Year / 2005
Ain’t No Room for Culture in the New I-Rack
The United States is now rivaling those who burned the Great Library of Alexandria as cultural destroyers. Having deliberately built a base upon Babylon, a new report from the British Museum notes:
- damage to the dragons decorating the Ishtar Gate, one of the world’s most famous monuments, from attempts to prise out the relief-moulded bricks
- broken bricks inscribed with the name of Nebuchadnezzar lying in spoil heaps
- the original brick surface of the great processional route through the gate crushed by military vehicles
- fuel seeping from tanks into archaeological layers
- acres of the site levelled, covered with imported gravel – which Dr Curtis said would be impossible to remove without causing further damage – and sprayed with chemicals which are also seeping into the unexcavated buried deposits
- thousands of tonnes of archaeological material used to fill sandbags and mesh crates, and equally damaging, when that practice stopped, thousands more tonnes of material imported from outside the site, contaminating the site for archaeologists forever.
Dr. John Curtis, the writer of the report, noted that his charges “should not be seen as exhaustive, but is indicative of the types of damage caused.”
In Defense of Conversational Adverbs
Apparently, some folks are taking offense to using “actually” in conversation. Actually, there’s something very nice about using adverbs in regular conversation. Realistically, it beats the tongue-tied swagger or the awkward pauses because, actually, the brain gets an extra second as the beads of sweat form hideous spoors on your forehead while hot lights, cameras and an audience are upon you and you hope to hell that you’re coming across as articulately as the perfectionist producers demand (yes, even on CSPAN!). Actually, it’s not quite like that at all. But having been on camera, it’s close. Inadvertently, in print, adverbs stick out long sore thumbs but, actually, adverbs announce a moment of discovery, a sense that one is discovering a point or a thesis in the process of response and, actually, if someone has a problem with this, well then we suspect that they may not have many ideas to contribute to the world, save complaints over very minute things. Actually.
You Should Be Dancing
Gwenda has a highly accurate account of dance lessons, complete with clumsy bald guys, sad middle aged couples and tittering dwarfs. I want to assure everyone that ballroom dance lessons are really like this, particularly the ones that involve neophytes getting to a dance hall two hours before everyone else to pick up a few moves from an instructor barking over an inaudible PA system (or, even worse, with one of those damn headsets).
[8/11/05 UPDATE: Nearly eighteen months after I made a New Year’s resolution to thoroughly learn ballroom dancing, I have failed to follow up. At least from a long-term perspective. Much of this has to do with a promise I made to a now ex-girlfriend that I would take ballroom dance lessons with her. Sadly, the relationship ended before such a plan could come to fruition. Instead, what generally happens these days is that I attend some random lesson in a genteel club out of the blue (often with whomever I am dating), attempt to learn the intricate moves (taught as if one is supposed to learn these things by osmosis rather than cogent instructions), and stumble accordingly as partners are exchanged. But I’m great on a dance floor with idiotic Caucasians! Perhaps because I am more ambitious. I’m probably thinking of dancing right now because I have a date tonight and I’m thinking of intimacy, because it’s been a while (not too long but I’m impatient) since I went dancing and smelled a woman’s nice perfume and held her in my arms, and because I figure nobody will possibly sift through the archives to read these personal ramblings. That’s the great irony ab0ut categorizing everything. You think it’s for your users, but really you become personally connected to it and you start writing these longass afterwords as if you’re compiling some book — when, in fact, very few people care about these obscure peregrinations.]
Product Placement in Fiction
I’m not completely against describing products and cultural minutiae in fiction, but I have a distinct problem with the way Tricia Sullivan does it in Maul. This fascinating novel, an interesting cross between hard science fiction, riot grrls gone wild and cyberpunk which has yet to pick up a U.S. publisher, deals with a two-strand narrative. In the distant future, a Y-virus has wiped out nearly every male on the planet, leaving male clones (taken from existing tissue) to carry out a simulated program that involves teenage girls battling in a mall. Sullivan’s novel is stacked to the nines with ideas. In fact, as if channeling Kathy Acker’s ghost, it opens daringly with a girl masturbating with a gun and somehow manages to elude heavy-handedness. It’s truly the work of a writer to watch.
However, Sullivan’s too obsessed with girls wearing Red Hot Chilli Peppers T-shirts or handing over a Snapple. Okay, Tricia, we get the consumerist angle. It’s clear enough by the title. But why would Sullivan choose bands like the Red Hot Chilli Peppers who have long lost their lustre in the present among the teenage crowd. Why not take a speculative fiction environment and create brand new companies? Isn’t that a good deal more fun?
But even more infuriating is how these pop cultural asides get in the way of Sullivan’s fascinating effort to explore feminism. The product concentration detracts from the intellectual expose and dates the book almost instantly. Which is interesting because it was published in 2003.
Conversely, Richard Yates’ fiction (which I’ve finally begun reading after Lizzie threatened to have several Young Republicans remove one of my testicles) hasn’t dated at all. Even a story like “A Glutton for Punishment,” which deals with a 1960s-1970s corporate environment (and should date), still packs an emotional punch, while achieving a startling purity. I suspect that it’s because Yates avoids product placement and uses sparse terminology (“cubicle” is mentioned once) to describe his environments. He is more concerned with what a character is feeling, the look on another person’s place, the heat of a room, etc.
I used to believe that this so-called literary product placement was of value in fiction. The immediate example that came to mind was an image from a Stephen King novel that I can’t immediately recall: something along the lines of a Skippy peanut butter jar filled with coins. The image’s startling presence, however, has more to do with the effort to remove all the peanut butter from a jar and use it as a piggy bank.
The problem with using brands as shorthand for character attributes is that, when we’re considering the perseverance of fiction, today’s telltale brand could be tomorrow’s failure. (Who can’t chuckle at the Pam Am flight seen in 2001, which immediately undermines its future?) I’m inclined to believe that unless fiction involves a specific time and place, on the whole, brands really don’t belong in literature.