I didn’t know this, but in Lodi, Gary’s Uptown Restaurant offers balding (and the balder, the better) men free dinner on Wednesdays. (The funny thing about the clip: A bald woman and a bald man go on a first date to get the discount. And the only guy sitting alone has a full head of hair.)
Month / December 2005
RIP Robert Sheckley
The great satirical science fiction author Robert Sheckley passed away on December 9, 2005. He was 77.
Before Douglas Adams and Terry Pratchett (and perhaps Connie Willis), there was Robert Sheckley. Far from a mere wiseacre (although he was that and much more), Sheckley was one of the first authors to fuse satire with science fiction. Years before Stephen King ripped off the idea for The Running Man and decades before the crazed spate of reality television shows, Sheckley had written a short story, “The Seventh Victim,” in 1953, devising a futuristic world in which game show contestants were designated Hunters and Victims and competed for cash by murdering contestants. A film and a novel followed: The Tenth Victim (1965). Here is an excerpt that shows Sheckley in top goofball form:
Long legs flashing, sable coat clutched beneath one arm, Caroline ran past the tawdry splendors of Lexington Avenue and fought her way through a crowd gathered to watch the public impalement of a litterbug on the great granite stake at 69th and Park. No one even reamrked on Caroline’s progress; their eyes were intent on the wretched criminal, a lout from Hoboken with a telltale Hershey paper crumpled at his feet and with chocolate smeared miserably on his hands. Stony-faced they listened to his specious excuses, his pathetic pleas; and they saw his face turn a mottled gray as two public executioners lifted him by the arms and legs and lifted him high in the air, positioned for the final plunge onto Malefactor’s Stake. There was a good deal of interest just then in the newly instituted policy of open-air executions (“What have we got to be ashamed of?”) and not much current interest in the predictably murderous antics of Hunters and Victims.
Note the specific details nestled within these lengthy sentences. We have here a ridiculously picayune offense attracting a mob, complete with the attention given to the “telltale Hershey paper crumpled at his feet.” Not only is this “criminal” being executed for a trivial offense, but this is no mere hanging, but a more atavistic “impalement.” There is an enduring rivalry between New Jersey vs. New York, as if the crowd completely expected some lout from Hoboken to sully their neighborhood. Further, murder, by way of being televised, has been marginalized and is now devoid of the appropriate horrific response.
When Sheckley came along in the 1950s, speculative fiction needed a swift kick in the ass. While early innovators such as Alfred Bester and Fritz Leiber were just beginning to expand the genre’s limits (all to come full circle in the so-called “Golden Age” of the 1960s) beyond alien empires, robots and humanity’s skirmishes with extraterrestrials, Sheckley had a decidedly more mischevious purpose.
Immortality, Inc. (1958) imagined a world in which science had proven that an afterlife existed, but corporations charged exorbitant fees to get there. Dimension of Miracles (1968) concerns a man who wins the lottery, but must return to Earth to get his prize. And getting to Earth, much less the right Earth in the right time, proves a greater struggle than expected.
But Sheckley was far from a mere funnyman. He wasn’t afraid to experiment. His novel, Options (1975), was composed of seventy-seven brief chapters, resulting in a Flann O’Brien style collection of phantasmagorical imagery which may or may not be real.
It’s really too bad that Sheckley spent much of his latter years writing novels for Deep Space Nine and Babylon 5 (sadly, among the few of his works still in print) and never received the full credit he deserved. His work will be truly missed. However, if you’d like to sample, Nesfa Press has issued The Masque of Mañana, which contains Sheckley’s major short stories. They’ve also published Dimensions of Sheckley, an omnibus collection that contains five of his novels.
Failing that, the Robert Sheckley website has preserved a television appearance which was recorded in Romania last year.
Why Wikipedia is a Problem
Adam Curry, historical revisionist? Not just a revisionist historian. But if Wikipedia is to be an effective resource, then it needs to ensure that impartial third parties update the entries.
“Civil and Courteous” or Simply Listening?
At the Les Blogs conference, an altercation occurred between Mena Trott and Ben Metcalfe. (Video of the encounter can be found here.) Ms. Trott had urged bloggers to be civil and courteous during her speech. And Mr. Metcalfe, feeling that Trott’s statements didn’t hold water, typed “this is bullshit” into an IRC backchannel that was being simultaneously broadcast. Metcalfe was then called an asshole and singled out publicly by Trott as the panel was happening. But Metcalfe, unfazed, still challenged Trott on her points, noting that in the real world, people often aren’t always nice and that bloggers, as a whole, needed to develop thicker skins if they expected their discourse to hold water.
Trott has reproduced her speech here. And it seems curiously similar in tone and phrasing to a certain essay that was debated in the literary world a few years ago.
Given that Trott is on record as letting loose all manner of profanity on Metcalfe, I find her meet-cute “Can’t we all just get along?” nonsense incongruous with her message, particularly when she specifically singled out Metcalfe and urged him to stand up, a clear attempt to humiliate him that, in this case, failed completely. (Fortunately, it appears that the two had a conversation sometime after the panel to clear the waters. Likely most reports chronicling this scrape will omit this fact.)
It should be noted that, outside the interconnected world, audiences are likely to exchange similar thoughts about a speaker on a piece of paper or through a whisper uttered to an adjacent audience member in the heat of the moment. I don’t believe that any of this is intended to malign or slander the speaker, but to frame the speaker’s words into some kind of immediate context with which to take in the information and understand the speaker better.
The only difference here between a note or a whisper and Metcalfe’s offhand comment is that the latter was publicly broadcast and, despite all claims to the contrary about “thick skin” and the like by Trott, taken personally.
What this incident (and the respective reactions) proves is that blogging has a long way to go before it is even remotely similar to real-world conversations. (Why was the IRC backchannel publicly projected, for example? Are we so enamored with technology that we have lost the ability to preserve basic levels of human communication?) And until it makes some substantial developments along these lines, there is no reason to expect the non-blogging audience, which, lest we all forget, remains a substantial bloc of the human population, to jump on the bandwagon. While it is true that the comments allow for an almost immediate feedback (a distinct advantage to print journalism), perhaps there truly is an incompatibility between blogging and real-world conversation, given that the desire to break into the top ranks of Technorati often outweighs the thoughts and feelings of the blog entries posted. Oscar Wilde was more prescient than he realized when he said, “There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.”
The chief problem with this medium is that even smart people like Trott seem incapable of adjusting their mind set to determine what a dissenter’s “This is bullshit” might be all about and not take it personally. I don’t believe setting tonal limits is the answer. But I don’t believe that trying to lambaste your opponents in public over some picayune point of exploration is really the answer either.[1]
The answer involves bloggers being more skillful “listeners” rather than “talkers,” shifting the emphasis to one that permits the participants to maintain a malleable mind set for multiple perspectives and an outsider to see very clearly how all of these perspectives match up. And if the medium hopes to evolve, then it needs to stop being concerned with hits and statistics and become more concerned with bringing people together in a way that doesn’t demand some ridiculous level of commitment from the participants (one of the reasons why most social network sites have proven a bust, in my view). For the litblog scene, I think Bud Parr’s MetaxuCafe may be more of a revolutionary stroke along these lines than even Parr suspects.
One thing that’s clear to me: It’s decidedly unhealthy to let a point of contention get in the way of maintaining a civil discussion, particularly when it concerns issues that challenge the status quo, or to mistake the caustic quality of a message with the temperament of the messenger.
[1] Full confession: This blogger is sometimes guilty of this.
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Moody/Experimental Fiction Update
If you’re not reading this site through an RSS feed, then be alerted that the experimental author referenced by Rick Moody has personally responded on these pages. His name is Tim Ramick and his story, “Foursquare” (a PDF to be downloaded and read, whereby the page is split up into four quadrants and the reader jumps from square to square), can be found here.