Editorials are killing journalism

So Ross Douthat has another column up, and we’ve no doubt already gone through the same cycle we always do when that happens.

Step 1: Douthat writes a thoughtless, specious argument with the window dressing of legitimacy, i.e. “The point of [heterosexual marriage] is not that other relationships have no value, or that only nuclear families can rear children successfully. Rather, it’s that lifelong heterosexual monogamy at its best can offer something distinctive and remarkable — a microcosm of civilization, and an organic connection between human generations — that makes it worthy of distinctive recognition and support.”

Step 2: People refute it. I.e. “So, Douthat doesn’t actually give any arguments for why heterosexual marriage is a microcosm of civilization or why it’s a distinctly better way of supporting procreation; he just assumes that because he uses words like ‘microcosm’ people will agree with him. Basically, his argument is this: ‘Straight marriage is really, really hard, and it’s a way of supporting kids. Therefore, we treasure it as civilization writ small, and the state should support it. However, these days, because people don’t stay together for life, it makes even gay marriage–not that I’m saying gay marriage is worse! (but it is)–look good.’ Honestly, if we just supported things that were really, really hard, we’d have tax deductions for people who trained circus cats. In fact, I think that might actually be a far more apt description of civilization as I’ve seen it.”

Step 3: Douthat writes another column.

Self-insert

There’s a bit in Jonathan Lethem’s (excellent) Amnesia Moon where a character describes the novel’s protagonist:

[H]is ratty hair wasn’t ratty anymore; it was slicked back wet over his head, exposing his forehead and eyes, which were strong, stronger than his mouth and chin. He suddenly looked nice.

Now look at Jonathan Lethem:

I can’t tell whether I’m reading Lethem’s words onto his face, or if he’s describing his protagonist as himself. I’m tempted to say it’s the latter, for two reasons. Firstly, people like to write about themselves. Self-insert fanfiction thrives on this. Secondly, you are the only person you will ever completely know, and the person closest to yourself. It’s just easier to draw bits from yourself and put them on the page. The only way I can get around it is by figuring out what I need first, then becoming it long enough to write about it.

The sky outside the apartment was the color of television, tuned to the nature channel.

You know what will instantly make you feel better about anything? Writing about yourself like you’re in Neuromancer.

Adi wound her watch. It was a Chinese novelty knockoff of some Brass Goggles designer’s original, the spider-scratches of numbers surrounded by zodiac animals and the names of the archaic hours. It kept poor time and threatened to come apart in her hands, but she kept it as a reminder of a place that had made her miserable and ecstatic at the same time.

Turning to check the time on her Asus, she knocked her foot against the chair and winced. Its skin was pocked with old scars from the badly-fitted Charles David heels she picked up in flea markets, the latest wound an M-shaped abrasion on the knuckle of her big toe, a crust of dark red forming around the edges. She rubbed at it, coming away with blood on her fingers. The West Coast might have been easy on the feet, but the District was different. In the District, even the homeless wore business casual.

The apartment she kept now was simultaneously bare and cluttered, Lucas figurines from a boyfriend vying for space between twisted Seagate cables and bootlegged copies of VanderMeer books that she’d gotten in a warehouse up in New York. The boyfriend had left pills, too–hot pink tablets in a blister pack. She washed one down with the cheap beer they sold at the market across the Pike and waited. The nights were long here, and the hot days longer.

Okay, so I got a little Raymond Chandler at the end, but try it! It’s fun!

Oh, and if you turn over the blister pack, it reads “Complete Allergy Medication.”

Horrible puns are the exclusive province of bad comedians and good academics.

…Or, what I think of Red Planets, with some stuff about how to imagine utopias.

I like Marxism. By that, I don’t mean that I necessarily agree with it, nor that I think it’s the only framework for explaining things, and I certainly don’t mean I’m a communist or even necessarily a socialist–I’m talking about Marxism-the-interpretive-framework-in-literary-criticism, not socialism or communism as a governmental system. Marxism–the framework, roughly speaking–is a way of interpreting fiction by focusing on the spoken or unspoken assumptions about monetary systems, capital, and credit that pervade the work. Marxist critics see the structures of capitalism as all-pervasive and, generally, unfavorably limiting, because they turn everything, including one’s personal psychological makeup, into a form of commodity, and because they legitimize a system where one is alienated from one’s labor, i.e. one’s work, and the product of that work, is no longer seen as a part of oneself.

Marxist critics generally rely less on Marx himself than they do his twentieth-century descendants, like Adorno, Habermas, Lacan, and Zizek. The last two focused on a combination of Marxism and psychoanalysis, and range from fascinating to incomprehensible; the first I haven’t really read at all, and the second makes fantastic points up until about two-thirds of the way through a given piece, at which moment he suddenly starts going on a rant against cinemas or something else that I find kind of, well, alienating.

But none of that is stopping me from thoroughly enjoying the China Mieville (and Mark Bould)-edited Red Planets: Marxism and Science Fiction. I wrote yesterday about criticism and story-telling, and Red Planets is exactly what I enjoy in that genre, with the added bonus that a lot of it is both interesting and well-reasoned, i.e. I think it’s true. Sure, there are the occasional bits that seem stretched, but all of the authors so far show a solid familiarity with both Marxist theory and SF, and Mieville, the co-editor, is basically the original 21st-century Marxist nerd.

Day of the Gonzo Critic

I went back yesterday and read over Mainlines, Blood Feasts, and Bad Taste, the posthumous Lester Bangs anthology, yesterday–or at least what bits I could glean from Google Books. I remember being quite into Bangs as a teenager, which I guess I shouldn’t be surprised at, given my odd combination of squeaky-clean and morbidly eccentric. Looking back, it’s obvious why I was into Bangs: I was too much like him. I don’t mean the drugs or the bad family or anything like that. Refer to above squeaky-clean comment. What Bangs and I had in common was the juxtaposition of self-awareness and self-delusion–we were clever, worldly people who could analyze everything but ourselves.

Bangs, as far as I know, threw himself into music to have a calling, a form of community. He struggled for years to be accepted by the punk scene he analyzed, but never quite made it. I spent a lot of my last year in high school doing the same, which was what led me to Bangs in the first place (well, that and the Bruce Sterling alternate-history story “Dori Bangs,” which got his name stuck in my brain.) I interviewed every high-school musician within twenty miles, from the beatboxing Christian pop band to the heartthrob rock-and-guitar duo who spent their time picking up girls and attending backwoods parties in a green Chevy Nova, and stuffed the results into a one-time magazine that I named Press, padding it with shop talk from studio recorders and our high-school music teacher. A larger part of me than I wanted to admit hoped this would get me invited to parties and help me hit on boys. It worked even less well than it did for Lester Bangs, although at least Iggy Pop never called me an idiot to my face.

But the real thing that was so great about Lester Bangs was to whatever limited extent, he made being a critic cool.

Behemoth Awaits

(Note: I’m planning on writing this in parts, because there’s a lot I want to talk about in the Rifters trilogy; I want to go through my take on feminism and the books, and the books in relation to cyberpunk and viridian literature, but all of that comes later.)

Once again, instead of doing any of the things I’m supposed to be doing, I used my spring break to get through most of Peter Watts’ Rifters trilogy, starting with Starfish. My coblogger recommended it to me because of its similarities to something I wrote once; I imagine probably in part because of this:

We were young, a different kind of young than you. We had hope until we didn’t. We had spent our entire lives building towards a future, and, once it was gone…there wasn’t really anything to do anymore.

We were the first generation of stimulants. You’d find the modafinil I took negligible. But it was a symptom of our time, that we got to be the first ones to give up humanity in the name of industry.

In the Rifters trilogy, people genuinely do give up humanity in the face of industry. Long story short: The Earth is dying. We can’t grow most of the crops we need, we’re massively overpopulated, and global warming has essentially fried us. For many people, global capitalism has collapsed. A massive population of refugees crowds the coastlines, living off machines that provide infinite free food in the form of tasteless nutrient bricks. This doesn’t mean, however, that capitalism itself is going anywhere. For those who have jobs, most have been chemically optimized: guilt-enhancers for public servants, massive doses of antidepressants for disaster relief workers. There’s little choice in this. If you want to work in anything other than the most menial public service, your own body chemistry won’t do the job.

The titular Rifters are something else. In a world where most energy is leeched from deep-sea rifts, a few people are chosen to manage them. One of their lungs is surgically removed, replaced by a machine that allows them to pressurize and breathe underwater, and doses them with chemicals to counteract the endorphin surge of being several thousand feet underwater.

The only people who can manage this are those who are those who are already too maladjusted to work abovewater. The rifts are staffed with pedophiles, masochists, nervous breakdown cases, and sociopaths, particularly Lenie Clarke, a woman who has apparently taken the built-up anger of a lifetime and turned it inward.

Writing-wise, the books are a little like staring into a mirror. Watts is an infinitely better hard-science writer than I’ll ever be: The man has an advanced degree in biology, for crying out loud. His description of rifter biopsychology is breathtaking: The first time Lenie Clarke goes underwater had me hooked on the next three books.

Parts of the style, however, are familiar: As people have said about things I’ve showed them, Watts combines a huge cast of characters, most well-fleshed-out and fascinating, with a tremendous amount of plot. The second book in the series, Maelstrom, has what seems like at least four or five different plotlines, only some of them even involving people. This is where the books start to lose me. There’s a reasonably compelling overarching plot, but that’s not what I loved at all about Starfish, the first book in the series–I was there for the characters, for the interplay between lovingly-designed people with small-scale, human problems. Every time I have to sit through a discussion of why a particular world-destroying virus can’t be allowed out of its environment, I’m frustrated that I’m not getting to see how a burned-out disaster-relief worker is coping with her home life. I literally care about the fate of the world less than seeing some random person work out their personal problems.

This actually illuminates a problem I’d been having with something I’m writing. I’ve always kind of subconsciously dealt with the accusation that women writing SF just write “touchy-feely” things, not real, hard explanations of How Things Work. But that’s really what all fiction has to be about–I love hearing about your design for a new spaceship, but unless you’re talking about the effect it has on its characters, I’d rather just read an academic paper or a Nature article. Fiction about social systems is my favorite kind of SF, but even it can fall into this trap: I always liked Isaac Asimov’s essays better than his fiction, because the essays really seemed like his forte, the place where he could dispose of the dutifully-created characters and just write about abstract ideas. It’s the reason I like reading essays by Bruce Sterling–who can create fantastic visions of alternate worlds, like a post-global-warming future in which buildings are constructed through crowdsourcing–but prefer fiction by William Gibson, who as far as I know didn’t really know what a computer was when he wrote Neuromancer, but masterfully showed the effect computing could have on the human psyche.

Procrastination

I’m doing terribly on the one thing I really should be working on, which means I’m doing great at all the other ones. Or at least a few of them. Among other things, I designed and ASCII-fied a logo for a thing I’m working on.

It’s a hacker collective. They live in China and hack government communication satellites in the 1990s.

Oddly Satisfying: PlotWeaver

It’s like unartistic fanfiction, a derivative work that is simultaneously an explication, an extension, and a commentary. Here’s one I made for one of my classmates’ stories in Narrative Writing:

I have a much longer and more twisty one for my own piece, which I’m currently working on untangling. It would be interesting to experiment with Perfect Vacuum-style storytelling-through-graph; someone should start doing it at some point, although I’m not sure what the graph medium provides that others wouldn’t yet, aside from a sort of pretense of factuality and nonfiction that could be manipulated. So it goes.

via.