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Miscellany: November 18, 2008

  • Ingrid is approaching world domination. Her plaudit-winning reinterpretation of the cover for Cormac McCarthy’s The Road has not only received international online acclaim (Bookninja, The Guardian, Boston Globe), but her work was featured in Sunday’s New York (bloody) Times Book Review. Print and online editions (with the unfortunate misspelling of her last name in the print edition – needless to say this took a little of the shine off of the accolade. They will, however be printing a correction in an upcoming edition and the online version has her name spelled correctly).

  • I’ve sent the first revised draft of my novel to a few selected readers. Unofficially looking for feedback and consensus that what I’m doing is worthwhile. Nervous. Anxious. Perhaps as a result of this and other things, I’ve been struck by some interesting what-if’s regarding a new book idea. I must be a masochist. At least it doesn’t hurt.
  • I turned 38 on Saturday. I share that day with Ed Asner and Tilda Swinton (they were not in New York, unfortunately – I tried).
  • Two films I worked on opened within two weeks of each other. One is a franchise horror film (of the “moral error leads to violent suffering” kind) which traditionally draws massive audiences and box office gold (if not good reviews). The other is (wait for it) a gore-Goth rock opera which is only receiving an eight-theatre release (if not good reviews). They represent what I’ve been working on for the last twelve months. Working in film/TV is “what I do for money”, a distinction I wish I didn’t have to make, save for the fact that the quality stuff (often Canadian) doesn’t pay my rent. It’s a quandary punctuated by background horror-movie funhouse screams.
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And The Winner Is…

As previously noted, Ingrid and I submitted “re-branded” book covers to Bookninja for their contest. Guess what? Even with a handicap of -10 (she is, after all, a professional book designer), Ingrid took first place by popular vote! But wait, there’s more – a selection of the submissions are profiled in the (bloody) Guardian!

Congrats to her. As for my submissions, I placed somewhere in the honourable mentions, but sadly did not have any pieces profiled on the Guardian. I shall live vicariously through her success today.

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Art & Suicide

As reported in the news over the weekend, spilling into the papers this week, American novelist/essayist David Foster Wallace took his life. He had hung himself in his home, only to be discovered later by his wife.

To be honest, I’ve only read one piece by Wallace – an essay in an issue of Harper’s almost ten years ago on the release of the revised Oxford English Dictionary – and yet it left an indelible impression on me. It made me laugh out loud with its quirky honesty and his style was unique and strong; in short, it made me take notice of writing and writers at a time when it simply was not on my radar (for various reasons). I always swore I would read one of his books, but the prospects of picking up the one he is best known for, Infinite Jest, all 1,000 pages of it, was intimidating. It still is, but that has more to do with the fact that I’m in the middle (or, factually, just past the middle) of War & Peace with Joyce’s Ulysses staring at me from the bookshelf longingly.

Wallace’s suicide is the second in the last few years by an artist who’s work I’d kept an eye on. The first was that of American humorist and performer, Spalding Gray, who – it is assumed – leapt from a ferry into the Hudson River and drowned. I saw him at Massey Hall (one of the most venerable venues in Toronto) many years ago. As with Wallace’s essay, I remember crying with laughter during Gray’s droll monologue.

Which brings us to the question of artists and suicide.

Someone on Bookninja had this to say in reaction to the story:

In my work (psychiatry) I’ve seen so many creative people who are so tortured inside. I’ve often wondered if, given the choice, they’d choose peace over creativity. Maybe suicide is exercising that choice.

I thought about this. I wanted to respond, because I had something to say, but in the end I decided it would only be a tangent and while tangents are allowable in most online situations, an obituary is not exactly the place for one.

The answer is that artists do not want peace, or at least an artificial peace. To do so would be to abandon the tension which is inherent in art (and science, for that matter). In their art, over the course of their lives, artists attempt to resolve this tension; to articulate what it is that is at the centre of a storm which motivates them to create. The tension is the artist. Them against an outside world which does not work. Art becomes a philosophical expression of an existential dilemma. With this as the case, how many artists would willingly barter peace for creativity if such a trade were even possible? Not many, I would wager. What is peace when art allows you to reach higher than ever before, to touch the cookie jar of euphoria with your fingertips?

Like Wallace and Gray, I too suffer from depression. Their passing gives me pause, to put it lightly. Last night over dinner, Ingrid and I had a long talk about this – Wallace, Gray, art, and suicide – and she used a quote from Wallace that she’d read in one of the obituaries, that suicide happens very slowly. He is right. It is not, as commonly portrayed, an impulsive decision, but rather something which gestates very gradually within the mind of the sufferer. The danger is that this internalized dialogue, over the course of years, may eventually lead to the rationalization or acceptance of suicide as a logical option or self-fulfilling prophecy.

Art, however, is not depression, and depression should not be construed as something which only afflicts those in the arts. When you are depressed, anything can inflame the situation. Both the fire and the water used to douse it. It is for this reason that I take a moment to bring this up. So that people may understand what is, for lack of a better term, a mental illness. Allow me to suggest a wonderful series in the Globe and Mail, perhaps the best collection of stories and first-person recollections on the subject to be found in any newspaper.

I tip my hat to Wallace, to Gray. I mourn for the grief experienced by their loved ones.

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"Total" Oranje

I did promise this would not turn into a football blog during Euro ’08; with that in mind, I’ll make this passing note brief.

I cannot believe – I would never have believed prior to their first game – that Holland has not only won their first two games (vs. Italy and France, respectively) but that they would do so in a way that is making everyone, football fans or not, take note.

They haven’t played this well in 10 years. “Well” is probably not the best word to use. They are playing “total football”, a term coined in the early 70’s to describe a system developed by coach Rinus Michels and player Johan Cruijff in which teammates switch roles on the field: strikers become defenders, defenders become strikers, everyone becomes “aware” of space and time. What’s magical is that this philosophy transcends football and becomes a rather profound statement about the Dutch.

I’ll leave it at that. I encourage you to read one of two things, if you are interested in knowing more about this phenomena (now realised by their massive success in this tournament). The first is a concise article in the Globe and Mail, by John Doyle. He touches upon what I was saying in the above paragraph. If you really want to know more, I highly suggest you read a book called Brilliant Orange: The Neurotic Genius of Dutch Football, by David Winner; the writer, an Englishman, describes how the evolution of Dutch football – in particular, the concept of “total football” – becomes an extension of the Netherlands’ egalitarian society. Fascinating stuff.

And, if you’re wondering why someone with the (particularly Irish) name Cahill is following Holland, it’s because my mother’s from Leiden. Ik kan spreken nederlands ook. Een beetje. And if Holland wins Euro ’08, there may be a tattoo in it for me (if I’m sufficiently drunk).

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Language and Meaning

“The limits of my language mean the limits of my world“

– Ludwig Wittgenstein

I was reading the New York Times Sunday Magazine last weekend and caught this article, written by Michael Pollan, about the rise of agricultural diseases. In it, he begins with bemoaning the decreasing power of the word “sustainability”, seeing as it has been turned impotent; yet another zombiefied corporate catch-phrase designed to make what one does appear useful even when in practise the reality is much more ambiguous.

There is a biting summary of this phenomena in the second paragraph of Pollan’s article:

Confucius advised that if we hoped to repair what was wrong in the world, we had best start with the “rectification of the names.” The corruption of society begins with the failure to call things by their proper names, he maintained, and its renovation begins with the reattachment of words to real things and precise concepts. So what about this much-abused pair of names, sustainable and unsustainable?

I sat at the breakfast table, thinking about this paragraph. It stunned me, because my awareness of the philosophical questioning of language – its power to distort and clarify – didn’t extend as far as back in time as Confucius. To read it made me understand that this conflict – the fight to keep language from becoming a meaningless putty in the hands of technocrats – has been going on probably since the dawn of communication. It wasn’t until reading, of all people, Confucius – that old aphorism-spewing chestnut – speak about it that my understanding of the conflict was deepened.

The two writers who outlined this conflict most beautifully for me were Wittgenstein, quoted at the top (from his treatise, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus) and John Ralston Saul, who rallied against the rise of technocrats most effectively in his books Voltaire’s Bastards, and The Unconscious Civilization. Each fulfilled a means of illuminating the power of language in a way that was neither impractically academic nor precious. Saul warns about how the images and words we share can be/have been actively distorted by those with corrupting self-interest. Wittgenstein’s very philosophy is about the parsing of truth and falsity (or senselessness, as he would put it) in how we use language to construct a world view.

With the discovery of Confucius’ addition to this subject, I now have more to research and reflect upon. I suppose I’m fascinated with this subject, and for reasons I don’t think are trivial. We are beset by corrupted means of communication every day: images that lie as well as they seduce, thoughts withheld from publication/broadcast because of vested interests. And yet, most importantly, I believe it’s also language that can save us – the very tools used to fool us can be used to liberate.

I suppose one of the first questions I have is whether there are more than a handful of people out there who give a shit, or whether this is a pursuit (non-Quixotic, I insist) only a begrudging elite will ever have interest in following. Sometimes I’m haunted by the words of writer William Sturgeon, who – when asked if it was true that he thought 90% of science fiction was crap – answered that, actually, 90% of everything is crap. What haunts me is how this somewhat off-the-cuff pronouncement translates into the percentage of everyday people who truly care enough about things like this. It’s important to me that people understand that the corruption of language (visual, textual, audible) is not simply an academic concern, and that it’s possible to put up an effective, civil defense against it.

Update: For more on Confucius and the “rectification of names”, please see this link for some context.

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Article: Regarding A New Humanism

I came across an extremely well-written essay on the Edge site today. Written by Salvador Pániker, Regarding A New Humanism contains exactly the right sort of balance of passion and intellect that I find missing in so many essays concerning the path “we” (read: society) should take. It is neither heavy-handed nor exclusionary. I’d take the time to summarize it, but look, it’s a short essay. If you can’t spare the time to read it for yourself without a synopsis, even though the title is pretty darn self-explanatory, then…well, that’s just too bad. And it’s Friday.

An excerpt:

Indeed, those who pit science against sacred texts or science against art do so in error. Respective boundaries of autonomy aside, everything forms a part of the same prodigious struggle. The pursuit of the real which, in a sense, is the also the pursuit of the absolute. The absolute that is intuited, though it remains inaccessible. A fusion of fields as was seen in the Renaissance is certainly no longer possible; the mountain of specialization has grown too high. However, one might demand that the different fields of knowledge communicate with one another and without undermining each other.

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Article: The Top Censored News Items of 2007

Slashdot, a site I visit every once in a while for media/technology news (their motto is “news for nerds, stuff that matters”) had a summary of a very interesting (if disturbing) article, by an outfit named Project Censored (from their website: “Project Censored is a media research group out of Sonoma State University which tracks the news published in independent journals and newsletters. From these, Project Censored compiles an annual list of 25 news stories of social significance that have been overlooked, under-reported or self-censored by the country’s major national news media”).

Indeed, the Top 25 Censored Stories of 2007 contains some pretty disturbing stuff. Like:

#2 Halliburton Charged with Selling Nuclear Technologies to Iran

and…

#11 Dangers of Genetically Modified Food Confirmed

Again, though it may be easy, superficially, to think this is yet another left-wing group with a wishlist, it isn’t. These are well-researched, authoritative items of interest that are cross-confirmed by third-party contributors. That our media (and yes, there is an Americentric focus to the list – Project Censored is, after all, an American outfit) pays scant attention to any of these and yet devotes slightly less time to Anna Nicole Smith’s death than on the day of 9/11 is a travesty.

Since we’re on the topic of journalism, ethics, and self-censorship, allow me to talk to you about bias. There’s been a lot of mud thrown since just before 9/11 (and obviously since) about a “liberal media bias” in the news. In return, and certainly since 9/11, there have been just as many accusations about “right-wing media bias” also. The problem is that neither accusation is particularly correct – or rather, neither of these stances tackles the larger issue: money.

Television news requires advertisers to produce it. The producers of television news require viewers in order to sell advertising time. Ostensibly, there is no difference between news programming and sitcoms. They need to keep viewers watching in order for the advertisers who sponsor/pay-for the program to feel as if their money is well spent. Print news is the same (as are their internet-based spin-offs): advertisers are the lifeblood of news. It has been this way for over a hundred years.

So, getting back to the “liberal media” vs. “right-wing media” infighting, it’s not a question of who is truly pushing a “liberal agenda” or what show is promoting an unquestionable “right-wing” viewpoint. It’s about making money, getting viewers, and above all, keeping advertisers happy.

This is one of the not-so-good things about capitalism. When you surrender journalism to “the market”, the market wins every time. Thus, Anna Nicole Smith’s death is the rational choice for keeping viewers entranced and advertisers happy over, let’s say, the destruction of the world’s fish stocks. Complexity – and if there’s anything you can count on in life, it’s complexity – does not sell, or so “the market” dictates.

There are always exceptions – PBS in the US and CBC in Canada: however, both have been corrupted by government intrusion, if not partially hobbled. Funding for public broadcasting is constantly being trimmed and political interference, particularly in PBS’ case, has started to infect the roots.

I write all this not to say “don’t read newspapers, don’t watch Newsworld @ 11” but rather so that people understand that, yes, it’s possible for a newspaper or broadcast to spend pages of print and minutes of talking without actually focusing on stories that are truly substantial.

My advice: Keep digging. Don’t get sidetracked by trifling “left” vs. “right” debates when the freedom of news itself is the issue.

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Cheers to Charles Taylor

From the Globe & Mail:

NEW YORK — Charles Taylor, a Canadian philosopher who says the world’s problems can only be solved by considering both their secular and spiritual roots, was named Wednesday as the recipient of a religion award billed as the world’s richest annual prize.

Dr. Taylor, a professor of law and philosophy at Northwestern University, has won this year’s Templeton Prize for Progress Toward Research or Discoveries About Spiritual Realities. The award is worth more than $1.5-million (U.S.).

In a career spanning more than four decades, Dr. Taylor, 75, has investigated a wide range of issues, including how it is that the search for meaning and spiritual direction can end in violence. He contends that relying only on secular analyses of human behaviour leads to faulty conclusions.
(read the rest)

Not only am I happy that a nice Canadian boy won the prize, but that a well-measured and (dare I say, in this fractured age of ours) balanced look at the price society pays, being the lost children in the divorce between the strictly secular social sciences and the often inflexible tenets of religion.

I will definitely check out this man’s work – please read the full article.

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Article/Review: Digital Maoism, by Jaron Lanier

[from the I Wanted To Write About This Article a Month Ago Department]:

Jaron Lanier is a contributor and member of edge.org 1 (which I have listed in my sidebar links). Specifically, he offers his perspective on the evolution of technology and the internet and is credited as a “computer scientist and digital visionary”. In an essay posted May 30th, Digital Maoism: The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism, he tackles the rise of aggregator/meta-centric portals such as Wikipedia (which I also have listed in my sidebar links), where individual contribution he argues (and to this extent, responsibility) is obscured by an emphasis on a hive mind approach.

Lanier starts, appropriately enough, by sharing the fact that his Wikipedia entry refers to him as a film director, which is truthful only to the extent that he made one film, a decade and a half earlier. “Every time my Wikipedia entry is corrected,” he begins, “within a day I’m turned into a film director again. I can think of no more suitable punishment than making these determined Wikipedia goblins actually watch my one small old movie.”

And with this he sets his target. It isn’t, he insists, Wikipedia itself:

“No, the problem is in the way the Wikipedia has come to be regarded and used; how it’s been elevated to such importance so quickly. And that is part of the larger pattern of the appeal of a new online collectivism that is nothing less than a resurgence of the idea that the collective is all-wise, that it is desirable to have influence concentrated in a bottleneck that can channel the collective with the most verity and force. This is different from representative democracy, or meritocracy. This idea has had dreadful consequences when thrust upon us from the extreme Right or the extreme Left in various historical periods. The fact that it’s now being re-introduced today by prominent technologists and futurists, people who in many cases I know and like, doesn’t make it any less dangerous.“

Lanier’s strongest point, as I see it, is his contention that the collectivist, hive-driven format of sites such as Wikipedia (and extended in his essay to meta-meta-meta aggregators such as Digg and Reddit) continue a troubling trend toward aggregated, impersonally edited content over… well, content curated and written by identifiable humans.

“The race began innocently enough with the notion of creating directories of online destinations, such as the early incarnations of Yahoo. Then came AltaVista, where one could search using an inverted database of the content of the whole Web. Then came Google, which added page rank algorithms. Then came the blogs, which varied greatly in terms of quality and importance. This lead to Meta-blogs such as Boing Boing, run by identified humans, which served to aggregate blogs. In all of these formulations, real people were still in charge. An individual or individuals were presenting a personality and taking responsibility.
[…]
“In the last year or two the trend has been to remove the scent of people, so as to come as close as possible to simulating the appearance of content emerging out of the Web as if it were speaking to us as a supernatural oracle. This is where the use of the Internet crosses the line into delusion.”

Lanier’s line of query unfolds to include the observation that the “meta” is now more popular and, in respect to Google News, more profitable than traditional media (newspapers in particular), yet no one standing next to the microphone is able to articulate the fact that popularity contests do not historically vet the best, but rather, what the collective believes is safest. And of course, nobody seems to want to say that the collective is just as culpable – in some ways more powerfully culpable – as individuals.

I highly suggest anyone interested in the social internet, its architecture and direction, give this essay a good read. Lanier’s observations move from the immediate suspects above to commentary on analogous movements, such as Linux 2, the “open” software movement, and the ever-ubiquitous MySpace. In many respects, it’s about time somebody spoke eloquently about the collapse of the human face behind these efficient portals.

However, I do have some issues. For one thing, the tangents never really weave into a comprehensive whole, making it feel much too cumbersome (and a page too long) to concisely support Lanier’s provocative thesis. There are many arguments using the financial marketplace as a comparison tool which, although in theory an applicable analogy, is probably the last example I would use if I were arguing for a more humanistic approach. In fact, for someone arguing for this approach, Lanier’s language sometimes bares the same technocratic opaqueness which I would argue obscures a better understanding of the debate.

For example, leading to his summary:

“Empowering the collective does not empower individuals — just the reverse is true. There can be useful feedback loops set up between individuals and the hive mind, but the hive mind is too chaotic to be fed back into itself.”

I realize the term “feedback loop” is an applicable simile when discussing communication, but it’s disconcerting when a term normally applied to specialty occupations – namely, software programming and audio engineering – should somehow become the standard upon which we seek to inspire a better world. Is this not, to some extent, asking a less-predictable society to be like a more-predictable tool?

Please read the essay for yourself and feel free to share your feedback in the comments section.

Please note: there is a discourse on the essay on the edge.org site here.

1. From their site: “Edge Foundation, Inc., was established in 1988 as an outgrowth of a group known as The Reality Club. Its informal membership includes of some of the most interesting minds in the world. The mandate of Edge Foundation is to promote inquiry into and discussion of intellectual, philosophical, artistic, and literary issues, as well as to work for the intellectual and social achievement of society.”

2. There is no official site for “Linux” (outside of linux.org, which looks exactly as it was when first uploaded many, many years ago…and no this is not a compliment). The link I provided goes to Ubuntu, which is the flavour of Linux I use at home. There are others.

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Darfur – A Range of Opinion

You know you’re looking at a real-life problem (as opposed to the more easily-digestible choices portrayed in television dramas…who am I kidding – television news as well) when its tangled complexity clogs the drain of your ability (or desire) to “solve” it.

Take Darfur.

The way in which this conflict is rendered has been a hotly debated topic. A recent analysis showed that, in 2005, the Darfur story was covered for all of 10 minutes on the three major American networks; this would imply that the television-drama ER (in an upcoming episode) will have covered 6 times as much as them…again, in a single episode.

The newsmedia is sometimes the only means a tragedy has of reaching the eyes and senses of those who are too distant to know about them. Speculatively speaking, I have to wonder if some in the newsmedia – the above mentioned networks who all but avoided this situation for years prior – are now reluctant to spotlight it because doing so inherently implicates past apathy. An extreme interpretation, perhaps, but considering the media’s tepid hold on our trust – post 9/11 – this seemingly bizarre behaviour is not without recent precedents.

On the topic of how the situation in Darfur has been rendered in the media,Guardian journalist Jonathan Steele, describes in this bloggish-commentary what he calls the Darfur Disconnect:

[…]
Commentators thunder away at the need for sanctions against the regime in Khartoum and denounce western leaders for not authorising Nato to intervene.

Last weekend the outrage took a new turn, with big demonstrations in several American cities, strongly promoted by the Christian right, which sees the Darfur conflict as another case of Islamic fundamentalism on the rampage. They urged Bush to stop shilly-shallying and be tougher with the government of Sudan.

The TV reports are not wrong. They just give a one-sided picture and miss the big story: the talks that the rebels are conducting with the government. The same is true of the commentaries. Why demand military involvement, when western leaders have intervened more productively by pressing both sides to reach a settlement? Over the past few days the US, with British help, has taken over the AU’s mediation role, and done it well. Robert Zoellick, the state department’s number two, and Hilary Benn, Britain’s development secretary, have been in Abuja urging the rebels not to waste the opportunity for peace. Sudan’s government accepted the US-brokered draft agreement last weekend, and it is the rebels who have been risking a collapse.

[…]

An interesting, if divisive, point of view. I say divisive because it drags into the debate an almost unnecessary contention that there is some cabal of the (increasingly journalistic cliche) Christian right to portray this as a spectre of Muslim imperialism against Christian Darfurians – the truth of that particular matter is certainly more complex. I can certainly say that the rally I attended in Toronto had no religious overtones or other types of self-investment.

The more salient argument in this excerpt is whether, in pushing for military intervention, NATO/UN forces could unknowingly apply the wrong type of pressure and drive the conflict deeper or perhaps fragment it along ethnic/political lines – in this regard, it’s not as if there is a single Darfurian rebel organisation sitting at the negotiation table. There are several – some small, some large, and inevitably one would assume each may have their own agenda.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not trying to spin this into something that it’s not – ie obfuscate the conflict to the point where inaction is seen as an option – but rather, I’m trying to see different points of view because I really don’t feel we’re getting it from the media.

On this note, the CBC is having a Foreign Correspondents Forum on June 1st. They are taking questions from viewers regarding international events/affairs. I’ve taken the liberty of posing some of the questions raised above. If you would like to do the same (about Darfur or any other area of the world), visit this page for more information.

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