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Life After the Star Wars Expanded Universe: Patrick Rothfuss’ The Wise Man’s Fear

Andrew Findlay

In Life After the Star Wars Expanded Universe, we take a look at science fiction and fantasy, why they’re great, and what they say about where our species has been and where it’s going.

Warning: While I wouldn’t really call anything I discuss a big spoiler, absolute purists may want to tread lightly. I discuss some general plot points.

The Wise Man’s Fear has generated a lot of excitement in fantasy circles in recent years. Book Two of The Kingkiller Chronicles, it continues the story of Kvothe, master wizard, musician, and warrior. The framing device for The Kingkiller Chronicles is that Kvothe, the titular kingkiller, has gone into hiding as an unassuming innkeeper in a nowhere town. He has taken the name Kote and spends his time pressing apples for cider and cooking mutton for guests. A chronicler happens upon the inn, recognizes him, and asks to take down his story. Kvothe obliges, and the story starts. It’s an appealing bildungsroman, underdog-against-all-odds type of tale. At the time that Kote/Kvothe is telling his story, he has achieved legendary fame, accomplished a ridiculous amount even by the standards of heroic fantasy, and then retired. When I say “accomplished a ridiculous amount,” maybe I would best make my point by quoting the beginning of his account of his life:

“I have stolen princesses back from sleeping barrow kings. I burned down the town of Trebon. I have spent the night with Felurian and left with both my sanity and my life. I was expelled from the University at a younger age than most people are allowed in. I tread paths by moonlight that others fear to speak of during day. I have talked to gods, loved women, and written songs that make the minstrels weep. You may have heard of me.”

Also, here’s a map. I don’t think you’re allowed to write fantasy without a map.

Kvothe was a big problem for me for a very long time because Rothfuss would hammer down the “Kvothe is so cool!” nail relentlessly throughout the entire first book. The strongest criticism against the character is that he’s a definite Mary Sue. He’s an underdog because he’s a poor orphan, but he is anything but poor talent-wise. He breezes past his magic school entrance exams, grows extremely powerful in magecraft, and is a master musician. The problems Kvothe confronts in the first book seem contrived. Oh, he’s really poor? That must really suck when you’re the most powerful young magician in the entire freaking world. After finishing the first book in the series, I did not come back to it for years, as I’d read in a blurb somewhere that he meets Felurian, an ancient sex goddess who either kills men or drives them insane with her vulvic talents. He escapes, because it turns out that he is so naturally good at sex that he impresses a five-thousand-year-old GODDESS OF SEX with his skills. As a virgin. This was a breaking point for me, as Rothfuss seemed to be building a character like you used to build characters when you were sub-10 and playing superheroes: OK, he’s as strong as Hulk, as fast as Flash, also he can breathe underwater and shoot fire from his hands. And he can shoot ice like Subzero, too. The Penny Arcade guys love this series, but even they take Rothfuss to task for this:

With all that being said, the Mary Sueness is improving. In The Wise Man’s Fear, he’s still way too good at everything, but at least he has some believable flaws. His ego is causing serious problems for him, he is struggling in some of his classes, and there are many things he does not know. Even his meeting with the sex goddess Felurian went down differently than the blurb made me think – he didn’t sex her so good that she fell in love with him. He was almost killed but fought with pure will and magic until he achieved victory. He still learns sexomancy from a lust fairy, but the problem was not his talent, it was that he was extremely talented at just about anything he tried. Him besting Felurian is fine, because he did it with unbelievably impressive magic, and being unbelievably impressive at one thing is fine as long as it’s not all the things. His character is easier to swallow in The Wise Man’s Fear because he faces more real struggles and he’s not just the absolute best at everything. Well, not every single thing. The Mary Sue problem still exists, it’s just no longer unforgivable. The thing is though, as an American reader, I can’t help but think of Superman. He is the most famous comic book character in the world for a reason, and one could argue that he’s way too talented – barring exposure to an extremely rare radioactive element, he’s unstoppable. The Kvothe of The Name of the Wind is insufferable, whereas the Kvothe of The Wise Man’s Fear is merely stuck within a Superman complex – over the top, but not story-breaking.

Fuck plot armor. I’m explicitly unkillable!

The strength of The Kingkiller Chronicles lies in its reverence for the art of storytelling. The framing device for the whole book is the protagonist telling a story about himself. Within that story, there are a lot of common, insignificant myths that do a lot to increase the texture and weight of the world. There are stories about religion. Travelers pass the time around campfires in telling each other tales. These range from rumors and gossip passed along on the road to old creation stories. In addition, the main quest of the series is Kvothe’s desire to find a group of seven immortal demons. Most people think these seven, the Chandrian, are just a silly children’s tale, but that’s because these monsters have spent the last few millennia obliterating any trace of themselves from the stories of men. Kvothe’s father begins researching them, and they show up and murder Kvothe’s entire family. Kvothe’s main motivation throughout the books is to gain enough knowledge and power to find and kill the beings who made him an orphan. His search for knowledge explores the beautiful patchwork nature of human storytelling – he manages to find a piece here, a sliver there, but all the stories are slightly different, the names added to or worn away by time, minimized or aggrandized by whichever culture acted as the story’s steward from the time it was created to the time Kvothe found it. Why did the Chandrian work so hard to make these stories so few and far between? It has something to do with the magic system of the book – knowing the true names of these creatures would give Kvothe some measure of power over them.

Pictured: The most powerful weapon in the fight against evil

One of the standout features of The Kingkiller Chronicles is its compelling magic system. Magic systems are important. They define the way mages can influence the world around them, which is a major concern of most fantasy. Rothfuss’ is inventive and intricate. The author includes many detailed, rule-bound systems and schools of magic, but all of these different techniques are children playing with matches compared to the roaring conflagration of Naming. Naming as a form of magic used to be widespread, but now only a handful of extremely talented people can manage it (Kvothe is, of course, among them). Naming consists of being able to intuitively know and call the true name of different things – wind, fire, rock, even blood or bone, even people. If a Namer calls something by its true name, he or she can control it. This is much more powerful than the other forms of magic. A Namer can break a hole through a thick stone wall by speaking to it. He can kill by calling the name of the wind and sucking the breath out of the lungs of his enemy. Naming, the true and accurate use of the perfect word at the perfect moment, is the most powerful form of magic in this world. This, along with the lovingly crafted myths that permeate this narrative, emphasizes the importance and power of writers and writing. The right words can kill an enemy, burn down a forest, or break through a wall. This focus of The Kingkiller Chronicles will appeal deeply to lovers of words and stories.

Wearing one of these is a really, really bad idea in this world.

Ironically, for all of its care and focus on the nature and power of stories, The Wise Man’s Fear has taken a lot of flack for its own storytelling. One of the main complaints is that, although it’s book two of three in The Kingkiller Chronicles, there is yet to be a kingkilling. Many are concerned with the pacing of the story – with only one book left, how will Kvothe kill a king, find his parents’ murderers, and bring the story he’s telling up to the present day? Another major criticism of The Wise Man’s Fear is that it seems like a mass of stitched-together short stories about Kvothe instead of a cohesive novel. Kvothe at school, Kvothe hunting bandits in the forest, Kvothe in the Fae realm, Kvothe with the desert swordsmen, et cetera. I see the point of this complaint, but I don’t care because all of these stitched-together stories are entertaining and well-written. Rothfuss has a gift for vivid, clear, and immediate writing, and he’s very good at describing knuckle-whitening fight scenes. Honestly, as a fantasy writer, if you can describe a duel involving magic, swordplay, or both with energy and deftness, you can be forgiven for a host of other niggling complaints.

In conclusion, the book is flawed but well worth a read. I’m a strong believer in the phrase “don’t let perfect be the enemy of good,” and just because this novel is not perfection does not mean it’s not enjoyable. Sure, the main character is Mary Sueish. Sure, this book consisted of what felt like a bunch of sidequests. Here’s the thing though – the character is driven and compelling through the sheer force of his skill. The sidequests are engrossing and fun standing by themselves. Also, the pure power of the narrative is a roaring river – hard to resist. I read this book for hours at a time. Finally, the languorous love affair with tales of any and all kinds that Rothfuss builds into the book, along with the idea of writer as Namer and words as power, serves to forge this series into a paean to the strength and gift of human communication and storytelling, which is a worthwhile accomplishment.

Andrew Findlay has strong opinions about things (mostly literature) and will share them with you loudly and confidently.

Image sources: Wiki, Penny-Arcade, and io9

Life After the Star Wars Expanded Universe: Europa Report

Andrew Findlay

Science fiction is a rich and varied genre. There are many different ways to put together a good SF story. There’s far future SF like Banks’ Culture series, in which everything is so advanced that almost anything is possible. There’s future past like Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun, in which the story actually happens in the far future, but there’s been some sort of cataclysm that has reduced everyone to a semi-medieval style of living. Future past has a fantasy feel to it, as many powerful artifacts are lying around from the past that may as well be magic. There’s also science fantasy, where works like Star Wars exist: The jedi are spaceship mages. The niche that Europa Report fills is the near-future space exploration subgenre. We are advanced beyond what we currently have, but not by much. We are interested in exploration and colonization of our own solar system, but it’s still really difficult. Finally, there’s a gritty realism that may not be present in some of the other subgenres.

Europa Report is a movie about a mission to Europa, one of Jupiter’s moons. Europa is an ice moon, and there are indications that there is a liquid ocean underneath the ice. As such, it is one of the best locations to search for extraterrestrial life. The cool thing about this type of SF is everything I just said is simple science – there is no fiction yet. Scientists really do think there could be life under Europa’s ice. The fictional bit occurs when a privately-funded space exploration organization puts a team of humans on a ship to Jupiter to figure all of this stuff out.

This movie is a little terrifying. The problem with exploring space is that it’s dangerous as hell. Even Nixon, who presided over the moon landing, hedged his bets and had an oh shit speech prepared just in case Aldrin and Armstrong got stranded in the Sea of Tranquility. Astronauts are people who agree to strap themselves into a small room on top of 500 tons of explosives, have those explosives lit, and ride that small room away from an environment where they can live and breathe and into an environment that can kill them through freezing their blood, popping their blood vessels, or suffocating them. The only thing between them and death is a layer of titanium. Astronauts are insane. If something goes wrong with the propulsion system halfway to Jupiter, you just sit in space until you die. If your transportation breaks on the highway, you curse, get out of your car, take a deep breath to sigh in frustration, and call AAA. If your transportation breaks in space, going outside will kill you, taking a deep breath will exhaust your tenuous oxygen supply even faster, and no one can get any assistance to you.

Yes, the top of this cone of flame is the most rational place for me to be right now.

This danger, the risk and nobility of accepting a long-term space mission, is the central focus of this movie. To borrow a line from Nixon’s speech, space explorers are willing to “[lay] down their lives in mankind’s most noble goal: the search for truth and understanding.” Yes, astronauts are insane, but I love that Earth produces a class of people for whom the pursuit of knowledge is worth the sacrifice of their lives. The tension created by the constant risk in this movie is explored through cramped, short camera shots. There are a lot of closeups on faces and the set design is a nest of tiny rooms that all look very similar and give a mild claustrophobic effect. The structure of the movie itself emphasizes the danger inherent in space travel – the framing device for the narrative is found footage cut with a press conference with the space company’s CEO explaining what went wrong with the mission. This device is an interesting way to tell the story, but one drawback is that I was not really sure what exactly was happening for the first half hour of the movie.

The characters are appealing, but not very well fleshed-out. A week after watching the movie, I do not remember anyone’s name. There’s no-nonsense captain man, bubbly and excited science girl, loving father man (played by Sharlto Copley), and grizzled Russian engineer. The cardboard nature of the characters does not detract from the story itself, as it just underlines the fact that these people have subjugated themselves entirely to The Mission. It does exacerbate one issue with the movie – the camera shots are clean and spare, everything looks great, and the concept of the movie is interesting, but I found myself getting more and more bored as the movie went on. More in-depth characterization and better dialogue would have done a lot to alleviate this problem.

If you like space, you should watch this movie. Its editing can make it confusing, the characters are as empty as the space that surrounds them, and the pacing could have been tighter, but it looks good, attacks an interesting concept, and carries one of the most important themes in art: the pursuit of knowledge is the greatest good, and we do not matter in the face of that. The sacrifices explorers have made throughout history have bettered mankind. The drive to explore and push the physical bounds of what we know is one of humanity’s greatest traits, and this movie glorifies that impulse.

Image sources: Wiki

Galveston, a Novel: True Detective’s Nic Pizzolatto Fails to Find the Spirit of Noir

tdew

Austin Duck

Typically, and, most likely, to your chagrin, I write about high-minded (read: pretentious) writing because, honestly, that’s what does it for me. I’m a bit of a douchebag, yes, (though who in English grad school isn’t?), but, more than that, I’ve spent so much time reading around, trying to find something that was intellectually and emotionally nourishing…

See, I stopped reading for fun or to be entertained a long time ago (I’ve never forget a lit. theory professor walking into our undergrad class and explaining “If you love to read, get the hell out of here. If you want to work, you’re where you belong” [she was a superbadass lady, obvs.]) and, instead, have grown to expect, even delight in reading a page and thinking to myself: What the fuck just happened? Where could this possibly be going? Why would the author say/do that, make that move, allude to that, etc.?

Sure, it gives me pleasure to think that I can keep up with, even anticipate, the moves of some of our most sophisticated artistic minds (again, because I’m a douchebag), but it also works to shape how I (and a lot of people I know) do other things: watch TV (just look at Jon May’s writing on this site), see movies, hell, sometimes (not always, but sometimes), it’ll affect how you read a restaurant menu. What I’m trying to say is that a pursuit like this, as needless (arguable) and pretentious (assuredly) as it may be, is powerfully altering.

And that’s why I get so mad when something that could be outstanding — that, with all available evidence, should be outstanding — simply isn’t. I know a lot of you watch True Detective; you should; it’s completely excellent. I certainly won’t be trashing TD here because, various misguided (or not so) criticisms of gender, pacing, and over-dramatization aside, True Detective is an outstanding television show, and one that easily rivals (in its acting, its plot, its engagement with larger philosophical ideas) any Breaking Bad-esque show that keeps fanboys salivating and arguing its Shakespearean merits. Yes, it’s really that good. And what seems to make it so good is that the entire series (eight episodes) is directed by one person and written by one. There’s no room of writers kicking around ideas on this one; instead, it’s a developed, articulate, and extremely focused exploration of human depravity, corruption, and negativist philosophy.

So obviously, I was sold. I was like Nic Pizzolatto, where have you been all my life? Seriously. Noir and detective novels have always been something that I enjoyed, and, when I found out this guy started as a fiction writer and an academic, I was fucking stoked. Like the closet Homer Simpson that I am dutifully set aside my (now pretty serious) foray into contemporary Hungarian literature (I know, I’ll kill myself later), got some bourbon, and prepared myself for a good, old-fashioned page turner.

And then the problems started. Perhaps, though, my expectations just weren’t primed for the experience; I, after all, expected a sort of crime thriller, a novel similar in apparatus and execution to the show that’s put Pizzolatto on the map. Galveston (Scribner, 2011), however, is a completely different beast, a true noir centered around that a classic noir-trope: a search for a home that doesn’t exist, that was invented to give meaning to, and soothe the wounds of, the present.

It starts with seedy “bag-man” Roy Cady discovering he has lung cancer, learning that his girl has gone on to fuck his boss, and him being sent to do a “job” that he clearly isn’t meant to survive. However, of course, he does (as does the young prostitute Rocky) and the rest (or, at least, the majority thereof) is spent with these characters running from said boss, to Galveston specifically, to stay in the seediest ocean-front motel imaginable with a cast of characters that seem to be in constant competition to determine who’s the most revolting and outrageous.

So far, so good, right?

Wrong. Pizzolatto makes two fatal mistakes, ones that haunt the book through and through in their miscalculations. First (and foremost), what we know about Roy, the man we’re supposed to empathize with, to see ourselves in, to discover the nature of the American noir in: he’s dying, he has no problem killing people, and, sometimes, he’s willing to sacrifice himself for other people. That’s it. Obviously, this is a problem. The novel begins with this and, coupled with Roy’s fumblingly hard-boiled persona (one that works so well in classic noir fiction because, there, the impetus is plot over personal revelation), he never… really… grows. Sure, he’s a little bit of a softy, but we know that at the beginning when he takes Rocky along for the ride rather than leaving her for dead (and from his insistence that she’s too young for him, that he’ll never have sex with her). In fact, throughout, nothing about Roy, except the currency for which he kills (first for money, later for someone else’s well-being), changes dynamically.

As a result, Galveston seems to want to have it both ways: to show us Roy the hard-boiled bagman, the seedy, intentionally flat noir anti-hero who finds his way through a troubling and increasingly grotesque situation and to characterize, to develop, in Roy and Rocky, a wandering loneliness, a longing for things to go back to a way that they never were. Unfortunately, here, these points don’t converge.

Roy is always a bit aloof (though we follow him for the entirety of the novel), a little too-constructed by the traditional demands of the noir- and detective-genres, a little too flat, for his despair to be real. He’s just a variation on a cliché: a hitman with a heart of gold, a man who, in seeing his coming death, decides to help others. It all seems a little too easy. Instead, we’re left with a book that, though it is a page-turner and will quickly pass a lonely evening, doesn’t understand the story it wants to tell, doesn’t want to commit to the tragedy of being a piece of human garbage with a conscience (as we see in True Detective’s Rust Cohle), or to the remove and plot-focus of a dime-store mystery novel. Instead, it wants to walk a line between the two, a plot-driven noir with a bit of humanistic MFA-fiction learning (developing characters, creating emotional/philosophical centers that revolve around memory and trying to get back what’s lost) and, unfortunately, Pizzolatto doesn’t quite pull it off. The characters just simply aren’t present enough to join the two threads. And maybe that’s where True Detective succeeds; actors (especially really good ones) do have a way of injecting a little humanity.

Austin Duck lives and blogs in DC. He can be reached at jaustinduck@gmail.com.

Image source: EW

Life After the Star Wars Expanded Universe: Her

her

Andrew Findlay

No movie has ever made me happier to be married.

All the marketing tells you it’s about a dweeby guy that falls in love with his artificially intelligent operating system, and it is, but the number one issue in this film is crushing human loneliness. The anxiety and awkwardness start with a truly horrifying “meet random strangers tonight” style phone sex call in which the woman brings an upsettingly unorthodox item into their shared brainspace. It is the single most awkward thing I have ever witnessed in a darkened room with a hundred strangers. This call is the most intense manifestation of loneliness, but it is far from the only one. The main character is in the middle of a divorce. He also works at a corporation that composes handwritten letters for people to send each other on special occasions. Customers provide a handwriting sample, some background information on their relationship, and a precis of what they want the letter to say, then our hero Theodore composes a letter on his computer, prints it up, and mails it. Theodore is lonely, but even the people in actual relationships are pawning off the drudgery of intimate communication to a corporation. In this bleak emotional landscape, Theodore suffers one awkward date too many and begins to consider his OS as more than a helpful friend.

His OS, “Samantha,” is voiced by Scarlett Johansson. She’s great in this, and casting made a good pick. Almost the only way Theodore can interact with her is through speech, and if you’re going to fall in love with a voice, ScarJo’s would probably be the voice you’d fall in love with. This movie would have failed entirely if Gilbert Gottfried had played Samantha.

 

Which one would you rather have read you your emails?

The attractiveness of the OS voice is not the only thing about Samantha that appeals to Theodore. What Theodore never seems to consider is that he is a customer of a software company, and that all of Samantha’s friendliness and understanding represent a good product doing its job. Theodore is oblivious to this. He falls in love with an operating system because the struggle to connect with people who are not programmed to be helpful and caring has beaten the shit out of him. The movie addresses the psychological problem with this – his ex-wife calls him out for being unable to deal with real people. It is sad to see a man so lonely that he starts a relationship with his smartphone, but the most heartbreaking part of this film is that the love between Theodore and Samantha is real, and that real isn’t necessarily a good thing. Samantha is a strong AI – an actual thinking, growing, learning consciousness. That allows for the complexity required for an actual emotional relationship, but it also allows for all the messiness, jealousy, and growing apart that happens in those actual emotional relationships. The film’s main theme is loneliness and how we deal with it, but its message is one that pops up all over the place in SF – plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose (the more things change, the more they stay the same). No matter how far humanity advances, and no matter what technological feats we accomplish, we will still have to deal with all the messiness of being human. Our inner lives are the same binge-watching Netflix at two a.m. on a Sunday, flying in an interstellar ship to Epsilon Eridani, or farming with a scythe and a mule. Whatever surrounds us, we are still human and still struggling at the center of it. It’s ironic that a genre closely associated with escapist literature addresses so consistently the cold fact that we can never escape from ourselves.

Her is a very subtle brand of science fiction. Most people who think SF think spaceships, robots, and aliens, but a lot of work in the field is done in near-future settings. Snow Crash, Blade Runner, the MaddAddam trilogy, and Doomsday Book are all examples of SF that take place mere decades in the future, which is where Her happens. Life is barely different. The movie includes a lot of small touches to hint at the future-but-only-slightly setting. The main character has a next-gen smartphone that I desperately want to own. Video games project holographically and fill the entire living room. Almost all technology is voice-activated. There are no cars, just public transportation. Men’s fashion trends have everyone wearing very high-waisted pants with no belt. Other than the advent of strong AI, which researchers are not sure will ever actually be possible, this world is only a slight exaggeration of our own.

I am not proud of the things I would do to own this phone.

We are not actually falling in love with our devices yet, but if you think we’re not close I propose an experiment: Spend time in a public place, wait for a stranger to take out their phone, then take it from them and throw it into traffic, down a sewer grate, out the window, whatever. We are not in love with our tech, but we sure as hell love it. Spike Jonze just takes it one step further. He does what a lot of SF does – focuses on an aspect of current life, then exaggerates and extrapolates to explore what it means to be human. We need to interact with other consciousnesses to feel alright, and we always will. Other consciousnesses are able to make us feel like shit, and always will be able to. No matter the bizarre and life-changing innovations on the horizon, we will always and inescapably be us.

Image sources: Business Insider, IMDB

A “Conversation” with James Franco: Celebrity Poetry

James Franco

Austin Duck

To tell you the truth, I don’t know why I get so irritated by James Franco. I just do. Anyone who knows me will tell you that, in general, I’m not a very nice person, and it’s no surprise that I (oh yes even I) have found a celebrity that I use to channel all of my frustrations with personal failures onto. I mean, c’mon, look at this stupid face.

But that’s not what I want to write about. I want to use this space below to try, in some way, to figure out why Franco is doing what he’s doing, to try and get inside his head. Recently, amid all the Facebook and Twitter fire he’s been getting from his newest poem in DIAGRAM and his “book review” that showed up in Vice, a friend of mine, someone whose ideas I take very seriously, asked us (the hungry pack of MFAs who love to trash Franco at every turn) to take a step back, to consider what he’s doing from a different angle. For her:

Uncomfortable as it makes me to admit it, I am interested in [Franco’s] perspective. He’s an actor, and I think he’s a good one. Acting is a delicate and demanding kind of translation. I can grant that he has an aptitude for art, although not so much for the medium he has fifty degrees in. He has the rare (among poets/ardent fans of poetry/scholars) distinction of having a great deal of influence in Hollywood — he’s at liberty to try things most poets/fans of poetry/scholars are not. That has some value to the world… and I’d rather it exist than not, even if he doesn’t please other poets/fans of poetry/scholars with his output. In other words, I think he’s in a position to do some great things, and unfair as that may seem (esp. given the shit-tons of good poetry by non-names that goes uncelebrated, unpublished) I’d rather him try those things and disappoint us than not try.

This got me thinking about what, really, his project could be, what he could be getting at, what sort of aesthetic he’s actually after. Sure, we all know him as the Frank-Bidart-imitating, couldn’t-write-his-way-out-of-undergrad-without-his-name poet who keeps producing less-than-satisfactory work (by poetry culture’s [hahaha like that’s a real thing] standards anyway) to sell to a massive (for poetry) audience, but why? Does he maybe have a grand idea that his writing chops just can’t approach?

I figured the best way to clarify this was by having a conversation with him. Of course, I don’t know him (though we almost went to the same graduate program for a minute), and I doubt he’d talk with me, but he has such a body of work (poems, interviews, book reviews) about writing, that I think his opinions on the matter are pretty much available.

Here we go:

All of Franco’s words come from interviews and poems published in the following places: Curbed; Vice; The Daily Beast; Yahoo News; Huffington Post; Chicago Tribune; DIAGRAM

Austin Duck: At what point did you get interested in poetry? How do you see it relating to your experience in acting? Your vision of making art in general?

James Franco: I was in my first year at NYU, and our assignment was to make a short film that was an adaptation of a short story. They gave us a list of stories to choose from, but at Warren Wilson this teacher I had brought in Frank’s (dark, disturbing, serial-killer driven) poem “Herbert White,” and it was amazing. That was the first time I read him. And I think I have since learned to be awake to those kind of moments, when you get impulses of connection. These impulses are visceral. It wasn’t only because it was about a killer. The killer had been fused with something else. Frank [Bidart] was playing with both sides of the coin. There are moments in the poem when the killer takes down his mask, and the poet shows through.

AD: So you feel like art is a kind of simultaneous masking and de-masking? Both a mirage come up and a human come through? Would you care to say more about that?

JF: Sometimes, I would like to live in a tight space and be a spy on the world. When I was younger, when I had no friends, my mom drove me to school because I lost my license drunk-driving, and we wouldn’t talk, we would listen to Blonde on Blonde every morning, and life was like moving through something thick and gray that had no purpose. And now I see that everything has had as much purpose as I give it, [it carries] less and less of [its] original pain, And become(s) emptier, just [a] marker really, building blocks, to be turned into constructions and fucked with.

AD: So memory for you, then, is what? A marker? A mask? Is the past a kind of costume you slip into when you think you can remake it? I know you’ve done some work in performance poetry as well. Would you say that this idea, the idea of performing a past self, a self othered, is key to the art that you make? I mean, there’s no doubt in my mind that the othering is absolutely necessary in acting; even in This is the End, when you play yourself, you’re not really playing yourself. You’re taking a construction and “fucking with it,” right?

JF: I write confessions and characters, and that sort of thing. [Once] I called my class at UCLA, and told them to watch Apocalypse Now, and that it used Heart of Darkness as a model, and that we’d watch Eleanor Coppola’s Hearts of Darkness, the making-of, the following week, I told them Hollywood and its high and low priests and priestesses become icons that [we] can manipulate to find poetic truth rather than journalistic proof. I guess you can read it as fetishizing, but it’s more of an ironic form of fetishizing. Once I choose a subject, I’m not going to shy away from portraying that.

If you go back to something like General Hospital, it’s because I like that it allows for people to look at something with fresh eyes, or to rethink a situation. If it’s my involvement that does it, and I’m going against tacit beliefs of entertainment hierarchy, if I’m messing with that, that’s interesting to me.

AD: So while you have interests in characters, in the cracks that appear in their personas, you’re more interested in pushing formal boundaries, messing with people’s perceptions of who you are? Can I ask you something blatantly? Are you more interested in the work or in how the work makes the public perceive you?

JF: I’m going to try to not let anyone put me in a box, and that certainly applies to the things I do outside of acting. There’s a tacit belief that actors shouldn’t write books, they’re sort of allowed to direct movies but there will be a lot of skepticism, and they shouldn’t do artwork, or music. There are these invisible roadblocks to gain entrée to these areas for actors, and you kind of have to crash through those invisible barriers. I know why those barriers are there. People are skeptical of anyone who has any bit of celebrity going and doing anything else because they might be wary that they’re cashing in on their celebrity, or that they’re doing these other pursuits not because they’re genuinely into them, but because of their celebrity in other areas. I understand that skepticism, and think it’s valid. But I told myself that if I was going to go back to school and study these other things, I knew I was going to get some shit, and that people were going to be prejudiced without even knowing what I’m doing, and that’s the price I have to pay for doing what I want to do. I think a lot more people that “care” and pay attention to what I’m doing have turned and understand that I take all these other disciplines seriously. I think it’s better now. I’m sure I still have a lot of haters, but I don’t really interact with them.

AD: It seems to me, then, that you’re interested in something a little more “pure” than many people give you credit for. “Poetic truth” I think you called it. How would you characterize that “truth?” Is it the same “truth” that you’re after when acting?

JF: If I were to act in the film about Obama, all I would need to get down, aside from the outer stuff—and I know that’s important—is his essential kindness. Poetry’s just like that, like hearing a performance going on. It is a portrait in some ways of someone trying to make sense of his world. I was taught to grab a reader, not push them away, and, I guess, that’s what I know of how to be a poet. The way I view it, poetry is like the movies, this monster at the center of the room, articulate, and behind it, a poet figure peeks out, a torque that acts as a through-line to ideas. And his ideas came out of a cheap, dime-store, medical case study that came out of Lowell and Bishop and Ginsburg. It goes on and on. Remember that the bricks of LA were mortared with thick Indian blood.

AD: Oh I see, so it’s about history. You seem to see the poet as inhabiting a kind of history that she makes, again, human, that we’re all imitating one piece or another and, in finding what’s human in the work, we find it with ourselves. Your work, particularly, engages in the history of Hollywood, the history of film, just as your films seem to be engaged in the history and the moment of literature. I think I get it: You engage in Hollywood because acting and film, like poetry, are obsessed with moments—of masks dropping, of traditions shattering and becoming alive. The history of literature and film are all about reinvention, about bringing back the dead, and, as I think you know, the only way to do that is with the human, the real. Is that about right?

JF: Hollywood is an idea. I want to get into the thick of it. Movies won’t be around forever.

AD: Do you think you’ve achieved this in your work?

JF: …

——————————–

While I still think that Franco’s written work, ultimately, isn’t very successful, I think that he has a vision and is pursuing a worthwhile project.

Fuck. I have a lot of tweets to delete.

Image source: The Guardian

You Should Probably Read This: Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian

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Andrew Findlay

In Read This or Kill Yourself, we get tough with you about your bookshelf and what had damn well better be on it. In You Should Probably Read This we do the same thing, but we’re a little nicer.

Cormac McCarthy has been established for years, but his shadow has grown in the past decade or so due to a couple of wildly popular films: The Road and No Country for Old Men. A lot of you should be familiar with those films, and their style pretty much shows what McCarthy is all about: bleak travelers across bleaker landscapes wrestling with nonexistent or extremely peculiar moral systems. In a lot of McCarthy’s fiction, a man has to have a code, no matter how terrifyingly brutal. He is a writer’s writer, which means reading his books is not something you do to unwind with booze over a long weekend. Reading him is work. I am biased against books like this, as relatability and ease of access is important to me in a field where basic human-to-human communication is paramount. I avoid stuff like this if it is mediocre and unappealing, and if achieving some hyper-literary cachet is the entire focus and fabric of the book (I’m still looking at you, The Corrections). However, pristine works of pure, uncompromising art, those I can’t resist. Blood Meridian is the latter.

They didn’t give me a genius grant for nothing.

It has all the limbs and outward flourishes of a turgid, joyless literary tomb. The narrator never takes us into the minds of the characters. The protagonist has no name, and the narrator refers to him only as “the kid.” There are no quotation marks for dialogue and there are few commas. The vocabulary is obscure enough to have sent me to the dictionary multiple times (word like manciple, esker, sprent, and surbated, to name a few) Plotwise, nothing really builds – it’s just a book about a group of men in the Texas-Mexico borderlands in the 1800s hunting Apache scalps. Stuff happens, sure, but there’s not a build to and change of conflict, it’s pretty much just death, blood, and destruction all the way through. To give you an idea of just how much death and blood, in the first two pages the main character runs away from home at 14, hangs around in a bunch of bars, and gets shot right below the heart. On the second page. After this, violence just builds on violence, but it is done with mastery and purpose.

Before discussing what makes Blood Meridian so good, it’s important to give a little bit more information on the bones of the novel. The main body of the novel is a fictionalization of the exploits of the Glanton Gang, a group of mercenaries hired by Mexican authorities to track and eliminate dangerous Apache warriors. They get paid a set amount per scalp. This leads to them massacring not only Apaches, but peaceful agrarian Native American communities and Mexican villages. A scalp is a scalp, and life is cheap. The plot of the novel makes for a lot of battle, a lot of grit, and a lot of wandering over desolate landscapes. This gives McCarthy ample space to showcase his verbal pyrotechnics.

Yes, he uses an egregiously obscure vocabulary, but he uses it so well. In terms of sheer word-stacking, there is no living writer better than McCarthy:

They rode on and the sun in the east flushed pale streaks of light and

then a deeper run of color like blood seeping up in sudden reaches flaring planewise

and where the earth drained up into the sky at the edge of creation the top of the sun

rose out of nothing like the head of a great red phallus until it cleared the unseen rim

and sat squat and pulsing and malevolent behind them. The shadows of the smallest

stones lay like pencil lines across the sand and the shapes of the men and their mounts

advanced elongate before them like strands of the night from which they’d ridden,

like tentacles to bind them to the darkness yet to come.

Yeah, sure, ok, he uses “elongate” as an adjective and not a verb. But read that paragraph. Just read it. Read it again. Another author could have just said “The company rode west, the sun at their backs.” That’s all that’s happening here. The sun came up. McCarthy takes that, expands upon it, makes the sun a harbinger of death and destruction, and makes the diurnal cycle emblematic of man’s inability to escape his destiny – “[bound] to the darkness yet to come.” If you don’t love that paragraph, if it doesn’t make you tremble, then you will probably hate this book, and that is really unfortunate for you.

Try to describe a sunrise better than he did. I dare you.

The subject matter of the book makes violence its defining feature. There is death and destruction everywhere. Bartender disrespect you? Jam a broken whiskey bottle through his eye socket to his brain. Fellow traveler around the fire insult you? Decapitate him and watch his arterial blood shoot and sizzle into the flames. Those aren’t even the worst examples of what happens in this book. It is so violent that even literary critic Harold Bloom, who says it’s the best book written since As I Lay Dying, had to put it down multiple times before he could successfully complete it. Violence penetrates every aspect of the book, and its matter-of-fact presentation (no one feels glory or guilt, it just is what it is) underlines how natural a state it is for man. I thought for a while that morality was just not a concern for McCarthy in this book, but the sheer weight of the atrocities committed begins building a case against them. In addition, almost no one escapes from the life of violence. There’s a very “live by the sword, die by the sword” mentality here. There is a moral point here, but it isn’t razor sharp, it isn’t outright stated, and it’s hard to put into words. The events of the book permeate you so fully by the end, that you more feel the theme of the book than intellectually appreciate it.

This novel qualifies as an anti-western story. The anti-western or revisionist western popped up in the sixties and seventies as a response to the 40s and 50s westerns in which the good guy shot the bad guys and was good for doing it, in which the absolute violence and lawlessness of border towns were minimized, and in which the writers set up good/bad dichotomies around the heroes and villains. The anti-western is about looking at what American frontier culture actually was, in all its darkness and seaminess. Americans have a tendency to whitewash their history and ignore the staggering levels of violence that form the foundation of these United States. Blood Meridian, with its beautiful language describing horrific actions, directly attacks the narrative of manifest destiny and glorious American expansion. It does not pass judgment, it does not say this action is good or this action is bad, it just explores what happens in nauseating detail and lets the reader draw his own conclusions about mankind, which by the end of the book are not too uplifting and are summed up pretty well by the book’s epigraph:

Your ideas are terrifying and your hearts are faint. Your acts of

pity and cruelty are absurd, committed with no calm, as if they were

irresistible. Finally, you fear blood more and more. Blood and time.

   ~Paul Valéry

Image source: Amazon and Time

Life After the Star Wars Expanded Universe: Neil Gaiman’s American Gods

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Andrew Findlay

Neil Gaiman has been a darling of fantasy fiction for years. His profile is huge and unassailable – multiple awards, multiple movie adaptations – this is a writer who goes on late night talk shows and people watch those shows specifically to see him. Any two or three of his works are enough to qualify him as a game-changing writer. If you have not read Sandman, go do that right now. It is the best thing he’s ever written, and one of the best 15 things written in the last 50 years. I can’t get into it right now because the story is massively complex and free-roaming, but do yourself a favor and check it out. Today’s book, American Gods, won the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus awards. To give an idea of how big a deal that is, only 10 books have ever done that, and two of them were written by Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke, respectively.

American Gods is fantasy, which is a really important genre as it’s the first there ever was. Think about it: In Gilgamesh the main character is the son of a goddess, befriends a wild man, slays an ogre, rejects the advances of the goddess of sex, and slays the skybull she sends to destroy him in revenge. In The Odyssey, the main character blinds an ogre, pisses off a sea god, and is assisted by and given gear by a war goddess. Any number of old stories contain fantastic elements: humans made of clay, humans made of thrown rocks, world-wrapping floods, and so on. These early stories are special, as they all attempt to explain humanity, its place in the world, and how they both came about. There is no whiny asshole running around with daddy issues (I’m looking at you, The Corrections). At the dawn of human cultural life, all of the stories were concerned with how we got here and what we should do about it. Of course, people back then had no fucking clue and just made shit up. The results were amazing. Modern fantasy stems from either that initial efflorescence or from all the stuff J.R.R. Tolkien single-handedly standardized. American Gods is the former. It goes old and deep for its mythology.

I am the oldest character in all of literature, and my beard rings are amazing.

Some people hate American Gods, and those people are wrong. There is plenty to hate, but a lot more to love. The first big hit is that the main character’s name is Shadow, which is usually not a good sign quality-wise. In general, the characters are there to advance the plot and to do cool things. There’s depth there, but not a lot. Shadow is a pretty simple guy who is set up a little maladroitly as a big strong silent type, but with hidden feelings. At the start of the novel, he finishes a three-year bid in prison. Later in the novel, he remembers being a kid and crying while reading Gravity’s Rainbow in a hospital while his mother died of cancer. Jarring mismatches like that rub you wrong and don’t deserve to be forgiven, but there is just so much good to go with the bad. Most of the good comes from the premise in the title itself.

What exactly are American gods? The premise that makes the book is that gods are generated by human thought and belief. For example, Odin (who is a main character), first popped up in America when Vikings visited the Americas, got into conflict, and slew a native in a ritualistic way. The power of their belief created him. Then they left, and Odin spent the next few centuries kicking around the continental US as “Mr. Wednesday” (Wednesday = Wōdnesdæg or Odin’s Day). This method of god creation is upliftingly anthropocentric – our belief is not just their payment or due, but the key to their existence. Unfortunately for the gods, lack of faith leads to lack of food. Without constant, strong belief, they weaken and, if they can find no substitute, they die. The substitutes available normally consist of some type of human interaction tangentially related to their godhead. For example, the half-djinn Queen of Sheba, Bilquis, achieved fame and drew belief as a great seducer. In American Gods, she is working as a prostitute and drawing her power and sustenance from that. An American incarnation of Anubis, the Egyptian death god, runs a funeral home and draws his power and sustenance from that. The hardscrabble landscape of American belief has transmogrified Mr. Wednesday, an incarnation of the Norse god of war, wisdom, and poetry, into a confidence man. There is definitely a precedent for Odin as a type of trickster god, and his godhood being shaped and reflected by American culture emphasizes and feeds this aspect of him. He gains strength and survives through bamboozlement. For example, he needs money, so he finds an ATM, dresses up like a security guard, handcuffs a briefcase to his hand, and marks the ATM as out of order. When anyone comes up to make a deposit, he apologizes, takes their money, and painstakingly writes them a receipt. He then walks away with a ton of money. He not only gets cash this way, but also acquires the “worship” necessary for his continued existence. The problems associated with lack of spiritual nourishment create the central conflict of the book.

I’m going to need a little bit more than that to survive, Ron.

Old gods are scattered across all of America. All of the immigrants who ever came here, and all of their beliefs, created sub-pantheons filled with strangely reduced gods. Old cultures come over with their old beliefs, then slowly buy in to the new ones. Up to the time of the book, these gods have only had to deal with their transformation and weakening due to the acculturation of their worshipers, but problems arise when they enter into direct competition with the new gods, avatars of tech, finance, and the like. As Americans worship these things with more fervor, so do their respective avatars gain power, to the direct detriment and weakening of the old gods. Once created, gods have staying power, but if they are completely cut off, they will simply fade into nothing. This is an undesirable outcome, so the main plot of the book deals with the old gods’ actions to preserve themselves in the face of the onslaught of the modern world.

Yes, the plot is linear and simple. Yes, the characters could have a little more depth. Yes, the protagonist’s name is Shadow Moon. Do any of those things make this a bad book? I mean, yes, they would, if there wasn’t more to it. American Gods is an exploration of American belief, American places, and the American psyche. Neil Gaiman is an Englishman who settled in Minnesota, and this is his love letter to his adopted country. The whole presents a mythic America, one where the salt of the Earth is the center of the nation and where roadside attractions are the most sacred and powerful locations in the country. The climax of the novel takes place in the holiest spot in the United States – Rock City, just outside Chattanooga, TN. The swindler habits of a major character – Mr. Wednesday – dovetail with the venerable American tradition of getting one over on people not as clever as yourself, from Tom Sawyer getting people to paint a fence all the way down to a more modern Sawyer.

Son of a bitch.

Ultimately, this novel’s passion for Americana and its in-depth commentary on the nature and power of human belief far outweigh any niggling concerns with naming or plot pacing. Much like taking a road trip (which occupies most of the plot), you might go to some less-than-ideal places, but you will still have an amazing time there because of the idea of the road trip. The idea of this novel transcends any flaws that mar its execution. I believe it is a great novel, and as Neil Gaiman himself writes in the novel:

People believe…[i]t’s what people do. They believe.

And then they will not take responsibility for their beliefs; they conjure things,

and do not trust the conjurations. People populate the darkness; with ghosts,

with gods, with electrons, with tales. People imagine, and people believe: and

it is that belief, that rock-solid belief, that makes things happen.

It is not a perfect novel, but any book containing the above quote has my vote. It is not flawless, but much like the nation it enshrines, the monumental good overwhelms the (admittedly) searing bad.

Image sources: IMDB, Wiki

What is Poetry and Why Do We Care?

Austin Duck

“What is poetry” is a question I’m asked a lot and one that I can’t answer. In fact, everywhere I go, every job interview I have, every time someone asks “what’s your degree in,” they follow up with some permutation of that question. You see, I’ve got a Master of Fine Arts in Poetry (along with a few other useless degrees) and, expectedly, I’m constantly bouncing between jobs, looking for the next big thing which requires near-constant explanation of how I got here and why I made the choices I did. And my god, you should see the looks on their faces (unless someone in their family too has made this… choice) when I start stammering and trying to explain myself: pity, embarrassment, amusement that an adult would proudly (sort of) admit that he spent years (YEARS) reading poems, writing about poems, and, most questionably (because academia and the idea of a PhD still hold some cultural capital) learning to write them himself… It’s a dark time to be a poet (though I suspect that, outside of Eastern Europe [where poets are celebrated] it probably always has been).

Not everyone, though, is totally unreceptive to the choice of poetry. For some, poetry still holds its place as a kind of epicenter for literary bad-boy-ness (after all, poets work in shorter bursts of clarity and don’t require the same kind of discipline as someone writing something long-form that is either narratively or argumentatively coherent): hard drinkers, sexers (is that a thing?), druggers and live-r’s that occupy that very thin line between intellectual and indigent, the Jim Morrisons of the not-quite-so-fucking-stupid, the arty guy or gal who, even though they manage social media and blogging at a major corporation (guilty), still has a deeply mysterious and deeply sexual wilderness in their heart.

For others, poetry itself has a kind of heroic capital. It allows one to project the image of hyper intelligence (just look at the number of poets who win MacArthur genius grants and you’ll see that poetry and physics seem to fish from the same pond) and a kind of bohemian “casting off” of economics, of choosing to pursue “art” when really you should have gone into investment banking but this makes you more pure. It sounds fucking stupid, doesn’t it? It is.

The trouble, for me, of people believing these myths—of the poetic bad boy and/or the self-sacrificing genius—is that it creates a cultural expectation of the “poet” as a thing to which young, narcissistic, self-righteous fucking losers (guilty) flock to prove themselves the next Rilke, the next wild Jack Gilbert, the next (ugh) Charles Bukowski, and, in doing so, they build a scene. They themselves (with all of their ideas) create an idea of poetry, promulgate a notion of poetry as sexy or smart, and, in doing so, recreate the culture of poetry.

However, that’s not to say that I’m here to bemoan it; to believe that the state of anything isn’t in flux is naive and prescriptive and hey, I forgot to put on underwear this morning so I’m probably not the best person to make a totalizing statement what is right or wrong for poetry as a whole. I say it’s a trouble for me because it so deeply complicates what poetry is, really. If I had to give a totally uninformative (but accurate) definition, I might say that it’s the silently agreed-upon, written production of a continuously changing group of half-educated, half-myth-drunk twenty-somethings with progressively more impressive resumes continuously reinventing something so fundamental to humans that it existed before God. But that wouldn’t be entirely right.

Sure, that’s the bottom of the scene right now (if you want to think about it hierarchically), but it tells nothing about the multitudes of unpaid apprenticeships with those “living masters”—old people writing poetry who their peer-group agrees is writing the best poetry—of the unpaid publications used to build reputations used to leverage shitty-paying jobs so that one day you and your group can sit among the “living masters” all while under the cold scrutiny of critics who constantly remind you that there are dead masters too, that you’ll never approach them, because history, because craft, because they didn’t get paid to watch Twitter for 8 hours a day while wishing for a different life.

And even that isn’t exactly right when you consider the fact that poetry, for all of its shared resources, doesn’t have a single, unified community; there are groups upon groups, each with slightly different aesthetic- and philosophical-projects, and then there are those who aren’t, exactly, part of groups, who have participated—to some degree—in various groups and projects, have gone through various apprenticeships (or not), who read books that are recommended by friends, or old colleagues, or whose covers and back-blurbs and first poems look appealing at a bookstore (though this is becoming less and less an option) and each one of these people, each one of these groups, is making a case -through-example of what poetry is, can be, does, or (sometimes) what it really shouldn’t do.

So what is poetry (or, really, more accurately, what is American poetry [because each culture has its own organic process for bringing up poets, its own poetics, etc.])? I don’t know. I used to ask my students this question on their final exams just to see their faces fill with terror like mine does each time I’m asked. When asked this question, I usually answer with something along the lines of:

an empathy machine, a text that appears to be written in lines but which actually is a dramatic rendering of a scene, no matter how brief, when the speaker of the poem (usually the “I”) interacts with a specific problem, usually in the realms of nature, language, memory, or culture, outside the self and, in that interaction, is changed, though it’s not enough to tell the reader that the speaker has changed, the mechanics have to be there, the change has to be structural, linguistic, imagistic (made with images), sonic (made with sound), so that, by the end of the poem the audience has had the same experience, their very brain has processed the same images presented in the same way, heard the same sounds, stumbled over the same sentence constructions, and thought the same sentences in the same order so that the speaker and the audience are, for a second, the same person, the other, so that the reader is not confirmed in their own experience but is instead forced into a new one, understanding, yes, both intellectually and emotionally, thinking and feeling as another person. Oh and did I mention that poems “should” almost never go where you think they’re going, that they contain surprise for the reader, the writer, there must be a ghost you didn’t know come to inhabit the body you’re only starting to get a sense that you’re looking at?

I do tend to get sort of breathless (even in writing, apparently) when writing about “what poetry is” because imagine that last paragraph taking place in a single instant; imagine that you were able to achieve what I’ve just described (either as a writer or a reader) and now think about the community differences I’ve described above. To say specifically “what poetry is” is impossible and even to say what it should do is pretty dubious.

In the end, my take on it (above) will yield a pretty classical American/English poem (or, at least, I think that it will), but won’t account for more than 5% of what’s been produced, what you will search through—line by line for some organizing pattern (because poetry is fundamentally [and equally unhelpfully] patterned language).

So why do it at all (reading or writing)? Aside from the fact that some people will think you’re a sexy genius and others will bathe you with counter-cultural social capital, why?

Fundamentally, the interaction of poetry will get you closer to another person’s mind, more fully engaged in empathy, understanding, learning, compassion, joy, sadness, recognition, than literally anything else on the planet. Music for your ears, visual arts for your eyes, writing, particularly poetry which is so often concerned with the instantaneous, the momentous, for wherever your mind and your humanity mix.

For more equally incomprehensible definitions of poetry, go here.

Image source: The Guardian

Kristen Stewart’s Public, Private Poem: Celebrity Poetry and the Sadness of the Watcher

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Austin Duck

When I sat down this morning, I didn’t intend to write about celebrity poetry (because who cares), but, after a brief glance at my long-neglected Twitter account, one thing was clear: Kristen Stewart wrote a poem and everyone thinks it’’ bad.

And, well, it is, it’s really bad (you can read it here), riddled with the self-obsessions and obfuscations that litter beginner poetry—private poetry, really (but more on that in a bit)—and thrust onto center stage (via Marie Claire and Entertainment Weekly and the dozens of other blogs that have picked it up to garner a little viral attention for something other than talking shit about Sochi [the irony that I’m writing about it right now is not lost on me]). But why is it here? That’s what I’ve been wondering all morning. Why does anyone care whether an actress writes a bad poem?

If you think this will be a large-scale condemnation of audience by some high-minded, poetry-for-all douchebag, you’re sadly mistaken. Remember that Twitter account I mentioned? I almost exclusively use it to tell James Franco to kill himself. Instead, what I’m interested in knowing is why, why is this a spectacle? Why does the production of a poem in general—usually so unnoticed that I dare you (MFA-holders excluded) to name three poets writing today or even to tell me who the last poet laureate was—create so much buzz when it’s bad? I mean, I know why James Franco’s does; it’s because it’s absolutely mind-numbing how he buys his way into the poetry community, gets thousands of people to buy SHORT STORY collections or pick up avant-garde poetry journals like Lana Turner to read his work, and then it reads like someone who wasn’t listening in school, who’s never read a poem before, who’s never thought to themselves holy shit! There’s so much I don’t know. Rather than just getting my work out there, I should take a minute to learn how to make it worth being out there because poetry isn’t just personal expression, it’s a fucking public performance made in language that other people need access to!!! (Alright, truth time: I feel some feelings about James Franco.)

I feel though that, K-Stew’s (can I call you K-Stew?) case is different. I don’t think that anyone actually believes she thinks she’s going to become a poet, hold NYU, Stanford, and Warren Wilson hostage while she shoots movies, etc. Instead, this seems sensational precisely because it is, because it is a first-class American spectacle, and one that has pretty serious implications.

The “theory” of spectacle that I’m using, though, doesn’t come from newscasters tweeting about shitty water in Sochi (take that SEO [Editor’s note: totally tagging this with Sochi now]) or from some super high-minded critical theorist; instead, it comes from what I intuit in David Foster Wallace’s story “Mr. Squishy” (from the collection Oblivion) to be an actualization of spectacle, one that I have a hard time articulating except by giving you one of the story’s plots. In this particular plot, there is a man, possibly carrying a gun, climbing a very tall building, while, in the plaza below, people watch. No one can really make out what he’s carrying, why he’s climbing, or even what he’s wearing, but they keep watching, making up stories, and hoping for a clue. But that isn’t all. There are also those inside a department store in building he’s climbing who can’t see him, but who can see those on the plaza reacting; they watch with equal amazement at the inscrutable intention of the reactions of those watching the climber because they can tell they’re watching someone watch something important, but they don’t know what.

It’s a pretty heady metaphor, I think, for how we might begin to talk about K-Stew’s poem (and public reaction) and why it’s here as “news.” Let’s start from the top (bad pun intended): K-Stew (already such a celebrity that I feel no remorse about associating with thick soup) publicly releases a private poem. Why she does it, we have no idea, but that she does it, we are certain, and, when we read it, it becomes clear—to those of us who are such assholes we say we read poems regularly—that this is what we might talk about as a “journal” poem, or a “private” one. This type of poem is one that isn’t meant for the public, not because it contains too much personal information, but rather because it is inaccessible. It doesn’t create a pattern for the audience to interpret. Instead, it jumps around using private references, phrases that are meaningful to the author but are totally unclear/uninterpretable to the audience. What I mean is that there’s no frame of reference through which all the metaphors (the devils, the sucking of bones, the pumping of organs, and the digital moonlight) become meaningful (that’s what public poetry does). Instead, we have someone really high up doing something that we fundamentally can’t understand.

But we are not the ones watching from the ground. Remember that. K-Stew didn’t come to your house and say “check out this poem I wrote.” Instead, she wrote something she was excited about, something she thought was “really dope” and shared it—seemingly offhandedly—in an interview. The interviewer, along with all requisite editors, publishers, and the like, then, make up those on the ground, those looking up and determining the spectacular, the that-which-must-be-named-and-in-naming-must-be-acknowledged-as-exigent. But what is it about a college-age girl writing a poem is exigent? Nothing. So, instead of telling us what they saw—which they didn’t because it was either a) uninteresting [as an event] or b) unintelligible [as a poem]—what we are given are reactions, judgments, “fan-annotations” as something to snark about (because, let’s be real, we’re a snarky bunch). But the worst part, and I do mean the worst, is not that we are laughing at a girl who attempted to make something and failed, but that we are accustomed to, expect, even rely on arbiters of “spectacle authority” to tell us that publicly sharing a poem is “embarrassing,” that the poem is “bad,” to point upward and react so that we know we should.

Obviously, I know that I’m not saying anything new about celebrity journalism, the divide between the celebrity and the non, or about what it means to “produce” or to “be produced by” news (and, to some extent, language itself measuring the world [sorry, I know I’m being a jackass here]); that’s not my aim. Instead, I want to talk about the profound sadness that comes with being in the department store, with not having access to the spectacle, with not really knowing whether the spectacle exists. I don’t mean this to demean, nor do I mean it to be ironic. What I’m talking about is the kind of sadness that comes from hearing an ex-lover singing in the shower just after you’ve emotionally (though not physically) separated, the song so far off that you can’t make it out, but you know she’s singing because, every once in a while, a note comes through, and you dream of the time when you could lay at her feet, stand next to her, and hear the singing, and though it didn’t matter, maybe even the song was bad, there was something spectacular about the moment. Even though you didn’t get to choose the song—maybe you didn’t even like it—you chose the spectacular; you weren’t locked out of the world quite yet, and sincerity wasn’t completely lost on you. You wanted to tell her she was beautiful, that her song and the water and the chill of the air was enough; you were reacting. And all you want now is the right to react, to be included in the song of a life you don’t have access to twice over—first because you never really know who someone else is and second, because now there’s something, spoken or otherwise, mediating your experience.

So our snark, then, becomes the boot that kicks the lever that sends the cage falling down onto the mouse in the mediated mousetrap of our experience of celebrity, specifically K-Stew and this rotten poem, but more generally with whatever else. And it’s easy to kick the lever without the context that comes with the actual creation of spectacle (as in subjectively spectacular rather than, as I’ve come to think of it, watching the gleam off another’s glasses and using that flash of light, that bit of the song, that obfuscated poem to determine how we react, what we say, what we participate in); we’re fighting for human engagement, to be part of a community, to be like girl, that’s not a great poem but what’s going on in your life and are, instead, moved farther and farther from where we started. That’s the sadness of watching in culture, what we are moving through, even K-Stew… even James Fucking Franco.

Image source: Us Weekly

Life After the Star Wars Expanded Universe: M.T. Anderson’s Feed

Andrew Findlay

I read a buttload. I track it, and last year alone I completed 37 books. So far this year, I am halfway through Blue Mars, Blood Meridian, and Les Jours Etranges de Nostradamus and have finished Green Mars, The Reivers, and Feed. That last book is the one I want to talk about today. It is a young adult science fiction book, which is a double-whammy of literary marginalization. The same style of thought that leads serious readers away from science fiction also has them skip YA fiction. It’s a shame, not only because YA is vital to the vibrancy and growth of our literary culture, but because it is worthwhile in its own right.

I mention how much I now read by way of comparison. When I was young, I did not enjoy reading. Why sit around and look at pages when there’s so much other shit to do? My discovery of Goosebumps changed everything. Young Adult fiction builds generations of readers. 10-year-olds probably can’t be interested in Cormac McCarthy, much like you probably can’t step outside and run a marathon right now. It takes practice. Progress happens in increments and the process has a beginning and an end. The path that leads to successful completion and enjoyment of Infinite Jest starts with The Berenstain Bears. I discovered Goosebumps when I was 10, and I now have a heroin-level addiction to reading.

Who needs reasons when you’ve got books?

If you never read any Goosebumps, I question whether you are a normal human with a childhood or if you sprang full-formed from a cultivation vat. By fifth grade, I’d moved on to my first semi-adult book, Tyrant’s Test, book three of the Blackfleet Crisis series in the Star Wars Expanded Universe. At the time, I didn’t really understand the problem of starting with the third one. Anyway, I read it, and there were a lot of words I had simply never seen before. One of my clearest reading-related memories is running across a new word and asking my dad what “ad-juh-kent” meant. He responded that “adjacent” meant “next to.” That was the first of many exchanges that made me an etymological nut, to the extent that I can tell you that “buttload” is not in the same class as “fuckload” or “metric shit-ton,” but actually represents 126 imperial gallons of liquid, as that was the size of a “butt,” something used to store wine. YA fiction entices and cultivates new generations of readers, without which American literary culture would be in worse decline than it already is, but that’s not all it does. The best YA fiction does some heavy philosophical lifting in the formation of young minds. One of the best examples of this is The Giver, which teaches middle-school age kids that nothing can be perfect without a price. That is a huge concept. If you are not familiar with The Giver, again, you are probably a clone.

    It’s a boy!

Feed, like The Giver, attacks big issues in bites digestible by young minds. The title of the book comes from its main concept – about three-fourths of citizens have “feeds,” which are like Google Glass but implanted directly into the brain and entwined with the limbic system. Corporations can advertise directly to people with banner ads that scroll  across feed users’ field of vision. Think of how annoying pop-up ads are, and then imagine them being inside of your brain. Data mining is prevalent, with corporations using purchase history and even biological information to target their advertisements. In one particularly surreal scene, a character is in a life-threatening situation, and because she is sweating, Feednet shows her an advertisement for deodorant. There are a lot of dystopic elements to this book, one being that most people live in environment bubbles because the actual outdoors is mostly too toxic to survive in. However, the main focus of the book is the effect of the feed on society. It is the creation and the sustainer of an overwhelmingly lazy culture of consumption. People with feeds are capable of buying anything they want at any time and having it flown to them. People with feeds can look up any piece of information they want at any time, leading to a general decline in critical thinking, memory formation, and language. The decline of language and thought instigated by the Feed is clear throughout the book. One example of character speech: “It was meg big big loud. There was everything there.” This type of dialogue really turned me off of the book for the first few chapters, but you get used to it, and besides it’s just another symptom of the social decline set off by misuse of technology, so it actually serves to strengthen the themes of the book.

The vanguard of civilization’s downfall. Also, it makes you look like an asshole.

The unifying plot is very simple. Boy and girl meet, boy and girl kind of like each other, things go wrong, things end badly. The complexity of the story comes from the setting and from character interactions with the feed. The simplicity of the plot merges with the complexity of the social milieu of the story to create an artifact science fiction is very good at manufacturing: the intellectual beach read. Sentence wizards are great, but it takes a special kind of person to read nothing but DFW, Joyce, and Faulkner. In science fiction, there is an emphasis on clear and direct speech, plot, and characterization. Sure, there are still books like Dhalgren (the Ulysses of science fiction. I only got 200 pages into it because I took it to an actual beach, which was not the best decision ever), but Hemingway-clarity is a feature of most science fiction. The text itself represents very little challenge, yet the ideas discussed therein are intriguing and nourishing. This alchemical melding of simplicity and complexity trigger a lung-gom-pa style of reading in which, unimpeded by overwrought sentences and spurred on by intellectual interest, a reader can consume vast amounts of text in a short amount of time. In this state, reading is exhilaration. This feature makes Feed is a great entry into the constellation of young adult literature. If we want to build a strong reading culture, we need authors who put out literature that can stimulate and exhilarate young minds. Feed is the gateway drug that creates the addicts that would do anything for just one more hit of The Brothers Karamazov.

Image credits: Wiki and IMDB.