Posts Tagged ‘literature’
“Seeing comes before words”*…
Five years ago, (R)D featured John Berger’s award-winning– and more to the point, hugely-influential– television series Ways of Seeing (in some ways a response to Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation series). The broadcast was followed by an adaptation of Berger’s scripts that became a book of the same name.
Now that hugely influential work is available in a gorgeous web version…
Based on the 1972 BBC series and comprised of 7 essays, 3 of which are entirely pictoral, Ways of Seeing is a seminal work which examines how we view art…
A beautiful new way to enjoy (and learn from) a classic: “Ways of Seeing“
* John Berger (the first line of Ways of Seeing)
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As we ponder perspective, we might pause to celebrate the induction, on this date in 2005, into the the National Toy Hall of Fame of a plaything that invites constant creativity– the cardboard box.
“We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if mankind is to survive”*…
The estimable Robin Sloan on the challenge of keeping our language– our words and our use of them– up to the task of wrestling with our present and our future…
The overloading of common words is well underway: new language models have “thinking” modes, “reasoning” capabilities! What this means, in practice, is that they’ve learned to produce a special kind of text, the conversion of the linguistic if-then into a dynamo that spins and spins and, often, magically — yes, it is magical — produces useful results.
Here is one distinction among several: this process can only compound — the models can only “think” by spooling out more text — while human thinking often does the opposite: retreats into silence, because it doesn’t have words yet to say what it wants to say.
Human thinking often washes the dishes, then goes for a walk.
So, if you redefine “thinking” to mean “arriving at a solution through an iterative linguistic loop” … yes, that’s what these models do. That definition is IMHO pretty thin.
We talk about humans thinking harder, which is not the same as thinking longer. I think most people know from experience that thinking longer generally just makes you anxious. But that’s what the models do, and not only longer, but in parallel, all those step-by-step monologues spilling out simultaneously, somewhere in the dark of a data center. “Quantity has a quality all its own,” said Stalin, maybe …
Well, okay — what does it mean for a human to think harder? Reasonable people will disagree (and in interesting ways) but, for my part, I think it means prospecting new analogies; pitching your inquiry out away from the gravitational attractors of protocol and cliché; turning the workpiece around to inspect it from new angles; and especially bringing more senses into the mix — grounding yourself in reality. You’ll note these moves are challenging or impossible for systems that operate only on/with/inside language.
A couple of years ago, when I wondered if language models are in hell, I expressed some hope about the richness of multimodal training. So far, this hasn’t panned out. Rather than images anchoring text in a richer, more embodied realm, the marriage seems to have gone the opposite direction. The models chop images into sequences of tokens — big bright pictures become spindly threads, a bit sad — and feed them in along with everything else.
We are going to lose this word — we might already have lost it — but/and we can put a marker down; a gravestone, you might call it; for a kind of thinking that used to mean more than “more”.
Other useful words, still with us, include: imagination, ingenuity, insight. Clarity, most of all. Clarity is what Einstein was seeking when he sat and thought hard about the relative motion of magnets and conductors. He wanted to push through language, beyond it, beyond even the formalism of physics — because there wasn’t physics yet for the things he wanted to understand.
I am still waiting for models that aspire to pack complex systems — whole economies — into high-dimensional space, “hold it all in their heads”, then make observations and predictions way out beyond the if-then of “reasoning” language.
Think harder!
“Thinking modes,” from Sloan’s wonderful newsletter.
Pair with “Horseless Carriages, Digital Paint, AI,” Quentin Hardy‘s meditation on the ways in which new technologies shape both our language(s) and the ways we think (from Hardy’s also-wonderful newsletter).
[Image above: Rodin, “The Thinker” (source)]
* Albert Einstein
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As we ponder pondering, we might recall that it was on this date in 1963 that “Louie Louie” by the Kingsmen entered the Billboard Hot 100.
For more on how the record came to be (and the ruckus over language that followed), see here (and here and here).
“I think every age has a medium that talks to it more eloquently than the others. In the 19th century it was symphonic music and the novel. For various technical and artistic reasons, film became that eloquent medium for the 20th century.”*…
… and few filmmakers have been as fluent as the remarkable Walter Murch. In the context of a review of Murch’s recent book, Suddenly Something Clicked: The Languages of Film Editing and Sound Design, John Lahr offers an appreciation…
Walter Murch , the film editor and sound designer Francis Ford Coppola has described as ‘kind of like the film world’s one intellectual’, has what he terms standfleisch. He has spent most of his almost sixty years in the film industry standing his lanky frame in front of various editing consoles. ‘Why do surgeons, orchestra conductors and cooks all stand to do their jobs?’ he asks in Suddenly Something Clicked, a piñata of ideas and anecdotes about his life and work. It sheds light on his forensic craft, his distinctive way of thinking about editing and the making of many of the major films he’s worked on, including Apocalypse Now (1979), the Godfather trilogy (1972-90), The Conversation (1974), American Graffiti (1973) and the 1998 recut of Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil.
To Murch, who has won three Academy Awards and been nominated for six more, film editing is a sensual ‘full-body’ experience: ‘a kind of dance, a choreography of images and sounds in the flow of time, forged in movement, eventually crystallising into permanence’. This embrace is a kind of erotic surrender to the unique metabolism of each story and its performers, a way of ‘drenching yourself in the sensibility of the film to the point where you’re alive to the smallest details’. ‘To watch Murch at work,’ Michael Ondaatje writes in The Conversations (2002), ‘is to see him delve into almost invisible specifics, where he harnesses and moves the bones or arteries of a scene, relocating them so they will alter the look of the features above the skin.’ The Conversations, a book of interviews with Murch, grew out of his work on the film version of Ondaatje’s novel The English Patient. ‘Most of the work he does is going to affect us subliminally,’ Ondaatje writes. ‘There is no showing off here.’ In the filigree of image and sound there comes a moment when, Murch says, he disappears into the film: ‘The shots, the emotions, the story seem to take over. Sometimes – the best times – this process reaches the point where I can look at the scene and say, “I didn’t have anything to do with that – it just created itself.”’
How heavy is this editorial heavy-lifting? Murch, of course, has done the maths. In the tale of the tape, Apocalypse Now is the undisputed champ. A single frame of 35 mm film weighs ‘five-thousandths of an ounce’; a reel of film – eleven minutes of picture and sound – weighs eleven pounds, or a pound a minute. By that calculation, the 1,250,000 feet of film shot by Coppola weighed more than 14,000 pounds or, as Murch puts it, ‘seven tons of film that had to be broken down, boxed, catalogued, put in accessible racks, moved around from editor to editor’. The average ratio of footage shot to footage used in a feature film is 20:1; the ratio for Apocalypse Now was 95:1. Over four years, Murch and his team got the film down from 236 hours to 2 hours and 27 minutes. This is as much bushwhacking as editing, finding the film’s story as well as its grammar, a feat Murch also accomplished for Coppola in The Conversation, which he restructured and essentially rewrote by cutting a third of the scenes…
… If Murch is full of wonder at film’s storytelling possibilities, the inventors of the moving picture were not. ‘The cinema is an invention without a future,’ Louis Lumière declared. The cinematograph, which he invented with his brother, Auguste, was a camera that recorded, developed and projected film onto a screen (one of the first being a bedsheet in a Russian brothel). Thomas Edison, though more interested in sound than image, developed the Kinetograph (an early motion-picture camera) and the Kinetoscope, which projected images that could be seen through peepholes. The breakthrough, which turned a 19th-century novelty into the 20th century’s only new art form, was the arrival of montage in 1901. The transition from one shot to another transformed motion pictures from a literal medium into a psychological and poetic one. Movies could now jump back and forth in time and space, ‘the cinematic equivalent to the discovery of flight’, as Murch sees it. Out of its illusion of naturalistic flow – 24 frames a projected second – a new grammar of seeing and of storytelling evolved: close-ups, dissolves, long shots, fade-outs.
‘“Filmic” juxtapositions are taking place in the real world not only when we dream but also when we are awake,’ Murch wrote in his book from 1992, In the Blink of an Eye. This explains why audiences find edited film a surprisingly familiar experience. Every blink is a thought. Every thought is a cut. In support of this belief, Murch quotes John Huston: ‘Look at that lamp across the room. Now look back at me. Look back at that lamp. Now look back at me again. Do you see what you did? You blinked. Those are cuts. Your mind cut the scene. First you behold the lamp. Cut. Then you behold me.’ In cinema, Murch says, ‘at the moment you decide to cut, what you are saying is, in effect, “I am going to bring this idea to an end and start something new.”’…
… Murch jostles between metaphysics and neurology in his discussion of film editing, but biology is his link to theorising about sound design. Hearing develops four and a half months after conception. ‘We luxuriate in a continuous bath of sounds: the song of our mother’s voice, the swash of her breathing, the piping of her intestines, the timpani of her heart,’ he writes. ‘The almost industrial intensity of this womb sound’ is about 75 decibels, ‘equivalent to … the cabin of a cruising passenger jet’. After birth, however, sound is gradually demoted. ‘Whatever virtues sound brings to film are largely perceived and appreciated by the audience in visual terms. The better the sound, the better the image.’ This fusing of sound and image is a sleight of mind in which the brain projects dimensionality onto the screen and makes it seem as if it had come from the image in the first place. ‘We do not see and hear a film, we hear/see/hear/see it.’
By his own admission, the phenomenal success of The Godfather triggered a revival of the metaphorical use of layered sound. Murch’s masterstroke of sound design was the addition – not indicated in the original script – of a rising metallic screech, as if from an overhead train, as Michael Corleone prepares to assassinate Sollozzo and Captain McCluskey. ‘The rumbling and piercing metallic scream,’ he writes, ‘is not linked directly to anything seen on screen, and so the audience is made to wonder at least momentarily, if perhaps only subconsciously, “What is this?”’ Because it is detached from the image, the scream becomes a clue to Michael’s state of mind; it comes and goes, then grows louder and louder until he finally pulls out his gun. After he shoots, the sound stops abruptly.
‘Even for the most well-prepared of directors, there are limits to the imagination and memory,’ Murch writes. ‘It is the editor’s job to propose alternative scenarios as bait.’ In Apocalypse Now, the sampan massacre and, more important, the restoration of Captain Willard’s narration to the final script are down to Murch. ‘Willard is an observer – he is our eyes and ears in this diabolical landscape – and for most of the journey, until he gets to the Kurtz compound, he is a mostly silent passenger,’ Murch explains. ‘The audience judges character by comparing words spoken with actions taken, but if there are few words and fewer actions, the character has to emerge from somewhere else: out of an interior, quasi-novelistic voice.’ Following this editorial impulse, Murch dug out Willard’s voiceover from the original screenplay and recorded it himself, ‘lacing it selectively over the first half-hour of film’. His pitch worked. Willard’s voiceover was reinstated (as rewritten by Michael Herr), a crucial adjustment that spoke to the accuracy of Coppola’s dictum that a film director is the ‘ringmaster of a circus that’s inventing itself’.
Suddenly Something Clicked was conceived by Murch as a ‘three-braided rope – theory, practice and history’, a sort of intellectual high-wire act of technical expertise and personal anecdote. Like Murch himself, the book is unique. It’s designed for the reader to play with. Want to read Maxim Gorky’s reaction to seeing his first motion picture? Or see Orson Welles’s lost 58-page memo to the Universal Studios executives who took control of his production of Touch of Evil? Or hear the six pre-mixes and the final mix of the helicopters landing to ‘Ride of the Valkyries’ in Apocalypse Now? Or watch an animated restructuring of the scenes in The Conversation? QR codes beside the text provide detours into these subjects and more. Similarly, there are chyrons of adages from other filmmakers and artists – ‘fortunes’, Murch calls them – at the bottom of every even-numbered page, intended as a kind of dialectical chorus to counterpoint or contradict his opinions. His high-spirited advice to film editors holds true for his readers: ‘Good luck! Make discoveries!’…
Eminently worth reading in full: “Every Blink,” from @lrb.co.uk.
As his book(s) on film and editing would suggest, Murch is generous in sharing his insights. That’s true too at a more personal level, as he’s made time to advise and mentor younger, less-experienced filmmakers (as your correspondent can attest).
Apropos Coppola’s characterization of him, Murch is a man of wide interests– to many of which, as reported in “Walter just knows stuff” (source of the image above) and “Transits, Translations, and Secret Patterns: When Lawrence Weschler Met Walter Murch,” he’s made important contributions. Oh, and he’s also a literary translator.
* Walter Murch
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As we juxtapose, we might spare athought for an earlier cinematic pioneer, Hal Roach; he died on this date in 1992. A film and television producer, director and screenwriter, and founder of the namesake Hal Roach Studios, he was active in the industry from the 1910s to the 1990s. He is best known for producing a number of early media franchise successes, including the Laurel and Hardy franchise, Harold Lloyd‘s early films, the films of entertainer Charley Chase, and the Our Gang (AKA, “The Little Rascals”) short film comedy series.
“I am not Cinna the conspirator”*…
As Philip Goldfarb Styrt explains, Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar offers a telling parable about the administration of justice—and rife mishandling thereof—in our day…
American politics has a long history of referencing William Shakespeare’s The Tragedy of Julius Caesar, from Abigail Adams, who identified with Portia, the wife of Brutus, as Betsy Erkkila has noted, to the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, which “both was and was not reenacting” the play, in Cary M. Mazer’s words. These references are likely due to the intersection of American identification with Roman republicanism, which the play dramatizes, and the long history of American interest in Shakespeare specifically. More recently, a great deal of ink was spilled during Donald Trump’s first term comparing the president to Caesar. But while an excellent hook for contemporary stagings of the play, this kind of parallel has limitations. King George III and Abraham Lincoln weren’t Caesar, and neither is Donald Trump, even if a lead actor sports a distinctive red tie. This history does, however, raise the question of what Shakespeare’s play might have to tell us about our current historical moment.
One overlooked area of governance that has become increasingly important in the early days of the current administration is due process: what procedures does the government have to go through and what kinds of hearings must be held, particularly in immigration cases, in order to arrest someone? To remove or deport someone from the country? From the Mahmoud Khalil case at Columbia University to the Rümeysa Öztürk case at Tufts, the Secretary of State has been personally marking individual visas and green cards for revocation; in addition, in cases like the one that centers on the removal of alleged gang members to El Salvador, whole categories of people are being removed without a hearing or a trial and with at least some allegations that the individuals removed aren’t even part of the targeted class.
Julius Caesar treats these issues directly. The play focuses on the assassination of the title character by a conspiracy headed by Brutus and Cassius and the defeat of the conspirators in battle by Caesar’s successors, the triumvirate of Marc Antony, Octavian, and Lepidus. Along the way, the play presents punishment as a major theme: First, the punishment of Caesar for the perceived sin of royal ambition, and second, the punishment of the conspirators for his murder. Because of this, a close look at the play and the scholarship surrounding it can help make clear the stakes of due process. While the term itself wouldn’t have been used in Shakespeare’s time, his era was one in which the procedures of law we now call due process were being formalized, and his plays show a consistent interest in whether that proper procedure is being followed.
A pair of crucial scenes related to this issue immediately follow the play’s most famous parts (Caesar’s assassination and the speeches delivered by Brutus and Antony over his body, in Act 3, Scenes 1 and 2, respectively) and may be sometimes overlooked. But when considered together, they give insight into why arbitrary executive action without due process is dangerous, whether it technically operates within the law or not.
The first of these two scenes—in Act 3, scene 3—features mob violence. Incited by Marc Antony to seek revenge, the citizens seek out conspirators to murder, and they mistake the poet Cinna for a conspirator of the same name. They tear him to pieces. Though this act is hardly the same as an official arrest, which might seem to distance it from discussions of due process, this moment isn’t just about the mob, as Martin Mueller points out; it’s about how power acts, whether through masses or through government. It’s a case of enacting punishment in a case of mistaken identity, particularly one where despite that mistake having been corrected in real time, the damage is done. “I am not Cinna the conspirator,” are the victim’s last words, but the play gives neither time nor opportunity for his insistence to convince anyone to keep him alive. Due process would allow for potential Cinnas to demonstrate innocence and remove themselves from the unwarranted threat; without it, everyone is imperiled.
There’s another element of the current concern regarding due process that relates to the fate of poor Cinna. His death isn’t merely the result of mistaken identity; as Jeffrey J. Yu writes, after he tries to identify himself the mob changes its tune, declaring that they’ll kill him for being a bad poet instead. Absent due process, there’s no pause to decide whether this person should be condemned or if the reason given for condemnation is legitimate. This episode serves as a reminder that due process doesn’t merely protect people from mistaken identification; it also requires those who would mete out punishment to specify, up front, the reason for it.
The Trump administration’s refusal to give key information to multiple judges in the removal cases recalls this danger. By refusing to specify details of the case, the government keeps the possibility alive of changing their reasoning or their claims to have the same effect for different reasons—just as the mob changes its reasoning for killing Cinna. This belies the question of whether those who are looking to deliver punishment are acting in good faith, a concern that became part of the appeals court decision in the El Salvador case and has subsequently been raised in other courtrooms as well. Just as Shakespeare’s mob finds new justifications for why Cinna the Poet should die, the government keeps open the possibility of producing a different reason for removing the people it currently claims are alien enemies—a process they have already begun with individual visa revocations. Due process requires a commitment to the reasons punishment is sought and thus allows those reasons to be addressed and countered.
As Nicholas Royle argues, the scene of Cinna’s death can easily be treated as a version of Julius Caesar in miniature. The play as a whole is about categorical error: killing someone because you think they are one thing only to find out you were wrong. This, in turn, centers the idea of due process, because only through it can deliberative decisions about identity, guilt, and punishment be properly engaged. The lynching of (the wrong) Cinna is the madness of a mob; the murder of (the right) Caesar is a conspiracy of nobles; the removal of hundreds of (alleged) Venezuelan gang members is the action of ICE. Each is a distinct entity, but they hold in common a lack of judicial process to determine what is to be done and to whom.
If the death of Cinna is a microcosm of the play, the other moment that reinforces the importance of due process in Julius Caesar is even more compressed, lasting a mere eight lines at the start of the fourth act. That’s all the time it takes for Marc Antony, Octavius (the future Augustus Caesar), and Lepidus to choose the Romans who will die by proscription in order to keep their triumvirate in power while they war against Caesar’s assassins. This is an arbitrary and impersonal form of execution: the triumvirs check off the names of those they want dead: “these many, then, shall die; their names are pricked.” As Robert Kalmey observes, this moment encapsulates what Roman historians thought of as the worst of all of Octavius’s crimes against the state before becoming emperor. This “tyrannical ruthlessness and cruelty,” in Robert Miola’s words, reveals that the triumvirate will be no better than Caesar’s assassins or the mob; they too will kill at whim to stay in power.
There’s something disturbing about these proscriptions, which is why both Kalmey and Miola identify them as critical. The triumvirate make a cold-blooded choice to kill many Romans; it has neither targeted motivation, as did the assassination of Caesar, nor does it possess the emotional if not legal justification embraced by the inflamed mob in its misdeeds. This isn’t to justify those prior murders. Rather, it’s to point out that the proscriptions somehow exceed even them in horror because of how they’re administered. There’s no due process here, either; the three triumvirs don’t get their hands dirty, their decisions can’t be appealed, and there’s no public process by which those to be killed will be identified before the decision is final.
In this there’s a distinct echo of the process currently in use for determining which visas (permanent or temporary) will be revoked under the current administration. The decision lies solely with Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who has the power to determine if a particular immigrant poses a threat to national security; if he makes that determination, then the immigrant in question can be picked up off the street without hearing or appeal. Thus far, there’s no venue for disputing such a determination nor is there a published list of those whose visas have been revoked, even though Rubio claims to have revoked as many as 300 (coincidentally, as Kalmey details, the number of senators proscribed by the triumvirate).
Of course, deportation or removal from the United States isn’t the same as death; Rubio’s unilateral visa revocation isn’t the same as the proscription. But the lack of transparency and due process are similar, and there are few to no guarantees of the safety of people whom ICE agents remove, often without identifying themselves, and move around without notifying the family or lawyers of the detained. In fact, the government has argued in court that it has no responsibility to return those who might be removed incorrectly or by accident.
In Julius Caesar Shakespeare demonstrates the extreme consequences of a lack of due process. Not every such deprivation becomes a literal matter of life and death as in the play, but making use of such scenarios enables Shakespeare to highlight more effectively the danger of arbitrary action. Whether we imagine ourselves, like Cinna the Poet, hunted for a crime of which we are innocent or, like the Roman dignitaries proscribed by the triumvirs, marked out for condemnation, the drama asserts that some kind of due process is a necessity for a free state. If, as Lloyd Matthews has argued, America’s founding ideals of liberty are intimately linked to Julius Caesar, that connection should remind us that such liberty requires due process to function properly…
“The Lessons of Due Process in Julius Caesar,” from @jstordaily.bsky.social.
Pair with: “Brush Up Your Shakespeare” (“A Harvard Law class uses the Bard’s plays to explore legal themes and concepts past and present”)
* Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, Act 3, Scene 3
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As we recognize rights, we might recall that it was on this date in 1938 that the Mercury Theater broadcast the Halloween episode of their weekly series on the WABC Radio Network, Orson Welles’ adaptation of H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds. The first two-thirds of the show (which was uninterrupted by ads) was composed of simulated news bulletins… which suggested to many listeners (a huge number of whom joined in progress, after tuning over from the Edgar Bergen show on NBC) that a real Martian invasion was underway.
While headlines like the one below suggest that there was widespread panic, research reveals that the fright was more subdued. Still there was an out-cry against the “phony-news” format… and Welles was launched into the notoriety that would characterize his career ever after.
“Down with all kings but King Ludd!”*…
Further, in a fashion, to yesterday’s post…
Thomas Pynchon is having a moment. On the heels of the success of Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another (loosely based in Pynchon’s novel, Vineland), he has released his first novel in 12 years, Shadow Ticket, a sufficiently big deal to merit not just a featured focus in The New York Times Book Review, but also a combo review-profile in The New York Times Magazine (both links to gift articles). Your correspondent is about half-way through Shadow Ticket and having a blast…
But here, I offer a much older piece from Pynchon, and non-fiction at that: an essay he wrote for The New York Times in 1984… one resonant with themes that run through his novels; one that speaks to that moment– the mid-Eighties– even as it speaks to ours…
As if being 1984 weren’t enough, it’s also the 25th anniversary this year of C. P. Snow’s famous Rede Lecture, ”The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution,” notable for its warning that intellectual life in the West was becoming increasingly polarized into ”literary” and ”scientific” factions, each doomed not to understand or appreciate the other. [See almanac entry here.] The lecture was originally meant to address such matters as curriculum reform in the age of Sputnik and the role of technology in the development of what would soon be known as the third world. But it was the two-culture formulation that got people’s attention. In fact it kicked up an amazing row in its day. To some already simplified points, further reductions were made, provoking certain remarks, name-calling, even intemperate rejoinders, giving the whole affair, though attenuated by the mists of time, a distinctly cranky look.
Today nobody could get away with making such a distinction. Since 1959, we have come to live among flows of data more vast than anything the world has seen. Demystification is the order of our day, all the cats are jumping out of all the bags and even beginning to mingle. We immediately suspect ego insecurity in people who may still try to hide behind the jargon of a specialty or pretend to some data base forever ”beyond” the reach of a layman. Anybody with the time, literacy and access fee these days can get together with just about any piece of specialized knowledge s/he may need. So, to that extent, the two-cultures quarrel can no longer be sustained. As a visit to any local library or magazine rack will easily confirm, there are now so many more than two cultures that the problem has really become how to find the time to read anything outside one’s own specialty.
What has persisted, after a long quarter century, is the element of human character. C. P. Snow, with the reflexes of a novelist after all, sought to identify not only two kinds of education but also two kinds of personality. Fragmentary echoes of old disputes, of unforgotten offense taken in the course of long-ago high- table chitchat, may have helped form the subtext for Snow’s immoderate, and thus celebrated, assertion, ”If we forget the scientific culture, then the rest of intellectuals have never tried, wanted, or been able to understand the Industrial Revolution.” Such ”intellectuals,” for the most part ”literary,” were supposed, by Lord Snow, to be ”natural Luddites.”
Except maybe for Brainy Smurf, it’s hard to imagine anybody these days wanting to be called a literary intellectual, though it doesn’t sound so bad if you broaden the labeling to, say, ”people who read and think.” Being called a Luddite is another matter. It brings up questions such as, Is there something about reading and thinking that would cause or predispose a person to turn Luddite? Is it O.K. to be a Luddite? And come to think of it, what is a Luddite, anyway?…
[Pynchon explains, and puts the “movement” into both socio-political and literary context…]
… The Gothic attitude in general, because it used images of death and ghostly survival toward no more responsible end than special effects and cheap thrills, was judged not Serious enough and confined to its own part of town. It is not the only neighborhood in the great City of Literature so, let us say, closely defined. In westerns, the good people always win. In romance novels, love conquers all. In whodunitsses we know better. We say, ”But the world isn’t like that.” These genres, by insisting on what is contrary to fact, fail to be Serious enough, and so they get redlined under the label ”escapist fare.”
This is especially unfortunate in the case of science fiction, in which the decade after Hiroshima saw one of the most remarkable flowerings of literary talent and, quite often, genius, in our history. It was just as important as the Beat movement going on at the same time, certainly more important than mainstream fiction, which with only a few exceptions had been paralyzed by the political climate of the cold war and McCarthy years. Besides being a nearly ideal synthesis of the Two Cultures, science fiction also happens to have been one of the principal refuges, in our time, for those of Luddite persuasion.
By 1945, the factory system – which, more than any piece of machinery, was the real and major result of the Industrial Revolution – had been extended to include the Manhattan Project, the German long-range rocket program and the death camps, such as Auschwitz. It has taken no major gift of prophecy to see how these three curves of development might plausibly converge, and before too long. Since Hiroshima, we have watched nuclear weapons multiply out of control, and delivery systems acquire, for global purposes, unlimited range and accuracy. An unblinking acceptance of a holocaust running to seven- and eight-figure body counts has become – among those who, particularly since 1980, have been guiding our military policies – conventional wisdom.
To people who were writing science fiction in the 50’s, none of this was much of a surprise, though modern Luddite imaginations have yet to come up with any countercritter Bad and Big enough, even in the most irresponsible of fictions, to begin to compare with what would happen in a nuclear war. So, in the science fiction of the Atomic Age and the cold war, we see the Luddite impulse to deny the machine taking a different direction. The hardware angle got de-emphasized in favor of more humanistic concerns – exotic cultural evolutions and social scenarios, paradoxes and games with space/ time, wild philosophical questions – most of it sharing, as the critical literature has amply discussed, a definition of ”human” as particularly distinguished from ”machine.” Like their earlier counterparts, 20th-century Luddites looked back yearningly to another age – curiously, the same Age of Reason which had forced the first Luddites into nostalgia for the Age of Miracles.
But we now live, we are told, in the Computer Age. What is the outlook for Luddite sensibility? Will mainframes attract the same hostile attention as knitting frames once did? I really doubt it. Writers of all descriptions are stampeding to buy word processors. Machines have already become so user-friendly that even the most unreconstructed of Luddites can be charmed into laying down the old sledgehammer and stroking a few keys instead. Beyond this seems to be a growing consensus that knowledge really is power, that there is a pretty straightforward conversion between money and information, and that somehow, if the logistics can be worked out, miracles may yet be possible. If this is so, Luddites may at last have come to stand on common ground with their Snovian adversaries, the cheerful army of technocrats who were supposed to have the ”future in their bones.” It may be only a new form of the perennial Luddite ambivalence about machines, or it may be that the deepest Luddite hope of miracle has now come to reside in the computer’s ability to get the right data to those whom the data will do the most good. With the proper deployment of budget and computer time, we will cure cancer, save ourselves from nuclear extinction, grow food for everybody, detoxify the results of industrial greed gone berserk – realize all the wistful pipe dreams of our days.
The word ”Luddite” continues to be applied with contempt to anyone with doubts about technology, especially the nuclear kind. Luddites today are no longer faced with human factory owners and vulnerable machines. As well-known President and unintentional Luddite D. D. Eisenhower prophesied when he left office, there is now a permanent power establishment of admirals, generals and corporate CEO’s, up against whom us average poor bastards are completely outclassed, although Ike didn’t put it quite that way. We are all supposed to keep tranquil and allow it to go on, even though, because of the data revolution, it becomes every day less possible to fool any of the people any of the time. If our world survives, the next great challenge to watch out for will come – you heard it here first – when the curves of research and development in artificial intelligence, molecular biology and robotics all converge. Oboy. It will be amazing and unpredictable, and even the biggest of brass, let us devoutly hope, are going to be caught flat-footed. It is certainly something for all good Luddites to look forward to if, God willing, we should live so long. Meantime, as Americans, we can take comfort, however minimal and cold, from Lord Byron’s mischievously improvised song, in which he, like other observers of the time, saw clear identification between the first Luddites and our own revolutionary origins. It begins:
As the Liberty lads o’er the sea
Bought their freedom, and cheaply, with blood,
So we, boys, we
Will die fighting, or live free,
And down with all kings but King Ludd!
Thomas Pynchon considers: “Is It O.K. To Be A Luddite?” from @nytimes.com.
Pair with: “Is This the New ‘Scariest Chart in the World’?”
* Lord Byron
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As we hang onto our humanity, we might recall that it was on this date in 2006 that review copies of Against the Day were distributed; it published later that year. At 1,085 pages, it is the longest of Pynchon’s novels to date (note that there is a rumor that Pynchon, who is now 88, completed another book alongside Shadow Ticket (only 304 pages long)… so who knows if Against the Day will hold its “title”…)
Pynchon has “teased” the novel with a synopsis:
Pynchon’s synopsis states that the novel’s action takes place “between the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair and the years just after World War I”. “With a worldwide disaster looming just a few years ahead, it is a time of unrestrained corporate greed, false religiosity, moronic fecklessness, and evil intent in high places. No reference to the present day is intended or should be inferred.” Pynchon promises “cameo appearances by Nikola Tesla, Bela Lugosi and Groucho Marx”, as well as “stupid songs” and “strange sexual practices”.
The novel’s setting “moves from the labor troubles in Colorado to turn-of-the-century New York City, to London and Göttingen, Venice and Vienna, the Balkans, Central Asia, Siberia at the time of the mysterious Tunguska Event, Mexico during the Revolution, postwar Paris, silent-era Hollywood, and one or two places not strictly speaking on the map at all.”
Like several of Pynchon’s earlier works, Against the Day includes both mathematicians and drug users. “As an era of certainty comes crashing down around their ears and unpredictable future commences, these folks are mostly just trying to pursue their lives. Sometimes they manage to catch up; sometimes it’s their lives that pursue them.”
The synopsis concludes: “If it is not the world, it is what the world might be with a minor adjustment or two. According to some, this is one of the main purposes of fiction. Let the reader decide, let the reader beware. Good luck…”
– source
It is probably Pynchon’s most debated novel. Some readers and critics find it too scattered; others believe it to be his masterpiece (a title more commonly awarded to Gravity’s Rainbow). FWIW, Against the Day is your correspondent’s favorite, which, given how much I’ve admired and enjoyed and learned from all of Pynchon’s work, is saying something…
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