Jonathan Franzen

At the sound of the bell, Franzen is out of his corner and makes a quick right jab to the ebook. Franzen delivers a talk at an author’s festival in Columbia and makes remarks at a press conference, and all these comments get conflated (and maybe taken out of context) in news articles posted in The Guardian the The Telegraph. He says that words in ebooks are ephemeral. People crave the permanence of ink on paper. It gives them comfort and a sense of continuity. He says that ebooks are damaging to democracy and freedom. They promote a culture of ephemera when what we need most right now are enduring values. Somehow, he ties this all to capitalism and says the world feels out of control.

The crowd goes wild. Some people throw popcorn from the stands and call him a pussy Luddite for failing to embrace new things. Some call him a hypocrite, since his novels have sold well as ebooks. The guy at the beer concession points out that Franzen is a “literary” writer whose concern for permanence—ascending to the pantheon of the classical canon—betrays either narcissism or a fear of death, or both. Joe, who’s driven down to the cage match from Timmins, says that in the winter, when he’s snowed in and can’t get to the nearest bookstore, he still has his internet connection and can download the latest from his favourite authors. “Fuck him,” he says. “I like my ebooks.”

Others rush to Franzen’s defence. Ewan Morrison says the epublishing business is just another bubble and soon will burst. More people have made money selling ebooks on how to make money selling ebooks than have actually made money selling ebooks. Because the ease of publishing an ebook has removed the barriers to entry, the ebook market is now glutted with piffle. It’s damaging to democracy, not so much because of its impermanence, as because it is the clanging of a noisy gong that drowns out meaningful conversation.

Ursula Franklin

As a pacifist, Franklin doesn’t come out of her corner at all. The referee stops the fight and explains to her that the notion of a cage match is metaphorical and there will be no real fighting. Once she’s satisfied that a fight with Franzen won’t actually hurt him, she enters the ring with fists of fury. She lands her first blow with the observation that Franzen’s is a gendered view of technology. You’re such a man! she says. Technology is not a thing you hold in your hand. It’s a practice. Technology is not a discrete object, like an ereader or an iPhone. It’s a system. Discrete objects are embedded in contexts. Objects and contexts influence the development of each other in ways that are unpredictable and such development may be blind to the human beings who are the “beneficiaries” of the technology.

Franklin lands a body blow with her distinction between holistic and prescriptive technologies. Holistic technologies are those in which a single person controls every stage of production. Artisans and crafts people often use holistic technologies to manufacture and sell objects, like the pottery and paintings one might see at a craft show. Prescriptive technologies restrict control through division of labour or by removing human labour from the process altogether. The assembly line at an auto plant is a paradigm of prescriptive technology. Individual workers have no view of the entire process and little autonomy within that segment of the process where they work. Franklin observes that “[i]n political terms, prescriptive technologies are designs for compliance.”

The way in which we deploy technology is determined by public policy and shared values. Although there is no outcome preordained in any of this, we have come overwhelmingly to favour prescriptive technologies. This is an understandable consequence of the fact that our policy and value choices arise from within the context of capitalism. Prescriptive technologies produce more efficient outcomes. Never mind that such outcomes may also be dehumanizing and unjust. Capitalism removes such considerations from our public debate. In fact, we have so internalized the dominance of prescriptive technologies (this is the way it ought to be done) that we tend to ridicule holistic technologies as backward or hokey.

Although Franklin was writing before the advent of social media and ebooks, her discussion of technology provides a useful framework for considering Franzen’s comments about ebooks. I have an impression of Franzen as a holistic technician railing against the incursion of prescriptive technologies into the domain of his craft. But ink and paper novel-writing has never been an entirely holistic technology. While novelists have traditionally asserted a huge measure of control over the production of their work, they still must relinquish some control to editors, designers, lawyers, marketers, booksellers, reviewers, etc. At the same time, the ebook is not entirely a prescriptive technology. In fact, it is easier now than ever before to engage book production in a holistic fashion. From the first scratches on a pad of paper to processing a credit card payment, I can do it all on my own web site. But such a practice is anomalous. Overwhelmingly, we have chosen to treat the ebook as a prescriptive technology.

We see the consequence of this choice—and it is a choice—in the way large organizations (with access to capital) have deployed the ebook as a design for compliance. Amazon has embedded the ebook in a vertically integrated organization that aims to freeze out every worker in the traditional publishing process except the writer. Even the writer is in jeopardy as titles appear for sale that may have been cobbled together by algorithms. Apple offers authors a take-it-or-leave-it EULA that makes it questionable whether the author owns their own work. Even small players like Smashwords have automated the production process. And DRM prevents people from sharing what they’re read, limits library lending, and provides a solution to that most subversive of anti-capitalist organizations—the used book store.

What would Franklin say to Franzen’s concerns about freedom and democracy? I’m inclined to think that identifying the ebook as the source of the problem is a bit like taking a symptom for the disease. In fact, one could argue the opposite: it is ink and paper books that threaten freedom and democracy, for, as Franklin notes, there is a strong relationship between written text and orthodoxy and fundamentalism. If ebooks are a problem, it is only because they can be manipulated in ways that deliberately curtail freedoms and enforce compliance with capitalist structures. So, for example, while there is nothing necessarily ephemeral about the text of ebooks, it becomes ephemeral if our ability to access it is restricted. What happens when planned obsolescence makes an ereader useless by deprecating its operating system? In this scenario, technology is manipulated to force compliance with the demands of an endless consumption on which our capitalist structures depend.

That is not an ebook problem. That is a problem with unregulated economic systems. Perhaps that is the proper target of Franzen’s criticisms.

Related posts:

1. Cage Match: Spong vs. his (credible) detractors
2. Cage Match – Catholic Mystic vs. Protestant Liberal
3. The ebook piracy experiment

The Global Soul makes for unsettling reading not so much for what is in the book as for what might have been in the book had its publication been delayed for five years. Published in 2000, it provides us with a snapshot of an emerging global culture just before 9/11. I read it with an archaeologist’s relish for a simpler age when people were more trusting and less anxious, when people could pass through airports without having to submit to body scans and pat downs. In 2000, there were cell phones and email and internet technology, but no hint yet of the inaptly named social media. There was no flaming, no comment trolls, none of that ceaseless and polarizing chitter-chatter that has turned much of our public interactions into a barrage of ad hominem attacks.

As that rare creature, the native Torontonian, I find The Global Soul particularly poignant because Iyer’s longest, and perhaps warmest, chapter is an extended meditation on multiculturalism and the way it plays out in Toronto. I think it’s a universal response that when a non-native non-resident tries to understand life in your home town, you prick up your ears. You want to know how you are perceived elsewhere in the world. Iyer’s concern here is to ask whether multiculturalism is real or just some made-up anti-myth which we apply to ourselves to keep the newcomers happy while we natives surreptitiously impose our culture upon them. Iyer wants desperately to believe in the “city as anthology”. He observes: “Toronto … seemed to me a much more hopeful and witty vision of a world not conforming to the old categories without dwindling into a universal Nowhereland …”

Iyer may be viewing the city through rose-coloured glasses or reading his own needs into the landscape, except that he demonstrates no qualms about writing scathing criticism when he feels so inclined. In the next chapter, he savages Atlanta. It is “a small town’s idea of what a big city should be.” It is global “by virtue of being featureless.” Its buildings are “all the interchangeable props of an International Style that could, in its latest incarnation, be called Silicon Neo-Colonial.” Its deepest division is not racial but “between those who were willing to buy into the belief that profit curves could be the answer to suffering and those who were not.” Given his assessment of Atlanta, one assumes that if Iyer had not liked Toronto, he would have said so.

One of the things Iyer gets about Toronto is the deep sense of irony that pervades local culture. Perhaps this is a defence against being (mis)taken for an American city. This gives rise to an unease “expressed with a good humor I wouldn’t expect to find in England”. The reference to England is curious since ironic humor strikes me as more of a Scottish habit and for precisely the same reason. Like the Scottish, we must steel ourselves any way we can against an overbearing cultural presence south of our borders.

I learned early on that many Americans are deaf to our tone of irony. In high school, I remember music exchanges with American high schools. We would feel inferior when faced with marching bands that performed with military precision. When it came our turn to play, at least a couple of our students would be stoned. We’d play horribly. We’d laugh afterwards and the teacher would accuse us of being apathetic. Maybe we were apathetic. Mostly, the experience made us cringe. We’d rather share half-assed jokes than perform anything with military precision—music, football, or war for that matter. Or consider the Canadian reputation for politeness. It is astonishing how many times I hear my fellow citizens say “I’m sorry.” However, outsiders (or at least those without an ear for irony) may miss that our apologies are often delivered like a knife in the back.

Although Iyer doesn’t make the point, at least not explicitly, he suggests a connection between irony and multiculturalism. His characterization of irony as “a chastened sense of history” anticipates his observation “that if the essential question that America asks of every newcomer is, “What will you do with your future?” Canada adds to it the more difficult one: “What will you do with your past?” Irony gives us the detachment to entertain a twofold vision. While we can appreciate the optimism of America’s forward-looking gaze, irony gives us imaginative space where we can maintain that part of our identity which lies behind.

Oddly (for someone born here), I share that twofold vision. Recently, I’ve reconnected with friends from high school, many of the same ones who went with me on those music exchanges to American high schools. Now, we share with one another in ways that were impossible as teenagers. In this sharing, I have discovered how I was perceived as one of the few Toronto-born WASPs in my circle of friends: I belonged in a way that none of them did. What is curious (ironic even) is that I perceived myself as an outsider too. I perceived my normal as Iyer’s multiculturalism, a linguistic and cultural soup and me floating in the broth like one more ingredient.

Twelve years after The Global Soul first appeared, do Iyer’s claims for multiculturalism in Toronto bear up under scrutiny? Undoubtedly things have changed. 2010 was a benchmark year for us in several ways. In 2010, Toronto ceased to have a dominant ethnicity. We are all minorities now, although I suspect the locus of political and economic power remains with WASPs. Also in 2010, Toronto hosted the G20 summit. Twenty world leaders were whisked into the downtown core for thirty-six hours, then whisked out again at a cost of more than $1bn. Nineteen thousand police and paramilitary personnel secured the event and effected the largest mass arrests in Canada’s history. At the time, something felt different, but I couldn’t characterize it. On reading Iyer, I wonder if the difference lay in an absence of irony. None of this belonged to Toronto. Even the protests seemed out of place. In the grand tradition of colonialism, the protesters came here mostly from elsewhere to do our protesting for us, deploying their globalized Black Bloc brand of tactics without regard for local nuance, which is, well, ironic, given that they described themselves as anti-colonial anarchists.

Finally, in 2010, Toronto elected mayor Rob Ford, a conservative in every sense of the word. Although Ford claims to be motivated solely by economic considerations, his “derail the gravy train” brand of fiscal restraint has harsh consequences for new arrivals and ethnic minorities. For example, Ford has slashed the public library budget and wants to eliminate city-run daycare spaces, two services which are invaluable for people trying to get a foothold in this city. Again, drawing on Iyer, I note that one of the things which distinguishes Ford from his predecessors is tone deafness. He does not hear irony. Or, to switch metaphors, he lacks the twofold vision that would allow him to respect our past even as we move forward. His inability (or is it his refusal?) to hear irony also denies him the capacity to empathize with those who inhabit hybrid identities.

Although Iyer’s perceptions of Toronto still apply, I think it’s fair to say that recent changes indicate an erosion of multiculturalism even as the city becomes more multi-ethnic.

If you find my assessment harsh, I’m sorry.

Related posts:

1. Toronto the Whore and Michael Redhill’s Consolation
2. Toronto-Themed Summer Reads
3. Toronto Elites Sleeping on the Streets

I’ve always been resistant to the idea of cellphones. I blogged about my first cellphone and my disappointment at its failure to live up to the hype. Talk of convergence was premature. Now, with people reading War & Peace on their iPhones and taking photos with their iPads, I wonder if the idea of convergence is just wrong-headed; single-purpose devices have a place after all. I also wrote about what has come to be known as the “digital divide.” Cellular technology draws clear lines around those who are marginalized from the mainstream. And many of those who do use cellphones struggle to maintain their accounts, yet feel they have no choice if they want to stay connected.

Nevertheless, I relented. Like all conscientious middle-class parents, we got a family plan and tied up our children with digital leashes. Call, text, tweet, post to Facebook. Let us know where you are. If we can’t reach you on a Saturday night, know that we cower in the dark, growing more anxious by the minute, certain that you’ve been mugged, or worse. I know you think this is annoying, but we worry because we love you.

On the Wednesday after Christmas day, my wife and I went for a morning coffee at Balzac’s in the Distillery District. We sat in the loft, iPhones propped beside our mugs and catching up on our Facebook and Twitter feeds, sharing with one another whatever we learned. From there, we drove to the St. Lawrence Market, parking (perhaps portentously) in front of the Rogers store on Front Street. While my wife waited for an order at the butcher’s, I called my son to make sure he was awake. We left and, on the way home, stopped at a local grocery store. Once home, I reached to my right hip where I keep my iPhone clipped to my belt and felt nothing. Damn, where was my phone? I checked my coat pocket and, again, nothing. Returning my hand to my hip, I felt a plastic tab slide from under the belt—it was the clip from the holster I used to hold the phone. It had snapped from the case.

I’ve lost it, I said.

I ran back to the grocery store to ask if they’d found anything while my wife called the security office at St. Lawrence Market.

I was astonished at my own reaction. This stuff belongs in a psychology journal. First came paranoia: all my personal info is on that phone; somebody will hack my phone, then steal all my passwords—email accounts, bank accounts, social media sites, Paypal, blog. I spent the next hour and a half changing all my passwords, making sure they were unique and strong, uppercase, lowercase, numbers, punctuation. Next came anger, most of it directed at myself. How could I have been so stupid not to have noticed that I lost my phone? Mostly I was angry at myself for being so hard on my daughter about her lost phone. How could I have been so insensitive? The third and most surprising reaction was anxiety, not a generalized anxiety, but an acute feeling that I imagine would be closely associated with the experience of addiction. Words like withdrawal and cold turkey come to mind. In a single moment of carelessness, I had cut myself off from my social networks, my email, messaging, phone calls, photos, music, ebooks. What was I going to do with myself? I needed a fix.

After lunch, I went to Rogers with my old Motorola flip phone and got a new sim card. At least I would have phone service, and even texting, but when I tried to text, it didn’t feel the same. Although I’ve never been to a methadone clinic, my visit to the Rogers store was probably like to visit a methadone clinic. It gave me enough of a fix to get me over the initial symptoms of withdrawal, but it just wasn’t the same. I told the guy at the counter what had happened and he shook his head. He said: Losing an iPhone is like losing cash; you’re never gonna see it again.

That night, I lay in bed and tried to imagine life without an iPhone. I tried to persuade myself that I could get along just fine with an old Motorola flip phone. I told myself it was an act of resistance. Losing the iPhone was really my subconscious brain forcing me to do what I’ve wanted to do for a long time. I’ll opt out of the mainstream. Social media trivializes communication. It’s just a smokescreen for media conglomerates to monetize social space. Next thing you know, they’ll be putting up billboards between my synapses. I fell asleep with visions of myself as a new media hermit skulking off to my virtual cave.

The next morning I was a wreck. I ate breakfast without knowing what was going on in the world. I tried to walk the dog, but didn’t know what to wear outside because I had no weather app. I threw up my trembling hands and ran to the Rogers store. The guy smiled; he knew I’d be back; he’d seen this sort of thing before. He said it was horrible to see what can happen, even to a grown man.

My name is Dave and I’m an iPhone-a-holic. It’s true. I didn’t last even one day without an iPhone. It would be easy to grow discouraged, to conclude that all my ideals have been lost to a hunk of addictive socio-techno-candy. But not quite; there is an upside to this story.

Exactly one week after I lost my iPhone, I got a call from the Rogers store on Front Street. A passer-by had found an iPhone on the sidewalk and handed it in to the store. Although the phone wouldn’t start or recharge, they used the sim card to trace my account. An honest person. Who would’ve thought?

When I picked up the phone, it was clear that there had been some corrosion on the USB contacts. It had probably seen a bit of weather. I took it to the Apple store, hoping they could clean the contacts. Instead, because the phone was under warranty, they simply replaced it. When I got home, I gave it to my daughter. Isn’t that the way it goes with addiction?

_______________

Thanks to my brother-in-law, Paul Acheson, for posing with his iPhone in the photo above.

No related posts.

The Libretto

Like dreams, or memory, Darkling is fragmented and non-linear. To the extent that it constitutes a story, it is a Holocaust story. Polish Jews emigrate to New York between the wars, “[a]lways to feel alien, one foot here, the other in the old country”. There is the image of a woman who leaves for America just three weeks after her wedding. In this action, there is a sense of abandonment and a sense, too, of guilt.

Her father: writing from a deep cave of pain:
Why, why did you
Run off so soon after the wedding without saying goodbye?
A morning her brother pleads,
Take me along.
An afternoon his cousin flees
Warsaw for the woods,
The night they fathom unthinkable
sayings said …

We who have the privilege of hindsight know what follows: the rise of Nazism and the invasion of Poland, the Warsaw ghetto and Treblinka. Whatever fluke of personality caused the woman to flee can also be credited with her survival.

Meanwhile those who have settled in New York endure a suffering of their own, both psychological (survival seems like an act of betrayal) and physical (Jews are ripe for exploitation since, after all, they can scarcely complain about living conditions when at least they have their lives). For women, there is a twofold suffering, as we witness when the woman exclaims: “but oh, the endless speculation / about why I walked cautiously / inside your footprints“. The woman has no footprints of her own except as she makes them for herself, “racing to become / Native to herself” so that no one can later ask of her: “Woman, why were you not you?” It is a struggle for identity compounded by the fact that America places its own demands on the identities of newcomers. As friends and family in Poland are erased from history, the woman must struggle against a multi-tiered erasure of a different sort.

Alongside the image of a woman fleeing is another image, an image of images really: a girl, Anna, poised over a box of photographs and letters from the old country. The photographs are of people she can barely remember, if at all:

Letters: the shoebox is one-third full of letters;
Photos: a worn leather folder hugs in its
Entrails a small packet:
Friends and relations never named —
Strangers —

Because the friends and relations are never named, they risk the erasure that comes from the failure of memory. “[F]orgetting is a death”. In a sense, forgetting is complicit with genocide. But what if—like a young girl holding a shoebox—you never knew these people in the first instance? or heard their stories but at one or two removes? Then, perhaps, the act of remembering becomes an act of recovery, too. But the challenge is posed like a koan: “how do I quote names I can neither recall nor forget?”

One path to the recovery of forgotten remembrances is to write poems and operas. But as Rabinowitz reminds us, we cannot simply make things up. “[H]istory can be neither / bought,nor stolen, nor faked, / neither borrowed nor slaked—”. The recovery of what has been forgotten must be authentic. History imposes a burden on the poet and the musician to engage imaginatively with what has been forgotten, not to produce fantasy (like the revisionist film, Inglorious Basterds) but to produce places for deep empathy. For Rabinowitz, poems become graves and she laments “I CANNOT MAKE ENOUGH POEMS”. If this were the end of it—to create graves—then Rabinowitz would have left us with a dark poem and a bleak prospect of poetry’s capacity for recovery. However, almost at the end, we find her writing that “each poem is a prayer”.

The Music

In Darkling (the poem) there are periodic allusions to singing, which is not surprising given all it owes to Thomas Hardy’s darkling thrush which “[h]ad chosen thus to fling his soul / Upon the growing gloom”. At first, “[A]lone at night / she will not, / cannot sing”. In America, “I will put a new song in my mouth.” However, as already noted, it is not new singing which is required or demanded of her. It is a singing which will become a prayer, both as an elegy for incomprehensible loss and as a prophetic breath giving life to the dead.  The thrush, the singing, the polyphonic quality of the poetry, all these cry out for a musical setting.

In Darkling (the opera) Stefan Weisman has remained true to the progressions found in the poem. He preserves the fragmented “shoebox” of images through spoken word sections in which a variety of speakers fragment the text. The speakers enhance the effort to recover forgotten remembrances by evoking characters both in the old world and the new. The speakers do not pass the words back and forth like a conversation, but in a more associative style that suggests memory itself, as if we, the listeners, inhabit Anna’s mind. A small ensemble (string quartet and four vocalists) reinforces the sense of intimacy. Keeping things small has the practical benefit that the opera is easier to mount, but it must be small in any event. Something more grandiose, the story, say, of the whole Jewish people, would bury Darkling‘s interior struggle. And so the setting is spare.

In setting the poem to music, one thing which is lost is the acrostic. Its logic lends a structure to the poem, and offers the reader a reassurance that even in this chaotic movement from emigration, to grief, through the struggle to remember, there is an order which lies hidden but no less real for being hidden. Although the acrostic had to be sacrificed, the music itself retains this underlying logic. While it is beyond me to pore over the score, it would not surprise me if Weisman has embedded in the music similar strategies that give structure to the opera although we, the listeners, remain unaware of it.

For the most part, I would describe the music as “fractured” – challenging and without a tonal centre. Personally, this is as it should be. Having recently attended a large-scale “Holocaust oratorio”, I Believe, by Zane Zalis, I must confess that sugar-coated Broadwayish schmaltz leaves me cold. What I take from Darkling is this: remembrance is not the construction of monuments, but a process, a form of engagement; it is morally taxing; it is existentially exhausting. If Darkling were set as a work we could close our eyes and hum along to, it would undermine itself. Here, the music forces us to walk this journey with Anna, to engage as she does.

Although the score is challenging, that does not mean it is inaccessible. In particular, I was moved by the final extended Dayenu. Just as the poem finds rest in prayer, so the opera finds completion in liturgy. Speakers name atrocities, then the people repeat “Dayenu” – “It would have been enough.” The context turns the phrase on its head. Drawn from the Passover Haggadah, it is traditionally offered as an expression of thanks, but here, it almost falls upon God as an accusation, as if to demand: “How could you allow such things to happen to us?”

The opera follows both the poem and Thomas Hardy’s The Darkling Thrush by hinting at (without revealing) the possibility of hope. Why should “[a]n aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small” sing into the gloom except for “[s]ome blessed Hope, whereof he knew / And I was unaware”? Anna has her blessed Hope too: “Now I remember I breathe / a breath of you each / Day” and “she bears / A leaf a pencil some paper she / has found a leaf”. After Anna closes the shoebox and the voices fall silent, we have these words: “And I was unaware.” Although we may not be able to see it, there is hope.

Darkling is a challenging work. Make whatever effort it demands of you. It will reward you well.

Related posts:

1. The Wanton Sublime, by Anna Rabinowitz
2. Review: Present Tense, by Anna Rabinowitz

I paused halfway through and tweeted: “Am halfway thru 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami. Am undecided whether this might just be the dumbest book I’ve ever read.” Which I followed with: “I think 1Q84 is like eating potato chips. Kind of addictive, but too much gives you gas or something.” Brash statements, I’ll admit, but I have confidence in my take on literary matters. However, it shook my confidence to discover that the reviews in The Millions are not aberrations. The Globe and Mail has listed 1Q84 in its top 100 books of the year. And the Washington Post has gone so far as to place Murakami’s epic at the top of its list.

Am I missing something? I asked myself. Have I lost access to my critical faculties? Could I be suffering some kind of early dementia that affects my taste in books? Thank God for The Guardian, otherwise I might have driven myself mad with self-doubt. The Guardian nominated 1Q84 for a Bad Sex Award and offered extracts to illustrate just how bad the sex can get between the covers (of a book). Although 1Q84 did not win the award, simply to be a nominee is a remarkable achievement.

Even so, bad sex does not necessarily make for a bad novel, does it? It certainly doesn’t warrant claims like “Complete Waste of Brain Cells” and “Dumbest book of the Century” does it? The curious thing about my assessment is that, for the most part, I agree with the favourable reviews. 1Q84 is a well-written book. Murakami writes in a clean prose that carries the reader directly into a carefully structured story and doesn’t release the reader until it’s done whatever Murakami would have it do. Characters emerge into conflict. Ideas find completion. The novel has all the shape and form of a well-built house. And yet, for all that, I still think it’s a stinker of a novel.

Because this is mostly a gut response, I have struggled to find clear reasons why I respond this way. Here are a few thoughts:

1. 1Q84 is written in the wrong medium.

It should have been a screen play. We get this sense from Hartnett’s review which includes the statement: “And in one particularly riveting scene (that would surely feature prominently in a 1Q84 trailer should the book be made into a movie)…” Exactly. It is heavily and obviously influenced by the sense of realism that cinema produces. That in itself is no great sin. Except. Except.

The novel is chock full of extended dialogue without intervening narration. It’s lazy writing. His characters remind me of the bad guys in James Bond flicks who need to explain exactly why they’re going to kill Bond, which of course gives Bond enough time to find a way to escape. I want to scream at Goldfinger: Shut the fuck up! Forget the death by slow laser and just shoot Bond in the head! Too much dialogue with all its incessant explanation means a) the author thinks his characters are too stupid to exercise powers of inference; b) the author thinks his readers are as stupid as his characters; and c) the author isn’t really writing a novel. Instead, he’s sticking people in rooms or across restaurant tables and letting them explain things to one another while we eavesdrop. That’s called a play or a movie or a noh.

When Murakami writes, I read. When his characters talk, I yawn. Which means I yawn a lot.

2. The sex is frequent and frequently dreadful.

This second thought is related to the incessant dialogue. Not merely because the characters talk too much during sex (which they do) but because the need for explanation which drives the dialogue is the same need that drives the description of sex. It’s one step away from a technical manual. It comes from the demand for visual realism. Remember, Murakami has written a screen play, not a novel, and so it’s important for his readers to interpret it as if they are watching the action in a theatre. Nothing is left to the reader’s imagination. What’s more, the sex exhibits emotional immaturity. It’s the literary equivalent of anime porn.

3. Magical realism is subject to the same rules as science fiction.

The rule is: no more than one outlandish premise from which everything else follows. Midnight’s Children, by Salman Rushdie, illustrates the rule. Children born closest to midnight on the day of India’s independence are born with special powers. This is a device to explore the meaning of historical events affecting postcolonial India. There is nothing else. No alien visitors. No super-humans with laser beams shooting from their eyes. No time machines. No genetically altered viruses.

Rules have exceptions of course, and I’m not one to insist on rule-following. But rule-breaking needs a reason, and I can’t see any reason here. 1Q84 reads like a novel-by-committee where no one could agree on what outlandish premise should dominate and so each member was allowed to make a contribution. Two moons in the sky. “Little People” who enter our world through the mouth of a dead goat. An air chrysalis. Altered states that turn men into sexual automatons (absolving characters of responsibility for acts which would otherwise pass for incest and statutory rape). Immaculate conception. Extraordinary coincidences. Enough! I cry, and roll my eyes.

This is pulp fiction. This is escapism. A decent enough read (for escapist pulp fiction) but don’t try to sell it to me as something else. Don’t try to persuade me (like the reviews in The Millions) that this is Nobel material. It ain’t. It ain’t even close.

No related posts.

As you’d expect, death wishing produces social unrest: how can you plan for tomorrow when the world tomorrow may be wished into something radically different? This spawns the Wish Local movement to limit the global impact of poorly thought-out wishes. For example, a diva wishes permanent tacky orange clouds for her hometown, and so it is, but only within the city limits of New Orleans. The practice of death wishing has its dark side, too. People have an incentive to force the dying to make wishes that favour their caregivers, and some are even willing to murder for wishes.

In the midst of this chaos, we have Victor Swaim, our middle-aged, divorced, mid-life crisis-bemoaning, man-boob-sprouting hero. Victor has suffered some come-downs in his time. Once, he was the “info tech director for a major defense contractor” in North Virginia. Now he sews corsets in his son’s clothing shop and makes goo eyes at Pebbles, his son’s girlfriend. Victor would prefer an inconspicuous life blithely free of the wishing foofarah, and while some, like Victor, do not aspire to greatness, they have it thrust upon them anyways. In Victor’s case, the thrusting comes from several different directions at the same time. Pebbles falls into the clutches of a cult leader who is hell bent on killing people for their wishes (Victor gets on their hit list of course); a group of vigilantes buys its capes from Victor (making him an accessory to illegal actions); and in a case of mistaken identity, Victor becomes a local celebrity for (allegedly) foiling a robbery attempt at his son’s store. With so much unwanted attention, Victor finds himself on the run. I say no more on matters of plot lest I spoil the fun.

I think the novel can be read as a kitschy parable of consumer culture. The key to this reading can be found in the opening pages with an account of the very first death wish: that there really be alien bodies at Roswell. After the wish has come to pass, we have this passage:

Upon dissection, we learned that every detail of alien physiognomy had already been imagined by scientists, artists, writers, etc. It was all very exciting, but ultimately there was nothing to be learned from hundreds of copies of an all too generalized ideal. The aliens didn’t come from anywhere, and they couldn’t tell us anything we didn’t already know. They were the perfect ambassadors of our limits.

The things we desire come from within and so are no grander than the constraints of our imaginations. Those constraints, it turns out, are pretty much determined by pop culture.

We have the scene at Roswell as one of the novel’s bookends. The other bookend presents Elvis, after a session of shooting up old television sets, taking pot shots at the orange clouds over New Orleans. He keeps it up until they come crashing to the ground. It seems none of this wishing produces anything real; it’s all pop culture kitsch. Almost inevitably, the results of the death wishing fade away and the world goes back to being the world. Yet we can’t help but think that death is a terrible price to pay for something so fleeting and so tacky.

Death Wishing is a fun novel, written in a crisp prose and with keen observations. Like any work that comments on the kitschy side of the pop divide, it skirts dangerously close to the line and risks crossing over into kitschiness itself, but Laura Ellen Scott adroitly negotiates her way along this line.

If you like this book, you might also enjoy Amber Dawn’s Sub Rosa.

Be sure to make your own wish. Go to deathwishing.com and use the wish tank to post what you would wish for if you were about to bite the big one.

Related posts:

1. Curio, by Laura Ellen Scott
2. Death in Don Mills – The Gay Suspect
3. Review: Some Pleasant Daydream: The Stories of Jiri Kajane

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In the inside lane, we had this line of thought: I was thinking of my own camp experience as a kid. I didn’t go to Camp Couchiching; I went to a rival camp which wasn’t half as cushy as this camp (we slept in tents instead of in cabins). In particular, I was thinking of how oblivious I had been to the contributions that other people made to my camping experience. That’s the way it is for kids. Things seem to happen as if by magic. Meanwhile grownups, many of whom we may never know or meet, are busy working in the background to ensure that children – not necessarily our children – can have the best possible experience. Children, especially when they’re young, live in a kind of pleasant fog. As they get older, they become increasingly aware that their experiences belong to a wider social world. They know there are counselors and program directors and a camp director, but it isn’t until they are much older that they learn about the board of directors and affiliations with the wider world, which includes a large group of volunteers and hangers-on who are simply glad to lend a hand from time to time. There is a sense in which we can say that, as campers age, they experience a demystification of camp. The pleasant fog evaporates and they become aware of themselves as individuals within a larger matrix.

The Wizard’s Levers

We talk a lot about demystification. Although Barthes said it was an outmoded strategy two generations ago, it may well be a necessary stage in the postmodern approach to all our social institutions. I have written about it on this blog in reference to religion, especially (surprise, surprise) when I was studying at a seminary. Certainly atheists love to engage in religious demystification. They’re like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz, pulling aside the curtain to reveal that the pyrotechnics aren’t magic, but the manipulations of a burnt-out vaudeville fraud. More recently, I’ve been tracking the demystification of the printed word. The appearance of ereaders and the development of digital formats has accelerated a trend at work in Western culture since the invention of the printing press: the gradual erosion of the printed word as a magical bearer of meaning. Call it the secularization of print. Once, books were the repositories of sacred wisdom. Even as they became profane objects, like novels, texts, and non-fiction discussions of issues in our world, they continued to retain an aura of something numinous. They had about them a sense of authority. If a person quoted a book to support his own position, some of that authority passed from the book to that person’s lips. The rise of the ebook has merely made obvious, like the curtain pulled back from the wizard, that authority does not live in the print; it has nothing to do with the weight of the paper; nor the art of the cover; nor the display in the bookstore. Just as it has been unequivocally demonstrated that the Bible is the result of a highly fallible and utterly human process, so too the revolution in digital publishing has made it clear that books more generally have no magical authority. Books are the accumulation of words from highly fallible people who burp and fart just like you and me. They have become utterly demystified.

The problem, of course, is that we don’t like this state of affairs. We liked it better when we could appeal to the Bible as if it would settle everything for us. We liked it better when we could take up a book and cite it as if an aphorism was all it took to win an argument. We feel nostalgia for the days before demystification, just as I felt nostalgia, while raking leaves, for a time in my childhood when camp magically appeared each year just for me.

The Hostile Tone of Public Conversation

There is another problem, too, and that has to do with tone. I note a common tone in the quality of conversations that play out in both religion and publishing. At best, it is patronizing. More often, it is hostile and divisive. So, for example, a good number of atheists find religious people frustrating. Science, empiricism, rational thought. All of these modern approaches thoroughly skewer religious claims. Religious types don’t live in the real world; they’re ruining it for the rest of us by poisoning public discourse, sticking their noses in places they don’t belong. At the same, early adopters in the digital world look at traditional publishing houses and call them Luddites. People who prefer paper books are fetishists or are too ossified to adapt.

Imagine if the volunteers at the camp work weekend assembled and passed a resolution to adopt such a tone. Be it resolved: campers who refuse to see all that goes on behind the scenes will be ridiculed next summer; they will be taunted and systematically told they lack insight; and they will be forced to spend time doing some of that work instead of swimming with their friends and roasting marshmallows by the fire. But we never make such a resolution, do we? We are happy to stand behind the curtain with the wizard and keep out of sight. The reason, I think, is that nothing hinges on forcing the demystification. There is nothing of our personal identity at stake in what we do. Our egos do not demand of us that we go to the camp next summer and tell all the campers what we did the previous fall, how we require their acknowledgment. On the contrary, the tone of the weekend is one of generousity. We are present for them, whoever they may be, and not for ourselves.

My analogy is inexact. It seems to imply that I think of those who resist demystification as childlike; religious people are intellectually naïve; defenders of traditional publishing are just being overly nostalgaic. This is a limitation of my analogy, not of my argument. I would suggest that the same generousity of tone ought to seep into our more politicized conversations. If we choose to engage the modern with demystifying approaches, we might inquire first as to our own motives. Do we do this because we believe there is some neutral social benefit to be had? Or are we more concerned with private personal interests?

Eliade & Rites of Initiation

This takes me to Eliade. The book I was reading was Myths, Dreams, and Mysteries: The Encounter Between Contemporary Faiths and Archaic Realities. Eliade was a Romanian pioneer of comparative religion who wrote from the 1930′s to the 1960′s. He was interested in the way insights from other disciplines, like sociology, psychology and anthropology, could be leveraged to illuminate religious concerns. He felt it important to study the religious practices of non-Western (especially indigenous) cultures, anticipating an increasingly globalized culture in which the West would be forced into close proximity with the Other. In his view, the West had a choice in how it handled these encounters, but that choice was contingent upon the extent to which it educated itself and empathized with those it viewed as Other. Following the work of anthropologists like Margaret Mead, Eliade gave a great deal of attention to rites of initiation, both into adulthood and into secret societies.

One could argue that summer camp is a Western appropriation of the rites of initiation which appear almost universally in indigenous cultures. A rite of initiation is an inherently demystifying process. It introduces the novitiate into the secrets of the group. He becomes the bearer of a fuller knowledge which he in turn transmits to future novitiates. Campers discover that there are older people who do things in off-season gatherings to help maintain the camp for the following year. In succeeding years, many of these campers, as older people, do things in off-season gatherings, and so it goes. The curious thing is that the precise content of the secrets doesn’t matter (it could be leaf-raking or log-splitting). From the perspective of a scholar in comparative religion, what matters is the discovery that the rite of initiation functions identically across cultures. Its purpose is to establish membership in the group. It’s purpose is to affirm identity, not to affirm a specific knowledge except as that knowledge contributes to identity.

Because I have no great stake in the knowledge of camping, it is easy for me to detach myself from its mysteries. That’s why it is easy for me to use the initiation rite of the summer camp as an illustration. It might not be so easy if I were an atheist. I might be more attached to the particular details of atheism, so much so that I might miss the fact that the ability to recite the particular details of atheism is itself part of a rite of initiation. Similarly, a Republican has her talking points. And a Progressive Christian has his apologetics. And so on. The attachment to content is, in part, an affirmation of social identity. This is my tribe! The irony, at least for the atheist, is that the rite of initiation to establish group membership has a religious provenance.

Death of the Self and Rebirth

Eliade observes the basic schema of the ritual: it involves the death of the old self and the rebirth of the new. An example from Western culture: hazings are rituals designed to destroy the neophyte’s former identity. They are symbolic human sacrifices. Sometimes, the group takes that schema literally, engaging in actual human sacrifice or in ritual killings. For example, some modern gangs demand the commission of a murder as the cost of initiation.

It could be argued that the harsh tone of debate in much of contemporary Western discourse follows the same schema and has acquired its edge precisely because it seeks to fulfill a symbolic sacrifice. The atheist cannot truly claim membership within the tribe unless he emulates the kind of bloodletting that a Christopher Hitchens achieves when he sets upon a hapless Christian or Muslim fundamentalist. We witness the same ferocity in contemporary political exchanges, in debates between copyright law-and-order types and “free culture” advocates, and most recently in the kind of salvos between traditional print publishers and advocates of the self-publishing ebook market. In fact, pick just about any cause that receives play in our media and you are likely to find Eliade’s schema lying below the surface. We daily affirm our group affiliations through the ritual slaying of our opponents or through ordeals in which we die to our old selves and rise again to the new.

Nowadays, our instrument of  choice may be the demystifying power of science and rationalism, but we have never been so religious a people.

No related posts.

Maybe my own church, the United Church of Canada, will try to weasel out of the indictment by pointing to the work it’s done and the stand it’s taken on globalization and empire. But seriously, it’s no support to email a link as proof that you’ve thought about the issues.

This is not a trivial movement. Economic justice is the issue of our age.  From it springs all other major concerns – the environment, peace, freedom, dignity – all concerns which Church professes to champion. Yet where is the Church when ordinary people struggle to assert these concerns?

I have some tough words for the Church:

• Mainstream churches wail about their own decline. Where are the young people? they cry. Go to any public rally, any protest, any demonstration on behalf of a social cause and you’ll find your answer. But as I observed during Toronto’s G20 Summit, young people are served up to power as sacrificial lambs by a complacent middle class. They are doing your work while you sit in what Pierre Berton aptly called “the comfortable pew.” Why would young people bother to join an organization that rarely puts itself where the work needs to be done? Church has not become irrelevant because it exists in an increasingly secular world; it has done this to itself. It has made itself irrelevant by being irrelevant. Secularism is just the excuse it gives.

• Mainstream churches have become middle-class ghettos whose primary purpose is to affirm to their memberships a middle-class identity. For the most part, churches have lost their sense of purpose or, because “purpose” is one of those secular words, they have lost their calling, their ministry. The purpose of Church, in its broadest sense, is to look to the Other and to identify deeply with that Other. In a word: compassion. Navel-gazing just doesn’t cut it.

• The issue most decried throughout the world can be summed up as structural sin. We have created institutions to serve important human needs. That purpose has been thwarted to serve private desires. Now would be a good time for Church, as one such institution, to reflect on the ways in which it, too, commits structural sin.

And to individual church-goers:

• Middle-class guilt is no excuse. It’s no excuse to justify silence by saying that because you’ve benefited from unjust institutions, it would be hypocritical to speak out against them. Look to the origins of Church. It was founded to bring about a just world. It wasn’t revolutionary in a Marxist sense where early Christian workers rose up against a ruling capitalist elite. Read Paul’s letters and you’ll find evidence of something more like house cells, communal property, decision-making by consensus, and a membership that included both the wealthy and the poor. On your own, you are not wise enough to exempt yourself from the obligations to which you are perpetually called.

• A theme I have heard, especially from hard-working middle-class types is some variation of the free-rider problem: the people shouting the loudest probably want handouts so they don’t have to contribute anything. There is a spiritual corollary to the free-rider problem which is found in the tension between grace and works. But in the context of Church, it isn’t those shouting the loudest, but those who make no noise at all, who risk being called free-riders. That’s because, in the context of Church, we embrace the paradox that, while grace means that you get what you get whether you deserve it or not, nevertheless that has no impact on your obligations – your calling to compassion. Or in the words of William Munny (played by Clint Eastwood) in Unforgiven: “Deserve’s got nothing to do with it.” It doesn’t matter who you are, you’ve got work to do, and you do it because it’s right, and for no other reason.

• Dignity is a fundamental human need. Today, institutions automate the process by which power is applied to strip people of their dignity. Watching and doing nothing strips us of ours. This is not a new insight. This one has been with us for 2,000 years.

Related posts:

1. Hogtown – my gift to the Occupy Movement
2. Resisting Church
3. Communion in a Progressive Church

• You’re incoherent. So many different voices saying so many different – sometimes contradictory – things. The message gets lost in the noise.

• You don’t make specific demands. How can change happen when you don’t seem to know what you want?

• You’re a bunch of hypocrites. Anti-corporate, anti-capital, while you tweet away on your iPhones.

These criticisms boil down to the well-worn KISS rule: keep it simple stupid. That’s what the critics demand. Not surprisingly, this rule is the prime directive of the very media responsible for disseminating these criticisms. If it can’t be reduced to a 3-second sound byte, or to a clever cartoon, or to a pithy headline, then it isn’t real. Methodically developed argument has no place here. Nuanced reflection has no place here. Careful research has no place here.

The KISS rule is as much about keeping people stupid as it is about making things simple. We find an illustration with the late Steve Jobs, founder of Apple Inc., who steered the company to its present position as the second largest corporation in the world.  Jobs was renowned for his AGM presentations. Always on message. He told everyone what he was about to say. Then he said it. And when he was done, there was never any doubt about what he had just said. This formula for clarity was an extension of Apple products themselves. They were designed to hide technological complexity so that users could focus on creative tasks like mixing audio tracks or editing videos or designing book covers. Since Steve Jobs’ death, millions have expressed a regret at his loss sometimes verging on a strange messianic grief.

Those who have not been swept up by the messianic fervor remind us that the hidden wires and complicated gizmos are still there, and no matter how simple the message, the complexity will not go away. More sinister is the possibility that simplicity has become a manipulation. The iTunes music store is easy to use, which means we are more likely to surrender significant gobs of personal information as a surreptitious cost of making purchases through this media portal. It also means that we are more likely to overlook certain awkward facts, like the iTune TOS which makes our contractual relationship with Apple Inc. anything but simple; or its history of censorship; or its supply chain to sweatshops in China and coltan mines in the DRC. The lure of simplicity blinds us to its cost.

People go on about simplicity as if it were a social value we ought to promote; simplicity is the province of the common man; it speaks our language, just like Don Cherry; complexity, on the other hand, is elitist and not to be trusted.

I take a different view of things.  Imagine if a news reporter went to a quantum physicist and said: “Make it all simple for me so I can understand.” The quantum physicist would face two hurdles.  First, the universe isn’t simple. Demanding simplicity from complex systems is like demanding that the sky glow pink with purple polka-dots. You can’t demand that the conditions of reality be changed at your whim. Second, even if the quantum physicist could make things simple, the news reporter might not have the cognitive ability to understand in any event. There are practical limits to the comprehensibility of complex systems.

Too often we confuse accessibility with simplicity. I differentiate them by noting that simplicity is a manipulation. Accessibility is its antidote. Simplicity can be benign, but as with my Apple Inc. illustration, it can be deployed to darker ends. While my hypothetical quantum physicist may rebuff the news reporter’s request to make things simple, he can still make his discipline accessible. He’s never going to say: “But there are a few facts we will always keep secret from you because quantum physicists have a special fraternity and you can never belong.” Instead, he will point the news reporter to books and university courses. To the extent the news reporter is able, he is free to learn all there is to know about quantum physics.

It bears asking whether the powers that influence our lives – government, corporations, media, financial institutions – are accessible in the same way that my hypothetical quantum physicist is accessible. Or do these organizations function more like a fraternity that closely guards its secrets?

The Occupy Wall Street protests are far from simple. They reflect a complicated reality. Besides, simplicity would be dishonest and would risk excluding those whose experiences were not captured by a simple message. Notwithstanding a lack of simplicity, the protests are accessible. As with the news reporter quizzing the quantum physicist, accessibility demands something of the critics who accuse the movement of being incoherent and too complicated. The critics won’t find their answers in three-second sound bytes. They’ll find their answers by listening closely. By spending time with individuals and hearing their stories. By asking: What have you lost? How have you been hurt?

Related posts:

1. Where is the Church in the Occupy Movement?
2. Street Needs Assessment of Toronto Homelessness
3. Occupy Toronto – Day One

Authorized

There are two main categories of street art: the stuff that’s authorized by city council, and everything else.  A good example of authorized street art is a mural of Miles Davis above the For Life Natural Foods store at the corner of Augusta Ave. and Nassau St.   As a bonus, there are speakers blaring Sketches of Spain and Kind of Blue into the street, which is fine if you like Miles Davis (and I do like Miles Davis) but not so fine if you live in the neighbourhood and jazz isn’t your thing.  An employee of the store told me the owner commissioned the mural with city council’s blessing to cover a plague of graffiti on his building.

Unauthorized

A good example of unauthorized street art is a wall featuring a portrait of Rob Ford with the caption:  “We can’t afford this.”  Not far from the piece is a hand with all the fingers up except the middle one.  I take this as a sly jab at Rob Ford who has a reputation for giving people the finger as he drives by in his car.

Power

Although I hesitate to use “traditional” and “postmodern” side by side, here goes: the traditional pomo analysis might say this is another illustration of the interplay between power and culture.  Power manipulates the mechanisms of legitimation to produce what counts as proper expression in our local culture.  The mayor and his cronies deem certain expression vandalism and an assault against private property and this authorizes the erasure of expression that began its existence as social criticism.  The word censorship comes to mind.

Occupy Ford Nation

There is great irony in the timing of Rob Ford’s little war.  This Saturday, Toronto will play host to an OCCUPY protest.  Ford has cast his lot with big money.  He wants to privatize everything.  He wants to throw all our social services to the wolves of an unregulated economy.  Isn’t it ironic that he cannot help himself when it comes to regulating certain forms of expression.  Why not privatize street art too?  Leave it, like everything else, to play out its life in a deregulated privatized street art economy?  But no.  He wants to quash it all.  His failure gives me hope.  Street art gives me hope.  It reminds me that ideologues like Ford have less control than they pretend to.

Stop Making Sense

It’s worth looking at the rationale behind city council’s legitimating power.  What reasons justify some forms of expression over others?  Especially when, at least superficially, authorized and unauthorized look the same?  Here is my theory.  According to city council, legitimate street art is legitimate because it makes sense.  Art makes sense if (a) it has a readily discernible message and (b) that message contributes to the local economy.  The Miles Davis mural makes sense because everyone can see that it’s Miles Davis and it promotes a local business.  The Rob Ford mural doesn’t make sense because … well … it was probably put there by some goddamn communist.

As for the naked Indian chief with boobs, that just drives Ford et al. bonkers.  Why the hell would anyone do that?  It doesn’t mean anything?  How is anyone supposed to make any money from it?

Then again, as people move to Occupy Wall Street, Bay Street and any other street where derivatives traders manipulate the global economy, it seems that senseless street art makes as much sense as anything else.

View more senseless things on my flickr account.

Below are some composite photos of walls.  Click the images to download poster-sized versions.

Related posts:

1. Rob Ford and Toronto’s graffiti
2. Doug Ford Discovers Book
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W.O. Mitchell’s best-loved book tells a timeless and heartwarming tale of the young boy, Brian O’Connal, who grows up with the restless wind, the endless sweep of sky, the lonesome prairie of Saskatchewan.  The sunlit story of a boy and his dog, his first skates, his gang, and the shack where they sneak away for a smoke – it is also the deeply moving portrayal of a small Canadian town during the dark days of the Depression.  Charged with a special people’s humour, courage, and strength of character, it stresses the qualities that protect a child’s innocence while giving him the burning need to know what makes a boy a man.

Gag.

Whether I like it or not, my reading sensibilities have changed since high school.  I have become a postmodern – or even a post-postmodern – reader.  I’m incapable of reading a novel that offers straight-up unaffected sentiment without hearing an ironic, snooty commentary running in the background.  I imagine, hovering above the heads of the characters, cartoon thought-bubbles revealing what they might really say if only Mitchell would cut them some slack.  “Can’t I get laid, just this once?”  “Can’t I paint graffiti on the grain elevator, please, please, please?”  “Can’t we march all the aliens down the main street in their underwear?”

By the way, there are no aliens in Who Has Seen The Wind.  Instead, there is a heartwarming tale.  As you’d expect from a heartwarming tale set in a Depression era Saskatchewanian town, the good people are pretty much good, and the bad people are pretty much annoying in the same way that Michele Bachmann is annoying.  There is the obligatory OFFICIOUS CHURCH BUSY BODY who wreaks all kinds of harm in the name of doing good.  And there is the MORALLY RIGID TEACHER who is so hell bent on following (and enforcing) rules that compassion shrivels up and dies on the classroom floor.  And, of course, there is the wind of the title, the OVERARCHING METAPHOR which is closely identified with a mysterious boy and the land he inhabits, and the numinous spiritual quality that envelopes them both.

Mitchell’s writing belongs to a specific place.  We see this in descriptions like the one I’ve reproduced here:

Spring came to the prairie with the suddenness of a meadow lark’s song.  Overnight the sky traded its winter tang for softness; the snow, already honeycombed with the growing heat of a closer sun, melted—first from the steaming fallow fields, then from the stubble stretches, shrinking finally to uneven patches of white lingering in the barrow pits.  Here and there meadow larks were suddenly upon straw stacks, telephone wires, fence posts, their song clear with ineffable exuberance that startled and deepened the prairie silence—each quick and impudent climax of notes leaving behind it a vaster, emptier prairie world.  The sky was ideal blue.  Crows called; farmers, impatient as though it were the only spring left in the world to them, burning with the hope that this one would not be another dry year, walked out to their implements, looked them over, and planned their seeding—barley here, oats there, wheat there, summer fallow there.

Literature of a place has to start somewhere.  Maybe it is always the case that such literature starts with straight-up unaffected sentiment.  It springs from a love of the place.  Only later is it possible to approach the place with a critical eye, deploying less straight-up strategies like irony and parody.  Only when the love is faded and the mystery demystified do the postmodern writers get their turn in that place to bang away at their keyboards.

I wonder if there is a critical equivalent of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross.  Instead of delineating the stages of dying, it sets out the literary stages a culture engages as it colonizes a place.  I suppose, in a way, colonization is a kind of dying.  (The first stage is the fresh-faced author who writes the heartwarming tale.  The second stage is denial; this place can’t be as imperfect as it seems.  The third is bitter irony.  Etc.)  Now, in the twenty-first century, there are no more uncolonized places remaining on Earth where we can test such a theory of literary development.  We’ll have to wait until we start colonizing the moon.  Maybe the first lunar novel will be titled:  Who Has Seen The Vacuum.  It will be the heartwarming tale of a boy and his robot.

No related posts.

In two of his essays, Dyer draws on Marc Augé’s Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity.  In the first, Dyer describes his brief stint as a Def Leppard groupie when the band played a concert in Seoul.  He suggests that the members of Def Leppard are residents of the supermodern world, where one hotel looks the same as any other, as do the airports, restaurants, limousines, and concert venues.  One might go so far as to say that Def Leppard plays supermodern music, the heavy metal equivalent of elevator muzak (can you hum any Def Leppard tunes off the top of your head?)  And, as the punch line for this piece, it appears that people are also interchangeable.  What goes unsaid is that the notion of supermodernity may also apply to writing, which has detached itself from a rootedness in place and wings its way around the globe through fiber optic cables and satellite transmissions.

Dyer continues in this supermodern vein with “Sex and Hotels”, an essay about the relationship between the generic luxury hotel and pornography.  By their very non-placeness, luxury hotels are the ideal locale to view pornography, the ideal setting to film pornography, and they somehow elicit in their guests long-buried sexual proclivities.  The Dominique Strauss-Kahn scandal is a case in point.  Whatever the legality of his exchange with a chambermaid in a New York City hotel, it is clear that he was engaged in behaviour that he is unlikely to repeat with his wife in their matrimonial residence.  Again, one can infer from Dyer that the supermodern non-placeness of internet writing evokes similar pornographic tendencies.  The utter sameness of Huffpo articles elicits from readers a kind of cultural masturbatory response.

Anybody devoted to quality writing and original thought will feel inclined to resist the supermodern tendencies of internet writing.  Which makes the intrusion of personality a relief .  By “personality”, I don’t mean a gushing effusiveness or belligerent ranting, but something more subtle, a presence in the writing that hints at a distinctive world view mediated by unique experience.  While Dyer is deliberately autobiographical in the “Personals” section (we learn whether or not he had sex on his first date with the woman who later became his wife), we detect hints of the autobiographical even in his more scholarly pieces (it is not without good reason that he bears a strong affinity for the novels of D. H. Lawrence).

Which returns me to the question I posed at the outset:  how does a writer justify devoting more than a quarter of the words in his new book to a visual medium (and another significant chunk to music)?  The short answer is that writing has to be about something.  I grow tired of the solidly crafted work from writers freshly squeezed out of MFA programs.  It’s like drinking air from an empty crystal goblet.  For Dyer, writing is the occasion to share other commitments – commitments which may well be more important than the writing itself.

But there may be a more complicated answer.  Photographers provide Dyer with another example of what appears to be a persistent concern:  the supermodern erosion of discrete experience.  His essay on Robert Capa is almost elegiac.  There was in Capa’s work during WWII a thisness which a handful of other war correspondents approximated but which has disappeared since the advent of digital reportage with its clarity and gruesome explicitness.  Now, war photographers take the same risks, but do so for the sake of a visual record which is indistinguishable from pornography.  They’re in the field for the cum kill shot, since that’s what sells papers (and pays their salaries).  A photo by Capa is a photo of Capa or at least sufficiently distinctive in the view it presents that we can’t help but note Capa’s presence in the work.

Geoff Dyer aspires to the same thing.  But because he doesn’t own a camera, he captures his experience with words.  A photograph or an essay, it doesn’t really matter.  When done well, both draw us into the distinctiveness of the experience they present and buttress us against an onslaught of the supermodern.

No related posts.

Secular, assimilated Christian communities such as the United Church of Canada (UCC) have turned away from their original faith, leaving a vacuum, which must be filled, Kay said.

“I don’t think it’s a coincidence that these are exactly the airy-fairy, touchy-feely churches who are so anti-Israel because they have no religion. They’ve abandoned Christ, they’ve abandoned [Christianity], so they need something, and so they’ve taken on Mohammed al-Dura as their Christ and they’ve taken on the Palestinians as their disciples. This is their religion.”

Anti-Israel activists from other backgrounds have embraced this “secular religion,” which Kay described as a political cult requiring the use of conspiracy theories “to protect the dogma from the intrusion of reality.

Although it’s unclear whether Kay actually makes these claims about the UCC, it’s clear that Hill does.  The claims are outrageous and Hill risks ridicule by making them.  The article demonstrates an unfamiliarity with UCC culture—the big tent, the willingness to include a spectrum of beliefs, from what the article describes as “secular religion” on the one hand to conservative traditionalists on the other, and everything in between.  While there is a thin sliver of activists who do use that dreaded word, apartheid, to describe Israel’s treatment of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, the majority of the UCC membership is little old ladies out to visit their friends on a Sunday morning.  Seriously.  And while there have been calls for BDS from the head office, the UCC’s hierarchy is more an administrative convenience than a tool for imposing dogmatic statements.  Most of what comes from the head office qualifies as “suggestions” and most of those suggestions go unnoticed by the general membership.  Hill assumes a level of engagement in the UCC which does not exist.

What interests me most about this article is my own response to its flagrant mischaracterizations.  Why do I care?  After all, I have removed myself from the UCC rolls.  In the 2011 census, I responded to the religious affiliation question by indicating “no religion”.  Or was it “atheist”?  I can’t remember.  Nevertheless, I come charging in to defend my beleaguered UCC against these claims.

I think the clue to my response rests in the notion of personal identity.  Intellectually, I have detached myself from the UCC.  Emotionally, it is still my home.  And so I read the article’s mischaracterizations, at least in part, as a threat to my personal identity.  This is instructive.  It gives me pause to wonder if many Israelis (and diaspora Jews for that matter) don’t experience an analogous response to criticism from outside.  “They don’t live here.  How can they understand?  These are my people.  This is my home.”  What begins as criticism of a government’s policies is ultimately received as an attack against personal identity.  And since, for most Israelis, that personal identity is inextricably bound with being Jewish, the criticism is received as anti-Semitism.  My own response to criticism helps me connect the dots, at an emotional level, between criticism of Israel’s policies and charges of anti-Semitism.

So how does one ever hold a meaningful conversation about issues which are closely tied to personal identity?

One possibility has been proposed by Roger Hutchinson in a paper titled “Towards a ‘pedagogy for allies of the oppressed’” which arose from his experience negotiating a dispute between the Dene, an indigenous group living in the Mackenzie Valley, and oil executives from Calgary who wished to use the Mackenzie Valley as the route for a pipeline.  He developed a four-step method of ethical clarification.  I have reproduced below a description of Hutchinson’s comparative ethics which I wrote for a paper while at Emmanuel College in Toronto.

For my purpose, the most important step is the beginning which is accomplished through storytelling.  We hear ourselves being talked about and we object:  they don’t understand us.  They hear themselves being talked about and they object:  we don’t understand them.  Storytelling breaks open the dialogue and allows points of entry into the other’s experience.  Storytelling reveals assumptions, points of view, habits of thinking which often determine the ways in which issues are framed but remain otherwise unacknowledged and inaccessible.

But there is a challenge in doing this.  Storytelling’s counterpart is deep listening, and deep listening poses a threat to personal identity.  If I am a Jew, will I lose myself if I identify, however briefly, with a Palestinian living in Gaza?  If I am an activist member of the UCC, will I be committing a betrayal if I spend time listening to a Jew tell her story?

A story is like a basket.  It holds a sense of our identity.  Paradoxically, we don’t lose our identity if we share the basket.  On the contrary, the very act of sharing our story further entrenches our identity, both by reinforcing it in our own minds, and by allowing others to empathize with it.

But implying that little old ladies belong to a cult has an altogether different effect.

_________

Excerpt:

In his case study of the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline Debate, Roger Hutchinson offers an approach to clarification of ethical issues that seeks to provide an alternative to those modes of discourse (variously referred to as foundational, positivist or imperialist) which seek to bring closure to debate or to preclude the possibility of debate altogether. This is a process, and as such, seeks to accommodate both those, on the one hand, who have narratives to share and who have strongly held convictions arising from such narratives, and those, on the other hand, who have empirical data to present. It is a process which recognizes that even though a participant in a debate may validate her position by reference to objective claims, nevertheless, her motivation for participating may be convictions which are just as strongly held as the participant who speaks in religious or ethical terms. Thus, the first step in Hutchinson’s method “involves noticing the auras of approval or disapproval which hover over the specific claims and arguments presented by each side.” In his analysis of the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline debate, Hutchinson notes areas of factual disagreement and interpretation of data. Nevertheless, the presentation of facts had little impact upon the debate, because different groups had declared their positions before relevant studies were ever completed. It was these positions, and not empirical evidence, which determined the language used by competing participants. And so we move to a second stage of analysis which works to ethical clarification by looking to the values which motivate competing interests. The purpose is not to set values in conflict with one another, but rather, to delineate with precision the scope of the conflict. Revealing regions of conflict can operate to reduce conflict because it has the salutary effect of revealing regions of agreement as well. In his third stage of analysis, Hutchinson engages competing interests at a post-ethical or foundational level of clarification by examining “metaphors, images, symbols, sacred texts and authoritative traditions.”

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What is Mad Pride?

Mad Pride borrows from Gay Pride.  It takes queer theory and applies it to mental health.  So, for example, rather than trying to “cure” mental illness (which may be ludicrous in any event, at least in the case of chronic major mental health issues), it seeks to assert mental illness as an identity.  One way to do this is to take back those words that have typically been used to stigmatize and denigrate people who wrestle daily with major mental health issues.  Just as Gay Pride seizes ownership of words like faggot, fairy, and queer, Mad Pride seizes ownership of words like nuts, crazy, and cuckoo.  In addition, Pride movements try to dispel myths – the pedophilia myth in the case of homosexuality, the violence myth in the case of major mental illness.  I have written previously about the application of queer theory to mental health.  You can learn more about Mad Pride here and here.

Amy Winehouse

Although news reports have not yet disclosed a cause of death, for my purposes, it doesn’t really matter.  Expressions of regret for a talent destroyed by addiction are legitimate.  What concerns me here is the way people respond given the fact that her death is presumed to be drug and alcohol related.  People denigrate her talent.  People call her a loser.  People say it was her own damn fault; she was a weak person.  Others, like James Rhodes writing for The Telegraph, suggest it was the price she paid for her talent, as if she had entered into a Faustian pact.  Almost from the day she released her first album in 2003, the public has shown a lurid fascination with her pharmacological struggles, her increasingly bizarre stage behaviour, her on-again off-again relationship with rehab.  She wasn’t a musician with fans; she was a cottage industry for voyeurs.  People went to her concerts for the same reason they go to NASCAR races – they secretly hoped to see a wreck.

What is missing from the responses to the woman’s addictions is empathy.  If we identified with Amy Winehouse, that would require us to drop the moralizing tone that prompts us to say it was her own damn fault.  If we identified with Amy Winehouse, we might even have to drop the “disease” language and acknowledge that the challenges of addiction place it more in the category of a syndrome than a disease.  It has multiple contributors.  It is complex.  One-word epithets like “loser” and “tragic” are expressions of denial.  They deny complexity, and in particular, the complicated social arrangements that made us all complicit in Amy Winehouse’s death.  We bought her albums.  We devoured the stories of her latest onstage meltdown.  We paid to watch.  In other words, we helped to finance the machinery that converted her personal misery into a marketable commodity.

Anders Behring Breivik

When the story broke of a bombing in Oslo, the media assumed it was a terrorist attack, probably perpetrated by Muslim extremists (do the media know any other kind?), probably members of al Qaeda.  In an op-ed for Aljazeera, Ibrahim Hewitt notes how much this reveals about Western prejudices.  When the media later learned that the perpetrator was a blond-haired, blue-eyed Norwegian, he was no longer a terrorist, but a “deranged lone gunman.”  The media neatly side-stepped the fact that Breivik was strongly influenced by fundamentalist Christian extremists and a politics of the far right.  The “deranged lone gunman” label allows right-wing ideologues to brush aside the embarrassing fact that Breivik’s target – a left-wing youth camp – suggests an affiliation with a politicized Christian right.

Hewitt’s observation is sound, but it deserves another turn of the screw.  Since the Western media could no longer scapegoat Islam, they resorted to the mentally ill.  Breivik is deranged, insane, crazy, nuts.  He must be.  That’s the only inference that can be drawn from the commission of such heinous violence.  We see a subtle example of this (il)logic in a BBC article.  After reporting that Breivik remained “calm and balanced throughout a 10-hour night of interrogation”, the article quotes his lawyer:  “I think he’s realized what he’s done, and he views himself as sane.”  Implicit in the statement is that no one else agrees with his self-assessment.  Breivik is either a Muslim extremist (which the facts don’t support) or he’s insane.  The third option is unthinkable:  Breivik is a calculating and rational man who has demonstrated what it means to draw right-wing Christian views to their logical conclusion.  Since this is unthinkable, the media has chosen instead to perpetuate the myth of a correlation between mental illness and violence.  As a result, those of us who already suffer, suffer doubly for media prejudices.

Evasion of Responsibility

What these two stories hold in common is the application in the media of prejudices, stereotypes, clichés, myths, and half-truths about mental health issues in order to facilitate a collective evasion of responsibility.

In the case of Amy Winehouse, we get to pretend that she suffered from a moral weakness and that the collective demands we imposed on her had nothing to do with her death.

In the case of Breivik, we get to pretend that he was a “deranged lone gunman” and that a global swing to the hard right, with its rising militancy and rejection of difference, had nothing to do with his violence.

As a proud madman, I wrest the word “deranged” from the media.  I am deranged.  I am peace-loving, too.  And, except when I snore, I’m a delight to be with.  Through its articles, the media provides examples of how sane people think.  I would rather be deranged.

Update

Since I drafted this post, the quotes I provided in reference to Breivik’s calm demeanor and self-perception as sane have been deleted from the BBC article.  See News Sniffer to track the changes.  What are we to infer from the deletion of references to Breivik’s sanity?

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