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Showing posts sorted by relevance for query matrix. Sort by date Show all posts

Traffic Cone = Cinema

Heraclitus warned us that "the only constant is change." For many years, the American school system eluded this inevitability, but not this year. EVERYTHING has changed. No textbooks. A new tablet device. We're wireless. And Bluetooth. We've adopted a new learning management system. Canvas instead of Google classroom. OneDrive instead of Google drive. OneNote instead of something else. And there's the looming threat that the winds of change will soon to remove our desktop computers.

Also, I still have stuff on Evernote.

Yesterday, I couldn't even figure out how to play a DVD. Every year, in Honors Philosophy, we read Plato's "Allegory of the Cave" and then we watch the first thirty minutes of The Matrix. Because it's the best visual representation of Plato's allegory.

But yesterday, I couldn't get the DVD to play. Apparently, Windows has removed this function from its Media Player. People stream now. Have you heard of Netflix? Amazon?

Coincidentally, both of these are blocked at our school. Even if you've purchased the movie on Amazon. So I freaked out a bit (in front of the children) and then I downloaded a bunch of weird free DVD players (and probably infected my desktop with some weird viruses . . . now whenever I use the search bar, it sends me through Yahoo! instead of Google).

Then the tech guy came and showed me that there WAS a player on my computer. The VLN player. The symbol is a traffic cone. It didn't open automatically when I put a disk in, so I didn't know it was there. And when the tech guy scrolled down through my apps and showed me the traffic cone, I wondered: why is orange traffic cone synonymous with playing a DVD? But then he started telling me about all the changes in my future-- they were taking my desktop, my DVD player, my big monitor, and my hardwired internet . . . and so I shouldn't even get used to the VLN player.

"They're not making your job any easier," he said, "and they're not making my job any easier either."

And why is the VLN Player logo a traffic cone? There's an enigmatic explanation on Wikipedia, but it adds more to the mystery than it resolves it: "The cone icon used in VLC is a reference to the traffic cones collected by École Centrale's Networking Students' Association."

If anyone can make sense of that, please leave the explanation in the comments.

Remember Going to the Movies in 1999?

The year is 1999.

The competition for moviegoers' attention is fierce; this is making M. Night Shyamalan extremely anxious. He's confident he has something special with The Sixth Sense, but he's nervous that the film will be overshadowed by the super-hyped Blair Witch Project.

Then, in one of the many compelling anecdotes in Brian Rafferty's Best Movie Year Ever: How 1999 Blew Up the Big Screen, there is the moment when Shymalan knew his film was going to be huge. The writer/director said he was watching a pick-up basketball game and a player threw a wildly inaccurate pass that flew out of bounds. A pass intended for no one. Another player, unaware that Shymalan was watching, said to the guy who threw the lousy pass: "You see dead people or something?"

The Sixth Sense exceeded expectations, had a 9-month run and made a boatload of money. The phrase "I see dead people" went viral.

For people who came of age in the 1990s, Best Movie Year Ever: How 1999 Blew Up the Big Screen is a reminder of just how important film was back then. People worshipped Quentin Tarantino and Kevin Smith and Paul Thomas Anderson. Movies tackled big ideas. Indie films battled studio giants. Stars did it all. People went to the movies to be disturbed and challenged.

This book was a walk down memory lane for me, and it's a great resource for younger cinemaphiles.

Here are a few of the movies discussed in the book, vaguely in order of how much I like them:


  1. Being John Malkovich
  2. The Matrix
  3. Fight Club
  4. Rushmore
  5. Election
  6. Three Kings
  7. The Limey
  8. The Sixth Sense
  9. Office Space
  10. Run Lola Run
  11. The Blair Witch Project
  12. Magnolia
  13. American Movie
  14. eXistenZ
  15. Boys Don't Cry
  16. The Insider
  17. American Beauty
  18. The Virgin Suicides
  19. Galaxy Quest
  20. The Iron Giant
  21. Cruel Intentions
  22. American Pie
  23. 10 Things I Hate About You
  24. Eyes Wide Shut
  25. The Phantom Menace
Many more films are mentioned (not all from 1999). The book really captures the mood as we prepared to head into a new millennium.

There a few good movies I saw back then that are NOT mentioned in the book. 1999 was a bountiful year in film. The Straight Story and Bringing Out The Dead and Princess Mononoke and The Talented Mr. Ripley.

It's absurd that one year could produce so many significant moments in an art form. Soon after, movies went into decline, and we entered the age of Platinum TV, but maybe someday soon things will change. Maybe once this quarantine is over, we'll want to go to the movies to think again. We'll tire of the same big-budget superhero retreads and gross-out comedies, and want meatier fare.

Until then, while you are stuck at home, there are worse things you could do then return to a few of these films. Happy viewing.

Glasshouse

If I were a free person in the 27th century cosmic war crime prison of Glasshouse, the Charles Stross sci-fi mindbender I just finished, I'd probably use a T Gate assembler to back myself up, then create a duplicate version of myself, have my duplicate write this sentence while my other self took a stroll on the beach, then merge the two neural nets into one version of me that contained both sets of memories . . . but before any of that, you have to solve Curious Yellow and the polity; a good fast read, as long as you don't get bogged down in the technical jargon; an exponentially advanced and precocious baby of The Matrix and Inception.

Reading on the OBFT?


I was able to polish off a book and a play on the Outer Banks Fishing Trip XVI: As You Like It by Shakespeare and The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch by Philip K. Dick, and despite the obvious differences-- As You Like It is a comedy and a light one (despite banishment, lions and wrestling) with plenty of funny banter, cross dressing, and trans-gender courting and The Three Stigmata is a precursor to The Matrix and Vanilla Sky and eXistenz, only trippier, with more religion and drugs and transcendence-- but they both have one thing in common, whether you're tripping in an eternal hallucination on Chew-Z or hanging out in the forest of Arden, you're doing it to escape the passage of time, the reality of your body and the status to which you are constrained-- and who doesn't want that once in a while?

Like Finches, Only Wackier and With Guns

The This American Life podcast  "Good Guys" is a mixed bag, but the last story (Act 4) takes a turn into strange territory -- an anonymous soldier sent producer Sarah Koenig a number of recordings he made while on a tour of duty in Afghanistan, and he describes a group of men who joined the army not for love and country and patriotism, but instead to be able to experience the thrill of killing another human being . . . and while on some level this is disturbing, on another it makes me wonder if humans are just becoming more specialized, the way the finches did on the Galapagos Islands: now you can make your way in this world as a political pundit, a math nerd, an architect, a musician, a professional athlete, and as a killer . . . you can exploit your artistry, anger, rhetorical powers, mathematical skills,  good looks, ruthlessness, business sense, good will towards all humans, or any number of oddball human traits to earn money and gain fame and favor, so it makes sense that the killing niche will find its experts as well, and they aren't necessarily going to be doing it for the "right" reasons . . . in fact, if they are doing it for the "wrong" reasons, then they might be better at it (but also immoral) just like these guys were really good at making money . . . and if the niche exists, just as it would in an evolutionary matrix, something is going to move into it and exploit it, and you really can't blame people or animals or weeds or finches or whatever, if they do.

Just In Case You Thought You Had Things Under Control



Just in case you haven't read Plato's "Allegory of the Cave" lately . . . or recently watched The Matrix, here is a friendly video reminder that human perception is limited, that what you see isn't what you get, and that our brains are barely hanging on to this thin thread we refer to as reality (this is also an opportune time to wish Einstein's Theory of Relativity a happy 100th birthday).

The True Meaning of the SNL Weezer Sketch (and the True Meaning of Weezer, the Universe, and Everything)

In December, SNL aired a sketch about the band Weezer. Some folks are sitting down to what looks to be a lovely holiday dinner party, but then the music algorithm randomly spits out Weezer's cover of "Africa." The quintessential Weezer debate ensues. Leslie Jones and Matt Damon get into it, vehemently. If you're a Weezer fan of a certain age, then you've tread this ground before. And if you're not, then the debate probably didn't make much sense. The rest of the dinner party can't understand why Damon and Jones are getting so hot and bothered. The best line in the sketch might be when Heidi Gardner asks: “Is this a thing people care about?”

The Atlantic promptly posted an article called "The Saturday Night Live Sketch That Sums Up All Online Discourse." The author, David Sims, completely mischaracterizes the piece. He tries to glean a general, modern lesson from the particulars, and he bungles it. His big takeaway is this:
If you know Weezer’s back catalog intimately, every silly reference made in the sketch lands, but if you don’t, it’s still effective. Because above all, this is a sketch about the way some people discuss almost anything these days—with feigned politeness immediately escalating to personal cruelty. Though part of the joke was that this Weezer disagreement was playing out at a dinner party, I was immediately reminded of so much online discourse, where part of the point is coming up with the most extreme reaction possible.
                                                                                                                         
No offense Mr. Sims, but you can burn in hell. And drink my hot blood. This sketch isn't about how people argue online. It's not about "feigned politeness escalating into personal cruelty." The emotions here are totally valid, because Damon and Jones are arguing about something much more profound than Weezer. Deep stuff. They know it. I know it. And my buddy Kevin knows it. We've been having this identical argument since 2005. Since long before online discourse. Pre-Twitter. The Age of Myspace.

Is This a Thing People Care About? Yes!


Kevin and I have been having this very same debate since Weezer released their fifth album, Make Believe. The one with "Beverly Hills." Yuck. "Beverly Hills," which features on-the-nose lyrics, an awkward faux hip-hop delivery, and a talkbox solo. I pronounced the album terrible. I swore I would never listen to the band again. Kevin kind of liked it. He didn't love it, but he also didn't consider it the end of times for Weezer. He was more forgiving than me, but I had my reasons. I knew better. I had been burned before.

And so the debate began. A debate much bigger than Kevin and me, a debate much bigger than the cheesy crap that Weezer started to produce, a debate much bigger than all of our meager and insignificant lives (whether we have a 90210 zip or not). People will be having this debate far into the future. Kevin and I might download our consciousness into the singularity and continue this debate until the sun burns out (which you will see would be highly appropriate). Intelligent carbon-based life-forms on other planets are having this debate right now. It's a discussion about the permanence of character and identity. It's discussion about the possession of an eternal and everlasting soul. Where lies your essence?

In this debate, I always play the role of Leslie Jones. To infinity and beyond. And Kevin will eternally be Matt Damon. It's a post-modern musical version of Sartre's "No Exit."

Here's a quick synopsis of the two positions. They are, of course, allegorical.

Matt Damon takes the stance that Weezer is "doing some cool things right now." He's looking forward to the release of The Black Album. Leslie Jones does not agree. She believes the band "hasn't had a good album since Pinkerton . . . in '96." She believes that all "real" Weezer fans know this. The two of them get deep into the band's discography. Matt Damon presents himself as open to the band's new music. He listens to all of it. He's "ride or die." Cecily Strong says, "For Weezer?" She doesn't get it. She doesn't know what they're really talking about (but she shouldn't feel bad . . . neither does David Sims, a Senior Editor at The Atlantic)

Damon labels Leslie Jones "a purist" because Jones only truly respects Weezer's first two albums (Blue and Pinkerton). Like me, she will deign to "go all the way up to The Green Album" (which is Weezer's third album). The rest of their material is "corny." I agree.

Matt Damon tells her to grow up. Stop living in the past. Jones calls Damon a "grown ass man" and chastises him that he should know better. He should be able to recognize good art and bad art. Things get pretty heated and both Jones and Damon behave badly, but this is not about online discourse and the lack of civility in conversation. This is about something bigger. Something that excuses bad behavior. Something scary and frustrating and philosophical. Also, I can't begin to explain how accurately this reflects the argument Kevin and I have been having since 2005, since Make Believe. It's almost like the sketch writers have been listening on on us.

A Magical Moment of Consensus


Things don't end well-- Damon storms out-- but there is a magical moment just before Damon leaves when Jones and Damon's sentiments align. Damon yells, "Can we all just agree that Weezer is the best band of all time?"

Everyone else at the dinner party yells "No!" aside from Jones, who says: "Yes!"

Watch and see (go two minutes and 53 seconds in).


This is why they are so passionate. They both truly, sincerely loved Weezer. Damon still does. Jones is conflicted. She qualifies her statement: "And then they became the worst band of all time." Damon still loves Weezer, while Jones loves what Weezer once was.

But aren't they the same thing?

Possibly. But probably not. We're talking about one of the stickiest philosophical dilemmas. A dilemma that involves consciousness, identity, art, and creativity. A dilemma that smacks of the infamous Ship of Theseus, but with something more malleable. You.

Are you your past self? What kind of relationship do you have with your past self? Is your brain the same brain you had in the past? Is your body the same body you had in your past?

This is why you have to excuse all the anger and arguing in the skit. Jones is reckoning with the fact that we have no soul, that we have no essence. There is no true identity. The old Rivers is gone. Damon is hanging on, but some part of him must realize that this is disturbing reality is true. Jones has simultaneously lost her faith in Weezer and in the divinity of the human soul.

Supposedly, most of our cells renew themselves every 7 to 10 years, but not the neurons in our cerebral cortex. We're stuck with them for life (and this is why we can get dementia). Other brain cells regenerate. But-- more importantly-- every time we remember something, that memory changes. Every time we recall something, we revise that thing.  So in the biggest sense, our brains are not the same as they once were. Our memories do not accurately connect us to our past, they are creations of our present self. Yikes. The old Rivers Cuomo has been replaced, cell-by-cell, revised memory by revised memory. He's a living version of the Ship of Theseus. We are looking at a Doppelganger, a facsimile. Jones is not fooled. Damon is (or perhaps he doesn't want to grapple with this reality).

Is Weezer still Weezer? They've had a few line-up changes, including the loss of bassist Matt Sharp and the addition of guitarist Scott Shriner. But they are mainly the brainchild of Rivers Cuomo. Leslie Jones claims to know Rivers Cuomo "better than he knows himself." And she knows that he is no longer the Rivers Cuomo that produced Pinkerton and The Blue Album. She truly believes that Make Believe is make-believe. It's not genuine Weezer. I agree with her. Matt Damon is not so sure. He thinks Rivers is still Rivers. He's "into the new stuff." He encourages Jones to grow up and listen to some of it. He tells her that "she doesn't understand what Rivers is going through right now." He believes Rivers will suffer the ordeal, endure the crucible, and emerge hardened, annealed and even better than before.

What happens to our identity and our ideas over time? Do we have any sincere connection to our past selves? My guess is not much. I think we are always in flux. I am nothing like my twenty-two year old self. That guy was an asshole. He was also quite fast. But our athletic ability inevitably declines (except for Tom Brady, who -- according to my sources-- drinks a protein shake each morning laced with the blood and stem-cells of precocious toddlers).

While we physically decay, there's a case to be made that we should be getting better at things like music and drawing and writing and art (until we get dementia). Our artistic and cerebral skills should improve over time. But this doesn't always seem to be the case. Where is the Weezer that Leslie Jones once loved? And why hasn't the band improved with time, like a fine wine? Should she have the childlike faith that Matt Damon has? Faith that the past Weezer will return triumphant? Or is her skepticism more grounded in reality. I side with Jones. For whatever reason, Rivers is no longer (and will never be) his past self.

Jones and Damon are arguing over the existence and essence of the human soul. Is it eternal and unchangeable? Unable to be destroyed? And does it still reside within Rivers Cuomo . . . or did it evaporate when he moved to Beverly Hills? Was the soul of Rivers Cuomo make-believe all along?

Miles Davis said, "the key to creativity is a bad memory." I understand what he means. You have to keep changing, you can't get too attached to the past. Otherwise, you'll simply repeat it, in less and less sincere forms. You'll plagiarize yourself. You'll lose your soul. You'll sell your soul. I tried to find that quotation online-- to make sure Miles Davis said it-- and I had some trouble. I've been saying it to my Creative Writing classes for twenty years, but all I could find was this odd web page about painter Paul Solnes. So who said it? Perhaps Miles Davis. Perhaps not. But whether he said it or not, he lived it. Miles Davis constantly reinvented himself. The key to creativity might be to embrace the fact that we have no true essence, and we've got to keep moving on.

In 2012, David Remnick wrote an article about Bruce Springsteen, called "We Are Alive." Bruce had just turned sixty-two and Remnick‌ marveled at his ability to produce new and relevant material. Bruce keeps figuring out how to remake himself. But the best thing in the article was what Remnick said about The Rolling Stones. I love The Rolling Stones. I love entire albums by The Rolling Stones. Some Girls and Exile on Main Street and Sticky Fingers. So many good songs on those albums. Remnick said that The Rolling Stones are now merely a high-end Rolling Stones tribute act, though they contain the same humans that were in the actual and legendary band. This may be the perfect example of the Ship of Theseus dilemma as an identity conundrum:
But, unlike the Rolling Stones, say, who have not written a great song since the disco era and come together only to pad their fortunes as their own cover band, Springsteen refuses to be a mercenary curator of his past. He continues to evolve as an artist, filling one spiral notebook after another with ideas, quotations, questions, clippings, and, ultimately, new songs. (David Remnick)
Most of The Rolling Stones are still alive, the same guys who wrote "Sway" and "Rocks Off" and "Dead Flowers" and "Gimme Shelter." Brian Jones died in 1969, just after he was booted from the band. Mick Jones didn't play with them for a long while, but other than that, they are intact. And all they can do is perform their old songs. Why? Why can't they occasionally write an amazing song? Why aren't they who they once were? It's frustrating and disturbing.

Remnick does raise the point that perhaps the Stones are mailing it in. They only get together for the money. This makes sense. he's probably right. But you'd think they would still want to write a few great songs when they do get together. Perhaps that is impossible without self-reflection, progress, and process. While Bruce Springsteen keeps evolving, the Stones became "curators" of their past.

Weezer is another story. Rivers Cuomo is working his ass off. He's got plenty of process. He's trying his damnedest to evolve. Listen to Song Exploder 70: Weezer for the details on how he wrote "Summer Elaine and Drunk Dory." Understanding all the work he put in makes me almost like the song. Almost. But it's still not "Surf Wax America." It's still ersatz.



Cuomo has spreadsheets of lyrics broken down by syllables and accents and prosody. Everything's tagged and searchable. He can "search for lyrics with five syllables and an accent." He's got Spotify playlists of cool old songs; he collects these songs and ruminates on them and finally dismantles them, unravels the chords progressions and the melodies so that he can transform the bits and pieces into something Weezer. He sings his guitar solos first. He eavesdrops and writes stream-of-consciousness journals and has been using the methods in Julia Cameron's classic book on creativity: The Artist's Way.

So why can't he knock it out of the park? Why can't he make another Blue Album?

I think I have one possible answer.

Jonah Lehrer wrote an article for the New Yorker in 2012 entitled "Groupthink." In it, he skewers the "brainstorming myth," the idea that spewing out a bunch of ideas is a valid path to creativity. There's something wrong with the "no wrong answers" approach. While it's fun to push for quantity over quality, and it feels positive to encourage freewheeling associations and censor all criticism, these methods don't produce good results. There's been plenty of research on this subject, and apparently working in a more critical environment is a better way to produce good ideas. There needs to be some constructive feedback and debate. Dissent is important; Charlan Nemeth discusses this in "Freakonomics Episode 368: Where Do Good Ideas Come From?"

The Lehrer article summarizes a research experiment designed by Brian Uzzi that explains a critical element in the creative environment necessary for achievement. Uzzi uses the idea of a "Q reading"-- which is basically how long and how well members of a team know each other-- to assess success.

Uzzi focused his study on Broadway musicals, which he calls a "model of group creativity." He studied the Q reading of Broadway musical teams from 1945 to 1989 and he discovered something exceptional. Broadway actors, producers, choreographers, lyricists, and stage managers tend to work together over and over. Broadway musicals are expensive. There's less risk if you know the members of your team. What Uzzi found was that teams with very low Q readings-- teams of artists that didn't know each other at all-- those teams were destined to fail. Q readings in the middle, teams comprised of a variety of relationships-- some old, some new, some in between . . . when the team was acquainted, these plays did the best. And when the Q reading was very high, when the team had worked together many times, then the chance of success went down again.

Total strangers don't work well together. People who have known each other so long that they can't criticize each other without taking umbrage and offense, they don't work well together either. In that middle ground, however, when people are professionally acquainted but not overly familiar, those teams succeeded.

The best Broadway shows were produced by networks with an intermediate level of social intimacy. The ideal level of Q—which Uzzi and his colleague Jarrett Spiro called the “bliss point”—emerged as being between 2.4 and 2.6. A show produced by a team whose Q was within this range was three times more likely to be a commercial success than a musical produced by a team with a score below 1.4 or above 3.2. It was also three times more likely to be lauded by the critics. “The best Broadway teams, by far, were those with a mix of relationships,” Uzzi says. “These teams had some old friends, but they also had newbies. This mixture meant that the artists could interact efficiently—they had a familiar structure to fall back on—but they also managed to incorporate some new ideas. They were comfortable with each other, but they weren’t too comfortable.” (John Lehrer)
I think this often holds true for bands. Michael Azerrad's book Our Band Could Be Your Life is a comprehensive and vivid depiction of post-punk Q readings. A band's first album is usually made after many months of touring and practice, so the band has gotten to know each other quite well (usually because they've been living in a van). But they're not so well acquainted that they can't surprise each other. First albums are often good because the band is in that sweet spot of the Q reading. They know their band mates well enough to debate and dissent, they can recognize the good ideas and toss out bad ones. As time passes, it's often all downhill. The Rolling Stones are no longer professionals in a working band. They are long-time friends. Once things get too comfortable (unless there's a major change, such as Johnny Cash working with Rick Rubin) then it's just going to be more of the same.

Why Is There No Sequel to The Big Lebowski?

Perhaps this is why the Coen Brothers can't make another Big Lebowski. It's why Pavement couldn't make another "Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain." Once in a while, an artist creates something new and unusual and awesome deep in their career. Willie Nelson made Spirit and Teatro in the late '90's. Who knows what got into him? Maybe it was the weed. Radiohead does their best to break new ground with each new album, but most people still prefer The Bends and OK Computer. And these exceptions are the rare counter-examples that prove the norm.

This truism, that artists often peak somewhere in mid-career, seems to hold true for individuals as well, perhaps because every individual artist is ensconced in a nest of relationships and stimuli. Every human is part of a team. And when that network gets old and hackneyed, then things get stale. It's why Liane Moriarty's middle books (Big Little Lies and The Husband's Secret) are so damned good, and why her latest (Truly Madly Guilty) just seems to just be checking the "Liane Moriarity" boxes. It seems derivative. It's why Thomas Pynchon can't do it again.

It's tough to be your past self. It's even tougher to beat your past self, to out-compete that person. Especially when your audience is no longer their past self. They are older and smarter and more experienced. As Heraclitus said, "You never step in the same river twice."

Ride or Die For Strat-O-Matic Hockey?

My buddy Kevin is something of a completist. He reads all the Michael Pollan books. He listens to all of the Weezer and Radiohead albums. He collects things. He still plays Strat-O-matic baseball (and Strat-O-Matic hockey . . . Strat-O-Matic hockey?) He buys the physical cards every year for his Strat-O-Matic‌ sports, even though he doesn't roll dice any longer. Even though the game is now computerized. He's ride or die for Strat-O-Matic.

Kevin feels the same way about Weezer and Michael Pollan. He's a fan of the artist. I'm a fan of the art. Once I don't like the art, I defect. I love Life's Rich Pageant and Murmur, not the band R.E.M. It's because I learned my lesson early on. More on this later. I hate R.E.M.'s Out of Time, even though it was made by the same humans that made Reckoning. "Losing My Religion" is the worst. The fact that Michael Stipe wrote "Talk About the Passion" and also wrote "Losing My Religion" has made me lose my religion, made me lose my belief in an eternal soul.



Strat-O-Matic Hockey?
I'm the opposite of a completist. I only want to listen to the best things. I read Omnivore's Dilemma, but I might never read another Michael Pollan book again. That was his high point. I'd rather listen to first-rate jazz than second rate Weezer. I'm a grown-ass man! I'm logical about it. Old R.E.M. is slightly better than old Weezer, and new R.E.M. is slightly better than new Weezer, but I'm not going to spend my time listening to new R.E.M. because it's slightly better than new Weezer. Instead I'll listen to first rate something else. I'll move on. In this case the newer stuff-- whether it's Weezer or R.E.M.-- is ersatz.

Kevin is loyal and faithful and believes that his favorite artists are still his favorite artists. They can do it again. I'm not so sure. I think we're a constantly changing-- our cells, our memories, our routines, our thought patterns-- and we are surrounded by a constantly changing collection of people. It's really hard to replicate a particular time and place. This may also point to the impossibility of loving a Weezer album again. I am a different person. I'm not in my twenties. I'm not childless and open to the infinite possibilities of the universe and both overly-confident and slightly scared of what that means. Pinkerton really nailed that feeling. But now I'm a grown-ass man. Perhaps that kind of music could never speak to me the way it did back then.

When my wife and I lived and taught in Syria, I played a lot of music with my friend Matt. We both loved Pinkerton and so we learned a bunch of those songs. They were hard to play and sing. Weird chord progressions and some high notes. Weezer was still rolling along. The Green Album had just come out and it was short but good. Catchy and driving. We were young and without children, living in a foreign country, and when we played "The Sweater Song," everybody sang along. It's a time in my life that's impossible to replicate, and it would be silly to think that it's even possible to do so. Matt and I were on exactly the same page, musically. We were in a "strange and distant land," a weird holiday of sorts. Weezer was our common ground.

When Weezer's time was over, I had no problem abandoning them. I may have learned to defect so readily because of what happened when I was a teenager. I had a comically traumatic experience with my favorite band: The Cult. The Cult were the masters of creative transformation. The real version of Spinal Tap. They began as The Southern Death Cult, a goth/post-punk band in the spirit of Bauhaus. Then lead singer Ian Astbury teamed up with his artistic soulmate, Theater of Hate guitarist Billy Duffy and they stripped their name down to The Cult. In 1984, they put out the Dreamtime, a weirdly awesome brew of apocalyptic Wild West riffs, Native American chants, and tribal rhythms. A year later they released the cerebral-sounding college rock classic Love: an impeccably produced collection of droning, ethereal guitars and wailing reverb-laden vocals. The album with '80's anthem "She Sells Sanctuary." I totally dug that album, but the The Cult's next move separated them from the other alternative post-punk bands of the time. They hired Zodiac Mindwarp's Kid Chaos on bass, teamed up with producer Rick Rubin, and made Electric, a raw, stripped down freight train of a record. It was 1987. I was 17 years old, and the album spoke to me and my friends. We felt wild and violent and unhinged, and so did this album. We loved it.

I was ride or die for The Cult

This was one of the reasons I couldn't talk to girls. I really wanted to ask them whether they preferred the celestial sound of Love or the crisp overdriven guitars of Electric. The production values of Steve Brown or Rick Rubin. I wanted to know their opinion. It was a litmus test. Kind of like The Weezer debate. But this was not a thing most people cared about. Certainly not most girls. The only people that cared were my high school buddies, who liked The Cult as much as me. And we loved Electric. We loved moshing at the shows, we loved when Ian Astbury-- drunk-- clambered to the top of the speaker cabinet at the Felt Forum and couldn't get down. It was Spinal Tap embodied. Billy Duffy kept on soloing on his giant White Falcon Gretsch hollow-body guitar, hanging it over the crowd so you could touch it while he played, soloing and soloing until the roadies got Astbury down.

Then I went to college, and my freshman year The Cult released Sonic Temple. It was 1989. They got yet another drummer-- Mickey Curry-- and a new big-time producer: Bob Rock (who has produced acts such as Metallica, Aerosmith, Bon Jovi, Mötley CrĂ¼e, the Offspring, and David Lee Roth). I heard a couple singles from the new album on the radio and MTV-- "Fire Woman" and "Sun King"-- and while they sounded a bit over-produced, they still rang true, they still passed as genuine Cult songs (if a bit cheesier than the old stuff). I heard Astbury in an interview and he said he wanted to make "sonic landscapes," like the Fleetwood Mac song "The Chain." That sounded fine to me. "Sun King" certainly did that.

I bought the album on CD, though I didn't own a CD player yet. I could see the writing on the wall for cassettes (but I couldn't fathom that vinyl would make a comeback). My buddy Whitney and I went into a friend's room who had a CD player. Whitney knew I was a diehard Cult fan. He listened with me and watched me nearly shit my pants when I heard the corny strings at the start of "Edie (Ciao Baby)" and the goofy organ at the start of "Sweet Soul Sister" and the abominable a capella chorus at the start of "Wake Up Time For Freedom." I was disappointed. But I hadn't yet become a defector. I blamed Bob Rock. I enjoyed what I could from the album-- mainly "Sun King" and "Fire Woman"-- and waited patiently for the next one. I was young and dumb and optimistic.

Before Ceremony came out, in 1991, I made the absurd decision to have the logo from the Electric album tattooed on my ankle. I was ride or die for Electric. I liked it that much. And I had faith that The Cult would return triumphant.

Then I listened to Ceremony, and it broke me. I realized that these were not the same dudes that made Dreamtime, Love, and Electric. Nor was I the same person. I realized that, in fact, people weren't people at all; they were conglomerations of memories and molecules in a particular matrix of time and relationships. There was no continuity to anything. Ceremony was so fucking bad. It was derivative. It consisted of mashed-up versions of every lousy Cult song, squashed together, with cheesy super-slick production. Self-plagiarism of the worst kind. I defected. I learned my lesson. I eventually covered my Cult tattoo with another absurd tattoo (grist for another post).

By 1991, R.E.M. was dead to me as well. While I could tolerate a few songs from their 1987 effort Green, it was the same routine and timeline as Sonic Temple and Ceremony. "Stand" was "Wake Up Time For Freedom" awful, but "Pop Song 89" and "Orange Crush" were fun. But Out of Time, that whole album seemed ersatz to me. Not genuine R.E.M. I heard "Losing My Religion" and "Shiny Happy People" over and over on the radio. I was angry. I realized you couldn't go back to Rockville. What the fuck? What had happened to the artists I loved?

And then I got over it. I moved on. I discovered new stuff: Cake and Wilco and Ween and Beck and Underworld and Crystal Method and Tribe Called Quest. I got into jazz: Wes Montgomery and Grant Green and Charlie Parker and Jimmy Mcgriff and Jimmy Smith. I went back to old familiar stuff and realized I liked it more than I thought: The Rolling Stones and The Talking Heads and The Cure. I got into hip-hop beyond The Beastie Boys. I learned to find new art-- or art that was new to me-- instead of relying on my old favorites. Why bother being loyal when the cards are so stacked against success? Rivers Cuomo sang it on Pinkerton:
Why bother? It's gonna hurt me.
It's gonna kill when you desert me.
This happened to me twice before
Won't happen to me anymore.
Weezer
I'm no longer angry. I learned not to be offended when an artist I liked produced something shitty. That artist is no longer the artist they once were. It's not a betrayal. You're different, they're different, everything is different. The Artist Formerly Known as Prince got it exactly right when he renamed himself. I'm happy that people can come together at all, in any time or place, and create something of significance. It's really hard. And it can't last. Everyone has to be in the right space. There's some real vitriol out there about Rivers Cuomo and Weezer, but I'm just glad they made the Blue Album and Pinkerton (and the Green Album is decent, I just gave it another listen). You can't expect much more.

I was lucky enough to move in lock-step with The Cult and some other bands-- including Weezer-- for a few years, for a few albums. But what are the chances for that to continue? For you and the artist you love to evolve in the same way, so that you enjoy everything they make? Slim to none. It's just not feasible, for a variety of reasons. I was fourteen when The Cult made Dreamtime, and investigating punk-rock and goth and underground music. It was a perfect fit. A year later I had picked up the electric guitar and the droning riffs on Love were intriguing. Every budding guitarist in the '80's who liked alternative music learned the opening to "Rain" and "She Sell Sanctuary." And when I was seventeen and full of testosterone, The Cult put out Electric. Perfectly appropriate for me and my buddies. These albums are touchstones of time as much as they are of sound. They moved in parallel with my aesthetic sensibilities. That was a happy accident.


Our identity depends as much on who surrounds us as it does with what is within us.

There's a fantastic artifact from The Cult discography symbolic of this theme: that our identity depends as much on who surrounds us as it does with what is within us. The Cult recorded an earlier version of the songs that eventually became the hard-driving Electric. These tracks are called The Manor Sessions. They were produced by Steve Brown, the same guy who produced Love. If you like The Cult, then these are fascinating tracks.



It's the songs from Electric but they sound like B-sides from Love. The band decided these recordings didn't reflect their new direction. They enlisted Rick Rubin and made the "real" version of Electric. And it was all about the production. If The Cult had stuck with Steve Brown and made another album that sounded like Love, I would have liked it. I like The Manor Sessions. I would have liked The Cult, the same amount that I liked Jane's Addiction and Guns N' Roses and Soundgarden and The Cure and Danzig. A lot. But I wouldn't have gotten a Cult tattoo. That Electric album that spoke to my me and my friends in a very special way when we were high school seniors, when we were drinking beer, driving around, doing vandalism-- that album almost didn't exist. You can actually hear what it could have been. If this had been the case, we would have driven slower and done less vandalism. Maybe we would have been more cerebral and sensitive. We certainly would have been different. It makes me realize a piece of art is so dependent on the circumstances. It's a product space and time and relationships. It's a miracle that it ever works at all, that a bunch of sounds could mean so much. And it's greedy to think that it can be repeated, especially by the same humans at another time, in another place, when everything is different. Weezer is never going to make another Blue Album, and that's okay.

I'm doing something annoying and pretentious right now, but it fits perfectly with this philosophy. My family is taking a trip to Costa Rica this summer, so I started brushing up on my Spanish. This led me to search for some great Latin American alternative albums. I stumbled on some fantastic stuff. Cafe Tacuba's highly regarded Re. Los Amigos Invisibles' funk album The New Sound of the Venezuelan Gozadera. Soda Stereo's alternative classic Sueño stereo. And Jessico Megamix by BabasĂ³nicos‌ (a band regarded as the Argentinian version of Beck).

Listening to this music is like stumbling on buried treasure. These are the best albums by these bands. You can tell they are in the Goldilocks Zone for Q reading and creativity. It's a real treat. And I'm learning some interesting Spanish idioms (such as CĂ³manse a besos esta noche . . . you can eat kisses tonight?)

So no more ride or die for me. I'd rather listen to some nearly incomprehensible first rate Latin American music than second rate stuff from my favorite bands. I've embraced the Miles Davis philosophy. I have a shitty memory, and it keeps me moving. I'm not going to wait for lightning to strike twice when I can search for a fulgurite.

I'd like to apologize to David Sims for "escalating to personal cruelty." I don't actually want him to burn in hell . . . but I do want him to read this and understand the true significance of the SNL Weezer sketch, and the true significance of the Weezer debate. It's about the continuity of our identity, and the truth might be disturbing. There might not be any continuity of our character. Our soul might be an illusion. There's an up side to this. Change is not only possible, it is inevitable. I'm in a better place now. I've dredged up lots of memories, and my brain has revised them. I've listened to a bunch of old music and it's made me nostalgic. I'm nothing like the guy who started writing this post. That guy was a little disappointed with Weezer. That guy was angry at David Sims. That was my past self. But nearly six thousand words later, this new guy, this new Dave, he knows better.

Dave Beholds the End of Civilization (and Is Subsumed Into the Matrix)

I apologize for the hyperbolic title, but I'm truly at a loss for words . . . there are no words . . . but fuck it, I'll give it a shot: so let me begin at the beginning: last week, I ran into a spate of uncited AI writing submissions in ALL of the various high school classes I teach-- the same thing happened around the same time last year . . . kids are on good behavior at the beginning of the year, then they get lazy around winter break, then a few kids get zeroes for cheating, and then-- after seeing the consequences-- they shape up again for a few months-- then they get senioritis and fall apart again-- it's a wonderful cycle-- and while some of these uncited AI writing pieces were in my college-level writing classes, which is a serious academic integrity violation and requires all kinds of bullshit: phone-calls with parents; meetings with the students; emails and meetings with guidance counselors; academic integrity forms . . . it's a terrible and tragic timesuck (and both students and parents cry . . . which is both endearing and kind of funny) but I also got a couple of AI-written assignments in Creative Writing class . . . they were downright awful mock-epic stories-- which are supposed to be funny, but AI is NOT funny-- and with these kids I was more lenient-- Creative Writing is a relaxed elective class-- so I admonished them and told them to do the assignment again for half-credit . . . and one of the students who used AI was absent so I sent her a message explaining that I recognized her piece was AI (and so did Chat GPT Zero) and that she needed to rewrite it and this morning, I noticed a reply to my message in my Canvas Inbox and upon reading two or three sentences of this rather long apology for unethical use of AI to write her mock-epic, I noticed that her apology letter for using AI was definitely written by AI and that's when I felt my corporeal body being digitized and sucked into the metaverse-- and I let out a distorted, electronic scream . . . the very same distorted electronic scream that Neo let out when they were locating his corporeal body and he was being digitized and subsumed-- and then, just to make sure, I asked Chat GPT to write an apology note for using AI on an assignment and Chat GPT went right ahead and executed this task, without noting the hypocrisy and irony, and both the message sent by the student and the Chat GPT letter began with the same weird opening: 

"I hope this email finds you well," 

and then the student-- or actually the AI, posing as the student-- expresses "deep regret" and then, and this is where I just need to show you the money-- and I should point out that I would normally never exhibit student work for entertainment purposes, that's just lowdown and mean . . . but this is NOT student work, it's written by AI and it's amazing-- and while the message was longer than this . . . because AI is incredibly bombastic and verbose if you don't give it very specific limits-- this is the heart of it and it's amazing:

Your guidance and support have been valuable, and I want to assure you that your message has resonated strongly with me I am committed to ensuring that our communication reflects the genuine connection and respect that our collaboration deserves. Please accept my heartfelt apology for any unintended oversight. I value our partnership and the trust you have placed in me. Rest assured that I am diligently working on the assignment and committed to re-submitting it no later than tonight. I am grateful for your patience, and I look forward to delivering a thoughtful and meaningful assignment.

and so when I talked to this girl after class today-- and, to her credit-- she told me that she wanted to talk to me after class and I agreed that we'd have to do that . . . and when we met, I realized that she sincerely wanted to apologize and she didn't want the rest of the class to suffer for her mistake and she sincerely wanted to explain to me that she was under a lot of stress and pressure and had a lot of other school work to do and she was sorry that she took the easy way out and that she didn't take the time to do the assignment herself and all that boilerplate-student-crap and I was like: "That's fine, no worries, just don't do it again . . . BUT . . ." and then I asked her the million dollar question: I asked her if she used AI to write the apology and she said, "Yes, I just wanted to send you something to show how sorry I was" and I said, "You know the definition of irony, right? You know how crazy this is-- to send an apology for using AI written by AI" and she seemed to understand that this was an absurd action-- but now I'm wondering if she does know the definition of irony-- and I know if I need to explain irony that I now have the best example in the universe . . .and the saddest part of the story is that if she actually recognized the meta-humor in her action and acknowledged the silliness of using AI to write an apology for using AI, I would have thought it was hysterical and lauded her as the greatest creative writer in history-- but it turns out that she sincerely sent me an AI written apology note for using AI on an assignment, not realizing the hypocrisy of this methodology and I'm fairly sure this is the Seventh Seal of the Apocalypse.


Like a Sea Urchin in Your Urethra




In The Matrix, just before Morpheus sends Neo down the rabbit-hole, he commends him for his awareness: "you know something . . . what you know you can't explain, but you can feel it . . . you don't know what it is, but it's there, like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad" and his words are both ominous and elegant, a perfect set-up for the bombshell soon to come, but I recently learned from an anonymous source that the Wachowski Brothers ran through a number of alternatives before they arrived at the "splinter in your mind" simile . . . here they are:

1) like a cinderblock in your anus;


2) like a sea urchin in your urethra;

3) like a Khan worm in your ear;


4) like a polyp in TR's nostril;


5) like a hedgehog in your armpit;


6) like a caltrop between your butt cheeks;


7) like a booger in your mustache;


8) like the early-morning gound in your eye;


9) like a donkey in your bathtub;


10) like a splinter in your pinky-toe, right under the nail, and you can't get it out-- even with a pin that you sterilized with rubbing alcohol . . . it is this feeling that has brought you to me . . . do you know what I'm talking about?

At Least It Was Short

Once again, I got sucked into another ridiculous Blake Crouch sci-fi thriller: this one is the first in a trilogy and it's called Pines . . . it's pretty much Twin Peaks plus Winesburg,Ohio inserted into The Matrix.

Respect the Speck


Hockey is hard enough to watch on TV, but if there's a black speck on the TV-- or several black specks on a couple of TVs-- then things can get really confusing . . . sometimes you're following the puck, sometimes you're following the speck, and sometimes-- like that magical moment on The Office when the DVD logo hits the corner-- the black speck intersects with the actual puck and reality breaks down into an inception of the matrix.

A Case For Reading Novels (With Some Help from Steven Johnson andGeorge Eliot)

Two roads diverge in a yellow wood . . . which one do you take?

You have time to ponder. You're not being chased by a lion, tiger, or bear. So do you choose the road less traveled by? Or head down the well trodden one? Either way, your choice will make all the difference.

Steven Johnson discusses these life-altering moments in his new book Farsighted: How We Make the Decisions That Matter the Most. He thinks we are woefully unprepared for these kinds of choices. He's probably right. We read "The Road Not Taken" in my Creative Writing class, and then we discuss times when we made these kinds of decisions. We all readily concede that once you journey down a particular fork in the road, you probably won't backtrack and take another path, but I don't advise them prescriptively on how to navigate these crucial moments. Instead, I present them with a literary example. We read it, discuss it, and run through the variables and options. It turns out-- according to Steven Johnson-- that this may be the best tactic imaginable.


Aunt Belle's Two Roads


I use an example from a book of anecdotes and recipes called Little Heathens: Hard Times and High Spirits on an Iowa Farm During the Great Depression by Mildred Armstrong Kalish. It's not fiction, but for folks in suburban New Jersey in 2019, it might as well be. It's damn close to a time travel story. If you haven't guessed, Mildred Armstrong Kalish is very old. She's 96. Coincidentally, my grandmother also goes by Mildred (though her Christian name is Carmella) and she's also 96.

When Mildred was a child, Aunt Belle tells her a story.

Once, before Aunt Belle died, I got up enough courage to ask her a very personal question.

"Aunt Belle, how come you never got married?"

She looked at me for a long time. She was standing by the kitchen stove, her delicate hands clasping and unclasping the stove handle, and she told me the following story:

"Well, I did have one beau. He told Art (her brother and my grandpa) to tell me Barkis is willin' and that he would be over Saturday night. Well, that made me so mad! I thought he had a lot of nerve asking me to marry him through Art like that! So when he came over Saturday night I wouldn't take his hat; I wouldn't take his coat. I wouldn't ask him to sit down. I treated him just as cold. I treated him so bad he never came back."

She stood absolutely still for a long time; then she continued:

"I'm kind of sorry I was so cold to him; he went and married Abbie Cross, made her a good home and was a good husband to her. They had a nice family."

She remained contemplative for a while and then continued, "It's been kind of lonesome sometimes."

Talk about roads not taken.

                   


Aunt Belle obviously regrets her decision. She made it out of spite, and-- by choosing a moment of indignant retribution over a lifetime of possible happiness/contentedness -- she impulsively inverts Pascal's famous wager. After we read this, I remind my students that they are lucky to live in a densely populated area, where they will have plenty of opportunities for courtship and marriage. They probably won't have to resort to marrying a first cousin (which is apparently legal in New Jersey) but in Depression-era Iowa the pickin's were slim.

We're Talking About Practice

Big decisions are tough. We don't get enough practice. Most people only get married once . . . or twice . . . but rarely thrice. The same goes for buying a home. I got lucky with my marriage, but we all know the divorce rates; marriage is a coin-flip. Buying a home is similar (and often simultaneous). If I had more practice with home buying, I would have checked out the concrete more thoroughly. I would have been more annoyed by the basement crawl space. I would have found the roof suspect. I would have known just what an ordeal it is to redo a kitchen. But I knew none of this, and simply liked the location and the deck. Next time . . . if there is one, I will be more discerning.

I learned an easy technique to help with this decision-making-dilemma on The Art of Manliness (Podcast #465: The Powerful Questions That Will Help You Decide, Create, Connect, and Lead) The guest, Warren Berger, suggests imagining yourself in the new scenario-- whether it be a new house, a new marriage, a new location, a new wife, a new job. Really vividly imagine this new life. And then ask yourself: would you go back to your old life? Would you make the switch in reverse?

Or perhaps you could follow the advice of way-finding guru Dave Evans and do some "odyssey planning." This involves imagining three possible lives that you could genuinely live and sincerely considering all of them. Recognizing that there is no "one true path" for you to tread so you can engage in all the possibilities.

Many times we get hung up on the small details and anxiety of change, and fail to think about the consequences of the actual decision. Aunt Belle got hung up on the way Art asked her to marry, but she never imagined married life with Art and compared this long-term scenario to spinster-life on a farm in Depression-era Iowa. If she had done that, she might have overlooked Art's graceless go-between proposal and thought more about the big picture.

Advice for the President

The most notable thing about Steven Johnson's Farsighted is that he lauds the power of literary novels to help us imagine and simulate these big decisions. Johnson also has more typical fare in the book: the history of weather forecasting and the theoretical, strategic, and tactical planning of the raid on Osama bin Laden's compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. But his main example is George Eliot's Middlemarch.

I'm an English teacher, and I often wonder if my job is bullshit. Do kids really need to read Beowulf? The answer might be no. Lately, the Language Arts curriculum has been moving toward more practical coursework, non-fiction texts, and synthesis essays. I see the value in this. But the Johnson book validates the traditional inclination of English class: reading novels. The ideas he presents feel groundbreaking and pushing them on both my students and my colleagues. Sometimes we need a reminder of why it's worth it to read literature with kids. While there is a myriad of reasons to do this, Johnson makes the compelling case that people faced with big decisions should hone their skills by reading literary fiction. I'll explain why later in the post, but someone should pass this advice along to our fearless leader, Donald Trump. According to this list, Trump is not a fan of fiction, literary or otherwise.


Victorian Spoilers Ahead!

Johnson made Middlemarch sound so intriguing-- despite the fact that it's a 900 page Victorian novel-- that I decided to read it in tandem with Farsighted. This was no easy task, and while I recommend Middlemarch, I definitely had to use the internet to understand several parts. It's often dense. The sentences are beautiful, but often long and wandering. I'm guessing you're not going to read it (and the synopsis in Farsighted will suffice) but I still should warn you that there will be spoilers ahead.

Many years ago, my friend and colleague Dan saw me reading Tolstoy's Anna Karenina. I was five hundred pages in.

"Why are you reading that?" he asked me. "She's just going to throw herself in front of a train."

"What? Why did you tell me that!"

"Everyone knows that," he said.

I did not know that.

When in Doubt, Wait and Think Anew

The biggest decision (among many big decisions) in Middlemarch is whether recently widowed Dorothea Casaubon should follow the codicil in her dead husband's will and lose her fortune, or ignore the codicil and marry the man she truly loves . . . a man her dead husband despised. Mary Anne Evans doesn't make it easy. She details all the forces that might weigh on a life decision of this magnitude. Johnson explains charts these forces:


At its core, Dorothea's choice is simply binary: Should she marry Ladislaw or not? But Eliot allows us to see the rich web of influence and consequences that surrounds that decision. A full spectrum map of the novel would look something like this:

MIND → FAMILY → CAREER → COMMUNITY → ECONOMY → TECHNOLOGY → HISTORY

In Middlemarch, each of these levels plays a defining role in the story.

Johnson then points out the difference in scope between Middlemarch and a more narrowly bound (but still wonderful) literary novel like Pride and Prejudice. We get insight into the personal lives of the characters in Pride and Prejudice, but we are "limited to the upper realm of the scale diagram: the emotional connections between the two lovers, and the apparent approval or disapproval of their immediate family and a handful of neighbors." Mary Anne Evans goes all the way. Things get so complicated that all we can do is what Dorothea does: "wait and think anew."

Great novels don't give us prescriptions for what to do in complex situations. They are not morality plays or fables. There is no set of invariable rules. Once again, Johnson explains this better than I can:

Great novels-- or at least novels that are not didactic in their moralizing-- give us something fundamentally similar to what we get out of simulations of war games or ensemble forecasts: they let us experience parallel lives, and see the complexity of those experiences in vivid detail. They let us see the choice in all its intricacies. They map all the thread-like pressures; they chart the impact pathways as the choice ripples through families, communities, and the wider society. They give us practice, not prepackaged instructions.


It's a lot easier to read literary novels than it is to amass the experiences within them. My buddy Whitney recently reflected on these moments in a numerically epic post . . . he's lived a life that might encompass several novels, and so he's got more moments like this under his belt than most folks. Most of us don't get this much practice, and Johnson suggests that the next best thing is to ingest fiction, things that never happened.

Just the Fiction, Ma'am


Why fiction? Why not stick to the facts? We could spend out lives in the world of reality, watching documentaries and reading non-fiction, and never want for compelling stories. Why involve ourselves in lives and worlds and decisions that don't exist? Johnson takes a guess: "Stories exercise and rehearse the facility for juggling different frames of truth, in part, because they themselves occupy a complicated position on the map of truth and falsehood, and in part because stories often involve us observing other (fictional) beings going through their own juggling act."

Glitch in the Matrix?


We can run our limited perspective through many other minds and fictional lives, hypothesizing both about the reality of truthfulness of that world and the reality and truthfulness of the decision making within it. It's why I love Middlemarch and Brothers Karamazov and it's why I think the TV show Ozark -- though it's well acted, set in an interesting location, and looks like quality work-- might be totally stupid. Something is off with the simulation. There's a glitch in the matrix. There's something foggy floating in the suspension of disbelief.

The new novel An Absolutely Remarkable Thing, by Hank Green, handles this in an incredibly in-your-face manner. While the book is ostensibly a first-contact, robots-from-space sci-fi story, the irony is that the weirdest, most alien technology is actually the social-media-verse created by the humans. April May, the heroically awkward anti-hero, has to navigate her viral first contact fame and make several big decisions about the arc of her life. The novel inhabits the same space maturity-wise as the works by John Green, the author's brother. The story is sophisticated enough for adults to enjoy it, but the portrayal of politics and the dialogue can be a little schlocky. And the ending devolves into more of a Ready Player One puzzle-fest. While the book is probably more suited for a an advanced young-adult reader, I still like how it tackles decision-making . . . it literally exemplifies Johnson's reason for reading fiction. Here's how April May breaks down her first big moment:

Option 1 (the sane option):

I could detach from all this as much as possible. Stop doing TV things, definitely do not meet a strange science girl at Walmart in Southern California to buy smoke detectors, never do anything on the internet again, pay off my loans. Buy a big house with a gate with the licensing revenue that would, no doubt, if this were real, keep flowing for the entire rest of my life, and have dinner parties with clever people until I died.

Option 2 (the not-sane option):

Keep doing TV, spice up my Twitter and my Instagram and have opinions. Basically, use the platform that I was given by random chance to have a voice and maybe make a difference. What kind of difference? I had no idea, but I did know another chance wasn't going to come along . . . ever.

Hank Green

Don't Be Shallow and Pedantic


I'm going to let Steven Johnson finish this post off, with an especially long passage that I really think you should read. I made my students read it, and I gave it to a number of English teachers in my department. It's a great explanation of why we should spend time reading novels . . . literary novels. What designates a "literary" novel is another question for another post, but for now we can use the same benchmark that Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart used to recognize hard-core pornography. He said he couldn't easily define it but, "I know it when I see it." The same goes for literature. As long as it's not "shallow and pedantic," then I think anything goes.

The novel is a better tool for simulating decision-making than a movie or TV show. Images move too fast and we never get to truly inhabit the interior of a character's mind. A novel allows for turning back and contemplation. It allows you to stop and hypothesize whenever you like. It's literally your world. Netflix tried to emulate a bit of this contemplative freedom with the choose-your-own-adventure Black Mirror episode "Bandersnatch", and while it was fun to make the choices, the story felt a bit contrived, and you never felt the threads and pressures that George Eliot portrays with such accuracy. You just picked a path so you could see what happened. The stakes were low. But when you invest in a challenging novel, and really live inside it, then profound things might happen.

This is the other reason novel reading turns out to enhance our decision-making skills . . . many studies have confirmed that a lifelong habit of reading literary fiction correlates strongly with an enhanced theory of mind skills. We don't know if other-minded people are drawn to literary fiction, or if the act of reading actually improves their ability to build those mental models. Most likely, it is a bit of both. But whatever the causal relationship, it is clear that one of the defining experiences of reading literary novels involves the immersion in an alternate subjectivity . . . The novel is an empathy machine. We can imagine all sorts of half-truths and hypotheticals: what-she-will-think-if-this-happens, what-he-thinks-I'm-feeling. Reading literary novels trains the mind for that kind of analysis. You can't run a thousand parallel simulations of your own life, the way meteorologists do, but you can read a thousand novels over the course of that life. It's true that the stories that unfold in those novels do not directly mirror the stories in our own lives. Most of us will never confront a choice between our late husband's estate and the matrimonial bliss with our radical lover. But the point of reading this kind of literary fiction is not to acquire a ready-made formula for your own hard choices. If you are contemplating a move to the suburbs, Middlemarch does not tell you what to do. No form of outside advice-- whether it takes the form of a novel or a cognitive science study or pop-psychology paperback-- can tell you what to do on these kinds of situations, because these situations contain, by definition, their own unique configuration of threadlike pressures. What the novel--along with some of the other forms of mapping and simulating that we have explored-- does teach you to do is to see the situation with what Eliot called "a keen vision and feeling," and keep you from the tendency to "walk about well wadded with stupidity." The novel doesn't give you answers. But it does make you better at following the threads . . . more than any other creative form, novels give us an opportunity to simulate and rehearse the hard choices of life before we actually make one ourselves. They give us an unrivaled vista into the interior life of someone wrestling with a complex, multi-layered choice, even if the choice happens to be a fictional one . . . the path of a human life, changing and being changed by the world around it.

Steven Johnson

Kickin' Off BHM with a Classic (by a white lady)

To kick off Black History Month, I read Harriet Beecher Stowe's classic anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom's Cabin. It is a melodrama, and surprisingly entertaining: dramatic, humorous, action-packed, tragic, and evocative by turns. And a little bit racist . . . but that comes with the territory. Stowe (and her characters) definitely throw some generalizations around about the African race, but they are always couched in their peculiar and horrible American predicament. And she certainly meant well.

There's also a lot of deepfelt Christianity, probably because the novel primarily functions as a persuasive tract, and-- as Annette Gordon Reed explains in her New Yorker piece “UNCLE TOM’S CABIN” AND THE ART OF PERSUASION: How Harriet Beecher Stowe helped precipitate the Civil War:

By the eighteen-thirties, Southerners were offering the country a new vision of slavery, as a positive good ordained by God and sanctioned by Scripture. Naturally, abolitionists in the North believed that the Bible told them the opposite: slavery offended the basic tenets of Christianity. Each claimed moral authority, hoping to win over the vast majority of citizens who were not activists on either side. Nothing would change in either direction without the support of these uncommitted and wavering citizens. They had to be persuaded that slavery, one way or another, had moral implications for everyone who lived on American soil.

This was the country that Harriet Beecher Stowe addressed in 1852 when she published “Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or Life Among the Lowly,” one of the most successful feats of persuasion in American history. Stowe’s novel shifted public opinion about slavery so dramatically that it has often been credited with fuelling the war that destroyed the peculiar institution. Nearly every consideration of Stowe mentions what Abraham Lincoln supposedly said when he met the diminutive New Englander: “Is this the little woman who made this great war?”

You can read all day and night about the merits and flaws of this novel. I read the book because Tyler Cowen mentioned how excellent it is, and I trust him. But opinions vary. One thing I can say for certain is that the derogative term "Uncle Tom" has been decoupled from the character in the novel.

Currently, "Uncle Tom" is a black person who sells out his race and is excessively obedient and servile to the powers that be. Even Urban Dictionary recognizes that this is a bastardization of the term. This is probably because of the many piss-poor overly melodramatic stage performances of the novel that made Uncle Tom into a fawning sycophant.

The "real" Uncle Tom is only servile to his faith, to Jesus and Christianity. He dies a martyr, at the hands of the wickedly callous slaveholder Simon LeGree, because he refuses to give information about Cassy and Emmeline (a pair of runaway slaves). LeGree whips him to death because Tom won't give in to his power . . . because Tom won't be servile to his master. Tom's faith enrages LeGree and causes him to destroy a valuable asset. 

James Baldwin was pissed off about Uncle Tom's passivity in the face of evil-- and this foreshadows the whole Malcolm X vs. MLK conflict over tactics in the Civil Rights Movement. Passive resistance vs. violent uprising. The high road vs. vengeance.

Stowe presents a colorful continuum of slaves and slave-owners. There are slaves escaping to Canada to work and be self-sufficient. Slaves escaping into the swamps, slaves crossing icy rivers by way of slippery floes. There is Sambo, a slave that terrorizes other slaves so that he can have some modicum of power. There are slaves being sold down-river, slaves being separated from their wives and children, slaves at market, slaves in the field, and slaves living in luxury in lavish homes. Slaves are sold for economic reasons and slaves are sold because their benevolent owners die.

There's also a wide variety of owners. The Shelby's are kind, especially Mrs. Shelby, but when push comes to shove they have to sell Tom to keep the farm. Then there are the typically callous and calculating slave-traders. The portrayal of Augustine St. Clare, the effete Southern Gentleman from Louisiana, who loves poetry and learning but can't seem to find faith is particularly affecting. He treats his slaves extraordinarily well, but can't find the moral compunction to free them. He embodies all the paradoxes of the Southern Man, civilized and kind, but he dies in a knife fight. And there's heroic little Eva and sickly, self-centered and abominable Marie.

St. Clare illustrates the powerful irony of the peculiar institution. He spoils his slaves and lets them have the run of his luxurious mansion. But in doing so, he allows the institution to carry on. He can't bring himself to take action, to become moral and faithful, despite the pleading of his Vermonter cousin Miss Ophelia (who grapples with and defeats prejudice of her own). If all owners were repugnant like Simon LeGree, the slaves would revolt and the abolitionists would have had all the fodder they needed to end the practice. But the benevolent owners actually did the cause harm, and Stowe points this out with the irony of St. Clare's character.

Controversial and stereotypical or not, Uncle Tom's Cabin is a novel full of memorable people-- and that's all you can ask for in a book. It may be intended more as a persuasive missive, the language is sometimes flowery, and the scenes can be overly-long-- little Eva's dying takes forever!-- but the book is well worth the time. The characters-- based on actual stories from Stowe's life and experience-- are larger than life. That's why they became stereotypes-- they are profound, abundant in American culture, and resonant-- and it's important to spend some time with the origin of these stock roles, not just the generative simplification and deterioration of them that time inevitably produces.

In the end, the book will make you contemplate the ultimate question: what is freedom? You could have been born a slave. You could have been born a battery in the Matrix. You could have been born a king or a queen or a serf or an untouchable. And once you are born, how much control do you really have over your fate? Do we deserve any of our gains? The very freedom to succeed, persevere, and accomplish is based on the fact that we are indeed born free, born into freedom. It didn't have to be this way. And-- not very long ago-- it wasn't a definite.

If you want to join my Black History Month book club, I've just gotten started on Walter Mosley's Devil in a Blue Dress. I plan on reading most of the Easy Rawlins sequence of novels. I might even do it before February ends-- it's a Leap Year.

Hey Internet! Write This Novel!

Here's a terrible idea for a novel: 

the internet becomes so large and complex that it attains consciousness and starts writing e-mails to people, because that is the only way it can connect with reality-- it has no senses, just an awareness through its content that there is an outside world (like the reverse of The Matrix . . . or maybe a science-fiction version of Pinocchio) but, honestly, I'm not going to write it, and so I'm just throwing the idea out there . . . perhaps the internet will read it and then decide to self-reflexively write it-- so listen up, Internet, if you write a big-budget movie, I want some compensation!

Let's Get Political, Political . . . Let Me Hear Your Party Talk

Since the topic has generated some interesting commentary, here are some final thoughts on Jonathan Haidt's book The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion:

1) while there are more than two kinds of people, our political system breaks us down that way-- unfortunately, there should be room for libertarians (who give even less of a shit about things than liberals do, but really care about liberty/oppression and have even less empathy than conservatives)

2) you can tell someone's political beliefs by the kind of dog breed they prefer: gentle and independent versus loyal, protective and wary of strangers;

3) Haidt admits that liberals go too far sometimes in their reflexive anti-business stance, and they could endorse the wonders of the free market to solve problems-- he makes a great analogy with food and the silliness of having food insurance, instead of knowing the prices for items and shopping around and buying what works, versus health insurance, where we have no clue what anything costs and so want to be insured for everything-- he brings up the case of lasix, which went on the free market and the price adjusted accordingly  . . . we've gone so far in the care/harm department with health care that the spending is utterly bonkers;

4) on the other hand, regulation can also have benefits-- the regulation of leaded gasoline in the late 70's and early 80's, despite Ronald Reagan's attempt to cripple the EPA and its ability to make that change (sound familiar, Scott Pruitt, bringer of asthma and global warming) was ill-founded . . . as are Trump's trade tariffs (it's Smoot-Hawley all over again . . . Smoot-Hawley! anyone? Bueller?)

5) the tug of war between these two groups is significant and important-- the debate between those that are primarily concerned with care/harm and making the world fair and free for as many people as possible-- and those that are concerned with groups and loyalty and liberty and authority and sanctity, as well as the former principles . . . and that's the most important thing that many liberals need to understand, that conservatives es still care about care/harm and fairness, just in slightly different ways;

6) Haidt's final advice is that if you want to truly understand another perspective, follow the sacredness-- I've had conservatives tell me that I don't actually care about endangered species and the environment, because they can't believe that someone would be sincere about that-- and I have trouble truly believing that people are sincere about religion or truly care if gay people get married . . . but we have to try to see why people believe these things, which all make sense in the context of what is sacred . . . and we have to remember that though there are more than two types of people, "once people join a political team, they get ensnared in its moral matrix" and follow the grand narrative of that party . . . but liberals are conservatives are yin and yang and both necessary for the health of a political system;

7) he ends by saying that libertarians and conservatives certainly provide a valuable counterweight to "liberal reform movements" but he sees two liberal points which are profoundly important to the health of society:

"governments can and should restrain corporate superorganisms"

and

"some big problems CAN be solved by regulation"

and I think these are the two points that we need to all come together about, we are rapidly destroying our environment and our resources, and we are rapidly being consumed by larger and larger corporate entities, which have captured the government, making all this tug-of-war and debating utterly useless, if the people no longer have any say in what happens to our country.

Taking the Purple Pill: Trying to Step Outside the Moral Matrix



This sentence is going to be a random, stream-of-consciousness mess, but I think (for once) my form fits my function: lately, I have been trying my damndest to understand the polarization between liberals and the conservatives in our country, and how this is shaping the current economic policy and the election platforms . . . I've been doing my homework and listening to conservative talk radio-- some Rush Limbaugh and plenty of Mark Levin, and in between the overblown rhetoric, the ranting about Hillary "Rotten" Clinton . . . how she is a felon and a serial liar and the devil incarnate, the disgust with poor people and immigrants, the lack of empathy for people of color, the absolute hatred for the government and its programs and the possibility that our liberties might be curtailed (guns!), the fear of socialism and any redistribution of wealth, the paranoia that taxation and public works projects will just allow the government to get its dirty hands on our money, and like the mafia, take its cut-- as a public school teacher, it's hard to listen to this-- but in between all this vitriol, there is a kernel of an idea that these conservative blowhards are trying to espouse . . . that the government should be smaller and taxes should be lower and regulations should be less and that the best way to produce wealth is an unfettered free market-- and while is think this is true in a limited sense, for certain goods and products, I also think a free market is expensive and volatile with certain things, especially things that we wish to flow: electricity, water, health care, infrastructure . . . we just want these things to be reliable so that other things can work on top of them, and I also think there's a question of externalities, which the conservatives rarely mention . . . but underneath all the hatred there is something to talk about, and I find it interesting that the conservatives don't agree with all Trump has to say, especially on jobs and government infrastructure spending and protectionism and minimum wage . . . meanwhile, the liberals want a revolution-- free college, free healthcare, higher living wages, alternative energy, restrictions on corporations, control of externalities, and equal treatment for all people: rich, poor, immigrant, native, white, black, gay, transgender, and don't mind some redistribution of wealth to encourage this, and I've been listening to the ultra-liberal and fairly funny Citizen Radio to get a bead on some real radical left wing logic and emotions, and while I have more in common with those ideas, they can be really annoying and idealistic and insular and obnoxious as well . . . and it doesn't seem like any of these candidates or their followers are going to do what Jonathan Haidt suggests in his TED talk and "step outside the moral matrix" and actually look at what some smart people have figured out, which is that it's a combination of free markets and regulations that make economies work, and no one knows the exact balance . . . read some Ha-joon Chang to understand "kicking away the ladder," which is how many developed countries arrived at economic stability and wealth through complex and strategic protectionism, tariffs, regulation of foreign investment, regulation on imports and exports, and subsidies-- but then once these these nations (and he uses America, Britain, and his home country of North Korea as his prime examples) have reached a position of economic power, they use institutions such as the WTO and the IMF, treaties, embargoes, copyright law, and tariffs to force impoverished nations into adopting extreme free market policies despite the fact that these countries are not ready to compete in a free market . . . in other words, there's no magic bullet for an economy and it takes a mixture of ideology to understand this, which is what Jonathan Haidt's TED talk is about, his research shows that while there is some consensus between liberals and conservative on fairness/reciprocity and harm/care as valid moral concerns, conservatives tend to be much less open to experience and thus much more concerned with three moral traits that liberals don't interest liberals: purity/sanctity . . . so the strict interpretation of the Constitution . . . in-group/loyalty . . . so "real" Americans and patriotism and military jingoism and Ronald Reagan as God . . . and authority/respect . . . so law and order and belief in the police and a more traditional patriarchy and Christmas and religion and all that . . . and Haidt points out to the mainly liberal crowd (he polled them, and it's a typical TED talk audience: open to progress, science, and new ideas and almost entirely liberal) that BOTH of these mentalities are required to create a great society . . . there needs to be some revolution and progress, but order is also delicate and hard to maintain and actually requires the three moral traits that liberals tend to ignore . . . now Trump throws a bit of a monkey wrench in this because he doesn't seem to be concerned with some typical conservative values-- purity and respect for authority-- and so his economic and policy plans might be something entirely new (and unpalatable in some respects to the "true" conservative) while Clinton certainly can be more jingoistic about the military and more loyal to her group (the Democrats) than a typical rebellious, progress-minded liberal might like and while I know that these two sides are never going to love each other, or even see eye-to-eye . . . conservatives work on a five-channel moral system while liberals work on two-channels, so conservatives will always be annoying to liberals because they care passionately about more stuff and seem angry, and liberals will always seem to be amoral libertine radicals because they don't care about enough things, but we are going to have to embrace the fact that what makes America great is diversity, and Donald Trump and Ted Cruz and Ronald Reagan are part of that diversity, and those conservative views-- which I often find hateful and ranting and humorless-- are important, just as important as the stereotypical diversity most liberals embrace: multi-cultural, multi-gender, pan-religious, multi-ethnic diversity . . . diversity that appeals to people who are open to all kinds of experience, the diversity that leads to a wide-variety of good restaurants, many of them quite cheap . . . such as the new Tacoria in New Brunswick . . . and that's what this is all about, right?
A New Sentence Every Day, Hand Crafted from the Finest Corinthian Leather.