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.

Where Do Babies Come From? . . . Or, Sexism And Women In Fantasy

A lot of electrons have been spilled recently about the presence (or lack thereof) and roles of women in fantasy stories.  Both The Mary Sue and Tansy Roberts have weighed in on the supposed historical justification of sexism in the fantasy genre, and each author makes compelling arguments.  Basically, it goes that women throughout history have played vital roles and pursued all sorts of careers so it makes little sense to indulge historically inaccurate portrayals of women in fantasy stories.

Roberts's critique of The Mary Sue is spot on:

"History is not a long series of centuries in which men did all the interesting/important things and women stayed home and twiddled their thumbs in between pushing out babies, making soup and dying in childbirth.

History is actually a long series of centuries of men writing down what they thought was important and interesting, and FORGETTING TO WRITE ABOUT WOMEN. It’s also a long series of centuries of women’s work and women’s writing being actively denigrated by men. Writings were destroyed, contributions were downplayed, and women were actively oppressed against, absolutely."

Her point is absolutely right, but then she moves to identify the two main tropes in fantasy as military/warfare and politics.  Magic is identified as a strong third, and links these to male dominance in historical reporting.  Ignoring the role that women played in war and politics, however, is a willful ignorance on the part of ancient reporters, and continues to be so in the fantasy genre.

"When it comes to politics, I’m sorry, but there are no excuses. Sure, women have been excluded from the public political process for large swathes of history and culture (except, you know, when they weren’t—even the supreme patriarchy that was Rome didn’t have complete control over the provinces, where female politicians and civil servants sprung up like weeds) but public is only one piece of politics. The Mary Sue article refers substantially to Game of Thrones, and that’s a very good example, but again you can look to history—as soon as there is any form of dynastic element to your politics, then women are IMPORTANT. Even when the political careers are solely male, those men have wives and families who have a stake in the proceedings and the outcomes, they have risks to take and campaigns to wage every bit as much as the men. And if the women’s politics are happening in salons rather than assembly halls… maybe you should be peeking into those salons. I can guarantee political DYNAMITE is going on in there. With finger sandwiches and mint tea? Why not?"

Okay, that makes a bit of sense.  But here's where I digress.  Historically inspired stories, like the fantastically successful Game of Thrones mentioned above, replicate stereotypes and inadequately populate fantastical worlds with shallow or fulsome representations of human activity.

I don't really want to engage the staggering sexism in fantasy except to make a more general point: historically inspired fantasy is boring.  Don't get me wrong, history is chock full of great stories, and they're perfect jumping off points for a couple dozen novels.  But historically flavored novels that simply replace the Lancasters with the Lannisters and England for Westeros (but what if St. George really did kill a dragon?) is about as interesting as sitting in traffic.

I suspect that my distaste for George Martin's novels stems from its conscious departure from fantasy tropes; instead of dealing with heroes and magic, his world is ours, though dimly glimpsed.  Essentially, it's bad fantasy and boring history, yet readers mistake it for verisimilitude the way a man dying of thirst will mistake a mirage for an oasis in the desert.

So thinking about fantasy as somehow a historical representation misses the point entirely.  Literature in all its guises is about human behavior.  Science fiction and fantasy offer wonder, but they also allow us to examine our present and speculate about our future.  Political worries, cultural values, dominant hierarchies are all reflected in fantasy and reveal a glimpse of the zeitgeist.  That is their power.

Science fiction excels by extrapolating human achievements to their logical end.  Fantasy can do the same by extrapolating human activity in settings beyond the mundane.  J.R.R. Tolkien reproduced the Earthly milieu consciously.  Writers following in that vein from Robert Jordan to Terry Brooks continued that trend with greater or lesser success.  Where G.R.R. Martin succeeds is creating a world disengaged from the environment of evolutionary adaptation -- though by failing to follow his worldbuilding to a logical end it quickly reveals its shaky foundations.  Brandon Sanderson's Way of Kings successfully disengages from a historical model by creating whole-cloth both a world and its inhabitants.

Marie Antoinette

None of these authors engage the elephant in the fantastical room, however.  Why there are human beings more or less indistinguishable from the reader is never addressed.  Indeed, it remains such a persistent trope that it is rarely considered.  C.S. Friedman's Coldfire Trilogy successfully tackles the trope by wrapping it science fiction -- the human beings in her story are the descendants of human colonists on an alien world (where physics is kind of wonky -- a concession to the genre which corresponds well enough with what we know of science).

Regardless, instead of confronting sexism in the genre, commentators like Tansy Roberts should instead engage sexism in our own culture (and in our authors), and recast the mirror which reflects it.  And calling your empire

When Dominant Culture Doesn't Dominate . . . Or, Cosplay, Geek Culture, and Bourgeois Culture

It's pretty self-explanatory

By Steven McLain

In the 1940s, Stetson Kennedy undertook an anti-racism campaign premised on a simple idea.  Whenever someone heard bigoted speech, that person should frown.  It's brilliant in its simplicity, and highlights the power of ostracism and social acceptance as a means of change.  Stetson was a landmark figure in the struggle against Jim Crow laws, and his bravery in infiltrating and revealing the secret rituals and codewords of the Ku Klux Klan seriously undermined that organization.

After infiltrating the KKK he filtered their secrets to the Superman radio drama, when engaged the popular icon in a fight against bigotry and exposed the organization to its own farce. 

Seriously, how cool a name is Stetson?

Kennedy died in 2011, but both his infiltration of the KKK and his "Frown Campaign" are useful in analyzing the power and delineations of culture.  These in turn can help us identify when and where certain cultures exist, when they have been appropriated, and when they have willingly submerged themselves into the bourgeois culture.

I'd like to make a couple of definitions clear from the outset, since I'll be using them in somewhat esoteric ways (which also differ from social scientists' and semiologists' definition).  First, let's acknowledge that culture is a tough thing to define, since it is inherently nebulous.  But if you can't define what exactly culture is, you can at least define its function.

For the sake of this argument, culture consists of the transmittable values and practices which signify inclusion in a group.  Basically, culture delineates "us" from "them" and includes language (including jargon, accent, patois, etc.), styles of clothing, taboos, rituals, and meaning attached to specific markers (such as flags, buttons, logos, brands, etc.).  You're probably not aware of these things until you enter a different culture, but it's abundantly clear when someone doesn't belong to your culture by the way they walk, talk, or dress.

Kennedy (and Martin Luther King, Jr. incidentally) believed that the bulk of people were good, and could challenge bigoted attitudes by expressing their disdain.  Frowning was a way to demonstrate disapproval, and subtly alter perceptions.  But it relied on a shift in the bourgeois culture so that bigotry was a cultural distinction.  In a sense, bigotry alienated you from bourgeois culture.

Now, generally when we talk about culture, we use hierarchical words of dominance and submission which disguises the real nature of culture as a progressive continuum.  That is, while there are major and minor cultures, one need not inhabit one or the other; indeed, one can occupy multiple cultures at the same time (and probably does).  Instead of dominant or submissive cultures (sub-cultures as they're often called), bourgeois culture reflects the idea that communities often embrace a single, overarching culture under which multiple, fluid identities can emerge and flourish.

When Martin Luther King identified racism, poverty, and militarism as evils, it was precisely because they dehumanized individuals as means to an end, or by obscuring their humanity by overlooking their individuality, or through bigotry.

King said of poverty:

“There is nothing new about poverty. What is new, however, is that we now have the resources to get rid of it. The time has come for an all-out world war against poverty … The well off and the secure have too often become indifferent and oblivious to the poverty and deprivation in their midst. Ultimately a great nation is a compassionate nation. No individual or nation can be great if it does not have a concern for ‘the least of these.”

 And racism:

“Racism is a philosophy based on a contempt for life. It is the arrogant assertion that one race is the center of value and object of devotion, before which other races must kneel in submission. It is the absurd dogma that one race is responsible for all the progress of history and alone can assure the progress of the future. Racism is total estrangement. It separates not only bodies, but minds and spirits. Inevitably it descends to inflicting spiritual and physical homicide upon the out-group.”

And militarism:

“A true revolution of values will lay hands on the world order and say of war- ‘This way of settling differences is not just.’ This way of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation’s homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.”

MLK

But if he were alive today, I have no doubt Martin Luther King would include consumerism on his list of modern evils right there with racism, poverty, and militarism.

Consumerism exists in that same spectrum of evil by reducing individuals to means of acquiring.  Rather than basing individual worth on the merit of being a human being, what you own determines your worth.  These aren't new criticisms, and shouldn't shock you, but take a moment to really consider what it means that bourgeois culture is also a consumer culture. 

The word "bourgeois" has a tortured history.  It initially indicated the French middle class which emerged between the aristocracy and peasants.  During the French Revolution it acquired a pejorative status which persisted into the nineteenth century, where it eventually acquired its labor implications.  Marx and Engels used bourgeois to signal the propertied owners of capital who alienated workers from their labor.  This is the meaning it largely kept through the mid-twentieth century, until it came to first signify the bureaucratic authority emerging in the Western world; finally it acquired a class signifier in the early twenty-first century and was appropriated by trend-setters and the petty intelligentsia when it was crafted into the patois.  "Bougie" became an indication of pedestrian pretension. 

An example from the Seattle Times helps emphasize that distinction:

“In an urban environment, in the elements, you want to feel protected,” says Gregg Andrews, fashion creative director at Nordstrom. “You don’t want to feel that you can’t walk on broken concrete. There’s this fashion utility to a boot that makes it very appealing.”

Plus, he says, “boots are sorta like sunglasses — they give you instant attitude . . . A woman could own an entire closet of boots that really would change the look of everything that’s in her wardrobe.”
We will mix and match so many shirts, sweaters, jackets and pants that they couldn’t possibly add up to a cohesive outfit, yet make it look fresh and “seasonless,” to borrow a term used to describe the direction in menswear for the coming year.

We will pair soft fabrics with the leather that will be everywhere this fall, wear white after Labor Day and shamelessly pile on two or three shades of the season’s go-to colors: green, blue and red. We will make tie-dye look bougie and make [ombré] look hippie." [emphasis my own]

Oh, those French

But despite definitional slippage, bourgeois maintains its connection to the middle class, to a system of virtue ethics firmly tied to a social and economic class.  The rise of the middle class is a historical phenomenon which pre-dates the industrial revolution.  It is tied to social movements even today, and indicates a broadening access to political and economic power.  The decline of the middle class is not a signifier of declining economic power per se, but rather points to gradual lessening of access to that power by the largest segment of nation's population.

That intersection creates a unique cultural imperative which includes and supersedes every other culture.  Bourgeois culture in America (and perhaps in most of the developed and emerging world) is associated almost entirely with consumerism.  Worth and value are predicated on one's ability to acquire and conspicuously consume.  These cultural assumptions are what underpin Apple's yearly unveiling of new and only slightly improved iPhones.  Fundamentally, the iPhone and the iPhone 5 are no different (let's not even mention the distinction between the S and C), and the iPhone itself represents only minor aesthetic improvements on pre-existing technology.

Rather, the acquisition and conspicuous consumption of these technology signify inclusion within a particular culture.  That the gold iPhone 5 is seen as a status symbol should surprise no one.  Rather, as an indication of the power of bourgeois culture, the iPhone is the most obvious example of one culture embraced and enfolded by bourgeois culture.

This is not a condemnation of either bourgeois culture, or any of the cultures which oppose or embrace it.  Indeed, many cultures are complementary, or even supplement, bourgeois culture.  Some cultures actively reject bourgeois culture and try to embrace self-sufficiency and autonomy, or see the obvious environmental damage our particular bourgeois culture causes and attempt to meliorate their own impact. 

Culture-jacking

Other cultures which began in conscious opposition to bourgeois culture lack the power or the organization to successfully reject it and either embrace or are co-opted by bourgeois culture.  Consumerism is such a prevalent and powerful force that the latter is more likely the case.  Bourgeois culture may colonize alien cultures and gradually incorporate them into itself, expressing alienness as novelty (culture-jacking, if you will) -- the Asian fetish of the early twentieth century and the television show "The Big Bang Theory" are equally representative of this phenomenon.

It's also what lends legitimacy to a particular culture.  Legitimate cultures consciously articulate a particular vision of the good life.  What that vision is remains irrelevant.  Rather, what is important is that a culture express that vision through its cultural markers.  Remember Kennedy and his frown campaign?  The power of bourgeois culture overruled deeply ingrained bigotry (along with the active participation of civil rights activists, legislators, and the oppressed themselves).  Kennedy was able to de-legitimize the KKK by exposing their secrets to ridicule.  Their cultural signifiers became markers of absurdity.

By appropriating those markers instead, the bourgeois culture maintains the sense of separateness while utilizing the power which separates culture to advance its own agenda.  Geek culture, which peaked in the 80s and early 90s, offered a significantly peculiar version of the good life to differentiate it from bourgeois culture of the time.

Highlighted by a preoccupation with science and technology, geek culture presented furthering of knowledge as an end to itself.  Geek culture embraced the rational enlightenment virtues of previous generations and molded it with a fascination of technology.  The result was a vision in which science and technology were lauded for their own sake, and elevated what bourgeois culture considered hobbies to ends of themselves.  Geek culture appropriated the mode of bourgeois culture as the means for its own ends; this appropriation both legitimized and enabled geek cultures to oppose bourgeois culture.

By Ibrahim Evsan

But by the early twenty-first century, bourgeois culture responded by re-appropriating the symbols of geek culture into itself.  The pre-eminent example is the colonization of Comic-Con by a consumer culture marked by conspicuous consumption and acquisition as a determination of worth.  And we should be clear that legitimation is not itself a moral judgement, but rather a statement of definition.  That is, to be legitimate, a culture must correspond itself to a peculiar vision of the good life which differs from another culture.

Indeed, the simple proliferation of Comic-Cons (San Diego, New York, Portland, OR, etc.) are not indicative of the power of a particular culture, but rather representative of the appropriation of geek culture to bourgeois culture.  Geek culture may persist, but incoherently.   

Legitimization is both a strategy and goal of bourgeois culture.  As a strategy, it allows bourgeois culture to colonize peculiar cultures.  This is also why I suspect that cosplay is itself not a legitimate culture.  Emerging from both geek and nerd culture (historically an offshoot of Renaissance Fairs and, I imagine, the costuming impulses of Halloween) it allows both men and women an opportunity to assume alternate and deviate identities.

Though I can't speak to motivations, and while much of it seems like a harmless vacation from the self, cosplayers such as Ani Mia, Jenni Hashimoto (who was featured in a Business Insider expose of the New York Comic-Con) and other members of that community who peddle their wares (as it were) on the internet or on cable reality television (such as The SyFy Channel's "Heroes of Cosplay") have either consciously adopted bourgeois culture, or been appropriated by it.  Failing to cogently express a vision of the good life, and adopting the vision of a competing culture reveals their complicity in delegitimizing their peculiar culture.

The "Fake Geek Girl" controversy raging throughout the interwebs is a clear indication that geek communities understand that their culture is being appropriated.  Alice Vega, a geek commentator, offers a few words of live-and-let-live that hints at libertarian moral laissez faire but fails to recognize the invidiousness of these cultural appropriations.

"First off, a Fake Geek Girl is defined as a female of any age faking it in the geek culture, i.e. cosplaying characters she doesn’t know, saying she’s a gamer but has never touched a Playstation, etc. You might have seen some of these girls or know some yourself. But here’s a newsflash: Who the fuck cares?"

Vampirella at Rose City Comicon

Her rant betrays her naivety.  "Heroes of Cosplay" may indeed introduce outsiders to a niche hobby, and may help inspire new fans to go out and indulge their self-obscuring fantasies.  And "fake geek girls" may indeed by culture-jacking geek culture as a means to garner attention, or they may be intentionally sexualizing themselves as a means of re-appropriating their sexuality from a dominance culture they navigate at their own peril.  What commentators like Vega and the geek community in general fail to understand, however, is that they are willing participants in their own appropriation.

So while the libertarian in me is crying "no harm no foul," the better part of my nature is worrying that people are building castles in the air and failing to address the real problem.  As a self-identified geek I understand the frustration of the community, but want to point out that it's already too late.  Unless we can re-craft a peculiar vision of the good life, bourgeois culture will always win. 

The Achilles Heel of Literature . . . Or, Hearing The Iliad For The First Time

One of the unique treats of audio books is the ability to hear certain works as they were originally intended.  According to St. Augustine in his Confessions, reading was commonly done aloud, so that he commented on St. Ambrose's oddity in reading to himself.  Alberto Manguel, who wrote A History of Reading notes that this was the first recorded instance of silent reading. 
Certainly, people read to themselves before this, but reading was meant to be communal.  That the written word conveys meaning beyond just the author is such a truism that it hardly needs to be remarked.  But you should pause a moment and consider to whom the author of any work really intends his writing.

I'm currently in the midst of listening to the audio version of Homer's Iliad.  Based on oral tradition, the Homeric cycle was not compiled until the sixth century B.C.  Even after it was written down, however, few were literate enough to read it.  So it continued to be performed for public consumption.

The version I'm listening to is the Richmond Lattimore translation.  (If you want to read the original Greek, check out the University of Chicago's online database of everything Homer.)  I prefer the Lattimore translation to Robert Fagles's translation because of its felicity to the text.

Fagles does a remarkable job rendering a verse translation but it sometimes seems forced.  Lattimore, while eschewing the epic style we've come to expect through Dante and the Old English cycles such as Beowulf, maintains a rugged verisimilitude that reads (and is heard) as genuine.  (Though hearing Helen call herself a "slut" and a "bitch" jars -- which may have been the intent.)

Both of these translations remain more or less true to the original.  For sheer poetic aesthetics, though, I prefer the Alexander Pope translation.  Rightly criticized for being as much Pope's poetry as Homer's epic, it nevertheless remains a staggering work of genius.  For example, look at these opening lines of Pope:

Declare, O Muse! in what ill-fated hour
Sprung the fierce strife, from what offended power
Latona's son a dire contagion spread,
And heap'd the camp with mountains of the dead;
The king of men his reverent priest defied,
And for the king's offence the people died.

Which are answered by Fagles:

Begin, Muse, when the two first broke and clashed,
Agamemnon lord of men and brilliant Achilles.
What god drove them to fight with such fury?
Apollo the son of Zeus and Leto.  Incensed at the king
He swept a fatal plague through the army -- men were dying
and all because Agamemnon spurned Apollo's priest.

and by Lattimore:

 SING, goddess, the anger of Peleus' son Achilleus
and its devastation, which put pains thousandfold upon the Achaians,
hurled in their multitudes to the house of Hades strong souls
of heroes, but gave their bodies to be the delicate feasting
of dogs, of all birds, and the will of Zeus was accomplished
since that time when first there stood in division of conflict
Atreus' son the lord of men and brilliant Achilleus.
What god was it then set them together in bitter collision?
Zeus' son and Leto's, Apollo, who in anger at the king drove
the foul pestilence along the host, and the people perished,
since Atreus' son had dishonoured Chryses, priest of Apollo[.]

Like most things in life, this is an aesthetic preference on my part.  Many people prefer the Fagles translation, and it has continued to sell well since it was introduced.  But for myself, it seems less magisterial than the Lattimore translation, and, as importantly, it is far less mellifluous.

The Lattimore translation sings when heard; Charlton Griffin narrates exceptionally well with a rich authority that sells Agamemnon, Odysseus, and Achilles.  He manages to impart personality to all of his characters (though it can be odd hearing a baritone Briton reading Aphrodite).

But I'm forced to consider why we should listen to it at all.  Easily 3,000 year old (and probably older) it reflects the values of our forebears which no longer seem relevant to us.  Virtue to the Achaians (which is a familial designation rather than a national one, since Greeks as such did not yet exist) reflected a warrior ethos and reinforced the agrarian and pseudo hunter-gatherer lifestyle of many of them.

Acquisition through contest of arms was lauded.  Agency existed along a continuum in no one was entirely autonomous.  From Zeus derived ultimate authority, which constrained even the gods.  But the immortals were capable of inserting thoughts and manipulating the minds and actions of mortal men and women.  Women were alternately the baubles of gods and men (or both); they were manipulated, squabbled over, and traded between men without consideration.

Though women certainly were constrained, they surely were able to exercise some agency within the constraints of their society, a dynamic that Homer reflects poorly (if at all).  Indeed, the Wolfgang Petersen movie Troy suffers by including a level of agency that betrays the characters.  In the movie, Helen is a willing participant in her abduction, even as she recognizes the peril it places on her, her lover, and her adopted nation.  She predicts the danger, and though we forgive her the initial betrayal of her husband, we cannot forgive her each subsequent decision.

But Helen in Homer is a puppet of Paris and Aphrodite.  The gods wage their bitter struggle to support the Achaians against the Trojans, and vice versa, and the mortals are merely pieces on the board.  To that extent, the Homeric cycle reflects a surprising wisdom: that countering our planning, and the fullest expression of our own will are contingent moments, be they historical, cultural, or simply environmental, which serve to constrain our autonomy.  Though Homer may call them gods, we still consider luck and fate as beyond our hands and coterminous with our own will.

Homer allows us a moment to reflect on how best to express our free will in a world constrained by resources and the caprice of good or ill fate.  When Hector leaves to confront the Achaians, his wife begs him to stay.  His reply in the sixth book (translated by Ian Johnston) is not an idle boast, but reflects a warrior's ethos:

“Wife,
all this concerns me, too. But I’d be disgraced,
dreadfully shamed among Trojan men
and Trojan women in their trailing gowns,
if I should, like a coward, slink away from war.
My heart will never prompt me to do that,
for I have learned always to be brave,
to fight alongside Trojans at the front,
striving to win fame for father and myself.
My heart and mind know well the day is coming
when sacred Ilion will be destroyed,
along with Priam of the fine ash spear
and Priam’s people. But what pains me most
about these future sorrows is not so much
the Trojans, Hecuba, or king Priam,
or even my many noble brothers,
who’ll fall down in the dust, slaughtered
by their enemies. My pain focuses on you,
when one of those bronze-clad Achaeans
leads you off in tears, ends your days of freedom.
If then you come to Argos as a slave,
working the loom for some other woman,
fetching water from Hypereia or Messeis,
against your will, forced by powerful Fate,
then someone seeing you as you weep
may well say:

‘That woman is Hector’s wife.
He was the finest warrior in battle
of all horse-taming Trojans in that war
when they fought for Troy.’

Someone will say that,
and it will bring still more grief to you,
to be without a man like that to save you
from days of servitude. May I lie dead,
hidden deep under a burial mound,
before I hear about your screaming,
as you are dragged away.”

And still more poignantly, we see Hector's address to his son, whose benediction still echoes: "May people someday say [. . .] 'This man is far better than his father.'"  How Hector confronts the uncertainty of battle maps for us a possible way to confront uncertainty in our own. 

Harold Bloom, whose book Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds, calls Achilles the first human being in fiction.  Every other character of course represents a human being, but Bloom sees in Achilles the transformational moment to which good literature aspires.  It is a moment of self-understanding so that one can look at oneself contemplatively.

The moment comes after Achilles has killed Hector, dragged his body round the walls of Ilian and retired to his tent.  Priam, the Trojan king, manages to infiltrate the Greek camp and begs Achilles for the body of his son. 

It’s all for him I’ve come to the ships now,
to win him back for you — I bring a priceless ransom.
Revere the gods, Achilles! Pity me in my own right,
remember your own father! I deserve more pity…
I have endured what no one on earth has ever done before –
I put to my lips the hands of the man who killed my son.

 And Achilles, who had raged over the death of his lover Patroclus (lover fails to adequately convey the meaning in this context, but it will have to suffice) now looks at Priam, feels remorse, and is forced to concede that honor, grief, and glory have conflicted meanings.  Homer understood that this was Achilles's story, and he rightly bookends the Iliad with Achilles's petulance at the beginning with his transformation at the end.

That transformational moment is why the Iliad ought to be read.  Like all good literature, it allows us to experience life through the peculiar perspective of another and wonder the great what if of another's life.

When Kant Played Football . . . Or, Injury and Dehumanization In College Sports

One of the more worrying trends at Universities and colleges in the United States is the increasing emphasis on collegiate sports over academics.  To be fair, sports have an important place.  Douglas MacArthur, while commander of West Point, called the athletic pitch "The field of friendly strife."  He saw the link between martial virtues and sports clearly.  The emphasize camaraderie and physical courage, and helped foster a sense of tribal affiliation among onlookers.  The dedication of ardent fans is really the only proof you'll need: It is why riots break out when one team loses.

In college sports, those rivalries aren't quite as intense (we hope).  They are nonetheless pervasive, and generate a level of commitment which solidifies unique brand loyalties.  And universities aren't particularly cagey about fostering that loyalty.  When Oregon State University shifted to a new logo and new uniforms for the 2013 season Head Coach Mike Riley made it clear that it was part of a strategy to boost recruiting.

Though why anyone would want to be one of the Nutrias is beyond me

“This stuff absolutely matters to kids, and I think it looks really sharp [. . .] It’s cool that the kids are so excited about it. During the season, we were able to sneak a peak at some of the helmets, and the guys loved it.”

And success on the field has significant impact on university recruitment in general.  A winning team attracts high school juniors who care less about academics than who has the better team.  In Oregon, a state without major league sports, college football rivalry is elevated to the same status as the 49s vs Raiders.  But the same is true elsewhere.  According to a CNBC report, college football

pulls in $5 billion a year, which is more than Facebook, Twitter, and Candy Crush combined.

The singular difference between college football of today, and MacArthur's "field of friendly strife" is that today economic forces compel each team to compete not just on the field but also on the free market.  The central tenet of free-market ideology is that competition refines a product and establishes equilibrium between supply and demand.

(AP photo/Bill Haber)

The inherent problem in this equation is that the product are human beings struggling not to be better football players (we hope) but rather to become educated members of society.  We trust that education is the end, and that football is a means to accomplishing those goals.  But as football becomes commoditized, the people are increasingly marginalized.

It seems like a truism, but winning is the goal; human beings are lumped onto one side of the equation which ultimately yields victory.  While most coaches, and certainly university administrators would argue that they ultimately have the students' interests in mind, market forces offer incentives to behave as though players were cogs in the athletic machine.

The evidence for that atmosphere of commoditization is mounting.  Today, PBS released a documentary on the dangers of professional football.  "League of Denial: The NFL's Concussion Crisis" highlights the work of Dr. Bennet Omalu.  A pathologist trained in neuropathology, Omalu examined the brain of Mike Webster, a former Hall of Fame player who retired in 1991.  Webster died in 2002 following mental degeneration which left him staring into space in a Pittsburgh train station.  When Omalu examined Webster's brain, instead of finding traces of Alzheimer's, he discovered that "its cells had been strangled by excess tau proteins released after collisions."  His diagnosis of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) should have been a wake up call to NFL doctors, but instead they minimized his findings and appealed to him to keep quiet.

“‘Bennet, do you know the implications of what you’re doing?’” Omalu recalled being asked by a league doctor. “He said, ‘If 10 percent of mothers in this country would begin to perceive football as a dangerous sport, that is the end of football.’”

According to the Center for the Study of Traumatic Encephalopathy, chronic traumatic encephalopathy is a progressive degenerative disease found in the brains of people who experience multiple concussions.  Certain athletes are particularly prone to them, and was thought to be limited to sports such as boxing and hockey which traditionally experience high rates of concussion.  More worrying is that subconcussive hits -- violent hits that are nevertheless not traumatic enough to cause a concussion -- also cause CTE by causing a buildup of the abnormal protein tau.  "These changes in the brain can begin months, years, or even decades after the last brain trauma or end of active athletic involvement."  Despite ardent attempts to reduce harm, the damage might already be there.  Since CTE is exacerbated by every hit, a long history of trauma further heightens athletes' risk.

The link between the NFL and college sports isn't subtle.  Watch a game and as the on-screen stats pop up, notice where each player went to college.  At the professional level, college affiliation doesn't matter.  Instead, it reinforces which school is a good football school.  It's a feedback loop that promotes college programs and helps recruitment.  The academic implications are worrying enough, but the documentary goes on to make a profound criticism.

One of the world’s leading authorities on the topic, Dr. Ann McKee, told the filmmakers she thinks it’s possible every athlete in pro football has CTE in one form or another, and that the condition may also affect high school and college players. This means there are tens of millions of former and current players who are potentially susceptible to the disease’s long-term effects—anger, agitation, a loss of focus and memory. Even those who don’t care about football should care about what resembles a public health crisis. [Emphasis my own.]

So while we as consumers of athletic entertainment demand teams with higher win-loss ratios, we inadvertently expose our children to exponential levels of harm.

Certainly, this is not a call to end high school, college, or professional sports.  But it should be a call to re-evaluate our roles in a worrying trend, and ponder how we think about our athletes.

I'll just leave this here to think about.

Are they human beings and (as Kant said) worthy to be considered as ends unto themselves, or are they facilitators of our entertainment?  Because if they are merely cogs in the machine whose goal is literally a goal, then we needn't accommodate demands for increased protection any more than we would for a prize horse, or a NASCAR stock car.

The very fact that we do consider their appeals for basic protection reveals that we are uncomfortable making that distinction.  I'd argue that we should in fact be working toward maximizing protection, which might mean slowing down the game, or de-emphasizing our own need for entertainment.

This isn't to say that all risk can or should be eliminated from our lives.  Hardiness and resilience are necessary virtues, and should be cultivated in our children.  Moreover, college sports have consistently facilitated social mobility, offering an opportunity for low-income students to access advanced education.  And lest we become the Long Island middle school that banned cartwheels, we have to accept that some risk is unavoidable.  But we ought not revel in it, or reduce players to means to an end.

The Inertia of Spectacle . . . Or, Gravity Movie Review

This review is going to be relatively short.

Alfonso Cuarón's Gravity is . . . wow.  It's just wow.  I've never seen a movie as intensely, gloriously spectacular before now.  I found myself agog for one hour and twenty minutes.

When the credits began rolling, I realized that I'd never seen a movie like this before.  The obvious comparisons between Gravity and Apollo 13 are just that, obvious.  To make them demeans both movies.  While each deals with tragedy in space, the two are worlds apart, though equally deserving of every single accolade that each earned -- and probably three more besides. 

Before we get too far into it, though, let's talk about some of the specific criticisms that real scientists have had about the science in this movie.  Neil DeGrasse Tyson is the most obvious, and his twitter posts have a tongue-in-cheek feel to his criticisms.  But Alfonso Cuarón addressed those comments early on in an interview with Wired.

"Well, the story itself is … not unrealistic, but it’s just not very probable that it would happen, you know? And we had to embrace that from the get-go. But I want audiences to embrace the universe. It’s not about trying to figure out what is accurate and what is not. I mean, there’s no sound in space, for instance, but we use music to convey the story."

I like to think that you can make a good science fiction that is completely scientific accurate, but I respect that sometimes the story demands certain concessions, and to my mind none of those concession were so egregious that they distracted me from the story itself. 

Basically, Sandra Bullock plays a scientist working to repair the Hubble Space Telescope, and George Clooney is the NASA astronaut tagging along.  Things go terrible, horribly wrong very quickly and they're left to try to rescue themselves.  Parts of the movie reminded me of that terribly campy 80s NASA-glorification Space Camp.

Other than those parts (and one really, explicitly unlikely scene reminiscent of a certain Pixar film about a futuristic robot) the movie was simply spectacular.  When I use that term, I want you to hear it for what it means -- a movie filled with the best kind of spectacle.

Aristotle put spectacle as the lowest form of poetry -- something that appeals to the senses (especially visually: spectacle/spectacles . . . get it?).  He insisted that this was the lowest form of art, but it makes sense in our era of spectacle and popcorn-spectacle to make a further distinction.  Because in movies we're allowed to grasp the awe and wonder of the universe, and our remarkably tiny part of it, in a way that no other form of media can convey.   

Gravity makes a bold assertion that film can make us more aware of our mortality and convey an existential synchronicity with the members of the audience.  That is, in that moment, we all have a shared experience which binds us closer as members of humanity.

It's heady and wonderful and glorious spectacle that should not be missed.



(As an aside, I'd like to launch on a short screed about how irritated I was watching how awesome NASA is, how glorious it is that human beings were in space, and then remembering that the United States of America doesn't do that anymore.  The movie begins on the shuttle Explorer, a shuttle which was never in our fleet -- when we had one!  How small and petty are we that we don't even think of the grandeur to which our forebears strove and then reached.  We belittle ourselves by forsaking our potential.)

Wonder Woman!

Rainfall Films has done some incredible work making Wonder Woman look good and the video below makes me think it could be done well (if the story was figured out).  Let me know what you think in the comments.

The Trauma of Submission . . . Or, Submitting a Short Story

So I just finished submitting my latest sci-fi short "A Deeper Darkness Than Night" to Analog Science Fiction and Fact.  The submission process is surprisingly easy.  It's an online system; plug in your cover letter and attach the story and you're set.

I was really worried about the cover letter -- I'm not sure why but it seemed like the hurdle that I just had to get over.  But the story should stand on its own, the cover letter doesn't have to sell it.  So I'm not entirely sure why the cover letter should have been such a big deal in my mind.

The worst they can do is reject my story (which I have to remind myself, is not a rejection of me), and I suppose the letter was just the final block in my mind.

I got an automated email back pretty quick (like thirty seconds quick) telling me that they received my submission and the average response time is between 2 and 6 weeks.  I guess I'll let you know what I hear in 2-6 weeks.