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Art, Bill Schutt, biology, Cannibalism, Cannibalism: A Perfectly Natural History, glasses, Hannibal Lecter References, Joshua Jammer Smith, original photograph, Science, speciation, still life
Perfectly Natural
15 July 2017
02 Wednesday Aug 2017
Posted Art, Science, Still Life
inTags
Art, Bill Schutt, biology, Cannibalism, Cannibalism: A Perfectly Natural History, glasses, Hannibal Lecter References, Joshua Jammer Smith, original photograph, Science, speciation, still life
Perfectly Natural
15 July 2017
31 Wednesday May 2017
Posted David Foster Wallace, Essay, Literature, Philosophy, Science, Writing
inTags
A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, animal cruelty, apathy, arthropoda, Arthropods, bacon is amazing and if you disagree you're a goddamn communist, biology, Birthdays, Boiling Lobsters, Consider the Lobster, David Foster Wallace, empathy, Essay, ethics, Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Gourmet, Infinite Jest, Jason Segel, killing animals for food, Literature, Lobster, Lobsters are Bugs, Maine Lobster, Maine Loster Festival, metacognition, mortality, PC, Philosophy, preference, Science, segmented joints, self preservation, selfish acts of violence, Shogun's, suffering, will to survive, Writing
Is it right to boil lobsters? I’m seriously asking.
Four months back was the most wretched of holidays, a day of the year that I dread more than anything else: my birthday. This isn’t me trying to be cute, I legitimately hate my birthday. Part of this is because of my depression and self-loathing. I’ve trained myself to consider myself worth less than dog-shit, and so when you live in a culture that reinforces a narrative that birthdays are about taking a day to celebrate someone and extol their virtues and just celebrate their existence it becomes, difficult isn’t the word, fucking agonizing. Put it simply, how do you appreciate your existence when you often consider your existence to be a waste of other people’s time? Still I’m fighting this bullshit in my head, partly because last year’s birthday was quite possibly the worst day of my entire life. This year I wanted it to be different. Part of what helped was having to work on my birthday, it kept me occupied, but the other half was about a week later my family took me to one of my favorite restaurants, Shogun’s a Japanese Steakhouse. I’m sure places like this exist around the country, but if the reader doesn’t know what this is it’s a place where patrons sit around a stove and a chef comes out and cooks their food in front of them usually performing by lighting fires, throwing bits of food into their mouth, and performing incredible stunts with knives, spatulas, and other cutlery.
I asked originally about lobster because on this night I had what I usually do when I go to Shogun’s: chicken, steak, and lobster. The lobster, it should be noted, wasn’t boiled alive in front of us, the chef simply brought out two tails, coated them with butter and seasoning, and then baked it under a steel bowl while he cooked the chicken and made jokes about me and my sister both working in libraries.
He picked up the bowl, dropped the lobster on my plate, and started with the filet mignon. I ate the lobster, and I’ll admit it without shame, it was delicious. I also, on one small side note, got my wife to try lobster for the first time ever.
This may at first seem like an opening that will then switch over into a long monologue about how I regretted it later, and how I have since made a vow to never eat lobster again. Well, fortunately, this isn’t the case. I didn’t regret ordering or eating the lobster. The only guilt I felt was a remembrance of a documentary that aired a few years ago about lobster catchers in the Caribbean who are being manipulated by big seafood providers, but I ordered a Maine lobster so that didn’t even come into the equation. I honestly don’t feel any guilt about eating lobster, unless they’re boiled. And this development, like most things in my life, has to do with reading, specifically a wonderful essay by David Foster Wallace called Consider the Lobster.
My regular reader will remember that over the last year I’ve experienced an explosion of interest in the writing of David Foster Wallace, buying up most of the books he ever wrote. I’ve read Infinite Jest (and survived) and in-between reading that book and A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never do Again, I bought a hardback copy of another one of his essay collections Consider the Lobster. It’s impossible to forget this book with it’s pure white cover, and a red lobster raising its right claw up in a kind of grim welcome to the reader. I remember seeing the book before whenever I would encounter David Foster Wallace’s writing, and my amazon account was always recommending it to me. When I asked a professor friend of mine, who I originally consulted for Infinite Jest, about it her answer was an unequivocal, “Yes, I fuckin loved that book.”
I bought a copy and started reading it the moment it arrived.
The essay was originally a field piece Wallace was assigned to write by Gourmet magazine. I wonder briefly what they knew what they were getting into when they hired Wallace because the man never just wrote about his topic, he managed to write about the philosophy and spirit of whatever material he was writing about. Wallace is specifically writing about the MLF (Maine Lobster Festival), and while he explains the significance of the event in terms of food connoisseurs and Lobster enthusiasts, the essay eventually becoming a moral conversation about the nature of being a gourmet period.
And part of that is providing a taxonomic, biological background of the lobster which, if the reader honestly believes I won’t provide a quote for you clearly have never read any of my work:
Taxonomically speaking, a lobster is a marine crustacean of the family Homaridae, characterized by five pairs of jointed legs, the first pair terminating in large pincer fish claws used for subduing prey. Like many other species of benthic carnivore, lobsters are both hunters and scavengers. They have stalked eyes, gills on their legs, and antennae.
[…]
And arthropods are members of the phylum Arthropoda, which phylum covers insects, spiders, crustaceans, and centipedes/millipedes, all of whose main commonality, besides the absence of a centralized brain-spine assembly, is a chitinous exoskeleton composed of segments, to which appendages are articulated in pairs.
The point is lobsters are giant sea insects. (237)
Part of the joy for in including that quote is knowing that somewhere out there in the world someone who has just recently eaten lobster will start to gag as they realize that cockroaches, beetles, and centipedes are related to lobsters and that they, in principle, recently ate a sea-roach. But after I get over my juvenile habit of grossing people out with facts about bugs (it’s the main reason why I never get invited to parties), there is a purpose to including this quote because it’s also part of the reason Wallace includes this background material in his essay. Shortly after this he provides a brief historical account about how lobster was seen a lower-class food, how it was often fed to criminals, and after this he explains that the principle means of cooking lobster is to boil it alive. All of this ultimately moves towards his central thesis, or, really, the central question of Consider the Lobster:
So then here is a question that’s all but unavoidable at the World’s Largest Lobster Cooker, and may arise in kitchens across the U.S.: Is it right to boil a sentient creature alive just for our gustatory pleasure? A related set of concerns: Is the previous question irksomely PC or sentimental? What does “all right” even mean in this context? Is the whole thing just a matter of personal choice? (243).
This question is an important one to ask, especially when you live in a society that has become more and more divorced from the reality of food. Individuals who live in the twenty-first century, specifically people who live in urban areas, tend to live in artificial environments where the reality of killing creatures for meat is a somewhat alien concept, actually, let’s be real here, it’s damn near abstract for them. Probably one of the best examples is the hog-killing scene in Forgetting Sarah Marshall where Jason Segel has to kill the hog which is screaming and grunting and then spends most of the time on the way to the party crying.
Before I get into my analysis of Wallace’s argument though I do want to take a moment to just note the previous quote and observe the man’s ability as a writer. Part of a writer’s job is not just coming up with catchy hookers that grab people’s attention and then being cute and smart and funny until you reach your word limit. Which, you’ll note, is pretty good summation for everything I do on this shitty blog. The writer’s principle job, to sound archetypal for a moment, is simply to observe humanity’s character and behavior and then to show it right back. As Wallace observes his own question he notes immediately what the reaction will be, and having asked this question in real life I understand why he prepares for a reaction. I asked my wife one night the same questions and she responded with a quick and precise “no.” Now in her defense she’s a biologist; she’s been trained to study animals and that often includes capturing them, killing them, and then cutting them up to see how they work. I tried to make my argument but she threw back plenty of facts about arthropods in general the most obvious one being that, unlike humans, they lack a real nervous system, or at least one as centralized as human beings.
That brings me back to bugs and Wallace again.
No one is really sure whether or not bugs, or arthropods feel pain. I took a few weeks of an etymology course before I realized the class wasn’t for me (I don’t think the other students liked me) and while I was there the professor of the class noted that it’s difficult to measure “pain” in arthropods. Wallace himself observes the complications of pain when he writes:
Since pain is a totally subjective mental experience, we do not have direct access to anyone or anything’s pain but our own; and even just the principles by which we can infer that other human beings experience pain and have a legitimate interest in not feeling pain involve hard-core philosophy—metaphysics, epistemology, value theory, ethics. (246).
Wallace also notes that the conversation itself is uncomfortable as he notes just a few lines later:
The more important point here, though, is that the whole animal-cruelty-and-eating issue is not just complex, it’s also uncomfortable. It is, at any rate, uncomfortable for me, and for just about everyone I know who enjoys a variety of foods and yet does not want to see herself as cruel or unfeeling. As far as I can tell, my own main way of dealing with this conflict has been to avoid thinking about the whole unpleasant thing. I should also add that it appears to me unlikely that many readers of Gourmet wish to think about it, either, or to be queried about the morality of their eating habits in the pages of a culinary monthly. (246)
This last point seems to be the most poignant element of the entire essay, and all the more important. Wallace’s essay really becomes what it is in this paragraph for me because it stops being about the experience of lobster and instead becomes an opportunity for meta-cognition. If the reader doesn’t remember that word it literally means “thinking-about-thinking,” or to put it another way “thinking about the way that you think about things.” I suspect many readers of Gourmet were rather pissed at Wallace for making them revaluate choices that he himself admitted he didn’t think about, but if I can dust off a platitude, the unexamined life is not worth living.
Now I know my reader’s objection immediately: You’re a hypocrite sir, you admitted yourself that you ate lobster recently and you felt no qualms about it, so why should I feel lousy for simply enjoying lobster?
The reader makes a good point, and the only sufficient rebuttal I have is that this essay, this reflection, is a not a condemnation of people who eat lobster in general. My only aim is to ask a question which can start a moral argument, which, by it’s nature, is never going to have a clear answer for each person’s morality is subjective.
For my own part I have no intention of stopping eating lobster, however I refuse to eat boiled lobster because it seems unnecessarily cruel.
My reader will almost assuredly rebut this point and again cite Wallace himself on the issue of pain, but Wallace provides a few moments of sobering clarity for me when he observes the actual process of boiling lobsters alive by noting their reaction to the process. He writes:
However stupourous a lobster is from the trip, for instance, it tends to come alarmingly to life when placed in boiling water. If you’re tilting it from a container into the steaming kettle, the lobster will sometimes try to cling to the container’s sides or even to hook it’s claws over the kettle’s rim like a person trying to keep from going over the edge of a roof. And worse is when the lobster’s fully immersed. Even if you cover the kettle and turn away, you usually hear the cover rattling and clinking as the lobster tries to push it off. Or the creature’s claws scraping the sides of the kettle as it thrashes around. The lobster, in other words, behaves very much as you or I would behave if we were plunged into boiling water. (247-8).
Some might continue to object, but allow me to offer one more quote before they negate this behavior:
To my lay mind, the lobster’s behavior in the kettle appears to be the expression of a preference, and it may well be that an ability to form preferences in the decisive criterion for real suffering. (251).
I tried, when I made the argument with my wife, to make this point, but I have a damn difficult time expressing my opinions and intellectual positions clearly in conversation. That’s the main reason why I write; it gives me control and a focus I lack in real life. To my wife’s credit she observed but stuck to her argument, and in fact I’m sure there are many who will do the exact same after reading my review and Wallace’s actual essay. Nobody’s going to really stop eating lobster if they don’t have any such qualms about the lobster’s potential suffering because it’s just, as I and Wallace noted before, a sea-bug. There’s no reason to observe much empathy because they’re an other.
But hopefully the reader has observed that Consider the Lobster is NOT about lobsters at all. In fact the essay is nothing more than a chance for Philosophic reflection about the way human beings act about their food. Wallace concludes his essay with two keen observations:
Why is a primitive, inarticulate form of suffering less urgent or uncomfortable for the person who’s helping to inflict it by paying for the food it results in? (252-3).
And then in closing paragraph he notes:
I’m not trying to bait anyone here—I’m genuinely curious. After all, isn’t being extra aware and attentive and thoughtful about one’s food and its overall context part of what distinguishes a real gourmet? Or is all the gourmet’s extra attention and sensibility just supposed to be sensuous? Is it really just a matter of taste and presentation? (254)
Empathy is a tricky a word to throw out because it’s so wrapped up in morality, and morality itself tends to be clouded in religious discourse that discussing empathy for animals makes one seem naïve or “soft” or even worse, a vegetarian. For the record, vegetarians are not the scum of the earth, those are vegans. No eating cheese my ass. I fuckin love cheese.
But all this reflection reminds of a moment years ago that gave me pause for thought. I was in a biology 1201 lab course and we were waiting to start our Mid-term Practicals. I looked down and crawling beneath my feet was a small field cricket. Without thinking I slammed my foot down, enjoying the hard crack and wet crunch. I had killed crickets before, dozens of times. My father was an exterminator so killing insects really wasn’t an issue for me, it was literally just business. But when I lifted my foot and looked at the carcass I felt instantly that I had done something wrong. The cricket hadn’t bothered me. It hadn’t bitten me. Crickets aren’t known for spreading disease. Nor do they usually bite. A cricket is about the closest thing you can get to a puppy in terms of insects. It’s ridiculous to fret about wantonly stepping on a bug, but is it?
It’s easy to negate another creature’s potential suffering for the sake of your own comfort, and it’s just as easy to establish rhetoric to justify that worldview. There’s nothing wrong with killing lobsters, and if you do believe there is that means you’re either just another insane animal rights activists, or else you’re just soft bodied and want to ensure that other people don’t have a good time. I worry about this, because narrative, as I’ve demonstrated in previous writing, matters more than anything. It’s easy to spin this rhetoric and just stop asking questions about the need for a moment of empathy and reflection and that can lead to consequences. It may start as lobsters, but then it may shift to cats, dogs, dolphins, whales, and even people.
I have no business with slippery-slope arguments. Humans aren’t going to eat people anytime soon (unless they taste good with butter I suppose, but then again what doesn’t?). But fostering a lack of empathy can lead to real problems because it negates that suffering can exist in multiple forms. Once one stops caring about whether lobsters may be experiencing pain it might be easy to forget that people are dying in Syria, that the state of Israel acts like a bully and gets away with it, that women across the globe face regular sexual harassment, that workers in the meat industry tend to be illegal immigrants who are used and exploited and then quickly tossed aside once they become injured on the job, that in the united states there is a 14% illiteracy rate, and the list can go on until one becomes with numb to tragedy.
Consider the Lobster is an important essay because it asks the reader to perform a simple task: consider. This act can make people uncomfortable because most of the time people would rather not consider that their actions may be wrong, or, more appropriately, that the way of life that they’re enjoying may be at the expense of another. But asking that question is a valuable endeavor because it can foster the behavior of self-reflection and empathy for other beings which is worth more than all the lobster in the world.
And besides, there’s always bacon.
*Writer’s Note*
All quotes from Consider the Lobster in this essay were quoted from the hardback Little, Brown & Company edition. However, if the reader is interested, I have also provided a link to the original article published on Gourmet’s website. Enjoy:
http://www.gourmet.com/magazine/2000s/2004/08/consider_the_lobster.html
15 Saturday Apr 2017
Posted Art, Science, Still Life
inTags
Adam Piore, Art, gum, Human Body, Human Developement, Joshua Jammer Smith, mechanical pencils, original photograph, OUT, paperclip, Science, still life, tea, The Body Builders, The Body Builders: Inside the Science of the Engineered Human, Times Literary Suppliment
Meat Gears
13 April 2017
01 Wednesday Mar 2017
Posted Art, Atheism, Christopher Hitchens, Literature, Philosophy, Science, Still Life
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"mountain of knowledge", Art, Atheism, books, Christopher Hitchens, coffee, Cookie Monster, glasses, god is not Great, Joshua Jammer Smith, Literature, Mark Twain, original photograph, Philosophy, Richard Dawkins, Science, still life, The Bible According to Mark Twain, The God Delusion
A Small Mountain of godlessness
19 February 2017
08 Wednesday Feb 2017
Tags
American Gods, Ananssi Boys, Art, Book Review, Daytripper, Fabio Moon, Gabriel Ba, graphic novel, How To Talk to Girls At Parties, masculinity, myth, Neil Gaiman, Neil Gaiman's Guide to Getting Girls to Like You, Novel, Sandman, Science, science fiction, Sexuality, Short Story, speculative fiction, Take a chance and ask that girl to dance you won't regret it, teenage boys, The Doll's House, The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. Le Guin
It’s a lesson I’m not sure if I’ve learned yet, which might explain why I bought the book. It’s not that I have problems talking to women, I’m married so obviously I have some skill (though my wife might say otherwise to spite me) it’s just that I never really learned how you actually talk to girls when you’re at a party. Because of this I figured I would learn from Neil Gaiman how exactly you do this, and instead I got a rather odd, wonderful, beautiful book about a boy who meets goddesses, suns, and universes.
Amazon is the ultimate temptation for me, and minutes, sometimes hours, that should be spent reading or writing are instead spent following the trails of recommendations of books I was just looking at. The Sandman: The Doll’s House leads to the graphic novelization of The Graveyard Book which leads to American Gods which leads to Anansi Boys which leads to Coraline which leads to Endless Nights which leads eventually to an odd book with three beautiful women on the cover (more about them later) beneath the title How to Talk to Girls at Parties. As I said, wrote, before, I wasn’t a social creature growing up, and the only reason I acquired any confidence was because I had to get out of my shell for a job, also I got a girlfriend that tends to help. Still despite when I was looking at the cover I had an odd moment of reincarnation when I began to recognize I had become a teenage boy again. Not only that, one of my favorite authors had written a guide for me so that, should it occur, if I was invited to a party I could now just follow a guide.
I bought the book and read it mystified by the experience because it was nothing of what I thought it was.
How to Talk to Girls at Parties is a story about a young teenage boy named Enn who is dragged to a party by his friend Vic. Enn is the kind of boy that is obviously just the younger avatar version of the writer, or else the every-man nerd that eventually grows up and becomes an accomplished author who writes about every-man nerds growing up to become accomplished authors. I recognize that that sounds like I’m being bitter and that the work is good but you misunderstand me, I write out of hope. If Neil Gaiman was the nerdy loser who got lucky there’s still a chance for me. Enn and Vic arrive at a house that isn’t the party they’re going to, but when the door opens a beautiful girl answers the door, and when she invites them inside the party is nothing but beautiful women. Vic is the go-to suave, confident jock who immediately hits it off with one of the girls and Enn is left to himself wandering through the house where he meets and “talks” to three women who, while they talk, speak as if they aren’t really women, or human for that matter. The exact word one of the girls uses is “tourist.” As the book goes on it’s clear that these women are either aliens, goddesses, or even universes made manifest into human form. Enn eventually talks to one and begins to kiss her, realizing that the girl is using him as a conduit so that her “story” will live on when Vic grabs him and tells him they have to leave. The girl he was going to sleep with glares after them, her head become an exploding sun, and as soon as they’re out of the house it’s clear that Vic became terrified once it was clear that the girl was using him and not the other way around. As for Enn, he forgets the “poem” almost as soon as they leave the house, and as they walk away it disappears slowly becoming as fleeting as music.
This plot description is important because anyone who buys the book thinking what I thought originally should know what they’re really buying, and while this isn’t just a lecture series by Gaiman (“Neil Gaiman’s Guide to Scoring Babes” is currently in development as a Great Courses series by the way) by the end the book had taught me exactly how to talk to girls.
You don’t talk, you just listen.
In hindsight I wish someone had just told me that when I was thirteen that this is the way you talk to girls, it would have made high school a far easier experience than it was, but we all must fight through the slough of despond that is puberty and emerge victorious. Part of that struggle is finding your own path through it.**
Most, if not all, of Gaiman’s books on some level tackle the nature of stories and narratives, and you could make the argument that his entire creative ethos is simply an effort to tell one really long story about stories period. Whether it’s the stories of myth in American Gods, the stories of old houses and children who find themselves caught in them in Coraline, or whether it’s the very story of the narrative existence in his Sandman series, Gaiman’s creative writing, and even his non-fiction, all seem dedicated to telling, unravelling, and then recreating the structure of narratives period while telling amazing stories.
At this point my reader will interrupt and ask what’s so damn special about How to Talk to Girls at Parties then? If Gaiman isn’t bringing anything new to the table, why bother with the book at all? And what if I already know how to talk to girls at parties, what then smarty-pants?
To begin with let’s avoid the name calling. Greg.
Second there are at least two significant reasons for reading this slim graphic novel and the first is Gabriel Ba and Fabio Moon. My regular reader may recognize those names, and if you have never read any of my work you still might have heard about them. Moon and Ba are the creative team behind the book Daytripper, a graphic novel which has won several Eisner awards (basically the Oscars of graphic novels) and a wonderful story about a man who wants to be a writer. Apart from the spectacular writing of Daytripper the lingering impression of the book is art which, and I know I’ve used this word several times already but it’s the best word that works, is simply beautiful. Daytripper is illustrated and colored with the stuff of dreams, and while reading that book I was struck by the thought that such work couldn’t possibly be replicated, I found myself fortunately corrected in How To Talk to Girls at Parties.
Gaiman’s words make the Moon and Ba’s colors, lines, and girls become some of the most radiant images collected into one small book. As Enn travels from room to room listening to the three women tell their story I felt as if I had left the world I knew, and as the women told their story I carried their words, and beings, long after I had closed the book. Ba and Moon are what helps make the book what it is, because their colors make each woman unique, and quite possibly the most beautiful women in comics I have ever seen.
As for my second response to my contester I would remind my reader that even if Gaiman is continuing his process of anthropomorphizing stories, gods, feelings, emotions, or non-living beings like stars or the internet, this is no reason not to read his work. In fact, given the fact that it’s Neil Gaiman this should only provide more impetus to actually read it. Gaiman is a writer who does not half-ass his reader, and even in his most esoteric (Sandman Overture was about something, I’m still working on not drooling while staring at the art) he manages to write characters and settings, and events into being that feel true. Normal human beings with their own lives, who are trying to figure out the oddity of mundane reality become swept up by supernatural events or creatures. Ultimately his characters are forever impacted by these experiences, and while most forget the sights and wonders the way a person might immediately lose a dream when they awake, they still feel the experience long after. His prose is where this wonder takes place, and as he wraps his reader in their dream he leaves the lasting impression.
Looking at the exchange between Enn and the last girl, a Grecian red-head named Triolet, the reader hears her story and is carried away to a different realm:
“We knew that it would be soon over. We knew…so we put it all into a poem…to tell the universe who we were and why we were here and what we said and did and thought and dreamed and yearned for. We wrapped our dreams in words and patterned the words so that they would live forever, unforgettable. Then we sent the poem as a pattern of flux, to wait in the heart of a star, beaming out its message in pulses and bursts and fuzzes across the electromagnetic spectrum, until the time when, on worlds a thousand sun systems distant, the pattern could be decoded and read, and it would become a poem once again.” (43-45)
If I can break the fourth wall for a moment, while transcribing this passage I have a video playing titled “underwater whale songs.” Humpbacks and the sound of the ever roaring waves echoing through the infinite abyss of the ocean just seemed to make the words feel real.
Aside aside, moving on.
This small exchange, rendered magnificently by Moon and Ba, is the typical anthropomorphizing that Gaiman fans are used to, but looking deeper into the passage I realized at this moment that Gaiman had achieved a miracle for blending science fiction with myth. Myth as a term has fallen on hard times, and shows like Mythbusters have only perpetuated this tragedy (and it is a tragedy because the show is great and a wonderful way for people to become interested in science), but at its core myth is about explaining reality through narrative rather than empirical means. Triolet may be a goddess, or a star, or an alien, but ultimately it doesn’t matter because at this moment what matters is that she’s telling the story of her people, what they used to be and were and what they believed. The act of speaking to Enn, and having him listen, is in essence recording her culture. And while the reader may immediately question why that is so important I would remind them of the necessity of recording history, myth, culture, philosophy, history, science, and stories. It’s a romantic thought, but crucial to remember, that nothing in this world ever really matters until someone has written it down.
Record seals memory and so Gaiman achieves something really interesting by not only telling a story about an alien race keeping themselves alive by telling their stories to young men looking to get laid, there’s also a fascinating possibility for the future.
In the introduction to her novel The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. Le Guin writes about science fiction as a genre and what is the ultimate creative goal. She also tries to clarify the idea that science fiction is a genre trying to “see into the future.” She writes:
This book is not extrapolative. If you like you can read it, and a lot of other science fiction, as a thought-experiment. Let’s say (says Mary Shelley) that a young doctor creates a human being in his laboratory; let’s say (says Philip K. Dick) that the Allies lost the second world war; let’s say this or that is such and so, and see what happens…. In a story so conceived, the moral complexity proper to the modern novel need not be sacrificed, nor is there any built-in dead end; thought and intuition can move freely within bounds set only by the terms of the experiment, which may be very large indeed. The purpose of a thought-experiment, as the term was used by Schrodinger and other physicists, is not to predict the future – indeed Schrodinger’s most famous thought-experiment goes to shwo that the “future,” on the quantum level, cannot be predicted- but to describe reality, the present world.
My reader may be getting impatient at this point, but hopefully this quote will explain one of my lasting impressions of reading How to Talk to Girls at Parties. Science fiction isn’t about predicting future technology, or predicting how the world will eventually die. As Le Guin says, the entire genre is built upon the concept of the “thought-experiment.” Imagine a set of conditions and let it just go. Explore an idea through imagination. And so listening to Triolet’s story I see a beautiful science fiction possibility. Already humanity is moving more and more towards a paperless system of record keeping, in which every action, thought, belief, and art product is contained in formless data streamed through wires and eventually through waves. Ba and Moon’s art shows the species collecting their culture into a “poem” before containing it in a sun and sending the signal out to be discovered by some new race that might study their species and carry their memory on.
How to talk to Girl’s at Parties isn’t just about learning how to speak to that girl across the room who keeps smiling at you, it offers a deeper understand of what such an interaction actually is. Walking across the room, feeling your tongue swell up and your palm getting sweaty as you think of something to say to the girl you’ve seen everyday in Algebra I for the last year is like encountering a new world. You’ll never be the same after you ask her a question, and you’ll never be the person you were when you see her smile and listen to her talk about finding her blouse at Goodwill. The small act of listening to a girl tell you about her clothes or day may not be the grand thought experiments of writers like Le Guin, Clarke, Dick, Adams, Asimov, or even Gaiman but in its own way it does forever leave what you knew behind.
So long story short, take the chance, talk to the girl, and just listen carefully. You’ll find yourself in a different world.
*Writer’s Note*
The quote from Le Guin’s introduction can be found ACE Science Fiction paperback copy, as well as by following the link below:
http://theliterarylink.com/leguinintro.html
**Writer’s Note**
Upon finishing the essay I remembered that my father had actually taught me this lesson, but like most young men receiving advice from their dad’s I didn’t listen to it. So thanks dads, and sorry I didn’t pay attention.
02 Friday Sep 2016
Posted Book Review, Comics/Graphic Novels, Film Review, Literature, Novels, Philosophy, Science, science fiction
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"arrow of time", 2001: A Space Odyssey, A Brief History of Time, A Brief History of Time: From The Big Bang to Black Holes, Abram Adams, Alan Moore, Back to the Future, Bender, Bender's Big Score, Book Review, clocks, Comics, Cube, Dave Gibbons, Divinity, Dr. Manhattan, evolution, Film, film review, Fourth Dimension, Futurama, geometry, graphic novel, H.G. Wells, Human evolution, Literature, Math, Novel, Perception of Time, Philosophy, Reality, Role of Science Fiction in society, Science, science fiction, Space, Stanley Kubrick, State of Being, Stephen Hawking, The Monolith, The Time Machine, The Time Traveler, Third Dimension, time, Time Travel, U.S.S.R., Watchmen
I’ve tried once to explore the fourth dimension, but only in writing. I was taking a creative writing course and riding the high of being one of the few top writers in the class. This wasn’t ego on my part, because if it hasn’t been made apparent at this point in my life my fatal flaw is my inability to sing my own praises. Whatever the case most of the students in the class would confide in me and tell me that they thought I was a great writer and the teacher seemed to support this sentiment, and riding that high I thought about Stanley Kubrick.
Kubrick is a bit of an acquired taste, and sometimes I do honestly believe some critics sing the man’s praises because they want to make other people think that they understand his creative ethos, but being a teenager I suffered the delusion that I would be a film director and so I began watching interviews with film makers who would often drop the man’s name. On a small tangent my desire to be a director shifted after reading Slash’s autobiography and so for a number of years I suffered under the delusion that I could be a rock star. This faded when I remembered I had little to no musical talent. Kubrick was a film maker that I enjoyed because his narratives were so eclectic. Looking at just few years he made in respective order: Paths of Glory, Sparticus, Lolita, Dr. Strangelove, 2001: A Space Odyssey, A Clockwork Orange, and Barry Lyndon, and to put this in perspective he moved from a World War I epic to a gladiator rebellion, to a Pedophile capturing a young girl, to the Nuclear apocalypse, to a science fiction philosophy opera, to a dystopian nightmare, and finally to a period piece about an Irish peasant ascending to the British Nobility.
2001: A Space Odyssey is probably one of his best known films, though often because many people in the 70s got stoned and watched it with their kids. What they missed in their induced state was that in his own way Kubrick was attempting to do what I tried in my own small essay about how we tell stories.
Human beings exist in the third dimension, and if I can remind you of your brief high school geometry class the third dimension’s quality is that it allows figures to move through space. In the first dimension objects and organisms could only move to the left or right, whereas in the second objects could then move up and down left and right. The Third dimension allows objects and organisms to move forward and back and they do this by moving through space. Human beings exist and interact with a three dimensional reality, and it needs to be made clear this is a simplistic breakdown of a complicated philosophical, mathematical, and psychological problem. Many scientists turned philosophers have mused about our three dimensional reality, and looking to inspiration from science fiction authors, the next frontier seems to be to understand if it possible to break into the reality of the fourth dimension who’s defining quality and nature is time.
Steven Hawking, the noted theoretical physicist and part-time Simpsons character, explores this in his book A Brief History of Time. When I first read the book I was fresh out of high school and it should be noted that at the time I understood little if any of the actual text, however over time this changed. That’s a bad joke so I’ll move on. In a chapter dealing with wormholes, pockets of space in which it is believed human beings might, and a big emphasis on might there, be able to move through large stretches of the galaxy relatively quickly Hawking writes:
Because there is no unique standard of time, but rather observers each have their own time as measured by clocks that they carry with them, it is possible for the journey to seem to be much shorter for the space travelers than for those who remain on earth. But there would not be much joy in returning from a spae voyage a few years older to find that everyone you had left behind was dead and gone thousands of years ago. So in order to have any human interest in their stories, science fiction writers had to suppose that we would one day discover how to travel faster than light. (161-2).
It’s important to note that, while Hawking is an unapologetic science fiction fan even once appearing on an episode of Star Trek, the passages immediately following this quote explains why these writers’ descriptions of travels through space and time were rather inaccurate or else impossible. The problem of human beings entering or attempting to move through the fourth dimension is either plagued by the actual science, or the fact that actually passing into that dimension requires individuals who are willing to do so without concern of what they’re leaving behind. As such I look back to Kubrick, but before I do I look to H.G. Wells.
Hawking actually bothers to mention Wells at the beginning of the chapter from which I received the previous quote, and the reason for this is Wells’s small novel The Time Machine. The book is a slim narrative but contained within its pages is in fact some of the earliest inclinations of the science that men like Steven Hawking would write into reality. Wells, it should be noted, is often considered one of the “founding fathers” of science fiction, and while it should be noted that there were other writers writing into similar territories and ideas, Wells work boosted the aesthetic of science fiction into something concrete and often inspired future engineers and scientists. Looking at just the opening pages of The Time Traveler it’s incredible to see the man’s foresight:
“Can a cube that does not last for any time at all have a real existence?”
Filby became pensive. “Clearly,” the Time Traveler proceeded,” any real body must have extension in four directions: it must have length, breadth, Thickness, and—Duration. But through a natural infirmity of the flesh, which I will explain to you in a moment, we incline to overlook this fact. There are really four dimensions, three which we call the three planes of Space, and a fourth, Time. There is, however, a tendency to draw an unreal distinction between the former three dimensions and the latter, because it happens that our consciousness moves intermittently in one direction along the latter from the beginning to the end of our lives. (4).
The” arrow of time” is a concept that is explored even outside the studies of physicists and mathematicians for poets and writers have been relying on that damned symbol almost since the first arrow was painted on a wall. It should be noted that part of the reason for this is that the shape is incredibly phallic, but I don’t have the time to explain that all of history is just men measuring dicks.
The Time Machine made its first appearance in 1895 and, according to some, effectively established the genre of science fiction though this last point is debatable. What’s still incredible about the book is how well Wells managed to explain out the idea of dimensions in just one paragraph. Employing the “arrow of time” in order to convince his companions about his ideas concerning the fourth dimension, The Time Traveler, who is never named by the narrator thus launching him into the territory of archetype, manages to begin the first question: can man step out of his comfort in the third dimension in order to see his potential.
That last word has been chosen carefully as I get closer to my later conclusions.
But along with his observations of the abstract concept of time the Time Traveler also makes a fascinating observation about human beings:
“Well, I do not mind telling you I have been at work upon this geometry of Four Dimensions for some time. Some of my results are curious. For instance, here is a portrait of a man at eight years old, another at fifteen, another at seventeen, another at twenty-three, and so on. All these are evidently sections, as it were, Three Dimensional representations of his Four-Dimensional being, which is a fixed and unalterable thing. (6).
From here the Time Traveler makes his argument that it would be possible for man to break free from the “arrow of time” from which he is forever caught by his perceptions, and, given the supposed hypothetical conditions, almost anything could be possible, specifically time travel. Because this is the late Victorian period and science had only proceeded so far The Time Traveler produces the Time Machine, and it’s important to note how that dates the book, but not necessarily in a bad way. It’s through an external device or machine that man is going to be able to achieve his destiny and this idea of man riding a kind of time traveling vessel is not outdated for the Back to the Future movies proved that this concept is still alive and well. What changed over time is revealed in this second quote.
The Time Traveler notes that human beings are three-dimensional beings but that is only because they haven’t unlocked the ability to see and observe their true potential. This is actually a brilliant idea being expressed that, while it has enormous philosophical implications, seems to counter act the very necessity of a time machine. Simply put, human beings are Fourth-Dimensional creatures they just haven’t realized how to actually tap into that reality. Human beings typically perceive their existence like a three dimensional cube. They recognize the length, width, and girth of the physical space they occupy, but because they can only perceive time as an arrow moving through time they don’t recognize that they are actually able to be a four-dimensional cube, a shape that, in its true form is malleable and constantly regenerating itself. I don’t want to suggest that this is immortality, but the direction two science fiction narratives have taken seems to be just that.
I had no real intention of reading Divinity because before I saw the advertisement in the back of Faith Vol.1 I had no idea that it actually existed. The image of an astronaut, later revealed to be a cosmonaut, caught me because despite my trepidation I do actually enjoy science fiction stories they just have to be grounded in or around planet Earth or its history. I asked my friend Michael (one of the three Michael’s I know and talk to regularly) what the book was about seeing as how he is the go-to Valiant expert. His exact description was: “I mean, I liked it. If you ever watched 2001 and were like “man, this sure would be better as a superhero comic”, well, that’s Divinity in a nutshell.” Given the fact that I loved 2001: A Space Odyssey (though let’s be fair I really like the idea of it far more than the actual film) I was intrigued and so I bought the book a week later and devoured it in four days. The only reason it took four was because I tend to read books one chapter at a time per day; it helps me get through a lot of books.
Divinity is about a cosmonaut named Abram Adams who assigned a top secret task of being launched into space. The U.S.S.R., desperate to defeat the Americans launches Adams to the very edge of the galaxy and when he arrives at his destination after years of isolation and Cryogenic stasis he encounters an energy force, a plane of white light that some would call god and other might refer to as the ground of being, that enters his body and alters his consciousness. Abrams effectively becomes a god but what’s most important is the fact that the story is told is a splintered fashion. Rather than follow Adams and then show MI-6 sending in The Eternal Warrior and X-O Manowar to take him down, Matt Kindt writes the book so that events are taking place in the past, in the present, in the future, in individual’s imaginations, and in people’s memories all at the same time.
Abram Adams hasn’t just become just a superhero, his has accessed his fourth dimensional being.
Reading Divinity I was struck by how much I thought of the graphic novel Watchman and my favorite character from that book Dr. Manhattan.
Watchmen was published through the years of 1986 through 1987 in twelve installments, which is rather fitting given the clock imagery deliberately inserted throughout the book. If the reader has never read it before that’s a terrible shame because there really are few great books in existence and Watchmen most certainly fits that category. The graphic novel follows a group of superheroes in the year 1985 right after one of them, the sociopath ex-government agent The Comedian, is thrown from his apartment window and killed. From there the characters Rorschach, Silk Specter, Night Owl, Ozymandias, and Dr. Manhattan each in their own way try to discover who is trying to kill former superheroes and why, while in the background a nuclear war is looming against the U.S.S.R. and President Richard Nixon seems only to be baiting and encouraging it. There’s also a pirate comic book that’s being read throughout the text but that’s for another essay. While each hero has at least one issue dedicated to them, it was the Dr. Manhattan chapter that always intrigued me (Rorschach’s is really fun too, though I use the word “fun” loosely) because it’s written from his perspective after he retreats from planet earth to live on Mars. Dr. Manhattan is more or less a god and became so after he was working on a particle physics experiment that went horribly wrong and ripped every atom of his body apart. He eventually pulled himself back together and became Dr. Manhattan, but what’s most important about his character’s chapter is its narrative structure.
Like Divinity, Dr. Manhattan is experiencing the past, present, and future seemingly all at the same time and looking at just a few passages from the book it becomes clear that his perception of time far exceeds human understanding.
I should finally address my contester however, for they remind me that most people cannot or will not perceive anything outside their own dimension. What the point, or why should I care about books that are written about people outside of my own perception? It’s impossible for human beings to break free from the “arrow of time” and spending your life trying clearly will only leave you isolated or destroyed or alienated from society, so why not try and enjoy your life?
These are all excellent points, and to be fair I’m not sure I have a satisfying answer to them. Carpe Diem, or seize the day, may be a platitude but it’s one that leaves average people generally satisfied and happy with their lives. Human beings have yet to reach a point in their evolution so that they would be able to access the Fourth-Dimensional being that they are, and it’s likely that such a stage is hundreds, if not thousands, of years away anyway, but books and films like Divinity, The Time Machine, Watchmen, and even 2001: A Space Odyssey try to offer up ideas of how human beings might access that next level. For the most part it seems that humans will have to wait until a supernatural entity, whether it’s the black monolith or the white plane, arrives and bestows knowledge of being to them, but at least in the case of Watchmen and The Time Machine there’s an idea that, through their own devices, humans might make the next step themselves. Even if it is through technology, humans might be able to expand their awareness and being and that’s an important idea, because in many ways we’re already trying to do just that.
Steven Hawking ends A Brief History of Time with a thought concerning the future of physics, philosophy, and possibly that of mankind:
Up to now, most scientists have been too occupied with the development of new theories that describe what the universe is to ask the question why. On the other hand, the people who business it is to ask why, the philosophers, have not been able to keep up with the advancements of scientific theories.
He concludes then:
However, if we do discover a complete theory, it should in time be understandable in broad principle by everyone, not just a few scientists. Then we shall all, philosophers, scientists, and just ordinary people, be able to take part in the discussion of the question why it is we and the universe exist. If we find the answer to that, it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason-for then we would know the mind of God. (191).
The purpose of science fiction is largely to ask questions either about the nature of human beings, or their future. While many have taken the opportunity to explore thought experiments and the more morbid conclusions concerning the future of humanity a few select have decided to question what if human beings could become more and explore a new dimension of being? A while the general conclusion is that the result of this experiment would result in alienation or some kind of self-destruction I would argue that that reaction is rooted more in those left behind than those moving forward.
The closest success human beings have made in understanding this new state of being is fiction, and that’s perhaps the most telling but also the most encouraging. Scientific enterprise depends upon imagination, and as more and more writers explore the notions of time travel and accessing new states of being, so too will scientists who will change our world in ways we can’t possibly even imagine.
Though if we ever get to the point where we start sending Bender back in time to steal precious masterpieces, we may have taken it a step too far.
*Writer’s Note*
While I was working on this review I found this essay on The New Yorker Website. Enjoy:
http://www.newyorker.com/culture/richard-brody/hearing-and-seeing-2001-a-space-odyssey-anew
**Writer’s Note**
I’ve included links to three videos below. The first is the “star gate” sequence of 2001: A Space Odyssey
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ou6JNQwPWE0
The second link is the final three minutes of the film in which the astronaut Dave ascends to a new state of being:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AXS8P0HksQo
I’ve also found a small documentary a YouTuber produced in which he explains the Monolith. This interpretation, as he notes, created a bit of a controversy because many fans loved the idea but certain film scholars didn’t. I’ve posted Part 1 here:
08 Monday Aug 2016
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anthropology, Art, Charles Darwin, fossils, Graduate Student, headband, Lesbianism, Original Drawing, Professor, Sexual politics, Sexuality, skulls
Dr. Patricia Pottleswain
26 December 2015
07 Sunday Aug 2016
Posted Film Review, horror, Literature, Novels, Science, science fiction
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"More Human than Human", "What knockers!", Alchemy, Ego, Engineer, Epistolary Novel, ethics, Fall Out 4, fear, fear of death, Film, film review, frame narrative, Frankenstein, George Gordon Lord Byron, Harry Potter, horror, isolation, Literature, Margot Robbie, Mary Shelley, Novel, Parents, Percy Shelley, Peter Weyland, Philosopher's Stone/Sorcerer's Stone, Prometheus, Ridley Scott, Robert Walton, Robot, Science, Science Ethics, science fiction, The Institute, Victor Frankenstein, Young Frankenstein
Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay
To Mould me man? Did I solicit thee
From darkness to promote me?—
—Paradise Lost, Milton
For the record the best Frankenstein film to date remains Young Frankenstein. The line, “Wow, what knockers!” will be carved on the edifice of time even if I have to fight to my last breath. Then again Wishbone was my first introduction to Frankenstein and he was, and probably still is, the best Victor Frankenstein in cinema history. I remember watching the film for the first time with my dad, and true to form he would often whisper the line before the actor or actress would. This habit, which I happened to pick up from the old man, may be annoying to some but I enjoyed it and still depend on it for it’s one of the traits that makes my father the man he is. Saying the lines early always impressed me as a kid, because it seemed like dad possessed some kind of special knowledge about the world that I didn’t, and while that may sound corny I truly attest to the fact that it impressed the shit out of me. One of the reasons I wanted to become an intellectual was because of Mom and Dad and Papa (my grandfather); because all three of them spoke with such knowledge about books, films, politics, history, and that knowledge was something I desired for myself. I wanted to be the guy who knew and understood things. I looked to my parents for guidance about what it meant to be a human being.
Every parent fucks up in some form or fashion, and this is partly the reason why I am avoiding becoming a parent as long as I can. My wife has just signed on to become a high school teacher, and while I search for jobs and do everything in my power to avoid working in retail, she’s begun to talk about babies more and more as a concrete reality rather than abstract concept. I don’t mind children for the most part, in fact most of the ones I’ve met are actually pretty fascinating, but I just can’t stand babies. I also live in mortal terror of fucking my children up, because to be honest, I think there are more level headed men out there more qualified to be fathers than me.
The idea of parental responsibility reminds me that around three weeks ago I wrote a review of the movie Prometheus. By the end of that essay I felt like I had mostly bounced around the real meat of the film rather than actually digging into a real analysis, but this is a familiar sensation whenever I write, and looking at it in hindsight I’m a little more forgiving of my work. What gnawed at me while I was arranging the pictures was the idea that I had missed the chance to develop on more idea in the story which is the idea of parental responsibility, or more accurately creative responsibility. This also reminded me of the novel Frankenstein by Mary Shelley.
It also reminds me my wife told me to stop posting pictures of Margot Robbie lest I suffer her immortal wrath, but she never reads any of my work anyway so I might as well indulge where I can.
If my reader is unfamiliar with the plot of Frankenstein it would not be terribly surprising for no director to date has managed to film an accurate retelling of the novel, and since most people watch television or movies rather than reading books it’s most likely that few if any actually know the real plot. The history behind the book should be told first for it’s actually rather fascinating, or at least it’s fascinating to me. The book itself came about because Mary, and her soon-to-be husband Percy Shelly, were visiting Lord Byron at the Villa Diodati in Geneva (this was shortly after Byron was “exiled” from Britain for having an affair with his step-sister). During a particularly stormy night they decided to tell ghost stories, and after going to sleep, so the story goes, Mary Shelley was tormented by a nightmare of an inhuman eye opening at staring at her. She began a draft of a story and Byron so loved it that he insisted she write the rest of it while he went with Percy off to the mountains, most likely so that the two of them could bang.
As a professor of mine once explained this is why the 1818 version is considered the more “accurate” version because in the re-writes in 1831 the character of Victor, who’s largely believed to be inspired by Percy, is presented as not so much of a douchebag.
The novel is told through three narrators and is presented through what’s known as frame narrative. This is a framing technique used by some writers and probably was best used in the movie The Princess Bride. The entire novel is actually written within a letter, making it an epistolary novel in case you forgot what your English Lit professor told you would be on the exam, written by a man named Robert Walton, an explorer who seeks fame and fortune by finding a new trading route through the Northwest passage. His intentions possess some purity however, for while the glory would be nice, Walton’s desire is to help humanity and this intention will be seen again and not just in Frankenstein.
Walton writes to his sister:
I shall satiate my ardent curiosity with the sight of a part of the world never before visited, and may tread a land never before imprinted by the foot of man. These are my enticements, and they are sufficient to conquer ask fear of danger or death, and to induce me to commence this laborious voyage with the joy a child feels when he embarks in a little boat, with his holiday mates, on an expedition of discovery up his native river. But, supposing all these conjectures to be false, you cannot contest the inestimable benefit which I shall confer upon all mankind to the last generation, by discovering a passage near the pole to those countries, to reach which at present so many mortals are requisite; or by ascertaining the secret of the magnet, which, it at all possible, can only be effected by an undertaking such as mine. (6).
Walton’s ego is as apparent as his eventual failure, for men of passion have often dreamed of finding a passage through the north and failed miserably. What’s important in this passage however is how Walton’s ego speaks before his intentions. He speaks a great deal about his passions for discovery first before then recognizing and recording the larger benefit it will have on humanity. This arrangement is revealing but also a recurring theme throughout the novel Frankenstein for almost every character possesses some kind of selfishness that drives their actions before their contemplation. In a previous essay I spoke about the term metacognition, thinking about thinking, and looking over the novel it becomes clear that none of the characters take the chance to observe their behavior to determine its quality. Looking at the protagonist Victor Frankenstein, his motivations are just as troublesome as Walter’s.
Victor is the son of a rich Genevan family, and from a young age the man is possessed by a fierce intelligence and a desire for knowledge. During a family vacation Victor discovers the works of the medieval Alchemists, and because he wishes to become a scientist, he embraces many of the old masters. Alchemists are something one usually only encounters in Final Fantasy games or else at a Wiccan convention, but if the reader doesn’t know what one is an Alchemist was something akin to a wizard or soothsayer. Most of the “philosophy,” and I use that word lightly, has to deal with transmutation: the transforming of minerals and objects into other materials. If the reader has ever read the Harry Potter Series the Sorcerer’s Stone, or to my British readers Philosopher’s stone (Americans generally distrust Philosopher’s yet not Sorcerers for some reason), the stone that is referenced and eventually found beneath Fluffy’s trapdoor is rooted in an ancient Alchemical concept. Victor becomes absorbed in these medieval lessons reading voraciously until his mother dies of scarlet fever just a few weeks before he’s about to leave for the University in Ingolstadt. While there he learns that all of his learning is outdated and new ideas such as physics and chemistry are replacing these old concepts, but Victor holds to his early learning eventually deciding to make a name for himself in defeating death.
Victor describes to Walton his motivations, after Walton finds him out on the ice during his ship’s travel north:
Life and death appeared to me ideal bounds, which I should first break through, and pour a torrent of light into our dark world. A new species would bless me as its creator and source; many happy and excellent natures would owe their being to me. No father could claim the gratitude of his child so completely as I should deserve their’s. Persuing these reflections, I thought, that if I could bestow animation upon lifeless matter, I might in process of time (although I now found it impossible) renew life where death had apparently devoted the body to corruption. (34).
Most people just take up Ultimate Frisbee during Grad School, though to be fair the people that do so are only moderately less of a douchebag that Victor. Jokes aside this passage precedes Victor’s description of his life as he assembled the ill-fated and iconic “Creature” by robbing slaughterhouses, charnel houses, and even graves for body parts which he assembles in an apartment he rents out before eventually bringing said “Creature” to life.
At this point my reader may be wondering what’s the point? So what if the characters in Frankenstein are ego driven jerks who wind up failing miserably? What does that have to do with being a parent?
Before I can really answer that I have to look at the film Prometheus again. I wrote and published an essay about the film recently and in that article my concern was to examine two themes in the film. The first was how the film explored the origins of life, and the second was the notion of entitlement. Looking back then to Frankenstein, these ideas are not only similar they’re almost exact replicas.
In a deleted opening scene to the film Peter Weyland is giving a stadium sized TED Talk about his company’s developments into cybernetics, and if the reader pays attention they’ll note a few similarities between his speech and Victor’s:
Peter Weyland: [from TED Talks viral video] 100,000 BC: stone tools. 4,000 BC: the wheel. 900 AD: gunpowder – bit of a game changer, that one. 19th century: eureka, the lightbulb! 20th century: the automobile, television, nuclear weapons, spacecrafts, Internet. 21st century: biotech, nanotech, fusion and fission and M theory – and THAT, was just the first decade! We are now three months into the year of our Lord, 2023. At this moment of our civilization, we can create cybernetic individuals, who in just a few short years will be completely indistinguishable from us. Which leads to an obvious conclusion: WE are the gods now.
Pater Weyland doesn’t play a significant role in the plot, in fact he only has a few moments in the actual film. His character serves the important function however of mirroring Elizabeth Shaw and Charlie Holloway, the scientists who were looking for the Engineers hoping to discover the origin of life and determine where human beings actually come from. Weyland’s desire is ultimately to overcome death, and while it’s never said out loud, Shaw’s motivation isn’t that different, but looking at Weyland in relation to Victor, both the novel and the film demonstrate a fundamental weakness of human beings: the fear of death.
Victor Frankenstein lost his mother just a few days before he left for the university and once he finds himself in a new environment, away from his family and friends, and is informed everything he has learned has been rejected as rubbish, the man retreats into himself. Human beings are by nature a narcissistic species and it’s through interaction that we are able to overcome our sense of isolation and ego and develop a personality in relation to others. Victor doesn’t develop any real connections outside of himself and so he decides to attempt to overcome death. Likewise, with Peter Weyland, while he leads a massive intergalactic corporation his position isolates himself and so rather than finding some kind of solace in his relation to the rest of humanity he retreats into himself. This isolation is what eventually leads to these men’s downfall, because rather than creating relationships that would provide a healthy outlet for their egos, they eventually are driven to perpetuate their existence through their creations.
By creating life however Victor becomes a parent, and in that title is an inevitability that I listed out before: every parent fucks up in some form or fashion. Looking at Prometheus there’s two exchanges that reveal this. Weyland has spearheaded the Cybernetic movement creating synthetic human beings like David. Charlie, drunk and frustrated at the seeming failure of the mission, speaks to David:
Charlie Holloway: What we hoped to achieve was to meet our makers. To get answers. Why they even made us in the first place.
David: Why do you think your people made me?
Charlie Holloway: We made you because we could.
David: Can you imagine how disappointing it would be for you to hear the same thing from your creator?
Charlie Holloway: I guess it’s good you can’t be disappointed.
Later in the film, after Charlie has died and Shaw has removed the squid from her stomach, she talks with David:
Elizabeth Shaw: What happens when Weyland is not around to program you anymore?
David: I suppose I’ll be free.
Elizabeth Shaw: You want that?
David: “Want”? Not a concept I’m familiar with. That being said, doesn’t everyone want their parents dead?
Elizabeth Shaw: I didn’t.
Looking at Weyland and David there is no intimacy between the two men, and before my reader objects and says “He’s a flippin robot” I object that that is immaterial.
Over the last few months I’ve been playing Fallout 4, the latest science fiction game from Bethesda and in the game is an organization called The Institute. Without starting a controversy, I have never found the Institute to be a sympathetic figure at all principally for the fact that, like Weyland Corp, the organization creates synthetic human beings and treats them like property rather than human beings. Again my reader objects “They’re flippin robots” but once again I object. There’s a difference between a drone and a synthetic human being made of meat and independent consciousness and the difference is the fact that we label the latter a “human being.” Without resorting to too many clichés (specifically the old “more human than human”) humans imprint and replicate themselves upon the space and place they operate in, and as robotics has progressed two camps have emerged. Boston Dynamics has developed humanoid robots designed for combat, and in Asia robotics is principally being channeled into the sex industry. It’s clear that regardless of the purpose human beings will continue to follow the root etymology of the word robot which means slaves. This is all just a way of saying that human beings are driven to create more realistic robots, but to that I ask the question:
To what purpose? If creating robots is simply to improve our lives, what benefit can come about by having them “synthetic” human beings? I don’t have an answer to this question other than what Charlie offered, “Because we can.”
Both Weyland and Victor end up attempting to overcome death out of mortal terror, and while doing so they end up creating monsters that wreak havoc upon humanity. Rather than recognize the power they have created, and rather than recognize the humanity of their “children” they wind up Othering them and fleeing from their responsibility as creators.
Looking at the “children” in Prometheus and Frankenstein there is a remarkable similarity. When the Creature speaks to Victor on the Glacier he wails:
Oh! My creator, make me happy; let me feel gratitude towards you for one benefit! Let me see that I excite sympathy of some existing thing; do not deny me my request! (112).
And likewise when Weyland, David, and Shaw meet the Engineer she asks it:
Elizabeth Shaw: [to the Engineer] Why do you hate us?
Hopefully by now I have addressed my contester’s points. The dynamics taking place in Prometheus and Frankenstein are those between creators and creations, parents and children. Each tries to understand the nature of the other but in both stories there is too much of a power dynamic in place. Rather than nurture or assume responsibility Weyland and Victor (and in some way the Engineers) pursue their egos hoping desperately that their creations will help them overcome the grim reality of death.
Weyland and Victor are ultimately just two scared men afraid of death and their “children” suffer for it. Whenever I would read Frankenstein for school I was always taught that the key to Victor’s downfall was his lack of “domestic affection.” I can’t honestly say that being affectionate to a robot would have kept Elizabeth Shaw from losing Charlie, or Victor being affectionate to his “Creature” would have spared Elizabeth, but the reader can be sure in the knowledge that loving their own children will pay off in the end.
It’s the time and self-sacrifice that matters, and, to be real here, changing diapers and singing along to Barnie CDs does wonders for reducing the ego to manageable levels.
*Writer Notes*
The Sorcerer’s stone/Philosopher’s stone, as mentioned above, was an object of fascination for many people, including Issac Newton. While the man was rigidly held, almost dogmatically so, to the principles of Enlightenment reason between his discoveries and writings of mathematics he indulged frequently in alchemy trying to find the Philosopher’s stone. The stone was supposed to hold the ability to transmute any known object into pure gold.
Now as to why American publishing companies wanted to change Philosopher’s stone to Sorcerer’s stone, the only explanation I can guess at is what I suggested in the essay. Americans distrust Philosophers, because on the whole philosophers don’t get jobs. Sorcerers on the other hand make people think about C.S. Lewis and Angela Lansbury which is sweet harmless fun…or at least it is until Preachers from the south believe the books are about witchcraft.
27 Wednesday Jul 2016
Posted Book Review, Essay, History, Literature, Satire/Humor, Science
inTags
A Letter to a Royal Academy, Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip With David Foster Wallace, Aristotle, Benjamin Franklin, Benjamin Franklin: An American Life, biological arguments, Book Review, Carl Japikse, Catch-22, Essay, Family Guy, fart jokes, Fart Proudly, farting, fathers, Founding Father, Founding Fathers Purity Myth, history, Literature, Mouse Trap, On Rhetoric, Playboy, Playboy Interview, Playboy September 2009, Satire, satisfaction, Science, Seth McFarlane, The Oath, Walter Isaacson
A title like Fart Proudly grabs you immediately and you realize that you not only need to read the book, you have to own it. The fact that it’s written by Benjamin Franklin and actually taught in college classrooms is just the way you defend it when you mother tsk tsk’s you when she catches you reading it. Your mother anyway, my mother loved the book and wanted to read it herself.
I read Fart Proudly in its entirety during graduate school when I needed an early American Lit course and decided to spend my semester reading famous American speeches, and while that semester was largely spent reading and dissecting Native American oratory, I made sure that Fart Proudly was on the reading list. My professor laughed, but didn’t object, for she often used the book when teaching the class to undergraduate students and in her own words, “The title just beckons.” I hadn’t come across the book through her class I’m ashamed to admit (she had a reputation as being one of the most difficult professors and so I pussied out), but actually through a friend who was taking the class. She had her books spread out over one of the tables in the writing center, a not uncommon sight for everyone did this at some point, and because I am the self-declared book whore I had to see what she was reading. Dr. Beebe had been right, the “title just beckons,” and so I picked the book up while my friend worked on her paper and I read a few of the passages.
I mean this without hyperbole, I actually laughed out loud. This is a rare occurrence, for while I have found several books funny, there’s only been two or three times a book has actually made me laugh out loud, the other two being Catch-22 and Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip With David Foster Wallace. Fart Proudly is a book of rich and deep humanity, because it tries only to poke fun at day to day life, including its more morose moments. Take for instance the small poem The Oath:
Luke, on his dying Bed, embraced his Wife,
And begged one Favour: Swear, my dearest Life,
Swear, if you love me, never more to wed,
Nor take a second Husband to your Bed.
Anne dropt a Tear. You know, my dear, says she,
Your least Desires have still been Laws to me;
But from the Oath, I beg you’d me excuse;
For I’m already promised to John Hughes. (30).
It’s passages like this that remind me I want to go back and pursue my degree in American history, for it would provide me plenty of excuse to study Benjamin Franklin. Growing up in America the Founding Fathers are figures of contention for when you’re young the typical indoctrination is that the writers of the Declaration of Independence were perfect beings, devoid of flaws or human weakness. This image becomes contrasted as you age and experience the first “real” history teacher, who begins to show chinks in the armor of these ideal beings, and then eventually students will encounter teachers who will teach them that these men were slave owners, drunks, and hypocrites. Before the reader assumes I’m going to side with any one of them, I have to disappoint because my position is that all of these interpretations hold value. George Washington and Thomas Jefferson did in fact own slaves, and John Adams was boring at parties (seriously who wants to play Mousetrap at a kegger? The damn game never works). These are facts that can’t be denied, but I would remind the reader that there is nothing so suspect as judging people in past with contemporary standards. I’m not excusing or condoning the owning of slaves, I’m just asking the reader to remember that the idea that slaves were people too was a paradigm that was slowly gaining in traction.
My aim isn’t to discuss the complexities and nuances inherent to studying and arguing about Colonial American historical discourse, because like the title suggests, this article is about the noble art of farting. I just want the reader to understand what model of man I’m working with here before I get into the book.
Benjamin Franklin is the troublesome founding father for many Americans, for while pundits on Fox news try desperately to pretend like the man doesn’t exist, and while Liberals try to turn him into some kind of enlightened genius plagued by rumors of his sexual voraciousness, Benjamin Franklin, the man tends to get lost. Just the other day I decided to begin a biography of Franklin, not his autobiography which I started once and had to stop because of school and Fraggle Rock (it was a weird weekend), but instead Benjamin Franklin: An American Life by Walter Isaacson. Two chapters in and already the book is proving to be one of the best financial decisions of my life, and when approaching the life of Franklin Isaacson offers up what is in my mind, one of the best examples of what good biography should do:
Benjamin Franklin is the founding father who winks at us. George Washington’s colleagues found it hard to imagine touching the austere general on the shoulder, and we would find it even more so today. Jefferson and Adams are just as intimidating. But Ben Franklin, that ambitious urban entrepreneur, seems made of flesh rather than of marble, addressable by nickname, and he turns to us from history’s stage with eyes that twinkle from behind those newfangled spectacles. He speaks to us, through his letters and hoaxes and autobiography, not with ortund rhetoric but with a chattiness and clever irony that is very contemporary, sometimes unnervingly so. We see his reflection in our own time. (2).
It’s this spirit of man who wrote the essays, letters, reviews, and poems found within Fart Proudly, and the reason why I return to the book again and again. Washington is a man made of marble and legend; Franklin as a man is as much a scholar as he is a vulgarian, and for this he earns my eternal respect.
Looking through the book the best selection to choose from, for it best represents the book as a whole and even provides the inspiration for the title of the slim tome, is A Letter to a Royal Academy. Franklin studied the natural world throughout his life, and these observations eventually lead to him becoming one of the best scientists of his generation. He often read and contributed to scientific societies and documents, and in A Letter to a Royal Academy, which was in fact a real letter to a friend, Franklin is able to demonstrate his passion for science, as well poke a little fun at the institution of the Academy.
He says, with tongue firmly in cheek:
It is universally well known, that in digesting out common food, there is created or produced in the bowels of human creatures, a great quantity of wind.
That the permitting this air to escape and mix with the atmosphere, is usually offensive to the company, from the fetid smell that accompanies it.
That all well-bred people therefore, to avoid giving such offense, forcibly restrain the efforts of nature to discharge that wind.
That so retained contrary to nature, it not only gives frequently great present pain, but occasions future diseases, such as habitual cholics, ruptures, tympanies, &tc, often destructive for the constitution, & sometimes of life itself.
Were it not for the odiously offensive smell accompanying such escapades, polite people would probably be under no more restraint in discharging such wind in company, than they are in spitting, or in blowing their noses. (15).
It’s hard to put into words painful and pleasant recognition. I often get into debates with friends and colleagues who argue that fart jokes aren’t terribly funny, and while there are individuals who legitimately suffer from medical problems that result in uncontrollable flatulence who understandably don’t find farts terribly amusing, most of the criticism of fart jokes, and likewise farts themselves, is that enjoying them is an indication of stupidity or immaturity. I’ve written at length about my love for the television show Family Guy, which relies on farts for a majority of its comedy, and my love for the show is often looked upon as suspect. Farts smell bad, sometimes, and Franklin tries to argue that the only reason farts bother people as much as they do is because of that smell. If farts possessed no odor at all, he argues, then farting would be no different than sneezing or coughing, though people would still probably tell you to shush in a movie theatre.
Franklin’s creative aim in the letter however is scientific and so he makes the following proposal:
My Prize question therefore should be, To discover some drug wholesome and not disagreeable, to be mixed with our common food, or sauces, that shall render the natural discharges, of wind from our bodies, not only inoffensive, but agreeable as perfumes. (15).
The idea of pills that make farts smell better at first sounds ridiculous until you remember that there are pills on the market designed to make penises stiffer. Letter to a Royal Academy is not mocking science so much as it is mocking the standards of “moral” or “proper” behavior. In many ways Franklin’s letter is akin to On the Importance of Being Ernest by Oscar Wilde, for the Letter is in essence a “comedy of manners.” Franklin is poking fun at humanity who regard farts as monstrous or unwholesome despite the fact that, scientifically speaking, there’s nothing inherently wrong with farting. In fact, as the previous quote demonstrated, farts are a natural and healthy part of every individual biology.
To return to Family Guy for a moment, I remember a time when I actually received Playboy magazine on a regular basis (before they decided to cut the nudity from their magazine and become, I don’t know what) and my favorite part of the magazine was actually the Interview. I still hold to this day the September 2009 copy because the interview was with Seth McFaralane, a man who has become not just as a formative influence upon my life, but who is also in his own way reminding me why I enjoy Rat Pack music so much. At one point in the interview he’s asked about his “emotional age” and this brings up the topic of fart jokes on Family Guy.
Playboy: What would you say is your emotional age?
McFarlane: Maybe 97
Playboy: Really? It seems a lot more adolescent than that.
McFarlane: Yeah, it’s sort of a combination of 97 and 12. If somebody farts, I can get to laughing so hard I can’t breathe. But I sure do love the music of Nelson Riddle. I love Woody Allen movies, and I love watching Jackass. We’ve been criticized for being too crude and lowbrow on Family Guy. What in the world is wrong with that? That kind of laughter releases the healthiest endorphins. There’s something puritanical about people who object to fart jokes or shit jokes. It’s that puritanical idea that you shouldn’t have sex because it feels good—and that’s a sin. How can anything that makes you laugh that hard be bad in any way unless it’s harming somebody? Farts are good; they clean you out. (34).
McFarlane and Franklin come together beautifully then for both men advocate the release of farts, but more importantly the release of the elitism that surrounds farts. Rather than embrace biology, and laugh off what can be the most annoying and obnoxious part of our biology, there is a section of humanity that tries to ignore the cold (though sometimes hot if you’ve eaten spicy foods) reality of their bodies. The body digests food through a process of cellular respiration and during that process a fair amount of carbon dioxide and methane is produced, and because our species has yet to find a way to release that gas without producing funny smells and sounds, we’re all slaves to our biology which is rather loud, though sometimes sounds like Louis Armstrong’s trumpet. Rather than mourn this reality, or suggest that those who try to laugh off the pain of embarrassment are uncultured and immature, the only healthy approach is to laugh and remind yourself that life is absurd and ridiculous.
By purging your body of the fart, and the idea that there’s something wrong with farting, a real comfort arrives.
Franklin embraces this model of hedonism, and in fact explains it out as the more sage philosophic reality:
Are there twenty men in Europe at this day, the happier, or even easier, for any knowledge they have picked out of Aristotle? What comfort can the vortices of Descartes give to a man who has whirlwinds in his bowels. The knowledge of Newton’s mutual attraction of the particles of matter, can it afford ease t him who is racked by their mutual repulsion, and the cruel distention it occasions? The please arising to a few philosophers, from seeing, a few times in their life, the threads of light untwisted, and separated by the Newtonian Prism into seven colours[sic], can it be compared with the ease and comfort evert man living might feel seven times a day, by discharging freely the wing from his bowels? (17).
I am an avid reader, but I must concede to Franklin’s argument for the release of a fart has tended to provide more satisfaction to me than ever reading Aristotle. In fact, to be honest, between the choice of re-reading On Rhetoric again or laying a fart I would probably choose the fart. This is not because I don’t believe On Rhetoric has no merit as an intellectual product, but if my aim is to be happy and comfortable farting will honestly, realistically provide me with more comfort for afterwards I will probably laugh, move on with my life, and then eventually pick up On Rhetoric and learn about what makes Oedipus the King such an amazing play.
Fart Proudly offers up numerous essays that deal frankly with issues of sex, farting, and parodies of the seemingly endless rules and values of cultured society, and once again I look to Franklin the man rather than the “founding father.”
I’m a product of my time, for the last words always inspire distrust, because those people who talk about what “the founding fathers would have wanted” always come with their own agendas and the “fathers” are merely the justification for whatever action is desired. It all boils down to elitism and personal bias, and this is odious to me as an American because I am a patriot, and I am a man who understands that “fathers” tend to be human creatures; fathers are anything but ideal in this way. My father and grandfathers taught me plenty of lessons about life and liberty, but they also taught me the important lessons: like how to spit, where to pee in the woods, if you have to take a shit what do you use (or not use) to wipe your ass, and of course, what to say when you eventually fart. For the record I always taught to blame “frogs,” their croaks sounded suspiciously like the farts of a grown man who would laugh when mom sighed and told me grab him another beer.
Farting is a human act. It levels you in your reality and body and prevents you from developing an asinine elitism that is in fact only having your head up your ass. Fart Proudly, Franklin (really Carl Japikse the editor), argues, because there really isn’t any other way to that will keep you sane.
*Writer’s Note*
Because I like fart jokes, having a steady supply of them on hand is of a must and so I’ve provided a link below of one or two websites that provide the reader with all the fart jokes their hearts and gum could ever desire. Enjoy:
http://www.short-funny.com/fart-jokes.php
13 Wednesday Jul 2016
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Science! Help Your Government Today!
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