Broken clocks and other highly metaphorical items

[A note before I start: I've been working on this post for several days, and since I began to write it, there's been another fire in the sf/f factory; I'm going to have to address that in a separate entry, because I have too much to say to wedge it in here. But that's forthcoming.]

I spent a big chunk of last weekend reading Clockwork Game, a webcomic by Jane Irwin about the Turk, a chess-playing machine made in the late 1700s (which played and won against people like Napoleon and Ben Franklin). The comic is clearly exhaustively researched and it's pretty fun for a historical account (although I'm sure it helps if you're a nerd like me). It has a pretty big flaw, though -- and Irwin says it best:

When I've given thought to the automaton's relationship to its owners and audience, I've been thinking this whole time only of the automaton as metaphor for the gap between man and machine, which it is. But what I've almost completely left out of my own mental equation is the additional subtextual metaphor of White society versus The Mysterious Other. [...] I'm suddenly realizing that modern Readers of Color are simply not going to be able to escape seeing that metaphor.

The Turk (which looked like this) was definitely a reflection of the priorities and prejudices of its designer:

When he created the automaton in the guise of a Turkish man, Kempelen was responding to late-eighteenth-century Austrian society's dual infatuation with the beautiful, exotic trappings and omnipresent threat of the Ottoman Empire. The Battle of Vienna was still undoubtably [sic] on everyone's mind -- it took place less than a hundred years before the automaton's debut --- and his audience would have immediately understood both the alien mystery and intimidation inherent in Kempelen's choice of costume for his figure.

Both quotes are from her blog post here.

The machine's human features are used to great dramatic effect, but its treatment at the hands of its creator/exhibitioner is echoed uncannily in the comic -- one example is the last panel here. You can't look at that and tell me that the group of people for whom the Turk is named are being respected. Not by the characters, and not by the author, either, since the comic (as it is now) never addresses the issues of racism, xenophobia, and exoticism, even as it cuts an object that looks like a Turkish man into pieces, and sticks those pieces in a box in a basement.

I first heard about Clockwork Game in the context of RaceFail '09, an extraordinarily complex barrel of events that I will now hideously simplify:

1) Fantasy author Elizabeth Bear wrote a post on "how to write the Other" in her LiveJournal.

2) A blogger of color, Avalon's Willow, wrote an open letter to Bear citing examples from her work that suggested that Bear was not the best person to give advice on this matter, because she had some of her own stuff to work on.

3) A discussion began wherein friends of Bear's (nearly all of whom were published writers, editors, and other industry professionals) essentially said that Willow's criticisms could not possibly be right, and that her reading was shallow. This progressed to the implication that she (and any other reader who objected to the content in question) was not smart or educated enough to make that call.

(Digression: at this point several people on the supposedly-uneducated team whipped out their academic credentials, many of which were very impressive, and I snickered to myself.)

4) Bear, who had initially stated that she would moderate comments on the post, moderated the comments of people her friends were attacking, not the attackers themselves. Lots of other posts were made, on other journals.

5) Things got extremely nasty. A surprising (to me) number of SF/F authors and other industry people started showing their asses in a number of ways, the most benign of which was "you can't possibly know what you're talking about; this could not possibly be problematic." Many of these people outright ignored explanations of why things were problematic, in addition to explanations of why it was very screwed up that a bunch of white writers were loudly telling readers of color that they were not qualified to comment on racism.

6) through 376290) Things got even nastier; people's real life identities were linked to their online names; someone used "orcing" instead of "trolling" to describe the actions of people of color protesting racism; etc. etc. Bear eventually told people it had all been a ruse (to educate others about racism, of course) and then my head exploded.

The entire thing is way beyond the scope of this entry, but it's important to look at -- a good first summary is here and a collection of relevant links is here.

So now that we've wandered far afield and stumbled into someone else's house and eaten something out of their fridge: this relates to Clockwork Game because its author, who watched RaceFail and the accompanying "NO, I DON'T HAVE TO EXAMINE MY WORK," actually thought "hmm, I need to examine my work." And she discovered that she'd been screwing up: that her work had ignored a major part of its setting and context, and she had assumed that her audience would not be bothered.

Irwin's first plan was to improve things in future installments of the comic, but she quickly realized that that was unrealistic and unhelpful. She decided to publish the rest of the pages in the chapter-in-progress and then abandon the project. (She has since decided to start over, hopefully with better results.) I wish there were something on the comic's actual website about this -- or, if there is, I haven't been able to find it -- but it looks like it's just on her blog right now.

I admire the self-awareness and maturity it takes to look at your work this way and then do what needs to be done; I hope to always look at my work as critically and honestly as I can, and follow Irwin's example if I need to. One of the hardest choices to make as an artist is the choice to kill a work in which you have invested crazy amounts of time, thought, and labor. But one of the most necessary choices you can make as a human being is the choice to harshly examine your own behavior, and to own up to your mistakes -- whether they're due to carelessness or outright hostility. And then to try to fix them.

Through the door to your left is a three-dimensional rendering of the world you actually live in

After all that stuff last entry about immersive theater experiences, I actually got a job helping someone do something very similar. I'm stage-managing Static, a show similar to the audio tours you can rent at a museum, but a theatrical piece. (We can argue all day about what makes it a theatrical piece, instead of a "fictional art exhibit" or something similar; it's late and I'm not very smart right now, so I'm going with the it's-theater-because-they-told-me-it-is defense.)

Static is the story of a young couple who stumbles on an urban legend about "the collector and his wife," an older couple who obsessively tapes the sounds of daily life (Walt) or records it in journals instead of speaking (Millie). Walt and Millie collect other things, too: buttons, clocks, odd toys, tons of stuff, which they categorize weirdly but sweetly, according to categories like "mouse" or "night-time" instead of by type. Then, of course, disaster strikes -- but it's not clear exactly how. The Static audience listens to Walt's recordings and the younger couple's commentary as they walk through Walt and Millie's house (played by an actual house) and perform some of the tasks they did while they lived there.

I've been watching audience members do test runs of the audio and activities (some normal household activities, some more specific to the house's odd inhabitants), and it's definitely interesting watching, although it's still kind of a passive experience. The audio contains instructions about what to do, and that makes sense, because the point is just to walk in Walt and Millie's shoes, like the younger couple also did -- and learn about their story. It's much closer to being that kind of game experience than probably any other theater I've seen, but there are still guidelines, and obviously there are still clear lines between fiction and reality.

What about an experience where the audience members have to take an active role, to solve a puzzle or clear their own path? You could do it with actors representing obstacles (talk to this person, get them to give up a secret; fight with them; get their help), or the audience could work against the space itself (how do we get out of this room? can we find and light a candle?). Now that I think about it, it's a lot like the Cronenberg movie eXistenZ, which is itself about people playing a game that is basically indistinguishable from real life. Some of my favorite scenes are the characters figuring out exactly how to get what they want out of an environment that will completely unlock if they just do the right thing.

In my experience, people go see theater expecting to become invisible when they become part of the audience, and anything that necessitates their involvement ("You there! Come up onstage!") makes them very uncomfortable. Even actors looking straight at you can be incredibly unnerving. (I once had a part where my character was severely mentally ill, so I was already no fun to be around, and then the director instructed me to stare at one audience member during the performance. He looked like he wanted to figure out a way to kill himself with his chair.)

So -- would it be a thousand times worse to stick audience members in a situation where they're the actors, the engines of the story? Or would it be better, because the situation is clearly so different that there's no way a conventional production could occur, and so you can't pretend you're going to become invisible? I think better, although there are a lot of other problems with the idea, obviously. But it could be so much fun.

Will has died of dysentry

I've been playing a lot of weird little online games lately, mostly escape games, in which you are stuck in a room (or house, or telephone booth, or fallout shelter) and have to use various objects inside to solve puzzles and get yourself out. I'm being general because there's a lot of variation; in certain games you wander through a crumbling town and collect eggs stolen from a museum, and in some you decode numbers scratched into a wall, and in some you pry up loose floorboards with crowbars or melt locks with chemicals.


My favorite kind are the post-apocalyptic ones, which are often strangely sad. I didn't grow up playing video games and wasn't expecting to feel so immersed in the various worlds I was visiting, but I was clearly wrong there. Daymare Town 2 and its predecessor, for example, feature worn-out towns populated by scratchily-drawn, angry creatures who follow you around, and windows that you look through to see, sometimes, a lone man who used to be the town butcher, naked and thirsty. The Daymare games fascinate me because they refuse to explain themselves -- the player has a purpose, to collect objects and fit them together to escape -- but there's a much larger story than you can possibly understand, and you're not relevant to it. Why is one section of the community mostly buried? Who broke into the museum? Whose blood is that? Why is the librarian so angry? The game doesn't care about you, so you don't find out. It's great.

The Fog Fall and The Fog Fall 2 are another pair I really like -- they seem to be in an alternate universe in which the Cuban missile crisis turned out far shittier, and you wake up trapped in the fallout shelter where you thought you could keep your family safe. But you're alone, your generator's in pieces, and you can't get out. A successful escape leads you to the sequel, where you have to trade favors and packets of freeze-dried food, and in order to do that you've got to walk through your ruined neighborhood, where grass is growing over people's cars and the dead are upright in their chairs as though they're still keeping watch.

I'm kind of jealous that game designers can create these highly complex, immersive experiences, partially because they're able to fit unlimited exploring-space into my laptop. Writing a play with this kind of experience would require an astonishing set, one that appeared to be completely realistic but was also sealed off from any outside influence that would ruin the illusion. Like a haunted house, but with a narrative. (I love haunted houses.)

I read a play once (and why can't I remember the fucking title?) that was meant to be staged in a house with several rooms, through which the audience was led and thereby exposed to different scenes. It's not quite the same, though, because it was clearly a play -- the action stopped and started depending on who was in each room; there were tour guides and commentary; you knew you were going to see a theatrical piece. And all you did was watch, if I remember correctly -- it would be really interesting to create a play where you forced the audience to save itself (assuming consent and safety). There's probably one out there already, but the idea of translating a game experience to a theater piece is interesting enough that there's room for two, I think.

Action sequence

I was going to write a fawning post about how much I love Holes, no matter how many times I read the damn thing, but instead I thought I would comment on the flaming-bandwagon-going-into-a-ravine that is Amazon.com's new policy on GLBT books. Grab your hat.

In summary: Amazon has removed a significant number of books by GLBT authors or dealing with GLBT issues from its rankings, which means that they are no longer available in bestseller lists and in certain searches. This includes a book aimed at preventing teen suicide, a once-obscure novella that became a blockbuster hit, and many other significant works of literature and memoir. What's their rationale? Here's what they said to author Mark Probst, whose YA novel was one of the unlucky ones:

In consideration of our entire customer base, we exclude "adult" material from appearing in some searches and best seller lists. Since these lists are generated using sales ranks, adult materials must also be excluded from that feature.

Hence, if you have further questions, kindly write back to us.

Best regards,

Ashlyn D

Member Services

Amazon.com Advantage

"Adult" materials. Which includes works that have little or no mention of sex or genetalia, works of memoir widely acknowledged as classics, and works aimed at helping middle-schoolers accept themselves regardless of who they might be. (A list is being gathered here.)

Amazon.com is possibly operating on some magical alternate plane that the rest of us don't understand, one where the fact of someone's life is explicit material, even if they're baking bread or mowing the lawn or farting or something. To Amazon, GLBT people are only allowed that one label, and that label always equals inappropriate. That's hateful and absurd. So.

I'm going to stop buying through Amazon, which I have done a lot over the years, and I sent them a note: their executive customer service email is ecr@amazon.com, and their phone number is 1-800-201-7575. (The blog post where I got this information also has an email template up that mentions that you can still search for -- and find -- materials on dogfighting.)

It's been a while since I felt this good about the recession kicking various businesses in the nuts. Smart move, Amazon; I'm sure you didn't need the business of GLBT people and their friends and families.

Coddling

Sorry there was no update last Sunday -- I did something wretched to my back and spent the next several days making grumbling noises and chewing ibuprofen like Perry Smith or somebody.

I continue to bash away at this new play; I'm up to 80 pages, which I have to keep reminding myself is pretty fucking good. This one has taken so much longer to write (three of the four previous plays took about six weeks; one was six hours) that I'm crazy blind sick of it, and trying to rush forward to the part where people read it and (I hope) give me compliments, because that is way more rewarding. I'm inching along, nudging different scenes into formation, identifying gaps -- I keep trying to coddle myself: you don't have to solve all the problems today, you don't have to write all the missing pieces.

When I'm writing, I often have to be very cautious and gentle with myself in order to stay in a mindset where I can write freely and unselfconsciously. I'm very controlling about who gets to see what I'm writing and what they get to say -- inspiration is very tenuous for everybody, but I find that I'm the same way with enthusiasm, which can get tripped up at any stage and ruin everything. I have to convince myself that, if another person is skeptical of my idea or my work, they are incredibly wrong and have no idea how wrong they are.

When I was writing We Three and explaining it to people, sometimes I got "uh huh..." and a doubtful face, but I was confident in my belief that I could make it all work -- and I did, fortunately. I'm having a little more doubt this time around, probably because I'm doing something so out of my comfort zone -- it's much bigger and wider in scope than I usually go. Last time I was considering keeping a journal of my writing process, so I could look at it during future projects and feel better if I was having a shitty day, but I was lazy and didn't. I think having a blog will help fill this need the next time around.

Cliches I'll never be sick of

- The Gentle Giant (especially if the GG is later pushed to the point of violence, which I think is a pretty standard narrative for the character). I'm a small guy, but I know some very big people, and the way they have to try to control their bigness (to not hurt other people by accident, to appear less threatening, to fit places) is really interesting to me. I read somewhere (possibly Esquire) that somebody asked Yao Ming what it was like to be 7'6" (aaaagh) and he said that everything seemed dirty, because he could see into places that were too high to clean. Poor Yao Ming.
Delicious examples: The Iron Giant, City of Lost Children.

- Rag-Tag Team of Misfits Barrelling Across the Galaxy (where "galaxy" can mean the Wild West, or an unnamed city pulsing with corruption, or whatever; some lawless place). There's nothing I don't love about this concept. I love "chosen families," and the ensemble of misfits often sidesteps the blandness you can sometimes get when you have a Hero Protagonist with some wacky friends. If everyone's kind of a weird lameass, they're all much more fun, I think.
Delicious examples: Ocean's 11, The Usual Suspects, Firefly. Butch and Sundance are almost weird enough in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid to qualify, even though there's only two of them.

- The Law-Enforcement Dude Going Rogue. Regrettably almost always a dude (though not in Criminal Minds, because it does awesome things with gender roles, including having the Damsel in Distress be this guy). I love stories about very skilled people, and I love watching crimefighting techniques get twisted for shadowy purposes. This usually involves a lot of improvisation and ingenuity, because the Rogue has no backup, and using everyday objects and concepts in new brilliant ways. It's a cool way to have the spy thriller world interact with our recognizable one.
Delicious examples: The Bourne movies. You can't beat a guy facing a knife-wielding opponent with a rolled-up magazine, you just can't. There's nothing more awesome. Also Spy Game, even though it kind of sucks otherwise: CIA Robert Redford on his last day at the agency tripping up his dickish younger colleagues with old-school machinations.

- You Must Solve These Puzzles. It's hard for me to walk away from any narrative once it's going, but You Must Solve These Puzzles pretty much ensures I will stick around, no matter how bad the source material. I read The Da Vinci Code to the bitter, warty end because they had not yet solved the puzzles.
Delicious examples: The Da Vinci Code, ergh. Also Seven. And a stupid new movie called 12 Rounds [of puzzles] that I suspect I will see.

- We Gotta Make This Fit into This. Also known as: any montage about thinking. I love montages, but the ones that visually demonstrate the development of thought are extra-interesting, because I struggle with how to dynamically portray someone's thought process on stage. Film has a major advantage over theater here, because cutting and close-ups and other techniques (like A Beautiful Mind making stuff light up) can draw audience focus to small pieces of a scene, but in theater you're mostly stuck with the whole picture the whole time. If I figure out a solution to this enduring problem, you'll be the first to know. Then I will make my millions.
Delicious examples: Apollo 13 (from which the title comes), A Beautiful Mind, Pollock, The Prestige.

Oh, beloved cliches, I try to reinvent you in my work, but I'm just hoping to find excuses to write The Tired Thief Aiming for One Last Score Versus the Grizzled Cop Who'll Stop at Nothing. That's great literature, right?

Cliches I'm sick of

There are a lot of cliches I'm very fond of, but that's going to be another post. These cliches are my pet-peevy ones. I've tried not to include too much stuff that's based on stereotype or is outright offensive, because "sick of" doesn't really do it justice, but I've included a couple that show up so often that they're cliches in addition to being ignorant and stupid. When I can think of some, I've listed some media that sidestep this phenomenon, and some that fail at it.

- Troubled female character with a history of sexual abuse/assault. What, you can't think of anything else that might be bothering your female character? Similarly, plot cliche: strong female character is captured by the enemy -- part of her torture/fear for her safety is sexual assault or the threat thereof. Happens too much to female characters, never to male characters.
Notably avoided: Criminal Minds, Red Dragon (it's my weirdo opinion that a male character's stabbing is set up to be similar to rape, and you can't talk me out of it). Firefly almost succeeds. Freaks and Geeks, and other shows with predominantly teen casts. Oz subverted this by creating an environment where essentially all the female characters had power over the majority of the male ones, since the former worked in the prison and the latter were incarcerated there. Though the show still has sexual violence against women, there's more against men, perpetrated by both sexes.
Surprisingly not-at-all avoided: Deadwood.

- Characters only dating people of their same race. Not really a cliche, just a stupid thing that shows up all the time, but god is it stupid. This was also a notable theme of the posters advertising prom dresses that my high school was routinely papered with.
Notably avoided: House, The Wire, Criminal Minds (also, bonus points for having mixed-race characters played by mixed-race actors), The West Wing.
Surprisingly not-at-all avoided: If I'm not mistaken, Queer as Folk (at least with the main characters). The show had characters of various genders, classes, sexualities, and abilities, but not so much racial diversity.

- The misanthropic genius (especially the misanthropic secretly tormented genius). I think House was the last character I actually liked who did this, but my patience with him is in little scraps all over my desk. It's such a lazy character template and one of the most frequently used on network TV, after "sad sad pretty boy." Fringe also had one of these, and he made me want to put out my eyes. Nice (or "nice") geniuses are way more interesting. Or geniuses with more than two dimensions, even.
Notably avoided: Criminal Minds has a deceptively sweet genius; if you count Willow, which you probably can, so does Buffy. The West Wing has a handful of characters who can be considered geniuses, some crankier than others, but I can't think of any whose primary character trait is that they're dickholes. Even if Bartlett insists on obnoxiously quizzing people on Latin.
Surprisingly not-at-all avoided: I wrote one of these, but the play hasn't seen the light of day yet. I are hypocrite.

- Geeky stand-in for the writer. Or, really, any stand-in for the writer. You're not so special I'm watching this to learn about you. Abundant in House and all of Joss Whedon's work except maybe Toy Story.
Notably avoided: Liz Lemon on 30 Rock walks the line pretty nimbly between being Tina Fey's self-parody and her own person. Freaks and Geeks relied heavily on the writers' experiences but used them to build believable characters.
Not-at-all avoided: Juno, even though I liked it. Diablo Cody talks exactly like that. It works for Juno, but it's awful in United States of Tara.

- Trash-talking black man, esp. "the super crazy one on the team"/Sassy black woman, esp. "the sassy best friend." They're going in the same category because they seem to both say "here's how a white writer is going to take Traits that All Black People Have but make them friendly!" -- which: blech.
Notably avoided: Most shows where there are more than two major black characters, because then they get to be people. Firefly is worth its own mention because it fails at race in other sparkly ways, but it sidestepped this particular turd.

There are so many other wonderful ones, like "two characters with obvious chemistry who will never get together because they're the same sex," "good girl with no personality," and "OMG SLUT," but this is a long post already (and I wish I had more examples). Maybe I'll do more of these in the future. Next post, though, will be the ones I can't get enough of. Preview: most of them can be filed under "goes in a heist movie."