Wax Banks

The world has turned and left me here.

Most recent comment on the endless Family Guy thread (bonus: check out agi and GoDaddy justifiably dissing me in the comments, before the teenagers arrive):

family guys ok if they werent so offensive its no perfect or even good but its just for killling time most episodes arent roflol funny but just haha funny except some parts where its just so random its hilarious. its better that they arent as offensive as south park cause they retain more fans this way by not scaring em all of....

but he what do i know im just some 15yearold reading an interesting disscussion im not however much into tv as i enjoy books cause i likem more uknow cause im kind of a book worm and btw im a boy

OK, typos, so what. But 'roflol'? 'its just for killing time'? 'just so random its hilarious'? 'retain more fans this way'? 'IM KIND OF A BOOK WORM AND BTW IM A BOY'?!@#@$!

My empathy falls apart here. I don't know how to put myself into this book worm's shoes, I don't know what it would be like to have this particular arrangement of knowledge at age 15. I don't know what kind of relationship a person has to text, who grows up communicating in that form of writing. Something appears to be impossible forever. Waaah, waaah, waaah.

Barriers.

[Riffing off Chatty's post here.]

I think 'creative person' is a misnomer. Creativity is inextricably linked to context, to expression. Some people are able to come up with one side-splitting one-liner after another over drinks but can't write a joke to save their lives; others swerve effortlessly around bugs in code but can't see why their relationships break up. You might spitball two dozen wild ideas in a group meeting and draw a blank when staring at a blank page; the same melody that erupts from your horn in a jam session could be totally inaccessible in the studio or at the composition desk.

The common thread in these examples (let's get very, very abstract here) is the relationship between the mind's wacky-new-idea apparatus and its interacting-with-the-world apparatus. It seems to me we can describe creative 'blocks' in terms of conception/expression mismatch - and note that what we call 'genius' might be described as optimal ability/modality matching, or somewhat snarkily, well-chosen problems plus luck.

I find improvisation exciting and rewarding, and I'm a terrible planner. So I seek out situations in which I'm rewarded for making stuff up as I go along, and avoid having to make long-term schedules and plans. Because of this avoidance I lack practice at planning - which translates to reduced ability, thence to suppressed enthusiasm and (ha) avoidance. Experience only directly translates into more experience. Successfully applying a creative skill doesn't make me that 'kind' of person - it's just action. Even if it becomes habitual it's just action.

Habitual failure isn't a special class of experience or outcome, nor does it indicate an essential quality; it's only repeated action.

On Saturday mornings I tutor kids in Dorchester. It lifts up my spirit. Sometimes I'm confronted by a kid seeming not to know how to approach a problem, and beginning to sink into despair. The kid will come to believe that no approach is possible. This is the worst feeling, I think: loneliness. ('I'll be left standing still and the work - and my friends - will go on without me.') It seems to me that two dynamics are at work in those situations: when 'at rest,' the kid loses sight of what it would feel like to be 'in motion' (applying skill, displaying mastery); and yet half the time the kid knows every portion of the solution but can't (won't) combine them - won't try it out, I mean. Mismatch of conception and expression: not realizing that keys are for opening locks; not realizing that poetry is not written in an unknown language; not seeing that operations on dollars are easily translated to operations on decimals because dollars are decimals, etc.

Creativity is the willingness to test oneself.

Some kids don't know how 'smart' they are - how creative - because they don't recognize that they're in an environment where their creativity and risk-taking and intelligence will be recognized and valued. They harbor the misconception that when they manipulate complex symbol-systems in the form of SimCity or Halo or the chessboard they're applying skills that port directly to math problems, questions of history, wilderness tracking.

I see shapes and spaces when I listen to music - and am I far, far better at playing 3-D games with loud music on? Does my musical sense seem to 'tune' my spatial reasoning? It seems so. Well, now I know a secret...arrived at through (lite) analysis. The line between 'critical' and 'creative' thinking is blurry at best and can be obliterated entirely, if you let yourself experience 'criticism' as a creative act and incorporate analytical thinking into your creative activities. (When programmers speak of their job as an art form, we should take their word for it; after all we pretend that 'writing a novel' is not only an 'artistic' task but indeed a single task of any kind, despite the silliness and indeed impossibility of such a description. Same for writing a symphony, designing a megadungeon, building a website, etc.)

I'm terrible at certain 'creative' tasks. Plotting, for instance. ('Oh, sigh.') I have a hard time working out story-structures; stories fill in for me (when they fill in) like water droplets soaking into a piece of paper, moving from isolated points in every direction to 'fill in' the entire sheet. I can't conceive of stories in straight lines; shit, I can't even write a paragraph most days without a parenthetical apology or self-contradiction. Can I get away with calling that 'style'? I wouldn't be the first. On the other hand I am able to come up with snazzy little bedtime stories for my wife - which do coalesce into linear narratives, more or less. (And always with a moral at the end. Sample moral: 'Be true to your school.' Sample #2: 'Always eat a balanced breakfast.' The stories themselves are rather more morally complex.) Spitting out words I discover in myself a capacity for linear assemblage, which I don't know how to port over to pen-and-paper-and-write.

It would seem to be a matter of controlled testing, for me: start small, get acclimated, recognize analogies, submerge the ego. Exercise, in other words. Everything comes down to goddamn exercise.

I think conception/expression mismatches - creative errors - often result from egotism. You want to be 'you' but there's no such thing, so you corrupt your actions to correspond to an imaginary state of being. Isn't that comforting. Or, with less generalizing and more metaphorizing: you're saying 'sink or swim' but I'm worrying about whether I'll dissolve in water, y'know?

(I'm biting my nails right now. Shameful. Did I mention I've been wearing a rubber band around my right wrist? I snap it when I catch myself, but I don't always catch myself.)

Well, but to respond to this from Chatty...

As I said before, it turns out that some people have a really hard time coming up with an idea. Several more have an even harder time making something tangible with an idea when it finally manifests itself. The creative process has several mental blocks that get in the way between idea and final product. I think this is effectively so in the geek mind...

...I think we seem to have a hard time coming up with ideas because we have opinions about our ideas, or rather about our 'selves.' We imagine the Other judging us and let ourselves get bound up by the need to correspond to an ideal. 'I can not write this story about a wizard because I have not exhaustively worked out how this school of conjuration would function.' We've imposed a precondition on experience - a category. A new subproblem. How do you know that a subproblem is part of the problem you're trying to tackle? You know it when you encounter the subproblem in the context of solving the problem. When you directly experience it. The rest is egocentric fiction. Chatty cites these 'mental blocks':

• The Right Answer
• That’s Not Logical
• Follow the Rules
• Being Practical
• To Err is Wrong
• I’m not Creative

Every one of these is a version of, as Milch(!) would say, 'imputing motivations to some postulated Other.' We don't know what's in the hearts of other humans, and mistake the desire to know for a need, so we sink into despair, which is: 'I'll never be loved.' As if making and giving and feeling love were somehow different categories of experience; as if love were a disease to be passed rather than song to be sung; as if 'being loved' could possibly consist of anything other than shutting the fuck up and loving someone else.

Did this answer even a single question? Stop defending yourself; that battle is over. I'm trying to find the vocabulary of I love you, Reader(s). You win some you lose some. The 'be true to your school' part was at least funny though, right? Of course right!

No blogs for one week - maybe 'til Columbus Day.

Self-preservation. Nail-related anxiety might be stemming partly from pointless online bickering. See y'all soonish.

Concern.

My nails! Damn it, I've been pulling my nails compulsively since I was a little kid, and though they're longer right now than they've been in a year or more I'm still pulling them today. So much pretty dead white skin cells waiting to be broken and torn away, sterile satisfaction, to be, to...

Well, I'm fucked if I think too much about them and fucked otherwise, so let's stop here: nothing is easy when you're trying to shatter a decades-old compulsion trivially indulged. I'm fighting and losing, damn it! But fighting is preferable to, um, whatever else.

The bourbon, it turns out, does not help my willpower. And yours? How do you break bad habits, loved one(s)?

(I finished another writing project this week and realized anew that I am a Worth-While Human Doing. What, not 'being'? Nope. Just sitting there I'm as useful as a polyp full of birthday candy, waiting to bust.

Scattered, spoilery thoughts on Felix Gilman's excellent novel Thunderer.

Thunderer had me on page 4:

Countless painters decide to capture the Bird's image. It'll test their art. [...] Later, no one will even be able to agree what kind of bird it is. Some see a storm of bright feathers; others only the graceful motion of its wings. Little more than a sense of easy, invincible speed remains. A dozen minds conceive abstract new schools of painting to capture the moment.

You can imagine the last sentence (or rather, some immense distended version of it dripping with vile ichors and dark intimations best turned from with all speed, etc.) jutting from a Lovecraft story, but in Gilman's story it's a rational worldbuilding component: the passage of the Bird and its fellow deities really does change minds in that way. The city of Ararat, the central character of Thunderer, is as irrational as can be, but Gilman's offhand bits of description and microhistory always make sense; he knows how to maintain the 'vivid continuous dream' of good fiction. In this regard the novel is a complete success. Ararat has been showing up in my own dreams this week. I've been there and wish to go back.

What happened there is another, more ambivalent matter. [Spoilers damn you!] Thunderer picks up steam as it goes and ends with several vivid scenes, but they're out of proportion with the buildup; the climactic confrontation begins on page 425 of 437, and feels like a formality. The plot is patchy and unevenly paced and apportioned. One of the main characters, the scholar Holbach, is held up for most of the novel by several characters as a font of knowledge and possibility, but his eventual uselessness seems less like a clever irony than like a mishandled narrative thread. Another, the black-clad Captain Arlandes, doesn't do a single interesting thing after the first hundred pages, but just floats around waiting for Gilman to symbolically redeploy him in the final chapters. The protagonist Arjun's great quest gives the book its structure and ostensible central mystery, but his 'advancement' in the story consists of (1) getting superpowers and (2) apparently learning nothing.

I understand that this description of Arjun misses one of the points of the story - he lives a very full, exciting life in this book, with or without the involvement of Ararat's gods, and while not advancing in his preexisting quest he finishes a couple of others through ingenuity and dedication - but the Thunderer's plotting lacks the neatness and imagination of his worldbuilding.

The book has plenty of things on its mind that Gilman never quite follows through on, for whatever reason(s). Interesting suggestions about religion and politics are made; brief vivid parallels to current events are drawn; astonishing feats of narrative telescopy are performed; a mature sexual relationship is ably rendered; a feral, almost inhuman Peter Pan (the book's most interesting and truly otherworldly character) swoops in to save the day several times; and in the end, as several critics have pointed out, it's the city's survival that matters. Which seems a bit...cheap, in a way. It's tiring to get wrapped up in the story of a half-dozen people and a city only to find that the fates of the half-dozen are just incidentally or symbolically important.

I know I made similar complaints about Last Call, which was less vivid, more plotty, and ultimately less successful than Thunderer. But Gilman's treatment of human psychology is more believable and complicated than Powers's, and even as his characters morph from people to icons they retain the reader's interest, or in any case they held mine - which can't be said for 3/4 of Last Call's quartet at book's end. (Among Powers's surviving characters, only Arky stays human - and that poor bastard didn't even have a plot to follow.) I don't mean to dwell on Thunderer's inconsistent characterization and plotting in this review; it's just more immediately rewarding to point to what isn't perfect in the book than to rhapsodize about what is, viz., Ararat itself.

Fantasy cities have a certain appeal, starting with: they allow us to generalize (or more diplomatically 'universalize') without offending actual existing socioeconomic groups or being bound by the dramatic inadequacies of mere history. Plus there's something appealing to a certain kind of reader/writer about schematic creations like Ararat (or New Crobuzon or Gaiman's London or Powers's Vegas): a good fantasy city turns the entire world into a multiplication table, cyclical, algorithmically generated, easy to interpret. As busy as life but with none of the complex terror of talking to other human beings. And the big win for readers: everything corresponds to a straightforward System of Meaning. The neighborhood lines are bright and their identities clear, the organic process of urban development and variegation follows some abstract Plan, and - inevitably - there's some magical character who can traverse the city in unnatural ways, taking in its unnaturally sharp angles and artificially concentrated smells and inhumanly bright colours and producing perfect understanding.

(The archetypal modern urban decoder is of course Sherlock Holmes; Ararat even loosely fits Holmes's turn-of-the-century time period. Ararat's Perfect Urbanite-Semiotician is Arjun the (naturally) outsider, who learns to travel through time and space by listening very carefully to music. He's the wide-eyed focus character who strides, then slouches, then phases through the city searching (at least nominally) for his people's lost god, the Voice.)

The appeal of such a character isn't hard to understand: industrial cities are complicated and unnatural, their straight lines and mechanical sounds forbidding, their mere scale alienating and soul-deadening. They look like circuit boards, and deliver the same electric shock to the unwary. It's nice to imagine people with the ability to leap from building to building in a single bound (Jack) or step directly from one neighborhood to another (Arjun and Shay) or drop out of one life/career and into the next (Defour) or concoct a Book of All Things (Holbach and Nicolas) or see the full expanse of the city all at once (Arlandes and the Thunderer itself). Gilman's achievement in Thunderer is to build a city that can contain all these characters/types yet still remain vibrant and complex, organic and believable, a truly living thing. Gilman manages to deliver both a complex urban ecosystem and a set of unifying (comforting) fantasy premises and tropes without losing the wonder in either. I admire his work in Thunderer; it's lively but clear, and never dull. If it were more shapely I'd call it a great fantasy novel.

[Summary damn you!] The language of Felix Gilman's Thunderer is sprightly and clever; his characters are more 'neato' than 'deep,' but the story flows, and complicates, and satisfies. Gilman is better here at establishing ideas and situations than at plumbing their depths, but this is (was) his first novel, and that capacity will come in time, I've no doubt. In the meantime the sheer inventiveness of Thunderer is enough to recommend it, which I do without reservation. This is a hell of a first novel.

Discount on eye of newt.

20 people you might meet in a magic shoppe

Old man foolishly seeks weapons to rescue kidnapped grandson
Merc/thief stocking up before raiding mail station (next door)
Teenager collects materials for first love spell (doomed)
Musician defending self against devil collecting on soul-purchase (doomed)
Gardener cheating at biggest-pumpkin contest
Farmer readying anti-gopher incantation (doomed)
Bartender preparing brew that turns patrons into cavemen
Seer needs supernatural advisor to explain nightmares
Spelunker wants to create ever-burning torch (doomed)
Chaos-worshipper crafting bomb for local school
Kids mean to make magic rocket (doomed)
Owner's ex-spouse seeks post-separation redress at knifepoint
Parents want spell to keep (possessed) child from nail-chewing
Time-traveler stuck without functioning wormhole
Pregnant nun seeks magical abortion for demon spawn
Writer's novel sprung to unholy life; seeks unbothered sleep
Chemist indulging curiosity, avoiding derisive colleagues
Game designer looking for ideas (doomed)
School librarian on errand for evil science teacher
Seamstress must repair growing tear in spacetime in living room

Fall feeling.

Autumn is generally my favourite season of the year. A brisk fall day under a bright grey sky in sweater and hat is one of the best things. The first time you see your breath on evening air, balled fists jammed in coat pockets, you're not yet hunched into the New Englander's wintering posture of tucked chin and tense rounded shoulders...or the cutting cold wind off the Charles River just to piss you off a bit, hone your edge, ready you for the bitter hell of Boston winter. I love even those things. The right music helps; love too. If you can tell the difference you're not listening closely enough. I awoke from a two-hour trance to chiming guitars and the sky deepening from carolina to columbia to cornflower blue on its way to (I hope) the extravagant red of martian cities. I used to find myself in this situation all the time. The important thing, whether the sun's rising or setting and whether or not the music has yet found its way back from animated suspension to resolution and diminuendo and hush, is - the only thing is - will you listen to that -

Modes of instruction (RPG edition).

The D&D 4e 'training' adventure, Kobold Keep, contains five rooms, each containing bad things to kill.

Frank Mentzer's sample adventure for The D&D Basic Set contains seventy rooms - many of them empty.

Between them is an essential difference in opinion about the nature of the fantasy hero - and purpose of tabletop gaming. I am intrigued. (And this week, when this next round of paying writing work is done, I promise to write about something else. Maybe Thunderer, maybe the next nighttime read, A Confederacy of Dunces, bitterly funny so far.)

Of late: chemical bonds.

[From the thing I've been working on all summer.]

The Nature of Chemical Bonds (they’re just like love)

Most atoms want to form compounds: atomic combinations. The forces that bind atoms into compounds are called chemical bonds, and can take many forms. Chemical bonds are like love: sometimes they're about sharing something important to both of you (covalent bonds – shared electrons), or changing each other for the better (ionic bonds – exchanged electrons). With some love-bonds, it's the amount of electricity flowing all around you that keeps you together (metallic bonds – crystals trapped by a sea of electrons).

Sometimes the course of love has more to do with circumstances than what's between you; the same goes for molecules. There are chemical forces that aren’t bonds, and aren’t as strong as chemical bonds, but which do alter atomic behavior.

A molecule is the smallest group of atoms that can take part in a chemical reaction; it’s a tightly-bonded group of two or more atoms in a fixed ratio.* H2O, for instance, is the chemical formula for a molecule called "water." A billion oxygen atoms and two billion hydrogen atoms might constitute a quantity of water,** the substance, but the units are two-to-one clusters. The chemical formula indicates the ratio, not the molecule count.

[*] I won’t speculate on whether the "love" metaphor holds up for giant polyatomic molecules and ions.

[**] This is actually a miniscule amount of water. A decent-sized spoonful of Jell-O contains a million billion billion molecules of H2O. And yet, paradoxically, there's always room for Jell-O. It's a miracle, I guess.

Quantum Theory.

Last night I slipped through time to a parallel dimension
You were alive and happy

Our children played in trees
were strong and wise
and knew no fear

We watched them play together

Somewhere everyone is happy
Somewhere fish do not have bones
Somewhere gravity cannot reach us any more
Somewhere you are not alone

This morning, when I awoke
God was dead but I lived on
I cannot move
but I am free
I found the source of gravity

Somewhere everyone is happy
Somewhere fish do not have bones
Somewhere gravity cannot reach us any more
Somewhere you are not alone

Somewhere in a parallel dimension
Happening now but not within your sight
The force that binds the universe together
Everything is gonna be alright

--Jarvis Cocker, 'Quantum Theory'

Please watch this.

Complete Seinfeld, $99 today only.

Why do you need The Complete Seinfeld? Among other reasons:

* It's the canonical 90's TV show, even moreso than The X-Files and Twin Peaks and (yes) The Simpsons. In terms of both sitcom history and recent American cultural history it's an invaluable resource.

* There haven't been many comic ensembles in the history of television with the chemistry and chops of Seinfeld's cast. Even the group's weakest actor (Seinfeld himself by a large margin) was blessed with great timing and a natural feel for how to deliver a punchline; as the show developed according to each performer's strengths, his comfort and ability grew, and by the show's fertile middle period he held up his end of the show just fine. His castmates, meanwhile, are masters who deserved every Emmy.

* While it's been surpassed in this regard by Arrested Development, mid-period Seinfeld featured the most complex sitcom plotting yet seen, not to mention the darkest outlook of any network comedy I know of. It was poisonous satire played skillfully to the cheap seats, written with the dense referentiality of The Simpsons. The best writing on Seinfeld was the smartest and funniest on TV, Back Then.

* Why in the world would anyone forgive Michael Richards anything? Because Kramer is one of the great TV roles - a type and yet an individual, which is to say an icon. George is a richer role, Elaine a more difficult one, but of the four Kramer is the holy figure.

Bah. I just bought the thing while writing so I'm fresh out of ready-for-sublimating desire. Just buy the damn thing. $99 is a fantastic value for this much TV.

District 9.

The opening half-hour of District 9 is so good that it sets the film up for failure or godhood; it does fail, ultimately, through a combination of thin worldbuilding, rapidly-attenuating characterization, threadbare plot, and (I imagine) subtleties lost on this American viewer. Roger Ebert picked up on a few such encoded messages:

The title “District 9” evokes Cape Town’s historic District 6, where Cape Coloureds (as they were called then) owned homes and businesses for many years before being bulldozed out and relocated. The hero’s name, van der Merwe, is not only a common name for Afrikaners, the white South Africans of Dutch descent, but also the name of the protagonist of van der Merwe jokes, of which the point is that the hero is stupid. Nor would it escape a South African ear that the alien language incorporates clicking sounds, just as Bantu, the language of a large group of African apartheid targets.

The film's first aim is to engender sympathy with the aliens, who are inscrutable, inconsistently rendered, and - let's be frank - vile. The protagonist is no less vile, his startling and always-clear onscreen transformation notwithstanding; Sharlto Copley's performance in the lead role is unforgivably good, given that the bastard's never acted before. This doesn't make the aliens easier to empathize with, however. The film's other aim is to entertain you with a merry brutal chase and some action-movie histrionics; writer/director Neill Blomkamp achieves this second aim with skill and panache (particularly given his smaller-than-usual budget). He's a filmmaker to watch.

But you can see action movies any weekend. The decidedly un-Hollywood first half-hour of District 9 you only get to see for the first time once - lucky you. That it's bound to be followed shortly thereafter by the remaining 80 minutes is misfortune of the sort we've all seen before, and can indeed see every single goddamn weekend at our local cinemas and video stores. Lucky us.

Well it's a fine time anyhow, if underwhelming in the end. What are we left with? Potential, as ever.