Lambda: the ultimate religion
The Puritans of the colonial era believed in Calvinist theology, which states that God chose who would be saved from eternal damnation, and if He didn’t choose you, nothing you did could change His mind about your fate. In order to join their churches, you had to convince the church elders that you were one of the Elect, which you did by describing your personal conversion experience; this experience proved that God had laid His hand on your soul and brought you into the fold.
Following this hoary tradition, disciples of God’s own programming language have peppered the Internet with their own conversion experiences. Testify, brothers and sisters!
The mutant as [ethnic slur]
Reading various essays on the racial politics of the new X-men movie—see, for example, Ta-Nehisi Coates, N. K. Jemisin and Matthew Yglesias—reminds me just how sophomoric the whole “let’s use mutants as a metaphor for the oppressed minorities of the real world” conceit is. I mean, if African-Americans could fly or shoot laser beams out of their eyes or read white minds, the whole civil-rights movement would have turned out a bit differently, eh?1
And when I squint at the idea long enough, it reminds me of how people who have not grappled with their own prejudice can relish their “positive” stereotypes about marginalized groups. Jews are smart; Asians are stoically hard-working; African-Americans have natural rhythm; Roma have magical powers; gay men have excellent taste; etc.2 I guess I’d rather have undeserved praise than undeserved condemnation, but compliments based on a stereotype are not really compliments, and the Jews who are “smart” one year can be “crafty” the next.
A well-chosen metaphor can illuminate the truth in a way that literal statements cannot, but this one does more to obscure than illuminate. Better super-metaphors, please.
1 Now there’s a concept for a superhero comic.
2 There’s another concept: The League of Stereotypical Heroes! Umm… maybe not.
Time for a settling of accounts
On the way home from work, I saw an advertisement plastered across the back of a bus, announcing that the Christian Day of Judgment will come on May 21st. This led me to wonder:
- When someone sells ad space to anyone annoucing an impending apocalypse, should they demand payment in full up front?
- If the vendor normally sells space on more generous terms (e.g., net 90 days), can the apocalyptic purchaser sue for religious discrimination?
The legal beagles among my readership may start preparing their memoranda, which are due in two weeks.
Kingdoms of awesomeness
I have been putting off reviewing N. K. Jemesin’s The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms ever since it came out, partly because there is just so much to say about it that I haven’t found the time to write up the review it deserves. But now that it is out in mass-market paperback and nominated for a Hugo and nominated for a Nebula and you can get the ebook for only $2.99, I should let you all know, at the very least: Read this book. It rocks. Consider that a placeholder for the more comprehensive review that I ought to have written a long time ago.
(Oh, yeah, the sequel rocks, too.)
The emo threesome
After watching Buffy on DVD, years after all of my friends had seen it on the network, and watching Babylon 5 on tape, and watching Big Love on DVD, and watching Firefly on DVD, and… well, every once in a while I hear that some new show is going to be premiered, and I think, aha, this one I will see from the beginning, so I can be a first-class member of its fan community.
So I just saw the premiere of Being Human and… well, it ended on a cliffhanger and I am not rearranging my schedule to see the second episode.
The main reason that Buffy, B5, etc. make for such good drama is that their protagonists actually have passions. That’s what the “pro” in “protagonist” means, right? The protagonist wants something, and isn’t satisfied by just going through the motions of desire. BH had an hour to establish the motivations of its characters, and defines them in terms of what they are avoiding, not what they seek. The emo-pire doesn’t want to feed off live humans. The emo-wolf doesn’t want his relatives to know that he’s a werewolf.1 The emo-ghost doesn’t want to leave her ludicrously underpriced two-story apartment.2
Even the episode’s bad guy, über-vamp sire of emo-pire, is weak: a vampire patriarch who has apparently read too many Dr. Sears books. There’s one scene where the emo-pire, who has been trying to claim that he is out of the whole predation scene, asks his sire for a significant favor, and the sire just grants it, without even a suggestion of “you owe me and you can be damn sure I will come back to collect on your debt”. If Vito Corelone had run his family this way, they wouldn’t have been able to take over a Rotary Club.
I don’t expect High Art from Hollywood, but sheesh, is a little storytelling too much to ask for?
1 The protagonists of Big Love, in the first few seasons, don’t want their neighbors to know they are polygamous—life in the closet, and the effects thereof, is a running theme—but that avoidance does not define them. They want to live as a family and maintain a lifestyle that resembles the middle-class LDS ideal while staying closeted.
2 The apartment is in a Boston neighborhood that my wife guessed as the South End, and the paying tenants are a hospital nurse and an orderly. I have an easier time suspending my disbelief in vampires.
World without suits
When I finally got around to reading Anathem, my wife told me she was uninterested in reading it after me, because she thought Neil Stephenson did a mediocre job at character development.
“But that doesn’t matter,” I told her. “He’s a geek. His characters are all geeks. His readers are all geeks. He doesn’t need to put much character development into the actual writing, because we readers know what his characters are like already.”
Unfortunately, after I said that, I started noticing how true it was. Anathem (if you are not a geek, or if you are a geek who only got twenty pages into the book) is a novel whose central characters are very much like monks on a planet very much like Earth… except that the focus of the monks’ lives is not Divine service but the study of math and physics. (Also, no celibacy.) OK, fair enough, it’s a novel about geeks. But when these monkoids have contact with the world outside their walls, everyone they have to deal with is also pretty damn geeky. The narrator’s sister is a machinist. When the plot turns to political machinations, the politicians the narrator interacts with are either mucketymucks in the monastic world itself, or secular politicians who are generally sympathetic to the monks.
What really drove this home to me was a passage where the narrator describes a fascinating religion—the gist of which is that we are all characters in the mind of a condemned criminal, and if we don’t make our world a better place, then the convict will be executed and our world will vanish—and he concludes:
…[T]he Inspiration that had passed from the Innocent to the Condemned Man at the moment of her death was viral. It passed from him into each of us. Each of us had the same power to create whole worlds. The hope was that one day there would be a Chosen One who would create a world that was perfect. If that ever happened, not only would he and his world but all of the other worlds and their creators, back to the Condemned Man, would be saved recursively.
That word “recursively” kicked me out of the story. I was no longer immersed in a world where a monk disguised as a layman was attending a service in a church of a different religion. Instead I was thinking: “The author of this novel is a geek, so of course, he cannot resist the opportunity to put in something recursive.”
(Yes, I read the book all the way to the end, and I understand that part of the point of the story is that Arbre is in all respects a geekier world than Earth. Even so, the characters on stage always seem to represent the geekiest end of their world’s spectrum.)
Timeless wankery
Sometimes, when technology marches on, it tramples popular culture under its jackboots. For example, I often wonder what people who grew up with e-mail and cellular phones make of Diva, a film in which half the cast chases the other half around looking for surreptitious tape recordings.
But sometimes, an artist recognizes a fundamental truth of human nature that transcends the hardware of the age. Compare Flanders and Swann’s fifty-year-old “Song of Reproduction” with the latest xkcd strip.
Oy gevalt! Foiled again!
I regret to inform you, comrades, that this year’s War on Christmas is over, and Christmas won.
via Hacker News
The young and meaningful earth
Matthew Yglesias proposes that we “assume that God created the universe—fossils and all—to look exactly like that 4,000 years ago. That’s obviously a religious hypothesis rather than a scientific one, but it’s consistent with the evidence and doesn’t anyone to believe in a scientists’ conspiracy or anything.”
This assumption is OK as far as philosophy goes, but it misses a crucial detail: if God did create the universe in this fashion, why should I care? Young-Earth Creationism, at least in its American Christian incarnation, is not simply an allegation of facts about the universe. It casts the scientific view of the world’s origins as not merely incorrect but evil, because it implies a history of progress1 without intervention from a personal God. By contrast, in this ideology, the earth is not merely six-thousand-ish years old, but bears a six-thousand-year history of paradise, decline, and redemption.
1 To see evolution as “progress” from “lower” to “higher” forms of life is a mistake going back to the Victorians, but young-earth creationists are not the only ones unclear on that concept. A co-worker of mine once reported hearing, from a certain world-famous linguist, that the syntax of natural languages must be optimal, because the human capacity for language is the product of evolution. “But… but…”, I sputtered, “evolution only tends to local… maxima…” She rolled her eyes in sympathy.
Ele-mentally
For once in, like, decades, I have actually watched the premiere (or at least, the US network premiere) of a TV show at the same time as the rest of the world, instead of watching it on DVD months or years later. So, a few quick reactions to Sherlock, to share with fellow fans:
- One of the amazing things about fiction is that if you have a main character who is passionate about something, the reader will identify with that character, even if the character is otherwise, ahem, flawed. David Tennant’s wild-eyed portrayal of Doctor Who was enough to draw me through the series, even though, let’s face it, most of the episodes had plot holes large enough to drive a planet through. It’s nice to see some Who writers use Benedict Cumberbatch’s acting skill to achieve a similar effect in a TV show that actually has a plot.
- Speaking of plot, it’s also nice to watch a mystery show on TV where I do not feel compelled to reach through the screen, grab the alleged master detective (or, worse, the writer) by the lapels, and scream “You idiot!”
- The use of captions to show text messages on characters’ phones is an interesting presentation technique: has anyone done this before? Also, the use of captioned “wet”, “dry”, etc., as Holmes examines the body.
- I really hope that “everyone assumes that Holmes and Watson are a gay couple, NOT THAT WE THINK ANYTHING’S WRONG WITH THAT, wink wink nudge nudge” does not become a running gag throughout the series.
