A young man in a small town in Patagonia or in Kansas reads an ancient Chinese poet in a book he borrowed from the library and falls in love with a poem, which he reads to himself over and over again as the summer night is falling. With each reading he brings the voice of the dead poet to life. For one unforgettable moment, he steps out of his own cramped self and enters the lives of unknown men and women, seeing the world through their eyes, feeling what they once felt and thinking what they once thought. If poetry is not the most utopian project ever devised by human beings, I don’t know what is.
There is of course a written literature that predates and underlies all these movies, which could hardly have found their form without the help of H.P. Lovecraft and Arthur C. Clarke and Philip K. Dick (not to mention the foundational assistance of H.G. Wells and Olaf Stapledon). There is even an epic poem, Harry Martinson’s Aniara, an absurdist vision of life aboard a rocket ship permanently lost in space, that in 1958 was turned into a twelve-tone opera by Karl-Birger Blomdahl. But it is in the form of movies that this mythology becomes part of the furniture of our world, to which we turn as one might to a prayer rug or a Ouija board, in an effort to make contact with the unknowable. It’s where the Romantic Sublime went to die.
Publishing books is itself a strange experience. Your relationship with a book in progress is intensely intimate while you’re writing it–it’s always on your mind. But once it goes to the publisher, you pretty much lose control of the whole process. Sometimes people make the analogy to being a parent–the book grows up, it graduates, and out into the world it goes. But your kids don’t have your name on their spine, and books aren’t autonomous actors.It may be that the book seems odd to the author because the usual process of commodity fetishism doesn’t work. Neighbors see the book sitting conspicuously near the front door, where I’ve casually left it, and are impressed; it just appeared! I buy commodities like that all the time: they appear in the store, they look cool, I buy them. But I can’t do that with the my book–I can’t square the object with the years of labor required to produce it.
Dan Cohen suggested that back when you typed your manuscript, or had someone type it, you ended up with a big pile of paper, a sort of primitive, missing-link relative of the book itself. The stack of paper was related to the book like a vestigial limb on a whale. A printed book was a vast improvement over a pile of numbered pages: you couldn’t lose it or have it blow away or fall to the foor and get out of order. The progression that went “idea — pile of pages — book” made sense. But a modern book might never leave your computer screen before it shows up in print. The transition is jarring.
The physical book – The Aporetic. Well, first of all, congratulations to Mike! And second, I resonate with some but not all of this. For me the really strange thing about writing and publishing a book is that I’ve never gotten the feeling of closure, of completion, that I always expected I would get and somehow still expect to get, even though I ought to know better now.
When are you “done” with a book? You feel done-in-a-way when you complete the first full draft, then done-in-another-way when you send it to the publisher. But that’s when a lot of important stuff is just getting started. You get editorial suggestions that you respond to, usually by making revisions; then you get a copy-edited version that you have to go over, making further changes; then you get a designed and typeset version that looks pretty much like what the final version will look like, to which you are allowed to make only very minor changes, like correcting spelling errors that got missed in earlier pass-throughs. Around this time you might get a bound galley, the version that’s going out to reviewers. Finally, the book itself arrives in the mail. And you’re done! Finally, it’s done!
Well, sort of. If you’ve written more than one book, you know that there will still be errors: factual mistakes, grammatical infelicities, and the like — but also perhaps judgments you wish you hadn’t made and would like the chance to revisit. Some writers read their books as soon as they arrive, but I’m not one of them: it takes me about five years before I can bear to look at a book I’ve written, in part because I ready to think about other things, but in part because I don’t want to face all the things that I wish I could fix.
When I finally do have to face those errors and poor judgments, I can’t help thinking of a second, revised edition somewhere down the line — even when I know that that’s highly unlikely or simply impossible. I turn over in my mind the possibilities, the changes I would certainly make, the ones I might or might not make. The book’s still a living, developing thing in my mind. As a character in one of my favorite novels, Anita Desai’s Clear Light of Day, says, “Nothing’s over. Ever.”
A scholar’s business is to add to what is known. That is all. But it is capable of giving the very greatest satisfaction, because knowledge is good. It does not have to look good or even sound good or even do good. It is good just by being knowledge. And the only thing that makes it knowledge is that it is true. You can’t have too much of it and there is no little too little to be worth having.
Amid the tiny din of two-hundred micturating rodents, Ralph X. Bumblefutz goggled in disbelief at a discovery that would forever lay waste to the West’s most cherished ideas about incontinence. It was a clear Autumn morning in 1974, in a cluttered basement laboratory occupying a disused corner of the Cornell University School of Hotel Administration, and pants would never be the same. But before we can come to terms with Bumblefutz and his paradigm-exploding diapered hamsters, we must travel in time to 14th-century Tuscany and confront the mystery of a beloved Dominican friar hanged to death for frock-soiling. …O God! What hath Gladwell wrought?! Plenty of “ideas non-fiction” editors think this hype is what readers want. And maybe they do want this. Maybe editors know readers. But not this one. No, not me. I swear to sweet Moses I’m sick unto death of the anecdote-choked, aha!-hunting ,“What the New Science of Blah Tells Us about Blech,” book-length collection of pop-sci features articles.
A well-off, very successful, and very well-known science fiction novelist raising $500,000 to build a video game engine seems very far from the high-flying promises of the crowdfunding world. After all, [Neal] Stephenson could easily pay for this out of pocket or get a bank to loan him the money. He’s the reverse of someone who needs access to the democratic power of social finance. And yet realistically, it’s almost the ideal crowfunding pitch. Who better to raise funds on this basis than someone who’s already famous? It just so happens that “famous” and “already has a lot of money” are often pretty closely correlated.
excellence-proofed
The fact that I didn't think I heard a single interesting bar of music from the forty or so acts I caught or overheard at Creation shouldn't be read as a knock on the acts themselves, much less as contempt for the underlying notion of Christians playing rock. These were not Christian bands, you see; these were Christian rock bands. The key to digging this scene lies in that one syllable distinction. Christian rock is a genre that exists to edify and make money off of evangelical Christians. It's message music for listeners who know the message cold, and, what's more, it operates under a perceived responsibility — one the artists embrace — to "reach people." As such, it rewards both obviousness and maximum palatability (the artists would say clarity), which in turn means parasitism…. Every successful crappy secular group has its Christian offbrand, and that's proper, because culturally speaking, it's supposed to serve as a standin for, not an alternative to or an improvement on, those very groups. In this it succeeds wonderfully. If you think it profoundly sucks, that's because your priorities are not its priorities; you want to hear something cool and new, it needs to play something proven to please … while praising Jesus Christ. That's Christian rock. A Christian band, on the other hand, is just a band that has more than one Christian in it.… And here, if I can drop the openminded pretense real quick, is where the stickier problem of actually being any good comes in, because a question that must be asked is whether a hardcore Christian who turns 19 and finds he or she can write first rate songs (someone like Damien Jurado) would ever have anything whatsoever to do with Christian rock. Talent tends to come hand in hand with a certain base level of subtlety. And believe it or not, the Christian rock establishment sometimes expresses a kind of resigned approval of the way groups like U2 or Switchfoot (who played Creation while I was there and had a monster secular radio hit at the time with “Meant to Live” but whose management wouldn't allow them to be photographed onstage) take quiet pains to distance themselves from any unambiguous Jesus loving, recognizing that this is the surest way to connect with the world (you know that's how they refer to us, right We're “of the world”). So it's possible — and indeed seems likely — that Christian rock is a musical genre, the only one I can think of, that has excellence-proofed itself.
John Jeremiah Sullivan, “Upon This Rock,” GQ 2004. This is a pretty famous essay, and rightly so. A good many Christians know of it, and know what he means in this passage I’ve quoted about excellence-proofing, but I’m just not sure it’s possible for us to meditate too much on what Sullivan says here. In the last few days I’ve found myself in dialogue with some people who are trying to think in serious ways about what it might mean to engage as faithful Jews with a digital world. I wrote about my encounters in two pieces for the Technology channel of The Atlantic, here and here. The approaches are rather different, and while I think that there could be some fruitful collaboration among these people, I don’t know that it’s going to happen; but in any case, what struck me about both approaches is how grounded they are in distinctive practices of the Jewish faith. One might be on the Orthodox end of the spectrum, and the other closer to the Reformed end, but all the people involved seem to be thinking as Jews. This is something that I often find to be missing from the technological practices of my fellow Christians. I’m sure there must be innovative stuff out there, truly and deeply grounded in distinctive Christian practices, but it’s hard for me to find. In many ways no point could be more familiar: Church buildings look just like ordinary civic auditoriums — indeed they are auditoriums; Christian books are designed to look like whatever books happen to be popular at the time, and follow the same titling practices; Christians dress like whomever they want to imitate socially; and so on. Christian colleges, like the one I teach at, have a curricular structure that exactly replicates that of secular institutions, just with slightly varying proportions of requirements. We all know how this works, and we know that there are — or at least can be — good reasons for it. But this way of doing business has become our default, and that’s not healthy. And it’s especially discouraging to me when I see people who know the emerging tech world well, and have good education and some technical skills, and (most important) have the opportunity to innovate, instead choosing the same imitative patterns that lead, inevitably, to excellence-proofing themselves. Take, as just one example, the series of videos produced by the smart and committed people at Q: They’re imitation TED talks. Pure and simple, nothing but. Same staging, same camera angles, same length. They seem to be designed to make stray viewers think that they are watching TED talks.
Can’t we do better than this? Can’t we back up a step or two, and instead of asking “What currently cool technologies can we copy?” ask “What are our core convictions and core practices, and what existing technologies best support them?” And maybe even ask this more challenging question: “What if the existing technologies don’t serve our needs very well? How can we acquire the imagination, the technical chops, and the sheer courage to roll our own instead of choosing from a pre-existing menu of options?” It’s better — far better — to risk abject failure than to choose a safely imitative course that makes excellence impossible by design.