On Fantasy (the genre)

Today I started reading Furies of Calderon, a novel that starts a fantasy series that I've been assured by people whom I trust to be very good. Forty pages in, there's already been considerable action and some interesting seeming characters...but I really don't give a shit yet. I'm going to push through and see if things change, but I think I'm starting to figure out what it is about traditional fantasy (and the space fantasy sub-genre of sci-fi) that has made it so hard for me to get into it for the last several years: I don't have the patience for the window dressing.

In order to effectively engage their audience, any author needs to suck their readers into the world of their story. With fantasy, that's an even more ambitious task because the world often looks so little like our own. The author needs to help the reader understand not just the social and physical environment in which the characters reside, but the social and physical properties of the world. This makes fantasy a very visual genre. Often times, we are introduced to the realities of this world through elaborate set pieces or plot sequences designed to illustrate way things work. Since I'm not a visual thinker, I'm easily distracted by overly visual descriptions. They get me working to create an image as opposed to comprehending the idea.

Best case, for me, is that the author quickly establishes these things as mundane and moves beyond the overly ornate descriptions. Worst case is that the window dressing becomes not just a fact of the universe but a major part of the plot; the author remains enamored of his or her imagery and the novel trades proper character and plot development in favor of a series of ever escalating set pieces - like a bad action movie in text form.

Now, urban fantasy (and many genres of sci-fi) manage to get away with things for me because they exist on top of our world. Instead of establishing whole new realities, they propose an altered version of ours. This frees up their ability to focus on what is unique and lets me, as a reader, establish a means of contrasting this world with mine instead of needing to construct it from the ground up. The other way that urban fantasy (though not most sci-fi) tends to be able to effectively introduce its world is by having the reader learn about it along with the protagonist. This is a device that is utilized effectively by most of Neil Gaiman's urban fantasy as well as by Harry Potter (which, I believe, would also be considered urban or modern fantasy).

Maybe, if I stick it out, Furies of Calderon and further books in the series will show me the light. Maybe they will reignite a love for traditional fantasy in me and help me find the patience to give some other books a chance. I'm a bit worried about the overly-capable young female rogue type character and the underdog young boy who will rise to great importance; but I've read enough of the Dresden Files to know that Jim Butcher is a capable author who is willing to toy with cliches enough to keep them interesting. I'll make sure to report back when I'm done.

Re-examining Harry Potter

A bit under two years ago, shortly after the release of the seventh and final Harry Potter book, I blitzed through the entire series. I ready all seven books in under three weeks, while moving, and with multiple day waiting periods between the fifth and sixth and sixth and seventh books. At the ripe old age of 20, I was able to appreciate what I hadn't been able to when I first tried to read the series as a Tolkien obsessed 12-year-old; and I got thoroughly sucked into J.K. Rowling's world. This over-exposure hit me hard. I briefly fell in love with one of the fictional characters. I spent a couple of days when I finished being about as depressed as I've ever been over the fact that I didn't live in that world. After the dust had settled, I started to wonder what had captivated me so strongly, and I vowed that I would re-read the series more slowly, and out of order, to try and figure things out.

Last summer, I went back and re-read Prisoner of Azkaban (the third book) and Half Blood Prince (the sixth book), which had been my favorites after an initial reading. I read them more slowly and deliberately. I am currently re-reading Goblet of Fire (the fourth book, which is a favorite for many readers), and I think I can say a few things with certainty.

First, the reason these books are successful is simple. Very few people have been exposed to well-imagined fantasy worlds that remain accessible to the average reader. I've been put off by lots of traditional fantasy in recent years simply because immersion into the world is too hard to achieve. This is either because it feels like it hasn't been fleshed out (everything outside the scope of the book is uncharted and essentially non-existent) or because it is too far apart from reality as I know it. Rowling has handily avoided both of these pit-falls. The vast majority of the time, I feel as though there is a world out there much larger than the one that Harry's adventures take place in, and the fact that we're discovering the very existence and intricacies of this world along with Harry helps.

Second, and less positive, the books are a far cry from perfect, even for young adult literature. I don't feel like I noticed it as much with PoA or HBP, but re-reading GoF, I feel like Rowling spends a lot of time at the beginning of the novel trying to reintroduce certain elements of the world she's created or past plot points. Virtually all of these moments feel forced, largely because they involve a lot of telling. Having the narration switch tone and move away from the current action is distracting, and I think that Rowling could have avoided this easily.

One way would be through better use of dialog. For instance, in an early chapter of GoF, we are introduced to the characters of Bill and Charlie Weasley for the first time. This is also the first time that Harry has met the characters. Everybody is preparing to go to the Quiditch World Cup, and the characters are talking excitedly about the sport. Suddenly, narration shifts location and we hear about Harry's exploits as the seeker for the Griffyndor house team over the past three years. This easily could have come in the form of dialog from Bill and Charlie, whom, having just met Harry for the first time, would have good cause to try and use the subject to try and strike up conversation. I mean, consider the following dialog, template

Bill: "I hear you're quite the Quiditch star yourself, Harry."
Charlie: "Made seeker on the house team as a first year, didn't you?"

It gets the point across without feeling forced or breaking the action, and would even open up room for some banter to help us get to know these characters better faster. We could easily have covered things like what happened with Sirius the year prior or Harry's dislike for Divination class through conversation instead of narration.

Another way to avoid this obtrusive telling would be to simply have more respect for your audience. Yeah, relevant plot points from the last book may need to be brought up, but some mundane aspects of the wizarding world don't need to be explained again. We don't need to remind people how awesome Harry's Firebolt broom is, for example. Nor do we need to be reminded which ghosts are associated with which houses or that Harry received his broom maintenance kit from Hermione the year before. These aren't important to the plot. They are trivia, and trying to put all of your readers on equal footing in terms of trivial knowledge is a waste of time. Also, people like to remember or figure these sorts of things out on their own. It adds an "aha" or an "oh, yeah" moment that makes us feel intelligent.

Neil Gaiman plug! The thing that most impressed me about the (Newbury Award winning) young adult novel Graveyard Book was the level of respect that Gaiman showed his young readers. This is exemplified best by the fact that we are never explicitly told within the confines of the text that Silas is a vampire. We are shown this fact in numerous ways, but we are never clubbed with it. We are free to realize it at our own speed. If you're completely unfamiliar with vampire lore or oblivious to the language used to describe his existence between life and death, then you could go the whole book without realizing this fact, and it wouldn't detract from your ability to appreciate the story at all. This is the perfect example of the kind of respect that Rowling, in her desire to include everybody, sometimes lacks.

As the book goes on, though, and as the main plot and the new material pick up, these moments become rarer, and I find myself more continually enraptured in the world of Hogwarts. It's been a delightful place to visit again, and I fully intend to buy the whole set for myself in the not-too-distant future. I only hope that re-experiencing Deathly Hallows this Fall won't be as painful as I'm afraid it will be. The more I think about that book, and in particular its ending, the more I'm certain I don't like it nearly as much as the rest. I'll make sure to let you all know.

Ripped from today's headlines!

So, those of you who follow the news know that one of the recurring fluff stories right now involves a Philadelphia day care and a local country club swimming pool. The short version is this:
Due to the closings of a number of city pools, the day care center contracted with said country club to use their pool once a week.
At the first visit, some of the members of the country club made derogatory remarks about the kids, many of which were racial in nature.
Shortly thereafter, the country club cancelled the contract and returned the full check to the day care center.

The slant that the day care center and liberal activists are taking is that this turnabout on the contract was racially motivated. After all, if a handful of the members of this club are bigoted, then obviously the entire organization must be.

The story according to the country club is that participation was unexpectedly high and they couldn't legally support having that many people using the pool. They cancelled similar contracts with other, predominantly white day care centers, too.

I don't really care at the moment which side is right. What I care about is that the obvious slant from the media is that the day care center is. The day care center is insisting that the entire board of the country club resign and that members who are identified as having made racist comments be expelled from the organization. What gives them this authority? Nothing, at least not until actual wrongdoing is proven. Until then, this is blackmail, plain and simple, and it's disgusting; and yet, it's not going to be seen as that in the press. It's going to be seen as a justified crusade against the ghosts of systemic racism.

I hate that, as soon as racism or homosexuality enters the picture, innocent until proven guilty flies out the window. Any time these issues arises, we start confusing correlation with causation; and not just in the lack of evidence, but often times (such as in this case) in the face of evidence to the contrary. I understand why we do it. We want to make sure that the system can't be abused to protect bigots. To borrow a phrase from the Green Lantern Corps, we want to ensure that no evil escapes our sight. I'm not sure that we go about it the right way, though, when we give our entire sympathy to the "defendant", particularly when they abuse their supposed weakness in this fashion.

More Religious/Catholic talk!

I really don't get why so many religious people are so violently opposed to anything dealing with postmodernism. We actively talk about faith as being transformative, and I can't think of anything more postmodern than that - belief impacting behavior and perception. The basic idea is that, if you really truly believe that Jesus of Nazareth was and is the eternal Son of God who came to live among us, then you're going to live your life differently. You're going to try to follow His example and His teachings more closely. You're going to have a new appreciation for the handiwork of creation in light of the revelation of God's love. The reality you live in will, in a real way, be altered from the reality you understood before believing.

Thinking about this finally helped me to understand the Catholic sacraments. The common definition of a sacrament is "An outward sign, initiated by Christ on Earth, to give us grace". The definition as I tend to remember (and prefer) it is "An outward sign of God's grace, initiated by Christ on Earth". The difference here is that the grace, in my definition, is pre-existing. It is something that the sacrament is a reminder of and not something conferred by participation in it.

Here's where I'm going with this. If I receive the Eucharist, and I firmly and truly believe that it is, metaphysically, the body and blood of Christ, who sacrificed himself that I may live more fully...then I'm going to respond to that presence. I am going to honor that sacrifice in my living. I am going to strive to be a better person. That's not to say that I couldn't do those things without having received the Eucharist, but participation in the sacrament, if I believe in it, heightens my sense of duty and my awareness of the abundant grace I have already been blessed with, grace I may not otherwise be aware of.

I've seen this in people. I had teachers throughout my Catholic education who tried to make it to Mass every morning, and you could tell when they hadn't. They were grumpier, they were less patient, they didn't teach as well. Daily Eucharist was a ritual by which they connected to God and their duty in the classroom as Christian educators, and without it, they were lost. For other people, myself included, Eucharist doesn't have nearly this big an impact...but that's because we don't believe in it, or at least not to the same extent.

Some people would look at what I'm saying and construe it as another way of saying "oh, religion is for the weak, the people who don't have the will to lead the lives they know they should without it". Maybe that's a valid interpretation. Maybe it's all a bunch of psychosematic crap we would be better off without. I disagree, though. I think that any way we have of pushing and encouraging ourselves to be better is of value; and I happen to believe very strongly that Jesus was right in His teachings of what it means to be better.

That is all.

WALL-E Revisited

I love WALL-E. It may be my favorite Pixar film. Whenever I say that, though, people give me kind of a look. "Seriously?" they say. Most people agree that the first half hour or so, up to the point where WALL-E and EVE are on the ship, is spectacular, but lots of people tend to get hung up on the "environmentalist agenda" of latter half of the film. To these people I say, please don't turn setting into subtext.

WALL-E is not a movie about condemnation. It's not a movie about our responsibility to the planet. It's a celebration of remembering what it is to be human. The humans in space don't want to re-cultivate the earth because of any sense that they've done wrong. They want to do it because there's something about growing things, about dancing, about falling in love that innately appeals to us as human beings. WALL-E and EVE, in their initial discovery and pursuit of these joys, serve as a catalyst for the human beings in their rediscovery of them.

I think that what get's people hung up is the extreme way the humans are portrayed in the film. Maybe I get it because it's a rhetorical strategy that I like so much, but that's just a variation on captatio benevolentiae. It's a straw man built with a wink and a nod, a caricature actively recognized as such so that we can feel better about ourselves and our more legitimate situation. After all, if these poor oafs can get back to basics, what's to stop us?

Sure, responding to those fundamentally human callings towards creativity and relationship may require us to reject consumer culture, to an extent at least, but they don't make any insistence about that point, so what's the a problem? Beats me.

Dynamic Link Submission

Web 2.0 and the Rise of Passive Relationships

While the Web may have started its life as a collection of largely isolated repositories of knowledge, it has evolved into something entirely more human as the Web 2.0 revolution has taken off. Whereas once the masses were largely relegated to being mere consumers of online content, we are now invited to contribute, categorize, critique, share, and support it. The response to this democratizing power has been overwhelming. More and more, we are witnessing the vast subculture of the Web permeate popular culture. More and more, we are trusting the expertise of the many when seeking knowledge or entertainment. More and more, we are becoming comfortable living transparently as we broadcast our lives and our thoughts to the world.

It's well known that identity is a complicated issue in the online world. Long before the introduction of the World Wide Web, way back when Usenet was shiny and new, science fiction authors and scholars alike were already probing into the implications anonymity could have on our perception of others online. In his seminal 1985 novel Ender's Game, Orson Scott Card included a major subplot in which mere children manipulate the entire geopolitical dialogue by contributing to what is essentially a global bulletin board system. The only things they needed to earn legitimacy in this impersonal, asynchronous environment were their own brilliance and the assumed names of Locke and Demosthenes. As it so often does, what began as conjecture has become commonplace in reality. For reasons both noble and vile, many people take advantage of the potential for anonymity online in order to create identities for themselves that wouldn’t be possible in the real world. Over the years, as the Internet has grown in significance and as people increasingly turn towards it for communication, we have not only adapted to this conundrum, but we have learned from it. Interactions with our peers online can teach us much about the nature of our neighbor. They can help us realize that wisdom is wisdom regardless of its source. They can help us accept that bad behavior isn’t necessarily perpetrated by bad people.

An issue that I haven't seen being discussed nearly so thoroughly is the impact of the Internet on our relationships. At its core, the Internet is a platform for the development of new communication technologies; and while, historically, advances in telecommunications have aimed to make it easier for us to reach out to specific individuals or groups at increasing distances, the ever growing suite of Web 2.0 technologies is different in nature. When we engage in the culture of Web 2.0, whether it's through blogging, social networking, participating in an online community, or whatever else, our communication is no longer targeted. We no longer control with whom we are communicating or who is viewing our communications. Instead of being members of an intentional dialog, we become part of some sort of incomprehensible, existential play. The basic structure of this production involves millions of individuals acting as both audience and cast. We jump between hundreds of thousands of stages, concurrently participating in numerous smaller dramas; observing as many more as we are willing or able to; and directing one another's attention to particularly riveting performances along the way.

The voluntary, asynchronous, and broadcast natures of social interaction on the Web allow for us to develop attachments radically different from those that regular, personal encounters nurture. Of chief interest to me is the increasing prevalence of what I have begun to refer to as passive relationships. By this, I mean relationships that are sustained without direct contact between the parties involved. These sorts of relationships have a number of interesting characteristics. They are low maintenance, they are directional, and they have limited impact on our daily lives. These are the sorts of relationships that we used to develop with celebrities or even fictional characters, but as ordinary people continue to increase their online presence, it is becoming more and more common for our ordinary relationships to become passive.

As I see it, this is cause for concern, as passive relationships like these encourage us to substitute information in place of intimacy. Moreover, from this information, we can't help but make judgments and assumptions. We take the information available to us and then continue to fill in the blanks of the other person's character on our own without the clarifying context that personal experience brings. The result is that, ironically enough, this overload of personal information has the potential to obscure our understanding of our neighbors' identities more than anonymity ever could. The real danger in online interaction no longer lies in failing to properly recognize Locke and Demosthenes for who they are. Instead, it lies in determining which of our classmates are worth getting to know by a simple “about me” section on Facebook. It lies in keeping track of our friends by following their Twitter feeds or Flickr accounts instead of keeping in touch with them through email and phone calls and going out for coffee. It lies in inundating ourselves with weak ties to the point that we are no longer able to strengthen any of them. It lies in re-imagining our neighbor in our image and faltering in our ability to grow in love for them.

I have no doubt that we will learn important lessons from this dilemma just as we learned from dealing with the complexities of anonymity, but we need to begin talking about it first. Web 2.0 services have proven time and time again that they have great power. From reconnecting childhood friends to helping creative individuals get the chance they so richly deserve to make a career from their talents; from exposing corruption to galvanizing the grass roots, the seemingly personal nature of these systems makes them valuable beyond measure. Yet, if we fail to recognize and begin serious discussion of the dangers and shortcomings inherent to these technologies, then this value is worthless. Let's get the conversation started.

-Jonathan Walz

Hmmm

I've been a bit down lately, and when that happens, one of the ways I try to find strength in remembering who it is I'm trying to be. Sometimes this means I need to take a moment and remember who my heroes are and why. I figured I'd take a moment to share a partial list and see if the rest of you can spot the emerging pattern.

Capt. Malcolm Reynolds
Albus Dumbledore
Peter Parker
Andrew "Ender" Wiggin

edit: the real question should be, can you figure out why I really need new heroes (beyond the fact that these are all fictional characters...). =P