Condemned to the Not-So-New
by rsbakker
Aphorism of the Day: The important thing isn’t to arrive first, but to arrive big.
Aphorism of the Day II: Imagination becomes a curse precisely when it begins catering to ambition. The world starves what hope enslaves.
One of the things I dislike about blogging is the way it reveals the vagaries of my mood. When it comes to novels, the sheer amount of time you spend with the text assures that you revisit each section with multiple frames of mind—the peaks and valleys are levelled through sheer interference as much as anything else. You can be ‘professional’ simply because you garble any trace of your emotional presence into a background of white-noise, the nowhere of the disinterested narrator. Not so with blogging. It’s all laid out for the careful reader to perceive. So much so that I even have a maxim: ‘Do not blog when manic or depressed.’
The rule I’m breaking right now.
I’ve had a busy weekend. The Nietzsche Workshop seemed like a smashing success. The paper I gave, “Outing the ‘It’ that Thinks: The Collapse of an Intellectual Ecosystem” seemed to go over far, far better than I had feared. I had worried that Horst Hutter, the one true Nietzsche scholar on our panel, would savage me on my interpretation of the crackpot messiah; he followed me away from the lectern he was so excited with my claims. I had also worried that Arthur Kroker, the one true culture and technology scholar on our panel, would hammer me for claiming that the humanities (as we know them) were about to go extinct in the wake of cognitive science; he had nothing but the highest praise.
So why so down, baby blue?
In the hurley-burley, I had no chance to read the weekend Globe and Mail. So first thing this morning, after getting my tea and Ruby settled with breakfast, I cracked open the Arts section, only to find that John Barber, the Globe’s lead arts reporter, had written yet another article on fantasy—this one on the literary re-evaluation of what should have never been a fallen genre. He mentions the success of A Game of Thrones, quotes Erin Morgenstern who’s Night Circus has become such a rage, and concludes with Lev Grossman—and in the middle he writes about an upcoming book of essays by the Grande Dame of Canadian Literature, Margaret Atwood, that critiques… you guessed it, the Incredible Shrinking Sublime: “Atwood’s essays,” he writes “present a multilayered argument in favour of magic in fiction, suggesting that what’s really weird (and perhaps passé) are the upstart conventions of social realism.”
I don’t know Margaret Atwood the person, but Margaret Atwood the public literary figure I well and truly despise, as do many others in the Canadian genre community. Why? Well, check this PBS piece out for one. Every time she comes out with something she fears might be written off as genre, she follows this pattern: Upon release, she says ‘This is Literature, not genre,’ then proceeds to do what she does in this interview—give the accepted definition of the genre (extrapolation of real technologies), and then claim that the genre (with the all-important proviso, ‘means to people’) is something obviously silly like ‘talking cabbages’ and ‘lizard men.’ If that wasn’t bad enough, once the book has been safely accepted as genuine literary fiction, she then turns the strategy upside down, claiming that the book is in fact genre and has been all along, in an effort to increase sales. Rather than fight for genre, she literally—explicitly—steps on it to feather her own nest.
I’ve exchanged a couple of correspondences on literature and fantasy with John Barber—he’s even read the “Dancing Bears and Wild Ones” (which is a cruder, earlier version of “The Future of Literature”) in the essay section—but the list of people he references makes clear his interest lies with those already in the cultural spotlight (which is to say, with those people his readers are already interested in). And the fact is, readers will be far more inclined to actually revalue fantasy fiction if they hear the argument from people they already know. In this respect, given all the years I’ve poured into this particular issue, I should be jumping for joy.
But when it’s Margaret Atwood who gets the credit?
Ego, huh? I mean why should this bug me so much? It’s not as though I’m in any way original in claiming that genre needs to be taken seriously (though I think my particular argument is original). Ed Kellar’s mind-bending presentation at the Workshop, which featured J. G. Ballard, reminded me how old the debate is. Christ, it goes all the way back to James and Wells!
Is it just the idea of outsiders, people who built reputations contra-genre, suddenly spinning with the turn of the tide and getting credit (and spikes in their sales) for their hypocrisy?
No. It’s bigger than that. I’ve felt it for some time, I think. The way I felt it after giving my paper (which I’ll be posting shortly) at the Nietzsche Workshop—or even, for that matter, my debate with G. M. Palmer last week. What troubled me so much about the paper was—and this is going to sound strange—that people found it so damn convincing. It’s almost like there’s an exhaustion in the air, an ambient, communal recognition that the old foundations have rotted beyond repair—that it’s time to build a new house. I went in wanting to convince everyone in the audience that this is an age of profound excitement and opportunity. Then I had this premonition, this sudden certainty that arriving first—or at least being ahead of the curve—doesn’t really count for anything, that culture will simply brick you over with nary a trace, especially if you fail—as I have failed—to cultivate the proper institutional affiliations. That the opportunity belonged to others, not me.
Being original counts against you, generally speaking. Being right, counts for nothing. Being accredited, successful, or networked, on the other hand…
And it makes me think that this ‘fighting for the future’ tone I constantly invoke is really just a sham. Have I just been fighting for myself all this time? I worry that my ambitions are every bit as preposterous and absurd as they seem when I glimpse them in the eyes of others.
And at the same time I hate myself for thinking this way: I mean, I’ve worked, been so poor I had to live off rice for a year, so I know that scraping by on my wits month to month the way I do is nothing short of a miracle–especially in an industry wobbling on the edge of collapse. It almost seems sinful, despairing for my old, youthful dreams of recognition when life is slack enough to afford me time to mope like this.
We should all be so lucky.
And yet, always this fucking hunger for more. Always starved. Always incarcerated.
Watching the likes of Margaret Atwood eat.
Three Pound Brain 
“Then I had this premonition, this sudden certainty that arriving first—or at least being ahead of the curve—doesn’t really count for anything, that culture will simply brick you over with nary a trace, especially if you fail—as I have failed—to cultivate the proper institutional affiliations. That the opportunity belonged to others, not me.”
I would love to disabuse you of your notion, but sadly, this is correct.
Don’t blame or fault yourself for fighting for your own interests though… that kind of hypocrisy is one we all share.
Semi-related aside: I recently played a video game called Deus Ex: Human Revolution, (the main premise of the game being a near-future society in which artificial limb and neural enhancements are becoming commonplace) and one of the antagonists says the following line: “As long as this technology exists, mankind will continue to divide!”
You better start yelling louder, because you are certainly not alone. You have a huge advantage though: you gave it a name. Semantic Apocalypse has a nice right to it.
In Deus Ex: Human Revolution I think the best quote came from Eliza Cassan;
‘It’s not the End of the World, but you can see it from here”.
To me that sort of alluded to how its our mediums that seem to be killing us, rather than redeeming us like we’ve been assuming they would all along. And the Irony of an AI news presenter saying that sort of shit was sort of humorous too.
There never was any explanation for why that AI would stop spewing celebrity ‘news’ and start waxing philosophic, but thats another thing entirely.
The AI didn’t just want to be an entertainer? >:)
Definitely not alone! I need to affiliate. Playing Zarathustra is starting to get stale.
I’m going to stick with the Aphorisms though. They’re just too damn much fun!
And the robe. I definitely like the robe.
And the staff for that matter.
The beard’s definitely got to go…
Fuck the beard.
Are you a wizard?
Frank, probably more a Stormcrow.
“Atwood, you shall not press!”
I’ve noticed that cultural critics often tend to be extremely non self-critical when it comes to their own writing. They can lament the historical marginalization of some author on one page and on the very next ignore what was actually written by that person in favor of their own wholesale conjectures, they hardly ever test their theories against their own works and their own lives, and as you had mentioned elsewhere, they don’t hesitate to write about the disadvantaged but would never stoop to write for them. I think that for someone doing what you’re doing, your tendency for self-criticism is a rarity, even though it shouldn’t be.
I’m no disciple of Spivak by any means but I remember being so relieved when I first read her essay on the subaltern to find, at last, an academic who bothered to ask “Am I correct? Who the hell am I to be even writing about all this?” Academia needs that kind of awareness, desperately. And even though you may no longer view yourself as being in the middle of it, you’re still much better connected to the academic world than many among your audience.
So as long as you’re still fighting to get your message out there, keep breaking as many of your own rules as you want. If you ever try to hold an actual pity party instead of taking a hard look at your own motivations, I’m sure there will be plenty of people here who won’t spare you your ego in pointing that out.
“And yet, always this fucking hunger for more. Always starved. Always incarcerated.
Watching the likes of Margaret Atwood eat.”
Holy shit man, you turned into an Inchoroi or Sranc there near the end O-o.
Margaret Atwood could make a sranc chaste. Gross.
(OK, that was sexist. *shrug*)
I want you to know that I (and a great deal of the people in my life, some who comment on this blog) think of you as a big part of my intellectual inheritance.
And to watch you call into question your own ambition publicly, here, it only reinforces this belief.
It is we who strive to be worthy of such a heritage and we share your ambitions as much as your self-doubt.
More then anyone else I’ve read, you have contributed to destroying that which is false within me, and there’s a great deal more to do. But here I say I am grateful.
And I can’t wait to read the Unholy Consult. Or the Nietzsche paper for that matter!
The thing i was thinking about after reading your post is that I’m not sure how to make a better future except to imagine the world you want to live in. What other world is one going to imagine, it seems to me that we are all searching to make the world better for ourselves and the ones around us. I guess the question would be how do we imagine or understand a better world than the world we imagine ourselves living, who else do we really know.
And it makes me think that this ‘fighting for the future’ tone I constantly invoke is really just a sham. Have I just been fighting for myself all this time?
Were you invoking fighting for a future which did not include yourself? If so, yeah, a sham. If not you included yourself in such a future, it is of course atleast partly selfish. That’s just gunna be the case, pretty much for everyone, to some extent?
despairing for my old, youthful dreams of recognition
Why did you dream? Was it that pivotal to you when you started, or something merely really nice?
Sorry about the rice year, that shouldn’t have happened.
Bakker, Bakker, Bakker…
Shit sucks 😦
It’s ridiculous though, people who are mediocre and unoriginal get all the fucking credit and fame and glory yet someone like you, who is by far one of the best writers and thinkers in the industry right now, is venting this. You should be recognised for your work, your writing and your papers much more than you are. I have no idea how youde manage that but it needs to happen. Maybe you need a strong fanbase that doesnt just read your books and read your blog and so on, we need activism! We need some NOISE! Something like how GRRM’s fans are, a forum for your series’s! A wiki!
Ok i think im rambling, but you do have alot of support and acclaim, the only negative reviews ive seen are ones that are clearly biased against either Fantasy or or themes and styles.
VIVA LA BAKKERUTION!
If it was anyone other than Atwood, I doubt the pique would have hit me at all. You know how you have those certain public personalities that you basically use as a shill for your disgust for this or that – the person who represent X? That’s Atwood for me.
And all of this really is great news.
Look who got interviewed for this week’s Nature! And look how she (subtly) disparages LeGuin’s work while (not-so-subtly) comparing herself to Orwell!
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v478/n7367/full/478035a.html
I can see how this might make you seethe a little.
It’s asking me for $32 to read the damn thing – but it’s probably for the best. I feel mugged as it is!
If you want to take the plunge, here’s the article on its author’s website in PDF form, free to read.
Click to access NatureAtwood.pdf
Ugh. I would say thanks, but…
Speaking of others getting the credit for Bakker’s windmill tilting… 😉
http://entertainment.salon.com/2011/10/03/why_americans_don_t_win_nobel/singleton/
“Four years after Morrison won the Nobel, David Foster Wallace predicted the current rut in which our literature finds itself in a New York Observer evisceration of John Updike’s “Toward the End of Time.” Though he took particular issue with Updike’s autumnal output, Wallace parceled blame to all of the Great Male Narcissists, with their hermetic concerns and insular little fictions. The following is Wallace’s estimation of Updike, but it could just as easily be said about anyone else in the postwar American pantheon: “The very world around them, as beautifully as they see and describe it, seems to exist for them only insofar as it evokes impressions and associations and emotions inside the self.”
Our great writers choose this self-enforced isolation. Worse yet, they have inculcated younger generations of American novelists with the write-what-you-know mantra through their direct and indirect influence on creative programs. Go small, writing students are urged, and stay interior. Avoid inhabiting the lives of those unlike you — never dream of doing what William Styron did in “The Confessions of Nat Turner,” putting himself inside the impregnable skin of a Southern slave. Avoid, too, making the kinds of vatic pronouncements about Truth and Beauty that enticed all those 19th-century blowhards.
As Bret Anthony Johnson, the director of the creative writing program at Harvard, noted in a recent Atlantic essay, our focus on the self will be our literary downfall, depriving literature of the oxygen on which it thrives: “Fiction brings with it an obligation to rise past the base level, to transcend the limitations of fact and history, and proceed skyward.” This sentiment is a sibling to Wallace’s anger — and both have a predecessor in T.S. Eliot’s 1919 essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” where he called art “a continual extinction of personality.”
The rising generation of writers behind Oates, Roth and DeLillo are dominated by Great Male Narcissists — even the writers who aren’t male (or white). Jhumpa Lahiri is a Great Male Narcissist whose characters tend to be upper-middle-class Indian-Americans living in the comfortable precincts of Boston or New York. Swap the identity to Chinese-American, move the story a couple of generations back on the immigrant’s well-trod saga, and you have Amy Tan. Colson Whitehead started promisingly with “The Intuitionist” and “John Henry Days” but his last novel, “Sag Harbor,” was little more than the bourgeoisie life made gently problematic by the issue of race. Jonathan Safran Foer is a narcissist disguised as a humanist. To his credit, Jonathan Franzen doesn’t even pretend.
That makes for a small literature, indeed. The following are words from citations for recent winners and runners-up of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, inarguably our most prominent commendation for a novelist: tender, warmth, heartbreaking, celebration, polished and sensuous. It’s all small-bore stuff, lack of imagination disguised as artistic humility.”
He calls them ‘narcissists’ because something critical has to be said. The real problem (I agrue) is ingroup specialization (to differentiate social status and identity). I need to check out Eggers’ literary outreach program, see if he’s actually letting those ‘disadvantaged’ kids read what they want, or always pushing them to adopt the literary scheme. But it just goes to show the power of value attribution. Criticisms are only taken seriously from individuals who are taken seriously, which is to say, those who are complicit, and will only advocate half-measures. The fact is, until I crack the scene with something literary, I’ll always remain another politically suspect manque.
Which I probably am!
You should publish a collection of critical essays called The Semantic Apocalypse about how literature is asphyxiating, it’d be a manifesto; publish it in French so you’re taken more seriously.
But I would have to start smoking again to be credible…
In the end, I’m sure there are some scientists somewhere, inventing ways to cure some cancer or some desease, who resent the press coverage either of you end up getting. Always starved. Always incarcerated. Always building giant robots to reap revenge on a shallow species…
Is Light, Time, and Gravity still coming out on the 28th? Also, regardless if the answer is yes or no. Could you put up a chapter, or an excerpt.. Or, an atrocity tale?
No – and I’m not sure why Insomniac hasn’t removed the listing. I’ve been mulling the idea of posting… I have a completed Atrocity Tale (regarding the creation of the Consult). Mulling, mulling…
So, how about making a donation meter. With each Atrocity Tale as our goal? Or self publishing them through amazon? Cut out as many middlemen as possible.
Any future release planned for Light, Time, and Gravity then? Or what can we do to help mull on the shortest path?
I’ve decided to sit on LTG a little longer, pick at it, play with a few structural things – and most importantly, decide how to pitch it. The Atrocity Tales will appear here over time, dribs and drabs, little caramel candies to hide between big fat pillows of skeptical indoctrination…
Scott:
27%
Twenty-seven perfuckingcent. And we accept verbal testimony in court. I want to take this test and see how badly I perform.
Great link Jorge, and I’m off to hide under the bed now…
That’s rather disruptive to my ‘Were all using the same brain’ ideas. I actually feel sad that possibly such a massive difference exists…I was just getting over the 2% sociopaths figure…
And gawd, if self cognition is actually pivoted to some degree in an actual, mechanical fold? Part of the brain bent over to detect another part through actual physical contact, is it? Such a grossly mechanical scheme? In what is otherwise kinda a nanotech system…
And to think I was just arguing with Kalbear about whether she was really seperating the fiction around the supposed ‘objective morality’ with her own real life sense of morality…
You are a mine filled with creepy gold, Jorge! Or a mind, maybe.
“I worry about exposing him to bands like Journey, the appreciation of which will surely bring him nothing but the opprobrium of his peers. Though he has often been resistant – children so seldom know what is good for them – I have taught him to appreciate all the groundbreaking musicmakers of our time – Big Country, Haircut 100, Loverboy – and he is lucky for it. His brain is my laboratory, my depository. Into it I can stuff the books I choose, the television shows, the movies, my opinion about elected officials, historical events, neighbors, passersby. He is my twenty-four-hour classroom, my captive audience, forced to ingest everything I deem worthwhile. He is a lucky, lucky boy! And no one can stop me.”
Dave Eggers – A Heartbreaking Work Of Yadda Yadda
I’ve been thinking about pitching Eggers to my reading group – worthwhile?
nope, pitch Phantom Tollbooth, which is a metaphor about the value of a liberal arts education:
“For “The Phantom Tollbooth” is not just a manifesto for learning; it is a manifesto for the liberal arts, for a liberal education, and even for the liberal-arts college… What Milo discovers is that math and literature, Dictionopolis and Digitopolis, should assume their places not under the pentagon of Purpose and Power but under the presidency of Rhyme and Reason. Learning isn’t a set of things that we know but a world that we enter.”
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/10/17/111017fa_fact_gopnik
Btw. I’d pay at least $5 per tale for the atrocity tales. sell them on kindle?
On the money, I think the elements of that aught be considered (if not discussed) at some concious level. I could see a vector of indeed, passing down tales as they did at campfires, but that being tempted over into a bottled up, constipated unless you hand the cash over communication form. Sure, negative phrasing from me, but that’s primarily aimed at if someone unconciously slips over to the cash form without really deciding to. But if there’s a concious acknowledgement of personal policy change, well I’ll sigh alot but atleast its decided and based on percievable principles, not just slipped over invisibly.
TL;DR version – don’t just tempt him! Not that I’m sure that applies to Scott, but atleast to me, money tempts like that.
an atrocity tale is worth a latte. easy.
I say post the first, oh five or six paragraphs here as a teaser/taste and then have a link to the kindle download of the tale where one can purchase the story for $5 🙂
Money makes everything seem simple.
Begining work with the intention of selling the work (which are the books, after all), sure. But if that wasn’t the intention, then isn’t it breaking intention to then go and sell the thing? And didn’t we make such a fuss about intention being so important in regards to sexism, for example? But when it comes to money, intention is so easy to snap then?
Setting out with the initial intention to write a work that is to be sold for $5, that sounds like a good idea and may be a way for an author in this age to break away from a wheezing dinosaur of a distrubution network (certainly from what I’ve heard about distribution, it’s stupid). I would agree with you on that. You can just think I’m pedantic on the intent stuff – even if I’m correct on it, not sure how that’d have stopped me from having been pedantic.
Stop mulling it over, Mr. Bakker. Give us an atrocity or our erratic nature may see us wander the wilderness of the literary world never to return…It feels like WLW came out so long ago…we need to remember.
Yeah, like I said on Westeros, let’s stop this talk about being snubbed, about the insular literati and get some Atrocity Tales going.
Seriously, fuck the bullshit and put fingers to keys man! 🙂
Ever since that plane accident back in 76 my fingers have been permanently fused to the keyboard. Otherwise my interests are a wilful herd of cattle.
Scott,
Any chance we might read the paper you presented at the conference? I plugged the title into Google but didn’t see an option for it. If it is in fact offered further down the page of this blog, I will be somewhat embarrassed.
Thanks,
Dave
Yep. I just need to tidy it up between the cracks of inspiration. I’ll actually be posting all the papers and responses from the Nietzsche Workshop.
I’m not sure how much M. John Harrison you’ve read, but what he discusses in this entry on his blog (from earlier this year) strongly reminded me your particular bent on genre. Have you read it/any thoughts?
Harrison concentrates on form, whereas I’m only interested in audiences – the real living things that get flattened into oblivion when you concentrate on form. He thinks the problem with literary fiction is that it is commercial, like science fiction, whereas I think the problem is the way we’ve managed to divvy up people with different values and sensibilities, making sure they primarily speak only to one another. The ‘commercial’ aspect I see as a mixed bag.