A Window, A Light...

AKA: “How Are You Gonna Treat the Police?”

Spent the better part of my being bugfuck anxious, where it felt like my heart wasn't necesarily beating faster just harder, somehow, creating a kind of constant background noise that didn't block anything out but simply made it more difficult to parse. Then there was too much of it - noise - anyhow. I have way too many cats. One of them's in heat - haven't been able to get her fixed - and she's been yowling for weeks. It has to stop sometime, but I don't even remember the last time she wasn't in heat.

Fucking awful. I haven't done shit in a few days, this being day two. God knows I keep trying to get into a writing head space. So, we'll see.

Brewed a pot of oolong tea. Ate some lunch. Re-brewed it with a teaspoon of lapsang. I didn't used to be a tea guy and now I am, at least after breakfast. I don't know my tea academically, I just drink a lot of it. A stimulant to calm the nerves like nicotine, which is a vice I can't afford to trade in.

Okay, so I started re-reading Gibson's "The Bridge" trilogy, which has me beginning with Virtual Light. I've gotten, oh, about 7/8s through it before I've been able to sit down and let my thoughts clear up. Kept thinking I wanted to start with chapter 2, not chapter-by-chapter, but in terms of the whole sub-narrative it creates for us. But space is precious and there's actually too much to write, so I just narrow my focus to Gibson's treatment of the police.

When I read this in college, I didn't give a shit one way or the other about cops, and now I don't like them at all. Full disclosure. I actually wish I could like the police, you know? Like, if there were any kind of way that they'd be like I used to see them in TV - basically good, generally there to protect people. As if you could call the cops and they'd help you. Even Gibson doesn't write it like that. Rydell and Sublett seem to be some kind of aberration in the fabric of the police-narrative. Rydell can't stop himself from reacting, which costs him literally every employed position he has at every possible turn, while Sublett is physically and socially liminal. Like, it's probably strange to see such a fragile security gaurd - allergic to basically everything, including the light - part of a television cult that he's not even in proper adherance of doctrine with. I'm thinking, honestly, Sublett's a surprisingly brave dude. Both Rydell and Sublett are treated by the narrative as figures of personal, if reflexive, integrity.

Head canon seems to lock Rydell in as a Bruce Willis figure, almost based on the speech pattern alone. Read it and tell me he doesn't sound like fuckin' John McClane. Fresh from watching Luke Cage, I want to cast Theo Rossi as Sublett, but that creates chronology issues for my conciousness. This is the 90's, so my head re-tunes its image to, like, maybe James Marsters. Seriously. Anyhow.

I guess you can kind of clock someone's unthinking ideology by their cop figures, and the 90's are just like... they're fucking thick with 'em. I don't know why, because we're fresh out of the anti-government 80's, but there's something about the military and the police that are given a pass. I feel like the reason this happens is that they're granted authority and then break rules, which honestly makes them the worst of both worlds and I'd probably suggest that this results in the kind of scum-sucking blue lives matter movement bullshit I've come to see so often. Turning people into symbols and ignoring structure and ideologies.

Gibson's treatment of the police was similar, I think, to my own unthinking ideology when I was younger, so I think it just kind of... missed me. I didn't think about it. Rydell was good because he was doing things that seemed pretty good, if surprisingly destructive, and he was operating in places where breaking a lot of shit was either not really his fault of fundamentally harmless. He's never really put into a position where he has to make a difficult decision because now he has cop training and "good" cop ideology, but no cop rules at all. This kind of reminds me of David Sirota's book on how our attitudes kind of flow naturally from 80's media and this is fresh from that decade, so it's really no surprise. Gibson's cop writing is basically just that - just a re-heating of media cop narratives overlaid into a 90's cyberpunk milieu. I think it's a little weird, really. As insightful as Gibson can be on some stuff, there's shit he just doesn't seem to catch at all.

This is just rambling - when I'm writing, I constantly have to re-clairify myself to myself. I'm feeling stymied this morning, so I'm going over some fundimentals. Obviously feel free to read if you want to - there's nothing of my mental state or day to day, but you might still be entertained if this is your bag. If it gets really long, I might put it under a cut.

( Read more... )

I actually don't have all that long to type here, since we've got to get to a mechanic for Katie's car and then I gotta help with a food drive at a local convention. I'll have the evening free, but I'll probably forget by then, so I'm just going to post now, instead.

First, the link.
http://thanatos02us.blogspot.com/

Second, why I'm posting the link.
That's the blog that I was working on a while ago and the resulting posts never materialized. There are good reasons for that, I assure you, but there's no ignoring the fact that I said I was gonna be doing a thing and then never actually got around to it. 

I'm extremely rusty on anything approaching academic writing, so once I had started, I had to go back and keep coming back to it, trying to figure out why what I had written wasn't quite right. Even now, I'm not really sure it's where it needs to be - in my opinion, it's probably reached the point where I'd be comfortable calling it a rough draft, but it's also a post made to Blogger (and, incidentally, Tumblr) and nobody is really going to comment on it, though I imagine I'll get at least a few people who bothered to read it. 

The premise is that genre writing is rarely taken seriously, and I feel that one of the hurdles of cyberpunk as a genre is that it's somewhat pigeonholed as universally dystopian literature, and that reading with that label stuck on it kind of flattens the world and makes critical reading that much more difficult. 

It's obviously not the only thing I'm going to write, either about cyberpunk or on media as a whole, but at least now that's off my desk and I can go on to work on the next thing. 

I have a stack of notebooks on my desk, one book, several uncounted note cards, and 9 tabs in my browser baring the name of one William Gibson as I look for a very specific quote that I never seem to have added to my every increasing list of notes on the man and the subject of dystopian cyberpunk. 

Having re-read old notes and accidently stumbled upon ever newer things that should have been there in the first place, I took a look at what was currently in progress vis a vis my blog and realized that the post is going to take longer then I thought it probably would. My state of affairs is bordering on the ridiculous, but it's a situation I take seriously, so it needs to be remedied. 

In the mean time, let me assure you that my presence here is not mandatory. I genuinely kind of want to talk to you. I am aware that I am freeloading, but there is also time for this kind of business - especially when this kind of business frames my struggles with an amusing feeling of purpose. 

Did you know I specifically cleaned my desk so that I could mess it up with literature notes? It's true. That is a long way of saying, "Obviously, I am a nerd."

The quote I was looking for was when Gibson said that his writings were not really intended to by dystopian, but what I did find came close. The interview was with Scientific American*, and he was asked, "Your fiction has depicted wide class gulfs in which "lowlifes" co-exist with the rich and feudallike corporations that concentrate mind-boggling amounts of wealth... do you think that this disparity will continue to greater extremes as they develop further, and could they potentially restructure the current social order somehow?"

The printed answer, "I depict those socioeconomic gulfs because they exist and because most of the imagined futures I grew up with tended not to depict them. Migration to cities is now so powerful, so universal, that people will create cities, of sorts, simply through migration—cities that literally consist mainly of the people who inhabit them on a given day." is similar to what I assumed the reason had been, or what I remember saying, I forget which is which. Basically that this wide gulf already exists, and when you write it, it looks like a dystopia. 

What I'm writing doesn't hinge on that, but it's certainly part of it. There are lots of times, because Gibson repeats himself, where he says that most fiction, and especially his fiction, is about when it was written. 1984 is about 1948, The Sprawl trilogy is about the 80's, and The Bridge trilogy is about the 90's - regardless of original intentions. This is all in the writing, by the way, so you'll see it again with proper sourcing. If you want to ask about the relevance of cyberpunk, the thing to remember is that it almost can't help being social commentary no matter what the tropes are. Perhaps especially because of the tropes, but probably not.

I really had to take a break and write on this because my writing of this isn't done yet and I wanted to have something up, at the very least. We're still fucking around trying to get a 'yes' or 'no' out of the insurance company about the crawlspace, and when one's as good as another, it's time to fuck off and just find another way of dealing with it since there's very little chance that it's going to be over the deductible in the first place. I also know that I slipped the whole 'I'm getting married.' in kind of under the radar, like some kind of shitty test to see if you're paying attention. There's so much ridiculous shit going around at the moment that something simultaneously good and fun a year away seems akin to fiction and, even if it's on the level, is probably happening either to or for somebody else. 

Like I said before, I'm not sure on the details, so I guess you're likely to know whenever we do for sure if you're the type of person to whom these details are or become relevant and generally speaking, you know who you are. 



* http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=gibson-interview-cities-in-fact-and-fiction

I've been spending a lot of time reading on a decrepit red couch in a dusty room situated in an apartment complex which can best be described as a series of rickety, identical boxes with some of the most technologically complicated marvels ever created by humans.

Incidentally, what I've been reading are cyberpunk novels.

If there's a weak link in Gibson's newer Blue Ant trilogy, then Zero History ain't it. It's a lot snappier then Spook Country, and ties in more smoothly to Pattern Recognition then Spook did. Gibson's a much more sophisticated writer now then he was over twenty years ago, and it's hard not to take that into account, so instead I'll just mention John Clute's note that Gibson has more or less stopped writing something that can be called traditional science fiction because traditional science fiction is no longer possible "in a world lacking coherent 'nows' to continue from..."*

I think it's probably stretching it to say that it's impossible. It's definitely more difficult.

Sci-fi, in any environment, is a reference to a future, though. That's different then cyberpunk which is more of a movement then it ever was a genre. And when you've got Stephenson writing something like Snow Crash in 1993, where he's pretty much lampooning the movement (at the same time he tells a pretty compelling story), well, I feel like the writing was already on the wall.** It's hard to write with the tropes we're familiar with being attached to cyberpunk in the modern age, because we've currently subsumed those very same tropes into our daily life.

We're a smart phone grafted to our skull away, and really, we've already got bluetooth, so fuck it. We generally don't like those guys anyhow, so I guess the question isn't 'how' but 'how much do we want it'? Followed shortly by 'and how much are you willing to pay?'

This cyberpunk shit is pretty much not what we envision it being anyhow. Seriously, it's not. We think chrome and mirrorshades and I guess whatever Lady Deathstrike crap the Molly Millions crammed into her fingernails, but on reading up, a lot of it was just sci-fi in a near future environment populated by people with poor personal skills. So, actually, the critical part of cyberpunk is probably the -punk suffix; something that we haven't been able to culturally nail since we sold it to Hot Topic for mass distribution, followed by sound mocking.

*^ Clute, John. "The Case of the World". Excessive Candour. SciFi.com. Archived from the original on October 30, 2007. http://web.archive.org/web/20071030090441/http://www.scifi.com/sfw/issue305/excess.html. Retrieved 2007-10-14. Shameless stolen from Wikipedia.

** This is honestly a little disingenuous, because the lampooning seems to be rooted in how seriously some of the cyberpunk movement took the grimdark of their prospective 80's settings at a time when we were coming into the Clinton 90's. As a younger guy, I remember reading a Wired article speculating how the tech bubble might never burst, so how's that for your ridiculous optimism?