Beauty in Literature . . . Or, When Google and Art Collide

Such a boring vision of beauty.

Today I asked Google what was the most beautiful book ever written.  My first page (after dismissing titles of books called The Most Beautiful Book) was a collection of best designed covers.  All of which are lovely, in their own way (and none of which are particularly artistic).  But that left my question unresolved.

It’s been a question haunting me for a little while, ever since finishing The Pure and the Impure by the French writer Colette.  Initially, I was attracted to the book because of a quote I saw on Tumblr:

As that word “pure” fell from her lips, I heard the trembling of the plaintive “u,” the icy limpidity of the “r,” and the sound aroused nothing in me but the need to hear against its unique resonance, its echo of a drop that trickles out, breaks off, and falls somewhere with a plash.  The word “pure” has never revealed an intelligible meaning to me.  I can only use the word to quench an optical thirst for purity in the transparencies that evoke it—in bubbles, in a volume of water, and in the imaginary latitudes entrenched, beyond reach, at the very center of a dense crystal.

The book is semi-autobiographical, and told in brief, barely interrelated portraits.  It begins in an opium den: “The door that opened to me on the top floor of a new building gave access to a big, glass-roofed studio, as vast as a covered market.”  Here, Colette the narrator watches with a keenly descriptive eye as men smoke away their cares.  The details are deeply intimate, but Colette takes care never to lapse into a the kind of voluptuousness of American modernism.  Instead, her descriptions are tactile, sensual, warm without quite revealing the source of that heat: “Just then a woman’s voice was raised in song, a furry, sweet, yet husky voice that had the qualities of a hard and thick-skinned velvet peach.  We were all so charmed that we took care not to applaud or even to murmur our praise.”

The book is filled with descriptions like this, and she somehow manages to keep them restrained, even as they gallop toward hyperbole.  She is fixed on the immediate.  Her subject is erotic love, between men and women, between two women, between men. 

A book like hers could easily transgress literature and topple into erotica, but her restraint allows one to examine the deeply intimate emotions surrounding love and sex, like an eclipse by the moon will allow one to look into the atmosphere of a star.

Since reading The Pure and the Impure, I’ve been on a sort of quest.  I wanted to replicate the feeling I had reading Colette’s book for the first time.  I read some of her other works, Chéri, Gigi, a collection of her short stories and journalism.  The early stuff especially was gaudy, filled with youthful exuberance.  But there were hints of the later beauty that would emerge with the temperance of age.

Expanding my quest, I read Zola’s Nana, Robert Musil’s Young Torless and The Man Without Qualities.  For a time, mistakenly, I thought the secret was in Colette’s examination of eros, so I read The Story of O, Melissa P.’s (rather surly) One Hundred Strokes of the Brush before Bed, Anais Nin, and The Sexual Life of Catherine M.  These were bawdy and unreflective.  Mechanical.  The dowager antecedents of E.L. James.

That led me to a fundamental question I’d never thought to ask.  What is beautiful in literature?  Or rather, where do I find beauty in writing? 

It cannot be simply the writing, though that is important, as well.  Kafka writes beautifully “Country Doctor” and some of his longer works.  I’ve known Updike and Beckett—even Joyce—to occassionally glimmer. David Foster Wallace, even at his most erudite, was never beautiful—his was the absent-minded poetry of an engineer, who saw beauty in parts that fit well together. 

What all of these authors lack, to my mind (for surely you or others will protest) are living characters.  Men and women who inhabit the pages, who seem to have an inner life and a multiplicty of loves and hatreds that don’t quite fit the story.  Characters who are self-contradictory and spiteful.  Characters who genuinely love.  Characters who infest a world and whose bonds with other characters form a unique web that in the real world we would interpret as community. 

These are women like the Wife of Bath, Hero, and Lady MacBeth; men like Jack Falstaff, and Iago, and Hal.  The narrator of Dante’s Comedy was as pernicious as he was pious, who equally despised the men who had slighted him and (ever a devout heretic) worshipped Béatrice before Yahweh. 

Where, I wondered, are characters as richly self-deluded as Milton’s over-reaching Satan?  Why was it so difficult to create worlds inhabited by creatures as heart-achingly rendered as in Dickens?  In the modern world, it would be impossible to place pride besides prejudice.

The question I posed to Google was as much an existential question as a literary one.  Socrates believed (so we’re told) that the good life was composed of beauty, justice, and truth in equal measure. 

So when I asked my question, I was looking for a book that was just: It allowed the real heartbreak and joy of the world their versimillitude.  I also demanded from the book truth: a narrator and author who keenly saw the order of the world, for good and ill. And beauty: a book which harmonizes wit and poetry into a graceful whole.

I haven't found the most beautiful book, yet.  Like the perfect french fry, and the perfect ginger ale, it eludes me.  But I'll keep looking, keep judging according to simple measurements: how truthful was it, how just was it, how good was it?  I'll let you know what I find.

In the meantime, down below in the comments, let me know what the most beautiful book you ever read was.

Spacing Out . . . Or, Two Spaces or One?

The good ole days

It’s a debate as old as the internet: One space after the period, or two?  I was surprised to learn that this is a difficult question to answer.  Half the people I’ve spoken with add two spaces after a full stop.  The other half raise an incredulous eyebrow and tell me that one space is not only preferable, but get morally indignant that I even asked.  I kid a bit, but in all seriousness, if you were to ask Plato which is better, he might tell you that a single space correlates most closely with the Ideal manuscript formatting.

So what’s the deal?  Turns out the biggest part of it has to do with when you learned to type.  If you learned to type on a typewriter (or shortly after word processors were introduced) you probably add two spaces after the full stop to accommodate the monospacing font on the typewriter.  More simply, when the striker on a typewriter impacts the paper, the letter takes up the exact same amount of space as any other.  So the I you type occupies the same space as an M.  That’s not the case when you type on a word processor, whose fonts are variable (and may or may not have serifs).

If we extend that to the present, most documents are not only produced on word processors, but are also published online.  The digital revolution produced a surprisingly homogenous landscape, with writers forced to learn new rules.  But, in the early days of internet publication, no one had yet figured out just how to format their writing.  You can still sometimes see this, if you type something on Word and then post it straight to a blog site—the pagination is strange and sentences are broken up at odd places.  This led to a revision in publishing expectations: now writers were expected to accommodate the internet by only inserting a single space after a period.

The not-so-good ole days

Turns out, this is all just another one of those generational divides with everyone over thirty on one side (and who trusts us anyway?) and those meddling kids (I would have gotten away with it too, if it weren’t for them!) on the other.

But I don’t like a single space at the end of a sentence.  It feels constricting.  A sentence ought to be more than an expression of fact, it ought to reflect certain aesthetic choices.  In a sense, how you write ought to communicate as much about your understanding of beauty and the way the world operates as it does about the simply communicating information.  This, of course, is a stylistic choice.

Style is tough to communicate.  As tough to communicate as to teach.  Strunk and White tried it, and Stephen Pinker chastised his colleagues in the sciences over their (lack of) style.  The basics of any style can be printed in a book and remonstrated against in lecture halls.  Omit needless or useless words; avoid cliches like the plague; death to hyperbole!  You get my drift.  Harder to instill a style that is completely your own.  Your style reflects your voice.  Maybe it’s conversational, perhaps it’s academic; it could be cold or warm or informal or meandering.  It should never be cookie-cutter. 

Hemingway on a typewriter

That last bit is the hardest to deal with, though, since it demands constant attention to craft and on-going refinement.  Hemingway and Faulkner are both known for the way in which they wrote their stories, as much as the plot or characters themselves.  But they had to listen to criticism, take advice, ponder, reflect, edit, rework.  In the end, their style is as much  a part of the narrative as the plot is.

Which brings me back around to tapping out space-space when I come around to the end of a sentence.  I like the space it gives me (pun, of course, intended).  There’s a little bit of additional room to  breath, a blank space into which I can insert my thoughts and reflections on what I’d just read.  It indicates to the reader that she should savor what I’ve offered. 

We live in a cramped world where experiences flash at us at 60 miles per hour.  Faster, sometimes.  If I only wanted to communicate facts, I would have written them as bullet-points.  I don’t.  I want you to experience my words as a reflection of who I am, to engage in a conversation with me. 

The dialogue that we construct together is tenuous, at best, but it is part of the long, strange process of becoming a person capable of introspection.  Ultimately, it’s about you and me sitting down together to share our thoughts. 

I’ve changed as much writing as you have reading (I hope) and those two little spaces at the end of the sentence have facilitated, in their own humble way, that process. 

So type on, I say.  Type on.

The Scales of Justice Tilt for Thee . . . Or, the Right Right for the Left

I have a really hard time understanding conservatives. And not in a “how could they possibly believe that” sort of way. I mean that I have a hard time generally just following their line of thought. It must have something to do with the venue: National Review and other partisan outlets, such as FOX News, are mostly writing to themselves. They service an increasingly restricted demographic—their audience is shrinking—and as a result they can assume that their audience already knows the game. I like to imagine it’s a bit like people who are really into curling. To them it’s grand strategy; to me, it’s just some guys huddling around a rock on the ice.

The problem, as I see it, is that while they’re talking to themselves, they’re not talking to anybody else. Their ideas get lost in self-referential jargon and inside jokes. To insiders, it makes those ideas more accessible and helps foster an environment of exclusion: like culture broadly speaking, it helps distinguish “us” from “them.” But it quickly starts sounding as though you’re preaching to the converted; without external references, ideas get trapped in a feedback loop. Fundamentally what this means is that those inside the loop lose perspective.

It’s the same with liberals, of course. The Right has no monopoly on self-referential ideology. But as the United States moves farther to the left, it has embraced a form of liberalism that advances a notion of just behind what John Rawls referred to as the veil of ignorance—that we should all be treated equally before the law. Behind that veil, people are treated as individuals absent race, gender, sexual orientation, income, or what have you.

To conservatives, this perspective is patently absurd. Justice, in their sense, is a function of divine order: the world is naturally arranged so that certain people assume authority, be they kings, priests, generals, or fathers. To be virtuous, one had to rely on strict adherence to those hierarchies. A son had a duty to a father, whose duty was also to the church and state. Liberalism inverts that order, placing the duty on the state to the individual, famously in the idea of a blindfolded goddess balancing the scales of justice. The point is that she doesn’t know who is on either side: a gay man, a black teen, or the state.

Of course, as citizens we do have obligations to the state and to society generally. Conservatives are not wrong in that sense. Our democracy only works when each citizen is engaged in the body politic through voting (at the very least), expressing their opinions to elected representatives, and observing duties to their fellow citizen, among so many other obligations. The reason that Rousseau thought democracies could only work in small countries was because people were geographically close enough to talk to one another. So while chatting isn’t exactly a panacea, it would certainly go a long ways toward alleviating many of the difficulties liberals and conservatives are having getting their point across.

When you say it like that, of course, it sounds silly. Even trite. But it requires the moral courage to assume that your interlocutor is capable of kindness and charity, and then the far more difficult task of extending those virtues yourself.

The Watchers Watch with Increasing Watchfulness . . . Or, Why Google Glass Offends Me

Not so long ago, a guy came into my work wearing Google Glass.  (Or, as the convention should go, glasses.)  I responded . . . poorly.

It's hard to think of yourself as a person who would become affronted by the mere existence of an otherwise not-that-consequential a thing.  In fact, it's weird thinking that I'd ever dislike Google Glass.  It seems like something that the sci-fi nerd in me would love.

I watched Star Trek: The Next Generation as a kid, and was really in awe of Geordi's visor.  I thought it would be cool to have access to all those parts of the electromagnetic spectrum that the human eye simply didn't evolve a need to see.

The idea of recording everything you saw had a kind of voyeuristic thrill to it as well.  The beauty of a sunset was something that should be captured instantly; recording everything made recalling everything a snap; I believed that this kind of access would fundamentally improve lives in a still-as-yet-undefined way.

But when Google Glass actually entered my life, I was incensed.  "Is that on?" I demanded.  The wearer, to my chagrin, answered me literally.  "Yes."  And I was off.  "You have no right, it's an affront, an invasion, blah blah blah."

The thing is, being on and recording are two different modes of operation for Google Glass.  Yeah, it was powered on and he could access information and the like, but it wasn't recording.  Apparently in a nod to Star Trek (I opine), you have to tell it turn on.  "Ok, Glass, record a video." 

So this poor fellow was not recording anything, as much as my tablet, or some random stranger's iPhone was not recording video, though it has that capability.

Glass, however, is a third eye that is forever looking out at the world, and the uncertainty of whether or not that eye was watching me left me uneasy.

This, I think, is a subject worth pondering.  If the eye remains unseen, do we care that it's watching?  Certainly, the revelations by Edward Snowden have revealed the unseen watcher watching with increasing watchfulness (say that five times fast).  As American's (and differently-nationed citizens) grapple with that realization, the way in which they mediate their own lives also changes.

That, I think, is what offended me so much about Google Glass.

For a moment, let's consider that we are all mediated selves.  That is, we understand our place in the world through our relationships with other people; we moderate our behavior to conform to social and cultural expectations.  Our actions are mediated by how others perceive them.

Yet, we are also mediated by how we present ourselves to the world.  Facebook and other social media allows us to edit ourselves -- to self-photoshop (metaphorically, but also literally) -- and though we can argue the fundamental philosophical implications, that mediation is under our control.

Google Glass eliminates that control.  We no longer mediate ourselves as much as we are caught on camera unmediated.

The worst part of talking heads and the political echo chamber of the cable news cycle is that they so often take things out of context, or fail to treat the subject with humility or compassion.  People misspeak.  They sometimes speak out of ignorance.  Or they have been purposefully misquoted.  In effect, they are mediated by others without their consent.  Google Glass highlights many more ways that can happen.

And frankly, I have the right to mediate myself however I choose.  I may want every action caught on camera -- the wit with the wisdom with all the flatulence in between.  But I may not.  I have the right to be treated with compassion and humility.  We all do.  Part of what erodes that compassion is the increasingly sophisticated surveillance with which we have to contend.

The watcher may watch with increasing watchfulness, but the effect of being watched is to lose part of our own souls.  That's why I don't like Google Glass.

The Power of Three . . . Or, NaNoWriMo!

It's November, and you know what that means! 

National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo is in full swing.  NaNoWriMo began somewhat innocuously in the late 90s or very early 2000s (if my memory hasn't failed me).  Back in the day, the whole point was just to write 50,000 words (or so I recall).  Nowadays, the point of this whole endeavor is to write an entire novel from start to finish in a month.

At the very least, it get you in your chair writing; best case scenario, you finish the month with something you can sell.  More likely, you'll have something tangible to get editing -- and that's nothing to sneeze at. 

I was working on something fairly pompous in 2001 and decided that I would just use NaNoWriMo to work further aggrandize that pomposity. 

Since then, I've participated in NaNoWriMo two more times.  Each time, I used it to work on something already in progress. Each of those works were long and complicated.  Also, something like 2/3 didn't reach the end.

So this year I decided I would sit down and write a book from start to finish.  It wasn't going to be bold, or complex, or difficult.  It would be a little plot heavy.  And it would be between 50,000 and 65,000 words.  Also, aside from a pretty intimate understanding of the three-act structure, I have no idea what the plot even is. 

So far, a C-130 has been shot down, terrorists are running around Oregon backwoods, and our hero has undertaken to protect a young woman who may hold the secret of humanity's destiny.  (Superficially, it reminds me of The Fifth Element.  A movie that came out right around the time I was introduced to NaNoWriMo.  Coincidence?)

I'm pretty sure there's going to be a shadowy government agency, kung-fu, a Shakespeare spouting hero, and possible space travel.  So, you know, the usual.

If you're participating, let me know how it's going in the comments.

Also, click HERE for a story about how NaNoWriMo actually started.
 

The Human Journey Is Just Beginning . . . Or, Watching Star Trek: The Motion Picture With My Girlfriend

For my birthday, my girlfriend got me the Blu-Ray collection of the first six Star Trek films.  And then, just to prove that she loves me, she watched the Motion Picture with me.  All the way through.  And only fell asleep once.

That's a pretty big deal.  The most she knows of Star Trek is that 'splosion-laden parody from J.J. Abrams.  See, back in the late 70s, science fiction wasn't exactly a big property.  2001: A Space Odyssey had come out in 1968.  Stanley Kubrick's masterpiece set both the mood and tone in science fiction for the next decade.  The story was intellectual and dense; the plot was nearly incomprehensible on the first screening (and second, third, and fourth), and matched outstanding acting and exquisite modeling with a breathtaking musical score.

Then Star Wars: A New Hope happened.  It fundamentally altered the viewing public's perception of what a movie could be, and how science fiction ought to be presented.  But Star Wars isn't really science fiction.  Sure, most of the story happens in space but for all it's vacuum bona fides, the technology and plot are purely fantastical.

Sure -- most of the time we lump science fiction and fantasy together (they even have a nifty moniker: SFF) but the two are fundamentally different genres that happen to share a common origin.  But while fantasy hints that the universe is inherently inexplicable, science fiction examines the ways in which the universe can be understood.  Where they overlap is their reliance on knowledge.

In fantasy, that knowledge is arcane and restricted through either initiation or fortune to a select few.  Science fiction revels in the fact that with a little hard work the universe can be understood by everyone.  And in the fiction of SF, the reader himself is the initiate.

Back to Star Trek: The Motion Picture.  After Star Wars shattered just about every record ever, executives at Paramount Studios needed something spacey.  They already had Star Trek, and were working on a new television series, called Phase II, and spurred by the dedicated activism of fans.

The Motion Picture is something really special, encapsulating Gene Roddenberry's truly novel future within the framework of a genuinely compelling science fiction story.  The plot is simple enough: a vast, incomprehensible alien entity of unimaginable power and destructive capability is on a straight shot to Earth.  The U.S.S. Enterprise is the only starship within interception range.  Admiral/Captain Kirk and his crew head out to investigate, and hopefully turn it back.

If the movie had been shot today, the ending would be pretty simple.  After investigating the heretofore inscrutable, indefatigable, and indestructible thing they would have discovered a vital weakness and exploited it.  The movie would have ended with a vast fireball and Kirk high-fiving Spock on the bridge.

Except this was made back when movies weren't just Hollywood execs standing around in a circle-jerk.

The Motion Picture ends with discovery.  The entire movie is an extended meditation on the meaning of life (highlighted by a five-minute overture that would have left audiences isolated in the womb-like darkness of a movie theater) so it is appropriate that the final epigram announces "The Human journey is just beginning." It ends with a moment of reflection on what it means to be human.

Phase II Enterprise

But this first film is more than simply good science fiction; it's the most realized vision of the future in any of the Star Trek films.  Gene Roddenberry's utopian vision is reflected best here by allowing audiences to really see the future.  We see civilians, contractors, a dynamic range of social and sexual mores, the reality of space travel, and the inherent dangers associated with any technology.

One of the truly visceral moments of peril is when a transporter malfunction scrambles two people in mid-transport.  Ostensibly, this is to give both Spock and McCoy a plausible excuse to rejoin the crew of the Enterprise, but it does double-duty and elaborates the dangers of simply existing while illuminating Kirk's character.  When we see the restrained grief, and the terse consolation of the transporter tech, we are reminded that with authority comes responsibility and know that these deaths will weigh on Kirk.  But as important, he'll push on and accomplish the mission. 

Watching this movie with my uninitiated girlfriend brought out something else.  At one point, she commented that she would like to be friends with Spock.  Besides being incredibly cute, it reminded me that these characters feel real.  I would never want to hang out with any of the characters in Abrams's Star Trek (except possibly Scotty, but that's just because I think we could go find Nick Frost and grab a pint). But in The Motion Picture, these people all feel incredibly real, and more importantly, their relationships feel like more than reflexive tropes satirizing archetypes. 

Which is just to say that while Abrams's films are entertaining -- with their running, running, 'splosions, angst, faux pseudoscience, 'splosions and more 'splosions -- they are neither fantastical nor science fictional.  They don't elaborate on friendship, duty, compassion, or the search for meaning.  And beating the bad guy literally means beating the bad guy.  They're shallow romps.

The Motion Picture offers -- in fact it practically invites -- a second viewing.  It's almost certain that it will reward the effort.  Its intellectual precursor 2001 suggests a second watching, but is less successful than The Motion Picture.  For these reasons and more you should give it a chance this weekend, sit down with a beer, and really dive into the best of all Star Trek films. 

Geeks Vs. Nerds

Yeah.  This basically sums it up.