How actions are like literature

The author is magic

"Death of the Author" is a famous 1967 essay by Roland Barthes regarding the interpretation of literature.  He argues that the intentions and context of the author are irrelevant when interpreting the author's work.  At most, the author provides a single interpretation, which must compete with all other interpretations.

"Intent! It's fucking magic!" is an influential 2010 essay by Kinsey Hope regarding the moral judgment actions.  There's a common circumstance wherein a person tries to justify their mistakes by emphasizing their good intentions.  The essay snarkily observes that good intentions have the strange and magical power to erase all harms.  "Intention isn't magic" has become a common saying among activists.

Though the two essays live in completely different contexts (literary criticism vs moral discourse), I would argue that the sentiments behind each are substantially similar.  Indeed, in the modern age, when we increasingly look at popular works of fiction through moral lenses, and when "actions" often consist of tweets or other comments, it is questionable whether they even live in different contexts.

Each essay is questioning the importance of intention. The intention of the author, the intention of the actor, what is the relevance of either to our judgment of the result?  If an poet fails to articulate a compelling interpretation of their own work, does that make it a bad poem?  If a celebrity says they didn't mean to offend anyone with their comments on black people, does that protect them from charges of racism?

Intent isn't completely irrelevant; rather, people frequently overrate its relevance.  Once we abolish the common misconception of the authority of intent, we can then quibble over the relatively small ways in which intent might matter after all.

Intention as predictor

Some small insight can be gained by considering a form of fiction which maybe wasn't so popular in 1967: webcomics.  Alternatively, we can consider fanfiction, ongoing TV shows, or any medium where we consume the work at the same time that it is actively updated.  As the work is being updated, our interpretations of it must also be updated.  Insofar as we are offering a coherent interpretation of a single body of work (as opposed to string of interpretations of a series of disconnected works), our interpretations must care about what will happen in future updates.

Intention doesn't change the past, but it is a predictor of the future.  Thus it is necessary to speculate on the intention of the author(s), at least until the time of completion of the work.

When we apply moral judgment to past actions, it might seem that intention doesn't matter because past actions are already past.  But moral judgment is the most future-looking way of looking at the past.  The practical purpose of morally criticizing an action is not to lament what has already happened and can never be changed, but to discourage similar actions in the future.  Thus, moral judgments care not just about results, but about the processes by which the results are produced.  In short, moral judgments must care about intention.

Still, intent is not the end-all-be-all.  A person can have the best of intentions but still produce evil actions.  Actions are the product of intent and execution.  Declaring one's own positive intent is a poor defense against moral criticism, because a positive intent may still be executed poorly.  The purpose of moral criticism may be to suggest better methods of execution, not necessarily to impugn people's motives.

Similarly, in literature, we want to look at what's there, not just what's intended.  An author can intend to write the greatest literature in the world, but so what?

Ignoring the dystopia

Instead of committing any words to my own novel, I spent the last month or so reading Pride and Prejudice.  It was research, I say.  Research!

Pride and Prejudice of course takes place in the dystopia that is Georgian England.  True to the dystopian genre, there are multiple fantastical constructs which are slowly introduced to a horrified audience.  For instance, there's the idea of an "entail".  I don't really get the purpose of it, but apparently it's a restriction on whether an estate can be passed on in your will.  And then there's "elopement" which just means that a woman runs away with her lover.  It doesn't sound like there's anything wrong with that, but within the dystopia it's a horrible thing to do, and a complete disgrace to the entire family.

There are also many neat world-building details.  I like how the servants are always there, but no one ever thinks about them much, because that's just how wealthy people in this universe think.  At the same time, rudeness towards servants signals an unsympathetic character, and kindness towards servants signals a noble character.  That's the only way the lower classes are ever important: in relation to wealthy people.

I also like how we know exactly how many pounds each character is worth.  In Capital in the 21st Century, the great literary critic Thomas Piketty explains that this is because there are relatively low inflation and constant returns on capital.  Thus, an author can list exact money amounts and expect readers decades in the future to have the same understanding of how much it is.*  Jane Austen really put a lot of thought into that one.

*Upon research, I discovered that Piketty's claims are disputed by quantitative literary theorists.

Changing the subject, the other day, my boyfriend and I saw Never Let Me Go, a film based on the book of the same name.  I had read the book and thought the movie was a terrible adaptation.  My boyfriend, however, detested the movie, because of the way it ignored its own dystopia.  Without any spoilers, the movie involves some extremely questionable bioethics, and nobody ever questions it, much less gets angry at the system.  Bioethics simply isn't a theme in the movie.  Instead, bioethics is just a plot device, a metaphor for the brevity of life.

My boyfriend thought the story wasn't very American.  Which figures, since the writer and screenwriter are British.

But actually I think there's something interesting about that idea.  A dystopia where nobody fights the evil of the system, or even notices that it's evil.  Evil is simply there, and the story addresses completely different themes of love and life.

Although come to think of it, maybe that's too trite.  Maybe that describes every story ever.

Pride and Prejudice ignores the evil of its own dystopia, and instead criticizes smaller evils.  Like how some people are so proud, other people are so prejudiced, and some people are so depraved as to join the priesthood, or to elope.  But sometimes those people learn that they were in the wrong, and eventually come to admit it.

I love that there's a classic romance where the central plot is about two people changing their minds about each other.  Changing minds!  What a rational value!  This also implies that the woman in the romance has a mind to be changed.  A romance where the woman has agency?  It feels like the most progressive romance I've known in ages!

Probably the worst part of the book is that the main reason the woman changes her mind is in response to the man's display of financial generosity.  He's so wealthy, and sometimes he sometimes assists other wealthy people who are on the verge of losing their wealthy status!  The main problem with this part is that it reminds us, the readers, of the dystopia which we were so carefully pretending to ignore.

Generally, I'm not a fan of so-called "classic literature", particularly when people praise it as "timeless".  There is no way that I am reading classic works of literature the same way that contemporaries did.  I don't think I should read it that way.  But Jane Austen was a pretty decent writer, and this novel was worth reading.

Nintendo as cultural import

Tauriq Moosa had a good article on people of color in video games.  The article kicks off with a discussion of Rust, a western game which recently added POC to its previously all-white population.  In a simulation of reality, each player is stuck with one race forever, with no way to change it, not even by restarting your character.  I'm marveling at the sheer artistic brilliance of that idea.

You can read that article, but I'm going to go in a different direction.  As is typical of discussions of race in video games, there is a lot of focus on dark-skinned POC in western "realistic" games.  While this is certainly a worthwhile topic, it doesn't really address my experience as an east-Asian American who mostly plays Nintendo.

Japanese video games are fascinating, because they're possibly the most significant foreign cultural import to the US.  We here in the US are used to exporting our culture to the rest of the world, and experiencing Japanese imports is the closest thing to knowing what it feels like for other people in the world.

As I said, this topic is fascinating, but I also don't know what to say about it.  I am no student of Japanese culture, and I don't really understand which aspects of Japanese media are informed by Japanese culture.  There's something significant there, but I don't know what it is.  Is... is this perhaps what it's like for the rest of the world to experience US culture?  Hell if I know.

Indeed, it seems that most people in the US simply ignore the Japanese-ness of these video games.  The most obvious marker of a foreign culture tends to be the portrayal of non-white characters.  However:

1. Most Nintendo games have cartoony aesthetics, and often no humans at all.  Compared to the "historical accuracy" excuse, this is a much more plausible reason to not portray different ethnicities.
2. Japan, being colonized by the US after WWII, tends to portray a lot of white people, and otherwise admire white characteristics.
3. Even when Japanese games portray characters that they think of as Japanese, Americans think of them as white anyway.  It doesn't help that Japanese people portray themselves with all sorts of hair colors.

For example, is Link white?  He may have blonde hair and blue eyes, but I think he's Japanese.  His facial features are Japanese, though they're not as exaggerated as they would be when Americans try to portray someone as distinctly Japanese.  He also obviously falls into the bishonen boy archetype, which Americans just interpret as androgyny.

Rinku: sooo Japanese.

Of course, officially, Link is Hylian, and he lives in a world with Gorons, Zoras, and, ummmm, the Gerudos.....

A race of dark-skinned thieves, not racist at all, Nintendo.  From ZeldaWiki.

I also think the preoccupation with cartoony aesthetics might be peculiarly Japanese?  But nobody seems to talk about that.

So given the Japanese influence on video games, you'd think we'd see a lot of East-Asian representation in video games.  And we do, more so than TV or movies or books.  But it's less representation than you might think because most characters are indeterminate, or appear white to American audiences.

Instead of character representation, I think we mostly get a lot of Japanese cultural influence.  But I don't recognize or understand the cultural influence, and as an Asian American it's not my culture in any case.

Deciding who dies in a story

If storytelling were itself a story, the main conflict would be between two beasts: Freedom and Constraints.

When it comes to action, battles, duels, and combat, they all grant a boon to Freedom.  Because, honestly, you can write a combat scene to come out almost any way that you want.  Who wins or loses, who lives or dies, often has little to do with who is more powerful or who has the greater numbers.  The Constraints are instead provided by what makes story-sense.

Sometimes, what makes story-sense also makes physical sense.  For instance, it makes sense for the greenhorn protagonist to lose at the beginning of the story, not just because they are inexperienced, but also because it sets up further conflict.

On other occasions, what makes story sense is the opposite of what makes physical sense.  One example is the law of conservation of ninjutsu (look it up on tvtropes), where the strength of an army is inversely proportional to its size.  In a story, the strength of a character is often proportional to how much we care about them, and we simply don't care about large numbers of faceless individuals.

Other examples left as exercise to the reader: Why are love interests so frequently captured or killed?  Why is the protagonist's mentor always fated to die?  Why are the first ones to die in a horror film always the hot girl, black guy, and gay guy?

There are of course other means to add Constraints.  For instance, if you really wanted to be realistic, you could have the winners determined at random.  I would call this "aleatoric storytelling", named after aleatoric music.

From XKCD

For obvious reasons, aleatoric storytelling isn't very popular, except in sports and D&D.  You'd end up with a lot of things that don't make story-sense at all, like having the protagonist die or having them achieve victory at a random point in time.

Another way is to establish a set of rules about how your universe works.  This is the path followed by Death Note and HPMOR, for instance.  On the other hand, this is usually something a writer will attempt only if they think themselves clever enough to get around the constraints.  It seems you really need that Freedom.

Review of Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality (HPMOR) is one of the best-known pieces of fanfiction ever written, meaning it was even read by people like me, who otherwise despise fanfic.  This is my (spoiler-free) review.

I should begin with the caveat that I hardly remember most of HPMOR.  Like much of internet fiction, it has updated very slowly over a long period of time.  I started reading HPMOR over three years ago, and I know because there's something in my blog archives about it.  Frankly it would have been better suited to reading over a short period of time rather than a period of years.  But this is hardly relevant now, because the fanfic has now been completed and you can read it at your leisure.

HPMOR begins as a light-hearted parody of Harry Potter as well as a tutorial on rationalist ideas.  It takes place in an alternate universe where Harry Potter is an incredible genius.  Rather than unquestioningly accepting the magical world revealed to him, Harry applies scientific thinking to it, revealing many absurdities.  Over and over again, he has realizations that apparently nobody else in the history of the wizarding world has thought to consider.

In these early chapters, Harry is obviously an author insert and a Mary Sue.  Despite being 11 years old, he can do no wrong.  Nonetheless, if you simply accept the premise that Harry is unrealistically smart, the same way we accept the premise that there are wizards, HPMOR takes that and goes interesting places with it.  It's okay for Harry to be really smart, and the rest of the world to be really stupid, because we get a lot of laughs, and the rationalist lessons are effective.

As the story moves on, it becomes more serious and enters a thriller cycle. Harry repeatedly gets into impossible predicaments, and the joy is in finding out how he gets himself out.  The rationalist themes also become more mature.  For example, one set of chapters was on the theme of taboo tradeoffs, such as making trades where lives are on the line.  Rather than Harry didactically delivering lessons, he has arguments with other characters, and it's not always clear who is right.  Although at times one suspects that the author still believes Harry is always right.

I consider this gradual maturation to be one of the most appropriate characteristics of HPMOR.  It mirrors the intellectual development of someone who has encountered rationalist/skeptical ideas for the first time (as many in fact do when reading HPMOR).  At first, it's exciting to learn about all these fallacies and cognitive biases.  Everything seems so straightforward, and everyone else seems blind.  But then over time you realize, stuff is complicated, and maybe you don't really know what you thought you knew!

Now for the bad stuff: Wizard battles.  These battles are deliberately riffing on the part of Ender's Game where all the kids at the military school have team battles in zero G.  But as I saw it, the point of those battles was to distract all the kids with pointless masculinity contests as a twisted way to turn kids into military generals.  None of the details of the battles actually mattered.

The wizard battles in HPMOR read like someone who adored Ender's Game for all those details.  The battles occur repeatedly, and every time as multi-chapter epics.  It was lots and lots of tactical details, with hardly any thematic content except the glorification of competition.

The emptiness of these sections I felt also poisoned the rest of the fic, as it became clear that none of Harry's trials really matter.  So Harry plays escape artist by transfiguration again by transfiguring X into Y.  So what?  What do I get out of it?  (You might be starting to see why I despise fanfic.)

I have very little connection to other readers of HPMOR, but my sense is that many fans were disappointed with the ending.  Why?  According to Hallquist, the particular way Harry gets out of the final predicament is unsatisfying because it involves the evil overlord behaving like a typical evil overlord (i.e. stupidly).

This can be seen as a failure of HPMOR to do what it was trying so hard to do.  But I feel that only highlights how little I cared about what it was trying to do.  The tactical details of how Harry wins in the end is not important to me at all.  That some of the "smart" characters sometimes behave stupidly is not at all surprising, and if anything, it should have happened far more frequently.

Thematically speaking, I felt the ending had a lot going for it.  As you may know, one of the fatal character flaws of the canonical Voldemort is that he utterly fears death.  The author of HPMOR, Eliezer Yudkowsky, is also known for fearing death, and is entirely serious about advocating immortality technology, such as cryogenics.  This leads to some good dialogue between HPMOR and the canon about death.

I also like how Voldemort is portrayed as a dark reflection of Harry's rationalism, with all the intelligence but without the morals.  This seems like the most fitting end to a fic about rationality.

Realism and ugliness

I want to talk about something which is far far away from math, and far far away from science.  I want to talk about aesthetics, and my own sense of aesthetics in particular.  (Of course, I've already written my magnum opus on aesthetics, but perhaps the subject would benefit from a less facetious treatment.)

I've realized that what I like in art is a reflection of reality.  Not a realistic reflection of reality necessarily, but a reflection nonetheless.

For example, my favorite novel of the past year was The Unconsoled, which takes place in a sort of nightmarish dreamscape, with the story frequently wrapping around in a circle only to contradict itself.  That book had some deep things to say about social obligations, and the lies we tell ourselves to justify random happenstance.

The idea of reflecting reality, without being realistic, is also embodied in another aesthetic, that of "gritty realism".  I think of the ur-example of gritty realism to be The Dark Knight.  I think you'll agree that The Dark Knight is not realistic, but is perhaps meant to invoke uncomfortable truths about reality.  Like when Batman is forced to choose between his girlfriend or the mayor, that's keeping it real, or something.

One justification for the realism aesthetic:  "Yes it's ugly.  But the truth is ugly."

But that sounds wrong to me, or whatever the equivalent of "wrong" is when we discuss aesthetics.  For me, it's not that the truth is ugly.  It's that beauty is ugly.

What is beauty?  Beauty is a subjective judgment we make about real objects, even though the objects themselves have no intrinsic beauty about them.  Beauty is a lie.

It's more than that.  Beauty is a social lie.  When something is beautiful, we are all supposed to find it beautiful.  For instance, as a scientist, I am supposed to sing praise for the beauty of science.

The Pale Blue Dot, a famous image of Earth as viewed from space.

The above image is ugly.  Because beauty is ugly.  Beauty is social coercion.  I don't need to share Carl Sagan's aesthetics.  Fuck that.

Of course, I say this while simultaneously recognizing that Saturn's rings are actually very pretty.  And don't you know that even as I profess the ugliness of prettiness, I post a lot of pretty photos of origami every month.  No one said aesthetics need to be logically consistent.  It's not mathematics.

Nonetheless, there is a lot of value in subverting conventional aesthetics.  On the social level, popular aesthetics can be a great evil.  Like the idea that white men are, aesthetically speaking, the best hero protagonists, and the most relatable characters in general.  Or the cultural designation of a particular body type as attractive.  Or the fact that culture which is popular among lower classes or marginalized groups is systematically considered uncool (for example, see what happened to Disco).  The beauty we have here in society is ugly.

Aesthetics are an expression of inner emotions, a thing that cannot be fully justified, or countered, with rational argument.  Sometimes the best way to fight aesthetics is with aesthetics.

Gay culture: a tragedy

In the category of things I wish I had blogged about at the time, some years ago I saw the movie Broken Hearts Club: A Romantic Comedy.  It was a film about gay men, released in 2000.  It didn't get exactly good ratings, but we have a lower standard for gay movies.  Roger Ebert gave it 3/4 stars, saying, "It insists on the ordinariness of its characters, on their everyday problems, on the relaxed and chatty ways they pass their time. The movie's buried message celebrates the arrival of gays into the mainstream."

I'm not going to remember the plot details, but what I remember is my overall impression: This movie makes much more sense when read as a tragedy.

The movie portrays a group of friends, and they are absolutely awful to one another.  They should clearly break up.  However, the writer doesn't see it that way, and treats the near break-up of the group as the "conflict" of the story.  In particular, I recall that one of the friends leaves to make new friends--a group of heroin addicts.  Eventually he overdoses, and the friends all come together at the hospital.  They resolve to stay together, not because they are actually good friends to each other, but because gay people need to stick together.

On IMDB, you can find lots of people who liked the movie because it was exactly like their own life.  I get that people are happy to finally see a movie that sweeps away the stereotypes, but what we find underneath is just sad.

The more I think about it, the more this feels symbolic of larger things wrong with gay male culture.  People accept all kinds of abuse, basically because the alternative of leaving gay culture is worse.  And while lots of people know that something's broken, hardly anyone shows self-awareness of how they're part of the problem.

Many specific kinds of abuse are showcased uncritically in the movie.  There's rampant femmephobia, such as a bunch of bad dates, where the date is bad basically because they're too effeminate.  There are the body image issues, encapsulated in this quote:

All of the men in L.A. are a bunch of 10's looking for an 11. On a good night, and if the other guy's drunk enough... I'm a 6.

Perhaps the only thing missing is the constant complaining about how nobody else wants long-term relationships (then where do all these complainers come from?).  But you can find plenty of that theme in other gay movies.

I don't know if I am the right person to make this sort of cultural critique.  I've always been on the boundaries of gay culture, and I've been out of the dating pool for several years.  This is more something that affects my friends, and which pervades discourse among gay men.

On the other hand, when hearing from people who do personally deal with the problems of gay culture, I don't hear cultural critique, I hear self-pitying.  Like the character in The Broken Hearts Club, who complains that he's only a six in attractiveness, but doesn't even think about how he treats other sixes.  Without pointing to other specific examples, I see this theme repeated endlessly in popular gay media--fiction and nonfiction.

Novels are a strange medium

Regular readers may have noticed that I stopped posting monthly updates about the novel I am trying to write.  I'm still writing the novel, at such a crawl that I may never finish.  That's fine with me.  However, I decided I didn't want to do further regular updates.  The updates make me feel like I'm fulfilling an obligation.

I'd still like to talk about fiction, without focusing on my writing in particular.  Specifically, I've become more aware of how strange novels are, and stories more generally.

I used to think that writing a story was like wandering an open street.  You could go in any direction you please, and see whatever you want.  Instead, writing a story is more like wandering an open galaxy.  You can go in many directions, but you have to build a space ship first, and the vehicle proceeds to limit your perspective.

I'm talking about some really basic constraints:

-You can't have too many well-developed characters.  And if you do have lots of characters, you can't introduce them all at once.

-Stories need a conflict and resolution.  You can have a conflict without a resolution, but it feels much weirder than it does in real life.  If you don't have a conflict, it's not a story, it's an essay.

-Pacing is counterintuitive.  We want to tell the details of the story which are interesting, and skip the details which are uninteresting.  For most stories, this requires zooming in and out a lot, but if you zoom in and out too much it feels jerky.

-Many novels have the conceit of a narrator character.  But why would a sensible person talk like a novel, or even write about their experiences like a novel?

-Vivid descriptions are a strange concept.  Why do we like them?  Do we all in fact like them?  Do descriptions need have anything to do with the rest of the story?

-A story has a beginning, which is disorienting.  I find it telling that in video games, which are often in second person, so many stories begin with the protagonist waking up or having amnesia.

-Readers don't automatically care about characters.  If you have characters do something important before readers care about them, then the readers might miss its importance entirely.

-A story has an ending.  The sheer weirdness of having an ending is most obvious when we see sequels to stories where a sequel wasn't originally planned.  It especially screws with character development, because how do you have a character achieve enlightenment repeatedly?

-Fiction can have a message, but is severely limited in its ability to argue the message.  You can't really say "X is wrong because people in my story did X and it led to bad things."  Actually, lots of fiction makes that kind of argument anyway, but I'd personally rather not.



Can you think of any other constraints in the novel or story medium?

Five awful things about "God's not Dead"

I saw God's Not Dead, a Christian film that appears to be based on that absurd chain e-mail about the brave Christian student who faces down an atheist professor.  This movie got a 16/100 on metacritic, but still ended up a big box office success.  If you want to know what happens in it without watching it, I recommend this synopsis.

In the world of God's Not Dead, atheists are horrible people who mock their girlfriends in public, abandon people close to them when they're dying, and secretly hate god.  The movie joyously depicts atheists dying by cancer or car accidents, and gloats over their last minute conversions.  Also, all atheist arguments are arguments from authority or assertion (oddly, so are the Christian arguments).

But a lot of that has already been said.  So here I present five things that were awful or bizarre about God's Not Dead that had nothing to do with atheism.

1. The girlfriend from middle school

The main character, Josh Wheaton, mentions that it's his sixth anniversary with his girlfriend.  He's a college freshman.  ...  I suspect the writers didn't think the math through, and just wanted it to seem like they had a long-time commitment.

The six-year commitment makes it all the more devastating when they break up!  Josh's girlfriend demands that he stop trying to challenge his professor, because they need to get good grades so they can go to law school together, like God wants.  Josh stands his ground, so she threatens to break up with him, and then she does.  Wow, how did they stay happy together so long in such an obviously abusive relationship?  Josh, naturally, has no emotional reaction to the breakup whatsoever.

2. A distillation of Muslim stereotypes

Another character, who is utterly unrelated in any way to the protagonist, is Ayisha.  In the presence of her "traditional" Muslim father, she wears what I think is supposed to be a niqab, although it's not remotely accurate.

Her whole plot arc seems to be based on the view that Muslim women wear covers because of direct coercion by male figures in their life, such as their husbands or fathers.  This is pretty much explicit when a student goes up to her and says, "I wish you didn't have to wear that".  Later, when Ayisha converts to Jesus, her father, who loves her very much, beats her and kicks her out.  Gee, I knew these were Muslim stereotypes, but I've never seen them represented so succinctly.

3. The car that won't start

Two Christian pastors are trying to drive... somewhere.  It was explained at some earlier point in the movie, while it was still throwing random characters at us, and I didn't know there was anything worth paying attention to.  But they can't get there because their car won't start.  And then a car rental guy drives a car over to them, and that car won't start either!  And then the scene with the car rental guy is repeated again, for good measure.

Get this: the car rental guy is going to audition for a role in Death of a Salesman.  Why is that relevant?  Who the hell knows?  I don't even understand how he gets to his audition without any transportation.

This whole time I'm thinking, obviously their car doesn't start because God doesn't want them to get on a train that God plans on crashing.  Turns out it's actually because God wants them to convert an atheist and then dance over his grave.  Props to the movie for being unpredictable.

4. That Chinese kid

There's one Chinese student on campus, and he is a visiting student from China.  His entire story arc is that he converts to Christianity, which his family finds inconvenient because maybe the Chinese government won't let his brother visit the US anymore (??).

I am Chinese American, and this is one of the most blatant examples of tokenism I've ever seen.  Couldn't they imagine that some Chinese people actually aren't from China?  It's also suffering from White savior syndrome, wherein a white American male hero rescues a foreigner from his ignorant foreign culture.  I'm pretty sure the Chinese Christian communities are much more effective at converting Chinese people, thanks.

5. The Duck Dynasty cameo

Early in the movie, a character has an interview with the guy from Duck Dynasty.  This served no purpose whatsoever, except to allow some celebrity to spout stuff about Jesus and ducks.  Later I found out from the synopsis that the interview was supposed to be hostile, because the character is an angry blogger.  I totally missed that because the rest of the blogger's story arc is about how she's dying all alone from cancer.

In case you didn't get enough of Duck Dynasty, he makes a second cameo.  For no apparent reason, he shows up at a music concert and encourages everyone to participate in a viral texting campaign (send "God's not dead" to all of your contacts!).  This is, of course, a very good idea, and is well-received by all.

Personal thoughts on the four campfires of art

Scott McCloud is a cartoonist, and the leading theorist of comic arts.  In his book Making Comics, McCloud proposed the idea of the "four campfires of art", also known as "tribes of art" or "passions of art".  It's a way of dividing art or artists into four types.  But perhaps it's better understood as dividing art into four aspirations, since any particular artist or work of art can draw from multiple campfires.

For a description of the four campfires, here's a good blog post, or you can see what McCloud himself says in his TED talk or in this interview.

Image taken from McCloud's TED talk.

In addition to those links, I offer a very brief description:

• Classicists focus on beauty, and mastery of the artform.
• Animists focus on content, trying to present their story or ideas in the clearest way possible.
• Formalists focus on form, exploring the contours of the medium.
• Iconoclasts focus on truth, especially by targeting artistic conventions which gloss over truth.

Though McCloud is coming from the perspective of comics, they also may apply to other art forms, such as fine arts, literature, movies, music, and video games.

I find these four campfires to be personally validating, so much to the extent that I cannot offer any general commentary on them, and only offer my personal feelings.

I take one look at the four campfires, and it's blatantly obvious which one I fall into, both in my appreciation of art, and in my recent attempts to write a novel.  I'm an iconoclast. I really like fiction that deconstructs common tropes.  I like art that turns common moments into objects of fascination.  When I set out to write a novel, I end up writing a novel about a narrator whose major flaw is too much trust in tropes.

I also appreciate formalism and animism, but the campfire that is hardest for me to understand is classicism.  I think the category somewhat suffers from its association with "classic" art, because I think that most of the time when artwork gets immortalized as "classic", it's not because the artist set out to do so.

For example, is Shakespeare a classicist?  A lot of Shakespeare focuses on the details of the plot, and linguistic wit of the characters, both of which are animist values.  However, regardless of artistic intention, perhaps classicism is the main thing people get out of Shakespeare today, if only because the other values don't age as well.  I don't know, I don't really care for Shakespeare.  Or classic works in general, really.

I find the four campfires personally validating, because I really like art, but this is hard to explain when I'm not much into popular art, and dislike most classic art.  Also, my favorite thing to do with art is complain about it.  But it seems there's still a place for me at one of the campfires.

Which of the four campfires would you say you value most?

Writing a novel: month 4

I'm going to go ahead and admit that I did not write anything for my novel for most of this month.  But let's not phrase it as "admitting".  Writing is a hobby.  It's not my job.  Writing is more fun than my job.  I can do whatever I want with my hobby, including ignoring it for a month.

This month, I was instead engrossed with another book, The Unconsoled, by Kazuo Ishiguro.  I tend to write on the bus, and also read on the bus, so the time I spend reading and writing negatively correlate with each other.

I may or may not have said before, that Kazuo Ishiguro is one of my inspirations.  He zooms in really close on ordinary social interactions, and reveals the unnameable emotions within.  For example, in one chapter of The Unconsoled, a man explains at great length why he doesn't speak to his (adult) daughter.  When she was a child, she did something to anger him, and it was only meant to be a few days. But there never seemed an appropriate moment to break the silence.  An appropriate moment finally arose when she was grieving her hamster, which she accidentally killed, but he hesitated, and now it seems like speaking to her would disrespect the memory of her hamster.

So good!  Although I would have hated this book in high school.  And it's basically impossible to imitate.

Uh, yeah, so my novel... I will not apologize for taking a break, because my alternate activity was wonderful.  But it was not a permanent break.  I'm getting back into it now, and the fresh perspective is already helping.

My approach with many of these posts about writing has been to discuss an idea I have that I find exciting.  But I'm reconsidering whether this is a good idea, because I worry about building up expectations.  These are cool ideas and all, but it really all comes down to execution.

Review: Jesus Christ Superstar

The other night I saw Jesus Christ Superstar again, the newer version from 2000. I've probably seen the musical four or five times by now--I am a fan. But there are also aspects of it I don't care for, which I will get to below.

The really outstanding thing about Jesus Christ Superstar is, of course, the score composed by Andrew Lloyd Weber. Weber manages to incorporate plenty of musically interesting ideas, and make them easily accessible, and catchy, even. One of my favorite parts is the introduction of the high priests, which uses polytonality to great effect. The high priests sing in a minor key ("He is dangerous!"), while the crowds praise Jesus in a major key ("Jesus Christ, Superstar!"). Polytonality is an idea that is very hard to "get", but in context it makes complete sense. This kind of thing is only possible in incidental music!

And that's not the only song which plays with tone. There are a few examples where the same theme is repeated with different tones (such as when Judas and Jesus argue while Mary tries to calm Jesus down). And there are examples where the musical tone is bright, but the meaning is soured with irony (such as when the zealots ask Jesus to lead them in battle, and when King Herod asks Jesus to perform a miracle).

My least favorite songs are the ones expressing straightforward devotion to Jesus. I prefer music with more anger, bitterness, or tension.

The many devotional songs, especially concentrated near the end, I think speak to the definitively Christian perspective of the musical. But one of the great things about the musical is that it lends itself easily to alternate interpretations. King Herod has a classic scene where he asks Jesus to perform a miracle to prove that he isn't a fraud--Jesus has no response to this. Judas has a relatively sympathetic portrayal, and says lots of sensible things ("You've begun to matter more than the things that you say").

Judas is a jerk, mind you, but then again, so is Jesus. Jesus Christ is like a D&D adventurer who rolled high charisma, but whose player doesn't actually know how to role-play charisma. Everyone is falling over themselves to please Jesus, from Judas to Mary to Pontius Pilate. But never does Jesus do anything to justify this treatment. Instead he spends most of his time throwing tantrums, telling people that they don't love him enough, and offering maddening hints that he intends to die. And then, when he dies, he has the gall to forgive people for carrying out his intentions.

This is part of a larger problem with the musical, which is that it relies too much on the audience knowing and accepting the source material. The audience already likes Jesus, so the musical doesn't spend any time demonstrating Jesus' charisma. On the other hand, the musical still felt the need to hit all the common Bible stories from the New Testament, even when they didn't really fit in with the rest of the narrative. As a result, my boyfriend, a first-time watcher, complained that the plot was very thin, and that it seemed more like a series of unrelated vignettes.

My own complaint is that the ending is just way too slow. Spoiler alert: Jesus dies and everyone is sad. They are so sad that the music loses all its anger and becomes boring. Oh, if only Jesus were still around, he'd make the music more interesting by yelling at people for no apparent reason. Yeah, I'm harsh.

Writing a fictional ethnic minority

Dealing with race is scary for a lot of people, because of what I'm calling the "vacuous critics" problem.  There are so many people saying terrible things about race, that people are afraid of opening the doors to those people, or worse, being that person.  But I'm not sure that this fear serves us well in "post-racial" US, where most people of my generation refuse to acknowledge that racial issues still exist.  In particular, it doesn't serve people well when they try to write fiction.

There's the easy way of including ethnic minorities in fiction, which is to mention or imply a character's ethnicity, and not make anything out of it.  And then there's the hard way: dealing with a character's ethnicity with the nuance that the issue deserves.

In my novel, I take the easy way with several characters.  But then I also take the hard way, inventing an entire ethnic minority, which includes two main characters.  It's a way of talking about race, without talking about any race in particular.

Now, I'm not exactly coming from experience here, since it's my first novel and I've written like 10% of it.  But it seems to me the first step to creating a nuanced ethnic group is to write out their history.  I decided that there were maybe three qualitatively different ethnic histories (in the US--there might be even more outside the US).

1. There are Native Americans, who lived here before Europeans moved in.
2. There are African Americans, who were imported as part of the slave trade.
3. There are immigrant groups.  Some of these groups (eg Irish, Italian) eventually got conglomerated into "white", while others groups probably never will, because they're not light-skinned, or otherwise look different.

I thought it would be easiest to write an immigrant group, since the others might require more radical alternate histories, and I'm not feeling quite so adventurous.  Furthermore, the first two histories would read as thinly veiled metaphors for Native Americans and African Americans, so it almost seems like you should just be writing about the real deal.  Lastly, I'm more familiar with immigrant issues, being half Asian.

I guess I just inadvertently invented an Asian American subgroup based on my own experiences!  Oh well.  It's basically impossible to write something that would generalize to all ethnic groups, even just to groups within the US.

The issues of the ethnic group don't have to be complicated.  Here's a really basic and ubiquitous issue for immigrants: First generation vs later generations.  Bam.  Here's another one: stereotypes.  Another: feeling distant from, and inferior to white people.  Easy.  At least in theory.

And then there are more difficult issues.  For instance, I'm inventing a religion.  But most of the characters are not part of this religion, they're Catholic because they were converted by colonists.  Colonialism is super complicated.  Luckily, in a work of fiction I don't need to deal with it explicitly, I just want it in the background to the story's events and dialogue.

Currently reading

What have I been reading lately?

I read The City and the City by China Miéville, a mystery novel taking place across two city-states, but the city-states actually seem to be in the same location.  The unusual setting got far more mileage than I thought it would, but I didn't think much of the flat characters.  I would be willing to read more Miéville in the future.

I read A Perfect Vacuum by Stanislaw Lem, a collection of reviews of books that don't exist, mostly books of the postmodernist sort.  This format allows it to describe really fascinating books that probably wouldn't work in practice.  My major complaint is that Lem didn't use the premise to its full potential--most reviews simply summarized the books they were reviewing, without much actual judgment.  I would have liked to juxtapose the contrasting perspectives of the book's characters, the book, the reviewer, and the reader.

I read The Casual Vacancy by J K Rowling, which is mainly an exercise in juggling lots and lots of characters and the dynamics between them.  The main plot arc is about class struggle and urban development politics.  I enjoy having lots of unsympathetic characters, so this was a book for me.

I just finished reading Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake, which takes after the apocalypse, with the prior dystopia described through flashbacks.  The dystopia is a world where scientists are developing pigs that grow human organs, where sex slavery is common, and where the upper class (mostly researchers) live in compounds separated from an increasingly impoverished lower class.

I'm not generally a fan of speculative fiction, but I liked the parable of a coffee company that developed a coffee plants whose beans would ripen all at the same time.  This of course leads to rioting because all those coffee pickers are out of jobs.  It's funny how the technology leads to more efficient production, but ultimately harms the quality of life because it concentrates wealth.  One hopes that in the real world, as scientific technology progresses, political "technology" can keep pace.

Bothersome character developments

Speaking of things in fiction that bother me, here's another: characters who are not adventurous enough, but through the story learn to be more adventurous.  A classic example is The Hobbit.  But other examples that come to mind are Anansi Boys, which put me off from Neil Gaiman entirely, and The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, which I know I wouldn't like based on the previews.

Like my previous complaint, it comes down to the limitations of fiction as a medium.  We like stories about the interesting or unusual.  So in a story, adventurous often means going on this dangerous adventure to kill the dragon.  We also like stories where the hero wins.  So of course they defeat the dragon every time despite the one in a million odds.  Doesn't that just show the virtue of being a risk-taker?

Even in a more realistic story where there are no dragons, it's all about living life to the fullest, according to whatever writers think that means.  Inevitably it's something that's fun to read about but doesn't sound like fun to actually experience.  More exploiting the limitations of fiction as a medium.

Maybe it just annoys me on a personal level, as I've met innumerable people who discover that I'm not into one thing or another, and think it's such a travesty that I should try it over and over until I like it.  Geeks are especially bad about this, with all their shows and movies that they think I should watch.  I like to enthuse about webcomics and blogs, but I don't operate under the illusion that everyone else would like them too if only they'd try.

In discussion with my boyfriend, he said this didn't really bother him.  Instead, he's bothered by a different kind of character development, wherein a member of the upper middle class discovers that money can't give their life meaning.  Specific examples include The Great Gatsby and American Beauty.  I think he has trouble sympathizing for those poor poor wealthy people.  I think that doesn't bother me as much though.

Stories where skeptics are wrong

Lately I've been thinking a lot about queer representation in fiction, but what about skeptical representation?

Representation of skepticism is quite a bit different to me, because I don't particularly care about character representation, more about thematic representation.  There are certainly stereotypes of skeptics reinforced by fictional media (think Vulcans and House, MD), but I'm not as bothered by these stereotypes as I am about queer stereotypes, because skepticism isn't an entirely coherent or recognizable identity.

For an example of good thematic representation, see Harry Potter. It's wonderful to read that even in a world full of magic, there are wacky conspiracy theories flying around, and skepticism is still important.

On the other hand, in most fiction, when a wacky conspiracy theory or paranormal hypothesis shows up, there's a good chance that it's true within that story.  And it makes sense too, from a storytelling perspective.  We like stories about the unusual or fantastic, and we like stories that connect to our real life.  So why not depict an ordinary world, only in this world the supernatural is real!  But given that this is like the real world, most people don't believe in the fantastical.  But in the fictional universe, all those people are wrong.

It's okay that stories depict the fantastical.  But it annoys me when a story dwells too much on people's disbelief in the fantastical.  It feels like the story is trying to say something negative about disbelief.  But it's not criticizing disbelief in a very fair way, it's just using the limitations of fiction as a medium.  Fiction is limited to describing what is interesting and unusual, stories worth hearing.  There aren't a lot of stories about people brushing their teeth.  Imagine if someone somehow twisted this around to show that brushing your teeth is unnecessary.

I'm sure this isn't the intention of most people writing such stories, but the meanings of stories aren't bound by the authors' intentions.

There are several solutions that I find satisfactory.  One is to just not talk about people's disbelief that much.  Then I don't have to think about it too much.  Another solution is to describe further paranormal or conspiracy beliefs that are false within the fictional universe.

Dear readers, are you also bothered by stories where all the skeptics are wrong?

Reading of the past year

I haven't talked about my reading material in almost a year.  That's because I usually write about books because I want book recommendations, but I haven't needed recommendations lately.

In the past year, my interests have turned towards historical fiction.

I read several novels by Kazuo Ishiguro.  One of them, Remains of the Day, is about a butler who reflects back on his life, and realizes that his master was a Nazi sympathizer.  Another, Artist of the Floating World, is about an artist in Japan, who reflects back on his work supporting the Japanese empire in WWII.  There seems to be a bit of a pattern in Ishiguro's work.  The history provides an emotional background, but the main focus is actually the main character, the narrator.  As they tell their story, the reader can see that their perceptions are distorted by what they are unable or unwilling to see.

I also read Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell.  It's a story of magicians, that takes place in the early 19th century.  Naturally, the magicians set out to solve the greatest problem of their time: Napoleon.  Very fun.

Lastly, I'll mention Blind Assassin, by Margaret Atwood.  She's generally thought of as a feminist author, and Blind Assassin focuses on a female character who is trapped by gender roles.  But that's not what's great about the book.  The main character's sister kills herself, and leaves behind a novel.  The novel tells the story about a woman and her lover; her lover tells her a sci-fi story.  So it's a story within a story within a story.

Kazuo Ishiguro and Margaret Atwood can be quite dry, and I can only imagine that I would have hated them in high school.  But for now I'm enjoying the high-brow literature (or "snooty" literature, as I like to think of it).  Maybe later I can read some pulpy stuff too.

I was considering reading J. K. Rowling's new novels, only it would take a long time for them to become available at the library.

ETA: If you know me and are on GoodReads, you should add me!

Character vs thematic representation

I was thinking about fictional representation, partly because there was an FtBCon panel on atheists in pop culture, and partly because there's been some recent bloggy discussion about ace characters.  Actually there's some similarity between ace and atheist representation: many characters seem like they could be ace or atheist by default, simply because they're not shown practicing religion or expressing interest in sex.  But here I focus on atheist representation, just as an example.

Different people seem to want different things in their fictional representation.  Some people just want characters who are mentioned or implied to be atheist, and to not be horrible stereotypes.  The story doesn't have to focus on their atheism.  But sometimes, some of us would like stories that deal directly with atheism, rather than simply having atheist characters.

Perhaps we should be separating out these two desires entirely.  They both have to do with fiction and representation, but they're asking for different things, and have different motivations.

On the one hand, you want people to understand that atheists are just ordinary people.  They can be perfectly intelligent and sociable, or not, as the case may be.  They have flaws, but ordinary ones (depending on the style of fiction) that don't necessarily line up with stereotypes.  If you feel alone as an atheist, it's also nice to see a character you can relate to, or which legitimizes your experiences.

On the other hand, you may be interested in atheist issues, like skepticism or the dangers of religions.  It would be nice to explore these topics through fiction.  And you know, the fiction doesn't even have to have any atheist characters in it!  You can simply depict a religious institution, or some other institution that acts as a metaphor.  Or you can depict superstitions.

Interestingly, the balance of the two desires varies from identity to identity.  For example, when people ask for women in fiction, they usually aren't asking for fiction that deals with women's issues so much as fiction that includes women as important characters.  Similarly when people ask for POC representation, they just want characters, not necessarily entire stories dealing with race.  When people look for LGBT fiction, they're often looking for stories that deal directly with LGBT issues, thus the countless stories about coming out.  But my coblogger Queenie expressed interest in seeing more stories about "space wizard boyfriends", so there's also demand for characters who are incidentally LGBT.

When it comes to atheism, people would like to see both incidental atheist characters, and also stories with atheist themes.  You could say that this reflects the tension between atheism as a personal identity and atheism as a quasi-political cause.

What would I personally prefer?  I like it when there are atheist characters out there in pop culture, but I don't have much of a personal interest in them.  I already know atheists are ordinary people!  But I am interested in seeing more atheist thematic content.  Or at least, that's what I'd like to see in principle.  In practice, I tend not to like fiction that expresses an atheist slant, because it's too ham-handed.  These days I like subtle, serious, "snooty" literature.  Instead of literature that advances certain ideas (that I probably disagree with anyways), I'd rather see literature advance ideas that are subsequently torn down.  I haven't really seen much atheist literature that does that.

Tevye as a parable

In my post about gay scouts, I wanted to make an analogy to Fiddler on the Roof, but it wasn't really a good idea because not many people would even understand the reference or agree with the interpretation.  So here I discuss it separately.  There are spoilers, but it's like revealing that Romeo and Juliet die in the end--it doesn't spoil the story that much to know the ending.

In Fiddler on the Roof, Tevye, who lives in a Jewish village in Tsarist Russia, has three daughters that he needs to marry off. The marriages don't satisfy him for various reasons, but he comes to accept them anyway.  Why?  It's what God wants.  This rationale is strained to breaking point when his final daughter marries into Christianity.  So he rejects his last daughter.  It's really sad.  But the music is great.

So there's a great story about why it is bad to do the right things for the wrong reasons.  Eventually you may come to a situation where the wrong reasons no longer lead to the right things, and lead to the wrong things.  At least, that's one way to view it.

The story also makes me think about the relation of intuitive morals and religious morals.  God isn't really telling Tevye what to do.  There's just something emotionally wrong about rejecting one's daughter, and it's easy to attribute this intuition to God.  There's also something emotionally wrong with rejecting a daughter who converts out of your religion, but it's harder to attribute this to God.

Anyway, Fiddler on the Roof is a must-see for secularists.

Faith in fiction is hard

My blogging rate has been suffering lately because I decided to watch most of the Extra Credits video series, mostly about video game design.  I found it quite interesting, even though I hardly play any video games anymore, and have no interest in joining the game industry.  Being a typical ungrateful blogger, I will reward the show by picking out the one video I disagreed with most so I can talk about how terrible it was.

Specifically, they try to explain why video games have thus far failed to deal with themes of faith (and not just dealing with the trappings of religion).  I do not agree with their explanation.



They got so many responses to the video that they posted another video defending themselves.

I did not read the responses, but I suspect that the main reason they got so many negative responses is that they repeated some pretty standard arguments in favor of faith.  They argue that science and math also require faith, bring up the early 20th century physics revolution, and patronizingly attribute hostility towards faith as a mere reaction against bad behavior from people of faith.  This is guaranteed to provoke a strong reaction, because lots of people have already heard these arguments, and have pre-prepared counter-arguments.

But I won't get into any of these arguments (unless any readers are interested).  Rather, I wish to discuss why video games have failed to deal with issues of faith.  Extra Credits believes that it's because the gaming community is hostile towards faith.  That's only half right.

The thing is, if the gaming community were just uniformly hostile towards faith, then it would be easy for video games to explore faith by putting faith in a negative light.  And arguably video games already do this to some extent.¹  The problem is that gamers are not uniform.  If the gaming community is anything like the rest of society, there are radical atheists like me, conservatively religious people, and also the entire spectrum in-between.  Some people whole-heartedly value faith, others think faith has no value whatsoever, and still others (like the people in Extra Credits) think it's a wash.  It's really hard to make a work of fiction that deals with faith themes in a way that will satisfy people in a large range.

Usually when a writer tries to deal with faith or religion, it feels like they're beating you over the head.  If a writer makes a character who values faith, and portrays any consequences this has for the character, this already telegraphs the writer's position on the matter.  If the consumer disagrees with this position, they'll feel values dissonance². And even if the consumer agrees with the position, they may feel uncomfortable with how heavy-handed it is.³  And it doesn't help to portray faith as partly good and partly bad, because lots of us really think it's mostly good or mostly bad.

One way to get around the problem is to only portray things that we mostly agree on.  Most people think violent religious zealotry is bad, so writers can portray that negatively without problems.  We can all agree that sometimes the ways that religious and non-religious people interact is problematic.  We can all agree that particular people who are religious or non-religious may have their personal strengths and flaws.

Another way to get around the problem is to avoid portraying positive or negative consequences.  This allows the consumers to judge it however they like.  For example, I think House did this on a regular basis.  Dr. House was very much anti-faith, but some of his doctors acted as religious foils.  Whenever an episode dealt with religious themes, viewers were free to agree with Dr. House, or to agree with any of the religious characters.  It's a difficult balance, and it's hard for me to tell if they pulled it off, since I have a one-sided perspective.

It may be particularly difficult to pull this off in video games.  Consequences are everywhere in video games.  Extra Credits suggested a faith-skepticism meter (much like the good-evil meters in many games), but this wouldn't work if the meter has any consequences with respect to achieving in-game goals.  If having a faithful or a skeptical character were both valid strategies, that would harm my suspension of disbelief.  I think the way to go is to offer the player choices that don't have in-game consequences (except perhaps who your allies are).  The consequences are simply how the player feels about playing a faithful or unfaithful character.  If I recall, Mass Effect was able to do this, but it's been years since I played it.

(Further complicating matters are the fantastical settings in many video games.  In some of these universes, it may be unreasonable to be an atheist, and faith may mean something entirely different.)

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1. To judge for yourself, see this Gamespot video showing lots of examples of religion in video games.
2. See TV Tropes.
3. This is why I don't like the His Dark Materials trilogy.  Though I might agree with Philip Pullman's views on religion, it felt like he was just beating up on a concept that couldn't defend itself, because the only person who could provide a defense was Pullman.