Friday, May 16
Fin
(editor's note: we the publishers of the site would like to apologize for this buzzer beater post. Fans of the team will note the last time this happened was when Tristan competed at the state tournament for soccer in African American Literature. To amend our error, we would like to offer this, a very special final edition of They All Just Fade Away, and Gurtler Blogs, Inc.)
Here's an idea: furries perfectly exemplify the postmodern age.
This post, we'll be taking one last look at the postmodern world around us. For those in the know, Mike Rugnetta, friend of the blog (ed. We wish), takes one idea every week and explores it, in great detail, on his Youtube production, the Idea Channel. Above, I've included a great speech Mr. Rugnetta delivered at the 2013 XOXO Festival, which celebrates "creativity and innovation in forms [...] considered alternative or disruptive to the prevailing social or professional context." Mr. Rugnetta's Youtube channel inspired many posts on this very blog, including its own title (check out the "If you have to ask, you're streets behind" page over on the sidebar for some vague explanation). But this speech is of particular interest to me because he spends some time talking about something he hasn't gotten to on the Idea Channel and something of a personal interest of my own.
I'll sum up the beginning half of the video like so: the Internet is a big deal. And the Internet's native format is to connect people in communities. Here's what Mike means: the Internet is, in so many ways, completely different from anything that came before it. Never before could people from so distant places connect so easily with each other. And why is this important? Well, now, people who before would have to travel great distances and go to great lengths in order to connect with others of similar, unusual interests (a la sci-fi conventions, etc.) can simply go to the relevant forum or subreddit or special community site in order to do... whatever it is that they do.
This, of course, is not hard to see from our own experiences. However, there's something about each of these communities that they share(d), even when they didn't have a home on the internet. Most communities like this, or fandoms as they also may be called, have some canonical media to be a fan of. "Trekkers" have Star Trek. DnD players have, well, Dungeons and Dragons. "Bronies," perhaps the most recent group, have My Little Pony. Because of this, although the Internet makes it easier for these people to connect, the Internet also did nothing to create them. Ante-Internet, these people would've shipped out to conventions, or found a meager few near themselves, or held these interests more or less to themselves in their garage or whatever.
The trick is, nowhere here did the Internet itself create a venue where any of these ideas could be cultivated. None of these fandoms are quite... postmodern enough. There is, however, at least one fandom that exists today that we could argue is, that, though it technically does predate the Internet some used the Internet to more or less create its own canon media to be fans of. They are furries.
Here's an idea: furries perfectly exemplify the postmodern age.
This post, we'll be taking one last look at the postmodern world around us. For those in the know, Mike Rugnetta, friend of the blog (ed. We wish), takes one idea every week and explores it, in great detail, on his Youtube production, the Idea Channel. Above, I've included a great speech Mr. Rugnetta delivered at the 2013 XOXO Festival, which celebrates "creativity and innovation in forms [...] considered alternative or disruptive to the prevailing social or professional context." Mr. Rugnetta's Youtube channel inspired many posts on this very blog, including its own title (check out the "If you have to ask, you're streets behind" page over on the sidebar for some vague explanation). But this speech is of particular interest to me because he spends some time talking about something he hasn't gotten to on the Idea Channel and something of a personal interest of my own.
I'll sum up the beginning half of the video like so: the Internet is a big deal. And the Internet's native format is to connect people in communities. Here's what Mike means: the Internet is, in so many ways, completely different from anything that came before it. Never before could people from so distant places connect so easily with each other. And why is this important? Well, now, people who before would have to travel great distances and go to great lengths in order to connect with others of similar, unusual interests (a la sci-fi conventions, etc.) can simply go to the relevant forum or subreddit or special community site in order to do... whatever it is that they do.
This, of course, is not hard to see from our own experiences. However, there's something about each of these communities that they share(d), even when they didn't have a home on the internet. Most communities like this, or fandoms as they also may be called, have some canonical media to be a fan of. "Trekkers" have Star Trek. DnD players have, well, Dungeons and Dragons. "Bronies," perhaps the most recent group, have My Little Pony. Because of this, although the Internet makes it easier for these people to connect, the Internet also did nothing to create them. Ante-Internet, these people would've shipped out to conventions, or found a meager few near themselves, or held these interests more or less to themselves in their garage or whatever.
The trick is, nowhere here did the Internet itself create a venue where any of these ideas could be cultivated. None of these fandoms are quite... postmodern enough. There is, however, at least one fandom that exists today that we could argue is, that, though it technically does predate the Internet some used the Internet to more or less create its own canon media to be fans of. They are furries.
The furry fandom, as well as anybody can date anything, was begun in the year 1980, as a "funny animal" sci-fi discussion group inspired by the art of Steve Gallacci that met at various conventions. Of course, it is predated by a variety of anthropomorphic media (Disney's Robin Hood, for example), but this is seen as, more or less, the first time anybody met to discuss such media. What you may notice, though, is that it started with a canon media: Albeda Anthropomorphics, Gallacci's work.
With this beginning, though, it was not long before the fandom grew in an entirely different way. MUCKs, Multi User Content Kingdoms, are a sort of text-based MMORPG (like World of Warcraft) where fans morphed from discussing anthropomorphic art to performing it, acting as various anthropomorphic animals in chat and action. Now, there was more than Gallacci's art; there was the beginning of something bigger.
In the time since the 80s, various other forms of communication have arisen between members of this fandom. Though MUCKs have fallen by the wayside for the most part, now there is an increasing presence in IRCs, a variety of forums, and most importantly, social media-like art communities. The largest of these is FurAffinity, begun in 2005 and has already collected millions of submissions. Submissions consist of drawings, writings, music, and anything else that users want to share with a like-minded audience. However, most importantly, these drawings are, largely, original content. They don't relate to any strict canonical media (though there does exist a significant amount of cross-fandom activity between Bronies and Furries). They only are joined together by an idea, a general structure to follow.
Even that is tenuous. Nowhere will you find a hard and concrete definition of what a furry, or furry media is. Generally speaking, it's somebody or something that relates to art (not just visual, but written and so on) involving anthropomorphic animals. BUT, not all art that does this is furry. Is Robin Hood, a piece created before a formal furry fandom even existed, furry art? How about TwoKinds, a webcomic created by Tom Fischbach using animals and humans as allegory for racism and, at least according to Tom, not intended to be anything related to a furry fandom? Nobody can tell you explicitly. On the /r/furry subreddit, one of the most frequent posts are questions of whether individuals are furries. The answer? "What do you think?" The fandom as a whole is an ever-changing, ever-whirling maelstrom where the edges are never constant but the center always is. Nothing can be stated resolutely but this; those who identify as furries enjoy art of anthropomorphic animals.
The trick is, this really couldn't exist in quite the same state without the Internet. For one thing, just gathering these people together would be difficult. But what's more compelling about this is the way people can change how they represent themselves on the Internet. Whereas in person, to those they know they are bound by their known character, and to those they don't they are still bound by their bodies and appearance. But, on the internet, none of this applies.
With this beginning, though, it was not long before the fandom grew in an entirely different way. MUCKs, Multi User Content Kingdoms, are a sort of text-based MMORPG (like World of Warcraft) where fans morphed from discussing anthropomorphic art to performing it, acting as various anthropomorphic animals in chat and action. Now, there was more than Gallacci's art; there was the beginning of something bigger.
In the time since the 80s, various other forms of communication have arisen between members of this fandom. Though MUCKs have fallen by the wayside for the most part, now there is an increasing presence in IRCs, a variety of forums, and most importantly, social media-like art communities. The largest of these is FurAffinity, begun in 2005 and has already collected millions of submissions. Submissions consist of drawings, writings, music, and anything else that users want to share with a like-minded audience. However, most importantly, these drawings are, largely, original content. They don't relate to any strict canonical media (though there does exist a significant amount of cross-fandom activity between Bronies and Furries). They only are joined together by an idea, a general structure to follow.
Even that is tenuous. Nowhere will you find a hard and concrete definition of what a furry, or furry media is. Generally speaking, it's somebody or something that relates to art (not just visual, but written and so on) involving anthropomorphic animals. BUT, not all art that does this is furry. Is Robin Hood, a piece created before a formal furry fandom even existed, furry art? How about TwoKinds, a webcomic created by Tom Fischbach using animals and humans as allegory for racism and, at least according to Tom, not intended to be anything related to a furry fandom? Nobody can tell you explicitly. On the /r/furry subreddit, one of the most frequent posts are questions of whether individuals are furries. The answer? "What do you think?" The fandom as a whole is an ever-changing, ever-whirling maelstrom where the edges are never constant but the center always is. Nothing can be stated resolutely but this; those who identify as furries enjoy art of anthropomorphic animals.
The trick is, this really couldn't exist in quite the same state without the Internet. For one thing, just gathering these people together would be difficult. But what's more compelling about this is the way people can change how they represent themselves on the Internet. Whereas in person, to those they know they are bound by their known character, and to those they don't they are still bound by their bodies and appearance. But, on the internet, none of this applies.
People can represent themselves however they like. Sherry Turkle, in her book Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet (from 1995), talks about the way people use and, to some, misuse communicative technology on the Internet. Specifically, she argues that misrepresenting oneself, whether by gender or by personality or, in the case of furries, by species can be therapeutic, where people can gain insights into the lives of others by pretending to be them, where there are no consequences. Of course, this also can lead to catfishing (what happened to Manti Te'o) and predatorial relations, but Turkle sought instead to look at the positive. But, ultimately, this is an act restricted to the Internet, where every girl's a guy and every kid's an undercover FBI agent.
So, furries, love them or hate them, are nothing if not interesting to talk about. More than just freaks in suits, they embody a whole principle of ideas about the world we live in today. Can you say the same?
"The more you know, the more you realize you know nothing" - Socrates, according to some guy on Yahoo! answers
"The miscalibration of the incompetent stems from an error about the self, whereas the miscalibration of the highly competent stems from an error about others" - David Dunning and Justin Kruger of Cornell University
The Dunning-Kruger effect is a cognitive bias that manifests in two ways. Firstly, those who lack skills in a subject perceive themselves to be significantly better than they really are, attributed to a metacognitive inability to recognize one's own ineptitude. Secondly, those who have considerable skill in a subject may suffer from weak self-confidence, attributed to their possible assumption that those around them share said skill. We all know of people who are not good at something, but constantly claim to be amply good. Some of us may also know people who are good at things, and don't realize that others aren't too. This effect is loosely related to the quote in the title, attributed to Socrates though possibly it's from Aristotle and more probably neither of them said it explicitly, they just said something vaguely like that.
It's particularly interesting to me that we can talk about the action of knowing something as precluding further knowledge. What a thought that is! Really though, what we're saying is not nearly so concrete. After all, there are experts in fields for reasons. They didn't all just make stuff up to gain popularity. Rather, those who know a lot about a subject know that they know a lot about said subject. They also know, however, increasingly more about the parts of the subject they don't yet know about; questions raised by research designed to answer questions raised by earlier research, and so on.
So what does this have to do with Libra? Well, I think when I talked in class earlier about this concept, it became an impromptu implicit proof of the maxim that we may never know what exactly happened in the JFK assassination. And to that, I say, well, maybe? But don't be so sure. The thing is, we still learn about subjects. We still gain knowledge. We still make narratives. It is easier to complicate a narrative today, surely. It is easier to find evidence that points toward an incorrect conclusion as well. But, the whole aim of science is to be able to do better with this, and make statements with greater and greater confidence. There is, naturally, no such thing as saying all but a precious few things are undoubtedly true. Even criminal courts can only require proof "beyond reasonable doubt." There is no way we could force lawyers to argue against unreasonable doubt, even if they were at a later date proven not as unreasonable as originally thought. And, certainly, there may or may not be reasonable doubt in the case for Lee as the lone gunman of November 22, but with more and more successful ways to interpret data (notice that I focus on interpreting, not creating), we can push doubts to be more or less reasonable.
The Dunning-Kruger effect is a cognitive bias that manifests in two ways. Firstly, those who lack skills in a subject perceive themselves to be significantly better than they really are, attributed to a metacognitive inability to recognize one's own ineptitude. Secondly, those who have considerable skill in a subject may suffer from weak self-confidence, attributed to their possible assumption that those around them share said skill. We all know of people who are not good at something, but constantly claim to be amply good. Some of us may also know people who are good at things, and don't realize that others aren't too. This effect is loosely related to the quote in the title, attributed to Socrates though possibly it's from Aristotle and more probably neither of them said it explicitly, they just said something vaguely like that.
It's particularly interesting to me that we can talk about the action of knowing something as precluding further knowledge. What a thought that is! Really though, what we're saying is not nearly so concrete. After all, there are experts in fields for reasons. They didn't all just make stuff up to gain popularity. Rather, those who know a lot about a subject know that they know a lot about said subject. They also know, however, increasingly more about the parts of the subject they don't yet know about; questions raised by research designed to answer questions raised by earlier research, and so on.
So what does this have to do with Libra? Well, I think when I talked in class earlier about this concept, it became an impromptu implicit proof of the maxim that we may never know what exactly happened in the JFK assassination. And to that, I say, well, maybe? But don't be so sure. The thing is, we still learn about subjects. We still gain knowledge. We still make narratives. It is easier to complicate a narrative today, surely. It is easier to find evidence that points toward an incorrect conclusion as well. But, the whole aim of science is to be able to do better with this, and make statements with greater and greater confidence. There is, naturally, no such thing as saying all but a precious few things are undoubtedly true. Even criminal courts can only require proof "beyond reasonable doubt." There is no way we could force lawyers to argue against unreasonable doubt, even if they were at a later date proven not as unreasonable as originally thought. And, certainly, there may or may not be reasonable doubt in the case for Lee as the lone gunman of November 22, but with more and more successful ways to interpret data (notice that I focus on interpreting, not creating), we can push doubts to be more or less reasonable.
Thursday, May 15
The Art of Persuasion
The trouble with fate is that it messes with causality. Lee began his work in the Depository before JFK was even scheduled to kill JFK, let alone drive right past the building. Yet, if Lee is fated to kill JFK, as Ferrie supposes, then that fact, occurring after the events that led to it, is whagt causes JFK to give Lee an opportunity. As The Doctor, of Doctor Who fame, puts it, "People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect, but actually from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint - it's more like a big ball of wibbly wobbly... time-y wimey... stuff." If anything, Ferrie seems to be in tune with this non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint. He taps into the consciousness surrounding Libra itself to know that things we may call coincidence because we have no better term for it are anything but. Why does Lee see a sign from the universe when his boss buys a few rifles immediately following his discussion with Ferrie?
And for that matter, why does Lee start "reading between the lines" of the leftist periodicals he receives? Of course Cuba and Russia are sending him secret, coded messages, aren't they? Really, Lee is close to delusional in the hype and excitement leading up to the culmination of the plot. Ferrie, likely unintentionally, feeds into Lee's latent narcissism and self-importance, convincing Lee to finally get out and do it. Never mind that Lee doesn't know there's plans behind his back, a second shooter, a bullet with his name on it in the dark theater. Neither does Ferrie, after all; these things aren't so paramount to "fate" as Lee's presence in the window on November 22.
So, if Lee is convinced to go through with his portion of the plot by fate and delusion, what makes Jack Ruby step up to the plate? We could talk about his fervent patriotism, the idea that people will love him for killing Lee Harvey Oswald. But, I think that's merely a subtext. Karlinsky is speaking without speaking in his conversation with Ruby. He mentions the people that want Lee Harvey Oswald dead outright, but he's more concerned about the people that want Lee dead, who don't want Leon to give up the game. Ruby, on the other hand, doesn't seem to have any passion in the killing of Oswald that one might think goes with killing a man patriotically. On his way to the event, he has to stop and wire one of his dancers money. He's running late. He's nervous. It all happens in a rush. The forces that be had set it in motion, and Ruby was just along for the ride.
Jack Ruby is concerned for his financial affairs. He is concerned for his future beyond the murder. Lee, on the other hand, may be concerned for his future, but that is the future of the assassination. He doesn't have plans for what he'll do following killing Kennedy. Ruby's first concern is what the state of his club will be while he's in prison (because, he knows he will go to prison, at the very least). We talk about Ferrie convincing Lee, but really Lee convinces Lee, and Ferrie is just there to see it happen. When we look at Ruby, Karlinsky is fully the one to convince Ruby to do the act. Ruby has no reason to be the man who kills Oswald other than Karlinsky has given him a good offer for what will happen afterwards. Talking about the patriotism, the love Ruby will receive for his act, is inconsequential. Fate doesn't direct his actions quite like it does Lee's.
And for that matter, why does Lee start "reading between the lines" of the leftist periodicals he receives? Of course Cuba and Russia are sending him secret, coded messages, aren't they? Really, Lee is close to delusional in the hype and excitement leading up to the culmination of the plot. Ferrie, likely unintentionally, feeds into Lee's latent narcissism and self-importance, convincing Lee to finally get out and do it. Never mind that Lee doesn't know there's plans behind his back, a second shooter, a bullet with his name on it in the dark theater. Neither does Ferrie, after all; these things aren't so paramount to "fate" as Lee's presence in the window on November 22.
So, if Lee is convinced to go through with his portion of the plot by fate and delusion, what makes Jack Ruby step up to the plate? We could talk about his fervent patriotism, the idea that people will love him for killing Lee Harvey Oswald. But, I think that's merely a subtext. Karlinsky is speaking without speaking in his conversation with Ruby. He mentions the people that want Lee Harvey Oswald dead outright, but he's more concerned about the people that want Lee dead, who don't want Leon to give up the game. Ruby, on the other hand, doesn't seem to have any passion in the killing of Oswald that one might think goes with killing a man patriotically. On his way to the event, he has to stop and wire one of his dancers money. He's running late. He's nervous. It all happens in a rush. The forces that be had set it in motion, and Ruby was just along for the ride.
Jack Ruby is concerned for his financial affairs. He is concerned for his future beyond the murder. Lee, on the other hand, may be concerned for his future, but that is the future of the assassination. He doesn't have plans for what he'll do following killing Kennedy. Ruby's first concern is what the state of his club will be while he's in prison (because, he knows he will go to prison, at the very least). We talk about Ferrie convincing Lee, but really Lee convinces Lee, and Ferrie is just there to see it happen. When we look at Ruby, Karlinsky is fully the one to convince Ruby to do the act. Ruby has no reason to be the man who kills Oswald other than Karlinsky has given him a good offer for what will happen afterwards. Talking about the patriotism, the love Ruby will receive for his act, is inconsequential. Fate doesn't direct his actions quite like it does Lee's.
Thursday, April 17
Remember, If You See Something, Say Nothing, and Drink to Forget
"A friendly desert community where the sun is hot, the moon is beautiful, and mysterious lights pass overhead while we all pretend to sleep. Welcome... to Night Vale."
Welcome to Night Vale is a podcast produced by Commonplace Books, written by Joseph Fink & Jeffrey Cranor, and narrated by Cecil Baldwin. The best way to describe it is as a cross between This American Life and The X-Files. In it, we listen in as Night Vale Community Radio host Cecil narrates the news of a desert town swept up in the middle of intrigue and worldwide conspiracies. As Cranor describes it in an All Things Considered interview, "[...] it's a small community town. It has the mundane qualities of everyday life in small-town America. As you hear more about the dog park (the first "news piece" read in the first episode), you realize it is completely locked down, not only physically but somehow spiritually too. You have no concept of what's happening in there. And there aren't even people in the dog park, just hooded figures that are in and around the area. [...] here's a mundane, quaint American town, sort of overrun by ghosts or spirits or conspiracies or underground societies."
The radio show itself is informative about Night Vale, albeit not in any straightforward way. Each biweekly podcast centers around one main news story (e.g. the opening of a new dog park, a sandstorm threatening the city, history week) spread in chunks throughout the twenty minute show. In between these chunks, we get various snippets of other items. In the community calendar, we discover what's happening in the next few days, and which days are still scheduled to occur. In traffic, we receive poetic statements about the action of travelling interspersed with actual advice. In words from the show's sponsors, nonsensical and bizarre advertisements for normally mundane products tell us what we should buy. In the weather... well, this is the only "weather" piece that so much as discusses meteorological occurrences. Recurring themes and arcs appear every so often, like Intern Dana, who got trapped in the dog park trying to see what was inside, or Carlos, a scientist visiting Night Vale whose hair enthralled Cecil at first sight. But, most of all, we get a sense of a pervasive and strong conspiracy, whose existence is undeniable fact and relatively unnoteworthy, as we see from this snippet of episode 19a "The Sandstorm":
I contrast this especially with conspiracy theories in our world, the real world. Whereas Cecil exasperatedly agrees with listener Steve Carlsburg that the government would naturally be manipulating the weather, people in our world wouldn't even give him the satisfaction of believing him if he said the same thing here. It's interesting to me how Welcome to Night Vale flips the idea of the government conspiracy on its head; it would be more unbelievable if everything went exactly as it should. A commenter on some internet forum explaining how there had to have been a second shooter on the grassy knoll would be ridiculed by the average person if he were talking about the knoll in Dealey Plaza. Assumably, it would be different if he were talking about the knoll out by Old Woman Josie's house, in Night Vale. I wonder, what about a covert government action makes people automatically decide that the person they're dealing with is out of their mind?
Welcome to Night Vale is a podcast produced by Commonplace Books, written by Joseph Fink & Jeffrey Cranor, and narrated by Cecil Baldwin. The best way to describe it is as a cross between This American Life and The X-Files. In it, we listen in as Night Vale Community Radio host Cecil narrates the news of a desert town swept up in the middle of intrigue and worldwide conspiracies. As Cranor describes it in an All Things Considered interview, "[...] it's a small community town. It has the mundane qualities of everyday life in small-town America. As you hear more about the dog park (the first "news piece" read in the first episode), you realize it is completely locked down, not only physically but somehow spiritually too. You have no concept of what's happening in there. And there aren't even people in the dog park, just hooded figures that are in and around the area. [...] here's a mundane, quaint American town, sort of overrun by ghosts or spirits or conspiracies or underground societies."
The radio show itself is informative about Night Vale, albeit not in any straightforward way. Each biweekly podcast centers around one main news story (e.g. the opening of a new dog park, a sandstorm threatening the city, history week) spread in chunks throughout the twenty minute show. In between these chunks, we get various snippets of other items. In the community calendar, we discover what's happening in the next few days, and which days are still scheduled to occur. In traffic, we receive poetic statements about the action of travelling interspersed with actual advice. In words from the show's sponsors, nonsensical and bizarre advertisements for normally mundane products tell us what we should buy. In the weather... well, this is the only "weather" piece that so much as discusses meteorological occurrences. Recurring themes and arcs appear every so often, like Intern Dana, who got trapped in the dog park trying to see what was inside, or Carlos, a scientist visiting Night Vale whose hair enthralled Cecil at first sight. But, most of all, we get a sense of a pervasive and strong conspiracy, whose existence is undeniable fact and relatively unnoteworthy, as we see from this snippet of episode 19a "The Sandstorm":
Steve writes, "The sandstorm is clearly a cover-up. I believe this was a government-created project. Our government has long been participating in cloud seeding experiments and trying to suppress the people with pharmaceuticals. I believe that this government will stop at nothing in order to..."
Now you listen here, Steve Carlsburg! You're not saying anything new, Steve. Of course the sandstorm was created by the government! The city council announced that this morning! The government makes no secret that they can control the weather, and earthquakes, and monitor thoughts and activities. That's the stuff a big government is supposed to do! Obviously, you have never read the Constitution.
Okay, sure, government can be very inefficient, and sometimes bloated, and corrupt, but the answer is not to complain about everything that they do. Without government, we would never have schools, or roads, or municipal utilities, or helpful pandemics, or black vans that roam our neighborhoods at night, keeping us safe! So please, Steve Carlsburg, I've had enough of your government bashing!Does that sound like how anybody talks about the various JFK conspiracy theories? Welcome to Night Vale is a totally strange and wonderful upheaval of the way we look at conspiracies. Everything that you may assume has, in our world, a normal explanation, in Night Vale, probably has one connected to "a vague, yet menacing government agency" or "the Sheriff's Secret Police" or some other group. "[The podcast is] trying to take the dystopia model and actually make the people who live there quite happy with it," says Cranor elsewhere in the NPR interview. It's a small little town, where everything is just off.
I contrast this especially with conspiracy theories in our world, the real world. Whereas Cecil exasperatedly agrees with listener Steve Carlsburg that the government would naturally be manipulating the weather, people in our world wouldn't even give him the satisfaction of believing him if he said the same thing here. It's interesting to me how Welcome to Night Vale flips the idea of the government conspiracy on its head; it would be more unbelievable if everything went exactly as it should. A commenter on some internet forum explaining how there had to have been a second shooter on the grassy knoll would be ridiculed by the average person if he were talking about the knoll in Dealey Plaza. Assumably, it would be different if he were talking about the knoll out by Old Woman Josie's house, in Night Vale. I wonder, what about a covert government action makes people automatically decide that the person they're dealing with is out of their mind?
Wednesday, April 16
The Aesthetic of Conspiracy
As we break into Libra and specifically following the Frontline piece ("Who Was Lee Harvey Oswald"), it always fills me with wonder to see the people who decide to step out and comment on something with their own "correct" version of the story; just look at the comments on the Frontline webpage for the piece for several examples. Certainly, readers will note a sense of superiority in correcting a news source as lauded as Frontline in their own comments section, but what struck me was my reactions to each. If it was a short comment, (to me) it was just some uninformed idiot who didn't know what they were talking about. If it was a long comment, it was somebody trying to justify their ridiculous premise by launching words at me. If it was a poorly written comment, the commenter's inability to type properly ruined their attempts to persuade me. If it was a grammatically infallible comment, it still didn't change anything because what they were saying was still preposterous. No matter what, they couldn't win.
I wonder why I immediately presume that these commenters couldn't possibly be correct. My first thought comes to the stereotype of a conspiracy theory buff. In the television show Fringe, about a FBI team that investigates bizarre and weird occurrences and crimes believed to be connected to an international (and later interuniversal; it makes sense in context) terrorist group (very similar to X-Files), one episode in the first season sees the team meet Emmanuel Grayson, a "conspiracy monitor" who they think might be able to help them explain apparent cases of spontaneous combustion. First, however, they must be passed through his security system containing no less than eight locks. When they speak to him, you can see three computer monitors behind him, open to various conspiracy theory webpages or with a background featuring a flying saucer hovering just beyond the earth's atmosphere. Behind where members of the team sits are stacks upon stacks of manilla folders filled with various documents. On the wall hang several paintings of an abstract space vista. He insults the FBI agent for being "[a pawn] being used by the government to spread their propaganda." But when they convince him to help them, he lays out what proves later in the episode/series to be correct; a bizarre and ludicrous theory that an extremely powerful weapons and technology company (who frequently contracts with the US government) was founded so that its owner could build up a team of "supersoldiers" to fight an upcoming war. Then, Grayson goes back off the rails, saying that the war will be between the United Federation of Planets and the Romulans (from Star Trek), and that he himself is Spock. Yet, in the middle, he was completely correct, and if the team ignored him outright for his later completely unbelievable statements, they would miss out on critical leads to solve the case they were working on. Just because he looks like somebody they couldn't put their trust in, didn't mean he was never right.
Now that's interesting, isn't it? Surely the conspiracy theorists commenting on the Frontline piece would try to convince you they are even more correct than Grayson. The fact of the matter, though, is it's very hard to believe them. Just look at any of their websites. Here's one to explain the solution to the JFK murder. Here's another, that tells us that all the world's governments are run by lizard-like aliens. One more for you, about Denver International Airport. In large part, these websites share a lot in common. They were designed early in the age of the internet (and show it). They give huge and detailed explanations that are, to a non-believer, hilarious to read through. But, they bring up interesting points. The JFK murder is questionable. The Reptoids page detailed a technology that is both interesting and surprisingly similar to Elon Musk's upcoming hyperloop project far before he outlined it. Not only is DIA a creepy and weird place, but various tours of the place have been met with closed doors that could not be entered and odd vibes. Is there an underground city beneath DIA? Probably not, but it's still fun to think about.
My memory goes back to walking on Green St. a summer or two ago. There was a man on the street corner handing out fake dollar bills and brochures, both containing information about his 9/11 truther website. He looked like a nice enough guy, but my friends and I looked through his information to see what we could make of it. It was interesting, but ultimately extremely unlikely. But, specifically before I knew what this guy was handing out, I didn't think anything of him. He wasn't somebody I had to distrust, nor was he someone I implicitly wanted to believe. Once I knew what he was telling people about, I just laughed. It was silly! I tried to sneak a picture of him without him noticing. The spectacle of a conspiracy theorist was enough to entertain me by itself.
I suppose this post reads like a defense of conspiracy theory buffs, and I'm not really trying to tell anyone what to believe about anything. How should I know what's right? But, really, it's crazy how immediately we either assume somebody is believable or unbelievable based on what they believe.
I wonder why I immediately presume that these commenters couldn't possibly be correct. My first thought comes to the stereotype of a conspiracy theory buff. In the television show Fringe, about a FBI team that investigates bizarre and weird occurrences and crimes believed to be connected to an international (and later interuniversal; it makes sense in context) terrorist group (very similar to X-Files), one episode in the first season sees the team meet Emmanuel Grayson, a "conspiracy monitor" who they think might be able to help them explain apparent cases of spontaneous combustion. First, however, they must be passed through his security system containing no less than eight locks. When they speak to him, you can see three computer monitors behind him, open to various conspiracy theory webpages or with a background featuring a flying saucer hovering just beyond the earth's atmosphere. Behind where members of the team sits are stacks upon stacks of manilla folders filled with various documents. On the wall hang several paintings of an abstract space vista. He insults the FBI agent for being "[a pawn] being used by the government to spread their propaganda." But when they convince him to help them, he lays out what proves later in the episode/series to be correct; a bizarre and ludicrous theory that an extremely powerful weapons and technology company (who frequently contracts with the US government) was founded so that its owner could build up a team of "supersoldiers" to fight an upcoming war. Then, Grayson goes back off the rails, saying that the war will be between the United Federation of Planets and the Romulans (from Star Trek), and that he himself is Spock. Yet, in the middle, he was completely correct, and if the team ignored him outright for his later completely unbelievable statements, they would miss out on critical leads to solve the case they were working on. Just because he looks like somebody they couldn't put their trust in, didn't mean he was never right.
Now that's interesting, isn't it? Surely the conspiracy theorists commenting on the Frontline piece would try to convince you they are even more correct than Grayson. The fact of the matter, though, is it's very hard to believe them. Just look at any of their websites. Here's one to explain the solution to the JFK murder. Here's another, that tells us that all the world's governments are run by lizard-like aliens. One more for you, about Denver International Airport. In large part, these websites share a lot in common. They were designed early in the age of the internet (and show it). They give huge and detailed explanations that are, to a non-believer, hilarious to read through. But, they bring up interesting points. The JFK murder is questionable. The Reptoids page detailed a technology that is both interesting and surprisingly similar to Elon Musk's upcoming hyperloop project far before he outlined it. Not only is DIA a creepy and weird place, but various tours of the place have been met with closed doors that could not be entered and odd vibes. Is there an underground city beneath DIA? Probably not, but it's still fun to think about.
My memory goes back to walking on Green St. a summer or two ago. There was a man on the street corner handing out fake dollar bills and brochures, both containing information about his 9/11 truther website. He looked like a nice enough guy, but my friends and I looked through his information to see what we could make of it. It was interesting, but ultimately extremely unlikely. But, specifically before I knew what this guy was handing out, I didn't think anything of him. He wasn't somebody I had to distrust, nor was he someone I implicitly wanted to believe. Once I knew what he was telling people about, I just laughed. It was silly! I tried to sneak a picture of him without him noticing. The spectacle of a conspiracy theorist was enough to entertain me by itself.
I suppose this post reads like a defense of conspiracy theory buffs, and I'm not really trying to tell anyone what to believe about anything. How should I know what's right? But, really, it's crazy how immediately we either assume somebody is believable or unbelievable based on what they believe.
Tuesday, April 15
Sacrificial L[i]mb
Foreword: late post is late. Apologies from the team of monkeys. Now back to your regularly scheduled programming.
Of course, it's not a stretch to say that Dana's missing arm is an omnipresent reminder of the bizarre and harrowing experience she endured. Dana can't get Rufus off her mind, even in her own time. Her fifteen days in LA with Kevin after cutting her wrists are fraught with worry over coming back once more. But, when Dana returns after killing Rufus and losing her arm, the experience is apparently over. She begins to travel again, going to Maryland to check out records of what happened after she left. We don't hear anything about any more time travel. There is no Rufus to call her back. In much the same way, the tramp stamp person learns an important life lesson about the dangers of excessive drinking. The injured/ill may be much less able now, but they're certainly still alive. I may have an unsightly line across my left abdomen, but the cancer seems to be gone. The marks that remain are a constant reminder both of what we went through and that we aren't dealing with them anymore (Note: this doesn't really work for people with deteriorating conditions, like Alzheimer's or Parkinson's).
Dana losing her arm has a sense of finality to it. It feels like she sacrificed some of herself so that she could be free of the curse (of time travel). In a real sense, she sacrificed a part of herself when she killed Rufus too, both considering his status as her ancestor and their relationship. But, Rufus's ruthless love could only be ended or satiated with hurt. Imagine, for a moment, that Rufus and Dana are playing tug-of-war and between them is a portal between their worlds. For the portal to close, there are only three possibilities: Dana pulls Rufus through (unlikely), Rufus pulls Dana through (he is satiated), or somebody cuts the rope. Their connection is ended, and like any games of tug-of-war when the rope breaks (looking at you, Spirit Assembly) everybody falls down. Rufus dies, Dana loses her arm, but Rufus's love for Dana can no longer hurt her. So it goes.
Monday, March 10
"To Crush the Disease of Nazism"
"'You're going to have to fight the Communists sooner or later,' said Campbell. 'Why not get it over with now?'" (208).
In 1917, the Bolsheviks staged a revolution to overthrow the Tsar and institute their own government in Russia. From 1917 to 1922, this new government was best referred to as "Soviet Russia." From 1922 to its eventual fall in 1991, it was known more accurately as the "Soviet Union." But, by World War II, the Communists and their influence were well known by the West.
During WWII, Russia was officially an ally of the United Kingdom and of the United States. However, tensions were high even then. The Eastern Front (fought mostly by the Russians) in Germany saw many magnitudes greater a number of casualties than the Western Front (fought by UK and US troops). It is thought that the dropping of the atomic bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki was done in part to keep Russia out of the Pacific theater of war and to demonstrate the US's willingness to use atomic weapons if need be. Though the Cold War wouldn't start until 1947 (commonly; dates for this are in debate), for those looking, it was easy to foresee the coming storm even in the middle of the one preceding it.
Clearly, Howard W. Campbell, Jr., was one of those looking. Of course, in his earlier quoted comment, his aim is to convince the prisoners of war to fight and most likely die for a country and government they had been taught to hate. He is asking them to commit treason. But, despite his ulterior motive, he can see that there will be conflict amongst the Allies following the war even if they were to topple the Axis.
In response to Campbell's implorations, Edgar Derby, leader of the Americans, stands up. He insults Campbell, calling him below snakes or rats or even blood-filled ticks. Derby speaks movingly of the American style of government. He speaks of the brotherhood between Americans and Russians to exterminate the Nazis, like a disease. Campbell gives up on his audience, though more due to the air-raid sirens going off then any conceding to Derby.
Derby and the other prisoners know of the Russians. At the prison where they met the English officers were many, many Russian prisoners of war. The Americans and English were treated better than the Russians, but they occupied the prison together. They held no contempt for each other or for each other's governments, at least not openly, and sympathized with each other. But, ultimately, Derby's impassioned speech of "the brotherhood between the American and the Russian people, and how those two nations were going to crush the disease of Nazism" (209) only applies during World War II. Once that conflict was over, it was time for a new one, and our old "brothers," the Russians, became our new archenemies. If anybody in America sympathized with Russians, they were "Reds." If there was a conflict somewhere in the world, and the USSR was involved or thought to be involved, you can bet the US got itself in there too. Now, a lot of this followed the Chinese Communist Revolution in 1949, but the Truman Doctrine and the idea of containment predate that, being unveiled closer to the Tito-Stalin split in 1948. For all that brotherhood Derby speaks of in the titular slaughterhouse, there's nothing but enmity between Russia and America once the "disease of Nazism" is no longer a threat.
I find this all particularly interesting for the context Vonnegut writes it into. The book was published in 1969, amidst the Vietnam War. I think, in a way, this is a dig at the people who promote or support the war, Derby talking about "the brotherhood between the American and the Russian people." Notice that he doesn't say between America and Russia, but between its people. Vonnegut seems to be saying that, between people, there aren't really these big differences as implied by the large term "Communist." People are people. Russian people, American people, it's all the same. Though the political leaders and governments might be keen on posturing and grabbing up power and influence, these things don't matter to their people so much as just living. Do you guys have any ideas about this passage?
In 1917, the Bolsheviks staged a revolution to overthrow the Tsar and institute their own government in Russia. From 1917 to 1922, this new government was best referred to as "Soviet Russia." From 1922 to its eventual fall in 1991, it was known more accurately as the "Soviet Union." But, by World War II, the Communists and their influence were well known by the West.
During WWII, Russia was officially an ally of the United Kingdom and of the United States. However, tensions were high even then. The Eastern Front (fought mostly by the Russians) in Germany saw many magnitudes greater a number of casualties than the Western Front (fought by UK and US troops). It is thought that the dropping of the atomic bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki was done in part to keep Russia out of the Pacific theater of war and to demonstrate the US's willingness to use atomic weapons if need be. Though the Cold War wouldn't start until 1947 (commonly; dates for this are in debate), for those looking, it was easy to foresee the coming storm even in the middle of the one preceding it.
Clearly, Howard W. Campbell, Jr., was one of those looking. Of course, in his earlier quoted comment, his aim is to convince the prisoners of war to fight and most likely die for a country and government they had been taught to hate. He is asking them to commit treason. But, despite his ulterior motive, he can see that there will be conflict amongst the Allies following the war even if they were to topple the Axis.
In response to Campbell's implorations, Edgar Derby, leader of the Americans, stands up. He insults Campbell, calling him below snakes or rats or even blood-filled ticks. Derby speaks movingly of the American style of government. He speaks of the brotherhood between Americans and Russians to exterminate the Nazis, like a disease. Campbell gives up on his audience, though more due to the air-raid sirens going off then any conceding to Derby.
Derby and the other prisoners know of the Russians. At the prison where they met the English officers were many, many Russian prisoners of war. The Americans and English were treated better than the Russians, but they occupied the prison together. They held no contempt for each other or for each other's governments, at least not openly, and sympathized with each other. But, ultimately, Derby's impassioned speech of "the brotherhood between the American and the Russian people, and how those two nations were going to crush the disease of Nazism" (209) only applies during World War II. Once that conflict was over, it was time for a new one, and our old "brothers," the Russians, became our new archenemies. If anybody in America sympathized with Russians, they were "Reds." If there was a conflict somewhere in the world, and the USSR was involved or thought to be involved, you can bet the US got itself in there too. Now, a lot of this followed the Chinese Communist Revolution in 1949, but the Truman Doctrine and the idea of containment predate that, being unveiled closer to the Tito-Stalin split in 1948. For all that brotherhood Derby speaks of in the titular slaughterhouse, there's nothing but enmity between Russia and America once the "disease of Nazism" is no longer a threat.
I find this all particularly interesting for the context Vonnegut writes it into. The book was published in 1969, amidst the Vietnam War. I think, in a way, this is a dig at the people who promote or support the war, Derby talking about "the brotherhood between the American and the Russian people." Notice that he doesn't say between America and Russia, but between its people. Vonnegut seems to be saying that, between people, there aren't really these big differences as implied by the large term "Communist." People are people. Russian people, American people, it's all the same. Though the political leaders and governments might be keen on posturing and grabbing up power and influence, these things don't matter to their people so much as just living. Do you guys have any ideas about this passage?
Saturday, March 8
The Ecstatic Lightness of Getting out of Your Head (and into Someone Else's)
(Editor's note: I know I have a tendency to produce long, twisting, confusing blog posts. This one is, will be, and has been a particularly long one. If you'd like to skip down to where I begin to actually discuss Slaughterhouse Five, scroll down until you see the signal that I've begun that. Alternatively, you might just skip my introduction to talking about PREQUEL and why I think its most recent page was really cool. Either of these should be pretty obvious. Still, though, wouldn't you like to follow my ramblings and get into my head for a little bit..?)
I have an addiction to webcomics. Currently, I read 16 active to semi-active webcomics concurrently, 2 that are on extended hiatus, and countless more that have already finished. For those who don't know what a webcomic is, the basic form is exactly what it says on the tin: a comic (like a newspaper comic, or a comic book) published on the internet. However, two of my favorites go beyond that. PREQUEL -or- Making A Cat Cry: The Adventure is a comic following the misadventures of a Khajiit (anthropomorphic cat from the world of The Elder Scrolls games) named Katia Managan who tries (and fails, at least in her mind) to make her life less miserable and pointless. From the official about page: "PREQUEL is an interactive story where readers serve as the protagonist’s subconscious" and "I hope you enjoy reading my story about an alcoholic cat who hears internet voices." It was inspired by the aforementioned Elder Scrolls universe as well as the other webcomic I referred to earlier as "[going] beyond [being 'a comic on the web']," Homestuck. Luckily, I'm not crazy enough to try to discuss Homestuck at any length (let it be stated simply enough that it currently occupies the spot as longest webcomic on the Internet, and as would be expected there's a whole lot to talk about there), but it's useful to discuss why these two webcomics are so different than mundane "comics on the web."
First of all, looking back at Kazerad's (author of PREQUEL) description of the webcomic, they call it "an interactive story where readers serve as the protagonist’s subconscious." That is, readers submit ideas to Kazerad for Katia to... think, and act upon, and Kazerad strings it together into a cohesive narrative about a cat trying to discover that she isn't as pathetic as she thinks she is. This is derived from the style created by Andrew Hussie (author of Homestuck, and other "MS Paint Adventures" (MSPA)), wherein he had a suggestion box posted on his website underneath the ongoing comic that readers could use to suggest the next action to take place (a la "Break through glass with fist to unlock door."). Ostensibly, he took the first intelligible suggestion from the box to make the next page of the comic, which consisted of an image and text underneath explaining the events that take place. As time went on, he cherry-picked suggestions to make the story actually go somewhere, and eventually eliminated the suggestion box altogether so he could take the story directly where he wanted.
This brings us to the second reason I so enjoy these comics. Earlier, I stated that each page of MSPA consisted of an image followed by some amount of text. Starting with his first major story, Problem Sleuth, Hussie began interspersing animated images (.GIFs) instead of static pictures into the mix. His next project, Homestuck, took this even further, by incorporating Flash videos into the mix with action and music, then going even further and creating interactive videos, and then creating entire games within the comic that had to be completed to understand what was occurring in the story. One video was so big and watched by so many people when it was first released that it crashed Newgrounds, a site Hussie had specifically sought out to host the video because he knew his own servers would not be able to handle the load. What all this is getting at is that MSPA (and PREQUEL too) successfully utilizes the "Infinite Canvas," the concept that because a webcomic is not necessarily published in physical form, it can do things beyond that constraint (the name comes from the idea that theoretically you could draw infinitely in all directions and still post it, but the same concept can be taken further to include things like animation and such). If you're interested in this idea, Kid Radd was one of the first webcomics to include animations, and Subnormality is the quintessential "infinite canvas" webcomic; both come highly recommended.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~(first skippable point [PREQUEL stuff])~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Now, all of what I just talked about could be discussed at length for its particular... post-modernness. But I'm here to talk about getting out of your head, so let's get there. For those of you who skipped, we're talking about PREQUEL -or- Making A Cat Cry: The Adventure. Anyways, I trailed off into a discussion about why I like this comic (and its predecessor Homestuck); to sum it up, it's because instead of limiting itself to be a "comic on the web," PREQUEL takes advantage of its non-physicality and features animations, immersively HTML5 pages, and games. But, the craziest part about it is that to follow the story, you must actually play these games, get through the unnaturally tall HTML5 page, and watch the animations.
What particularly interests me is how these gimmicks are used. If you'd indulge me, look at this page. If you didn't, I'll sum it up for you: Katia (the main character), who is in a nightmare, tries to face her fear (a king), but when she does so, it breaks the comic. The king slices with power so great, the very panel he resides in is destroyed, and Katia falls into a blank, white space. On the next page, Katia hides in an "other commands used" box, which is normally not expanded until the reader clicks on it. She stays there for a number of pages until the king breaks in and kills her, and she wakes up. The effect of the gimmick of hiding within the architecture of the website is that we share Katia's fear of the monstrous king tentacle beast. This thing is so powerful that it breaks the comic itself, and we have to resort to constructions around the comic just to get away.
The idea of following Katia in dreams is continued at the end of her next day, most notably here. On this page (which does not display properly in Google Chrome, fyi), Katia is dreaming of when she was a child, living in a castle (her father worked there). She leaves her bedroom and instead walks down a ghostly, floating set of stairs. However, the action of her walking down the stairs is not a simple image or even animation. Instead, it goes in sync with the reader scrolling down the webpage. Just as Katia is uncertain of what awaits for her down the stairs, the reader is forced to contemplate what will happen when they reach the bottom of the page. Worse still, along with the magic stairs and floating torches to light the way that appear periodically as we descend, strange, tentacle-like blobs stream around the edge of the panel. For those who remember the previous night, a warning has just been issued. Whatever we find at the bottom of the stairs is likely to be related to the previous dream's king tentacle monster. And, just as Katia is scared of what she might find as she steps down from her room, the readers are once again filling her shoes, scared of what the tentacles might mean this time. All this immersive weirdness brings Katia to a clearing where she is again attacked by the king, only to hear a golden voice telling her that she'll be okay. In fact, the golden voice is wrong, and the king kills her anyway, but the voice promises to try to help her when she wakes up, which happens with a snap from page-wide animation to a normal page containing only images and text, jolting the reader from the dream layout back to the awake layout as unexpectedly as Katia is jolted from sleeping to lying on the floor.
But, in both of these examples, we are merely sympathizing with Katia. We cannot possibly experience the same thing she does, so we cannot progress any further. That is, we cannot progress any further, unless we try something new. The most recent page (at the time of this writing, Aggy: Extrapolate) sends the reader into a flash animation. To explain, Katia is talking with the ghost of a Dark Elf witchhunter, who has taken it upon himself to be her guardian and mentor. The two lines of dialogue that you ought to know preceding the page are as follows:
Katia: "I don’t want to disappoint you, but… I’m nothing special. I’m just a wet, homeless, jobless nobody out in the rain because she has nowhere else to go."
Aggy: "Well, I can fix that."
That leads us to the page where Aggy (the ghost) shoots some power bolt into the sky, and there's a link to the flash animation I mentioned earlier.
In the flash, Katia and Aggy have dialogue for a little while. Katia is depressed, feels like she has no hope, and just wants Aggy to leave her in peace. But Aggy has taken up the role of her guardian, and now he can't quit without succeeding. The flash begins with only some background wind noises, but as the conversation continues, some music starts playing. It's bright and crisp and cheery; it's stereotypical "our hero is about to learn something great about themselves and get their shit together" music. In that moment, the reader knows they are about to experience something incredible, the crux of the whole comic, what everything's been building to: we no longer make the cat cry. The conversation continues. Aggy stubbornly continues to insist that Katia is not giving herself enough credit, while Katia tries to tell him about how awful she is, and how many times she's messed up. Finally, Aggy pulls out a table from the tavern they are standing outside of, on top of which lies a puzzle:
~~~~~~~~~~~~(main skippable point [Slaughterhouse Five])~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
To those of you who skipped all that, thanks for scrolling down. Hope your scrolling fingers are intact after all that work. What I was talking about with that webcomic, PREQUEL, was that it was particularly good at placing the reader into the mind of its main character in strange and interesting ways. I see that as one of the main strengths of Slaughterhouse Five. Of course, all writing is, in a sense, attempting to get its readers to occupy the head of somebody else. Academic papers are trying to get you to come inside its author's head so they can explain this cool thing they thought of or found. History, in many cases, attempts to get you into the heads of all the people's and the people as a collective's heads. Fiction tries to get you into the characters' heads. But, some writing is less successful, whether intentionally or not. Some writing is not able to bring you into the mind of its subject but instead must tell you what is there.
Slaughterhouse Five, however, is very successful in pulling the reader into the mind of Billy Pilgrim. Time travel is as jumpy and sudden for us as it is for him. We experience it right alongside Pilgrim. We go from Ilium to war and back in just as odd a way as Billy does. Even if we don't understand what the Tralfamadorians are saying, neither does Billy, really. Billy just goes along with the jumps and the shenanigans and the weirdness, and so should we, or else we'll quickly get left behind and the book won't be successful any longer. That's why places like that second "Listen: ..." are so confusing; for a book that has us going in the mind of Billy Pilgrim, we are suddenly pulled right back out to hear that "Billy Pilgrim says he went to Dresden, Germany, on the day after his morphine night in the British compound in the center of the extermination camp for Russian prisoners of war." Why does he say this? Why doesn't he just do it? What is there to doubt about this happening, if we are to take it on faith that Billy always knew his plane would crash and that he was abducted by aliens and that he was constantly jumping through time?
Why, for that matter, does Billy give the same reverence to the death of water as to that of Wild Bob? The truth of the matter is, it's all subjective. So, to all those people that are just now starting to notice how many times "So it goes" appears in the book, congratulations! Death is all around us, as is life. It's startling that there aren't more chances for it to appear. But, now that you know that, can't you see why Billy says it all the time, even if you find it irreverent? And for those of you who just let it slide past without comment, welcome to the world of Billy Pilgrim! In some small way, your view on death, at least in this book, is in line with that of our boy Pilgrim. Isn't that fun?
The book hinges upon the reader tagging along inside Billy's brain. That's what makes it so successful, that we can see things from Billy's strange perspective, a whole new world of ideas, even though we could totally not agree. I don't fully understand why there are points where Vonnegut breaks that and inserts himself into the story, but it doesn't change the fact that the book works best when Billy and the reader are one. That's what I like most about the book, I think; that I can get out of my head for a little bit and see things like a Pilgrim.
I have an addiction to webcomics. Currently, I read 16 active to semi-active webcomics concurrently, 2 that are on extended hiatus, and countless more that have already finished. For those who don't know what a webcomic is, the basic form is exactly what it says on the tin: a comic (like a newspaper comic, or a comic book) published on the internet. However, two of my favorites go beyond that. PREQUEL -or- Making A Cat Cry: The Adventure is a comic following the misadventures of a Khajiit (anthropomorphic cat from the world of The Elder Scrolls games) named Katia Managan who tries (and fails, at least in her mind) to make her life less miserable and pointless. From the official about page: "PREQUEL is an interactive story where readers serve as the protagonist’s subconscious" and "I hope you enjoy reading my story about an alcoholic cat who hears internet voices." It was inspired by the aforementioned Elder Scrolls universe as well as the other webcomic I referred to earlier as "[going] beyond [being 'a comic on the web']," Homestuck. Luckily, I'm not crazy enough to try to discuss Homestuck at any length (let it be stated simply enough that it currently occupies the spot as longest webcomic on the Internet, and as would be expected there's a whole lot to talk about there), but it's useful to discuss why these two webcomics are so different than mundane "comics on the web."
First of all, looking back at Kazerad's (author of PREQUEL) description of the webcomic, they call it "an interactive story where readers serve as the protagonist’s subconscious." That is, readers submit ideas to Kazerad for Katia to... think, and act upon, and Kazerad strings it together into a cohesive narrative about a cat trying to discover that she isn't as pathetic as she thinks she is. This is derived from the style created by Andrew Hussie (author of Homestuck, and other "MS Paint Adventures" (MSPA)), wherein he had a suggestion box posted on his website underneath the ongoing comic that readers could use to suggest the next action to take place (a la "Break through glass with fist to unlock door."). Ostensibly, he took the first intelligible suggestion from the box to make the next page of the comic, which consisted of an image and text underneath explaining the events that take place. As time went on, he cherry-picked suggestions to make the story actually go somewhere, and eventually eliminated the suggestion box altogether so he could take the story directly where he wanted.
This brings us to the second reason I so enjoy these comics. Earlier, I stated that each page of MSPA consisted of an image followed by some amount of text. Starting with his first major story, Problem Sleuth, Hussie began interspersing animated images (.GIFs) instead of static pictures into the mix. His next project, Homestuck, took this even further, by incorporating Flash videos into the mix with action and music, then going even further and creating interactive videos, and then creating entire games within the comic that had to be completed to understand what was occurring in the story. One video was so big and watched by so many people when it was first released that it crashed Newgrounds, a site Hussie had specifically sought out to host the video because he knew his own servers would not be able to handle the load. What all this is getting at is that MSPA (and PREQUEL too) successfully utilizes the "Infinite Canvas," the concept that because a webcomic is not necessarily published in physical form, it can do things beyond that constraint (the name comes from the idea that theoretically you could draw infinitely in all directions and still post it, but the same concept can be taken further to include things like animation and such). If you're interested in this idea, Kid Radd was one of the first webcomics to include animations, and Subnormality is the quintessential "infinite canvas" webcomic; both come highly recommended.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~(first skippable point [PREQUEL stuff])~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Now, all of what I just talked about could be discussed at length for its particular... post-modernness. But I'm here to talk about getting out of your head, so let's get there. For those of you who skipped, we're talking about PREQUEL -or- Making A Cat Cry: The Adventure. Anyways, I trailed off into a discussion about why I like this comic (and its predecessor Homestuck); to sum it up, it's because instead of limiting itself to be a "comic on the web," PREQUEL takes advantage of its non-physicality and features animations, immersively HTML5 pages, and games. But, the craziest part about it is that to follow the story, you must actually play these games, get through the unnaturally tall HTML5 page, and watch the animations.
What particularly interests me is how these gimmicks are used. If you'd indulge me, look at this page. If you didn't, I'll sum it up for you: Katia (the main character), who is in a nightmare, tries to face her fear (a king), but when she does so, it breaks the comic. The king slices with power so great, the very panel he resides in is destroyed, and Katia falls into a blank, white space. On the next page, Katia hides in an "other commands used" box, which is normally not expanded until the reader clicks on it. She stays there for a number of pages until the king breaks in and kills her, and she wakes up. The effect of the gimmick of hiding within the architecture of the website is that we share Katia's fear of the monstrous king tentacle beast. This thing is so powerful that it breaks the comic itself, and we have to resort to constructions around the comic just to get away.
The idea of following Katia in dreams is continued at the end of her next day, most notably here. On this page (which does not display properly in Google Chrome, fyi), Katia is dreaming of when she was a child, living in a castle (her father worked there). She leaves her bedroom and instead walks down a ghostly, floating set of stairs. However, the action of her walking down the stairs is not a simple image or even animation. Instead, it goes in sync with the reader scrolling down the webpage. Just as Katia is uncertain of what awaits for her down the stairs, the reader is forced to contemplate what will happen when they reach the bottom of the page. Worse still, along with the magic stairs and floating torches to light the way that appear periodically as we descend, strange, tentacle-like blobs stream around the edge of the panel. For those who remember the previous night, a warning has just been issued. Whatever we find at the bottom of the stairs is likely to be related to the previous dream's king tentacle monster. And, just as Katia is scared of what she might find as she steps down from her room, the readers are once again filling her shoes, scared of what the tentacles might mean this time. All this immersive weirdness brings Katia to a clearing where she is again attacked by the king, only to hear a golden voice telling her that she'll be okay. In fact, the golden voice is wrong, and the king kills her anyway, but the voice promises to try to help her when she wakes up, which happens with a snap from page-wide animation to a normal page containing only images and text, jolting the reader from the dream layout back to the awake layout as unexpectedly as Katia is jolted from sleeping to lying on the floor.
But, in both of these examples, we are merely sympathizing with Katia. We cannot possibly experience the same thing she does, so we cannot progress any further. That is, we cannot progress any further, unless we try something new. The most recent page (at the time of this writing, Aggy: Extrapolate) sends the reader into a flash animation. To explain, Katia is talking with the ghost of a Dark Elf witchhunter, who has taken it upon himself to be her guardian and mentor. The two lines of dialogue that you ought to know preceding the page are as follows:
Katia: "I don’t want to disappoint you, but… I’m nothing special. I’m just a wet, homeless, jobless nobody out in the rain because she has nowhere else to go."
Aggy: "Well, I can fix that."
That leads us to the page where Aggy (the ghost) shoots some power bolt into the sky, and there's a link to the flash animation I mentioned earlier.
In the flash, Katia and Aggy have dialogue for a little while. Katia is depressed, feels like she has no hope, and just wants Aggy to leave her in peace. But Aggy has taken up the role of her guardian, and now he can't quit without succeeding. The flash begins with only some background wind noises, but as the conversation continues, some music starts playing. It's bright and crisp and cheery; it's stereotypical "our hero is about to learn something great about themselves and get their shit together" music. In that moment, the reader knows they are about to experience something incredible, the crux of the whole comic, what everything's been building to: we no longer make the cat cry. The conversation continues. Aggy stubbornly continues to insist that Katia is not giving herself enough credit, while Katia tries to tell him about how awful she is, and how many times she's messed up. Finally, Aggy pulls out a table from the tavern they are standing outside of, on top of which lies a puzzle:
If you've ever been to Cracker Barrel, you might recognize this. You jump pegs over each other in order to eliminate them, intending to leave only one peg on the board. Aggy challenges Katia: solve this puzzle, and prove to yourself that you are not a failure. Katia, not wanting to continue a fruitless argument, simply chooses to play along. And that's where the reader comes in.
Once this has happened, the reader is presented with the board themselves. Interestingly, the programmers of this file have chosen to give you the hardest possible starting position for a non-pegged hole. In any case, if you click on a peg, a paw-like hand picks up the peg, and if you click on a valid hole to put it in, the hand puts the peg there. The reader has literally become Katia Managan.
(sidenote: I'm writing this part assuming that, if you chose to play through this file, you did not win very quickly; this is more or less how I felt playing through it)
Katia plays through a round of the game, but ultimately is unsuccessful. She claims that proves that she is a failure, but Aggy counters by telling her that her failure was inevitable. It was her first time even trying, after all! She tries again. Once more she fails. Maybe she does better this time, maybe she does worse, but either way, not solving it in two tries is apparently proof of her uselessness. Yet, Aggy keeps trying to convince her that she is merely "too dumb to see that [she's] smart." At his prompting, she tries again. Once more, she fails, and at this point she is deep in contemplation about all those times she sat, waiting for her breakfast to come out, and tried this stupid little game, but she could never get it. She doesn't say that, though, she just says that the endeavor is pointless. Aggy makes her try again, this time using her mouth. That doesn't work. At this point, Katia is aware of the fact that the dialogue between herself and Aggy has not repeated once yet, indicating that she is in fact intended to continue failing, so that Aggy can finally convince her to believe in herself. The magic isn't in winning, it's in failing, and trying again, and failing again, but better this time. In fact, Aggy points this very fact out. She's kept trying, despite the fact that she clearly doesn't believe she'll be able to succeed. Failure has now been redefined. Failure is now quitting while the challenge is still at large. Katia tries again. She doesn't succeed, but she doesn't fail either. Aggy queries her: what lies on the table before her? He is asking her to look beyond the mere board and see what it represents. In fact, he is asking her to look beyond her mere life and see what it all could be. He goes into a discussion of Mysticism. Finally, he has gotten through to Katia. She is frustrated, sure, but she keeps going anyways. She does not succeed. She tries again. She does not succeed. She tries again. As she tries, she finally notices a ghostly white line appear as she makes a move. When she picks up the next peg, it doesn't appear again, so she puts it down and tries another. A whole series of lines appears, giving her moves that she's already made that will take her closer to the solution. She follows them until she sees no more. She must not repeat her mistake from last time, whatever it was. She makes a move. Then another. Pegs go away, but at the last second she makes a poor decision and is left with three pegs when she easily could have finished it. She's motivated. She knows she's close. There are more lines this time, guiding her back to that unfortunate mistake. She corrects it, finishes the game. DUMB PUZZLE SOLVED, the caption reads.
The reader is pulled back away from Katia. No longer are the reader and Katia one and the same. It is at this point that the reader realizes that they could go back, solve the puzzle sooner, and see a new ending. But it doesn't matter. For a brief window of time, the reader occupied the mind of Katia. It doesn't matter that the reader was made of skin and bones, and Katia was made of ideas and bits downloaded from the internet. What the creator of this flash was able to do was set up a situation where the reader felt exactly what Katia felt and went through everything that Katia went through. Playing the jumpy peg thing again would not be able to recapture that moment when Katia contemplated playing in Cracker Barrel when she clearly had never been there. Playing it again would not recapture the moment when the reader felt they would not be able to solve the game and Aggy made them do it again anyways. What mattered wasn't the solving of the game, even though that was nice. What mattered was the immersion into the mind of Katia that occurred in the middle of the game.
To those of you who skipped all that, thanks for scrolling down. Hope your scrolling fingers are intact after all that work. What I was talking about with that webcomic, PREQUEL, was that it was particularly good at placing the reader into the mind of its main character in strange and interesting ways. I see that as one of the main strengths of Slaughterhouse Five. Of course, all writing is, in a sense, attempting to get its readers to occupy the head of somebody else. Academic papers are trying to get you to come inside its author's head so they can explain this cool thing they thought of or found. History, in many cases, attempts to get you into the heads of all the people's and the people as a collective's heads. Fiction tries to get you into the characters' heads. But, some writing is less successful, whether intentionally or not. Some writing is not able to bring you into the mind of its subject but instead must tell you what is there.
Slaughterhouse Five, however, is very successful in pulling the reader into the mind of Billy Pilgrim. Time travel is as jumpy and sudden for us as it is for him. We experience it right alongside Pilgrim. We go from Ilium to war and back in just as odd a way as Billy does. Even if we don't understand what the Tralfamadorians are saying, neither does Billy, really. Billy just goes along with the jumps and the shenanigans and the weirdness, and so should we, or else we'll quickly get left behind and the book won't be successful any longer. That's why places like that second "Listen: ..." are so confusing; for a book that has us going in the mind of Billy Pilgrim, we are suddenly pulled right back out to hear that "Billy Pilgrim says he went to Dresden, Germany, on the day after his morphine night in the British compound in the center of the extermination camp for Russian prisoners of war." Why does he say this? Why doesn't he just do it? What is there to doubt about this happening, if we are to take it on faith that Billy always knew his plane would crash and that he was abducted by aliens and that he was constantly jumping through time?
Why, for that matter, does Billy give the same reverence to the death of water as to that of Wild Bob? The truth of the matter is, it's all subjective. So, to all those people that are just now starting to notice how many times "So it goes" appears in the book, congratulations! Death is all around us, as is life. It's startling that there aren't more chances for it to appear. But, now that you know that, can't you see why Billy says it all the time, even if you find it irreverent? And for those of you who just let it slide past without comment, welcome to the world of Billy Pilgrim! In some small way, your view on death, at least in this book, is in line with that of our boy Pilgrim. Isn't that fun?
The book hinges upon the reader tagging along inside Billy's brain. That's what makes it so successful, that we can see things from Billy's strange perspective, a whole new world of ideas, even though we could totally not agree. I don't fully understand why there are points where Vonnegut breaks that and inserts himself into the story, but it doesn't change the fact that the book works best when Billy and the reader are one. That's what I like most about the book, I think; that I can get out of my head for a little bit and see things like a Pilgrim.
Monday, March 3
A Brief Diversion
So, this isn't totally related to anything, but this past weekend, many of you probably missed out on the performance of our generation. I'm talking, of course, about The Jennings Brothers and their Electro-Pop Band's performance at the Champaign Park District's Battle of the Bands.
(2013 performance at the 5th battle)
(this is one recording of it; it's slightly better than the one here, but they're both not great)
So, in keeping with our theme of postmodernism in the real world, I'd like to talk briefly about The Jennings Brothers and their <genre> Band. The band's origins lie in the 2012 Battle of the Bands, again put on by the Champaign Park District. At that time, the guitarist and the bassist were in a band known as Bad Columbus with a third party not shown here. In point of fact, that band still exists and is working on either their second EP or their first LP. However, this story is in 2012 right now, when Bad Columbus was snubbed for second place at the Battle of the Bands (first place earned it, second was pretty bad, and third was Bad Columbus). Micky and Ricky were displeased with the result, and a plan slowly formulated. Gathering together a group of friends, they began to develop an idea for the next battle, in 2013.
When it came time for the 5th annual CPD BotB, the group announced their development as The Jennings Brothers and their Surfaboogie Band. With the band came the new personas: "It's Micky! *clapclap* *clap* Ricky! *clapclap* *clap* Dicky! *clapclap* *clap* and Tito! *music begins*" Ostensibly, the band was parodying surfer rock and surfer/stoner culture. In actuality, however, the band served as a way for the group to playfully mock and vent about the battle and the way it worked.
(2013 performance at the 5th battle)
For example, the bassist introduces their final song with the story of "Billy Bob the Surfin' Dog." Originally, they just planned to introduce their last song and get into it. However, one of the bands that played before them had dedicated a song to victims of (if I remember correctly) Hurricane Sandy (Note that the battle was in March of 2013, and Sandy struck in October of 2012). The band, feeling that this was a cheap ploy for sympathy attached to a song that ultimately had no relation to any tragedies, decided to parody the act of dedicating a song, by dedicating their song to the death of fictional Surfin' Dog Billy Bob (he died the way he lived, being swept away by a tidal wave). For their efforts, they were met with allegedly artificially lowered scores by judges who didn't appreciate a band mocking the institution of the battle.
This past weekend saw the next and most likely final evolution of the Jennings Brothers, their Electro-Pop Band. They added a new brother, our very own Colin Althaus (in canon, adopted brother "Chow Mein Jennings") to play keyboard as they once again took the stage. After their previous battle, the band had decided that in addition to further developing their personas, they would tighten up their musical performance, in order to stand a better chance of placing in the top three (who receive a paid gig to perform sometime in the spring for the Champaign Park District). However, they still intended to, as they put it, "not just stand on the stage stiff and straight-faced and act like we're not having fun."
They brought out a new version of "Billy Bob the Surfin' Dog," "Billy Bjork the Clubbin' Dog" (who was killed in a disco accident wherein a "Category 9 earthquake" striking Berlin caused a disco ball to fall upon Billy Bjork, which he did not survive). They played Rick Astley's timeless classic, Never Gonna Give You Up. They brought together the 80s and the BotB in a playful joke at the expense of the people who put on the show. But, ultimately, it was not enough, and the band was not able to place in the top three. Most of the members, who are all but one seniors in high school, do not intend to play again next year ("It would be kinda weird for a college kid to be [there]"), and so our only chance to see a new iteration of The Jennings Brothers and their <genre> Band, at one of the reward shows, was thwarted. In a text message later, one member diverged that "[one of the judges] gave us a fair score but the other two guys shat all over us." Again, members and fans alike alleged against the judges that they had purposefully given the band a low score to prevent them from placing (This year's third place winner, Rocket Nostril(? or Rocket Earhole? or Rocket Mouth? or Rocket Eyeball?), was honestly very bad. Just, really, terribly awful. Not even because the songs they picked weren't good choices or because they didn't perform them well enough, but because they didn't have the talent to perform them at all. Sorry, personal rant over). This, of course, or the ever-present Illuminati held back the band from the performance of their destinies. But, we may never know what truly happened. In the end, we can only agree on one thing; the world just wasn't ready for The Jennings Brothers.
 |
| (Indisputable proof of the true culprits) #exposeBOTB |
Tuesday, February 25
BC(E)
Stories are, in many senses, didactic. That is, they serve a purpose to teach something. Aesop's Fables are the perfect example of this; they were stories created with the explicit purpose of teaching a moral or a lesson to whomever would listen. No fox ever flattered a crow into dropping the cheese it had taken so the fox could eat it, but the idea of the story is still useful.
When PaPa LaBas, Black Herman, and the rest of the crew bust into the gathering at Villa Lewaro, to levy their charges against Hinckle Von Vampton and Hubert "Safecracker" Gould, they tell a story. Ostensibly, the story is true; in any (Atonist) court of law, it'd have to be to convict them of anything. But, better than true, the story is there to teach a lesson. Through allegory, LaBas and Herman elaborate not only what Von Vampton and Gould have done in the past, but what they are doing in the present.
Their story is an interesting amalgamation of Egyptian mythology and Judeo-Christian religion and history. The beginning of the story, all about Osiris, Set, and Isis, and setting up the rest of the narrative, is interesting, but what particularly intrigues me is the edited story of Moses. In Judeo-Christian religion, Moses was more or less the savior of the Jewish people. He was born to a normal Jewish family but set in a basket on the Nile because "Pharoah gave this order to all his people: 'Every boy that is born you must throw into the Nile, but let every girl live'" (NIV, Ex. 1:22). For clarification, the story implies that this order was specifically given to boys born to the Hebrews, not actually all of Pharoah's people. Moses ends up adopted by Pharoah's daughter, yadda yadda yadda, and we fast forward to when he flees Egypt for killing a guard. He meets Jethro (sometimes referred to as Reuel), marries Zipporah, sees the burning bush, goes back to Egypt to free his people from the grip of Pharoah, brings them into the desert, sets up their legal structure, and inspires a new leader Joshua (interestingly, a more accurate translation of the original texts tells us that Jesus' actual name was probably also Joshua (Yeshua, to be precise); not important, but it always fascinated me that we could know that fact and still consciously ignore it) to bring the people to their promised land.
LaBas and Herman's version of the story is a little different (and to be clear, is what I am referring to from here on out unless I explicitly mention the Judeo-Christian narrative). Moses is again plucked from the river in a basket by Thermuthis, "the stubborn, self-indulgent daughter of a weak Pharoah" (174). Instead of being secretly Hebrew, Moses is now a man who sneaks off to the Domain of Osiris. He hears from the other worshippers of Osiris that the best sound could be found with old Jethro the Midianite and decides to study under him. He goes off, learns the songs, goes to leave, and is coerced into marrying Zipporah in order to learn Jethro's "family secret." Moses then sets out to learn from the actual Book of Thoth from Isis. He does this, returns to Egypt, and plays a show for the Egyptians with all that he's learned.
This is where the story gets particularly interesting to me. Going back to when Moses leaves Jethro, Jethro attempts to warn him that all Isis could teach him is, at least at that time, the bad side of the Book. Moses, just as Thor Wintergreen after him, has delved into forces and powers he neither understands nor really accepts. Thor stepped in with the Mu'tafikah only to be persuaded by Biff Musclewhite to give them up. A similar effect occurs when Moses plays his Egyptian show.
The show begins with Moses' announcement that the show "would be a dignified concert and that everyone would have to leave them old nasty-assed animal fetishes and 'rattlers' and all these other 'flesh-pipes' back home and that there would be no savage dancing" (182). He has come in belittling the beliefs of the people and appropriating their techniques to his own ends. This is important! But, "[t]he Osirians were furious. They knew this to be an Atonist trick and decided to disrupt the concert" (182). Moses has tipped his hand, and the Osirians will strike back.
The concert is set up, the people are herded in, and Moses begins to play. However, "[the songs] weren't coming across like the way they had at the old man's fireplace. They sounded flat, weak, deprived of the lowdown rhythms that Jethro had brought to them" (182-3). Moses' taking of Jethro's songs has left something to be desired. The people throw grain on the stage and hiss at him. Moses knows something is wrong.
Things go crazy when Moses tries to perform the songs and dances from The Work. "The ears of the people began to bleed. Some of them charged the stage and tried to get at Moses but the Atonist thugs beat them back. 1 Osirian priest could no longer take it. He and several others knew what Moses had learned and knew how it was using him" (183). Moses is confused that this Work, all this he learned from the Book, did not successfully make the people go crazy. Instead, the Osirians rise from their place in the stands, and, not knowing The Work that Moses did, were still able to fill the air with beautiful songs and calm the people. They begin to dance, and Moses is irate.
In LaBas and Herman's narrative, this part of the story probably serves to link Moses, Judaism, and eventually Christianity to Atonism. However, more than that, it serves to elaborate what exactly Von Vampton was trying to do with the Talking Android. The role of the Android was to infiltrate the ranks of the J.G.C.s, and make it look ridiculous or wrong from the inside out. This is exactly how Moses operates in this story; he, though supposedly independently, was most likely influenced by the Atonists to join the Osirians and learn their tricks. Eventually, he hits the jackpot, goes out to Jethro, and learns the most powerful force of the Osirians. Even better, he learns of the Book of Thoth, learns from it, and returns to Egypt to finish his secretly Atonist task. Using the most powerful force of the Osirians and the divine force of the Book of Thoth, Moses tries and fails to convert the Osirians away from their "uncultured" ways and towards Atonism. Likely, this is what would have happened if Von Vampton sent the Talking Android to Harlem to perform instead of Irvington-on-Hudson. In fact, the story hints at both the suppression of Jes Grew and its eventual resurgence; Moses unleashes a nuclear bomb on the Nile by misuse of The Work, quieting the Osirians as the Left Hand rises to equal power with the Right Hand. Yet, many years later, Herman and LaBas reference the creation of the Ten Commandments in Judeo-Christian canon by saying that Moses returned from communicating with his God one day to find his children "dancing before the despised Bull God Apis, the animal which carries the living spirit of Osiris" and that Moses "heard the 'heathen sounds' [...] he hadn't heard since the old days in Egypt" (187). That is, the Osirians, even under the titan of Atonism Moses had become, resurged, if only briefly; in the same way, Jes Grew was destined to wax and wane against Atonism as time went on.
What I find particularly compelling about all of this is the way it ties into the way we talk about stories/histories from the past. Looking back to White's interpretations from our packets, we say that history and fiction can and did blend together. Whether for purposes of morality or artistic license, in the past and in LaBas and Herman's story, truth and fiction are blended together both to tell how the past was and how the present is. Does this strike any of you meaningfully? I just thought it was fascinating to point out.
When PaPa LaBas, Black Herman, and the rest of the crew bust into the gathering at Villa Lewaro, to levy their charges against Hinckle Von Vampton and Hubert "Safecracker" Gould, they tell a story. Ostensibly, the story is true; in any (Atonist) court of law, it'd have to be to convict them of anything. But, better than true, the story is there to teach a lesson. Through allegory, LaBas and Herman elaborate not only what Von Vampton and Gould have done in the past, but what they are doing in the present.
Their story is an interesting amalgamation of Egyptian mythology and Judeo-Christian religion and history. The beginning of the story, all about Osiris, Set, and Isis, and setting up the rest of the narrative, is interesting, but what particularly intrigues me is the edited story of Moses. In Judeo-Christian religion, Moses was more or less the savior of the Jewish people. He was born to a normal Jewish family but set in a basket on the Nile because "Pharoah gave this order to all his people: 'Every boy that is born you must throw into the Nile, but let every girl live'" (NIV, Ex. 1:22). For clarification, the story implies that this order was specifically given to boys born to the Hebrews, not actually all of Pharoah's people. Moses ends up adopted by Pharoah's daughter, yadda yadda yadda, and we fast forward to when he flees Egypt for killing a guard. He meets Jethro (sometimes referred to as Reuel), marries Zipporah, sees the burning bush, goes back to Egypt to free his people from the grip of Pharoah, brings them into the desert, sets up their legal structure, and inspires a new leader Joshua (interestingly, a more accurate translation of the original texts tells us that Jesus' actual name was probably also Joshua (Yeshua, to be precise); not important, but it always fascinated me that we could know that fact and still consciously ignore it) to bring the people to their promised land.
LaBas and Herman's version of the story is a little different (and to be clear, is what I am referring to from here on out unless I explicitly mention the Judeo-Christian narrative). Moses is again plucked from the river in a basket by Thermuthis, "the stubborn, self-indulgent daughter of a weak Pharoah" (174). Instead of being secretly Hebrew, Moses is now a man who sneaks off to the Domain of Osiris. He hears from the other worshippers of Osiris that the best sound could be found with old Jethro the Midianite and decides to study under him. He goes off, learns the songs, goes to leave, and is coerced into marrying Zipporah in order to learn Jethro's "family secret." Moses then sets out to learn from the actual Book of Thoth from Isis. He does this, returns to Egypt, and plays a show for the Egyptians with all that he's learned.
This is where the story gets particularly interesting to me. Going back to when Moses leaves Jethro, Jethro attempts to warn him that all Isis could teach him is, at least at that time, the bad side of the Book. Moses, just as Thor Wintergreen after him, has delved into forces and powers he neither understands nor really accepts. Thor stepped in with the Mu'tafikah only to be persuaded by Biff Musclewhite to give them up. A similar effect occurs when Moses plays his Egyptian show.
The show begins with Moses' announcement that the show "would be a dignified concert and that everyone would have to leave them old nasty-assed animal fetishes and 'rattlers' and all these other 'flesh-pipes' back home and that there would be no savage dancing" (182). He has come in belittling the beliefs of the people and appropriating their techniques to his own ends. This is important! But, "[t]he Osirians were furious. They knew this to be an Atonist trick and decided to disrupt the concert" (182). Moses has tipped his hand, and the Osirians will strike back.
The concert is set up, the people are herded in, and Moses begins to play. However, "[the songs] weren't coming across like the way they had at the old man's fireplace. They sounded flat, weak, deprived of the lowdown rhythms that Jethro had brought to them" (182-3). Moses' taking of Jethro's songs has left something to be desired. The people throw grain on the stage and hiss at him. Moses knows something is wrong.
Things go crazy when Moses tries to perform the songs and dances from The Work. "The ears of the people began to bleed. Some of them charged the stage and tried to get at Moses but the Atonist thugs beat them back. 1 Osirian priest could no longer take it. He and several others knew what Moses had learned and knew how it was using him" (183). Moses is confused that this Work, all this he learned from the Book, did not successfully make the people go crazy. Instead, the Osirians rise from their place in the stands, and, not knowing The Work that Moses did, were still able to fill the air with beautiful songs and calm the people. They begin to dance, and Moses is irate.
In LaBas and Herman's narrative, this part of the story probably serves to link Moses, Judaism, and eventually Christianity to Atonism. However, more than that, it serves to elaborate what exactly Von Vampton was trying to do with the Talking Android. The role of the Android was to infiltrate the ranks of the J.G.C.s, and make it look ridiculous or wrong from the inside out. This is exactly how Moses operates in this story; he, though supposedly independently, was most likely influenced by the Atonists to join the Osirians and learn their tricks. Eventually, he hits the jackpot, goes out to Jethro, and learns the most powerful force of the Osirians. Even better, he learns of the Book of Thoth, learns from it, and returns to Egypt to finish his secretly Atonist task. Using the most powerful force of the Osirians and the divine force of the Book of Thoth, Moses tries and fails to convert the Osirians away from their "uncultured" ways and towards Atonism. Likely, this is what would have happened if Von Vampton sent the Talking Android to Harlem to perform instead of Irvington-on-Hudson. In fact, the story hints at both the suppression of Jes Grew and its eventual resurgence; Moses unleashes a nuclear bomb on the Nile by misuse of The Work, quieting the Osirians as the Left Hand rises to equal power with the Right Hand. Yet, many years later, Herman and LaBas reference the creation of the Ten Commandments in Judeo-Christian canon by saying that Moses returned from communicating with his God one day to find his children "dancing before the despised Bull God Apis, the animal which carries the living spirit of Osiris" and that Moses "heard the 'heathen sounds' [...] he hadn't heard since the old days in Egypt" (187). That is, the Osirians, even under the titan of Atonism Moses had become, resurged, if only briefly; in the same way, Jes Grew was destined to wax and wane against Atonism as time went on.
What I find particularly compelling about all of this is the way it ties into the way we talk about stories/histories from the past. Looking back to White's interpretations from our packets, we say that history and fiction can and did blend together. Whether for purposes of morality or artistic license, in the past and in LaBas and Herman's story, truth and fiction are blended together both to tell how the past was and how the present is. Does this strike any of you meaningfully? I just thought it was fascinating to point out.
Thursday, February 6
False History
History. Old charts, drawers full of weathered documents, and stories passed down from grandparents to children. Usually, we think of history as a constant, a totality, a truth. History tells us what happened 100 years ago. If it's wrong, we find a new history that isn't. Overall, we'd like to think that we know what happened in the past; this is the 21st century after all! We might not have hovercars and jetpacks, but we can damn well figure out what happened on May 8, 1945. Right?
So, we take serious issue when official stories, the thing that should be a definition of historical truth, aren't right or complete. People love a good conspiracy theory. "They" hid the fact the moon landing never really happened. "They" are the secret force that runs the world. A man was able to fake his way to the post-game press conference at the Super Bowl in order to tell us that "they" were the ones who actually perpetrated the 9/11 attacks. Whoever "they" might be (the government, the New World Order, Reptoids), "they" are powerful. "They" thrive wherever the official story is not adequate.
When the official story is not complete, we seek the truth for ourselves. Think about the way perceptions about the American Civil War change as you grow up. From a young age, we talk about how it was "to end slavery," the North stepping in more or less from a moral high ground to end this atrocity. Then, you hit your teenage years, you start rebelling against the authority (internally and externally), and you reject this simplified story. In your mind, your elementary school teachers were sugarcoating a war that was more about states' rights and other factors in order to sell this story of good vs. evil that children love. Time goes on, you live with this idea, but eventually, you read up on it some more. It hits you; it really was about slavery. Sure, elementary school did sugarcoat it too, states' rights do play in too, but the war simply could not have happened without slavery. The whole thing is absurdly complex. Neither the original truth nor your rebellion were correct. You started close to, but not exactly at, the answer. You swung away in search of the "real" answer that teachers were "hiding" from you, only to swing past the answer and away from it again. And that's just the norm as its taught today (in the North).
So, this brings up an important point. When you compile a history to relay the truth of the past, you will cut out data, stories, and information that could potentially be relevant. There isn't enough space in the world to put it all together. So, how do you choose what you cut out?
Let's look at another example of history being twisted. In modern conception, it's become popular to almost fetishize a view of Nikola Tesla as a brilliant and put-upon genius. He was downtrodden by Edison, he was overshadowed by Edison, but ultimately he was so much better; Edison electrocuted an elephant! I mean, he literally hooked up an elephant to AC current in order to convince people that AC was dangerous! Tesla never killed any animals. This is a perfect example of what I'm talking about. Most of the stuff this guy is talking about is, more or less, correct. But he's also not talking about a considerable amount of stuff that would make Tesla look pretty bad. He was a eugenicist. He didn't believe in subatomic particles. He thought Einstein was incorrect with his theory of relativity. He was convinced that at one point he received a transmission from Mars. So, in effect, we have essentially two very different people, who shared a name, story, and body. One was the guy who was the underdog to the goliath Edison, and one was the guy who was born in 1856 and died in 1943. (If this section interested you, you'll probably like to watch this).
So, how do we deal with this? Should we even deal with this? What does this all mean? In physics, we have what is known as the uncertainty principle, which specifically states that the more one knows about the location of a particle, the less one knows about its momentum, but which is commonly referred to as stating that the act of observing something changes it. More importantly, as someone who sets out to write a history, or some historical account, how do you deal with the fact that you will categorically be unable to tell everything that could be relevant to the story? And that by trying to tell it, you may very well be affecting perception of it to the point of creating a new, false version of it?
Say you set out to share with the world a presumably true story from the past, but as you go along, you realize you have come to an impasse. No matter how you tell the story, there will be things you leave out, leading to two problems. Firstly, what we saw in the Civil War example might occur, where your simplification or leaving out of data will lead someone to assume the entirety of your story is not correct and they will conduct their own, misguided research to find out what you were keeping from them. Alternatively, you might experience the Tesla example, where your simplification or leaving out of data will lead someone to (and this is very important) BEYOND YOUR WORK compose ON THEIR OWN an image of a story that, as it grows in popularity and notability, diverges more and more from the truth, until eventually it doesn't even seem like you're talking about the same thing anymore. How do you deal with this?
If we look specifically at the "Uni history" example we talked about in class, there was information "hidden" (or perhaps better said, "not disclosed") on official channels. However, nobody knows exactly what the truth is except those directly involved, which is probably for the best (it's their private lives, after all). In the absence of some "absolute truth," we swing away from the "official story," try to decide our own truth, and then we cause this two-Tesla separation between the real figure and the one in our heads. When somebody completely separated from the story looks in (say, an alumnus who is Facebook friends with somebody still in the school), they're shocked at the developing, being-created story, when, if they were here, it wouldn't be anywhere close to as big a deal as it seems on the place most of us use to vent our worst feelings about a sensitive issue.
The truth is, there exist things, stories, and ideas we'll never know fully. We have to settle for "close enough" at some point, and sometimes where we settle that is unsatisfactory. Further, if we try to push beyond "close enough," there's huge risk for those involved to be harmed (airing of dirty laundry, etc.). At the same time, this doesn't mean we can't or even shouldn't look beyond what we're told; what it means is that we should be careful not to be sucked into either the "it's not what they told me, so clearly it's ridiculous" or the "it's not what they told me, so clearly it's right" mentalities. Isn't that disappointing?
So, we take serious issue when official stories, the thing that should be a definition of historical truth, aren't right or complete. People love a good conspiracy theory. "They" hid the fact the moon landing never really happened. "They" are the secret force that runs the world. A man was able to fake his way to the post-game press conference at the Super Bowl in order to tell us that "they" were the ones who actually perpetrated the 9/11 attacks. Whoever "they" might be (the government, the New World Order, Reptoids), "they" are powerful. "They" thrive wherever the official story is not adequate.
When the official story is not complete, we seek the truth for ourselves. Think about the way perceptions about the American Civil War change as you grow up. From a young age, we talk about how it was "to end slavery," the North stepping in more or less from a moral high ground to end this atrocity. Then, you hit your teenage years, you start rebelling against the authority (internally and externally), and you reject this simplified story. In your mind, your elementary school teachers were sugarcoating a war that was more about states' rights and other factors in order to sell this story of good vs. evil that children love. Time goes on, you live with this idea, but eventually, you read up on it some more. It hits you; it really was about slavery. Sure, elementary school did sugarcoat it too, states' rights do play in too, but the war simply could not have happened without slavery. The whole thing is absurdly complex. Neither the original truth nor your rebellion were correct. You started close to, but not exactly at, the answer. You swung away in search of the "real" answer that teachers were "hiding" from you, only to swing past the answer and away from it again. And that's just the norm as its taught today (in the North).
So, this brings up an important point. When you compile a history to relay the truth of the past, you will cut out data, stories, and information that could potentially be relevant. There isn't enough space in the world to put it all together. So, how do you choose what you cut out?
Let's look at another example of history being twisted. In modern conception, it's become popular to almost fetishize a view of Nikola Tesla as a brilliant and put-upon genius. He was downtrodden by Edison, he was overshadowed by Edison, but ultimately he was so much better; Edison electrocuted an elephant! I mean, he literally hooked up an elephant to AC current in order to convince people that AC was dangerous! Tesla never killed any animals. This is a perfect example of what I'm talking about. Most of the stuff this guy is talking about is, more or less, correct. But he's also not talking about a considerable amount of stuff that would make Tesla look pretty bad. He was a eugenicist. He didn't believe in subatomic particles. He thought Einstein was incorrect with his theory of relativity. He was convinced that at one point he received a transmission from Mars. So, in effect, we have essentially two very different people, who shared a name, story, and body. One was the guy who was the underdog to the goliath Edison, and one was the guy who was born in 1856 and died in 1943. (If this section interested you, you'll probably like to watch this).
So, how do we deal with this? Should we even deal with this? What does this all mean? In physics, we have what is known as the uncertainty principle, which specifically states that the more one knows about the location of a particle, the less one knows about its momentum, but which is commonly referred to as stating that the act of observing something changes it. More importantly, as someone who sets out to write a history, or some historical account, how do you deal with the fact that you will categorically be unable to tell everything that could be relevant to the story? And that by trying to tell it, you may very well be affecting perception of it to the point of creating a new, false version of it?
Say you set out to share with the world a presumably true story from the past, but as you go along, you realize you have come to an impasse. No matter how you tell the story, there will be things you leave out, leading to two problems. Firstly, what we saw in the Civil War example might occur, where your simplification or leaving out of data will lead someone to assume the entirety of your story is not correct and they will conduct their own, misguided research to find out what you were keeping from them. Alternatively, you might experience the Tesla example, where your simplification or leaving out of data will lead someone to (and this is very important) BEYOND YOUR WORK compose ON THEIR OWN an image of a story that, as it grows in popularity and notability, diverges more and more from the truth, until eventually it doesn't even seem like you're talking about the same thing anymore. How do you deal with this?
If we look specifically at the "Uni history" example we talked about in class, there was information "hidden" (or perhaps better said, "not disclosed") on official channels. However, nobody knows exactly what the truth is except those directly involved, which is probably for the best (it's their private lives, after all). In the absence of some "absolute truth," we swing away from the "official story," try to decide our own truth, and then we cause this two-Tesla separation between the real figure and the one in our heads. When somebody completely separated from the story looks in (say, an alumnus who is Facebook friends with somebody still in the school), they're shocked at the developing, being-created story, when, if they were here, it wouldn't be anywhere close to as big a deal as it seems on the place most of us use to vent our worst feelings about a sensitive issue.
The truth is, there exist things, stories, and ideas we'll never know fully. We have to settle for "close enough" at some point, and sometimes where we settle that is unsatisfactory. Further, if we try to push beyond "close enough," there's huge risk for those involved to be harmed (airing of dirty laundry, etc.). At the same time, this doesn't mean we can't or even shouldn't look beyond what we're told; what it means is that we should be careful not to be sucked into either the "it's not what they told me, so clearly it's ridiculous" or the "it's not what they told me, so clearly it's right" mentalities. Isn't that disappointing?
Friday, January 31
Ding! Dong! Von Kleist is Dead!
Today, the word "classic" is fairly abused. A piece of music from twenty or thirty years ago becomes "classic rock" when before it was just "rock," the game last week was an "instant classic," and Coke became Coca-Cola Classic just 79 days after the release of New Coke. How can something become a "classic" in less than three months? Folktales are one of few things to really nail that word. Our "timeless classics" have been passed down so long we can nearly assume they've just always existed. Like the rain, the dirt, and the Uni building, folktales are old, so old and ingrained in our cultural collective that everybody can be expected to know them, or at least be familiar with them. After all, Disney makes a killing producing animation featuring these cultural bastions! So, the next question becomes, when will Disney cover Michael Kohlhaas?
We talked a considerable amount in class about the implications of Ragtime borrowing plot lines from this 1808 German novella, mostly favorably. The story, being translated to a new time and context, takes on additional and new meaning; it's harder to move the story around like that than just plopping it down and letting it go, after all. Yet, still, there was uncomfortability; the borrowing was not recorded in the library check-out. Even folktales in the retelling tip their hand obviously at the original work; the story is still easily identifiable by all, and usually they keep the name. Note that Frozen, the most recent Disney retelling of a folktale, is based off of "The Snow Queen," a Scandinavian folk tale originally written by Hans Christian Andersen. As such, the title is actually The Snow Queen in other languages; in America, it followed the titling procedure enacted by Tangled (Rapunzel) before it. On the other hand, Doctorow's only hint to the origins of Coalhouse Walker, Jr., is briefly viewed in a stein that the man throws out the window of J.P. Morgan's library. Even if there were a bigger hint, the story of Michael Kohlhaas is not nearly well known enough to be able to say that people could be expected to realize the connection there. So, it gives the whole thing an air of dubiety.
So, hold on to that idea while we diverge for a moment to talk about the '60s and '70s in philosophy and critical theory. From earlier discussions, you might be able to recognize that this is around the time postmodernism was picking up speed, but here we're going to be more concerned with a closely related body of work known as post-structuralism. Like postmodernism, post-structuralism is better defined as what it isn't than what it is; it is not structuralism. So, what was structuralism? More or less, structuralism said that culture could be understood with the model of a structure mediating between concrete reality and abstract ideas. In much the same way that language is a way to understand ideas in terms of our real worlds, but it is in itself separate from both, culture is a way to understand cultural feelings and notions in terms of the rest of the world, yet is not itself a part of those feelings or the world. On the other hand, post-structuralist authors, who all present different critiques of structuralism, might say that the structures posited by structuralism are not inherently self-sufficient like they are assumed to be by that theory, and the binary oppositions that constitute those structures (between abstractness and reality) are not as rigorous and exclusive as implied by the theory. Overall, it ends up being closely related to postmodernism in tenets and theories, but is just as complex on its own right.
Into all this steps a man named Roland Barthes. I'll save you the extensive and enlightening history of his work and life to instead just talk about one particular piece, a 1967 essay called "The Death of the Author." In it, Barthes opens by talking about the method of literary criticism that relies on the author's identity to interpret a piece of literature. That is, the experiences and biases of the author lead directly into the creation and importance of the text that they write. While this is fairly common even in our English classes and not a bad place to start (in my opinion), Barthes argues that the principle of this action is flawed, saying that, "To give a text an Author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing." Barthes suggests that to liberate the text from interpretive tyranny, we must instead completely divest the author and the text. "The text," he writes, "is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture." It is itself composed of multiple layers and meanings, and the final meaning of the work rests on the reader, not on the author. As Barthes writes later, "[...] a text’s unity lies not in its origin but in its destination." In place of the "Author-God" model we tend to think of as forming our novels and media, Barthes suggests the term "scriptor," whose power is not to individually and spontaneously generate culture but to combine and compose pre-existing work in clever and interesting ways. The scriptor does not serve as explanation for the work, only as producer. Barthes writes, "[...] the modern scriptor is born simultaneously with the text, is in no way equipped with a being preceding or exceeding the writing, is not the subject with the book as predicate; there is no other time than that of the enunciation and every text is eternally written here and now." The meaning of the work is in its effect on the reader and in language itself, not in the life story of the person who ended up making it.
So what does all this have to do with Ragtime and von Kleist? Barthes here is arguing that a text is fundamentally divested away from its author, or more generally, the circumstances of its creation. And that brings us back to the dubiety surrounding Doctorow's lifting of the plot line of Michael Kohlhaas. When we talk about this, we are speaking solely in terms of the real world and the actions of a man that could be argued had no more to do with the creation of Ragtime than any other piece of culture at the time. The work that originated in von Kleist's writing and appeared in Doctorow's serves a new purpose and a new meaning in its new home, and we would be ignoring that to the detriment of the text as a whole if we were to focus too heavily on the way it moved between these two. While in academic works the line is very clear for what forms plagiarism and how you must keep yourself from committing it, that line is far, far less clear in artistic pieces. Could Warhol be argued to have "stolen" the Campbells can in his infamous work, or would it be more accurate to say that the very act of adopting or "stealing" it changes the work in a significant and meaningful way? That is, what really constitutes plagiarism or theft in an artistic work? While some cases seem more clear than others (a student trying to turn in something he just pulled off the internet being very clearly not an acceptable act), there is still dubiety over the whole affair. In a way, it could be up to the viewer of the work to decide whether what the "scriptor" has done is itself original and worthy of admiration or not. But, it's a complex and, at times, confusing question. Now that you've barreled through my wall of text, do you guys have anything to say to that?
We talked a considerable amount in class about the implications of Ragtime borrowing plot lines from this 1808 German novella, mostly favorably. The story, being translated to a new time and context, takes on additional and new meaning; it's harder to move the story around like that than just plopping it down and letting it go, after all. Yet, still, there was uncomfortability; the borrowing was not recorded in the library check-out. Even folktales in the retelling tip their hand obviously at the original work; the story is still easily identifiable by all, and usually they keep the name. Note that Frozen, the most recent Disney retelling of a folktale, is based off of "The Snow Queen," a Scandinavian folk tale originally written by Hans Christian Andersen. As such, the title is actually The Snow Queen in other languages; in America, it followed the titling procedure enacted by Tangled (Rapunzel) before it. On the other hand, Doctorow's only hint to the origins of Coalhouse Walker, Jr., is briefly viewed in a stein that the man throws out the window of J.P. Morgan's library. Even if there were a bigger hint, the story of Michael Kohlhaas is not nearly well known enough to be able to say that people could be expected to realize the connection there. So, it gives the whole thing an air of dubiety.
So, hold on to that idea while we diverge for a moment to talk about the '60s and '70s in philosophy and critical theory. From earlier discussions, you might be able to recognize that this is around the time postmodernism was picking up speed, but here we're going to be more concerned with a closely related body of work known as post-structuralism. Like postmodernism, post-structuralism is better defined as what it isn't than what it is; it is not structuralism. So, what was structuralism? More or less, structuralism said that culture could be understood with the model of a structure mediating between concrete reality and abstract ideas. In much the same way that language is a way to understand ideas in terms of our real worlds, but it is in itself separate from both, culture is a way to understand cultural feelings and notions in terms of the rest of the world, yet is not itself a part of those feelings or the world. On the other hand, post-structuralist authors, who all present different critiques of structuralism, might say that the structures posited by structuralism are not inherently self-sufficient like they are assumed to be by that theory, and the binary oppositions that constitute those structures (between abstractness and reality) are not as rigorous and exclusive as implied by the theory. Overall, it ends up being closely related to postmodernism in tenets and theories, but is just as complex on its own right.
Into all this steps a man named Roland Barthes. I'll save you the extensive and enlightening history of his work and life to instead just talk about one particular piece, a 1967 essay called "The Death of the Author." In it, Barthes opens by talking about the method of literary criticism that relies on the author's identity to interpret a piece of literature. That is, the experiences and biases of the author lead directly into the creation and importance of the text that they write. While this is fairly common even in our English classes and not a bad place to start (in my opinion), Barthes argues that the principle of this action is flawed, saying that, "To give a text an Author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing." Barthes suggests that to liberate the text from interpretive tyranny, we must instead completely divest the author and the text. "The text," he writes, "is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture." It is itself composed of multiple layers and meanings, and the final meaning of the work rests on the reader, not on the author. As Barthes writes later, "[...] a text’s unity lies not in its origin but in its destination." In place of the "Author-God" model we tend to think of as forming our novels and media, Barthes suggests the term "scriptor," whose power is not to individually and spontaneously generate culture but to combine and compose pre-existing work in clever and interesting ways. The scriptor does not serve as explanation for the work, only as producer. Barthes writes, "[...] the modern scriptor is born simultaneously with the text, is in no way equipped with a being preceding or exceeding the writing, is not the subject with the book as predicate; there is no other time than that of the enunciation and every text is eternally written here and now." The meaning of the work is in its effect on the reader and in language itself, not in the life story of the person who ended up making it.
So what does all this have to do with Ragtime and von Kleist? Barthes here is arguing that a text is fundamentally divested away from its author, or more generally, the circumstances of its creation. And that brings us back to the dubiety surrounding Doctorow's lifting of the plot line of Michael Kohlhaas. When we talk about this, we are speaking solely in terms of the real world and the actions of a man that could be argued had no more to do with the creation of Ragtime than any other piece of culture at the time. The work that originated in von Kleist's writing and appeared in Doctorow's serves a new purpose and a new meaning in its new home, and we would be ignoring that to the detriment of the text as a whole if we were to focus too heavily on the way it moved between these two. While in academic works the line is very clear for what forms plagiarism and how you must keep yourself from committing it, that line is far, far less clear in artistic pieces. Could Warhol be argued to have "stolen" the Campbells can in his infamous work, or would it be more accurate to say that the very act of adopting or "stealing" it changes the work in a significant and meaningful way? That is, what really constitutes plagiarism or theft in an artistic work? While some cases seem more clear than others (a student trying to turn in something he just pulled off the internet being very clearly not an acceptable act), there is still dubiety over the whole affair. In a way, it could be up to the viewer of the work to decide whether what the "scriptor" has done is itself original and worthy of admiration or not. But, it's a complex and, at times, confusing question. Now that you've barreled through my wall of text, do you guys have anything to say to that?
Thursday, January 23
Music Appreciation
Fantasia 2000 - Rhapsody in Blue by R174
If you haven't experienced the joy of middle school Music Appreciation class, allow me to explain the movies Fantasia and Fantasia 2000. The original came out in 1940, but, as stories tend to go, we really begin a little earlier, in 1936. Walt Disney was looking for a way to boost the popularity of a certain mouse, and to do so he decided to feature him in The Magician's Apprentice, a cartoon short based off of the poem of the same name written by Johann Wolfgang van Goethe set to the tune by Paul Dukas, also of the same name. However, unlike earlier work by Disney such as Silly Symphonies, he desired to go beyond mere slapstick by the composition of cartoon and classical music. To that end, he sought out a well-known conductor to record the music, for extra prestige. As things proceeded, he realized that The Magician's Apprentice had no hope of recouping its already sizable budget by itself, and the originally singular piece was adjoined by several others of a similar vein, together creating a concert (and movie) now known as Fantasia. In 1999, a sequel was created with all new shorts (The Magician's Apprentice being carried on as well), featuring the piece above, Rhapsody in Blue by George Gershwin.
The piece itself, though called by Gershwin "a musical kaleidoscope of America," is widely interpreted as a musical portrait of New York City. The short expands on this, set in the 1930s, focusing on the interweaving and simultaneously completely independent stories of four different people as they live in the Depression-era city. A little girl searches the city for something to do while her parents are at work when all she really wants is to spend time with them. A red-haired man is tired of being dragged along by his wife and her spoiled lapdog. A blue guy is out of money and desperately wants to work. An African-American dude is not interested by his construction job and would rather be playing as a jazz drummer. George Gershwin and his... prominent chin even show up for a few seconds. Disney being Disney, the stories all culminate in a happy ending after using the topography and feelings of New York City to tie together the lives of four complete strangers in much the same way Doctorow ties together the independent stories present in Ragtime.
The truth is, in Ragtime, there's so much going on between so many different people it's hard to keep everything straight. Why do we even need to know about Pierpont Morgan's secret sarcophagus or Harry Houdini's mommy issues? Why did I bother prefacing this discussion with one about a musical animated short? Just as it's fun to watch and write about Rhapsody in Blue, so too is there an element of Doctorow's infinite power as author to make the characters dance about as he pleases. But, it's important to keep in mind that the stories do comment on each other and interact as well. Houdini's "escapology," as he calls it, both is prefaced by the notion of upward mobility and the American Dream as well as prefaces Harry K. Thaw's escape from prison and Evelyn Nesbit's escape from her normal life. Henry Ford is the negative image of Coalhouse Walker in demeanor, stature, and attitude. Rhapsody in Blue and Ragtime serve as parallel images of how history works: not a single line from an archduke's assassination to war to revenge-seeking Germany to war again but a careful interplay of economic forces, cultural feelings, political maneuvering, overarching themes, and small and bizarrely specific individual stories that collectively attempt to tell the story of the world.
This flighty narration is what appeals to me the most in Ragtime (as well as in Rhapsody in Blue). It allows us to follow the zany exploits of a wide cast of characters as well as process the variegated emotions and opinions spanning America at the time. History's tentacles cover far and wide, beyond just one story or one piece of music, to ideas and powers crossing countries and continents. Isn't that something we can all appreciate?
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