraway Hills -- right down to the name.

While we're on the topic: It's eerie how closely my reading interests these last few years track with Aegypt's subject matter, and with Crowley's ongoing interest more generally. Even more than Pynchon, he's the author I've been waiting for, for many years; or maybe I've been preparing, for some time, to be the reader Aegypt expects, or just prefers. I'm disappointed with how much of myself I see in Pierce Moffett, as he's a bit of an asshole (in this first volume) and I like to pretend I'm not.

I wonder whether Crowley has read much Charles Fort -- whose own take on 'damned thoughts' also tracks, in some ways, with what I read as Crowley's depiction of lost worldviews as alternate, arguably more 'magical' worlds. Though of course Crowley writes as a generous skeptic who's presumably taken his LSD, while near as I can tell, Fort's madness didn't ever have a welcoming alternative social context to fit into. And I'm not sure how he'd feel about modern 'Forteanism'...

[*] L,B and The Hobbit are in some sense fairy tales about Britain, or British-myth-come-to-America in Crowley's case, whereas the respective longer stories seem to be, at some level(s), about the destructiveness and confusion of revolutionary change and the passing of eutopia, on a continental-European scale in fact. Gotta come back to that when I'm much further into Aegypt.

An essential misunderstanding about story, Buffy edition.

The editor of the Buffy comics at Dark Horse, Scott Allie, recently did an interview about Angel+Faith #5. It included this exchange:

AndrewCrossett: I have a question about the "zompires" and the mechanics by which they are created. In Buffy #3, Willow says "When someone becomes a vampire, a demon possesses their dead body. But without the Seed, demons can't pass into this world. The demon has to possess the vampire's body from another dimension." I took the last sentence to be Willow clarifying that [...]

So, could you clarify the real explanation behind the zompires (at least insofar as the characters understand it at this point)?

Scott: [...] This season has also led to a lot of conversation about the metaphysics of the demon/vampire/human connection, and we have some varying theories. Joss doesn't want it nailed down in a scientific kind of way, so we try to make sure that what we do loosely works within a few differing ideas for the metaphysics of it. We think that giving the readers something to ponder in terms of the nature of these characters is more interesting than explaining it. [my emphasis --wa.]

I once referred to Allie as a 'glorified project manager' rubber-stamping Whedon's scripts and getting a shitload of free publicity for what seemed to be other people's work, and that was unfair and small-minded of me. He did write the second most incoherent arc of Buffy Season 8, so he has more to apologize for than enjoying secondhand Whedon publicity; but it was still a totally inappropriate comment which embarrasses me greatly.

But this answer is straight amateur-hour bullshit -- a writerly failing rather than a publicity-tour faux pas -- and he's made this mistake often enough that I'm starting to get embarrassed for him too.

Ambiguity is not ambivalence. (Cognate: complication is not complexity.) How many times must I and everyone else with half a brain say it? Incoherent plots are not the same as complex thematics; multiple explanations for a plot device are not the same as multiple moral frames for a story. JESUS CHRIST!

If you can't make 'there's a demon inside you and it wars with your human self for control over your actions' resonant without making a half-assed mystery out of the logistics because you can't be bothered to finish building the world your employers licensed, you're in the wrong business. Whedon handwaves his metaphysics all the time; he's infamous for it, in fact. But he never handwaves the meanings of his stories; he never misunderstands 'open to interpretation' as 'we don't have to work out super basic plot details.' Simple plots, complex stories. That's Joss's strong suit.

Y'know where the Dark Horse Buffy comics went badly off the rails last year? When the story called for one of Whedon's patented 'here's the big unbelievably-thematically-freighted plot cliché which we'll spend the rest of the story complicating' moments (Glory is a god, Buffy curses Angel, Buffy 'came back wrong,' Faith 'turns evil'), and the best the writing staff could do -- unbelievably -- was 'the universe did it; it's fate.' (I can't even bear to explain what this means; just typing out that offensive shit will lower my IQ by a good 30 points.) It felt like Whedon simply let the story get away from him for the rest of Season 8 -- indeed, in interviews he's given the impression that the offending plot-shit wasn't actually his idea, though he's justly taken the blame for the comic's incoherence.

That was an example of complication, rather than complexity, of storytelling weighing down the tale. Instead of making a clear, strong plot choice for the audience to interpret however it liked, Whedon/Allie/Meltzer made a half-assed plot choice without really committing to it, which robbed the rest of the season of almost every drop of its moral weight. As a result, what should've been one of the most tragic events in the 14-year(!) Buffy story made absolutely no sense -- and was robbed of so much of its impact -- in Allie's telling of it.

Too much plot 'cleverness,' too much business, not enough story. That ended up being the unexpected problem with Season 8. And this 'zompires' silliness sure seems to be more of the same. Joss is partly to blame, yes. But the TV series sure didn't have this problem...

* * *

As much as anything, my frustration here comes from the knowledge that -- perhaps, perhaps -- the Buffyverse is running out of steam again, because it's once again lost its prime mover. Season 4 of the original show was an enjoyable mess, a recovery period during which the writers searched for a way to write the Scooby Gang, who had been clearly written as unjustly burdened adolescents through the show's first three years, as adults. Whedon had planned to tell 'high school is hell' stories on Buffy, and the show had to shift gears, somewhat uncomfortably, before it could become a story about accepting the selflessness and entry into real community that so much constitute adulthood. (Marti Noxon's knack for depicting burgeoning eroticism and heartbreak helped the show move into its triumphant second season, and she was instrumental in guiding the series through seasons 5-7.)

The last three seasons of the show were explicitly about the deepest nature of the Slayer (mythos and character), but they were even more about the expansion and overflow of personal and group identity: Buffy joins the world, main characters drift apart and reconstitute themselves, families grow and are reimagined (remember the episode 'Family'!), destinies are grappled with and ultimately rejected, and private moralities are explored in a grey zone way way way beyond the simple 'Slayer good, demons bad' rules of the early episodes and seasons. The finale of the TV series showed Buffy simply blowing up the entire premise of the show -- the Slayer mythology itself -- and in the process giving away her birthright...so as to become a whole person, without it. ('Cookies,' in the parlance of the series finale.) The story had come to a natural ending and exhausted itself.

Then the comic began. And suddenly Buffy was...a supporting character in her own book. The mythos came back in the clumsiest way imaginable: a plot as old as the universe, by which a Slayer/supervillain teamup was preordained so as to bring into existence a magicless world and...oh fuck it, it's still too stupid; the point is, the nature of the Slayer was trivialized instead of deepened by the 'Twilight' plot. The comic was burdened, in the end, by a lot of conspiratorial gobbledygook, which wasn't enough to hide the fact that the story -- the characters, their development, the play of actual human desire -- had been lost.

I have no idea whether 'Season 9' will be any good. But it's clear from the first couple of issues that one of Whedon's key storytelling ingredients -- a dead-simple premise which ramifies and signifies in an ever-expanding assortment of (usually painful) ways -- is still missing, or deeply buried in plot mess. 'Magic has left the world' just doesn't feel personal; the 'Twilight' thing still doesn't make sense to me; Spike flying around with a spaceship full of bugs feels like a bad joke; the Xander/Dawn pairing isn't desperately necessary (it's just...limp). It's all business.

That's a sign of a faltering story: business. (For a show consisting entirely, solely of business, see Lost or the laster seasons of Galactica -- two promising shows that crawled right up their own respective assholes double quick.)

* * *

Or maybe the problem is I just don't care about comics anymore. 20 pages a month? Are you kidding me? Give me Dave Sim or BKV or even 100 Bullets, but it's just not working for Buffy. Or rather, for me. I'm the problem.