Hunger Games are from Venus, Hunger Artists are from Mars

Some assembly required. Batteries not included.

Just in time for the movie, if two years behind the teens, I read The Hunger Games.  But even though he’s been dead for almost ninety years, Franz Kafka beat me to it.  In 1922, just a few years before he died, Kafka published the short story A Hunger Artist, a weirdly candid but unsurprisingly depressing mediation on a man who starves himself for the entertainment of others.  Although the story was published ninety years ago, it is already nostalgic, looking back on the golden era of starvation artists, a real-life phenomenon where men would live in cages, their wasting public for gawking spectacle. As the story opens, “During these last decades the interest in professional fasting has markedly diminished. It used to pay very well to stage such great performances under one’s own management, but today that is quite impossible.” 

As usual with Kafka, it’s nearly impossible to easily interpret, although at least no one wakes up as a cockroach.  Is the story autobiographical and symbolic, with emphasis on the word “artist”: starving artists as hunger artists, sacrificing themselves for their art?  Is the hunger artist a Christian martyr or Christ himself, sacrificing his body for the seeming benefit of others, even if those others don’t know it? Is the story sincere or ironic—does Kafka really think that slow starvation is a great performance?  Is the hunger artist a victim of a vicious society or the perpetuator of a con, making a living literally doing nothing?  Is he misunderstood, as he believes, or does he misunderstand himself?  Kafka seems to want to story to seem spiritual and existential, but in our contemporary culture of eating disorders and reality television, he now seems anorexic and narcissistic, equally food- and attention starved—psychiatrically disordered, rather than acetic, spiritual, or even alienated.    The hunger artist would have loved the present.   

So let’s cut to the present.  The Hunger Games, the first major post-Harry Potter young adult lit phenomenon, seems the titular heir to Kafka’s hungry hungry hero.  Yet I had some major qualms about the book—at least until I was more than halfway through it.  Like Hunger Artist, Hunger Games is also nostalgic, not because the days of starvation are behind them but because they are ahead. In this futuristic, totalitarian dystopia—like there’s any other kind?—America is now Panem, but not the friendly skies: a weird amalgam of technological advancement amidst an overall feudal, semi-agrarian society. 

Our futuristic dystopian overlords, apparently.

In order to keep the story’s twelve districts in line and circumvent rebellion, the government, such as it is, uses a lottery to select two contestants—Tributes, one boy and one girl—from each district, elevates them to celebrity status, has them model haute couture and eat haute cuisine, makes them appear on TMZ, then televises their gory fight to the death, with a single winner rewarded with food and other valuable prizes.    The good news is that this set up keeps ex-contestants from robbing convenience stores or starring in pornography once the show is over.  The bad news is that it doesn’t make much literal or political sense.  We like our ultimate fighting and our reality stars separate, not that I’d be surprised by Kickboxing with the Kardashians.  But time tested, old fashioned slaughter, secret prisons, pograms, public impalement, and killing fields are far more cost effective for the frugal, discerning despot.

The influences show everywhere: Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery, obviously, Stephen King’s Running Man and The Long Walk, an episode of Justice League called War World, which itself borrowed from Spartacus, and every battle royale ever written, from Koushun Takami to Ralph Ellison. Plus, the writing seems equally prosaic. While it’s ostensibly the first person POV of Katniss Everdeen, our protagonist (and therefore, we quickly surmise, winner of the Games, a kind of built in spoiler), the language is often so clichéd and dry that it reads more like a book report about some other, better written novel that Katniss read and is telling us about secondhand.

Yet somehow, even with this ticker of criticism running through my head as I read, I found myself enjoying the book more and more, until by the end, none of the problems mattered, any more than the unlikelihood of talking bears or the existential crisis of wishes in a fairy tale. 

Even more than what turns out the be the novel’s narrative triumph—that is, somehow creating suspense even when the ending is predestined; somehow making interesting a violent snuff film of a bunch of kids killing each other—is what the novel does for gender.  It may seem, in our post-Aliens and Terminator world, that female heroes are at last the norm, but they’re not, not really.  Katniss is simply herself, and who she is is tough, but not particularly smart; self-preserving more than altruistic, even if, like Kafka’s hunger artist, she seems to sacrifice herself for her sister Prim and despite that she does rue Rue; skilled at traditionally masculine tasks like hunting; and lucky, but the kind of lucky that comes after the disaster of living in Panem and winding up in the hunger games.  In other words, she’s far more like Harry Potter than Hermione Granger, more Peter Pevensie than Susan, who does receive a bow and arrow from Father Christmas but is admonished to use it only “in great need…for I do not mean for you to fight in the battle.”  Girls are supposed to be the smart ones, the sisters, the girlfriends, the blank slates, the protected, the supporting characters. Katniss is not any of those things.  She’s better. Yet at the same time, the book never seems to have any gender agenda.

What’s more interesting, though, is her contrast with the male District 12 tribute, Peeta, whose name sounds feminine and reminiscent of bread (he’s the baker’s son), who protects himself in the hunger games by painting himself in camouflage and hiding, and whose sensitive romantic dumb love for Katniss could give Bella a run for her hanky.  This alone would be an interesting gender reversal. But the book does more.  After an improvised rule change forces Katniss and Peeta to team up, Peeta’s injuries make him more of a liability than an asset for Katniss. But not only does she have to protect him, she needs to protect his male ego, so that as she’s protecting him, she has to make him believe that he’s protecting her.  Edward, Jacob, and all those other guys just have to protect, without any self-consciousness and subterfuge.  And in the end, [yes, yes spoilers, although why you’re reading this if you haven’t read The Hunger Games is a mystery to me] when Peeta and Katniss both live, we discover that Peeta’s leg has been amputated.  He’s been saved by a girl like a hundred times, and then symbolically castrated.  And all he wants is looooove. 

I remember in my first year of college reading a super politically correct textbook called Racism and Sexism.  I no longer have it, so I can’t double check this (although I never sold books back so it must still be on my old bookshelf in my parents’ house).   But in it I remember a thought experiment for guys, imagining that every President, nearly every major world leader, nearly every famous scientist, nearly every writer until only a hundred years ago, etc etc etc, was a woman, and how women must feel about the real world.  I got it then, of course.  But I think I get it much better now, thanks to Katniss and The Hunger Games.  In the back of girls’ minds, there had to be a little nagging that the girl is always a Wendy but the boy gets to be the Peter Pan.  Yet when kids read Hunger Games today, they’re not going to think about Kafka, or Shirley Jackson, or the occasional clichéd language.  They’re not even going to notice that Katniss stands almost alone as a realized yet nonchalant female hero.  They’re just going to take the book as it is, and Katniss for herself. 

For a story in the dystopian future, it makes me very optimistic.  And the only Kafkaesque hunger the fans feel is for the next book. 

Time: a little over an hour

Jesse Kavadlo

Coming soon: from Wall-E to Hunger Games to Gone to Uglies: what’s with all the dystopia for kids?   

UPDATE: Here’s that post: http://jessekavadlo.wordpress.com/2012/03/26/bedtime-stories-after-the-end-of-the-world-ages-12-and-under/

On Stolen Songs, Snowflakes, Fingerprints, and DNA

We’ve all done it—heard a new song that’s clearly inferior to the music we came of age to, and cried foul.  The “ripped off song” even seems to have become its own YouTube genre at this point.  One of my favorites is this one: 

If you didn’t bother to view it, I can sum it up here.  Thirty-four songs—James Blunt, You’re Beautiful; Richard Marx, Waiting for You; Alicia Keyes, No one; Mika, Happy Ending; Amiel, Lovesong; Black Eyed Peas, Where is the Love?; Alex Lloyd, Amazing; The Calling, Wherever You Will Go; Bush, Glycerine;  Thirsty Merc, Twenty Good Reasons; Lighthouse Family, High; Red Hot Chili Peppers, Soul to Squeeze; Bic Runga, Sway; Ben Lee, Cigarettes; Maroon 5, She Will Be Loved; U2, With or Without You; Crowded House, Fall at Your Feet; Casey Chambers, Not Pretty Enough; The Beatles, Let it Be; Red Hot Chili Peppers [again?], Under the Bridge; Michael Jackson, Man in the Mirror; Elton John, Can You Feel the Love Tonight; Men at Work, Down Under; Banjo Patterson, Waltzing Matilda; A-Ha, Take On Me; Eagle Eye Cherry, Save Tonight; Toto, Africa; The Offspring, Self Esteem; Blink 182, Dammit; One Republic, Apologize; Tim Minchin, Canvas Bags; Natalie Imbruglia, Torn; and Missy Higgins, Scar [whew!] are all stealing Journey, Don’t Stop Believing,

Although it’s hard to see how the artists who wrote their songs before 1981 could have stolen anything, it’s smart.  And funny.  And accurate.  And, for YouTube, exceptionally well done. 

Yet Axis of Awesome, the group behind the video, must also understand, since they also included their own song, Birdplane (thirty-five songs, then), in the medley, the following problems:

1) These songs are all using a standard, conventional rock chord progression.  What they’re calling a stolen song is really just called a rock song.  Would anyone create a medley of blues songs and say, “They’re all following the same pattern!”  (Blues songs all follow the same twelve-bar pattern; it’s what makes them recognizably blues songs.)  If we keep the same chords here—in the key of C, it would be C/G/Am/F—and were a little more flexible, we could in fact include all of the blues (C/F/C/G/F/C, with occasional variations),  all 1950s doo wop and adaptations (C/Am/F/G), and, really, most of pop music (C/G/F, which covers everything from Wild Thing to Hang on Sloopy to What’s the Frequency, Kenneth).

 2) In their original and complete forms, these songs sound much less alike then when reworked, restructured, rerecorded, decontextualized, and resung by the same singers over the same tempo accompanied by the same piano.

Yet in fairness, other videos, like this and this, understand a lot less about music.  But at least they leave the original recording, so that you can hear, however briefly, that once the vocal comes in, or the song changes to the next section, all of a sudden, the songs don’t sound that much alike anymore.

My favorite—and, with 10,000,000 hits, clearly other people’s favorite, though, is this one:

Here, comedian Rob Paravonian makes a similar point as Axis of Awesome, about the humorous but relentless similarities between pop songs, here framed as Pachobel’s personal  conspiracy against him. But even he takes some liberties with the songs; again, it’s the same person singing over the same guitar, sometimes as few as a single line to make his point.

This is not to say that any similarities between any songs are OK.  In the 1950s, white artists like The Beach Boys and Pat Boone certainly did rip off black artists like Chuck Berry and Little Richard, respectively.  (Perhaps more in another post.) And it’s funny that Green Day, in many ways a more interesting and original band than the hipsters give them credit for, seems to wind up on these lists an awful lot.  

But still, if people are so quick to judge songs as derivative, why are we also so eager to declare people’s uniqueness?  Aside from the occasional Chuck Palahniuk character, most of us heartily believe that we’re special and unique.  Unique like fingerprints, even though fingerprints are all nearly exactly the same and their uniqueness only comes into play if you’ve, say, committed a jewel heist.  Unique as snowflakes, although all snowflakes are all white and all cold and all too small to see the differences and all melt too fast to really compare them anyway and for any practical purposes are all interchangeable.  In sum, Everyone agrees that Everyone is unique. Which is not very unique of Everyone.   Fight Club’s Tyler Durden seems to be unique in his opinion that we’re not unique.  And he’s [spoiler alert! That’s right, I’m giving away the end of Fight Club! Um, you have had thirteen years to see it, people] a figment of the narrator’s psychosis, not a real person at all. And a fictional character on top of that.  

I can already picture a Youtube video montage of random people, scrolling through faces that stole the idea of having two eyes, and one nose, and a mouth with lips AND teeth.  Barring accident or abnormality, it turns out that people are like fingerprints and snowflakes: they’re all mostly the same. 

THE MOST STOLEN FACE IN HISTORY!

But despite the overwhelming similarities, I do believe that we’re really all different, beyond fingerprints, beyond gender, race, color, size, clique, style, and the other ways in which people vary. Because we are all truly unique at the genetic level, our DNA representing the chord progressions of our lives, the similar-yet-a-little-different sequences that make us who we are. 

I’m no biologist, so I know I’m oversimplifying and maybe getting some things wrong, but it seems to me that humans are essentially  structured like a song: our DNA is composed (music/biology overlapping word) of only four different bases (basses? OK, a stretch), abbreviated, like chords, by a letter: adenine (abbreviated A), cytosine (C), guanine (G) and thymine (T).  And DNA also like a song, creates difference through sequence and pattern.  No, there’s no T chord, but if you go with the letter F instead, and make A into A minor, you have the famous progression, C/G/Am/ F—the same one in Don’t Stop Believin’, the Most Stolen Song.  Yes, it’s a stretch (it is T, not F).  And a coincidence, even if you accept the stretch. 

But a song’s uniqueness is very much like each person’s—similarly patterned, generally unsurprising, but also recognizable, the same way in which we instantly greet our friends, family, and loved ones without each time thinking that their faces all form the same boring pattern.  A great example for me is Glen Hansard’s Falling Slowly, from the movie Once.

It’s that same chord progression again—mostly C/F/C/G, with occasional Am, almost a melancholy version of Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.  But like the people most important to us, it also feels like the only one if its kind: heartfelt, occasionally surprising (the falsetto leap on the word “time“), and, as we all aspire toward, unique.  

Time: over again! 70 minutes.

Jesse Kavadlo

All Movies are Time Travel Movies

Hugo, taking time travel literally

So it turns out that Einstein was right: “The faster-than-light neutrino results, announced last September by the OPERA collaboration in Italy, was due to a mistake after all. A bad connection between a GPS unit and a computer may be to blame” (see story).

 This means two things: check your cables, people.

And that time travel is impossible.

But don’t tell that to the movies, which never seem to tire of time travel. One of the best and most interesting time travel movies, Midnight in Paris, just won Woody Allen an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay.  I’m not sure people think of it as a time travel movie, exactly, because it defies the basic conventions of the genre. The trailer doesn’t even allude to the main plot point, making it seem like a standard rom-com:

  

In keeping, the film resolutely does not attempt to explain how or why writer Gil, played by Owen Wilson playing Woody Allen, winds up in the 1920s, meeting his literary and artistic  idols like Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Stein, Dali, and others.  No flux capacitor-equipped DeLorean.  No Klingon Bird-of-Prey that slingshots around the Sun.  No Time Displacement Sphere.  No black hole . No Time-turner.  No damn time machine at all. (Thanks for keeping track, Metacritic.)

Gil does not fret that his actions will have any ripple or butterfly effects.  He does not accidently kill his father, or flirt with his mother, or prevent his parents from marrying.  He does not have to protect the woman who will give birth to the hero who battles against the robots except he winds up being that hero’s father.  (So many Oedipal motifs!) No saving a hippogriff, or releasing zoo animals.  Especially no goddamn whales.  It’s something like magic, although only the trailer is stupid enough to use that word.  It’s a fairly light, conflict-free film, especially given Allen’s recent foray into murder thrillers and never-ending absorption with death. Through the journey into the past, Gil understands something important about himself, his fiancé, and his writing: his loves, and his life.  And it’s really a straightforward wish fulfillment, pure fantasy, for anyone nostalgic for a time they themselves have never known, anyone who imagines that there’s a golden age that they were born too late for.  As Gil discovers at the end [spoiler alert!], no matter where, or when, you go, there’s always an even earlier golden age to romanticize.  

Allen has done time travel before, though, in Sleeper, when Happy Carrot health-food store owner Miles ends up two hundred years in the future, only to discover that everything he thought was good for him is now known to be bad, and vice versa.

Yet food aside, things are not really better in the future, and not exactly worse, either, new technology to the contrary.  But rather, humans, whenever and wherever, are still very much the same.  Almost forty years later—or perhaps three hundred years earlier—Midnight in Paris suggests something similar: people have always been nostalgic, and scared, and hopeful, in the past as well.

Yet our fascination with time travel in movies does not wane.  And that is because all movies are time travel movies.  Bear with me.

Look at the two biggest winners from last night’s Academy Awards, The Artist and Hugo. 

While neither literally features time travel, the time traveler is the viewer.  Hugo, clearly thematically intertwined with Martin Scorsese’s own film preservation efforts, posits the idea that the camera itself is our time machine, capturing moments that we can then revisit each time we re-view—unless the film is lost or destroyed, taking with it our very history and key to the past.  Keys, cameras, locks, and clocks all feature prominently throughout the movie, not to mention an actual Automaton itself, a kind of anthropomorphized metaphorical time machine that connects Hugo to his own past and serves as a plot point to take him to his future. 

The Artist, which I confess I have not yet seen, even seems to go further: while Scorsese remade some of real-life filmmaker/character Georges Méliès work for Hugo, in general the 3D movie has a high tech, self-consciously postmodern style, calling attention to itself though its uses of angles, point of view shots, and extreme close-ups.  Not The Artist (as far as I know), which aspires to take viewers into the cinematic past through imitation as well as setting.

Much like Midnight in Paris, Hugo transports viewers back into 1930s-ish Paris, and then back further, through the recreated movies.  It implores us not to forget our past, even as it dares us to consider both Hugo’s own setting, as well as the turn of the century, when Méliès created his art, to be a cinematic golden age. 

Movies that take place in the past take us back to that past.  The same for movies set in the future.  They are our time machines.  And movies set in their own contemporary time?  Just wait long enough and you’ll discover that they take you back in time as well.  Sleeper looks a lot more like the 1970s than the 2000s, to say nothing of the 2200s.  Any movie + enough time=nostalgia movie. 

On the other hand, if we like Hugo, or Midnight in Paris, or The Artist, it’s hard not to see Scorsese in the end siding with Allen: the golden age is now. 

Good thing, too, because it’s the only time we’ve got.  Until scientists learn to check their cables, at least we have movies. 

And Dippin’ Dots: Ice Cream of the Future.

Time: Back to 60 minutes on this one.

 

Jesse Kavadlo

Why Do Americans Care About Downton Abbey?

No goddamn second "W," people

 

Warning: Contains details from Seasons 1 and 2.  Look for a future post on the whole idea of “spoilers.”

You know a show has had a cultural impact when doing a Google search for the perfectly reasonable term “Downtown” (notice second “w”) prompts Google to say “Showing results for downton abbey instead of downtown.” Huh.  

My first impression of Downton Abbey was that it mashed up Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility with Kazuo Ishiguro’s Remains of the Day, pleasant enough but nothing that special.  It’s the familiar-to-Jane-ites tale of a family of wealthy daughters who risk being dispossessed of house and fortune unless the eldest can marry the new heir to the property, or at least marry rich. Ishiguro, writing centuries later, was also concerned about the butlers who remained anonymous and invisible to earlier readers.  Fair enough.

Two seasons crammed into less-than two months later, it’s still Sense and Sensibility and Staff, but I’m hooked and jonesing for Season 3. 

So: how exactly did a BBC via PBS costume drama quickly became what seems like the most talked-about show in television?

So far, at least a few critics seem drawn to the class question.  As Katie Roiphe says in Slate, “One might wonder why, at the precise moment that we are condemning class divides in this country, so many of us would develop a passion for a show like Downton Abbey; why suddenly lawyers, unemployed artists, stay-at-home moms, and assorted liberals find themselves glued to a drama about an English country estate a hundred a years ago where the entire staff of footmen and ladies’ maids lines up outside to greet a titled guest.”  But Roiphe’s analysis doesn’t take the show’s fictional status into account.  Lots of us—all of us?—are entertained by characters, scenarios, and depictions that are different from, even counter to, who we are in real life.  Do cops watch Law and Order? Did doctors watch ER?  Maybe, but it’s the regular people outside the subcultures who made those shows huge.  If anything, Roiphe gets it exactly wrong: OF COURSE the very people she lists are fascinated by the extravagant wealth portrayed.  KR contrasts viewers’ love the show with America’s current anger at the top 1%, but DowAb is a work of elaborate, intricate fiction, not a documentary on the real or contemporary or boringly wealthy.  

As a work of fiction, DA allows viewers to identify with everyone, not just the fortunate: the Crawleys, certainly, and our wishes that the titled could be as admirable as they often seem, plus of course our fantasies of wealth—even as we get to snicker over the ironed newspaper that begins the series or the dowager countess’s confusion over what a “weekend” is.  We get to be Carson, the butler, so fastidious, so dignified, and in his own way ironically the most powerful person in DA; Matthew, who really is the in-between figure for middle-class Americans to identify with, since he is the only Crawleywho has had to work for a living, and he’s both fascinated with and a little dismayed at first by DA’s opulence; and the rest of the staff, who have to work for everything but, as we begin to see, have dreams of their own.  The British setting adds another layer of distance: the English do not think of class in the same mutable way that Americans do, rightly or wrongly.  And the WWI-era historical time frame (more on that in a minute) cements the remove required for Americans to enjoy the show conflict and hypocrisy free.  It’s British Historical Fiction, and there are no overt heroes or villains (except, perhaps, the war itself, and, later, Carlisle a little), so it’s safe.  It’s better than safe—it’s fun. 

But there’s more to the show than class, so let’s examine the possibilities.

It’s the quality, stupid. That’s certainly the angle from PBS and Masterpiece Theatre (nothing says sophisticated like “-re” instead of “-er” in “theatre,” although sadly, the whole word, it seems, has been dropped).  Before DA even begins, we get the beautiful and talented Laura Linney introducing the show and the opening advertisement sponsorship (this is ad-free public television!), luxurious, sumptuous Viking River Cruises.   (Why does Roiphe think that the audience is primarily “unemployed artists… and assorted liberals,” anyway?  Because Republicans keep trying to defund PBS?)  The costumes, the sets, the details, and clothes are gorgeous, impeccable, and lovingly captured.  OK, the editor of the Oxford English Dictionary has taken the show to task for its period-inaccurate idioms like “I am fed up seeing our lot get shafted.” (Interesting—coincidental?—that one of the chief examples of anachronistic slang is also the rare case of class resentment to sneak into the show, spoken by the sneakiest sneak, Thomas.)  But even for me, fretting about a few phrases is the costume drama equivalent of a superhero movie’s continuity error—nerdy nitpicking at best and belligerently  missing the point at worst. 

In any case, if it seems unfair to call the show Eye Candy, than let’s call it what it really is: Eye Caviar.  Expensive, posh, and symbolic of wealth.  But is it any good for you?  

Well, it’s also the acting: Britain’s best, and not a single one of them is wearing a pointy hat and teaching wand waving or foolish incantations in this class.  But even leaving aside the lack of CGI, unlike much of what’s out there, Downton is clearly a show about, by, and for grownups.  There aren’t even any children ON the show, and, like her wedding, I don’t see Sybil’s future baby having much screen time either.   And while I loved seeing Matthew and Carlisle scrap, most of the acting is subtle, expressive, and understated.  The WWI trench scenes only underscored the usual quiet and equanimity—I found myself scrambling for the volume button each time the scene shifted from Manor to battlefield or back.   The overall refinement counts for a lot when so much American film acting is all physical and kinetic.  Maggie Smith’s many zingers would not be nearly as funny without her wry delivery.  She’s the show’s special effect.  

High/low, not just upstairs/downstairs:  But the real beauty of the show is that is seems like it’s supposed to be good for you. British, historical; no elves, no aliens.  But it’s really like those Whole Foods or Trader Joe’s granola bars—you can imagine that they’re healthful all you want, but they’re really fancy candy.  Downton Abbey: looks like homework, feels like a soap opera.  (Original betrothed to Mary [possibly!] returns after surviving the Titanic post-amnesia and burned beyond recognition? OK!)  The Onion, as usual, nails it: Watching Episode of Downton Abbey Counts as Reading a Book. 

The World War I Era:  For all the corsets and fretting about eldest daughters, we’re over a century from Jane’s World. Writer/creator Julian Fellowes (has there ever been a more British name?) has mentioned that the Downton time period—roughly 1890-1940—is a time of great upheaval, the making of the modern world as we know it.  He’s right.  But World War II is like The Godfather II and Empire Strikes Back—the sequel that surpasses the original in scope.  The lead up, war itself, and post-war era—especially the 1920s—is one of the most historically interesting times, yet, today, it seems under-examined.   Here, we see the end of Victorian England—the class stratification, the entitlement, the empire itself.  But it’s only historical hindsight that makes us so aware.  Like the wealthy passengers on the Titanic who drowned on the opening episode, the Crawley family has no idea that their urgent plight over the heir to Downton is like fretting about the deck chairs when the entire ship is about to go under. 

For Americans, thwarted romance never gets old: In the end, the center of the show is, of course, Matthew and Mary.  So while the set up steals Sense and Sensibility, the conflict, like every other rom-com, pilfers Pride and Prejudice.  The Youtube montage below is one of many fan creations that inadvertently helps explain both why and what makes DowAb special: because unlike many of its poorer Austen-American relatives, it never resorts to awful sentimental terrible musical montage sequences.

But even with the M&M engagement, don’t toss out your hankies or get your hopes up.  Downton has painted itself into a narrative corner.  As everyone knows, fictional courtships may be dreamy, but fictional marriages are a nightmare.  And Mathew and Mary are just in time for the seismic shift in gender attitudes of 1920s, the decade that saw the rise of iconoclastic Brits DH Lawrence and Virginia Woolf and Americans like Hemingway and Fitzgerald and the most scathing literary critiques of marriage in history.  The story is supposed to end when the couple marries, or else we’re forced to watch their dissolution and misery.  The Season 2 finale—the snow, the proposal, the kiss, the hope for the future, the resolution of Matthew’s pride and Mary’s prejudice, the security of the Crawleys, should be the end.  It’s where Austen would have known to end it. 

Look for Julian Fellowes to invent reasons to keep his poor puppets apart even longer.  As everyone knows, 100% of marriages end in divorce or death. 

Time: OK, 75 minutes again, not including reading the other articles and links, which I did separate from writing the entry.  If I had more time, I’d have made it shorter.  Sorry.

 

Jesse Kavadlo

Women and/or Rock

 

Last week I wrote about VH1’s Metal Evolution  and was thrilled to see it linked to Banger Film’s social media.  I never actually expected anyone to see what I wrote, so I wasn’t thinking about readers’ reactions.  Yet of all the possible reasons to balk, the one that jumped out was calling the show on its gender imbalance.  Feminism somehow trumps Marx and Freud on the controversy-meter.

First, I stand corrected: there were not three women interviewed in the eleven hours; there were ten. 

And, of course, there’s the inherent numbers problem: how many women of metal are there?  No one would take Ken Burns to task for leaving women out of his documentary on baseball.

But music is, obviously, very different.  The easy solution to the skew would be a Women in Metal (or Hard Rock) episode.  It was the first thing I thought of.  And it would probably be great.  This has been Rolling Stone magazine’s way around their usual disparity. Yet while it solves one problem—balance and equality—it raises another: wouldn’t it be better to include women throughout the year rather than offer the consolation prize of a separate—and, according to the Supreme Court, by necessity, unequal—issue?  There is something about a special issue reserved for women that smacks of tokenism, as though female musicians didn’t make the real cut but want their Participant ribbon. 

But you know what? The truth is, I’m not going to resolve any of this here.  And that’s OK with me. 

Here’s what I’m really interested in, anyway: how gender works in rock, or whether gender in rock even matters at all. 

And one way for me to create the closest thing to a study of something as defiantly unempirical and unscientific as the meaning in music (evolutionary metaphors to the contrary) is to look at covers of songs where one version is performed by a man and the other by a woman.  What difference—other than obvious vocal tone—does it make?

Case #1:

 

No, Joan Jett didn’t write it or even record it first.  But when you listen to The Arrows plod through it—their own song!—after years of hearing Jett, you wonder why she even thought it would be worth recording at all.  When sung by a guy—or maybe, in fairness, THIS guy—it seems a pretty typical homage to the joys of jailbait, and the references to dimes and jukeboxes sound pathetic, nostalgic, and dated, even in the 1970s.

 

OK, the video does seem a little goofy today.  (See a smokin’ 1980s live version here; I didn’t want to compare studio to live.) But the gender inversion works wonders. Instead of seeming pathetic, like some dude in his 20s (30s?) hanging out by the record machine hoping to pick up a girl about seventeen, Jett seems tough, in control, and able to breathe life into the phrase “I Love Rock & Roll,” a deathly cliché for The Arrows but totally believable and sincere here—even as the butchy jacket and bangs suggest a singer with a wink and wry ironic sensibility. 

Case #2

 

I know you didn’t need to click on the link—you can hear the whole song in your head at this point just by reading the title.  OK, not rock, exactly, but certainly rockin’, a song that has become synonymous with post-breakup empowerment for a generation of women lip-synch sobbing into their hairbrushes.

Cake did a brave thing by covering a song that women own.  And unlike The Arrows, their version, way after it became iconic, wears well.  But it’s nothing like the original.  Where Gaynor belts it out, Cake plays it cool, except for the one lyrical update, “stupid lock” becomes “fucking lock.” With that shift, and overall laconic, behind-the-beat delivery, the song seems less about getting over an ex than an angry passive-aggressive possible psycho holding a grudge, the mantra of the jilted stalker who protests too much more than the surviving girlfriend. Its cool façade can’t cover the righteous anger. 

Case #3

The famous, the classic, but not the original.

Elvis was hated and feared for his devastating hip swivels and pelvic thrusts in his day, but funnily enough, his Hound Dog is neutered compared to Big Momma’s.  The gender inversion is just weird when you think about it: when sung by a woman, the song is clearly about a cheating man.  You  hear tha anger, but also the passion.  When sung by a man, however beautifully Elvis emotes and growls, it seems to be about… a hound dog. But, you know, 100,000,000,000 fans can’t be wrong.

Case #4

(YouTube won’t let me link to the video, so here is a live version, despite what I said above)

Bias: Possibly the best song on possibly one of the best albums ever.  I vividly remember the first time hearing this when it was released and thinking, “This is like nothing I ever heard.”  It’s like all the heroin in their bodies somehow seeped into the recording, so that between the delay on the guitar riff, the echoing shriek, the modulating keys, and the bouncing beat, it feels like the best nightmare.  The guitar and vocals are somehow so metal yet so blues that it’s no surprise that the song appealed to…

Etta James. [UPDATE 5/30/12: the linked video has since been removed] Too many variables: gender, but also race and age.  Still, James’s version makes the jungle seem like a funhouse, less frantic than Guns and more inevitable: if you’re lucky, and you live, maybe you can enter my jungle.  The thing that’s dangerous in this version of the song isn’t LA, rock, or drugs.  It’s Etta James.

Case #4a: Girls, Girls, Girls, Motley Crue

When feminists want a case-in-point for rock misogyny, they have one-stop shopping with Crue.  “Break her face or take down her legs” in Live Wire; “Use you up, throw you away” in Piece of Your Action, and this.  I hate to get all feminist theory again after last week, but this is a case study of the male gaze, where women exist only as objects.  But the issue isn’t whether anyone agrees with that point, since it’s obvious. The issue is whether you object.

4b: Take it Off, The Donnas

No, this is not, of course, a cover.  But it’s a great flipside and way to wrap after Girls x3.  Taken together, these songs force the listener to consider: What changes when women play and sing a song that objectifies men, where they’re the rockers and the subjects of the sexual chase? The lyrics certainly invert the Crue:

Need your love 1,2,3
Stop starin’ at my D cup
Don’t waste time, just give it to me
C’mon baby, just feel me up
C’mon, just give it up

Go on and take it off
You gotta shake it off baby, for me.

In many ways, it’s less a tribute to MCrue than it is to Joan Jett, decades later.  Reversing the gaze doesn’t seem demeaning to them, or, really, to men.

And the video, playing on viewers’ latent biases and sexpectations of what women in rock are supposed to look and act like, is worth more than a mountain of Rolling Stone’s Women in Rock issues.

Commenters: Got more examples of songs covered by both men and women? Post and discuss.     

Time: I’d love to keep going, but even rushing and trying to keep it short I’m at 60 minutes.

Jesse Kavadlo

VH1’s Metal Evolution as Interpreted by Theorists other than Charles Darwin

[Previous blog on VH1 and heavy metal]

VH1 concluded the first season, eleven episodes, of Sam Dunn’s documentary on heavy metal, Metal Evolution.  The thing that impresses me most, even more than the obvious time, money, energy, thought, and love that went into it, is the thesis: Dunn is actually true to the title, reading the history of metal as a gradual process by which the music changed into different forms and subgenres over four decades.  The introduction (excerpted in the clip below) shows Dunn hard at work constructing his diagram of categories and hand-lettered band-name logos, using architect-grade pens, an X-acto knife, pushpins, and string, so that the resultant chart is a meticulous assemblage worthy of a lepidopterist,  cartographer, or serial killer. As he works, the camera flashes to a bust of Charles Darwin, and then later to a bookshelf highlighting The Origin of the Species.  Dunn clearly sees metal as deserving of a hagiographic, Ken Burns-style documentary, even as metal, unlike Burns’s jazz and baseball, is not a simple slice of Americana; like an anthropologist, Dunn traverses the globe, frequenting Britain but also hitting Germany, Denmark, Canada, Brazil, and more, all to catalogue the comprehensive metal diaspora.

[Clip: Ad for Metal Evolution series; about 1 minute in, turns into clip of anti-metal diatribe for some reason. Ah, Youtube]

Yet [channeling Carrie Bradshaw] I couldn’t help but wonder: what if the series went on beyond Darwin? [Smiling for not saying “evolve.”] 

Metal Materialism

 

I'm a Marxist. A Groucho Marxist.

Dunn uses the image of evolution to suggest change, but it’s clear that it’s not natural selection as much as the unnatural, invisible hand of the marketplace:  the 1960s and early 1970s are presented as a golden age of metal, only to lead to a bloated, decadent phase of arena rock in the late 70s. Which then led to the energized, revitalized New Wave of British Heavy Metal (NWoBHM)    Which led to late 1980s glam excess and languor    Which led to deeper, darker thrash    Which led to back-to-basics, punk-influenced grunge (:S [confused face]) Which led to Nu Metal (first , with Korn, then , with Limp Bizkit and Linkin Park, with spelling  the whole time).  In each case, it’s not exactly that the music got old as much as the target market did—record companies were always on the lookout to find the next big seller for the next generation, happy to dump last year’s act in favor of a new flavor, only to dump them, ad infinitum.

But it’s not just market fluctuation as much as a deliberate assimilation of subversion.  Hard rock, then metal, then thrash, then grunge, are systematically stripmined of their rebelliousness; the very thing that in one year makes it dangerous in the next makes it a hot commodity.  Venture vulture capitalism not only absorbs the marginal into its mainstream; it profits from packaging and selling rebellion right back to the teens who invented it, until it’s all gone.  Then it moves on to the next form. This is not evolution as much as a business cycle, or, if you’re thinking generously Hegalian, a series of dialectical movements between conservatism and creativity, reformations and counter-reformations.  

Metal Poststructuralism

Don't be so Saussure

But what about the episodes I didn’t mention above, on Shock Metal, Power Metal, and Progressive Metal? They fall outside—or maybe side by side—Dunn’s partially chronological approach, a kind of concurrent evolution, so that each of these three episodes starts over again in the 60s, even as the first eight episodes were working their way closer to the present.  We can think of metal, then, in Roman Jakobson’s terms: syntagmatic—linear, forward moving, evolving, chronological, narrative—as well as paradigmatic—vertical, categorical, thematic, metaphorical.  Seeing metal as moving from roots to early metal to NWoBHM to glam to thrash to grunge to Nu metal is syntagmatic; seeing the previous episodes as representing the traditional narrative of metal with outliers in Shock, Power, and Prog is paradigmatic.   

Alternately, we can see all of heavy metal as a language system—the langue of heavy metal always consisting of loud, distorted guitars, hard-hitting drums, extreme vocals (whether screaming, high-range, guttural, or Cookie Monster), and rebellious attitude; the parole of metal comes from the specific utterances and subgenres.  The reason your grandma (or a nonfan) can’t tell the difference between any of these episodes is because they’re not native speakers of metal—they recognize only the langue but cannot decipher the particulars of the parole.

Metal Patriarchy

I would not even think about putting a funny caption here

Dunn in general is not looking at metal’s faults.  Fair enough. It’s his show.  Yet the glaring fact is that, over eleven hours and interviews with hundreds of musicians, producers, journalists, and academics, I counted only three women: a manager, a professor, and Melissa Auf der Maur, bassist with Hole and other groups. (I may have missed someone, I suppose). 

Maybe it’s just a numbers game—metal bands are mostly male.  But consider one of Dunn’s very un-anthropological forays into complaint: he is very clear about his dislike of glam metal and seems only to include it out of some fanatical completist’s OCD.  And why does he dislike glam?  It seems, in part, because he sees the groups as feminine, wearing makeup and spandex, although, again, Grandma would see most of these groups as effeminate.  Ugly androgyny and makeup a la Alice Cooper and Marilyn Manson, who even assume women’s names, is OK, but not stage makeup or names like Rikki Rockett.  And beyond looking like women—or, arguably, caring about their looks at all—what is glam’s other serious violation? It appealed to—GIRLS!  In fact, the one thing that all of Dunn’s defective eras in metal share—including his open disdain of Linkin Park—is that they had a significant number of female fans.  Dunn’s metal shop is a boy’s club.

(Not that glam isn’t also, paradoxically, a low point in lyrical misogyny.  Dunn is not particularly interested in lyrics anyway.  And unlike the other metal genres, glam has at least discovered girls in the first place.) 

Metal Heliocentrism

Revolution Number 9

Dunn seems to see the 60s as the Big Bang of metal creativity.  And the cosmological model may be better than the evolutionary one, as evolution implies not just change but change into a better form.  For Dunn, it’s clear that the subjects of his previous documentaries, Iron Maiden and Rush, represent the sun around which the other bands and genres revolve.  The introduction plays Maiden’s The Trooper, and these two groups still seem absolutely central to Dunn’s metal universe, rather than mere transitional stages in a larger evolutionary process of species improvement. 

Metal Psychoanalysis

Sometimes a circular saw codpiece is just a circular saw codpiece. Oh, wait. No it's not.

If Dunn can use Darwin and I include Marx and Copernicus, it’s only fitting that I end with the other world-changing thinker, Freud.  The introduction also flashes briefly to photos of Dunn’s childhood and his college degrees on the wall.  It’s hard to wonder whether this whole documentary filmmaker gig isn’t a chance to meet the idols of his youth—and, in some oedipal sense, surpass them.  Many of the former stars are now aging, overweight, bald, and way, way past their era of fame.  Dunn is in charge now, calling the shots and asking the questions, controlling—creating—the metal narrative.  And at what must be a height of about 6’5”, Dunn again and again towers over the rock stars.  The star-struck child returns, and this time he is the symbolic adult.   Power metal indeed. 

Forget metal evolution—Dunn has crafted himself as metal’s Intelligent Designer.

Time: Yeah, I’m over an hour on this one. Yeah.

 

Jesse Kavadlo

UPDATE 2/15/12: Read the follow-up to the part that got people talking: Women and/or Rock.

Eye-Catching Image, Specific Subtitle: One Man, or A Woman, A Formula, and The Extraordinary Journey to Save the Campus Reads Book

Any disparaging puns are unintentional I SWEAR!

I’m a member for my university’s campus reads program.  Like a lot of schools, for the past five years we’ve selected a book to be given to all incoming first-year students—and plenty of faculty and returning students—to foster academic community.  It’s a very nice idea, and I’m behind the sentiment completely—I, you know, being someone who, I assert, believes in Reading, and Books, and Sharing, and, um, College.  And Reading!  There is just one small problem.

It’s nearly impossible to pick a book.

You’d think with approximately one zillion books in print that it would be a snap.  But to keep the costs down, we need paperback.  To fulfill part of the mission, we need a book with a theme of diversity or social justice.  To keep students interested, and to keep open the possibly of bringing the author to campus, as we did twice, the book should be relatively recent (but not so recent as to be in hardcover only; see stipulation 1), and the author needs to be alive.  (Although bringing a dead author to campus would surely also keep students interested.)  If the book is too long, or too esoteric, or too technical, or too mature, or too advanced, students won’t read it, since it’s not always enforceable homework, per se.  If the content is potentially controversial, parents—and possibly students—will complain.  

Think, then, of cost, diversity, context, length, content, and potential disagreement—to say nothing of actual quality or literary merit—it’s like a Ven diagram with seven circles:

This doubles as my future album cover

The one book that I felt was perfect and championed—the .001% overlap in the Ven Diagram of programmatic strictures— was Zeitoun, by Dave Eggers, a powerfully written and researched nonfiction narrative of one family’s experience in New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.  But the book’s strength did not come from the ready-made fodder of disaster; it came from what it subtly, increasingly argued to be the intersection between natural and human-made disaster, and the domestic consequences of the War on Terror’s collision of religion and politics.  Of course, some students didn’t like it, and at least one parent complained, but, for me, it was perfect.  And, unfortunately, perhaps unique.

The publishing industry, though, seems to have smelled this niche opening.  (Ew, sorry.) Lots of catalogues, and even whole conferences, have crept up devoted to choosing and fostering the campus read.  So far, so good.  The problem, though, is that based on the known constraints, they all are starting to sound alike.  When a formula works—good looking, non-sparkly vampires in the modern world; what superheroes would be like in real life; peanut butter and jelly; twelve bar blues; schools for wizards—I’m totally there.  But when it doesn’t, the results seem not just predicable, but trite, regardless of the topic or intentions.

And the formula the industry has devised seems cribbed from their initial best sellers.   Before I began coordinating University Seminar (required class for all first-semester students), for years all first year students read Tuesdays With Morrie: An Old Man, A Young Man, and Life’s Greatest Lesson.  Yes, yes, lots of people love it.  As it happens, it is one of my least favorite books.  We replaced it with The Freedom Writers Diary: How a Teacher and 150 Teens Used Writing to Change Themselves and the World Around Them.  Better: it engaged in student voices, involved a school, brought in class and race issues (unlike Albom, who seems insulated and vacuous) and makes death seem dangerous (unlike Albom, whose paunchy prose and insufferable attitude makes his book the braindead version of Tolstoy’s Death of Ivan Ilyich).  

Two years later, we used Three Cups of Tea: One Man’s Mission to Promote Peace… One School at a Time, by Greg Mortenson. Mortenson’s subsequent scandal aside—this was before it broke—the formula’s seams were already showing and wearing thin: an overwritten account, from the perspective of a white, privileged person, about  wild success, despite the haters, in helping others less fortunate (Morrie is just old, but as the genre drags on, the needy are young and dark), while also learning valuable lessons in humanity and humility that the writer is now virtuously passing onto you, dear readers, for what I think was at least $15,000 a pop in speaking fees, to say nothing of the hundreds (for some schools, thousands) of books pushed.

By now, though, we’re entering the decadent stage of this peculiar genre.  I don’t claim to have read all of the books below, but who can?  No, don’t judge a book by its cover, but what about its cover, title, subtitle, blurb, and, um, content?  All of these were pulled from the same catalogue, and each essentially plays Mad Libs with the titles, worth repeating here, of Tuesdays With Morrie: An Old Man, A Young Man, and Life’s Greatest Lesson; The Freedom Writers Diary: How a Teacher and 150 Teens Used Writing to Change Themselves and the World Around Them; and Three Cups of Tea: One Man’s Mission to Promote Peace… One School at a Time.

How about these?

Outcasts United: An American Town, a Refugee Team, and One Woman’s Quest to Make a Difference

An Unquenchable Thirst:  One Woman’s Extraordinary Journey of Faith, Hope, and Clarity

Strength in What Remains: A Journey of Remembrance and Forgiveness

A Mighty Long Way: My Journey to Justice at Little Rock Central High School

Enrique’s Journey: The Story of a Boy’s Dangerous Odyssey to Reunite with His Mother

Gertruda’s Oath: A Child, A Promise, and A Heroic Escape During World War II

Make the Impossible Possible: One Man’s Crusade to Inspire Others to Dream Bigger and Achieve the Extraordinary

Joker One: A Marine Platoon’s Story of Courage, Leadership, and Brotherhood

Black Hearts:  One Platoon’s Descent into Madness in Iraq’s Triangle of Death

Be Different: Adventures of a Free-Range Aspergian with Practical Advice for Aspergians, Misfits, Families & Teachers

And the winner for longest title:

The World is Bigger Now: An American Journalist’s Release from Captivity in North Korea . . . A Remarkable Story of Faith, Family, and Forgiveness

Now, let me emphasize: these books may be important.  Some are probably even fine.  Stories of triumph over adversity, of courage, of inspiration, are, for the most part, a good thing. Several books attempt to allow sometimes-silent people an opportunity to tell their story.   

And yet—messages are not enough.  Books are not meaning -filled syringes or lofty content-delivery systems.  If Zeitoun had been called A Mighty Big Wave: A Man, an Extraordinary Voyage, and an Incredible Story of Survival and Reunion—and the writing and message matched—I would not have pushed for it.  In fact, Zeitoun is not a success story or feel-good read at all.  Its language is always lean and clear, never sentimental; its ending, equivocal; part of its message, dark and critical.  In the end, these books above traffic in the sensations and trappings of war, danger, and death, rather than their intellectual, political, or emotional entanglements.   The problem may not be the lack of options of the over-determined Ven diagram.  The problem may be in what we want out of a campus read in the first place. 

For me, the role of a good book is not to make the reader feel good.  It is to make the reader feel at all. And think.  And see the power, and even limitations, of language and story.

Time: 75 minutes (dammit), plus images, which I’ve decided never to count.

AND: Got a suggestion for a campus reads book? I’d love to hear it in Comments.

Game Over: When Bad Things Happen to Good Videogame Characters

Death by a thousand pixels

Two nights ago, I noticed that my boys, ages 10 and 13, looked—there is no other word for it—depressed.  Two weeks ago, I wrote about their obsession with/addiction to Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword, including this: “for all the seeming fantasy, what the game—most games?—embodies are the very same strictures surrounding American school and work life.  Playing the game must be fun, too, I guess, but the real joy seems to be advancing to the next level—only to work toward surpassing that one, ad infinitum.”  But they didn’t look happy now.  My younger son should have been especially happy, because my older son had helped him beat a tough part, much to my chagrin—I’ve told them repeatedly that they should not play each other’s turns or games, since the playing, not the winning, was the point.  You wouldn’t ask someone to eat your ice cream for you.  They persisted anyway.

But now, they weren’t down because they had lost.

They were down because they won. It turns out that they beat the game. 

And with that victory, a kind of defeat: my doctorate of philosophy calls for a diagnosis of Existential Crisis, one that usually doesn’t set in for another few years, the nagging, gnawing, corrosive question that sets in at adolescence and, in some cases, never ceases: Is That All There Is?

It turns out that once you get to the last level, beat the last villain (in video game parlance, “Boss,” which seems weirdly Marxist to me), and rescue Zelda, the credits roll (Dear Fellow Old People: video games have credits), and play simply starts over at the beginning again. 

I asked them: what did you think would happen?  The point of the game was, as always, to kill monsters, beat bosses, acquire money (“Rupees,” which seems weirdly Asian Subcontinent), and move one level closer to finding Zelda.  It couldn’t go on forever, could it?  Did they think victory would reveal a secret code for a secret club or secret game? That a crisp $20 bill would pop out of the Wii? No, but—and here I paraphrase—they didn’t think that winning the game would feel so much like losing it.  Not just emotionally—really, all that happens after you win is that you go back to where you started, same as when you lose.

For all the scholars who suggest that video games are texts ripe for analysis, or that they even surpass more conventional narratives like stories thanks to their interactivity and player control, the end of the video game seems very different to me from the ending of a story.  As Walter Benjamin says in “The Storyteller,” readers intuitively understand all of life through the end of the story, which represents a kind of death, or through the actual death of a character:

The nature of the character in a novel cannot be presented any better than is done in this statement, which says that the “meaning” of his life is revealed only in his death. But the reader of a novel actually does look for human beings from whom he derives the “meaning of life.” Therefore he must, no matter what, know in advance that he will share their experience of death: if need be their figurative death—the end of the novel—but preferably their actual one. How do the characters make him understand that death is already waiting for them—a very definite death and at a very definite place? That is the question which feeds the reader’s consuming interest in the events of the novel.

In other words, as human beings we can never understand the full significance of our own lives, because we must live them, from our perspective, and can’t reflect on our own ending, because we’re, ya know, dead.  But we can contemplate the full life, objectively, of a fictional character, because the beginning and end of the story delineate the full beginning and end of their existence.  And so through fiction—the figurative deaths that are stories and the more real but still fictional deaths of characters, we may understand something big—Death!—that, by its very nature, eludes our grasp, and therefore we may take comfort. As Benjamin concludes, “What draws the reader to the novel is the hope of warming his shivering life with a death he reads about.” It’s uplifting.  Really.  So we think that we’re sad when our favorite characters die or our favorite stories end, but we also, on another level, feel good, or, if you’re Aristotle, experience catharsis, a purging of the bad emotions, once you’re through.

Or, as Frank Kermode understood it, narrative endings are not only dress rehearsals for death, but they are inextricably linked to our apocalyptic sensibilities: “Fictions,” Kermode says, “whose ends are consonant with origins satisfy our needs.”  The conventions of story itself dictate a beginning and an ending; for every “Once upon a time,” a “Happily ever after.” He goes on to suggest that “one has to think of an ordered series of events which ends, not in a great New Year, but in a final Sabbath.”  Or a Black Sabbath, if you’re not feeling particularly rapturous.  Kermode relates the endings of all stories to the endings of all things: narrative endings as death, but also death as a narrative ending, “the End is a fact of life and a fact of the imagination.”

But video games seem not to provide Benjamin’s comfort, Aristotle’s catharsis, or Kermode’s closure at all.   There is no Once Upon a Time or Happily Ever After, only the grim, relentless Middle—just like our own real lives.  As I wrote in the other blog, main character Link looks and seems a lot like Peter Pan. But it’s not just the pointy ears and pointy weapons, the green clothes, or the shock of hair.  Like all video game characters, and like Peter Pan, Link is, for all intents and purposes, immortal and eternally youthful.  You could make the same case, I guess, for all fictional characters—that they revert to being alive and young when you start the book or movie again.  But that’s symbolic.  Thanks to endless “lives”—the word gamers use—and concomitant reincarnation (a word no one uses) with each reset or replay, Link lives, and dies, again and again and again.  As a father, I find no sentence weighs heavier on my heart than when one of the boys tells me, when their game time is over, that “I’ll just play until I die.”  He’d like that, I suppose.  The shift to first person—“I” die, not “Link dies” or even “my game ends”—makes clear that the games are about defying death, but they also focus relentlessly, discordantly, on death itself.

You thought you had it rough?

But if Link cannot ever die, if there is no final level—since the thing resets ad infinitum—no sense of an ending, then it feels like there is also no point.  The Onion, as always, gets it hilariously right: “Video-Game Character Wondering Why Heartless God Always Chooses ‘Continue’”:  “ORANGEBURG, SC–Solid Snake, tactical-espionage expert and star of PlayStation’s ‘Metal Gear Solid,’ questioned the nature of the universe Monday when, moments after his 11th death in two hours, a cruel God forced him to ‘Continue’ his earthly toil and suffering.”  In the end, “God,” of course, is revealed to be “Orangeburg 11-year-old Brandon MacElwee,” who “offered no comment on His greater plan for Snake, saying He was ‘too busy trying to get to the part with the knife-throwing Russian girl.’” 

But players realize that they are not gods, or God, and that the never-ending levels and never-ending deaths in video games provide a different, cautionary lesson than those in stories: the ironic moral that there is more to life than acquiring points and money, more to existence than merely getting to the next level.  And I said this to the boys, concluding that “this is why I don’t let you play the hard parts for each other.  All you’re doing is speeding up the end, and it’s the playing  itself that’s supposed to be the fun part.” 

With that, my ten-year old looked at me, eyes bright and wide, and said, “I understand now.”

Time: It looked like I was gonna finish in 50 minutes, but then I decided I wanted to find the Benjamin and Kermode quotes that you probably didn’t read anyway, which took me overtime to 75 minutes.  I’ll finish faster the next time I play.

I Have Issues with Fictional Characters’ Names

I’m teaching Henry James’s “Daisy Miller: A Study,” a very frequently taught short story, in my just-started American lit class.  If you haven’t read it, or read it a long time ago, it’s an ostentatiously written drama from 1878 about a group of privileged Americans living in Europe and their reaction to a new-money girl, the title character, as seen through the perspective of Winterbourne, a young man who finds her, in a word repeated a million times, “pretty.”  Nearly everything about the story is ambiguous or could be argued from either side, which is one of the reasons it works so well in a class: is Daisy a strong, free-spirited proto-feminist, or a foolish girl?  Does she understand the way the vicious polite society talks about her behind her back—and if so, what does this say about her behavior?  Does Winterbourne really love her—or does Daisy really love him—or are they both toying with each other in different ways?  Does Daisy—does Winterbourne?—understand what she—or he?—is doing?  Does Daisy’s [do I really need to say Spoiler Alert about a story that’s over 130 years old? Fine. “Spoiler Alert.”] death at the end suggest a misogynistic society, a kind of death wish, recklessness,  or just a fogey author who needs to punish his own literary creation?  Is Daisy “innocent”—another repeated word throughout the story—or, in the words of Jimi Hendrix, experienced?  Is this even a fair question?  Does Winterbourne experience an epiphany at the end thanks to some revealed information, or has he learned nothing? And over a hundred years of scholarship more.

HOWEVER.  For all the complexity, intricacy, and layered ways of reading, one aspect stands out: for all of James’s painstaking realism and period detail—clothes, speech, scenery—Daisy’s and Winterbourne’s names are so heavy-handedly symbolic that they threaten to bring everything down.  “Daisy”=fresh, lovely flower; “Winterbourne”=bearing or aspiring toward cold. ‘Cause you know, winter kills flowers! So much for subtlety.    

Maybe it’s more complicated—Daisy’s real first name isn’t even “Daisy;” it’s “Annie.” Her last name “Miller” could be analyzed, and Winterbourne’s first name, “Frederick,” could be worked in.  But the headline “WINTER KILLS FLOWER!” is inescapable.

Last month I wrote about Lev Grossman and The Magicians.  As much as I love the novel and admire the marriage of magic and realism, the main character’s name, Quentin Coldwater, still leaves me, um, cold.  A book-smart kid from Brooklyn (something I know a little about) is far more likely to have a name like Chang, or Furci, or Jackson, or Reddy, or really, for that matter, Grossman.  Like Winterbourne, Coldwater connotes someone chilled in his emotions, and “throw cold water on” means “criticize something that people are enthusiastic about,”  both of which describe Quentin well.  (“Coldwater Creek” and women’s apparel, less so).    

And the alliteration is reminiscent of real-life writer Quentin Crisp; of course, Crisp changed his name from Dennis Pratt.  Quentin Coldwater is closer to Faulkner’s Quentin Compson, but for me is most reminiscent of superhero names—especially recent X-Men villain Quentin Quire—and the never ending litany of Clark Kents, Peter Parkers, Lex Luthors, and Bruce Banners.   OK, Bruce Wayne doesn’t have alliteration, but he has two first names, along with Steve Rogers (Captain America) and Steve Trevor (Wonder Woman’s love interest).   Speaking of Steve, Dr. Stephen Strange gets—who could have seen it coming?—mystical powers! Dr. Victor Freeze develops cold powers!  And Dr. Victor Von Doom’s parents should have changed every name involved.  I don’t know what he’s a doctor of, but I’m guessing it’s not English.  As J. Jonah Jameson (triple alliteration!) slyly notes, of Dr. Octopus, “Guy named Otto Octavius winds up with eight limbs. Four mechanical arms welded right onto his body. What are the odds?”  Pretty good, I’d say.    

Would you take a college course from this man?

The Wizard of Oz pits sweet but sassy Dorothy Gale (meaning: “a very strong wind”—cyclone?) against wicked Mrs. Gulch (“a rocky ravine”).  The Bourne Identity’s Jason Bourne—Quentin Coldwater gets the Winter, Jason gets the Bourne—rediscovers his true self after losing his memory and becoming, quote unquote “born,” if you will, by fighting the covert operations who had previously employed him.  Guy named Bourne gets amnesia.  What are the odds?   Lev Grossman held a contest in December on his blog to provide a last name for one of his main characters, Julia.  The result: Julia Wicker. Gal named Wicker winds up becoming a witch.  What are the odds?   

But what’s the alternative to non-symbolic names?  While Hermione Granger gets both mythological allusion and a last name metaphorically fitting her reading habits, title character Harry Potter gets the Everyman treatment—no allusions, no symbolism.  But then, the LACK becomes the point.  His nonsymbolic name symbolizes his very ordinariness and relatability.  The Big Lebowski’s unliterary name is itself funny, and like Daisy, he then anoints himself anew. (The Dude also Anoints.)  I would quote Juliet’s “What’s in a name?” here, but Romeo and Juliet’s names have become symbolic, even if they didn’t start that way. 

When names belong to fictional characters, then, they’re either already filled with meaning, or we can’t help but fill them with meaning ourselves. 

Even if it would be unfair to warn women with floral names to stay away from Winterbournes , or Coldwaters, in real life.  Maybe they should, just to be on the safe side.

Time: 60 minutes, not counting making the My Name Is Daisy Miller image or, as usual, uploading.

Don DeLillo is Not Dead

Also: Not Dead Yet

While it seems impossible to believe, some people don’t know who Don DeLillo is; or, as I say to students, he’s the most famous author they’ve never heard of.[i]   And many of those people, including my non-academic acquaintances—yes, I have some—presume that Don DeLillo is dead.  They’re surprised that he’s not.

Their assumption raises a few interesting problems for teachers and scholars of living authors.  The first is the notion that the only authors worth studying must come from a previous era, a line of reasoning that English Departments discarded decades ago but that the general public may not have.  Not that they don’t read, or even prefer, living authors themselves, but that living authors don’t produce Literature, only books, and ideally bestsellers.  We can’t, in this line of thinking, really know an author’s place, value, or contribution in his or her own lifetime, as though authorship were akin to sainthood.

The second is what I think of as the Back to School Problem.  If you’ve seen the movie (1986), Rodney Dangerfield (who is, in fact, now dead) plays his usual self-deprecating schlub.  In the words of IMDB’s tagline, “To help his discouraged son get through college, a funloving and obnoxious rich businessman decides to enter the school as a student himself.”   When Dangerfield’s character needs to write a paper on the novels of Kurt Vonnegut (who is also now dead), he hires Vonnegut himself to do the work.  The cameo alone is funny, but the punchline is that Dangerfield fails the paper, not just because the professor knows right away that someone else wrote it, but also because “whoever did write [this paper] doesn’t know the first thing about Kurt Vonnegut.” (Warning: offensive language)

The joke, as usual I suppose, is on the professor, who, we understand through dramatic irony, only thinks she is an authority on Vonnegut’s work.  Or worse, she (unknowingly) believes that she knows Vonnegut better than he knows himself.  Despite decades of reader response theory and deconstruction, despite cases where authors themselves have claimed not to have understood what at they wrote at the time, despite authors admitting only a hazy notion of how their work would be interpreted, in the popular mind, the author is still the best, and maybe only, authority on his or her work.  Shakespeare can’t tell you that your, say, Lacanian readings of Hamlet weren’t what he intended.  Well, how could they have been?  And contemporary critics understand that intentions are not the only point—if not beside the point entirely.  But Don DeLillo can still tell you that your, say, ecocritical reading of White Noise isn’t what he intended.  Or, as he has suggested in interviews, that he never reads critical or literary theory.  And, unlike, Back to School, it would not be a joke.  If students worry that they’re not entitled to form opinions on Shakespeare because his work is centuries old, endlessly discussed, and firmly canonical, they can feel equally constrained by the living author, because they can still be proven wrong, if the author only says so.

Which takes me to my final problem.  DeLillo, unlike, say JD Salinger (who died only recently), is not only alive but still prolific.  The last decade alone has produced The Body Artist, Cosmopolis, Falling Man, Point Omega, and the new collection of short stories, compiled from 1979-2011, The Angel Esmeralda: Nine Stories.  This work alone could be the envy of many authors—consider that in about the same time, Jonathan Franzen produced a single novel, Freedom; in only a little less time, Jeffery Eugenides wrote The Marriage Plot.[ii]  So in addition to what I see as the indisputably Great Novels—White Noise, Libra, and Underworld—such an output is astonishing.     

And these works can’t help but change how I read DeLillo now.  Point Omega is almost the anti-Underworld (Overworld?), so sparse and imagistic as to be nearly inscrutable.  If Underworld overwhelms readers, Point Omega underwhelms them, by design.  Libra is often read as speculative fiction, a conspiracy-minded counter-narrative to the prevailing Kennedy history.  But rather than taking on what could have been a similar approach to 9/11, DeLillo completely eschews paranoia in Falling Man, surrendering his anointment as chief shaman of the paranoid school of literature.  And Angel Esmeralda, for me, provides the greatest pause.  Perhaps I shouldn’t admit that I had never read the first story “Creation,” published in 1979, but reading it now reveals a writer interested in mixing breezy eroticism into his usual—and now, arguably since White Noise, semi-suspended—absurdist, black humor. 

Overall, what the collection—and the past decade’s work—demonstrates is an author who is unrepentantly alive, in all senses of the word:   animated, energetic, relevant, and changing.  It gives the reader a lot to live up to, and much to look forward to as well.

Time: OK, I have to admit that I forgot to pay attention to the clock today. I know, I know, that’s my whole schtick.  Maybe 60 minutes? Probably a little over.  Not too much, though.

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[i] Chances are that this isn’t even true, since many have not heard of Joyce or Faulkner or even Austen, but I like the line.

[ii] Not that these aren’t great achievements, I hasten to add, since Franzen and Eugenides are alive and likely to get annoyed at such comparisons.