welp, still hyped for what i imagine is going to be some scathing criticism
@fipindustries [re: Bubblegum]
welp, still hyped for what i imagine is going to be some scathing criticism
Yeah… I definitely want to write something about it. I mean, the author wrote my favorite novel – or it’d be tied for top 2 or 3, anyway – so my disappointment is surprising, and seems like it ought to be meaningful or interesting.
Plus, given my previous level of respect for the guy, I feel like I have almost an obligation to think about his book seriously, and treat its failure (if it is failure) as a startling misfire by a talented artist – an epic folly, a brilliant execution of a fundamentally bad idea, something like that – rather than just dismissing it with all the other bad books that get published every year.
The trouble is that it … is really not even very interestingly bad. It’s just bad. Or anyway, I’m having trouble finding an interesting gloss on it. I can’t think of any higher-level interpretations that don’t absolutely suck, in such a basic way that they aren’t even worth talking about for long.
The least bad way I can look at the book is as a collection of a bunch of little pieces, many of which are individually “pretty good” or even “great,” where you’re not supposed to care too much what it adds up to.
The closest thing to an interesting theme I can extract from my reactions, right now, is that Bubblegum feels like a far more immature book than The Instructions. It’s super weird – whereas Instructions was a first novel that felt masterful and perfectly self-assured, Levin “at home in his writerly skin” from day one, Bubblegum isn’t a first novel but is (maybe on purpose?? god dammit) almost a parody of what bad first novels are like. For instance
1. it’s about a writer, and he spends a lot of time talking about writer’s block, and navel-gazingly wondering about whether people have read his (obscure) work and whether they liked it if so, and when he’s not doing that he’s talking about his troubles with women, you know, the ones all these semi-autobiographical first-novel guys have
2. the writer character is a pathetic schlub in general, and this feels almost like an extended running joke at the guy’s expense, where he’s self-aware enough to be really self-conscious and make all these pre-emptive jokes about his own patheticness, but not enough to actually change it or double down and really own it
…which is the kind of character you’d write if you were worried you were this guy, and wanted to head off the accusation by doing the same pre-emptive self-criticism on a meta level – implying you + the reader are “better than” this guy (we can see him from outside, see his defense mechanisms) but still writing the exact book that guy would write
3. On that note, the whole book feels very defensive? It has all these themes about Art and Artists that make it hard to criticize it without feeling like you’re falling into a trap, e.g. one major character is really interested in “creating new experiences” in the abstract for artistic reasons, and his elevation of this above other values is critiqued harshly – so then if I say “this book is hackneyed” I now have to explain why I’m not being just like that guy, valuing only novelty
4. It is, as the above points suggest, “bad on purpose” a whole lot. In a lot of different ways, clever ways. It’s so clever about the numerous levels on which it is bad on purpose, and their relation to the object-level themes, that it feels like it’s trying to trick you into accepting this as a substitute for actually being good. Which feels insecure, of the writer. This gets much worse near the end and was partly responsible for my great frustration right upon finishing – the end is the worst part
5. It is really dark, in a depressive kind of way – like Lanark it has that lordly, sneering, all-encompassing, “everything turns out bad and I know the secret reasons why” attitude that the depressive mind-voice has. This is subtle and suppressed for much of the book but creeps up on you, and explodes into the foreground near the end, revealing in retrospect its subtler traces throughout the rest.
This kind of thing feels instinctually “deep” to my brain, but simply by parasitizing off of how the depressive mind-voice itself feels instinctually “deep.” It doesn’t actually provide a novel or useful gloss on the world, or even on the main character’s brain. But it does provide one that feels deep, feels impregnable, perfect, “masterful.” (Just what a new writer wants the reader to feel, is worried they won’t feel)
I’ll probably write something with spoilers later, maybe? Maybe not? Depends on if anyone has read the book and would read it, and I’m advising people not to read the book, so I dunno.
I like to send mental energy vectors out into the universe, since that involves nothing more than pointing at the sky with a stylus. I should probably get some maps and coordinate them somehow and stuff.
What can I say? It was great when it was revealed to Richard Garfield during his 1993 drugs-and-higher-math-fueled stroke of inspiration, bringing together the five-color system and the idea of a “collectible card game” in one fell swoop. It got even better under Mark Rosewater’s decades of steady improvements to user experience, game balance, and many many interesting mechanics and worlds. Like many things, it got even better than that when intellectual property was abolished, leading to an efflorescence of ground-up playstyles and environments and sets - I don’t know if this is an analogy that would make sense for your generation, but it was like the difference between unmodded and modded Hammerfall (granted that WotC-shepherded Magic was always better than vanilla Hammerfall - but no one today would play with lands, for instance!) And when KX-558 came and it turned out that their psychics had visited the same part of the astral plane that Richard Garfield had, that made all the difference - we were able to place our best players against theirs and, by those grinding tournament days that were the moral equivalent of war, secure a place for human sovereignty within our little corner of the galaxy.
But you didn’t come here for all that. You came, I imagine, to exploit my special rights as a U to utter unpopular opinions. And here we come to the rub. Magic: the Gathering’s special influence on our culture, however much we can respect its role in shepherdiing us through our greatest moment of need, and in providing a bridge of not just warriors’ respect but real spiritual comity with other peoples of the stars, has led to stagnation. Would not some people marked off as Gs for their skills as mystics and birthmothers be happier in an arcology? Are we really best entrusting our most powerful weapons to hotheads, and are we not squandering the ambitions (although I have heard that in the times-before their dominion over others led to unfortunate abuses) of Bs by channelling them into the Grand Tournament Rounds? Ultimately it is up to the Ws to make such decisions, for it is my place to raise heresies to the level of consideration, rather than act, and to supplement such considerations with analysis, when requested. But if it is our caste’s special duty to think, I suspect many of the failures and infelicities of this system lies in our failures to do so.
