Saturday, June 30, 2012

Aristotle on Screenwriting.


In a satisfying natural coincidence of two interests of this blog, Aristotle (notable in philosophy) wrote a book (Poetics) unpacking how serious drama was done in his time.  English script-development guru Stephen Cleary gave three talks at the Victorian College of the Arts in Melbourne Australia.  (It's Victorian only in being in a State called Victoria.  It's nature is a sort of strident Bloomsbury for 18-20 year olds.)

This blog post introduces them, and you can download them from there.

Plato wanted to ban fiction because it wasn't true, and he thought, couldn't contribute civic value.  Aristotle's defence of fiction (not that they had the concept fiction, but poetry and drama were understood to be in a different category from every events and rules for living) - I will begin again.  Aristotle's defence of fiction (according to SC) understood it from the inside out.  He looks at each of the elements and how it interfaces with the others, and what the overall effectiveness hinges on.

What I took from SC's explanation was that in a story, we understand people in ourselves - we read their situation intellectually and emotionally (and even physically - I sometimes notice I've got breathing anxiety when I see someone in a film underwater).  The complex drama (e.g. greek tragedy), though, keeps the protagonists off balance, constantly challenged or threatened by events, to which they respond with emotionally motivated actions that are not quite right, don't resolve the tension. The tension is escalating throughout the film until, at last, there is a realisation.

The realisation needs to happen in a specific series of moments, the hero being knocked off balance one last time and then receiving information that throws the mind back to the start of the story, that changes the meaning of everything, that makes them realise for the first time what has really been happening. The audience, feeling along with them, should be moved - in tragedy they should feel pity, and terror.  This moment is the moment of catharsis, a moment of powerful intellectual, emotional and physical reprocessing that lays hold of one as you realise that you are subject to some powerful truth, just as the tragic hero is: Macbeth learns that murder is wrong.  In a different type of film, Field of Dreams, Kevin Costner (and we) remember how we love our fathers, and they love us.

Please listen to the whole thing.  It's very good if you are interested in philosophy, film, or even just an interesting bit of psychological / cognitive processing.

Monday, June 25, 2012

Casting Novels

Casting is a complicated business. Because of the extent to which audiences follow movie stars as indicators of film quality and sensibility, the money (following the audience) wants to know that a script has the right stars signed on. Conversely the wrong star can put money off.

This is especially complex for novels and other fiction, where there is no set appearance. Audiences will have extremely specific requirements in the appearance, but they may be mutually exclusive. Personally I understood Frodo for the first time in Elijah Wood's portrayal of him, but I though Jennifer Ehle was not as lean and long-limbed as Jane Austen had made her Elizabeth. Harison Ford is not fat enough to be Colonel Graff, but I can go with it.

I have a couple of firm casting opinions for films I wish were coming:

No1. Ricky Gervais for Chiark-Gevantsah Jurneau Morat Gurgeh from Iain M Banks' "The Player of Games". Gurgeh goes the gamut from lightweight Culture personality yearning for more risk, to Azad-addicted power pervert, back to Culture person and instrument of world-collapse for the Empire of Azad. He's got the beard, the sneer and the pathos to be Gurgeh. The other characters are mostly aliens and machines, but Lal Yay is a type* and Shohobohaum Za could be a Ryan Gosling smooth operator, or Idris Elba with a big Afro and some speed.

No2. Jesse Tyler Ferguson (from Modern Family) to be Dr Talos from 'The Book of the New Sun' by Gene Wolfe. Dr Talos is a homonculus - Severian thinks of his ur-self as a stuffed and mounted fox. It's mostly the red hair and beard, but Dr Talos' menace, vaudevillean streak, cruelty and yet his almost feminine care for the giant Baldanders seem like they would be within his range if he could play it a little less snarky.

No3. Who to be Gully Foyle from Alfred Bester's 'The Stars My Destination'? Someone massive, big and tall, with a barely restrained violence. He should be fat at the beginning and lean down and muscle up as he quests for more life. The cupboard of my awareness of actors is pretty bare.

* I'm unable to think of a young blond actress - is that weird? Britt Marling seems too smart, insufficiently frolic. But she might work out. Lal is a game player Gurgeh has some time for.
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Saturday, June 23, 2012

The war of all with all

Many of the early philosophers of society (Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau etc) tried to understand society as arising from the relations of humans in the state of nature.  Sometimes this meant the natural authority of fathers  would justify as natural the authority of Kings.  Sometimes it was assumed that the natural state was war of all with all, which could only be restrained by social contract or (internalized) subjugation.

I think the famous 'Prisoner's Dilemma' problem is a very nice source for considering these issues. Two prisoners have committed a crime, but prosecutors will need evidence against them to establish a full conviction.  Hence they will cut a deal if you default on your partner and give evidence against them.  Formalised, it assumes that by cooperating, both parties can benefit, but by defaulting while the other cooperates your benefit can be even greater, and their penalty large.  The penalty for both defaulting is equal, but less severe than the individual penalty.   Suppose this table gives outcomes - negative numbers are penalties for years in prison.  So if you dob and your partner doesn't, you go free and they get five years.  If you each dob, responsibility is split and you get three years each.

                    Cooperate      Default
Cooperate         -1 / -1              0/-5
Default             -5 / 0              -3/-3

The game theory analysis of this situation is that you should always dob, because cooperating is a dominated strategy - that is, your expected results are considerably worse playing 'cooperate' than playing 'default' regardless of what your partner plays. If you partner cooperates, you wish you'd defaulted. If your partner defaults, you wish you defaulted.*

This game theory solution always makes people anxious.  In real life, the person defaulted against will get out eventually, and may be able to penalize defaulting. They may have powerful friends. These stem from the idea that there is some continuity, and in fact you can change the game by playing indefinitely.  (Interestingly, if you play a fixed series, there is an argument via backward induction that you won't be able to sustain cooperation, because at the last turn, we both know we'll both default, and therefore the decision point moves to the turn before last. The turn before last becomes the chance to default against and so on.)  If you don't know when the last turn will be, and the probability is low enough, the potential benefit of a series of future cooperations may begin to outweigh the loss of being defaulted against once after which you default against your opponent every turn.

I think the cooperate / default choice is foundational for society and that philosophers have tended to come down on one side or the other without consciously / explicitly considering the payoff table.  Society works when you can find games in which 'cooperate' is not strictly dominated by default. You can start structures that will increase the penalties of defaulting and increase the benefits of cooperating - contracts and so on.  Nietzsche has a whole thing about the value of conscience and the construction of beings with the right to make promises, that (I think) is an attempt to undercut the distinction between cooperation and default and an attempt to revalue the two.  In this he is motivated by a justifiable suspicion that the structures that work against 'default' will become a way for indecent power to overcome legitimate power.  That is, the government / law / elders will be motivated to eat the benefit of cooperation and begin to use the penalties of default - thus defaulting in their way, against their society.

A wise old jewish friend took exception to this model applied to marriage, because of the assumption that there is always a solution of defaulting against a cooperator that is better than cooperating. I think it depends on the units of gain and loss, the concept of marriage.  If marriage is a cynical money-making scheme, it may pay to marry Mel Gibson and have a child with him, and then divorce him.  If marriage is a cynical sex-maximising scheme, it might make sense to have an affair or visit prostitutes.  If marriage is a scheme to be known and loved, default cannot increase the bottom line.

*   This changes if the payoffs are different, of course. You can imagine a weakly positive payoff from being defaulted against. You can imagine a game where being defaulted against is still not as bad as both defaulting it. 

Tuesday, June 19, 2012

Anxiety and Screenwriting


Scriptshadow is updating 'his' web-site and asked for suggestions that would support a new community site for discovering good scripts and nurturing talented writing.  There were a lot of good suggestions, most of which revolved around the way a high standard of review could be achieved by non-professional writers, many of whom (like me) aren't even working in LA. Most of these suggestions worked something like Slashdot, where good comments are moderated up, and good commenters gain some status from the contribution.  Moderators can spend their 'mod' points to lift up points they agree with.  A variation on this was to create a low-stakes market where you can offer a basic non-pro read for $5 and once your reputation was lifting your price could go up.

The problem of getting good screenwriting is an interesting search problem.  It's hard to say what  a good screenplay is.  There are perhaps four patterns by which good ones are produced:

  • a great screenwriter who knows a lot of tricks, writes a great screenplay.  Easy to find if you know he's a great screenwriter.
  • a bad screenwriter with a great idea sells a script on the idea, and then other screenwriters work on it.  Easy to find because the idea should be 'high-concept' - a sentence or two.
  • a good screenwriter reworks his screenplay in development hell until it is purified or consumed by fire.  Easy to get into, hard to come out of, unless a great screenwriter lends a hand.
  • a novice screenwriter writes a great script by some degree of accident.  Hard to find, because there are so many novices pumping out terrible accidents, and which of them are good?  Who wants to find out?

I would go back to what a good screenplay is.  A good screenplay offers a helpful 4D map of a world, exploring the challenges and the pathways, the anxiety and its resolution.  This post was going to be some examples of that - some of my favourite films.

The Big Lebowski - plays with the anxiety of unmotivatability.  The Dude is seduced by the Bunny Lebowski problem because he lives in denial and is looking for easy money. At least he's not a nihilist.

The King's Speech - explores the anxiety of social responsibility for which your aren't skilled.  The social aspect is important, because Bertie's identity is going to be jeopardised. He overcomes this by gaining a social identity in friendship.

No Country for Old Men - explores the anxiety of the meaning and meaninglessness - which is ultimate? There are two heros - the tragic hero whose realisation and death happen off screen and randomly, no lesson learned, no catharsis earned; the older policeman wise enough to avoid it though it means a young woman will be undefended. He has no fire of his own, but his father will meet him and welcome him. It puts the meaninglessness in a tenuous frame of meaning in life (before he was born & after his death), rather than life floating in a meaningless sea.  But its frail.  It's just a little flame.

Friday, June 15, 2012

Abuse

The defence forces in Australia are in the news again as places where people have been abused, and I guess the important issue is whether or not there have been little cultures of abuse, little breeder reactors, insulated from justice by management. There is a level of abusive practice in the background - reading advice columnists like Prudence @ slate.com furnishes examples, and if you've ever been to or played competitive sport you will have your own.

This abuse is theoretically marginal, but there are a couple of things that worry me. The first couple are from Zizek. Zizek thinks that the rights-based subject is by definition a vulnerable porcupine, who can't experience unwelcome events except as harassment or abuse. He also quotes Ayn Rand's hymn to money (in which she says that without money, the only way to sort out power relations is guns or mobs) as giving the game away: money is (in capitalism) an instrument for domination.

The second couple are from the 'war on terror'. The kill/capture missions, as described by Glenn Greenwald and Spencer Ackerman and others, are a relentless pounding on people taken to be enemy soldiers. But some of them are very young, all of them are very misguided, and it isn't clear that there are attacks on the sources of misguidance, or that the strategy is headed toward making an ommelette. This may be a phantom resemblance, an artifact of feeling that anyone you can film for 8hrs, you can capture or negotiate with. Second, more obviously, the enhanced interrogation techniques that are brutal, and the lingering strong support for Bush-era torture. People still occasionally give the game away, that waterboarding is not merely functional - its also satisfying a power instinct, that this is punishment.

Another interesting correlate for me was something Amanda Marcotte put in a footnote on some anti-feminist pushback that included very low verbal abuse - vulgarity and namecalling. She pointed out that some abusers had posted pornography, intending it to be taken as hate speech.

The Toffler's (Future Shock etc) apparently suggested that the way you make money becomes the way you make war. I think we could be in the middle of one of Heidegger's reconfigurations. We were in a time when we considered ourselves blankly useable, possibly useful, in which there isn't any obvious way of evaluating goals against one another. He called it the default of the Gods - the closing over of the sky. There are no longer super-personal entities to relate your behaviour to. You can't resolve on any God and so you settle on none. You can't agree on any future, and settle for a future no closer than the end of your nose. We are going into a time when every practice will refer itself no longer to use, but to abuse. Where Heidegger complained of the emptiness of enframing, we will try to substitute a fullness of violation, of raw power. Google will try to do good, but find it is smothered by accusations of abuse and Government intervention because it turns out what they intended for good is experienced by people as bad.
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Thursday, June 14, 2012

On Twitter

I've been on twitter for a little while (since Scriptshadow's TwitPitch contest) - I mostly follow screenwriting discussions.
@BittrScrptReadr How has no one written a contained thriller about a man trapped in bathroom stall while victims of food poisoning attend to their situation?
RT : "Panic Room #2"
@BittrScrptReadr  That's pretty good. Anyone else? 
@MichaelBStark Sarcophagi -- A hemophiliac Egyptologist gets locked in the crypt he's plundering while he has explosive diarrhea


Diarrhea is a recurring theme for Michael and its always funny, and usually explosive. Explosive diarrhea has everything a good screenplay should have - tension, horror, shame, vulnerability, facial expressions and then EMERGENCY Running! Emergency Pants dropping!  And then resolution and peace.

Both Bitter and Michael have blogs, but there's something very liberating about knowing that your tweets will have been drowned from your correspondents' feeds in fifteen minutes.

Wednesday, June 13, 2012

Losses

One of the things I've lost in having a child, is my sense of humour about bad things happening to people, especially children. Back when I was fifteen, I was accutely conscious that there was not much innocence in my cohort. Now, though, when I read about children getting in trouble (gunned down by Apache helicopters while gathering firewood, for example; or recruited by the Taliban as lookouts - a dangerous job; or murdered by their parents for wanting to marry the wrong person) - I don't cope as well. All my defences were at bottom denial, or rested on a sense that no one was lovable, really, if you knew them as they knew themselves.

I'm not sure really, what the right response is now. I certainly can't save the world; and I can't not save it either. I guess I am liable to save it should I ever have the power and liable already to the extent I do.
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Sunday, June 10, 2012

The Stars My Destination

Lorenzo DiBonaventura (producer - Transformers, other things), Raymond Wagner (producer, super-old) and Neal Adams (odd* conceptual designer) are listed on IMDB as developing 'The Stars My Destination' by Alfred Bester, for the screen, since 2007, scheduled to be released 2012.  Nothing seems to be happening on this film.  (Warner bros have some work under way for 'Cristo' or as I think of it:  Space Count of Monte Cristo. A shallow reader might think it similar to TSMD.  It is relatively lame (see below).  Still a great story and should be an awesome film though.)

The Stars My Destination should be made as a film.

  This is a hot, fast-moving book that I think should be an easy adapt, except for the complicated backgrounds that might need exposition.  The novel teeters on the brink of chaos, but somehow he wrestles the whole into shape with structures within structures, interlocking shapes of story that you can only read and marvel at.  I would write it for free if it helped it get made (though I can't imagine anything less likely to succeed than approaching a giant star and director and production company with - "here's the screenplay - it's by another hopeful dickhead you never heard of. You didn't read about it in the trades because it was free - it's literally worthless.").

Themes - why this is an important story for today:
1. Intellectual Property ascendant.  The background is a world of very high technology and a very stratified society, where an aristocracy of intellectual property holders dominates the globalized society.  If you think about how copyright is steadily being extended and patent law is more and more the ground on which inter-corporation wars are fought, this seems to be exactly somewhere we could get to.
2. Inequality. Everyone except the very rich is vulnerable to poverty, violence and crime.
3. Terrorism. The solar system is at war, but it's a fundamentally unequal war in which the tactics are terrifying, asymmetric - attacks on populations, exploitation and internment of refugees.
4.  Globalization. The power of Earth national governments to regulate issues of citizenship is limited, because transport (jaunting - pretty much 'disapparating' from Harry Potter) is very cheap and very fast. The boundaries that now define 'nationalities' are found at spaceports and similar, and Earth has a government and secret police and military.
5.  The body. Surgical intervention to augment and alter the body is available, but most heavily used by criminals, the military and social climbers.
6.  Life. The foregoing sets up a lot of very recognizable vulnerability (and corresponding, prized invulnerability). The story mythos is how to live under this vulnerability.

Synopsis (spoilers - but the book is from the fifties, so for goodness sake):
Gully Foyle is an emotionally shut-down ambitionless lump of a spaceman.  His ship is captured by Outer Satellites privateers, and he ends up in a small airtight locker on a ship drifting aimless out past the asteroid belt.  He lasts about half a year by scavenging air and food and water in desperate adventures in a leaky space suit.  When a ship appears, he thinks he will be rescued, but on seeing it is only him, SS Vorga doesn't stop.  This awakens Gully emotionally and when he tries, he finds he can repair his ship and get the main engine started, although navigation is not possible.  (There are a number of statistically very unlikely conjunctions in space in this story, but we'll just have to deal with it.)

     Gully reaches Earth where he is rehabilitated and learns to jaunt and begins to be a criminal, plotting against the Vorga and sexually assaulting his jaunte instructor Robin to ensure her silence. Then he makes a stupid attempt at revenge which sees him locked up.  At the same time, his story comes to the notice of Presteign of Presteign, a front rank aristocrat with basic patents on a lot of spacefaring.  Gully is imprisoned in the Gouffre Martel, a perfectly dark underground prison, from which jaunting is impossible. There he meets Jizzbella McQueen, a beautiful and brilliant professional criminal. They become dependent on each other - he for her intelligence (and he learns to prize intelligence) and she for his absolutely implacable courage/rage. When Presteign attempts to interrogate him in prison, he escapes with Jizzbella.  During his escape he sees the Burning Man, a grim apparition of a man on fire, for the first time.

    Gully and Jizzbella work out that there was treasure on his ship, steal a sporty spaceship and try to salvage it.  But Presteign turns up and Gully just barely escapes, by abandoning Jizzbella.

   On Earth, he is soon fabulously rich and takes an identity as Geoffrey Fourmyle, a ludicrous spendthrift clown-entrepreneur.  He travels with his Fourmyle circus, a sort of giant Carnivale / Burning Man Festival / royal court in which there are concealed a few terribly serious scientific investigations into the mysterious substance that came with the treasure.  But he is really beginning in earnest his quest to find the captain and crew of the SS Vorga, and he recruits Robin to coach him in civilization.  At the same time, Presteign wants to draw Fourmyle in, at first because of his wealth, and to keep his enemies close.  And Gully falls in love (violently, as he does everything at this stage of moral development) with Olivia Presteign, Presteign's albino daughter, with eyes that see Infra Red.

   Having identifed three former crewmen, Gully sets up an opportunity to interrogate them during a progressive New Years' Ball, in which he takes as an escort the partial telepath, Robin, who taught him to Jaunte. Each of the crewmen dies on trying to say the name of the director of the mission, but Gully gets a new facts: the name of crewman now working as a slave on the Moon's algae farms. The Burning Man appears at each killing, and the Burning Man is recognizable as Gully. He kidnaps him and hooks him up to life support before interrogating him.  Even though the hypnotic kill switch activates and his heart stops, he stays alive long enough to reveal that Lindsey Joyce is in the Skoptsy colony on Mars, having renounced life.

   Gully feels beaten.  Skoptsies are religious who give themselves to total sensory deprivation.  There seems no way to punish Joyce.  But Gully is implacable - he steals a telepath and uses him to intrude on Lindsey Joyce.  He terrifies the young telepath so much that everyone, including Joyce, is affected. Gully is absolutely disgusted by Joyce.  Her detachment is absolute evil in his moral scheme.
  Then Gully finds out the last name.  The director of the voyage, who refused to pick him up was Olivia Presteign. And all the silence was because she was scuttling refugees - taking their money and belongings, then dumping them to die in space.  Gully has the insight of a tragic hero - everything he's done to remake himself for revenge had made him too great to take revenge on her.  He gets captured by Presteign.

   Presteign explains that among the treasure was PyRE - a substance that is the primordial stuff that detonated in the big bang; and PyRE can be detonated any time, by Will and Idea.  Robin is there, and her idea of detonation radiates out - Foyle's lab in the Fourmyle circus had a smudge of Pyre left behind and it explodes.  Fortunately the main mass of PyRE is deeply secured below the lab, and cannot detonate.  Gully negotiates with Presteign for Olivia; he expresses his outrage at the power of PyRE being under the control of just a few people - having mastered all his smallness while remaining himself, he is enraged by the narrow, dirty cheating of the wealthy and powerful. Although drugged, he escapes to Earth, and from there he heads to his laboratory to do something about PyRE.

  His lab is on fire.  His great strength and augmented reflexes and courage lead him to try to go to the PyRE, but he gets stuck in a burning loom of wire, tangled and flailing.  He tries to jaunte, but being drugged is making it difficult to resolve a destination, and then he starts flashing to significant places - the air-tight locker, the cell, the scenes of the deaths of the spacemen, the present, and then the future.  In that future, Robin tells him how to get free.  In doing so he discovers the secret to space-jaunting - thinking through time - he space-jauntes to Arcturus' blue fire, to his old coffin and back to earth.  Presteign helps him.  The fire is coming under control, and Gully recovers and sits up.  He lectures Presteign on living, then distributes PyRE across the world and directs everyone to start living, right now.

Story Structure(s) - why this is a (very) filmable story

Neal Gaiman wrote an introduction to the story that highlighted the sequence of wombs, out of each of which, Gully is reborn more powerful: the air-tight locker; the Gouffre Martel cell and several others, culminating in the burning wire cage.  Each of these forms a sequence with goals, stakes, urgency of their own.  The sequences are basically the seven and a half paragraphs in the synopsis. A lot of detail has been lost to synopsising, but in every sequences, Gully grows and becomes more powerful, and more morally conscious, although he remains cruel and remorseless, beginning with neglect of even himself, through a blunt and aimless cruelty, to a razor-edge relentless predator ranging the solar system.  But you can't grow so much as a person without starting to have your shit together morally speaking.  Gully is genuinely sorry for raping Robin by the middle of the film, and does her only good once he recruits her.  By the conclusion of the film, Gully has transcended everything that made him, as has Robin.

Second, the morality.  There are two layers of morality operating in the story.  The more familiar is the conventional morality in which its wrong to hurt the weak, to be unfair.  The less familiar is straightforwardly Nietzschean 'yes to everything' morality, in which letting other people make you is a regrettable weakness, but evil is refusing life - refusing to make big choices and take big chances. Lindsey Joyce and all the other crew of the Vorga allowed Olivia Presteign to make them, and crushed by guilt, gave up on life.  This is their evil, the evil of weakness dwelling in and clinging to its weakness.  Its what Gully overcame when Vorga abandoned him.


Third, the characters all partake of both moralities, but strongly represent one or the other.  Presteign represents Nietzschean power, but in the end Gully judges him to have taken too much on himself, which is wrong even as a Nietzschean because it preserves his power that should exist by contending, not by secrecy and declining to compete.  Dagenham, Jizzbella and other minor characters operate on skill power - Presteign, though, is most skilled at holding on to his inherited power.  Robin operates entirely without Nietzschean power, and yet by the mid point Gully is begging for her help, and by the end depends on her to save his life.  He is moved into conventional morality by this.  Robin has lived to overcome his assault, to become too great to hold it against him.  Olivia is a pure Nietzschean, willing to do anything to sate her Presteign passions for blood and money - yet she expresses a desire to be overcome to Gully.  Gully was shut down to life until he nearly lost it - perhaps he was trapped in conventional morality, just going along, conforming, until the people really living life showed how little that meant to them.

Everyone has a story - indeed its bewildering how much story is in this short book.

Challenges

  • Nietzschean 'yes to everything' morality freaks people out ('Yes Man' notwithstanding):  
    • The protagonist is extraordinarily imperious, relentless and cruel - and those are the qualities his character develops.  
    • The protagonist rapes a lovely woman who helps him, and then gets her to help him achieve his dreams.  I can't imagine that going over well with women and people who care about them - I would expect protests from feminists.  (I would argue that this is treated as seriously as anything in the story, but I doubt any writer could make it serious enough.)
    • Olivia Presteign is the worst mass murderer I can think of in fiction - defrauding and killing the most vulnerable people she can, including Robin's family.  And her punishment is that Gully marries her.  It has a certain logic, but its to see audiences feeling satisfied.
  • The protagonist may not be very sympathetic in the opening of the film.  Just getting pushed around and being unwilling to push back is not universally sympathetic.
  • The amount that would need to be explained is large.  Jaunting, PyRE, the solar system's warring sides, the existence of telepathy, Gully's progressive identity shifts (Geoffrey Fourmyle, souped up Commando), and the complex webs of relationships, inferences, games and tricks that motivate all the participants.

Come on, guys!  Make this film!


* Neal Adams thinks that all seismic and geological evidence is best explained by his idea that Earth (and other planets) is steadily growing in size.  ?        ???              ?????

Wednesday, June 6, 2012

scared straight

Like most contemporary men, I sometimes believe (or subconsciously subscribe to a pattern) that the answer to the question 'How much sex does a man need?' is 'More.'*

The 'relationships' columns at Salon.com have scared me straight, though.
+ a lesbian woman who had hooked up with guys lately because it was easier, the relationship equivalent of Homer eating the dirt under the bleachers.
+ a polyamorous girl hoping to bonk a hot coworker from a different generation, who thought he might not get what that relationship would be. Who has the psychic energy to create and manage the turbulent sea of sexual relationship on a case-by-case basis with everything to be negotiated every time?
+ a woman whose relationship with her partner might have gone better without his kids, but after it broke down and the kids grew up, missed them terribly. Just sad, but written with a tone of surprise, as if it was news that every 'yes' says a thousand 'no's, and so there are some advantages in making it the biggest 'yes' you can.
+ a columnist writing about a hookup with her favorite male porn star and how it was too overlaid with performance to be as flat out enjoyable as she'd imagined.
+ the gay guy who was checking out a neighbour on grindr and gradually realised he was quite sick with sex addiction.

The men who have sex most (more than 20 times per month, which sounds exhausting) are almost exclusively doing it with one partner (who is also having a lot of sex) in a relationship. Although there is a lot of whining about how difficult a well worked out, committed relationship is, I think the alternatives are short-term easy, long-term bad for you.

* JP Morgan reference. He was talking about money. I linked a long time ago to an article about this. I, at that time, suggested that Nietzsche's reprehensible epigram alleging that pregnancy was the answer to the question of female unintelligibility was equally applicable to men. It was awesome.
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Monday, June 4, 2012

The Interval of Comedy

A couple of things came to mind after my last post.  First, when Berman speaks of an 'interval', it calls to my mind a moment from the Book of the New Sun, in which Severian has become the Autarch, but is lamed and weak. He travels up the Gyoll to Nessus on a ship of ordinary men, and finds them comical.  He declares that his story has reached 'the interval of comedy.'

The other thing that happened was that I listened to the Partially Examined Life podcast #57, reading a Henri Bergson essay from [1900] on comedy. (This is such an enjoyable and informative podcast - if you every listen to podcasts, you should check this one out.)  Bergson argues that comedy arises from a perceiving a rigidity, an automatism that has become irrational to you.  The sense of humour begins as something darker and more predatory:

In this sense, laughter cannot be absolutely just. Nor should it be
kind-hearted either. Its function is to intimidate by humiliating. Now,
it would not succeed in doing this, had not nature implanted for that
very purpose, even in the best of men, a spark of spitefulness or, at
all events, of mischief.
Bergson points out an important social function:
Laughter is, above all, a corrective. Being intended to humiliate, it
must make a painful impression on the person against whom it is
directed. By laughter, society avenges itself for the liberties taken
with it. It would fail in its object if it bore the stamp of sympathy
or kindness.
Shall we be told that the motive, at all events; may be a good one,
that we often punish because we love, and that laughter, by checking
the outer manifestations of certain failings, thus causes the person
laughed at to correct these failings and thereby improve himself
inwardly?
Much might be said on this point. As a general rule, and speaking
roughly, laughter doubtless exercises a useful function. Indeed, the
whole of our analysis points to this fact. But it does not therefore
follow that laughter always hits the mark or is invariably inspired by
sentiments of kindness or even of justice. 
And as Severian sees the behaviour of the common men around him as automatic, and comical, he shows he has their measure and is their master.

But I think laughter would be the nicest possible face to put on a coming interval of inequality. And if there is inequality but the poor are never too poor and the rich will only treat us as a comedy, perhaps we can bump through that interval together ok.

Sunday, June 3, 2012

How it ends*

Looking forward, this essay sees the end-point of our civilization:
The planet’s metabolism has altered. The new Dark Ages will be socially, politically, and spiritually dark, but the economic Moloch — mass production and consumption, destructive growth, instrumental rationality — will not disappear. Few Americans want it to. We are hollow, Berman concludes. It is a devastatingly plausible conclusion.
An interval — long or short, only the gods can say — of oligarchic, intensely surveilled, bread-and-circuses authoritarianism, Blade Runner- or Fahrenheit 451-style, seems the most likely outlook for the 21st and 22nd centuries. 
Much of the material discussed in this review is drawn from Morris Berman's three volume epic.
That is indeed what Morris Berman concludes in his three-volume survey of America’s decline: The Twilight of American Culture (2000), Dark Ages America (2006), and Why America Failed (2011). 
The articulation of the inner truth that is being worked out in our history:
Berman seeks the source of our civilization’s decline in its innermost principle, its animatingGeist. What he finds at the bottom of our culture’s soul is … hustling; or, to use its respectable academic sobriquet, possessive individualism. 
The economic Moloch (Moloch symbolises murder of infants), also named Mammon (usually symbolises Money) in the essay, and the possessive individualism.  We have singularity now, and we know it as individualism.  The true singularity would maybe cause a great union.**

Hat tip: The Dish - a great smorgasboard blog, part of my daily diet.

* 'How it ends' [Scriptshadow] is a screenplay of the end of the world in which things begin shutting down, and falling down around America, and no one wants to make the sacrifices to save it, and many are delighted to watch it burn.

**Society is like a big game of prisoner's dilemma - you can usually benefit reliably by cheating, but greater benefits are available at the higher risk of trusting. Knowing you will play forever, or even knowing that the end is not likely enough, will make an equilibrium of trust a valid play.  But if the benefits of trust are lowered steadily (by hard economic times, for example), the threshold for thinking the end has arrived is lowered too.