books

Daniel Albright on the Cocteau-Picasso-Satie-Diaghilev collaborative ballet Parade:

Cocteau's most remarkable instruction to [the "American Girl," played by Marie] Chabelska, was this: "The little girl...vibrates like the imagery of films." Elsewhere Cocteau wrote: "One day they won't believe what the press said about Parade. A newspaper even accused me of 'erotic hysteria.' In general they took the shipwreck scene and the cinematographic trembling of the American dance for spasms of delirium tremens." If I read these sentences correctly, Cocteau asked Chabelska to shake in the way a film image shakes when the projector wobbles--that is, she was asked to imitate the technical errors associated with the film medium... That a newspaper would mistake her trembling as "erotic hysteria" is a delightful proof of the tenacity of systems of intepretation based on feeling-expression, even in the excitingly apathetic and technical world of Parade, where the medium is the message...

From Albright's book Untwisting the Serpent: Modernism in Music, Literature, and Other Arts, 2000. The shaky GIF was made from an image in the book, fair use, etc.

On the Digital Media Tree blog I quoted BruceB's reconsideration of the Niven & Pournelle science fiction novel The Mote in God's Eye in light of the "9/12 mentality" of Glenn Reynolds and other techno-class warmongers:

What most troubles me now is the glibness of it, the emphasis on the cleverness of the humans who see through the Motie deceptions, since this looms even larger than the courage of some humans who must die for the sake of plot developments. And it’s completely callous about the wisdom and morality of just standing by and watching an entire society collapse into barbarism - since it’s not the full-blown genocide some authorities had thought be necessary, it’s an improvement, and it seems like since it’s not genocide, it’s A-OK. Other people’s stuff is there to be exciting and interesting props, but it and its owners can be shoved around and broken up as need be, and what really matters (as presented in Mote) is the coolness of the humans who’ll do the pushing and breaking.

Just finished Serpent's Reach by C. J. Cherryh (yeah, yeah, prolific paperback author but there are gems in the canon--this one's from 1980) and found it dealt with Mote-like themes in a much less chauvinistic way (mild spoilers):

1. The premise is a quarantined star system where aliens periodically go on destructive rampages, causing the complete collapse of organized society.

2. The difference is the humans aren't just worried observers trying to contain the menace. In Reach, human colonists entered the system pre-quarantine and have been living among the aliens for centuries. They are verboten to the rest of human space, along with the aliens, because they have developed a de facto symbiosis--not in terms of breeding but shared cultural traits. The Majat species is a hive organism split into four families and over the course of the book we learn how insect-like and clanlike the humans have become living in close proximity to them.

3. This human-alien bond that develops between the descendants of the colonists and the Majat is a working partnership, resulting in biotech and other goods that are traded all over human space, outside the quarantine zone.

4. So the hive worlds thrive and the monstrosity of human-alien "cultural miscegenation" continues. Unlike Niven and Pournelle, who approach the Moties as outsiders and a mere problem for the dashing "Americans" to solve, Cherryh's perspective is that the "Americans" are outsiders--she even calls the people from human space that, Outsiders--as she tackles the bigger topic of what happens to former "Americans" who have settled down and become as intermingled with another culture as, say, Christians and Muslims intermingled in pre-war Bosnia or Iraq.

5. The POV of the book is that of a human aristocrat denizen of the quarantined zone who communes with the hives and is long-lived thanks to that biotech. She and her fellow aristocrats have adopted hivelike, eusocial characteristics without ever openly acknowledging it. For one thing, they have taken the ova of of would-be colonists sent to the hive worlds from human space (pre-quarantine but after their own arrival) and bred Betas, who are normal-lived test-tube humans psychologically conditioned to serve the aristocrats. The Betas in turn have bred "azi," who are clones and comprise yet another, lower caste of servitude.

6. Cherryh describes this state of affairs non-judgmentally. She assumes that colonization means change and that both good and bad come from this (this is true of the other books of hers I've read--Downbelow Station and Cyteen). She is more interested in mapping the psycho-geography of this change than writing disguised polemics about "appeasement" or "the rights of the unborn." She devotes much ink to the emotional connections that develop between aristocrats and aliens, or between aristocrats and their serfs and sub-serfs. And from that a morality is mapped out for a set of circumstances completely different from ours. So, file it under "post human studies" or "the Cyborg."

7. One thing should be clear--the aliens are not just so-called second or third world peoples in disguise. They are truly alien. Cherry is exploring the unknown here--how will humans change in the face of circumstances not currently even imaginable. It would be like Lovecraft actually writing about the fish men in The Shadow Over Innsmouth instead of just shrieking in horror at them.

8. Ultimately, for all its strangeness, Cherryh's yarn is richer, more complex, more satisfying, and more real than Niven & Pournelle's boys' adventure story.

Somehow missed this Wm. Gibson quote the first time around, supposedly from the late '80s: "The future is already here; it's just not evenly distributed." From a WaPo interview about his new book. The interview is slightly lame in that the reporter emailed Wired and Bruce Sterling and asked for questions to ask Gibson.

Brian Aldiss: Helliconia: How and Why (you might want to enlarge the typeface)

For many years I had contemplated writing a story about a world where seasons were so long that all one's life might pass in spring, say, or in the winter.

...

It was clear from the start that I would need advice for all the disciplines needed to fortify the narrative: history, biology, philology, and so forth. At the basis of everything, the astronomical and geophysical aspects - the details of the Helliconian binary system - had to be as correct and current as could be. Today's theories were wanted, not yesterday's.

So I consulted the various authorities whose names are acknowledged in the novels. Most of them entered into the game of Helliconia readily, and had fruitful suggestions to make. Most specifically, it was Iain Nicholson's description of the binary system and how it came about which opened up what I regard as one of the most profound themes of the novel, the process of enantiodromia, by which things constantly turn in to their opposites; knowledge becomes by turns a blessing and a curse, as does religion; captivity and freedom interchange roles; phagors become by turns conquerors and slaves. As a means of making concrete this amorphous but deeply felt theme, the binary model was ideal.

Phagors:

Helliconia is presented as a strange and wonderful planet. So it is. But so is Earth, and there is little that happens on Helliconia which has not happened in one form or another on Earth. The one major difference is the existence on Helliconia of other intelligent or semi-intelligent species: most notably the phagors, that ancipital race perpetually warring with humanity for possession of the globe.

Although deadly enemies, phagors and humans exist in a commensal relationship with each other. Much of the story is taken up with this painful relationship, which must be broken and yet would be fatal to break. On Earth we have no phagors, only the animal sides of our natures, with which we are similarly at war, and with which we must come to some kind of agreement. This problem, exciting as any encounter with a mounted phagor, finds explicit place in the final volume.

These are amazing books. Anti-fantasies yet genuinely strange. I want to revisit that universe again and it's only been about three years. (Avoided them initially because they coincided with the early-'80s trend of inventing a fantasy world and milking it over several books, which is what still keeps "science fiction" alive in the market. Aldiss obliquely acknowledges that pressure but makes the sincere case that this is a single massive novel split into three parts).

One disturbing factoid from the same website: Aldiss' great first novel Non-Stop was never filmed because, Aldiss says, a Kubrick subsidiary bought the rights to anything that might challenge 2001 in the market. The purpose was to bury the book. If true*, Kubrick's narcissism was beyond the pale--the abuse of intellectual property rights by the movie business taken to another level of ego.

* And it seems likely since Aldiss later spent much time in Kubrick's presence developing what eventually became the dreadful AI.

What would happen to the Earth if every human suddenly disappeared?
Alan Weisman has written a book about it, which I can't wait to read.
One of the things I often envision is the animals we've moved all over the world regenerating in new environments. Like the Japanese snow monkeys thriving in South Texas. All the inhabitants of zoos could potentially proliferate and create completely new ecosystems.
Weisman concludes that the planet will survive even if we annihilate ourselves but suggests we can make that demise less inevitable by having one child per family, to get the population back to 19th Century levels. Good luck! Human nature is going to interfere there, and we already know fundies kill for babies (and to keep women birthin' them).