Contributing to Two Books for 2009 (maybe more)

Ben Goertzel and I will be rewriting "The Path to Posthumanity" into a book we hope will actually sell this time, along with new co-author Lisa Rein who lends her needed experience as an editor to the project. Right now we're still in the preliminary phases of getting into the rewrite, but the book will be out by mid-2009 if our publisher agrees to release it at a reasonable price point. Ben and I have at least four other books we're supposed to be working on together, and I'm hoping we'll get cracking on at least one of them in 2009.

I am also contributing to a forthcoming handbook of Visual Effects production, an outline for which was just submitted to a publisher. That book is an edited volume, and will have around 30 authors or so. I doubt anyone outside the industry will have any interest in the book, but it should be pretty good for industry folks (hopefully meaning not just TDs, but artists, producers, directors, cinematographers, and others as well).

R.I.P. Studs Terkel

The great Studs Terkel, author, oral historian, radio personality, social activist, and unashamed Liberal, passed away yesterday at 96.

I wish I'd had the opportunity to get to know him, but I know his work, and it has been a great inspiration to me as a writer and social activist. Terkel's books, especially Race, The Good War, Working, and Hard Times, helped shape my understanding of our nation. Though my own working class upbringing exposed me to a variety of characters in many different life situations, my family rarely left New York when I was a kid. Studs Terkel's books gave me glimpses into the worlds of people outside our region, and across generations. Even though I am also a voracious reader of more "objective" academic histories, the personal narratives in Terkel's works made history and biography even more engaging.

He led a long, full life, but his passing is still a great loss. The literary world will never be the same, as there are currently few, if any, writers following in his footsteps as oral historians and chroniclers of working class culture.

The Upside Of The Downturn

As the world falls apart around us, or so the newspapers and television pundits claim, perhaps there is some upside to the downturn. My hope is that it will be better art, music and writing.

The 1980s (the late Cold War Era, the Reagan years) brought with them a treasure trove of angry punk rock (which started to rear its wonderfully ugly head in the mid 1970s, during the post-Viet Nam Ford and then Carter years), and literary and cinematic dissections of the "me generation" and the ever-present Cold War. During the Clinton Years, however, anti-establishment culture got co-opted and eliminated by mainstream media. Some of it survived, but its prominence has been nothing like it was in the 70s and 80s.

Maybe now that we're on the brink of economic cataclysm, we'll see not only a less poppy reinvention of punk rock and other 1970s-80s counterculture, but also a return of 1930s era artistic trends as well. The 30s of the Great Depression also brought with them a lot of great culture including: films like Duck Soup, literature by folks such as John Steinbeck, and in the art world, late Surrealism.

Great struggles often lead to great art. While I'm not exactly thrilled about the struggle part, perhaps at least we can enjoy the side benefit of some great art.

Horace Engdahl's Ignorance

According to the Guardian, Nobel Prize comittee chair Horace Engdahl has out-of-hand dismissed any chances of Americans winning the Literature prize. He was quoted as saying: "The US is too isolated, too insular. They don't translate enough and don't really participate in the big dialogue of literature ...That ignorance is restraining."

Poor Mr. Engdahl. His own ignorance is keeping him from a treasure trove of great American literature. And if he's dodging any books that may seem excessively American, he may very well be missing out on the best our country has to offer.

A respondent called Sarka, commenting on this Guardian follow-up commentary, points out: "Universal or provincial? It's a silly argument. The American novels I love best are thoroughly American in themes and treatments, if in very different ways. The same goes for any other nation - don't tell me that the appeal of Dostoyevsky's novels is not partly their extreme unabashed Russianness..."

I think this nicely references the core paradox of storytelling: it is from the specifics rooted in a particular place, culture, time, and character that universality emerges. Carefully observed, passionately related details create a sense of realism, even in the most fantastical of stories, which makes the narrative come alive.

What makes a story seem universal is richness of specific detail. Details, not necessarily overwrought Victorian explication, but relevant observations of people, places and problems, grab the audience, and their empathic and mirror systems kick-in and allow them to relate to the narrative at a very core level. While one may never have been a soldier freezing on the Russian Steppe, or an immigrant laborer drunk in a seedy bar in Brooklyn, it is the relating of particulars about such people and places that allow us to feel as if their specific stories relate to universal themes.

American novels are best when they are American.

The Guardian mentions some obvious examples: Philip Roth, Joyce Carol Oates, John Updike and Cormac McCarthy. But there are a number of other great American authors who are being overlooked, or who will achieve greatness one day and then be overlooked. Let me name a few so you can add them to your reading list: Thomas Pynchon, Chuck Palahniuk, Don DeLillo, Michael Chabon, Frank Turner Hollon, Craig Clevenger, Dave Eggers, Douglas Coupland, and David Foster Wallace (who sadly will now never get a chance at a Nobel).

Of course, genre fiction never gets considered, but Dennis Lehane is a great crime writer, and there are numerous American science fiction authors of high quality, such as William Gibson and Harlan Ellison. If none of Philip K. Dick, Stanislaw Lem, Isaac Asimov, or Arthur C. Clarke were given Nobel Prizes in Literature, probably no science fiction writer ever will be.

Kurt Vonnegut, who was not really a genre writer, but his genius was called into question by some who decided he was (and that that was necessarily bad), was also overlooked. So were Joseph Conrad, and "the poet laureate of skid row," Charles Bukowski.

Of course, there are many more great American writers. Please feel free to post comments with your recommendations. Outside the U.S., the Guardian quotes David Remnick as citing Proust, Joyce and Nabokov as overlooked, to which I'd add Murakami and Bulgakov (his greatest work being published posthumously may have been part of it, but other writers have received Nobels for their lesser works).

Either Mr. Engdahl is reading some particularly bad American writing, or he is simply unwilling to accept the fact that Americans, like any other people, can tell compelling and universal stories embedded in the context of their own unique experiences. Regardless of the source of his ire, I am skeptical of someone who can cast aside all literature from a nation of three hundred million people with nary a shrug. How is it that someone tasked with judging literature can be so ignorant of such a crucial element of storytelling: that personal, temporal, spatial and cultural particulars are precisely what cause a well-told story to come alive and resonate as universal?

I already consider the arts and sciences to be something far greater than game shows to be "won" by the cultural uebermenschen, but with people like Mr. Engdahl serving as judges, such competitions seem even more dubious to me. His sort of attitude may work well for Simon Cowell, but I'd expect more from an organization with such pretensions to relevance.

Confessions of a Yakuza

I just finished a very interesting book called Confessions of Yakuza, which I highly recommend if you're interested in the history of Japan.

What is most surprising about the book is its relative lack of violence. The old guard Yakuza portrayed in this book are most concerned with keeping the Police away through maintaining good relations with neighbors, and providing a comfortable gambling environment for their customers. While Eiji, the titular Yakuza, does spend time in jail for killing a man, it was a fellow Yakuza, and if his story is to be believed, it was in self-defense. And there is little reason to doubt his story, as the book is full of confessions and tales which are embarrassing and unflattering. It seems he was holding back little from the author, Dr. Saga.

The portrait of Japan during the prewar period is especially interesting, with its rampant corruption and rotten infrastructure, it is easy for a Yakuza to come off as more of a good guy than the Police or Officials. Many gangster books romanticize the life, and make the code of conduct and code of honor seem more inviolate than they ever really were, and this book does seem to be doing that. But knowing whatever crimes Eiji may have omitted to make himself look better would do nothing to diminish the fact that Japanese life during his time was not the utopia that many in the US currently fantasize about Japan.

It is a kind of historical biography that is very uncommon. Criminal histories abound, but biographies of someone who isn't famous are quite rare (Eiji was a Yakuza boss, but he is very far from a household name like Al Capone). Without that fame getting in the way, the author need not have an agenda, and the resultant book feels convincing, and definitely worth a read if this sort of thing is your cup of tea.

David Foster Wallace

Brilliant writer David Foster Wallace, an inspiration to a whole generation of emerging writers, took his life Sept. 12th, 2008.



The choice of Sept. 12th certainly resonates. Each Sept. 12th, after the numbness of another Sept. 11th of remembrance wears off, I am left contemplating a whole host of personal and political quandaries, a pile of vexing questions about the whys of the world and the seemingly ever-failing quest for mutual understanding between both persons and people. I didn't know him, but I can imagine the possibility that Wallace had similar feelings conjured up by this inauspicious date. Wallace's desperate portrayals of the world in his work, commented upon already by others such as Salon's Laura Miller who noted the "increasing darkness" of Wallace's writing, was a perfectly reasonable response to observing the society around him.

It's even understandable to me that someone with so much to offer could have possibly felt quite the opposite. Feeling that way is pretty much par for the course in an overpopulated, overstimulated world. The profound lack of understanding and compassion displayed by too many people makes it simple to feel like an insignificant voice, one which conveys nothing but one's own failure and fraudulence, particularly when one has chosen to dedicate themselves to communicating emotions and ideas to others.

There is conjecture that Wallace felt this way, based particularly on Wallace's "Good ol' Neon," -- as well as the opposite feeling that to believe this is to deny the ability of Wallace to look beyond himself in his writing. People are complex, the trite observation goes. Writers put a bit of themselves into everything they write. I can fully understand the uncertainty about where the observation about the world ends, and the observation about oneself begins.

What I can't understand, because to do so could bring disastrous consequences, is making that final choice to accept as real whatever form of imagined defeat he must have been feeling. It is even sadder than the world in which nonexistence can seem -- even for a fleeting moment -- to be a superior option to existence, that a single instant can be so irreversible, can so easily turn a glorious hero into a tragic one, and thus deprive the world of someone with so much left to give to it.

The History of Murder

Those of you who are familiar with my obsession with reading about science, philosophy, the arts, and World War Two may find it surprising that my guilty non-fiction reading pleasure is true crime books.

Unfortunately, the true crime genre is filled with badly written tripe ranging from the mountains of mediocre Mafia books to the truly pathetic "From The X-Files of Murder" (which I read over a couple lunchtimes recently, and was sorely disappointed with). There are also the comprehensive, yet somewhat perfunctory, case files such as "Drug Lords: The Rise and Fall of The Cali Cartel" (which was actually pretty good for that style of book), interesting pop-tech books like John Douglas' "The Anatomy of Motive," and even the occasional gripping personal narrative like William Queen's "Under And Alone" (which I desperately wanted to adapt as a screenplay when I read it, but unfortunately Daniel Barnz and Ned Zeman had the same idea first). What is generally lacking in the genre, however, are any sort of well written, engaging histories (ideally, of the quality of a Richard Rhodes or Martin Gilbert).

Enter Colin Wilson and the deceptively titled "The Mammoth Book of the History of Murder." Having been unfamiliar with Wilson, and given that title, I had expected its 500+ pages to be filled with typical true crime historiography: titillating anecdotes listed in chronological order, with no premise, no analysis, and no historical grounding.

I was pleasantly surprised. Wilson, a largely self-taught philosopher, is a literate writer. And while it turns out he is better known in the U.S. for his books on mysticism, this book sticks to the subject without any real digressions into that territory. It is sadly not a masterpiece in the vein of Rhodes or Gilbert, but it is a very readable, egaging tract that actually bothers to have a thesis.

Though it is indeed rooted in a series of titillating anecdotes listed in chronological order, Wilson ties these together with historical grounding, sociological analysis, and, most surprisingly, literary and artistic reference to both describe the times he's writing about and root some of his social premises in contemporary interpretations. Some of the historical grounding is light, as the focus is on the crimes themselves, but there is enough to draw a basic picture of an era for an otherwise historically uninformed reader.

Wilson does build-up a premise: that contemporary murder, particularly thrill killing and sex murder, was once the privilege of the upper classes (such as Gilles de Rais) for the particular reason that they were comfortable enough to eschew common crimes for material gain or to avenge one's "honor." Being spoiled, Wilson demonstrates through numerous cases, is a necessary precursor for this kind of psychopathology. Prior to our modern era, the working classes did not generally have enough resources to become spoiled and thus their crimes, no matter how copious and gruesome, were nearly always rooted in personal material gain or vengeance (such as Sweeney Todd). It is an interesting idea, and while this is not a scholarly work of criminology or psychology, Wilson does a credible job of making this point.

Though there are also a few dubious or underdeveloped ideas in this book (particularly his thinly drawn premise that rape stems from a different psychological basis among the pre-industrial poor), ultimately it is an interesting popular history that holds together rather well against many of its genre peers. It is particularly good as an overview, providing the reader with a slew of historical people, cases and literature to pursue on their own. I've read other reviews which claim that Wilson's two-book "The Killers Among Us" is a superior work, and given that "The History of Murder" is itself a surprisingly good work in a genre that too often embraces simply awful writing, I look forward to finding out whether or not those reviews are correct.

Beware of God

I just finished reading Shalom Auslander's hilarious and thought-provoking collection of short stories, Beware of God.

With story titles such as "Smite The Heathens, Charlie Brown" and "Holocaust Tips For Kids," it's apparent that Auslander's perspective, and sense of humor, is not for everyone. Drawing upon the indoctrination he received growing-up Orthodox, and his keen observations of both day-to-day human nature and the hypocrisy of religion, Auslander skewers the religious closed-mindedness and bigotry of both Goy and Jew alike.

Stories such as "Waiting for Joe" and "It Ain't Easy Being Supremey" ridicule the blind obedience, moral certainty, and resulting factionalization amongst religious zealots by transferring those tenets of belief onto the worldview of Hamsters and Golems, respectively. "Heimish Knows All" does the same for preachy moralizing, from the viewpoint of a family dog. And the obsequiousness obedience to an unreachable deity is shown for what it is, just another form of celebrity worship, in "They're All The Same." Possibly the most moving of the stories is "Holocaust Tips For Kids," which relates a young boy's perspective on the Holocaust and how to survive it (presumably, Auslander recalling his own childhood thoughts on the subject).

Every one of the stories in Beware of God is an easy, entertaining read, while at the same time making keen observations on humanity and our relationship to belief. While the humorlessly observant and easily offended need not apply, the rest of us can have quite a good laugh along with our critique of the foibles of religiocity.

Little Troubles In Big China

I just finished reading The Corpse Walker by Liao Yiwu. This collection of interviews with Chinese from the bottom heap of society, onto which Liao Yiwu had been flung by his government for being a dissident writer, is such a compelling read that despite coming home at eleven PM on average I barely managed to put it down each night, resulting in my getting about 4 hours of sleep a night for three nights.

The Corpse Walker by Liao Yiwu


The most compelling, and depressing, thing about The Corpse Walker is that each of these harrowing, Kafkaesque tales is true. Each interview reveals a litany of problems which may seem like small or distant problems individually (oddly, particularly to those interviewed), but which add up to a portrait of a society that badly needs real reform, not just an Olympian whitewash. Their little troubles add up to a big problem for Chinese society. Many of the interviewees have resigned themselves to matter-of-fact remembrances of various individual incidents which, to comfortable westerners such as myself, would seem crushing in their own right. Death and privation are discussed and written about in a tone that may seem disturbingly perfunctory to Westerners, but for these people who have experienced so much misery, resignation seems to be the only coping mechanism many of them have left. Most of those who ultimately succumb at all to any admission of their despair, frustration and anger only do so after recounting long stories of repeated abuse, and lives wasted by The Party on misguided ideological crusades.

Liao's status as a pariah gave him first hand access to other, usually less politically motivated pariahs in Chinese society. He has given these people their voice, and it is not always one which will find sympathetic ears in the West. It seems that his purpose in writing this book was both to give ordinary Chinese who aren't participating in the "economic miracle" a platform, and at the same time to put the lie to the global claims that China is a reformed, modern society whose leadership is worthy of praise, even coddling. The picture of China from Mr. Liao's view is quite different. Perhaps tales of The Cultural Revolution and The Great Leap Forward with their utterly devastating effects seem like relics of the past, but in this book you will hear not only of the impact those policies had at the time, but the legacies that still exist in China today. People destroyed by those policies are being forgotten all over again, and at the same time the government still detains people like Mr. Liao. The policies may be somewhat less brutal since Mao, but the underlying theories remain the same: power for the powerful, a dab of hope for those who toe the line, and little left for anyone else.

Human Rights Watch has this to say about the author's backgroud: "Liao Yiwu (China), poet, novelist, film scriptwriter, has been arrested repeatedly over the past fourteen years. He was first arrested in March 1990 while working on a movie about the government´s persecution of persons involved in the June 4th Movement. Over the next four years, he was frequently confined to detention centers and prisons where he was subjected to abusive treatment, once being handcuffed for twenty-three consecutive days causing abscesses in his armpits. He tried to commit suicide twice. In October 1995, police searched his home, confiscated his writings, and held him under house arrest for twenty days. In September 1998, he was arrested because he compiled The Underground Poems of the Seventies in China. The book´s publishers were dismissed from their posts. In January 2001, the publisher of his latest book, Voice From the Lowest Rung of the Society, was ordered to recall copies that were already in the stores. Voice From the Lowest Rung of the Society was then published in Taiwan. In December 2002, Liao Yiwu was detained again after he posted his writings on the Internet and signed a petition to the 16th Party Congress."

Given his status, Mr. Liao had insider access to prisoners (political and otherwise), beggars, and others in Chinese society that had he not fallen from grace with his government, he would probably have never even noticed. The stories he relays are of desperate people trampled by the marche of progress as their country become prosperous either without them, or worse, at their expense. China, in the eyes of Mr. Liao and many of the people he interviews, is a place where life is cheap. The survivors of The Cultural Revolution are a "wasted" generation, malnurtured and discarded. Poor and dissident Chinese of today are little better off. Liao is not always sympathetic to his interviewees, and his stating so often leads to even more revealing responses -- particularly in the cases of unrepentant abusers such as the Human Trafficker who defends the practices of kidnapping and rape, and the former Red Guard who defends torture, murder and the annihilation of China's historical treasures.

The Corpse Walker is a fascinating look at a country that has garnered a lot of attention lately. While you may not find the picture of China that Mr. Liao paints to be very appealing, it is one of the realities of his society and without people like him to remind the world of this fact, there will never be any hope of changing the reality of China to better conform to the public relations image. The only disappointing thing about the book is that there are two other volumes as yet untranslated, a deficiency I hope will be rectified in the not-too-distant future.