Benyakir B. Horowitz's Blog: Ben's Thoughts
November 8, 2019
The Full Review of Campusland
Quick note before I start. When I review a book, I usually write down a few pointers and notes that I want to remark on. This time I had about 40. Good or bad? Well, 2 out of 5 stars probably means bad!
Before anyone criticizes me of having a thin skin, or, as Kirkus Reviews puts it, “Trigger warning… it [this book] should not be read by those who lack of a sense of humor…”, I mostly fault this book for not being satire. I found this book (and got it subsequently from the library) after finding it on the Amazon list of the top 100 selling satires. The writer may not have been aware of someone marketing it with the wrong genre. Except let’s not kid ourselves. This book is to satire as Alanis Morissette’s Ironic is to irony. As in some satire is there, but it’s definitely not intentional. Most of it “this is supposed to be funny so it’s satire”.
For those of you who don’t know, humor may flow from satire, but satire does not flow from humor. For example, satire would be: a man with whose head is literal poop. “Satire” is: the author calling the man a poop head (and optionally finding that funny). You can guess which of the two the book has. Not to mention multiple “jokes” that other characters find funny.
Before I go on, I want to list some of the good parts of the book. The book is mostly well paced, and the conflict that leads to the conclusion is well constructed even if I don’t like the satire (though the ending comes a bit later than it should). The book flows well (I read a bunch of it out loud to my baby because he likes hearing me talk) except for a few parts (by the way, greatest tip ever. You are either the best writer ever or a negligent one if you don’t do this). Also there is one great line, quoting the back of the book: “But something about the latest winds blowing through campus had a dark edge, as if a subtle transition were going on from the American Revolution to the French.” The problem is the author knows it, and it’s used to even better effect in the first third of the book, and it’s unfortunate that it’s repeated on the back. Someone much smarter than me said something about how a particularly stand-out effect is more noticeable when it’s repeated, even if other things are repeated much more often. The last good thing is when a progressive visits a monarchist (let’s be honest, regressive and probably Fascist but they don’t actively think about it, much like the alt-right) student group. The progressive’s voice (but let’s be honest, the author ‘thinks’ through them every time he changes perspective) notes the old furniture and stale air. That’s some quality satire. I suggest the author read Children of Men because the book has more of it than this one.
Okay, now all the bad things. So this is going to be mostly about the satire thing. The purpose of a book, especially satire, is to say something. What does this book say?
If I understand it correctly, it’s supposedly the South Park take on everything, don’t take anything too seriously. No one does anything sincerely. The progressive group on campus cares only about recognition, not anything tangible. The African American student group just cares about money. The feminists (called the Womyn Collective because apparently takes from the 70s is still a thing that goes on, more on this later x 1) is a bunch of ugly losers who love arguing more than the argument. I’m not kidding there. The only sincere students are described homely. Okay? In effect they’re all straw men. Whatever, the author is making fun of them, I can hear my own straw man saying. But the thing about satire is that we should know what the author is talking about. Unless there’s an obvious person that is being satirized (Stalin in the form of Snowball), they should be sincere because you are making fun of them. If you are satirizing an idea, like the boss guy in 1984 (it’s been awhile, okay?), then they have to be sincere in what they believe. It’s just that their beliefs are worthy of satire. Otherwise, what you’re saying is that no one who believes in progressivism is sincere in their beliefs. Therefore anyone who ever says anything progressive is actually after their own self gain. Not that the ideas are wrong, it’s just that anyone who holds them really just wants some material benefit. Yeah, now you can extend that to rape and sexual assault because that’s what the author does!
A short note before I go on. The leader of the progressive student group is actually super rich and gets money from a trust fund. And he disrespects capitalism! So he’s a hypocrite. Again, this is the same as before, that no one sincerely believes that capitalism is bad. And he’s never worked a day in his life! And he’s guilty of moral turpitude! That gets his granddad, the man who really earned the money, from giving him anymore. It feels like wish fulfillment, but whose? Also he worked at an Amazon warehouse for a summer, as if that also makes him a hypocrite. What? If Jeff Bezos worked there, I would respect him (for that alone). If Bernie Sanders worked there, I would applaud him. Idem with anyone at all! It’s hard work, and you definitely don’t earn as much as you deserve. Amazon may do bad things to small businesses, but that’s a management decision. If you have to work there to get by, then you shouldn’t be criticized. There is no ethical consumption under capitalism, yes, but ethics only apply if you have a choice. Starving to death because you can’t find any other work is not one. I’m reviewing this book on Goodreads and Amazon. Does that make me a hypocrite? Okay, the answer is yes as long as I have a choice. Do I feel like I have one? No. So more yes than no, but more no than if I weren’t trying to make it as a writer.
The first half of the conflict is the progressive students accuse Ephraim (the first POV character) (who I’m pretty sure is not Jewish even though he has a very Jewish name. Maybe biblical names are popular in Alabama?) of having a racist reading list for his 19th century literature class. The first book is The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and anyone who’s read it or heard about it, know what this is about. So the author is trying to pretend the conflict was about getting the work banned and not about the teacher not dealing with the use of the N-word. Anyway, the main conflict is that Ephraim refuses to put more African American authors on the syllabus. He says it’s because there weren’t any until later. So it’s about facts why this is happening. Facts, guys! Except a really cursory google search had Huckleberry Finn coming out in 1885… and there were a handful of African American writers by that late in the 19th century? If the author had used an antebellum example or something. Then the professor can’t do it because it’s about Romantics vs. Realists. Uh, okay? Later on the book, another teacher comments that teaching is easy because you teach a semester once, you teach the same thing every year (more on that later x 1). If you’re teaching elementary languages or something, I can understand that (though the teachers should be updating their textbooks and teaching methods at least every now and then), but that’s the definition of a stodgy old teacher, and the reason why making compromises means doing the hard thing and actually having to give a crap about your job.
This argument basically boils down onto “the people asking for progressive policies are asking for us to change things! We have to make decisions, but it’s a fact that the classics of literature are that for a reason.” There are two primary faults with this conversation. If a school is deciding to change, then it has to make sacrifices. Some of those will be painful, and so a part of making changes and accepting diversity is accepting that you don’t know everything, and what you value most is not what others value most. The second point is that it’s not a fact about what are classics. Okay, so I should say I didn’t do literature, at least not in English. I did some Italian literature, but from what I’ve seen about the ‘classics’ of literature, it’s a lot of people’s opinion over time. Good literature was a response to older stuff, and so on and so forth. It’s a bit simple and easy when Kant argued about universals, but there is no literature that is universal! It’s like Chomsky arguing about universal grammar. It’s pretty useful and convenient for western languages and culture, but it’s not true everywhere! Any decent teacher would take what their students say seriously and ponder it. They wouldn’t just throw it out because a student says it. Ephraim really should’ve thought about African American authors and said “hey, let’s include a few.” In fact, on page 98, the author Elizabeth Keckley is suggested, and Ephraim (and his African American girlfriend, more on this later x 2) are like ‘who?’ What a bad teacher! Why is he up for tenure if he isn’t willing to learn something new? Even though American Literature is Arts and Sciences, the scientific method applies! Teachers learn new things all the time!
The second main conflict comes from Lulu Harris (the second POV) falsely accuses Ephraim of sexual assault. She does it as a way of getting out of trouble for stealing. And she starts doing an elaborate walk around campus with a chain attached to her ankle. She’s just doing it to get Twitter followers, but everyone rallies around her as a victim. What is the message of this? Well, another character says it makes it harder for real victims to come forward. Well, if you’re familiar with anyone who says they were sexually assaulted, this is literally the defense of the accusers every time. It came up when women were accusing Kavanaugh and Trump, but… according this logic, the accusations are never correct. Because no one’s ever sincere in what they believe! #Metoo is use about destroying good men who lose their jobs over false accusation, apparently.
Then the teacher’s accusations goes to the Title IX committee, who don’t care about the truth. They just want to bring down a teacher because there must be sexual assault on campus, whether any actually happened. And people are trying to justify their jobs and high paychecks. Finally, in the last third we get to the heart of the author’s argument (especially because the author has a page About Campusland that says that this book is supposed to be funny… except the Title IX committees, which are really a thing and so unfair! In the book, Eph complains that it’s not fair, and he deserves to confront his accusers and have representation. Well, guess what? This is the exact same crap that people bring up about impeachment. Guess what? Only the Judicial branch of the government goes through that! Military Tribunals and education isn’t subject to those regulations. However, if Eph had tenure. So, yes, it isn’t very fair. However, the argument should really be against the tenure system which only gives an opportunity to defend themselves to teachers who have it. Associate professors and adjuncts are screwed. Why isn’t that touched on? I suspect it’s because the author doesn’t actually know what tenure means.
Okay, now I’m going to get political/state my opinion.
The first thing I want to talk about is one of the big themes of this book. Eph (who you should obviously recognize as the voice of the author) says ‘I’m progressive, but this is crazy! This isn’t real racism when a bunch of stuffy white people teach the same things forever and never have to change! It only happens when people say the N-word! Women can’t be at danger or feel endangered at the school because they constitute over 50% of the student body (hmm, I wonder if the peasantry of France before their revolution thought they were represented because they were over 50% of the population).’ Saying ‘I’m X but…’ is usually an indication that you’re not X. Anyone who is seriously progressive realizes that it’s an ongoing struggle. Gay marriage isn’t a step too far because we already have interracial marriage, for example. An idea that the author mocks (that the struggle must be ongoing) is fairly simple and well-accepted by anyone who fundamentally cares about these concepts.
The second is a bunch of people really care about grammar in casual conversation (like someone caring that Title IX is used as a verb). If anyone in a non-academic setting gives someone else a hassle about that sort of thing, everyone would stop talking to them. Plus, I’m pretty sure stuff like that has come up in a few of the academic conferences I’ve gone to. Besides that, I’m pretty sure literature taught these days in English is much less normative. I can see it happening in foreign language classes, but even those weren’t sticklers about it unless it was in a paper. Italian universities were, but that’s not in America. I guess this is one advantage of doing Linguistics, where everyone cared much more about intended meaning than perfection.
A side note here. Lulu makes fun of the jocks for having poor diction when she herself, at this point of the book, barely attends class and doesn’t care about her education. Also, she makes a joke about gay stereotypes. Dude, that does not fly anymore!
The third, that should’ve been apparent by now (and , was the attitudes the author had about things. The back of the book says he went to college in the 80s. Examples are words like ‘correctamundo’, ‘total nob’, explaining what EDM means and what beer pong is, and going on and on about how fraternities are awesome and fun and constantly partying. During down time, the fraternity members were spitting loogies on the ceiling and seeing how long it took for them to fall back down. Uhh… do they not have smart phones? Like, I get it. I never was in a fraternity, and I graduated in 2015 (okay 2014 from a school that had fraternities), but c’mon. Along this line, the author complains about the drinking age being raised to 21 and explains its impact on college campuses. Holy moly! Who does not know that the drinking age is 21? And that college students drink a lot? And that the people who are over 21 help those that are under? Also, they refer to their beer as Natural Lite and not Natty Lite. I have never, ever heard someone in person call it Natural Lite. You should ask if they’re an alien. Also, wouldn’t they be drinking PBR (or as the author would call them, Pabst Blue Ribbon)? Maybe I’m dating myself here. Anyway, the book is set somewhere between 2017 and 2019, but it doesn’t feel like that other than some lip service about how progressive values are ruining campus life! Again, myself, but when I went to college (one for my undergrad, one for my Masters), it was a bastion of centrists. Teachers, events, everything. I wish it was this crazy place that the book says college is like, but it sure wasn’t that.
Okay, little annoyances I had:
Lulu’s mom flat out asks her if the accusations are real. And Lulu’s ignores it until later than is like ‘yeah, I made it up.’ If anyone, especially someone you trust, is accusing you of making false accusations, don’t talk to them. Even if it’s true, that’s not a relationship. If they’re right, they know you’re a liar, and so no trust can be had there. If they’re wrong, there’s no trust, and obviously this person is saying they’re not your friend or think you’re family.
Also Lulu’s dad signs an NDA that says that he can’t reveal that he had a daughter with a famous movie actress. Does this character, a high powered lawyer, not know that NDAs can’t cover this sort of thing? Consult a lawyer about two things: NDAs that don’t have to do with keeping an industry secret under wraps and really unfair prenups.
So the more on this later comments:
First: The other teacher complains about ‘students these days’, how physical violence and name calling is good, how teachers shouldn’t have to change their syllabus ever (because it’s an easy job even though he just mocked students for being too lazy). It’s all given unironically with no comment. Where’s the satire here? What’s the author saying?
Second: Ephraim constantly refers to his girlfriend as ebony. Ebony skin, Ebony and Ivory, etc. Seriously, was that alright in the 80s? Cus it definitely wouldn’t have flown when I was in school.
I want to leave you with some of the most ridiculous quotes from the book:
“He [Red, leader of PSA] swore sometimes women should come equipped with user manuals” - P 221. My response: who says this still? Again, 80s talk.
“…later identified as a ‘comfort animal’…” - P. 82. Who calls an Emotional Support Animal a comfort animal? Like, I get that it’s one of those ‘those darn kids’ things, but c’mon.
“[Some character said,] ‘Was it Beria who said, “Show me the man and I’ll show you the crime”?’ Eph recalled that Beria was Stalin’s secret-police chief - P. 101. Okay, whatever, accusations of popular opinion, but the target audience of this book knows who Beria is. And if they don’t, they can google it. Don’t explain it here!
“So digger is wasted and hooks up with this chick, right?… [the next morning] this chick says, ‘you don’t remember my name, do you?’… She starts throwing shit at him…” - P. 128. Okay, so I cut a lot out of that paragraph, but you get the point. First off, who expects a loving and committed relationship from a frat boy? This book is full of dated tropes, and it makes me so annoyed that the author even thought he consulted someone on making his book up to date. I guess they should’ve said to just gut half of it. Or set it in the 80s!
“Most of his time, though was spent grading term papers. Forty students times twenty pages meant eight hundred pages of reading, plus critiques.” - P. 134. Okay, so the author has no idea about workloads and stuff for teachers. I had a few friends that were TAs or taught classes, and that might be their workload. A teacher? Much more since they’re not just teaching 2 classes. Also, that’s the only term paper. Anyway, the book ends with Eph skipping out on tenure at Devon University so he can work as an adjunct at Samford. I don’t think the author knows what it’s like to teach as an adjunct with the promise of maybe one day being full time. That sort of thing is only for people that are already rich, not normal associate professors.
There’s some other stuff, but I’ve spent like two hours on this. So bye.
Before anyone criticizes me of having a thin skin, or, as Kirkus Reviews puts it, “Trigger warning… it [this book] should not be read by those who lack of a sense of humor…”, I mostly fault this book for not being satire. I found this book (and got it subsequently from the library) after finding it on the Amazon list of the top 100 selling satires. The writer may not have been aware of someone marketing it with the wrong genre. Except let’s not kid ourselves. This book is to satire as Alanis Morissette’s Ironic is to irony. As in some satire is there, but it’s definitely not intentional. Most of it “this is supposed to be funny so it’s satire”.
For those of you who don’t know, humor may flow from satire, but satire does not flow from humor. For example, satire would be: a man with whose head is literal poop. “Satire” is: the author calling the man a poop head (and optionally finding that funny). You can guess which of the two the book has. Not to mention multiple “jokes” that other characters find funny.
Before I go on, I want to list some of the good parts of the book. The book is mostly well paced, and the conflict that leads to the conclusion is well constructed even if I don’t like the satire (though the ending comes a bit later than it should). The book flows well (I read a bunch of it out loud to my baby because he likes hearing me talk) except for a few parts (by the way, greatest tip ever. You are either the best writer ever or a negligent one if you don’t do this). Also there is one great line, quoting the back of the book: “But something about the latest winds blowing through campus had a dark edge, as if a subtle transition were going on from the American Revolution to the French.” The problem is the author knows it, and it’s used to even better effect in the first third of the book, and it’s unfortunate that it’s repeated on the back. Someone much smarter than me said something about how a particularly stand-out effect is more noticeable when it’s repeated, even if other things are repeated much more often. The last good thing is when a progressive visits a monarchist (let’s be honest, regressive and probably Fascist but they don’t actively think about it, much like the alt-right) student group. The progressive’s voice (but let’s be honest, the author ‘thinks’ through them every time he changes perspective) notes the old furniture and stale air. That’s some quality satire. I suggest the author read Children of Men because the book has more of it than this one.
Okay, now all the bad things. So this is going to be mostly about the satire thing. The purpose of a book, especially satire, is to say something. What does this book say?
If I understand it correctly, it’s supposedly the South Park take on everything, don’t take anything too seriously. No one does anything sincerely. The progressive group on campus cares only about recognition, not anything tangible. The African American student group just cares about money. The feminists (called the Womyn Collective because apparently takes from the 70s is still a thing that goes on, more on this later x 1) is a bunch of ugly losers who love arguing more than the argument. I’m not kidding there. The only sincere students are described homely. Okay? In effect they’re all straw men. Whatever, the author is making fun of them, I can hear my own straw man saying. But the thing about satire is that we should know what the author is talking about. Unless there’s an obvious person that is being satirized (Stalin in the form of Snowball), they should be sincere because you are making fun of them. If you are satirizing an idea, like the boss guy in 1984 (it’s been awhile, okay?), then they have to be sincere in what they believe. It’s just that their beliefs are worthy of satire. Otherwise, what you’re saying is that no one who believes in progressivism is sincere in their beliefs. Therefore anyone who ever says anything progressive is actually after their own self gain. Not that the ideas are wrong, it’s just that anyone who holds them really just wants some material benefit. Yeah, now you can extend that to rape and sexual assault because that’s what the author does!
A short note before I go on. The leader of the progressive student group is actually super rich and gets money from a trust fund. And he disrespects capitalism! So he’s a hypocrite. Again, this is the same as before, that no one sincerely believes that capitalism is bad. And he’s never worked a day in his life! And he’s guilty of moral turpitude! That gets his granddad, the man who really earned the money, from giving him anymore. It feels like wish fulfillment, but whose? Also he worked at an Amazon warehouse for a summer, as if that also makes him a hypocrite. What? If Jeff Bezos worked there, I would respect him (for that alone). If Bernie Sanders worked there, I would applaud him. Idem with anyone at all! It’s hard work, and you definitely don’t earn as much as you deserve. Amazon may do bad things to small businesses, but that’s a management decision. If you have to work there to get by, then you shouldn’t be criticized. There is no ethical consumption under capitalism, yes, but ethics only apply if you have a choice. Starving to death because you can’t find any other work is not one. I’m reviewing this book on Goodreads and Amazon. Does that make me a hypocrite? Okay, the answer is yes as long as I have a choice. Do I feel like I have one? No. So more yes than no, but more no than if I weren’t trying to make it as a writer.
The first half of the conflict is the progressive students accuse Ephraim (the first POV character) (who I’m pretty sure is not Jewish even though he has a very Jewish name. Maybe biblical names are popular in Alabama?) of having a racist reading list for his 19th century literature class. The first book is The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and anyone who’s read it or heard about it, know what this is about. So the author is trying to pretend the conflict was about getting the work banned and not about the teacher not dealing with the use of the N-word. Anyway, the main conflict is that Ephraim refuses to put more African American authors on the syllabus. He says it’s because there weren’t any until later. So it’s about facts why this is happening. Facts, guys! Except a really cursory google search had Huckleberry Finn coming out in 1885… and there were a handful of African American writers by that late in the 19th century? If the author had used an antebellum example or something. Then the professor can’t do it because it’s about Romantics vs. Realists. Uh, okay? Later on the book, another teacher comments that teaching is easy because you teach a semester once, you teach the same thing every year (more on that later x 1). If you’re teaching elementary languages or something, I can understand that (though the teachers should be updating their textbooks and teaching methods at least every now and then), but that’s the definition of a stodgy old teacher, and the reason why making compromises means doing the hard thing and actually having to give a crap about your job.
This argument basically boils down onto “the people asking for progressive policies are asking for us to change things! We have to make decisions, but it’s a fact that the classics of literature are that for a reason.” There are two primary faults with this conversation. If a school is deciding to change, then it has to make sacrifices. Some of those will be painful, and so a part of making changes and accepting diversity is accepting that you don’t know everything, and what you value most is not what others value most. The second point is that it’s not a fact about what are classics. Okay, so I should say I didn’t do literature, at least not in English. I did some Italian literature, but from what I’ve seen about the ‘classics’ of literature, it’s a lot of people’s opinion over time. Good literature was a response to older stuff, and so on and so forth. It’s a bit simple and easy when Kant argued about universals, but there is no literature that is universal! It’s like Chomsky arguing about universal grammar. It’s pretty useful and convenient for western languages and culture, but it’s not true everywhere! Any decent teacher would take what their students say seriously and ponder it. They wouldn’t just throw it out because a student says it. Ephraim really should’ve thought about African American authors and said “hey, let’s include a few.” In fact, on page 98, the author Elizabeth Keckley is suggested, and Ephraim (and his African American girlfriend, more on this later x 2) are like ‘who?’ What a bad teacher! Why is he up for tenure if he isn’t willing to learn something new? Even though American Literature is Arts and Sciences, the scientific method applies! Teachers learn new things all the time!
The second main conflict comes from Lulu Harris (the second POV) falsely accuses Ephraim of sexual assault. She does it as a way of getting out of trouble for stealing. And she starts doing an elaborate walk around campus with a chain attached to her ankle. She’s just doing it to get Twitter followers, but everyone rallies around her as a victim. What is the message of this? Well, another character says it makes it harder for real victims to come forward. Well, if you’re familiar with anyone who says they were sexually assaulted, this is literally the defense of the accusers every time. It came up when women were accusing Kavanaugh and Trump, but… according this logic, the accusations are never correct. Because no one’s ever sincere in what they believe! #Metoo is use about destroying good men who lose their jobs over false accusation, apparently.
Then the teacher’s accusations goes to the Title IX committee, who don’t care about the truth. They just want to bring down a teacher because there must be sexual assault on campus, whether any actually happened. And people are trying to justify their jobs and high paychecks. Finally, in the last third we get to the heart of the author’s argument (especially because the author has a page About Campusland that says that this book is supposed to be funny… except the Title IX committees, which are really a thing and so unfair! In the book, Eph complains that it’s not fair, and he deserves to confront his accusers and have representation. Well, guess what? This is the exact same crap that people bring up about impeachment. Guess what? Only the Judicial branch of the government goes through that! Military Tribunals and education isn’t subject to those regulations. However, if Eph had tenure. So, yes, it isn’t very fair. However, the argument should really be against the tenure system which only gives an opportunity to defend themselves to teachers who have it. Associate professors and adjuncts are screwed. Why isn’t that touched on? I suspect it’s because the author doesn’t actually know what tenure means.
Okay, now I’m going to get political/state my opinion.
The first thing I want to talk about is one of the big themes of this book. Eph (who you should obviously recognize as the voice of the author) says ‘I’m progressive, but this is crazy! This isn’t real racism when a bunch of stuffy white people teach the same things forever and never have to change! It only happens when people say the N-word! Women can’t be at danger or feel endangered at the school because they constitute over 50% of the student body (hmm, I wonder if the peasantry of France before their revolution thought they were represented because they were over 50% of the population).’ Saying ‘I’m X but…’ is usually an indication that you’re not X. Anyone who is seriously progressive realizes that it’s an ongoing struggle. Gay marriage isn’t a step too far because we already have interracial marriage, for example. An idea that the author mocks (that the struggle must be ongoing) is fairly simple and well-accepted by anyone who fundamentally cares about these concepts.
The second is a bunch of people really care about grammar in casual conversation (like someone caring that Title IX is used as a verb). If anyone in a non-academic setting gives someone else a hassle about that sort of thing, everyone would stop talking to them. Plus, I’m pretty sure stuff like that has come up in a few of the academic conferences I’ve gone to. Besides that, I’m pretty sure literature taught these days in English is much less normative. I can see it happening in foreign language classes, but even those weren’t sticklers about it unless it was in a paper. Italian universities were, but that’s not in America. I guess this is one advantage of doing Linguistics, where everyone cared much more about intended meaning than perfection.
A side note here. Lulu makes fun of the jocks for having poor diction when she herself, at this point of the book, barely attends class and doesn’t care about her education. Also, she makes a joke about gay stereotypes. Dude, that does not fly anymore!
The third, that should’ve been apparent by now (and , was the attitudes the author had about things. The back of the book says he went to college in the 80s. Examples are words like ‘correctamundo’, ‘total nob’, explaining what EDM means and what beer pong is, and going on and on about how fraternities are awesome and fun and constantly partying. During down time, the fraternity members were spitting loogies on the ceiling and seeing how long it took for them to fall back down. Uhh… do they not have smart phones? Like, I get it. I never was in a fraternity, and I graduated in 2015 (okay 2014 from a school that had fraternities), but c’mon. Along this line, the author complains about the drinking age being raised to 21 and explains its impact on college campuses. Holy moly! Who does not know that the drinking age is 21? And that college students drink a lot? And that the people who are over 21 help those that are under? Also, they refer to their beer as Natural Lite and not Natty Lite. I have never, ever heard someone in person call it Natural Lite. You should ask if they’re an alien. Also, wouldn’t they be drinking PBR (or as the author would call them, Pabst Blue Ribbon)? Maybe I’m dating myself here. Anyway, the book is set somewhere between 2017 and 2019, but it doesn’t feel like that other than some lip service about how progressive values are ruining campus life! Again, myself, but when I went to college (one for my undergrad, one for my Masters), it was a bastion of centrists. Teachers, events, everything. I wish it was this crazy place that the book says college is like, but it sure wasn’t that.
Okay, little annoyances I had:
Lulu’s mom flat out asks her if the accusations are real. And Lulu’s ignores it until later than is like ‘yeah, I made it up.’ If anyone, especially someone you trust, is accusing you of making false accusations, don’t talk to them. Even if it’s true, that’s not a relationship. If they’re right, they know you’re a liar, and so no trust can be had there. If they’re wrong, there’s no trust, and obviously this person is saying they’re not your friend or think you’re family.
Also Lulu’s dad signs an NDA that says that he can’t reveal that he had a daughter with a famous movie actress. Does this character, a high powered lawyer, not know that NDAs can’t cover this sort of thing? Consult a lawyer about two things: NDAs that don’t have to do with keeping an industry secret under wraps and really unfair prenups.
So the more on this later comments:
First: The other teacher complains about ‘students these days’, how physical violence and name calling is good, how teachers shouldn’t have to change their syllabus ever (because it’s an easy job even though he just mocked students for being too lazy). It’s all given unironically with no comment. Where’s the satire here? What’s the author saying?
Second: Ephraim constantly refers to his girlfriend as ebony. Ebony skin, Ebony and Ivory, etc. Seriously, was that alright in the 80s? Cus it definitely wouldn’t have flown when I was in school.
I want to leave you with some of the most ridiculous quotes from the book:
“He [Red, leader of PSA] swore sometimes women should come equipped with user manuals” - P 221. My response: who says this still? Again, 80s talk.
“…later identified as a ‘comfort animal’…” - P. 82. Who calls an Emotional Support Animal a comfort animal? Like, I get that it’s one of those ‘those darn kids’ things, but c’mon.
“[Some character said,] ‘Was it Beria who said, “Show me the man and I’ll show you the crime”?’ Eph recalled that Beria was Stalin’s secret-police chief - P. 101. Okay, whatever, accusations of popular opinion, but the target audience of this book knows who Beria is. And if they don’t, they can google it. Don’t explain it here!
“So digger is wasted and hooks up with this chick, right?… [the next morning] this chick says, ‘you don’t remember my name, do you?’… She starts throwing shit at him…” - P. 128. Okay, so I cut a lot out of that paragraph, but you get the point. First off, who expects a loving and committed relationship from a frat boy? This book is full of dated tropes, and it makes me so annoyed that the author even thought he consulted someone on making his book up to date. I guess they should’ve said to just gut half of it. Or set it in the 80s!
“Most of his time, though was spent grading term papers. Forty students times twenty pages meant eight hundred pages of reading, plus critiques.” - P. 134. Okay, so the author has no idea about workloads and stuff for teachers. I had a few friends that were TAs or taught classes, and that might be their workload. A teacher? Much more since they’re not just teaching 2 classes. Also, that’s the only term paper. Anyway, the book ends with Eph skipping out on tenure at Devon University so he can work as an adjunct at Samford. I don’t think the author knows what it’s like to teach as an adjunct with the promise of maybe one day being full time. That sort of thing is only for people that are already rich, not normal associate professors.
There’s some other stuff, but I’ve spent like two hours on this. So bye.
November 7, 2019
Voyager
So, now that I’ve gone through what I really wanted to talk about in Star Trek, I’m gonna wrap this up. Expect this and another update where I talk about the other series and movies. I haven’t read the books (hah) or whatever other stuff there is.
This update is Voyager (VOY). I’m not going to say I like Voyager because I don’t. I think the consensus, rightfully, is that Voyager has all the wasted potential of every series of Star Trek, compounded right in one.
I guess I’ll start with the premise.
The Hook:
The starship Voyager is stranded 70 years away from home in a strange, new area of space. I used the word hook because this was supposed to be the big overarching plot of the series, the journey for home. Like how gods was the big one for DS9 (with the Prophets coming up in the first episode) or exploration for TNG (with Q’s dire warnings against humans exploring what they shouldn’t). However, that thread gets mostly dropped by the second and completely by the third season. Let me clarify. In this series, there are three stories going on (or that’s how it was pitched) at all times. The first is the journey home, which is what the whole series is about. The second is whatever season-long thing is going on, which I’ll explain later. The third is the monster-of-the-week thing I love so much in other series.
When I say that, the first and secondary plots go away. Not completely. They get lip service, but the show no longer is about the ship going home. It’s about exploring new planets, just new. And by this point the writers had run out of ideas so they recycle plots from other series. Or they just make the plot simplistic and about big explosions. The episodes seem way more structured (and that’s after watching TOS where you could time the plot beats of every episode), when there’s the introduction, the action, the complication, etc.
Characters:
Janeway is the captain. So you know how I was talking about how TNG is (neo)liberal and DS9 is progressive? A lot of that is decided (declared) by the captain and how they approach the problem and the people they surround themselves with. Voyager is conservative. And that all starts with Janeway. She starts off as basically Picard lite then by the end basically says that Federation values don’t work out away from Earth and where the society is created. It’s the traditional argument when the center cannot hold. DS9 is a split to the left, and VOY is to the right. But as in either series, the basic ideas are kept. It’s just sometimes the more bureaucratic elements are done away with. This could go into a longer diatribe, but I’m not going to point out the hypocrisy, mostly that the needs are an excuse most of the time.
Chakotay is the first officer with only a first name. So Chakotay starts off like Nerys and ends up much more like Riker. Let me qualify that: Nerys has some deeply founded and important spiritual beliefs that guide her actions. Riker’s spiritual beliefs are the Federation and culture in general, much like a white collar O’Brien. Okay, more explanation, but this time about Chakotay. He, like Paris and Torres are Maquis who were trapped with Janeway. They are the first real humanization of the mostly reactionary Maquis. I don’t know too much about it, but the Native American cultural advisor was supposedly a hack, but I think Chakotay’s beliefs are supposed to be an amalgam of various, actual beliefs. Or maybe not. Either way, he’s probably the most important ‘alternate’ to technology as a concrete, sincere belief. It actually impacts his decisions in a fundamental, important way. At least for the first season.
Kes is the most interesting character. Also a weird apologia for pedophiles, but uh, let’s address that first. She’s an Ocampa. They live to about 7 to 10. So they sexually/biologically mature very early. She joins the Voyager crew (along with Neelix, who I’ll briefly mention later), one of the not quite violations of Federation praxis. Her race was taken by a protective alien force, but now they have to take care of themselves. She has to realize, by traveling far away from home for the vast majority of her life, what her home is. She also gets unceremoniously exiled near the beginning of season 3 because her new role was taken up by Seven of Nine. Or who I’ll just call 7 from now on. After all, George Costanza liked it as a name.
The Doctor is a hologram and the ship’s doctor. Over the course of the first three seasons, he gets upgraded. Then all of his character progression is done so he just sustains (noticing a pattern?). He slowly has to grasp the concept of his own sentience when he was originally intended as a temporary solution if the ship’s doctor was killed. He gets to decide when he’s turned off and on, eventually interacts with objects (becoming effectively solid) and gets to go anywhere eventually and not just his dedicated zone. The series never has him give himself a name, a major setback from TNG (because he obviously contrasts with Data, whose development isn’t physical like the Doctor’s but emotional).
7 is a former Borg drone who gets deprogrammed and transitions slowly to human. I decided to talk about her here instead of later because she technically is in more of the show than Kes even if she is much less interesting of a character. She has about one interesting season, 3, and the rest is mostly coasting. If it sounds like I’m really praising season 3, I’m not. Season 1 is the only one that does a good job, but for half of season 3 and everything after, the series drops off a cliff of quality. She has conflicts about individuality and its value because, after all, she was part of technologically superior hive mind. I want to say something. I don’t think it’s wrong that 7 is basically ‘hot Kes’, but it’s annoying that doesn’t really go anywhere. That’s why I don’t like her as a character. She has some good potential, especially at the beginning, but Unmet Potential should be the subtitle for Voyager.
Everyone else: Harry Kim has no confidence and does nothing important (except season 1 in a few episodes); Tom Paris is whiney and angry that he’s a disappointment to his dad (that gets nominally resolved by the end of the Series); Neelix is a Talaxian and becomes the ship’s chef. He hilariously discovers that while there are many afterlifes that are true in Star Trek (Ferengi, Klingon, etc.), the Talaxian afterlife is a lie; Tuvok is the only dedicated character that’s a Vulcan, and he’s like Spock-lite. Vulcans are examined more interestingly in TNG despite only being in a few episodes; Torres is by far the most interesting character of the minors. She’s half Klingon and is constantly struggling to find her balance.
The Plot:
So, I said before that the story is nominatively about them getting home. The series has a bunch of episodes where they discover means to do so, but there’s obstacles to it. The last episode, where they finally succeed, has a deus ex machina in the form of time travel, which is kinda funny. This, what I called the primary plot or whatever, isn’t very important to Star Trek. The problem was they promised so much in the beginning! The first season has them keep track of precious resources (torpedos, energy supplies—please ignore the whole point of the ship having Bussard collectors—, etc.), but that part gets forgotten soon. I mean, I understand. It’s not compelling TV, and it creates the wrong mood. But it really shouldn’t have been introduced in the first place.
The secondary plot is where they dropped the ball the hardest, as surprising as that is. Okay, so between the first and second season they set up the conflict between Starfleet and the Maquis. It’s actually set up competently over the season through a bunch of smaller plot points. That said, it’s kinda hammy and overdone, especially near the end. That’s the last time they really care about a larger story, other than when they encounter the Borg. So, what’s stopping the Borg from just killing them all went hey encounter them? Well, err… nothing. But they needed to come up with something. So they flexed their early-90s CGI and made up species 8472, the perfect biological entity that the Borg can’t assimilate. They’re also basically even more all-powerful than the Borg. So Voyager helps them stop the new enemy for safe passage, and things go bad. Not important, but this is one when Kes becomes 7. One last complaint: they make the Borg have a queen (okay, this was in First Contact, but they could pretend it didn’t happen or was a thing they did for the situation). So effectively they’re a monarchy with some degree of individualism and not just a hive mind. Okay, yes, bees and ants and whatever, but c’mon. This doesn’t have to be realistic. Star Trek’s supposed to be idealistic and have actual, real life examples of philosophical maxims.
The first time that the series doesn’t just drop the ball but slap it into the ground is the Year of Hell. So through some time travel shenanigans, Kes learns that the ship will go through what they call the Year of Hell, where it looks like all those scarcity episodes will actually matter. There will be actual consequences! Characters will die! Well, one episode after the Year of Hell actually happens, it all means nothing. Everything goes back to how it was before. Then there are the Predator-lites, and there’s some development (they even openly call them Nazis, which takes some real balls), but it kinda just peters out.
Okay, whatever. Star Trek isn’t really good at this sort of stuff, so why not make it monster of the week? Well, the tertiary plot seems to be the standard fare. But it’s as if someone watched Star Trek, didn’t get the idea of why it was anything but a standard show and then made more episodes. I realize that these were the same writers for the most part, but that’s how it comes off.
I was going to write much less about Voyager than this, but that’s how much the show annoys me. It could’ve been good, almost within spitting distance of the greatness of TNG or something! But it wasn’t. It didn’t have a coherent message, and it just felt like a waste of time.
This update is Voyager (VOY). I’m not going to say I like Voyager because I don’t. I think the consensus, rightfully, is that Voyager has all the wasted potential of every series of Star Trek, compounded right in one.
I guess I’ll start with the premise.
The Hook:
The starship Voyager is stranded 70 years away from home in a strange, new area of space. I used the word hook because this was supposed to be the big overarching plot of the series, the journey for home. Like how gods was the big one for DS9 (with the Prophets coming up in the first episode) or exploration for TNG (with Q’s dire warnings against humans exploring what they shouldn’t). However, that thread gets mostly dropped by the second and completely by the third season. Let me clarify. In this series, there are three stories going on (or that’s how it was pitched) at all times. The first is the journey home, which is what the whole series is about. The second is whatever season-long thing is going on, which I’ll explain later. The third is the monster-of-the-week thing I love so much in other series.
When I say that, the first and secondary plots go away. Not completely. They get lip service, but the show no longer is about the ship going home. It’s about exploring new planets, just new. And by this point the writers had run out of ideas so they recycle plots from other series. Or they just make the plot simplistic and about big explosions. The episodes seem way more structured (and that’s after watching TOS where you could time the plot beats of every episode), when there’s the introduction, the action, the complication, etc.
Characters:
Janeway is the captain. So you know how I was talking about how TNG is (neo)liberal and DS9 is progressive? A lot of that is decided (declared) by the captain and how they approach the problem and the people they surround themselves with. Voyager is conservative. And that all starts with Janeway. She starts off as basically Picard lite then by the end basically says that Federation values don’t work out away from Earth and where the society is created. It’s the traditional argument when the center cannot hold. DS9 is a split to the left, and VOY is to the right. But as in either series, the basic ideas are kept. It’s just sometimes the more bureaucratic elements are done away with. This could go into a longer diatribe, but I’m not going to point out the hypocrisy, mostly that the needs are an excuse most of the time.
Chakotay is the first officer with only a first name. So Chakotay starts off like Nerys and ends up much more like Riker. Let me qualify that: Nerys has some deeply founded and important spiritual beliefs that guide her actions. Riker’s spiritual beliefs are the Federation and culture in general, much like a white collar O’Brien. Okay, more explanation, but this time about Chakotay. He, like Paris and Torres are Maquis who were trapped with Janeway. They are the first real humanization of the mostly reactionary Maquis. I don’t know too much about it, but the Native American cultural advisor was supposedly a hack, but I think Chakotay’s beliefs are supposed to be an amalgam of various, actual beliefs. Or maybe not. Either way, he’s probably the most important ‘alternate’ to technology as a concrete, sincere belief. It actually impacts his decisions in a fundamental, important way. At least for the first season.
Kes is the most interesting character. Also a weird apologia for pedophiles, but uh, let’s address that first. She’s an Ocampa. They live to about 7 to 10. So they sexually/biologically mature very early. She joins the Voyager crew (along with Neelix, who I’ll briefly mention later), one of the not quite violations of Federation praxis. Her race was taken by a protective alien force, but now they have to take care of themselves. She has to realize, by traveling far away from home for the vast majority of her life, what her home is. She also gets unceremoniously exiled near the beginning of season 3 because her new role was taken up by Seven of Nine. Or who I’ll just call 7 from now on. After all, George Costanza liked it as a name.
The Doctor is a hologram and the ship’s doctor. Over the course of the first three seasons, he gets upgraded. Then all of his character progression is done so he just sustains (noticing a pattern?). He slowly has to grasp the concept of his own sentience when he was originally intended as a temporary solution if the ship’s doctor was killed. He gets to decide when he’s turned off and on, eventually interacts with objects (becoming effectively solid) and gets to go anywhere eventually and not just his dedicated zone. The series never has him give himself a name, a major setback from TNG (because he obviously contrasts with Data, whose development isn’t physical like the Doctor’s but emotional).
7 is a former Borg drone who gets deprogrammed and transitions slowly to human. I decided to talk about her here instead of later because she technically is in more of the show than Kes even if she is much less interesting of a character. She has about one interesting season, 3, and the rest is mostly coasting. If it sounds like I’m really praising season 3, I’m not. Season 1 is the only one that does a good job, but for half of season 3 and everything after, the series drops off a cliff of quality. She has conflicts about individuality and its value because, after all, she was part of technologically superior hive mind. I want to say something. I don’t think it’s wrong that 7 is basically ‘hot Kes’, but it’s annoying that doesn’t really go anywhere. That’s why I don’t like her as a character. She has some good potential, especially at the beginning, but Unmet Potential should be the subtitle for Voyager.
Everyone else: Harry Kim has no confidence and does nothing important (except season 1 in a few episodes); Tom Paris is whiney and angry that he’s a disappointment to his dad (that gets nominally resolved by the end of the Series); Neelix is a Talaxian and becomes the ship’s chef. He hilariously discovers that while there are many afterlifes that are true in Star Trek (Ferengi, Klingon, etc.), the Talaxian afterlife is a lie; Tuvok is the only dedicated character that’s a Vulcan, and he’s like Spock-lite. Vulcans are examined more interestingly in TNG despite only being in a few episodes; Torres is by far the most interesting character of the minors. She’s half Klingon and is constantly struggling to find her balance.
The Plot:
So, I said before that the story is nominatively about them getting home. The series has a bunch of episodes where they discover means to do so, but there’s obstacles to it. The last episode, where they finally succeed, has a deus ex machina in the form of time travel, which is kinda funny. This, what I called the primary plot or whatever, isn’t very important to Star Trek. The problem was they promised so much in the beginning! The first season has them keep track of precious resources (torpedos, energy supplies—please ignore the whole point of the ship having Bussard collectors—, etc.), but that part gets forgotten soon. I mean, I understand. It’s not compelling TV, and it creates the wrong mood. But it really shouldn’t have been introduced in the first place.
The secondary plot is where they dropped the ball the hardest, as surprising as that is. Okay, so between the first and second season they set up the conflict between Starfleet and the Maquis. It’s actually set up competently over the season through a bunch of smaller plot points. That said, it’s kinda hammy and overdone, especially near the end. That’s the last time they really care about a larger story, other than when they encounter the Borg. So, what’s stopping the Borg from just killing them all went hey encounter them? Well, err… nothing. But they needed to come up with something. So they flexed their early-90s CGI and made up species 8472, the perfect biological entity that the Borg can’t assimilate. They’re also basically even more all-powerful than the Borg. So Voyager helps them stop the new enemy for safe passage, and things go bad. Not important, but this is one when Kes becomes 7. One last complaint: they make the Borg have a queen (okay, this was in First Contact, but they could pretend it didn’t happen or was a thing they did for the situation). So effectively they’re a monarchy with some degree of individualism and not just a hive mind. Okay, yes, bees and ants and whatever, but c’mon. This doesn’t have to be realistic. Star Trek’s supposed to be idealistic and have actual, real life examples of philosophical maxims.
The first time that the series doesn’t just drop the ball but slap it into the ground is the Year of Hell. So through some time travel shenanigans, Kes learns that the ship will go through what they call the Year of Hell, where it looks like all those scarcity episodes will actually matter. There will be actual consequences! Characters will die! Well, one episode after the Year of Hell actually happens, it all means nothing. Everything goes back to how it was before. Then there are the Predator-lites, and there’s some development (they even openly call them Nazis, which takes some real balls), but it kinda just peters out.
Okay, whatever. Star Trek isn’t really good at this sort of stuff, so why not make it monster of the week? Well, the tertiary plot seems to be the standard fare. But it’s as if someone watched Star Trek, didn’t get the idea of why it was anything but a standard show and then made more episodes. I realize that these were the same writers for the most part, but that’s how it comes off.
I was going to write much less about Voyager than this, but that’s how much the show annoys me. It could’ve been good, almost within spitting distance of the greatness of TNG or something! But it wasn’t. It didn’t have a coherent message, and it just felt like a waste of time.
October 28, 2019
Deep Space 9
Finally, I’m getting around to this. I had planned to write this before Mattia was born, but things rarely work out as we plan. So I’m doing it now because Deep Space 9 (DS9) is my favorite Star Trek series and favorite TV series ever. It’s much more plot based and less episodic (going from about 2-3 episodes per season of the other shows to 6-7), so this will be long.
One way that I like using for explication of a story is one of Dante Alighieri’s letter to Cangrande, the doge of Venice (I’m not going to tell you which because I don’t remember). There are four ways that an author can convey meaning to the audience: the literal, the metaphorical, the allegorical and the philosophical. The way that I understood is that for most books, there’s the story, that’s the literal. The metaphorical and the allegorical are somewhat interchangeable (at least usually), but whatever. The philosophical is much more about the relationship of humans with the divine, the literal philos sophia, the love of wisdom.
On the metaphorical: DS9 is progressive in all the ways that TNG is liberal.
On the allegorical: Imagine Martin Luther King’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail but as Star Trek.
On the philosophical: if TNG is about looking for meaning, DS9 is about looking for God.
But let’s start with the literal to explain that all.
The Setting:
On the edge of Federation space, there is a space station called Deep Space 9. It isn’t actually Starfleet but Cardassian, handed over in a peace treaty. It was an ore processing station that has been repurposed for general purposes, including commerce, which had been absent from Star Trek other than some minor mentions in TOS (and completely absent from TNG).
DS9 is positioned right above Bajor, a technologically and militarily inferior planet that was occupied by the Cardassians for a long time. And I don’t mean they applied taxes or anything. There was slave labor, sex slaves, human trafficking, secret police and every type of 20th century oppression imaginable. It’s fairly easy to draw the comparisons to the Chinese occupation of Tibet, the Palestinian state, the Armenian genocide or pre-final solution Nazi Germany (because the destruction of the Bajorans isn’t genocidal or systematic but violence and power).
The Cardassians are a major political and military power, roughly on terms with every other power, the Federation, the Klingons or the Romulans (this is relevant later). Their day-to-day life is basically 1984 but in space. There’s a near-omnipotent-and-omnipresent secret police that enforces an authoritarian society.
There are also the Maquis (the last season of TNG covers their origins). They are humans and other Federation species that were living in an area that was handed over to the Cardassians after the peace treaty. However, they refused to leave. The Cardassians came to an agreement to mostly leave them alone, but they sabotage and use guerrilla tactics to attack the Cardassians as much as they can.
Starfleet is somewhat helping the Bajora get back on their feet in the hopes that Bajor will join the federation. The apathy changes until they discover the first stable wormhole that anyone knows about. Things get crazy. The wormhole is inhabited by a group of aliens who are called the wormhole aliens or the Prophets (by the Bajorans). It turns out that they’ve been occasionally communicating with the Bajorans for a long time (who revere them as Gods, relevant for later), not that they know that it’s been a long time. The Prophets exist outside of time and have no ability to experience linear time. They also gifted the Bajorans with various orbs, small fragments of the wormhole that each have different qualities. One lets the user see visions of the future, others travel in time, but most importantly they let someone communicate with the prophets. There’s some even crazier things, but that comes later.
On the other side of the wormhole is the Dominion. This will be hard to talk about without mentioning characters, so I’ll give a general description. The Dominion is a perfectly ordered society. The Dominion is ruled by the shapeshifters, called the Founders in their society, an elusive race that stay as far away from all eyes even those of anyone else in their Dominion. They command with an iron fist and have genetically engineered everyone in their society to fit perfectly in to what are needed.
The Vorta perform the commands of the Founders, acting as military commanders, bureaucrats, diplomats and any other organizational role in their society. Like the next race of the Dominion, they are genetically programmed the revere the Founders as Gods and are incapable of dissent. They are produced by cloning and cannot reproduce on their own.
So now I’ll talk about the Jem’Hadar. They are the soldiers of the Dominion. They are cloned, grow to full size in a few days, and are genetically dependent on a drug, Ketracel-white. The Founders keep them in line by making the process to make the drug as secretive and difficult as possible. The Jem’Hadar are violent and live only a few years.
So, when I was hesitating to call the Cardassians Nazis, this is why. The Dominion are Nazi Germany to the Cardassians’ Fascist Italy. The Dominion do all sorts of atrocities. The least of which comes up in Season 1, Episode 13: Battle Lines. Two tribes of people on a planet were always fighting. Think Hatfields and McCoys. So the Dominion punished them by forcing them to fight an eternal war between each other. Anyone who dies on their planet will be healed, but they can’t leave the planet. So these people are eternally tortured in a cycle of life and death they cannot escape. Another example is Season 4, Episode 24: The Quickening. They infect an entire planet with a nigh-incurable super disease that causes tremendous pain and lesions but is only fatal when people get to the latter end of their sexual maturity. So people have children because they want to have hope for the future, but everyone is destined to die horribly, for generations and generations. All for the crime of rebelling against the Dominion.
The characters:
Starfleet:
1. Benjamin Sisko is the most important character. He is both the Starfleet commander stationed at DS9 and the Emissary to the Prophets. So I’ll touch on that first thing. The story starts that he and his son, Jake, move to DS9 because he’s lost all purpose or faith in his life after his wife was killed in a Borg attack. He despises Jean-Luc Picard, the protagonist of TNG and hero of Starfleet for becoming Locutus of Borg (TNG last episode of season 3 and first episode of season 4). It’s a bold, meaningful choice for the show since Sisko, just like the viewer, has to construct meaning out of what he experiences.
2. Jake Sisko is the son of Benjamin. Unlike the other Star Treks, he and Nog (under Ferengi) grow up together from adolescence to young adulthood. He is so disillusioned with Starfleet that he (like Wesley in TNG) doesn’t join it and goes on his own way. He’s maybe the only main character that goes into a mostly creative pursuit, writing.
3. Jadzia Dax is the science officer on DS9. It’s a bit nebulous what she does (as it is for all ‘science officers’). The most interesting part of her is that she’s a joined Trill. That means that she’s actually two beings: an effectively immortal symbiote (Dax) paired with a humanoid Trill voluntary host (Jadzia). In her past lives Dax has been an artist, an engineer, a diplomat, a father and a mother. So there’s a fine line where Dax has to live in balance of the two personalities inhabiting her body. There’s a lot of development of what exactly it means in her species to be joined with a symbiote and what it doesn’t. Dax is fantastic because the way she’s portrayed is very progressive. She’s effectively transgender and beyond normative sexuality. She doesn’t care what anyone thinks about her. She just does what she does. She also had the first lesbian kiss on TV, and it was pretty controversial at the time. Note: TOS had some firsts too, such as the first interracial kiss on TV, but TNG didn’t.
4. Julian Bashir is the medical officer, ambitious and arrogant. DS9 is the only Star Trek series where the doctor gets to demonstrate his medical abilities. Bones in TOS was more old-fashioned, cantankerous and a foil for Spock because he was emotional rather than logical. Pulaski (TNG) was more of that, and Crusher was more the mother of Wesley and friend of Troi than fully idealized for her medical abilities (a few minor exceptions and the major exception being season 5, episode 16). Bashir has to wrestle with the fact that he’s genetically engineered (banned in the Federation because of the eugenics wars, elements of which come up in almost every Star Trek series).
5. Miles O’Brien, Keiko, and Worf are three characters/actors that come over from TNG. I don’t have much to say about them except that Miles and Keiko are somewhat comic relief (when horrible things aren’t happening to Miles). Worf has to continue to wrestle with his loyalty to the Klingon empire in the latter half of the series.
Bajor:
1. Kira Nerys is the liaison officer between the Bajoran government and Starfleet. She fought as a resistance fighter against the Cardassian occupation. She is deeply spiritual to the point that she finds herself frequently caught in a struggle between her real life obligations and her religious beliefs.
2. Odo is a shapeshifter, but he’s on the good side. In the last decade of the Cardassian war, a bunch of goo was found in space, and a Bajoran scientist under Cardassian rule slowly discovered what he was and helped raise Odo until he grew into sentience. He was one of a hundred young changelings sent out into the galaxy by the Founders. He believes strongly in order but has difficulty squaring his reality with the strict rules and hierarchy of the Founders in the later seasons.
3. Winn is basically the Bajoran equivalent of a Catholic cardinal. She is zealous and regressive. She will do anything to do what she perceives as what the Prophets wants.
Ferengi: Before I go on to the specific characters, I should talk about the Ferengi as a whole. They were first introduced in TNG and supposed to be the big bad foil to the Federation, hyper capitalist and bloodthirsty in place of curiosity and luxury gay space communism. That didn’t really work out because the Ferengi never really came off as that threatening. So they got a lot more life and exposure on DS9.
1. Quark is the quintessential Ferengi. He is an ardent believer in the Rules of Acquisition (a mercantile, minimalistic bible/Art of War that’s a series of 200+ commandments like ‘treat workers like family: exploit them’). He runs a bar on DS9, starting in the days of the Cardassians. He is notorious for promoting his self worth and surviving.
2. Nog is Quark’s brother and a miserable Ferengi. He values women’s rights and is compassionate. He is often pitted as a foil to Quark because of how much he’s a loser in Ferengi eyes for doing what any reasonable person would consider a good or nice thing.
3. Rom is Nog’s son and undergoes a lot of change for what seems to be a side/comical character. He goes from being very Ferengi and on Quark’s side to Nog’s and joining Starfleet. He serves as a foil to Jake throughout the series. Nog is Ferengi to Jake’s humanity at the beginning, and later Nog is Starfleet and ordered to Jake’s lackadaisical and creative pursuits.
Cardassians:
1. Gul Dukat is the closest thing to persistent antagonist in all of the Star Trek series. He was the governor for Bajor, and, though the Cardassians have withdrawn, frequently finds himself nearby. He is fantastically dynamic, weirdly charming and overpoweringly narcissistic. He believes in himself and nothing else. He is at times a convenient ally to Starfleet, but he ran concentration camps and sides with whoever will give him the most power.
2. Garak is the only Cardassia who lives on DS9. He runs a clothing store on the station and never reveals anything about his origins. His backstory is slowly revealed, but he revels in the mystery. If Gul Dukat is the military side of Cardassia, Garak is the secret police. He’s an onion of deception, lies and subversion. Comically so.
Dominion:
1. The female changeling is the face of the Dominion’s Founders in the last few seasons. I am reluctant to mention her, but it is important because she leads the war effort (uh, that’ll be mentioned in the story) for the Dominion. She is the embodiment of law and order of her strictly controlled empire. She doesn’t tolerate any sort of deviation from her desires by anyone except by other changelings because, in their credo, no changeling harms another (this series’ Checkov’s gun). In fact, she speaks for all of them (minus Odo) because changelings are entirely alien from other societies in that all changelings more or less a part of one super organism.
Why I like DS9 so much:
So, obviously, there’s an overarching plot. And, however much I said I loved the monster-of-the-week plots that Star Trek often uses, this one is exceptional. Not because it’s particularly nuanced, but it is deep for Star Trek, and it doesn’t hold back. It fulfills its themes in a way that TOS doesn’t do and TNG only does in its very last episode.
The most important thing about the series is that the Benjamin is ready to admit the faults of Starfleet. Let’s start with the peace treaty with the Cardassians. It’s Starfleet’s brand of centrist, principled stands. It brings peace and ends a war, undoubtedly good things, but it doesn’t resolve the fundamental problems that created the war in the first place because Starfleet refuses to intervene in Cardassian internal affairs. The refusal to be proactive sets in motion the events for the later seasons of DS9.
Okay, the crux at the center of this series is the paradox of free speech. There are some people who use their free speech to only undermine the free speech of others. They are the types to do whatever they can to convince others they’re right, no matter if it’s in good faith or not. They’ll claim that all ideas need to be presented as equal on the grand scheme of everything, and the moment that they face a contrary minority opinion, they’ll claim that the opponent is unpopular or unnatural in some way that it doesn’t deserve equal representation. Areasonable person cannot engage with their ideas because they’ll switch argumentative tactics in whatever to convince someone when all of their rhetoric is just flashy, not substantive. I suggest you check out Umberto Eco’s list of 14 features of Ur-Fascism, available here (and the whole essay that explains these ideas is here and really worth the read).
One of the most famous quotes is: “When I was a boy, I was taught to think of Englishmen as the five-meal people. They ate more frequently than the poor but sober Italians. Jews are rich and help each other through a secret web of mutual assistance. However, the followers of Ur-Fascism must also be convinced that they can overwhelm the enemies. Thus, by a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak. Fascist governments are condemned to lose wars because they are constitutionally incapable of objectively evaluating the force of the enemy.” Everyone should understand that because it won an election in 2016.
TNG, which really established modern Star Trek, tolerates literally everyone. Starfleet’s philosophy works for (and washes its hands of the consequences of) what they know, the Cardassians, the Klingons, etc., but it’s aggressively useless against those who act in bad faith and seek to do anything to conquer the galaxy, the Dominion. DS9 is the reaction to that. They pull no punches in showing that for Starfleet to continue existing, it cannot tolerate those who seek to militarize it in fear of its enemies (the Dominion and its shapeshifter spies which can perfectly imitate anyone) or restrict any of the rights of the citizens of the Federation. They cannot “destroy paradise to save paradise”, as is excellently demonstrated in season 4, episodes 11 and 12, Homefront and Paradise Lost. In these episodes, Benjamin along with Odo seeks to increase security of Starfleet because of changeling infiltrators, namely taking blood samples. The only problem is the old-school dad of Benjamin who calls it out for what it is: reckless paranoia. When I first saw the episode (I was like 20), I thought Benjamin’s dad was acting ridiculous, but when I watched it again last year, I realized that he’s completely right. This act allows neighbors to denounce each other. It opens the floodgates to the Gestapo stalking through the everyone’s lives, the constant fear of denouncement to the Inquisition for being a jew, etc. In the episodes, it turns out it was a Dominion plot to undermine the democracy of the Federation because they cannot tolerate free will (check out the essay by Eco). That is the Dominion: every act and decision is mandated by the Founders through the Vorta.
Now, before anyone accuses me of hypocrisy because DS9 introduces the first pure warship (the Defiant) to add to the starships of Starfleet where they had only had multipurpose, scientific research or commerce ships, I don’t think it’s bad. They must accept an active role in combatting the enemy, but they must also do it for the right reasons (check out season 7, episode 23, Extreme Measures for a Starfleet response to the American use of atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki).
I’m not going to go into all the story because I think it best anyone interested watch the show. Some of the episodes suck, but most of them are good, and some are excellent. But I will mention three story points and a kinda thematic element.
First is season 3, episode 26, The Adversary. A changeling spy has infiltrated the Defiant and is going to destroy the Defiant and kill the protagonists while they’re on board. This is where the series’ Checkov’s gun comes into play, as in Odo has to choose between saving all of his friends and killing the other changeling. The Founders frame the choice as loyalty to his race or a complete betrayal. All they want to do is bring order to chaos, and so Odo’s choice of stopping the plot is a corruption of the super organism.
Before I go on, I wanna talk bout the thematic element. The Dominion is depicted, through their use of absolute control of their sector of space. They justify their intolerance as making sure that they are never the oppressed again. To this end, Jem’Hadar can’t be anything but bellicose and short-sighted because they’re that way from birth (a complete change from TNG’s philosophy of anyone can be saved), obey the Founders (their gods) without question and will die (because they don’t get Ketracel-white if they don’t obey every order, a parallel to the use of methamphetamines in WW2). Check out season 3, episode 6, The Abandoned; season 4, episode 23, The Abandoned, and season 6, episode 2, Rocks and Shoals for episodes about this.
The philosophy of the Dominion is that everyone is a literal instrument, so much so that the Jem’Hadar who pilot their warships know absolutely nothing about what’s going on. It’s up to the Vorta leading them to give out orders, which they follow literally blindly. Also these warships literally suicidally run themselves into the enemy when they are about to be destroyed (another parallel with WW2 and the Kamikaze pilots). The rest of the Founders of the Dominion will not harm Odo, even though he is on the opposite side, because he is one of them. Either they have genetically reprogrammed themselves so much that they cannot understand why one of their own would side with the enemy or because they drank the kool-aid and believe that he is a Founder no matter what, even if it runs opposite to their self-interest.
The second story point is the Klingon invasion of Cardassia. I’m going to gloss over a bunch of things, but the Klingons invade Cardassia at a point at which there is a lot of upheaval in the government. Gul Dukat prevails and becomes the new face of Cardassia and becomes the sole ally of the Dominion in the alpha quadrant, enabling the Dominion assault on the Federation. I bring this up because it highlights the problem with the TNG: the Dominion isn’t afraid to take advantage of Starfleet’s policy of non-interference.
The last story point is the ending. In Star Trek, the ending and the last season of each series is usually pretty bad. In TOS, it’s just kinda a mediocre episode. In TNG, it’s great in my opinion, but the last two seasons are god awful because the writers ran out of ideas. In DS9, the last season isn’t that interesting for the most part, and its best episodes are only good (okay, there are a few gems like season 7, episode 9, Covenant where Gul Dukat can’t help himself but sleep with the married women of his cult).
Okay, so the story is building up to Gul Dukat summoning the Bajoran devil, the Pah-Wraiths. Winn, now the Bajoran pope (Kai), helps him because that’s her only way of proving that the Prophets are actually against the Emissary, who disagrees with her about her orthodoxy. I’m not going to talk about the last episode, but I think, like all serious matters in Star Trek, it’s not executed well (after the part where Winn kills her cardinals to help Gul Dukat because I like how that’s done) and a bit cheesy. But the point is that Dukat’s God is himself. Winn’s god is being right even if that means changing what correct means.
I love this series because it asks every character to be completely honest with themselves. Okay, the one exception is Ezri Dax. For the last season, they switch actresses for Jadzia. In the last episode of season 6, the writers hastily come up with some excuse for her to die, and they get some other actress. It really ruins the story and thematic elements of the series (I’m not going to go into depth about it, but you can read up on it on your own). With that covered, if you watch DS9, I beg you to watch it with a critical eye and ask always ‘what God does this character serve?’ which leads the question of ‘who is my God and what do I do for him/her/them/it?’
One way that I like using for explication of a story is one of Dante Alighieri’s letter to Cangrande, the doge of Venice (I’m not going to tell you which because I don’t remember). There are four ways that an author can convey meaning to the audience: the literal, the metaphorical, the allegorical and the philosophical. The way that I understood is that for most books, there’s the story, that’s the literal. The metaphorical and the allegorical are somewhat interchangeable (at least usually), but whatever. The philosophical is much more about the relationship of humans with the divine, the literal philos sophia, the love of wisdom.
On the metaphorical: DS9 is progressive in all the ways that TNG is liberal.
On the allegorical: Imagine Martin Luther King’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail but as Star Trek.
On the philosophical: if TNG is about looking for meaning, DS9 is about looking for God.
But let’s start with the literal to explain that all.
The Setting:
On the edge of Federation space, there is a space station called Deep Space 9. It isn’t actually Starfleet but Cardassian, handed over in a peace treaty. It was an ore processing station that has been repurposed for general purposes, including commerce, which had been absent from Star Trek other than some minor mentions in TOS (and completely absent from TNG).
DS9 is positioned right above Bajor, a technologically and militarily inferior planet that was occupied by the Cardassians for a long time. And I don’t mean they applied taxes or anything. There was slave labor, sex slaves, human trafficking, secret police and every type of 20th century oppression imaginable. It’s fairly easy to draw the comparisons to the Chinese occupation of Tibet, the Palestinian state, the Armenian genocide or pre-final solution Nazi Germany (because the destruction of the Bajorans isn’t genocidal or systematic but violence and power).
The Cardassians are a major political and military power, roughly on terms with every other power, the Federation, the Klingons or the Romulans (this is relevant later). Their day-to-day life is basically 1984 but in space. There’s a near-omnipotent-and-omnipresent secret police that enforces an authoritarian society.
There are also the Maquis (the last season of TNG covers their origins). They are humans and other Federation species that were living in an area that was handed over to the Cardassians after the peace treaty. However, they refused to leave. The Cardassians came to an agreement to mostly leave them alone, but they sabotage and use guerrilla tactics to attack the Cardassians as much as they can.
Starfleet is somewhat helping the Bajora get back on their feet in the hopes that Bajor will join the federation. The apathy changes until they discover the first stable wormhole that anyone knows about. Things get crazy. The wormhole is inhabited by a group of aliens who are called the wormhole aliens or the Prophets (by the Bajorans). It turns out that they’ve been occasionally communicating with the Bajorans for a long time (who revere them as Gods, relevant for later), not that they know that it’s been a long time. The Prophets exist outside of time and have no ability to experience linear time. They also gifted the Bajorans with various orbs, small fragments of the wormhole that each have different qualities. One lets the user see visions of the future, others travel in time, but most importantly they let someone communicate with the prophets. There’s some even crazier things, but that comes later.
On the other side of the wormhole is the Dominion. This will be hard to talk about without mentioning characters, so I’ll give a general description. The Dominion is a perfectly ordered society. The Dominion is ruled by the shapeshifters, called the Founders in their society, an elusive race that stay as far away from all eyes even those of anyone else in their Dominion. They command with an iron fist and have genetically engineered everyone in their society to fit perfectly in to what are needed.
The Vorta perform the commands of the Founders, acting as military commanders, bureaucrats, diplomats and any other organizational role in their society. Like the next race of the Dominion, they are genetically programmed the revere the Founders as Gods and are incapable of dissent. They are produced by cloning and cannot reproduce on their own.
So now I’ll talk about the Jem’Hadar. They are the soldiers of the Dominion. They are cloned, grow to full size in a few days, and are genetically dependent on a drug, Ketracel-white. The Founders keep them in line by making the process to make the drug as secretive and difficult as possible. The Jem’Hadar are violent and live only a few years.
So, when I was hesitating to call the Cardassians Nazis, this is why. The Dominion are Nazi Germany to the Cardassians’ Fascist Italy. The Dominion do all sorts of atrocities. The least of which comes up in Season 1, Episode 13: Battle Lines. Two tribes of people on a planet were always fighting. Think Hatfields and McCoys. So the Dominion punished them by forcing them to fight an eternal war between each other. Anyone who dies on their planet will be healed, but they can’t leave the planet. So these people are eternally tortured in a cycle of life and death they cannot escape. Another example is Season 4, Episode 24: The Quickening. They infect an entire planet with a nigh-incurable super disease that causes tremendous pain and lesions but is only fatal when people get to the latter end of their sexual maturity. So people have children because they want to have hope for the future, but everyone is destined to die horribly, for generations and generations. All for the crime of rebelling against the Dominion.
The characters:
Starfleet:
1. Benjamin Sisko is the most important character. He is both the Starfleet commander stationed at DS9 and the Emissary to the Prophets. So I’ll touch on that first thing. The story starts that he and his son, Jake, move to DS9 because he’s lost all purpose or faith in his life after his wife was killed in a Borg attack. He despises Jean-Luc Picard, the protagonist of TNG and hero of Starfleet for becoming Locutus of Borg (TNG last episode of season 3 and first episode of season 4). It’s a bold, meaningful choice for the show since Sisko, just like the viewer, has to construct meaning out of what he experiences.
2. Jake Sisko is the son of Benjamin. Unlike the other Star Treks, he and Nog (under Ferengi) grow up together from adolescence to young adulthood. He is so disillusioned with Starfleet that he (like Wesley in TNG) doesn’t join it and goes on his own way. He’s maybe the only main character that goes into a mostly creative pursuit, writing.
3. Jadzia Dax is the science officer on DS9. It’s a bit nebulous what she does (as it is for all ‘science officers’). The most interesting part of her is that she’s a joined Trill. That means that she’s actually two beings: an effectively immortal symbiote (Dax) paired with a humanoid Trill voluntary host (Jadzia). In her past lives Dax has been an artist, an engineer, a diplomat, a father and a mother. So there’s a fine line where Dax has to live in balance of the two personalities inhabiting her body. There’s a lot of development of what exactly it means in her species to be joined with a symbiote and what it doesn’t. Dax is fantastic because the way she’s portrayed is very progressive. She’s effectively transgender and beyond normative sexuality. She doesn’t care what anyone thinks about her. She just does what she does. She also had the first lesbian kiss on TV, and it was pretty controversial at the time. Note: TOS had some firsts too, such as the first interracial kiss on TV, but TNG didn’t.
4. Julian Bashir is the medical officer, ambitious and arrogant. DS9 is the only Star Trek series where the doctor gets to demonstrate his medical abilities. Bones in TOS was more old-fashioned, cantankerous and a foil for Spock because he was emotional rather than logical. Pulaski (TNG) was more of that, and Crusher was more the mother of Wesley and friend of Troi than fully idealized for her medical abilities (a few minor exceptions and the major exception being season 5, episode 16). Bashir has to wrestle with the fact that he’s genetically engineered (banned in the Federation because of the eugenics wars, elements of which come up in almost every Star Trek series).
5. Miles O’Brien, Keiko, and Worf are three characters/actors that come over from TNG. I don’t have much to say about them except that Miles and Keiko are somewhat comic relief (when horrible things aren’t happening to Miles). Worf has to continue to wrestle with his loyalty to the Klingon empire in the latter half of the series.
Bajor:
1. Kira Nerys is the liaison officer between the Bajoran government and Starfleet. She fought as a resistance fighter against the Cardassian occupation. She is deeply spiritual to the point that she finds herself frequently caught in a struggle between her real life obligations and her religious beliefs.
2. Odo is a shapeshifter, but he’s on the good side. In the last decade of the Cardassian war, a bunch of goo was found in space, and a Bajoran scientist under Cardassian rule slowly discovered what he was and helped raise Odo until he grew into sentience. He was one of a hundred young changelings sent out into the galaxy by the Founders. He believes strongly in order but has difficulty squaring his reality with the strict rules and hierarchy of the Founders in the later seasons.
3. Winn is basically the Bajoran equivalent of a Catholic cardinal. She is zealous and regressive. She will do anything to do what she perceives as what the Prophets wants.
Ferengi: Before I go on to the specific characters, I should talk about the Ferengi as a whole. They were first introduced in TNG and supposed to be the big bad foil to the Federation, hyper capitalist and bloodthirsty in place of curiosity and luxury gay space communism. That didn’t really work out because the Ferengi never really came off as that threatening. So they got a lot more life and exposure on DS9.
1. Quark is the quintessential Ferengi. He is an ardent believer in the Rules of Acquisition (a mercantile, minimalistic bible/Art of War that’s a series of 200+ commandments like ‘treat workers like family: exploit them’). He runs a bar on DS9, starting in the days of the Cardassians. He is notorious for promoting his self worth and surviving.
2. Nog is Quark’s brother and a miserable Ferengi. He values women’s rights and is compassionate. He is often pitted as a foil to Quark because of how much he’s a loser in Ferengi eyes for doing what any reasonable person would consider a good or nice thing.
3. Rom is Nog’s son and undergoes a lot of change for what seems to be a side/comical character. He goes from being very Ferengi and on Quark’s side to Nog’s and joining Starfleet. He serves as a foil to Jake throughout the series. Nog is Ferengi to Jake’s humanity at the beginning, and later Nog is Starfleet and ordered to Jake’s lackadaisical and creative pursuits.
Cardassians:
1. Gul Dukat is the closest thing to persistent antagonist in all of the Star Trek series. He was the governor for Bajor, and, though the Cardassians have withdrawn, frequently finds himself nearby. He is fantastically dynamic, weirdly charming and overpoweringly narcissistic. He believes in himself and nothing else. He is at times a convenient ally to Starfleet, but he ran concentration camps and sides with whoever will give him the most power.
2. Garak is the only Cardassia who lives on DS9. He runs a clothing store on the station and never reveals anything about his origins. His backstory is slowly revealed, but he revels in the mystery. If Gul Dukat is the military side of Cardassia, Garak is the secret police. He’s an onion of deception, lies and subversion. Comically so.
Dominion:
1. The female changeling is the face of the Dominion’s Founders in the last few seasons. I am reluctant to mention her, but it is important because she leads the war effort (uh, that’ll be mentioned in the story) for the Dominion. She is the embodiment of law and order of her strictly controlled empire. She doesn’t tolerate any sort of deviation from her desires by anyone except by other changelings because, in their credo, no changeling harms another (this series’ Checkov’s gun). In fact, she speaks for all of them (minus Odo) because changelings are entirely alien from other societies in that all changelings more or less a part of one super organism.
Why I like DS9 so much:
So, obviously, there’s an overarching plot. And, however much I said I loved the monster-of-the-week plots that Star Trek often uses, this one is exceptional. Not because it’s particularly nuanced, but it is deep for Star Trek, and it doesn’t hold back. It fulfills its themes in a way that TOS doesn’t do and TNG only does in its very last episode.
The most important thing about the series is that the Benjamin is ready to admit the faults of Starfleet. Let’s start with the peace treaty with the Cardassians. It’s Starfleet’s brand of centrist, principled stands. It brings peace and ends a war, undoubtedly good things, but it doesn’t resolve the fundamental problems that created the war in the first place because Starfleet refuses to intervene in Cardassian internal affairs. The refusal to be proactive sets in motion the events for the later seasons of DS9.
Okay, the crux at the center of this series is the paradox of free speech. There are some people who use their free speech to only undermine the free speech of others. They are the types to do whatever they can to convince others they’re right, no matter if it’s in good faith or not. They’ll claim that all ideas need to be presented as equal on the grand scheme of everything, and the moment that they face a contrary minority opinion, they’ll claim that the opponent is unpopular or unnatural in some way that it doesn’t deserve equal representation. Areasonable person cannot engage with their ideas because they’ll switch argumentative tactics in whatever to convince someone when all of their rhetoric is just flashy, not substantive. I suggest you check out Umberto Eco’s list of 14 features of Ur-Fascism, available here (and the whole essay that explains these ideas is here and really worth the read).
One of the most famous quotes is: “When I was a boy, I was taught to think of Englishmen as the five-meal people. They ate more frequently than the poor but sober Italians. Jews are rich and help each other through a secret web of mutual assistance. However, the followers of Ur-Fascism must also be convinced that they can overwhelm the enemies. Thus, by a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak. Fascist governments are condemned to lose wars because they are constitutionally incapable of objectively evaluating the force of the enemy.” Everyone should understand that because it won an election in 2016.
TNG, which really established modern Star Trek, tolerates literally everyone. Starfleet’s philosophy works for (and washes its hands of the consequences of) what they know, the Cardassians, the Klingons, etc., but it’s aggressively useless against those who act in bad faith and seek to do anything to conquer the galaxy, the Dominion. DS9 is the reaction to that. They pull no punches in showing that for Starfleet to continue existing, it cannot tolerate those who seek to militarize it in fear of its enemies (the Dominion and its shapeshifter spies which can perfectly imitate anyone) or restrict any of the rights of the citizens of the Federation. They cannot “destroy paradise to save paradise”, as is excellently demonstrated in season 4, episodes 11 and 12, Homefront and Paradise Lost. In these episodes, Benjamin along with Odo seeks to increase security of Starfleet because of changeling infiltrators, namely taking blood samples. The only problem is the old-school dad of Benjamin who calls it out for what it is: reckless paranoia. When I first saw the episode (I was like 20), I thought Benjamin’s dad was acting ridiculous, but when I watched it again last year, I realized that he’s completely right. This act allows neighbors to denounce each other. It opens the floodgates to the Gestapo stalking through the everyone’s lives, the constant fear of denouncement to the Inquisition for being a jew, etc. In the episodes, it turns out it was a Dominion plot to undermine the democracy of the Federation because they cannot tolerate free will (check out the essay by Eco). That is the Dominion: every act and decision is mandated by the Founders through the Vorta.
Now, before anyone accuses me of hypocrisy because DS9 introduces the first pure warship (the Defiant) to add to the starships of Starfleet where they had only had multipurpose, scientific research or commerce ships, I don’t think it’s bad. They must accept an active role in combatting the enemy, but they must also do it for the right reasons (check out season 7, episode 23, Extreme Measures for a Starfleet response to the American use of atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki).
I’m not going to go into all the story because I think it best anyone interested watch the show. Some of the episodes suck, but most of them are good, and some are excellent. But I will mention three story points and a kinda thematic element.
First is season 3, episode 26, The Adversary. A changeling spy has infiltrated the Defiant and is going to destroy the Defiant and kill the protagonists while they’re on board. This is where the series’ Checkov’s gun comes into play, as in Odo has to choose between saving all of his friends and killing the other changeling. The Founders frame the choice as loyalty to his race or a complete betrayal. All they want to do is bring order to chaos, and so Odo’s choice of stopping the plot is a corruption of the super organism.
Before I go on, I wanna talk bout the thematic element. The Dominion is depicted, through their use of absolute control of their sector of space. They justify their intolerance as making sure that they are never the oppressed again. To this end, Jem’Hadar can’t be anything but bellicose and short-sighted because they’re that way from birth (a complete change from TNG’s philosophy of anyone can be saved), obey the Founders (their gods) without question and will die (because they don’t get Ketracel-white if they don’t obey every order, a parallel to the use of methamphetamines in WW2). Check out season 3, episode 6, The Abandoned; season 4, episode 23, The Abandoned, and season 6, episode 2, Rocks and Shoals for episodes about this.
The philosophy of the Dominion is that everyone is a literal instrument, so much so that the Jem’Hadar who pilot their warships know absolutely nothing about what’s going on. It’s up to the Vorta leading them to give out orders, which they follow literally blindly. Also these warships literally suicidally run themselves into the enemy when they are about to be destroyed (another parallel with WW2 and the Kamikaze pilots). The rest of the Founders of the Dominion will not harm Odo, even though he is on the opposite side, because he is one of them. Either they have genetically reprogrammed themselves so much that they cannot understand why one of their own would side with the enemy or because they drank the kool-aid and believe that he is a Founder no matter what, even if it runs opposite to their self-interest.
The second story point is the Klingon invasion of Cardassia. I’m going to gloss over a bunch of things, but the Klingons invade Cardassia at a point at which there is a lot of upheaval in the government. Gul Dukat prevails and becomes the new face of Cardassia and becomes the sole ally of the Dominion in the alpha quadrant, enabling the Dominion assault on the Federation. I bring this up because it highlights the problem with the TNG: the Dominion isn’t afraid to take advantage of Starfleet’s policy of non-interference.
The last story point is the ending. In Star Trek, the ending and the last season of each series is usually pretty bad. In TOS, it’s just kinda a mediocre episode. In TNG, it’s great in my opinion, but the last two seasons are god awful because the writers ran out of ideas. In DS9, the last season isn’t that interesting for the most part, and its best episodes are only good (okay, there are a few gems like season 7, episode 9, Covenant where Gul Dukat can’t help himself but sleep with the married women of his cult).
Okay, so the story is building up to Gul Dukat summoning the Bajoran devil, the Pah-Wraiths. Winn, now the Bajoran pope (Kai), helps him because that’s her only way of proving that the Prophets are actually against the Emissary, who disagrees with her about her orthodoxy. I’m not going to talk about the last episode, but I think, like all serious matters in Star Trek, it’s not executed well (after the part where Winn kills her cardinals to help Gul Dukat because I like how that’s done) and a bit cheesy. But the point is that Dukat’s God is himself. Winn’s god is being right even if that means changing what correct means.
I love this series because it asks every character to be completely honest with themselves. Okay, the one exception is Ezri Dax. For the last season, they switch actresses for Jadzia. In the last episode of season 6, the writers hastily come up with some excuse for her to die, and they get some other actress. It really ruins the story and thematic elements of the series (I’m not going to go into depth about it, but you can read up on it on your own). With that covered, if you watch DS9, I beg you to watch it with a critical eye and ask always ‘what God does this character serve?’ which leads the question of ‘who is my God and what do I do for him/her/them/it?’
August 3, 2019
The Next Generation
Introduction
I was thinking about the difference between creative writing and essay writing. And where does this sort of blog post fit in? So I’ve decided I’m going to lead with the conclusion that I’ll explain at the end: The Next Generation (TNG) at its best (not always) tries to answer the question ‘what is the meaning of life?’ by examining all the ways the question can be asked. It explores the virtues of liberalism, and while it shows the value of social progress, it fails to acknowledge the paradox of unfettered freedom (granting equal rights to those who wish to deny you those rights).
That was a mouthful and poorly constructed sentence, but second drafts are for losers. I wrote a long description of characters and themes, but it’s a bit long winded. I’ll include it at the end, but here’s what I want to say:
If you want to learn what TNG is about, watch The Measure of a Man. It involves Data, an android and is pretty much a very good computer attached to a complete mechanical body. He has no goal and serves with the crew to explore the universe. A scientist has decided that he should more or less dissect Data in order to build others so that their superior abilities can help Starfleet and humanity in their exploration.
Long story short, there is a space trial, where the the characters must debate at what point Data may and must be called another form of life and not just a machine. It seems like such a passé idea now, but if you look at it in the context of even 10 years ago, it seems controversial. Then keep in mind it was written more than 30 years ago. Okay, yes, it’s basically the idea behind Caves of Steel (one of my favorite books), but it places the argument in a more pure, platonic setting of a trial.
Okay, now I’m now going to give you all the nitty gritty. I would most like to talk about the plot, but to get there I’m going to give an overview and talk about characters.
The basics:
The show takes place roughly a century after TOS, and it has taken that time to formalize practically everything. But, like its predecessor, the show is about a crew of mostly humans on a starship as it explores space. However, all the details are examined. Now you have the Federation (also its charter as conditions on membership), the prime directive and food replicators. The Federation is separate from Starfleet (whose Enterprise is the ship we follow), and different planets have their own starships. The only one that’s really talked about is the Vulcan Science Directive.
The characters:
Let’s talk about the main characters, and I’m going to skip a few because I want to keep this short… well, medium, not too long.
The captain is Jean-Luc Picard, played by Patrick Stewart, the most highly billed actor in any Star Trek. He’s supposed to be the philosopher king or, rather, philosopher captain. He is very well read and very thoughtful. In one episode, he takes over for a diplomat. He always stands up for the Federation’s values, namely that all intelligent life must be respected and preserved, and that diversity and uniqueness is important. What is the meaning of life for him? He wants to explore, find out the diversity of life and study history (amateur archeology being his hobby).
Rivaling him as most important character is Data. Data is an android, the only one of his kind. He’s also a lieutenant commander (because they use navy/military ranks for some unknown reason). He’s like Spock somewhat, in that he’s a perfect calculating machine and is enormously strong. He’s unlike Spock in that he has no emotions, and he spends the series trying to become human. What is the meaning of life for him? He wants to become human. He wants to have children and have weaknesses.
Deanna Troi is the ship’s psychologist. She is half betazoid and therefore empathic. She can’t read minds, but she can feel people’s emotions. That is her domain, in that she cares a lot about how people feel and react with each other. I’m going to go on a tangent now because this may seem a bit nebulous (as if everything already isn’t). Her abilities change depending on how the writers feel. Sometimes she knows someone is lying, sometimes she doesn’t and what could’ve been resolved in two minutes becomes a whole episode, and her abilities are strangely quantified. What I mean by that is that Data, who doesn’t normally feel emotions, gets an ‘emotion chip’, and all of a sudden she can feel him. She is at the same time both an interesting character and the most problematic because her ability implies universality among humanoid species (if I recall correctly there are some nonhumanoid species she can read and some humanoid species she can’t, again writer dependent). And I would criticize that more except it’s actually addressed. And with that same thought process applied, you can guess that Data gets similar emotions because humanoids will create what they know, just that emotions are not understood yet (despite it being the central characteristic of the betazoids). So, as I have asked for all other characters, how does she look for meaning in life? If you’ll notice, all of the main characters will have similar goals because they’re Starfleet. That isn’t too relevant in TNG but will be relevant in Deep Space 9. She wants harmony and personal felicity between people. That may seem a little vacuous, but it’s while she explores the galaxy. Her career is on her mind, and part of the meaning of her life is seeing where life takes her.
Worf is the Klingon that serves along with the rest of them in Starfleet. He takes over for Tasha Yar as the security officer… and her story is kinda interesting, but she died after the first season (while Worf gets continually dunked on because his answer is always force and that’s no good in TNG) so most of her story didn’t get developed until much later. Yada yada yada, Worf has a longer character arc, especially in the later seasons. Despite being raised on Earth, he can’t give up his Klingon heritage. In certain ways, he fetishizes Klingon culture and reveres it to a degree other Klingons don’t. But on the other hand, his faith in Klingon religion and ritual unifies the empire. Speaking of which, that’s the main question for him. The Klingon equivalent of Jesus, Kahless, comes back, but it turns out he’s a clone from some DNA they have. He has a choice, whether he believes what is more important, authenticity or pragmatism. That is, whether he should denounce Kahless because he is not evidence of the genuine and miraculous afterlife, or should he worry more about the Klingon empire uniting behind their returned prophet.
Wesley Crusher is the last one I’m going to talk about. He’s the son of one of the officers and is allowed to apprentice as someone important. I don’t quite remember what seasons they are, but some seasons he appears, some seasons he doesn’t. I mention him because there’s this weird relationship of sons and fathers, both between Crusher and Picard and between Riker (the first officer I didn’t mention) and Picard too, where Crusher is the kid, young and stupid, Riker is the 30-ish man, bold and aspiring, and Picard is the wise man, older and more philosophical. I mention Crusher especially because the seventh season kinda sucks, but Crusher gets a conclusion that matches with the themes of the series. The wanderer, an alien of seemingly infinite knowledge, recruits him into exploring the universe in ways that are far beyond human capabilities. He finds his purpose in the universe.
I’m sorry to skip Riker, Geordi LaForge, Beverly Crusher and Guinan, but chest la vie. Guinan gets half of her character development in one of the movies, so uh, it would have to be long if I didn’t skip over it.
The plot:
TNG’s first season is awful and boring, but it lays down some of the ground for the better seasons, except for the second episode. Never, ever watch the second episode.
Anyway, back to the first episode (and letting anything else go to waste), the crew of the Enterprise go to a planet on the outer reaches of the Federation. On the way there, the ship is intercepted by a power they later recognize as originating from a being of unimaginable power, Q, who can cause anything at all to happen with a snap of his fingers. Q states that Jean-Luc is on trial for the human race because of all the atrocities they have committed, dating back to what was considered the worst time for humanity, between now (the early 20th century) for a century, when there were (will be? would be?) nuclear wars, eugenics wars and great inequality.
So, I said most of the ideas/background of Star Trek isn’t really covered in TOS, but it’s explored a lot more in depth here and in DS9. Human society was (will be/would be) devastated, but they were saved and slowly got to where they would be with the help of the Vulcans and the desire to explore and better themselves.
Anyway, it’s mostly a sideshow. A weakness in having a team of writers and having the story written over such a long time that very few long-term plans pay off. One of them is whether Q is impulsive and bored, given how boring omnipotence and eternal life is, or whether he’s cunning and has a long term plan, which is what the first and last episode of TNG would have us think. Every other episode would have us think he’s arrogant, cocky and kinda stupid.
There are two other big plot threads, the Klingons and the Borg. As far as the Klingons, you can get it mostly from the TOS part of this blog series and the part about Worf. The main idea is that they are searching for an identity in a universe where they’ve been outclassed by civility. Where do their loyalties lie? Is it with the 24 royal houses? Is it with the empire as a whole? Is it with them as individuals? Oh, by the way, Worf’s father was supposedly responsible for selling out a Klingon base which ended up with a massacre. But it was actually the father of the current leader of the council at the head of the Klingon Empire, and revealing the truth (simultaneously clearing his own name because the son pays for the sins of the father) is the choice Worf has to make.
The difference between this and TOS is that TNG makes very few judgments about cultures. TOS does. Kirk and Spock unabashedly call the Klingons a bunch of barbarians. TNG doesn’t do that. Even though the Klingon empire may be anathema to the Federation, it is another culture, and Picard respects that. He cares more about doing what’s right. There’s more detail to it it, but that’s what I can say without going in to a lot more detail. I’m being long-winded enough.
The Borg are the most intriguing villain of Star Trek, at least until Voyager. The Borg are a technologically advanced species from an entirely unexplored part of the galaxy. They are alien in a way that no one else is. Every single mind in their civilization of every single being is hooked up to their massive gestalt consciousness. Each drone as they are called has the voice and consciousness of every other Borg inside their mind at the same time. So each of them have trillions of other beings inside of them and their beings are inside trillions of others.
However, no drone is differentiable from another. And what they do that’s so threatening enough to make them an antagonist is that they go around the galaxy and absorb entire civilizations with the goal of achieving perfection.
So why is this antithetical to the Federation? Well, besides the Borg trying to absorb them, what do they do? They destroy uniqueness in the name of preserving it by forcing it into their collective. Their motto, after all, is ‘Resistance is Futile’, indicating that they are perfectly conscious of what they are doing. But more than anything else, all of the major powers are roughly on the same level of technological and social development, but the Borg are so powerful and vast that they can easily do what they say. However, humans are almost minor enough to not really warrant the Borg’s attention.
So the Borg only really come up two times. The first is when they invade Earth. They assimilate Picard to be their mouthpiece… in order to make the people of Earth more at peace with their upcoming assimilation. It’s pretty early on, but, uh, that doesn’t seem very Borg-like? I’m not sure.
The more important episode happens substantially later when a Borg ship crashes, and one drone survives and are cut off. The crew of the Enterprise discover a virus that, if the drone gets reabsorbed into the collective, could destroy it all. Because they see the Borg as the closest thing a non-theistic society can conceive of as evil, the decision seems simple. However, as time goes on, Picard develops empathy for the drone and refuses to condemn the whole Borg collective to death, even if they would do the equivalent to humans.
I remember reading the introduction to a Clockwork Orange. Anthony Burgess said in the introduction if artists and writers knew the answers to everything, they wouldn’t be writing. It’s fairly obvious now that I’m older, but it seemed particularly novel and interesting when I was younger. I think that was the philosophy of the writers of TNG. They wanted to ask questions, and it is harder to get any satisfying answers. However indisputably, it shows the better word that we can achieve. with cooperation, care for each other and curiosity.
I was thinking about the difference between creative writing and essay writing. And where does this sort of blog post fit in? So I’ve decided I’m going to lead with the conclusion that I’ll explain at the end: The Next Generation (TNG) at its best (not always) tries to answer the question ‘what is the meaning of life?’ by examining all the ways the question can be asked. It explores the virtues of liberalism, and while it shows the value of social progress, it fails to acknowledge the paradox of unfettered freedom (granting equal rights to those who wish to deny you those rights).
That was a mouthful and poorly constructed sentence, but second drafts are for losers. I wrote a long description of characters and themes, but it’s a bit long winded. I’ll include it at the end, but here’s what I want to say:
If you want to learn what TNG is about, watch The Measure of a Man. It involves Data, an android and is pretty much a very good computer attached to a complete mechanical body. He has no goal and serves with the crew to explore the universe. A scientist has decided that he should more or less dissect Data in order to build others so that their superior abilities can help Starfleet and humanity in their exploration.
Long story short, there is a space trial, where the the characters must debate at what point Data may and must be called another form of life and not just a machine. It seems like such a passé idea now, but if you look at it in the context of even 10 years ago, it seems controversial. Then keep in mind it was written more than 30 years ago. Okay, yes, it’s basically the idea behind Caves of Steel (one of my favorite books), but it places the argument in a more pure, platonic setting of a trial.
Okay, now I’m now going to give you all the nitty gritty. I would most like to talk about the plot, but to get there I’m going to give an overview and talk about characters.
The basics:
The show takes place roughly a century after TOS, and it has taken that time to formalize practically everything. But, like its predecessor, the show is about a crew of mostly humans on a starship as it explores space. However, all the details are examined. Now you have the Federation (also its charter as conditions on membership), the prime directive and food replicators. The Federation is separate from Starfleet (whose Enterprise is the ship we follow), and different planets have their own starships. The only one that’s really talked about is the Vulcan Science Directive.
The characters:
Let’s talk about the main characters, and I’m going to skip a few because I want to keep this short… well, medium, not too long.
The captain is Jean-Luc Picard, played by Patrick Stewart, the most highly billed actor in any Star Trek. He’s supposed to be the philosopher king or, rather, philosopher captain. He is very well read and very thoughtful. In one episode, he takes over for a diplomat. He always stands up for the Federation’s values, namely that all intelligent life must be respected and preserved, and that diversity and uniqueness is important. What is the meaning of life for him? He wants to explore, find out the diversity of life and study history (amateur archeology being his hobby).
Rivaling him as most important character is Data. Data is an android, the only one of his kind. He’s also a lieutenant commander (because they use navy/military ranks for some unknown reason). He’s like Spock somewhat, in that he’s a perfect calculating machine and is enormously strong. He’s unlike Spock in that he has no emotions, and he spends the series trying to become human. What is the meaning of life for him? He wants to become human. He wants to have children and have weaknesses.
Deanna Troi is the ship’s psychologist. She is half betazoid and therefore empathic. She can’t read minds, but she can feel people’s emotions. That is her domain, in that she cares a lot about how people feel and react with each other. I’m going to go on a tangent now because this may seem a bit nebulous (as if everything already isn’t). Her abilities change depending on how the writers feel. Sometimes she knows someone is lying, sometimes she doesn’t and what could’ve been resolved in two minutes becomes a whole episode, and her abilities are strangely quantified. What I mean by that is that Data, who doesn’t normally feel emotions, gets an ‘emotion chip’, and all of a sudden she can feel him. She is at the same time both an interesting character and the most problematic because her ability implies universality among humanoid species (if I recall correctly there are some nonhumanoid species she can read and some humanoid species she can’t, again writer dependent). And I would criticize that more except it’s actually addressed. And with that same thought process applied, you can guess that Data gets similar emotions because humanoids will create what they know, just that emotions are not understood yet (despite it being the central characteristic of the betazoids). So, as I have asked for all other characters, how does she look for meaning in life? If you’ll notice, all of the main characters will have similar goals because they’re Starfleet. That isn’t too relevant in TNG but will be relevant in Deep Space 9. She wants harmony and personal felicity between people. That may seem a little vacuous, but it’s while she explores the galaxy. Her career is on her mind, and part of the meaning of her life is seeing where life takes her.
Worf is the Klingon that serves along with the rest of them in Starfleet. He takes over for Tasha Yar as the security officer… and her story is kinda interesting, but she died after the first season (while Worf gets continually dunked on because his answer is always force and that’s no good in TNG) so most of her story didn’t get developed until much later. Yada yada yada, Worf has a longer character arc, especially in the later seasons. Despite being raised on Earth, he can’t give up his Klingon heritage. In certain ways, he fetishizes Klingon culture and reveres it to a degree other Klingons don’t. But on the other hand, his faith in Klingon religion and ritual unifies the empire. Speaking of which, that’s the main question for him. The Klingon equivalent of Jesus, Kahless, comes back, but it turns out he’s a clone from some DNA they have. He has a choice, whether he believes what is more important, authenticity or pragmatism. That is, whether he should denounce Kahless because he is not evidence of the genuine and miraculous afterlife, or should he worry more about the Klingon empire uniting behind their returned prophet.
Wesley Crusher is the last one I’m going to talk about. He’s the son of one of the officers and is allowed to apprentice as someone important. I don’t quite remember what seasons they are, but some seasons he appears, some seasons he doesn’t. I mention him because there’s this weird relationship of sons and fathers, both between Crusher and Picard and between Riker (the first officer I didn’t mention) and Picard too, where Crusher is the kid, young and stupid, Riker is the 30-ish man, bold and aspiring, and Picard is the wise man, older and more philosophical. I mention Crusher especially because the seventh season kinda sucks, but Crusher gets a conclusion that matches with the themes of the series. The wanderer, an alien of seemingly infinite knowledge, recruits him into exploring the universe in ways that are far beyond human capabilities. He finds his purpose in the universe.
I’m sorry to skip Riker, Geordi LaForge, Beverly Crusher and Guinan, but chest la vie. Guinan gets half of her character development in one of the movies, so uh, it would have to be long if I didn’t skip over it.
The plot:
TNG’s first season is awful and boring, but it lays down some of the ground for the better seasons, except for the second episode. Never, ever watch the second episode.
Anyway, back to the first episode (and letting anything else go to waste), the crew of the Enterprise go to a planet on the outer reaches of the Federation. On the way there, the ship is intercepted by a power they later recognize as originating from a being of unimaginable power, Q, who can cause anything at all to happen with a snap of his fingers. Q states that Jean-Luc is on trial for the human race because of all the atrocities they have committed, dating back to what was considered the worst time for humanity, between now (the early 20th century) for a century, when there were (will be? would be?) nuclear wars, eugenics wars and great inequality.
So, I said most of the ideas/background of Star Trek isn’t really covered in TOS, but it’s explored a lot more in depth here and in DS9. Human society was (will be/would be) devastated, but they were saved and slowly got to where they would be with the help of the Vulcans and the desire to explore and better themselves.
Anyway, it’s mostly a sideshow. A weakness in having a team of writers and having the story written over such a long time that very few long-term plans pay off. One of them is whether Q is impulsive and bored, given how boring omnipotence and eternal life is, or whether he’s cunning and has a long term plan, which is what the first and last episode of TNG would have us think. Every other episode would have us think he’s arrogant, cocky and kinda stupid.
There are two other big plot threads, the Klingons and the Borg. As far as the Klingons, you can get it mostly from the TOS part of this blog series and the part about Worf. The main idea is that they are searching for an identity in a universe where they’ve been outclassed by civility. Where do their loyalties lie? Is it with the 24 royal houses? Is it with the empire as a whole? Is it with them as individuals? Oh, by the way, Worf’s father was supposedly responsible for selling out a Klingon base which ended up with a massacre. But it was actually the father of the current leader of the council at the head of the Klingon Empire, and revealing the truth (simultaneously clearing his own name because the son pays for the sins of the father) is the choice Worf has to make.
The difference between this and TOS is that TNG makes very few judgments about cultures. TOS does. Kirk and Spock unabashedly call the Klingons a bunch of barbarians. TNG doesn’t do that. Even though the Klingon empire may be anathema to the Federation, it is another culture, and Picard respects that. He cares more about doing what’s right. There’s more detail to it it, but that’s what I can say without going in to a lot more detail. I’m being long-winded enough.
The Borg are the most intriguing villain of Star Trek, at least until Voyager. The Borg are a technologically advanced species from an entirely unexplored part of the galaxy. They are alien in a way that no one else is. Every single mind in their civilization of every single being is hooked up to their massive gestalt consciousness. Each drone as they are called has the voice and consciousness of every other Borg inside their mind at the same time. So each of them have trillions of other beings inside of them and their beings are inside trillions of others.
However, no drone is differentiable from another. And what they do that’s so threatening enough to make them an antagonist is that they go around the galaxy and absorb entire civilizations with the goal of achieving perfection.
So why is this antithetical to the Federation? Well, besides the Borg trying to absorb them, what do they do? They destroy uniqueness in the name of preserving it by forcing it into their collective. Their motto, after all, is ‘Resistance is Futile’, indicating that they are perfectly conscious of what they are doing. But more than anything else, all of the major powers are roughly on the same level of technological and social development, but the Borg are so powerful and vast that they can easily do what they say. However, humans are almost minor enough to not really warrant the Borg’s attention.
So the Borg only really come up two times. The first is when they invade Earth. They assimilate Picard to be their mouthpiece… in order to make the people of Earth more at peace with their upcoming assimilation. It’s pretty early on, but, uh, that doesn’t seem very Borg-like? I’m not sure.
The more important episode happens substantially later when a Borg ship crashes, and one drone survives and are cut off. The crew of the Enterprise discover a virus that, if the drone gets reabsorbed into the collective, could destroy it all. Because they see the Borg as the closest thing a non-theistic society can conceive of as evil, the decision seems simple. However, as time goes on, Picard develops empathy for the drone and refuses to condemn the whole Borg collective to death, even if they would do the equivalent to humans.
I remember reading the introduction to a Clockwork Orange. Anthony Burgess said in the introduction if artists and writers knew the answers to everything, they wouldn’t be writing. It’s fairly obvious now that I’m older, but it seemed particularly novel and interesting when I was younger. I think that was the philosophy of the writers of TNG. They wanted to ask questions, and it is harder to get any satisfying answers. However indisputably, it shows the better word that we can achieve. with cooperation, care for each other and curiosity.
July 25, 2019
The Original Series
Dear Reader,
I had a hard time deciding which series I was going to write about first, so I decided to do it chronologically, so here we are. I almost wanted to go with the Next Generation and do this series last. I hope some people understand why I’d feel that way, but anyway, let’s go forward.
A little background. The original series (TOS) debuted in the 60s, at the height of golden age Sci Fi. The first season and especially the first few episodes are really like their times. So if you’ve never seen trek before, I highly suggest at a minimum you start with the latter half of season 1. Especially the pilot, it feels like you’ve travelled in time back to the 60s. While if you watch most other episodes it’s like you’re only going back to the 80s-90s (despite being made in the 60s).
I don’t know the details, but, as far as I know, there was a lot of friction between CBS and Gene Roddenberry. I am too lazy to research this stuff, but there are at least some documentaries on Netflix, and I’m sure you can get a lot from wikipedia and such. Anyway, according to my understanding, Roddenberry had an idea for a show that was supposed to be humans that have moved beyond the problems we have now. But, just like we discovered with cancer in the 1980s, getting the answers to our current questions leads only to more later. So going out into the universe has created even more questions and just exploration of brand new mysteries and concepts, whatever truth may be out there. Also (and probably for this reason), the show was fairly progressive with its casting of women and people of color. It is so progressive, in fact, is why the casting is more progressive than a lot of modern television.
Anyway, this conflict is why the first episodes suck. CBS wanted more of what was considered Sci-fi back then with rockets and deceptive alien races. Roddenberry wanted things more like Spock (who isn’t even in the episode), the (half) Vulcan who’s beyond emotions and a nearly perfect calculating machine.
So, now I will go on to the cast. Because that’s the most important part of Star Trek. Except for some of Voyager and some of Deep Space 9, the show is a monster-of-the-week thing, just like the first few seasons of the X-Files. Well, this series has a problem on that front, and you can see it in how the characters are written. They are incredibly inconsistent from the 1st to the 2nd season. They smooth out a bit once you get there. They are mostly decided by the late 1st season (though not entirely)/2nd season, and the series figures out what it wants to be by then. So I’m gonna describe it from then.
The two biggest characters are Kirk and Spock. Kirk is very emotional and is an embodiment of masculinity. He always stands up for the crew and right thing. He may not take the safest, easiest way to get to the right place, but he always ends up there. A problem that’s pretty obvious is that there are a lot of 60s values channeled through him, especially how women are treated.
Spock is nothing like that. He and Kirk agree usually on the end point and idea, but they hardly ever arrive there by the same means. Leonard Nimoy also added the Vulcan salute, which he got from Judaism. He is also physically superior and has a special trick to instantly incapacitate an enemy, and he is able to instantly evaluate something (like how long it will take a towel to dry or whatever). The Vulcans aren’t emotionless machines who operate only on logic, but they feel them intensely. However, they have decided to suppress them and cultivate their logic so that they can move beyond their problems. If I sound a bit repetitive now, it’s because the Vulcans are supposed to be an extreme example of logic over emotion that goes into contrast with the Klingons (more on them later).
So why are these two characters important? Because they represent all the thematic elements in the series. Every problem can be approached with the appropriate amount of empathy, understanding, thinking and resolution. Force is never needed to resolve
Okay, there are a few other minor characters. First is Bones, the ship’s doctor. He really doesn’t like what he sees as Spock’s lack of emotions because he sees it as a lack of empathy. It is somewhat of an antiquated thought that machines can’t care about things. The emotion is carried on a little bit to the early seasons of The Next Generation. The other three characters that we see a decent amount is Uhura, Checkov and Scotty. None of them really do much or get much characterization. And as much as I said the characters are important, Kirk and Spock are most of the show, and if you see a random book that isn’t one of those five who wears a red shirt and goes on an away mission, they’re going to die from space enemy. That’s the source of jokes about red shirts.
Okay, I want to talk about the technology. Each Star Trek series handles technology in an interesting way. TOS, in retrospect, is the least interesting. But taken into the context of its origins, it’s the most interesting because it takes a ton of tropes and turns them on their heads. The transporter, originally used because they didn’t have the budget to show rockets going up and down from planets, turns into its own thing. What does it say? Well, first off, there’s no longer this great consumption of resources. A rocket, especially a re-usable golden-age-sci-fi one, is all about mankind’s domination over nature. Humans are able to overcome gravity by burning a lot of resources. A transporter means mankind is working in harmony with the forces of the universe.
In line with that is all the offensive weaponry. The starship has what they call the phasers, and people carry around phasers too. Uh, don’t think about it too much. Anyway, both of these are thought of and used both for their ability to destroy as their ability to wound, incapacitate or help (for example to destroy a door that’s in the way).
The next item is the communicator. It’s basically a glorified walkie-talkie that works over vast distances. It isn’t innovative because the radio’s an easy concept for a generation that came right after WW2. However, everyone who goes away on a mission has one. It’s a nice step to show that everyone on a starship is valued (uh, except those red shirts apparently).
The last thing I want to talk about is the computer. Like the other inventions, it changes a lot from series to series (and that’s why I talk about them). The computer can do calculations faster and better than Spock, but it’s also capable of inferences and answering most any question. Such as, if we do this, and they do that, what will be the outcome? Some things to laugh about because this was made in the 60s is some of the hilariously dated technology. The computer prints things on tapes (because somehow they could envision this all but not the transistor or lasers), and people have to fill out forms on clipboards.
Okay, finally, probably the traditionally most important part, the plot. Nothing up until now describes what actually happens in the stories, just the background. Well, the plot isn’t particularly present. The stories are at most 2-parters, but the vast majority are one-offs. The closest thing you can see is the conflict between the Federation and the Klingons. Also there are the Romulans.
The Klingons are basically what the Federation isn’t. There are two ways to see them (in TOS). They are either the space soviets, or they’re the opposite of the Vulcans. They are very aggressive and imperial. One example is season 1, episode 26. The Klingons arrive and declare the planet Organia and its inhabitants theirs because they arrived with force. They are the stronger, so therefore they are the winners. The Federation arrive and stand in contrast. Their message is that Organia has to side with them, to give them a choice, because to not side with the Federation is to lose their ability to choose. So you can see that’s kinda bullshit, but the only two choices are either some form of distant colonialism or brutal military oppression. I’m not going to go into the details of what happens in the episode, but that’s the quintessence of the Klingons in the original series.
The Romulans are a brief side-plot. They are distantly related to the Vulcans, so the impact of their appearance (after a hundred year pause where they disappeared into their own space) is that it stokes tensions in the Federation against Spock because he might be secretly one of them. It’s an episode about racism, much like the whole concept of races because a singular thing (oh man, am I gonna have fun with this concept when we get to Deep Space 9).
Okay, so that really doesn’t answer the question either what the story of Star Trek is. I hope you’re beginning to get the point, but I’m gonna talk more about the individual episodes. TOS is known as kinda hilarious for the stupid hijinks and plots. There’s the nazi planet, there’s the gangster planet, there are the space hippies, there’s the mining because of space capitalism planet, there’s the Greek gods planet, etc. A lot of them.
Devil in the Dark (mining for space capitalism) is the first one I’m going to talk about. Kirk and Spock go down to a mining colony that’s having trouble. They want to figure out and resolve the problem. A rock monster attacks and kills a few of the crew. But Kirk, when confronted with it, doesn’t kill it after he has wounded it. Instead, he convinces Spock to mind meld with it (another Vulcan super power) and find out what it wants. It turns out that it’s protecting its eggs in a really long spawning cycle. The miners, in their zeal to hit their quotas and sell enough rocks, were killing the eggs and encroaching on the species’ habitat. It’s not a particularly innovative message, but it’s more nuanced than what I would expect from 60s television. However, the message is clear: problems need not be resolved with relentless greed or aggression lest there be nothing left besides us. Remember, this was created during the Cold War when the desire to defeat the Soviets was greater than any concept of conserving what we have on Earth or caring about diversity.
I think I’ve said all I wanted to about TOS. I could analyze more episodes or discuss the general messages, but TOS isn’t that great of a show. It was innovative and amazing for its concepts and because it asked questions about the universe that weren’t Heinlein or War of the Worlds. It also opened up the possibilities for later shows (and maybe when I’ve watched the first two seasons of Discovery, I can talk about why it isn’t really Star Trek for me). The show has lots of flaws, including kinda boring or repetitive plots. But it showed that there was so much potential out there for people to explore.
With all the other series I will end the post by suggesting some episodes. I have a harder time with that because I like most of the episodes about the same, but here are some of my favorite: Season 3, Episode 10: for the world is hollow and I have touched the sky. I like it because it’s about compassion in a way that predicts a lot of future sci-fi plots about computers protecting humans from themselves. Season 3, episode 5, and the children shall lead is kinda fun and funny in a campy way. Season 3, episode 7, is there in truth no beauty? is one of my favorite, and I’ll have a hard time writing a concise summary. It’s contemplative and takes one of the few breaks the series gets from humanoid aliens.
Most of what I will call the worst aren’t really too bad (exceptions being the first season), but they are kinda stupid. One is season 2, episode 25, the omega glory, where the big reveal is basically ‘but it was earth all along’. Both the pilot (the cage) and the first real episode (where no man has gone before) are both pretty bad and unenjoyable. Surprisingly, the last episode isn’t bad.
Anyway, until next week (or whenever I get around to The Next Generation)!
I had a hard time deciding which series I was going to write about first, so I decided to do it chronologically, so here we are. I almost wanted to go with the Next Generation and do this series last. I hope some people understand why I’d feel that way, but anyway, let’s go forward.
A little background. The original series (TOS) debuted in the 60s, at the height of golden age Sci Fi. The first season and especially the first few episodes are really like their times. So if you’ve never seen trek before, I highly suggest at a minimum you start with the latter half of season 1. Especially the pilot, it feels like you’ve travelled in time back to the 60s. While if you watch most other episodes it’s like you’re only going back to the 80s-90s (despite being made in the 60s).
I don’t know the details, but, as far as I know, there was a lot of friction between CBS and Gene Roddenberry. I am too lazy to research this stuff, but there are at least some documentaries on Netflix, and I’m sure you can get a lot from wikipedia and such. Anyway, according to my understanding, Roddenberry had an idea for a show that was supposed to be humans that have moved beyond the problems we have now. But, just like we discovered with cancer in the 1980s, getting the answers to our current questions leads only to more later. So going out into the universe has created even more questions and just exploration of brand new mysteries and concepts, whatever truth may be out there. Also (and probably for this reason), the show was fairly progressive with its casting of women and people of color. It is so progressive, in fact, is why the casting is more progressive than a lot of modern television.
Anyway, this conflict is why the first episodes suck. CBS wanted more of what was considered Sci-fi back then with rockets and deceptive alien races. Roddenberry wanted things more like Spock (who isn’t even in the episode), the (half) Vulcan who’s beyond emotions and a nearly perfect calculating machine.
So, now I will go on to the cast. Because that’s the most important part of Star Trek. Except for some of Voyager and some of Deep Space 9, the show is a monster-of-the-week thing, just like the first few seasons of the X-Files. Well, this series has a problem on that front, and you can see it in how the characters are written. They are incredibly inconsistent from the 1st to the 2nd season. They smooth out a bit once you get there. They are mostly decided by the late 1st season (though not entirely)/2nd season, and the series figures out what it wants to be by then. So I’m gonna describe it from then.
The two biggest characters are Kirk and Spock. Kirk is very emotional and is an embodiment of masculinity. He always stands up for the crew and right thing. He may not take the safest, easiest way to get to the right place, but he always ends up there. A problem that’s pretty obvious is that there are a lot of 60s values channeled through him, especially how women are treated.
Spock is nothing like that. He and Kirk agree usually on the end point and idea, but they hardly ever arrive there by the same means. Leonard Nimoy also added the Vulcan salute, which he got from Judaism. He is also physically superior and has a special trick to instantly incapacitate an enemy, and he is able to instantly evaluate something (like how long it will take a towel to dry or whatever). The Vulcans aren’t emotionless machines who operate only on logic, but they feel them intensely. However, they have decided to suppress them and cultivate their logic so that they can move beyond their problems. If I sound a bit repetitive now, it’s because the Vulcans are supposed to be an extreme example of logic over emotion that goes into contrast with the Klingons (more on them later).
So why are these two characters important? Because they represent all the thematic elements in the series. Every problem can be approached with the appropriate amount of empathy, understanding, thinking and resolution. Force is never needed to resolve
Okay, there are a few other minor characters. First is Bones, the ship’s doctor. He really doesn’t like what he sees as Spock’s lack of emotions because he sees it as a lack of empathy. It is somewhat of an antiquated thought that machines can’t care about things. The emotion is carried on a little bit to the early seasons of The Next Generation. The other three characters that we see a decent amount is Uhura, Checkov and Scotty. None of them really do much or get much characterization. And as much as I said the characters are important, Kirk and Spock are most of the show, and if you see a random book that isn’t one of those five who wears a red shirt and goes on an away mission, they’re going to die from space enemy. That’s the source of jokes about red shirts.
Okay, I want to talk about the technology. Each Star Trek series handles technology in an interesting way. TOS, in retrospect, is the least interesting. But taken into the context of its origins, it’s the most interesting because it takes a ton of tropes and turns them on their heads. The transporter, originally used because they didn’t have the budget to show rockets going up and down from planets, turns into its own thing. What does it say? Well, first off, there’s no longer this great consumption of resources. A rocket, especially a re-usable golden-age-sci-fi one, is all about mankind’s domination over nature. Humans are able to overcome gravity by burning a lot of resources. A transporter means mankind is working in harmony with the forces of the universe.
In line with that is all the offensive weaponry. The starship has what they call the phasers, and people carry around phasers too. Uh, don’t think about it too much. Anyway, both of these are thought of and used both for their ability to destroy as their ability to wound, incapacitate or help (for example to destroy a door that’s in the way).
The next item is the communicator. It’s basically a glorified walkie-talkie that works over vast distances. It isn’t innovative because the radio’s an easy concept for a generation that came right after WW2. However, everyone who goes away on a mission has one. It’s a nice step to show that everyone on a starship is valued (uh, except those red shirts apparently).
The last thing I want to talk about is the computer. Like the other inventions, it changes a lot from series to series (and that’s why I talk about them). The computer can do calculations faster and better than Spock, but it’s also capable of inferences and answering most any question. Such as, if we do this, and they do that, what will be the outcome? Some things to laugh about because this was made in the 60s is some of the hilariously dated technology. The computer prints things on tapes (because somehow they could envision this all but not the transistor or lasers), and people have to fill out forms on clipboards.
Okay, finally, probably the traditionally most important part, the plot. Nothing up until now describes what actually happens in the stories, just the background. Well, the plot isn’t particularly present. The stories are at most 2-parters, but the vast majority are one-offs. The closest thing you can see is the conflict between the Federation and the Klingons. Also there are the Romulans.
The Klingons are basically what the Federation isn’t. There are two ways to see them (in TOS). They are either the space soviets, or they’re the opposite of the Vulcans. They are very aggressive and imperial. One example is season 1, episode 26. The Klingons arrive and declare the planet Organia and its inhabitants theirs because they arrived with force. They are the stronger, so therefore they are the winners. The Federation arrive and stand in contrast. Their message is that Organia has to side with them, to give them a choice, because to not side with the Federation is to lose their ability to choose. So you can see that’s kinda bullshit, but the only two choices are either some form of distant colonialism or brutal military oppression. I’m not going to go into the details of what happens in the episode, but that’s the quintessence of the Klingons in the original series.
The Romulans are a brief side-plot. They are distantly related to the Vulcans, so the impact of their appearance (after a hundred year pause where they disappeared into their own space) is that it stokes tensions in the Federation against Spock because he might be secretly one of them. It’s an episode about racism, much like the whole concept of races because a singular thing (oh man, am I gonna have fun with this concept when we get to Deep Space 9).
Okay, so that really doesn’t answer the question either what the story of Star Trek is. I hope you’re beginning to get the point, but I’m gonna talk more about the individual episodes. TOS is known as kinda hilarious for the stupid hijinks and plots. There’s the nazi planet, there’s the gangster planet, there are the space hippies, there’s the mining because of space capitalism planet, there’s the Greek gods planet, etc. A lot of them.
Devil in the Dark (mining for space capitalism) is the first one I’m going to talk about. Kirk and Spock go down to a mining colony that’s having trouble. They want to figure out and resolve the problem. A rock monster attacks and kills a few of the crew. But Kirk, when confronted with it, doesn’t kill it after he has wounded it. Instead, he convinces Spock to mind meld with it (another Vulcan super power) and find out what it wants. It turns out that it’s protecting its eggs in a really long spawning cycle. The miners, in their zeal to hit their quotas and sell enough rocks, were killing the eggs and encroaching on the species’ habitat. It’s not a particularly innovative message, but it’s more nuanced than what I would expect from 60s television. However, the message is clear: problems need not be resolved with relentless greed or aggression lest there be nothing left besides us. Remember, this was created during the Cold War when the desire to defeat the Soviets was greater than any concept of conserving what we have on Earth or caring about diversity.
I think I’ve said all I wanted to about TOS. I could analyze more episodes or discuss the general messages, but TOS isn’t that great of a show. It was innovative and amazing for its concepts and because it asked questions about the universe that weren’t Heinlein or War of the Worlds. It also opened up the possibilities for later shows (and maybe when I’ve watched the first two seasons of Discovery, I can talk about why it isn’t really Star Trek for me). The show has lots of flaws, including kinda boring or repetitive plots. But it showed that there was so much potential out there for people to explore.
With all the other series I will end the post by suggesting some episodes. I have a harder time with that because I like most of the episodes about the same, but here are some of my favorite: Season 3, Episode 10: for the world is hollow and I have touched the sky. I like it because it’s about compassion in a way that predicts a lot of future sci-fi plots about computers protecting humans from themselves. Season 3, episode 5, and the children shall lead is kinda fun and funny in a campy way. Season 3, episode 7, is there in truth no beauty? is one of my favorite, and I’ll have a hard time writing a concise summary. It’s contemplative and takes one of the few breaks the series gets from humanoid aliens.
Most of what I will call the worst aren’t really too bad (exceptions being the first season), but they are kinda stupid. One is season 2, episode 25, the omega glory, where the big reveal is basically ‘but it was earth all along’. Both the pilot (the cage) and the first real episode (where no man has gone before) are both pretty bad and unenjoyable. Surprisingly, the last episode isn’t bad.
Anyway, until next week (or whenever I get around to The Next Generation)!
July 15, 2019
Why Star Trek is Great
Hello dear readers,
I wanted to write about why I like Star Trek so much and why I think a lot of people could get something out of it. So today I'll be writing about the show in general. In the future, I'll be talking about each of the series.
Anyway, I finally rewatched all of Star Trek in preparation of writing these blog posts. By “all of Star Trek”, I mean The Original Series (TOS), The Next Generation (TNG), Deep Space 9 (DS9) and Voyager (VOY). I’m not including the animated series, Enterprise or the modern series. People who watch them may quibble with what makes up the Star Trek canon, but for me those are the most essential. Also, Enterprise sucks and is awful. Don’t ever watch it.
Star Trek isn’t a far-flung future or a space opera like Dune or Star Wars (near contemporaries). It’s a (somewhat) realistic several centuries in our future. It’s unapologetically utopian, and conflict comes from outside not from within. Imagine all the little problems in life, petty miscommunications or frustrations like bureaucracy, money woes or assholes like dictators or rulers. The Earth is united and in an alliance with various planets called the Federation.
What exactly and who exactly composes the Federation and the others powers isn’t examined in depth in the original series, which is a product of the 60s. I’m going to write a blog post all about the original series, but each of the four series has their own emphasis. But, nevertheless, except for DS9, they all occur on a space ship as it travels between the planets. They generally don’t have overarching plots… and I’ll deal with the exceptions when I get there.
The reason why I like Star Trek so much is it seems to be the only show that consistently wanted to ask philosophical questions. Sometimes they’re entirely abstract, and sometimes they’re really ham-fisted. But, given that I really like Philip K. Dick, the presentation doesn’t matter as much as the idea. So you have some episodes that is basically “this is the Nazi planet. Now we talk about why the Nazis were bad” or you have something that’s like “one character is Klingon and has a hard time adapting to human civilization.”
I guess we should talk about the general structure of things. The Federation includes an alliance of different races. How they contribute or join (or leave) isn’t well defined. In TNG (80s-90s), they define it pretty well. Basically, the world has to be utopian and have all of its problems solved. No sectarian violence. One world government. Equality and just laws. No currency (this wasn’t true in TOS but becomes true for the other three series). The worlds of the Federation benefit from mutual cooperation. The best known one besides Earth is probably Vulcan, home to Spock, by far the most iconic character in Star Trek. He is purely logical and avoids emotions.
There are other empires or collectives that live outside of the federation. The most well known are the Klingons who have the forehead ridges (in everything past TOS. It’s explained in Enterprise, but that’s not real Trek). The Klingons in TOS were space Russians or the devil: vindictive, powerful and ruthless and in later series they were all about might over knowledge. There are the Romulans, which are as cunning and methodical as the Vulcans but evil.
There is much more to talk about in each series, but that’s the general show. What if humans could be better than we are now? Could we find the meaning of life without all these (human) obstacles in our way? What is a life without unneeded suffering?
I often think of the grocery store where I used to go in Florence. In Italy, the clerks and employees don’t smile at you like they do in the United States. Nor do the waiters. They’re expressing the truth of the moment, that working in a grocery store sucks bad. Why should they pretend that it’s any better? Why shouldn’t we accept the truth of existence? If we can accept that, could we imagine a world where we don’t have someone toiling away in their life for no real productive or lasting benefit? Could we imagine a world where everyone is a scientist, an artist, a captain, someone who plants a millions of trees, a video game designer? Life has gone so much beyond a thousand serfs supporting one nobleman. Instead, everyone is a nobleman and can pursue what they are truly best at, whether that is creativity or a really good janitor (I’m looking at you, O’Brien). In the end, it’s a truly progressive vision of the future (especially for the era in which it was originally created), where we can cooperate and direct our resources to provide everyone a utopia instead of the few. I can’t think of any other show that does this, so that’s why I love Star Trek.
I wanted to write about why I like Star Trek so much and why I think a lot of people could get something out of it. So today I'll be writing about the show in general. In the future, I'll be talking about each of the series.
Anyway, I finally rewatched all of Star Trek in preparation of writing these blog posts. By “all of Star Trek”, I mean The Original Series (TOS), The Next Generation (TNG), Deep Space 9 (DS9) and Voyager (VOY). I’m not including the animated series, Enterprise or the modern series. People who watch them may quibble with what makes up the Star Trek canon, but for me those are the most essential. Also, Enterprise sucks and is awful. Don’t ever watch it.
Star Trek isn’t a far-flung future or a space opera like Dune or Star Wars (near contemporaries). It’s a (somewhat) realistic several centuries in our future. It’s unapologetically utopian, and conflict comes from outside not from within. Imagine all the little problems in life, petty miscommunications or frustrations like bureaucracy, money woes or assholes like dictators or rulers. The Earth is united and in an alliance with various planets called the Federation.
What exactly and who exactly composes the Federation and the others powers isn’t examined in depth in the original series, which is a product of the 60s. I’m going to write a blog post all about the original series, but each of the four series has their own emphasis. But, nevertheless, except for DS9, they all occur on a space ship as it travels between the planets. They generally don’t have overarching plots… and I’ll deal with the exceptions when I get there.
The reason why I like Star Trek so much is it seems to be the only show that consistently wanted to ask philosophical questions. Sometimes they’re entirely abstract, and sometimes they’re really ham-fisted. But, given that I really like Philip K. Dick, the presentation doesn’t matter as much as the idea. So you have some episodes that is basically “this is the Nazi planet. Now we talk about why the Nazis were bad” or you have something that’s like “one character is Klingon and has a hard time adapting to human civilization.”
I guess we should talk about the general structure of things. The Federation includes an alliance of different races. How they contribute or join (or leave) isn’t well defined. In TNG (80s-90s), they define it pretty well. Basically, the world has to be utopian and have all of its problems solved. No sectarian violence. One world government. Equality and just laws. No currency (this wasn’t true in TOS but becomes true for the other three series). The worlds of the Federation benefit from mutual cooperation. The best known one besides Earth is probably Vulcan, home to Spock, by far the most iconic character in Star Trek. He is purely logical and avoids emotions.
There are other empires or collectives that live outside of the federation. The most well known are the Klingons who have the forehead ridges (in everything past TOS. It’s explained in Enterprise, but that’s not real Trek). The Klingons in TOS were space Russians or the devil: vindictive, powerful and ruthless and in later series they were all about might over knowledge. There are the Romulans, which are as cunning and methodical as the Vulcans but evil.
There is much more to talk about in each series, but that’s the general show. What if humans could be better than we are now? Could we find the meaning of life without all these (human) obstacles in our way? What is a life without unneeded suffering?
I often think of the grocery store where I used to go in Florence. In Italy, the clerks and employees don’t smile at you like they do in the United States. Nor do the waiters. They’re expressing the truth of the moment, that working in a grocery store sucks bad. Why should they pretend that it’s any better? Why shouldn’t we accept the truth of existence? If we can accept that, could we imagine a world where we don’t have someone toiling away in their life for no real productive or lasting benefit? Could we imagine a world where everyone is a scientist, an artist, a captain, someone who plants a millions of trees, a video game designer? Life has gone so much beyond a thousand serfs supporting one nobleman. Instead, everyone is a nobleman and can pursue what they are truly best at, whether that is creativity or a really good janitor (I’m looking at you, O’Brien). In the end, it’s a truly progressive vision of the future (especially for the era in which it was originally created), where we can cooperate and direct our resources to provide everyone a utopia instead of the few. I can’t think of any other show that does this, so that’s why I love Star Trek.
February 27, 2019
The Infinity gems implies a definitive proof of God
TL;DR: Marvel’s whole universe, though it may seem diverse, is extremely homogenous because it all comes down to the argument of cogito ergo valeo, humans have definitive proof of the afterlife and are welcome to it because they are capable of thought.
The whole story: Hey, I wanna start this off by saying I’m not religious. Like so many of my generation (or the founding fathers), I may be spiritual or deistic. Anyway, because I did Latin and Greek (and because of my general curiosity), I learned some things about the Judaism and Christianity (to clue you in, check out my last name, though I never read the Talmud). I want to start off with a clarification about what I’m going to talk about. Growing up, I heard a lot that usual old person hootenanny, that young people had replaced religion with politics or something like that. I think it’s because a lot of people have two parts to their religion, zealotry and faith. It’s a lot more complicated than that, but I want to simplify it because it serves my purpose. Anyway, I want to deal with the latter a lot more than the former, because zealotry is human, (relatively) simple and understandable, while faith is a matter of accepting that there are unknowns but stating flat out there are answers that you don’t have to find. Obviously, you can see how one feeds the other, but I want to treat this as an academic subject (much like how a language in the classroom never evolves or reacts to the outside world). I know that Marvel has a devil, hell and various gods in it, but let’s make something clear. These are a matter of personal taste and cannot fully describe God (in contrast with god) because they give human characteristics and understandable definition. As a matter of faith and philosophy, God must exist so outside of human perception and existence that any corporeal representation is a matter of metaphor or allegory (much like any classical paintings of the subject or stories like the burning bush, also note that I didn’t talk about Islam above because I know virtually nothing about it).
The reason why God cannot be understood or depicted in way that isn’t metaphorical is because humans interact with God as a medium for things that we cannot understand, and the number one thing we don’t understand is death. Well, we understand most of it, but it’s just the pesky question of what happens specifically to us after death. There is no proof of a soul, and to give one would be to violate faith. Believers now have something in their life that demonstrates their value, but the whole ordeal of the faithful is to conquer doubt and human foibles to allow certainty with no proof. It is a central tenet of Christianity, for example, that we die with only hope for an afterlife in our heart. Miracles may happen, but they cannot be demonstrated, replicated, understood or argued in a scientific way because of this. As an aside, if you are interested in this argument, aliens in fiction are usually one of two ways. They are a manifestation of God or humans. One way that Jesus makes things interesting is that he is the first and only hybrid, half God and half human.
Okay, so how does this relate to the whole Marvel thing and the infinity gems? Okay, so first off, let’s list them: Soul, Time, Space, Mind, Reality, and Power. Now, these are already verging off from “what could be thought of” to “writers not understanding physics” and finally “oh boy, we have to have six stones, so what can we make up?” I mean, the power stone could easily be more understandable as energy, right? And what does the reality stone do that the others don’t? According to wikipedia it’s a gateway to alternate universes, so okay, whatever. Time and space should be one (I mean, guys, this was stuff that was already ancient history by the time this story was written). But whatever, let’s move on to the two that are pertinent to my argument, the soul and mind stones. What’s kinda funny is that these are probably the least explored in the comic (that I did read like 10 years ago or something).
Because of the very name, infinity, there is a connection to the divine and inconceivable. This may be taking a bit of liberty with the source material since Wikipedia is the only source of my understanding of where the stones came from or a lot of the nitty gritty. I, however, believe that the writers at Marvel didn’t conceptualize a whole religion of details around this story,. However, let’s act as someone who only watches the movies or has read the specific cartoon where Thanos assembles his gauntlet. Our knowledge of the infinity stones is that. Hold on, I’m going to go on a tangent real quick. Skip ahead to the next paragraph if you’re really dying to read only the salient points of my thing. As economic professors like to joke, there is no free lunch. Even if you don’t have to pay for your meal, someone does. Energy is kinda the same, and as far as we understand it, there is a limit to it, known as existence. For the same reason that are night sky is not absolutely filled with stars (take that persistent universe theory), we know that if a constellation exists, it must be because there’s dark between all of those stars. Likewise, if we get energy, no matter its source, it has to come from somewhere. Only God can create the infinite (and infinity gems if there truly is no limit to the power that they can draw on) because then there really is a free lunch out there somewhere.
Okay, the mind and spirit gems, here’s the crux of my argument for that whole TL;DR at the beginning. These recognize the human mind because they interact with our perceptions specifically. They leave no scientific (I.E. measurable, repeatable) results, unlike the power stone, which presumably we can measure in terms of watts or newtons or something. A person may say that they play upon the electrical connections in our brain or neurons or something (look, I’m not a doctor, don’t ask me). However, there’s a problem with this. We know that there are aliens in the universe (Thanos himself is one of them), and the changes in perception that the gem(s) act upon are exactly the same for them, no matter differences in biochemistry or whatnot. Even if you stated (rather human-centrically) that all brains must be of the same composition, we have a humongous intra-species difference. Each human perceives things differently, and the gems act in such a way as to create the same impact upon us. The thing is that, central to Christianity, is the existence of a soul (I kinda talked about this earlier). These gems accept as a given that something exists universally across species with consciousness and perception. We can call that our soul because it is precisely as Christianity defines it. And so a soul is the one connection that may exist between intelligences, human and aliens. And then these are infinite stones, so there is the connection between a soul and a god. I am not saying that it is a paradise, but it establishes that there is a God definitively in the Marvel universe.
My conclusion is this, that the way that the stones are constructed is kinda lazy. It implies a very ordered, simplistic universe that conforms to Christian standards of existence because it implies the big one God, the other side of existence that governs all and makes sure that there is justice and an afterlife. While this isn’t a problem in of itself, Marvel doesn’t subscribe necessarily to Christian thought. It’s just that writers, especially in Occident, find themselves very hard pressed to remain within the metaphors that litter our society. They have written themselves into a universe that we know well, that there is necessarily a normative force whose origin is God. No matter how many Scandinavian gods or whatever they put in, there is a higher power and authority because the mind gem recognizes consciousness and implies that humans are worthy of God because we can think. Cogito ergo valeo.
The whole story: Hey, I wanna start this off by saying I’m not religious. Like so many of my generation (or the founding fathers), I may be spiritual or deistic. Anyway, because I did Latin and Greek (and because of my general curiosity), I learned some things about the Judaism and Christianity (to clue you in, check out my last name, though I never read the Talmud). I want to start off with a clarification about what I’m going to talk about. Growing up, I heard a lot that usual old person hootenanny, that young people had replaced religion with politics or something like that. I think it’s because a lot of people have two parts to their religion, zealotry and faith. It’s a lot more complicated than that, but I want to simplify it because it serves my purpose. Anyway, I want to deal with the latter a lot more than the former, because zealotry is human, (relatively) simple and understandable, while faith is a matter of accepting that there are unknowns but stating flat out there are answers that you don’t have to find. Obviously, you can see how one feeds the other, but I want to treat this as an academic subject (much like how a language in the classroom never evolves or reacts to the outside world). I know that Marvel has a devil, hell and various gods in it, but let’s make something clear. These are a matter of personal taste and cannot fully describe God (in contrast with god) because they give human characteristics and understandable definition. As a matter of faith and philosophy, God must exist so outside of human perception and existence that any corporeal representation is a matter of metaphor or allegory (much like any classical paintings of the subject or stories like the burning bush, also note that I didn’t talk about Islam above because I know virtually nothing about it).
The reason why God cannot be understood or depicted in way that isn’t metaphorical is because humans interact with God as a medium for things that we cannot understand, and the number one thing we don’t understand is death. Well, we understand most of it, but it’s just the pesky question of what happens specifically to us after death. There is no proof of a soul, and to give one would be to violate faith. Believers now have something in their life that demonstrates their value, but the whole ordeal of the faithful is to conquer doubt and human foibles to allow certainty with no proof. It is a central tenet of Christianity, for example, that we die with only hope for an afterlife in our heart. Miracles may happen, but they cannot be demonstrated, replicated, understood or argued in a scientific way because of this. As an aside, if you are interested in this argument, aliens in fiction are usually one of two ways. They are a manifestation of God or humans. One way that Jesus makes things interesting is that he is the first and only hybrid, half God and half human.
Okay, so how does this relate to the whole Marvel thing and the infinity gems? Okay, so first off, let’s list them: Soul, Time, Space, Mind, Reality, and Power. Now, these are already verging off from “what could be thought of” to “writers not understanding physics” and finally “oh boy, we have to have six stones, so what can we make up?” I mean, the power stone could easily be more understandable as energy, right? And what does the reality stone do that the others don’t? According to wikipedia it’s a gateway to alternate universes, so okay, whatever. Time and space should be one (I mean, guys, this was stuff that was already ancient history by the time this story was written). But whatever, let’s move on to the two that are pertinent to my argument, the soul and mind stones. What’s kinda funny is that these are probably the least explored in the comic (that I did read like 10 years ago or something).
Because of the very name, infinity, there is a connection to the divine and inconceivable. This may be taking a bit of liberty with the source material since Wikipedia is the only source of my understanding of where the stones came from or a lot of the nitty gritty. I, however, believe that the writers at Marvel didn’t conceptualize a whole religion of details around this story,. However, let’s act as someone who only watches the movies or has read the specific cartoon where Thanos assembles his gauntlet. Our knowledge of the infinity stones is that. Hold on, I’m going to go on a tangent real quick. Skip ahead to the next paragraph if you’re really dying to read only the salient points of my thing. As economic professors like to joke, there is no free lunch. Even if you don’t have to pay for your meal, someone does. Energy is kinda the same, and as far as we understand it, there is a limit to it, known as existence. For the same reason that are night sky is not absolutely filled with stars (take that persistent universe theory), we know that if a constellation exists, it must be because there’s dark between all of those stars. Likewise, if we get energy, no matter its source, it has to come from somewhere. Only God can create the infinite (and infinity gems if there truly is no limit to the power that they can draw on) because then there really is a free lunch out there somewhere.
Okay, the mind and spirit gems, here’s the crux of my argument for that whole TL;DR at the beginning. These recognize the human mind because they interact with our perceptions specifically. They leave no scientific (I.E. measurable, repeatable) results, unlike the power stone, which presumably we can measure in terms of watts or newtons or something. A person may say that they play upon the electrical connections in our brain or neurons or something (look, I’m not a doctor, don’t ask me). However, there’s a problem with this. We know that there are aliens in the universe (Thanos himself is one of them), and the changes in perception that the gem(s) act upon are exactly the same for them, no matter differences in biochemistry or whatnot. Even if you stated (rather human-centrically) that all brains must be of the same composition, we have a humongous intra-species difference. Each human perceives things differently, and the gems act in such a way as to create the same impact upon us. The thing is that, central to Christianity, is the existence of a soul (I kinda talked about this earlier). These gems accept as a given that something exists universally across species with consciousness and perception. We can call that our soul because it is precisely as Christianity defines it. And so a soul is the one connection that may exist between intelligences, human and aliens. And then these are infinite stones, so there is the connection between a soul and a god. I am not saying that it is a paradise, but it establishes that there is a God definitively in the Marvel universe.
My conclusion is this, that the way that the stones are constructed is kinda lazy. It implies a very ordered, simplistic universe that conforms to Christian standards of existence because it implies the big one God, the other side of existence that governs all and makes sure that there is justice and an afterlife. While this isn’t a problem in of itself, Marvel doesn’t subscribe necessarily to Christian thought. It’s just that writers, especially in Occident, find themselves very hard pressed to remain within the metaphors that litter our society. They have written themselves into a universe that we know well, that there is necessarily a normative force whose origin is God. No matter how many Scandinavian gods or whatever they put in, there is a higher power and authority because the mind gem recognizes consciousness and implies that humans are worthy of God because we can think. Cogito ergo valeo.
December 27, 2018
Is the act of writing a statement?
A warning before you start: this is a bit off-the-cuff and not well thought through. Also I didn't check for typos, and, like always, my use of commas and such is abysmal. Caveat emptor (as if you'd pay to read this)!
I hold off on posting too many things in one day because I try to space out the few things I do (that isn’t writing because that’s what I actually spend most of my time doing), but I want to tell you a story. Like most of the fiction I like, it will start with something kinda unrelated and eventually get to the point where you (dear reader) get the title. So forgive me for writing about this two days after the fact. I also am lazy and refuse to do anything on Christmas after spending most of it with family. It’s a good thing that I’m not so misanthropic that some people strangely want to hang out with me (trust me, I don’t get it either).
In fact, that’s the root of today’s post. Next time I’ll talk about Deep Space 9, which I finished rewatching (I think for the third time), but this is about a discussion I had with my brother. I think this is the fundamental difference between us. He went into important and serious things, Engineering, Math and Economics and even got his doctorate in it. I, on the other hand, went into the Arts and Sciences despite being very similar our upbringing. If you’ve read my recent stuff or my book (please do, it’s awesome!), some major sh… stuff happened to me when I was 18. I decided after that point that I should do what I want with whatever was left of my life because I wasn’t anticipating ever getting out into the real world.
Unfortunately, my decision was going to college and growing up because I wanted to demonstrate to others and (most importantly) to myself that my mind still functioned. I didn’t really think about the long term consequences of my decision. All I did was what felt right in the moment, and that was mostly working my butt off and getting (what I will not try to demur on even though I’m usually modest, I promise) stellar grades. However, it was in things that aren’t marketable: Classics (language focused), Italian and Linguistics. And I didn’t do any of that cool career-creating stuff like Speech and Language Pathology (for various reasons, but I was too enamored with Italian at the moment to go into that or a Masters in Linguistics, another subject I can tell a great many stories about).
The conversation began with what I feel is me talking about the general problems with book writing, mostly how little you get paid and transitioning into how you aren’t guaranteed any income. That is a question that I consider often because it seems quite silly that writers should get any money without making it. But, I present to you the counter arguments: professors get a paycheck as long as they do a job, managers get paid. There are few people who are in a position like writers: artists, people who start companies and salespeople. Otherwise you are more or less protected unless the company folds or you are fired for cause, but let’s assume that isn’t it because well, (and this is an important issue), there’s no way to judge writing so there is no way to say if you’re doing a good job or not.
Before I go on about the digression from the digression from the main topic, I feel like that’s an important part of my point above. You have to perform according to certain standards, assuming you aren’t friends with your boss and people care enough. There are a bunch exceptions to this like how a lot of big companies outsource their HR so they don’t have to fire people directly or instead downsizing. So what are the criteria to be a good writer? Is it the elusive creativity? Okay, that can be one, in the abstract, but can you define a book/fiction that is entirely creative? We all build on each other, and just like Newton wrote about calculus as somewhat of an innovation, he was drawing on knowledge that had been there for thousands of years. Edgar Allen Poe wasn’t writing entirely new stories. He was including a certain amount of realism/relatability with the unknown. When we (me included, a first person plural inclusive in Fijian, there’s some Linguistics knowledge bombs on you) ask for creativity, it’s a very specialized term because we want some but not too much. The biggest one is probably culture as in we won’t tolerate something that is remarkably human but too disconnected from us.
This is the same in Sci-fi and Fantasy too, which is kinda funny but completely understandable. Okay, diversion level four or five or whatever, but if we can’t tolerate a foreign but equally human culture, how can we possibly extrapolate something so alien as… actual aliens? I’ve talked about this in my books (I’m pretty sure Manual Automata), but we don’t have exact matches between languages. And the cultures are even more disparate than that. For example, French, Italian and English, despite being incredibly similar languages (compared to non Indoeuropean languages and because they’re modern languages with little verbal conjugation and noun case/number usage), have different words for house, apartment and home. This means how the users of each language imagines where the normal person lives is vastly different, and there are different assumptions about daily life. It’s not groundbreaking to say these things, but I want to share the astonishment of learning that someone who is supposed to be out of the box will be punished for non-conformity. By punished, I mean mostly as far as money/etc. goes. I’ll talk about that later.
Okay, next criteria for succeeding is how well you work on the art, such as anything from the fundamentals like grammar to structural elements like producing the 3-act-play or superliteral items such as adherence or rebuking artistic movements. I probably have the least to say about this than the other categories since it’s (in my opinion) pretty boring, abstract and least tractable without delving into specific things, which I don’t really know. I don’t study those matters, and even as someone that writes little to be commercially acceptable, I write to satisfy my personal thoughts and not because of artistic movements or whatever. But I will talk about grammar stuff (because of the linguist in me).
Grammar is a funny and should be way more of a touchy subject than it is. Right now we have a standard, kinda. There are various forms. I’ll start off with the most strict: academic or scientific writing. Vocabulary and grammar is heavily controlled so that it is understandable not only unambiguously but easily to an international and non-English speaking audience. I experienced this a lot when I took classes at the Università di Firenze. A lot of it would be comprehensible even with a minimal Italian education as long as you understood both the Italian accent and had a general college education in the United States. I’m not going to delve into all the boring little things that they talk about in classrooms, but there are four that I want to talk about (and these terms are mostly my own invention), the aforementioned, writing standard, conversational medium and conversational low.
Writing standard deals mostly with grammar though some syntax. Imagine a video game, this is what’s expected. It can be clunky, but that’s not what it’s concerned with. It’s the ‘art’ or supposed ability of the user of this mode of writing to make it less so. It’s things like capitalizing at the beginning of a sentence, idem for beginning of quotes, when and how to layer quotes, that alternating quotes is a conversation, where to put commas (and the Oxford one too, which is supposedly about free choice between two restrictive styles) and all the rest. It’s very much about nonchalance because you don’t notice when it’s right but you notice when it’s off. Side note: I didn’t learn until I was about 23 or 24 that nonchalance meant knowing a difficult subject so well that you can play off knowledge of any of it as easy. It’s easy to take it to mean cool cucumber when it means something much more detailed and only superficially related. This is what we expect writing to be (such as this blog post). Any correct usage will be regarded as the normal and goes without praise, and incorrect usages (not even errors) are seen as wrong and an indication of my poor education/capabilities. It is largely a formal convention. I’m not going to comment on that until I get to the end of writing styles.
Okay, medium and low conversational English. I’m going to ignore high conversational English because it mostly conforms to writing standard as much as can be in such a different method of expression. Conversational medium holds writing standard as an abstract goal, but it allows some freedom, especially in grammar and syntax. This is everyday conversation between normal folks that don’t necessarily know each other too well. It’s the register you probably use with your parents. A few curse words are allowed (because this in a continuum, let’s say in the middle) but not too many. Sentences may have too many “ands” in lists and such, ungrammatical expressions like “But the man! Eating his lunch!”, etc. Low Conversational, and why I feel like it has to be differentiated, though it is on the same spectrum just at a different point, is because it’s different enough to be worth highlight. I’m talking about the land where new words are spontaneously created to filter into human consciousness and grammar is just a suggestion because ideas come before them. Communication is the main focus of low conversation, and it occupies half of if not more conversation. One invention: AF as in “as fuck” that’s just added so easily to things. That reference may be out of date, but as soon as I stopped being a teenager, I stopped paying attention to this stuff. Another might be considered is dick pics, where a concept has a verbal form, but this may not be a classical, typified, fully constructed idea and more of (what we might consider in this context) an act. Oh, one last one that I really like is when you mix words and movements like “and he went like this” and you say the main act of your sentence by playing an air guitar.
So of these four categories (and there’s a lot more complication that I won’t get into), they go from educated (err, kinda, hold on a second) to less and rigid to fluid. So instead of low and stuff, maybe I should’ve put them on one end as rigid and the other as free flow. But I didn’t because I was too lazy to do it. Anyway, back to my point. My first comment is that the whole point of it being educated has a rocky start. Education was inseparable from class for a long time. Over time(and largely thanks to stuff like the Enlightenment, modern democracies and everyone’s ability to participate in democracy), the two have been decoupled at least literally, but our social attitudes keep them int he same bucket. That whole thing about nonchalance? It was a way for the upper classes to demonstrate education and therefore superiority. We still have this association of knowledge to value, but well, it’s not true. You can see this with yours dearly (a joke, hopefully), but there are many demonstrations of this. Let us ignore the question for now what value is (since I will address that when I finally get back to my main point, whenever that is), but most of us know somebody that doesn’t have education or works for peanuts and is a smart cookie and capable of more critical thought than their ‘superior’ counterparts. One is my friend Andy who does the podcast with me. He’s great, and his abilities have nothing to do with how much time he spent in a classroom.
Okay, I’m sorry, I’m starting a new paragraph because that was all a side story pretty much. Now, I’m going to talk about how innovation or intriguing effects travel up (already a metaphorical reinforcement of classist structure) the great continuum from everyday usage to the formal. However the reality of our situation may be, the choice of register shouldn’t be rigid. Obviously, we don’t have to use scientific writing, but why should we be held to writing standard as the norm? Alternate spellings, grammar and syntax should be allowed if our President 45 doesn’t adhere to it? These should be choices, and I think writers have used them well in past books, but let not artistic merits be punished. However, they are. The classist structure of how conversation should be formalized is still alive in societal thought. And if you don’t adhere to the norm, even beyond how happy your editor/partner/reader may be, you will be punished for experimentation or such. And if you’re not, you’re writing a gimmick book that relies only on that to make a point. There are very few opportunities to mix high and low registers that incorporates from informal word-act to academic discreet.
My last possible criteria for how to measure the success of a book is how people outside of writing/dedicated readers (and some authors and hardcore readers) will see it: how successful you are, how many books you sell and how many people actually read them. It makes some sense to think of this as the means of being prolific. Under our current system, it’s kinda true and kinda not. This was a lot o the discussion with my brother, the tyranny of the big five (more of an informal consortium is what I should be saying). They’re the goal of most authors, but they present a problem too. If we should assume that they’re perfectly fine and not enforcing their standards for writing (and let’s not kid ourselves that they aren’t), that there are only five poses a problem. As much as they might be diversified, they will make writers conform to what they want, not that they will look out into the greater world for the most outlandish works. If we come to reality, they want to make money above all so they will be normative at the very least. I don’t know (and feel free to correct me if I’m wrong), but there aren’t any indie books on bestseller lists. I would wager, and this is true for me at the least, that most people who create or invent aren’t interested in making money. They couldn’t care less about anything other than doing what they do. The assumption is that they can continue to live while producing is basic but it’s as unfeasible now as it has ever been. Anyway, my reasons for talking about this is that financial success has little to do with anything except exactly that. Just like you cannot control what goes viral on the internet, you cannot say what will get popular. However, certain qualities will be universally appealing to a certain degree. I have no explanation for it, but I think at least some of it is being in the right place at the right time. Another part of it is ease of reading, and that is a big nonchalance thing, where some books flow easily. Now for examples to illustrate my point:
Dan Brown, the best book in selling good and flowing well. His books are ultimately vacuous, but it’s not a bad thing. The author acts like it is, hiding all of the fast action in little tidbits of knowledge. It fulfills the modern reader’s expectations. It reinforces the need for sprezzatura-enforcing trivia (I’m not going to go into the history of the word, but trivia was one of those blunt instruments to hammer in how superior rich people were, but this whole thing is why people on Jeopardy are seen as smart when they may be so but it’s only coincidental and usually only because a good education will teach critical thinking and trivia) to justify how much it isn’t thought provoking. His books give equally little insight into history of the lifestyle of any real person (such as no professor outside of Indiana Jones having a life that’s nearly that exciting or fulfilling of what he studies). Grisham kinda fits into this but lesser on the continuum, especially his early stuff. You get an insight into how lawyers actually fit into every day life. A bunch of popular authors fit into this like Tom Clancy and Stephen King.
As a brief aside as I get into other major other category, I want to mention Malazon, Book of the Fallen as an interesting change from most fantasy, in that it’s obsessed more with the functioning of the world than philosophy or art. I mean there are small, specific points that it brings up such as the stereotype of the noble savage and stuff. But it’s mostly character-focused or world-focused. By that it means that there is a lot of time spent talking about how magic works, and there’s nothing greater you can get from that. It’s somebody explaining their weird dungeon and dragons rules, and unremarkable for that. However, one thing I do like is that the mythical beings who live for millennia actually do demonstrate some of the possible intelligence they would gain from that. They have long term plans that demonstrate a lot of creativity from the author. I haven’t seen this much in the (admittedly little) fantasy I read, where most races (kinda a funny thing to consider) are entirely analogous to humans.
I’m going to just jump to the other end of books (without giving many in-betweens because I’m lazy and don’t want to dig up books that I’ve read to give out examples), the books that you read for your literature/English/LA classes. I mean things like The Great Gatsby, The Old Man and the Sea, The Lathe of Heaven, Crime and Punishment, and other stuff you probably had to read in school. Shakespeare is probably the most common one. Most of these books seem (though I don’t know about their history) to be driven more to making a point or a statement than being commercially viable. I will be delineating that there are a few that seem to belong here but don’t. One that isn’t read in school (God, I hope not) but could fall into this category is The Fountainhead. Another is The Jungle (which is better but neither talks about the human condition, just one specific political/historical point).
To end this (somewhat), I want to bring it all back to me and form a conclusion from my own interaction with it because I am the center of the universe. Like pretty much everything, writing isn’t one thing or another. There is the moneymaking (or culturally approved or popular) side of it, the creative side and there’s the selfish side. Let’s put this in the context of the question I started off with, whether my writing or outputting work will change the world at all in a vacuum (and I think we all know it will be pretty much that because I’m not published by the big five). My brother was telling me if I want to make my opinions known (that the world should be forced to allow us to exist and live off of writing alone), I should protest and make my voice heard. I should conform to society because writing by itself is not an effective form of doing that. However, my contention is this: it shouldn’t be on me (in an ideal society) to go out and force them to conform to me. It should be on them (who them? anyone I meet and asks this question, whether they voice it or not) to prove I shouldn’t exist because first off, finding your way to fit into society is way more intricate than saying it makes it seem, and second off, why do I have to justify my existence when we are so far from being unable to feed every mouth and house every person out there? I feel for myself (because of what has happened, the subject does come back around to relevance) and everyone, even those who have faced few difficulties in life (however few of these people they are because I haven’t met anyone personally who doesn’t have something screw up), I’m sick of it. It’s common advice when you look for a job to sell yourself, but no one has ever bothered to say why. One constant in history is people saying “this is how it’s always been so it’s better to adapt to it than worry about it changing.” That’s why I write, and I believe that the mere act, even if no one should read it or care about it in the least, is an expression of not only my values but universal, philosophical ones. Even if my writing is incoherent or talks about something else, no human should have to justify their existence. I exist because I exist, not because you think I exist.
Okay, that was a bit rant-y so I’ll try to put it better. My writing is a creative effort. I need my books to be a pure expression of my soul and being because even if no one besides my family cares about me, I need to matter for my life and my continued existence to make any sense whatsoever. I don’t care about capitalism, and I believe my mere act of existence and the writing endemic to it is an expression that has no monetary value, but it has sentimental value and don’t dare talk to me about how society isn’t paying the true value of entertainment or the arts because that is not at all what I’m talking about. As a thinking, functioning human being, you should be able to remove the value of a human’s production from the value of a human’s soul and social worth because though they are the same to anyone who doesn’t know you, they are never, ever the same thing in reality. However, and this is why I sound like a whiny teenager learning about communism for the first time, I don’t want my family to live in want. My more eloquent fight against the tyranny of the world we live in is my writing, and that is a hill I’m almost ready to die on, at least one I’ll haphazardly lay my banner until my case gets resolved and I move on from solidarity, much like a politician.
P.S. I didn’t want to include this in the main body because it’s a nerdy aside. I want to give an alternate example of the same issues I talk about in writing because it is something that I know about as an amateur, Starcraft. I watch a lot of it while I write. In fact, I’m doing it right now (not when you’re reading this, maybe). It’s a video game about making a city to fund an army and technology to defend your opponent. However, how you play it can be seen as a medium to express yourself. There isn’t complete freedom like there is in writing (besides the need to express ourselves in words, the written form limits us but allows infinite possibilities of words and their combination) because there are so only so many resources to prolong growth, there is only one goal (to defeat your enemy) and three main variations of gameplay (I’m not going to digress because it wouldn’t get mentioned again in this rant). There is the professional gamer that does the utmost to win, those who do it casually without knowing what exactly what they’re doing, and there are some people who goof off while they play. Most people see the force that drives all players is the elimination of the enemy, but shouldn’t we be allowed to walk the land too if all we do is comment on how we can make funny pictures by getting our subordinates to position themself in patterns? Or if all we want to do is prolong the game at a cost only to ourselves? I haven’t provided many examples or details, but the game can be a medium of expression, and it too can be steered in one direction. That’s my point.
I hold off on posting too many things in one day because I try to space out the few things I do (that isn’t writing because that’s what I actually spend most of my time doing), but I want to tell you a story. Like most of the fiction I like, it will start with something kinda unrelated and eventually get to the point where you (dear reader) get the title. So forgive me for writing about this two days after the fact. I also am lazy and refuse to do anything on Christmas after spending most of it with family. It’s a good thing that I’m not so misanthropic that some people strangely want to hang out with me (trust me, I don’t get it either).
In fact, that’s the root of today’s post. Next time I’ll talk about Deep Space 9, which I finished rewatching (I think for the third time), but this is about a discussion I had with my brother. I think this is the fundamental difference between us. He went into important and serious things, Engineering, Math and Economics and even got his doctorate in it. I, on the other hand, went into the Arts and Sciences despite being very similar our upbringing. If you’ve read my recent stuff or my book (please do, it’s awesome!), some major sh… stuff happened to me when I was 18. I decided after that point that I should do what I want with whatever was left of my life because I wasn’t anticipating ever getting out into the real world.
Unfortunately, my decision was going to college and growing up because I wanted to demonstrate to others and (most importantly) to myself that my mind still functioned. I didn’t really think about the long term consequences of my decision. All I did was what felt right in the moment, and that was mostly working my butt off and getting (what I will not try to demur on even though I’m usually modest, I promise) stellar grades. However, it was in things that aren’t marketable: Classics (language focused), Italian and Linguistics. And I didn’t do any of that cool career-creating stuff like Speech and Language Pathology (for various reasons, but I was too enamored with Italian at the moment to go into that or a Masters in Linguistics, another subject I can tell a great many stories about).
The conversation began with what I feel is me talking about the general problems with book writing, mostly how little you get paid and transitioning into how you aren’t guaranteed any income. That is a question that I consider often because it seems quite silly that writers should get any money without making it. But, I present to you the counter arguments: professors get a paycheck as long as they do a job, managers get paid. There are few people who are in a position like writers: artists, people who start companies and salespeople. Otherwise you are more or less protected unless the company folds or you are fired for cause, but let’s assume that isn’t it because well, (and this is an important issue), there’s no way to judge writing so there is no way to say if you’re doing a good job or not.
Before I go on about the digression from the digression from the main topic, I feel like that’s an important part of my point above. You have to perform according to certain standards, assuming you aren’t friends with your boss and people care enough. There are a bunch exceptions to this like how a lot of big companies outsource their HR so they don’t have to fire people directly or instead downsizing. So what are the criteria to be a good writer? Is it the elusive creativity? Okay, that can be one, in the abstract, but can you define a book/fiction that is entirely creative? We all build on each other, and just like Newton wrote about calculus as somewhat of an innovation, he was drawing on knowledge that had been there for thousands of years. Edgar Allen Poe wasn’t writing entirely new stories. He was including a certain amount of realism/relatability with the unknown. When we (me included, a first person plural inclusive in Fijian, there’s some Linguistics knowledge bombs on you) ask for creativity, it’s a very specialized term because we want some but not too much. The biggest one is probably culture as in we won’t tolerate something that is remarkably human but too disconnected from us.
This is the same in Sci-fi and Fantasy too, which is kinda funny but completely understandable. Okay, diversion level four or five or whatever, but if we can’t tolerate a foreign but equally human culture, how can we possibly extrapolate something so alien as… actual aliens? I’ve talked about this in my books (I’m pretty sure Manual Automata), but we don’t have exact matches between languages. And the cultures are even more disparate than that. For example, French, Italian and English, despite being incredibly similar languages (compared to non Indoeuropean languages and because they’re modern languages with little verbal conjugation and noun case/number usage), have different words for house, apartment and home. This means how the users of each language imagines where the normal person lives is vastly different, and there are different assumptions about daily life. It’s not groundbreaking to say these things, but I want to share the astonishment of learning that someone who is supposed to be out of the box will be punished for non-conformity. By punished, I mean mostly as far as money/etc. goes. I’ll talk about that later.
Okay, next criteria for succeeding is how well you work on the art, such as anything from the fundamentals like grammar to structural elements like producing the 3-act-play or superliteral items such as adherence or rebuking artistic movements. I probably have the least to say about this than the other categories since it’s (in my opinion) pretty boring, abstract and least tractable without delving into specific things, which I don’t really know. I don’t study those matters, and even as someone that writes little to be commercially acceptable, I write to satisfy my personal thoughts and not because of artistic movements or whatever. But I will talk about grammar stuff (because of the linguist in me).
Grammar is a funny and should be way more of a touchy subject than it is. Right now we have a standard, kinda. There are various forms. I’ll start off with the most strict: academic or scientific writing. Vocabulary and grammar is heavily controlled so that it is understandable not only unambiguously but easily to an international and non-English speaking audience. I experienced this a lot when I took classes at the Università di Firenze. A lot of it would be comprehensible even with a minimal Italian education as long as you understood both the Italian accent and had a general college education in the United States. I’m not going to delve into all the boring little things that they talk about in classrooms, but there are four that I want to talk about (and these terms are mostly my own invention), the aforementioned, writing standard, conversational medium and conversational low.
Writing standard deals mostly with grammar though some syntax. Imagine a video game, this is what’s expected. It can be clunky, but that’s not what it’s concerned with. It’s the ‘art’ or supposed ability of the user of this mode of writing to make it less so. It’s things like capitalizing at the beginning of a sentence, idem for beginning of quotes, when and how to layer quotes, that alternating quotes is a conversation, where to put commas (and the Oxford one too, which is supposedly about free choice between two restrictive styles) and all the rest. It’s very much about nonchalance because you don’t notice when it’s right but you notice when it’s off. Side note: I didn’t learn until I was about 23 or 24 that nonchalance meant knowing a difficult subject so well that you can play off knowledge of any of it as easy. It’s easy to take it to mean cool cucumber when it means something much more detailed and only superficially related. This is what we expect writing to be (such as this blog post). Any correct usage will be regarded as the normal and goes without praise, and incorrect usages (not even errors) are seen as wrong and an indication of my poor education/capabilities. It is largely a formal convention. I’m not going to comment on that until I get to the end of writing styles.
Okay, medium and low conversational English. I’m going to ignore high conversational English because it mostly conforms to writing standard as much as can be in such a different method of expression. Conversational medium holds writing standard as an abstract goal, but it allows some freedom, especially in grammar and syntax. This is everyday conversation between normal folks that don’t necessarily know each other too well. It’s the register you probably use with your parents. A few curse words are allowed (because this in a continuum, let’s say in the middle) but not too many. Sentences may have too many “ands” in lists and such, ungrammatical expressions like “But the man! Eating his lunch!”, etc. Low Conversational, and why I feel like it has to be differentiated, though it is on the same spectrum just at a different point, is because it’s different enough to be worth highlight. I’m talking about the land where new words are spontaneously created to filter into human consciousness and grammar is just a suggestion because ideas come before them. Communication is the main focus of low conversation, and it occupies half of if not more conversation. One invention: AF as in “as fuck” that’s just added so easily to things. That reference may be out of date, but as soon as I stopped being a teenager, I stopped paying attention to this stuff. Another might be considered is dick pics, where a concept has a verbal form, but this may not be a classical, typified, fully constructed idea and more of (what we might consider in this context) an act. Oh, one last one that I really like is when you mix words and movements like “and he went like this” and you say the main act of your sentence by playing an air guitar.
So of these four categories (and there’s a lot more complication that I won’t get into), they go from educated (err, kinda, hold on a second) to less and rigid to fluid. So instead of low and stuff, maybe I should’ve put them on one end as rigid and the other as free flow. But I didn’t because I was too lazy to do it. Anyway, back to my point. My first comment is that the whole point of it being educated has a rocky start. Education was inseparable from class for a long time. Over time(and largely thanks to stuff like the Enlightenment, modern democracies and everyone’s ability to participate in democracy), the two have been decoupled at least literally, but our social attitudes keep them int he same bucket. That whole thing about nonchalance? It was a way for the upper classes to demonstrate education and therefore superiority. We still have this association of knowledge to value, but well, it’s not true. You can see this with yours dearly (a joke, hopefully), but there are many demonstrations of this. Let us ignore the question for now what value is (since I will address that when I finally get back to my main point, whenever that is), but most of us know somebody that doesn’t have education or works for peanuts and is a smart cookie and capable of more critical thought than their ‘superior’ counterparts. One is my friend Andy who does the podcast with me. He’s great, and his abilities have nothing to do with how much time he spent in a classroom.
Okay, I’m sorry, I’m starting a new paragraph because that was all a side story pretty much. Now, I’m going to talk about how innovation or intriguing effects travel up (already a metaphorical reinforcement of classist structure) the great continuum from everyday usage to the formal. However the reality of our situation may be, the choice of register shouldn’t be rigid. Obviously, we don’t have to use scientific writing, but why should we be held to writing standard as the norm? Alternate spellings, grammar and syntax should be allowed if our President 45 doesn’t adhere to it? These should be choices, and I think writers have used them well in past books, but let not artistic merits be punished. However, they are. The classist structure of how conversation should be formalized is still alive in societal thought. And if you don’t adhere to the norm, even beyond how happy your editor/partner/reader may be, you will be punished for experimentation or such. And if you’re not, you’re writing a gimmick book that relies only on that to make a point. There are very few opportunities to mix high and low registers that incorporates from informal word-act to academic discreet.
My last possible criteria for how to measure the success of a book is how people outside of writing/dedicated readers (and some authors and hardcore readers) will see it: how successful you are, how many books you sell and how many people actually read them. It makes some sense to think of this as the means of being prolific. Under our current system, it’s kinda true and kinda not. This was a lot o the discussion with my brother, the tyranny of the big five (more of an informal consortium is what I should be saying). They’re the goal of most authors, but they present a problem too. If we should assume that they’re perfectly fine and not enforcing their standards for writing (and let’s not kid ourselves that they aren’t), that there are only five poses a problem. As much as they might be diversified, they will make writers conform to what they want, not that they will look out into the greater world for the most outlandish works. If we come to reality, they want to make money above all so they will be normative at the very least. I don’t know (and feel free to correct me if I’m wrong), but there aren’t any indie books on bestseller lists. I would wager, and this is true for me at the least, that most people who create or invent aren’t interested in making money. They couldn’t care less about anything other than doing what they do. The assumption is that they can continue to live while producing is basic but it’s as unfeasible now as it has ever been. Anyway, my reasons for talking about this is that financial success has little to do with anything except exactly that. Just like you cannot control what goes viral on the internet, you cannot say what will get popular. However, certain qualities will be universally appealing to a certain degree. I have no explanation for it, but I think at least some of it is being in the right place at the right time. Another part of it is ease of reading, and that is a big nonchalance thing, where some books flow easily. Now for examples to illustrate my point:
Dan Brown, the best book in selling good and flowing well. His books are ultimately vacuous, but it’s not a bad thing. The author acts like it is, hiding all of the fast action in little tidbits of knowledge. It fulfills the modern reader’s expectations. It reinforces the need for sprezzatura-enforcing trivia (I’m not going to go into the history of the word, but trivia was one of those blunt instruments to hammer in how superior rich people were, but this whole thing is why people on Jeopardy are seen as smart when they may be so but it’s only coincidental and usually only because a good education will teach critical thinking and trivia) to justify how much it isn’t thought provoking. His books give equally little insight into history of the lifestyle of any real person (such as no professor outside of Indiana Jones having a life that’s nearly that exciting or fulfilling of what he studies). Grisham kinda fits into this but lesser on the continuum, especially his early stuff. You get an insight into how lawyers actually fit into every day life. A bunch of popular authors fit into this like Tom Clancy and Stephen King.
As a brief aside as I get into other major other category, I want to mention Malazon, Book of the Fallen as an interesting change from most fantasy, in that it’s obsessed more with the functioning of the world than philosophy or art. I mean there are small, specific points that it brings up such as the stereotype of the noble savage and stuff. But it’s mostly character-focused or world-focused. By that it means that there is a lot of time spent talking about how magic works, and there’s nothing greater you can get from that. It’s somebody explaining their weird dungeon and dragons rules, and unremarkable for that. However, one thing I do like is that the mythical beings who live for millennia actually do demonstrate some of the possible intelligence they would gain from that. They have long term plans that demonstrate a lot of creativity from the author. I haven’t seen this much in the (admittedly little) fantasy I read, where most races (kinda a funny thing to consider) are entirely analogous to humans.
I’m going to just jump to the other end of books (without giving many in-betweens because I’m lazy and don’t want to dig up books that I’ve read to give out examples), the books that you read for your literature/English/LA classes. I mean things like The Great Gatsby, The Old Man and the Sea, The Lathe of Heaven, Crime and Punishment, and other stuff you probably had to read in school. Shakespeare is probably the most common one. Most of these books seem (though I don’t know about their history) to be driven more to making a point or a statement than being commercially viable. I will be delineating that there are a few that seem to belong here but don’t. One that isn’t read in school (God, I hope not) but could fall into this category is The Fountainhead. Another is The Jungle (which is better but neither talks about the human condition, just one specific political/historical point).
To end this (somewhat), I want to bring it all back to me and form a conclusion from my own interaction with it because I am the center of the universe. Like pretty much everything, writing isn’t one thing or another. There is the moneymaking (or culturally approved or popular) side of it, the creative side and there’s the selfish side. Let’s put this in the context of the question I started off with, whether my writing or outputting work will change the world at all in a vacuum (and I think we all know it will be pretty much that because I’m not published by the big five). My brother was telling me if I want to make my opinions known (that the world should be forced to allow us to exist and live off of writing alone), I should protest and make my voice heard. I should conform to society because writing by itself is not an effective form of doing that. However, my contention is this: it shouldn’t be on me (in an ideal society) to go out and force them to conform to me. It should be on them (who them? anyone I meet and asks this question, whether they voice it or not) to prove I shouldn’t exist because first off, finding your way to fit into society is way more intricate than saying it makes it seem, and second off, why do I have to justify my existence when we are so far from being unable to feed every mouth and house every person out there? I feel for myself (because of what has happened, the subject does come back around to relevance) and everyone, even those who have faced few difficulties in life (however few of these people they are because I haven’t met anyone personally who doesn’t have something screw up), I’m sick of it. It’s common advice when you look for a job to sell yourself, but no one has ever bothered to say why. One constant in history is people saying “this is how it’s always been so it’s better to adapt to it than worry about it changing.” That’s why I write, and I believe that the mere act, even if no one should read it or care about it in the least, is an expression of not only my values but universal, philosophical ones. Even if my writing is incoherent or talks about something else, no human should have to justify their existence. I exist because I exist, not because you think I exist.
Okay, that was a bit rant-y so I’ll try to put it better. My writing is a creative effort. I need my books to be a pure expression of my soul and being because even if no one besides my family cares about me, I need to matter for my life and my continued existence to make any sense whatsoever. I don’t care about capitalism, and I believe my mere act of existence and the writing endemic to it is an expression that has no monetary value, but it has sentimental value and don’t dare talk to me about how society isn’t paying the true value of entertainment or the arts because that is not at all what I’m talking about. As a thinking, functioning human being, you should be able to remove the value of a human’s production from the value of a human’s soul and social worth because though they are the same to anyone who doesn’t know you, they are never, ever the same thing in reality. However, and this is why I sound like a whiny teenager learning about communism for the first time, I don’t want my family to live in want. My more eloquent fight against the tyranny of the world we live in is my writing, and that is a hill I’m almost ready to die on, at least one I’ll haphazardly lay my banner until my case gets resolved and I move on from solidarity, much like a politician.
P.S. I didn’t want to include this in the main body because it’s a nerdy aside. I want to give an alternate example of the same issues I talk about in writing because it is something that I know about as an amateur, Starcraft. I watch a lot of it while I write. In fact, I’m doing it right now (not when you’re reading this, maybe). It’s a video game about making a city to fund an army and technology to defend your opponent. However, how you play it can be seen as a medium to express yourself. There isn’t complete freedom like there is in writing (besides the need to express ourselves in words, the written form limits us but allows infinite possibilities of words and their combination) because there are so only so many resources to prolong growth, there is only one goal (to defeat your enemy) and three main variations of gameplay (I’m not going to digress because it wouldn’t get mentioned again in this rant). There is the professional gamer that does the utmost to win, those who do it casually without knowing what exactly what they’re doing, and there are some people who goof off while they play. Most people see the force that drives all players is the elimination of the enemy, but shouldn’t we be allowed to walk the land too if all we do is comment on how we can make funny pictures by getting our subordinates to position themself in patterns? Or if all we want to do is prolong the game at a cost only to ourselves? I haven’t provided many examples or details, but the game can be a medium of expression, and it too can be steered in one direction. That’s my point.
December 10, 2018
ἄνδρα μοι ἔννεπε, μοῦσα
Dear readers,
For those of you who didn't study Ancient Greek, it's somewhat of a tradition to spend a humongous amount of time talking about the opening paragraph of the Odyssey. I envy you, really, because you didn't waste countless hours on this endeavor. But it's what I want to talk about, so here's the translation of the title:
Let's first go for a word-by-word/morphemic version:
(Of) the man, to me, speak, muse
Literally:
Speak to me, o muse, of the man... yada yada yada, the rest isn't what I'm going to talk about.
I generally think that the Odyssey is too old to be relatable to a modern audience without much study and that there are many contemporary books that can take its place. But I decided to quote this because of the first three words (and I'm not even going to go into a diatribe about the case usages or who the grammatical persons are in the sentence):
Man (subject) - Me (audience) - Muse (storyteller)
Those are the classical three persons of communication and of writing. Okay, yeah, sensibilities have evolved in the last three thousand years, but I gotta stop myself before I get too wrapped up in things I know nothing about. I do want to make it clear that since the written word has existed, writers have made it clear that there are three independent wills to contend with. They want to express something, however banal or enlightening it may be, the object of the story will pursue its own will, and the audience has its own desires and tropes that they judge the story by. Yes, it's the storyteller who manipulates the story and expresses it, but it's easy to say when you're the one who creates it.
I'm going to jump a bit forward. The next person I want to talk about is Primo Levi. I take no pleasure in reading about the Holocaust, but it's vital (especially as we forget to never forget). When I first read Primo Levi e Se questo è un uomo I thought being afraid of not being heard. I'd been raised with discussions of the Shoah every day (this is not an exaggeration) so it seemed impossible that people should believe it didn't happen. However, given what happened to him, I think it's obvious that it does exist. In the last few years in our own county, I've seen beliefs I thought impossible to have with any sincerity rise not only to the surface but mass awareness.
There was a push for people to be conscious of differences. Gay marriage, acceptance of transgender individuals, police brutality, etc., i.e. progress, is always met with reaction, and it tends to exaggerate because they've no desire to let any transgressions (in their eyes) rejoin the same levels as the past. I embrace any empathy that may come because I, too, want what happened to me to be acknowledged though I will say it's nowhere even close to the Holocaust or overwhelming prejudice and oppression. However, it's my story, and I say that the people who have gone through these things inspired me.
I remained silent (for almost a decade) about my coma. I told some people, friends and family for the most part. Almost all of the reactions were similar: "oh, okay, sorry that happened, moving on..." in fewer or more words. I think what most people don't realize is that when something happens to you, you want to talk about it. I always thought that people needed time to adjust, but a new conclusion has become clear: people need explication. That's why I wrote on my book that'll be up on Goodreads soon (I hope), but here's a link to Instagram so you can see the cover
What goes into a book cover? The ideal should attract readers (oy vey), reveal what they're going to get into, and at best, it should add to your message instead of being coincidental. The vast majority of books have something of a generic one like a face or a person in a pose. They may be pretty, but what do they mean? What do they add to the majority of the message? Obviously, I'm not good at marketing (the first one), and a generic one is better at attracting readers because they get what they want.
I figured if I'm going to go into writing, it needs to be something that I could be happy with. If I'm not going into the usual publishing route, then I need to soothe my conscious and go with something more expressive than sells. So let's start with the style. It's a bit cartoony, but it's not too. It's based on photos that drawn-over, kinda like a rotoscoping but with someone who has no idea about how to do it or what it really involves.
The first decision I had to make was go for what we did, an illustration, a photo or a basic but generic cover. We needed to play to our strengths, and what is that? A gaudy, big design wasn't something that's easy to do for one person so an illustration was off the table. It would be really cool and fitting, but we're not a publishing house with people contracted to do that. The photo or something normal didn't really appeal to me because it didn't feel right. Since I first saw them in high school, I've loved surrealist paintings. Everything by Dali or Magritte's The Son of Man (the one everyone, ever thinks of) struck a nerve. There's something we can understand, and there's something we can't.
That's how I wanted my story, and I had to ask myself, how do the two relate? The book is an entirely a transition from surrealism to normal life. The first third is that way a bit (and trust me, I cut down on the mysterious and indecipherable enigmae I tried to put in), and the story of the book resolves the sensorial/postmodern descriptions but welcomes an abstract feeling of unease by the end. The style resolves this by being almost realistic but doesn't quite make that step. The front is much more understandable, but the back of the cover is even less that. You have to put more effort into understanding, correlating the image to reality.
What is the image, then? You see a hospital bed with a remote on it and a wrist with an identifying band. Everyone's who had a stay at the hospital recognizes them. The remote is almost photorealistic, but the bed cover is a strange purple, not what you'd see normally. The back is a hospital gown tied up in the back with the occasional small dots they have on one. Between them is the back of the book description.
What do you see? A place to rest, a home to be. What don't you see? Confinement, IV stands, the wastes of disease or the outside world, the eyes that the protagonist is seeing the world from. The protagonist, John Albuquerque, has removed himself from his observations. All he sees is how everything interact because from his point of view, he doesn't count himself as a worthwhile being or even alive.
Oh also, check out the ebook on Lulu if you're interested:
The Rest of the Dreams on Lulu
For those of you who didn't study Ancient Greek, it's somewhat of a tradition to spend a humongous amount of time talking about the opening paragraph of the Odyssey. I envy you, really, because you didn't waste countless hours on this endeavor. But it's what I want to talk about, so here's the translation of the title:
Let's first go for a word-by-word/morphemic version:
(Of) the man, to me, speak, muse
Literally:
Speak to me, o muse, of the man... yada yada yada, the rest isn't what I'm going to talk about.
I generally think that the Odyssey is too old to be relatable to a modern audience without much study and that there are many contemporary books that can take its place. But I decided to quote this because of the first three words (and I'm not even going to go into a diatribe about the case usages or who the grammatical persons are in the sentence):
Man (subject) - Me (audience) - Muse (storyteller)
Those are the classical three persons of communication and of writing. Okay, yeah, sensibilities have evolved in the last three thousand years, but I gotta stop myself before I get too wrapped up in things I know nothing about. I do want to make it clear that since the written word has existed, writers have made it clear that there are three independent wills to contend with. They want to express something, however banal or enlightening it may be, the object of the story will pursue its own will, and the audience has its own desires and tropes that they judge the story by. Yes, it's the storyteller who manipulates the story and expresses it, but it's easy to say when you're the one who creates it.
I'm going to jump a bit forward. The next person I want to talk about is Primo Levi. I take no pleasure in reading about the Holocaust, but it's vital (especially as we forget to never forget). When I first read Primo Levi e Se questo è un uomo I thought being afraid of not being heard. I'd been raised with discussions of the Shoah every day (this is not an exaggeration) so it seemed impossible that people should believe it didn't happen. However, given what happened to him, I think it's obvious that it does exist. In the last few years in our own county, I've seen beliefs I thought impossible to have with any sincerity rise not only to the surface but mass awareness.
There was a push for people to be conscious of differences. Gay marriage, acceptance of transgender individuals, police brutality, etc., i.e. progress, is always met with reaction, and it tends to exaggerate because they've no desire to let any transgressions (in their eyes) rejoin the same levels as the past. I embrace any empathy that may come because I, too, want what happened to me to be acknowledged though I will say it's nowhere even close to the Holocaust or overwhelming prejudice and oppression. However, it's my story, and I say that the people who have gone through these things inspired me.
I remained silent (for almost a decade) about my coma. I told some people, friends and family for the most part. Almost all of the reactions were similar: "oh, okay, sorry that happened, moving on..." in fewer or more words. I think what most people don't realize is that when something happens to you, you want to talk about it. I always thought that people needed time to adjust, but a new conclusion has become clear: people need explication. That's why I wrote on my book that'll be up on Goodreads soon (I hope), but here's a link to Instagram so you can see the cover
What goes into a book cover? The ideal should attract readers (oy vey), reveal what they're going to get into, and at best, it should add to your message instead of being coincidental. The vast majority of books have something of a generic one like a face or a person in a pose. They may be pretty, but what do they mean? What do they add to the majority of the message? Obviously, I'm not good at marketing (the first one), and a generic one is better at attracting readers because they get what they want.
I figured if I'm going to go into writing, it needs to be something that I could be happy with. If I'm not going into the usual publishing route, then I need to soothe my conscious and go with something more expressive than sells. So let's start with the style. It's a bit cartoony, but it's not too. It's based on photos that drawn-over, kinda like a rotoscoping but with someone who has no idea about how to do it or what it really involves.
The first decision I had to make was go for what we did, an illustration, a photo or a basic but generic cover. We needed to play to our strengths, and what is that? A gaudy, big design wasn't something that's easy to do for one person so an illustration was off the table. It would be really cool and fitting, but we're not a publishing house with people contracted to do that. The photo or something normal didn't really appeal to me because it didn't feel right. Since I first saw them in high school, I've loved surrealist paintings. Everything by Dali or Magritte's The Son of Man (the one everyone, ever thinks of) struck a nerve. There's something we can understand, and there's something we can't.
That's how I wanted my story, and I had to ask myself, how do the two relate? The book is an entirely a transition from surrealism to normal life. The first third is that way a bit (and trust me, I cut down on the mysterious and indecipherable enigmae I tried to put in), and the story of the book resolves the sensorial/postmodern descriptions but welcomes an abstract feeling of unease by the end. The style resolves this by being almost realistic but doesn't quite make that step. The front is much more understandable, but the back of the cover is even less that. You have to put more effort into understanding, correlating the image to reality.
What is the image, then? You see a hospital bed with a remote on it and a wrist with an identifying band. Everyone's who had a stay at the hospital recognizes them. The remote is almost photorealistic, but the bed cover is a strange purple, not what you'd see normally. The back is a hospital gown tied up in the back with the occasional small dots they have on one. Between them is the back of the book description.
What do you see? A place to rest, a home to be. What don't you see? Confinement, IV stands, the wastes of disease or the outside world, the eyes that the protagonist is seeing the world from. The protagonist, John Albuquerque, has removed himself from his observations. All he sees is how everything interact because from his point of view, he doesn't count himself as a worthwhile being or even alive.
Oh also, check out the ebook on Lulu if you're interested:
The Rest of the Dreams on Lulu
September 18, 2018
Some Thoughts About Movies I've Seen on the Road
It took me a long time to come to the conclusion that I’ve definitively become a grumpy old man. The revelation came when I was thinking about a conversation I had way back when, during my undergrad, almost a decade ago. I was talking about a movie I didn’t like, and my friend was legitimately surprised that I had a problem with the movie. I usually was pretty lenient with my ratings, and now I know why.
Up until recently (even back then), I used to judge movies based on the quality of their cinematography. I had the advantage of seeing the blockbusters or otherwise movies with certain qualities in the theaters (and not cinemas, that’s what we call them in the real world, may the East coast be damned). They’d have that rising action at 100 minutes, techniques from Alfred Hitchcock and earlier works, scare jumps, tension builders, everything perfect. If you only see those movies, you only get the Dan Brown of movies. I’m not going to make a statement about art or Art, but I think it’s a bit like eating at Outback every day. You get a goodish quality of meal, but it’s only one certain type. You’ll have never experienced Italian cuisine, Moroccan mint tea or the wonders of vegetarian food cooked specifically for that purpose.
I think the big change when I started looking inside movies and at what they’re saying. Now, anyone who is reasonable, some sort of straw-man, may be saying duh. And I deserve that because I thought that was a bonus, an interesting thing to appreciate on top of everything else and not the other way around.
This rant came about because I saw two movies recently, A Simple Favor and Searching. As for the latter, it’s in a style that I suspect has become popular because it’s cheap, the entire movie filmed from the prospective of a computer. There’s a few times where the computer’s camera witnesses a new scene or landscape, but the majority of it is different pictures and google results on the screen. From such a dry description, it can seem the movie would be dry, but it helps them funnel the attention of the audience on specific objects. It isn’t boring, but it feels like lazy script writing.
So that’s it, now that I pay attention to such things, right? Before I was a consumer, but now it’s the output of my profession. Time to wrap this up and go home. But I’ve been noticing this for a long time, as my wife can testify. And I refuse to say that I’m the only human being (or participate in a class) that thinks alike. I think it’s coming of age. Like at 10 or 12, I started to notice that not all movies were good, and at 25 or so I began paying attention to the message of the media I consumed beyond what aimed to distract me the best . I think it took me that long because I wasn’t mature enough. Or I was stupid, or I was a late bloomer. It doesn’t matter.
Back to the Searching, you have to wonder what the point is. I did, at least. Not to give anything away, but you see most of the plot beats from the preview. The daughter disappears, it turns out that she had a bunch of different priorities, and the conclusion of the movie wasn’t what I expected. However, what did I learn? High schoolers can be superficial and fickle, good people can be taken advantage of… and? Nu? as my dad would ask.
So, A Simple Favor. It came out on Friday, and so there’s not much I want to talk about as far as plot goes. I liked most of the movie, but I came away with a weird feeling. The two main characters are both women but completely opposite. There’s the character with a career, and she’s alcoholic and capricious, while the other is a homemaker who vlogs with her cooking recipes. Now, given what looks like Gone Girl, you can guess vaguely what happens, but it’s less negative. The stay at home mom, though she initially doubts herself, learns that she’s better at pretty much everything and is able to resolve the mystery. It’s a nice and punchy film. But when I thought about it, there were two problems. The first is, well, really? I realize that at this point of career women there’s a lack of proactive STAH moms (so this might be seen in some ways as creative by renewing an older trope), but that’s really what we don’t need the glorification of this in opposition to a woman that is proactive about her career and achieving her goals. I apologize, but I’m trying hard not to give anything away, and that’s weakening my ability to make my argument.
And my other problem is similar though not a matter of gender. It’s the glorification of the individual. The protagonist resolves everything and gets the disobedient husband in line, the criminal in jail, and even shows up the police. Then she writes a best-selling book. gets a ton of followers on her vlog, and becomes a part-time detective assistant (or something, she helps resolve crime in the future) when she was on the road to financial problems before all this, her husband’s savings and life insurance policy on its way out. That’s good for her, definitely, but what’s the message here? Dawn comes when it gets darkest? Life happens in mysterious ways? Those are the best things I can get out of the movie (women should stay home is probably the worst one), but here’s the thing. A story is written, not a description of reality but a human manipulation to prove a point. Did either of these movies use their moment to say anything that’ll remain with me? No. And I hope anything I create or work on doesn’t do the same.
See you next time,
Ben
Up until recently (even back then), I used to judge movies based on the quality of their cinematography. I had the advantage of seeing the blockbusters or otherwise movies with certain qualities in the theaters (and not cinemas, that’s what we call them in the real world, may the East coast be damned). They’d have that rising action at 100 minutes, techniques from Alfred Hitchcock and earlier works, scare jumps, tension builders, everything perfect. If you only see those movies, you only get the Dan Brown of movies. I’m not going to make a statement about art or Art, but I think it’s a bit like eating at Outback every day. You get a goodish quality of meal, but it’s only one certain type. You’ll have never experienced Italian cuisine, Moroccan mint tea or the wonders of vegetarian food cooked specifically for that purpose.
I think the big change when I started looking inside movies and at what they’re saying. Now, anyone who is reasonable, some sort of straw-man, may be saying duh. And I deserve that because I thought that was a bonus, an interesting thing to appreciate on top of everything else and not the other way around.
This rant came about because I saw two movies recently, A Simple Favor and Searching. As for the latter, it’s in a style that I suspect has become popular because it’s cheap, the entire movie filmed from the prospective of a computer. There’s a few times where the computer’s camera witnesses a new scene or landscape, but the majority of it is different pictures and google results on the screen. From such a dry description, it can seem the movie would be dry, but it helps them funnel the attention of the audience on specific objects. It isn’t boring, but it feels like lazy script writing.
So that’s it, now that I pay attention to such things, right? Before I was a consumer, but now it’s the output of my profession. Time to wrap this up and go home. But I’ve been noticing this for a long time, as my wife can testify. And I refuse to say that I’m the only human being (or participate in a class) that thinks alike. I think it’s coming of age. Like at 10 or 12, I started to notice that not all movies were good, and at 25 or so I began paying attention to the message of the media I consumed beyond what aimed to distract me the best . I think it took me that long because I wasn’t mature enough. Or I was stupid, or I was a late bloomer. It doesn’t matter.
Back to the Searching, you have to wonder what the point is. I did, at least. Not to give anything away, but you see most of the plot beats from the preview. The daughter disappears, it turns out that she had a bunch of different priorities, and the conclusion of the movie wasn’t what I expected. However, what did I learn? High schoolers can be superficial and fickle, good people can be taken advantage of… and? Nu? as my dad would ask.
So, A Simple Favor. It came out on Friday, and so there’s not much I want to talk about as far as plot goes. I liked most of the movie, but I came away with a weird feeling. The two main characters are both women but completely opposite. There’s the character with a career, and she’s alcoholic and capricious, while the other is a homemaker who vlogs with her cooking recipes. Now, given what looks like Gone Girl, you can guess vaguely what happens, but it’s less negative. The stay at home mom, though she initially doubts herself, learns that she’s better at pretty much everything and is able to resolve the mystery. It’s a nice and punchy film. But when I thought about it, there were two problems. The first is, well, really? I realize that at this point of career women there’s a lack of proactive STAH moms (so this might be seen in some ways as creative by renewing an older trope), but that’s really what we don’t need the glorification of this in opposition to a woman that is proactive about her career and achieving her goals. I apologize, but I’m trying hard not to give anything away, and that’s weakening my ability to make my argument.
And my other problem is similar though not a matter of gender. It’s the glorification of the individual. The protagonist resolves everything and gets the disobedient husband in line, the criminal in jail, and even shows up the police. Then she writes a best-selling book. gets a ton of followers on her vlog, and becomes a part-time detective assistant (or something, she helps resolve crime in the future) when she was on the road to financial problems before all this, her husband’s savings and life insurance policy on its way out. That’s good for her, definitely, but what’s the message here? Dawn comes when it gets darkest? Life happens in mysterious ways? Those are the best things I can get out of the movie (women should stay home is probably the worst one), but here’s the thing. A story is written, not a description of reality but a human manipulation to prove a point. Did either of these movies use their moment to say anything that’ll remain with me? No. And I hope anything I create or work on doesn’t do the same.
See you next time,
Ben
Ben's Thoughts
I invite everyone to read a little more about me and my thoughts. I plan to discuss the things that occur to me and answer the questions no one but my brain asks me.
- Benyakir B. Horowitz's profile
- 46 followers
