R. Scott Bakker's Blog, page 38

Definition of the Day – Leaf Fan: a convenient way for the rest of the world to feel better about themselves (as in, "It could be worse, you could be a Leaf Fan," or, "You may have lost the Cup, but at least you're not a Leaf Fan," or, "Your penis fell off, rolled through spilled acid and broken glass before dropping into a storm sewer, but at least…" You get the picture).

Like so many others, I watch The Hockey Night in Canada every Saturday night I can manage. I typically suffer through the first game–the Leaf game, the one that matters–and then relax for the second, which more often than not, features the Vancouver Canucks. I almost feel West Coast watching it. No calculating the standings. No fretting over the Kessel trade, or whether Reimer is truly the 'real deal' (as I think he is). And best of all, no Don Cherry peddling the obvious as hockey insight and wisdom. Just a cast of players that I've watched grow into the game over the years, playing hard and brilliant hockey in front of a goal-tending giant.

For as long as I can remember, the Vancouver Canucks have been my 'number two team.' The great thing about watching your number two team is–paradoxically enough–the absence of passion. It allows you to see the game through all your hopes and gripes and worries. These are the games where you can turn the volume down and actually communicate with your friends: ponder the fate of Phoenix, argue about the way risk-management mania is slowly locking down the world, and even, on rare, awkward occasions, ask how the wife and kids are doing…

Only to shout, "Did you see that? Did you see that play?" when the Sedins do something remarkable and unprecedented. "Ohmigod! How? How is that possible?"

Every once in awhile my wife heckles me for some of the harsher things I say about Ottawa and Montreal, and I have to remind her that the great thing about sports–the great gift–is the ability to love and hate without reasons. I hate them and they hate me–so be it. Game on, motherfucker. Sports are tribal. They predate history and civilization. They speak with an uncluttered voice. And in this country, at least, that voice is singular. With the NFL all the loyalties are imported, which makes it a happy coincidence when you and your buddies are rooting for the same team. Not so with the NHL, where the entire country can become a home ice arena.

Set aside all the hokey analysis, all the corporate banners and the brainwashing parade of commercials, and you will see that hockey is about finding community in simplicity. Consummate grace wedded to abject savagery. Sheer will pitted against shit luck–and at times even fate. Men on knives riding lines of impact and injury.

And in a special sport, the Vancouver Canucks are most definitely a special team, one unlike any the game has seen. Ryan Kesler is a beast. The Sedin twins are artistes. And Roberto Luongo is stone-cold obstruction. It's been a long time since I've been this excited by a playoff run: I had such high hopes I even dared use the 'destiny' word on occasion!

But as the playoffs progressed, I became more and more worried (and mystified) that every single goal that Vancouver scored came off of their sticks: not one garbage goal scored the entire playoffs (at least that I could remember).  And precious few softies–gifts from the opposing goaltender. And in this final series, it seemed they couldn't even buy a lucky bounce! Almost all their goals (with the exception of the San Jose series) came as the result Herculean, and at times Sisyphian, efforts. They would finally find a way to solve Rinne, only to have a puck break-dance into their own net.

At every turn they had to rely on skill and effort–and I think it's a testament to the team that they made it as far as they did.

But you had the feeling that they were skating with their pockets turned inside out against Boston. Luck. Luck was the only way they were going to slip pucks by Tim Thomas, especially once Coach Claude Julian took their skill out of the equation. Boston ripped a page out of Chicago's playbook, even going so far as to turn Marchand into a Boland clone. They made attitude–contempt and intimidation–the centerpiece of their game plan, and the Canucks made the mistake of obliging them. The series got nasty–it's one of the ugliest Cup Finals I can remember in a long time.

In terms of the mechanics of the game on the ice, it was like watching replays from the old clutch-and-grab days–back when the Sedins never seemed anything special. The only exception was the San Jose series, where the referees decided to officiate according to the rulebook after the nastiness of the opening. It's no coincidence the twins shined that series.

The Canucks almost did it, came close enough to break a million hearts. But I can't help but feel that Vancouver is still a team built to win regular seasons, and to wilt when the whistles hang dry. And it's a crying shame–truly. All the commentators go on and on about 'letting them play,' and I can't help but wonder whether we're watching the same brawl. The Canucks are capable of producing wonders when the rules are enforced (and I mean this seriously: they have done things I've never before seen on the ice), playing with a level of skill and speed that I'm starting to think Lord Stanley will never have a chance to see.

The Grinders won this one. Good for Recchi. Good for Kaberle. Otherwise, man, I hate the Bruins!

Aphorism of the Day: Aspiration is what makes the world spin in greedy circles.

This is just a stab at clarifying some points that have come up in your comments.

What's literary is any competent text-induced semantic effect that is counter-cultural, which is to say, artfully cuts against the received assumptions of real readers. My argument is that the rules of resemblance that we presently use to define 'literature,' are producing fewer and fewer of these effects because of rapidly changing social, economic, and technological conditions: our transformation into an 'e-Harmony World.' The reason I continually fret about the commercial utility of this blog is simply because I've never left my old working class ears behind: I am keenly aware how pompous this must sound, especially to many readers of genre. "Just fuckin write, will you? Get. Over. Yourself. I mean, really? Who gives a shit about all this?"

Well, anyone who wants to be part of the solution. Cultural transformation requires a horde of 'pompous geeks' like me pulling the rope in a different direction. And this is just to say that it requires a great amount of faith. A cause.

A guess worth taking risks for.

Nothing is ideologically inert. All communication encodes assumptions. And everybody possesses a hardwired tendency to prefer confirmation. These aren't controversial claims: they're simply fact.

If the ideology you read is invisible to you, it usually means that it's your ideology, by and large. Entertainment reinforces implicit values and assumptions. It will always be the status quo preference, for both writers and readers (but this simply means the pompous geeks have that much more work to do).

I happen to think that much entertainment is relatively innocuous simply because I don't think all our values are problematic. Some of it may even be 'helpful' in a personal (as opposed to) a social sense. But I also think that our culture is caught in a kind of paradoxical positive feedback trap: the technologies that were supposed to universalize access to dissenting points of view have actually had a contrary effect, facilitating the pairing of values and consumers instead. Fox News was just the beginning. In the old, geo-semantically constrained world, if you wanted to debate you had to talk to your neighbour, who could believe any old thing. You had to take what you could get, and you found yourself dragged over the rough rocks of dissent as a result. Nowadays, you tell your neighbour to go fuck himself, or 'politely refrain' from discussing anything divisive, and go online to haggle cultural minutae with people who generally share your values and interests.

Information technology has rendered the cultural industry far more responsive consumer desire–which sounds like a good thing until you realize how often that desire is the product of our innate cognitive shortcomings. Information technology is allowing the markets to exploit our weaknesses–and at a time when we need to be as clearheaded as can be.

And remember, markets, as the primary organizing principle of our society, are the keel of culture. A definition of fantasy could be, the satisfaction of desire absent the constraint of reality. In this sense, you can say that information technology is facilitating the growth of a new, even more extreme fantasy culture (I say 'more extreme' simply because I think our psychology inevitably renders all cultures more or less fantastic).

Knowledge. If everything is information, as many physicists are now wont to claim, then all human action becomes hacking. And this is what I fear we are doing: using our knowledge to hack ourselves, to sidestep our defenses, to embed fragments of malicious code, to steal cooperation. We are evolving a culture bent on indirect manipulation, on pushing all the buttons that cannot be seen, the opposite of what it pretends to be: a culture bent on emancipation. And literary culture, I think, is the greatest pretender of all.

Exploitation of desire arises out of the very structure of markets. When it comes to the desire to eat, this is undoubtably a good thing. When it comes to the desire to fuck, this is a controversial, problematic thing. When it comes to the desire to be ideologically pampered, it is disastrous, plain and simple.

There has to be some kind of push back. The technological roller coaster ride is just beginning, folks: there's a good chance that we will all be screwed before the century is through. We live in Pandora's World. All of our institutions, from democracy to marriage, are the products of past social conditions: animals adapted to what was. Only the tendency of the social future to resemble the social past allows them to function the way they do. That tendency has almost run its course.

There has to be some kind of push back, some kind of understanding of how we are fast becoming our own worst enemy. In today's world there is no challenge, no literature, short of work, a self-conscious reaching for dissenting audiences. And the best way to accomplish that, I'm saying, is to write genre. The path of least resistence–writing for your peers–pretty much guarantees you are simply reinforcing the status quo.

In today's world, all the easy roads lead to entertainment.

Aphorism of the Day: Philosophy is the discipline where everyone thinks they've found the one yellow-brick road through a swamp where nobodys' boots get wet.

Just a note: I've put two more papers up in the Essay Archive. And thanks for the WordPress tips: I'll be acting on them shortly.

Rereading my prospectus has sparked some old circuits to life, flushed blood into vestigial habits of thinking. Make no mistake: the reason I carve philosophers so much is simply because I am one.

My dissertation project was my demon for a long, long time: I kept thinking that I had caught glimpses of ways to innovate around feuds both ancient and contemporary. All I had to do was wrestle the beast to the mat. Given what I've learned about human cognition (the stuff they should be falling over themselves to teach in philosophy, of all places), I no longer think that's possible. All I was doing was gaming ambiguities this way and that, asking original questions, sure, maybe, but never really coming close to any knockdown answer – just another way to pose the problematic.

Conceptual gestalt shifts intitially strike some as promising, even compelling, simply because they deliver thought to uncharted terrain. The paths you lay are bound to smack of inevitability, given your ignorance of the alternatives. But as time passes and others wander this way and that, striking off in competing directions, the terrain becomes as trammelled as a fair ground meadow, and the necessity that seemed to warrant any step this way or that begins to evaporate. Cynicism sets in, and skepticism is not long to follow, and before you know it, someone decides to raise the ferris wheel across different ground, maybe this time on the posh side of town.

Where the process can begin again.

So maybe this is why I traded it all in for a cause. There's nothing quite like good old fashioned fear (and a healthy dollop of status anxiety) to anchor your interpretations.

A strange sensation, bumping into former fanatical versions of yourself. I see all the slo-mo smuggling, all the minor and drastic mutations, all the conceptual babies abandoned, and the new one's born, and I think, "Ah, the Great Circus!"

So much better than the County Fair.

Try moving Disney World to the other end of town.

Definition of the Day – Hemorrhoids: A pain occurring in your head that you ironically attribute to your ass.

I have to admit, 'the Hemorrhoi' is a name I've always wanted to add to the fantasy world… Give them some nasty teeth.

Just a post to say that I've added a couple of more things to the Essay Archive section, including a prospectus for one of my bungled dissertation attempts (actually, the one I almost completed before the book deals came knocking). Talk about religious conversions. Take an Advil before bothering…

Also, I can't figure out how to bury this part of the blog behind something more consumer friendly. I'm a techno-knob, I know. Christ, I can't even fix the book links below! Suggestions would be appreciated.

Aphorism of the Day: Art is slow to clean out its ears. Most of the time, you're better off talking to rocks.

Aphorism of the Day II: Paint only dries when you're not watching.

I came across another central literary misconception while reading The Globe and Mail this morning, what I've been calling the Myth of Compositional Autonomy.

"This [the importance of a writer's relationship with their readers] may well be true but it's problematic. I'm concerned about the slow and subtle shift in attitude that constant marketing may effect in writers. Once you are in charge of your own promotion and sales, you cannot help think of your audience as a market, and a market must be pleased. Writers should never think about their audience – they should never worry that their ideal demographic (say, women over 45 living outside large cities) won't get the learned reference or will be nauseated by the torture scene. Art is not a product like any other."

Logically, the problem here is one of crude equivocation: you blur 'audience' with 'market,' and suddenly 'writing for your audience' becomes 'writing for money,' and conversely, 'writing for nobody' becomes 'writing for something other than money'–which is to say (deep, reverential breath), Art.

Writing, as communication, is about audiences, period. To write is to write to, and no amount of pretending will make it otherwise. So the question becomes one of who is Smith telling us we need to write to? Nobody is simply incoherent, simply because the writer is always in the room.

What Smith is saying is that the writer must only think of themselves, what moves them, provokes them, and so on. Since every writer, no matter how hard they pretend otherwise, belongs to a demographic, what Smith is saying is that every writer must write for people like themselves. As indeed they do.

Now this may have been well an fine in the 20th Century, when something like a 'general audience' still existed in the developed world. In the course of writing for the likeminded you could be relatively certain that your fiction would reach dissenting audiences–people who could actually be challenged as opposed to confirmed. Your work could do double duty as high-end entertainment for some, and assumption stressing literature for others.

In other words, you could use resemblance as your primary criterion for what was literary, and still reliably produce literary effects. The 'Smith myth' was a relatively benign way for literary writers and readers to congratulate themselves for their moral, intellectual, and aesthetic superiority–and actually get some literary work done.

Not so much nowadays. More and more we find ourselves living in an e-Harmony world, where market segmentation and preference algorithms are balkanizing audiences according to their interests and values.

This is why I argue that the form of the literary has been disconnected from the real world consequences, why you see so many writers referring to Ideal Philistines, people who wouldn't be caught dead reading their works, but would be challenged, were they to.

And as always I remain mystified: everyone knows that we're living through the greatest communications revolution in the history of the human species, and here we have this set of nested institutions–the ones most prone to tout their critical credentials, no less–simply assuming that, despite the drastic technological transformation of their social context, simply repeating the old forms will produce the same results.

What could be more obvious than the fact that literary fiction has become 'just another genre,' a marketing category primarily distinguished by its hypocritical pomposity?

The Age of Accidental Literature is over. Writing for your audience can mean any number of things, some positive, others negative. The bottom line is that you need to know who you're writing to if you're going to have any hope of challenging their assumptions. Writing for yourself assures apologia and cultural irrelevance. You need to game audiences. Which means you need to abandon the milky world of literary fiction, and dive face first into the world of commercial genre.

Definition of the Day – Experiment: A bullshit guess that we fear others might remember.

They say the definition of insanity is expecting different results from repeating the same actions. Given the law of unintended consequences, I actually think this works better as a definition of sanity. Crazy only comes in when you assume the results are going to be happy.

I've checked out several other author blogs and have come to no conclusion whatsoever. Most seem to be gestures and nothing more,  a handful of updates scattered across the years. Others were as extensive as they were tedious. Many were flat out funny. Not one was quite so intellectually maudlin as this.

All in all, I found the company rather embarrassing.

So I've decided that I would try to experiment, to show more of the preacher in me, while concealing him at the same time. I've created an 'Essay Archive' page, where I hope to slowly add sundry writings of mine from years gone by. In the meantime, I'm wondering if their isn't a way to tuck these posts behind some kind of promotional shell.

I might even gussy things up with some pictures of my asshole. Make it really appealing.

I've been able to have it both ways with my books, so far. Maybe I can do the same with this blog. 

Speaking of which, I stumbled across several recent 'reviews' of Neuropath here and here and here. It appears that my books and this blog have something in common! I wonder if I shouldn't try a reverse psychology sort of thing and pull together a splash page with blurbs from everyone freaked out by NP. The list is getting quite juicy.

Aphorism of the Day: Justice is the triumph of truth over inevitability.

This is long overdue! As I mentioned in this most recent interview, and as I've suggested several times here, I remain deeply ambivalent about this whole blogging thing. Were I a mature, self-actualized adult, I'm sure I could waltz back and forth across the contradiction between the need to sell and the need to tell without batting an eye – like pretty much every other writer on the planet. But I continually find myself plagued by my own hypocrisy.

And this ambivalence, fortunately or unfortunately, has led to neglect.

One of the overarching themes of my work is the growing incompatibility between knowledge (as developed by science)and experience (as determined by biology and tradition), and its social, interpersonal, and individual consequences. If reflection is enlightenment then enlightenment is poison – and cynicism is the only glove that allows you to maintain a grip on the world as it is.  The rest is all make-believe.

And this is not a message people want to hear, these days particularly. Positivity sells. Decisiveness sells. Since people want to be told that everything will be A.O.K, and since markets are driven to exploit wants, and because markets are the central structural feature of our culture, we find ourselves living in a sycophantic world, harbouring any number of deluded and outright foolish notions of who and what we are…

Which means there's a genuine need for neurotic assholes like me.

The Three Pound Brain is still enjoying several hundred hits a day despite several weeks of silence on my part, but I'm fairly convinced that it is doing real harm to the books. Meanwhile, more and more people are jumping on the cognitive shortcoming bandwagon, spreading the bad news in explicit form (as in articles like this), enough for me to think that my fiction is the place where I need to concentrate on critiquing and problematizing culturally given assumptions.

The proper place to be pissing in the whiskey.

I'll likely sit on the fence for a while longer, see how much more pain my balls can take. But if the Three Pound Brain were to suddenly vanish, you can sleep easy knowing that the Rapture had nothing to do with it.

Aphorism of the Day: After thirty years of middle-class stagnation, the forces of fiscal conservatism have proven that if you strangle people slowly enough they'll think you're giving them a hug.

So… Canada has elected what is likely the most fiscally conservative government it has seen in a century. A University of Calgary educated economist now enjoys the peculiar blend of absolute power and constitutional constraint that is the result of parliamentary democracy. Someone who believes that market value is ethical value (with the exception of corporate and agricultural welfare, of course) is now running the Canadian show.

The silver lining is that the NDP, a party that genuinely believes that markets are a means as opposed to an end, are now the official opposition. Given the resources the Conservatives poured into maligning the Liberals, they were able to slip through the negative advertising cracks and make gains across Canada. Even better, they have brought Quebec back into the national political fold.

Another consolation is that after years leading a Minority government, Stephen Harper seems to have developed a taste for power. He knows that he's far further right than most of the swing voters who brought him to power, so he'll be certain to move slowly…  slowly enough to fool people into thinking he isn't moving at all, at least when it comes to pervasive social issues. He'll only fiddle with the Canada Health Act. He'll be content to let the CBC wither on the vine, lest he be labelled the Man-who-killed-Hockey-Night-in-Canada. Everything he hates that the bulk of Canadians support, he'll let wither on the vine.

But what about arts funding?

My guess is that this is one issue he'll move quite quickly on, so that the furor, which will be as thin as it is loud, will be little more than a sour memory when he faces the electorate in four years time. Given all the time I've spent grousing about living in a country with an Official Literature, you might think I would be happy to see this happen. But I am, in fact, a staunch believer in government support for the arts, so long as checks and balances exist to prevent the kind 'institution creep' that bedevils so many public enterprises.

Even still, I can't help but feel as though the arts community has brought this 'Harpergeddon' on itself: why should the Conservatives fund a special interest that is not only overtly antagonistic to them, but communicates in no way whatsoever to their political base? This is what happens when you spend too long speaking only to the likeminded: you cease to be relevant to anyone else.

Maybe, when Canadians finally wake up to the fact that economic growth at the expense of middle-class stagnation is not social progress, but rather a power-concentrating trend that has unravelled many a society over the ages, we'll be able to start over, introduce an arts funding model that serves all Canadians, rather than the cookie-cutter few. Maybe, maybe not. I just hate that it had to happen this way.

Definition of the Day – Novelist: a creature that lives in a deep, narcissistic hole.

Having a book come out is like a season, and a strange one at that. One of the things that characterizes the season is Google and the constant trolling for new reviews. Ordinarily I avoid vanity Googles because of the way it messes with my head, and during the Season, I'm always reminded of why that's the case.

The great temptation is to use this blog as a platform to vent and gloat, to hold up those comments that prick for ridicule, and to wave those that thrill like a flag. As a place to pass judgment on the judgment of others. We're hardwired to throw words at words for our own advantage, to call attention to those that promote, and to bury those that condemn - and I feel the instinct as keenly as anyone, I suppose (especially when it comes to strawman distortions of my views!).

But it's a mugs game, ultimately. It really strikes me this time around how its a matter of averages, the way your words pop into the heads of others, the kinds of flavours they have, be they shitty or sweet. The novelist – or the blogger – has precious little control over how their words strike individuals – pretentious or profound, arrogant or self-effacing, humourless or witty – so they have to aim at populations and keep their fingers crossed. It all feels so bloody random to me anymore. The only constant is the tendency to make universal yardsticks of our idiosyncratic responses.  Seven billion centres of judgmental gravity, and counting. 

The only thing that really matters is that Vancouver beat Chicago – and with Luongo in net, no less! 

Yes. Playoff hockey, man. Now that's a season.

Definition of the Day – Markets: the form of bureaucracy that most efficiently serves the rich.

So, officially The White-Luck Warrior should be available across the USA today, and as far as I know Amazon has begun shipping. Unfortunately, several thousand copies have yet to be shipped, including those destined for many Barnes and Noble outlets. What's worse, B&N online doesn't even have the book listed yet. I thought I should post this in the hope of saving some of you the frustration of a(nother) fruitless commercial expedition.

Sorry guys.