I feel bad because I want to learn more, learn more that isn’t in my little areas of specialization, become more politically aware, just generally feel less oblivious about everything going on around me

But I know that the times when my mind is rattling loudly about this are the times when it is least achievable.  If I try to sit down and read anything now I will actually not be able to concentrate because I will be thinking too much about how bad I feel about not concentrating enough on what I’m reading (!)

I know the only way to improve is through patience and care – by identifying and exploiting my best moments – rather than through brute force, but part of my mind hasn’t caught up with that lesson and keeps calling the rest of me lazy

I used to think I might be able to be a writer, but my sense of my own abilities has gone downhill a lot over the years.  And for the most part I have no ideas, as well as no talent.  But I do wish I had the ability to do something I really want to do, which is to write a story about people interested in the late, controversial “problem children” of a beloved writer’s output.  A story about the way that some people (in real life) feel, with greatly varying degrees of severity, about things like

• The Silmarillion
• Finnegans Wake
• Cerebus (after its glory days)
• Nabokov’s late work
• The VALIS Trilogy
• Homestuck (for wherever that particular person got off the bus, if they did)

A story about people who love some fictional author and don’t know what to make of that author’s final work, which is half-incomprehensible and disturbing and seems like self-parody, or something worse.  But it can’t just be dismissed, because it hangs like a shadow over everything else, because of the pathos of failure, because of the desire to play Devil’s Advocate, because of the feeling of some secret unity that one is just too stupid or blind to recognize … 

But I don’t know how to make an interesting story out of that, and if I did I wouldn’t know how to write it.

the ardis of time

I’ve been very old for the past few years, but now I’m getting younger.

You know, I actually find the concept that the universe is a cold, indifferent machine to be kind of comforting, as it’s preferable to my gut instinct which is that the universe actively hates me

Speaking of such things, it’s funny – when I was in college I remember several people (like at least 4-5 independent cases) telling me point-blank that I struck them as an “unemotional” person.  Which was surreal, because I’d spend part my time with these people (none of whom were physics majors) and then spend the rest of my time feeling like everyone else in my chosen academic field was a perfect glistening professional machine and I was this complete mess that they kept around for some unfathomable reason

I honestly think some of this behavior is the result of consuming too much pop culture that puts a lot of emphasis on the heroes being warmer and more empathetic and so forth than the villains.  I’m sure this kind of stuff makes writers feel like they’re sending a good message, but given the way heroes and villains tend to act in pop culture, it usually sends the message that “being warm and empathetic” is synonymous with “not being too weird”

So these people’s behavior made a lot more sense when I realized that they really didn’t want me to be more emotional (in fact they would hate that, because it’d mean I’d lack the composure to make myself into a “likable character” in front of them) – it was just that my mannerisms had identified me as a cartoon villain and they now wanted to Defeat me with their Power of Pure Heart or something

I spent from noon to 8 PM today being useless and doing nothing because I was stewing and raging about a fact I learned that 1) doesn’t affect me or anyone I care about except indirectly, and 2) isn’t really a bad thing and I’m still actually not sure why it made me feel so horrible

Abstractly, this is kind of a fascinating phenomenon – I don’t think it’s happened before

There is no specific word or phrase or commonly understood concept that encapsulates all the specific ways in which my childhood was unusual, but nonetheless, those qualities have shaped my adult personality in incredibly obvious, direct and constraining ways

There’s no soundbyte or loaded word I can use, I just have to fall back on “my dad is a messed-up guy and that’s why I’m so weird,” and that’s frustrating, because it sounds underwhelming when the reality is overwhelming in its specificity and profundity of its implications for literally everything I ever do

found in my old notes; a fun sample of what was going on in my mind ca. october 2011

Keep reading

As you have likely noticed, I have a thing for stories about precocious children/teenagers.  It isn’t very hard to figure out why: although I am supposedly “smart” and all that, my unrelentingly self-deprecatory mind can’t let go of developmental delay as a analogy/exaggeration of my life experience, so these stories provide both appealing fantasies (of having the opposite sorts of problems) and, also, the sort of context that I, as an adult, feel is my natural milieu.

At 15 I was monumentally stupid and oblivious, almost to the point of sub-humanity (I know these are terrible terms in which to think but my mind won’t let them go); now, at 25, I am at the point where I – with my particular blend of over-developed and under-developed capacities – imagine I might be really impressive if I were 15

yellow blue trivia

I just finished Yellow Blue Tibia by Adam Roberts.  It’s the fourth Roberts novel I’ve read, and at least the second best, if not the best, of those four. I liked it a lot.

Yellow Blue Tibia was the subject of a particularly scathing blog review a few years ago that I remember seeing linked on several SF blogs.  I read it before I had read any of Roberts’ fiction.  As someone who had gotten a good impression of Roberts from his blogging and reviews, I was curious: could his fiction really be that bad?  I later delved into Roberts’ fiction and enjoyed it, but kept my distance from YBT, I guess out of worry that it might really be that bad after all.

Having now read it, and re-read Valente’s blog post, I feel at a strange impasse.  Most of Valente’s criticism concerns historical accuracy.  I don’t know enough about the Soviet Union to say, but I’m willing to concede that YBT is inaccurate in all the ways that Valente says it is (well, except for that bit about the Russian “x” – I think she just doesn’t get the joke there).  It certainly feels like it might be that inaccurate.  It’s fundamentally a comic novel, not just in the sense of being laugh-out-loud funny, but in the sense of being disorienting, campy, unserious when you might expect it to be serious (and vice versa), and so forth.  It seems no more intent on evoking the nuances and particulate details of a historical period than, say, Life of Brian.  It’s a weird, silly book, and quite clearly so on purpose.  Valente says: “literally every cultural note in this entire novel is wrong.”  One could add that all the other notes in the novel are “wrong,” too.  It is off-kilter by design.  "This piano sounds odd.“  It certainly does; don’t you know you’re at a John Cage concert?

Is that an excuse?  I think Valente would say no.  She says the novel is full of "painfully inept cultural appropriation” and calls Roberts “a Westerner in redface” (!)  Presumably “it’s meant to be silly and farcical” doesn’t excuse these faults, since at the end of the day it’s still someone else’s culture that is being distorted for the sake of comedy.

Here’s what I’m wondering, though.  Does an author always have the responsibility to “get it right” whenever they take on any subject matter whatsoever?  Is it possible to throw up one’s hands and say: I’m not promising accuracy, so don’t expect it?  Surely people who like reading printed falsehoods for fun must be ready to accept some sorts of compromise with the truth.  So where is the line between untruths that can be accepted, and those that can’t?  (That isn’t a rhetorical question.  I’m actually not sure.)  When I read a book as bizarre and farcical as YBT I immediately conclude, and accept, that the author is not striving for historical authenticity.  Is this some product of my distance from the circumstances depicted?  But don’t I have the same response when I read highly unreal books about circumstances I’m familiar with?

What exactly is it that separates legitimate complaints of this type from, say, the complaint that there is no existing psychological condition that makes someone act like Charles Kinbote?  But of course it is clear when one reads Pale Fire that Nabokov is not trying to authentically evoke the experience of mental illness.  He has failed at that task because he never attempted it.  (It’s also clear that Pale Fire, like YBT, is a comic and highly artificial work, willing to sacrifice verisimilitude for a cute joke or an internal reference.)

Or here’s another example along the same lines: the protagonist of Jonathan Lethem’s novel Motherless Brooklyn has Tourette Syndrome, as do I.  Lethem’s protagonist experiences Tourette’s as some sort of weird, trippy internal logorrhea that’s quite far from the rather uninteresting set of simple motor and verbal compulsions that actual people with Tourette’s experience.  I’m happy, not angry, that Lethem didn’t “get it right” when he wrote about Tourette’s, because actual Tourette’s is boring and has little fictional potential.  Am I anomalous in not caring about something like this?

And Valente isn’t Russian.  Now if I imagine someone without Tourette's criticizing the portrayal of Tourette’s in Motherless Brooklyn in such a high-minded tone, I don’t imagine I would feel that person was doing me a favor – in fact I imagine I would feel quite angry at them.  But this analogy I’ve been making is full of holes, isn’t it?  Having Tourette’s is very different from living in Soviet Russia.  But which of the differences matter for the point in question?  That isn’t a rhetorical question, and neither are any of the questions above.  I actually don’t know.  I’m just left with the sense that Valente and Roberts are talking past each other, and wondering whether there is just some misunderstanding that could be resolved, or whether they actually just have two totally different conceptions of the responsibilities of fiction.  (If the latter, which of these conceptions is more common?  Is one of them “right”?)  I’m very sleep-deprived and should stop writing now.