On Art and Politics and Silencing

Recent events have made me think about  the efforts of some to silence others within our community.  I’ve been trying to organize my thoughts.  Here’s what I’ve arrived at.

There is, within any social group, pressure to conform, at least in certain ways; that’s just the nature of the beast. If that social group is intensely political, that will include pressure to conform to the dominant political slant. In my milieu–the world of science fiction and fantasy literature–there is constant pressure to conform to identity politics and social justice activism–so much so, that I have often been silent about my own opinions, for fear of outraging or hurting friends and even family.

And you know something? So what. The pressure is there, my response is my own decision, and none of this pressure (in my case!) has been applied maliciously, or in an underhanded way, or with any sort of deliberate effort to shut me up. There is absolutely nothing wrong with people who believe in something fighting for what they believe in, and that fight will generate pressure to agree. If it doesn’t, you’re doing it wrong. I might–and do–disagree with much of what my friends, family, and loved ones support, but I in no way question their right to fight for it. So, yeah, I have sometimes chosen to remain silent; I have not been silenced.

Other people have. When death threats, bullying, doxxing, and career threats are used in an effort to either force someone to agree or to shut that person up, that is way, way out of line. At that point, you have lost the moral high ground.

I feel like I have to establish that I am not against silencing at all times under all circumstances.  For example, when the Murdoch-owned New York Daily News was spreading slanders and lies about the NYC bus drivers, the News was quite properly protected by the First Ammendment. And if the bus drivers had gone down to those offices en mass and shut that paper down, I’d have cheered.  I’m not a free speech absolutist; the interests of the working class take precedence over the rights of the bourgeoisie. (Yes, there are issues of when such actions can be turned against us; but that is a tactical question, and here I’m discussing the moral issue.)

But we are not talking, now, about a case where the vital interests of the working class are threatened by lies and distortions; we’re talking about a community built around the written word, in which our goal is–should be–the creation of moving and powerful stories. Everything the artist says, thinks, does, hears, goes into the image-constructed emotion-based cognition of life that we call “art.”   Art can no more be separated from politics than can anything else that human beings do socially. But art cannot thrive in an environment where the free exchange of ideas is suppressed.  The activity of battling against each other and the activity of working together can and should blend creatively in our effort to understand and improve both our craft and our goals–and above all, the understanding of our world that is at the heart of any story.

One would have to be incredibly naive to think that my conflicts with social justice activists do not–in complex, obscure, distorted, often contradictory ways–have an effect on the tales I tell. And that effect is a feature, not a bug. We are having conversations, both between stories and between writers, and these conversations inform the work we produce. And, obviously, this applies to criticism, whether public comments by a reviewer, or private remarks by a colleague, because just as art strives to reveal what is hidden in the world, criticism strives to reveal what is hidden in a work of art.  It’s all part of the exchange.  Any attempt to control or suppress this exchange by bullying, by intimidation, by shaming, by threats, hurts us all.

 

Amazon’s Latest Crap

A good summary of Amazon’s most recent bullshit can be found here.  It’s a good enough summary.  I just want to make a couple of points.

A book–a novel–both is and isn’t a commodity.  It is in the sense that, given a stack of the same book, it matters not at all, to anyone, which one the reader buys, and it is produced for exchange.  It isn’t a commodity in the sense that it is subject to all of the strange combinations of changing tastes and fads and social dynamics of the moment as a film or a sculpture or a record or a painting, all mediated through the author’s skill, taste, and perception.  A publisher, therefore, is caught in an interesting bind.  In order to make a profit and continue publishing books, the book must be treated as a commodity–as a mass produced item that fulfills a human want and that has an exchange value.  In order to get a good product, the book must be treated in some measure as a work of art–authors are idiosyncratic, and a good publisher will fill certain positions with people who are skilled in getting the best work out of these strange beasts (having editors and production people who actively love the sorts of books being produced is kind of cheating, but it seems to work).

Here’s the thing: As consumers, we know that businesses exist to get us to cough up cash and don’t give a shit about us as people; that’s the nature of the beast.  But we don’t like to have our faces rubbed in it.  We would like the guy at the store or on the other end of the customer support line to least pretend he cares about us.  In the same way, as writers, we don’t like having our faces rubbed in the fact that, to make a living, we have to produce a commodity.  We (okay, I, but I’m not the only one) care deeply about the stories we tell, and believe that we can tell stories that will move and delight, and thrill and even sometimes enlighten our readers, and that this is, above all, why we do what we do.  We don’t like to be reminded that we’re just a piece of a massive money-making machine, and that while we and our agents negotiate furiously for how much of the pie we are going to get, above us are massive corporations that are arguing even more furiously, and nastily, and about how much of the pie they are going to get.

This is not, in my opinion, a moral issue.  Amazon is doing what it does because it is a corporation and only cares about the bottom line, like any corporation.  There are no heroes in this.  But it is very much a practical issue.  If Amazon succeeds, many writers who are, at present, making a living as writers, will have to augment their living doing other things, and this will mean they will write less, and I will have less good stuff to read.  It is also a personal issue; many of the people being fucked over, or in danger of being fucked over, are friends of mine.

I’ve stopped buying books from Amazon; I think this will make exactly no difference.  I have no confidence in consumer pressure against an organization the size of Amazon (I have even less confidence in the US Government’s anti-trust investigators).  So, no, I do not see a solution.  I hope I’m wrong, but it looks like Amazon can pretty much do whatever it wants, and readers and writers are simply going to have to deal with it.  Like I said, I hope I’m wrong.

 

Slings & Arrows: SPOILERS!

The Canadian TV show, “Slings & Arrows” is so good I almost can’t stand it.  Three seasons, six episodes per season, and it is a gem.  The writing, the acting, everything.  There are many things worth talking about with the show, but my main focus, of course, is on the writing.  I may return to this show in the future as I consider more of the techniques they use, but for this post, I’m just going to look at one particular thing Jen and I were discussing today.  Very much spoilers, in case you didn’t notice the title of the post.

There is a delicious moment in the third season where Geoffrey, finally willing to see a therapist, sits down with Oscar’s ghost and has a conversation with him.  The therapist wants him to pretend that Oscar is really there (obviously, he is) and they have that talk they’ve needed to have all along.  It is heart-rending and hysterically funny, with the therapist making comments like, “You’re really good at this.”  In a sense, it is the payoff we didn’t know we were waiting for since the Geoffrey-Oscar issues were introduced in season 1.

Note that: the payoff we didn’t know we were waiting for.

But then, in the last episode, something happens that makes me want to bow down before the writers as nothing on TV has since “Rome” pulled off the, “You too, mother?” thing.  The payoff referred to above, which is complete, and elegant, and fulfilling by itself–turns out to be a set-up for the epilogue.  Suppose I told you, “Then, at the end, one of the characters sits there talking to an empty chair and fills the viewer in on all of the ‘here’s what happens to the characters after the show’ stuff.  Lame.  Stupid.  Artificial.  Forced.  Except, because of the set-up with the previous conversation, it is closure in several ways at once; it is breathtaking.

In other words, the writers manage to use a payoff as a set-up for the next payoff, which turns a cheap trick into an elegant device, all without the viewer realizing what is happening.  It is a tour de force.  I don’t know what I can learn from this beyond, “Some writers are really, really good,” but I know I’m going to be keeping an eye out for a way to pull that one off.

Payback’s a Bitch, Isn’t it, Scott?

Gentleman Bastards

Tune: My Little Pony

My Little Bastards, Gentlemen Bastards
What will today’s big caper be?
My Little Bastards, Gentleman Bastards
Let’s loot a pirate ship on the sea!
What are you stealing?  Is it appealing?
Will Father Chains make you share?
My Little Bastards, Gentlemen Bastards
Hey look! That’s Sabatha there.
Let’s all go back to the lair.

By Jennifer Melchert and me, inspired by @zarhooie and the god Nemesis

Who Do You Write For, and The Effect of Good Criticism

One of the fun things to consider about writing is: who are you writing for?  My stock answer is that I’m writing to entertain an imaginary reader out there who just happens to like everything I do.  In fact, it is a bit more complex than that.  Sometimes people who are important to me get passages.  “I’m going to put this in there for Jen,” or, “Pamela will like this,” or, “This will make Will chuckle,” or, “Okay, Adam, here’s one for you,” or, “I wish I could see Emma’s face when she gets to this bit.”  Obviously, this is even more fun when collaborating: writing to delight your collaborator is a big part of what drives you.

That’s one of the things that makes writing fun and enjoyable.  And I make no apologies, because if Adam, for example, is going to be pleased when I make fun of elaborate, stupid dream sequences, well, I’m pretty sure some other readers will also be tickled.  And tickling the reader is good in at least two ways:  One, I like to make readers happy.  Two, a good tickle tends to disarm the reader, thus setting him up for a good, hard, kick in the ‘nads.

I now abruptly change subjects.

I adore good criticism.  By good criticism, I mean a piece of writing that makes me go, “Oh, man.  I hadn’t noticed that.  Cool!”  The platonic ideal of a critic for me has always been the late and very much lamented John Ciardi.  Of those working currently, one of my favorites is David Walsh of the World Socialist Web Site (he’s just written this, which I highly recommend).  Now, unfortunately, Walsh doesn’t often review Hollywood movies, which means he rarely discusses anything I’ve seen.   But, in the first place, his insights can be delightful even if I’m not familiar with the work, and, in the second, that makes it all the more fun when he covers something I have seen.  A good critic makes you think about how the creator achieved the effect, about subtleties that are obvious now that they’ve been pointed out, and about how this work fits into a broader context both within the genre and within the society that produced it.  This is stuff that I happen to enjoy, and is obviously useful, at a minimum in the sense of making you go, “Oh, hey, I know what I could do!”

And now we tie the two sections of this post together.

I’ve been reading Jo Walton’s essay collection, What Makes This Book So Great.  It is delightful on several levels, not the least of which is that I come in for a lot of ego stroking.  To semi-quote Twain, we like compliments. All of us do: writers, burglars, congressmen, all of us in the trade.  But with Jo’s book, I’ve noticed something else.  She keeps nailing me on things I did right, then backed away from.  I still remember writing my first book, Jarhead or whatever it was called, and thinking, “Why the hell can’t people write books with ongoing, happy romantic relationships where that is just part of the backdrop?  Fuck it, I’m going to do that.”  Then I didn’t hang with it, and Jo called me on that.  Or when I wanted to add a bit of revealing background by talking about how there weren’t carriages any more, now that teleportation was so common.  Then I slipped away from that, because I wanted a carriage in a particular story, and she noticed that (I’m working on a retcon for that one).  Critics who notice what you’re doing, like what you’re doing, and can point out things about your work that you didn’t notice, are incredibly valuable.

It just hit me today, as I was looking over the final draft of Hawk and considering the early chapters of Vallista, that at the moment I’m kind of writing for Jo Walton.  I can live with that.