A Year in Reading 2009

The end of the year is often a time to look back and reflect on where we've come from, particularly through the easily-digestible form of the best of list, often reminiscing over music and movies and other popular media. Book reviewer The Millions is currently doing a series called A Year in Reading, in which various notable authors discuss what books they read and enjoyed during 2009. As an author and voracious reader, it's nice to see literature represented as a still living form, and thought I'd contribute my own words on some of the books I read this year and didn't get around to rambling about the first time!

The noted reads featured Bolano's 2666 and The Savage Detectives, Murakami's The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, Galeano's The Book of Embraces, Wallace's Infinite Jest, Tsutsui's Paprika, and Patchen's Memoirs of a Shy Pornographer (these links to my reviews). And these were pretty good too:

Death takes a holiday in Death with Interruptions by Jose Saramago. Imagines all the socio-political implications of death stopping in only one country, with all the emotional intensity, compassion, and whimsy available to the Portuguese master-storyteller as he passes through his eighties. I read it on the plane. Also of note is Blindness, which imagines the horror of if everyone except one old lady goes blind.

Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie tells the nighttime story of India, following the life of one of the fifty magically-gifted children born on the eve of Indian independence. Hailed as eastern magical realism, Rushdie's almost apocryphal tone of storytelling soon descends into the horror of real politics while never once stopping that cloying wink at the reader. While it wasn't a favorite due to Rushdie's over-pretentious use of language, this book holds a significant place in post-colonial literatures, as Rushdie's life took on the quality of his writings when a fatwa was issued for his depiction of Islam in The Satanic Verses, which I'll hopefully get a chance to read over the holidays.

I read One Man's Meat for an autobiography class and was highly impressed. This book is the accounts of the daily life of E.B. White, of both Charlotte's Web and Strunk and White Style Manual fame. White shows a masterful grasp of relating the minutiae of every day life to both complex themes and global/historical changes. Poignant and thought-provoking, this collection of non-fiction essays is highly recommended as a masterpiece of the form.

The Empire of Dreams by Giannina Braschi is a wild surreal prose-poetic ode to living in New York City as if it was caught between the urban and a land of mythic dreams. An incredible sense of language and the immediacy of the process of writing as a saving grace. Honestly I need to reread it, many many times, and you should too.

The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov... is just brilliant. The Devil, his shapeshifting cat, and an improbable character in a hideous checked suit and pince-nez wreck havoc in 1930's literary Moscow. At once politically intelligent, fast-paced, and absurdly comic, Bulgakov flat out nails the way literature should be written: with enough of an edge to get banned in his home country for over 40 years.

Hidden Faces is not the novel one imagines Salvador Dali could have written. Penned in a madcap week, it is mainly a story of the dissolution of the bourgeoisie way of life through WWII and the unquenchability of people's obsessive desires. Actually pretty tragic, Dali's language is often dense and abstract, while at the same time being absorbingly visual. Perhaps the most interesting is his technique of telescoping between objects and metaphors, so that the words in a description in one sentence become an emotional state in the next, a real fluidity of meaning that harks more from the interplay of dreams than the figurativeness of poetry.

I've tried reading Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow about four or five times in the last ten years, and finally finished the whole thing this summer. While I read his latest, Inherent Vice, this summer too, it doesn't even hold a match-flame to the sprawling global epic that assured Pynchon as the master American novelist of the 20th century. All I can say is don't give up, it really is worth it. Next time around I'll read it along side Zak Smith's Pictures Showing What Happens on Each Page of Thomas Pynchon's Novel Gravity's Rainbow... but before then I should probably tackle Ulysses.

Pedro Páramo by Juan Rulfo and Warlock by Oakley Hall paint the double edged face of the mythic western. The first is a surreal tale of a haunted Indian ghost town, hailed as one of the most important pieces of Latin American literature by both Marquez and Borges, and features one of the most beautiful descriptions of a meteor shower. The second narrates the hard-edged failure of the cowboy to live up to his heroic image, and was Pynchon's favorite novel as a youth (and was most likely the main source inspiration for the show Deadwood). Reading these back to back was highly illuminating of why the "wild west" maintains an integral place in the American cultural imagination.

It took me a long time to get to reading Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell, namely as I'm skeptical of reading books that consistently top best of lists. But there is a very good reason why this one does, because it is awesome! The frame story is essentially a set of nesting doll tales taking place through various genres and historical periods from the 1600s to the far future, intertwining a sense of urgency about why and how we are able to narrate our lives, and the effect these narrations can have generations hence. Though a little heavy-handed at the end, this book points to a new direction for the importance of storytelling in the future.

[Edit: For the sake of symmetry here's one absolute reading failure for the year: The Fox from Up Above and the Fox from Down Below by Jose Maria Arguedas was recommended by my Literature of the Americas teacher as an example of the function of magical realism in the Boom and took half a year to track down an affordable copy of. This book is both a portrait of a small fishing town crumbling under the approach of modernity and the journals of the author crumbling under the weight of the untenability of writing this portrait. While at first glance it looks like an interesting juxtaposition between the process of writing as intertwined with the object of writing, this book has no plot, turgid and horrifying descriptions of life, and an undercurrent of despair that at once is directly critical of the other Boom authors while driving them to reject Arguedas from literary circles. I picked up and put down this book multiple times but was unable at any point to make headway, and finally had to admit that as fraught as this book is it is no wonder the author killed himself before he finished writing it. At the same time I wouldn't be surprised if twenty years down the road I return to and decide it is a masterpiece.]

Bananarchy in the Bowl of Winds (fiction)

[This one's inspired by a bunch of puns from work today, and the ridiculousness of the anxiety that manifests itself in Pittsburgh this time of year. Enjoy!]


Bananarchy in the Bowl of Winds

It was third down in the final minutes of the third quarter, and Jerry was on the edge of his seat. C’mon, he screamed, just catch the ball! I can’t believe that call, he was clearly across the line… I couldn’t tell how Jerry knew; it was almost impossible to see the field from as high up as we were in the stands. But the seats were cheap, even if in this terrible weather the wind just whipped down into the bowl of the arena and froze our faces off, even though the group of fans in bright yellow suits right below us seemed jovially unconcerned.

Touchdown! No it’s not, Jerry howled, wringing his towel and jumping up and down. One of the fans cast an odd glance up our way, but his friends were occupied, huddled around something I couldn’t see, probably watching a replay on the Net as the JumboTron screen was having a hard time staying focused. The fan’s face was inexplicably painted like a clown’s, in a yellow as garish as his suit. Jerry had warned me the fans often dressed quite strange to show their team spirit. I’ve never understood football myself, being more of a story man. What’s the entertainment value of watching large men you can’t even see tumbling all over each other? But Jerry’s enthusiasm was contagious, so when he begged me to come along with him to the game I agreed, not realizing how miserably wretched the weather would be, even in the chintzy team windbreaker Jerry leant me that did nothing to keep out the wind. Those thick yellow suits were starting to look appealing right now.

The game wore on, Pittsburgh falling behind as Dallas caught a second wind, and then a third. Unable to make out the ant-like players below, my attention kept wandering, returning to the yellow-suited fans who seemed to be having a lot more fun. It looked like they were busy constructing some apparatus, what after a moment my brain told me was a catapult. A catapult? I wanted to ask Jerry if this was for some post-game ritual, but he was too busy chewing his mittens to shreds over the last foul to listen, so I sat back again to watch, finally a little curious.

Third down in the final minutes of the last quarter, and the Steelers had just used their last timeout, hopefully planning how to turn their game around before poor Jerry threw himself from the bleachers in despair. The whole crowd was on the edge of their seats, except for me, unable to see why this was so important, and the yellow suits, who’d finished building their contraption and all leaned back, opening their jackets despite the chill. Suddenly, just as one of the Cowboys was about to claim another first down (I think that’s what it’s called), a small flapping object went whirling out of the stands, landing right in front of the runner, whose feet flew out from under him in an inglorious pratfall.

The crowd went wild as the cameras zoomed in to reveal a banana peel on the jittery JumboTron screen. The announcers all mumbled, uncertain where it had come from. The crowd was actually aghast, but they couldn’t keep from laughing at the absurdity of it, the yellow-suited fans most of all. Finally the field calmed down again so the Cowboy could redo his play without interruptions. But no! This time with an audible thwang another yellow whirl went sailing, and another. Suddenly the arena’s cold air was filled with banana peels, all landing whichever way the winds blew them! Looking around I realized that the top rows of the stands were dotted with yellow-suited individuals, each group of them busy at their own little catapult. They must have planned this whole caper in case the Steelers began to loose, unless it was a political statement, hiding the bananas in their jackets to keep them from freezing.

No one else seemed to notice the characters depart, all eyes intent on the field, where the game carried on now despite the rain of peels, the players slipping and tumbling all over the place, the ball slick with juice and a fruity reek wafting up to the stands. It was chaos, sheer bananarchy! Jerry could only shake his head as his cherished pastime was reduced to the buffoonery I’d always told him it looked like, while I laughed and laughed, entirely forgetting about the cold. Eventually the game was called on account of the mushy sabotage, and as we were walking to the lot I turned to Jerry and said, you know what, that was a lot more fun then I expected, you wanna go get a smoothie? For some reason he only grumbled and kept walking.

The Unlimited Story Deck is now online!

I finally finished designing the website for my final project for my Narrative and Technology class, and the Unlimited Story Deck is now available online!


On the site you'll find an introduction, rules, playtested stories and analyzes, and downloadable versions of all the cards (licensed under Creative Commons). I will be continuing to test out the limitations of the deck and revise it for a gamma version and eventual publication, so if anyone's still interested in trying it out, either download the Deck or get a hold of me to play it.


It's been one hell of a process banging my eyes off html code the last couple days and I am in much need of a break!

A Magnet for Possibilities (news)

APA Philosophy Referee Hand Sginals (above)
Rumors that first Dark Matter Particle has been discovered
US finally to settle Native American Trust Lawsuit
What Philosophers Believe
How the iPhone could Reboot Education (which I've already seen with my own eyes at Pitt)
Tom Waits may be up for a role in the Hobbit
David Bowie and the Occult
The Fortsas Bibliohoax
The Milky Way at different Wavelengths
Don't Believe in God? Can't Hold Office in NC
MIT's Mind Machine Project takes AI research to 2.0
Dave Eggers publishes a newspaper
Casual Sex found to not be psychologically dangerous for young people
Henry Miller's Watercolors
Should Earth Scientists take a Hippocratic Oath? (I say yes)
The Mystery of the Magically Braided Horse Manes
Music for Water Bears
100 Best last lines of novels, the first of which and my favorite is from Beckett's The Unnameable:

".... ...you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on."

Updates from the World

A Lost European Culture, Pulled From Obscurity

New Model of the Universe Says Past Crystallises out of the Future

Trees Communicate with Aspirin-like Chemical

Rudiments of Language Discovered in Monkeys

David Foster Wallace's Toy Cement Mixer

"Nothing is more free than the imagination of man; and though it cannot exceed that original stock of ideas furnished by the internal and external senses, it has unlimited power of mixing, compounding, separating, and dividing these ideas, in all the varieties of fiction and vision. It can feign a train of events, with all the appearance of reality, ascribe to them a particular time and place, conceive them as existent, and paint them out to itself with every circumstance, that belongs to any historical fact, which it believes with the greatest certainty. Wherein, therefor, consists the difference between such a fiction and belief?"
-David Hume, from An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding

Liber Novus: first impression of Jung's Red Book

I couldn't sleep last night, as inspired as I was having begun to read Carl Jung's Liber Novus, his "Red Book." My first impression is that this is a massive tome; at 16x12x2'' it is easily the largest book I've ever laid hand on, and just turning the pages takes a substantial effort. But it's well worth it.



The Liber Novus is Jung's account of his decades long process of psychological and subconscious self experimentation, through a technique called "active imagination;" a process that he claimed was the seeds to all his work. Written first in a series of Black Books, this masterpiece was later painstakingly copied into a red leather-bound book, though never finished. And by copy I mean create an entire illuminated manuscript, complete with exquisite calligraphy and full color mandala and dream illustrations, that Jung worked on till his fascination with alchemy took hold, and then sat in a box until long after he died.

This first edition presents not just a translation of the text (by Jung scholar Sonu Shamdasani), but a full facsimile of the original folio plates, which have been kept in a safe deposit box unlooked at for the last 80 years and so are in excellent condition. The edition also includes critical apparatuses; a historical essay to contextualize the significance of the Liber Novus in Jung's life and work (and was the main thrust to convince the Society for the Heirs of Jung to finally let the book be published), as well as paratextual citations to highlight the variety of references in the manuscript itself, which should make the read that much more insightful.

Flipping through the folio I was struck by the richness of the illustrations, some of which I would consider masterpieces in themselves, filled with fractals, swirling colors, archetypal situations, and a surreal dream-sense that was apparently under-appreciated by the Surrealists. The calligraphy is in German, which I unfortunately don't speak, and can only comment on the precise appearance of.

As for the text itself, that will be my next attempt. I will say that it begins with the title: "The way of what is to come," along with some prophetic quotations from Isaiah, and much of it is in dialogue form between Jung and his spirit guide (in the tradition of Mephistopheles), placing the work as a modern take of the tradition of revelatory literature, which isn't so far off considering the inclusion of Jung's dreams prophesying the World Wars.

On the whole, the book seems to be Jung's attempt to reconcile the scientific with the mythic and spiritual, the personal with collective, and as such could not be more timely than to finally see the light of people's eyes. As a writer interested in the use of dreams and personal narratives, as well as having taken this process to my own experimental, revelatory, self-mythology and understand the danger of attempting vs. the incredibly potent imagery that can come out of such a process, I suspect the Liber Novus may have far reaching cultural effects that we could only begin to imagine.

The Unlimited Story Deck – Artist’s Statement

“I think we should put some mountains here. Otherwise, what are all the characters going to fall off of?” -Laurie Anderson

As a storyteller and theorist on the role that narratives play in our lives, I am concerned with how we produce stories, particularly in our contemporary, hyper-mediated age. We are exposed to narratives everywhere we turn, from the news and movies, to the expression of our memories and daily experiences. Despite this overwhelming abundance of narrative forms, it seems that people often take in stories passively, and do not think about how each of us are continually narrating the world around us. The uncertainty over the future of print media and the Internet’s allowance of the production of rapid and potentially low-quality narratives point to a pressing need to encourage people to continue to learn and enjoy the art of good storytelling. To this end I have created a game and technology, called the Unlimited Story Deck, which can be used to highlight the ways in which we construct narratives, both individually and as communities, and encourage people to tell and enjoy telling new and quality narratives.

There is a myth that that the authorial process is a challenging, mystical, and solitary craft. On the contrary though, everyone is telling stories all the time; the ability to form narrative connections between diverse concepts in our lives may be one of our most rudimentary abilities. Scott McCloud, in his Understanding Comics, suggests that we make such intuitive narrative connections when making sense between the panels of comics . We recognize patterns and desire causal or associational relationships between the contents of our experience, regardless of what those contents are or the contexts and mediums in which they are encountered, just as in comics we don’t need to be told how to interpret the variously arranged and disjointed panels. The Unlimited Story Deck works by presenting its users with a variety of such juxtaposed concepts, from which we can recognize and express our narrative connections.

But what are these contents or concepts we recognize and construct narratives from? The Pre-Socratic philosopher Anaximander believed that all reality was constructed from one underlying substance that he called the Unlimited, essentially a storehouse or database of all potential qualities that could be intermixed and expressed in the world . While this was subsequently disproved as a valid physical theory of the Universe, it may serve as a metaphor for the field of storytelling, in that all narrative realities are constructed from the intermixing and expressing of the unlimited storehouse of conceptualized language. Specifically, we find in stories concepts for characters, settings, events, objects, and dynamics, which are intermixed and expressed in a variety of ways. Each card of the Unlimited Story Deck presents one of these types of storytelling concepts, which can be played in a variety of ways to construct narratives.

While one of my aims is to see how we tell stories outside of expected forms or mediums, (otherwise how might they be novel), it seems we can tell stories from concepts because they are familiar or recognizable from our experience; we know the associations and trappings and how they might be used. There are through the wealth of human narratives certain types of stories that are told again and again, and which anyone who has ever read a book or watched a movie might immediately recognize. Like Anaximander’s Unlimited, one imagines a database of all available narrative types, a technology that Heidegger would call a “standing-reserve” of concepts , which reveal these concepts for us to use in story creation. For the Unlimited Story Deck I have collected such recognizable types of content, which should allow its users to more readily and enjoyably create narratives. Though the form of a deck is limited, physically by the need to shuffle the cards, the permutations of narrative connections between any of these concepts is as unlimited as the human imagination.

While I believe our ability to form narrative connections is intuitive, telling stories still takes work. As media theorist Espen Aarseth suggests, texts are machines for the production of narrative meaning that require the input of a human user to make them operate . Even traditional narrative forms like the novel require some amount of feedback and interpretation from the reader to make sense of a story. On the other hand, this ergodic feedback can be fun, when viewed as games that encourage us to enjoy the act of problem solving or narrative resolution . While it does not present the kinds of goals typical of games, the Unlimited Story Deck is intended to induce the same kind of fun when played by randomly generating concepts that we have to express as narratives, and as such stands in a tradition of storytelling and card games that require interaction to form narrative connections.

Aarseth notes that one of the oldest books, the Chinese I Ching, makes use of discrete nonlinear/random methods for being read, producing 4096 possible distinct readings from the permutations of its symbols . A similar and more direct antecedent is the divinatory system of the Tarot, which presents its users with randomly drawn cards that each contain a concept or archetype from which a reading is constructed. Some important aspects of the Tarot to note are that 1). The archetypes are drawn from familiar or basic situations in human life, 2). Provide open guidelines for the spatio-temporal arrangement and reading of the cards, and 3). Ask the reader to consider the cards and their constructed narrative as a representation of the reader and their personal associations to the cards’ contents.

This last point becomes important when considering another antecedent: that of role-playing games such as Dungeons and Dragons. Though many actions in RPGs are decided through the chance of dice rolls, this kind of game’s fun comes primarily through the story that the players and game master construct and express from the randomness of events and charts of possible outcomes. The players are encouraged towards this act of narrative construction because they identify themselves with the characters in the story. While the Unlimited Story Deck could be used in a similar, self-representational way, it seems that this identification between reader and character may be an integral part of how we interpret stories: by imagining ourselves into the situations and relationships presented these become real for us. Many of the cards in this deck have thus been addressed to the user to encourage their involvement in the stories that can be constructed.

A last few antecedent forms to consider include collectible card games, such as Magic: The Gathering, where players place cards on the table that each represent different characters or forces operating on each other. While this may look the most like the Ultimate Story Deck, collectible card games don’t generally encourage narrative creation and have very particular constraints of game play and goal-situations. Another card game worth mentioning though is Fluxx, where the cards played change the rules and end-situations of the game. This is closer to the player relationship to the cards played in the Ultimate Story Deck, but once again without the use of narratives. Lastly is the card game 1000 Blank White Cards (which I have yet to play, and so can’t speak freely about how it operates), essentially blank cards drawn on by the players to make up the game as it goes along. The Ultimate Story Deck seems very similar to this, but with a preset range of cards and a focus on narration somewhat more similar to the Surrealist storytelling game Exquisite Corpse, where a narrative is made up by people passing around sentences to be finished or continued.


This project is still unfinished, the cards are being designed and should hopefully be done next week in time to start play-testing how the Deck works. More details forthcoming.


1. Scott McCloud. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art (New York: HarperPerrenial, 1994) 62-4
2. Philip Wheelwright [Ed.] The Presocratics (New York: Macmillan, 1985) 53
3. Martin Heidegger. The Question Concerning Technology. Basic Writings. David Farrell Krell [Ed.] 322
4. Espen Aarseth. Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature (Baltimore: John Hopkins University) 20-1
5. Raph Koster. A Theory of Fun for Game Design (http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20041203/koster_01.shtml, 11.30.09)
6. Aarseth 9

The Way of What is to Come

Monday, listening to M.Pyres, dancing up and down over my copy of Jung's "Red Book" [on his theories of interpretation] finally arriving, though won't have time to dive into it for a couple weeks due to the increasing school work load. But soon.

For the time being here's some links that have been building up in my reader:


Images
From Kris Kuksi's Beast Anthology (above).
Dust Echoes: animated stories from the Australian dreamtime.
The dawn of a new post postmodern era in art.

Words
Viking love (and war) poetry.
Alan Moore's new zine, Dodgem Logic.
A Reader's Manifesto, or why contemporary literature sucks.
Bad sex in fiction award 2009 (NSFW).
The Books that founded D&D.

Faith and Politics
Obama omits reference to God in Thanksgiving speech.
The inherent fail of New Atheism.
Ritual sacrifices in Nepal see 320,000 animals sacrificed.
Switzerland Votes to Ban Minarets
CIA's lost magic manual resurfaces.
The global protest movement, ten years later.

Science
Doctors Recommend Medical Marjiuana for Minors with ADHD.
Humans hear through their skin.
Plants have a social life.
Science is shackled by intellectual property.
Large Hadron Collider sets world record for particle acceleration.
Virgin Galactic's Space-Grazing Aircraft Is Ready for Liftoff.

Academicia

As part of the current process of integrating my various creative works onto the Internet, I've decided to post some of the more interesting academic papers I've written over the last several years for school (backdated to when they were written, including a couple pieces of fiction, not including any work from the current semester):

Manifesting Power: Indra’s Slaying of Vṛtra as Kratophany of the Vedic Kings, 10.6.07

Vivid Wanderings: The Gunwinggu Rainbow Serpent as Symbol for Indigenous Australian Life, 11.3.07

Speaking the World: Pico della Mirandola’s Cabalism and the Languages of Science, 11.20.07

Dreams of Identity in Everett's Erasure, 11.28.07

Haunting Tradition: Ritual Failure in the Lakota Ghost Dance, 12.10.07

The Incoherence of the Sentence in Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony”, 1.30.08

Analyzing the Mystery of Poe's The Murders in the Rue Morgue, 2.15.08

Distorted Reflections of Reality in Borges' “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”, 4.16.08

The Mythic Narrative of Beckett's “The Calmative”, 4.24.08

The Legend of the Forbidden Treasure in Conrad’s “Nostromo”, 9.11.08

Simultaneity of Tradition in Eliot’s “The Wasteland", 10.2.08

Dystopian Symbols and Counter-Symbols in V for Vendetta and Alphaville, 11.2.08

Place Names as Reality Effect in Joyce's “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man”, 11.18.08

Saving Middle-Earth: The Power of Recording Reality in Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, 2.20.09

The Anthropological Perspective in LeGuin's The Left Hand of Darkness, 2.22.09

Apocryphal Narratives in Pynchon's Slow Learner, 4.13.09

Believing in the Fantastic of Gaiman's Neverwhere, 4.8.09

Cyberpunk and the Magical Power of Language, 4.21.09

Please feel free to cite these papers and ideas if of interest and use. I would prefer not to be plagiarized. Thanks!


A Personal Myth (fiction), 10.1.07

The Death of the Author as a Young Man (autobiographical fiction), 2.27.09


I've also gone back and updated tags for all entries on this blog and transferred the posts from my old blog True Names to here (but haven't gotten to their tags yet).

On Ultimate Realism

I haven't written much yet publicly on the new perspective or belief system I have been attempting to formulate over this past year, a perspective that I call Ultimate Realism, which is perhaps best summed up by the quote from Patchen's Memoirs of a Shy Pornogrpaher: "Everything which man can imagine, dream, or conceivably want to exist... does exist."

This view first occurred to me one day last year during a week of spiritual-existential difficulty. I had gone to a local bar and ran into an acquaintance, who said, having not seen me in ages due to my focus on school and writing, "welcome back to the real world," to which I could only reply, but isn't everywhere also just as real? and then wandered down the street struck by the total implications of everything around me being that real. There is some sense in which we tend to believe that only those habits and experiences that we usually have are really real, or at least of the most real importance to us, forgetting that other experiences we don't have are just as real. And beyond existing situations, every content of our imaginations and the stories we tell is real, in that these have real effects in the real world. And ultimately, any perspective that will allow us to articulate our lives in the whole of such a multifaceted reality, and perhaps allow us to formulate a perspective of global significance and understanding, will have to put us in relation to that whole, not just as it is scientifically and historically understood, but in relation to all that humans have said, imagined, believed, and dreamed.

This view has come out of years of questioning spiritual beliefs and the nature of the stories we tell. How do we, as human beings in a world with other human beings, deal with the fact that people have divergent and often contradictory views on what the world is and our place in it? Historically, belief systems have clashed, and continue to clash because each side takes their perspective as most true and right, whereas if one view was somehow objectively true and right there should be no cause for conflict; and yet there is. In my own life I have struggled with such limited perspectives, not knowing in what to believe, as the beliefs always seemed too small, and yet needing to believe in something, to tell some kind of story, and finally recognizing that any belief I would want to hold would have to be large enough to contain all possibilities of believing.

Similarly I fear global destruction due to the clash of these limited perspectives, and that we as a species do not have the stories to set us in relation to where we are now that might allow us to continue into the future in a meaningful, healthy, and positive way. The stories we are prone to tell today are often too small, quotidian, dealing with failure, comeuppance, and the meaningless joy ride of post-modernity, whereas we need a perspective that can address the Universe as a whole, for future generations of humanity in this Universe. These stories must be ultimate in order to place us and our actions in the widest set of meaning or significance necessary for survival.

My old professor, Dr. Fred Clothey (a student of famed mythographer Mircea Eliade), suggested that the stories we tell can tell us about ourselves, in effect modeling our understanding of reality in order to authenticate current actions and allow future actions. Our stories/ myths/ beliefs/ perspectives, etc. can do this precisely when they are cast in an "aura of ultimate significance," that is, by referring us to the widest possible scope of experience and understanding, to our cosmic and social beginnings, to our longed for and feared endings, to our ideals taking on human form. We find our place and being in between the limits of the real as we know it.

One such ultimate signifier, that has had a direct effect on real occurrences, is the concept of God(s). While belief in supernatural beings has allowed articulation of our relation to society and mortality, is has, perhaps most clearly and distressingly, served as a justification for centuries worth of horror and cruelty: crusades, inquisitions, terrorism, or just plain ignorance. But we are prone to forget in our polarized times that this personification of ultimate ideals was also a necessary and integral perspective for the development of scientific reasoning, framing an objective and total perspective that we humans could then hope to achieve ourselves, a belief that has existed coterminous to science up through the 20th century. Contemporary atheists might be glad that God is no longer a reference for rational understanding, but "His" death has negative impacts as well: God has traditionally not only been a signifier for ultimate perspective and knowing, but also for perfection and goodness, in short, ethical understanding of behavior, without which we do things like build the atomic bomb. Technology runs rampant when not placed in the widest relation to how it might rightly be used, or the lack of an ethical signifier allows the cultural insecurities that haunt us to become manifest, and such horrors not only be imagined but made real. One imagines a similar lack of ultimate significance in the perspectives that have allowed western culture's unparalleled material consumption, environmental destruction, and continued ideological warfare on the rest of humanity.

I am not arguing here for a return to a belief in the traditional monotheistic God or earlier gods. These stories, as we have seen, are just too small and conflict-provoking compared to those perspectives that now need to be adopted. I am arguing though for a greater belief in the reality and efficacy of the contents of our stories and imaginations, and an awareness of how these otherwise subconscious narratives influence the real world.

One of the problems to this approach is the primacy we give to literal truth, vs. the obvious falsity of our "true" representations of reality. I am a huge fan of stories of the fantastic, of the magical, supernatural, weird, heroic, or sci-fi, which, looking at the predominance of these themes in the current cultural media and imagination, I believe I am not alone in. But why do we love supermen, zombies, and the end of the world? There has been a trend in storytelling, dating from the late 18th century, of attempting to represent reality as it "really is," social or quotidian realism, and not as an allegorical reference for otherwise real things. Fiction, when it first was read as not literally true, was cast as "petite histories," in order to accept stories they had to mimic reality while being divorced from talking about reality. My immediate response to all this is, there's already too much of the world we experience on a daily basis, why create more of it, when stories beyond the everyday may raise possibilities of experience and understanding more than that which we are already familiar with. That familiarity constrains us, by being real, to the obviously inadequate belief systems we now live under. We hold up what we believe is a mirror and say, this is real, and because we say it, that marks the bounds up what we will allow to be really real.

My second issue with realism is that it is not reality despite how it primps and masquerades itself as such. It may represent aspects of reality, but does so by relying on and reaffirming our assumptions about how the world is and should be, which constrains us to accepting those views and realities as more true or valid, to the exclusion of wider views. And today it seems our view of the real is that it frankly sucks and nothing matters anymore. And any attempt to actually discuss real human issues in an emotionally valid way is negated by the irony and scorn with which we articulate the real world. The fantastic however, by being non-real and symbolic of the real (mythopoetic in Tolkien's terms), precisely allows us to highlight those human themes and conditions we want to examine in truthful ways. But in order to even accept the contents of fantastic stories we must (as Coleridge first suggested) suspend our disbelief of those things that couldn't be literally true in our everyday experience. We no longer have a problem leaping into wizard fights or across star systems, we can suspend disbelief but we are never asked to truly believe, and thus are not as prone to take such fantasies as being symbolic or ultimately significant for how we really are or could be in the world. We are content to let them be mere entertainments and diversions rather than suggestions of possibility.

Yet, are ghosts and gods really real, or is this even the right way of framing the question? There is a sense that certain things are existentially real, they commit us to accepting their physical reality, being right in front of us. The invisible and imaginative do not so commit us; one can not empirically and scientifically prove a god's actual existence. To argue one way or the other for this is to miss the entire point about gods. But one can clearly see the effects that belief in such unprovables has on our world, both on our perspectives and psychologies and in actual historical occurrences. Ignoring and belittling the immaterial causes of such beliefs and effects does little to add to our understanding of ourselves in the world, allows the results of inappropriate or too-small beliefs to continue unchecked, and limits the human imagination to articulate new possibilities of being and understanding being, which are necessary for our current and continued survival, let alone enjoyment and well being. On the other hand, if we do not remember that the stories we tell are only stories, that have been made up despite their real effects, we run the risk of mistaking the stories as literally true, thus causing us to act in dangerous and inappropriate ways, when imagining better stories to live by and through is always an option (and it is this lack of awareness of the power of our symbols that I mean by the absent narrative).

I do not know where we will go from here, but I am wary and sick of the post-modern skepticism that rejects any ultimate significance in favor of what we can directly lay our hands on (and in so doing, strangle it to death). I would prefer to see interconnections of the layers of reality rather than the whole's deconstruction and rebuttal. Acting as if we know everything and nothing really matters is perhaps the smallest and most dangerous perspective one could hold. Ultimately, we exist in a Universe which we barely understand, and in which we are a bare speck, and perhaps in that widest view humanity is indeed meaningless and fated to extinction for lack of any better options. And yet it is also possible to believe, and live by the belief, that life and our consciousness of life may be more than a random fluke or evolutionary mistake; not that we serve some clear teleological purpose or extant will of God, but that for all these unknowns we are still real, and still here, and confronted with the implications of that for all reality.

Though reality may be inherently meaningless we have the choice to take on meanings and act on those meanings, to continue to be and gather greater understanding and significance, both on this planet and in the Universe as a whole, should we choose to accept this mission. Anything less than such an Ultimately Realist perspective sells ourselves short, and will only propel us down the road of meaninglessness and destruction. But if we can perhaps articulate a perspective wide enough, not just for all humans, but all life in general and beyond life, then perhaps we can continue on until that perspective, and all else we can imagine, becomes real.

Heavens and Alchemy (fiction)

It was Love at first light, the interconnection of subatomics leaping across the solar winds and the vast gulfs between star systems, our photons rejoicing in that immediate recognition. It was always this way, since the People first flew the Cradle of Worlds into these wider Heavens, replacing the primitive Einsteinian relativities with bonds that knew no bounds or bodies in too small space-time. Strife was vanquished with the false god Physics, and Love reigned supreme.

Or it had, while the People sailed out on Love’s fast fields, connecting the Cosmos as She saw fit. And wherever they alit, greeting the beings they found there as they would greet themselves: in joyous recognition. For they too were One and All, as we, my Beloved, should have been One and All, when the waves we reflected first lit each other’s senses. We sailed across the ecliptic and the trajectory of meteor showers, in search of that Dark Flow, the path that still leads to other Verses, which each god-to-be must traverse in our youth, in order to shower all the Verses with Love’s light, or so our stories go. We were still mortals then, little sparks, foolish as we raced across the terminator, your wings shimmering in Orion’s rays, each of us trying to sail ahead, to stay abreast the revolving darkness, but knowing that no matter how far apart we spanned the aether, our subtle bodies would always be in communication.

Oh Heavens and alchemy, I would have caught the stars for you that rained like angels on our orbits, I would have voiced whole new worlds, with their strange uncertain histories, I would say yes, as you reached the Event Horizon first, and leapt into the dark heart of the Cosmos, all giddy and aglow. As the People have done since we left that cradle Gaia, our split across the interstellar divide should have set a new Verse spinning, should have began the Creation anew. And yet, as I traversed, only moments after your wings brushed the Eternal, I felt you slip away. I know not where or to what Verse you fell, for as I alit in this one I felt all the celestial orbits tremble, and the suns race away as if they were afraid. For the connection to your presence, my Beloved, was nowhere to be found. No, not any beings here to recognize as ourselves in the joyous bonds of Love, no, not any One and All, only myself, particled in the scattering dark. And the stars fly apart, faster and faster than you could have imagined, than any of the stories say. Perhaps Love has been vanquished too in this here-now, for without your connection there is no force powerful enough to hold the worlds together, nothing to reflect and no light left to leap between us.

Yet perhaps this too is story, our secret untold chapter, that in each new Verse, Love must begin anew, alone, in search of its Beloved. That somewhere in these vasts and gulfs you still await, or not yet popped back into existence, specks of stardust accumulating in the warps, gathering into stars and planets that some day may birth beings to reflect Love’s light. And so I must wait, and search, and connect the One and All in the rays beyond space-time, until space and time are born anew, and so are you, and Strife is vanquished, and we fly the worlds and finally meet, in joyous recognition, beyond the edges of everything we are yet to imagine.

Review: Kenneth Patchen's Memoirs of a Shy Pornographer

I was already a big fan of Kenneth Patchen after reading his terrifyingly beautiful anti-war novel, The Journal of Albion Moonlight, but he really nailed it with his surreal Memoirs of a Shy Pornographer. The loose plot follows the comedic adventures of a shy man who accidentally writes a work of pornography and ends up in a variety of absurd social situations. Like the scathing poetic rants against war in Albion Moonlight, Patchen turns his raging eye here on society, cultural production, and genres, satirizing the failure of culture to produce meaning. What really makes this novel work though is the protagonist Alfred Budd, an innocent and honest man who has the ability of manifesting anything he imagines into reality. Unlike contemporary fictions that would ridicule such a figure, Budd is presented as the sole source of sanity and possibility in a world falling into surreal meaninglessness, especially in his attempts to heal a crippled girl by imagining hard enough that she can walk again, and convincing her to believe that this is possible. What really sealed my love of this hilarious and moving book was a scene where Budd tries to convince the girl that she can walk by saying that god doesn't need to exist, as belief is only about things that we don't understand or aren't real, except that everything we can imagine is real:

"And what would you say the God who stands before you is?"
"Everything."
"That's certainly narrowing it down."
"Everything which man can imagine, dream, or conceivably want to exist-"
"Will exist?"
"Does exist. How else could we conceive of them? It amazes me to think that there are people who suppose they believe in God, and yet won't believe that there are butterflies bigger than the earth, that there are fires raging at the bottom of the sea, that there are leopards made of golden wire circling the sun-"
"And these things prove there is a God?"
"Prove there isn't - because there's no need for one."

I think that this idea that everything we can imagine is real is very important and entirely missing today, an age where we are all too aware of the falsity of the Spectacle that confronts us in every direction, that despite their unreality, the productions of culture do effect us in very real ways, that the imagination does (and has always been the only human means to) make reality real. As such, Patchen offers a way out or beyond this, suggesting that the kinds of stories we are used to telling are not the only kinds of stories, and that the frail aesthetic irreality we give these stories might be replaced by a belief in the possibility of anything we can imagine.

Adaptive Fictions

This is an interesting look from evolutionist Erin Johnson at the adaptive role fictions play in helping humans survive (from an article on Atheism as a Stealth Religion), not just in religions' use of gods, but in any thought or belief, that is expression as mythology:

This leads to a crucial distinction between what I call factual and practical realism. Consider Hans and Igor, who are mortal enemies. Hans understands that Igor is much like himself, even to the point of competing for the same square of ground. Igor regards Hans as an inhuman monster, completely unlike himself. If Igor's belief makes him fight with greater determination, then it counts as practically realistic, even if it is factually incorrect. Now imagine similar contests among beliefs--and the brains that create beliefs--taking place over thousands of generations of genetic and cultural evolution. Voila! We arrive at a conception of human mentality that is far more nuanced and interesting than the black-and-white cartoon of atheism vs. religion.

Factual and practical realism are not always at odds. To pick an obvious example, a hunter needs to know the exact location of his quarry. The point is that the relationship between the two is complex and that our minds are prepared to massively depart from factual realism, when necessary, in ways that motivate effective action. This is not a sign of mental weakness but a time-tested survival strategy. Moreover, adaptive fictions are not restricted to religions. Patriotic histories of nations have the same distorted and purpose-driven quality as religions, a fact that becomes obvious as soon as we consider the histories of nations other than our own. Intellectual movements such as feminism and postmodernism are often shamelessly open about yoking acceptable truths to perceived consequences. That's what it means to be politically correct. Scientific theories are not immune. Many scientific theories of the past become weirdly implausible with the passage of time, just like religions. When this happens, they are often revealed as not just wrong but as purpose-driven. Scientific theories cannot be expected to approximate factual reality when they are proposed, but only after they have been winnowed by empirical evidence.

These and other belief systems are not classified as religions because they don't invoke supernatural agents, but they are just like religions when they sacrifice factual realism on the altar of practical realism. The presence or absence of supernatural agents--a particular departure from factual realism--is just a detail. It is humbling to contemplate that the concerns typically voiced about religion need to be extended to virtually all forms of human thought. If anything, non-religious belief systems are a greater cause for concern because they do a better job of masquerading as factual reality. Call them stealth religions.

Ancient Verse

I've been doing a lot of research recently for an essay to submit to the upcoming Immanence of Myth anthology, and have particularly grown fascinated by the scope of history, and particularly the birth of writing in the Mesopotamia river valley. Most well known is the Epic of Gilgamesh,a hero-myth written down in the 23rd century BCE Akkadian Empire, and for all intents the first action story as well as model for how kings and men ought to behave.


Around the same time though we also apparently find Enheduanna (above), daughter of Sargon the Great of Akkad, high En (priestess) of Nanna, and the first poet known by name, if not the first recorded author. The link contains links to some of her poems, which seem for the most part to be temple hymns to Innana and other Sumerian goddesses. It is interesting to note that after the development of writing, it seems most myths and stories were told in poetic verse, and most narratives were mythic, which lasts until the second emergence of Greek culture and the prose myths of Hesiod's Theogony (800 BCE).

Non-mythic literature doesn't arise until the Japanese serialized "novel", The Tale of the Genji (finished 1021 CE), and European Medieval allegories of the 1300s. We don't start taking stories as literally fictive until Robinson Crusoe in 1719, and even then it had to be published as a "petite historie," a private, little, or dubious history, perhaps because it was still hard to believe that something you hear is true in itself though not true in reality, a bit of doublethink those of us who've grown up in the present are accustomed to.





And just because this is now becoming an absurd saga, Baguette Dropped From Bird's Beak Shuts Down the Large Hadron Collider (Really), from Popular Science.

A Spectacle of Behemoths

*Claude Lévi-Strauss, French anthropologist and founder of structuralism, has passed away at 100.

*Slate on how Ayn Rand became an American icon

*The Index of Supernatural Collective Nouns

*Persuasion and the art of storytelling.

*A giant crack in Africa may create a new ocean

*US Troops in Afghanistan are burning copies of the Koran.

*Corey Doctorow on science fiction as an indicator of the present.

*Talking about interactive fiction in my narrative and technology class, here's a boingboing post about keeping interactive fiction alive.

*Nuclear accidents and the origins of superhero origins

*Alejandro Jodorowsky gets funding for his dream project 'Abel Cain'.

*And Horacio Castellanos Moya on the myth of Roberto Bolaño. What's exciting is that I'll be taking a class on contemporary fiction next semester from this irascible exile.

Fictionology

In light of the Church of Scientology being convicted of Fraud in France, the Onion offers this brilliant mock competing religion, Fictionology [via mutate!]:

Fictionology’s central belief, that any imaginary construct can be incorporated into the church’s ever-growing set of official doctrines, continues to gain popularity. Believers in Santa Claus, his elves, or the Tooth Fairy are permitted—even encouraged—to view them as deities. Even corporate mascots like the Kool-Aid Man are valid objects of Fictionological worship.

“My personal savior is Batman,” said Beverly Hills plastic surgeon Greg Jurgenson. “My wife chooses to follow the teachings of the Gilmore Girls. Of course, we are still beginners. Some advanced-level Fictionologists have total knowledge of every lifetime they have ever lived for the last 80 trillion years.”

“Sure, it’s total bullshit,” Jurgenson added. “But that’s Fictionology. Praise Batman!” [...]

“Scientology can only offer data, such as how an Operating Thetan can control matter, energy, space, and time with pure thought alone,” McSavage said. “But truly spiritual people don’t care about data, especially those seeking an escape from very real physical, mental, or emotional problems.”

McSavage added, “As a Fictionologist, I live in a world of pretend. It’s liberating.”

Interestingly, I personally suspect that if there is any kind of contemporary folk mythology, this is essentially it, the belief in any literary or culture character as an object of worship, wisdom, or personal identification. Just because in the past the culture characters we did this with were gods does not mean contemporary characters are any less available for their symbolic significance. One just has to look at the hype surrounding the release of new superhero movies, the lines around theaters like ancient temples. Perhaps without intending to the Onion seems to have hit exactly on what makes pop culture tick in the human heart.


For further perusal, here's an interesting tor.com article on the role memory and recognition play in making quality stories, as well as a handy chart to help you determine (based off food preferences) what religion you should belong to.

News Updates

The End of Philosophy. From Adbusters, interesting but the writer went to Pitt, and had one of the same philosophy classes I'm taking there this semester, and I agree its mostly irrelevant, except I'd have to say: don't expect other people to apply ideas for you, you have to think for yourself.

the Age of Universal Authorship. The one thing the author hasn't considered is that only will we have universal authorship when everyone has access to the technologies of communication and authorship.

Luther Blisset is now Wu Ming. Luther is one of the shared or multiple-use names phenomenon, which I first heard about in connection with Monty Cantsin and Neoism. Good to know these names are still out there.

Giant Orb Weaver Spider Discovered[image via riot rite right clit clip click]

Essential Plot Twists for Writers. Now in handy cartoon format.

Why Our Brains Will Never Live in a Matrix. Because they already live in bodies. Though the Internet is Altering our Brains.

The New End of the World Date is now 2068. Get Your calendars ready for the meteor crash.

In the mean time, don't forget to Live Life to the Full. A free guide to cognitive behavior therapy. Or, maybe depressed people are suffering from a lack of fun.

And finally, though science wants to stop aging, we still don't know exactly what is time?"

Brave New World LP

Aldous Huxley narrates Brave New World.

[via posthuman blues]

Wild Things

Taking a break from such heavy cosmological topics as the Universe ending in heat death sooner than anticipated and a new translation of the Bible that shows God did not create heaven and earth but merely separate what was already there, Sophie and I went out last night to check out the opening night of Spike Jonze's adaptation of Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are. Despite reviews claiming the movie is too depressing or frightening we both found it highly charming, particularly the stellar acting of child-star Max Records, the intricate costumes from Jim Henson's Creature Shop, and upbeat soundtrack from the Yeah Yeah Yeah's Karen O [Found link, for preview purposes only, buy here]. It was interesting to note that the audience was primarily comprised of young adults, who probably were raised on Sendak's masterpiece and are perhaps the intended target demographic of Dave Egger's script (the whole movie really capturing the indie spirit of the times).


[Potential Spoilers Below]

The thing that really stuck out for me though was what this movie says about the human imagination. Despite our cultural love of monsters and fantasy, the imagination here is presented in its rawest or most primal. Shaggy monsters dance and tear up the woods and throw clods of dirt at each other. Everyone howls and growls. Certainly the monsters possess some amount of adult-like self-reflection (enough to come off as rather depressed), but no more than Max himself. In fact, one could take a psychological perspective that the monsters and their land are all projections of Max's own fears and desires, for friendship, against alienation and being young and misunderstood if not ignored.

But what is interesting was the choice of not stating whether the events of Max's journey really took place or not. The final return scene has no dialogue, so we aren't asked to chose with Max over what really happened, even if with all the day to night transitions he must have been gone for several weeks. This draws on elements of the Fantastic in art, that supernatural events are left ambiguous as to their reality. This is a necessary move because the audience, instead of being asked to decide what is real here, can instead suspend their disbelief and let the monsters be real. They are reflections of ourselves. Of course, this in turn adds more weight to what both Sophie and I decided was one of the pivotal scenes of the movie, when the monster Carrol rips the bird monster's arm off, and the camera focuses on a stream of sand spilling out. Up till this point, Max has taken the monsters as real, but they are shown to be not real, and he starts feeling the need of returning home to his flesh and blood family.

What this says for me is that despite how primal and raw we sometimes need to express our imaginations as children, this rawness sometimes tears holes in the stories we make up and tell ourselves, and shows us what is more importantly real in our lives. For another example, in a school scene at the beginning of the movie, Max is told that one day the sun is going to die, which when he tells the monsters makes them even more depressed and desperate (to tie this in with the links at the beginning of this entry). I think we are encouraged to equate those kinds of predictions of science with the imagination as well, as something that must ultimately give way to the reality of the present and the more immediate significance of our families and loves.

Faith Ills...

... if your faith happens to be as bigoted and close minded as a parishioner denying a marriage license to an interracial couple or an NC church burning non-canonical religious texts as "satan's books."

Sadly, neither of these religious groups seemed to have been paying much attention to their own myths.