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Come From Away and emotional sleight of hand

Come From Away, about a small town in Newfoundland that takes in stranded passengers when US airspace is shut down after 9/11, is a deceptively affecting piece that weights its unassuming premise with a kind of sleight of emotional transference. So I found myself, unexpectedly, crying within the first twenty minutes of the performance. Based on what I’d heard about the show, I’d thought that the emotional valence would be about welcoming the stranger (which may not be surprising, I suppose – our culture does tend to interpret every story through contemporary politics). And on the surface, that is what it’s about. But the gravity of the show is all about people processing mass tragedy.

Art that deals with mass tragedy has a tradeoff to make. It can hover directly over the tragedy, and that can give the audience a real perspective of what happened and what it was like to be there, which is vital. But it also shuts us down emotionally. Watching a mass tragedy occur, the scale of loss is inhuman, numbing, emotionally inaccessible to us. Our animal brains know very well that when you see a cloud of ash sweep across a city like the fist of God swallowing people whole (or a gas chamber in Germany, or a machete genocide in Rwanda) that this is not a time or place to access our feelings. This is a time to run. Our other systems shut down. The fully engaged audience comes out battered, but not necessarily enlightened or cathartic.

To offer catharsis about a mass tragedy, focus just to the left of the tragedy itself. A rural town in Newfoundland, just turning on the news (the abandoned building where the pianist discovers a piano that he can’t yet play, the hotel in Hotel Rwanda, etc.). You take the audience someplace safe. And then you give them a smaller, more human-scale drama onto which they might project all of the feelings that inform that day, about which they can’t directly speak, because that surrogate of the experience is what we need to process it.

A less emotionally intelligent show, for example, might give you a glimpse into what was happening in New York on that day, just to set the context. But Manhattan doesn’t appear in Come From Away. With a conspicuous discipline, what happened there is not even spoken of. We see people turning the radio on. And then, with ashen faces, telling other people to turn the radio on. When the passengers disembark the plane at nightfall and ask the woman running the shelter finally what happened, she struggles to find the words, and then tells them that the televisions are on in the cafeteria. They can see for themselves.

In any other context – say, an airline goes bankrupt in midflight – the spectacle of a few dozen planes full of international strangers without a common language and a crate full of animals plus a rare pregnant baboon touching down in a rural backwater where everyone has to run in circles to find food and toiletries is a setup for a comedy. What happens to these stranded people for five days doesn’t particularly matter in any material sense. Whether the Newfoundlanders, in a vacuum, are hospitable or a bit prickish isn’t that important, because we know that on most days the world is full of casual indecencies and we probably wouldn’t believe a fairy tale about general Canadian saintliness anyways. But on 9/11, as everyone getting off that plane and everyone on the ground is struggling to come to terms with an act of mass inhumanity just a few hours away, the tiny trials of this nowheresville becomes weighted with processing that trauma. And suddenly, whether everyone gets hot showers deeply matters. Whether people give up their barbecues to the community center is important. Whether somebody goes into the cargo hold and makes sure the cats are fed is paramount – because however morally insignificant these particular passengers are over a given five-day layover, it is the sharp insistence on decency and order and kindness that we need to see, regardless of who receives it or how effective it is or whether the world is really any better for it. We need to believe that these forces respond when they’re affronted, whether they can heal Manhattan or only make tea for group of inconvenienced strangers. We need that insistence for its own sake.

In that sense, I think Come From Away could have been about anywhere and maintained resonance. And whether the folk who touched down in Iceland were greeted with cocoa or forgotten at the airport, the emotional heft of that story, about people trying to come to terms with how to respond in all the little ways that affirm or deny their humanity in the days after a traumatic event, would be intact. That’s the sucker punch that I didn’t quite expect walking into the theatre, focused on the foreground of the story. Just watching people probe their humanity in the shadow of that trauma makes you realize what that trauma really meant.

“Fable” Selection out in The Tusculum Review

Many thanks to Kelsey Trom, I have a quasi-poem out in the 2019 Tusculum Review (for paid subscribers only). They published a selection out of a piece I’ve had kicking around for a long time, a 17-poem suite titled “Fable.”

Announcement here: ttr.tusculum.edu/2019/11/13/201

“Fable” is a longer series that develops this archetypal myth of a girl named Marina who falls mute and how she recovers her voice again. I’ve had it for some time, but don’t get an option to submit it very often (not a ton of publications looking to put out epic poetry). The selection that The Tusculum Review chose to publish comes from the second section of the piece — where the angel steals into her room and takes something from her.

I’d still love to see the entire suite printed together one day. I’m not primarily a poet, so it may wait a little while before there’s a manuscript-length collection to send it out with.

Public Media

Among all the ways of interpreting society’s generalized angst at Mark Zuckerberg, the most helpful, I think, is becoming the call for more publicly supported media. See, e.g., this CIGI piece.

I’ve been known to spout off about the corrupting effects of new media on democracies here on the blog. Public media is one route you could take from here, so is banning advertising in the news (i.e., everyone is a subscription model), licensing web media sources, hiring the truth panels and suppressing misleading sources on Google and Facebook. You could probably come up with your own list.

My Semiannual Voidward Yawp of Pain and Disillusionment on Media Reform in the Age of Trump

If Trump loses, it doesn’t redeem American democracy. Democracy is an information-processing machine drowning in bad information. One normal result doesn’t correct the systemic issue. If you ask your search engine for “good apple pie recipe” and the first result calls for a cup of bleach, you don’t just move on to the next result in the list with ease and confidence in the system.

Trump proved, and reproved, and reproved until it was exhausting just to keep reading about it, that he doesn’t understand his own policy positions, and doesn’t care. He knows less about US immigration law, trade deals, climate, health care, and taxes than someone who spent five minutes on wikipedia learning about any of those topics. On his signature policy achievement, the tax cut, he was asked to leave the negotiating room by members of his own party because he was sabotaging them with ignorance. He contradicts himself without any self-awareness. His own staff anonymously report that they can’t get him to read a one-page daily briefing filled with pictures and his own name highlighted. Foreign diplomats publicly report exactly the same thing, with their names attached.

Yes, on top of that, he’s got a generally cruel vindictive streak. He likes to punish brown people — whether that’s denying aid to American citizens in Puerto Rico while 4000 of them died, or the Muslim ban, or creating uncounted numbers of orphans out of legal asylum seekers at the border, after subjecting these children to what amounts to torture as they piss themselves without diapers and sleep without blankets and forget their own parents, held in another detention center (and which is not, in any factual universe, anything like the Obama Administration’s policy, but I can’t even repeat basic facts anymore without my head being crowded with the garbage propaganda that half the country consumes).

He’s not just less qualified than the average man on the street, he’s less qualified than the average man in the crackhouse, because at least the man in the crackhouse would take the job seriously enough to try to learn something about it.

This unique kind of anti-qualification comes, I suspect, from being rich all his life, never having to work for someone else, and never being denied power. He can imagine that he doesn’t need to learn because he’s never had a formative moment in his life where he had to read something to understand it or else an employer would impose a consequence on him for it. He gets $500M under the table from his father, invests it in his father’s line of work (Manhattan real estate), and decades later, those investments are the only thing his name is on of real value, while he’s bankrupted a half a dozen other ventures and remained untouchable. If he’d taken the $500M and parked it in index funds (what your average know-nothing investor goes to by default to avoid learning anything), his net worth would be higher.

The fact that this is who America elected says a lot about the future of democracy, no matter who they elect next.

 

***

An information-processing system: You get a hundred million voters, you provide them with mass media about the candidates and the state of the country, the voters think about what that information means for them and try to contextualize it in their own lives, they show up at the polls, they pull a lever.

If the mass media voters are getting isn’t reliable, democracy ceases to function.

Throughout the 20th century, mass media was more or less controlled. There were a handful of sources with gatekeepers. People consumed it for a couple hours a day, maybe.

Today, there’s no controls on information, and people never unplug. Any asshat can start a news site with all the apparent authority of the New York Times, and if they say the NYT is lying to you, then you’re at an impasse. This has happened at massive scales, promoted by social media, abused by foreign governments (and the US has largely responded to every report about this by rolling out the red carpet — even rolling out the red carpet to keep trying to hack the voting machines).

Until we’re at the point where the density of propaganda out there on Alt Media is effectively more powerful than real media.

How could you measure this? Consider an experiment. Imagine you have a non-story in the news, any little bullshit factoid that might belong on page A-10 of the paper for a day. And you want to manipulate it to become an enormous, all-encompassing scandal. You twist the facts, make it unrecognizable from what anyone who tried to research it would find, and repeat your version all day every day to your little slice of audience, who find it reliably outrageous in your telling. And because media companies are all desperately competing to keep you glued to their site as their profit margins narrow, now some slightly-more-respectable media has to start reporting the same thing to try and keep you from cannibalizing their viewers with outrageous content. And soon you have a substantial part of the media ecosystem actually reporting this garbage, until you get some critical density of the electorate to believe it. And then you have the real, serious, responsible news outlets who have no choice, in a democracy, but to report on what 25% of the country believes, because it’s got profound electoral implications. And that snowballs and snowballs until your story is actually more talked about than every other policy issue combined by all sources in the midst of the biggest election of the country, and if that could happen, and you could measure that, it would be an incredible experimental outcome. Hard to imagine a firmer proof for “propaganda is mightier than news.”

And that’s what happened in 2016. You had a non-story about digital security and whether classified information was unwittingly made vulnerable, in a context where people all over the State Dept. are overclassifying and regularly making classified information vulnerable anyways. The story vanished as soon as it wasn’t useful. Months after the election, Donald Trump’s own kids were caught doing exactly what Hillary did with private servers, and nobody gave a damn. They tried to somehow link that to a terrorist attack that she had nothing to do with to confuse the issue, and here we are. More time was spent by all major media on the email story in 2016 than every other policy issue combined. That’s an incredibly high bar, an amazing feat.

That system is not healed if Donald Trump loses in November 2020. There is no greater restraint on mass media or propaganda. There is no restraint on foreign influence — there are not even efforts being made to keep them from hacking voting machines, because the party in power suspects that the hackers will favor them.

That is a system that is built to fuck up.

 

***

The US is first and worst, but not alone.

Every other major democracy faces similar pressures. Decent, respectable for-profit news is scrambling to compete with Alt Media that uses the most addictive, irresponsible methods to make vanishingly small profits from isolated clicks and five seconds spent on a page in confusion or outrage. They have no answer for it.

Yes, other countries are better insulated. They spend more on their public broadcasters, who can report what they think is true regardless of what it does for their ratings, and so these responsible broadcasters are better positioned to compete. There’s less money to be made from an idle second of eyeball, and so less financial pressure to propagandize foreign audiences in some cases. And there’s a less developed political divide to abuse and exploit to sow distrust of all major media.

But the same fundamental pressures are there for all of us.

The answers are probably simple — or else simple enough in concept with a thousand variations you could imagine — and utterly inimical to how most people think about freedom of information in the Western tradition. But here’s a sampler platter of what you might see fought over throughout the next generation:

1) Ban advertising on the news. Make people pay for subscriptions to support them. The difference in incentives between subscription and ad based makes a huge difference in media behavior. You’ll at least know that the news’ business model relies on appealing to your sober, reflective mindset when you balance your checkbook, and not your instantaneous vulnerability to clickbait.

2) Truth panels. If you can get a panel of editors from the NYT, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, NPR, and Fox News to unanimously agree that a story is false or misleading, it should be suppressed in search results and automated advertising, flagged wherever it appears online, and sanctions imposed on the publisher for repeated violations. Pay them to put enough people in this role full-time, and you can make a meaningful dent in the flow.

3) Web licenses. If you want to start a website, you can apply for a license from your domain provider, who will ask you about content. If you’re pushing news, you can be put on a list to monitor, and your license is revocable for cause. The idea that every person should have insta-access to mass media to promote anything at all is not a social value I would defend, though I suspect many are conditioned to accept it.

4) Yes, we can multiply the amount we spend on public broadcasting a hundredfold. The idea that news media should be able to exist without an incentive to keep you addicted to the product is obvious. That only exists when you remove the profit incentive. The news is a public good. For a long time, news media was doing okay just because the scarcity of mass media sources gave them little monopolies, but that’s no longer the case.

I’m sure there’s other good ideas out there in this vein. We should be talking about them. We should be talking about them before it’s a foregone conclusion that democracy is built to fail, or that there’s nothing we can do to resuscitate the kind of system we grew up romanticizing.

Donald Trump may very well lose in 2020. Or he may win by the same process he won in 2016. Or a Democrat may win by abusing the system in the same ways. Whatever happens, American democracy is utterly dependent on and vulnerable to its mass media system, and we need to start trying to defend it.

Saunders’ Lincoln in the Bardo

You probably know a few things about George Saunders’ Lincoln in the Bardo already: it’s the historical account of Lincoln cradling his son’s body in the graveyard, half told from the perspective of its ghosts. There’s a lot of beautiful stuff in this book. But it leans on two really ambitious concepts: first, to dramatize the inner lives of the dead through some kind of metaphysical action in the graveyard; and second, to tell everything through a chorus. In the end, I appreciate what he’s trying to do, but its a vastly ambitious set of concepts that, for me, underwhelm on execution.
On the mechanics of ghostworld: The action of the book hinged a great deal on the mechanics of ghostworld — which ghost is being eaten alive by roots and why, or is stuck in a burning train car that can only be blown up by a matterlightbloom phenomenon, or remembers or forgets aspects of themselves, or psychically projects themselves with a four foot dick — even whether one can influence Lincoln by stepping into his body and thinking loud thoughts. A lot of this was intended to be about projecting the psychological state of the characters out into the environment — and that’s great in concept. The most meaningful fantasy/speculative elements are about projecting psychic/social conflicts out into the environment, where it can play out on another level for us — making the immaterial in our world more material — offering us a different kind of insight into it.
But for me, the mechanics of ghostworld felt less insightful into character than simply there to serve other aspects of the story — the other ghosts need something to do, and Lincoln’s boy needs to be delayed, so let’s make them fight a root monster. The four foot dick thing sounds funny, and we need some humor here. The ghosts need to want to interact with Lincoln for this to be a story, let’s make them step into his body to try and influence his thoughts. The most insightful moments into the characters were just the characters telling you who they were, which was great. The mechanics of ghostworld and all the little action sequences they went through in between didn’t really shed any more light on them for me, which is to say, I saw them as devices while they were happening, and wasn’t that invested in them.
On the chorus effect: Creating a chorus of the living from history books and a chorus of the dead from all his ghosts, Saunders tries to offer us a big subjectivist philosophical statement about how we experience our world, and finally ourselves. Our world is composed of a thousand perspectives — they conflict, they make noise, they self-contradict with the fashion, yet this is all we have to assemble truth out of — and the most impoverished among us are the ones who are stuck clinging to one slender frame of perspective — their minds winnowing, becoming simpler and simpler, losing all other focus but one that keeps them riveted to their sick boxes, waiting to get better so they can return to fix that one stupid insignificant thing back in their lives.
It’s a really strong concept — and the historical voices worked marvelously, having strong disagreements, tones, and a surprising literary quality. But the execution of the ghost-chorus didn’t thrill me. In Saunders’ ghost-chorus, the lines of text often felt like a third person narrative that had just been cut up, some pronouns adjusted, to fit into the mouths of all his ghosts and subscribe to the given form. It’s a very modernist, Joycean kind of ambition, this polyphonic subjectivist thing. There’s a high bar. And when I read most of it, there’s too much text that isn’t really expanded by coming from the mouths of many rather than the mouth of the author. The perspectives of Vollman, Bevins, Thomas, etc. occasionally conflict or offer their own nuance that deepens what’s going on, but too often they just seem to be handing off a script between them to keep up the form. It doesn’t self-justify.
It’s not that any of this made it an unpleasant book — it’s beautiful, and easy to read if you get the concept — but it didn’t seem to know what to do with its tools. Brought a gun to a knife fight and came out at a draw. I.e., left a lot on the table. And for the humbler scale of its ambition, it might have been just as well leaving some of its more ambitious tools in the toolbox.

Oyeyemi’s “White is for Witching”

Some thoughts on Helen Oyeyemi’s White is for Witching –

Oyeyemi, as a stylist, is rich and restrained in fine balance. She lets, it appears to me, each emotion of the book take a metaphorical shape, become a surprising object, motion, surrealist spasm. Her prose is otherwise confident and restrained. There’s shy humor and wit, especially about growing up. There’s an exciting willingness to play with perspectives.

Oyeyemi, as a structuralist, is doing things that I’m surprised she was able to get past a publisher. The antagonistic force that drives the novel (Ghost(s)? Curse(s)? Historical trauma? Racism?) is perceived differently by different characters, including the voice of the family home itself, which speaks to fill in the history past our other characters’  memory. With multiple contradictory and incomplete accounts, further muddied by the poetics of the style, the book challenges the reader to piece together a version of the story that explains the evil that haunts its protagonist, without ever truly resolving it. The book begins with a series of questions and conflicting responses. It ends in refrain.

Which means that Witching, as a story, is a little too incoherent for my tastes. I am certainly allured by the style and the structural gambit. But my investment in the core conflict of the story is hobbled by not knowing what the core conflict is. It’s not until halfway through the text that I resolve that there will not be a discrete conflict that I can invest with emotional force. At that point, I can have a little more fun reading between the lines to pick at the theories Oyeyemi is setting up for us – it could be a malignancy brought out by an ancient witch and/or how that malignancy bent future generations of women to commit haunting crimes and/or something inherent in the property itself and/or the racist attitudes of certain ancestors but none of them suffice for really defining the stakes of the story. I am left ultimately ambivalent. I am not entirely unsure that wasn’t the goal.

A good surrealist/magical conflict can pit two moral forces against each other that couldn’t otherwise collide in a literalist world. A discrete past trauma haunts the present in Beloved, e.g. But our engagement in the story requires us to buy in to what those moral forces are – what is really represented by the haunting/cursing/sickness/etc. Without that clarity, the conflict is hollow.

Which is not to say that I didn’t enjoy the gambit. But I think it’s the kind of book you might enjoy better on a second reading than a first, knowing that your reading depends on you deconstructing the text and making something of it.

Phillips’ “The Tragedy of Arthur”

Although (obviously) white middle aged American writer protagonists with a fetish for Shakespeare should be a red flag that I’m being pandered to, I have to admit that Arthur Phillips’ The Tragedy of Arthur is the book I’ve inhaled the most defenselessly this year.

The premise of the text is simple: A lost work of Shakespeare has been discovered. The book in your hands is the first publication of the play. The introduction to the play (all 200-some pages of it, contractually obliged) is the confessional family story of the man who sold it to the publisher, and who now (for reasons endemic to the story) believes it to be a forgery by his long-time grifter father.

The narrative voice is charming, self-doubting, furiously introspective and confused enough to serve both plot and character. The family drama unveiled through the “Introduction” is a tensile triangle of love, distrust, hurt, yearning. (And though the ending is a bit weak, I can’t help but read it and think of the narrator earlier apologizing for Shakespeare himself, whose endings were always the weakest parts of his plays).

The play at the end is convincing to a lay eye as a plausible lost work of Shakespeare (I read the whole thing searching for the obvious error, speculated earlier by the doubting narrator, that would give the lie to the whole thing [my best nominee, the word “Dad”? – though it predates the publication of the play in the OED, it appears nowhere else in Shakespeare per my Ctrl+F’ing and would be an obvious poetic device]). Moreover, the debate between footnoters and the resonance of some parts of the play (generously to the careful reader, some parts that even go uncommented on by the commentators) with the family drama that precedes it gives the reader more dimensions to look at the work from. And it’s rare to find such a dimensionality in a popular novel.

The meta-textual engagement, interpreting everything in the story through Shakespeare in order to finally interpret “Shakespeare” back insofar as his imputed work determines their own story – expertly balanced. The trick of the novel – the existence of an unpublished play that may or may not be their father’s forgery – is accomplished with just enough steady aplomb and just enough showy exhibitionism to make you believe alternately that this could really happen – that a man could know everything about the Bard and his time and textual forensics and fool the world (and Arthur Phillips, the novelist, makes a winking case to the reader that it would be him), or else a son could be so convinced of his father’s conniving that he’d be incapable of seeing what the rest of the earth has discovered, a literary miracle. My ambivalence at the end of the text about the authorship question is exactly what the author wants to achieve, I imagine – and I am suggestible, therefore, to all his philosophical questions about the value of authorship itself, insofar as it determines how we relate to a work.

It’s a book I’m sad to have to give back to a library. It’s a book I think I might like to return to for a second reading someday.

On N.K. Jemisin’s Worldbuilding

I really loved this recent podcast with NK Jemisin and Ezra Klein wherein they do an abridged world building exercise – and while I’m loathe to just summarize someone else’s great ideas, I think I’d like to try and synthesize a point that they make here, or orbit around and perhaps don’t say quite explicitly.

Part of Jemisin’s world-building gifts is a really acute internal model of how the real world works – so that every time, in this world-building exercise, that Klein proposes a queer little quirk in the imagined world, Jemisin has an inference for it. If you have a people with tails, it’s because they must have lived in trees once. If you have people in a desert, part of their economy is going to be really advanced water-efficiency technologies. If, however, you have oppositional societies both in some degree of water scarcity, the society will face a lot of pressure to flaunt their abundance of water, using water gratuitous ways to tell the social story of how they’re superior to their neighbors.

Klein, coming from the world of journalism, hears all this inference and notes that his profession and Jemisin’s are perhaps more similar than he’d thought – that she must be a real student of human societies to develop the kind of sharp mental model of how the world works that she has, that she uses to inform her fantasy.

To which I’d just like to add the following implication – perhaps gratuitous but I felt underemphasized – that this implies something fascinating about how speculative literature functions as social critique, even when it doesn’t appear to be speaking to the real world at all. In building a world, one asks the question(s), “What would our world look like if we changed just X, Y, Z” – and we’re not making the answer up from whole cloth. We’re using a mental model we have of how this world works to predict the answer. If your mental model of the world is deeply Darwinist, you would make very different predictions about how a world with two advanced intelligent species might function than if you come from a Creationist kind of spiritual worldview, e.g.. In that sense, every speculative fiction is an implicit argument FOR the mental model that the author has of the real world. It’s all political in the sense that its predictions are based on a set of real-world political precepts.

Lots of other pearls in this podcast, and worth listening to if you like thinking about fiction or just how societies work.

Bringing Back the Body

With many thanks to Moira MacDougal, a poem of mine, “Bringing Back the Body,” is out in the Literary Review of Canada. Although it’s subscribers only, you can find the issue here.

The poem went through a first draft several years ago, and found its way comfortably into the dusty file of things with promise and unsatisfactory execution. Late in 2018, I started going through things I might submit with a little more polish. When I went back over the lines, I realized that basically what the poem needed was deletion. The story was familiar already. It need not be overexplained. The reader needed me to point them to the body, not tell them how to feel about it.

Tighter, more inviting for its openness, I’m pleased to have it come out in the LRC.