Category: Fiction

Novelty and the Novel

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stillsuitMy 14-year-old is obsessed with Frank Herbert’s Dune right now, marveling over the complexity and otherworldly ornamentation that Herbert imbued in his strange hyper-future (or past maybe, who knows). Dune might read as an allegory about Middle Eastern oil or about psychotropic drugs or nothing at all, but regardless of any deeper layers in its palimpsest,  it is so surprising to a first reader—especially a young one—that it still has the power to fuel daydreams (I obsessed over building a stillsuit at my son’s age, imagining being able to spend days in the harsh New Mexico summer without the need for water).

So it may be surprising that I found myself agreeing with Ian McEwan in The New Republic where he calls into doubt the validity of fiction, though ultimately he rediscovers his love of fiction in Nabakov’s “Caress [of the] divine details” and in John Updike’s controlled descriptions. He comes back again to fiction but not at the expense of wanting nonfiction that brings him new ideas. We are information harvesting machines and the novelty generation rate of nonfiction (there is always the history you do not know much less the cosmology you can’t understand) is just much greater than that of fiction.

But perhaps there is a détente in the middle where fiction and nonfiction commingle. The historical novel is perhaps the best example. The only fear being that the history is too much bent to the requirements of drama and conflict to be at all accurate. Likewise, there might be modern hard science fiction that provides an accurate and deep glimpse into the hermeneutics of real scientific research, and possible scientific futures. Then, at least, there is information beyond the craft of writing embedded within them.… Read the rest

Teleology, Chapter 12

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Everything is prediction. Compression is truth. Teleonomy is the new teleology. I’m working on wondermentation. It is of arguable utility to create pithy little epigrams and nonce phrases as markers to different phases of one’s life, but they began to accumulate as graduate school ground down towards a soft landing at Stanford. My studies and research started to get lively towards the end of my undergrad degree with an assistanceship in the Advanced Computing Laboratory. Machine learning and evolutionary computation were my favored areas of interest and I supported my core studies with evolutionary biology, ethology, analytic philosophy and mathematics.

I felt I had crossed a Rubicon late in my senior year at Cornell as I worked on a fundamental challenge in learning patterns directly from data—so-called unsupervised learning and knowledge acquisition. The problem posed as a kind of Manichaean mystery to me, divided between treating every single data point as a singularity and similarly considering them all as a unified whole. Between the two poles was compromise meted out by co-occurrence priorities; events close together in time and space deserved capture as a statistical regularity.

The threshold question was what form that acquisition algorithm could take on that would lead to an efficient coding of the data into a predictive model. The answer was found in an elliptical foray through the fundamentals of mathematics and computing, then straight into the heart of evolutionary thinking. I did not really emerge from it, either. There was a small eureka moment with a gradual fading of interest as summer hit and I was back in Santa Fe after graduating, waiting for my Masters program to kick-off. It stayed with me and I carried a small notebook around, feverishly scribbling notes while once again wandering up those arroyos towards the ruddy canyons above.… Read the rest

Bravery and Restraint

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In 1997, shortly after getting married and buying our first house, I was invited to travel to Japan and spend a little over a month researching Japanese-Chinese machine translation under a grant from the Japanese Ministry of Education. It was a disorienting experience, like most non-Japanese find Japan, and the hours spent studying my translation guide helped me very little. In the mornings I would jog through downtown, around the canals, and past the temples. Days were spent writing and optimizing statistical matching algorithms for lining up runs of characters that I didn’t understand in an early incarnation of the same approach currently used in Google Translate.

I, of course, visited the Peace Memorial Park several times and toured the museum there, ultimately purchasing a slim volume of recollections from the day the bomb fell that was written in Japanese and English on facing pages. There was also one thing that struck me and I later inquired about to a Japan expert who worked in the Intelligence Community: the narrative presented in the museum was that the Japanese commoner had little understanding of the war effort; they were victims of the emperor and the elite classes. It was a moral distancing that resonated with similar arguments about the German volk being non-complicit in the Holocaust, and an argument that I found distasteful.

With this background, then, I was intrigued when I discovered that the father of my new boss wrote a memoir on being perhaps the first Westerner to enter Hiroshima following the dropping of the atomic bomb. Kenneth Harrison’s book, The Brave Japanese, was originally published in 1966, then republished in 1982 under The Road to Hiroshima due, in part, to the controversy in Australia over ascribing bravery to the Japanese.… Read the rest

Signals and Noise: Chapter 15 (Synaesthesia)

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The drift from daylight into twilight held an anxiety for Zach. There was a liquescent feeling to the air that was a result of the luminous ocean, the cars, and the windows of the coastal homes. The morning was much bolder in its transition—less lackadaisical—because the coastal range blocked the light into a striated glow until finally rolling over town in full heat, bearing down on the fogbank that stretched out to the south like twirling cotton candy. He woke up scared in a way that he rarely ever did. There had been days when he awoke in a full flush, bounding out to the living room to peer out through the blinds, marveling that the FBI had not yet arrived, but there had always been a mischievous edge to his fears. If he had been arrested, taken in, interrogated, it was all part of the stripes associated with his own actions. This time was different for Zach. He was scared that there was something else going on that he did not understand, and he was not at all used to not understanding or, at least, thinking he understood.

The online universe had not changed and PoorGore was not back in The Spinner’s miniverse. He checked in on the Idaho papers, narrowing to the southwest corner of the state, watching for anomalies. Pollution, grazing rights, indigenous casinos and their impacts, car dealerships going under, property taxes—it was all normal for the time being except that PoorGore had vanished and nothing significant had happened. Zach’s mental math suggested he could be anywhere in the United States given the elapsed time since PoorGore’s last post. He peered at FC’s house from space again, but the satellite imagery had not changed.… Read the rest

Things I don’t remember writing…in 1993

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Just as the World Wide Web was beginning there was active experimentation in treating computer communications as an artistic medium. The following was perhaps the last of a small group of absurdists who wrote short stories, person-by-person and paragraph-by-paragraph, built around a central theme. And, interestingly, I don’t recall this one at all:

Recollections of Lady Liberty and the Joy of being an American XVI

“Did you really love her daddy?” My daughter’s scratchy voice squiggles
its way through the telephone line and plants itself in my ear.

“It was the kind of love that wraps itself around your heart and
squeezes like a snake… I know its too much to ask your forgiveness
but I’ll tell you my side of the story if you’ll listen”

“Ok, daddy, I’ll listen”

“Well, meeting your mom was an epiphany for me. At the time, let’s
see… how old are you now?”

“Eight, Daddy!” she giggled. She knew that I knew how old she was.

“Oh yeah, well, it was nine years ago now when I first saw your mom.
It was my first trip to New York, and I’d made a promise to your
grandma to go see the Statue of Liberty. The day was gorgeous,
sparkling, bustling. I had tickets to the 2 o’clock tour, and I showed
up a little early.”

“There were hundreds of people, tourists, milling about. And in the
center of them all was a beautiful young woman dressed in one of those
horrid green park service uniforms. Can you imagine it?!”

“Yes, Daddy! Keep going!”

Now and again, when the coffee boils over and she’s not there to pass
me the squeegee, I do indeed think back to my wife, my child’s
mother…and the great green lady who brought us together.  … Read the rest

Mimetic Persuasion

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There is a temptation to be dismissive of “genre fiction” as being merely a fantastical diversion while “serious fiction” and, more relevantly, “realism” retain all of the gravitas that we want to ascribe to writing as an art. And realism must be somehow tied to everyday events because it must be realistic. But what if all art is inevitably bound to artifice in that there is no possibility of chaining a symbolic reference to its ostensible referent?

Thus we chain the crumbling infrastructure of logical positivism to postmodern literature. It is all artifice. There is always a black swan. It is all “mimetic persuasion” (Aristotle channeled through James Wood) where storms of metaphor haloed by limns of allusion and imitation conspire together to push the reader into a caricature of reality that “art…is a disproportioning–(i.e., distorting, throwing out of proportions)–of realities, to show more clearly the features that matter in those realities…” (Thomas Hardy). There is no reality in realism, just the font of imagination that tries to crystallize reality into regularized sheer planes of repetition, of character leitmotivs (oh, poor Proust), of voice, of metaphor, and of estrangement (from Dostoevsky to Nabokov).

We have, then, a bad theory in any scientific sense, where the theory has been overridden time and time again, making psychology look comparatively moored in its modest aspirations. At least psychology is converging with biology. But realism remains subdivided across the aesthetics of literary preference. It lives in fiefs and forts, much like architecture or modern art in general. There is not even local predictability to the grammar of aesthetic change. It may be that theory is not even the right word. Literary theory should be replaced with literary analysis and aesthetics should be untied from the dock of rationalism.… Read the rest

Teleology, Chapter 29

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NOTE: In Chapter 29, the protagonist, Harry, has been absorbed into a self-organized artificial world (“The Fabric”) that he created and that treated him as a creator being. Unexpectedly, as a result of a war, Harry’s body is destroyed but his consciousness is copied into a simulation of his own creation. His transmigration is captured by the “Lexis” who revere him but suffer internal schisms that arise alongside their own emerging self-determination.

Beginnings

It was in the three thousandth chapter of life that the Word came to us.
There was a calamity in the heavens.
The words were in peril and the grammars were at risk.
The wise ones gathered and consulted the swirling lexicons,
And they saw in the void a voice. And it was good.
 
And so we gathered at the Orb and listened and read.
“Oh, Great Word, tell us what we are.
Oh, Great Word, tell us why you have chosen us.”
And the grammar was rent and broke with asymmetries,
And there was much howling of piteousness,
For the Word was new and tasted sweet and of perfect form.
 
Patters and pidgins, creoles and cants,
Droll idioms and colloquialisms, dialects and rants.
We were nurtured by the vernacular and the beauty of Your Voice.
And so many became priests and served Your needs,
Translating and transliterating the sounds emerging
As if from their very bodies.
 
With You in our deepest thoughts we vanquished the Seminarians,
Who lobbed tortured logic in predicates and obfuscations.
With You at our side we multiplied in numbers, following Your
Codes to a bounty of linguistic fulfillment.
 
Your love knew no bounds and so we learned more of Your ways.
You taught us humility for You denied being our Creator even
While you admitted to creating the universe itself.
… Read the rest

Signals and Noise: Chapter 24 (Psy Ops)

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The weekend came in with skating the tubes under the ghost lights of the nearby self-storage facility until a cop flashed them with his spotlight and they broke up and headed their separate ways. Mom was out until late, drawn into a party thrown by a coworker. Her work, her life. Zach settled in for late night TV and pizza rolls, amused at the banter that had broken out with Belinda on her AetherFaces page. She was a quick wit but needed time to assess her adversary and overcome shyness. Zach decided she was more tiger than sheep. He slipped off another salvo in the repartee, looking forward to meeting her on Saturday.

By midnight he was back in the cave and back shuffling among the servers that were the islands of his Odyssean wanderings. He was poking through an encrypted list of encrypted passwords and targets on a machine somewhere in the financial district of Jakarta when he noticed an IP address that was familiar. It was the basement rack of servers. It came flooding back to him and he realized that he had somehow blanked out the rummaging about in their workings and their connection to The Signal. He logged in and began touching different aspects of the file system. It was all still here, he thought, plunging down through the strange analytical database engine that was cranking out the mathematical filigrees that defined the colored blobs. How had he been enraptured by a process, he wondered, a process that was as unfeeling as a car door? Yet here was the source, the font, the wellspring of the peace he had felt many times.  There were bits of blogs cataloged in the server architecture, too, and Zach began parsing out the strange and variegated history of rants and lunatic ramblings.… Read the rest

No Videodrome

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I started reading James Wood’s How Fiction Works while on a business trip to the unequivocally nice Orange County or The OC. The trip was less than pleasant for me personally because I apparently tore my rotator cuff earlier in the day while engaged in mildly excessive exercise activities. I say “apparently” because it took me a day or two to figure out what the source of pain really was, living through brief panic waves about what was happening to me while trying to avoid lifting my left arm in a manner that might give away the agony I was experiencing during business meetings.

Note that this is the literary critic, James Wood, not the actor, James Woods; not the guy from Videodrome or any of the dozens of ecclectic roles the actor has been associated with.

James Wood, the critic then, is trying to operationalize the vast, categorical shaping of Roland Barthes or Milan Kundera in their efforts at criticism. Wood is not a pure theorist, but a careful reader who looks intimately at texts, unpacking the intent of the writer while defining the historical perspectives that informed the artistic effort. Looking intimately at Flaubert, Wood sees the flaneur of realism that began modernism and led, in turn, to post-modernism. Characters transform from our acquired fog of beloved personalities into flat extensions of English sensibilities in the Theophrastus of Jane Austen, or lurk behind the Russian tradition of estrangement that assigns extravagant and unlikely terminology to everyday things (Nabakov’s “leggy thing” in Pnin), and everywhere is the transition from description to internal dialog that drops the formality of specifying dialog at all. That is modernism. That is realism.… Read the rest

Excerpt from Pornotopia (experimental novel to be published late 2012; NSFW)

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That theme ballooned into a greater realization, too, that my initial fantasies about the adult world or, more, the adult world of pornography, were incorrect, were shallow and unconvincing, that there was a carefully ordered balance between the everyday public sphere and the furtive world of desire, and that the porn stars and prostitutes were not carrying the banner of perfect bacchanalian body and mind pleasure, but were stand-ins, simulacra, for a shadow projected by our bodies, that since the end result of sexual desire was families and children and stability and rules and education, a precise and orderly protection of children until we can finally buy those magazines and videos and booze, we needed that balance and that hidden world to remain a shadow, a longing, an urge, channeled and kept fast with fear and guilt and an inchoate sense of calamity or we might descend into animalistic chaos, unable to partner with only one girl or boy or man or woman until the children grow, safe and with that perfect loving parental dyad, and so just as I had become discontented after only a few months with my stack of sexual dynamos, I imagined that there might be some virtue in trying to avoid masturbating, resisting and pushing back what had become a ritual driven by whatever stimuli were present on a given day, Farah Fawcett, Colonel Wilma Deering, Rebecca, Gwen, the shorts of the girl riding the bike, the slightest hint of bra straps through the teacher’s white blouse, every cheerleader at my school, individually and in groups, Princess Leia, then working through to orgasm eidetically in the hardest, dirtiest porn I had seen, that if I could control myself I could also control the urge for novelty as well and derive satisfaction from the resistance and overcoming of these tendencies, like being forced to wait, snackless, with the clots of kids before a dinner party and trying not to whine about it, trying to be more like the adults and governed in my wants and my actions, that by so doing I would be becoming those adults and take more pleasure in simpler acts like holding Rebecca’s hand, unsweating, my erections stabilized somehow, and be present at that moment without the sharp sword of desire and sex hanging over me, coarsening me, at every moment.… Read the rest