Month: September 2017

Worldbuilding with Schiller

On writing and music…

The very first compact disc I ever bought was Schiller’s Voyage, the Anglophone market vesion of his album Weltreise.  I would listen to that album on my Christmas Sanyo portable CD player over and over again, savoring each song like a jawbreaker candy, tonguing and hearing through layer after layer.  With a yard-sale VHS recorder camera, I tried to make videos of the farmland vistas and low mountains that spread out in a beautiful rippling patchwork behind our exurban neighborhood to accompany the music.  I was entranced by that Trance album to where I could ascend in my imagination into these worlds and places that I had never, as a boy in Virginia, been even remotely near.

I sometimes wonder if it was fate that I found that CD, colored circles and round-edged jewel case, at the record store near the library my mother always took us to.  There had always been music to listen to on the radio, and my parents had vinyl and cassettes of all sorts of music.  But this was my first album, that I paid for and owned.  I still vividly remember putting on the ungainly large sampling headphones from the receiver at the store and jumping through the beginnings of several tracks, to “try before I bought” well before the mp3 and streaming brought music down to the status of a utility.

Since that time, more than a decade ago, I have listened to that album so many times as to have lost count only a few months into having it.  The lesson it taught me, to use music as a tool to nudge my mind, has become an ever important part of my life of the mind.  I may not be a great writer, pouring out captivating prose and poetry as quickly as a bird molts off great gouts of shimmering feathers only to grow them anew.  But I have harnessed that discovery to at least make attempts at capturing some of the stories and films that I have concocted in my head on paper and even, tentatively, on video.

Similar to finding the perfect runner’s high I have found that if you need to write particular sorts of things, the right soundtrack or music is marvelously powerful.  When I was in middle and high school, I would put on a lot of new agey-type music to work on the grand fantasy novel I had begun without much plan, relying instead on imagery and setting to carry a plot of only the vaguest dimensions atop.  I think that remains one of my greatest problems is that more than wanting to tell stories I want to take people on journeys like a helicopter pilot through my imagination, shouting out the names of fantastic places and buzzing the snowy heights of mountains in worlds without end.  What happens in those worlds is, to me, unfortunately secondary to their simple existence to be mapped, explored, named, and elucidated.

One of my goals while I have free time here in Qatar has been to work on the mechanics of writing more of that sort of detail – the things that readers are really looking for, as they are not filmgoers looking to watch a travel documentary about a made-up country, but require characters, deeds, and a comprehensible story arc.  To be sure, there are plenty of literary creations that have very little in the way of such things – Wittgenstein’s Mistress is one, for a particularly erudite example (and one I found by way of a David Foster Wallace biography.)  I am not, however, attempting to write about philosophical constructs wrapped in prose-poetry.

To sum up this somewhat meandering blog entry, I have found that using music ccan allow you to find the right words to capture a given place or time, whether you are attempting to pin down a dreamlike otherworld or to write a piece grounded firmly in the last several hundred years of history.  Music, perhaps uniquely among the aesthetic creations of humanity, can open waking gateways into the part of the brain that dreams without the cumbersome need for sleep. Music can send you soaring across landscapes that have no earthly counterpart for good or ill, and for me that first real musical takeoff came from Schiller (named, appropriately, for the German Romantic poet.)

Outsider Inside Out

On Perdido Street Station and the flow of reading…

For anyone who has read China Miéville’s fiction, it can almost feel like a cliché to talk about his portrayal of the outsider and those outside of “polite society.”  It is in many ways a mandatory manifestation of his personal politics, to the point that it becomes a meta-theme among his collected works, whatever their subject matter.  In his visions of strange and often horror-inducing things, the only thing that can redeem someone is their lack of participation in any part of ordinary society.  Their outsider status is like a step down the path towards a kind of half-possible redemption.

The idea of the outsider from “polite society” is, of course, a staple in most speculative fiction.  It is a trope that echoes through fantasy, with nearly every protagonist somehow cut off from the approval and embrace of the people, institutions, and world around them in some form or fashion.  Where that drives the plot is, of course, where variation runs the gamut.  Some stories feature the quest to create normality and to find a place in the world – this is particularly a trope of bildungsroman/coming-of-age stories.  Others rely on the outsider status as a kind of savior figure requirement – one could even argue that this is a feature of religious belief in the idea of Jesus’ being a prophet in his own town that could never be appreciated by it, Gautama Buddha becoming a castaway from his royal birthplace, or the idea of Mohammed wandering off into the desert, a failed merchant of Mecca, and returning wild-eyed and filled with bloodlust to build an empire out of the synergy of Abrahamic and traditional South Arabian religious and cultural products.

I find myself often identifying with this outsider trope, to the degree that when I come across a protagonist like, say, Quentin Coldwater of The Magicians I am initially unsure if I can sympathize enough with him to inveigle myself into his upbringing among the comfortable world of elite northeastern education and tradition.  But even he, despite his social and intellectual success, is inevitably cast as an outsider almost unto himself.  Reconciling that feeling of alienation becomes critical to developing characters and plots, whether revolutionary or reactionary in their natures.

Something that differentiates authors of speculative fiction especially is their portrayal of an understanding of what it feels like to be an outsider, the longing for approval and acceptance, the bitter embrace of the self for what it is, or the redemptive reconciliation of finding a place in the world.  I posit that this most often comes from the way that authors often picture themselves – not integral to their worlds, but rather in many ways exiles from whatever notion of normality pervades the times and places they inhabit.  What authors, then, do differently is instead of simply rebelling, destroying, reforming, or effecting control and change, is to tell stories that soothe that desire through the intellectual comfort of words.  Most fantasy offers at least a glimmer of hope, even Miéville’s dark and largely unrelenting works designed to unsettle and evoke a desire to fix a broken system.

Chasing those glimmers of hope has been a passion of mine as a reader since I was very small.  At this point, thirty-one years into my life, I read almost compulsively.  When I stop reading and have to consider my own place within the world and “the system” and nearly any sociopolitical landscape, I find that I am dissatisfied and frustrated by the way that no matter what frame I choose to look through, I can never quite climb through that frame and find a pattern of life that feels gratifying and meaningful.  I know I am not alone in that sense.

So, instead, like the gamblers in Addiction by Design, I seek out the flow-state of speed-reading, where the words blur together into images like Muybridge kinetic photograpy spun at a rate that blurs the individual shots too much to be clear, but enough to be discernable.  I devour books, slide across the lumpy lines of letters like a slug escaping the sun of social disavowal and a sense of near-constant dislocation from my surroundings.  This flow state of reading and consuming books instead of merely reading them slowly and thoughtfully has been both rewarding and disturbing by turns.  Sometimes it leads me to miss details and mis-remember things from non-fiction or fiction alike.  Other times it means that I can comprehend the feelings and intentions of the works more acutely than if I were to read out loud, approaching each word as a separate symbol demanding detailed decoding.  I often wonder what it feels like for other people to read books, or to read my own words, and I know that that gets into ideas of qualia and perception and individuality, and passes out of the realm of vocabulary and precise words and into art, poetry, and empathy.

What has always driven me to imagine and create things is a desire to share that way that I experience things like music, good writing, and ideas with other people.  I want to show them the good parts of my mind and explore the wild vistas of my dreams and imaginings.  On the one hand, it feels quite selfish. On the other, it feels very generous.  It underlies a lot of the way that I spend days overanalyzing how others interact with me, or I with them, in hopes that I have somehow managed to find common ground with their own perspective or experience.

I was speaking with one of my coworkers today about this whole topic.  I brought up how I experience film and how it generates, mysteriously, this kind of heightened sensation of the world around me from sounds to textures to the edges of objects.  My mind becomes a cinemtographer of reality for a few minutes or hours, and I enjoy reality much more than when I am slogging through an ordinary day of work or listless boredom on a day off.  Sometimes good books, read intensely, can generate that same heightened perception, and I imagine that it has to do with sets of neurotransmitters that people attempt to harness through illicit drug use.  But what frustrated me was that I had a very limited ability to explain the sensation in a way that made sense to him through shared experience, and he did not find that he had ever experienced that sensation himself, at least in a way that lined up with my choices of words to describe it.  All the more reason to keep writing, I suppose, to reifne my ability to express things that seem at first blush to be inexpressible and weird, outsider thoughts from an outsider to every community he has moved amidst.

Embark and Disembark

On the movements of the crowd…

Watching how people behave when boarding and offloading from a bus set off the spark of an idea in my mind today.  It is a mundane moment, and it repeats every moment around the world on trains, planes, buses, trolleys, boats, and nearly any other mass transportation system invented thus far.  That sort of moment is very popular, creatively.  Filmmakers use it to highlight transitions, authors use it to portrary a fluid, chaotic situation for characters to disappear into – the imagery of seas and schools of fish, herds and flocks seems to lurk verbally around the corner, if not leaping before your eyes as a reader or critic.

What struck me, tonight, looking at the people as they milled about towards their various destinations, was how much you can learn about a person at such a moment.  Perhaps it is not something that others find noteworthy – I tend to get hung up on details that should pass withouth much comment. The part that was most intriguing was the way that some people stayed in a clump of friends, even if they did not board all together at the start; others were coupled with the person they shared a seat with, planned or unplanned; most others zipped off like extras on the set of a movie that called for extra-busy pedestrians with no particular destination.

I think that part of the reason why the motif of a milling crowd is so powerful is, at least on some level, the fact that it represents people who were previously “aligned.”  In the case of bus riders or those on a train, they are literally lined up in one direction, or bands of a particular direction, as though they were human representations of magnetic forces all being pulled in the same direction. This is as true for prehistoric processions and caravans of people as it is for riders on a sleek bullet train.  At the moment of embarkation, though, those same people were individuals, chaotic, moving around with the potential to be any sort of crowd or to remain an aggregate of individuals and small groups. Upon disembarkation, that orderly line of people and their things returns to a state of near infinite potential.

Out of those moments of potential can come a dramatic reunion, a chance encounter, a fateful meeting.  A crowd can flee a disaster, or become unwitting pawns of viral marketers.  Few other circumstances besides transportation and mass, synchronized movements can offer quite that same opportunity for a writer, filmmaker, or anyone who finds themselves desiring of orchestrating human interactions. Maybe on the next time that you are able to take a moment getting in or on, out or off of a line of people in transit, look at the hundreds of stories all unfolding about you and enjoy the complexity of our lives.

Allelopathy

On the violence of the world of plants…

I did not have a specific idea in mind today to really discuss in this blog entry, but a conversation with a friend sparked the topic of allelopathy.  Many people have this concept of plants and their world as a peaceable kingdom, the idea of gardens and wild paradises of trees and ferns and so on, coexisting side-by-side. But more and more as botanists and other researchers look into how plants pass their time, it turns out that the vegetable world is full of chemical warfare, prisoner’s dilemma defections, clone armies, and chemical communications subtle and complex.

There are also amazing examples of plants using fungi and fungi using plants to communicate amongst each other.  Underground, everyone can hear you scream.  That smell of fresh-cut grass that many people find to be a trigger for happy nostalgia and the memory of sumer evenings? It is actually a distress call for grass to summon a species of predatory wasp.  Even things like placid kelp forests are full of leafy “violence” as clusters of algae compete for light and nutrients and fend off hungry animals.  It is about time for this author to hit the hay, but I thought a linkfest about the world of plants might provide an interesting piece of reading for you all in lieu of a more thoughtful, personal post.

Victory Not Vengeance

On post-apocalyptic fantasies…

In college, I lived in Pittsburgh. You may know Pittsburgh from being the setting (or at least location) for such films as The Mothman Prophecies, Dogma, Wonder Boys, Smart People, Dawn of the Dead, and The Road.  In the early 2000’s, the “zombie” fad was in full strength. Well before The Walking Dead captivated people’s TV screens and sometimes even their imaginations, my friends and I would always talk about what it would be like to survive in the “post-apocalypse.”  That theme remains immensely popular today, but the idea of it, to me, is very old indeed.

In tonight’s blog entry, I want to explore both the personal ways in which my friends and I would fantasize about that whole milieu, and about why such imagery is perennial in Western, especially American, culture.

Well before I actually arrived at college, it was always a motif in playing pretend while I was kid. My little sister and our friends would imagine that we were children taken from our families, forced to work as test subjects and researchers for big corporations, or a vaguely realized ‘government.’ It was a life and death situation, rife with melodramatic deaths and sneaking through pillow-forts and bed-sheet mazes in the basement to find freedom at the back door to the basement. But outside was not a return to home and family, so much as another game in which we had to survive on our own with no place particularly welcoming to hide.

Out in the woods, we would play as though we had to rebuild our own tiny society, scavenging for food, constructing shelters in trees, building retaining ponds for fish in creeks that barely even supported minnows.  From a mash-up of The Boxcar Children, the flashback scenes in The Pretender, Joan Aiken’s Is Underground, and a whole host of British literature about children in the throes of the Industrial Revolution. What all of our games had in common was either a lost family, a dead family, or a kind of childhood ex nihilo. You may make whatever judgments you wish as a reader, but I had a truly benign childhood compared to most, even in the United States. These were all the dark products of young imagination, not a manifestation of some greater trauma we were all trying to escape.

So moving forward through high school, where the games we played varied much more widely, until I got to college in a city that had declined from a roaring furnace of one million people to a sprawling masonry-and-metal maze hosting 250,000 remaining souls.  It is easy to imagine the world ending in a city like Pittsburgh in 2004.  The crowd of friends I found myself aggregated into was a raucous bunch. We deemed ourselves a tribe, and even self-consciously created rituals to welcome new people like wearing face paints to lunches and exploring the Cathedral of Learning from its cyclopean column bases to its openwork stone balconies and rooftops, attained by ducking under cracked-open windows.

One thing that we would talk about, a theme revisited like a tongue to a loose tooth, was the idea of our band of students surviving in a Pittsburgh truly devastated and without the niceties of free bus fare, electricity, or hot food. Sometimes it was a zombie apocalypse, sometimes it was aliens, sometimes the world just up and had ended leaving us behind as a remnant, having to do battle with other survivors and, again, found our own society out of the re-pounded rubble.  In every case, we imagined that not everyone we knew would have made it, and we would future-tense mourn our losses before moving on to deciding how to get clean water and which pocket valleys offered the best place to set up a bivouac that could eventually become a settlement.

I think what was most striking about all of these worlds after civilisational collapse was that we were not hoping to become barbarians, able to live like Lost Boys or Amazons, but rather an intense desire to develop order after a fashion – as much playing house as playing savages.  We talked about what knowledge we would have to preserve, and what music we would want to find some way of playing as the ‘soundtrack’ to our survival.

I think that is one of the conceits that underlies any fantasy of the world-after-the-end. It is not, in point of fact, the end of the world.  But rather than go into a long semantic digression about the finer points of the term “post-apocalypse” or “end of the world” I wil leave it as a general term that I think we can agree means nearly all of humanity have been wiped out, possibly even a great deal of our infrastructure as well.

Another critical factor is the idea that, despite statistics, our general nerdiness, and overall historical examples of the fall of civilizations, we would, naturally, have survived in a more or less intact group.  The fantasy was to essentially escape the larger constrictive world of post-industrial civilization by surviving its sudden and extensive demise. One of the things I find noteworthy about the whole idea is that in every single one of these games, imaginary discussions, or fantasies, we were all acutely aware of just how terrible things could very well become. There was not an idea that we would be plucky survivors who just happen across whatever we would need like characters in a scripted television show – the plans always included sometimes agonizingly detailed accounts of how we would have to hunt and preserve meat, purify water, and take up much of our days more or less functioning as highly-educated hunter-gatherers. The Fight Club idea that “when you look down, you’ll see tiny figures pounding corn, laying strips of venison on the empty car pool lane of some abandoned superhighway.”

In scenarios where some of civilization survived, that was always the goal – to get back to the comfort zone, even if that “comfort zone” was more Book of Eli or Mad Max than the megacities of Judge Dredd or the glittering Shanghai of Code 46.  There was still, at least, an attempt at creating meaning for our lives that felt impenetrably purposeless in their ease.

You can see wider echoes of these specific examples in the United States. It makes sense for a society that was founded on the idea of a constant frontier to have sociocultural fantasies of having to yet again re-conquer “wilderness.” I am not writing here to hash out arguments about the ethics of Manifest Destiny or weep tears for the injustices of European colonialism, but rather want to explore the imagined and idealized concept of taming wilderness with few or no people to oppose.  European stories are ones of ancient nations pitted against each other with roots that can be measured back before there was a solid idea of just how far into the ground roots could extend, conceptually.  American stories, speaking generally, are about reaching for the unknown and mastering frontiers. I am not writing here for nuance, so humor this discussion.

Joseph Tainter, in his work The Collapse of Complex Societies, analyses how many cultures change rapidly in the face of existential challenges, some becoming more and more complex and others by atomizing into smaller, less intricate societal subgroupings.  It is not an all-encompassing theory of history, but it does provide a useful framing for considering “post-apocalyptic” fantasies.  In short, the fantasy is that being the members of the society to survive an external event that destroys the “system” beyond the control of your band of friends or family, you now are not mere puppets to a vast iterated chain of beings well beyond your Dunbar’s number, but instead can stop feeling outcast and uncertain how to fit in when you do not exactly conform to societal norms or expectations.  It is a more merciful fantasy than the murderous drive of a revolutionary or an activist who demands conformity to their ideal world, in that as a fantasy, you yourself are not the agent of mass deaths and destruction.

I will return to this idea at some later point in this blog, as it is a recurring theme in both my personal writing and in popular culture of the past fifty years, but I will close this entry with a word-picture.  We imagined ourselves striding along Fifth Avenue armed to the teeth, carrying what we needed to go take over and hold the potential fortresses of European-style churches and their walled yards around the city of Pittsburgh.  The tame trees of Forbes bolted, the Phipps Conservatory a riot of desperate hothouse flowers straining to make it through one more summer, and the architecture school at Carnegie Mellon a museum of lost technological construction engineering and futuristic imagination. But we were free.

Bookworm Weekend

On finishing several books…

Over the past few days I have had some work, and also been allowed some time off for the US celebration of Labor Day.  While I did plenty of other things, I was most successful at finishing a number of books I have been either devouring or slogging through piecemeal over the past few months.

The first book, which read extremely fast for being a doorstopper in physical hardcover volume, was The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O. I enjoyed it immensely, and it is full of details that you only catch if you are an inveterate history, scifi, and language geek such as myself.  Neal Stephenson and co-author Nicole Galland. The overall tone is upbeat and almost cheery throughout, even when you know that something dire is about to happen. The book is written in a very self-aware multi-threaded style, and the authors use everything from jotted memos to skaldic verse to convey a surprisingly coherent narrative.  I would enjoy reading a follow-up volume if they do choose to continue the collaborative project. Stephenson and Galland, I did not know until reading a review of the book, had previously worked together on the Mongoliad hypertextual multimedia project.

The next book that I finished was Markman Ellis’ The Coffee-house, a History, which I first began to read last year as part of the research for my MA capstone project. The book was engaging, and covered an extensive range of primarily English history, seen through the lens of the social and economic roles of coffee and coffeehouses in both practical and more esoteric cultural terms.  Ellis’ coverage of the twentieth century veers into a very different sort of tone, but still conveys a great deal of interesting information.  Apparently before Starbucks, the British experienced a sort of non-centralized “franchise” coffeehouse phenomenon that ran alongside and interacted with the Mod period of the Avengers and the Swinging Sixties. But the majority of the book covers the era of the Enlightenment and Early Modern period, with figures any historian or even popular history reader will readily recognize.

Additionally I finished Addiction by Design, as I mentioned earlier.  I still think that in many ways that has been one of the more informative works I have read in a while, as it gives insight into the industrial scale of emotional manipulation. The gambling industry more or less seems to have heard secondhand accounts of the worst science folklore of Skinner boxes and said “hold my beer…”  But in other ways it touches quite strongly on the larger underlying social and psychological roots of addiction, habituation, and how risk-taking and seemingly wasting time and losing control can somehow satisfy the needs of restless people in broken communities for control over other areas of their life.

Not on the list of completed books, but I began reading Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom, which is a very well-written overview of the Taiping Revolution/Revolt/Rebellion that ran almost concurrent with the US Civil War. It is an absolutely fascinating look into Chinese civilization at a crossroads, well before the true dissolution of the Qing dynasty, but very much a vast, seething mass of humans with a few noteworthy figures suddenly slamming into the pressure cooking confines of expanding Western imperialism (in a very literal sense, not the modern intellectual catch-all the term has become.)  The Taiping as a cultural movement are themselves a fascinating group – part cult that would have almost fit in with the Second Great Awakening in the US, part very practical sociopolitical revolutionary party bent on taking China back from Manchu domination. I look forward to reading further into the book, which complements books on the Opium Wars and on general Chinese history that I have previously read.

 

Parchment Paper

On writing implements and writing impediments…

I bought a sheaf of parchment paper online, so I could write letters to my gramma on something more aesthetically pleasing and larger than postcards of the Corniche. This week has been a mix of blessings and curses, and beyond either class of events, largely uneventful in total. I am struck often by the way that I have notebooks of every size and description, the exact sort of rolling ball pens I most favor, and not one but four computers available even in my living space. One cheap, blue plastic-cover spiral notebook lies down beside my bed to catch slippery ideas about technologies, story plots, or odd thoughts – some nights I even end up jotting down the occasional poem.

But with all of those implements, I nonetheless find myself not writing when I feel I ought to be writing with alarming frequency. It is fairly common wisdom that if you are passionate about something, when you are doing it, making it, performing it, whatever verb you employ, you can lose track of time and have little effort needed to work hard and diligently at whatever task your passion requires. So the reluctance that I have towards writing on developing stories seems, in my low-rent self-psychoanalysis, to suggest that I do not possess sufficient passion towards writing.

What I do enjoy, however, is creating complex and detailed images, experiences, and even playing out whole scenes of characters – yet screenplays, too, hold little appeal to me as an output for creative expression. Where I have always felt happiest and most passionate is creating “things” in front of a video camera, composing scenes, imagining long and elaborate sequences of images that are not always furthering a conventional narrative. I have found that I write more or less out of frustration that the medium I find most comfortable is so impenetrably expensive and high-input, but the ideas will not leave me alone.

One attempt I made, briefly, to rectify my lack of skills with animation of any sort (to get around the immense capital costs of even amateur filmmaking) was to learn 3D modelling with blender. It is a powerful open-source tool for 3D modelling, but it also even less friendly to a non-obsessive than crafting film-like scenes with prose or poetry.

I realize that this entry sounds very much like whining, “oh, woe is me, I don’t have a film studio at my beck and call.” I am acutely aware of the incredible phenomenon that is Primer and several other films that reached an incredible level of technical and storytelling quality on budgets accessible even to a petit bourgeois such as myself. Perhaps, when I have “made my fortune” here in the Gulf, I can go out on a financial and personal limb and devote a couple of years to attempting to manifest my imaginings in video form. In the meantime, I am still trying to capture some ideas and imagery using my limited means of language and fiction-writing experience.