Here is the one panel I’ll be on…really looking forward to this one, noon on Friday.

“In Search of Lost Time: History and Memory in Historical and Speculative Fiction. Alan DeNiro, David Anthony Durham (L), Lila Garrott, Andrea Hairston, Howard Waldrop. “[I]n places like the Caribbean, West Africa and so on, we have two distinct elements. We have history which is written in books about the white people—how they came to Guadeloupe, how they colonized Guadeloupe, how they became the masters of Guadeloupe—and you have memory, which is the actual facts of the people of Guadeloupe and Martinique—the way they lived, the way they suffered, the way they enjoyed life. We are trained to rely more on our memories and the memories of people around us than on books”—Maryse Condé, explaining the genesis of her new novel Victoire: My Mother’s Mother. Clearly the best historical fiction attempts to bridge the gap between these two modes of understanding by bringing the richness of memory to the rigor of history. But it’s also a commonplace that history is the trade secret of speculative fiction. How is the interplay of history and memory in imaginative literature like and unlike that of historical fiction?”

Those are the kinds of questions I think about every day as I work on the new novel (set in the late 17th century).

I’ll also be reading at 2:30 on Friday for 30 minutes.

OK, so it’s time to blog about the sorcery of social media.

This essay by Jim Grote adroitly puts together a case for Simone Weil’s theory of “social force” as one that is extremely relevant in our highly networked times. Indeed her theories tie in astonishingly well (considering they were written before and during World War II) to how our social media works–in a manner that is almost purely reputation based. And reputation creates prestige:

Prestige “rests principally upon that marvelous indifference that the strong feel toward the weak, an indifference so contagious that it infects the very people who are the objects of it.”

In manners of trivial angst, you can see how this works with Twitter “followers”: the desire for more, and the efforts to acquire more. People aren’t necessarily “followed” for what is being written but rather for the unit of reputation that that content creator represents.

Thus, according to Weil, the consolidation of power in these forms of media (or mediated forms) only increases reputation as the main unit of currency in our society. It’s a “post-modernization” of prestige (post-modern not in the lit-crit sense, but in a sense of work-machines and systems, e.g., from ticker tape to the computer). And this prestige imbalance (provided one buys into the system) creates power disparity:

We read, but also we are read by other. Interferences in these readings. Forcing someone to read himself as we read him (slavery). Forcing others to read us as we read ourselves (conquest). A mechanical process. More often than not a dialogue between deaf people …. Every being cries out to be read differently.

*

Social force is bound to be accompanied by lies. That is why all that is highest in human life, every effort of thought, every effort of love, has a corrosive action on the established order …. The social order, though necessary, is essentially evil, whatever it may be.

This isn’t to say that Twitter is some inherently diabolical force in our culture, but rather it is indicative of how the forces in our culture operate. There is no purity in this; it’s hard to break out of seeing “beyond” social media when it is an aether that surrounds us. I get excited when someone even vaguely semi-famous follows me on Twitter. Why is that? The craving for attention, for recognition is all-pervasive. A total repudiation of this would be unthinkable for many people, especially in Generation Y and younger. The New York Times had an interesting article of late about the possible rewiring of the brain that takes place because of the prevalence of gadgetry and communication tools at our (by “our”, meaning a certain segment of the developed world-certainly cell phone usage is not a developed-world phenomenon; I would contend however that the onslaught overload of the continually new is) disposal.

He goes to sleep with a laptop or iPhone on his chest, and when he wakes, he goes online. He and Mrs. Campbell, 39, head to the tidy kitchen in their four-bedroom hillside rental in Orinda, an affluent suburb of San Francisco, where she makes breakfast and watches a TV news feed in the corner of the computer screen while he uses the rest of the monitor to check his e-mail.

*

When he studied, “a little voice would be saying, ‘Look up’ at the computer, and I’d look up,” Connor said. “Normally, I’d say I want to only read for a few minutes, but I’d search every corner of Reddit and then check Facebook.”

It’s that ‘little voice’ which interests me, bringing about complicity into the network. And, believe me, I know this pull. I struggle with it every day not only in my writing but in my everyday life. It was inculcated at a very early age (probably 8 or 9, when I got my first Texas Instruments computer?). Back to Simone Weil:

What, then, is the antidote? Weil puts forward an “out” that is neither capitalist nor Marxist. It involves attention, but real attention:

As Weil’s special vocation was to seek and find the forgotten, she considered the essence of both friendship, and social justice to be the act of “creative attention.” Her favorite parable was the Good Samaritan. The charity portrayed there she regarded as sacramental in character:

‘Christ taught us that the supernatural love of our neighbor is the exchange of compassion and gratitude which happens in a flash between two beings, one possessing and the other deprived of human personality. One of the two is only a little piece of flesh, naked, inert, and bleeding beside a ditch; he is nameless; no one knows anything about him. Those who pass by this thing scarcely notice it, and a few minutes afterwards do not even know that they saw it. Only one stops and turns his attention towards it …. The attention is creative. But at the moment when it is engaged it is a renunciation. This is true, at least, if it is pure. The man accepts to be diminished by concentrating on an expenditure of energy, which will not extend his own power but will only give existence to a being other than himself, who will exist independently of him …. Creative attention means really giving our attention to what does not exist… He who has absolutely no belongings of any kind around which social consideration crystallizes does not exist. ‘

Both love and justice perceive what is invisible to the world of social ideologies, that is, the individual sufferer. True attention literally creates personality in the sufferer. Far from leading to political quietism, Weil’s philosophy of “creative attention” leads to authentic political action.

What’s interesting about this from a standpoint of poetics or aesthetics, particularly narrative-prose aesthetics, is that fiction is also a process of “breathing life” into a stranger. The writer creates both the stranger and ground he or she stands upon–and then the stranger becomes “known.” In this, writing creates… “a ‘personal’ existence for that individual.” In the real world, in compassion, in giving life to relationship, we are in essence making that person exist for us. (How much of the day is spent amongst simulacra?) This is what is meant by the “depth” of a character–it is pointing toward the character’s character, the innate yet rather ineffable quality that comes about when a character comes alive in a book. And this, perhaps, is why the written arts are so crucial, and why I do worry that the shallowness of attention in our current culture is making the need for fiction obsolete.

Not because of length of prose, or even difficulty of reading (although that certainly plays a part) but because people would rather not get closer to each other. Even if it’s an imaginary other.

One final note, about social media and the sorcerous (I did promise that at the beginning of the post, didn’t I??). For Weil, the “Beast” of social media accretes power to the powerful by deception. Media manipulation by powerful conglomerates and spokespeople and celebrities. One of the most profound books I read in the last 12 months was Eros and Magic in the Rennaisance by Ioan P. Culianu, which involves:

how magic in the Renaissance was “a scientifically plausible attempt to manipulate individuals and groups based on a knowledge of motivations, particularly erotic motivations. In addition, the magician relied on a profound knowledge of the art of memory to manipulate the imagination of his subjects. In these respects, Culiano suggests, magic is the precursor of the modern psychological and sociological sciences, and the magician is the distant ancestor of the of the psychoanalyst and the advertising and publicity agent.”

I think the interplay between Weil and Culiano here is extremely apparent. I’ll try to touch on Eros and Magic, and Giordano Bruno, in a future post.

Late note: I have to add this excerpt from a review by John Crowley of a book about Culiano’s mysterious murder (well, it’s a long story). But this is the important part:

Culianu distinguishes between two types of polity: the magician state — such as the United States or Italy, where he lived when he came to the West — and the police state. The police state becomes a jailer state, “changing itself into a prison where all hope is lost,” repressing both liberty and the illusion of liberty in order to defend an out-of-date culture in which no one believes. It is bound to perish. The magician state, on the other hand, can degenerate into a sorcerer state, providing only the illusion of satisfaction, keeping the controls hidden; its faults are too much subtlety and too much flexibility. “Yet the future belongs to it anyway,” Culianu says. “Coercion and the use of force will have to yield to the subtle processes of magic, science of the past, of the present, and of the future.”

That sounds like the “Social Beast” to me.

A commonality doesn’t have to destroy beauty.

It’s also a shame that on de-weeding chemicals, on the labels, blackberries are considered “weeds.”

While gardening yesterday, I came across a vegetational oddity that was both grotesque and poignant. I was weeding the lower tier of our terraced garden, where our radiant tulips are in full apotheosis. However, near one of them, a suet feeder (i.e., a small rectangular cage) somehow had fallen into the garden thickets. Lost in the snow, most likely. And many of the leaves of the particular tulip that was closest to the feeder had sprouted into and through the cage, so that they were packed inside the narrow confines.

I did my best to extract the leaves with a minimum of damage, but my hands were clumsy. It was like extracting a vine through a keyhole. Some I got out, some I didn’t. The tulip lived, but it wasn’t pretty–or rather, one set of its leaves weren’t pretty.

#
When I was in high school, my main form of writing switched from fiction to poetry. Most of my works of fiction were self-aggrandizing fantasies involving myself and classmates in interplanetary adventures of one sort or another, or based on whatever ideas I could crib from the 1st edition AD&D Dungeon Master’s Guide (hey, nothing wrong with that!). I would daydream alot and concoct and sometimes write down what I concocted. But it was all escape, and escape wasn’t solving the problems of high school I was having, which were numerous and seemingly insurmountable. Painfully shy, imbued with pretty much no self-confidence, and in an all-male Catholic prep school that was absolutely merciless in its bullying towards those in the first two categories…well, you can do the math. It was absolute hell–I was in the wrong place in the wrong time, and didn’t have enough guts to extricate myself from the situation and go to a school with peers who wouldn’t seek to destroy me every single day. I was stubborn and stuck it out, trapped.

It was in this pressure cooker that I really started to write poetry for the first time in my sophomore year. I honestly don’t know how I got through freshman year without it. This pain directly transferred itself onto the page in a direct relationship. I got out a blank notebook and started addressing my tormentors, the captors of my spirit; address the walls and blockages , to say what I couldn’t say to anyone else. Was the poetry horrible? Oh yeah, of course. It couldn’t have been any different. I had read Yeats, came across a few others in whatever random oratorical speaking event or English class I had stumbled across, and of course song lyrics from New Order, The Replacements and the like. But–and I don’t know if it was any different for anyone else–the lyric mode of address managed to reorient how I saw the world, and allowed me to create hope (I miswrote this as “home”, which works too) when there was none in sight.

Of course, things did get better, slowly and surely, and I started to accrue craft and some measure of experience and confidence. And then, sometime in college, the Rilkean decision to commit my life to writing, come hell or high water. With lots of both since then–not there haven’t been other torments, and other painful and spectacularly bad choices, but I was fighting for my soul in high school.

And I guess when you actually fight for your soul do you come to believe that the soul exists.

In that sense, then, deep down I’m still that same kid–vulnerable, using the sentences at my disposal to try to unlock the cage of my own insecurities and gently extract the leaves. And I do suspect that a lot of us in this particular field (let me know if this is being presumptuous, or not applicable to your situation!), with our own adolescent cauldrons that are only remembered in glimmers, such as right before falling asleep or stumbling upon one of your tormentors on Facebook. But these are our creation myths, the common soil that we have planted our roots in, the lyric of struggle and flowering in the spring sun. I can’t pretend for a second that I’m not who I’ve been.

thinking –> writing –> publishing

You could even put “dreaming” before thinking here in this lame flowchart (or the unconscious; thinking that we’re not aware of).

However, in the “cloud” of social media, the flow changes a little bit:

thinking –> writing/publishing

The compositional/typographical tools become the writing tools; a “press to publish” compositional field narrows the range and timespan of an embryonic “writing” stage to one that is more “in the public.” This can be demonstrated any number of ways, such as the collaborative/tribal give-and-take between an author and audience that was talked about in the last post.

The potential problem isn’t with the writing in this role per se (although this can lead to bad writing of a different sort than the bad writing of the traditional model). The problem is that it binds thought more closely with publishing. It has the potential to have the writer willingly cede her or his thoughts to the whims of the marketplace. Now, sure, it could be argued that that happens all the time; writers thinking of projects that will sell, or whatever. Nothing inherently wrong with that. But writing is the nether-dreamworld acting as an intermediary and buffer between our private thoughts and the interactions we have. That is where, to a large extent, it gains its restorative power: to remind the reader of an inner life, separate from the bounds of a commercial world we are all, to one extent or another, trapped in. (This can be intimated as “mere” escape or the multilayered pleasures of immersive worldbuilding.) Worse still is the potential creeping of the “commercial network” into the true wilds of the unconscious, so that we don’t realize that we really don’t want what we want.

The point is not to say that great art can’t be made within a hypertexted, collaborative space. The point is, rather (or one of them, at least) is that attitude of short term, tactical gains in a marketplace–with these new tools that can shrink the bandwidth of a writer’s private lexicon–can potentially yield mere empty interconnectedness, without durability or the idiosyncratic vision of a writer that might be, in the end, his or her only true hallmark.

The early pulp writers were not great writers, for the most part, yet they put their hearts into their work, and their stories had high-impact and were encoded (encrypted, if you will) with a high level of cultural impact for future generations. They were networked, after a fashion, with the fan community, but were also for the most part isolated voices (the poignancy of written letters also is an instance of the marriage of thought and writing).

From The Exploit by Galloway and Thacker (truly a great book):

The expectation is that one is either online or not. There is little room for kind of online or sort of online. Network status doesn’t allow for technical ambiguity, only a selection box of discrete states. It is frustrating, ambiguity is, especially from a technical point of view. It works or it doesn’t, and when it doesn’t, it should be debugged or replaced. … One way to fix the ambiguity is to be “always on,” even when asleep, in the bathroom, or the unconscious. All the official discourses of the Web demand that one is either online and accounted for, or offline and still accounted for.

If we give away the store (our reserves of who we are), if we give our selves, what are we really receiving in return?

Absence and Dreams, Roots and Branches

Here’s a chalice.
I’m in Dixie.
Alchemy
is much scarier
than “alchemists”
say. It doesn’t
ever happen.
Electrical cords
happen.
A screen-saver
comes over
the eyes: clouds
mangy cover the
mountains. They
are so reasonable.
Thieves also
go on vacation,
but they don’t –
they just
don’t — see you
coming. And
giving. I’ve doused
the brochure on the
American anchoress
in a hotel sink.
And the little soaps
won’t wash out… Some
where in a door’s
county a lye
archon is baptized.
Here all buildings that
matter are white.
A brook
solves silently.
The book will
often be written
upside-down,
struckthrough, carried
off by
powerlines. Clear-cut
forests will become
growth and utter pythons
in the wilderness
of math. (A rail +
a rail + dogwood)
At the x-roads unknowing,
I eat my
breakfast: congregation and
dropsy, kneeled to
the bone, shovel-
ready. The persimmons
in the parking
lot scrawl: Bus
your own cups,
then again.

I found this snippet on a book panel re: SXSW that I thought was illuminating in regards to some of the attendant issues of authorship and culture that I’ve danced around in previous posts:

# An author is no longer an individual working in a room alone, but the leader of an online “tribe” of followers –- the people who comprise the author’s audience. Several example kept coming up, wine guy Gary Vaynerchuck, author of Crush It!, business guru Seth Godin; and Kroszer’s favorite example, The Pioneer Woman, who “could organize a tour on her own without the help of a publisher.” The consensus, from another panel –- “Scoring a Tech Book Deal” was that a potential author needed a minimum of 5,000 Twitter followers. [this social calculus is pretty funny --ed.]
# For non celebrities, social media is the way most authors will get this tribe. This can be difficult for some traditional authors. [emphasis mine]

This goes far beyond paper book vs. digital book. This is a fundamental change in the way text (to use the broadest sense of term) is constructed. We are indeed entering a true post-Romantic era, with many attendant positives and negatives that come with any seismic change. And these changes will absolutely change the content of fiction, as well as other disciplines. This is, in itself, nothing that revelatory. Probably thousands of others have said this is happening, or will happen, over the last 15 years or so.

The problem is that the tribe isn’t always right. God knows I love engaging with readers and other writers, but what, exactly, are the parameters of these pseudo-nano-states? I don’t want to take this metaphor too literally (obviously, unless we are in the real of interpersonal writerly experiments, most writers are still going to be “individuals working in a room alone.”). We are not in a troubadour era of oral culture. This interdependence for the written culture of reading silently (and in relative spatial isolation) is a drastic change.

And yet, to move it into the realm of fiction, and partic. speculative fiction (of all stripes) what does this entail for the content of stories? The subject matter? (Looking at the matter as a living, tactile thing?)

In other words, can the thoroughly modernist concerns of our fiction be served by this new world of tribalism?

Because, like it or not, the structures and “information embedding” of the stories themselves are still thoroughly Modernist. Ideally, the stories and novels that are brought forth as “the best and the brightest” in our field pay at least lip service to concerns such as, but not limited to: characterization, emotional resonance, the elicitation of surprise, immersion, perhaps even a sense of the secular numinous. This is where the Romantic bleeds into the Modern (using Poe as the pivot): the crucible of our fictions that have beginnings, middles, and ends.

And yet, the delivery of these stories is increasingly brought about by a play of surfaces: social media juice, buzz, and linkage; for a purely mundane example, I think about the open calls by people to nominate their story or novel on their blogs, tweets, etc. This is purely on the realm of horse trading, which has always existed–but it’s existing, perhaps for the first year ever in the SF/F field, in a completely different way than ever before in 2010, and the reason why this is the case is perhaps illuminated by the quote from the beginning of this post.

Perhaps it’s just a lagging indicator, and our storytelling forms will, in time, embrace different ways to deliver prose that matters in different ways than we thought possible. Perhaps. And this would indeed be a recalibration of the field that somehow manages to find the sweet spot between narrative depth and structural uncertainty. But until then, it’s “old wine in new barrels.” And the writer’s relationship to his or her materials–i.e., the space of a social media–is one of crucial importance. But as of now, in this time of transition, it’s really the “worst of both worlds”–the two worsts being:

1. the 1930s-1940s Golden Age notion of being a “pro”, which entails churning out quantitative work at all costs, cultivating status of being a “pro”, being ruthless toward aesthetic indeterminism.

2. the early 21st century branding of “self” in the hyper-public sphere of cyberspace (which very might look and feel like a real Self!), inculcating oneself with favors through the social network, embracing conglomerations and alliances of various tribes together to affect short-term gains in the field.

Finally, it has to be asked–what is the ultimate goal of the self-described digerati with literature in the first place, as a class? What is their use with literature? I honestly don’t know, and perhaps it is my bewilderment, or my own density of this issue, that drives me to explore this.

Maybe I’m writing this because I have deep misgivings which are my own and mine alone. I see, along the edges of sight, this ruthlessness creep up and pounce. I see takedowns and pettiness and it isn’t pretty. There have even been occasions when throughout the years I haven’t been on my best behavior myself. Writing isn’t necessarily a field in which to “feel justice” or equanimity. I do, however, think that this aforementioned tribalism gives a sense of false equanimity, false democracy. Which isn’t the same as community or truth. Where I do feel the need for truth is in my own voice–and that is certainly my “early Renaissance humanism” at work. (It took me many years to realize that I’m not a postmodernist. Imagine that.)

And I want other writers, especially ones just starting out, to realize that there are other ways to go about becoming a good writer besides getting 5,000 Twitter followers (okay, this is a metaphor…mostly), or getting one’s tribe up and running before going deep inside oneself and finding out what you need to say–what you really need to say, with gnarled persistence, and, yes, plenty of alone time.

On the Appearances page, you can see where else I’ll be roaming next week: Richmond, Chapel Hill, Charlotte, Asheville! Also, starting in Richmond one other thing that I wanted to do is a real-life extension of what I’ve been doing online and that is fundraising for Mercy Corps. This blog post here talks a little bit about the online efforts, but essentially: Mercy Corps is a fantastic organization that works all around the world to better the lives of ordinary people. (In particular, you can read about what Mercy Corps is doing in Haiti: http://www.mercycorps.org/countries/haiti).

So anyone that happens to come by the reading in the flesh and makes a donation of at least $5 will receive an impromptu micro-story written for them, then and there, set in the world of Total Oblivion, More or Less. I’ll also take requests–if you want a few sentences about your uncle, your dog, whatever…I can do that. And you don’t even need to buy a copy of the book (although if you DO, I’d be more than happy to inscribe it in the pages therein). Of course I’m still fundraising online as well, so if you can’t make it you can still participate and I will send you a little story either by email or postcard!

http://www.mercycorps.org/fundraising/adeniro

Thanks all!