R. Scott Bakker's Blog, page 42

Definition of the Day - Facebook: a clever distraction for the masses designed to secure the invisibility of the poor, the anti-social, and the technologically retarded.

Just a note to those who were surprised by my take on sanitizing Huck Finn: this site and my project are dedicated to walking the tightrope between actual difficulty and actual accessibility. Terms like 'selling out' and 'dumbing down' are cornerstones of our indoctrination into literary culture, the fig-leaves we use to avoid mingling with our intellectual and aesthetic 'lessers.' To continue writing for ourselves (the easiest thing to do) under the pretence of writing for eternity (the most difficult thing to do).

Over and over again we're told that altering literary expression for commercial or ideological reasons is an essential aesthetic evil, something that devalues works no matter what the contexts. The most immediate counter-example I can think of would be Underground Man, an originally Christian tract that was thankfully secularized by the Tsar's censors.

If we had the luxury of a long, stable future, then maybe I would be more inclined to sanctify Twain's intention (or my interpretation of it), but as it stands… Is Twain's purity more important than his popularity? If you think so, then you have a much more sanguine view of the future than I do.

I watched The Social Network last night, and it got me thinking how strange it is to live in a time when five years ago counts as history. It also got me thinking about social compartmentalization.

It's not that the world is flat or small: both of these metaphors emphasize the global availability provided by information technology. Framed in these terms, things like the internet seem unambiguously good. Information technology renders the world more transparent to desire.

The crazy thing is that this global availability was almost immediately identified as the primary problem. When everything is equally available, everything obscures everything else. People want certain things, not everything, and thus was the industry of web intermediaries born, companies that specialize in fetching what we want from the global information warehouse. Google. Facebook. WordPress. LexusNexis.

Each of these intermediaries turn on specialized programs that use all the data you have explicitly or inadvertently provided them to pluck things out of the stochastic soup of information. These algorithms are often their most closely guarded secrets.

Enter human nature, and the darker implications of our information future. So long as you leave human nature out of the picture, the kinds of specialized programs these companies use seem unambiguously good. Hell, I even appreciate the spam Amazon sends me. Why? Because my interests are the most interesting (and important) interests going, so the more Amazon feeds those interests, the better!

The problem is that human nature is adapted to environments where the access to information was geographically indexed, where its accumulation exacted a significant caloric toll. We don't call private investigators 'gumshoes' for no reason. We are adapted to environments where the info-gathering workload continually forced us to 'settle,' which is to say, make due with something other than what we originally desired, when it comes to information.

This is what makes the 'global village' such a deceptive misnomer. In the preindustrial village, where everyone depended upon one another, our cognitive selfishness made quite a bit of adaptive sense: in environments where scarcity and interdependency force cognitive compromise, you can see how cognitive selfishness–finding ways to justify oneself while impugning potential competitors–might pay real dividends in terms of in-group prestige. Where the circumstantial leash is tight, it pays to pull and pull, and perhaps reach those morsels that escape others.

In the industrial village, however, the leash is far longer. But even still, if you want pursue your views, geographical constraints force you to engage individuals who do not share them. Who knows what Bob across the road believes? (My Bob was an evangelical Christian, and I count myself lucky for having endlessly argued with him).

In the information village the leash is cut altogether. The likeminded can effortlessly congregate in innumerable echo chambers. Of course, they can effortlessly congregate with those they disagree with as well, but… The tendency, by and large, is not only to seek confirmation, but to confuse it with intelligence and truth–which is why right-wingers tend to watch more Fox than PBS.

Now, enter all these specialized programs, which are bent on moulding your information environment into something as pleasing as possible. Don't like the N-word? Well, we can make sure you never need to encounter it again–ever.

The world is sycophantic, and it's becoming more so all the time. This, I think, is a far better cartoon generalization than 'flat,' insofar as it references the user, the intermediary, as well as the information environment.

The contemporary (post-posterity) writer has to incorporate this radically different social context into their practice (if that practice is to be considered even remotely self-critical). If you want to produce literary effects, then you have to write for a sycophantic world, find ways not simply to subvert the ideological defences of readers, but to trick the inhuman, algorithmic gate-keepers as well.

This means being strategically sycophantic. To give people what they want, sure, but with something more as well.

 

 

  
 
 
 

 



Aphorism of the Day I: The mild feelings that accompany your presumption have no bearing on the mildness of your presumptions. Even Nazis wonder about all the fuss.

Aphorism of the Day II: If a word offends thee, pluck it, sure. If a word really offends thee, say it over and over again, until its nonsense is revealed. So, repeat after me: deconstruction, deconstruction, deconstruction, deconstruction…

Censoriousness is part of the human floor-plan. Everybody thinks certain people shouldn't be allowed to say certain things. We instinctively understand that controlling actions–power–turns on controlling beliefs. If you let the latter get out of hand…

When I was studying in Nashville, one of my classmates married this Polish guy who got a job working in construction. Shortly after getting the job he apparently approached one of his coworkers and said, "Excuse me. Please. Could you tell me? What is the difference between redneck and white-trash, and which one are you?"

On another occasion, I found myself debating two fellow PhD students, both from the deep south, who argued that the word 'nigger' was simply the word they grew up using, that they didn't 'mean anything' by it. The resulting argument, as you might expect from philosophy grads, led nowhere, though it did sketch a couple of interesting circles. I argued that what they thought they meant had precious little to with anything. Words were social and historical–and most importantly, bearers of value. In other words, words were huge, and some were larger than others. 'Nigger,' I suggested, was about as big as they come.

They argued a variety of face-saving things before petering out. The social authority gradient was skewed against them, and they could feel it. This is what shuts most people up, when you think about it. Numbers, not reasons. There was just more of me.

I mention this because of all the hoopla surrounding the new edition of Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, where the word 'nigger' has apparently been replaced by the more palatable 'slave.' Whatever you think about sanitizing works like Huck Finn, trimming and tucking them to facilitate the ease of consumption or whatever, what you can't say is that its 'just a word,' you're taking out. 'Nigger' is a social historical bearer of value, a monstrously huge one. So huge that we've invented a name–the 'N-word'–for the name, to spare us the back-breaking effort of actually lifting the thing.

If you concentrate on the ink of the word, you can convince yourself that the stakes are low, insignificant compared to the various advantages, such as not having to worry about irate mothers on parent-teacher night and the like. If you concentrate on the meaning, you suddenly find yourself trying to wrestle history itself to the mat.

Where the ink is externally related to the text, the meaning is internally related. Plucking the former is like fishing a bagel out a bakeshop bin. Plucking the latter is like ripping a skein of nerves out of meat. Imagine going through the Bible and replacing every instance of 'knew' with 'fuck.'  "And Abraham came unto Sarah and fucked her…" Gonzo scripture, baby. Everything changes where charged language is concerned.

This asymmetry, the lightness of the ink versus the heaviness of the meaning, explains the inevitability of censorship, as well as its attraction. It's powerful stuff: all you need is a Sharpie and you can black out whole swathes of the world. The beautiful is rendered ugly, and the ugly, beautiful. It's just too damn easy not to be utilized. As any parent who spells words rather than speaking them knows, there's nothing like managed ignorance to keep a child on task.

Which brings me to my point: the good and the bad of it depends on the task. The question of removing 'nigger' from Huck Finn, I think, ultimately turns on how you define the task of literature. Is it supposed to do, or is supposed to be? If you see literature as a kind of tool, as something to be judged according the utility of its effects, then who cares how you modify the thing, so long as it gets the job done. If you see it as a sacrosanct object, as quasi-scriptural, then modification becomes sacrilege. What? Change the Prophet's words?

(I can't help but pause and think just how gnarly all the competing intuitions are: purity, utility, respect, courage, pollution, embarrassment, guilt… And here I am, trying to dress them up with 'reasons' like everyone else!)

"Believe!" the blockbuster cries. "Believe!" the commercial whispers. "Believe!" the schoolteacher smiles. Self-deception has become our greatest cultural good, and in an age when we can least afford it. Given my commitment to cultural triage, I'm inclined to chuck principle, and to say that anything that gets more kids reading Huck Finn is a good thing–if this indeed is the consequence. There's plenty of gristle to chew on, otherwise. The original is always there.

And anything that popularizes Twain, the Great Sage of Human Stupidity, is even better.

Otherwise, I find myself wondering what Twain himself would think. As hard as he's laughing at all the semantic hygienists, my guess is that a part of him would be both heartened and honoured. Heartened that things have changed so much as to make an international issue of the role language plays in bigotry, and honoured that after all this time we're still paying so much attention to an old fool such as him.

Ultimately, his genius was to write books that show us for the tender idiots we are.

Again and again and again.

Aphorism of the Day: Literature is the cage where writers rattle empty cages.

So, true to his character, Disciple continues to hobble onward. A nice little capsule review appeared in The New York Times, and Drowning Machine actually picked him for their "Damn with Faint Praise Award," given to the best, most overlooked book of 2010. Hopefully this drip-drip will continue convincing people out in the noir blogosphere to take a looksee.

For the curious among you, the slip from Docx to 'Bocx' in the piece I posted last week was entirely Freudian–if only all my mistakes were so clever!

I wanted to elaborate a bit on the 'cages all the way down' argument I provided in the previous post, talk about a corollary assumption that seems to afflict literary culture: the Myth of the Outside.

The Myth of the Outside describes the assumption, prevalent among many in the literary community, that literature is defined by the absence of generic constraint, that it somehow happens outside all the generic boxes you find crowding the warehouse of popular culture.

Since conventionality is a necessary condition of communication, they can't be talking about the absence of conventionality. This particular 'outside' is unintelligible, plain and simple. No, Bocx and his ilk have to be talking about a different kind of 'outside,' one within the sphere of conventionality (to the degree it communicates anything at all), but distinguished in a manner that renders it 'special,' that exempts it from the myriad problems belonging to generic conventionality.

The Myth of the Outside, in other words, is a kind of lazy front for what might be called the Myth of a 'Better Inside.'

So what makes literary conventionality so special? If you look at, say, the literary saws I import into my fantasy work, several obvious arguments come to mind. You could say, for instance, that the literary emphasis on interior action attunes people to their own inner lives, that the literary penchant for lyricism opens readers to the possibilities of language, or that the literary preference for moral ambivalence better represents the moral complexities of our day to day lives.

Saying broccoli is better than doughnuts means nothing so long as you are talking about taste. Saying broccoli is better for you, on the other hand, is saying something quite different. And it seems pretty easy to argue that the above conventions are in fact 'healthier' for readers, even if they don't particularly like the taste. Indeed, this is largely why I imported them into the 'epic fantasy cage' in the first place.

So doesn't this suggest that the literati are right? That, like broccoli, their writing is 'just better for you' than what you find in genre?

As I keep saying, if you stubbornly refuse to ignore the communicative dimension of conventionality, if you obnoxiously insist on pairing readers with your writers, the conceptual landscape is radically transformed. Once we do this, we can see, for instance, that the broccoli metaphor is quite misleading. Broccoli is healthy because the link between what it is and what it is does is more or less fixed. Fiction, on the other hand, possesses no such stability. As 'semantic objects,' books quite literally do not exist independently of readers, at least not the way broccoli exists independently of eaters.

The literary conventions I enumerate above, in other words, are broccoli or doughnuts depending on who happens to be reading them. There is very little Bocx could provide an English professor, say, aside from a succession of intellectual and aesthetic buzzes–entertainment for a specialized palette. He may advertise broccoli, but his dogged fidelity to literary conventions assures him a literary audience, and so he primarily sells doughnuts instead. The only difference between him and the generic writers he derides (often with backhanded compliments) is honesty.

This fact is invisible to him simply because he buys into the Myth of the Outside. Because his yardstick frames all his measurements, it seems to fall outside of the possibility of measurement altogether, to be as gargantuan as Truth. Thus the preposterous hubris.

The only way to spin broccoli out of doughnuts is to game the generic expectations of actual readers. The only way to game the generic expectations of actual readers, at least as far as I can see, is to game genre. The only way to be truly 'outside' is to be inside everything.

And this, I'm arguing, is the literature of future: one where writers interested in genuinely challenging readers range across the bookstore, section to section, skew to skew. Things aren't looking good as it stands: posers like Bocx still occupy the cultural high ground, and as a result the wannabes continue to be herded into the faux-literary cage, convinced that turning their back on popular culture is the only way to be taken seriously by those who matter.

But the sense of exhaustion is mounting, and the dwindling relevance of the book is luring more and more gifted voices into the new media. The collapse is coming…

Maybe I'm describing the orthodoxy that will replace it, maybe not.　

　

Definition of the Day - Pretentiousness: If you are smart, the knack for making other people feel stupid. If you are stupid, the knack for making yourself feel smart.

Here's that piece I sent away to The Guardian some time back. The reason I keep flogging this horse, and will continue to do so, certainly has something to do with my own sense of resentment and status anxiety. I can feel it in the way I grit my teeth.

But it also has to do with the way I continually find myself trapped between cultures: the kinds of attitudes espoused by Docx and his clan do real damage to the Cause. Far from encouraging and desseminating criticality, they shut it down. People are hardwired to overgeneralize: so when a character like Docx comes along talking about 'simpler psychologies,' they not only reject him – there's few things more pathetic than claiming authority where none is recognized – they also tend to reject intellectualism and criticality more generally. Docx's column was literally an argument for why his practice was superior in kind to the practices of genre writers - with the upshot being that his readers are somehow superior as well.

On the other hand, I'm arguing that my particular, peculiar practice is superior in effect - and that in the world of 'market segmentation,' these effects can only be brought about by gaming genre. Otherwise you make your living reinforcing, rather than challenging assumptions, which is all well and fine so long as there's enough muckrakers to keep things interesting. The idea is that literary culture has managed to secure the comforts of genre, writing the same things for the same readers, while pretending to produce the effects of literature. And so it is the souls who claim to be the most enlightened, stumble through the most embarassing dark. Everyone walks away confirmed in their flattering views.

The picture is drastically more complicated, I know, but I'm convinced this captures the dilemma in sum, or at least enough of it to warrant real experimentation. The bottomline, I think, is that it is impossible to write literature in the 21st century without 'literary evangelicism,' which is to say, absent any awareness of the actual assumptions of your actual audience. Given market segmentation, the 'post-posterity' writer no longer has the luxury of writing for him or herself.

Docx's piece can be found here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/dec/12/genre-versus-literary-fiction-edward-docx

 
 
THE MYTH OF THE VULGAR CAGE
 
In his recent article "Are Stieg Larsson and Dan Brown a match for literary fiction?" (The Guardian, 12/12/10), Edward Docx unfortunately demonstrates that the myths that cripple literary culture are alive and well.
 
His argument and attitude are familiar enough: as a connoisseur of literary fiction, he is dismayed by the explosive popularity of Stieg Larson and his posthumus Millennium trilogy. Troubled by the prospect that people might confuse mediocrity for excellence, he believes that "we need urgently to remind ourselves of … the difference between literary and genre fiction." Apparently, culture is in danger of forgetting "that even good genre … is by definition a constrained form of writing. There are conventions and these limit the material."
 
He invokes, in other words, what I like to call the Myth of the Vulgar Cage, wherein conventions are understood as constraints, and genre, therefore, is characterized by the absence of freedom. This, we are supposed to believe, is bad, very bad.
  
 Despite Docx's assertion to the contrary, the 'Vulgar Cage' metaphor is far and away the most pervasive way proponents of literary culture conceptualize the conventionality of genre fiction. One finds it everywhere, invoked as though it were as obvious as can be, even though the slightest examination reveals even more obvious problems. Like most self-aggrandizing myths, it is little more than a conceit founded upon a misconception. Not only does it have the happy consequence of glorifying those who write and read literary fiction, it also strategically distorts what conventions are in actuality.

The conceit is straightforward, and unfortunately all too human. In genre, Docx is saying, the reader's expectations are more regimented, which means that far too many choices "are already made." Genre, he claims, "tends to rely on a simpler reader psychology." The presumption, apparently, is that his books engage a more sophisticated psychology, and therefore possess more aesthetic value. His books are better, he seems to be saying, because his readers are better. They are more 'sophisticated.'
But note how easy it is to radically transform the above claim with a simple change of terms. For instance, I would entirely agree that commercial fiction tends to rely on more natural reader expectations, and that literary fiction engages more specialized expectations, which is to say, learned values. Expressed in these, non-question begging terms, one can then proceed to debate the merits of these 'expectation sets,' where and when the natural trumps the specialized or vice versa. The issue is shifted to more retail ground, one where the advantages and liabilities of both can be balanced one against the other. Certainly Bocx isn't suggesting that all literary expectations are better all the time, is he?

But here's the thing: Bocx doesn't seem to think that literary fiction possesses any constraining conventions. This is tantamount to saying that literary readers do not possess overlapping sets of expectations–when, as a rather well-defined group of consumers, they most certainly do. Make no mistake, literary fiction is rife with rules, only a fraction of which Larsson violates! One can only assume that Bocx has been duped the way all of us, thanks to our psychology, often find ourselves duped. Since the values and expectations we use to rate and measure the world are generally implicit, invisible, we are inclined to think we are generally unconstrained, while those who follow explicit values and expectations seem to be thoroughly trapped.

It's always the 'other guy,' isn't it?

So much for the conceit. The shape of the misconception should already be clear from the way I have consistently paired conventions with expectations: the analogy of constraints entirely misses the communicative dimension of conventions. The Vulgar Cage is an out and out horrible conceptual metaphor. After years spent arguing this, I still find myself marvelling at just how sticky obvious falsehoods can be, so long as they flatter and exonerate. Convention is the bedrock of communication. Quite simply, there is no language, no culture, no storytelling–nothing intelligible at all–short of conventionality and its evil constraints.

This is why I much prefer to use the metaphor of the specialty channel when conceptualizing genre. Unlike, the Vulgar Cage, it captures the constraint without sacrificing the communication. The problem for Docx is that this formulation is anything but friendly to the attitude he is attempting to promote, primarily because of the way it binds authors to their audiences.

Literature, you see, is supposed to be a special kind of fiction, one that, arguably, has some kind of salutary effect on its readers. Literature is defined, in other words, not so much by what it is (or worse yet, what it resembles) as by what it does. Literature changes people, typically by challenging their assumptions.

So if you 'write for yourself' under the blithe assumption that you, unlike every other human on the planet, are not the conduit of innumerable implicit conventions, then you are essentially writing for people like yourself. But writing for the likeminded means writing for those who already share the bulk of your values and attitudes–for the choir, in effect. And this suggest that writers like Docx are actually in the entertainment business, which is to say, writing to confirm the attitudes of their audience, not to challenge them. 

Far from rendering you literary, repeating the moves of past masterpieces merely identifies you as the producer of a certain kind of reliable product. Thanks to market segmentation, the more homogenous culture that once made the production of literary effects possible in the past has vanished. Now literary writers have to hide behind the fiction of the Ideal Philistine, the person who would be challenged were they to read their books (but for some, typically flattering, reason never do), to convince themselves of their relevance.

All of this has resulted in what I think is an unmitigated cultural catastrophe. Articles such as Docx's spur so many howls of protest because they amount to a kind of thinly-disguised bigotry. And like most bigotries, they possess a number of untoward consequences. Not only do they convince new talent that they must write for one channel, one audience, to be taken seriously, they convince everyone else, those with simpler psychologies, to distrust intellectualism more generally.

Too much critical talent is being wasted on what amounts to a single specialty channel, the 'literary mainstream,' where all the forms of what once was literary are endlessly repeated, and few of the results of what was once literary are produced. Where the notion of actually challenging readers has either been conveniently forgotten, strategically foresworn (as in the case of Franzen), or made the grist for posturing and pretence.

If Docx really were interested in literature, then instead of bemoaning all those people reading Larsson, he would be trying to reach them.

How does one do that? Turn your back on the flattering choir, for one. Reach out to dissenting audiences by embracing sets of conventions, different specialty channels, rather than gaming rules piece-meal to impress one's peers with this or that obscure semantic effect–which is to say, the conventional thing.

Write genre, where the future of literature in fact lies. If, as Docx suggests, writing good genre is hard, and writing good literature is harder still, then writing something that combines both should constitute the greatest challenge of all.

Definition of the Day - New Year's resolution: 1) an annual ritual where optimistic souls remind themselves why they have no bloody reason to be so optimistic; 2) a type of gnat that pesters fat asses without ever damaging them.

Happy New Years everyone. Personally, I set a record for not drinking this holiday. For the first time in 20 years my wife and I did not go out and get shit-faced on New Year's Eve. Strange, the way a kid turns all the old ways upside down. By any of my old metrics this past holiday was hands down the lamest on record, and yet, I have to say, watching your little girl discover the wonder of Christmas is truly something to behold.  So this past holiday was at once the lamest, and most dazzling I have ever enjoyed.

Lots of laughter in the ol' Bakker household this year.

Before I forget, Pat has published his excellent review of The White-Luck Warrior here: http://fantasyhotlist.blogspot.com/2010/12/white-luck-warrior.html

I even find his qualifications convincing: there's quite abit more interior action in The White-Luck Warrior compared to The Judging Eye, something which will hopefully please as many readers as it irritates.

I was hoping Pat might expound on the difference in tone between The White-Luck Warrior and Disciple of the Dog, the way the books are almost tonal mirror images of one another. I had feared that the switch from the scriptural tone of the fantasies to the flip profanity of Disciple Manning would be difficult, only to be surprised by how effortless the transition was.

Otherwise, the prohibition against spoilers, I think, prevented him from discussing many of the things I'm keen to garner feedback on. Things like the stakes and the scale of the overarching story. I'm presently finishing the copyedit (a job which was dropped on my lap just as the holidays were beginning: a classic, you-know-you're-a-small-fry-when moment), and I have to say that, from my perspective at least, this book fulfills my resolution to make each book in this series better than the last.

What you ornery buggers think, only time will tell. Love it or hate it, I can only hope that you talk about it. And trust that I will redeem the fistful of narrative IOU's I've gathered over the years.

Aphorism of the Day: 'Radical' is not a name anyone can give themselves.

I'm starting to learn that the worst time to make a blog entry is the instant you feel like blogging. Writing a book is like having a padded cell in terms of the space of time you have to work through your rants and turn them into something muffled and respectable. Ideas have always gotten the best of me: it usually takes me several revisions to wrestle them to the mat.

Welcome to my notebook folks! Hopefully it doesn't read half as neurotic as it feels.

The Globe and Mail has picked up another article of mine, this one for their web only version: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/opinions/opinion/science-the-cruel-stranger/article1841317/ Speaking of the same 'ol same 'ol - this time packaged for mass consumption…

But then that's the point: there's no 'new' or 'challenging' outside the apprehending brain.

Definition of the Day - Literature: the genre that dare not speak its name.

Sometimes I crack me up.

Sometimes I feel so damn provincial, sitting here in a snow-buried London junior, taking the hypothetical piss out of these London senior literary types. I mean, just who do I think I am. I don't even have 'author photos' for Christ's sake.

I almost always feel hypocritical. I should, I think. As should anyone pompous enough to think their interpretative cartoons have captured some real socio-cultural dynamic. Lord knows mine are certainly flattering enough. 

But then I think I have the virtue of running a real risk.

It was the second year of my philosophy PhD., I think, when I finally realized that despite all the rhetoric, most everyone was really only interested in dead originalities. If you came up with a new spin, well then your grade point average did just fine. But if you brought a new top to the table, well then, you were in a heap-load of trouble.

The problem, aside from our myopic psychology, is that the world is filled with cranks and crackpots, with people who want to say something new without having gone through the trouble of understanding the old. The problem, in other words, is that originality is just too fucking easy. What we want is a special kind of originality, the kind that we can hail as visionary, transformative – in hindsight, of course.

Quite literally, what we want is dead originality.

Originality is literally the name we give to a very special kind of popularity contest. So much of what we value is a function of social proof bias. Steal a chapter from DeLillo and pitch it as your own, and I guarantee you the rejection letters will come flooding in. Thus the paradox. Thus the risk. You will only be acknowledged as original in this special sense, when you are acknowledged as original. Everyone literally sits around waiting to see what everyone else will do. Is this cool? Is this… could it be… original?

And we all know, at some level, that this is what makes those in the know so jealous of what they know, so intent on repeating dead originalities, and claiming the triumphs of dead risk-takers as their own. The well of rednecks has no bottom, so it's easy to pretend that you are messing with someone, somewhere – confronting hypothetical audiences with something 'new.' So you pitch the same 'ol same 'ol to the same, closed-circuit culture, you rig your ideology to make the confusion of art with fashion and commodity as seamless as possible, and everyone comes away feeling as though they earned their authorial scarves.

So, I may be a hypocrite, but at least you can't call me a coward.

Coming up: Ten Question to Fuck up your English Professor.

Definition of the Day: Literature: a form of fiction primarily concerned with the further inflation of already highly-pressurized egos. Once a social scourge responsible for innumerable cases of eczema and dandruff (and a fair amount of untoward head-scratching), it has now become a popular means of concealing public acts of masturbation. Sales of literary mass-market paperbacks have declined accordingly.

For those of you worried, Light, Time, and Gravity is already completed, and I am presently exploring a small press option. I've been back at The Unholy Consult for some time now, and will be for some time to come.

Disciple of the Dog continues to limp along. The latest review can be found here: http://www.dailyebookreviews.com/disciple-of-the-dog-by-r-scott-bakker

I gave Pat of Fantasy Hotlist fame a draft of The White-Luck Warrior several days back. My guess is that his review should be going up soon. He's as much a stickler on spoilers as I am, so checking out what he has to say should be safe.

I would like to thank Ilya for posting that link (in the comments to the last post) to Edward Docx's Guardian piece on the inferiority of genre fiction. I actually pulled together and sent a short article by way of rebuttal–which I will promptly post here if The Guardian's review editor decides to pass on it.

Entitled, "The Myth of the Vulgar Cage" it details both the institutional conceit and the theoretical misconception that underwrites the literary notion of conventions and conventionality.

Since implicit rules are generally invisible, the tendency is to always think that the guy who follows explicit rules is the one constrained. Thus the conceit: literature is the home of unconstrained writing, whereas genre writers find themselves caged with the "simpler psychologies" (his term!) of genre readers.

The misconception turns on the characterization of conventionality as constraint, a conceptualization that entirely blots out the communicative dimension of conventions. There is no communication without constraint–end of story. Because of this, I suggest the specialty channel as an alternate metaphor, because it has the virtue of preserving the way in which conventions connect authors with specific audiences. Then I show just how ugly and fatuous Docx and his ilk look when considered through this alternate lense.

Among all the self-congratulatory myths that cripple literary culture, the vulgar cage has always been a stand out for me. For such an obviously inadequate conceptualization to be so universally embraced demonstrates just how prone humans are to camouflage their self-interest with stupidity. "Let's just ignore all that pesky communication stuff, and look at conventions this way, because it makes me look so daring and smart!"

I mean, they just love their conventions so much, they just gotta be exceptional somehow. And besides, who wants to go through all the hard work of reaching out to popular culture? Sneering is just so much easier.

Speaking of sneering, I did my best to be polite in the article proper, even after checking out Docx's website: if his photo gallery is any indication, the man really takes seriousness seriously.

Aphorism of the Day: Only when you pause to listen–really listen–to someone else speaking, can you discover how irritating you yourself are.

The snow will simply not… stop… falling…

My back feels like a hooker's ass, I've been shovelling so much.

Progress on The Unholy Consult has petered out the past few days. Every morning, when I crack open my laptop in the coffeeshop, there's this wobbly moment which determines the next several hours of my day. For whatever reason this moment has been tipping me toward my bizarre CanLit piece, Light, Time, and Gravity.

Time wasted, I'm sure. I should start shopping it around, just to get it out of my hair.

Another alternative would be to publish it here, section by section, day by day. It would be a great way to get feedback, but I fear it would scare more sensible readers away.

The idea was to take the aesthetic norms of contemporary commercial literature at their word: to both write 'something I know,' and to write something 'genuinely challenging.'

This first imperative: 'Write what you know!' is little more than the aesthetic fig-leaf that literary culture uses to rationalize their disdain of spectacle. I find it more than a little coincidental that it became religious dogma around the same time mass public education made literacy universal. Appreciation for spectacle is simply part of the human floor plan, so if you want to exclude the masses, render yourself 'exceptional,' all you need do is banish it from the realm of 'serious art.' You make the banal your idol, then look down on the vulgar masses for not having acquired your tastes.

This second imperative: 'Challenge your reader!' is the second figleaf. Rather than look at conventions as kinds of channels that put you in contact with various audiences sharing common expectations, you characterize them as restraints, as cages that close down the aesthetic future. Once again you have the same happy coincidence: since humans possess a hardwired appetite for conventionality, defecting from popular conventions effectively isolates your 'art' from the masses, once again confirming your status as exceptional.

Both of these slogans are little more than self-congratulatory versions of painting NO GIRLS ALLOWED on your clubhouse door. They allow far too many exceedingly talented people to turn their back on their culture, all the while convinced that their culture has turned its back on them.

But you've heard all this before.

What I try to do in Light, Time, and Gravity is turn these slogans inside out, use them to wage a kind of spiritual war against the literary reader. I use my (crazy) teenage experiences working in tobacco to satisfy the first, then I use quasi-Nietzschean theoretical rants to satisfy the second, playing the two threads off one another. In neither case, do I let the reader off the hook. One of the things that has always dismayed me about literary writers is the hypocrisy of the 'egalitarian impulse' they are so quick to brandish on their textual sleeves. They certainly love writing ABOUT what they consider the low and the mean, but not one of them would be caught dead writing FOR them.  They're the kind of tourists who congratulate themselves for bringing candies to hand out to all the brown-eyed kids.

What I do is tell the story a la the Underground Man, from the standpoint of an embittered English professor (no relation!) looking back at his low caste youth and mourning the university institutionalization that has so mangled his soul. In the course of narrating the tobacco harvest of 1984, he systematically accounts for all the theoretical vanities and tribal conceits that have accumulated over the subsequent years–all the things that have turned him into, as he puts it, 'a fucking clown.' Parallel to this, he theoretically dismantles the self-aggrandizing folly of post-structuralism, and post-modernism more generally, in an act of ideological auto-cannibalism, realizing that status and self-regard had been the true engine of his practice all along. I intentionally don't pull any punches with the theory in the hope of showing certain readers what real 'challenge' looks like, and how they really aren't interested in it at all.

How what they really want is conventionality–their conventionality.

It's kind of an anti-Bildungsroman on the one hand, a story of an artist spiritually destroyed in the process of escaping his benighted origins, and a poor man's Philosophical Investigations on the other. The most obnoxious thing I have ever written.

And probably unpublishable.

Aphorism of the Day: The only difference between the ass-kicking talk of youth and the ass-kissing talk of middle-age is a man's tax bracket.

For those of you interested, my conversation with Jim Sallis has gone up over at Mulholland Books: http://www.mulhollandbooks.com/ 

Looks like all that positivity I've been beaming out to the universe has finally paid off…