Over at the Wall Street, protests, the United Federation of Teachers, 32BJ SEIU, 1199 SEIU, Workers United and Transport Workers Union Local 100 are all expected to participate in a march on Wednesday, which is great. However, if they march and chant and then report back to work before anyone gets inconvenienced, it won't mean much. The mix of unions is interesting—TWU Local 100 fights occasionally, while 32BJ has occasionally had strikes, but was generally very top-down and occasionally even eager to play reactionary cards, including, oddly, anti-Swiss sentiment (during a strike against Swissotel, years ago). So, who will win out?
Also, the Crain's article also mentions MoveOn and the Working Families Party planning on showing up—both are essentially fronts for the Democrats. What next step will these groups suggest? If you guessed: "We sent a message to Wall Street! Now take this energy and go home and start working for the 2012 elections to take back Congress and keep Obama in the White House! Rick Perry, booga booga!" you're probably right. The special vulnerability of leaderless manifestations is that anyone who seems to have it together, and has a lot of friends peppered about to say, "Yeah, he's right!" at the correct moments gets to lead. On the plus side, more radical elements have had two weeks now to cultivate their own messages within the manifestation. So indeed, the struggle is truly joined, but what will happen next? Sadly, we may already know...
I'm home today after another visit to the oral surgeon (all is well), and just watched this movie:
It was fun—a lot of interesting writers and teachers are in it, and the filmmaker is engaging and perfectly woebegone. Like most documentaries, it's a bit padded. Initially an attempt to figure out what "bad writing" is, using the filmmaker's own juvenilia—pseudo-Beat poems about cigarettes and writing poems while drinking—the film meanders into discussions of whether writing can be taught, or whether the Kindle and iPhone will ruin poetry as they tend to mess up line breaks ("Did you know where my line breaks are when I was reading my poems aloud," someone cleverly remarks in response) and the like. And there are shots of the filmmaker driving, of course, a visual cue which should be banned forever.
What the film is missing is a discussion of the mediocre. Ultimately, the very bad will likely never escape the notebook or the classroom. Even if it ends up on Kindle and sells only thanks to price, it still won't compete very well. Mediocrity, or even mediocre elements in an otherwise good book are the real issue for readers and writers. And speaking of, and I don't mean to smear this novel unnecessarily, I recently read Southern Gods, a first novel by John Horner Jacobs, who is a nice fellow I met in April when I went to Texas. And he gave me the ARC.
A lot of the book is quite fun—it basically combines Lovecraftian horror with the theme of suspicion of "the devil's music." Ramblin' John Hastur is recording horrifying r&b records that are being broadcast from a roving pirate AM radio station in the American south in 1951, and some hired muscle for a payola-type record producer is sent to find the musician. The scene-setting was great, the stuff about local radio (an interest of mine) was well-rendered, the main white characters weren't too obnoxiously and anachronistically 21st century in their racial politics, and there was some clever stuff about German folklore. From a guy named Horner Jacobs?? I knoooow. So it was all good, all first novel stuff: author from south, book set in south; author a big guy, male protagonist a big guy, that sort of thing. But charming! Utterly charming, don't let the next paragraph stop you from reading the book if you're at all intrigued by what I said so far.
But...structurally, the book is pretty mediocre. It's every eighties horror novel and every film. We start, of course, with a prologue from the previous century, and a very bloody scene. You have to start a horrormovie novel with some blood spray, otherwise the fans will grow restless. And we skip back and forth between the male and female leads—will they bone at the beginning of the third act in order to represent "the family"? Indeed. And speaking of the female lead, in 1951 she meets a Catholic priest (of course) who has some terrifying revelations. Then she "remembers" receiving similar information back in 1944, which she claims to have forgotten or repressed, though that just comes off as unbelievable, especially given that in 1944 she also receives several physical letters from her favorite uncle about these revelations. But second acts need a woman in distress over her state of mind, and a flashback. Right, right? Finally, there's a "showdown" and a little girl is saved in order to further cement the notions of domesticity and family, as is utterly typical of this sort of book.
We've seen the structure so many times that despite how baroque it actually is—it starts in the past and references an even earlier past, then shoots ahead to an arbitrary moment, cross cuts with increasing frequency until two people are brought together, then there is a major explanatory flashback, followed by a physical and mental struggle and sacrifice, then a warm little coda in which losses are measured and gains assured—it remains utterly transparent. (And don't get too attached to those McGuffins meaning anything!) Of course stories should look like a very particular model of roller coaster, and not any other kind.
Reality is much larger, structurally, than even the most phantasmagorical of fantasies, so we end up having to chip away at an infinity of potential to create a narrative-shaped object. Our problem is that we tend to select the same object-shapes time and again. This is as true in politics as it is in fiction. With the Wall Street protests—which inappropriately uses the term "occupation" in order to make itself fit the narrative of the Arab Spring—the old conflict between the leaderless and the leaders-without-followers will come to a head quite soon now. The question is who gets to write the ending. The conflict isn't even between the good protesters and the bad corporate system, but between the good protesters and the mediocre activists who have been in the employ of, well, Cthulhu, for so long that employment looks a lot like unemployment from their vantage point. For the Wall Street protesters, it's time to be conscious of the structure of their own struggle so that they may rewrite it—then they can truly choose their own adventure.
Also, the Crain's article also mentions MoveOn and the Working Families Party planning on showing up—both are essentially fronts for the Democrats. What next step will these groups suggest? If you guessed: "We sent a message to Wall Street! Now take this energy and go home and start working for the 2012 elections to take back Congress and keep Obama in the White House! Rick Perry, booga booga!" you're probably right. The special vulnerability of leaderless manifestations is that anyone who seems to have it together, and has a lot of friends peppered about to say, "Yeah, he's right!" at the correct moments gets to lead. On the plus side, more radical elements have had two weeks now to cultivate their own messages within the manifestation. So indeed, the struggle is truly joined, but what will happen next? Sadly, we may already know...
I'm home today after another visit to the oral surgeon (all is well), and just watched this movie:
It was fun—a lot of interesting writers and teachers are in it, and the filmmaker is engaging and perfectly woebegone. Like most documentaries, it's a bit padded. Initially an attempt to figure out what "bad writing" is, using the filmmaker's own juvenilia—pseudo-Beat poems about cigarettes and writing poems while drinking—the film meanders into discussions of whether writing can be taught, or whether the Kindle and iPhone will ruin poetry as they tend to mess up line breaks ("Did you know where my line breaks are when I was reading my poems aloud," someone cleverly remarks in response) and the like. And there are shots of the filmmaker driving, of course, a visual cue which should be banned forever.
What the film is missing is a discussion of the mediocre. Ultimately, the very bad will likely never escape the notebook or the classroom. Even if it ends up on Kindle and sells only thanks to price, it still won't compete very well. Mediocrity, or even mediocre elements in an otherwise good book are the real issue for readers and writers. And speaking of, and I don't mean to smear this novel unnecessarily, I recently read Southern Gods, a first novel by John Horner Jacobs, who is a nice fellow I met in April when I went to Texas. And he gave me the ARC.
A lot of the book is quite fun—it basically combines Lovecraftian horror with the theme of suspicion of "the devil's music." Ramblin' John Hastur is recording horrifying r&b records that are being broadcast from a roving pirate AM radio station in the American south in 1951, and some hired muscle for a payola-type record producer is sent to find the musician. The scene-setting was great, the stuff about local radio (an interest of mine) was well-rendered, the main white characters weren't too obnoxiously and anachronistically 21st century in their racial politics, and there was some clever stuff about German folklore. From a guy named Horner Jacobs?? I knoooow. So it was all good, all first novel stuff: author from south, book set in south; author a big guy, male protagonist a big guy, that sort of thing. But charming! Utterly charming, don't let the next paragraph stop you from reading the book if you're at all intrigued by what I said so far.
But...structurally, the book is pretty mediocre. It's every eighties horror novel and every film. We start, of course, with a prologue from the previous century, and a very bloody scene. You have to start a horror
We've seen the structure so many times that despite how baroque it actually is—it starts in the past and references an even earlier past, then shoots ahead to an arbitrary moment, cross cuts with increasing frequency until two people are brought together, then there is a major explanatory flashback, followed by a physical and mental struggle and sacrifice, then a warm little coda in which losses are measured and gains assured—it remains utterly transparent. (And don't get too attached to those McGuffins meaning anything!) Of course stories should look like a very particular model of roller coaster, and not any other kind.
Reality is much larger, structurally, than even the most phantasmagorical of fantasies, so we end up having to chip away at an infinity of potential to create a narrative-shaped object. Our problem is that we tend to select the same object-shapes time and again. This is as true in politics as it is in fiction. With the Wall Street protests—which inappropriately uses the term "occupation" in order to make itself fit the narrative of the Arab Spring—the old conflict between the leaderless and the leaders-without-followers will come to a head quite soon now. The question is who gets to write the ending. The conflict isn't even between the good protesters and the bad corporate system, but between the good protesters and the mediocre activists who have been in the employ of, well, Cthulhu, for so long that employment looks a lot like unemployment from their vantage point. For the Wall Street protesters, it's time to be conscious of the structure of their own struggle so that they may rewrite it—then they can truly choose their own adventure.