Author Archives: Abalieno

Lovecraft as a symbol

This is meant as an answer to something Steven Erikson wrote about the choice to replace the H.P. Lovecraft bust for the World Fantasy Awards, with something else. On the speculation that Lovecraft was a racist:
https://thecriticaldragon.wordpress.com/2015/11/14/awards-or-bust-guest-blog-by-steven-erikson/

I have something to say because I’m quite nitpicky about these matters and I feel it’s extremely important to pin down motivations in a way that is clear of ambiguity, otherwise, I think, all is lost and we fade into an endless war of factions and self-identity.

So, while I’m a huge fan of everything Erikson writes and not just for what’s on the surface, I also find a number of issues with this particular article. A few critical points that lead me to challenge that particular view in order to better define the “canon” we use to decide (or personally judge) these matters.

Symbols are potent things.

WFA’s philosophy of inclusiveness and diversity

Am I unique in ‘disrespecting’ Lovecraft (as a symbol of merit in Fantasy)

Adrian Cole chimes in to rail against political correctness and points out that the World Fantasy Award is not about racism, and he’s right. It’s not. So why symbolise it with the bust of a racist? We are then chided on getting ‘too soft’ and life’s too short to be ‘particular’ and ‘sensitive.’ In other words, this life, being so short, is better spent being insensitive, hard of countenance and dismissive of the particular.

(you read the original post for context, of course)

When I was a kid I was a big fan of Lovecraft. Without a doubt my favorite writer, closely followed by Clive Barker. And, especially, I was a fan of Lovecraft as a man, I read his biography and I bought with enthusiasm a book that collected some of his letters. I was an avid reader of the “writer behind the scenes” and interested to backtrack the origin of his imagination. Yet, not even for an instant I perceived or became aware of “Lovecraft as a racist”. Not because I was ALSO a racist, but simply because I didn’t detect anything that made me suspicious of that. For me Lovecraft, the man and the writer both, was an idol, but again it was an idol not colored by racist ideas or principles.

Nowadays Lovecraft has a huge cultural impact. A popular game like Bloodborne can come out, be played by millions of players, and universally recognized as deeply and explicitly “inspired by Lovecraft”. It drips with Lovecraft’s atmosphere and themes, and not superficially either. Yet again, neither the aesthetics nor the deep seated themes have anything to do with racism or other forms of prejudice.

My point? Erikson denounces Lovecraft “as a symbol”. He puts emphasis on this, saying that symbols are potent. But the thing is that Lovecraft was NEVER seen as a symbol of racism. I dare say that pretty much no one who worships Lovecraft, including me as a kid, does it recognizing Lovecraft as a racist. Or BECAUSE Lovecraft was a racist.

What I mean is that celebrating Lovecraft was NEVER a way to implicitly or explicitly celebrate racism. In our modern culture Lovecraft’s influence is completely absent of racist connotations. And now, to transform Lovecraft and denounce Lovecraft as a SYMBOL of racism is from my point of view a manipulation. An appropriation of a symbol, twisted to represent something that it didn’t represent up to this point. And part of a certain modern revisionism that can be quite pervasive with its ‘instrumentation’.

Yet now we know better. We have a poem, written when Lovecraft was 21 or 22 years old, and looking carefully in his private letters, and traces here and there in his stories. You can see enough evidence that, indeed, Lovecraft was likely a racist, and a fairly vicious one. Even if it seems he was also getting saner as time passed. Reading this I personally, definitely, have to reconsider Lovecraft. Yet this doesn’t automatically invalidates what I appreciated until now. Nor it replaces the symbol itself. Nor I will accept the re-framing of that symbol.

Some might raise the observation that Lovecraft was a man of his time, and therefore excusable for his objectionable views on race. Of course, there were other men (and women) of that time, who were not racists. Some of them, indeed, were neither white nor male. Accordingly, to those apologists attempting the ‘historical context’ argument, it just doesn’t fly, folks. The proof of that is plain enough and I’ll state it here: those who seek to apologise for the beliefs and attitudes of people in the past invariably do so in defense of the egregious and the objectionable. Nobody apologises for those people in the past who held virtuous views, do they? No, they laud such people and name them unusually enlightened.

Lovecraft had neighbours who were not racists. The historical context argument is bullshit.

I would turn around that stance. Being a man of his time doesn’t free Lovecraft of responsibilities, but from my point of view makes this problem intangible. We are alive and we judge, but what’s important is our actions.

The problem with Lovecraft being a man of his time is that you can’t face him. This is important. A “racist” is not simply some guy that needs to be judged and condemned, and be made into an example. A racist is someone that needs to be challenged. You have to confront these views, oppose them not as a “campaign”, but by going deep in this mentality, to understand it, expose it and then defuse it. But we can’t do anything like that with Lovecraft. Whether he was a racist or not, whether this deeply affected and nourished his fiction, these are all matters of speculation. We don’t have ways to probe the psyche of a dead man, only delusions that we can from our high moral perch.

This is Mieville:

“Yes, indeed, the depth and viciousness of Lovecraft’s racism is known to me …It goes further, in my opinion, than ‘merely’ *being* a racist – I follow Michel Houellebecq (in this and in no other arena!) in thinking that Lovecraft’s oeuvre, his work itself, is inspired by and deeply structured with race hatred. As Houellebecq said, it is racism itself that raises in Lovecraft a ‘poetic trance’. He was a bilious anti-semite (though one who married a Jew, because, if you please, he granted that she was ‘assimilated’), and if you read stories like ‘The Horror at Red Hook’, the bile you will see towards people of colour, of all kinds (with particular sneering contempt for African Americans unless they were suitably Polite and therefore were patricianly granted the soubriquet ‘Negro’) and the mixed communities of New York and, above all (surprise surprise – Public Enemy were right) ‘miscegenation’ are extended and toxic.”

This for me is comparable to fan-fiction. It’s purely speculation, whether plausible or not, a fictional interpretation of Lovecraft.

This modern certainty of being able to take some piece of fiction and SEIZE the deep psyche of its writer is nothing else but delusional and hubris. And, again, it’s a DELIBERATE manipulation used for personal ends.

Back to the WFA. I don’t see anything wrong in the choice of changing the “symbol” of the award, so I don’t find anything outrageous in the decision to use something else. The problem lies in the identity of that award, of course. One makes an award, and decides what it should ideally represent. An award isn’t a “thing”, it’s an agreement between people to symbolize a certain thing, so there isn’t any antecedent truth to appeal to.

It’s consequential that whatever the WFA people want the award to represent, it will represent. And that they should choose the symbol that better represents that value (and so even acknowledging that Lovecraft is ill suited for that role).

Yet, there lies the problem. Maybe those who already got the award didn’t consider the award to be characterized THAT way. Erikson writes as a premise that the values of WFA are: philosophy of inclusiveness and diversity. But was it always like that? There can be good fantasy even if it doesn’t celebrate diversity as its main purpose. This would be a specific angle to impose on a genre that is otherwise wider.

So it’s even possible that if the WFA, specifically, becomes a “philosophy of inclusiveness and diversity”, then it’s an award that is changing. That is being wielded for a different use. It gains more of a specific identity, but it also begins, if you want, to “discriminate”. To select fiction that is a possible candidate from fiction that won’t be.

A great piece of fantasy that doesn’t, specifically, celebrates diversity as its political point may not be anymore suited for WFA, because WFA acquires a specific slant and color. It embeds a political message that it wants to celebrate.

So, I put emphasis on that. The problem is not that there’s something wrong celebrating those positive values, but that the award might be seen as acquiring a different identity, and so the replacement of its symbol (the bust) follows a change that already happened about identity and purpose. And it is legitimate that some people who treasure “fiction”, don’t want fiction to be strictly caged within an imposed morality or political purpose. Because it’s fiction, and fiction isn’t required to follow political canons to be good. It can be great fiction that is about or includes politics, and is celebrated for that reason too, but it can be also without and still be vehicle of a completely different message.

But again, people change and institutions change. In the end the WFA award can change too, and celebrating inclusiveness and diversity is surely a worthy cause, if hopefully not totalitarian. All these “literary” prizes have very hazy identities and they matter very little, exactly because you can never see explicitly what makes one different from the other, and in the end it’s all more of a social game with its peculiar rules more than anything related to a literary value of any kind.

I’d only conclude with a suggestion. So Lovecraft isn’t exactly ideal if your goal is celebrating diversity. This should be evident to everyone, okay? That means that the decision to replace that symbol is understandable and well motivated. What do you change Lovecraft with, then? My suggestion is that you make a ‘bust’ of Cthulhu instead.

Which by the way would look fucking amazing.

Every Man in his Castle

“The only way…
to view the truth of life, Kotomichi…
is to stand apart from it,
to see…
the consequence of every thought,
every action.
But still…
we are bound by time and space,
unable to steer our destiny.”

A relatively non-spoilery quote from “The Man in the High Castle”, the TV series. I’ve finished the book itself a couple of months ago, while currently I’m trying to finish the mammoth of a book that is “Parallel Stories” by Peter Nadas, hopefully within this year.

Now that quote gives the perspective. Usually abstract-talking is more about evoking a mood, to seize a general feel about an idea, that in the end is either trite or whimsical. But that quote not only is precise and spot-on, but it also resonates with the series itself, and so lifting it even higher.

I’m not going to write about my impressions on the series, but I’ll say that I didn’t know there was a series when I read the book, and now I’m surprised to hear it’s getting a second season. The problem is that it ends up in a too tricky spot, and while it managed to stay almost faithful to the book, respecting it, a second season undermines it all. It’s walking a very fine line.

But until this point it sort-of complements the book, without directly belonging to the same space.

“The consequence of every thought, every action” is a good definition of determinism. “Bound by time and space” is a good definition of a life. “The truth of life” is the truth of that dichotomy, the impossibility of true return. Of crossing the barrier that divides the two.

The TV series did a great job putting good characters on the stage, so it did a good job showing people and circumstances. It created a good “story”, where story means linking events in a way that makes sense, showing what’s needed: empathy with characters, without taking sides. The book instead showed pieces of a fictional reality that was held up, hooked to an authoritative system of truth. A greater truth, that you could glimpse, if not belong to. It was about fiction becoming self-aware. Which again is a manifestation of the truth.

But the TV series, with the jump from what it did, and over to what it will try, violates the rules. You cannot simply change one thing in the course of determinism in order to explore alternatives, as if in a multiverse. Because that one element is still produced by what comes before it, you cannot extrapolate in a very convenient way. We are “unable to steer our destiny” because, from the system, we are witnesses, not actors.

HEIMAT

(still waiting to resuscitate the blog)

A different kind of Epic.

That True Detective finale

I’m one of those who liked a lot the finale to the first season.

Season 2 as a whole has been something else. A key aspect is that Nic Pizzolatto didn’t even attempt to follow up on what Season 1 represented, and instead decided for something completely different. If you ask which one was the best season, everyone, including me, will say that the first was simply better. So, for someone who saw the first, didn’t think it the best thing ever and so is considering whether or not to watch the 2nd, it seems the answer is straightforward: if you’ve watched season 1, and that one was better, there’s no real necessity of watching the second too since you’ve already seen the best it had to offer, unless you’re a fan. I’m sure that’s the rationale for a lot of people. Yet it’s the wrong one, because the two series are so different that they deserve to exist, and be seen, independently. There’s still the same fingerprint, it’s like two unrelated books by the same writer, but that means season 1 doesn’t effectively overshadow or replace season 2.

But then the finale itself mitigated this point of view I had, because in the end the merits of the series seem to evaporate, somehow. I think the whole finale has been conceived as a reaction. Same as End of Evangelion was a reaction of the director to the assault of the public. It’s like Pizzolatto decided to give the public the finale they demanded, something fitting a canon, an active reaction to the criticism.

Up to episode 7 I kept reading critics about the overwrought dialogue that I justified in the other blog post, and criticism about characters, and the omnipresent accuses of misogyny. I’d toss all that away, but the finale managed to make all these things worse, and so making them more tangible even to me. What annoyed me the most is that both plot and characters were railroaded toward a form I’d call “plot karma”. As if instead of telling a story, the point was to give a demonstration. So having these characters locked into a fixed plot karma that doesn’t follow actual karma rules, being disrespectful of the audience’s preferences, but wanting to prove and impose its moral relativism.

It’s disappointing because if the first season felt so fresh and different from everything else, this one traced a trajectory that lead right back to the derivative Hollywood writing, with its pre-determined patterns of plot twists. Especially watching Ani being pushed to the sidelines for the second half of the episode not only is infuriating to watch, but also radically incoherent with the character. If season 1 finale had its own flair and defiance of conventions, season 2 follows the ineluctably of fixed-pattern writing, with characters trapped in their mandatory pay-offs. So after a season of earning the public’s sympathies, they end up surrendering to the fact they are only movie-like characters, as fake as everything coming out of Hollywood. “Plot karma”, or things being locked into a too obvious trajectory, with dialogues that start the episode whose only purpose is to foreshadow everything that will follow, leading-on. As if the show has been chocked to death by the audience’s demands and expectations.

I feel like I’m being very wrong, but that’s what I got from this finale: the idea that Pizzolatto hated the audience’s response to the first season, and so decided to lash out with rage, feed the public with the artificiality they demand. Instead of offering them the bliss, he offered them a virus, working as an antidote and triggering a negative response.

So: the idea that all this was deliberate. A disruption. Forcing the public to watch, and so triggering a kind of rebellion against the thing they are watching. And refuse to accept it.

But beside this hidden, probably non-existent layer, remains instead the explicit theme: the dreamlike, fatalistic experience of things moving toward a single point/ending. Omega Station (the title), as the ultimate point, impossible to escape. Omega Point as the predetermined destination that all these characters are locked in.

Observe Velcoro in the whole end section: spellbound, as if observing himself doing things, instead of doing things. As if he’s sitting next to YOU, on the couch, watching himself in True Detective. Until he looks up to the trees, and observes these tightening plot limbs closing in, closing in. Narrowing as a cage, all around him. Out there in the open, yet claustrophobic. As if reaching past the layer, to the writer and the audience, asking “is that it? really?” Yes, really. I’s written right here.

And so, I imagine, the desire to break this spell, deny it. Demand characters to be more than contrived puppets stuck in their predictable and cliche-ridden patterns, just because the plot karma demands so.

Like Frank, Pizzolatto decided that rather than sitting idly by while his empire was dismantled in the inevitable backlash, he’d burn it all to the ground.

Double-aspect theory

Taking advantage of a brief discussion on Twitter to explain an idea here. I’ve still some philosophical things to archive on the blog that are already a few months old. Eventually I’ll haul it all over here.

The thing I wrote on Twitter (the purpose is to squeeze it down to a really simple and intuitive level that can be immediately understood):

(about Free Will and eliminativism)

The contradiction is born of dual path, one inside the other, both true. It’s perspective.
Free Will literally exists or not depending from where you look. Both Points of View are “true”.
Elimination being BOTH logical and impossible creates a contradiction because it juggles two planes.
Reduce perspective to one plane and Free Will EITHER exists OR doesn’t (the contradiction is resolved) – WHO IS ASKING?
“WHO IS ASKING” (or saying) is the ultimate solution to Free Will paradox

What surprises me is that no one seems paying attention to how plain is the paradox born from the contradiction. A contradiction is literally just a statement that is apparently both true and wrong and can’t seem to be solved, or brought down to ONE solution.

The problem of Free Will is exactly the same: a paradox.

These things always work the same. Consider for example the idea of “Nature”. What is the contrary of “natural” in our language? Artificial. And what does artificial means concretely? Man-made. Fabricated.

That is the seed of many contradictions that have significant impact in our lives. For most of everyone human beings have a “soul” and there’s a distinction between them and the rest of creation. The world out there is made FOR us. We are separate from it. Yet, if we believe in actual science, human beings are PART of nature, not distinguished from it. The system of nature closes around us. It INCLUDES us. It is then only consequent that nothing “artificial” can exist. If it’s man-made, and men are part of nature, it’s still as natural as everything else. Nothing can exist in nature that can transcend or violate nature itself.

It is the origin of many ethical problems. Manipulating genes is “not natural”. But if human beings can do it, and human beings are part of nature, then there cannot be anything artificial about it. It was already all part of the “design”, whatever it is. Unless you believe human beings have some special powers that make them distinct.

How is the contradiction born? Of language. But language is only a reference. If you move human beings OUTSIDE nature, and so create a plane, a system of reference that belongs to human being, to oppose to another plane, a system of reference that belongs to the rest of nature, then the consequence is about obtaining statements that are BOTH true and wrong. Because the contradiction originates from the confusion of these two perspectives, and so opposite answers.

That’s the problem of Free Will, being required yet impossible. DO WE HAVE FREE WILL? Has only a true answer:

WHO IS ASKING?

The solution (or the path leading to the solution) is brought by the double-aspect theory:
two aspects of, or perspectives on, the same substance.

The “substance” is one, Nature, Science (the description we make of Nature, the objective eye of God). But the perspectives are two, creating the apparent contradiction.

Human beings exist WITHIN nature, but they create two planes, two levels, that are perceptively separated. First person, third person. Man/nature. Inside/outside. The part of a whole. A slice, a point of view.

Free Will EXISTS within the first person, because of limited access to information. Free Will is concretely a limit applied, a perimeter that delimits a space. An enclosure. This enclosure creates a distinction between inside and outside. And so creates the principles of the two planes that then create a contradiction when you make statements while confusing the plane of reference.

But because Free Will exists within the first person, and the first person is contained in Nature, Free Will also is canceled when the perspective switches to third person. Science (third person) says: Free Will cannot exist. Because science postulates that there’s “one substance”, and so two contradicting truths aren’t possible. The first person/Free Will is “explained away”. Eliminated.

WHO IS ASKING? The question can be answered from two perspectives. First person and third person, yet there’s one substance only, because we can’t forget that human beings aren’t separate from nature, but caught within. So one answer/perspective is included within the other.

True Detective, Season 2

True Detective, Season 2, Episode 5:

One day you might find cause to ask yourself
what the limit is to some pain you’re experiencing
and…

you’ll find out there is no limit at all.
Pain is inexhaustible.

It’s only people that get exhausted.

I have this new program, see.

Because my powers of influence
are so meager in this sublunar world of ours,
I try to limit the people I can disappoint.

And I make sure to know the difference
between my obligations and somebody else’s.

Note: That line has been pointed at, across medias, as bad writing because of “who talks like that?” My comment to that is: bad writing that comes around and it is good. No one asks for realism when realism doesn’t add anything. There is not intent for authentic dialogue there, and so no fault.

True Detective is “written”. Charged with meaning, an artificial world. It’s set after the world has already ended. All characters are afterimages on a stage, manipulated as puppets without choice. They are only alive because they suffer. Episode 5 is a distillation of why human beings are utter shit. It’s literally post-apocalyptic setting.

Malazan, The Bonehunters:

‘Nothing can be done,’ Heboric said. ‘We each fall into our lives and that’s that. Some choices we make, but most are made for us.’

Both True Detective and Malazan switch focus from characters to environment, and back. How one shapes the other, and back. Environment as character. How one is a domain within the other.

‘Heboric’s chosen this path, but it’s not by accident. Sure, it’s a wasteland now, but it wasn’t always one. I’ve started noticing things, and not just the obvious ones like that ruined city we passed near. We’ve been on old roads – roads that were once bigger, level, often raised. Roads from a civilization that’s all gone now. And look at that stretch of ground over there,’ she pointed southward. ‘See the ripples? That’s furrowing, old, almost worn away, but when the light lengthens you can start to make it out. It was all once tilled. Fertile. I’ve been seeing this for weeks, Cutter. Heboric’s track is taking us through the bones of a dead age. Why?’

‘Death and dying,’ Scillara continued. ‘The way we suck the land dry. The way we squeeze all colour from every scene. And what we do to the land, we also do to each other. We cut each other down.’

Fantasy Realism

Well, that’s an oxymoron. Article on the New Yorker:
http://www.newyorker.com/culture/sarah-larson/an-open-letter-to-the-white-walker-army

Even Jon Snow, who, as several characters reminded us, has a pretty face and a sympathetic backstory, isn’t enough to provide all the human intrigue in a scene with seven million undead C.G.I. assholes.

“Game of Thrones,” which is part fantasy, is also mostly a drama, and those of us who are there for the drama, White Walker Army, and for the comedy, such as it is, rate you very low on the emotional-realism scale. We dread your appearance not just because you threaten Jon Snow and his cohorts but because you threaten to drag the show we love further into a realm that we find tedious. As a friend texted me recently, “It’s turning into a video game.”

The reaction I saw to this was about the attack on the genre elements of the show, that a part of the public certainly likes very much, but I’m not interested specifically on that aspect today.

I also believe, and have written a few times, that the more ASoIaF moves away from the political backstabbing and toward its more fantastic elements, the more it actually loses its shine and appeal. It’s not so much because I personally dislike fantasy in my novels (obviously), but because Martin’s skills don’t seem to be there. He’s good at writing the other stuff. So the series seems more on a downward trend not because of its sprawl, but because its direction (ice and fire) is less brilliant and inspired than its core (game of thrones).

I felt something similar when I was reading Erikson’s “Memories of Ice” the third book, also specifically about another zombie army. I could see what the author was trying to do, but I simply did not think it could be achieved. It would be a failure, for reasons that are similar to those expressed in that New Yorker article. Yet Erikson managed to pull it off by resorting to a certain “trick”. And it worked! It was brilliant and it managed to achieve that ambition I thought simply not possible.

Martin is not done, so we all have to wait to see if he pulls it off, or even WHAT he’s trying to pull off. But I think he has a more traditional interpretation of fantasy and that he’s not interested in digging deep. It’s just a layer. But because of this, there’s the risk of disappointment when the reveals will kind of fizzle out, or will look like dry CGI.

The TV show had the merit of pulling in the general public, but to a lot of them the “fantasy” in it still feels tacked on. Something they tolerate more than something they enjoy.