Meaningful Words

Thought of the day: maybe it doesn't matter what complex material a young mind engages, in order for someone to be able to contend with complex realities in adulthood. In order words, all that Latin in in my grandfather's era, in school, did train minds for future lawyers whether or not they needed the material it was about, and SF sagas (whether on TV or in books) do train minds to think about the moral issues of our era even when they aren't "real". In fact, I'm guessing it is better if the things thought about are not real because it frees the mind to dig in without being hampered by preconceptions vital to one's ability to adhere to the means of survival and success in one's own world. Our emotions are fashioned to let us "side" with cases and be united by beliefs that will promote our survival. That makes it very hard for us to think about our own circumstances with the kind of abandon and rigor that it is possible to think about artificial circumstances and thought experiments.

My fourteen year old daughter, Angela, told me about an encounter with a friend who is an Okal Rel Universe fan the other day. The friend, M, remarked while they were walking home one day on how amazing it was that Lynda (Angie's mother) had a made up a whole universe. Angie seemed unimpressed. "Don't you think it is amazing?" I asked. "Sure," she told me, "but lots of people have their own universes." When I asked her to elaborate she rattled off the list of her favorite sci-fi TV series (many of which are also my favorites starting with Babylon V). My attempt to impress her was neutralized. When I tried to make a case for the Okal Rel Universe being something more interesting or personal to her because it was something her own mother had created I realized she felt every bit as close, if not closer, to the magic behind Lois & Clark or Star Gate or Star Trek Voyageur as she did to me. She did not share my sense of dissociation from the productions. They were and are as personal to her as my passionate engagement with ORU is to me. As a mother, I'm largely pleased by her chocies, since most of her favorites are (at least in part) morality plays that I am not sorry to see her learning from. The intimacy she feels with something as distant and aloof as Big Screen successes, however, is something I guess I have lost. Or exceeded? Is my urge to write, perhaps, an outcome of the egotistic need to be more involved (have agency) in the stories that are my guides and maps to coping with life (much like a gamer gets greater pleasure having agency in a video game despite its shallower "plot" and other markers of intelligent and influencing design), and my need to interrogate, expand or otherwise tinker with the archetypes and situations presented as received culture from the books, movies and other media of story-telling that have influenced me all my life. A need to "talk back" with my hands in the clay of the arguments played out. Is Angela better off? Getting more out of the phenomenon than I am. If so, is there a way back? What would I give up? Identity, perhaps. Maybe it's as simple as that. Some sense of doing something meaningful that might be valued by others, as well? Hah! That's struck the artist's dilemna there. That balance between inner and external reward and validation. All roads lead to angst. :-) Knack is to haul it onto the examination table, itself, for a bit of an analysis ending, maybe, with a forgiving hug, and get on with life. Angie continues to be a revelation to me, though. I can learn a lot from her if I listen. Some days I can.

"Are we doing science fiction a disservice by fencing off part of its natural territory in this way?" from Grossly Exaggerated, by Djibril (Issue 2006.06 Futurefire).

Not a disservice, I'd say, but genre classification is something that pioneering writers are naturally going to transgress or else populate with work and move on. Classification is a useful organizing principle for the study of things, IMHO. But it is an "after the fact" tool.

My latest thoughts run along the lines that what will change next is less the nature of the stories, in genre terms, than the nature of the roles played by writer, reader and critic. Art is meaning and to be meaningfully engaged means something different now than it did in 1950. But that cannot mean "anything goes" or there is nothing to distinguish one mimscape from another (to recklessly coin a phrase using mimesis and landscape). And which world view we support is far more important in the end than which technology we use to do so.

Mulling over the business of right and wrong and value systems in collision and the role of literature in dramatizing same, I struck upon a great seminar or essay question for Righteous Anger (Book #2 in the Okal Rel Universe series from Edge Science Fiction and Fantasy): "Does Branst Fail?" The underlying issue is what constitutes success which would rely heavily on the perceptions of the reader. Whatever way the resulting essay or discussion went, it would reveal as much about the reader as the text. Maybe that is the secret of engagement. Works that reveal their readers to themselves. Such works would tend to prompt the audience to compare notes with their reference group, socially, to see if they got the same thing out of the story.

Just finished my first graduate English course, taught by Dr. Lisa Dickson, on Renaissance drama as exemplified through Hamlet. Reading, at the same time, A.C. Grayling's What is Good? where I came across his description of authors like Aeschylus (e.g. in Eumenides) and Sophocles (e.g. in Ajax and Trachiniae) as illustrative of the change between heroic virtue and civil virtue. Studying Hamlet gave me a new perspective on the play as transitional in this same sense from medieval to early modern views of law, religion and government. I am interested as an author and a critic, in how contemporary science fiction serves as a laboratory for examining moral ideas of how people should and may behave. I see the prospect of parallels, here, or perhaps establishing a pattern of high art with high value to its audience falling at the crux of a trasition between standards of "good". Golden Age SF was all about the wonder of new technology and what it might feel like to live in that brave new world. It's ethical standards were pretty much 1950s boy scout. Today, SF should pose a bigger challenge to the world view of wealth for its own sake, and by extension the successful business man, as the pinnacle of virtue in the same way that Sophocles and Aeschylus embodied the society transitions of their times.

Came across Complete Review of Literary Blogs while looking for some fellow text-geeks to hang with. Plan to check it out some surf-session.

Reading some of Doris Lessing's essays and one of Stephen Greenblott this weekend, it struck me how the most seminal commentators seem to rely the least on referencing the work of others, and speak directly from a store of their own internal authority. I wonder if this is a trend that could be demonstrated and if so what might be discovered about how a writer attains this enviable power to stand on his or her own reputation. Is it through sheer weight of reputation? Does that rely on mastery of a canon and evidence of ample proof that the emerging authority knows how to cite and summarize the arguments of those who went before him or her with respect to the epistomological space defined as belonging to his or her field? Is it different for a writer, like Lessing, and a critic, like Greenblott.

A quote in Grayling's What is Good struck a surprising resonnance for me with the political debates bound up in Renaissance revenge drama over old methods of justice based on personal honor and the emerging rule of law in which government authority dominates, making vendetta-killings a harmful disruption to the common good.

The immediate comparator from Renaissance criticim, fresh in my mind, is a paper on revenge and revenge tragedy (reference TBA) which pickes apart and illuminates the difference between older, medieval ideas of vengence as a clan right or question or personal honor, which clashed with the increasing power of the state in matters of justice, and decreasing tolerance of disruption to the common peace.

Transitional Ethics of Heroism in Classical Epoch

If there is one writer in the age of Pericles who more than any other signalises the epic civilisation-changing shift from warrior to civic morality, it is Pericles' friend Sophocles, through the medium of two of his plays in particular, each dealing with a mighty hero: the Ajax about the eponymous warrior and the Trachiniae, telling of the death of Heracles ... Sophocles brings the ancient heroes to earth -- to the grave -- because of the opposition they represent to the values which are the new values of Periclean Athens. The lesson cannot have been lost on the enthralled audiences who saw the plays on first performance. A.C. Grayling What is Good? The Search for the Best Way to Live (p. 18)

Started reading, started the notebook, the blog was inevitable -- I just didn't realize it until I came across the first web reference I wanted to comment on. Interesting that taking notes on print materials in a notebook felt like the right way to "talk back" but the first web resource of interest prompted a blog. Not that I am not a cross-media commentator. I am, as my Lynda Reads blog attests. I also expect I will blog about reactions to print and include web references in print notes and other productions. But there you have it. People, including yourself, often surprise you.

I'm intersted in things that "straddle" realities. Perhaps I don't believe the medium is the message after all; that there's a message beyond the form of its expression that can play out in different media. Just like my Okal Rel Universe is manifest in multile print personalities, more than one online manifestation and a growing variety of social connections. Even a couple of radio interviews of 1 hr or more, now, which start to become part of the whole rather than mere commentary on the whole.

Whatever I am, I'm too old and stubborn to accept any truths that don't satisfy my need to know. But I can still learn. We'll see how it goes.

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Now for that web discovery:

Did Shakespeare Consciously Use Archaic English? by Mary Catherine Davidson of the University of Toronto.

This article underscored for me how Shakespeare, himself, had a relationship with the past and a motive to use it in the service of his joint commercial and artistic mission. It is easy to view him as the past, and lose the rawness of his work in its own time, poised between the old and the new, commere and art, convention and innovation. For someone with her own unconventional enterprise in mid-flight (albeit, at least to date, one out of the currents of the dominant entertainment media unlike plays in early modern London) such discoveries are particularly gripping.