Gene Wolfe

My wife has always complained that Gene Wolfe makes her 'feel itchy' - that his writing has a real creepiness to it, redeemed by his great variety, skill and seriousness, but not fully explained either.

Case in point for those who have read TBOTNS - little is made of it, but Severian sleeps with both his grandmothers. Dorcas, who he raised from the Lake of Birds, was Ouwen's mother. He (Ouwen) first recognizes her while he Waits (tables) at the Inn of Lost Loves by the Sanguinary Field. Dorcas follows Severian the Thrax, but then journey's back down Gyoll looking for her real lost love.

In Thrax, Severian meets a beautiful older woman at an evening masquerade, Cyriaca. He allows her to seduce him and then cannot kill her as he is supposed to. He learns of her lost love, her daughter Katherine, sent to the Matachin Tower of the Torturers for occasioning some killing or other as a young beauty.

Finally he learns that Ouwen had slept with Katherine when she stayed at the Inn, in time for him to be born to her before her excruciation and death.

Waiting at the Inn of Lost Loves is so innocuously presented that I only realised it was symbolic in writing this. Is there something in the intimate relations with Dorcas and Cyriaca? Until I find something, I'm a little itchy too.

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I write the music and sing the themesong?*

Here's another coincidence of the interests of this blog. For mysterious reasons, I've ended up recording little versions of the theme song to Pilar Alessandra's On-the-Page podcast, a free 30-50min chat with the sharp and funny host (Pilar) and her producer and a guest. Very enjoyable. The original theme was composed by Dave Zukowski.   I can't find a web link for him, but episode 50, at the end, is where I got his name.  There's a hotmail email address.  Leave a comment if you believe me looking up the exact email address is a good idea for your porpoises.  I mean purposes.

I've put them on soundcloud.

Are you ready to be Bemused???**

I said, 'Are you READY to be BEMUSED?!!'

* Little Britain reference
** Really, if you don't come here expecting to be bemused, it is hard to know what you do expect.

More Life

If there is a common theme in 'The Stars My Destination' and 'The Book of the New Sun' and my worrying about right and right (adaptive, functional and moral, upright) and perhaps the gospel, it is the power of wanting and believing in More Life.

Gully Foyle spends six months in a wrecked spaceship fighting for enough food and water and air, and gets to know himself as a thing deserving and demanding more life. He finishes by stripping moral and real power from the few and imposing it on the many who had chosen to lead empty formalities instead of lives.

Severian, weighing the consequences of a white fountain (an energy emitting singularity) entering our solar system and interrupting life on Urth, remembers how the long tortured clients would lose hope of justice or vindication, and wish only for sunlight and air, for more life. The despair of an Urth in which everything has been tried and come only to frustration, is absolute. But even to be destitute, to despair, there must be something better that is despairing. In the end the only dimension that matters is more life.

This is Nietzsche's 'yes to everything' morality; a morality that works differently from 19th century morality of good and evil. To the 19th century late-christian morality, evil was a kind of monstrosity, a self-justifying wickedness that (like virtue) was its own reward. Nietzsche thought this was more an artifact result of an artificial (and therefore wrong) morality.

This week I saw a paper on Arxiv on a recasting of certain statistics to revolve around an analogue of Absolute Zero in thermodynamics. The goal was to create statistical tests for which more evidence would always be additive - to find a way of expressing an absolute zero for evidence.

I think Christianity needs to get back to its moral work of asserting that 'to be is good'. There is more and less good, but there is a limit to evil, an absolute zero of good. The fundamental communication from public christians to 'the world' has been 'no to everything' when it should have been More Life.*

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PS.  There is not space to point out that such a view is already, exactly the non-Manichean, Evil only as absence of good, view of Christianity.

PPS.  The Absolute Zero metaphor of evil is actually made a real thing somewhere in The Reality Dysfunction series by Peter F Hamilton.

Aristotle on Screenwriting.

In a satisfying natural coincidence of two interests of this blog, Aristotle (notable in philosophy) wrote a book (Poetics) unpacking how serious drama was done in his time.  English script-development guru Stephen Cleary gave three talks at the Victorian College of the Arts in Melbourne Australia.  (It's Victorian only in being in a State called Victoria.  It's nature is a sort of strident Bloomsbury for 18-20 year olds.)

This blog post introduces them, and you can download them from there.

Plato wanted to ban fiction because it wasn't true, and he thought, couldn't contribute civic value.  Aristotle's defence of fiction (not that they had the concept fiction, but poetry and drama were understood to be in a different category from every events and rules for living) - I will begin again.  Aristotle's defence of fiction (according to SC) understood it from the inside out.  He looks at each of the elements and how it interfaces with the others, and what the overall effectiveness hinges on.

What I took from SC's explanation was that in a story, we understand people in ourselves - we read their situation intellectually and emotionally (and even physically - I sometimes notice I've got breathing anxiety when I see someone in a film underwater).  The complex drama (e.g. greek tragedy), though, keeps the protagonists off balance, constantly challenged or threatened by events, to which they respond with emotionally motivated actions that are not quite right, don't resolve the tension. The tension is escalating throughout the film until, at last, there is a realisation.

The realisation needs to happen in a specific series of moments, the hero being knocked off balance one last time and then receiving information that throws the mind back to the start of the story, that changes the meaning of everything, that makes them realise for the first time what has really been happening. The audience, feeling along with them, should be moved - in tragedy they should feel pity, and terror.  This moment is the moment of catharsis, a moment of powerful intellectual, emotional and physical reprocessing that lays hold of one as you realise that you are subject to some powerful truth, just as the tragic hero is: Macbeth learns that murder is wrong.  In a different type of film, Field of Dreams, Kevin Costner (and we) remember how we love our fathers, and they love us.

Please listen to the whole thing.  It's very good if you are interested in philosophy, film, or even just an interesting bit of psychological / cognitive processing.

Casting Novels

Casting is a complicated business. Because of the extent to which audiences follow movie stars as indicators of film quality and sensibility, the money (following the audience) wants to know that a script has the right stars signed on. Conversely the wrong star can put money off.

This is especially complex for novels and other fiction, where there is no set appearance. Audiences will have extremely specific requirements in the appearance, but they may be mutually exclusive. Personally I understood Frodo for the first time in Elijah Wood's portrayal of him, but I though Jennifer Ehle was not as lean and long-limbed as Jane Austen had made her Elizabeth. Harison Ford is not fat enough to be Colonel Graff, but I can go with it.

I have a couple of firm casting opinions for films I wish were coming:

No1. Ricky Gervais for Chiark-Gevantsah Jurneau Morat Gurgeh from Iain M Banks' "The Player of Games". Gurgeh goes the gamut from lightweight Culture personality yearning for more risk, to Azad-addicted power pervert, back to Culture person and instrument of world-collapse for the Empire of Azad. He's got the beard, the sneer and the pathos to be Gurgeh. The other characters are mostly aliens and machines, but Lal Yay is a type* and Shohobohaum Za could be a Ryan Gosling smooth operator, or Idris Elba with a big Afro and some speed.

No2. Jesse Tyler Ferguson (from Modern Family) to be Dr Talos from 'The Book of the New Sun' by Gene Wolfe. Dr Talos is a homonculus - Severian thinks of his ur-self as a stuffed and mounted fox. It's mostly the red hair and beard, but Dr Talos' menace, vaudevillean streak, cruelty and yet his almost feminine care for the giant Baldanders seem like they would be within his range if he could play it a little less snarky.

No3. Who to be Gully Foyle from Alfred Bester's 'The Stars My Destination'? Someone massive, big and tall, with a barely restrained violence. He should be fat at the beginning and lean down and muscle up as he quests for more life. The cupboard of my awareness of actors is pretty bare.

* I'm unable to think of a young blond actress - is that weird? Britt Marling seems too smart, insufficiently frolic. But she might work out. Lal is a game player Gurgeh has some time for.

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The war of all with all

Many of the early philosophers of society (Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau etc) tried to understand society as arising from the relations of humans in the state of nature.  Sometimes this meant the natural authority of fathers  would justify as natural the authority of Kings.  Sometimes it was assumed that the natural state was war of all with all, which could only be restrained by social contract or (internalized) subjugation.

I think the famous 'Prisoner's Dilemma' problem is a very nice source for considering these issues. Two prisoners have committed a crime, but prosecutors will need evidence against them to establish a full conviction.  Hence they will cut a deal if you default on your partner and give evidence against them.  Formalised, it assumes that by cooperating, both parties can benefit, but by defaulting while the other cooperates your benefit can be even greater, and their penalty large.  The penalty for both defaulting is equal, but less severe than the individual penalty.   Suppose this table gives outcomes - negative numbers are penalties for years in prison.  So if you dob and your partner doesn't, you go free and they get five years.  If you each dob, responsibility is split and you get three years each.

                    Cooperate      Default

Cooperate         -1 / -1              0/-5

Default             -5 / 0              -3/-3

The game theory analysis of this situation is that you should always dob, because cooperating is a dominated strategy - that is, your expected results are considerably worse playing 'cooperate' than playing 'default' regardless of what your partner plays. If you partner cooperates, you wish you'd defaulted. If your partner defaults, you wish you defaulted.*

This game theory solution always makes people anxious.  In real life, the person defaulted against will get out eventually, and may be able to penalize defaulting. They may have powerful friends. These stem from the idea that there is some continuity, and in fact you can change the game by playing indefinitely.  (Interestingly, if you play a fixed series, there is an argument via backward induction that you won't be able to sustain cooperation, because at the last turn, we both know we'll both default, and therefore the decision point moves to the turn before last. The turn before last becomes the chance to default against and so on.)  If you don't know when the last turn will be, and the probability is low enough, the potential benefit of a series of future cooperations may begin to outweigh the loss of being defaulted against once after which you default against your opponent every turn.

I think the cooperate / default choice is foundational for society and that philosophers have tended to come down on one side or the other without consciously / explicitly considering the payoff table.  Society works when you can find games in which 'cooperate' is not strictly dominated by default. You can start structures that will increase the penalties of defaulting and increase the benefits of cooperating - contracts and so on.  Nietzsche has a whole thing about the value of conscience and the construction of beings with the right to make promises, that (I think) is an attempt to undercut the distinction between cooperation and default and an attempt to revalue the two.  In this he is motivated by a justifiable suspicion that the structures that work against 'default' will become a way for indecent power to overcome legitimate power.  That is, the government / law / elders will be motivated to eat the benefit of cooperation and begin to use the penalties of default - thus defaulting in their way, against their society.

A wise old jewish friend took exception to this model applied to marriage, because of the assumption that there is always a solution of defaulting against a cooperator that is better than cooperating. I think it depends on the units of gain and loss, the concept of marriage.  If marriage is a cynical money-making scheme, it may pay to marry Mel Gibson and have a child with him, and then divorce him.  If marriage is a cynical sex-maximising scheme, it might make sense to have an affair or visit prostitutes.  If marriage is a scheme to be known and loved, default cannot increase the bottom line.

*   This changes if the payoffs are different, of course. You can imagine a weakly positive payoff from being defaulted against. You can imagine a game where being defaulted against is still not as bad as both defaulting it. 

Anxiety and Screenwriting

Scriptshadow is updating 'his' web-site and asked for suggestions that would support a new community site for discovering good scripts and nurturing talented writing.  There were a lot of good suggestions, most of which revolved around the way a high standard of review could be achieved by non-professional writers, many of whom (like me) aren't even working in LA. Most of these suggestions worked something like Slashdot, where good comments are moderated up, and good commenters gain some status from the contribution.  Moderators can spend their 'mod' points to lift up points they agree with.  A variation on this was to create a low-stakes market where you can offer a basic non-pro read for $5 and once your reputation was lifting your price could go up.

The problem of getting good screenwriting is an interesting search problem.  It's hard to say what  a good screenplay is.  There are perhaps four patterns by which good ones are produced:

• a great screenwriter who knows a lot of tricks, writes a great screenplay.  Easy to find if you know he's a great screenwriter.
• a bad screenwriter with a great idea sells a script on the idea, and then other screenwriters work on it.  Easy to find because the idea should be 'high-concept' - a sentence or two.
• a good screenwriter reworks his screenplay in development hell until it is purified or consumed by fire.  Easy to get into, hard to come out of, unless a great screenwriter lends a hand.
• a novice screenwriter writes a great script by some degree of accident.  Hard to find, because there are so many novices pumping out terrible accidents, and which of them are good?  Who wants to find out?

I would go back to what a good screenplay is.  A good screenplay offers a helpful 4D map of a world, exploring the challenges and the pathways, the anxiety and its resolution.  This post was going to be some examples of that - some of my favourite films.

The Big Lebowski - plays with the anxiety of unmotivatability.  The Dude is seduced by the Bunny Lebowski problem because he lives in denial and is looking for easy money. At least he's not a nihilist.

The King's Speech - explores the anxiety of social responsibility for which your aren't skilled.  The social aspect is important, because Bertie's identity is going to be jeopardised. He overcomes this by gaining a social identity in friendship.

No Country for Old Men - explores the anxiety of the meaning and meaninglessness - which is ultimate? There are two heros - the tragic hero whose realisation and death happen off screen and randomly, no lesson learned, no catharsis earned; the older policeman wise enough to avoid it though it means a young woman will be undefended. He has no fire of his own, but his father will meet him and welcome him. It puts the meaninglessness in a tenuous frame of meaning in life (before he was born & after his death), rather than life floating in a meaningless sea.  But its frail.  It's just a little flame.