Ethan Gilsdorf
is now following Ed's reviews
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" Hi Paul and Laura --
welcome to the group, and feel free to chat, invite friends, etc. there's also another discussion on the FB page for my book that...moreHi Paul and Laura --
welcome to the group, and feel free to chat, invite friends, etc. there's also another discussion on the FB page for my book that you might want to see...
http://www.facebook.com/fantasyfreaksboo...
cheers,
Ethan
--
Ethan Gilsdorf
author of "Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks: An Epic Quest for Reality Among Role Players, Online Gamers, and Other Dwellers of Imaginary Realms"
ethan@ethangilsdorf.com
http://www.ethangilsdorf.com
http://www.fantasyfreaksbook.com
+++ Coming in paperback Sept 1: "Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks," named a Must-Read Book by the Massachusetts Book Awards.
Join FF&GG's Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/fantasyfreaksboo...
Follow me on Twitter: http://twitter.com/ethanfreak
"Geek Pride" blog at Psychology Today: https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/gee...
blog at Tor.com: http://www.tor.com/index.php?blogger=Eth...(less)"
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Old dogs, enduring appeal
A HUMAN EYE:
Essays on Art in Society, 1997-2008
By Adrienne Rich
180 pp. Norton $24.95
Old dogs, enduring appeal
A HUMAN EYE:
Essays on Art in Society, 1997-2008
By Adrienne Rich
180 pp. Norton $24.95
Reviewed by Ethan Gilsdorf...moreOld dogs, enduring appeal
A HUMAN EYE:
Essays on Art in Society, 1997-2008
By Adrienne Rich
180 pp. Norton $24.95
Old dogs, enduring appeal
A HUMAN EYE:
Essays on Art in Society, 1997-2008
By Adrienne Rich
180 pp. Norton $24.95
Reviewed by Ethan Gilsdorf
Internet Review of Books
In the forward to her new collection of prose, A Human Eye: Essays on Art in Society, 1997-2008, Adrienne Rich wants poetry to “dissolve both complacency and despair.” Amid a culture that devalues the written word, that twists language into the ugly shapes of marketing pap and military jargon, she strives for a poetry of responsibility. Her most valued poets straddle that gap between “dread and beauty” and bring something important to light.
A tall order? Perhaps. But Rich has earned the right to demand it. Long one of American letters’ most prolific poets and booster of activist, socially-conscious poetry, Rich has, more than many, dedicated her literary life and work as a feminist and thinker to the space where the personal and the political intersect. The author of some two dozen volumes of poetry, she’s also written half a dozen works of non-fiction. The essays in A Human Eye, like much of her previous work, poke and prod that “permeable membrane between art and society.”
This latest collection of essays is, in fact, mostly comprised of book prefaces; other pieces originally appeared as reviews in the Los Angeles Times Book Review, Boston Review, and elsewhere, or were delivered as lectures at the University of Stirling (Scotland) and the City University of New York. The unifying factor that binds them is what she calls “the art I know best from inside,” aka poetry. In this regard, the subtitle, Essays on Art in Society, 1997-2008, is misleading; readers expecting treatises on painting, film, music, and the other arts will be disappointed.
These are disconnected essays written at different times. What unfolds is less a developed argument so much as an insight into Rich’s pantheon of sung and unsung literary heroes. We see her prejudices and desires, her vision for poetry, what it might do, how it might serve us. The essays do not coalesce, but they do reflect off of each other. In a review of an anthology called “Iraqi Poetry Today,” she says to translate poetry from another language is to “make love with a new person, in a different body.” She also wonders, rightly, if the original poem is “actually more remarkable than translation can suggest?” Later, in an essay that became the preface to the Selected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser, Rich reminds us of the many “selves” that a single person can embody—Rukeyser identified as a poet, woman, American, and Jew. “If the four come together in one person,” Rukeyser writes, “each strengthens the other.” This compound identity is also a question central to Rich’s thinking: how to reconcile woman, Jew, lesbian, poet, mother? Or how to reconcile poetic minds? In “Dialogue and Dissonance,” Rich plumbs the intimate and at times combative literary correspondence between Robert Duncan and Denise Levertov.
It’s not necessarily fair to say the collection has its blind spots. But A Human Eye is backward looking. For Rich, who turned 80 this year, twentieth century poets and writers are the focus of her attention. Don’t look here for discussion of young 20-, 30- or 40-something lions. In other essays, she hails June Jordan and LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka). Lesser-known gay and lesbian poets like Thomas Avena are given their due. She also invokes prose writers important to her, like James Baldwin (described, in a lovely turn of phrase, as having a “lived-in, unsmiling face”) as well as Karl Marx and Che Guevara. Rich is our Virgil-like guide, taking us through their depths. And she is unafraid to quote them at length. About a third of this slim, 180-page book is made of direct citations, some a page in length or longer.
Though Rich has taught in universities for much of her career, she remains nostalgic for the unprofessionalized, uninstitutionalized days shared by contemporaries like Levertov and Duncan: “no MFA programs, no résumé building, no academic credentials,” she writes. The subtext? Rich implies the “career culture” of most writers may have somehow subtly wrecked the craft. Back in the day, before the support of the academy, “the idea [was:] to do one’s work, live decently, travel when possible.”
But one does not travel, through the world, or through life, naively or with a blindfold on. Rich would never allow it. Poetry is alive to the world. “Poetry, like silk or coffee or oil or human flesh, has had its trade routes.” Shelley is reflected in Jordan; Whitman bounces off of Iraq.
A Human Eye shows us the poets and writers dear to Rich. The ones she lauds here may be the old dogs, but Rich makes us see how they can still have an enduring appeal and purpose. Above all, in poetry Rich does not find pat solutions or easy comfort. “Poetry is not a healing lotion, an emotional massage, a kind of linguistic aromatherapy,” she says in one of the book’s best lines. Poetry presents as many problems as it some might hope it solves—if it solves anything at all.”(less)
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BOOK REVIEW
In ‘Legend’ poems, Tolkien the storyteller
By Ethan Gilsdorf, Boston Globe Correspondent | September 4, 2009
J.R.R. Tolkien is best known as the author of fantasy tales like “The Hobbit’’ and “The Lord of the Rings.’’ But some may not know...moreBOOK REVIEW
In ‘Legend’ poems, Tolkien the storyteller
By Ethan Gilsdorf, Boston Globe Correspondent | September 4, 2009
J.R.R. Tolkien is best known as the author of fantasy tales like “The Hobbit’’ and “The Lord of the Rings.’’ But some may not know that he was an academic first and writer second. The reclusive British scholar, lexicographer, and Oxford don was, in a way, the original geek. He specialized in the rather arcane field of philology (the history of languages), and pored over Anglo-Saxon and Old Norse texts. To Tolkien (1892-1973), Icelandic sagas and 1,000-year-old poems like “Beowulf’’ were the finest stuff ever written. He didn’t even read contemporary fiction.
Tolkien hung out with other medievalists in Oxford pubs, where they drank ale, smoked pipes, and made up stories by firelight. While most authors of the early 20th century were busy smashing Victorian conventions and reassembling the pieces into irony-laden modernism, Tolkien was penning stories and poems about domineering dragons and world-weary wizards.
Since he was more inclined to tinker rather than finish many of his projects, reams of uncompleted drafts remain, like treasures to unearth. Gradually, his son and literary executor, Christopher Tolkien, has been deciding which are worthy of publication. So it comes as no surprise that the son has discovered another of his father’s old works.
Written in the early 1930s, some years before “The Hobbit’’ and “Rings,’’ “The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún’’ almost vanished. The elder Tolkien lamented in a 1967 letter to W.H. Auden that he wanted to “lay my hands on it (I hope it isn’t lost), a thing I did many years ago’’; it appears he never revised the poems since those early days. Christopher, now 84, edited the manuscript.
The two poems that make up “The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún’’ are Tolkien’s version of the Old Norse Völsung and Nibelung legends, an attempt to unify and organize the material dealing with Sigurd, Brynhild, Gunnar, and other characters, using the same source materials that Richard Wagner drew upon for his opera series “The Ring.’’
Tolkien’s task was to fit modern English to the Old Norse meter: eight-line stanzas, each short line only four to six syllables and containing two to three stresses each. The poems were an exercise, he said, in “trying to learn the art of writing alliterative poetry.’’ He also wanted to capture the essence of Old Norse poetry, with its “demonic energy and force,’’ the lines chiseled to seize a situation and strike a blow.
The poems do deliver the desired blows. In the dense yet spare lines, we are told of Odin, Thor and Loki; dark forests and doors to caverns; giants and a monstrous wolf Fenrir. Abysses yawn; brothers murder fathers and “men sing of serpents / ceaselessly guarding / gold and silver / greedy-hearted.’’ Wise words are uttered, like these from Sigurd: “Stout heart is better / than strongest sword.’’ And yes, there are dungeons and dragons. In short, all the raw materials for 100 epics.
In “Sigurd and Gudrún,’’ one feels Tolkien warming up his own storytelling muscles and voice, recasting an old song in a new language so he, soon, could take the reins to tell his own original tales. And one also senses the sweetness of the son, Christopher, uncovering his father’s many “small slips of paper’’ and putting them in order, bent on making certain his father’s legend grows, too, along with the many tales he told.
Ethan Gilsdorf can be reached at ethan@ethangilsdorf.com His book “Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks: An Epic Quest for Reality Among Role Players, Online Gamers, and Other Dwellers of Imaginary Realms’’ has just been released.
© Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company(less)
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BOOK REVIEW
Gripping case studies of compulsive hoarders
By Ethan Gilsdorf | Boston Globe, May 5, 2010
Collecting Beanie Babies is one thing. Amassing piles of, say, old newspapers, yogurt containers, and rusty buckets is another. If you’re unable to ...moreBOOK REVIEW
Gripping case studies of compulsive hoarders
By Ethan Gilsdorf | Boston Globe, May 5, 2010
Collecting Beanie Babies is one thing. Amassing piles of, say, old newspapers, yogurt containers, and rusty buckets is another. If you’re unable to discard mountains of what most people would consider random clutter, your collecting bug has crossed into the realm of obsession. You can literally drown in stuff.
Take the case of the Collyer brothers, which kicks off “Stuff: Compulsive Hoarding and the Meaning of Things.’’ Langley and Homer Collyer, two well-heeled brothers living in New York City, packed their mansion over decades with more than 170 tons of debris, including an X-ray machine, a Model T Ford, 14 grand pianos, and thousands more mundane items. In 1947, police received a tip that something was amiss at the home, but they found the door blocked by clutter when they came to investigate. They finally entered the home via a second-floor window and found Homer’s body. It took them three weeks to find the other brother, who had died from suffocation after a tower of baled newspapers crushed him.
A highly readable account of this perplexing impulse that affects as many as 6 million Americans, “Stuff’’ offers a peek into the lives of compulsive shoppers, cat ladies, junk scavengers, even children who hoard things. The authors, Randy O. Frost, a Smith College psychology professor, and Gail Steketee, dean of Boston University’s School of Social Work, have been investigating hoarding for a decade. They’ve developed long-term relationships with hundreds of hoarders whom they’ve treated.
“Stuff’’ isn’t exactly a narrative; it’s a series of case studies. We experience the “awe, the excitement of discovery, and empathy for those caught in the web of hoarding.’’ We accompany the authors as they navigate the “goat paths’’ through the home of one woman, Irene, who is trapped by “a sea of boxes, bags, ski poles, tools, everything imaginable all in a jumble, chest-high.’’ We see Colin, collector of hundreds of articles of free designer clothing. For him, dressing each day is a nearly paralyzing act. We meet Madeline, whose penchant for hoarding drove her husband away, and we watch her grown daughter, Ashley, struggle with her own relationship to material possessions.
The most gripping chapter, “You Haven’t Got a Clue,’’ offers the pleasures of “you are there’’ immersion journalism. The authors arrive with a social worker and cleaning crew to empty a Manhattan condo whose rooms are, effectively, “a solid wall of trash 20 feet deep’’ and infested with cockroaches. Amazingly, a family lives amid the squalor. The account of trying to clean up the health hazard while the hoarder, a man named Daniel, refuses to see any problem, makes for stupefying reading.
The profiles of people save “Stuff’’ from reading like a dry academic conference paper. By turns fascinating and heartbreaking, the hoarders explain their rationales. For some, piles of clutter contain endless possibility. Others make nests or private worlds of potential knowledge. Some may be fearful of waste. Some see stories and find meanings in every item. “This outdated coupon seems as important as my grandmother’s picture,’’ Irene says at one point. Later: “If I throw too much away, there’ll be nothing left of me.’’
The irresistible fascination with a book like “Stuff’’ has already been proven by reality TV shows featuring makeovers and weight-loss quests: It’s the lure of oddballs trying to clean up their lives. But the book succeeds beyond mere voyeurism, because “Stuff’’ invites readers to reevaluate their desire for things. Which, as far as things go, is not a bad thing at all.
Ethan Gilsdorf is the author of “Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks: An Epic Quest for Reality Among Role Players, Online Gamers, and Other Dwellers of Imaginary Realms.’’ Contact him at ethan@ethangilsdorf.com.
© Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company(less)
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Making the rest of the world crazy
By Ethan Gilsdorf, Boston Globe Correspondent | January 24, 2010
Americans are a generous people. We donate riches to needy countries. We send our troops abroad. We have exported some of history’s most influenti...moreMaking the rest of the world crazy
By Ethan Gilsdorf, Boston Globe Correspondent | January 24, 2010
Americans are a generous people. We donate riches to needy countries. We send our troops abroad. We have exported some of history’s most influential cultural, scientific, and social inventions: democracy, fast food, and Britney Spears.
Whether that generosity is helpful to other nations is another question. And so it goes with mental health. According to Ethan Watters in “Crazy Like Us: The Globalization of the American Psyche,’’ the American way of perceiving and treating mental illness has quickly and ruthlessly become the worldwide way.
What is lost are local customs, beliefs, and practices that worked fine before the invention of antidepressants and antipsychotics. For example, people who suffer from schizophrenia in some developing nations tend to cope better than those in industrialized nations armed with “Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders’’ diagnoses. Why? In East Africa, for example, traditional beliefs in spirit possession help families accept schizophrenia and reduce social stigma. But Western ideas have “the effect of stripping away the local beliefs’’ that in practice can make people feel better.
Watters, who wrote “Urban Tribes,’’ an examination of the “never-married’’ generation, and “Making Monsters,’’ an indictment of the false memory movement, blends scholarship, journalism, and travel reportage to unearth this hidden story of good intentions in the mental health profession gone awry.
“Crazy Like Us’’ is both groundbreaking and shocking. By focusing on four countries and four disorders - anorexia in Hong Kong; post traumatic stress disorder in post-tsunami Sri Lanka; schizophrenia in Zanzibar, Tanzania; and depression in Japan - Watters shows how American mental health professionals and pharmaceutical companies, sometimes accidentally, sometimes insidiously, have actually hastened the spread of some Western disorders.
The opening section on anorexia is the most eye-opening and establishes the book’s thesis. Watters focuses on Dr. Sing Lee, a researcher bent on discovering why in the 1990s, increasing numbers of women in Hong Kong began unconsciously expressing their “mental distress’’ as anorexia nervosa. Sensational media stories and the swift spread of Western diagnoses, Watters argues, were “not only changing the way patients and doctors talked about the disorder - [they were:] changing the disease experience itself.’’ Watters astutely draws parallels to the rise of hysteria among Victoria era women plagued by internal strife. Like the fits, paralysis, and blindness exhibited by the sufferers of hysteria, for troubled modern Chinese women, starving themselves began entering the “symptom pool’’ of the disorder. Thus began “the feedback loop by which the disease goes forward and claims new victims.’’
As an aside, Watters notes that cases of hysteria fell as knowledge of the symptoms and the symptoms themselves became more commonplace, thereby losing some power to communicate the emotional pain of the sufferer. He suggests that eating disorders may someday similarly decline if we can find a way to diffuse “the meaning we give to them.’’ The ways America has colonized the foreign mind can be more deliberate. Or worse: driven by greed, as in the example of GlaxoSmithKline and other drug makers, which fund and influence favorable medical studies, wine and dine experts, and attempt to shape attitudes about depression in order to sell treatments in the lucrative Japanese market. GlaxoSmithKline, for instance, has succeeded wildly: From effectively zero market share in 2000, sales of the firm’s Paxil in Japan topped $1 billion in 2008.
For mental heath volunteers who rushed to Sri Lanka to counsel victims after the 2004 tsunami, it was case of big hearts colliding with naivety. Cultural differences were ignored; workers assumed that Sri Lankans would automatically express checklist symptoms for PTSD like New Yorkers after 9/11. The blunder resulted in often pathetic outcomes, such as bands of counselors competing for the affections of traumatized children.
Watters writes skillfully. His tone is measured, but you can see Watters struggling for a consistent voice and style. Is this lay scholarship (the nearly three dozen pages of sources are impressive) or first person travelogue? The “I’’ wavers in and out. Zanzibar is the most personal section. Sri Lanka feels the most distant, seemingly reported largely from library research and phone conversations; the section could have benefited from in-country reporting and more follow-up now that five years have passed since the tsunami. One could criticize the inconsistent methodology, or see the various approaches as creative tacks into a tricky subject matter.
Watters never fully unleashes his indignation, either. One might wish for a little more passion, particularly in the Sri Lanka and Japan chapters. But “Crazy Like Us’’ isn’t outright investigative journalism; the book is thoughtful, contextualized reportage of a disturbing if not entirely surprising trend.
The situation presented in “Crazy Like Us’’ is akin to the disappearing Amazon. “The remarkable diversity once seen among different cultures’ conceptions of madness,’’ Watters writes, “is rapidly disappearing.’’ Whether Watters’ book will be sand in the engines of the bulldozers remains to be seen. At least it proves the West, despite its best intentions, does not possess all the answers.
Ethan Gilsdorf, author of “Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks: An Epic Quest for Reality Among Role Players, Online Gamers, and Other Dwellers of Imaginary Realms,’’ can be reached at ethan@ethangilsdorf .com.
© Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company(less)
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Saga of DreamWorks with no help from leading men
By Ethan Gilsdorf | Boston Globe, May 2, 2010
DreamWorks was monstrous, misfit, and idealistic. The upstart studio was the progeny of three industry giants: director Steven Spielberg; record company mo...moreSaga of DreamWorks with no help from leading men
By Ethan Gilsdorf | Boston Globe, May 2, 2010
DreamWorks was monstrous, misfit, and idealistic. The upstart studio was the progeny of three industry giants: director Steven Spielberg; record company mogul and billionaire David Geffen; and Disney animation head Jeffrey Katzenberg, the driving force behind the idea to make a new studio from scratch.
DreamWorks began building on a lofty foundation. At the Oct. 12, 1994, press conference announcing the partnership, Spielberg said, “Together with Jeffrey and David, I want to create a place driven by ideas and the people who have them.’’ The studio was to champion works based on merit, not commercialism. Like the founding of United Artists in 1919 by Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford, Charlie Chaplin, and D.W. Griffith, it was to be an artistic haven amid Tinseltown’s money-grubbing rabble. It was to be different.
That the countless claims and promises didn’t always jibe with reality was to be expected. Of course, DreamWorks did its best to deflect attention from its bad moves. “But what about a story without the DreamWorks’ spin?’’ Nicole LaPorte asks early on in her book “The Men Who Would Be King: An Almost Epic Tale Of Moguls, Movies, and a Company Called DreamWorks.’’ A film industry reporter for Variety, LaPorte set out to tell the behind-closed-doors machinations of DreamWorks, the most hyped and ambitious entertainment venture of the past half century.
The central problem she faced was this: no participation from S, K, or G. None of the three would speak to her. Katzenberg even made calls warning sources not to talk to LaPorte.
So how do you tell the story of an empire when the emperors won’t sit for their close-ups? You interview lots of insiders, more than 200 of them, and hope their blow-by-blow accounts fill the hollow core. Compounding this, many of the secondary sources, understandably afraid to reveal anything too incriminating, insisted on anonymity. To make up the shortfall, LaPort bookends gossip with attributions like “according to sources familiar with Katzenberg’s thinking at the time.’’ Not that the author had a choice in the matter, but the omission of the founding fathers amid a cloak-and-dagger tone hurts the book.
On the plus side, we’re still privy to some serious dirt. We see Katzenberg’s attempts to bring down arch-nemesis Michael Eisner (his old boss at Disney) and best Pixar (the folks behind “Toy Story’’) at its own game. We witness muckraking Oscar campaigns between DreamWorks and Miramax.
We watch the studio’s inroads into video games and music hit dead ends and wince as the money pit of building a physical studio — what was to be a “giant dose of Ritalin’’ to focus a distracted Spielberg — gets deeper. More than $1 billion in investor capital evaporates.
LaPorte has clearly done her homework, and if nothing else, the sheer scope and depth of “The Men Who Would Be King’’ impresses. No hissy fit escapes her gaze.
Every time Geffen has a meltdown or A-list stars like Russell Crowe throw tantrums, LaPorte is there to capture it. More juicy nuggets: Hollywood women are “alternately tough and nurturing’’; men are “hard-charging bullies with paper-thin skin.’’ On the set of “ER,’’ Spielberg tells George Clooney he’ll be a movie star if he can learn to keep his head still.
LaPorte also relishes in the Oscar night triumphs of “Saving Private Ryan,’’ “Gladiator,’’ and “American Beauty’’ (though perhaps she expends too many pages detailing box office numbers and Academy politics).
But as the anecdotes, facts, and dates accumulate, LaPorte’s other Achilles heel is revealed: She’s a better journalist than a storyteller. Her style follows that terse, industry insider-speak of Variety. She paints her version of Hollywood using epic brushstrokes, piling on superlatives. But many an article-length chapter ends with clumsy cliffhangers such as: “at least for now’’ and “What could possibly go wrong?’’
Where LaPorte falters most is in juggling all the crisscrossing plots. Single chapters touch on multiple characters: We move from a visit with a micromanaging Katzenberg to a marketing department freakout to the ouster of a studio head. LaPorte should linger in her scenes longer and organize more chapters not chronologically but, rather, by topic, following one thread — say, the fascinatingly inept project called Pop.com — from beginning to end. Like an anxious film director, she cuts too often from one brief scene to the next. We often don’t get the payoff until chapters later, the effect diluted by the interval of space and time.
Nonetheless, this rise and fall and clash of the titans account can be a thrilling ride. When the story ultimately kicks in, the flaws fade to the background. The bumbling and infighting are just too good, and sad, to resist. In the end, the studio sheds its money losers, shape-shifts from artsy-fartsy to cash cow, gets bought by a studio, and starts making schlock. The initial reverie — “to become that buzz’’ as one DreamWorks executive wanted — takes a back seat to reality.
Still, we root for DreamWorks. We love our dreamers and hate to see hubris bring them down. Movies were always a metaphor for ambition. Or escape. As LaPorte sees it, “Hollywood fame may be the best way to avoid growing up.’’
Ethan Gilsdorf is the author of “Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks: An Epic Quest for Reality Among Role Players, Online Gamers, and Other Dwellers of Imaginary Realms.’’ Contact him at ethan@ethangilsdorf.com.
© Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company(less)
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BOOK REVIEW
‘Extra Lives’ asks: What’s in a game?
By Ethan Gilsdorf, Boston Globe Correspondent | June 17, 2010
These are potent days for video gamers. The baby steps taken by Pong, Space Invaders, and Doom have become the thundering footfalls o...moreBOOK REVIEW
‘Extra Lives’ asks: What’s in a game?
By Ethan Gilsdorf, Boston Globe Correspondent | June 17, 2010
These are potent days for video gamers. The baby steps taken by Pong, Space Invaders, and Doom have become the thundering footfalls of Halo, Gears of War, and Mass Effect. The industry rakes in billions. Production budgets for some games rival those of movies.
The problem is, no one knows how to talk about gaming — these Xbox and PlayStation binges that nervous parents worry could turn their kids into hollow-faced, emotionally-stunted, Dorito-eating dorks. As with any mass movement accelerating into the passing lane of pop culture, gaming requires its own discourse. Yet, the language we use to discuss, evaluate, and dissect this new medium is largely monosyllabic: good, bad, like, no like.
Frustrated by the lack of serious video game criticism, Tom Bissell wrote his own geek-centric inquiry. In “Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter,’’ Bissell sets out to establish his own aesthetics for the medium. He questions whether video games must remain mere entertainment. Might they provide narratives that books, movies, and other vehicles for story delivery can’t? Might they even aspire to art? “Extra Lives’’ aims a tentative mortar shot at these targets.
Bissell, author of highbrow books like “God Lives in St. Petersburg and Other Stories’’ and “The Father of All Things: A Marine, His Son, and the Legacy of Vietnam,’’ makes two startling admissions. 1. He outs himself as a serious, addicted gamer. 2. He finds the pleasures of literature “leftover and familiar.’’ He’s bored with books. “I like fighting aliens and I like driving fast cars,’’ he writes.
His investigation is bedrocked upon personal experience, but “Extra Lives’’ mostly steers clear of memoir. We don’t learn much more about Bissell’s life, other than a few personal details (including a troublesome cocaine habit). But the author’s reflections infuse everything. He doesn’t tell a story; rather, he maps how his favorite games make him feel.
In his quest to elevate video game criticism, Bissell borrows terms from literary and film analysis. He grapples with ideas like “authored drama,’’ “formal constraints,’’ and “narrative progression.’’ Along the way, we also meet game developers at such megaliths as Epic Games, Bio Ware, and Ubisoft.
Thankfully, the book isn’t pure fanboy boosterism. It’s love/hate. Video games can be great, he says, but they can be “big, dumb, loud.’’ Some (like Bissell’s beloved Left 4 Dead) refuse to challenge their players; they merely “restore an unearned, vaguely loathsome form of innocence — an innocence derived of not knowing anything.’’ He calls Call of Duty 4 “war-porn.’’
A master prose stylist, the erudite Bissell is frequently insightful, if only occasionally too clever. (He’s mined needlessly dark corners of his thesaurus for words like “saurian’’ and “dipsomaniacally.’’) “Extra Lives’’ can also be funny. Bissell mockingly laments that he’s “saved’’ so many fictional worlds that he’s “felt a resentful Republicanism creep into my game-playing mind: Can’t these [expletive:] people take care of themselves?’’
The aesthetics-in-progress of “Extra Lives’’ reveal a proclivity for games such as Fable II, which present players with tricky moral choices and tempt them to be bad. What’s more, Bissell deplores games that don’t make him feel anything. He even wonders whether first-person shooters “are not violent enough.’’
By book’s end, we’re left with this question for game developers: Now what? The industry has mastered gee-whiz realism, tasty eye-candy, and uber-believable game play. Gamers could demand the deeper emotional pleasures supplied by novels and movies. Or they might not. As indie game developer Jonathan Blow (of Braid fame) says, “We’re not really trying to have important things to say right now.’’
So don’t hold your breath. In the meantime, lock and load. We have plenty of zombies and aliens to blow away.
Ethan Gilsdorf can be reached at ethan@ethangilsdorf.com.
© Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company(less)
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