Wondering About Books That Don’t Exist, Jamming, 16/11/2017

So I’ve been reading an old book by a kind of obscure author these days. A totally serendipitous find. I grabbed The Fall of a Titan when McMaster’s Philosophy Department library was clearing out a lot of old books.

I’m not going to get into the storyline or the themes of it today. I want to talk about a curious little feeling that you get as a reader when a book surprises you – a sensible decision for the story that still shocks you.

So, no serious spoilers. I won’t be too specific. But there’s a character who’s been acting as a petty bully all the way through the first half of the book. He’s a teenaged jackass – Biff Tannen, but in 1930s Russia instead of 1950s California.

Whether or not the photo is real, Stalin could laugh.

But he's 19 years old, a student at the local university. He’s coasted by his whole life on just pushing people around. Now, he tries to do the same thing to the protagonist, rough him up and intimidate him into doing what he wants. On top of that, he has stupid, short-sighted, damned idiotic reasons for wanting to push the main character around.

This history professor is a veteran of the Russian civil war – when he was 19, he was sneaking up on Menshevik soldiers in the woods and slicing their throats open. Of course, you know what’s going to happen as soon as the kid starts a fight with this guy.

Yet the narrative has set this character up as a major foil to the novel’s female lead. So we expect him to follow her through the entire narrative, tormenting her. The sudden end to that relationship is a shock, given the expectations we had through watching their story.

Perfectly logical, yet utterly shocking. It’s a beautiful moment.

The Fall of a Titan is definitely not a perfect book. Some of his descriptions are a little too straightforward. Sometimes, Gouzenko strains to find the best image. But the careful logic of how his characters build his narrative is beautifully assembled.

Igor Gouzenko only wrote one book of fiction, this one. Other than that, he lived a quiet life in Mississauga, in a modest apartment. He had the remarkable distinction of being the first Soviet defector to the West. Three days after the final surrender of the Second World War, he marched from the Soviet embassy to RCMP headquarters with a pile of evidence of Russian espionage.

Yet The Fall of a Titan was his only book of fiction. I would have liked to see him pen more stories of the Stalinist era, or develop some dramatic novel about life in an immigrant community in the grey years of mid-20th century Ontario. Those don’t exist.

But what beautiful, fine-tuned books they’d be. Maybe I’ll imagine them.

Stories of Secret Violence, Composing, 02/01/2017

A little while ago, I finished reading a novel The Transformation by Catherine Chidgey. I didn’t know anything about Chidgey’s work when I found the book. I literally discovered it at random.

I found Catherine Chidgey a skilled and charming writer, but falling
short of revolutionary in her art.

Seriously. At random. One of my neighbours in my building moved out and left a couple of books sitting on the radiator in our basement porch. I’d never heard of Chidgey until I picked up this very mildly water-damaged hardcover, abandoned and forgotten after moving day.

Every book deserves a good home and a few extra readers.

Its central character is an arrogant, over-wordy, incredibly pretentious, sociopathic wig-maker. Born in France, after some violent incidents and quite possibly the murder of his own mentor, he ends up in Tampa.

The book is set in the last years of the 19th century, in the prelude, event, and aftermath of the American invasion and occupation of Cuba during their war with Spain. A Cuban war refugee, a boy in the heat of his teens, is one of the major characters.

It’s a fairly standard story, but the unreliable narration of the wig-maker twists what the reader knows about its events. When he describes his own emotions meeting the major female character of the book – a young widow with distinctive white-blond hair – it’s almost an unintentional seduction.

It takes a couple of hundred pages of a reader’s discomfort at the slow drips revealing the wig-maker’s real personality for you to realize that he’s an obsessed stalker. It’s a very artful, skillful process. The wig-maker’s narration is literally his talking himself into doing increasingly horrible, vile acts.

It's clear to see Chidgey's influence from Vladimir
Nabokov – the unreliable narrator, using his power as
narrator to hide his true nature as a monster. But as an
artist, do you want to have influences or influence?

Not coming up with excuses, but calmly reasoning his way to ordering grave robbing for supplies of hair to build wigs. Or building the object of his affections a wig the size of Leibniz’s when she paid him for a bang fringe. Or locking a child away to harvest her hair.

The whole story isn’t told from his perspective, though. There are chapters following the widow and the Cuban boy when they’re away from the wig-maker’s knowledge, which are told in a near-omniscient third-person.

It reminds me of another book I read once about a similar charismatically violent sociopath, The Debt to Pleasure. It was basically the same form – an unreliable narrator guides you through his personality, slowly revealing enough about himself that you realize he’s a monstrous multiple-murderer. Chidgey’s character was a wig-maker, the other a chef.

I enjoyed the book – Chidgey’s writing style is crisp and florid. It’s suited to writing about the flowery yet intellectual empty culture and lifestyle of Florida at the end of Victoriana. She's a deft hand at those slow, Nabokov-inspired unfolding self-revelations in narration.

But I felt like there wasn’t much beyond this. It was a less intricate and less meta-textual version of the same story as Pale Fire – a monstrous sociopath presents a charming façade at first, but his continuing narration reveals his true nature.

It’s hard to ask someone to push beyond what a genius like Vladimir Nabokov did. But that’s what an artist ultimately has to do. Not just create art but progress it. Never to be satisfied in a shadow.

Generations and Repetitions, Composing, 05/07/2016

I had an odd encounter on the bus back from Hamilton last week. Well, I say I did, but it wasn’t my encounter at all. It actually happened on the two seats in front of me on the bus, and I only watched it.

No, it was nothing like that and get your minds out of the gutter. It actually gave me an idea for a short novel. Just the barest idea right now – it’ll take me a while to flesh it out, given the work, activist, and creative commitments I have now. 

And I want to find a prospective publisher for this kind of idea before I get down to the details of writing it in the first place. I think one of the reasons A Small Man’s Town will probably never be published* is that I conceived and wrote it with no input from anyone who knew anything about how to market books. And now its moment is largely gone.

* The two years I spent writing the original manuscript weren’t a total waste, though. I at least got my most self-absorbed writing project out of my system at a young age and found greater success with different kinds of stories. So I now have no incentive to keep returning to my ego for story ideas, unlike most of the popular male authors of the 20th century. 

So I'm sitting on the bus at the Hamilton GO station, waiting to get moving back to Toronto. And I see this tall surfer-style woman – she couldn’t be more than 22 or 23 – sit down in front of me. Long blonde hair, big round purple sunglasses that could have been plucked off John Lennon’s face. And a rainbow-coloured skateboard. 

About a minute later, I see another woman come on the bus. She’s maybe 45, but could just as easily be a really bad 35 when I hear the rasp in her voice. Dressed in all black or laundry-faded black – cutoff shirt sleeves and jeans, black hair tied up in a messy high ponytail. The skin of her face is wrinkled but tight, like she was aged by the desert or by trauma. And piercing blue eyes. 

She sits down next to the skater-surfer and immediately starts up a conversation. Well, it was more like an extended rant. I barely heard the younger woman get more than a couple of words in for the entire hour’s drive, and the older woman’s story is free-associative. She drifts from one topic to another, sometimes a disjointed story of the distant past, sometimes a conspiracy theory.

But they like each other. They seemed like kindred spirits of a sort, especially as I saw them hugging each other goodbye on the platform in Toronto. And I realized that a very good book could come out of the collision of these stories. 

The structure would look like this. We’d begin with the young woman, a daughter of left-leaning professionals who grew up in the suburbs. She’s taking advantage of her summer away from college to start some travelling. 

Maybe she’s getting away from a crap situation back at her school. But it’s the kind of crap situation that makes for consequence-free drama. A boyfriend who cheated on her, friendships collapsing in one of those tornadoes of intensity that early-20s friendships tend to create. 

She’s on the bus into the city when this older woman sits next to her. Tells her a disjointed story of her own life, interwoven with conspiracy theories, dreams, and beautifully sad images. 

And that older character is largely a broken person. A former punk rocker who left a more comfortable living, like her young friend has right now. Maybe it was a traumatic event like family or relationship violence, or maybe just the growing ennui of social isolation.

But this old punk, when she was a young punk, found herself in a wonderful community of musicians and artists who were also pretty intense drug users. Some on the run from the police, some with HIV, many with habits tearing them apart. All of them dedicated to an ideal of art and music that circumstances keep them from ever reaching.

And when they say goodbye, we see the start of this young woman’s travelling vacation. We see conditions eerily similar to the situations that started her new friend’s downward spiral 20 years ago. Our surfer-skater makes a different kind of decision at a critical moment, but we’re not sure if it will keep her life from collapse or simply spin it into a different kind of eventual disaster.

We’re all fragile.

It Was Once Described to Me as “Gay Interest,” Composing, 17/03/2016

In the middle of all the madness that my life is today – communications contracts, a part-time sales job, volunteer work with the Syria Film Festival and the New Democratic Party – I still have new ideas for stories, novels, and films.

I say this as I continue to develop two independent film projects this year – Here Is a Man with director Lee Skinner and the film version of You Were My Friend with the theatre version’s lead actress Sam Nemeth directing. Even though I’m still working on these projects, I also think about other stories that would be interesting, provocative, and important to tell.

I have always found sports culture to be
pretty gay already.

A couple of weeks ago, I was talking with my GF about a very strange night I had back when I lived in St John’s. This happened to me more than a decade ago. 

I was invited to a party at a friend F’s house. Nothing out of the ordinary there. But F’s boyfriend The Clam set up her front room as a movie theatre – a projector and a white screen covering the entire north wall of the room. But this wasn’t to watch a movie. It was to watch a Toronto Maple Leafs hockey game.

I remembered this night, and it stuck in my mind, because I’ve lately seen a lot of examples of Leafs fandom here in Toronto. I walked into the screening room and saw 15 fellow 22-year-olds bathed in the blue light of the projected rink, eyes fixed on the screen, their faces twisted by adrenaline, screaming in a demented ecstasy whenever a Leaf would take the puck. It was half religious mystic enthusiasm and half simultaneous seizure. I was a little disturbed.

So I did the only rational thing. I went to the kitchen and hung out with all their girlfriends for the rest of the night.

Telling that story a couple of weeks ago, the GF commented about how incredibly gay it was in that improvised theatre. That got me thinking of a story.

I'm not gay. But I think I'm more comfortable with alternative sexualities than the average North American white cis straight male, if only because gay people have been normal to me for my entire life. They’re in my close family and some of my oldest friendship circles. 

I’ve never been alienated or mystified by gay existence the way many men still apparently are. I think that’s why Lee Edelman’s philosophy of homosexuality alienated me so much. The notion that gay existence is radically different from straight life with its valuation of reproduction, is itself radically strange to me. Gay existence is my uncle, some of my oldest friends. 

I feel like it would be disingenuous of me to tell the story
of a gay man exploring gay and homosexual subcultures,
at least until I found a collaborator for the project –
whether a film or a novel – who was gay, and would
help me build a narrative from his experiences.

But I can’t tell a gay man’s story. I don’t have that kind of positionality. It’s difficult for me to get inside the headspace of someone who’s experienced those internal and social struggles his whole life. If I told a story of a gay man on his own terms, I know that I’d slip away from its visceral reality.

But I can tell the story of a straight man learning the stories of the gay men around him. Here’s the basic shape of the story I’ve thought about from this image of the ecstatic hockey game. It would be very explicitly gay. Think of an X-rated Alice Munro.

Calvin comes from a small city in Toronto's wide orbit. When he moves to Toronto for university, he meets up with a friend from high school a year older than him, Justin, who’s come out. They get to know each other again, Justin introduces Calvin to the city, and they have a semi-drunk sexual encounter that convinces Calvin that he’s very much not gay. But the night remains friendly, and their platonic love for each other deepens.

This Calvin-Justin story unfolds in flashback, interspersed with a mystery plot. The narrative begins with the kind of party I described, with this sexually charged hockey ritual. Unlike my night at that party, Calvin actually succeeds in hooking up with one of his friend’s girlfriends. 

He and Samira have a wide-ranging conversation, which includes some of her frustration with her boyfriend Marcus, and after a few more (what neither of them will admit are) dates, they start having an affair. Calvin eventually starts getting curious, ostensibly on Samira's behalf but also from a strange curiosity, about what secret life Marcus has.

From Mark Duplass' film Hump Day, which consists
almost entirely of conversations between two straight
men trying to convince themselves that it will not be
gay when they have sex with each other.

The narrative unfolds similarly to The Big Lebowski. Sequences of Calvin’s affair with Samira and investigating Marcus’ double life are interspersed with hangouts with Justin and his boyfriend Jamal. This gay couple is a sounding board for the investigation, and we also get to know their situation. Justin could pretty easily come out to his progressive white family, but Jamal is alienated from many of his old friends in his more socially conservative community.

Eventually, Calvin discovers that Marcus is involved in a secret club of straight-identified mega-fans of the Toronto Maple Leafs who regularly organize orgies of aggressive sex among their all-male membership. 

It’s one of these homosexual-but-not-gay subcultures that Jane Ward talks about in this illuminating lecture. She talks about different rules and caveats that exist among these communities of straight men who have homosexual sex with each other, to separate the act of sex between men from the self-identity of being gay. I found it an interesting dynamic.

That's all I really have of the story. I don’t know how it will end. I don’t have all the details. Samira's character is still incredibly hazy. All I really have a handle on is the relationship between Calvin and Justin. And the dynamic that this isn’t a story of gay people themselves, but of a straight man exploring the subtleties of gay and homosexual subcultures.

And Exhale – Begin Again, Doctor Who: Hell Bent, Reviews, 06/12/2015

I always knew Clara’s departure would be anti-climactic. She’s had six departures from Doctor Who already, three of them fatal. Phil Sandifer’s review was enthusiastic, and while I agree that the episode was just as awesome as he said, I can’t help but feel let down.

Steven Moffat was able to do a lot in this script, both regarding what you might consider

SPOILERS

and what you might not. Here’s a list, with a little commentary.

Girlfriend Gillian was so sick of Clara this season. While I
still like the character, and will watch her stories again
whenever I like, I still think, as far as the production of
Doctor Who goes, it was time for her to leave.

Goodbye Clara

If I can say the Doctor and Clara’s relationship had any running theme this season, it was that they bring out the best and the worst in each other. Both equally reckless, but equally kind. They’re each other’s best friends, and have saved each other’s lives literally countless times. 

At the same time, they make each other idiots. Clara got herself killed in Face the Raven because she tried to start her own Doctor-ish scheme, but without the knowledge required to know how it could backfire on her. The Doctor nearly destroys the universe with the paradox of travelling with Clara, who should be dead.*

* Again, I’d say this is a matter of the Doctor’s subjective timeline. He watched Clara die, so created a point in his own past where he would have had to overwrite his own timeline to save her. 

But this is also something that deflated the story, because Hell Bent didn’t depict the actual destabilization of the web of time when the Doctor rescued Clara from the moment of her death. The frantic running around as everyone took the prospect very seriously was all they could do to justify how seriously everyone took it.

It wasn’t a full Delgo, though. As viewers of Doctor Who, we care about the characters because they’re the lead actors, and we’ve been watching the Doctor and Clara in the TARDIS for more than three years. 

Yet the story can’t depict why they mustn’t be together anymore. I can understand why, at least causally. Moffatt already produced a masterpiece in Heaven Sent that achieved something no other Doctor Who writer ever has, depicting the plodding duration of immortality. 

The Doctor dredged up all the signifiers and echoes of
past Doctor Who to rescue Clara. But Hell Bent was
incapable of continuing the status quo. Any more than
the Doctor himself could have returned to the old,
white, classic TARDIS.

But I’m getting ahead of myself again.

The only reason for the Doctor and Clara not to be together anymore is that Jenna Coleman is leaving Doctor Who to star in a high-profile BBC miniseries as the young Queen Victoria. 

I thought her death in Face the Raven was a wonderful, courageous way to finish the Clara story. It was powerful, beautiful, and tragically sad, entirely appropriate for the character as well. It provoked a discussion that Doctor Who would benefit from having, examining why someone would want to travel with the Doctor when it really is so dangerous.

At least I can continue looking forward to that discussion in the distant future, when a head writer has the guts to kill a Companion character with the comprehensive narrative logic of Clara Oswald and Face the Raven, but actually have her stay dead. Moffat, with his love of happy endings even hidden inside apparent tragedies, can’t allow that.

So Clara’s existence now has the same potential as Ashildir/Me. They’re two immortals exploring the universe in a rickety old TARDIS that they’re still figuring out how to fly, stuck in the shape of a retro American diner. 

They’re literally a new universe now. Not diegetically, but meta-narratively. They stole a TARDIS and flew out of Doctor Who. Now, whenever Jenna Coleman and Maisie Williams need some extra cash, they can book some days recording a new set of stories in the ongoing Big Finish series Clara and Me.

The Epic Stumbles of Idiots

The Time Lords are back, in all their blustering stupidity and profundity. Their story in Hell Bent leaves them in a perfect place going forward. Here’s how.

Robert Holmes designed Time Lords themselves to be
parodies of themselves and us, which is why their
leaders all wear that ostentatiously ridiculous
ceremonial headgear. Eric Saward's mistake in handling
the Time Lords was in taking the headdresses seriously
instead of the lurking terrors to which the headpieces
blind you. Fitting, really.

I remember when Doctor Who returned under Russell T Davies, he said that one of the reasons he got rid of the Time Lords was that there wasn’t much left to do with them anymore. And one of the reasons for the mysterious backstory for the Doctor in the Sylvester McCoy era was to restore some mystery to the Time Lords.

When they were first introduced under Terrence Dicks and Barry Letts, the Time Lords were austere technocrats of the fabric of the universe. They dispatched missions, pronounced judgments, and delivered exposition, not much else. 

Robert Holmes made the Time Lords truly interesting as sci-fi by making them a satirical reflection of human elitism. The Deadly Assassin introduced Gallifrey as a society where drama could happen, where the ossified elite of an agelessly old tradition could easily forget the Lovecraftian ghosts and demons on which their whole civilization was built.

Much like humanity. But subsequent Time Lord stories failed to follow up on this potential, instead reverting to the austere significance of Dicks’ conception, while keeping the trappings and myopia of Holmes’ conception. When you combine this with the tendency to idiot plots under Eric Saward’s script editorship, you end up with a set of ideas that looks exhausted.

Moffat has reintroduced Gallifrey, but in a way that lives up to the storytelling potential that Holmes gave them. They’re a civilization with great power, but also myopia about their past (which is also a fear). 

They can dispense justice and guard the coherence of the universe, but can also collapse into petty dictatorship, as under Rassilon. Rassilon himself is exiled from Gallifrey, which means that a later writer can bring him back as a villain on a mission of revenge against the Doctor for his humiliation in the coup against him. 

My own vision of Shobogan culture, based on what I spin
in my imagination from Hell Bent, is a society of
pacifists with all the power of Time Lords, but who
use them differently, largely refraining from using the
full extent of the powers they have, for fear of the
corruption that would be inevitable after that. Not a
bad pitch for a Doctor Who story concept, is it?

There’s also the Time Lords’ transgender and non-racial nature, as the General regenerates from an elderly white man into a young black woman, and remarks that she prefers being a woman. And it’s utterly casual.

The presence of the Sisterhood of Karn is also remarkably suggestive, but we don’t really know of what. Ohila has apparently survived for billions of years, effectively immortal and quite serene about it. But the nature of the Sisterhood’s relationship with Gallifrey, the Doctor, and the wider universe remains unexplored, so there’s plenty to work through here in future stories.

As well, we see Shobogan life, and they seem to be pretty close allies of the Doctor. They’re ostensibly the underclass of Gallifrey, but the Doctor seems content to leave them to their lot, which is very unlike him when dealing with an oppressed underclass. Usually, he does his best at least to nudge them toward revolution.

But maybe the Shobogans aren’t an underclass per se. Maybe they’re a society of Gallifreyans who are radical pacifists, having given up much of the technology, pomp, galactico-political power, and will to dominate of the Time Lords. 

The contrast between the Time Lord soldiers and the Shobogans in their confrontation is that the Shobogans never take up arms, and as the soldiers betray Rassilon, they join the Doctor and the Shobogans. 

Maybe the Doctor was a member of the ruling class of Time Lords who explored Shobogan philosophy and eventually decided to dedicate himself to their ideals of peace and justice from a more activist perspective while exploring the universe. Maybe someone else will write an entirely different story about this, because now they can.

There’s so much potential here for more, and more creative, Doctor Who stories about the Time Lords and Gallifrey. Not only has Moffat brought Gallifrey back, but he’s done it in a way that fills them with more possibility for interesting stories and ideas than the Time Lords have had since the 1970s. 

I just wish one of those episodes had been Hell Bent. This episode was mostly setup for the future’s potential, tying up loose ends, and ending the storylines that had to end for production reasons. 

It took her until the very end of the universe itself to
grow into the profundity of character that naming
yourself after an indexical implies. Typical human.

The Terror of Everlasting Time

I knew that Hell Bent was going to be something of a let-down after the masterpiece of Heaven Sent. I explained why in last week’s Doctor Who post about that episode. 

But I think I’ve found this season’s underlying thematic arc to be the most interesting of any since Doctor Who returned to television. Moffat has been, in different contexts and stories, in conjunction with the best writers in his bullpen, exploring what it means to be immortal.

He finds that it’s largely a pretty horrifying thing, immortality. Even though we’re afraid of death, everlasting life is even worse. 

The Dalek city in The Witch’s Familiar is built on still-living Dalek corpses, intelligent creatures genetically incapable of dying, but still decaying into self-aware all-consuming sludge with enough rage to drown the universe. Immortality in its purest Lovecraftian horror.

The story of Ashildir gives a more profound and reflective account of immortality. As the billions of years add up for her, until she and her library are the last bubble of reality in the final days of the universe, her first centuries of pain and resentment have given way to serenity at last. 

With the slow growth of years, sadness becomes beautiful.

Clara is now a walking existential treatise. Rescued from the last seconds of her life, she now exists as a living moment. Like Ashildir/Me, she’s frozen in time, forever as she is. 

But she’s grateful for all the extra years, decades, centuries, or even more of life, experience, and adventuring that she’ll have travelling in her own narrative universe with Me. They’re their own new iteration of Doctor Who, living as long as the actors do, probably on Big Finish audios. 

The Doctor spent last episode trapped in the horrifying repetition of 4.5-billion years of a few repeating days, being chased, tortured, and finally killed in an interrogation. And it was an interrogation over nothing, since all this talk of the Hybrid was just empty, serious only because the characters discussed it so seriously.

Hell Bent ends with the Doctor's first cameo in the Big
Finish audio series Clara and Me, starring Jenna
Coleman and Maisie Williams.

I think it was supposed to be empty. In a narrative universe like Doctor Who, a computer run by ghosts and protected by other ghosts is a concept that gets casually thrown around in a season with at least five different philosophical explorations of immortality and time. An idea as ordinary now as some kind of warrior race hybrid is honestly pretty dull.

And I think Moffat knew it was dull. Just a phrase to hang some portentous moments on. Like Davies’ Bad Wolf, but designed with the knowledge that it would be anti-climactic from the start, so the audience would know to look for the real significance of the season elsewhere.

The Story Is More Real Than the Experience

Another significant idea this season only really became clear with the final gambit of whether the Doctor or Clara will lose their memory of the other. 

Clara’s death was a response, from Moffat, to the Doctor’s cruel treatment of Donna, erasing her memory without her consent, to save her life when she didn’t want to be saved. Clara died on her own terms in Face the Raven, and the Doctor had to live with that.

But he still didn’t want to live with it. Clara was his best friend, and he didn’t just want her to die. Leave the show with someone else and be happy, fine. But don’t die. 

All that talk about “duty of care” was, pretty clearly by this episode, the Doctor’s socially awkward way of saying to Clara, “You’re my best mate, I love you, I don’t want to live without you, and I can’t let anything happen to you when I can figure out a way to save you.” They don’t need to say any of that to each other.

So when the Doctor forgets Clara, it’s a beautiful moment when he doesn’t recognize her, even though he’s looking for her. The Doctor still remembers that he had adventures with Clara. He remembers them as stories.

Clara will always be an important part of Doctor Who,
but like the paint of Rigsy's memorial flaking off the
TARDIS as it dematerializes, she can't stay forever.

He can talk about them, the way we talk about episodes of Doctor Who. We have streaming services, our DVDs, our novels for the tie-in fiction. We can watch the stories, read them, memorize our favourite lines, and be able to talk about them, sometimes in ridiculous levels of detail.

But he doesn’t remember the experiences. The stories are now real for the Doctor, just as they always were.

Goodbye Steven?

The stories are real. It’s been the centrepiece of how Moffat has approached so much of his writing for so long. It’s how he approaches Doctor Who, and Capaldi says it in his first scene of Hell Bent in the diner with Clara. All stories are real, and they’re real because they’re stories.

And while I love to hear it, and I love Moffat’s ideas, his writing style, his deft blend of comedy and drama, his plot craftsmanship. But it’s getting old. 

He’s talked in interviews leading up to this season that he wanted to experiment with Doctor Who’s story style so the show wouldn’t get stagnant. That willingness to experiment is a major part of his appeal to me. He’s always pushing himself to do something different.

But there are limits. He’s still working on Doctor Who, having just become the second-longest-serving lead producer of all time. The only one who beat him, John Nathan-Turner, desperately wanted to leave, but was kept on because the BBC brass hated him and refused to advance his career.

Moffat knows the history of the show. He knows that Doctor Who always has to outlive you and grow beyond you. It’s the secret of regeneration – you keep your immortality productive by becoming an utterly different version of yourself every now and then.

I think Moffat knows that it’s time for Doctor Who to do that with the creative producers’ chair. It’s why I think his seventh year (2016, Capaldi’s third, the new companion’s first, Doctor Who’s 53rd) will be his last. 

It’s why he made a point since the start of the Capaldi years of hiring new people. I remember him saying that he loved the perspective of Jamie Mathieson and Sarah Dollard because they were young enough that they primarily know only 21st-century Doctor Who. 

They don’t have the hangups on the past that many of Moffat’s generation of Doctor Who writers do. Maybe Jamie Mathieson will become the new creative producer in 2017. Maybe it’ll be Sarah Dollard, who already has creative producer experience with the Welsh drama Cara Fi.

Either way, both of them will continue to write Doctor Who, and Peter Harness won’t leave anytime soon. The flawed but reliable writers like Mark Gatiss and Toby Whithouse will stay in the roster, Gareth Roberts will usually be available. And who knows what will come out of the Class project under Patrick Ness.

This season, Moffat seems to be moving the pieces into place for his departure, making sure there are so many possible new leaders and creatives dedicated to Doctor Who that its renaissance will continue. And he’s left Doctor Who with ideas that still have so much potential to be explored, especially how he brought back the Time Lords.

I just wish the storyline of Hell Bent did more than move pieces into place for the show to go forward in the future. While it made me very happy about what Doctor Who can do next, I was a little underwhelmed at how little it did this weekend.

Ghost Stories, A History Boy, 25/08/2015

Depending on what I have to accomplish on my grocery runs some days, I’ll walk past a Book City about a block east of Jane subway station. They have a bargain bin outside, and as I pass, I always scan to see what they have. I usually find nothing too interesting to me, so I go on my way. 

But a little while ago, they had D. T. Max’s biography of David Foster Wallace, Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story. I bought it for $8, and I’m reading it now. 

A detail from an article that Max wrote in the New Yorker found its way into Ecology, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity. Max describes Wallace’s experience in rehab, feeling vastly uncomfortable in a therapy session shared with men who weren’t nearly as ridiculously erudite or overeducated as he was.

I know something like what he felt, because I’ve been in that kind of environment before, where you’re the most educated person in a room. I’m not like those grad students, who can only write in ways that most people can’t understand anymore. Max describes a moment where Wallace sees how his erudition gets in the way of his own thinking.

Wallace finds those cheesy slogans like “One day at a time” do little to help him with his addictions, because he sees through them. But their simplicity lends them a power to become mantras that can help his partners in the therapy session build a new order in their lives. He comes to see his deconstructive intelligence as an obstacle to recovery. The solution isn’t to throw away his brain, but to learn to see the simple with the same depth and detail of understanding that he sees the overly complicated.

Max’s story about Wallace’s rehab session makes for a beautiful illustration of the power of simplicity, a reminder that the most immediately effective idea is one that can be simple. The challenge lies in making sure your simple idea is expressed in just the right way to keep people on the intended path. 

• • •

I’ve always had a complex relationship with Wallace. Or maybe it’s actually very simple. I first bought Infinite Jest because I saw it in a bookstore. I was 16 and had read very little postmodernist literature at this point. I loved Vonnegut, but also enjoyed the simple styles of Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke. I’d grow beyond all these writers, eventually seeing too much that I thought was arid (Arthur), pessimistic (Kurt), or stagnant (Isaac) for them to inspire me.

Wallace was different, or so he was at the time. I bought the book simply because it was enormous – the hefty softcover edition with the calmly clouds all over the cover. The first time I tried to read it, it was too intimidating. Huge, complex, maddening, too much going on. Bloody endnotes. 

Infinite Jest was the first book I read with two bookmarks, one for the main text and the other for the endnotes. It became a regular practice for me whenever I read a book with substantive endnotes. 

The second time, I spent the summer working through its dense sprawl. If the term ‘dense sprawl’ seems to be self-contradictory, then you haven’t read Wallace.

Once I read the book, I admired its depth of detail and research, its wild inventiveness, beautiful imagery, and prose that could bring you inside not just a character’s perspective, but his personality and soul. You could experience the torment for yourself.

I bought Max’s book this month because Wallace as a person has fascinated me for a long time. I found the intensity of his personality intriguing, like watching from orbit a bubbling volcano spread enormous cracks in the Earth’s surface, but slowly, over many years. 

His work affects me strongly when I read it. His life is fascinating. Thinking about him and how he approached his depression and the wider world is an exquisite existential puzzle. I once tried to include a reading of his commencement address “This Is Water” in a set of readings for an introductory philosophy class for which I was a teaching assistant. But the professor in charge wouldn’t allow it because it didn’t have an argument.

Yet for all Wallace has mattered to me over the years, and still matters, I can’t say that his writing style has affected mine at all. Wallace’s maximalism is an amazing achievement, as is his skill at depicting mental illness and the way he weaves biographical details into his fiction. 

But when I read and think about his work, I realize that it’s impossible for anyone but Wallace to write like Wallace. I’m not sure how you can pick up a Wallace-type story and run with it in your own fashion, with your priorities. I could do that with a lot of other writers, like how Under the Trees, Eaten picks up the themes and tropes of a Lovecraft story in a new direction, with new focus.

No one can do a Wallace story like Wallace. He’s wonderful, and I’m glad he existed and his works exist. But his art, no matter how beautiful, is a dead end. There’s nowhere to go from him.

Science-Fictional World Building, Composing, 12/06/2014

Under the Trees, Eaten developed from a simple point. The head of BlankSpace Publications asked me if I had any ideas for a sci-fi story the size of a novella, and I came up with one by the end of the day. I had been reading some philosophy that made a very creative ontological use of H. P. Lovecraft, and having long been a fan of his stories, I wanted to create something that would overcome some of the limitations of the Lovecraft milieu. 

So I developed a concept for aliens that made them strange to humans, but not horrifyingly destructive, and a storyline that included a major role for the evil and pain that humans inflict on each other. And I developed a protagonist narrator who was not only a woman (non-existent for the Lovecraft corpus), but who could adapt well enough to her circumstances with just enough genre-awareness that, while she still stumbled a bit, could emerge victorious. 

The conflicts she facts go beyond just the characters in the book to include actual threats to her narrative voice within the book herself. Her father, occasionally speaking from three years before the story’s main events, buts into her narrative with his more conventionally Lovecraftian style, essentially trying to steal his own daughter’s narrative. Beyond that, the aliens themselves are a meta-diegetic force in the story who also, at least for a moment, overwrite Marilyn’s power to narrate her own life and existence. 

Between my own work as author and Jeffrey’s suggestions as editor and chief, we have a tight and wonderful novella to inflict on the public later this month. While I’ll be promoting it at as many bookstores around the GTA as I can over the summer and fall, Jeffrey is preparing for an internet-based blitz. It includes a blog at BlankSpace that regularly publishes short, creepy excerpts from the novella’s text as brief previews.

It also includes a meta-fictional element that I’ve been preparing this week, The Seul-Coeur Logs. This is a blog that will publish ancillary material to the central event that gets Under the Trees, Eaten’s plot moving, the plane crash over the isolated, alien-influenced town of Seul-Coeur, Quebec that killed Marilyn’s mother in 1997. The posts themselves will be written as if they were from the files about the plane crash that Marilyn’s father Paul collected from then until his death (this isn’t a spoiler; he’s dead at the book’s first sentence). It’ll include extended versions of his own increasingly unhinged rantings, pseudo-scientific explanations of the physics behind the alien habitat, and interviews with air transport security officials, which might include a character I’ve thought of including in a possible sequel to the story.

And of course, this blog will be following the story as well, and explaining, spoiler-free, some of the ideas behind each new update on The Seul-Coeur Logs. All these websites – BlankSpace Publications, Adam Riggio Writes, and The Seul-Coeur Logs – along with the book itself, will take part in building the world of Under the Trees, Eaten. The motives of writing Under the Trees, Eaten included my own concerns about science-fiction storytelling, and the characters themselves shape their narratives in ways that suggest they are familiar with the notion that they don’t live in the real world, but in a science-fiction narrative. Understanding the meta-narrative elements of the novella will help a reader see how I put it together, and seeing the cogs and wheels that assemble the whole is part of the fun.

The Myth of Singularity, Composing, 20/05/2014

It’s not exactly novel of me to say that there’s a common mood of human civilization that’s trying to grip conceptually the reality of humanity’s end. If you ask Slavoj Zizek or another Lacanian, he’d tell you that climate change denial wouldn’t be spoken so powerfully if we didn’t all basically know this might be the end. Contemporary human technology, which in my Ecophilosophy manuscript I call enormous industry, is absolutely unprecedented in human existence, and it’s reasonable to say that its effects may ruin us all.

If I were to make a bet on it, I’d say we’d go down to a combination of more extreme weather from climate change wrecking our infrastructure, toxic pollution of our ground water and other food sources reaching a tipping point, and the extinction of pollinating insects from pesticide use crashing our agricultural system. 

There’s been quite a lot of art, among other forms of speculation, produced about the end of Earth and the end of humanity. But the Johnny Depp film, Transcendence, doesn’t seem to be one of those at first glance. Instead, it’s a film about the dystopian aspects of the singularity, the conception of what would happen to humanity when artificial computer/machine intelligence surpasses the power of humans. In his own discussion of the film, my elder compatriot from the social epistemology group, Steve Fuller, describes its Faustian themes and its very Christian take on the singularity, the moment at which humanity transcends itself. But a link that Vaka Rangi sent me to a Washington Post article makes a slightly different point.

The third time Johnny Depp has become a vision of
humanity's sad dystopian end. Jarmusch and Gilliam did it
much better than this, though.

The singularity is another example of the end of the world, but it’s taken to be a positive one. Even if humanity doesn’t survive this process of its machines surpassing its own abilities, it will have created a legacy in those machines themselves, which would carry the human story forward. If we are our narratives, then the singularity, even the dystopian formulations that Transcendence, AI, and the Terminator franchise offer us, is ultimately a utopian vision. Like the dying grandfather of a huge, proliferating family, we continue indefinitely into sempiternity, beyond our mortal deaths.* 

* A note on nerdy philosophical terminology. Sempiternity refers to the continuation of the processes of flowing time indefinitely into the future. Think of the Latin semper, meaning always. Eternity is the kind of immortality that transcends time, an escape into changelessness that negates the reality of time itself. 

All these ideas are important to how I conceive of my Alice stories, the science-fictional imagining where I’m spinning my stories of an immortal android sage travelling the galaxy for thousands of years. There are two story ideas that I’ve thought of so far that would use this character. One has a 20-minutes-into-the-future setting, and the other is in a vastly distant timeframe, thousands of years from now, when humanity has proliferated across light-years, having lived for so long that they may eventually forget where Earth was.**

** I acknowledge my debt to Isaac Asimov’s late Foundation novels, even as the basic ideas with which I’m developing this story is a complete philosophical and narrative rebuke to his own ideas in those books. Asimov was the first serious science-fiction that I ever read, really. His legacy on me is inescapable, even as my own priorities as a writer are completely different.

The story about a sort-of-contemporary Alice will be told from the perspective of an all-too-human human, a colleague of Alice’s human partner and original commissioner. This bastard Dr Farkas will investigate Alice to the point of stalking her, obsessed with how his nebbishy colleague could have attracted such a beautiful, vibrant creature. The irony is that he didn’t attract her; he had her custom-built. 

Farkas will, because of his pretentious and erudite personality, think about such androids in the dystopian way that Transcendence conceives of the singularity. It is a promise that becomes a threat, the type of superiority that augurs our displacement and replacement. Of course, this plays into my repugnant narrator’s personality: part of his motivations for his sexist, exploitive behaviour is a hostility to women. There is fear involved in this vision, though fear isn’t the only factor. I don’t like designing characters with only one clear motive for their actions; it’s very unrealistic.

Farkas’ paranoid vision is inadequate for the same reason that Alice’s other story that I have in mind now takes place thousands of years in humanity’s future. I see nothing incompatible about the co-existence of humanity with artificial intelligence. There have been multiple forms of intelligent life on Earth before (and I believe this is still the case; the complexity of whale sonar signalling and the solemnity of elephant graveyards signify a lot to me). There will be again. Only human arrogance sees our ascendency as a throne with room for only one occupant at a time. 

Alice laughs at that profound arrogance in the same way I laugh at slapstick comedy.

Final Countdowns, Twist Endings and Refrigerators, Composing, 07/05/2014

As part of the publicity for my upcoming sci-fi novella, Under the Trees, Eaten, I’m going to discuss a few ideas I’ve had about its composition and editing process here on the blog. We’re just in the last stages now, and my editor at Blank Space has given me a wonderful recommendation on some changes to the ending. We’re furiously working through the last few edits to the manuscript this week (while also working on our day jobs) so we can release it for this summer and I can start touring.

My promotions will take me wherever the GO Transit network or the cars of amenable friends will go. So my late-starting career as a novelist is finally taking off, at least in terms of having a product to push. I also have a philosophical essay coming out in an upcoming issue of Social Epistemology, but that’s another story.

Because of the inland, rustic setting of the story, I designed
the aliens to resemble ants. Their social practices also fit
well with the philosophical undercurrents of the narrative.

The changes we’ve been discussing don’t even affect the story’s ending itself. It just adds another wrinkle to the motivation of a central character, a wrinkle that nonetheless demonstrates the inadequacy of humans, particularly men, to understand the complex features of their world, and their otherworlds. While we’re pitching the book as a pulp story, from the start I always wanted it to be more than a pulp story, simply because I never want my work to risk being dismissed as ordinary. Ordinariness, to me, is a killer of creativity. 

You see, every project I conceive always has multiple motivations. I think it’s a side-effect of just having so many concurrent thought processes going through my mind at once. In terms of pure pulp factor, Under the Trees, Eaten is a fast read that’s an entertaining collision of Lovecraft tropes with a female protagonist designed after the fashion of Joss Whedon. But that combination of pulp and feminist characterization also contains an important ethical dimension. It was of the utmost importance for me that the protagonist Marilyn not end this story as a victim of any kind. 

Quite frankly, I’m really rather sick of stories that make women into little more than victims or pawns in the plans and machinations of male characters. I even included a reference to Women in Refrigerators in an earlier draft, but it ended up having to be cut. 

I decided on an ironclad rule for my fiction that no major
female character would be victimized for the sake of
developing the narrative or plot of a male character.

The story is about Marilyn being manipulated by the men that surround her in her life. First, she’s manipulated by her dead father. Not in a literal sense, but insofar as she finds herself on a quest defined by validating his memory, solving the mystery that consumed and eventually destroyed his life, discovering the nature of the otherworldly plane crash where his wife died. Of course, if Marilyn's father Paul were the central protagonist of this story (and he is a minor protagonist; he narrates sections of chapters two through four), his wife would be a woman victimized for the sake of his story. There’s Pierre, the mysterious fellow from the town of alien-human hybrids who has a multi-layered hidden agenda for Marilyn. And there are the hostile townsfolk who will commit whatever violence is necessary to hide their secret, who naturally want this outsider American woman crushed and jammed inside the nearest fridge. The narrative is constantly threatening Marilyn with victimization or co-optation into a man's plan. 

At the end of the day, Under the Trees, Eaten should express this fundamental ethical and moral point: for all that this capable, intelligent, and increasingly enraged woman is pressured into fulfilling the plans and goals of various men around her, she does not, and will not. The new twist we’re adding to the motivations of some of the male characters will better indicate precisely what her own ethics are, and why the efforts of the men of the story to control her will always be inadequate. Marilyn is not an instrument, and if you attempt to make her one, you will be sorry.

Redux, Composing, 28/04/2014

I was revisiting my old manuscript for A Small Man’s Town this weekend, thinking about turning this sprawling, plot-light, disjointed narrative about life in St. John’s in the 2000s into a series of short stories. As I got to know the conventions of the publishing industry, I’ve realized that I could have more success with the manuscript if I were to edit the loosely connected scenes of the narrative into linked short stories. It would have helped if I had bothered to research the conventions of the publishing industry before I started writing the thing in 2007, but we all have our regrets in life. 

I grew up in this strange, beautiful town.

So here’s roughly how the novel would look as a group of short stories. I’m not sure what order they would go in for the final version of A Small Man’s Town: The Collection, but here, they roughly follow how each storyline starts in the novel version. All of these are very provisional titles, of course.

Stop The War, Please. In Fall of 2003, student activist Laurie is the lead organizer of a protest at the university campus against the American invasion of Iraq. The rally is a disaster because their first speaker is a local left-wing activist-for-hire who uses her speech to praise Islamist militants, suicide bombers, and al-Qaeda for bravely resisting the growth of Western imperialism. I actually wrote this draft in 2007, long before my recent fights over the politics of today’s Syrian and Ukrainian conflicts. Nadia, a child of Palestinian immigrants, tries to save the rally with her own speech, but she gets stagefright and runs away. Laurie and Nadia reconcile at a party that night over hash.

When Joseph Met Laurie. Joseph was the original protagonist of the novel, a quiet guy who seems basically kind, but mostly observes the world around him. By the end of the novel, you realize that he’s actually sort of a jerk as well. But this would basically be the story of his awkward meet-cute with Laurie, as they become friends through the campus newspaper and activist organizations, and he gets over just enough of his late-teenage anxiety to ask her out. She kisses him first.

But I Thought She Loved Me. This is a longer story, told in several scenes. Nadia, whose father works for an engineering firm in rural Newfoundland, comes to Memorial for university, living in St. John’s for the first time. Joseph and Laurie are her first, and best, friends in the city, and also the first people to whom she comes out as a lesbian. She then engages in a tumultuous relationship with Jen, a beautiful white woman who essentially uses Nadia for an experimental six-month fling, during which she continually cheats on her with men. Laurie, Joseph, and their friend Sanjay spread a humiliating story about one of Jen’s sexual encounters out of revenge for her treatment of Nadia. After they break up, Jen continues to display her promiscuity specifically in front of Nadia to upset her. 

Gone. A minor, but loveable, character in several of the university-centric stories is suddenly killed in a car crash shortly after graduation. Joseph has two awkward conversations at the funeral. First, a brief exchange with his gruff, Bayman father that reveals how ashamed Joseph is of his own rural Newfoundland heritage. Second, a walk with his ex-girlfriend Laurie.

Now Hit Me! Several years after the university stories, Joseph is picked up in a bar by a headstrong woman who, during sex, demands to be beaten and choked. Lucy later calls Joseph to apologize for making him uncomfortable, and they end up in a long-term relationship.

Come Near at Your Peril, Canadian Wolf. By force of personal charisma, Lucy becomes the provincial Conservative Party nominee in her Western Newfoundland district during Danny Williams’ 2007 electoral sweep. She adopts several propaganda techniques from Triumph of the Will to organize cross-province rallies to maintain popular support for Williams. She later picks a public fight with the CBC over their national network running a television news story about a stroke victim whose slurred speech vaguely resembles a stereotypical Newfoundland accent. Lucy's popularity comes to rival Williams, and he views her with suspicion.

Literary Ambition. Joseph works as a submissions editor at a St. John’s publishing company run by the eccentric Mr. Bradley. Bradley hires a new employee, a Newfoundlander returning from a decade in Argentina, to run international submissions, part of a plan to turn his small company into a globally famous publishing house. Arlena Gutierrez (born Arlene Parsons) is incredibly pretentious, and waxes on about the beauty of Argentina and her deep feelings for her former lover, Juan Garcia Rubenstein. Joseph better connects with her easygoing, English-deficient husband Hector. 

Unreadable. Another longer story. Joseph and Lucy keep trying to help his old university friend Bernie get his life together. He’s held down a series of mediocre, go-nowhere office jobs while trying to start a career as a novelist. But the manuscript he sends Joseph is terrible, an awful collision of James Dean clichés and mawkish romance set in the 1970 FLQ crisis. Bernie joins Joseph and Lucy on a night out with their old friend Sanjay, who has returned to St. John’s from his home in Toronto to marry his happily pregnant girlfriend Sarah. After Bernie lands a job answering phones for the city’s Arts Council, he meets Deidre, the sister of a local celebrity actor, with whom he becomes infatuated. Because Bernie is neurotic as hell and can’t just ask a girl out to coffee, he talks Joseph and Lucy into being his wingmen at a dinner party with several folks from the Arts Council. Smoking a joint with his host in the upstairs library, Joseph learns that his boss Mr. Bradley has been the kept man of one of Newfoundland’s richest men, and that his company was formed as a vanity project and sinkhole for the accounting of losses in other parts of the corporate empire. While he’s away, Bernie reveals his feelings for Deidre in a way that creeps her out and ultimately costs him his job.

My Secret Life. Joseph gets a manuscript from a local author on his desk: it’s about a young female adjunct literature professor who discovers her sexuality and self-confidence through an affair with one of her students, who is suddenly killed in a car crash shortly after graduation. Joseph is shocked to realize that this is actually a thinly veiled story of his own friend’s actual affair with their first-year literature professor. Joseph remembers a party they attended at another professor’s house where they showed up, seemingly on a date. At the time, he was preoccupied by accidentally seeing his friend Nadia’s ex Jen having a gymnastic threesome with the slimy professor Elias Farkas and his wife, while on his way to an upstairs bathroom. Lucy calls the manuscript creepy and obsessive, and on her advice, Joseph rejects it. Two years later, he finds the book in a local store, heavily revised and published by Random House.

Was It All About Me? Joseph visits Toronto for the first time at age 29, replacing an ill Mr. Bradley at a publishers’ conference. While there, he meets his old girlfriend Laurie, who moved to Toronto six years earlier and now works for PEN International. They have dinner that night at the hotel and talk about their past and current lives: Laurie has had no serious relationships, having dived into her political activism, while Joseph and Lucy are engaged and planning a family. Laurie realizes that Joseph never held any very strong political or even ethical beliefs of his own. He changes his politics and morals to suit those of his romantic partner. He briefly visits Sanjay, Sarah, and their toddler before happily returning to the comfort of home.

IowaLit 4: The Limits and Dreams of Ambition, Composing, 19/02/2014

Continued from previous. Yet literary singularity remains a paradoxical matter, at least in the account of it that I gleaned from Eric Bennett. The perfect articulation of a literary singularity is a description so precise and detailed that no general description or summary could be fully adequate to it. There is always some remainder. 

Derrida's embrace of seemingly insoluble paradoxes
include his decision to make a living as a writer, despite
considering language inadequate to reality in many ways.
Typical negative theologian.

Literature of the evocative image actually strives for a remarkably ambitious goal, which the Derrida-influenced streams of literary theory would actually take to be impossible. One of Jacques Derrida’s most intriguing concepts in his philosophy of language is that any linguistic expression is inherently inadequate to reality itself. The words of language are themselves generalities because they are applicable to more than one unique situation. In any description at all, there is always some remainder, some facet of the described reality that escapes the ability of language itself to describe it. Yet in the atmosphere of institutionalized middling that is Bennett’s experience of University of Iowa’s creative writing program, the supposedly unambitious evocative paradigm strives for a genuine impossibility.

Language puzzles people, I think more than literature. Despite the overrated break between analytic and continental philosophy over the last hundred or so years, one can make a solid case that the major philosophical discourses and controversies of the 20th century revolved around the nature of language. For examples, see any of the following list: Ludwig Wittgenstein, J. L. Austin, Jacques Derrida, Bertrand Russell (though his work is often misunderstood by ignoring his dual focus on both language and mathematics), Alfred Tarski, Martin Heidegger, Rudolf Carnap, Ferdinand de Saussure, Jean Beaudrillard, Saul Kripke, Willard van Orman Quine, Donald Davidson, Elizabeth Anscombe, David Lewis, John Searle. I’m sure I’m missing plenty of people.

That century was even more inventive in its innovations in the forms, techniques, and subject matters of literature. Compared to the innovations of the last century, the 21st would seem rather bland in comparison. Literary creation is far more corporate, and authors no longer innovate quite so wildly, and when they do, those experiments do not receive the same popular enthusiasm as the experimental works of, for example, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Samuel Beckett, Kurt Vonnegut, and Thomas Pynchon. Bennett’s essay is not only an advertisement for his own book on the genesis of the Iowa program, but is also part of a collection exploring the tensions between the MFA program establishment and the major New York publishing houses. The 21st century seems dominated by corporate priorities instead of artistic ones.

You need not restrict that last statement to the world of the arts alone.

Art and commerce have always had a
problematic relationship, but sometimes the
art is too amazing to worry too much about
all the problems. This caption brought to you
by Netflix, where you can watch Breaking Bad
until you starve to death on your own sofa.

Yet the literature of evocation quietly hides this mad ambition. Writing a wildly ambitious novel is openly and obviously a grand gesture. I have always had sympathy with artists who strive to create works that serve for the cultures of this century what Joyce, Marcel Proust, Beckett, Pablo Picasso, the Beatles, or F. W. Murnau supplied for the last one. And what Paul Cézanne, Charles Dickens, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Herman Melville did for the 19th century. Perhaps we’ll remember David Simon, Vince Gilligan, and Death Grips that way in decades to come. Writing the Great American Novel (or even the Great Canadian or Kenyan novel) is an ambition that includes all the skills of literary, narrative, and philosophical creation in a single, enormous project. Its writer becomes a bonfire that can be seen from a long way away. 

But here is the calm, sedate, humble style of evocative literature strolling out of Iowa with an ambition to do what some of the great thinkers of the last century have called impossible: craft language that is ontologically adequate to reality and life itself. The genre mashups that characterize my own Under the Trees, Eaten and some of the other ideas for short novels that I’m mulling over, have a different focus, which is less ambitious in this regard. 

My own literary works are philosophically informed art, but don’t strive for this kind of singularity. I’m too comfortable in the pulpy world of science-fiction to fit into the culture of Iowa as I understand it. My work in this realm, like the works of philosophy that I most admire and value, aims to provoke a reader to think differently about their life, and perhaps even change it, even in the relatively minor details of their thought and ethics. When some brilliant writer of the Iowan model finally does accomplish the impossible and craft language completely adequate to the singularity of reality, I’m not sure what can happen after that, how the form can move on. Literature whose motive is to change the world will always be vibrant because the world will always have problems to solve, and those solutions will constitute further, different problems in the future. Evocative literature seeks to reflect the world perfectly. But philosophical literature seeks to change it.