Reading Shouldn’t Be Work

We’ve all been there.

Deep in the bowels of a book – fiction or non, it doesn’t matter – getting through that vast middle between the beginning where you get hooked and the end where everything (hopefully) pays off, and it happens.  Something in the back of your mind, or maybe the front, says, “what the hell are we doing wasting our time with this shit?”

OK, so that’s what my mind says.  Your mileage may vary, as they say.  But everybody who reads is eventually faced with the question of whether a book is worth finishing.  Whether it’s the slimmest of novellas or a door stopper like the later volumes of A Song of Ice and Fire, you start to wonder if your time might be better spent elsewhere.  Like, say, reading a better book.

Writing at The Atlantic, Juliet Lapidos argues that you should stick it out to the bitter end, regardless of how much of a slog things become.  This isn’t just a matter of trying to ensure you don’t miss out on something that comes good at the end, it’s a question of morality:

This behavior, common though it may be, seems lazy to me. Wrong, even. Once you start a book, you should finish it.

That being said, she begins her case for always finishing a book with the most obvious utilitarian one – it might get better.  She gives examples (classics, naturally) of books that aggravated her to no end, but finally got around to a “transcendentally good scene” that made it all worthwhile.  This is true of anything, of course, and doesn’t really support the charge that bailing at some earlier stage is “wrong.”  Short sighted, maybe, but not wrong.

Her other reasons don’t fare any better.  The first is “fortitude,” which is essentially the intellectual version of being made to eat your vegetables.  Slogging through a boring book (to be fair, she names names – hello Ian McEwan fans!) steels ones resolve to deal with real life.  Which, conveniently enough in Lapidos’s case, involves . . . slogging through lots of poorly written verbiage.  I suppose there’s something to admire in that, but I don’t think anyone would begrudge her some editorial control over the reading she does on her own time.  I sometimes read court cases for fun (pathetic, I know), but only so long as they’re actually interesting.  I save the slogs for the office.

The last reason, is, I have to say, one that gets a little closer to why it’s “wrong” to step away from a book early – respect:

it is one thing to start writing a novel and another thing entirely to finish one. Many would-be authors simply cannot bring a work of fiction to completion, which is part of why publishing houses, as a rule, won’t enter into contract until they see an ending. The difference between being able to write 50 pages and being able to write a whole novel is the difference—at least, one major difference—between a professional and a dilettante.

To drop a novel after a few chapters is, then, to disregard what makes it a formal work of art rather than a heap of papers that reside in a desk drawer. Today, books and authors need all the help they can get; if you care about literature as an artistic endeavor and the people who create it, then you should do so fully.

As someone who has gone the full nine yards and finished a couple of manuscripts, I appreciate the sentiment.  But, ultimately, it pains me to think somebody would someday buy one of my books, start it, think “this really sucks,” but decide to finish it out just so they can support the cause.  OK, maybe I expect my wife to do that, but not strangers!  It’s less a sign of respect than a symbol of your own better nature as a human being – “hey, this novel really sucked, but at least I’m such a good person that I read all of this shit!”

Where any argument that a book, once begun, requires the reader to finish it fails is in what economists call opportunity costs.  Opportunity costs are, basically,, the things you could otherwise do with your time while you were doing something else.  Some people read entire novels in a day.  For others it takes weeks.  If you’re in the latter camp, aren’t you going to lose large chunks of your life reading stuff you don’t like just to say you could?  Reading other books in the time you would have spent slogging through (insert favorite horrific tome here) just makes sense.  We’re all gonna die at some point – life’s too short to read stuff you don’t like.

Which is why books are different than other forms of entertainments.  I’ve never walked out on a movie, although I’ve bailed on a couple while watching at home.  Regardless of how bad a movie is, it’s over in a few hours.  And, for the first reason Lapidos lays out, I tend to want to see if it gets better.  But a few hours is quite different than a few days or a few weeks.  Like I said, life’s just too short.

I am, perhaps, the ultimate subjectivist when it comes to art.  There is no bad or good, only what people like or don't like.  A slog that is redeemed for Lapidos by a single transcendent scene will be, for others, merely a slog.  Nobody should be guilted into consuming art because it's "good" for them.  They should be encouraged to develop their own tastes and interests.  If those don't include seeing every book through to the end, regardless of how much enjoyment the reader gets from it, so be it.

Friday Review: The Monuments Men

The story of the Monuments Men - a group of about 350 Allied soldiers who were tasked with safeguarding and liberating looted art during World War II - is fascinating and a part of the war that's frequently been overlooked.  That, thankfully, changed last year with the George Clooney flick, even though it didn't turn out to be the awards season champ it seemed designed to be.  The movie a fictionalized account of the story laid in the book by Robert Edsel.  For such an interesting story, it's a shame it doesn't get a better telling.

Edsel makes an admission right at the beginning of the book that doesn't bode well:

I have taken the liberty of creating dialogue for continuity, but in no instance does it concern matters of substance and in all cases it is based on extensive documentation.

I admire them for being up front about this, but it immediately calls into question what comes after.  More problematic, however, is that if the dialogue doesn't concern "matters of substance" then why include it at all?  In the end, the dialog doesn't add much drama or tension to the book, which is otherwise sorely lacking.  It's both an odd choice and a missed opportunity.

Perhaps one reason I'm particularly down on the dialogue is that in the Audible version, the reader tries to do most of them in accents and fails miserably.  I've rarely cringed while listening to an audiobook, but did so time after time with this one.  It was particularly jarring because early on when all the speakers were Americans, there didn't seem to be any accents at all (this changed, unfortunately).  The cliched French and German that came later, therefore, really grated on the ears.

Beyond that, part of the problem with the book is that the Monuments Men tend to blend together until it's hard to remember who's who.  They have very similar backgrounds and face the same kind of obstacles so that none of them really stand out.  In fact, the biggest help I had in keeping them separate in my head was to picture their counterparts in the movie (fictional characters based on actual people).

In fact, the two most memorable people in the book (aside from Hitler, Eisenhower, etc.) are ones that don't quite fit the "Monuments Men" label.  One was Rose Valland, a French woman who spent the war in the midst of Nazi Paris keeping track of plundered art, then became the key figure in tracking it down and recapturing it.  She, obviously, was not a man (nor American, which is the primary focus of the book and film).

The other is Harry Ettlinger, who was a man, but unlike the more sophisticated, educated, and high class art types who became Monuments Men, was just a private who wound up doing his part.  It's his back story that makes that part compelling.  Ettlinger was a Jew, born in Karlshrue and forced to flee before the war.  He was, we are told, the last person to have a bat mitzvah in that city's synagogue before it was destroyed.  That he returned to Germany an American GI, helping right the cultural wrong perpetrated by the Nazis (including a fulfilling personal mission) is the best part of the book.

The other problem is that, once things get going, the activities of the Monuments Men are pretty redundant.  During the initial periods after Allied landings in Italy and France, they are tasked with keeping valuable buildings and works from being carelessly destroyed.  Important, no doubt, but not that thrilling once we're past the initial instance.  Things pick up a bit once they're on the trial of looted art, but those trails mostly lead to a series of mines in Germany and Austria where the Germans stashed the loot.  The mere fact that untold treasures are stuffed down mines, much less the challenges of getting them out, are interesting but, again, become a bit redundant.

In the middle of this section comes an interesting, if not altogether relevant, diversion.  The most impressive of the salt-mine stashes was found in the Austrian town of Altaussee.  The Nazi governor of the area planned to blow the whole mine up, destroying all the looted artwork rather than let it fall into Allied hands (all based on an order from Hitler that may, or may not, have been rescinded and/or modified).  A group of locals managed to trick him into delaying the plan long enough for the Allies to arrive.  It's a neat story and, from Edsel's telling, one that's been untold in its true depth, for years.  However, it doesn't really have much to do with the Monuments Men, as they arrived after the drama was done.

But most of that is nitpicking.  What Edsel has done is to celebrate not just a group of people who did important (and often overlooked) work.  He notes just how unusual this focus on preserving and repatriating art was and what a worthy endeavor it was.  Armies just didn't do such things.

Nor do they much anymore.  Edsel wonders why we haven't had similar operations (at least in terms of scope) in future wars.  Sadly, I think it's pretty easy to figure out.  Edsel frequently refers to the Monuments Men's goal as no less than the salvation, not just of particular cultural artifacts, but of "our" culture in general.  He even goes so far as to call the Altaussee plot one of the great turning points of civilization.  So why, then, were there no Monuments Men units in Iraq or Vietnam or Korea?

Simple - those places aren't part of "our" culture.  The Nazis, after all, were still Europeans and thus part of a long heritage that extended to the United States.  Not so much some others. It's not for nothing that the Monuments Men effort was confined to Europe, with no mention of the Pacific theater.  Nor should it be lost that the genesis of the group that became the Monuments Men was concerns about protecting American art in case of invasion.  We care most about ourselves and those who remind us of ourselves (Bender was onto something), whether that is how it should be or not.

Edsel himself has an interesting story (according to Wikipedia).  He grew up in Texas and made his money in (what else) oil and gas drilling.  He sold out to Union Pacific in the 1990s and moved to Europe.  It was there he first became interested in the subject of the Nazis and art during the war.  He's done yeoman work to bring this issue to national attention and clearly cares deeply about it.  None of the criticisms of his writing should minimize that.

The Details
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The Monuments Men: Allied Heroes, Nazi Thieves, and the Greatest Treasure Hunt in History
by Robert M. Edsel, with Bret Witter
Published 2009

If You're Worried About Rosebud, You're Missing the Point

It's his sled. It was his sled from when he was a kid. There, I just saved you two long boobless hours. 

- Peter Griffin, spoiling Citizen Kane

Saw Gone Girl last weekend.  It's really good, particularly if you like the kind of movie that takes place in an air of dread that's perfectly summoned by David Fincher (with able assists from Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross).  I say that even knowing the big twist of the film going into it.  Not because I had read the book on which it's based, but because my wife blurted it out during a TV commercial. She didn't know I wanted to see it.

Point is, she didn't really "spoil" the movie for me, in the true sense of the word.  That's because the flick is good enough that it doesn't rise or fall on the big "twist" (which, for what it's worth, happens about halfway through - this isn't The Sixth Sense we're talking about).  In my opinion, any movie/book/TV show that rises and falls on that twist isn't really worth watching.

What's more, people seem to enjoy things more once they know how it turns out.  At least that's what some research says.

Back in 2011, as The Atlantic reports, a study was published that sounds pretty neat:

Scientists asked 900 college students from the University of California, San Diego, to read mysteries and other short stories by writers like John Updike, Roald Dahl, Agatha Christie, and Raymond Carver. Each student got three stories, some with "spoiler paragraphs" revealing the twist, and some without any spoilers. Finally, the students rated their stories on a 10-point scale..

The results?  Readers preferred the spoiled stories.  But why would we want to know how it ends ahead of time?

One theory is that our anticipation of surprises actually takes away from our appreciation for the 99 percent of the movie that isn't a monster twist. 'The second viewing is always more satisfying than the first,' Sternbergh said, 'because you notice all the things you missed while you were busy waiting for the twist.' Psychologists have observed that when we consume movies and songs for a second (or third, or hundredth time), the stories become easier to process, and we associate this ease of processing with aesthetic pleasure.

Think about this for a second.  Most of us have some piece of culture that we go back to again and again.  I know that the big escape at the end of Brazil takes place all inside Sam's head, but I still watch it.  I know that Arthur and Ford wind up on a primitive Earth populated by a bunch of idiots expelled from a better planet, but I'll still reconsume Hitchiker's Guide . . . again (in its many forms).  And I know Tommy goes back to being blind, deaf, and dumb at the end, but that doesn't make "Pinball Wizard" kick any less ass.

Of course, there might be other reasons why spoilers really aren't, including the uncomfortable recognition that we really like predictability more than we let on.  But, in this area at least, I'd like to not be completely cynical* and think that, deep down, we realize that works built on the big twist only are, as someone else put it in the Atlantic piece:

like artistic flash paper: It excites for a moment but offers little lasting wonder.

After all, we want to be better than Peter Griffin.  Right?

* I know, you're shocked, right?  How's that for a twist!

Friday Review: The Postman

A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its boots on.

 - Mark Twain (maybe)

You can lead with all new lines

If you believe in what you say

And life can be just as you make it

Believe the lie and it will all come true

 - Umprhey's McGee (definitely)

Yeah, OK, so sometimes the lie is easier to tell than the truth.  But what happens when the lie is a noble one, one that (to borrow from The Simpsons) embiggens your fellow man?  And what happens if the lie gets out of control and takes on a life of its own?

That's the basic idea behind The Postman, by which I mean the lauded David Brin novel, not the critically savaged (hello Razzies!) Kevin Costner flick that sprang from it.  Gordon Krantz is not actually the titular postman - indeed, there are no such things in the post-apocalyptic world Brin lays out (in what is now our actual past). But he claims to be one, just to survive.  Then, shit happens.

Brin does an interesting thing in The Postman because instead of taking us through the apocalypse and the initial postlude of survival, he drops Gordon (and us) in 16 years after everything went to hell.  That's allowed the world to settle a bit, although it's settled into a world full of dangers, from mundane bandits to leftover pre-war survivalists with a philosophy that's very like Ayn Rand on steroids. It's while escaping from those kinds of bandits that Krantz comes upon an abandoned USPS truck, complete with dead driver inside.  He nicks the uniform purely for warmth and grabs a bag of mail for reading (and presumably other) material, no real intent to pull a scam on anybody.

The scam, such as it is, unfolds slowly and does require a bit of a stretch, that being that after nearly two decades of there being no such thing as the United States, much less the United States Postal Service, people are overwhelmed at the idea of getting mail service back.  Krantz's attempts to slip away from the first small town he comes to are complicated by people trying to pay him to take letters for them.  From there, Krantz builds an entire facade of being an official of the Restored United States and begins to forge some connections between the scattered Oregon settlements.

That's part one, in which Krantz falls into and embraces his scam.  Part two adds a nice twist.  He comes to the town of Corvallis (home of Oregon State University and a prime location for the post-apocalyptic Dies the Fire series), where society seems to be holding on pretty well and surging toward a brighter future.  It's precisely the kind of place Krantz has been looking for all these years, a place to settle down and help rebuild the world, but he's now trapped by his own lie.  He's unable to give up the postman game because of how much the lie has taken root behind him.  Thrown in another nice twist in the form of a still functional (maybe) super computer and this middle section of the book is a highlight.

The third part (perhaps not coincidentally, the part that wasn't originally published in stand alone form)doesn't fare so well.  There's an invading army of Randians threatening the struggling civilization, which Krantz decides to stay behind and fight, rather than flee.  Which is a shame, because when the big showdown comes - between genetically enhanced soldiers who have played no real part up to this point - he's watching from the sidelines.  Add in a weird bit of extremist feminism that seems more like parody than anything else and the book ends with a bit of a thud.

Naturally, this being Brin, it ends on an uplifting (ha!) sentiment.  He's big on science fiction as an inherently positive endeavor, showing how mankind will keep on keeping on in the future.  It's a hard fit for a post-apocalyptic tale, so it has to at least suggest that happy days are on the way to being here again.  Having said that, there's at least enough uncertainty in the world of The Postman to not make it feel like a cop out.

The Details
------------------------
The Postman
by David Brin
Published 1985
Winner Locus Award, Aurthur C. Clarke Award

Friday Review: The MaddAddam Trilogy

A couple of weeks ago it was announced that award winning director Darren Aronofsky has been tapped to adopt Margaret Atwood's MaddAddam trilogy for HBO.  Seems like a good choice.  After all, Aronofsky's last movie was about a petulant being who nearly wipes all life from the Earth because he gets pissed off. Basically, the MaddAddam trilogy is the same thing.

Which is not to say Aronofsky won't have his hands full.

Most literary trilogies - most sci-fi (and it is, dear reader, regardless of what Atwood would tell you) ones, certainly - tell linear stories.  The story starts in the first volume, continues in the second, and then is resolved in the third.  MaddAddam doesn't play the same game.  Yes, there is a continuous story being told, one of a post-apocalyptic world and the few people left to deal with it.  But the focus of each novel is on the past, not the present, as we learn just how this world came to be the way it is.  Which is good, because the flashbacks are, generally, much more interesting than what's going on in the "present."

Book one, Oryx and Crake, begins with Snowman (aka Jimmy), a post-apocalyptic hermit who lives nearby some very strange nouveau humans, to whom he is a kind of protector and prophet.  Through flashbacks, we learn that Snowman was friends with Crake (aka Glenn), an all around genius.  They were both in love with Oryx, who may or may not have been a girl they first discovered via only kiddy porn (See?  I told you the flashbacks were more interesting).  Crake's genius, as it happens, is tempered by his disdain for what humans have do to the planet, so he uses his skills to (a) engineer a virus that wipes most of humanity off the planet and (b) engineer the nouveau humans, called Crakers.

The second volume, The Year of the Flood, focuses on two women who survive the virus, Toby and Ren.  Their back stories intersect with each other via a environmentalist cult called God's Gardeners (they also intersect with Jimmy and Glenn, as it happens).  The Gardeners preach about the need to return to nature and of the coming "waterless flood," which will wipe humanity off the map (thus allowing the big bad from Aronofsky's movie off the hook after promising no more floods).  This book is interrupted, in numerous places, for sermons from the Gardener's founder, Adam One, and songs of worship.  For the audiobook, the songs are actually performed, which was neat at first, but quickly got old.  If we need hippified love-Gaia kind of tunes, couldn't they have called up Steve Hilliage?

The final volume, MaddAddam, picks up where the first two converge and goes forward from there, but also backwards.  This one focuses on Zeb and his brother, Adam (aka Adam One), and their role in the waterless flood.  This is all told, in flashback (naturally), to Toby, who then has the unenviable task of translating it for the Crakers, who continue to want to know how they came to be.

With any trilogy, there's a sense of diminishing returns.  No sequel, no matter how skillfully done, can replicate the fun of being thrown into an entirely new world that you get from the first volume.  The MaddAddam trilogy suffers from this more than others, thanks to its format.  Each book essentially tells flashback versions of the same story, but from different points of view.  It's more effective than you might think, but by the time we dive into Zeb's story it's less a matter of learning new information than finding out how characters we've come to know from earlier volumes fit into the narrative.

The "old" world that Atwood fleshes out in the flashbacks is fascinating, chilling, and hits just a little too close to home.  Corporations have become supreme, not by buying into government (like they do now), but by setting up their own heavily armed fiefdoms.  Those who don't work for the corps are stuck in violence and poverty plagued "pleeblands."  The seas have risen (New York City is gone, replaced by a new version in Jersey) and various kinds of genetically grown critters - hybrids of, say, lions and lambs (it's a religious thing) - roam the earth.  I won't go so far as to say that Atwood sets up a world that's worth destroying, but that argument could be made.

The only thing in the new world that's half as interesting are the Crakers, the nouveau humans created by Crake as the replacements for our kind of humans.  Made with a heavy dose of genetic engineering, they're vegetarians (the graze), run around naked but can stand the warming sun, and mate only every so often in weird rituals that involve gang bangs and waving blue penises.  Unfortunately, the Crakers are also exceptionally annoying, because Crake did not bless them with a mind as advanced as our own.  The interactions between the surviving humans and the Crakers are sometimes amusing, but often are only annoying.

The dullness of the new world is most evident in the closing volume.  For one thing, Atwood lets Toby, a character who has survived on her own for months and was clearly a strong person, devolve into an older variant of a moody high schooler.  She spends entirely too much of our time worrying about whether Zeb's out fucking other women, based purely on speculation, and, generally, becomes a very passive personality.  I'll assume Atwood had a reason for doing this, maybe some comment on the way we fall into old communal habits even in the strangest of circumstances, but it was hard to take.

Similarly, there's very little threat to the characters in the new world.  Since this was a biological apocalypse there's lots of spare materials to use for survival.  Yes, life for these characters is harder than it was before, but I never had a sense that they were truly eking out a survival (nobody succumbs to a mundane injury/illness, for example).  One potential menace from the earlier books, creatures called "pigoons," loose their power to frighten.  Originally created to produce spare organs for humans, they're the most advanced sci-fi swine since the piggies of Speaker for the Dead.  But, as it turns out, the Crakers can talk to them and a deal can be struck to keep everybody safe.  Bleh.

That leaves as big bads for the humans, Crakers, and pigoons to face a pair of black-hat killers, refugees of a pre-flood punishment game called painball.  Painball is so ruthless and violent that anyone who survives it is turned into a heartless psychopath bent on rape and murder.  It makes them scary, but it doesn't make them interesting.  For one thing, it's never clear why Toby and the group see the painballers as such a threat - they have them outnumbered and outgunned, so why don't the painballers just go elsewhere?  For another thing, the group of survivors shows little rational thought when it comes to what should be done to the painballers, even worrying that their offspring might be murderous psychopaths (which makes no kind of fucking sense).  The final big confrontation is saved only by a nice switch in narration that gives the whole thing a distant, mythical gloss.

If that makes it sound like I'm down on the whole trilogy, it shouldn't.  Atwood's style and way with prose goes an awful long way to making the entire thing worth reading.  It's dark territory she's exploring, but there are bursts of humor and satire that stand out.  The only thing that really goes wrong is that the entire enterprise runs out of steam in the end.  That stings (see the US collapse against Portugal last Sunday), but it doesn't invalidate everything else.

But it does mean that Aronofsky has quite a bit of work ahead of him.

The Details
------------------------
All by Margaret Atwood

Oryx and Crake
Published 2003

The Year of the Flood
Published 2009

MaddAddam
Published 2013

Friday Review: The City and the City

Think of a city. Now, think of another city, one nearby whose culture, economics, and general life are completely entwined with the first one. Your mind may go to someplace like Minnesota's "Twin Cities" or perhaps Cold War Berlin, but think a little harder. What if the two cities actually overlapped each other so they shared the same physical space.

That's the basic idea underlying The City and the City.

One day a dead woman's body is found in Besźel, a city state somewhere in southeast Europe. Besźel shares some of its physical location with another city state, Ul Qoma. In some areas the two cities overlap (are "crosshatched"), requiring the citizens of each to learn to "unsee" the evidence of the other. A street in Besźel may be the same as a street in Ul Qoma, but the drivers in each city navigate it differently. Movement from one city to the other is restricted to a single border checkpoint. Murder is one thing, but the most serious offense in either city is to breach - to cross over to the other without permission - a taboo enforced by a shadowy organization known, coincidentally (and somewhat confusingly), as Breach.

Needless to say, the death of the young woman - from neither Besźel or Ul Qoma - requires our hero, a Besźel detective named Borlú, to dive into the mysteries of the two cities and, ultimately, of Breach itself. In other words, he winds up questioning the very fabric of his reality. China Miéville does a great job getting inside Borlú's skull, showing both the ingrained importance he ascribes to avoiding breach and his growing suspicion that it's all a bit daft.

There is, potentially, another city involved in all this, a city between the cities called Orciny. The murder victim is fascinated with Orciny and, just maybe, finds evidence that it exists and that's what got her killed. Only we wind up learning that the reason she was killed was much more mundane - a corrupt politician in bed with outside business interests - and the whole Orciny thing was just a means to string her along.

Similarly, Miéville kind of does the same to the reader. His premise that is inherently fantastic - as in a fantasy literature sense - yet he takes it and deconstructs it. However amazing the co mingled lives of Besźel and Ul Qoma are, there is nothing supernatural about their relationship. The citizens in each city merely learn not to see citizens in the other. Our brains have a powerful ability to not see what we don't want to see, but once the illusion is over it's over for good. Hence why Borlú, who gets as close to truth as there is in these places, can never really go back. Even Breach itself, which begins as some kind of "other" presence (possibly alien) turns out to be a sort of NSA plus SHIELD organization on speed.

By the end of things, to be honest, I felt as jerked around by Miéville as the victim had been by her killers. The only difference is that I loved every minute of it.

The Details
------------------------
The City and the City
by China Miéville
Published 2009
Winner Locus Award, Aurthur C. Clarke Award, World Fantasy Award, & Hugo Award (shared with The Windup Girl)

Friday Review: The Half-Made World

We often talk of making the world over in our own image, but at the end of the day, the world is what it is.  Any transformation is mostly metaphorical and, on a cosmic scale, brief.  But what if the world itself was still in the process of being made?  And what if human expansion is what finally tamed it?  That's the background for The Half-Made World, an entertaining mix of steampunk, alternate history (sort of), and "weird" tales.

The eastern portion of The Half-Made World looks a bit like Europe or the eastern United States in the Victorian age.  Out west, over the mountains, is a country in the process of being settled, sort of equivalent to the American west of the same time period.But further west, beyond that, things get wild.  Part and parcel of that is a native population that is more in tune with the unmade world than the more "civilized" parts of it.

Our journey into this world comes with the aid of Liv, a practitioner of the budding field of psychology who, leaves her life in the east to work at a hospital on the edge of the settled west; Creedmore, the agent of one powerful faction who kidnaps her and one of her charges; and Lowry, commander of another power faction trying to track all down.

The factions are a pair of ruthless forces that are more ideology than physical things.  The Gun favors chaos and destruction, wrought through its agents who are controlled (to a greater or lesser extent) by demons that live in their firearms.  The Line, on the other hand, preaches mechanical progress (it's main instrument are engines, which appear to be sentient trains) and converts everything in its past to a world that sounds slightly like a predecessor to Terry Gilliam's Brazil (that the Line's commander is named Lowry is surely not a coincidence).

The Half-Made World has two things really going for it.  The first is the world in builds (so to speak), particularly the way it turns an age old order/chaos conflict into the running battle of the Line and the Gun.  There isn't much time spent on why each faction does what it does or where they come from - I kind of like the ambiguity.  Instead, the book focuses on how out west everyone's lives are controlled by their relationship to one of those two factions (ally, foe, or wary neutral).

I also wonder if the way the Line and the Gun are meant to be a metaphor for American anti-terrorism activities in the 21st century.  The Gun are the ultimate terrorists, causing damage and death for the heck of it.  The deeds are committed by scattered agents that number, perhaps, in the dozens, as opposed to a kind of formal militarized force.  The Line, on the other hand, is precisely that kind of militarized force, deploying a formidable array of clever weaponry that obliterates basically everything in its path.

Early on, as the Line is in pursuit of Creedmore before he arrives at the hospital, he winds up in a small town, Kloan.  When his identity is revealed a firefight ensues that leaves most of the town's prominent citizens dead and much of the town on fire.  In spite of all that, Creedmore escapes.  What's left behind is a town now under control of the line, one that was truly destroyed so it could be saved.  If that echo of our anti-terrorism policies abroad wasn't intended commentary, it's a hell of a coincidence.

The other thing The Half-Made World really has going for it is Creedmore.  He's the only of the three main characters who really stands out in your mind.T he Line commander is just a cog in a wheel, easily replaceable, which doesn't make for great characterization.  And Liv, while fully realized in her own right, just doesn't have a lot to do.  Creedmore, on the other hand, has a fascinating past - he fell into a life of crime only after trying just about every do-gooder organization in this world (abolitionists, advocates for the native "hill folk," religious groups, etc.).  But he's a good criminal, which is what attracted him to the Gun in the end.  But now, a long way down a life extended by the Gun's magic, Creedmore is having second thoughts about his master, with whom he has nearly constant running discussions.  I appreciate that the book presents all this as an ongoing matter and dodges the easy cliche of a "bad" man who turns "good."  Creedmore is much more interesting than that.

Unfortunately, there's an awful lot of chasing that doesn't add up to a whole lot.  The unmade part of the world isn't as interesting as the Line/Gun lands.  This shift about and are generally "weird," but not all that dangerous.  As someone else pointed out elsewhere, there's still air to breathe and food to eat.  Still, the chase comes to an end, so that means something, right?  Not really.  The great secret that all parties have been chasing is never explained, although it's hinted at.  More importantly, the main characters don't seem to have arrived at any sort of end point in their stories. The book ends like it's the first of a series, but although there is a second book set in this world it isn't a direct sequel.  So the lack of a hard ending is a big disappointment.

Not big enough to avoid recommending the book, however.  The world is inventive and it's worth spending time with Creedmore as the action spills out over the west.  That it might have been better doesn't stop it from being very very good.

The Details
------------------------
The Half-Made World
By Felix Gilman
Published 2010

Friday Review: Dying of the Light

If you only know George R.R. Martin thanks to Game of Thrones (and the Song of Ice and Fire books upon which it's based), you should know two things.

First, he is not your bitch.

Second, he wrote stuff before A Song of Ice and Fire, some of which was really pretty good.  When your debut novel is nominated for a Hugo award, you're no slouch.

Which is not to say there aren't some parts of Dying of the Light that sound a bit familiar all these years on.  It's set on Worlorn, a rogue planet that's spent about 60 years in a place where it was habitable.  As a result, it hosted a festival that became a kind of World's Fair on steroids for the neighboring planets, but, as the novel starts, the festival has ended and the world is growing slowly colder and colder.  That's right - winter is coming!  There's also a typical Martin focus on detail (what everybody's wearing, eating, etc.) that, at some point, goes from interesting background detail about the world into overkill.  Oh, and did I mention that one faction that comes to the fore in the second half of the book has a wolf's head as a sigil?  Only they ain't Starks.

Our hero (of sorts), Dirk, comes to Worlorn at the urging of an old lover, who may or may not need his help.  As a result, he's dropped into some first rate culture shock when he finds out that said lover, Gwen, is now married (after a fashion) to a guy, Jaan,  who is also in a long term relationship with another man (his "teyn"), Garse.  It's complicated, but Martin does a good job of fleshing out the culture of High Kavallar (where Jaan and Garse come from) and its honor-based economy.

The other thing Dirk finds himself in, of course, is the middle of a planet that's dying.  The most effective part of the book for me was the first third or so, during which Gwen shows Dirk around the planet, taking him to several of the different cites set up by the various cultures that participated in the festival.  Those include a still fully active (and sparsely inhabited) city run by computers and the haunting Crying Lamia, an entire city designed as a musical instrument played by the winds.  The music it makes is so melancholy that it drives people to suicide.  Kind of like Magma (kidding!).

This exploration also gives Martin a chance to dig into the rich relationship between Dirk and Gwen.  To say Dirk holds a torch for Gwen is putting it mildly, although it's not clear that she has any real affection for him.  She takes him to task for holding onto a memory of another version of her that he basically made up (and gave a different name - names are big in Dying of the Light), but isn't certain whether she's in a better position in these days than those.

I thought the second half of the book was less interesting, mainly because it turns into a standard (if well done) series of chases, double crosses, and reveals of middling effectiveness.  And as the running occurs there's an inordinate amount of Kavallar dick swinging that, along with everybody going by their full several-words-long name, gets old fast.  Martin wraps everything up by not really wrapping up anything, with an ending that is either cleverly open ended or downright maddening (you'll have to judge for itself).

It's worth keeping in mind that Dying of the Light, for all its charms, is a creature of its time.  As this review notes, Gwen is "more than a McGuffin but not much more."  She's the only woman in the novel and, although she's not merely a damsel in need of rescue, the book mostly revolves around how the men in her life scheme over her.

The Details
------------------------
Dying of the Light
By George R.R. Martin
Published 1977

What's the Point of a Review?

My Friday Reviews are the descendant of one of the features of my original, hand crank operated, web page I had while I was in college and law school.  There I'd do reviews of just about every album I got, as part of a regular process of listening and figuring out what I thought about it.  I stopped doing those, largely because my reviews were winding up in one of two formats - gushing praise or harsh scorn.  If I didn't really "feel" one of those, I didn't even write up.  I'd like to think I do better now, but it's helpful to be able to pick and choose.

I bring all this up because of an interesting two-person article in the upcoming issue of the New York Time Sunday Book Review which asks the question, "do we really need negative book reviews?"

Now, as a struggling writer, I kind of like the idea of doing away with negative reviews. Who wants to see their work torn to shreds, after all?  But I'm not certain that would really be the best thing.

Francine Prose makes the case for not writing negative reviews.  It's pretty simple:

Even so, I stopped [writing negative reviews]. I began returning books I didn’t like to editors. I thought, Life is short, I’d rather spend my time urging people to read things I love. And writing a bad book didn’t seem like a crime deserving the sort of punitive public humiliation (witch-dunking, pillorying) that our Puritan forefathers so spiritedly administered.

From my reading of professional critics, that seems to be the best part of the job - when they find something in need of a champion, a book or film that won't reach a wider audience without some cheerleading.  It must be more rewarding that writing what shit the latest Transformers movie is or whatever.  So I see the point.

On the other hand, however, that seems a bit too touchy-feely, doesn't it?  To be fair, Prose (good name for a writer!) doesn't argue for lying about the quality of books, just not writing reviews of bad things at all.  Which, come to think about it, might be even worse - being ripped apart is one thing, being ignored quite another.

Zoe Heller makes the case for negative reviews and it is, as well, pretty simple:

most writers do not write merely, or even principally, to escape from or console themselves. They write for other people. They write to have an effect, to elicit a reaction. That is why they scrap and struggle, often for years, to have their work published. Being sentient creatures, they are often distressed by what critics have to say about their work. Yet they accept with varying degrees of resignation that they are not kindergartners bringing home their first potato prints for the admiration of their parents, but grown-ups who have chosen to present their work in the public arena. I know of no self-respecting authors who would ask to be given points for 'effort' or for the fact that they are going to die one day.

Part of being an artist, at least one who shares his work with other people, is the need to deal with criticism.  My father is a first rate grammar-Nazi.  I have him read my fiction, even though it's not the kind of thing he normally reads, because he will be precise and vicious with a red pen.  When my mother asked if I really wanted him to do that, I said, "because editors and agents will be kind and not point out those things?"  Being criticized is part and parcel of being a creative person.

Further, as Heller points out, reviews come with bylines and, hopefully, supporting argument as to whether a book is good or bad.  Real criticism goes miles beyond "it sucks" or even "it's great!"  Critics who are savage just for the fun of it won't garner a lot of respect or readers.

After all, as Prose admits, trying not to write a negative review is like trying not to eat too much at Thanksgiving.  You're bound to find something that rubs you the wrong way, doesn' work, and compels you to write about it.  Even if, as she also points out, in the end, nobody will really pay attention to what you have to say.

These days, when I write a review, I try to have something interesting to say about whatever the subject is. That's why there isn't a review posted every Friday.  Something's got to strike my fancy somehow, either by being brilliant or flawed, but I won't think twice about saying I think something sucks.  I just hope I have good enough reasons to make somebody else think, "yeah, all right."  Agreement, of course, is not required.

So I think the answer is yes, we do need negative book reviews.  Whether we need "bad" reviews is, of course, a completely different question.

Friday Review: Broadway the Hard Way

In 1988 Frank Zappa embarked on what would be his last tour.  He put together a big band, complete with a five-piece horn section and drilled it on dozens of songs, both reworked old favorites and new material.  Zappa mainstays like Ike Willis and Ed Mann were joined by newly minted stunt guitarist Mike Keneally.  Musically, the result was one of the best periods of Zappa's career, with argument being split as to whether this band or the mid-70s Roxy & Elsewhere band came out on top.

Sadly, the band fell apart, rather spectacularly, following stops in the eastern United States and Europe.  As a result, the 1998 band has an almost mystical quality to it, both because people wonder just what caused it to implode and the because it was, for many folks, the best band they never heard in their lives.

Thankfully, Zappa saw fit to record every stop on the tour (save one, due to technical difficulties) and, for a band with an aborted lifespan, it's ridiculously well documented.  During Zappa's lifetime he released three albums of material, with additional tracks showing up on some You Can't Do That On Stage Anymore collections.  Even more tracks have been released since Zappa's death.

The first of the three albums to be released was Broadway the Hard Way (also the name of the tour itself).  Originally an LP of almost all new material, it was expanded for its CD release with several reworked older tracks.  The new stuff is almost all political or socially satirical in nature  and will put off some folks.  However, the political stuff is bipartisan (Jesse Jackson gets smacked in "Rhymin' Man," along with the GOP in tracks like "When The Lie's So Big?" and "Jesus Thinks You're a Jerk") and some of the other stuff is good fun ("Elvis Has Just Left the Building," for instance).  There's also an appearance from "Mr. Sting" to perform "Murder By Numbers" and a ripping "Hot Plate Heaven at the Green Hotel."  Still, it's the least essential of the three because it's so bogged down in the era.

The two-disc The Best Band You Never Heard In Your Life featured more older material, although in radically different forms given the arsenal Zappa had at his disposal.  Good examples would be the run of One Size Fits All tunes on disc one.  It also features the highest quotient of Jimmy Swaggart related songs (he was a regular rhetorical punching bag throughout the tour), including "Swaggart Versions" of "More Trouble Every Day" and "Lonesome Cowboy Burt."  Finally, this release includes some bizarre cover versions, some recorded during sound checks, topped off by a version of "Stairway to Heaven" in which Zappa the guitar god lets the famous Jimmy Page solo be taken by  . . . the horn section.

The final release, also two discs, was Make a Jazz Noise Here, which is the most "serious" and "heavy" of these albums.  It's also the most essential.  It covers a lot of the more extended instrumental tracks, often laden with improvisation and Synclavier madness from various parties.  It's here where the band shines the most, as on the suite of old Mothers tunes stripped (for the most part) of vocals.  Check the uniform attacks from the horns and percussionist Ed Mann on "The Orange County Lumber Truck" and marvel.  Having said that, some of the pieces on disc one wander a bit.  However, disc two is probably my favorite hunk of Zappa ever released (except, maybe, depending on the day of the week and the barometric pressure, Roxy & Elsewhere).  All the songs are strong and they have enough structure to them to let you know where you are.  When things end with Zappa introducing the band at the end of "Strictly Genteel," it sounds like a perfect cap on the whole affair.

Speaking of the whole affair, what the fuck happened to this band, anyway?  The short answer is that a rift quickly developed between bass player Scott Thunes, also the "Clonemeister" (the guy responsible for rehearing in Zappa'a absence) for this tour and most of the rest of the band, particularly drummer Chad Wackerman and the horn section.  The long answer (although, honestly, there isn't much more to it) is laid out in Andrew Greenaway's recent book, Zappa the Hard Way.  Using extensive interviews (new and old) with most of those involved, Greenaway provides an interesting insight into the tour, the personalities involved, and how the whole thing fell apart.  It's not the most integrated work - Greenaway is prone to introducing a person and quoting whole paragraphs of the interview - but it's chock full of interesting anecdotes, not all of them focused on what went wrong (my personal favorite was the story of the night Mats & Morgan got to meet and play with Zappa).

One thing Greenaway gets right - because I agree with him! - is that Zappa was a bit of a hypocrite when it comes to these live albums.  In the liner notes to each, Zappa proudly explains that the music contained therein was all performed live and with no overdubs.  While that was true, it elides the fact that most of the tracks are stitched together from multiple performances, thus presenting performances that never really existed in the wild.  I've got no problem with that - it's a stunning technical achievement in some instances (over 20 in "Jesus Thinks You're a Jerk") - but don't get all holier than thou about it.

At the time the 1988 tour fell apart, nobody knew it was Zappa's last.  He made statement (both after and before) about being done with the rock band thing, but it's hard to say if he could have kept off the stage had he lived past 1993.  As a last hurrah, it's a shame it had to implode the way it did.  But it did leave behind an awful lot of excellent music for posterity.

The Details:
--------------------------
Broadway the Hard Way, by Frank Zappa
Released 1998

Tracks:
1. Elvis Has Just Left the Building (2:24)
2. Planet Of The Baritone Women (2:48)
3. Any Kind Of Pain (5:42)
4. Dickie's Such An Asshole (5:45)
5. When The Lie's So Big (3:38)
6. Rhymin' Man (3:50)
7. Promiscuous (2:02)
8. The Untouchables (2:26)
9. Why Don't You Like Me? (2:57)
10. Bacon Fat (1:29)
11. Stolen Moments (2:57)
12. Murder By Numbers (5:37)
13. Jezebel Boy (2:27)
14. Outside Now (7:49)
15. Hot Plate Heaven at the Green Hotel (6:40)
16. What Kind Of Girl? (3:17)
17. Jesus Thinks You're A Jerk (9:15)

The Best Band You Never Heard In Your Life, by Frank Zappa
Released 1991

Tracks:
Disc one
1. Heavy Duty Judy (6:04)
2. Ring Of Fire (2:00)
3. Cosmik Debris (4:32)
4. Find Her Finer (2:42)
5. Who Needs The Peace Corps? (2:40)
6. I Left My Heart In San Francisco (0:36)
7. Zomby Woof (5:41)
8. Bolero (5:19)
9. Zoot Allures (7:07)
10. Mr. Green Genes (3:40)
11. Florentine Pogen (7:11)
12. Andy (5:51)
13. Inca Roads (8:19)
14. Sofa # 1 (2:49)

Disc two
1. Purple Haze (2:27)
2. Sunshine Of Your Love (2:30)
3. Let's Move To Cleveland (5:51)
4. When Irish Eyes Are Smiling (0:46)
5. "God Father Part II" Theme (0:30)
6. A Few Moments With Brother A.West (4:00)
7. The Torture Never Stops (Part One) (5:19)
8. Theme From "Bonanza" (0:28)
9. Lonesome Cowboy Burt (Swaggart version) (4:54)
10. The Torture Never Stops (Part Two) (10:47)
11. More Trouble Everyday (Swaggart Version) (5:28)
12. Penguin In Bondage (Swaggart Version) (5:05)
13. The Eric Dolphy Memorial Barbecue (9:18)
14. Stairway To Heaven (9:19)

Make A Jazz Noise Here, by Frank Zappa
Released 1991

Tracks:
Disc one
1. Stinkfoot (7:40)
2. When Yuppies Go To Hell (14:36)
3. Fire and Chains (3:57)
4. Let's Make The Water Turn Black (1:36)
5. Harry, You're A Beast (0:47)
6. The Orange County Lumber Truck (0:42)
7. Oh No (4:43)
8. Theme From Lumpy Gravy (1:12)
9. Eat That Question (1:55)
10. Black Napkins (6:56)
11. Big Swifty (11:13)
12. King Kong (13:11)
13. Stars Won't Work (3:33)

Disc two
1. The Black Page (New Age Version) (6:45)
2. T'Mershi Duween (1:42)
3. Dupree's Paradise (8:35)
4. City Of Tiny Lights (8:01)
5. Royal March From L'Histoire Du Soldat (1:00)
6. Theme From The Bartok Piano Concerto #3 (3:43)
7. Sinister Footwear 2nd Mov. (6:19)
8. Stevie's Spanking (4:26)
9. Alien Orifice (4:15)
10. Cruisin' For Burgers (8:28)
11. Advance Romance (7:43)
12. Strictly Genteel (5:37)

Players for all:
Frank Zappa (lead guitar, synth, vocal)
Ike Willis (rhythm guitar, synth, vocals)
Mike Keneally (rhythm guitar, synth, vocals)
Bobby Martin (keyboards, vocal)
Ed Mann (vibes, marimba, electronic percussion)
Walt Fowler (trumpet, flugel horn, synth)
Bruce Fowler (trombone)
Paul Carman (alto saxophone, soprano saxophone, baritone saxophone)
Albert Wing (tenor saxophone)
Kurt McGettrick (baritone saxophone, contrabass clarinet)
Scott Thunes (electric bass, MiniMoog)
Chad Wackerman (drums, electronic percussion)

Zappa the Hard Way, by Andrew Greenaway
Published 2011

Friday Review: Bright-Sided

My favorite current comic strip is Pearls Before Swine.  Part of why it appeals to me is that I see the two main characters, Pig and Rat, as the dueling sides of my own personality (see also, Van der Graff Generator's "Man-Erg").  Pig is sunny, trusting, gullible, and generally simple minded.  Rat is a cynic, a curmudgeon, and thinks the best character for a childrens' book series is a frequently drunk, homicidal donkey.  You get the picture.  I mention that because, while reading/listening to Bright-Sided, I kept wondering about how Pig and Rat would react to a "positive thinking" sales pitch.  Undoubtedly, Pig would gleefully embrace the power of positive thinking.  Rat, by contrast, would beat it into a coma with a tennis racket.

Barbara Ehrenreich would probably help Rat by holding positive thinking down.  In Bright-Sided she catalogs how the idea that good thoughts can manifest good outcomes in the world around us has infiltrated just about every facet of modern American life.  She begins with the world of breast cancer, with which she was diagnosed in 2000.  She was appalled by the amount of ink spilt not only on the idea that one must have a positive attitude toward treatment in order to survive, but that in many quarters suffers are encouraged to see breast cancer as a "gift" that actually changes their lives for the better.  Ehrenreich traces such counter-factual positive thinking through modern business, religion, academics, and financial sectors.  It is, she argues, largely responsible for the financial meltdown of 2007.

Ehrenreich also goes back in time a bit to figure out where this aversion to reality came from.  Oddly enough, she traces it back to another aversion from reality - religion.  Specifically, Ehrenreich argues that what we think of today as the "positive thinking" movement began as a reaction to the particularly harsh, judgmental 19th Century form of American Calvinism.  In a world shaped by a view that your salvation (or, more likely, lack thereof) was preordained, a contrary voice saying you had more power to shape your own destiny than you ever knew was compelling.  The result was the New Thought movement, out of which sprang things like Christian Science and the Unity movement.

One irony of the positive thinking movement is that, although it began as a reaction to a particular strain of Christianity, it was eventually adopted by a wholly different one - the "prosperity gospel" megachurches.  Ehrenreich delves into that as well - particularly focusing on the church of Joel Osteen - and we see the self-affirmation and "imagine it and you can have it" morphed into "pray hard enough and God will provide it."  Same shit, different container, as they say.

To be honest, I've never given positive thinking, or its more recent commercial versions like The Secret much thought.  It's woo, of course, but largely harmless woo, right?  Ehrenreich convinced me otherwise.  Aside from the basic truth that someone who thinks they can mould reality to their will is going to be seriously disappointed eventually (perhaps in disastrous ways - see the financial meltdown), Ehrenreich also went into how the push to think positively helps obscure injustice in the world.  This particularly came through in her discussion of positive thinking as it invaded business practices during the 1980s, particularly when it comes to downsizing.  Why be angry at a political or economic system that just made you unemployed after years of work for a company when, if you think it hard enough, you can see it as an exciting new opportunity to change your life?  Likewise, why should the cancer patient rail against the inequality of living in the only civilized country on Earth without national healthcare when you can discover personal growth through the arduous (and expensive) process of mere survival?  In the end, all gurus sound like Pangloss, preaching about how this is the best of all possible worlds.

Having said that, there's a sense that Ehrenreich is only going after low hanging fruit.  It's easy to point and laugh at people who think they'll get a new Mercedes just by thinking hard enough about it.  The folks that peddle that nonsense are cranks of the first order.  Wealthy cranks, but cranks nonetheless.  But Ehrenreich doesn't really investigate where positive yet still realistic thinking might be helpful in certain circumstances.  To use a personal example, I wouldn't keep writing and working on fiction to try and get it published if I didn't have a little bit of "I know I can do this" running round in my head (confession time - I occasionally daydream about what my Wikipedia entry will eventually say).  That being said, I don't sit back and think I'll get published and be a successful author just by visualizing it.  I know there's a lot of work still to be done and lots of things I need to learn.  But if I didn't have some positive outlook on the whole process, why would I stick with it?

Which is to say, Ehrenreich's book isn't going to sway a lot of people away from the power of positive thinking.  She's largely preaching to the skeptical choir.  Nor does she really make any attempt to understand the allure of positive thinking to those who support the industry by buying books and DVDs and attending seminars devoted to it.  Sure, the stuff about the Osteens had its place, but what about those in the congregation who come back Sunday after Sunday?  It's too easy (and condescending) to dismiss them all as idiots and be done with it.

What Bright-Sided has going for it is that it's a fun read and, in many spots, an interesting one.  However, it falls short of really proving how positive thinking undermined America.

The Details
------------------------
Bright-Sided: How The Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermining America
By Barbara Ehrenreich
Published 2010

Friday Review Year In Review

2013 wasn't the most productive year here at Feeding the Silence, but if there was one thing I returned to time and again, even in fairly fallow periods, it was the Friday Review.  Partly, I'm sure, that's because if I have something to say about a movie, album, or book this is the best place to do it.  It's also due to the fact that, based on page views at least (meager though they be), this feature is fairly popular.  So, here's what you might have missed in the past 12 months:

Music:

• Dare
• Harbor Lights
• The Raven That Refused to Sing (and Other Stories)
• ROSFest 2013
• Selling England By the Pound
• Yessongs/Tales From Topographic Oceans
• The Weight of the World

Books:

• Dies the Fire
• Earth Abides
• The End of Eternity
• State of Jones
• Under the Dome

Movies:

• Compliance
• The Exorcist
• Mellodrama: The Mellotron Movie
• 9012Live
• Zero Dark Thirty

More to come in 2014!

Friday Review: Earth Abides

If Isherwood Williams is the future of the human race, perhaps best just to let it go and call it an eon.

I sometimes have a problem coming to things too late.  By the time I saw The Godfather and its sequel, the culture was so saturated in mob stories - from Casino and Goodfellas to The Sopranos (did I mention I came to it late?) - that it didn't seem fresh or all that interesting.  That's not a knock on its quality, just that it didn't really do it for me.

I get the same vibe from Earth Abides.  It is one of the first, if not the very first, examples of the post-apocalyptic "last man on Earth" subgenre of science fiction.  Published in 1949, it's won its share of acollades, including inaugural International Fantasy Award.  Heck, the version I read/listened to was even introduced by Connie Willis, no slouch herself.

So why doesn't Earth Abides do anything for me?  No, scratch that - why did it encouraged in me a positive loathing, at least at times?  Certainly part of it has to do with the genre itself having been played out ad nauseum over the ensuing decades.  The vistas of empty cities, decaying landmarks, overgrown lawns, and the like are all fairly common now.  Same for the struggle to survive in a world where the conveniences of modern life are gone.

That's certainly part of it, but a large part of my negative opinion of Earth Abides is that it is deeply entwined with its lead character, a hero who really is anything but.

Said hero, referred to as Ish for most of the book, is at an isloated cabin in the woods near San Francisco when some kind pandemic hits that wipes most of humanity off the Earth.  How he escapes that fate isn't really explained (it may have something to do with an infection from a rattlesnake bite he was fending off), but that's not important.  What is important is that when Ish comes down from the mountains to rejoin society, society's pretty much gone.

Early on Ish cites his background as a geographer and his termperment as giving him the perfect tools to observe how the planet will reclaim itself without mankind around to mess things up.  While this leads to some interesting digressions into the survival (or not) of particular environments or critters, it also, unfortunately, highlights the fact that Ish (and the author) are much more interested in watching than doing.  In fact, my main problem with the book is that we're trapped in Ish's head most of the time, even when he describes events that could serve as narrative jumping off points for some real drama.

A perfect exmaple - the book is divided into three main parts and covers over fourty years.  However, most of those years are blazed through in a pair of chapters in which Ish simply ticks of things that happend, including births and deaths that impact the makeup of the little tribe that just might be the future of the human race.  In addition to giving short shrift to those kinds of events, this allows Ish (and the author, by extension) to ignore lots of potential conflicts that could arise among a few dozen people trying to make a go of it after the world goes to shit.  There's very little dialog and even less tension, since everything is filtered through the lens of Ish's perception

Which is a major problem, because Ish is, sad to say, pretty much an asshole (I haven't disliked a main character this much since I read The Magicians).  His stand offishness doesn't come off as a chacater trait that will make it difficult to integrate with the new world, a barrier to overcome (which might have been interesting).  Instead, it's part of a smug superiority complex about himself compared to the rest of what's left of humanity.  Most of the first half of the book is taken up by an epic transcontinental journey during which Ish meets some other survivors, none of whom measure up to his standards for companionship.  Once he returns to the San Francisco area and settles down things get no better.  He repeatedly puts down the others in his little group as being stupid, not interested in intellectual matters, and generally inferior to him.  None of them are up to the task of rebuilding civilization, which Ish thinks is important, but not important enough to ever do anything about.  All of this wouldn't be so bad if we had something other than Ish's word to go by, but since we rarely see anybody else in action it's hard not to think he's just an elitest prick.

It doesn't help that Ish is very much a creature of his time.  The women of his little group (again, by his description only) are good for little more than house keeping, baby making, and a generic sense of "strength" in the face of even more generic adversity.  The one exception is Evie, a grown woman with some kind of mental deficiency or developmental disability.  For the most part she's simply an other, always kept apart from the tribe's subgroups when Ish feels the need to give us a census.  He even muses about killing her simply to be done with her and the problems she presents.

Evie's only part to play in the story is when an outsider, Charlie, comes to town with two of the younger men who have made another (aborted) transcontinental journey.  He's immediately "trouble" and starts to move in on Evie, probably giving her the only real attention she's recieved in years.  Ish is concerned and it's easy to see why - it looks like Charlie intends to take sexual advantage of a woman who's not metnally competent.  Good for Ish.  Only, it turns out, Ish's real concern is not for Evie's individual rights or bodily integrity, but that the resulting offspring would be idiots and, thus, drag the tribe down.  When Ish and a few others decide to off Charlie, it's less out of a sense of protecting an innocent than from some misguided low-tech eugenic concern.

It also doesn't help matters that Ish constantly changes the way he feels about the world lost and the world as it might be when he's gone.  On the one hand, he belittles some of his companions for holding onto memories of things from the old world that won't return for a long time, if ever.  On the other, he extols the virtue of books and the need to consume the knowledge in them, even if he never finds anyone worthy of his pursuit of that knowledge.  He wants someone to rebuild civilization, but it's never clear why as he didn't seem to have much fondness for it.

Which, oddly, counts for the greatest strength of Earth Abides.  For all its faults, the story itself is not the stereotypical one of surivovors picking up the pieces of a shattered world and trying to rebuild it.  Instead, Ish and his fellows just live, for years and years (all to easily, if we're honest), without undertaking great quests or schemes for rebuilding.  That's not the direction most works in the genre it helped spawn take, so kudos for that.

I recognize the prime place Earth Abides has in the genre's history.  And I recognize that, read at an earlier time with a more open mind, perhaps it would have a great impact on a reader (as it has to many others).  But on the verge of 2014, I have to admit that I just don't get it.  Earth may abide, but I don't think I'd be able to abide Ish for very long.

The Details
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Earth Abides
By George R. Stewart
Published 1949
Winner, International Fantasy Award (1951)

Stick Your High Art Where the Sun Don’t Shine!

OK, not really. I’ve got nothing against what most people think of as “high” art – I enjoy quite a bit of it – I just object to the classification. Regardless of how well-meaning or merely taxonomic it strives to be, it carries an implied judgment of “low” art as being, somehow, not worth as much. By further implication, it suggests that those who enjoy or make “low” art are somehow lesser than those who deal with “high” art.

I bring this up because of a recent essay over at the New York Times philosophy blog by Gary Gutting (with an assist from Virginia Woolf) about the divergence. Along the way, he appears to argue that musical worth, at least (it’s unclear if his metrics would apply to literature, film, or visual arts) can actually be quantified and judged objectively.

Along the way, he lays down this assertion:

Centuries of unresolved philosophical debate show that there is, in fact, little hope of refuting someone who insists on a thoroughly relativist view of art. We should not expect, for example, to provide a definition of beauty (or some other criterion of artistic excellence) that we can use to prove to all doubters that, say, Mozart’s 40th Symphony is objectively superior as art to ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand.’ But in practice there is no need for such a proof, since hardly anyone really holds the relativist view.

* raises hand *

I’m not sure how many of us there are, but I for one will proudly admit to being a relativist on the quality of art. Someone’s interaction with art is so personal, so bound up in the quirks of our own experiences, that it’s impossible to convert that interaction to some kind of objective measurement. For the record, I’m not ignoring the objective fact of consensus – that I like something a majority of the world can’t stand doesn’t make them right and me wrong, but it does mean I’m swimming against the current.

Anyway, back to the philosopher, who continues:

We may say, ‘You can’t argue about taste,’ but when it comes to art we care about, we almost always do.

Well, yeah, people will argue about things that matter to them, be it art, politics, or sports. Just because we do doesn’t mean the arguments can be won on some kind of objective scale. Humans will argue about anything!

He goes on:

You may, for example, maintain that the Stones were superior to the Beatles (or vice versa) because their music is more complex, less derivative, and has greater emotional range and deeper intellectual content. Here you are putting forward objective standards from which you argue for a band’s superiority. Arguing from such criteria implicitly rejects the view that artistic evaluations are simply matters of personal taste. You are giving reasons for your view that you think others ought to accept

Several things strike me as wrong about this.

The most important one, I think, is that Gutting is conflating the manner in which someone defends a preference with the actual basis upon which that preference rests. I’ve listened to an awful lot of music in my four decades on the planet, from the most popular radio hits to the most obscure wind band compositions. A lot of those I’ve listened to because of “hey, if you liked X, you’ll like Y, too” recommendations. I’m not sure they’re worth any more than a coin flip when it comes to predicting whether I’ll like it or not. Some things move me, some things don’t. The same is true for everybody, isn’t it?

More likely, these “objective” standards upon which Gutting relies are not the considerations we have when we decides something moves us, but post-hoc rationalizations to try and explain why that thing moved us. At the end of the day, I can’t really say why I prefer Marillion to Magma.* I suppose I could dig into the construction of the various songs and come up with some reasons for it, but they’d be meaningless. Most of the time, I’d rather listen to Brave than Udu Wudu. But sometimes not, you know? I can’t really tell you why.

Gutting’s reference to “objective” standards make me think of people who argue about whether one athlete is better than another when they’re separated by decades. Yes, statistics will be trotted out to support argue that Pele is better than Lionel Messi (or vice versa), but they don’t prove anything. Too many years have passed, the game has changed, etc. Ultimately, we have our favorite in mind before the argument begins and scramble to find some justification for it. If it was as simple as “consult these objective measurements” there’d be nothing to argue about.

Another flaw in Gutter’s presentation is assuming that those things he lists are “objective” to begin with. I’ll give him a pass on complexity for now (although more of that later), but the others have not just some, but large amounts of, subjectivity inherent in them. Whether something is “derivative” is a value judgment, in the end. Any musician is influenced by other music she’s heard and is, to some point, derivative of what’s come before. What’s the dividing line for being too derivative? What if it’s a parody, pastiche, or homage, anyway? Even more untethered from objective measurement are a piece’s “emotional range” and “intellectual content.”

As for complexity, how to measure it and what it means isn’t readily apparent. “Complex” generally implies some amount of difficulty, but any musician will tell you that sometimes playing something “simple” precisely and with musicality is more difficult than playing something that’s a tangled flurry of notes. Furthermore, that something is more complex doesn’t make it inherently more likely to connect with the listener. Quite the opposite, in fact. Returning to the Marillion/Magma example, few would argue if you called Magma’s more complex, but that wouldn’t lead inexorably to a conclusion that it was superior. For some folks it would be, for some folks it wouldn’t. For some people, there is a point where there are simply too many notes.

For another thing, using complexity as some sort of taxonomic tool fails to conflate like with like. Of course a three-minute song recorded in the early days of multitrack recording by four guys is less “complex” than a half-hour long symphony written to be performed by a full orchestra made up of dozens of people. So what? How does that help us judge either piece? It’s like saying desert is less nutritious than the main course – it utterly misses the point.

Someone in the comments to Gutter’s piece trotted out Duke Ellington’s aphorism:

There are simply two kinds of music, good music and the other kind

But even that’s not quite right – there’s what you like and what you don’t; what moves you and what doesn’t; what you want to hear and what you don’t. That a lot of people agree with you, or a consensus develops down through history that a particular work is a masterpiece doesn’t change that.

At the end of the day, as I said, art is personal. To label some of it “high” and some of it “low” throws up class barriers where none really exist. People like what they like. Sometimes, they like the same stuff you do. Sometimes they don’t. Deal with it.

* Before I get any angry letters in Kobaïan, I dig Vander’s bunch when I’m in the mood. Don’t take it personally.

Quick Hits, of a Mostly Familiar Nature

Here are a few brief stories that caught my attention while I was away getting’ matrimonyed. A couple of them tap into things I’ve written about before, so they’re a bit familiar. I’m working my way back into things, obviously.

Public Art for Fun & Profit

Back in April I wrote about the latest example of now-you-see-it, now-you-don’t public art that was creating a stir. In that case, it was a Banksy mural in the London neighborhood of Harringey that appeared, as much of his stuff does, overnight. Several months later it disappeared just as suddenly. At the time, there were issues over who removed the mural and what it’s fate might be.

Flash forward to last Sunday, when “Slave Labor (Bunting Boy)” fetched a cool $1.1 million at a private auction in London. That came after an initial auction in Miami was scuttled at the behest of the Harringey town counsel. Not surprisingly, the ones selling the mural were the owners of Wood Green Investments, who owned the building upon which it was installed. They were entirely within their rights to do so.

Art Is Not the Artist

I’ve argued before that it’s best to separate an artist from his art. I don’t really begrudge people who can’t or won’t do that, but I think it’s a bit short sighted. You cut yourself off from a lot of interesting art if it all has to pass through some kind of ethical litmus test. Besides, on a practical level, I’d rather you not read what I write because it sucks instead of the fact that I’m a Democrat/atheist/prog fan/DC United supporter.

Here’s a recent example of where getting up on your high horse might not be that good of an idea. A grad student at Northwestern, a member of the University Chorale, objected to being required to perform a particular piece, Howard Hansen’s Song of Democracy. Not because it was too difficult or aesthetically poor, but because the lyrics for that piece were taken from a Walt Whitman poem and Whitman, as were many of his contemporaries, was a big-time racist. The professor threatened to fail the student, but it’s unclear how the dispute was resolved.

It’s one thing to object to performing something that in and of itself is racists, sexists, whatever. But backing up further and requiring ethical purity from the original author is composer is really asking for trouble. As my friend who was recently-doctored in conducting pointed out, such a litmus test would eliminate most of the cannon of established Western music.

I’d go on to argue it would do the same with art, literature, and nearly any other endeavor. And while nobody can take away your right to take umbrage at such things, aren’t there more important things to worry about than whether the lyricist of a song you have to sing in class was a douchebag a century and a half ago?

Oh My, Sexy Werewolves! In Prison!

Finally, here’s a fun story that actually raises important issues of free speech and criminal justice. An inmate in California has won the right to possess (and read, presumably) a book called The Silver Crown. Why did he have to go to court in the first place?

The 262-page novel tells the story of Iris, a werewolf hunter who ends up falling in love with one of her prey. The book contains ‘a great number of graphic sexual encounters, one per chapter through most of the book, including detailed descriptions of intercourse, sodomy, oral-genital contact, oral-anal contact, voyeurism, exhibitionism and ménage à trois. Semen is mentioned,’ Richman wrote.

The judge also notes that the book doesn’t advocate or advance violence and the sex isn’t really all that weird and doesn’t include, for example, bestiality (unless, the judge explains, you include the werewolves!).

Prisons generally aren’t keen on letting inmates have possession of sexually-related materials. The wife used to tell me about dealing with those kinds of regulations during her days at Borders. So it’s a bit of a pleasant surprise to see a court not simply bow down to the prison’s regulations.

But what’s really amusing is that you can tell the judge wasn’t all that happy about having to deal with The Silver Crown in the first place:

’Personally, we would be hard-pressed to say The Silver Crown has ‘significant’ literary value and is a work ‘of great import,’ Richman wrote. But, he concluded, ‘we cannot simply dismiss the work as nonserious literature because it deals with werewolves and other paranormal creatures and activities. For better or worse, some segment of the population is fascinated by werewolves and other mythical beings. ... Werewolves, in fact, have played a role in popular fiction for centuries.’

I’m not sure anyone who writes about himself in the third person gets to knock anybody else’s literary choices.

Friday Review: Under the Dome

The situation in which regular people find themselves basically stripped of civilization and the comforts of our modern world is a classic fictional trope, from the English school kids of Lord of the Flies to the few survivors of some planetary disaster in The Road or A Canticle for Liebowitz. Generally, those stories take people who may or may not have any prior relationship to one another and throw them into a world of anarchy and chaos.

Stephen King’s Under the Dome turns that trope on its side in two crucial ways. First, the characters in the book are all from the small Maine town of Chester’s Mill, population 2000 (in the off season, as it is in the book) and thus not only know each other but have a complicated web of alliances, bitterness, and business interests (legit and otherwise) connecting them. Second, although the titular dome throws life in Chester’s Mill into utter higgledy-piggledy, there’s no anarchy or absence of leadership. In fact, what’s so terrifying about what happens in Chester’s Mill is that the political machine that’s run the town for years functions perfectly once crisis hits, which leads to apocalyptic disaster.

Overseeing this mess is “Big” Jim Rennie – used car salesman, obnoxiously loud Christian, and gargantuan meth dealer. If Under the Dome is supposed to be King’s meditation on the United States after 9/11, Rennie is the stand in for Dick Cheney as the power behind the throne. Although Rennie is the second of three selectman (one is actually a selectwoman) who govern the town, he wields all the actual power. The analogy doesn’t quite fit – nobody ever voted for Cheney directly, while Rennie had won numerous elections to maintain his seat. If anything, Rennie seems to be King’s warning that, while we focus most of our attention on national politics, the office holders with the most power to really fuck things up are locals and we ignore the low-level political offices at our own peril.

Having said that, to the extent that King is trying to do something more than tell a compelling, terrifying story, he misses some opportunities to explore some interesting grey areas. For example, once the dome comes down, new cops are quickly recruited to brace against chaos and lawlessness. It would have been interesting to see one or two good people in these positions, honestly dealing with the competing concerns of security and liberty. Alas, since Rennie is the one doing the choosing, the new cops are all his henchmen (including his murderous son) and proceed to do precisely what you’d expect henchmen to do given that kind of power.

Another missed opportunity is the lack of any exploration of the Chester’s Mill body politic. The novel’s cast of characters is impressively large and King does a good job of working them all together, even if the individual characterizations are pretty shallow. However, they divide neatly into the obviously evil – Rennie and his flunkies – and obviously good – the couple dozen citizens who oppose him. King isn’t really interested in the rest of the unwashed masses, which is a shame because they’re largely the ones who voted for Rennie again and again. Why had they? Why were they so willing to believe any bullshit story he told them? After all, Rennie’s claim to power is that “the town” is behind him, but “the town” remains nebulous and unexplored.

As for the dome itself, it’s a wonderful literary invention. Although the word “dome” and some of the initial interaction with it would bring to mind the giant glass bowl dumped on Springfield in The Simpsons Movie (with which Under the Dome shares a passing similarity), it’s not a solid barrier. Instead, it’s a somewhat permeable force field of some kind, through which plot devices like speech, heat, and (in a very limited way) air can move but people, vehicles, and explosives can’t. It effectively seals the town off, but allows for some contact with the outside world.

To his credit, King doesn’t just plop the dome down and let it go all McGuffin on him. He provides an explanation for it, one that drives the final hunk of the book. Unfortunately, that explanation is neither all that interesting logically or dramatically. It leads the end of the book to be a real let down.

We tend to think the best of ourselves, that when faced with crisis we’ll rise to the occasion and do the right thing. Truth is, some folks will do that, while others will use the anarchy to enrich themselves (in different ways) and still others will simply be passive observers, numb from the shock of their world going to shit. King grasps that. So long as Under the Dome focuses on life under the dome, it’s a pretty compelling read. Bigger explanations, not so much.

The Details
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Under the Dome
By Stephen King
Published 2009