Read 'em Already

Check out the Read Your Own Books Challenge! I've set aside an ambitious stack of books to tackle for 2009, and in keeping with this challenge I intend to keep you updated with my reading for this year. I'm currently working on An Alien Heat by Michael Moorcock and Volume 2 of the Complete Plays of Edward Albee. More to come...

Also note that I've added a few new links, including Eric of Austin's blog.

Likable Characters are for lonely readers.

In my enthusiasm for M. John Harrison's SF novel Light I did a bit of sniffing around the Internets, and stumbled across a review of it that I've been a bit fixated on over the last few days. (It's here if you want it.) I think it fascinates me because its logic and tone are such that it's uncannily like the review I might have written of Light 10-15 years ago, had the novel (and perhaps blogs) existed. The article got me thinking about how my view of fiction has changed.

Once upon a time I resented any and all fiction that wasn't

A: Escapist;

B: Comfort Food;

or C: Reassurance Fantasy.

As far as I was concerned an author's primary job was to sprinkle sugar on my thumb before I sucked it.

Phrases like "Two unlikable characters and one barely tolerable loser do not a compelling tale make" made perfect sense to me then.

I think what changed is that I slowly stopped turning to fiction and entertainment to fill my social needs. It seems a reoccurring problem for nerds like me; we want fictional characters and settings to meet, or help meet, our natural needs for human interaction and environmental stimulation. Once I got used to the fact that all my social needs should be met by humans, and all my needs for environmental stimulation should be met by my actual environment, I lost this desire to "hang out" with "likable"characters. Once one stops demanding that fictional characters be "likable," one is freer to engage the ways that fictional characters offer perspective on the human condition(s). Instead of looking for prefabricated Mary Sues a reader becomes open to understanding real people, to the extent that the author offers insight about real people.

Happy Eno Year!

I'm going through A Year With Swollen Appendices: Brian Eno's Diary and highlighting favorite passages. I thought I'd start the New Year by sharing a few of them with you. The following passages are all by Brian Eno, the great experimental musician and producer. His observations are wide-ranging, but I'm focusing are ideas about artistry with economy, since it seems the financial meltdown is going to tighten theatrical budgets, and I like lo-fi theatre anyway.

"Old ideas don't go away- new ones just get added.

"Spending lots of money is often an admission of lack of research, preparation and imagination. We must be more careful about this sort of thing in future. How much more satisfying to make clever, original (cheap) choices.

"Looked at fine gilded details on finials at (Big Ben) clock face-wondering if they were visible at ground level. They were-as subliminal detail. (Dave) Stewart explained theory of 'least distinguishable detail' (Christopher Alexander has it too), and we discussed the idea of working beyond perceptible ranges of detail- the idea that the mind registers detail without necessarily being able to distinguish it.

"If all I'd ever wanted to do was make money, I'd probably be really poor by now.

"Saying that cultural objects have value is like saying that telephones have conversations.

"All this money has been squeezed out of various committees on the pretext that something of high cultural value is being made for it. But whatever of value is made will not be the bit that cost all that money. I always want to work the other way round: 'Tell me what you can spare and I'll make something from it.'

"There must always be a positive relationship between what goes in and what comes out. Thrilling if little goes in and much comes out; OK when much goes in if much comes out; completely unacceptable if much goes in and little comes out. Classify all proposals on this continuum."

(Describing a group art exhibit which he oversaw:) "Almost without exception the best works were the cheapest. There are many good reasons why this should be so, but perhaps the best is that people who haven't invested much feel free to change their minds. So the cheap shows were the ones that suddenly changed quickly and for the better at the last moment.

"A new kind of artist-one who turns abandoned industrial projects into useful (lovely) objects.

"' Why am I doing this?' The question that always precedes something worthwhile."

The Triumph of Texas

I really liked what I got to see of the Austin area this Christmas. Never having been to Texas before, here are two things that made it special:

1. In the Southeast an ugly store, strip mall or factory can totally dominate the landscape, what with the uneven terrain, high trees, and smaller sky. In Texas, though, humanity's crapitalist follies are always, always dwarfed by the sky, no matter how much neon they spackle themselves with.

2. Because there's more space (and maybe because it's the Holidays) everywhere we went seemed populated, but not crowded. In the Southeast urban centers it can seem like Soylent Green days are here, but in Texas I finally lost that sensation of the world being overrun by a plague of humans. It ennobled humans and the landscape both.

Anyway, I had a good time meeting Laurie's family and thank them for their hospitality.

P. S. Eric, start a blog, please.

Light and Christmas

Wow, I'm not sick anymore, except for a slight itch in my throat. Christmas Carol is almost over, and it's been a remarkable experience. Concentrated theatrical work after the kind of months-long little-bit-at-a-time production schedules I've been used to. They crack the whip more in this venue, and I like it that way because it forces me to be as good as I can be, and demands the same of all the other talented people in this show.

I'm reading Light by M. John Harrison. Good timing. Several characters who have turned their backs on the potential within the world and themselves are forced to reengage with life and themselves, much as I've been doing over the last couple years.

Unadvertised Deals

I went to the mall recently to buy a toy (I searched the net for a more indy toy shop in town, but turned up nothing). It's a couple weeks until Christmas, but it looked like a couple weeks before Arbor Day. Is this due to the recession? Is our consumer culture in freefall? That's probably just what we all need, painful though it may be. More likely everybody's at Wal-Mart. Speaking of which, one of our cast members had her purse snatched in Wal-Mart. She went to security and asked if they got evidence on the billion cameras they have in there, but was told all the cameras are dummies except in the parking lot and electronics. Moral: don't shoplift electronics at Wal-Mart, if you see what I'm saying. Say, don't you deserve some free snacks?

The show's going well, though some of us call it The Sickness Carol since most of the cast is folded in half with respiratory ailments. We're artists whose medium is our bodies, and what more fragile, unpredictable medium is there?

This Gust

I got a few days off recently, and returned to Kannapolis, just in time to

A. come over all sick again, days after declaring myself fully recovered, and

B. have the bathroom plumbing get all backed up. After a few false starts the landlord found a plumber who has worked in this area for many years. He worked on our house as Laurie and I discussed Jonathan Haidt's theories about the role of disgust in morality. I was pretty convinced that disgust had long since ceased to be an overwhelming factor in my moral views; not that I never feel disgust, but that I can differentiate between immorality that inspires disgust in me (murder, rape, child abuse, etc.) and acceptable things that inspire disgust (smoking, odd but harmless sexual practices, etc.).

Eventually the plumber got everything working. As I shook his hand, he said it should be good for another five years.

"By then," he added, "Obama will be out of office and I'll fix it again. I did a job for a black lady the other day. She said she voted for Obama and she'll vote for him again. I said 'you may be voting for a dead man.' I don't believe he'll make it."

It's possible, of course, that he was expressing a fear that many of Obama's supporters hold for the President-Elect. But his twisted smile suggested otherwise. It's also possible that he was hoping for Obama to be killed because he simply doesn't like Obama's politics. But I assumed, and assume still, that he was hoping for Obama's death out of Honkey Pride.

I don't know when I've gone so swiftly from gratitude to loathing. I wanted to take the hedge clippers to this cross-eyed hillbilly's fist-sized adam's apple.

Of course I did nothing but glower at him and stiffly walk away, but the link between disgust and moral views was, for me, sharply reasserted.