I'm reading on Tuesday night, at Naropa University's Performing Arts Center (PAC), with Christopher Stackhouse, Leonard Schwartz, and Truong Tran.
2130 Arapahoe Ave.
Boulder, CO
Admission: General $6, Students & Seniors $4.
For more information please call 303-245-4665 or email jkazimer@naropa.edu.
If you're in the area, drop in and treat yourself.
Sunday, June 28, 2009
Friday, June 26, 2009
Towards a Contemporary Native Lit Manifesto
(I am making only suggestions, here, feeling my way through what will probably be an ongoing series of bullet point considerations. This is intended to be purified, adjusted, and put into action by better and better-positioned folks than me, if they are interested.)
*******
We need to retire the word “tribe” and replace it with “nation” or “culture” as appropriate to the individual instance. The word implies a smallness and simplicity, and was probably specifically chosen over “nation” or “kingdom” during the European invasion of this hemisphere specifically for those reasons.
Faux or pan-Native cultural items and activities should be retired. If we can’t do our own research, keep our own cultures in order, why should anyone else? If you’re doing it because it increases sales or lends you legitimacy to throw in some traditional weaves and bone whistles without, there’s the door, don’t let it… you know the routine.
There should be a temporary moratorium on writing in a historical setting, as this often implies to the uninitiated, mainstream, reader that Native peoples only exist (or exist authentically) in the past.
There should be a temporary moratorium on first contact stories. I’m sure there are Indians living in the United States of America who have just this minute met a non-Native person for the very first time, but they’re probably children. Or, lying. And if they aren’t, and the scene was a narrative, would it be giving us anything fresh to the conversation and field?
Write for your neighbors. It’s harder to sell out your neighbors’ stories than it is the people back home or from somewhere you just claim to be from (or researched). And if you don’t want to write for your neighbors, what, are you ashamed of them? Too good for them? Or, just telling things they don’t need to hear or learn?
A philosophy or concept is not more important or useful because it is traditional. They are useful and valid today, or they’re probably best left to the wayside. If you harbor some delusion that the world was perfect and paradisiacal in some murkily-defined past… door’s over there, we’re busy here.
Native people have been dumped on too much, and we cannot afford, in life or entertainment, to be isolationist. We cannot afford to be sexist, homophobic, racist, or otherwise bigoted in regards to the existence of any person on the basis of elements they cannot help (noting, that people can help being, say, racist, and that it is not a built in gene any more than misandry is inbuilt). If you want to do this on your own time, we’ll deal with you when the time comes, but when you put out works of entertainment or information, you are – whether you like it or not – representing all and every single other Native person.
Let us not reinforce the stereotype that Native people live outside, beside, or behind any other contemporary culture or subculture. Or that our culture(s) do not adjust, absorb, or appropriate other cultures, even if ours may be unfairly or unequally taken in. The Simpsons became part of Native culture the moment a bunch of Indians started watching the show and quoting from it.
There are good looking Indians. It’s usually a non-Native person being kind and helpful to us, who tells us that “Hollywood Indians” are not Native (enough), usually because they are fit, or sexy, or have nice cheekbones accentuated by professional makeup people. Those sentiments are bigoted and absurd. And defeatist. There are plenty of good looking Native people. Some of these sexy folks are thin, some are tall, some are the bronzed barrel-chested sweaty dude with good teeth that grace the frequent romance novel’s cover. Except, they’d have – one hopes – the good taste not to dress like that. Native people, like all people, come in a variety of sizes, shapes, and shades… as they always have.
If you write a self-help book, claiming the routines are ancient and Yaqui will not make them work better. A basic prayer workbook does not need Indianicity to work and in fact, if it doesn’t work, that layer of proposed Indianicity is not going to make it work. Also, the ghost of Carlos Castaneda may appear in a burst of light and sue you into the ground. After Barbara Myerhoff’s ghost finished suing his.
As someone who has lived, at times, without running water or proper heating, modern plumbing and conveniences are as important and ambient a part of contemporary Native living. Let’s remember that. Let’s also bear in mind, commod cell phones.
Not everybody has a casino, a CIB, or is a drunk because they’ve had a drink of alcohol.
In fact, maybe we should have a moratorium on drunk Indian stories for awhile. Everybody knows what to expect from there, and you know what? I know a lot of Native people who enjoy alcohol to varying degrees without being an alcoholic or getting smashed. And the mythology built up around liquor, the illusion of some innate spiritual horribleness and malice needs to be retired because it’s an embarrassment to us all.
As much, as nonwhite/nonblack people we may be inclined to complain that too much of the broader entertainment world treats life and story as a Black and White issue, let’s remember that it is also not a Native American and White world.
Native literature, as with much of the rest of Native art, shows an intense tendency towards pattern being more significant than causality. Our stories, poems, and plays often require the entire work, in context, to be understood. Native entertainment has always embraced and utilized abstaction, metaphor, call and response, pointillism, perspective shifts, and deliberate animism. Regardless of what canonicity may be offered to works more closely adhering to White or non-Native styles and cultural tendencies, let’s not play that demeaning game. Embrace the stylistic and cultural elements and not be concerned so much that these may appear etic to the perspective of non-Native audiences. We play catch up with them, every time we engage a story, film, or music video from outside our culture, so the same can be expected of them. No one of these systems or tendencies, these methods of communication and entertainment, is inherently the default.
The shade of your skin does not give you cultural or community-based authenticity. It does not lend these things to anyone else, either. Some Native people have darker skin than others, some lighter, and this has been true longer than there have been White people in this hemisphere.
No matter who looks to you to be the representative of all peoples and things Native American, you don’t need to act that way. You should not take that role on your shoulders, of your own accord, no matter how strong you may feel the call to do so. Somewhere out there, there is a Native person who disagrees with you on some point or who has a cultural or life experience different from yours, and they are no less Native than you are.
Let’s not be ethnographic tour guides in our prose and poetry, okeh? There is no default non-Native (or not Native enough) audience out there you need to communicate Native-ness and experience/being too.
Just because your character lives on a tiny rez town, does not mean they don’t drive into a bigger urban area to a major chain store.
Just because a certain person thinks they have no culture, or are not close to their culture, does not mean this is true. They may simply be mistaken as to what their culture is, and chasing after something that is not culture, but heritage. Alternately, some people feel that their culture is modern, but a Native American culture (whichever, depending on the example) is rooted and (in truth) suspended at some time between one and five hundred years ago. Eastern Hemisphere cultures have all, including European, been affected by involvement in the Western Hemisphere, just as the Western Hemisphere cultures and habits have been affected by them. If this were not true, pizza and donuts would be very different.
Is your character wearing something in public that, in your experience, would get them laughed at on their own rez or homeland? Are they speaking of things that would make their friends or grandparents shake their head in disbelief? Are you dealing with these things in that light, or have they got some feathers in their earrings and a choker full of turquoise over their fringe-tastic buckskins because you want to make sure the audience understands these are Indians?
Let's try to keep any non-English used in an English-language piece useful and purposeful. Words from a foreign language should not be used purely to affect an authenticity, or in situations where they would not be in general conversations. Entertainment is a trade operation, and the only time a lack of communication is useful in trade is for obfuscation and astonishig the rubes.
*******
We need to retire the word “tribe” and replace it with “nation” or “culture” as appropriate to the individual instance. The word implies a smallness and simplicity, and was probably specifically chosen over “nation” or “kingdom” during the European invasion of this hemisphere specifically for those reasons.
Faux or pan-Native cultural items and activities should be retired. If we can’t do our own research, keep our own cultures in order, why should anyone else? If you’re doing it because it increases sales or lends you legitimacy to throw in some traditional weaves and bone whistles without, there’s the door, don’t let it… you know the routine.
There should be a temporary moratorium on writing in a historical setting, as this often implies to the uninitiated, mainstream, reader that Native peoples only exist (or exist authentically) in the past.
There should be a temporary moratorium on first contact stories. I’m sure there are Indians living in the United States of America who have just this minute met a non-Native person for the very first time, but they’re probably children. Or, lying. And if they aren’t, and the scene was a narrative, would it be giving us anything fresh to the conversation and field?
Write for your neighbors. It’s harder to sell out your neighbors’ stories than it is the people back home or from somewhere you just claim to be from (or researched). And if you don’t want to write for your neighbors, what, are you ashamed of them? Too good for them? Or, just telling things they don’t need to hear or learn?
A philosophy or concept is not more important or useful because it is traditional. They are useful and valid today, or they’re probably best left to the wayside. If you harbor some delusion that the world was perfect and paradisiacal in some murkily-defined past… door’s over there, we’re busy here.
Native people have been dumped on too much, and we cannot afford, in life or entertainment, to be isolationist. We cannot afford to be sexist, homophobic, racist, or otherwise bigoted in regards to the existence of any person on the basis of elements they cannot help (noting, that people can help being, say, racist, and that it is not a built in gene any more than misandry is inbuilt). If you want to do this on your own time, we’ll deal with you when the time comes, but when you put out works of entertainment or information, you are – whether you like it or not – representing all and every single other Native person.
Let us not reinforce the stereotype that Native people live outside, beside, or behind any other contemporary culture or subculture. Or that our culture(s) do not adjust, absorb, or appropriate other cultures, even if ours may be unfairly or unequally taken in. The Simpsons became part of Native culture the moment a bunch of Indians started watching the show and quoting from it.
There are good looking Indians. It’s usually a non-Native person being kind and helpful to us, who tells us that “Hollywood Indians” are not Native (enough), usually because they are fit, or sexy, or have nice cheekbones accentuated by professional makeup people. Those sentiments are bigoted and absurd. And defeatist. There are plenty of good looking Native people. Some of these sexy folks are thin, some are tall, some are the bronzed barrel-chested sweaty dude with good teeth that grace the frequent romance novel’s cover. Except, they’d have – one hopes – the good taste not to dress like that. Native people, like all people, come in a variety of sizes, shapes, and shades… as they always have.
If you write a self-help book, claiming the routines are ancient and Yaqui will not make them work better. A basic prayer workbook does not need Indianicity to work and in fact, if it doesn’t work, that layer of proposed Indianicity is not going to make it work. Also, the ghost of Carlos Castaneda may appear in a burst of light and sue you into the ground. After Barbara Myerhoff’s ghost finished suing his.
As someone who has lived, at times, without running water or proper heating, modern plumbing and conveniences are as important and ambient a part of contemporary Native living. Let’s remember that. Let’s also bear in mind, commod cell phones.
Not everybody has a casino, a CIB, or is a drunk because they’ve had a drink of alcohol.
In fact, maybe we should have a moratorium on drunk Indian stories for awhile. Everybody knows what to expect from there, and you know what? I know a lot of Native people who enjoy alcohol to varying degrees without being an alcoholic or getting smashed. And the mythology built up around liquor, the illusion of some innate spiritual horribleness and malice needs to be retired because it’s an embarrassment to us all.
As much, as nonwhite/nonblack people we may be inclined to complain that too much of the broader entertainment world treats life and story as a Black and White issue, let’s remember that it is also not a Native American and White world.
Native literature, as with much of the rest of Native art, shows an intense tendency towards pattern being more significant than causality. Our stories, poems, and plays often require the entire work, in context, to be understood. Native entertainment has always embraced and utilized abstaction, metaphor, call and response, pointillism, perspective shifts, and deliberate animism. Regardless of what canonicity may be offered to works more closely adhering to White or non-Native styles and cultural tendencies, let’s not play that demeaning game. Embrace the stylistic and cultural elements and not be concerned so much that these may appear etic to the perspective of non-Native audiences. We play catch up with them, every time we engage a story, film, or music video from outside our culture, so the same can be expected of them. No one of these systems or tendencies, these methods of communication and entertainment, is inherently the default.
The shade of your skin does not give you cultural or community-based authenticity. It does not lend these things to anyone else, either. Some Native people have darker skin than others, some lighter, and this has been true longer than there have been White people in this hemisphere.
No matter who looks to you to be the representative of all peoples and things Native American, you don’t need to act that way. You should not take that role on your shoulders, of your own accord, no matter how strong you may feel the call to do so. Somewhere out there, there is a Native person who disagrees with you on some point or who has a cultural or life experience different from yours, and they are no less Native than you are.
Let’s not be ethnographic tour guides in our prose and poetry, okeh? There is no default non-Native (or not Native enough) audience out there you need to communicate Native-ness and experience/being too.
Just because your character lives on a tiny rez town, does not mean they don’t drive into a bigger urban area to a major chain store.
Just because a certain person thinks they have no culture, or are not close to their culture, does not mean this is true. They may simply be mistaken as to what their culture is, and chasing after something that is not culture, but heritage. Alternately, some people feel that their culture is modern, but a Native American culture (whichever, depending on the example) is rooted and (in truth) suspended at some time between one and five hundred years ago. Eastern Hemisphere cultures have all, including European, been affected by involvement in the Western Hemisphere, just as the Western Hemisphere cultures and habits have been affected by them. If this were not true, pizza and donuts would be very different.
Is your character wearing something in public that, in your experience, would get them laughed at on their own rez or homeland? Are they speaking of things that would make their friends or grandparents shake their head in disbelief? Are you dealing with these things in that light, or have they got some feathers in their earrings and a choker full of turquoise over their fringe-tastic buckskins because you want to make sure the audience understands these are Indians?
Let's try to keep any non-English used in an English-language piece useful and purposeful. Words from a foreign language should not be used purely to affect an authenticity, or in situations where they would not be in general conversations. Entertainment is a trade operation, and the only time a lack of communication is useful in trade is for obfuscation and astonishig the rubes.
Wednesday, June 24, 2009
Redistributing Distribution
There's a bit in Hoffman's Steal This Book that recommends inventing a magazine or column and getting companies to give you swag for reviews and plugs that may or may not happen. It also suggests passing along swag you aren't interested in to people who might be. Forty years past that book's publication, the methods seem even sounder than ever. The only way you can believe that the underground mag, the comix, the zine scene is less viable and present now than it was twenty years ago, is if you believe in the authenticity paper can buy you. And - look, I love paper, I'm sentimental for different sorts of paper, for the dusty smell of old paper or the way newsprint can get on your nose - paper is a deadend medium. It's inefficient and the costs, monetarily and environmentally, are too much for us.
But who doesn't have a website, a blog, or a twitter account at this point? Somewhere on Facebook or MySpace that they use as a public journal or to redistribute news items and list five things they don't like to eat? Our phones and word processors have turned even our minor thoughts and passing whims into a globally-distributed news burst. And, that's the thing. "Globally distributed" is big, but because it's electronic, because it does not hold the awe and authenticity that we have been trained to perceive with paper products, it does not appear to us in its full grandeur.
There are reasons Steal This Book has given way to Steal This Wiki and, yet, remains in print with an actual price listed on the cover.
Amanda Palmer talks about how a donation-only gig arranged through twitter, versus the high cost and low returns garnered from traditional distribution means, and it isn't a fluke, either.
Some people seem to think these methods are new, or something that can happen once but never be replicated, like the internet version of cold fusion. Scarab currently claims to be "the world's first and only mobile literary magazine" which ignores both a plethora of mags and zines online and downloadable as PDFs, many of them (not just plugFEMplug but Steam Punk Magazine , Drunken Boat) free and embracing the fact that distribution is global and many niche niceties of a more limited marketing out of date.
People can download free lit journals, free archives of artwork, and read them on their phones, their laptops, or they can put them through something like zinepal to get a printable pdf with pretty dual columns and all that good stuff. FEM's been thrown up on torrent sites, the files have been copied and re-copied, the text trimmed out with the old cut/n/paste key commands, read on phones and printed and spiral-bound. If it's online or in a digital format at all, people will find ways to take it with them and move it around as they need it, just like people will rip movies from DVDs or dub them off VHS, or use filesharing services to move mp3s about, even of the oldest, most inexplicably rare LPs.
The difference in quality between a salon in Paris a eighty years ago and the state of DeviantArt's archives, as of yesterday, is measurable on a case by case basis, individual works of art by singular artists, not by the closed door nature of one or the open registration of the other. And free does not mean that (a) the apparent authenticity of print will no longer hold weight with an element of the audience, or that (b) people won't give out money to keep getting stuff that is only free at the creators' whim. Freakangels and MegaTokyo have proven that, and by presenting their material freely first, they generate a lot of prospective glances and ambient conversation, which a piece that remains closed until purchase cannot as easily. How many people gave Warren Ellis money because they just think he's cute or are afraid he'll beat them up, versus the people who gave him (and other folks) money for print versions of his Come in Alone or Bad Signal essays and rambles, which remained free online? I'd put real money, serious money, on those print editions selling because they feel more significant, more reliable, on paper, than they do on a computer screen.
The authenticity of paper, of the press, has long been promoted as a mark of accomplishment or truth. Lovers of early America go on about "free press" and "right to print", but this meant, neither that everyone had an equal voice in print, nor that everything someone wanted to print could be. Free press is free to anyone with access to a press and funds to run it, but without access to distribution, none of that press' outpour can get to anyone, rendering the printed materials pretty much useless. When the British dissenters founded the United States, hardly anyone at all was ever likely to even get near to having access to methods of print production or distribution, and censorship was even thicker and more collusive than it is today. The authenticity, the argument of quality or veracity, which print is based on, is a lie, as self-serving to the liar as all lies.
Does that mean, I believe all work across the internet, every jot tweeted, every tittle typed, to be of equal or substantive value? Well, it doesn't mean I believe everything put to paper and carried by a major chainstore to be more valuable than something produced and released via different methods, certainly. And, it would seem reductive to draw a line in the communications-sands at print on paper, as it would have been to draw that line at the transition from scroll to book, or to mark off syllabaries as superior one and all to any other form of grapheme set. There are people who prefer to imagine and insist that visual and textual representations by themselves can be art, but hypergraphia combining text and visual is only fit for advertisements or children's diversions, but there are less of them every day, and they will eventually have to accept that position as one purely of taste, or grow so far out of the conversation as to be null. Just as people who are incapable of accepting value or use to abstract or photorealist representations are out of the conversation. People who use a particular gender, ethnicity, culture, or style of dress as the epitome of modernity, the default of humanity, are out of the conversation. People who think that print is dead and nobody reads but check their text messages whenever one comes in and spend half the morning responding to e-mails, are in danger of losing the conversation. And everyone, but teachers, preachers, and saints, will be too busy conversing and enjoying themselves to notice.
Update: As I posted this, apparently, Warren Ellis was putting up the distribution numbers on several lit mags and promoting FLURB, which is online, quality, and free.
But who doesn't have a website, a blog, or a twitter account at this point? Somewhere on Facebook or MySpace that they use as a public journal or to redistribute news items and list five things they don't like to eat? Our phones and word processors have turned even our minor thoughts and passing whims into a globally-distributed news burst. And, that's the thing. "Globally distributed" is big, but because it's electronic, because it does not hold the awe and authenticity that we have been trained to perceive with paper products, it does not appear to us in its full grandeur.
There are reasons Steal This Book has given way to Steal This Wiki and, yet, remains in print with an actual price listed on the cover.
Amanda Palmer talks about how a donation-only gig arranged through twitter, versus the high cost and low returns garnered from traditional distribution means, and it isn't a fluke, either.
Some people seem to think these methods are new, or something that can happen once but never be replicated, like the internet version of cold fusion. Scarab currently claims to be "the world's first and only mobile literary magazine" which ignores both a plethora of mags and zines online and downloadable as PDFs, many of them (not just plugFEMplug but Steam Punk Magazine , Drunken Boat) free and embracing the fact that distribution is global and many niche niceties of a more limited marketing out of date.
People can download free lit journals, free archives of artwork, and read them on their phones, their laptops, or they can put them through something like zinepal to get a printable pdf with pretty dual columns and all that good stuff. FEM's been thrown up on torrent sites, the files have been copied and re-copied, the text trimmed out with the old cut/n/paste key commands, read on phones and printed and spiral-bound. If it's online or in a digital format at all, people will find ways to take it with them and move it around as they need it, just like people will rip movies from DVDs or dub them off VHS, or use filesharing services to move mp3s about, even of the oldest, most inexplicably rare LPs.
The difference in quality between a salon in Paris a eighty years ago and the state of DeviantArt's archives, as of yesterday, is measurable on a case by case basis, individual works of art by singular artists, not by the closed door nature of one or the open registration of the other. And free does not mean that (a) the apparent authenticity of print will no longer hold weight with an element of the audience, or that (b) people won't give out money to keep getting stuff that is only free at the creators' whim. Freakangels and MegaTokyo have proven that, and by presenting their material freely first, they generate a lot of prospective glances and ambient conversation, which a piece that remains closed until purchase cannot as easily. How many people gave Warren Ellis money because they just think he's cute or are afraid he'll beat them up, versus the people who gave him (and other folks) money for print versions of his Come in Alone or Bad Signal essays and rambles, which remained free online? I'd put real money, serious money, on those print editions selling because they feel more significant, more reliable, on paper, than they do on a computer screen.
The authenticity of paper, of the press, has long been promoted as a mark of accomplishment or truth. Lovers of early America go on about "free press" and "right to print", but this meant, neither that everyone had an equal voice in print, nor that everything someone wanted to print could be. Free press is free to anyone with access to a press and funds to run it, but without access to distribution, none of that press' outpour can get to anyone, rendering the printed materials pretty much useless. When the British dissenters founded the United States, hardly anyone at all was ever likely to even get near to having access to methods of print production or distribution, and censorship was even thicker and more collusive than it is today. The authenticity, the argument of quality or veracity, which print is based on, is a lie, as self-serving to the liar as all lies.
Does that mean, I believe all work across the internet, every jot tweeted, every tittle typed, to be of equal or substantive value? Well, it doesn't mean I believe everything put to paper and carried by a major chainstore to be more valuable than something produced and released via different methods, certainly. And, it would seem reductive to draw a line in the communications-sands at print on paper, as it would have been to draw that line at the transition from scroll to book, or to mark off syllabaries as superior one and all to any other form of grapheme set. There are people who prefer to imagine and insist that visual and textual representations by themselves can be art, but hypergraphia combining text and visual is only fit for advertisements or children's diversions, but there are less of them every day, and they will eventually have to accept that position as one purely of taste, or grow so far out of the conversation as to be null. Just as people who are incapable of accepting value or use to abstract or photorealist representations are out of the conversation. People who use a particular gender, ethnicity, culture, or style of dress as the epitome of modernity, the default of humanity, are out of the conversation. People who think that print is dead and nobody reads but check their text messages whenever one comes in and spend half the morning responding to e-mails, are in danger of losing the conversation. And everyone, but teachers, preachers, and saints, will be too busy conversing and enjoying themselves to notice.
Update: As I posted this, apparently, Warren Ellis was putting up the distribution numbers on several lit mags and promoting FLURB, which is online, quality, and free.
Tuesday, June 9, 2009
The Cool Program
I think the central unifying factor of William Gibson and Pat Cadigan, or indeed, the post-cyberpunk slipstream in general, is made loud when Gibson talks about geeks and technicians, code-writers and code-breakers needing “permission to put on that black leather jacket and kind of rock with it. And now, that's sort of taken for granted that you can do that” (in an interview with Addicted to Noise from 1996) or Cadigan expressing the opinion that “So naturally the woman in Cryptonomicon is beyond feminism because she is too cool to have problems with men” (at The SF Site from an interview conducted in 2006). Affect come reality.
Because, if anything, cyberpunk was a reduction of science fiction to its social engineering roots (once more once), an expression of contemporaneity that Gibson, at least, felt was unique to his subset of authors and literature (as evidenced in the ATN interview, when he states “[M]ainstream traditional science fiction writers, particularly in the United States, I don't think they were conscious that they were writing about the era in which they lived. I think they actually thought they were writing about the future. I'm different in that from the very beginning I was self aware.”). Science is most centrally engineering (the combination of exploration and application) and Fiction is essentially nonphysical inasmuch as it is representational and not corporeal, so science fiction as social engineering seems as inevitable as affect come reality, as cool by decision, the inverse of physicist and professor Richard Feynman’s nightmare moment when a journalist would inevitably attempt to accentuate his science background with his talent with the bongos.
“Watch or be watched” Cadigan warns in Pretty Boy Crossover (or extols, depending on your take, I guess, on which side of the perspective you are looking from). Watch of be watched is the threat, the condition, the friction, of being. Perspective is the medium of the cyberpunk existence, as it has become ours in the extraneous electronic era (first, perhaps, protectively mapped in William Burroughs 1970 Electronic Revolution and the fabulous Phone Phreaker movement, wherein manufacture and use are one and the same. The threat and promise in Pretty Boy Crossover is one of being star (and starred) and being audience, and surely that is what we are now, in this age of Twitter and Youtube? Are we not all starring in our own films and headlines, producing news bursts for the public on a daily basis?
There’s an expectation in Pretty Boy Crossover that Gibson’s Neuromancer shares, wherein modification and communication are expected, if not demanded. We must be present, technologically, electronically, at all times, and this proves prescient if you consider how many people would be irritated if you left the internet alone, shut off your cell phone, for even a day, a weekend. Smartphones show us movies (however inanely small the screen and limited the audio), and for the high-end there are portable audiovisual arrays. Laptops, satellite-communicating navigation rigs in cars, Google Maps, not too long ago, I wore a heart rig that sent the pertinent information directly and near-instantaneously to the doctors who could do something with that info.
Technology is all perpetuation, but the electronic age, because it moves at the speed of electricity, transfigures this existence to less a trajectory and more the appearance of a wall of perpetuation. Gibson’s Case refers, in Neuromancer to corporeality simulated in this electronic/informational existence as “gratuitous multiplication of flesh input” and Cadigan, in Pretty Boy Crossover has her protagonist ruminate that “Like when he left the dance floor—people will come and fill up the space.” Space is not integral, and we are not integral to space, not like we are to information. Someone (it may have been Bruce Sterling), once observed that nobody wanted fully experiential porn, because no one wants to smell a porno set, to feel the twitch of infections or the hear the crew, feel the bed damped by the previous scene shot.
When Case goes into a recording of another’s experience, he fights “helplessly to control her body” before surrendering to indefensible onslaught of “stalls vending discount software, prices felt penned on sheets of plastic, fragments of music from countless speakers. Smells of urine, free monomers, perfume, patties of frying krill.” He finds that “her body language was disorienting, her style foreign.” He complains that her sunglasses aren’t as good as his might be. Individuality is strengthened by a removal from corporeality, from knowledge to information. As Pretty Boy Crossover’s protagonist observes, triumphantly, “As long as they don't have him, he makes a difference. As long as he has flesh to shake and flaunt and feel with, he makes a pretty goddamn big difference.”
Unpleasant or unwanted information can be categorized off to the side, ignored, but knowledge, experiential existence, is thick and irresistible. Thusly, does authenticity supersede reality. Reality is that, in an age of easy makeup and cosmetic surgery, ugliness is adjustable, but authenticity is unpleasant features, as Neuromancer gives us in its first pages, with “In an age of affordable beauty, there was something heraldic about his lack of it.” Ugly bartenders are more real. Molly Millions’ cool and prosthetics, her restraint and affect betray an inevitable history of manipulation and failings, here tied up with her history of selling herself out for sex and games. You don’t see a man go through that, in Gibson’s work, because men ultimately have the choice, especially White men, to adjust and customize themselves. Cadigan has lent this over to women and nonwhites as well, over her career, from the Pretty Boys and Girls of Pretty Boy Crossover to Darcy in Icy You, Juicy Me.
Icy You, Juicy Me actually comes out and nakedly expresses the perceptual imbalance of this social equilibrium quite elegantly: “She had been watching, and now it was her turn to be watched. Nothing was going to be right until she took her turn.” While in Gibson, it is always a man’s world, and Neuromancer layers itself with Rastafarian body-modificationists with earthy integrity, with invasive Asian corporations, with women who remain icy and unreadable even when they’re overtly lusting over his very cool, ubermacho men, the superwhite guys at the top of the food chain… Cadigan accepts that White Man is identity politics just as any other categorical other. And, yes, we are all othering each other and everybody is othering us.
I notice the words “ethnic” or “racial” and variations do not seem to be present in Neuromancer, and only once in Count Zero, where he utilizes the phrase “raceless… face” in all its amphigoric enthusiasm. I may not be entirely excited by Cadigan’s deliberately surface-only cultural identity and orientalism in Tea from an Empty Cup, or the deliberately underscored racial hybridization of her novella, Nothing Personal, but at least it acknowledges that these are (identifiable) traits and their informational quality as well as the physical actuality that we can disregard. Cadigan’s work seems to encourage a hermeneutic consideration, while Gibson would prefer actualization and integrity, hence, the protagonist of Johnny Mnemonic has to actuate his cool and his solid integrity by lathing his own shells and bringing his shotgun to bear, but Cadigan’s Pretty Boys just need to be.
Lisa Yaszek suggests (in The Self Wired), “[W]hile Gibson posits a broad binary distinction between commodified and ironic cyborg subjects based on their respective investments in official and subaltern histories of capitalism, Cadigan revises this binary to reflect her own concern with gendered forms of history…. Furthermore, while Gibson depicts laboring subjects who change for the machines without actually changing the machines, Cadigan suggests that subjects who attend to the intersections between bodies and technologies can use these intersections as templates to produce narratives or work and identity that change the machines themselves,” although Laura Chernaik (in her Social and Virtual Space) does not “find a binary gender difference” in, for example, Synners, considering instead, a minimum of a four-term matrix of “the repressed body, the laboring body, the marked body, and the disappearing body” while accepting that this set “with only four elements, in its turn reduces the complexity of Cadigan’s text.”
To be reductively didactic about it, I think Gibson prefers to see us living in a global village, in the world, and Cadigan, like (one set of) her contemporaries, that second generation of cyberpunk (Neal Stephenson, et al), acknowledges that global village or not, we live, shop, and stand on the curbs of our neighborhood. In the aforementioned ATN interview, Gibson posits that the world is “a very dark place viewed from a sweet and fancy hotel in San Francisco” while in the abovementioned Cadigan interview, she says, “As late as 1977, I couldn't get a credit card without having a husband to co-sign for me.” Gibson, as quoted early in this essay, suggests that he, being “self aware” is distinct from what he sees as a trend of science fiction author, but before that he claimed Moorcock and Delany as direct influences. Whether he got big enough to slough off his influences, or I am reading too much into the omission of influence or causality by the mid-Nineties is immaterial in the stream of understanding, because in that stream, localized flows are what matter, not the entire datasea (as Warren Ellis’ third-wave cyberpunk/decadent fiction Lazarus Churchyard called it).
It is immaterial that Neuromancer can be read as sociologically suspicious in terms of its publication era or contemporarily, but it is absolutely of significance when it is read as so suspicious, as untrustworthy in its representations or extrapolations, in the moment of now. As would be a Cadigan novel or anyone else’s work. Cadigan simply seems aware of this by the time of Tea from an Empty Cup in a way that Spook Country does not appear to lend itself to. For instance, in Tea from an Empty Cup, there is this doting and daring exchange:
“‘Christ.” The white guy rolled his eyes. ‘What’d you do, put your brain under the pillow and you got that instead of a dime?’
“‘Hey, it’s not what you think,” the Japanese guy said. ‘There’s a genuine creation myth in there. Among other things. And it’s all genuine.’
“‘Uh-huh.’
“‘I could show you the chromosome they stripped it offa,’ the Japanese guy said defensively. ‘One hundred purebreds got scraped for this. One hundred. In a hospital. This is pure pharmaceutical –’”
One could almost believe that has inherent positions about race, culture, or the validity of myth or industry, hospitals or creation. But, on keener consideration, the conversation is designed to be read into, to be presupposed and interpreted by the reader. Confidence has to be affect or it is probably worthless, and if it has worth, it is a worth that any other perspective, any other affect, can devalorize. It is the worth that Ellis ruminates against in his recent (and ongoing) Doktor Sleepless; “Your own bodies talk to your environment all the time without you doing anything. You can interrogate buildings and have conversations with objects. That wasn’t in the future you were expecting. You can rebuild your own fucking bodies with stuff you bought from the hardware store. You think that hardware store guy ever expected to sell anything but pots and pans thirty years ago? Bullshit. The future sneaks up on us. It leaks in through the small, ordinary things. You want a jetpack but you don’t even think about your IM lenses and your phones. Were you born with them? No. You’re science fictional creatures. Each and every one of you.”
It is worth and significance that Cadigan puts the lie to when she states in her SF Site interview, carefully reassuring us that it is reiteration, “It's what I've said in a previous interview with someone else a long time ago: that I insist to live in a world where the word ‘feminist’ is as quaint as the word ‘suffragette,” as it stands to a contemporary read, while Gibson is wondering “While we're on that, crack is a technology too. Why was that invented when it was? I'm really curious about that. Who did that? Who did that? How did cocaine suddenly appear in a form where you could sell like a $2 hit?” as though the causality, the investigation and not the recognition holds the importance.
It’s the difference between Neuromancer’s neurotic conflict between flesh and cyberspace, between idea and thing, experience and urge, or the circumventing rejection of our new cybernetic god at the climax of the novel, compared to the exeunt of Pretty Boy Crossover, “He keeps moving, holding to the big thought, making a difference, and all the little things they won't be making a program out of. He's lightheaded with joy—he doesn't know what's going to happen.”
Because, if anything, cyberpunk was a reduction of science fiction to its social engineering roots (once more once), an expression of contemporaneity that Gibson, at least, felt was unique to his subset of authors and literature (as evidenced in the ATN interview, when he states “[M]ainstream traditional science fiction writers, particularly in the United States, I don't think they were conscious that they were writing about the era in which they lived. I think they actually thought they were writing about the future. I'm different in that from the very beginning I was self aware.”). Science is most centrally engineering (the combination of exploration and application) and Fiction is essentially nonphysical inasmuch as it is representational and not corporeal, so science fiction as social engineering seems as inevitable as affect come reality, as cool by decision, the inverse of physicist and professor Richard Feynman’s nightmare moment when a journalist would inevitably attempt to accentuate his science background with his talent with the bongos.
“Watch or be watched” Cadigan warns in Pretty Boy Crossover (or extols, depending on your take, I guess, on which side of the perspective you are looking from). Watch of be watched is the threat, the condition, the friction, of being. Perspective is the medium of the cyberpunk existence, as it has become ours in the extraneous electronic era (first, perhaps, protectively mapped in William Burroughs 1970 Electronic Revolution and the fabulous Phone Phreaker movement, wherein manufacture and use are one and the same. The threat and promise in Pretty Boy Crossover is one of being star (and starred) and being audience, and surely that is what we are now, in this age of Twitter and Youtube? Are we not all starring in our own films and headlines, producing news bursts for the public on a daily basis?
There’s an expectation in Pretty Boy Crossover that Gibson’s Neuromancer shares, wherein modification and communication are expected, if not demanded. We must be present, technologically, electronically, at all times, and this proves prescient if you consider how many people would be irritated if you left the internet alone, shut off your cell phone, for even a day, a weekend. Smartphones show us movies (however inanely small the screen and limited the audio), and for the high-end there are portable audiovisual arrays. Laptops, satellite-communicating navigation rigs in cars, Google Maps, not too long ago, I wore a heart rig that sent the pertinent information directly and near-instantaneously to the doctors who could do something with that info.
Technology is all perpetuation, but the electronic age, because it moves at the speed of electricity, transfigures this existence to less a trajectory and more the appearance of a wall of perpetuation. Gibson’s Case refers, in Neuromancer to corporeality simulated in this electronic/informational existence as “gratuitous multiplication of flesh input” and Cadigan, in Pretty Boy Crossover has her protagonist ruminate that “Like when he left the dance floor—people will come and fill up the space.” Space is not integral, and we are not integral to space, not like we are to information. Someone (it may have been Bruce Sterling), once observed that nobody wanted fully experiential porn, because no one wants to smell a porno set, to feel the twitch of infections or the hear the crew, feel the bed damped by the previous scene shot.
When Case goes into a recording of another’s experience, he fights “helplessly to control her body” before surrendering to indefensible onslaught of “stalls vending discount software, prices felt penned on sheets of plastic, fragments of music from countless speakers. Smells of urine, free monomers, perfume, patties of frying krill.” He finds that “her body language was disorienting, her style foreign.” He complains that her sunglasses aren’t as good as his might be. Individuality is strengthened by a removal from corporeality, from knowledge to information. As Pretty Boy Crossover’s protagonist observes, triumphantly, “As long as they don't have him, he makes a difference. As long as he has flesh to shake and flaunt and feel with, he makes a pretty goddamn big difference.”
Unpleasant or unwanted information can be categorized off to the side, ignored, but knowledge, experiential existence, is thick and irresistible. Thusly, does authenticity supersede reality. Reality is that, in an age of easy makeup and cosmetic surgery, ugliness is adjustable, but authenticity is unpleasant features, as Neuromancer gives us in its first pages, with “In an age of affordable beauty, there was something heraldic about his lack of it.” Ugly bartenders are more real. Molly Millions’ cool and prosthetics, her restraint and affect betray an inevitable history of manipulation and failings, here tied up with her history of selling herself out for sex and games. You don’t see a man go through that, in Gibson’s work, because men ultimately have the choice, especially White men, to adjust and customize themselves. Cadigan has lent this over to women and nonwhites as well, over her career, from the Pretty Boys and Girls of Pretty Boy Crossover to Darcy in Icy You, Juicy Me.
Icy You, Juicy Me actually comes out and nakedly expresses the perceptual imbalance of this social equilibrium quite elegantly: “She had been watching, and now it was her turn to be watched. Nothing was going to be right until she took her turn.” While in Gibson, it is always a man’s world, and Neuromancer layers itself with Rastafarian body-modificationists with earthy integrity, with invasive Asian corporations, with women who remain icy and unreadable even when they’re overtly lusting over his very cool, ubermacho men, the superwhite guys at the top of the food chain… Cadigan accepts that White Man is identity politics just as any other categorical other. And, yes, we are all othering each other and everybody is othering us.
I notice the words “ethnic” or “racial” and variations do not seem to be present in Neuromancer, and only once in Count Zero, where he utilizes the phrase “raceless… face” in all its amphigoric enthusiasm. I may not be entirely excited by Cadigan’s deliberately surface-only cultural identity and orientalism in Tea from an Empty Cup, or the deliberately underscored racial hybridization of her novella, Nothing Personal, but at least it acknowledges that these are (identifiable) traits and their informational quality as well as the physical actuality that we can disregard. Cadigan’s work seems to encourage a hermeneutic consideration, while Gibson would prefer actualization and integrity, hence, the protagonist of Johnny Mnemonic has to actuate his cool and his solid integrity by lathing his own shells and bringing his shotgun to bear, but Cadigan’s Pretty Boys just need to be.
Lisa Yaszek suggests (in The Self Wired), “[W]hile Gibson posits a broad binary distinction between commodified and ironic cyborg subjects based on their respective investments in official and subaltern histories of capitalism, Cadigan revises this binary to reflect her own concern with gendered forms of history…. Furthermore, while Gibson depicts laboring subjects who change for the machines without actually changing the machines, Cadigan suggests that subjects who attend to the intersections between bodies and technologies can use these intersections as templates to produce narratives or work and identity that change the machines themselves,” although Laura Chernaik (in her Social and Virtual Space) does not “find a binary gender difference” in, for example, Synners, considering instead, a minimum of a four-term matrix of “the repressed body, the laboring body, the marked body, and the disappearing body” while accepting that this set “with only four elements, in its turn reduces the complexity of Cadigan’s text.”
To be reductively didactic about it, I think Gibson prefers to see us living in a global village, in the world, and Cadigan, like (one set of) her contemporaries, that second generation of cyberpunk (Neal Stephenson, et al), acknowledges that global village or not, we live, shop, and stand on the curbs of our neighborhood. In the aforementioned ATN interview, Gibson posits that the world is “a very dark place viewed from a sweet and fancy hotel in San Francisco” while in the abovementioned Cadigan interview, she says, “As late as 1977, I couldn't get a credit card without having a husband to co-sign for me.” Gibson, as quoted early in this essay, suggests that he, being “self aware” is distinct from what he sees as a trend of science fiction author, but before that he claimed Moorcock and Delany as direct influences. Whether he got big enough to slough off his influences, or I am reading too much into the omission of influence or causality by the mid-Nineties is immaterial in the stream of understanding, because in that stream, localized flows are what matter, not the entire datasea (as Warren Ellis’ third-wave cyberpunk/decadent fiction Lazarus Churchyard called it).
It is immaterial that Neuromancer can be read as sociologically suspicious in terms of its publication era or contemporarily, but it is absolutely of significance when it is read as so suspicious, as untrustworthy in its representations or extrapolations, in the moment of now. As would be a Cadigan novel or anyone else’s work. Cadigan simply seems aware of this by the time of Tea from an Empty Cup in a way that Spook Country does not appear to lend itself to. For instance, in Tea from an Empty Cup, there is this doting and daring exchange:
“‘Christ.” The white guy rolled his eyes. ‘What’d you do, put your brain under the pillow and you got that instead of a dime?’
“‘Hey, it’s not what you think,” the Japanese guy said. ‘There’s a genuine creation myth in there. Among other things. And it’s all genuine.’
“‘Uh-huh.’
“‘I could show you the chromosome they stripped it offa,’ the Japanese guy said defensively. ‘One hundred purebreds got scraped for this. One hundred. In a hospital. This is pure pharmaceutical –’”
One could almost believe that has inherent positions about race, culture, or the validity of myth or industry, hospitals or creation. But, on keener consideration, the conversation is designed to be read into, to be presupposed and interpreted by the reader. Confidence has to be affect or it is probably worthless, and if it has worth, it is a worth that any other perspective, any other affect, can devalorize. It is the worth that Ellis ruminates against in his recent (and ongoing) Doktor Sleepless; “Your own bodies talk to your environment all the time without you doing anything. You can interrogate buildings and have conversations with objects. That wasn’t in the future you were expecting. You can rebuild your own fucking bodies with stuff you bought from the hardware store. You think that hardware store guy ever expected to sell anything but pots and pans thirty years ago? Bullshit. The future sneaks up on us. It leaks in through the small, ordinary things. You want a jetpack but you don’t even think about your IM lenses and your phones. Were you born with them? No. You’re science fictional creatures. Each and every one of you.”
It is worth and significance that Cadigan puts the lie to when she states in her SF Site interview, carefully reassuring us that it is reiteration, “It's what I've said in a previous interview with someone else a long time ago: that I insist to live in a world where the word ‘feminist’ is as quaint as the word ‘suffragette,” as it stands to a contemporary read, while Gibson is wondering “While we're on that, crack is a technology too. Why was that invented when it was? I'm really curious about that. Who did that? Who did that? How did cocaine suddenly appear in a form where you could sell like a $2 hit?” as though the causality, the investigation and not the recognition holds the importance.
It’s the difference between Neuromancer’s neurotic conflict between flesh and cyberspace, between idea and thing, experience and urge, or the circumventing rejection of our new cybernetic god at the climax of the novel, compared to the exeunt of Pretty Boy Crossover, “He keeps moving, holding to the big thought, making a difference, and all the little things they won't be making a program out of. He's lightheaded with joy—he doesn't know what's going to happen.”
Sunday, June 7, 2009
Friends for FEM
As an experiment, I am asking everyone who reads this to send a link to FEM's website to one (or more) person(s), and see what the peripheral array of new folks looks like. Surely you know someone who likes good writing and excellent pictures? Or who might like to submit some, but hasn't hit upon the mag, themselves? For their sake, send a link and share us. And if you're on myspace or facebook or wherever, tribe, et al, throw out a link to us. Half of this is advertising cheaply, yes, but the other half is just me being curious if there will be a noticeable difference between the regulars and the results of this outreach.
www.futureearthstudios.com - it's that simple a url and Future Earth Magazine will love you more for the effort, even though we already love all of y'all pretty fierce.
www.futureearthstudios.com - it's that simple a url and Future Earth Magazine will love you more for the effort, even though we already love all of y'all pretty fierce.
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