The Visual Limitations of Novels

This week I read The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles first published in 1949, and then I watched the 1990 film version by Bernardo Bertolucci with Debra Winger and John Malkovich.  I found the novel a stunning example of writing, and the movie a stunning example of cinematography, which only made it obvious that novels are severely limited in evoking the visual world.  Reading the novel, the world of Port and Kit Moresby felt claustrophobic and small,  but seeing the same couple on screen, showed them living in a vast panoramic vista.

In mind, I knew Kit and Port were traveling across Algeria in the late 1940s, after WWII, so the sky should have been getting bigger and brighter as they got closer to the Sahara, but instead it got darker.  That’s because the story was getting psychologically darker.  In fact, their world as I imagined it, was often dark, with few people and buildings.  The book so reminded me of Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad, that I thought Bowles must have used it as a model.  In the film version of The Sheltering Sky, the streets were crowded with people, and the cities and villages were sprawling with buildings with narrow maze like streets, and everything was bright, colorful and beautiful.  The gorgeous visuals overwhelmed the dark brooding characters.

It was jarring to watch the film right after reading the book because it looked nothing like what I imagined, but obviously the film looked like the world Bowles wrote about and lived in.

Reading The Sheltering Sky and then watching its film version made me see the difference in the two art forms.  And it’s not because Bowles didn’t give me the information to visualize.

When she was hungry, she rose, picked up her bag, and walked among the rocks along a path of sorts, probably made by goats, which ran parallel to the walls of the town. The sun had risen; already she felt its heat on the back of her neck. She raised the hood of her haïk. In the distance were the sounds of the town: voices crying out and dogs barking. Presently she passed beneath one of the flat-arched gates and was again in the city. No one noticed her. The market was full of black women in white robes. She went up to one of the women and took a jar of buttermilk out of her hand. When she had drunk it, the woman stood waiting to be paid. Kit frowned and stooped to open her bag. A few other women, some carrying babies at their backs, stopped to watch. She pulled a thousand-franc note out of the pile and offered it. But the woman stared at the paper and made a gesture of refusal. Kit still held it forth. Once the other had understood that no different money was to be given her, she set up a great cry and began to call for the police. The laughing women crowded in eagerly, and some of them took the proffered note, examining it with curiosity, and finally handing it back to Kit. Their language was soft and unfamiliar. A white horse trotted past; astride it sat a tall Negro in a khaki uniform, his face decorated with deep cicatrizations like a carved wooden mask. Kit broke away from the women and raised her arms toward him, expecting him to lift her up, but he looked at her askance and rode off. Several men joined the group of onlookers, and stood somewhat apart from the women, grinning. One of them, spotting the bill in her hand, stepped nearer and began to examine her and the valise with increasing interest. Like the others, he was tall, thin and very black, and he wore a ragged burnous slung across his shoulders, but his costume included a pair of dirty white European trousers instead of the long native undergarment. Approaching her, he tapped her on the arm and said something to her in Arabic; she did not understand. Then he said: “Toi parles français?” She did not move; she did not know what to do. “Oui,” she replied at length.

There is much visual detail in this passage, but I never saw it in my mind’s eye.  I never “saw” Algeria like I saw it in the film.  Now that I’m reading passages from the book after seeing the movie, I’m “reading” it differently, and seeing it differently in my mind.  This might be a clue to always see the movie first.  I find the Harry Potter movies fantastic illustrations of the books, but poor substitutes for them.

Just look at this film clip and then imagine how to describe in it words.  Does the words camel, caravan and desert even come close to evoking what we see?

While watching the movie I felt the soul of the novel had disappeared.  The experience of reading and viewing beautifully illustrated the difference between the visual medium of film, and the world of black and white letters that are decoded inside our head.  The novel is rich in details I can’t see, and can’t be filmed.  Or can they? 

Movies seldom have narrative commentary.  One example I can think of is the theatrical release of Blade Runner, where Harrison Ford provided a film noir detective voice over.  I’ve always preferred the theatrical release over Ridley Scott’s director’s cut.  I wish movie makers would experiment with unseen narrators to see if they could get closer to filming classic books.  There is an aspect to books that is neither dialog or description, that is always left out of movies.

I also read Hull Zero Three by Greg Bear this week and it begs for a movie treatment, or at least a graphic novel adaption.  Bear describes a world that is as visually bizarre as Oz, and a spaceship with three hulls.  I have no way of visualizing this story.  And the novel, Hull Zero Three is written like an action film, so it feels like the soul of a novel is left out.

I wonder what my reading experience of The Sheltering Sky would have been like if Paul Bowles had included National Geographic like photographs of all the locations Port and Kit visited on their trip?  I know of one book that did this, Time and Again by Jack Finney, a time travel novel about 19th century New York City.  The book included 19th century photographs of the city.  It made a huge difference to the story.  I wonder how I would have experienced Hull Zero Three differently if Bear had commissioned illustrations for his book?

I assume writers expect readers to do all the mental cinematography themselves, but I don’t think it would hurt if they provided a few seed images.  I’ve talked to many readers who claim to hate movies of their favorite stories because it ruins their own mental images they have created.  I think my problem is I don’t visualize books as I read them, and illustrations and photographs would be helpful crutches for people like me.

I recommend creating your own experiments to test the visual powers of novels.  Would the monster hit TV show Downton Abbey be as popular if it was just a novel, without all the beautiful visuals?  And think about all the many visual interpretations of Sherlock Holmes?  There are many film versions of classic books Little Women and Pride and Prejudice.  Try reading the books before or after seeing the movies and see for yourself the visual limitations of novels.

JWH – 3/23/13

The Shelf Life of Nonfiction

I buy books faster than I can read them, and some books go stale before I get around to consuming them.  Fiction is often timeless, but for nonfiction, most books have a shelf life.  A ten to twenty year old science book is usually not worth reading.  Books about politics and economics go bad even quicker.  And books about current events and pop culture have practically no shelf life at all.

Yesterday I started reading Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas From the Computer Age by Paul Graham, published in 2004.  When this book came out, the back of the dust cover had seven high praising blurbs, but I think time has tarnished the luster of its big ideas.  I’m not singling out Paul Graham for criticism, but using his book as an example of what time does to nonfiction, and to compare it to how fiction holds up better over time.

For example Graham writes about nerds and geeks and speculates on the nature of popularity and how it appears that being smart is a good thing before and after high school, but not during.  Eight years later, this essay seems dated because the topic has been well covered since.  However, when I think of great stories about nerds and geeks, I think of King Dork, a 2006 book by Frank Portman, Sixteen Candles, a John Hughes film from 1984, and Freaks and Geeks, a TV show from the 1999-2000 season.  Graham’s nonfiction essay has few reporting details, other than some vague personal memories.  Graham was abstractly talking about the reputation of being smart among high school students, and if you were clued into his message it might have felt insightful in 2004.  It doesn’t in 2013.

Most of the essays are still somewhat appealing, but were probably much fresher as blog or magazine pieces at the time.  You can read them here, and in particular, “Why Nerds are Unpopular.”  I think the fictional accounts I mention above clearly show why nerds are unpopular, and these art forms have lasting power.  Now, this isn’t meant to criticize Graham’s essays.  I write the same kind of essays myself for this blog, and I often wonder if my ideas wouldn’t be better presented as fiction.  Social commentary often works better shown not told.

I wonder if 1981’s The Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder would hold up to rereading today?  It won the National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize in 1982.  Tracy used an abundance of actual details, and reported on the lives of engineers designing the Data General Eclipse MV/8000 minicomputer.  No one cares about that minicomputer today.  I found the book riveting at the time, but would I now?  Readers today might care about the history of the subculture that built it, but it would be an esoteric read.  I need to get a copy of The Soul of a New Machine and reread it to see how well it holds up 30+ years later.   Few people will ever read The Soul of a New Machine today, but many will keep watching movies like The Social Network (2010) long into the future.

Sure, some nonfiction books do have lasting power.  People still read On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin from 1859 and Walden; or, Life in the Woods by Henry David Thoreau from 1854.  Would more people understand these books if they were made into movies?

When I pulled Hackers & Painters off the shelf to read last week, I also pulled Monkey Girl: Evolution, Education, Religion, and the Battle for America’s Soul (2007) by Edward Humes, Off the Planet: Surviving Five Perilous Months Aboard the Space Station Mir (1999) by Jerry M. Linenger, and Axel’s Castle: A Study in the Imaginative Literature of 1870-1930 (1931) by Edmund Wilson.  The Wilson book is the most famous, but only known to literary theory historians probably.

These books are all worth reading, but do they really hold up?  Off the Planet offers the gritty details of being an astronaut and is far more realistic than any science fiction book.  And think about that.  Few people read about real space travel, and millions embrace highly unbelievable space opera in books, comics and movies.  For the most part people just prefer fiction to fact.

Monkey Girl is a serious book.  It’s an important book.  It’s about the teaching of evolution in schools and the legal actions against it.  A subject always in the news.  Monkey Girl is brilliant reporting on reality, with thousands of details and ideas to chew on.  I think that’s a clue to the success of nonfiction lasting.  Nonfiction must report details, not speculation.  A book like Eden’s Outcast, John Matteson’s 2007 biography of Louisa May Alcott and her father Bronson Alcott is timeless – until another biographer puts in more work that overshadows it.

I’m slowly moving from being a fiction bookworm to a nonfiction bookworm.  We’ve always cherished and judged great novels as art, but I think we need to apply the same attention to nonfiction.  Most nonfiction published is no more lasting than a newspaper, but some nonfiction books do have a long shelf life and we need to consider them as art too.

Yet, why does fiction have so much more lasting power than nonfiction?  I’m reading South Wind by Paul Douglas, a fictionalize account of British expats living on the island of Capri published in 1971.  Would a nonfiction travel book written at the time be more informative?  Before that I read Confessions of a Crap Artist by Philip K. Dick, a fictionalize account of 1959 life in Marin County, California.  I found it totally compelling.

What does fiction have that nonfiction doesn’t to make it enduring?  How is it we often find fiction more educational about the past than nonfiction books?

Writing nonfiction that’s powerful and lasting, should contain an abundance of facts that our collective soul won’t want to forget.  Either from research or reporting, nonfiction that’s as powerful as fiction must contain an overwhelming collection of vivid details about life in another time.  Strangely enough, it’s the accumulation of significant creative details that make fiction powerful.  Fiction can be lies that last for centuries.  Few nonfiction books last very long.  They are always superseded by books with better facts, but some nonfiction books do last.  We need to identify and think about them.

Here is Modern Library’s 100 Best Nonfiction Books.  There are many wonderful books on this list, but most of them just don’t convey the concept of classics to me.  I’ve only read nine of them, and read parts of a few others.  I often reread great fictional novels, but rarely reread a nonfiction book.  Why?

That’s another kind of shelf life.  I keep my favorite novels, but I give away the nonfiction I admire.

JWH – 1/22/13

Life of Pi–Is God the Better Story?

Director Ang Lee and screenwriter David Magee have done an excellent job of adapting Yann Martel’s 2001 novel Life of Pi to film.  When I read the book back in 2004 I thought at the time it would never be made into a film because the novel was too cerebral, too narrative heavy, plus, how could anyone get a tiger to do all that acting?

Life of Pi the film covered a surprising amount of the content of Life of Pi the book.  So far I can think of just three scenes I missed.  First, story of Pi’s family running into Pi’s three religious leaders.  Second, showing how Pi used turtles to survive, and finally, the scene where Pi is blind and hears people in another life raft.

Still, Lee and Magee beautifully succeeded with capturing the philosophical heart of the novel.  If you loved the book, go see the film, you’ll be surprised by how well it was filmed.

Is God the Better Story?

If you haven’t read the book or seen the movie, don’t read beyond this point if you plan do either, because I’m going to analyze the philosophical statement of the book and it will spoil the story.

In the main story, a boy from India, Piscine Molitor Patel,  who wants to be called Pi, is shipwreck in a lifeboat with a zebra, orangutan, hyena and a tiger named Richard Parker.  Martel tells us this story very realistically and we are expected to believe it happened. But along the way, Martel takes us through scenes that are very hard to believe, like the carnivorous island with the meerkats.

Yann Martel has crafted a Zen kōan into a novel.  Most kōans are short, “What is the sound of one hand clapping.”   Yann Martel essentially asks, “Is God the better story?”

At the beginning of the novel and movie, in a pseudo introduction, the author is told by an older Pi, that he can tell the author a story that will make him believe in God.  Yann Martel creates two stories, one very long, elaborate, fantastic, awe inspiring – and brutal, and a second that is short and brutal.  We are asked which one we prefer.  Martel is right, everyone, including realists like me, will pick the story with Richard Parker, the Bengal tiger.

So where does God come in?  How can this story make us believe in God?  Analyzing fiction for symbolism is tricky, but for me, Richard Parker represents God though analogy.  At the end of the film and novel, when Pi has told his long fabulist story to two Japanese insurance investigators they refuse to believe him.  So Pi tells a shorter, ugly version that we know is true, but hate to believe.  Then Pi asks the investigators which story they prefer.

We all want to believe in the story where Richard Parker existed because it’s a better story than the one of madness, murder and cannibalism.

So what about the prediction at the beginning, that the story will make us believe in God?  I believe Yann Martel uses the desire to believe in Richard Parker as a stand in for God, creating an analogy, that the readers and audience must make on their own.  Pi desperately wants to believe in God.  Pi asks us to believe in Richard Parker because the story of surviving in a lifeboat with a tiger is a better story than going mad and surviving alone.

The whole point of the novel is to trick the reader into the question:  Which story do you prefer.  Of course everyone prefers Richard Parker to be real.  By transference, we’re ask to accept that belief in God is the better story, just like how we want to believe that Richard Parker existed.  We’re never explicitly told that wanting to believe in Richard Parker is the same as wanting to believe in God, but I feel it’s obvious.

Yann Martel tells us people prefer religion over reality because the story of God is a better story than reality.  And I ask:  “Is this why people refuse to accept the fact of evolution because they prefer the story with Richard Parker – oh, I mean God?”

The novel is an elaborate metaphor to explain why people believe in God.  It doesn’t say that God exists.  Nor do we know what Yann Martel believes.  It just says people prefers belief in God because it’s a better story than how we see reality directly.

What the novel is tricking us into confessing is that the belief in God, no matter how unbelievable that story might be, that it’s a better story than reality.  That when we’re pushed to the ends of our physical and mental limits, we want God even if he’s cruel, vicious and indifferent.  That the belief in God is what gets us through this life.

Has Yann Martel stacked the deck?  Is God the better story?  Yes, reality does sometime involve madness, murder and cannibalism.  And even in the God story, people die, animals are cruelly killed and eaten, people suffer.  If the audience was given the Richard Parker story, and a documentary about the evolution of the universe with cosmology and the evolution of life on Earth with evolutionary biology, is God still the better story.  I don’t think so.  Richard Parker is like a magician’s diversion.  If you could watch this movie and blot out the tiger, the reality of Earth is magnificent!  Richard Parker and God divert our attention to our fantastic reality.

God is only the better story when you don’t understand reality.  Richard Parker is ferocious, terrifying, cruel, indifferent and doesn’t answer prayers.  No matter how much Pi loves Richard Parker and wants his recognition, Richard Parker ultimately refuses to acknowledge Pi’s existence.

So why is God the better story if Richard Parker just walks away from us?  I know many people who have long given up religion but haven’t given up on God.  They say that God must have created us but walked away from the universe and is no longer involved.  Personally, I’m confident there is no God and the size, age and origin of reality is beyond our understanding.  I find it far more comforting to know the rules of our local universe and not feel the need to blame a superior being for bad things or beg for good things.  If a bacteria, shark, drunk driver hurts me badly, I just accept it was the luck of the draw and not a judgmental deity deciding I had done something wrong.

Where the metaphor of Richard Parker breaks down is Pi can see Richard Parker, and we never see God.  It’s actually easier to believe in Richard Parker than it is to believe on God.  Life of Pi is a wonderful novel.  I’ve read I twice now.  And each time I want to believe the Richard Parker story, even though I know the truth is the story about cannibalism.  How many times will I have to read this book before the realistic story is the better story?

What if the novel and movie had been about a boy that survived 227 days on the ocean and had endured the incident with cannibalism and madness and survived.  No tiger, no zebra, no hyena, no orangutan, just Pi, his mom, the Frenchman and the Buddhist sailor?  It would have been brutal, but the success of Pi surviving the ordeal would have been just as magnificent. 

Why do we want a better story?  Santa Claus is a better story than parents buying kids Christmas gifts from Target.  The Easter Bunny is a better story than throwing milk teeth in the garbage.  Heaven is a better story than dying.  But why is God a better story than reality?  Is God a better story than evolution?  If you understood evolution and cosmology, God isn’t the better story.  God is a simpler story, and God’s story is endlessly confusing and contradictory.  It’s just God is fantastically powerful like Richard Parker.

Even though I disagree with Yann Martel’s assertion, I love his fiction.  See, that’s the real revelation in this.  Fiction is the better story, and Life of Pi is very good fiction.  Humans embraces fiction with an intense passion.  Richard Parker is a better character than a cannibalistic Frenchman.  And for many people, all the stories about God, are a better story than the brutal aspects of reality.  However, there is nothing in fiction that comes within light years of evolution.  All stories about God are just crude children stories compared to the complexity and beauty of evolution.  Evolution is just as brutal as the Old Testament God – it’s just not personal.

Here’s the final kōan:  Did Yann Martel write this story to make us atheists or make us believers in fiction?

JWH – 11/28/12

Defining Science Fiction by Analyzing NBC’s New Show Revolution

It’s very hard to define the term “science fiction,” a topic often discussed in my science fiction book club.  Searching the web reveals endless essays on the topic.  It’s not possible to come up with a one-size-fits all definition for science fiction.  I’m going to take another approach.  I’m going to analyze the new show Revolution point by point, and say which parts I think are science fiction and which I think are fantasy.

Revolution is about a family thrown into a dark world of a collapsed civilization.  The show begins 15 years after a worldwide blackout with a father dying, a son being kidnapped and the daughter seeking her long lost uncle Miles to help her rescue her brother.  The daughter, Charlie Matheson, played by Tracy Spiridakos is a kind of less hard, less savvy, Katniss Everdeen, so the story carries on the current vogue of girl action heroes.  Miles Matheson is played by Billy Burke and he’s your standard action guy.  This is why I loved Breaking Bad so much, none of the characters were cookie cutter clichés.

Strangely enough, the medium level bad guy in Revolution is Giancarlo Espositio playing Tom Neville, a ruthless, but sometimes coldly kind, captain of a militia, who previously played a ground breaking character in Breaking Bad, Gustavo “Gus” Fring, who was also ruthless with a strange tinge of cold kindness.  You’d think Espositio would have tipped the Revolution writers not to go for the obvious, and make him different.  I fear such a wonderful actor will get typecast.

Premise

Revolution pictures our world without electrical power or electronic gadgets – a powerful “What if…” scenario.  We’re all so depended on computers and electricity that it’s an intellectual adventure to pretend to live in a time of 18th century technology.   Revolution hints that some kind of force field is capable of dampening all electronics, and even electricity production.  Science knows solid state electronics are vulnerable to electromagnetic pulses (EMP) that are generated as a byproduct of nuclear explosions.  However, mechanical turbines should continue to work, and even old fashioned tube electronics might continue to work with EMP fields.

There is no science to suggest that such a energy dampening force field is possible.  It’s just a writer’s gimmick to advance the story.  Does that make Revolution a fantasy?  It’s a damn cool idea, but so is a school for wizards.  In other words, I have to say the premise of Revolution is fantasy.

In Revolution, there is a reason why and how the power got turned off. Revolution’s creators are holding that back as a mystery, like the mystery of the island in Lost. Mystery is one of the prime movers of fiction, so you can’t blame them for holding back, but I’m worried I’m going to be disappointed, like I did with Lost. Unless they come up with other mysteries, I doubt I’ll keep watching.  Bad Robot Productions, the company that made Lost, and produces Revolution, does have a track record for upping the mystery ante every week.

The mystery of who has killed off the power isn’t very science fictional to me. For it to be really science fictional, it has to be plausible, so we think, “Could this really happen?” When Jules Verne and H. G. Wells wrote stories about men traveling to the Moon, people did think, “Hey, that might be possible, what will it be like, and how will they do it?” That’s science fiction.

Contrast Revolution with The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi which is set in the 22nd century after fossil fuels have been used up, after global warming has changed every thing, and after crop monoculture and genetically modified agriculture has failed.  In The Windup Girl Bacigalupi develops kinetic energy machines using springs.  This same technology would work in the world of Revolution, but so far we haven’t seen any ideas like this, and I’m not sure the Bad Robot people think this way.

If the Bad Robot Production people had been truly creative, they would have taken the same scenario and come up with a totally new post apocalyptic society – one without electricity, but very creative.  They would have envisioned new forms of mechanical power, the return of sailing ships and dirigibles, funky new bicycles, rocket powered airships, and new forms of animal power.  They could have had computers like Babbage dreamed about, and new art forms not depended on digital media.  That’s what science fiction is about.  What they gave us is Mad Max Lite.

Post Apocalyptic World

Post apocalyptic fiction is one of my favorite sub-genres of science fiction, and for two reasons.  First, I love how an author imagines people surviving the collapse of civilization.  Second, thinking about how to rebuild civilization offers countless intellectual puzzles for my mind.  Now that’s some good clean science fictional fun.

Revolution is just a post apocalyptic fantasy that allows guys to fight with swords.  At least so far.  Why are guns rare but swords plentiful?  How did they gear up for sword production so fast?  I know I’ve only seen two episodes and the science fiction world building has been slight – mostly using stock after-the-collapse imagery.  In fact, they seem to have gotten most of their imagery from Life Without People.

Apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic fiction has a very long history which Revolution must be judged against.  When I saw the show announced this summer I had hoped for a television version of Earth Abides or The Day of the Triffids, or the British TV series Survivors.  Revolution is closer to The Postman by David Brin, more about adventure and less about the details of survival, or efforts to rebuild civilization.  Both feature a ruthless militia leader trying to start a post-civilization empire.

Now, this political subject is a honest science fictional topic.  Rebuilding our society after we’ve mined all the easily available resources is a scientific challenge worthy of much speculation.  However, in the first two episodes, Revolution hasn’t dealt with scarcity.  At one point Charlie’s Uncle Miles, tries to bribe someone with a small chunk of metal, which I assume we’re to think of as gold.  Gold nuggets are very rare, what gold we mine nowadays is molecules of gold processed from tons of ore.

What people use for money in Revolution’s apocalyptic world is a fascinating idea to explore, but so far the show ignores the issue, other than this one transaction with a tiny lump of yellow metal.  Good science fiction will explore all aspects of a possible future.  Revolution takes a Indiana Jones approach to the story, using slight of hand on facts, and diverting viewer’s mind with action and violence.

We have to ask ourselves:  Is a story science fiction if it’s set in a science fictional setting?  I don’t think so.  We are told Miles Matheson is a man who is good at killing people.  Miles’ abilities to fight are so unbelievable that they remind me of the recent Sylvester Stallone action flick, The Expendables 2.  That makes me think Revolution is more inspired by video games than science fiction books.  It’s appeal is to would-be first person shooters than folks who like to read speculative fiction about possible futures.

I wish Revolution’s level of violence was more like Breaking Bad’s, and it focused more on clever plots with interesting science fiction speculation.

Population Dying Off

If the power went off all over our world, how long could we support 7 billion people?  Revolution doesn’t even try to answer that question.  It skips 15 years immediately.  There’s some flashbacks, but no explanations.  The starting point of most collapse of civilization stories are a plague that kills off most of the population, or nuclear war that kills off most of the population, or aliens from space that kill off most of the people, or some kind of natural or cosmic calamity that kills off most everyone.  Revolution looks like the population took a major beating, but we’re not shown how.

I’m currently reading The Dog Stars by Peter Heller, another literary look at the end of the world, much like The Road by Cormac McCarthy.  Now this is real science fiction in my mind.  The Dog Stars is serious, philosophical, speculative, and worthy to be called science fiction in my book.  Revolution is decent fun without any real thinking involved.  That’s a shame.  For a story to kill off billions of people there should be more details.

In Revolution most of the population has disappeared and we don’t know why.  The writers obviously wanted a low population Earth for the story but hasn’t explained how everyone died.  In other words, after the collapse stories are so common in the mundane world that the producers don’t even feel the need to explain.  They are using a post apocalyptic world as a setting, just like Star Wars used a galactic empire as a setting.  There’s no science fiction speculation in either, so just accept the premise.  Revolution is an action adventure story set in a realistic but unscientific world.

Surviving the Collapse

I’m disappointed with Revolution because it makes no effort to show people surviving.  Everyone has plenty to eat, clean clothes without having to wash them, there’s no worry about diseases or bad water.  After 15 years, how good will clothes look?  There’s no effort to show how people make new clothes.  I don’t expect Mad Max fashions, but the show should speculate some, at least.

The plot is driven by Danny Matheson’s kidnapping.  Our characters don’t seemed challenged by any other problem.  The two episodes involved plots to set the stage so Miles can kill a bunch of people, and convince Charlie that killing is the way to operate.  The only survival going on is whether the audience won’t be killed off watching Billy Burke kill a dozen tough guys every episode.

Cliché Science Fiction

Whenever I read a new science fiction novel, or watch a new science fiction show I hope to discover a new idea or perspective. It’s hard to come up with a totally original idea nowadays. There just are too many fiction factories out there.  Barring originality I look for creative style – if you can’t deliver a new idea, at least present a mash-up old ideas in a new way.

Science fiction has become as formulaic as a murder mystery. I believe most SF fans find comfort by embracing their favorite sub-genres so writers cater to ever more baroque presentations of the same old ideas, creating Über-clichés. Revolution is merely the current incarnation of a long line of stories about the breakdown of civilization. Some reviewers call it dystopian, but I disagree. The original meaning of dystopia was an anti-utopia. In modern parlance dystopian has come to mean any unpleasant future. That’s a corruption of the original intent of the world. Nineteen Eighty-Four was a dystopian novel because the government of Big Brother was suppose to represent a view of communism, which before Stalin was seen by many intellectuals as a utopian ideal, but Orwell speculated communism would be hell instead of heaven.

Nineteen Eighty-Four was dystopian because it was anti-utopian. Revolution isn’t anti anything. Revolution uses a cliché science fictional setting to create an action adventure story. Collapsed civilizations are a good way to create a setting for rationalized violence, like westerns.  Post apocalyptic stories are good for creating situations where your character can kill a lot of people.  Audiences can’t seem to get enough of that kind of violence.

The proper categorization of Revolution is post-apocalyptic science fiction, which covers stories about the aftermath of collapse of our current civilization.  A common cliché within apocalyptic fiction is freemen versus brutal militias.   So Revolution is a sub-sub-genre.

To further complicate the problem all new fictional creations must compete with the most creative works at the moment. Taking on a new TV show for me, means finding something to watch that competes with my recent favorites, Breaking Bad, Friday Night Lights and Glee.

Watching the first episode of Revolution was a big letdown for me. Oh, it still has possibilities. But most great shows have fantastic first episodes, and Revolution’s was just ho-hum.  I did watch the 2nd episode and will watch the 3rd.  I have hope.  Revolution does have possibilities.

On the big screen they usually go for bigger and bigger action, usually involving saving the world. That’s an expensive proposition for a TV show, but Revolution has a very large scope.  There’s room for lots of action and speculation.  Let’s hope there is less of the former and more of the latter.

JWH – 9/25/12

Anna Karenina–Translations

Every time we read a book we have to translate it into our mind, even when we’re reading a book written in the language we speak.  If the book was written in another language, we have to depend on another mind to do an initial translation for us.  Sometimes two or more people work on a foreign language translation.  Those translators must interpret what they read in the original language and refashion it into English for us.  They have to choose between a literal translation and one that reads well.  Many decisions have to be made.  If an old book is being translated, does the translator preserve the language of the past, or modernize it, do they translate the colloquial phrases, or substitute similar English sayings, should they improve upon the original authors writing, for example, and change a weak passive sentence into a strong active one, etc.

In our modern world books are most often translated to film, but every reader translates words into pictures when they read.

There are so many kinds of translations going on, more than just moving ideas from one language to another.  When we read a story we picture it in our minds, and we seldom picture it as the author pictured it.  How often have you read a book and then talked with someone about that book only to find they translated the book completely different.  The best illustration of this when movies are made from books.  Is Keira Knightley what you think when you imagine Anna?  Or is Aaron Johnson how you picture Count Vronsky?

If you’ve read a book about a poor person and have never been poor yourself, you will translate the book different from a reader who has been poor.  I have never been a woman, Russian, rich, dashing, beautiful, lived in the 19th century or been part of an aristocracy, so I have to imagine a lot when reading Anna Karenina and translating what it must have been like to been Anna or Count Vronsky.  I have studied American History, but is translating concepts about American slavery equal to Russian serfs?  I’ve seen Greta Garbo play Anna in a 1930s film, but is Garbo anything like what Tolstoy pictured when he was describing her with words?

Here is a portrait of Baroness Varvara Ivanovna Ikskul von Hildenbrandt that was painted in 1889, years after the book was published, but who people in Russia then used as a model for Anna.

Researching translations is fun.  That’s why studying the Bible is fun for me even though I’m a non-believer.  My friend Mike loves studying Homer and other Greek and Roman writers and comparing translations.  Readers have to constantly ask:  Is this a good translation?  Think of how many Christian creeds, sects and churches been created from reading one book.

I’ve always wanted to tackle Anna Karenina or War and Peace.  Well I’ve finally read (listened) to Anna Karenina, but how much of the story did I get?  Is one reading enough to make a fair judgment?  Did I pick the right translation?  Without doing any research I ended up with the Maude translation because I liked the sound of the reader of the audio book.  But I have to wonder, did I pick a good translation.

I’ve gone out and found four different translations.  Two of which I have on my Kindle, and two of which I did a screen shot of the first page off of Amazon.com.

Here’ is the opening of Anna Karenina translated by Constant Garnett (1901):

Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

Everything was in confusion in the Oblonskys’ house. The wife had discovered that the husband was carrying on an intrigue with a French girl, who had been a governess in their family, and she had announced to her husband that she could not go on living in the same house with him. This position of affairs had now lasted three days, and not only the husband and wife themselves, but all the members of their family and household, were painfully conscious of it. Every person in the house felt that there was no sense in their living together, and that the stray people brought together by chance in any inn had more in common with one another than they, the members of the family and household of the Oblonskys. The wife did not leave her own room, the husband had not been at home for three days. The children ran wild all over the house; the English governess quarreled with the housekeeper, and wrote to a friend asking her to look out for a new situation for her; the man-cook had walked off the day before just at dinner time; the kitchen-maid, and the coachman had given warning.

Here is the same opening translated by Louise and Aylmer Maude (1918), the version I listened to:

ALL happy families resemble one another, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

Everything was upset in the Oblonskys’ house. The wife had discovered an intrigue between her husband and their former French governess, and declared that she would not continue to live under the same roof with him. This state of things had now lasted for three days, and not only the husband and wife but the rest of the family and the whole household suffered from it. They all felt that there was no sense in their living together, and that any group of people who had met together by chance at an inn would have had more in common than they. The wife kept to her own rooms; the husband stopped away from home all day; the children ran about all over the house uneasily; the English governess quarreled with the housekeeper and wrote to a friend asking if she could find her another situation; the cook had gone out just at dinnertime the day before and had not returned; and the kitchen-maid and coachman had given notice.

Here is another translation, from Joel Carmichael (1960).

And here is the more recent translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (2000):

This last translation was made famous by being picked for the Oprah Winfrey book club in 2004.

While listening to the novel I felt there were phrases that sounded modern, and wondered if Russians had some of the same sayings we did, or if the contemporary feel came from the translators.  Then my friend Mike called me to talk about his research on translations of War and Peace.  So I got to thinking about the translation of Anna Karenina.

I was very happy with the Maude translation, but it felt like I was reading Dickens.  But then Tolstoy wrote Anna Karenina just after Dickens died.  It was also serialized like Dickens’ novels, so it had that episodic feel.  Plus, both writers are coming to grips with similar changes in society brought about by industrialization, science and technology.

If you look at these different versions you’ll notice they are different and similar.  So, does the translation really matter? 

In the old two, Oblonsky had an intrigue with the French governess, while in the modern versions he had an affair.  Why the change?  How long has “an affair” meant what it does now?  But look at some other phrases:

“The wife did not leave her own room, the husband had not been at home for three days.” – Garnett.

“The wife kept to her own rooms; the husband stopped away from home all day;” – Maude, and it’s only part of a long sentence.

“Oblonsky’s wife refused to leave her rooms; he himself hadn’t been home for three days.” – Carmichael.

“The wife would not leave her rooms, the husband was away for the third day.” – Pevear and Volokhonsky.

Notice, there’s even changes in facts.  In the first the wife had one room, in the others, rooms.  In the second, the husband had been away all day, but in the others three days.

Notice how we’re told the cook has left.

“the man-cook had walked off the day before just at dinner time” – Garnett.

“the cook had gone out just at dinnertime the day before and had not returned” – Maude.

“the day before the cook had picked dinner time to go out” – Carmichael.

“the cook had already left the premises the day before, at dinner-time” – Pevear and Volokhonsky.

The Carmichael one doesn’t mention that the cook never returns.  And why doesn’t three of them mention that the cook is male?  I assumed the cook was female from my translation, but that’s my cultural spin on things.  I thought “walked off” was the strongest way of saying the cook quit.  “Left the premises” seems passive and not definite about why.

Well we do know why, the household is in confusion, upset and topsy-turvy.   Each of those words convey a different meaning to me, and none of them really convey the anger of a marital fight.  But then that might be Tolstoy’s failure.

Also, the famous first line is subtly different.  I wanted it to be more succinct.  Like “Happy families are all alike, unhappy families are distinctive.”  I don’t know Russian and would never be in the position to do a translation, but are the others translators like me, wanting to write the lines like they would want to read them?  If I had translated Anna Karenina it would have been a much shorter book, but is that translating or editing?

Then there’s Android Karenina, a parody mash-up of classic novel and science fiction – it’s another kind of translation.

Now many readers will be outraged by this particular translation of the novel, but really, is it any different in its extremes than the many film versions of Anna Karenina?  Most movie versions jettison the stories of Levin and Kitty, who appealed to me far deeper than Anna and Count Vronsky.  Just look at all these images from a Google search.  Each actress, or each painting for a book cover is an interpretation or translation.

How can modern readers understand Anna Karenina without understanding the social norms of the 1870s?  How much history do we have to know to really appreciate what Tolstoy is writing about?  I read AK at 60 and admired it greatly.  I could not have comprehended it at 20 or 30 or even 40, but even at 60 I’m sure I’m missing most of the story.  I don’t know Russian, but even if I did, I really don’t know much about life in 19th century Russia.  However, reading Anna Karenina is teaching me about Russia, like Dickens, Elliot and Trollope are teaching me about 19th century England.  Again though, through their translation.

History and fiction are constant mistranslations of reality, that change from generation to generation.

To see how we mistranslate history watch this little video “5 Historical Misconceptions Rundown" at YouTube:

JWH – 5/11/12

Doc by Mary Doria Russell

Doc is John Henry Holliday, legendary figure from the old west and most famously remembered for standing with Wyatt, Morgan and Virgil Earp at the gunfight at the O.K. Corral in 1881 as Doc Holliday.  All too often fictional accounts of famous people of history tend to be heavy on the fiction and light on the history, but this ain’t so with Doc, the new novel by Mary Doria Russell.

To see how serious Russell treats the history start reading her blog at Starting the Next Novel.  Blogs are annoying for reading older posts, but if you start here and read forward with the link at the bottom of the article, you’ll be able to track her comments about writing Doc and the next novel dealing with Wyatt.  Russell even took a five day horseback ride that recreates Wyatt Earp’s Vendetta Ride.  But keep reading her blog and you’ll be charmed by Russell and understand how she put so much biographical research into her fictional character.

Even covering this material in a nonfiction books like The Last Gunfight by Jeff Guinn it’s very tricky painting a portrait of a real person.  History leaves a limited set of facts that’s never enough to be definitive.  Like I said in Nonfiction, Fiction, History, Myth and States of Consciousness it’s extremely hard to discern nonfiction from fiction, and history from myth but Mary Doria Russell makes a climbing Mt. Everest effort to portray John Henry Holliday as fully and accurate as possible in the context of a novel.

I enjoyed this story immensely.  I’ve read many books and seen many movies about Doc Holliday and the Earps and Russell’s picture of them in 1878 Dodge City is nothing less than brilliant – not in the Einstein way of thinking, but in the way the Harry Potter kids use the term.  I have no idea how true this story is, but it feels right.  At worst I’d say she worked too hard to make Doc likable, and even elegant and tragic.  She elevates Morgan over Wyatt, but history has favored Wyatt because he survived.  I do believe Russell is right in suggesting that Doc was mainly Morgan’s friend, and after Morgan was killed and his murdered avenged, Doc didn’t have much reason to stick with Wyatt.

Now if you’re not caught up in the mania for Tombstone and the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral you might not give a fig about this book.  It is a well written western that stands on its own even if you aren’t caught up in the history, but I think you’ll at least need to love western movies to enjoy this book.  And I love westerns.  And this was one of my favorite books of 2011.

JWH – 1/2/12 

Nonfiction, Fiction, History, Myth and States of Consciousness

Have you ever read a book about a real life event and then watched a documentary about the same subject?  The contrast of what we can learn from words and what we can learn from film is often jarring and sometimes shocking.  One of my favorite books from youth is The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe.  Wolfe made literary fame by pioneering “new journalism” which is now called creative nonfiction.  The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test was considered the book that defined the hippies and their philosophy.  I read this book back in 1969, and now 42 years later I got to watch Magic Trip, a documentary that used actual film footage of Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters.   Wolfe interviewed all the principal people right after the events, and he also must have seen the original 30 hours of film, and I was blown away by the difference between the two ways of telling the same story.

Truth is the actual events.  How close can we ever come to reconstructing the truth?  What is the best evidence for the truth?  When Farmer Ted bets his geeky friends he’ll hook up with Samantha in Sixteen Candles and his friends demand proof, he asks them what kind, and they say in unison, “Video!”   As far as I can imagine, video comes closest to the truth as any evidence we can find – but even then it’s far from perfect.  For centuries, before the advent of video, our knowledge of past events was based on writing.

How much can we know from reading?  Before writing was invented our worldview was limited to the here and now.  We had oral storytellers that conveyed news from distant lands and remembered events and people from the past, but it was very limited.  Most of the time people’s consciousness was focused on the present and the immediate world around them.  Then reading and writing was invented and information about endless places and countless past moments could be recorded so people could conjure up in their minds things that weren’t here and now.  But how effective is reading at reproducing the past?  How accurate can reading describe distant places and events?

All my life I’ve been a bookworm, spending hours a day with my head in a book.  When young I most read fiction, and felt that time away from reality was just escapist entertainment, but over the decades I’ve shifted to reading more nonfiction, and felt I was learning stuff about other places, people and the past.  But am I?

Lately I’ve been reading nonfiction books and then seeking out documentaries and photographs to supplement my reading, and in every case I’m shocked by how different my mental image from reading is from the photograph or film.  Words are black marks on white paper, but they attempt to encode information that comes through our five senses.  How well does any word for a color convey the actual color? Does the word blue suggest any particular shade of blue?  Picture the wall of paint sample colors at your local Home Depot.  Which of the thousands of blues are the one we call blue?  Now think about the other four senses and words for sounds, textures, tastes and smells.  How close do words come to the infinite varieties of sensual details?

Last night I watched a documentary Magic Trip about Ken Kesey and his band of Merry Pranksters taking a bus from the west coast to visit New York City for the 1964 Worlds Fair.  In 1969 when I read “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test” by Tom Wolfe it blew me away by how exciting his non-fiction writing was at vividly conveying the story of these freaks on acid traveling across the country.  Over the years I’ve read more books and articles about this event, and the people involved.  To me this cross country trip was the legendary beginning of the hippies.  Of course I was wrong.   Kesey and his Merry Pranksters met the real hippies, like the Grateful Dead, when they got back from the trip and started promoting their acid test events.  Hippies already existed in 1964.

The documentary Magic Trip was created around the actual film the Pranksters took while on the trip and it blew my mind again.  It was absolutely nothing like I pictured from the Tom Wolfe book.  First off, Kesey and the Pranksters didn’t look like hippies – only the women had long hair.  And they all looked ordinary – I wouldn’t have named them the Merry Pranksters – that moniker seems way to grand for them.  The people in the film looked like college kids from the late 1950s or early 1960s acting really silly.  They looked more like early Beach Boys wearing stripe shirts.  Their antics looked as sophisticated as old episodes of The Monkees.

In some of the film clips Kesey and the Pranksters are on heavy doses of acid but you couldn’t tell that from what you see.  Now I know what they were feeling, I can remember that from those days.  Acid is like having a hurricane in your head, but you don’t see that from the outside.  What you see is kids being goofy and stupid.  Now in the book, Tom Wolfe tries to convey the epic psychological discoveries they were making – things going on in their heads, and the Magic Trip film tries to suggest that too, but the physical evidence of visuals from the film and sound recordings from tape just don’t back it up.  Wolfe wrote about what was going on in their heads and we can’t see that in the film.

As evidence of what actually happened I credit the film over Wolfe.  But is that fair or even accurate?  How much can we judge the truth of an event from what we can see and hear?  As counter evidence, how much do people know you from seeing you and hearing you talk?  See what I mean?  Reality and truth is deceptive.

It’s impossible to convey a psychedelic trip in words – and the clips of the trip festivals at the end of the movie don’t even come close.  What you see is kids dancing and acting weird and idiotic – no wonder the silent-majority Americans were freaked out by the freaks.  Back then the claim was drugs took you to a state of higher consciousness, but I always felt like they took me to a state of animal consciousness – a lowering.  Don’t get me wrong, it’s quite revealing, and you can learn a lot about how the mind functions, but all that talk about higher states was bullshit.  But then I value the verbal mind over the nonverbal mind.

In one part of the film, the west coast Merry Pranksters, along with their legendary bus driver Neal Cassidy, famed beat character Dean Moriarty from On the Road, meet up with his fellow real life On the Road beat characters Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg.  Hippies meet their beatnik idols.  But things don’t go off well.  Jack is morose and turned off by the silly pranksters.  Then the west coast psychedelic legends go and meet the east coast prophets of LSD, Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert.  Leary is so turned off by them that he runs away and hides and leaves the future Ram Das to deal with them.  Leary and Alpert were trying to make LSD a serious tool for studying consciousness and these proto-hippies were abusing acid like teenagers breaking into their parents liquor cabinet.  In 1964 most people did not know what to make of these crazy kids.

Seeing Magic Trip was shocking to me.  Imagine how disturbing it would be to discover films of Jesus and his merry band of disciples.  Christianity has created thousands of different interpretations of the history of Jesus – so imagine if we got to see what Jesus really said and did?   Video can be so shocking to see after studying words.  We have no idea what Jesus was like or what he said.  Everything he supposedly said was recreated decades after the fact.  In The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Tom Wolfe is deifying Kesey and his disciples just three years after the real event, and it’s impossible to know how much of the legend is Wolfe and how much is Kesey?

Tom Wolfe had used words to make this trip into an epic adventure, a transcendental experience of the first order.  He totally mythologized the people involved – of course the Pranksters were trying to do that themselves even while they were on the trip.  They gave each other funny names making themselves into characters on an epic adventure traveling in their legendary bus Further.

Now I don’t mean to suggest that these folks weren’t experiencing eye opening philosophical experiences.  They were exploring a new consciousness, breaking out of the rigid 1950s stereotypes, and exploring new experiences that would come to be known as the psychedelic sixties – but it wasn’t new consciousness.   Throughout history groups of people have rediscovered the Dionysian joys of intoxication and ecstasy – and wanting to escape from the rigid confines of society.  Even in the film Kesey says they were too young to be beatniks and too old to be hippies.

I remember my psychedelic days from over forty years ago, and it pretty much followed the Pranksters.  Me and my friends did a lot of silly and stupid things while exploring the doors of perception.  I had been inspired by Timothy Leary and Aldous Huxley and wanted my trips to be scientific experiments into the mind, but they weren’t.  It was just me and my friends doing many of the same exact things the Pranksters did in Magic Trip – going group swimming, driving around in funny vehicles that got a lot of attention, trying to play musical instruments when we had no ability, getting zonked out by nature, admiring the beats, upsetting the older people.  Oh, I learned a lot, but I can safely say to kids today, don’t bother, there are much better ways to explore the mind.  Read Steven Pinker, Edge.org and learn how to achieve Zen mindfulness.

But does any of this answer the question about how much truth we can attain from words?  In terms of acquiring knowledge, words can get you far higher than any amount of acid.  Truth and experience are wordless – ineffable.  I’ve experienced wordless states of consciousness through drugs and a mini-stroke, and that’s not a normal human state of consciousness.  As humans, like it or not, our consciousness minds are based on words and language – and language and words do not mirror reality perfectly.  Or even closely.  I know there are non-verbal conscious states of mind but the past and future don’t exist in those states.  The mere act of trying to recreate the past is a verbal state of consciousness.

The real question is:  How close does the nonverbal reality match our verbal reality?  I don’t think very much at all.  My proof is the fact that we all live in different verbal realities, and even when several people experience the same event they seldom recreate the shared reality with the same words.

A good lesson in understanding this is to study writing creative nonfiction.  I took two MFA writing courses with Kristen Iversen dealing with Creative Nonfiction and I learned quite a lot about “telling the truth” with words.  It’s actually very hard, if not impossible.  One of the first writing lessons she gave our class was to take a memory from when we were young and put it into words.   Even here I’m being misleading.  I can’t remember the exact assignment.  I think she might have told us to pick a memory from when we were twelve, but I’m not sure.  What immediately occurred to me to write about was a memory of me staying with my grandmother who maintained an old apartment building on Biscayne Bay in Miami, and the night she gave me an old fishing tackle box left in one of the apartments, and how I went out alone to fish off the concrete wall by the bay.  The more I thought about the memory the more details I could dredge up, but eventually I realized I couldn’t be sure of any of the exact details.  Memory is so faulty, but they’re also tricky.  It’s easy to create false memories. But my final essay was praised in class for its vivid details.

Was the essay absolutely true?  No, it wasn’t.  But I didn’t feel I was lying either.  I had recreated in words what were vague impressions and memories in my mind.  Mining those memories took work.  There’s a quality of effort in recreating memories that is very enlightening.  But still this brings us no closer to explaining the difference between nonfiction, fiction, history and myth.

I have read many nonfiction books on Wyatt Earp.  I have seen many documentaries on Wyatt Earp.  I have read many fictional stories about Wyatt Earp.  I have seen many fictional movies about Wyatt Earp.  I have heard many people discuss Wyatt Earp as a legendary mythic character of the old west.  Which of these various modes of learning about Wyatt Earp are the best for knowing who the real Wyatt Earp was like?  Is Tombstone the movie better than The Last Gunfight the nonfiction book, or Doc, a fictional novel where Wyatt is a prominent character?  Or the  PBS American Experience episode about Wyatt Earp?

Here’s what I can tell you.  It’s only based on personal feelings.  Wyatt Earp the man who lived in the nonverbal reality of the 19th century is long gone and unknowable.  That kind of reality is unknowable.  That’s why it’s called ineffable.  I can say some fictional versions of Wyatt Earp vary far from the actual reality of the nonfictional evidence, but can we say the Wyatt we create with historical evidence is actually close the to real flesh and blood Wyatt?  Yes, I think we can, even though there are many nonfictional Wyatt Earps to consider.  Every account, whether fiction or nonfiction creates a new edition of Wyatt Earp.  But I actually doubt we really get that close to the real man – some accounts are just more factual than others.

Scientists like to entertain the idea of multiple universes because there should be an infinity of these other universes allowing endless versions of our own world, many just slightly different.  That’s how verbally reconstructed Wyatt Earps exists.  There’s an infinity of them.  Some of them are close to the real world that did exist, but it’s very hard to judge which are the closest.  We can spot the absurd examples easy enough like all the Wyatt Earps in science fiction stories, but we can’t say which historical Wyatt is actually the best.

I think we’re getting closer to understand nonfiction, fiction, history and myth, but we’re not there yet.  I am reminded of a book called The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes.  What Jaynes suggested was for early humanity they had a different state of mind than we do now, which he called the bicameral mind.  I don’t want to go into the details of his theory other than to say that in the past we shifted from one kind of consciousness to another.  I just want to suggest that as our verbal consciousness evolved, we’re now shifting into a third state of consciousness.  This new consciousness is based on sharing facts and building a consensus model of reality based on science.

We’re not that good at it yet – the proof can be seen by how Democrats and Republicans model our political reality.  And even conservatives and liberals seldom share the same ideas.  But in theory we believe through science and other forms of knowledge, that we can model our complex social reality in political and economic laws, as well as nonfiction, history and even fiction.

In other words, many of us believe given enough facts we could prove to each other the validity of a model of reality.  Science has gone the furthest by explaining the physical world.  The consensus is very strong with that – there’s very little fiction or myth in science.  All other areas of knowledge, like politics, ethics, law, economics are a long way from matching reality with any kind of common agreement.  In other words, they are mostly built on fiction and myths.

What I’m saying finally is, we all like to believe that we can separate nonfiction and history from fiction and myths.  Whether that’s true or even possible, is still open for scientific evaluation.  In other words, if you hold any beliefs other than those covered by a narrow range of scientific study, you can’t be sure if there is any difference between nonfiction, fiction, history and myth.

There is no way to know who Ken Kesey or Wyatt Earp was scientifically, but is there any emerging discipline that could use consensus like science, to measure the accuracy between nonfiction and fiction?  Is the scholarship of History rigorous enough to make that claim?  Or will all areas of knowledge outside of science always by undermined by subjectivity?

JWH – 12/30/11

The Last Gunfight by Jeff Guinn

The Last Gunfight by Jeff Guinn has a subtitle that perfectly describes the book:  “The Real Story of the Shootout at the O.K. Corral – And How it Changed the American West.”  I’ve been reading about Wyatt Earp and the gunfight at the O.K. Corral for decades, and the story just gets better and better as historians gather more and more data and keep putting the pieces together over and over looking for the historical truth.  Jeff Guinn’s book is the best yet, but I also liked Inventing Wyatt Earp by Allen Barra.  Both have come a tremendous distance down the trail since Stuart Lake’s Wyatt Earp: Frontier Marshal in 1931.

Growing up in the 1950s meant watching a lot of westerns on television.  Western movies have been around since the earliest days of silent films.  The allure of the wild west began in print way before the famous gunfight at the O.K. Corral in 1881 with newspaper stories and dime novels.  Stories of the west have always been mythic, and the truth has always been hard to know.  We know the wild west through fiction – through the myths.   In recent years historians have been examining and writing about those myths and the reality is startlingly different.

Back in the 1950s Wyatt Earp on TV was a squeaky clean good guy.  But before the real Wyatt Earp got to Tombstone he had mainly worked in whorehouses, probably as a bouncer, but maybe as investor, and had been arrested a couple of times, including for horse stealing.  After the gunfight he killed three men in cold blood, and only one in a gunfight, because he was tired of waiting for the law to catch the killers of his brother.  Wyatt Earp essentially got away with murder.  Many people also felt the Earps and Doc Holladay murdered the three men at the O.K. Corral.   Wyatt Earp had worked for the law, but never as full Marshal or Sheriff, just as a deputy.  But this work brought him in contact with criminals that wanted him and his brothers dead, and the Earps killed the cowboys first.

In the myths of television and movie westerns violence is the solution.  We like to think the white hat cowboys represent good and the American way of life, and the black hat cowboys represent lawlessness and evil.  Jeff Guinn’s book goes beyond those stereotypes to explain things were far more complex.  As ambiguous as any complex issue today.

Even as the conflict between the cowboy rustlers around southern Arizona and New Mexico was taking place with the city folk of Tombstone, press reports about the violence was entertaining newspaper readers all over the country.  At first the Earps were praised for warring against criminals and maintaining the peace, but after the famous gunfight, when Wyatt went on his famous revenge vendetta ride, the public turned against him too.  He became just another killer that society needed to deal with.

Wyatt Earp lived another forty something years and fame dogged him the rest of his life.  He wanted to square his story with the public, which is why he worked with Stuart Lake on his autobiography.  But Earp died before it was finished, and Lake had to make it into a biography.  But because of Earp’s wife Josephine, Lake was forced to clean up the story.  Wyatt had already been telling lies for years about his life, and before he died already had his own mythic view of his past ready.  People wanted to read about a gunman, but Earp wanted them to believe he was a peace officer and businessman.

Then the movies started coming out and the legend began to grow and Wyatt Earp was turned into one of most famous men in wild west history.  He’s even eclipsing Wild Bill Hickok and other men who were more famous at the time.  Jeff Guinn explores this in the last chapter of his book.  I think it deserve a whole book itself.

The story is complicated.  Just read the “Gunfight at the O.K. Corral” at Wikipedia.  It’s so complicated that it makes for a Rashomon like tale.  Jeff Guinn strengthens this story by giving a lot of American history that leads up to why the various principle characters acted the way that they did.  Much of the story is political – can’t get far from the Republicans and Democrats today, can we?

Because of television and movies we picture old west towns with one long street, with a sheriff’s office, several saloons, a hotel, a general store, a telegraph office and a livery stable.  1881 Tombstone was far more urban than that.  It had two opera houses, a bowling alley, an ice cream store, tennis courts, a stationary story, many hotels, mines, factories, countless bars, countless whorehouses, two newspapers, and lots of businesses, including those that sold the latest fashions for women from the east and Europe.  The wild west in 1881 was already becoming what we know as modern – and thus the famous shootout was less about wild west gunslingers and more about of a complicated crime.

Wyatt Earp and his brothers had common law marriages to prostitutes, mainly earned their money from gambling, and Wyatt hoped to make it big by becoming Sheriff who got to keep 10% of the taxes he collected.  The Earps were near the bottom of the social/economic heap and hoped to climb up in status by working as lawmen.  Unlike the movies, they weren’t famous citizens of their town.  Their names got in the papers when they arrested cattle rustlers or arrested drunk and disorderly cowboys, but that wasn’t that often.  They were just tough guys hired to deal with more unpleasant tough guys.

We see westerns today where the good guys kill countless bad guys.  How many men did Marshal Matt Dillon kill over the course of Gunsmoke?  Well Wyatt Earp is the most famous gunfighter in history for being involved in killing six men, but none in quick draw duels.  There were damn few gunfight duels like we see on television that you have to study hard to find them.  Most gunfights were drunken brawls and cowardly ambushes.  Even the famous gunfight at the O.K. Corral was not men whipping out six-shooters from their holsters.  Wyatt had his pistol in a coat with a specially made pocket for a handgun.  I don’t know if any of the men had guns in holsters slung low on the hip like we see in the movies.  One man the Earps shot apparently didn’t even have a gun – but they probably didn’t know it since they let another man with out a gun, Ike Clanton, the man they really wanted to kill the most,  get out of the way.  Something like 30 shots were fired in 30 seconds by six people.   More of a close fire fight than a duel.

The gunfight at the O.K. Corral was an insignificant event in America history that’s been elevated into myth and legend.  Because the event is at the intersection of history and myth, like stories we find in The Bible, people can’t let them go.  The gunfight at the O.K. Corral is like a meme that grows and grows.  We can no longer tell reality from myth when it comes to stories about the American wild west, but there is something about these stories that deeply resonate with us.  We want to define ourselves and our history by the myths rather than reality.

I predict there will be more movies about Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday in the future, and with each new generation of films, they will redefine the story again and again.  Sometimes the pendulum will swing towards reality and other times towards fantasy.  The Kevin Costner and Kurt Russell portrayals glorified Wyatt Earp even though they both tried to be realistic.   The new book Doc by Mary Doria Russell tries to de-glorify them, and make them more human, and demystify the violence – but I’m worried she went to far in making them likable.  My personal guess is they were both pretty damn unlikable.  But the fact is we’ll never know.  We can make Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday into whatever we want – and will, time and again in the movies and books.

JWH – 12/28/11

What Do We Want From Science Fiction?

This month over at the Classic Science Fiction book club we’re reading and discussing Empire Star by Samuel R. Delany, and some of us are enjoying the story and others are finding it lacking.  We all take it for granted that people have different tastes, but do you ever wonder why?  One of the themes of Empire Star is about asking questions, and one of our members, Andreas, found this article by Theodore Sturgeon called “Ask the Next Question.”  Some of us even wondered if Delany had gotten the idea dealing with questions from reading Theodore Sturgeon.  In fact, we found many elements of Empire Star that had been used in other science fiction books – but more on that later.

Discussing Empire Star got me thinking:  What do we want from science fiction?  Did some of the book club members enjoy Empire Star because it contains certain elements they seek out in science fiction?  And the reason other people disliked the story is because it lacks those elements they normally seek?  Jo Walton really loves Empire Star or so she says in her review at Tor.com.

I didn’t just like the book a lot, the way a sane grown-up might like a book, I fell head over heels obsessively in love with it. I made myself a t-shirt of it. I read it several hundred times. I was a one-Jo Empire Star fangirl. I had a sign on my bedroom door saying “Entry for J-O Type Persons Only” which is a quote from it.

Evidently Empire Star rubbed Jo Walton in just the right way if she’s read it hundreds of times.  Really?  I haven’t read it that many times, but I have read it four times since 1968.  I keep coming back to Empire Star.  Why?

I think most of us generally think we read books because we want to be caught up in a good story and characters – and beyond that we assume all books are different.  But what if there are specific fictional flavors we crave like our favorite ice creams?

My all-time favorite books are the twelve YA novels Robert A. Heinlein wrote for Charles Scribner’s Sons in the 1940s and 1950s, and while I was reading Empire Star for the fourth time I noticed many elements in the story that reminded me of Heinlein.  Did Delany include them in the his novel because they were elements he liked and thought they belonged in any novel he wrote too?  Empire Star came out in 1966, so he wrote it when he was 23-24, and still quite young.  Delany and Heinlein don’t seem like they have much in common as people or writers, but there are some common elements in their stories that attract me, and that maybe they do share some things common.

Circular Plots

Heinlein wrote two classic SF stories with circular plots, “—All You Zombies—“ and   “By His Bootstraps.”  In each story one character turns out to be several in the stories.  In Empire Star three characters turn out to be many.  In fact all three stories might be considered Mobius strips.  I love circular plot stories, and repeating loop stories, like Replay and Groundhog Day.  This is definitely a science fiction element that will always hook me.

Alien Pets

Heinlein’s young adult novels sometimes had alien creatures that appeared to be pets but were really something else, like Willis in Red Planet, Lummox in The Star Beast, and Chipsie the spider-puppy in Starman Jones.  Empire Star gives us a devil-kitten D’ik, which eventually grows very large like Lummox.  Remember “The Trouble with Tribbles” from Star Trek?  Almost an exact copy of flat cats in Heinlein’s The Rolling Stones.  If puppies and kittens are cute, so are alien animal babies.  I guess I’m sucker for alien pets.  And that makes me think about how much fictional mileage J. K. Rowling gets our of her magical pets.

Running Away to the Stars

Now there’s one huge theme that appeals to a lot of science fiction readers, and that’s about a kid who gets to run away to the stars.  Isn’t that the core of science fiction?  My all-time favorite novel is Have Space Suit-Will Travel.  Empire Star follows the classic template as Starman Jones about a farm boy who heads out to explore the galaxy.  What that’s you say, didn’t George Lucas invent that motif for Star Wars?  Sorry, but it’s been around a long long time in a galaxy far away – but it’s probably why Star Wars is so successful and so much better than the other five films.  (I hate referring to it as A New Hope.)

Galactic Empires

I’ve written about this before but galactic empires are probably the most loved of all science fiction elements.  Read, “Are Galactic Empires the New Middle Earth” I wrote last June.  I don’t think I’ve really scratched the surface of that theme yet – there’s something deep there, that really needs to be explored.  Empire Star is about a galactic empire that uses slaves, and Comet Jo is going to free them, but after a long epic struggle that will take years.  However, Empire Star is a slight wisp of a novel, really a short novella, and if Delany wrote it today it would be 800 pages, and probably the first in a long George R. R. Martin like series.

Intelligent Machines

Stories about intelligent computers like Heinlein’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Gerrold’s When HARLIE Was One, Galatea 2.2 by Richard Powers and the current Wake, Watch and Wonder trilogy by Robert J. Sawyer really push my science fiction pleasure button.  So is it any wondered I loved Empire Star with Lump, a computer Comet Jo meets living on the Moon?  And I can’t help but believe Delany was inspired by Mike, a computer living on the Moon in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.

Other Elements

Delany doesn’t stop with just these five classic science fiction elements.  The whole book seems inspired by the weird humor of Robert Sheckley.  But I also hear from other readers that they see elements in Empire Star that remind them of Theodore Sturgeon – such as the theme about asking questions.

I wrote in “My Kind of Story” that I knew there were certain kinds of stories that appealed to me, but when I wrote that I thought I was dealing with narrative style and writing techniques.  But now I’m thinking that like some people with very specific sexual desires, I might actually crave very specific kinds of science fiction stories, or more precisely, stories with specific elements.  Which makes me wonder why I don’t seek to write stories with those elements?  Did Heinlein and Delany uses the elements discussed above because they believed they would sell more books?  Or because the were pleasuring themselves?

I need to contemplate if I have a limited number of fictional buttons I liked pushed, or are there endless possibilities. I’m really enjoying Once Upon a Time, the new TV series on ABC, and one of the things that excited me most about the story is that it’s told out of sequence, that the narrative double backs over itself, somewhat like a circular plot.  And like PKD, it’s about a town that doesn’t know the real reality of things.  If I kept looking I’d probably find several other story elementals that are my kind of groovy.

Now back to Sturgeon’s idea about asking questions. I’ve only gone one layer deep by asking what do we want from science fiction. If the answer is we love stories with certain themes or ideas then I should go to the next question: Why do I like those ideas? The answers would be too long to put into a blog post, but if you think about it, the question is important. For example, why is running away to go into space so appealing? During my adolescence that was a huge button to push with me. I had alcoholic parents that dragged me and my sister all over the country, so the real answer there is I wanted to escape from my own life. And as I got older and learned what it meant to be a real astronaut and what the right stuff was, I realized I would hate living in space – at least under present conditions.

The point is to keep asking question. Go deeper. Because if I did, I’d learn a whole lot about myself, and maybe stuff I didn’t even want to know. Why do I love the idea of intelligent machines? Is it because I don’t like emotions? Where’s that going? See what I mean?

Well, this blog is over – I’ll have to write more about this in the future.

JWH – 12/8/11

I Finish NaNoWriMo