On the positive side, this meta post doesn’t use a certain word that begins with m

Some blogger named Arianna Huffington went on the Daily Show this week to explain what “blogging” is, (it’s not just for cat pictures any more!)

“Blogging is not about perfectionism. Blogging is about intimacy, immediacy and transparency.”

Yes, that’s what blogging is about, and that’s why blogs are so bad. Here’s my philosophy:

- Blogging, like all writing, should be motivated by perfectionism. What you write doesn’t have to be important, and it doesn’t have to be perfect, but it should be as good as you can make it. If not, what’s the point? Where’s your pride? If your hobby is to paint or sing or play sports, you try your best. Trying hard and getting better is what makes it fun. Why should writing be different?

- Intimacy should be used sparingly. If you’re always intimate, you become just a reality star, but with fewer onlookers. Intimacy works, but it might be bad for you. Use it for the few parts of your life that are genuinely interesting or exceptional.

- What happens right now is overrated. Write about things before everybody notice them, or after everybody has forgotten them. If it’s happening now, you’re either too late or too early.

- In short, blogging should be a performance. Make it a good one.

Arianna’s advice is good for frightened newcomers. When you want someone to sing for the first time, you encourage them. Tell them nobody’s going to laugh. But when they’re no longer afraid, you tell them how to get better.

30’s movies marathon – part 4

The Most Dangerous Game (1932, USA) – A hunter of big game runs his yacht across a reef of Dramatic Irony, and becomes himself the hunted on a mad Cossack’s island. Contrived and badly acted, but gets points for making the quintessential Star Trek episode 30 years ahead of time.

The Island of Lost Souls (1932, USA). Good Island of Dr. Moreau, starring .. The Panther Woman?? Yes that’s what the credits say. Anyway the manimals rebel and chant “Law no more!”, thus making some point or other.

La Chienne (1931, France) – Introduced by a puppet, who mocks the conventions of filmmaking. Watched: 18 minutes. IMDB reviewers say that with this movie, French cinema enters the pathway to genius..

The Public Enemy (1931, USA) – Gangster childhood! Starring James Cagney, as an unconvincing teenager. Remember, kids, selling beer isn’t cool.

Le Bonheur (1934, France) – Surreal allegory about happiness. Impressive, whatever. Watched: 10 minutes.

White Zombie (1932, USA) – Ooh .. I had forgotten that zombies came from voodoo! But I prefer the kind that eats brrrraaaiiiinnnsss. This movie is terrrriiiiibbbllleeeee. Okay, I’ll stop now. Watched: 10 minutesssss.

The Big Trail (1930, USA) – Westerns got better over the years. Watched: 6 minutes.

Taxi (1932, USA) – Cab drivers can be gangstahs too! Yes, but I’m tired of gangster movies. Even if this one’s got a yiddish-speaking James Cagney. Watched: 9 minutes.

Flight Commander (1930, USA) – Won the Oscar for best writing, which is a mystery I don’t care to explore. Watched: 11 minutes.

Fuck you and the horse you rode in on

Joe Straczynski is one of the best scriptwriters in television. There’s been a golden age of television this decade, but Straczynski was years ahead of it, with the ca 100 episodes he wrote for Babylon 5 in the 1990’s. Nobody since has come close. Babylon 5 was a freak accident, where Straczynski was given the kind of creative control that is normally reserved for authors. The music, the actors, – the writing. Near perfect. An accident.

Now Straczynski has written his first movie, Changeling, which by Mysterious Means I’ve managed to see. (Angeline Jolie and Clint Eastwood are also involved somehow, but who cares?) I’m not fully pleased. Changeling is too subdued, especially at first. The story is realistic – a boy is kidnapped, the police screws up and sends the mother the wrong kid back, and when she complains they commit her to a psychiatric institution for being a nuisance. Realistic, oh yes. But it isn’t played in a believable way. Jeffrey Donovan plays the cop like his con roles in Burn Notice, light-weight. They should have filmed and cast this more like Carnivale.

Later it gets better, even quite good, and there are several Straczynski moments, (fans will know what I mean). And people in Hollywood seem to have liked it, and have given Straczynski more major movies to write. Good for him. I can’t evaluate this just as a movie. This is my hero’s big chance. He will never surpass Babylon 5, but maybe he’ll get the recognition he deserves.

Sweet, bland and uplifting

Andrew Orlowski writes that Malcolm Gladwell is a guru for the brain dead.

Gladwell is a walking Readers Digest 2.0: a compendium of pop science anecdotes which boil down very simply to homespun homilies. Like the Digest, it promises more than it delivers, and like the Digest too, it’s reassuringly predictable.

..

“…In embracing the diversity of human beings we will find the true way to human happiness.”

So there you’ve got Gladwell in essence: he always ends with a Hallmark style greeting telling you something sweet, bland and uplifting – that you already knew.

Gladwell isn’t the worst offender, but the anecdotal approach to popular science often results in a kind of pretend learning. It’s something you read so you can feel on top of current research, without doing any hard work. It doesn’t teach you facts, and it doesn’t teach you how to think about the subject. It’s like Guitar Hero. It doesn’t make you a better guitar player, it just reduces guitar playing to your level.

There are a lot of good popular science books. There are two signs to look for: The first is that the book doesn’t rely on anecdotes. The second is that it doesn’t make you think you actually understand the subject. Science is really really hard. If you close a book thinking you understand the subject, but the part that sticks in your mind is a story about some wacky scientist, then you’ve read bad pop-sci. Stop doing that. It’s making you dumber.

And here we all are together, here we are

Shikasta by Doris Lessing is the refined version of her earlier Briefing for a Descent Into Hell. She has stripped away the visionary excesses, and improved on the core idea: Cosmic forces look with frustration on the state of the Earth, and send emissaries to be born onto it to make it better. But they often get distracted and lose their way, trapped by human corruption and confusion.

The Earth was once psychically linked with Canopus, our cosmic superiors, and everything was bliss. But the link broke, and all went bad. Canopus creates religions to guide us, but they always deteriorate. As the 20th century ends, Earth’s diseased materialist culture collapses in a nuclear holocaust.

Shikasta is humanity seen through the glasses of the worst of 60’s/70’s theory and spirituality. Western culture is explicitly inferior. Science is just a religion. Material well-being is pointless. Canopus often comes across as arrogant, ignorant and, through association with all religious founders, evil. Unintentionally, I think.

But I don’t care. This is brilliant. I can’t mock it, I would feel small. It’s as if Lessing deliberately plays the part of a New Age mystic, saying “you’ve seen what others have done with this role, now look what I can do with it”. And she uses this premise to explore the missed potential in all of us. To dissect, reprimand and inspire.

Shikasta is not a novel. It is prophecy, in the Old Testament sense. Doris Lessing is Jeremiah. And Jesus. And the Buddha. I’m in awe.

30’s movies marathon – part 3

Paul Muni as ScarfaceMurders in the Rue Morgue (1932, USA) – This is really bad, but gets WTF-points for turning Poe’s crime story into a damsel & man-in-monster-suit movie. Takes place in Paris, 1845, where people are so well-read that they’re already discussing Darwin’s theory of evolution. Watched: 30 minutes.

Scarface (1932, USA) – Say hello to my little .. oh, never mind the pun. This is actually really good, apart from the comic relief and some attempts at being respectable. Paul Muni is a crazier and better Tony than Al Pacino. Notice the glee in his eyes as he gets his first machinegun.

Hell’s Angels (1930, USA) – Bits and pieces of everything stitched together. Some parts are shot as a silent movie, others in a sort of “color”. It’s the Frankenstein monster of movies: slow, dull, and with a sickly green hue (*ba-dum-bum ching*). Academy Award nomination for strangest German acting in a movie. Watched: 30 minutes, then fast-forwarded through the stuntman-killing action scenes. Not worth it.

I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang (1932, USA) – I am an important made-for-Oscar social drama. Watched: 9 minutes.

The Beast of the City (1932, USA) – The Shield: The Previous Generation. Watched it all.

Limite (1931, Brazil) – It’s not that I hate art films on principle. I just think they attract bad filmmakers. Watched: 10 minutes.

Fra Gyldendals Konversasjonsleksikon 1935 – P

Pacemaker, eng., person som ved trening e. konkurranse holder sig foran en løper, syklist o.s.v. for å lette hans arbeide e. opmuntre ham.

Paraply (fr. parapluie, mot regn), regnskjerm.

Parykk (fr. perruque), en tettsittende lue utvendig forsynt med hår (tagl, ull, e.l.)

Pedagogikk, den videnskaplige behandling av opdragelseskunsten.

Pedofili, se Perversjon

Perversjon [..] Den viktigste p. er homoseksualiteten.

Piken fra Norge, navn på Margrete, skotsk dronning

Plattenslager; i da. har ordet fått bet. “bedrager”, likesom uttrykket “slå en plade” i da. betyr “narre, bedra”.

Pollusjoner, ufrivillige sæduttømmelser, i alm. under søvnen. [..] Ved seksuell overirritabilitet kan p. bli meget hyppige og være ledsaget av nevrasteniske forstyrrelser; den eneste rasjonelle behandlingsmåte er da et regelmessig og hygienisk liv, særlig i seksuell henseende.

Positi´v. 1) Mindre orgel som bare er forsynt med labialstemmer, – 2. Lirekasse.

Pote´ter, urt fra Andesfjellene i Chile, Peru og Ecuador.

Promiskuitet, kjønnslig samliv i fleng.

Prylestraff, legemlig revselse, kan nu bare anv. i opdragelsesøiemed overfor barn av deres foreldre e. andre som står i foreldres sted, samt av skolen (dog ikke på piker over 10 år), hvis de av skolestyret fastsatte regler for skolens orden og tukt gir adgang dertil.

Pumpernikkel, en slags grovt, kliholdig rugbrød som opr. brev brukt i Westfalen, Preussen.

Pyøng-yang, by i det n.v. Korea, ved jernbanen Søul-Mukden.

Med inspirasjon fra Kjetil Johansen.

Vulcan rubber ears in our pockets

Neal Stephenson, this blog’s patron saint, talks about SF culture and mundane culture, and what it means for a book to be genre:

Via Wet Asphalt, who adds that it’s pointless to try to define SF as a certain kind of story. SF is a set of shared cultural traditions.

As Neal Stephenson says, the people who read science fiction overlap with the people who read fantasy, despite these being different kinds of stories. Asking what exactly makes a novel SF is to miss the point – it’s the culture of the readers that matters. Geek culture.

Stephenson says that in a way we’re all geeks now, but that is to water out the word. SF is influential, but geek is still a separate culture. It’s not a narrowly defined culture. There’s no uniform or canon. Anyone who calls themselves a geek is one, and also many who don’t. But there’s still a difference.

There are also geek snobs, people so fed up with being looked down on by cultural snobs that they look down in return. I’m more relaxed. But I still think you’re the poorer for not knowing who Neal Stephenson is.

That reminds me, I should read his newer novels soon. Some day. (Neal Stephenson fans can be recognized by their ambivalence towards him. Anyone who says they love everything he’s ever written is an impostor.)

All that remained was a future, now even that is denied me

In the Pyat quartet, Michael Moorcock gives a voice to the fascist Europe we left behind. The voice is a Russian engineer, a conceited techno-utopist who escapes the Russian civil war with a hatred of Bolsheviks and Jews. To make Pyat merely a fascist follower would be too simple. He’s rather a sibling of the fascists, like the Italian futurists, an independent thinker whose emotions find resonance with the fascist movements when they arrive, without falling in line behind any particular leader.

Byzantium Endures took Pyat through the Russian revolution and civil war. In The Laughter of Carthage he wanders through Europe a rootless emigrant, eventually landing in the US, where he makes friends with the Ku Klux Klan. With all Pyat’s faults, it may be excessive of Moorcock to also give him a cocaine addiction and a 13-year old lover, but what’s impressive about these novels is how reasonable Pyat appears in his own voice. And his voice is all we hear, apart from Moorcock’s introduction. The real story is a puzzle for observant readers to solve.

The novels are narrated by Pyat as an old man, a shopkeeper in London. This gives his story a melancholic slant. Pyat’s life has been a failure in every way. The stories he tells of his glorious youth are merely the rants of a bitter old man. The reader pities him. But it’s a cautious pity. Moorcock’s achievement is to show that the Europe Pyat personifies is neither remote nor fully dead.