My train book this week is Greg Graffin and Steve Olson’s Anarchy Evolution, and it’s turning out to be a very different beast than I expected. I’ve been a Bad Religion fan ever since a co-worker told me he thought I’d really dig a band called Christian Death. I mis-remembered his recommendation and picked up a copy of Bad Religion’s Suffer instead. It turned out to be a very fortunate accident. I wasn’t used to punk albums being so thought-provoking and catchy. For whatever reason, I never got around to checking out Christian Death. Anyway… This book is mostly about Dr. Graffin’s explanation of why the modern synthetic model of evolution is inadequate to explain what we see in species today and in the fossil record. Instead, he proposes the idea that the role of genes has become overblown in explaining how traits are inherited and distributed within populations. His writing is clear and his ideas are intriguing enough keep me turning the page. Turns out he can write, too. Graffin leans heavily on personal experiences in laying out his case. Many of the stories concern his musical career, but it’s the personal stories of his home life as a child and of scientific fieldwork that I find the most interesting and sometimes touching. I’m enjoying this book immensely,even if it hasn’t turned out to be exactly what I imagined it would be. ———————– I’ve also recently finished reading a book I can’t tell you much about at this time. What I can tell you is that it’s good, and even if it never sees the light of (published) day, I expect some parts of it will live on in the future in other works. It’s exciting to be in on a project like this, even as an observer. It’s exciting to get a little peek behind the curtain of where creative people produce honest-to-goodness creative work. Inspiring, too, which isn’t doing my productivity at the office any good, but I’m not at all sure that’s a bad thing.
Category: Journal
Answering a question and thinking out loud
A friend of mine recently posed a series of interesting questions on his blog and, rather than hijack his space, I want to take a look at the big one in some detail (spoiler alert: don’t expect any definitive answers): “Am I really asking what makes great literature great and, if so, what makes great literature great?” What makes literature great? That’s a heck of a question. It’s not a new one by any means, but that does’t mean it’s not worth reconsidering from time to time. My knee-jerk reaction is that you know it when you see it, but that’s a cop-out. How do you know it? What about it makes you recognize greatness in literature? Thinking about this has led me to wander over to Wikipedia, where I ran across the idea of “literary theory.” I’ll grant that my understanding of literary theory is shallow beyond measurement, but I’m pretty sure that it’s not an approach I want to take when addressing this question. Instead, I’ll start with looking at a list of great literature. For no compelling reason other than the fact that I need to start somewhere, let’s look at The 100 Best Novels Written in English, as per Robert McCrum. At this point, there is a pause in my writing as I’ve gone off to look over the list and then look over it again. Thanks to the magic of text, you won’t actually experience this pause, but I wanted you to know that it exists. Ok, now that I’ve gone over the list, I’m not certain that it gets me any closer to my answer. I’ve read a reasonable number of the books on the list, but most of them I read decades ago. I hope that they’d make more of an impression on me now because, honestly, while all of them may qualify as Literature-with-a-capital-“L”, they didn’t leave much of a mark on me. That’s good, though. For something to qualify as great literature, at least using my proto-definition, it needs to leave a mark on the reader. Fortunately, McCrum himself addresses the question as to what make literature great in a related article: “Calvino’s definition – ‘a classic is a book that has never finished what it wants to say’ – is probably the sweetest, followed by Pound’s identification of ‘a certain eternal and irresponsible freshness’…Thereafter, the issue becomes subjective. Classics, for some, are books we know we should have read, but have not. For others, classics are simply the book we have read obsessively, many times over, and can quote from.” A little romantic, and I’m not sure it’s useful if one’s looking for a systematic approach to answer the question, but still, it’s not bad…until he continues with: “The ordinary reader instinctively knows what he or she believes to be a classic.” And now we’re right back where we started. I’ve tried to make a list of the books which I’ve read and consider great, and then list out the defining traits of those books. I won’t both sharing that because it was a fruitless approach. Have you ever tried to decided if you should stay with a romantic partner by listing out their good and bad traits and then adding them up? This exercise worked every bit as well, which is to say, not at all. If I were a literary theorist, I’d suggest that the greatness of literature is an emergent property, but I’m not, so I won’t. So, after all of this, I’m just going to take a stab at what establishes the greatness of literature in my opinion. The book in question is great literature if… * The book sticks with me. If I can’t remember reading it, it may be literature, but it wasn’t great to me. * The book changes the way I look at the world or broadens my perspective in some way. I learn something of value from it. * I enjoy reading the book. This may seem like an extremely lowbrow way of looking for greatness, but it’s hard for me to consider a book great literature if it’s an outright chore to read, no matter how innovative the structure or clever the prose or intricate the plot. * The book is novel. Yes, I did that on purpose, but I mean it. If it seems new and fresh, I’m more likely to regard it as “great.” * Finally, the book needs to end well. The ending seldom saves a poor novel, but if the ending isn’t up to the quality of the rest of the novel, or if the it doesn’t “fit,” it leaves a bad taste in my mouth. These generalization are how I recognize greatness in literature…at least, that’s how I do now. The whole thing is subject to changes. I may someday read something that doesn’t tick any of these boxes and I still think it’s great, which will mean I’ll have to reevaluate the whole thing. Which is fine. I expect defining greatness in literature to be a work-in-progress for as long as I have the wits to consider it. Now, what good is a list like this? For me, it’s a target. When I write, these are the impressions I’d like to leave on the reader: That the work is memorable, that the reader learns something from it, that they enjoy it, and that it offers something different than other things they’ve read. Of course, I’d like to stick the landing as well, My personal example of an ideal ending is Terry Pratchett’s “Small Gods.” I doubt I’ll ever land as gracefully as Sir Terry did with that one, but if I come close, I’ll be more than satisfied. -RK Image from lydiaoutloud.com because it is the perfect image for this post, don’t you think? –
Post-mortem on that last story
I remember writing a paper for my high school creative writing class which should have been the best thing I wrote all year. I don’t even remember the specific subject, but I recall being extremely familiar with the material and instantly had an outline of what I wanted to write spring into my head. Only..this assignment had a particular format we were required to use and I had far more information than would fit. Not that it stopped me from trying. I wrote and wrote and wrote until my paper was more than twice the length my teacher had requested. Most of the time, when I overshot like that, my grade improved. It was, after all, a creative writing course and if I wrote more than the minimum requirement, that tended to be a good thing. That was not the case with this particular paper. I remember even being vaguely aware that what I was writing was kind of lousy while I was writing it, but I just had so much to say that I couldn’t stop myself. In the end, it was probably the worst thing I wrote during my senior year and, while I received a passing grade, it was a richly deserved “C.” This is a long way of saying that I’m not especially happy with Texoma by Torchlight. The assignment was to mash up two randomly-selected pop culture properties and I wound up with “Snow Crash” and “American Gods.” I know and love both of these books and feel like I have a pretty good handle on the core ideas contained within them. So, I had an unusually good handle on what the assignment required, but my end product isn’t as good as it should have been. Where did I go wrong? 1) The gimmick of trying to write in third person present didn’t suit the story. It might have been a good ploy for one of the two story lines, but it was confusing and awkward the way I wrote it. So, while it was a good exercise, I’d change it if this were work product. 2) The story leans way too much on dialog. I can hear the conversations in my head, and I know who is saying what. I am not reading my own work for the first time, and while there’s some nice dialog in there, there’s too much of it and it’s confusing. 3) This is a constant problem of mine: Stop trying to shoehorn a 10,000 word idea into a 2,000 word story. I’m very pleased with the ideas behind the story. However, the execution was a compromise between what was asked in the assignment and what the ideas really needed to be fleshed out properly. The story may have had an ideal length, but 3,500 words most definitely was not it. 4) Make sure the idea actually involves a story. I love writers like Warren Ellis and Larry Niven who can take one exceedingly weird idea and spin a story out of it. Simply having a good idea isn’t enough. Again, I am very pleased with the way I combined the ideas of “Snow Crash” and “American Gods,” but I’m not sure I actually wound up with a story. 5) Finally, this is supposed to be flash fiction. It might be a good idea to treat it as such rather than agonize over it all week. Writing quickly and instinctively rather than working it all out in advance is an opportunity to work on a different skill set and it’s one I’m going to need in a few months. I know these assignments (and really, there’s not assignments, but it helps me to think of them that way) are really just suggestions to get my creative juices pumping. I’m not required to follow the rules and I don’t mind going way over my word count if the story requires it. I’m writing these for myself as practice, and if the story requires more space, then I’m going to give it more space. What I don’t want to do, though, is to stretch or truncate something to make it fit. That’s the biggest problem I see with “Texoma by Torchlight.” Let’s see if I can do better, or at least avoid this particular pitfalls, next time. -RK
New car, caviar, four star day dream
I feel as though half my weekend was spent inside car dealerships. In truth, it wasn’t quite half, but it certainly felt like it. We wound up trading in the beloved but not-especially-wonderful-for-long-road-trips Miata in for a new Mazda3. It seems like an awful lot of car for the money. I have long enough legs that buying pants can be a problem sometimes, and I can’t reach the pedals on the new car with the seat pushed all the way backs. The ride is smooth, handling precise, and moves along nicely. It still feels a little bourgeois to buy a new car, but given that our payments are well south of $300, I don’t feel like it’s too much an extravagance. I’m not going to go in to it too much right now, but football season in England has started and I’m going to be unreasonably obsessed with soccer for the foreseeable future. I’ve been a Leicester City fan since the last millennium and we’ve turned in to one of the most interesting, if not the best, clubs in the Premiership. While basking in the glory of a dodgy-but-satisfying win over West Ham, I wore my #9 Vardy shirt to the market. For the first time since I’ve been supporting the club, someone who was clearly from the U.S. of A. recognized the crest and engaged me in conversation. I get the impression this might happen a little more often in the coming months. I expect I’ll be writing a lot of football this year, but I’ll try to tag those posts in case footie isn’t your “thing.” Now I’m wrapping up the weekend watching the X-Men and Speed Racer animated series. Nothing calms me down like trying get my head around why you’d have a car race through the middle of a mountain to determine whether or not your Aztec-ish nation will open their borders to the rest of the world. It still seems more plausible than Interstellar. -RK
Struggling with the “flash” part of “flash fiction”
This week’s prompt seems straight forward enough: Write a story based on a mashup of two randomly-selected pop culture properties. This one ought to be in my wheelhouse, but I’m having trouble getting a foothold on my story. Part of the problem is that, when I look at the list, I can see where some of these mashups already exist in one form or the other. ‘The Terminator’ meets ‘Toy Story?’ Let’s see, the essence of ‘The Terminator’ is that its a cautionary tale of machines rising up to destroy their creator. ‘Toy Story,’ of course, concerns it self with childhood playthings come to life. So, throw the two together and you get…’Child’s Play,’ right? The two I got with my first roll of the dice are ‘Snow Crash’ and ‘American Gods.’ At least I’m familiar with the source material in both cases. It does feel kind of like smashing them together might result in something very close to ‘Neuromancer.’ So, I feel like I need to avoid what I think is the most obvious direction for the story. Which ain’t necessarily a bad thing. It is, however, a difficult thing and one which is not coming to me easily. Two glasses of cheap but very drinkable red wine and Genesis’ ‘Selling England by the Pound’ didn’t help at all. Great album, wrong sound track for this story. My hope, as you may have sussed out for yourself, was that by writing this in my journal, I’d nudge the story into existence. I don’t think my cunning plan is going to work. I don’t think this one will be nudged. Excuse me while I go get my sledge… -RK Seriously? Someone went to the trouble to make a Lego version of the costume Peter wore when singing “Dancing With A Moonlit Knight?” Wow…
The Future, Not-Terribly-Distant
A few of quick note since I’m awake: 1) My wife and I have booked a vacation next month. It’s a little on the short side, but I expect Denver is lovely in September. We’re both the sort of travelers who find making too many plans for a holiday more stressful than making too few, so we are a good fit in this regard. She’s never been to Denver; I’ve only passed through, so this will be a new thing for the both of us. 2) I had an Idea yesterday which means I have a starting place for this coming November. Where I wind up may be some place very different, but at least I have place from which to begin. Of course, now I have one hell of a lot of research to do… 3) In the future, I will attempt to refrain from posting after midnight unless I’m drunk enough to be funny when I do it. -RK
Heroes
You all know Plato’s famous Euthyphro dilemma, but it’s worth re-printing here: “Is the pious loved by the Gods because it is pious, or is it pious because it is loved by the Gods?” Plato’s always a good place to start when discussing the touchy subject of personal heroes, and the Euthyphro is how I like to frame the discussion. I know people, friends and family, who don’t have any heroes because these are people, hey, we’re talking about, and people are flawed, people let you down, people have grey areas and are, in short, not worthy of being put on the Hero pedestal. That’s a point of view I can understand, but it’s not one I subscribe to. For me, a person doesn’t have to be perfect or even exceptionally virtuous to be a hero of mine. My heroes have one or more traits I find exceptional and admirable, or they’ve done exceptional and admirable things. In a more Platonic formulation, I might say “These ideals are heroic, and Bob is my hero because he does them,” as opposed to “Bob is my hero, so the things he does are heroic.” Anyway, this is a long way of getting to saying that Neil Gaiman is a personal hero of mine. It’s not because he writes terrific stories, stories which inspire me and I find myself re-reading over and over. What makes him a hero, to me, is this: He has the extremely rare ability to speak about ideas the sort of ideas which tend to provoke strong, emotional responses in a way that is calm, thoughtful, and definitive in a way that defuses rather than escalates. Here’s Neil Gaiman discussing “political correctness” a couple of years ago: I was reading a book (about interjections, oddly enough) yesterday which included the phrase “In these days of political correctness…” talking about no longer making jokes that denigrated people for their culture or for the colour of their skin. And I thought, “That’s not actually anything to do with ‘political correctness’. That’s just treating other people with respect.” Which made me oddly happy. I started imagining a world in which we replaced the phrase “politically correct” wherever we could with “treating other people with respect”, and it made me smile. You should try it. It’s peculiarly enlightening. I know what you’re thinking now. You’re thinking “Oh my god, that’s treating other people with respect gone mad!” In a sense, it’s the opposite of trolling. I admire that and recognize that it’s a lot more difficult than it looks. I try to make my point and still be above the fray the way Mr. Gaiman can be, but…well, I’m a bit of a work in progress in that respect. So, count me in the pro-hero column. I admire John Steinbeck and Warren Ellis and Sarah Vowell and Neil deGrasse Tyson and Greg Graffin and many others. I admire them for what they do and say. They’ve all given me something to aspire to be. I think that’s a fine thing so long as I don’t stick them up on a pedestal and say that everything they do is heroic just because they’re the ones doing it. -RK Pictured: Not heroes of mine, but funny.
Sometimes, the spirit can be too willing
For someone who has read, and re-read, every issue of Neil Gaiman’s “The Sandman,” I don’t know very much about dreams. I know that I have them, and that I seldom remember them, and with one notable exception, they don’t seem to have any literal relationship to anything going on in m life. I guess I know about as much as anyone who dreams. I did have one awful dream when I was going through my divorce, and by “awful” I obviously mean “wonderful.” I dreamed that my soon-to-be-ex-wife had gathered all of my friends and family together and, in front of them all, begged me to take her back. It was an unsually vivid dream and as I was waking, I remember mentally trying to take hold of it and make the dream real. It’s the only dream I’ve ever had that made me cry when I woke up. I’ve been dreaming more vividly lately than any other time I can remember in my life. The dreams haven’t been so obviously tied to any event in my life as the one during my divorce. They tend to involve friends or family in odd contexts doing even odder things. For example, last night, I dreamed that my best friend was taking his dog to visit all seven continents. He took the dog to the continental (and fictitious) “four corners” where four continents met at a single point. It never felt real, and I can’t imagine why I had this dream specifically, but this sort of thing is happening almost every night these days. My wife mentioned that she understood dreams to be how your mind “unpacks” the days events, like running a defrag on a hard drive. I haven’t done enough research on my own (which is kind of embarrassing, really) to know the state of current study on the subject of dreams, but her suggestion made sense to me. I know I’ve written more than once about reading “Against The Day,” but it’s long, it’s a slow read, and it’s engrossing as anything I’ve ever picked up, so of course I’m going to be writing about it for a while. It’s a strange and challenging book, as one might expect of Pynchon, and I think it’s what’s causing me to dream so much. The dreams certainly picked up in frequency when I started reading it, and while they’re not related to any of the characters, the tone of the dreams, as well as the geography, is in keeping with the novel. Now I’m curious: Have any of you ever experienced anything like this? Has a novel ever caused you to dream more often, or more vividly? It seems like the sort of thing that would happen, but like I said, I haven’t done my home work so I’m dealing strictly with the anecdotal at this point. While we’re at it, are there any particularly good books about dreams that any of you would recommend? -RK Of course, the only question was “Which Sandman image would I choose?” I’m partial to this version, but off the top of my head, I can’t think of a single subpar artist who ever worked on the book.
Personal Update
Several readers have contacted me privately to ask about my ongoing health concerns. Thank you for caring enough to ask, but I have to say, your timing was a bit off. My chronic skin condition had, until recently, been in less active state. That’s not to be mistaken for remission, but at least I was fighting it to a draw. Over the last week, it’s returned with a vengeance. The doctors would like to have a look at me and poke around at whatever bits they haven’t yet poked, or perhaps to re-poke some of them that they enjoyed poking. I’m sure I’ll have less blood in me this time tomorrow than I currently do, so I’ll be a lightweight drinker for the next forty eight hours or so. Other than my skin problem, things are fairly good. I’ve put on a few pounds, which I’ll blame on the medication and the doctor will call me a dirty liar. That’s to be expected. My body feels good, my moods have been fantastic, and my brain feels like it’s firing on cylinders it didn’t even know it had. I’m hope I’ll have some good news to post tomorrow regarding the skin thing, but experience has taught me that this battle is going to be one of, if not attrition, than at the very least long, drawn-out campaigns rather than swift, decisive actions. I have hope, yes, but not a great deal of expectations. I’ll keep you all posted. -RK I posted this as a metaphor for red, bumpy skin. Pro tip: Do not do an image search for “red bumps.” Trust me on this.
Brief Hugo voting update
I finally finished all of the required reading and cast my ballot. Although I said I would post my choices here, I’ve decided not to do that on account of the ballot being of the ranked-preference sort as opposed to a single choice in each category. This was my first vote, so I was a little unclear on how it all worked, but a long list of preferences makes for a lousy post. Instead, I’ll just note a few general impressions: 1) The reading was eye-opening and I wound up voting for some things that weren’t previously on my radar. No matter how objective one tries to be, preconceptions are a real thing, but there were some outstanding entries in unexpected places this year (graphic novels, I’m looking at you. Ms. Marvel was a revelation to me.) 2) The Sasquan folks were quite friendly and helpful in getting me set up. I’m a newbie at this and getting from point A (interest in voting) to point Z (having the ballot up on my screen) was not without a little difficulty. The folks at Sasquan provided swift and accurate help when I needed it. 3) If you’re going to submit a slate and the entire slate wins nominations, please, for the love of all that is good and right, try to make sure there’s at least one worthy nominee in that slate. I dislike the tactic of slate nominations, but if there are good candidates on the slate, I won’t vote against them out of spite. Slate-nominating mediocre material, on the other hand, lies somewhere between trolling and vandalism. I had no problem listing “No Award” first in instances where there were no worthy candidates. If you’ve never participated before, I cannot recommend it highly enough. The price of entry is a little steep, but the reading packet is more than worth the price. -RK