Category: Lit

Brooke’s Last Days of Montreal

You have to read your city’s literature (and what a pleasure to say your city has a literature), but because my French is still painstaking enough to really slow the literary experience, I’m getting the Anglophone perspective on Montreal for now.

In John Brooke’s Last Days of Montreal, we step into a world where Montreal’s unique multiculturalism is interpreted as a network of divisions. Scattered across the mid-1990’s, around the time of the separation referendum, Anglophones feel ostracized and transgressive for simply flying the Canadian flag. Communication breaks down with their French wives, and they look for connection with their immigrant neighbors. French radio hosts try to mythicize the everyday flying of the fleur-de-lis, but the people they are mythicizing don’t recognize themselves in the story. And homeless men stop suicides and think that they’re in love with their rescuees, who think they’re in love with trees, and junkies plan to move to Toronto because they can’t communicate with their families, and every individual in this colorfully-peopled world seems to be struggling with their relation to community. Which community, the reader sees in aggregate, appears darker, more mysterious and with more internal division and opacity than any of its members can appreciate. It’s a salient perspective on a city of languages and how those contrasts define its people.

And as one would hope, eventually the network of community exposes some shocking or tragic turns to the reader that none of its members can see from their limited perspective. And as one would hope, our characters end up a little more self-defined by virtue of their struggles against a community in turmoil.

The book’s objective can be its weakness, too — the tone can seem indulgently dark sometimes, full of drugs, prostitution, infidelities and loneliness (although I must admit, I’m seeing all the intersections Brooke is describing in 2018, and 1995 was a different world, in literal terms, and psychic ones, too, for the Anglophone community at the height of separatism). The dialogue seems to reach too hard for that literary loadedness sometimes and slips sensibility.

But a worthy perspective to absorb, all in all, getting to know a place. I hear John Brooke still lives around the Jean Talon market, writing mysteries. I wonder if I won’t see him sometime there, contemplating life’s darknesses, buying peppers.

Stories Create Language Create Stories

In an interview newly released for the first time in English, David Foster Wallace is asked about his taste for experimental fiction. A delightful quote pops out:

“When it’s experimental-looking, I never get the sense that it’s experimental because it’s trying to be experimental or trying to make some sort of coy point about structure. It seems that it’s experimental because that was the one and only inevitable way that the author could convey the dimensions of experience and emotion and cognition that was the story’s world.”

Which I want to probe just a little, because the implication suggests causality flowing one way – that the story exists independently, has its own world already, and in order to find expression, has to invent the language or the structure that would serve it.

When I think, rather, it may often be the opposite. That language creates story as often as the inverse. One of the sexiest ideas in neuroscience is how the language we speak shapes the way the mind functions (see also the documentary, Arrival). I think it follows that the narrative structures we use shape the mind in ways that are largely determinative of the kinds of stories we can conceive of, participate in, internalize, derive motive from, perpetuate all our little plots forward into subsequent stories, etc. Give a man a word for god, he will be able to tell the creation story. Take it away, and he will fumble, his sense of wonder grasping at air.

All of which is to say, when you create a new form for language to take, you also invite a new kind of story. And you may be surprised at the material that settles in to fill that container. Give us a new way of seeing a plot assemble, we might recognize points of tension that once lived outside our reckoning. Give a character a new mode of speaking, they might find they have new things to say.

If you’re wondering where the hell all this is coming from, I might be citing back to this post in a year or so, because it’s pretty good explanation of the process for a piece I’m working on now.

“Self-Similar” out in The Yale Review

Many thanks to Susan Bianconi,  a recent flash fiction of mine, “Self-Similar,” is out today in The Yale Review.

As a light sleeper/vivid dreamer, once in a great while I have the pleasure of waking up having dreamt something that’s the seed of a story or a song. This is a flash fiction, so at 600 words or so, I would say almost the whole thing was there on waking. I typed it out first thing in the morning.

Writing Mass Trauma

Without dumping on anybody’s work in particular –

Writing about mass trauma is tricky. There is a temptation to write paradigmatic — to essentialize the conflict into your characters so as to say you’ve done it justice — but then you’re probably in a derivative story, paying dues to the tragedy without saying anything new. I’d rather find novel characters and conflicts within the mass, even if they’re not representative — giving new faces and stakes to the subject, which begin to suggest to the reader how many staggering different experiences in absentia must be buried within that mass tragedy. Think of the guy in The Pianist – what do we remember about that movie? It’s not the Holocaust. It’s watching him play air piano in the middle of the Holocaust. It’s watching how much he aches to press his fingers down onto the real keys. It broadens what that tragedy means for us.

So use mass tragedy, but give us something bizarre and wondrous and new in the middle of it. Leave us with a sense of wonder at all the other infinite possible worlds that must be balled up inside of it.

Annihilation, Translated

The new (-ish, as in, this year, but I don’t buy movie tickets anymore) Annihilation movie is a beautiful adaptation that really does mutate the source material – see Emily Hughes, who so smartly put it, “How much can you change something before it’s a different creature? The novel asks that question, and the movie embodies it” – but the most significant level at which the material changes has less to do with whether or not we get the Wall-Creeper or any other particular plot point – it’s that it changes the central themes around what Area X means to us.

In Jeff VanderMeer’s text, Area X’s origin or purpose are never explained. The source of its power remains numinous and alternatively alluring and terrifying throughout the entire trilogy, and our characters are therefore drawn more into an existential crisis than a discrete conflict with it. The books do for sci-fi, in a way, what Paul Auster does for mystery, where it’s less of a who-dun-it and more of a did-anyone-do-it, was-it-even-dun, and who-are-we-in-light-of-the-ambiguity-surrounding-the-dunning-of-it. The questions are never answered in Area X, we just watch the characters change and question themselves and their world as they cope with something too strange and powerful for them to understand. It’s got an almost religious dimension that begs us to imagine ourselves vulnerable to its higher power. It’s a delicious subversion of genre in this way.

There are, of course, elements of that world left in Alex Garland’s adaptation – and I have such respect for this writer/director going back to Ex Machina that I’m inclined to go along for any warped journey he wants to take me on – but it’s a very different beast. We are given a rather straightforward, if incomplete, explanation of what Area X is from the first moments of the film. The Area is destroyed in a somewhat pat and unsatisfying way by the end of the running time, letting our mutated heroine and the eerie, Area-X generated clone of her husband meet again on the other side. But in a supremely satisfying payoff, the last frame of a film features our two leads finding each other both so profoundly changed by Area X that they really don’t identify as Kane and Lena anymore – are, in fact, so deeply mutated that they crave each other all the more for being the last living tokens of Area X left in this world, as Lena embraces the disturbing clone that has taken the place of her husband, and we cut to black.

It’s a revolutionary set of changes to the themes of the book, and frankly just as satisfying in a completely different way. I can’t help but wonder at how this metamorphosis took place, and I’m tempted to guess that it might be more than simple disregard/ambition on the part of the adaptation artist, and more a case study in the difference between film and text. That is, I’m wont to believe that Garland didn’t just read the book and say, this could’ve been cooler if we changed all these plot points. Part of the buzz around this movie at the outset was how potentially unfilmable the book was, spending so much time in a kaleidoscopically shifting subjective perspective just to impress on the reader how the characters were changing as a result of their exposure to Area X. And while I don’t think that makes the book strictly unfilmable – obviously, every drug usage sequence in modern film has figured out the tricks of distorting perspective, sound, light, color to let the viewer know that we’re in someone’s tripped-out head – this movie would have had to live in those kinds of shots for such a dominant portion of its length as to become pretty overwhelming, and to potentially lose a lot of viewers around basic questions of what’s happening, what timeline are we watching, real or imagined, and from what perspective. It may have been too much for a director (or his studio, likely) to handle.

So instead Garland imagines a way to convey the profundity of the changes consuming these characters while keeping the camera’s perspective objective throughout. That’s the tradeoff. And that meant putting these characters in a position where they could make a choice that so perfectly expressed their inner evolution (which is another great example of what it really means to show-don’t-tell at a high level) as to say as much as any amount of subjective perspective could have given you behind the lens. We know exactly how profound the changes affecting Lena are when we watch her embrace her monster-of-a-clone-husband. If we don’t get the payoff of that sequence, we have no idea how much of her is different as we watch Natalie Portman keep looking pretty much like Natalie Portman from objective perspective throughout. It’s an ambitious set of choices on Garland’s part, and one can really imagine how the pressure to translate the text into film gave him the mandate to subvert some central themes of the book in order to serve others.

It’s how he manages that tension – in both serving and subverting the text in order to translate it – that deserves respect and attention. I love this guy, definitely on my short list of high-concept filmmakers who give you something to chew on after the credits roll.

Life Before Man

“You don’t just stroll into another woman’s life and take over her husband. Everyone in the women’s group agreed, in theory at least, on the reprehensibility of such behavior, although they also agreed that married people should not be viewed as each other’s property but as living, growing organisms. What it boiled down to was that man-stealing was out but personal growth was commendable. You had to have the right attitude and be honest with yourself.”
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-Margaret Atwood, Life Before Man

Shakespeare

Shakespeare died unknown, apparently. His plays weren’t being performed. There wasn’t a publisher holding his rights. His works wouldn’t get put in print until a while after.

I do believe that once a thing is written, it exists independently of the author. It has a life in the mind of each reader who gives it attention. That attention is where the book finally lives. A precious little bit of a widely read work really belongs to the author.

Which makes the true authors of Shakespeare’s legacy the ones who came after, who gave the plays their attention, who loved them, who offered them a world to live in. They are in a real sense the true heroes of the story, because they had no horse in the race. They came for the love of the work, and until they came, the works were nothing, almost dead.

Just to make explicitly clear that this is all a cry of spurned vanity, waiting for a publisher feels like this.

The Ocean at the End of the Lane

I looked at Lettie in the moonlight. “Is that how it is for you?” I asked.
“Is what how it is for me?”
“Do you still know everything, all the time?”
She shook her head. She didn’t smile. She said, “Be boring, knowing everything. You have to give all that stuff up if you’re going to muck about here.”
“So you used to know everything?”
She winkled her nose. “Everybody did. I told you. It’s nothing special, knowing how things work. And you really do have to give it all up if you want to play.”
-Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane

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There’s a version of this thought around consciousness and recursion, because of course the universe can only be infinitely varied and wonderful if it is not a simple, recursive system. But if we take Douglas Hofstadter’s thesis seriously, all consciousness derives from recursive properties — the system knows itself only when it is limited, retraces its steps. Ergo, the lovely possible mysterious universe is ultimately constrained by our sheer ability to apprehend it.

Wishful Drinking

“Losing your mind is a frightening thing – especially if you have a lot to lose – but once it’s lost, it’s fine! No big deal! There could be a light shining out of your own head. It’s sort of like glowing in your own dark.” Carrie Fisher, Wishful Drinking

If there’s a little coherence lacking from the metaphor, I think it makes it all the more sublime here.

Living in the End Times

So, full disclaimer, I don’t have a license to be practicing philosophy. But I’ve been working my way through Zizek’s “Living in the End Times,” in which he levies a lot of condemnations of liberal politics or PC culture.

There is some good framing early on in how to think about classical liberalism: “For liberalism, at least in its radical form, the wish to submit people to an ethical ideal held to be universal is ‘the crime which contains all crimes,’ the mother of all crimes — it amounts to the brutal imposition of one’s own view onto others, the cause of civil disorder. Which is why, if one wants to establish civil peace and tolerance, the first condition is to get rid of ‘moral temptation’: politics should be thoroughly purged of moral ideals and rendered ‘realistic,’ taking people as they are, counting on their true nature, not on moral exhortations.” I  like this framing, casting liberalism as an essentially negative doctrine — the doctrine that all moral doctrines are injurious, which he rightly concludes is an unsustainable fiction. That is, it’s impossible to enforce this prohibition against oppressive moralizing because every time you try to supplant someone’s oppressive moralizing you’re just putting some other subjectivity in its place. There is no neutral moral framework, or, as he says later, “every universality is exclusive, it imposes a particular standard as universal.”

If there’s anything Zizek is infamous for on the left, though, it’s using this intellectual foundation to attack identity politics and PC culture in particular, levying that “liberal multiculturalism is hegemonic,” that “liberal-tolerant racism … [offers] ‘respect’ for the Other [as] the very form of the appearance of its opposite, of patronizing disrespect,” and that “the injunction is one of cultural apartheid,” and etc., among a series of arguments that in fairness to his work I ought to summarize more fully, but if I did, you’d still be hard-pressed to intellectually distinguish them from the Op-Ed page on Fox News, so let’s all save some time here.

Synthesizing some of his arguments, I think his point is that “prohibiting discrimination” as such is an essentially insupportable moral position, taking an ostensibly negative ethos and pretending that, in practice, it’s not just hiding someone’s positivist ethos inside the horse. I.e., you want to tell me not to insult the Muslims like that’s a neutral position, but it really just hides your endorsement of certain norms, while giving you a nominally value-neutral cudgel to impose them. And I get that in the abstract.

But personally, I’m inclined to understand liberalism in a categorically different way, in more of a procedural sense than as a fixed doctrine or lack of same. That is, directional — supplanting the adoption of any specific moral doctrine with consensus processes. Just looking at the PC debates, in 2018, we discourage specific types of speech, in the full knowledge that the moral framework we’re working under is subjective, temporary, and incomplete. In 2028, we will expand or contract that prohibition — the Irish will be fair game for mockery again, the furries will suddenly not be. It’s not a positivist, static vision on offer here (which is why conservatism habitually finds itself so neatly opposed to liberalism, stuck as it is on a fixed point in time when Ward Cleaver had the world figured out and the idea of post-modern subjectivist value systems are themselves threatening). It’s a commitment to gathering up the polyphony and seeking its consensus on what is offensive to its changing demographics. In that sense, its appreciates that no one of us is going to have an adequate handle on what is offensive to every different interest group, neither today nor especially over time. Our children will write us down for barbarians no matter what, and that’s fine — liberalism’s norms are built to be eradicated within a generation.

Zizek’s claims that the end results of that process look hegemonic, perversely racist, apartheid-esque, but if so, I don’t think it has to do with any hegemon (hegemen? hegewomen? hegefolk?) imposing it. In that sense, liberalism is queerly collectivist, and the question comes down to whether you trust the hive to reach legitimate consensuses.