The danger of wanting to be a writer is that it generally means “I want to get published, I want to win an award, I want to have a book.” And if that’s what’s driving you as a writer, you’ll never create anything worthwhile—even if you’re capable of it.
The title of this post comes from another quote mentioned elsewhere in the piece, and between that and the quote excerpted above I had plenty of things to chew on.
]]> There is little that's worse for any artistic endeavor than mixed motives. It is too easy for people not to be sincere with themselves about what they want and how they plan to get it. You tell yourself you want something for reasons that have nothing to do with you or the thing itself, and after a while, you believe it -- even if the whole process of telling yourself such things is a product of some misdirected motivation.I've been there myself, enough times that I ran out of fingers to count them on. Example: I wanted to be an artist, so I took some time off to refine my primitive drawing skills -- but I found myself in the middle of a session, pencil in hand, looking back over my shoulder at the keyboard. I didn't want to be drawing; I wanted to be writing. Eventually I put the pencil down, turned off the lightbox, and continued the novel I'd abandoned months earlier. I wasn't thinking about finished drawings; I was thinking about how I could brag to my friends and show them the resulting work.
This is not to say that taking pride in your work is a bad thing. It's that as a motive it all too easily hijacks other things. Pride in your work for the sake of bragging to others is a side effect of being devoted to what you do. As Brad Warner once said about enlightenment in relation to practicing Buddhism, that's the B-side and the remix, not the album cut.
One of the saddest things any writer of means can face is another would-be writer whose greatest avowed ambition is to be Rich and Famous. I know a great deal of working writers who are neither of those things, who are ostensibly more famous in their humdrum workaday jobs than they are as a writer, and more often than not have made orders of magnitude more money in said jobs than they ever did as a writer. It was once possible for someone to make a decent living and feed a family as an author of short stories or novels; such days are long gone. The best advice one can give any writer is to always know how to do something else, but to never stop writing anyway. (Irony: the real writers never need to be told to not stop writing. They do it even if everyone around them tells them to stop, and even if they are genuinely terrible at it.)
What's more, I know of no writer who walks around whispering sweet nothings into the ears of these poor fools, bewitching them with promises of piles of greenbacks and their names in five different kinds of lighting. From all I've seen, such folks don't need to be conned: they con themselves just fine. Why go through the trouble of having someone else trick you when you can usually do the job on your own, and for less cost?
It's sad to see people entertain such ideas -- even and especially when backed up by the kind of go-getter, In Search of Excellence mentality that many people assume will automatically translate into success. They will not be swayed by any amount of talk about how much fame sucks, about how most rich people are still miserable (although certainly a hell of a lot more comfortable), and how the ultimate reward for writing a book is to have written a book. They will have to find out all these things for themselves the hard way. I say let them.
]]>Libraries should concentrate on collecting books that people might want to read, might even enjoy and benefit from, but don’t know about, and then promote them like crazy. The bestsellers are already promoted like crazy. Most of them are pretty bad by whatever standard you want to apply, but they’re like cotton candy. They go down smoothly because the readers know exactly what to expect and never get any surprises. People who exclusively read bestsellers and mass popular fiction are hardly worthy of being called readers at all.
There's a lot in this piece (and in Annoyed Librarian's posts generally) about how libraries are scared of losing funding if they stop carrying the obvious bestsellers and genre fiction that, for better or worse, make up a big part of their circulation stats.
A lot of that attitude, I suspect, comes more out of the politics of public financing than anything else: I remember all too well the Congressional sessions where various scientists were called upon to defend the millions of dollars being poured into their research, and (rather stupidly, if I dare say so) admitted that there might not be any practical application for such work, but the fact that America would be promoting that much more scientific research was in itself good. End result: they had their funding slashed. In the same way, any public library that says "We're not going to emphasize books that everyone already knows about and can find" is begging on bended knee to have its funding gutted at the next referendum. Them's the breaks.
But all of the above brought to mind another question: Are bestsellers bestsellers because they're promoted like crazy, or is there another mechanism at work?
]]> I went back and forth about this particular chicken-and-egg issue a number of times, and settled on this. Bestsellers get a heavier promotional push than anything else out there because the publishing companies know they'll be getting that much more of a return on their investment by doing so. They push the latest Stephen King and John Grisham material because they know it's far easier to get people to actually spend money on such things. They're known quantities. People know what a Stephen King book is like, and so it's that much less work to get them to drop a bundle on a new hardback with his name on it. (I'm reminded of the old anecdote about Isaac Asimov penning a book on some fairly anodyne science topic with no obvious marketing pitch, and being reminded by the publisher that the word "Asimov" on the cover was the marketing pitch.)People respond to what's familiar -- a familiar name, a familiar subject matter, a familiar approach to same (read: genre) -- than they do what's unfamiliar. Even people of relatively adventurous tastes fall into this trap; I know I'm far more willing to spend, say, $40 on a box set by Merzbow than someone who has allegedly been influenced by him. You see how the power of a name even applies there?
If it seems paradoxical to fiercely promote things that are already sure shots, keep in mind that's because the whole system is trapped in the blockbuster model. Unless you're part of that tiny less-than-one-percent of authors who can reliably carpet-bomb the commanding heights of the New York Times bestseller list with their work, you get little to no support. You're on your own, and god help you if you are thinking about making a living trying to write books unless you're in at least the high midlist (which is itself being torn to shreds).
And a big part of why that is the case is because no publisher wants to throw the same advertising budget at Anonymous McUnknown and possibly never see a dime of that money again, when they can consistently bet on the same winning horses and get back something. Their profit margins are too thin to allow any other kind of behavior. They know better.
So when it comes to libraries, the behavior of the publishers themselves need to be ignored as much as humanly possible. know that when I go to the library, I'm not looking for bestsellers. Should I care to read them, they are there, but the vast majority of the time they can be found in the discount racks a year later for a dollar a copy. They're this year's model.
But I also know libraries cannot afford to pretend publishers exist in a vacuum. They fight tooth-and-nail against the lending of ebooks -- which from the publishers' POV is perfectly justified, for the same reason the movie studios are getting leery of offering rentals for a title before it's had a chance to exhaust its retail sell-through.
It sounds to me more and more like everyone on all sides are missing opportunities. I don't want to live in a world where everything is simply All Hits, All The Time, because that's boring. But I also don't want to live in a world where all creativity has been reduced to a bunch of unprofitable (or at least unmotivatingly unprofitable) micro-transactions because nobody can make any money doing what they love. I think -- no, I know -- I would continue to write even if there was no money in it; heck, I've been doing that for years. But it's naïve to expect everyone to feel the same way, and banking on that feeling alone will not change anything. And I really don't like the idea that the libraries are assuming they're Too Big To Fail in this particular equation.
]]>The second hour is slightly more absorbing, as the United Red Army of the title starts as an earnest splinter group from another faction but gradually degenerates into paranoia and self-persecution with many of its own members murdered for being not ideologically pure enough. The only people we get to know well enough are the instigators of the purge; everyone else is just a name and a date of death.
The home stretch re-constructs the infamous "Asamasanso Siege" (as documented in Shocking Crimes of Postwar Japan). Here there are hints of the movie this could have been as the revolutionists barricade themselves in a mountain lodge, stand off against police for days on end, and face both physical and psychological warfare. But by that point the film has long since worn out its welcome. It's all good intentions for so little real payoff, one-and-a-half hours of movie in a three-hour bag. Then again, maybe Wakamatsu's point is that this revolutionary political stuff is supposed to be boring, but I'm dubious. Bonus points for Jim O'Rourke's mournful soundtrack, though.
]]> amazon.com=B0063E008YGTO stands for Great Teacher Onizuka, and the adventures of Onizuka and his stupefying excursions into rock-ribbed machismo have been chronicled in both a manga and its subsequent anime adaptation. Both were translated into English, but are now sadly out of print. Enter Vertical, Inc., who have been looking to broaden their manga offerings. Rather than reissue all of GTO, which would have been problematic at best, they elected instead to bring English-speaking audiences this previously-untranslated follow-up series. It’s a gamble, but not a reckless one, and the presence of previous GTO stories doesn’t create a major barrier for newcomers.]]> I should know, since I’m something of a test case. I walked into GTO:14DiS with admittedly hazy memories of the original story—no plot specifics, just a general understanding of the overall storyline. It took only a few pages to get everything straight. At the age of twenty-two, former juvenile delinquent Onizuka has decided to turn his life in a new direction: he’s a schoolteacher. That said, most of his lessons are closer to life-coaching than conventional remedial instruction. He’s also known for his, uh, unorthodox approaches to reaching problem students … and when all else fails, he can always fall back on his brawn and brawling to make his point. He’s a pop-culture embodiment of the Japanese concept of ketsudan: steely determination in the face of all odds. (One of the adventures in the previous series involved him taking and passing an exam after having taken a bullet to the stomach.) The only Manliness Point he hasn’t scored so far is losing his virginity, and his (failed) attempts to do so make for a regular running gags in the GTO-verse.
14 Days opens with Onizuka deciding to take a hike from Tokyo and lie low after making a total ass of himself on national TV. (It’s a long story.) He elects to spend some time in Shonan, a stretch of the Japanese coast that’s best known for being a favored hangout for toughs of all stripes—meaning he’ll fit right in as long as nobody tries to kill him. Unfortunately, he’s barely even off the train before being embroiled in trouble: when he spots a girl shoplifting, she turns the tables on him and accuses him of being a groper. The cops are in the middle of forcing a gun down Onizuka’s throat when he’s bailed out by the girls’ own teacher. Her name’s Shiratori, and she runs a special school for difficult children (the “White Swan”). What’s more, she knows of Onizuka’s astonishing track record with similarly troubled youth, and is only too happy to invite him to stay at their place. The shoplifter, Katsuragi, was—what else?—a student of hers, and a particularly difficult and recalcitrant one at that.
“Everyone here is a victim of selfish parents,” Shiratori explains to Onizuka as she walks him from room to room in the White Swan. Case in point: Sakurako, a self-cutter whose violent father shows up to take her back home. Onizuka makes a stand to keep her out of Daddy’s (clearly abusive) hands. Because we’ve seen Onizuka suck up and dish out so much punishment already, it doesn’t come off as outlandish when he sends the guy flying out a window with one punch: it’s just par for the course with this character. What’s harder for him to deal with is well-connected thugs. Earlier on, Shiratori phoned some rent-a-brutes to teach Onizuka a lesson, and he gave twice as good as he got—only to find that the reason Shiratori is able to summon the cops on such short notice is because of her dad being one himself. This sets the stage for a long-term conflict between the two of them, one where the stakes are apparently limitless: Shiratori’s parting shot for the volume is to douse Onizuka in kerosene and set him on fire … well, it’s kerosene and water, 50/50. She does it mostly for the pleasure of watching the poor man wet his pants in front of everyone.
All of this falls right in line with the way GTO has worked in the past: put Onizuka in horribly adverse situations, surround him with people who want nothing more than to kick his ass into next Wednesday, and watch him not only triumph over them but make them into hardened allies. The whole concept of beating the bad guys by making them into friends thanks to the sheer force of your personality is a standard shonen manga staple: it’s hard to imagine Naruto, Luffy or most of the rest of their ilk without that trait.
What makes GTO stand apart is the way those situations are derived out of the rough-and-tumble of the lower tiers of modern Japanese society (albeit with a lot more color and invention than you’d get from, say, the pages of the Asahi Shinbun), instead of being set in a synthetic fantasyland. It’s one thing entirely to use a Clone Jutsu to clobber your opponent, and another thing entirely—one a good deal more immediate—to let someone else wielding a baseball bat get the first strike in so you can beat them down, because by now you’re inured to that kind of punishment. Probably funnier, too.
]]>There is no such thing as perfection. It’s an idea, and not even a particularly useful one at that: all it does is tell you what you are not. It’s even misleading as a goal or a direction to move in, because all it will do is dog you at every step and remind you of how you fall short.
This is what I tell myself most every day, as a way to keep my expectations from being hijacked by the impossible. Impossible is nothing, or so the Adidas ads tell us—and while I do admit every day there is a little bit less of the impossible all around us, there is never any more of the perfect. The only time there’s perfection is when we let ourselves dream, when we freely drop into a space where what’s possible takes precedence over what actually is. Sometimes the best way to get there is with the right music, and if the soundtrack to such a thing is not Kind of Blue then I don’t want another one.
Kind of Blue is the only jazz album I would recommend to someone who has never listened to jazz, whether in a conscientious way or in any way at all. That is only because it’s also one of the few albums I would recommend to anyone no matter what music they already listen to, or even if they listen to no particular music, period. It seems not “educational” but necessary: a world without Kind of Blue is missing at least one major constellation in its sky. You can play it in most any environment without directly noticing what is so special about it, and in a way that is part of what makes it so important. If someone has Kind of Blue in their collection and not a single other jazz record, they are not all that deprived.]]> A big part of it is, of course, the people involved. Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bill Evans (and Wynton Kelly), Jimmy Cobb, Paul Chambers, Cannonball Adderley. Davis gets top billing, but the latter five, sans Kelly, were all part of Davis’s own regular troupe by 1958. It is hard to imagine a better jazz ensemble—not just in terms of the pedigrees of all involved, but the effortless and even selfless way they were able to sit down and blend their strengths. Play the album and you hear no egomania, no showboating, no small thing to consider given all the stories about Miles’s fractious personality. Everyone has their day in the sun, and it’s a beautiful day for all involved.
2.
Much of what made Kind of Blue special in terms of jazz history was how it marked the first, and arguably the most important, transition in Davis’s musical style. The bebop he’d played through the Fifties—which he’d already started to break away from in the no-less-milestone album Birth of the Cool—was showing its limits. Bebop revolved around improvising across chord changes in a song, but jazzman and musical theoretician George Russell (he of the later Electronic Sonata, as much as favorite of mine as this record) had been working on an alternative that involved improvising using series of scales. This allowed for far more open-ended playing.
Davis had dipped his toe into this new “modal” jazz on his album Milestones and during his first sessions with Bill Evans, and liked the results. They weren’t just melodic; they were downright hummable. They brought jazz back into a space that seemed shared equally by the performer and the listener. As John Marks said in a piece for Stereophile, “[The players on Kind of Blue] freed themselves from harmonically organizing their solos by cycling through chord changes, instead letting the internal tension of modal scales provide the driving force. … They stripped out all fanfares, flourishes, and instrumental virtuosity for its own sake. What was left was pure music, equally capable of reaching the most casual listener and transfixing the most expert.”
Much has been made about how the performers had no more direction from Davis than a few skeletal melody lines and scales for each song, and maybe a suggestion or two about the order of solos, all put together only a few hours before everyone took their seats. Only partly true: Cobb reported that “So What” had been played live several times before, and “All Blues” had been in the works for some time before they entered the studio. But that doesn’t make the whole thing any less impressive or electric.
Only two recording sessions were needed for the whole thing (albeit with multiple takes for each song), both at Columbia Records’s 30th Street Studio—“The Church”, as it was called. This venue was aptly named: it was in a former Presbyterian church, with 100-foot high ceilings and 100 square feet of floorspace for the recording area. It was Davis’s studio of choice during his time with Columbia, which they had been using since 1949. As fantastic as the acoustics were, and as clean and precise as the audio system was, it was also an organic venue, beautifully suited to making this most organic and human of records. If you listen to the outtakes for the album, right before the band launches into take 2 of “So What”, you can hear an amused Davis noting that the floor squeaks.
3.
There are only five tracks on Kind of Blue—six if you count the alternate take of “Flamenco Sketches” that surfaced in the recent re-release of the record—with all but one clocking in at around ten minutes. None seem too long or too short; none either wear out their welcome or frustrate you by seeming like an underdeveloped idea. The opener, “So What”, begins with a soft conversation between piano and bass—almost as if they were musing between them about what sort of song to play—and then gives us the most basic of melodic patterns that becomes a building block for the solos that come next: Davis’s trumpet, Coltrane’s sax, Adderly’s sax. Then all of them together, ambling through the song’s final fifth as if they had always been doing this.
“Freddie Freeloader”, the most openly bluesy number on the album, takes some of the same basic chord ideas as “So What” and projects them in a slightly different direction. Wynton Kelly took over the piano stool here, injecting slightly more spirited playing into the piece than Evans features on the rest of the record—which is only to say that Evans’s strengths lay elsewhere and weren’t in any way overshadowed by what came here.
“Blue in Green” shows Evans returning to the piano, and given the dispute between him and Davis as to who wrote the song (Evans now gets proper credit), I can see why each would want to claim ownership of it. It is, I think, the song that for most people new to the album causes them to turn, cock their heads, and really listen. Slow, stately, pensive, unhurried—after the relatively bustling speed of the first two tracks it’s a moment for us to really breathe the air this album exudes. It also provides Evans with his first real opportunity to step forward with his playing, although even there he is never less than complementary to everything else that happens in the track. The ending in particular, where everyone else stands back and lets Evans and Chambers put the finishing touches on the track, is the kind of thing worth holding one's breath to hear all the better.
“All Blues”, returns to the basic format as the first two songs: a basic tune involving all players, three solo sections, a lead-out. It’s only slightly more uptempo than “Green”, at least as first, but that’s not a deficit: the oscillating, shimmering piano in the opening bars feels like a spiritual outgrowth of the playing in that prior track. The solos (Davis, Adderly, ‘Trane) add back in that much more spunk and spirit without making anything feel like it’s being artificially pepped up.
The closer, “Flamenco Sketches,” uses a languid variation on the melody used in the first two tracks, but uses a solo structure similar to the other songs: Davis, ‘Trane, Adderly, and finally Evans. The term “flamenco” mostly seems to be part of Davis’s sense of a “Spanish connection” in his approach to jazz—something far more explicitly spelled out in the follow-up record Sketches of Spain. It’s something that seems to come through in the space between notes, the way one part of a scale will lead into another, the way certain notes are muted and some are not, and maybe even also in the way the whole thing simply evaporates out into space without ever really declaring that it’s over.
4.
Most every pressing of Kind of Blue since its release has been mastered incorrectly. Due to a small problem with one of the original three-channel tape decks that was running during the recording sessions, the first three songs played back slightly faster and in a higher key than intended. Fortunately a second three-track tape deck had been running as backup at the time, at the correct speed. The resulting masters—which had never been used for anything before—were used to restore the album for its 1992 reissue and subsequent re-releases.
I never heard anything but the corrected pressings of the album, and in a way I wished I hadn’t. Strange as it sounds, I think I would have enjoyed the frisson of finally listening to the “correct” version of the first three songs, in much the same way I was electrified to see Metropolis restored to almost its entire length after much of its long-missing footage was discovered in Argentina.
But I don’t lament not having that experience. I discovered Kind of Blue, ironically enough, after having entered jazz from its most experimental and forbidding side—the noise-walls of Borbetomagus, the more fiercely experimental sides of John Coltrane (e.g., Ascension), the scree and squawk of Peter Brötzmann. It took me a while to touch down on Kind of Blue, and when I finally did I wondered what had taken me so long, because after arriving there I started to re-think whether or not there was such a thing as perfect.
]]>I’m amused by how intent people are on making human beings immortal or at least extremely long-lived. One of the consolations of dying is that [you think], ‘Well, that won’t have to be my problem’. Seriously, the world is changing so quickly that if you had any more than 80 years of change I don’t see how you could stand it psychologically.”
Most of Franzen's comments on e-books and technology are pretty shallow -- he's an admitted atavist, as per his essays in How to Be Alone -- but he does touch on something worth expanding on here, even if he doesn't seem to realize it.
]]> Vajra deals at least in part with civilizations that have the power to massively and in some cases indefinitely prolong human life. To that end, Franzen's statement made me think of several things at once:1) First, an unapologetic sideswipe at his opinions. If he says things like "if you had any more than 80 years of change I don’t see how you could stand it psychologically, that tells me he either doesn't do a lot of wondering about how such a thing could be possible, or he doesn't think it's his business to wonder such things. Which is fine, I guess, but I do look at it this way: why cut yourself off from a whole new field of things to learn about and ponder?
Also: when he says 80 years of change, which 80 years is he talking about? The 80 years of, say, 1800 to 1880, or the 80 years from 1900 to 1980? The sheer amount of change that takes place in any ten years of our lives now dwarfs what people experienced a hundred years ago in the course of their whole existences, but somehow the vast majority of us go on with our lives anyway.
I suspect that's at least in part because we've found ways to cope with it -- either by allowing most of those changes to be filtered away from us, or by becoming that much more thick-skinned. This isn't to say those things are good or bad, just that they are part of the price we pay for living in "interesting times". (And really, when you get down to it, when have we ever not?)
Another possibility is that things actually aren't changing all that much -- that it's a matter of perspective in more ways than one, and that what Franzen thinks we can or can't stand is entirely his projection.
2) If we were to have a society of extremely long-lived people, there are only a couple of conceivable models for such a society (PIT disclaimer applies). One assumes that conventional human reproduction takes place and the other assumes it does not. In the former, the long-lived ones are essentially "diaspora seeders": the generations they bring into being are meant to leave home and go out into the universe, lest they crowd out their own parents. In the latter, the concept of a successive generation is itself dispensed with -- why would you need to do that if you are functionally immortal? No prizes, by the way, for guessing which of these two would be an inherently reactionary society.
3) There's a difference between making people functionally immortal and using science to reduce their suffering, although at some point the difference between the two does become harder to parse. Some of that is just plain human nature at work: as Stanisław Lem (a writer Franzen might well admire) once said, "It's not merely that people want to not die; they want to live." Meaning they want to enjoy it, and not simply exist in some continuum -- which, in itself, implies risk, and that risk usually also implies the risk of dying. A life without death, or death that is simply postponed indefinitely at the cost of whole social constructions, doesn't sound like much of a life to me.
That doesn't make me a fan of death -- just all the more aware that the existence we get as human beings comes with certain constraints, and that just maybe those constraints exist for good reasons.
Granted, one way to get past that is to become something other than human -- but based on everything I've seen so far, we'd just use that as another way to be the same selfish gits we've always been. We don't have the greatest track record for just being plain old humans -- although, I give us at least credit for keeping on trying.
]]>"Well-timed" in big part because I was just debating this very issue with others earlier today, and because it's something I've taken a stance on re: my own work. No sequels, no multiple works in the same universe.
That said, I am fully prepared to admit I might reconsider once I have to deal with the way publishing works apart from hustling individual copies across a table at a convention.
]]> Everything I've written up to date, I've approached with the mind-set that I'm best off whittling it to fit into one comfortably-sized work. Tell the story, tell as much (or as little) of it as is needed, get it done, move on to the next thing.There's a couple of reasons I've taken this approach. One is because I've come to feel the world you pick for your story is crucial, and if you start from scratch each time you give yourself that much more leeway and latitude to shape both the story and the world as you see fit. I have tentative plans for a story after Flight of the Vajra which would need an entirely different milieu to tell it properly. There really isn't a way to tell it in the same universe as that story -- well, there might be, but at such a cost to the story that I want to tell that it wouldn't be worth it.
The second big reason is time. I don't like the idea of repeating myself, and writing more than one work set in the same universe just feels to me like retreading. Yes, even if different characters are involved, for the reasons I cited above. I'd rather break away and do something entirely different. I have no idea how long I'm going to live (not saying I have something terminal, just that it's an unknown), and I know that when I feel like I'm repeating myself I only regret the feeling. I don't want to waste what I've been given.
Also note that I'm not trying to use this as a critical mode for other people's work. I'm fondest of when someone is able to tell the whole story they have in mind in a single, well-considered volume -- and that's more where my tastes as a reader lean these days -- but I'm scarcely going to tut-tut you if you're reading Book Five of the Whatever Cycle.
So if I can't say anything else about Vajra yet -- and I have some carefully-selected details in the works -- I'll say this: it will most likely be a single, standalone story. It is not part of a series and will have no sequels, prequels, spinoffs or side stories -- and that's the way I want it.
I should add that I'm also prepared to come back to these words in five years and say "God, was I wrong about that."
By the way, the authors of that piece get major props for mentioning Alfred Bester, Theodore Sturgeon, Clifford Simak and Phil Dick -- all of whom occupy places of honor on the shelf in here.
]]>We're not going to have anything remotely like that for a long time, but right now we have a fabrication technology which has been turning a few heads: 3D printing. The technology has advanced quite a bit in a very short amount of time, so much so that it's a little intimidating. Check out the Shapeways site, and the range of materials available for use in a given project: it's not just ABS plastic. Naturally the implications vis-à-vis patent and copyright are pretty hair-raising.
What got me thinking, though, is a slightly oddball, sidelong aspect of the whole thing. At what point does the term "handmade" become pointless, especially if you could program a 3D printer to emulate the very imperfections and quirks that make a handmade item so endearing? Or is it even any of those things? Is it just the cachet that goes with knowing you have something an actual human being created with their own hands? How valuable is that feeling going to be in the future?
]]> I suspect this feeling is going to confine itself to things for which we can develop certain kinds of emotional attachments in the first place. Food, for instance: for most of us, a meal still has a strong emotional component, especially if it involves sitting down with family, cracking open a bottle with good friends, etc.To that end, we seem to be fonder of the idea of food made by human hands, as opposed to "industrial" foods that are spit out of retorts and off assembly lines. In the abstract, it's just as easy to make a horribly unhealthy meal by hand as it is to manufacture it automatically: have you seen how much butter is used in the average restaurant kitchen?
Another thing that's been growing in popularity -- or maybe just having its innate appeal rediscovered -- is handmade gifts. Last Christmas some relatives of mine received a gift that the recipient had spent a good deal of time and effort on, something which could have been bought from a store in some form but which was that much more personal -- and that much easier to form a personal connection with -- because it was handmade.
That's the part of it that matters the most, I think: not strictly that your own two hands produced that one thing, but that you were involved with its creation to a degree, and that you didn't just pull it off a shelf in passing. When I show people copies of my books, I get positive responses even though I didn't actually make each copy by hand. I did, however, write the text, create the cover design, compose the internal layout, the typesetting, etc., etc. I was involved on a personal level.
So I suspect if we get to the point where we're essentially becoming our own industrial designers, that's going to create a situation where we have more, not less, opportunities to create things that express a personal connection of come kind.
]]>This is an ambitious undertaking, and I am happy to report that What the Buddha Thought is not a case of hubris or mislaid ambition. It is one of a number of works that I am tempted to call “revisionist-Buddhist,” works that attempt to wipe away the encrustations of time or the dirt of history from Buddhism and make them not only relevant to the current age but allow us to see more of Buddhism than would be possibly by simply reiterating previous work. Brad Warner and Dzogchen Ponlop have both produced work in this vein for lay audiences, and now I am exploring works of a more scholarly nature that attempt to do the same things.]]> The book asserts several things about Buddhism, and the Buddha, which I have heard propounded before but not quite this comprehensively, and which make tremendous sense and constitute a valuable contribution to our understanding of Buddhism past and present. First, and in some ways most crucially, Gombrich talks about how Buddhism arose in great part as a reaction to and a revision of both the Brahmanist and Jainist thought. Those were two of the major strains of ecclesiastical thinking in India at the time, and the Buddha himself had plenty of direct exposure to the former before his awakening. Gombrich shows that without the context of either of these religions, much of what Buddhism teaches—and the exact wording of those teachings—is easy to misinterpret. Without the context of Brahmanism, a great deal of what the Buddha said and why become that much more difficult to appreciate.
The second thing is again a matter of context. Because the Buddha was addressing, by and large, people who had the same cultural background he did, he had to speak to them in terms they would understand. That meant using the trappings of Brahmanic belief as delivery mechanisms or comparable metaphors for his insights. In one eye-opening section, Gombrich discusses a colleague’s work in the origins of the Twelvefold Chain of Dependence, which theorized that several elements at the “start” of the chain were in fact borrowed straight from Brahmanic thought, but were stood on their head and attached to the other links in the chain as a way of demonstrating how they did not lead to anything but more bondage. Some of this amounts to the meanings of words and how subtle shades of meanings can change interpretations, but Gombrich does not get too hung up on this: he invokes it where it makes sense, and the rest of the time uses the broader context of history and anthropology to make his points.
The key insight Gombrich returns to is how the Buddha’s work, even when preserved via the Pali Canon—which was only written down centuries after his death after being orally transmitted for generations—stands apart, quite intentionally, from the cultural context that produced it. “It is hard to exaggerate how different the sutras are from most early Indian religious texts,” notes Gombrich, and he lays them out side by side to show how this manifests. What was specifically different was not just the approach—he shows how some of the Buddha’s invocation of common conceits at the time was used for contrast, as per the Chain of Dependence above—but the conclusions and the aim. The metaphorical treatment of death and rebirth is also part of this: when the Buddha talked of being reborn, he was using it as a way to contrast the awakened state from one’s previous, unawakened existence. But it was easy to look at what he was saying divorced of its context and assume he was simply continuing a tradition.
Another thing Gombrich points out is how this employing of tradition to break from tradition—for lack of a better way to put it—helped the Buddha spread his message, and also gave him a rhetorical vocabulary to do it. When people asked him about the afterlife, reincarnation, the existence of gods, or any number of other things that he felt were “off-message”, his reply would be along the lines of: What’s this got to do with the problem of suffering? He disliked such speculation not only because it produced no useful insight—that is, it did nothing to foster one’s liberation—but also because most of the time the questions themselves were misleading or on false pretenses, even if the questioner didn’t realize this at the time. He also refused to answer questions which he could not honestly lay claim to having direct knowledge of; he wasn’t interested in pretending to look wise. One of Brad Warner’s funny anecdotes in this regard involved a former “spiritual teacher” (the quotes are to express disdain that was his) describing how John Lennon had been a tree in his previous life because he’d once answered the door naked. Such footling pseudo-wisdom wasn’t the Buddha’s goal, since he did not want his students becoming attached to either him or the precise formulations of his wisdom.
This, I think, is the deeper meaning behind such conceits as “abandoning the raft once you have reached the other shore”. The Buddha was not saying that once you are enlightened, you no longer need to be taught anything (or learn anything); rather, that once you grasp intuitively and from within the meaning of the teaching, the exact way it was passed on to you—the precise wording, the specific examples—become less important. One should not become hopelessly attached to such things, but instead find individuated and creative ways to pass the wisdom along for the audience, times and manners that you are confronted with. Gongs, chants, incense and specific kinds of cushions are not themselves the wisdom, and if they get in the way of appreciating the wisdom they should be discarded and replaced with something that you have a better chance of connecting to. Much of what Gombrich has been unearthing points to that.
I suspect this is a problem in many walks of life and arenas of knowledge as well. We seem to have a tendency to assume that the only way something can be understood is if it is reduced to a formula or a set of steps, and that the only way to reproduce that understanding is to follow that same formula with slavish precision. This is pernicious and misleading, because it removes us from understanding how that formula was derived in the first place and what wisdom it is meant to reflect. I remember not long ago arguing with someone about the idea that there are only x stories in the world, where x was three, nine, thirty-nine, or any other number. I argued that there are an infinite number of stories, because the whole idea of a story is itself an arbitrary construction, and that to reduce that to a simple set of bullet points or procedural maps is to ruin your own capacity for real creativity. This is not to say that stories do not have things in common—only that we delude ourselves if we think that storytelling is a matter of producing from those elements a set of properly-constructed arrangements on the order of a logarithm table, or computing the entire move space for a game like chess. (And even if you did compute the move space for chess, that’s not a guarantee you’d be able to use that information to win, either.) In short, storytelling is not a matter of templates and checklists, just as real wisdom and insight cannot be derived from dogmas or formulas.
Digression over. So the real value of Gombrich’s book is how it points the way towards other work yet to be done in this manner. A few other works (e.g., Rebel Buddha) have started to pop up which talk about Buddhist thought as a living thing and not a historical artifact, something that needs to be re-appreciated in its present moment by every culture that tangles with it. When China did this, the result was Zen. The West has imported Buddhism in various forms—Zen especially—but in my opinion has yet to create its own truly Western Buddhism. Works like this are a tentative step towards allowing something like that to manifest all the more completely.
]]>Comic books aren't competing with other comics or being damaged by piracy so much as they're competing with video games, movies, music, and more. They aren't competing with baseball cards or riding around on a dirt bike any more. Is the latest issue of Daredevil more entertaining than Saints Row the Third? In a way, that's comparing apples to oranges. But to consumers, they're both entertainment options.
I suspect this argument cuts in all directions. The range, breadth, and availability of entertainment has broadened to such a degree that competition between all flavors of entertainment has also increased. I'm becoming convinced it's a cycle, and not simply a one-way street.
]]> Here's an extended example. A friend of mine who's an avid gamer has described his preference for video games in terms of cost-effectiveness. If you spend $50 on a game that gives you a few hundred hours of gameplay, as opposed to $25 for a newly-released movie that you're going to watch only a couple of times (if even that), which of those is the more sensible investment? Ditto a newly-released $25 hardback, or a $15 trade paperback, or what have you.This isn't to say that it's not worth spending $25 on a movie. I know I would gladly blow $25 on some movies without blinking. It's just that such decisions exist in far less of a vacuum than they ever did. Once upon a time, the only way to spend that much money on a movie was to take a ton of people to the theater or to buy a ridiculous amount of popcorn and soda. Now you can blow that kind of money on a film without even buying the refreshments, so of course spending $50 for something that will pay you back with far more entertainment over time will seem that much more appealing.
Likewise, video games are themselves being eroded -- sometimes from within, as per casual games like Angry Birds, and sometimes from without. I strongly suspect you will not be able to find a single niche of the entertainment world that has not discovered it is losing its core audience in some form to ... other niches of the entertainment world.
A parallel phenomenon appeared in the tech world with the rise of tablets. It wasn't that people would stop buying PCs or notebooks altogether and start buying iPads or 'Droid slates -- it was that those new devices opened up a whole new market for people who didn't really need a whole PC. I personally do need a full-blown PC; the range and type of things I do on a computer simply isn't supported by a tablet. But I can't begrudge anyone else their choices -- and I can't deny that the appearance of those devices has given us that much more granularity of choice.
That's what it comes down to more than anything else, I think: increased granularity of choice. There's more games in town than ever, more ways to spend an (increasingly-scarce) entertainment dollar than ever, and we ignore that at our own peril. It's why it makes that much more sense, as much as I hate it, for a given "entertainment property" to span multiple incarnations. To make a movie, video game, novelization, comic, etc., etc. from the same thing is less a form of mean-spirited artistic invalidation -- as some people might have it, me included once upon a time -- than it is a kind of fail-safe redundancy.
]]>It isn’t as if I think fairy tales sit further down the ladder from full-blown mythos—more like they occupy different seats on the same general bus. One thing I can say about Osamu Tezuka is that he seems to have been comfortable in any of those seats, as well as comfortable driving the whole bus. He created works that were not only mythology for the new age (Phoenix) but which dealt with real-world myth figures (Buddha)—and on top of that created a whole slew of manga which we could comfortably call fairy tales without feeling like either his work or the term itself was being demeaned. ]]> I’d long heard about Princess Knight being one of the most exemplary entries in that category, back when the only way to read any of Tezuka’s work was to either get it from Japan yourself or become friends with the tiny circle of people who were passing around photocopied, hand-retouched samizdat-style translations of his work. (That was in the 1970s, when the term torrent brought to mind a violent weather condition and not a copyright violation.) Knight has since been added to the ever-expanding lineup of Tezuka’s work in English, which has come to us mainly courtesy of four different publishers: Dark Horse (Astro Boy), Viz (Phoenix), Digital Manga Publishing (the aberrant Swallowing the Earth), and Vertical. Vertical’s own president Hiroki Sakai has mentioned that one of the main reasons Vertical was founded in the first place was to bring as much of Tezuka’s work into English, and after seeing so much of the fruit that desire has produced—Black Jack, MW, Ode to Kirihito, Apollo’s Song, Ayako, The Book of Human Insects—I have more gratitude than I know what to do with. Princess Knight is a cheery and spirited addition to that list, and I’m glad they made the effort to bring it Stateside.
Like many of Tezuka’s stories, Princess Knight’s form is simple enough that it’s easy to be misled. It has the presentation and the format of a children’s story, but with the complexity and greater moral implications of classic mythology. A child would see an enormously entertaining romp; an adult would see a bit more—and maybe a child would, too. It opens in Heaven, where a baby-to-be is mistakenly given the heart of both a girl and a boy. To straighten things out, Heaven sends down Tink—the cherub responsible for this whole mess in the first place, which is a little like asking the guy who robbed your bank to guard the teller booth, but never mind.
Tink’s a spirited and dutiful sort, and wants to set things a-right, and so down he goes to Earth in the guise of a human. When he finds Sapphire, though, he’s faced with a real problem. The baby in question— Princess Sapphire—was indeed born as a girl but raised as a boy in order to avoid problems of succession to the throne. They do a good enough job of this that everyone outside of the immediate family is fooled, but inside Sapphire despises the lie and simply wants to live as she chooses without any of these silly charades.
Sapphire’s issues are not because she has two hearts, but because she’s stuck in a society that has such deterministic views of men and women. By our standards, she’s more balanced than most of the people she meets or is at the mercy of. She can appreciate the beauty of a well-made dress or a rare flower, but she’s also a solid fencer (something that comes in handy when a snotty suitor figures out the Crying Game early on and tries to horn in on her). When a prince from another kingdom, Franz, comes to town to attend a ball, she dresses up as a princess—shades of Victor/Victoria here—and inadvertently captures Franz’s heart. This is complicated further by Franz meeting the “real” Sapphire—the male version—and being forced to duel with him. It turns out the duel is in fact an assassination plot: Sapphire’s sword is poisoned. As a result, she’s banished from the kingdom, and then her adventures begin in earnest.
There is a lot of plot to recap in Princess Knight, spread out over two 350-page volumes, but rather than plow through all of it here I will instead cite some highlights. The biggest threat to Sapphire’s existence comes not from Franz or even Tink, but rather the demoness Madame Hell. Hell’s plan is to steal Sapphire’s female heart, give it to her own rather unfeminine daughter and marry that girl to Franz, but everyone—daughter included—has other plans. Even more convoluted is the story of how Sapphire falls into a coma and a pirate named Blood (who sees through Sapphire’s disguise and is enamored of her) defies the goddess Venus to rescue her. There were a lot of things I was not expecting from this book, but among the most unexpected is the way pagan and Christian cosmologies are cheerfully forced to coexist side-by-side in Sapphire’s universe.
The vast majority of the story, though, is just plain fun—the kind of swashbuckling, and-then-what-happened? storytelling most commonly associated with Tezuka works like Astro Boy. I mentioned how Venus and Captain Blood enter the story, and even those aren’t some of the most convoluted things that happen. What’s also appreciated is how the deeper themes of identity—not just sexual identity, but social identity as well—weave themselves naturally into the story and aren’t used as a tract to bludgeon the reader. If Sapphire and Franz end up happy together, it’ll be because they’ve earned it and because that’s the ending that makes sense, not because the politics of the story demand it.
It’s the sort of story the label “shamelessly entertaining” was intended for—not in the sense that the story doesn’t care about anything other than pleasing us, but in that we have no qualms about being pleased this thoroughly by it, and because we know it’s quietly attempting to do more than just entertain.
]]>... "sympathetic" isn't the same thing as "compelling" — a character can be unsympathetic but utterly fascinating and spellbinding. Like a lot of the things on this list, this is all in the execution — if you're going to go with a protagonist who's fundamentally unsympathetic or unrelatable, you're going to have to do an amazing job of making the reader care about him or her in spite of everything.
The Stars My Destination comes to mind as a great example of this. Gully Foyle, the hero -- er, protagonist -- is one of the less likable characters of any SF story I've read. What makes him the center of such a compulsively readable story is a) we know exactly what he wants, but we never know how he's going to go about trying to get it next, and b) he does humanize as the story goes on. He begins as a brute, mutates into a creature of revenge, evolves into a spy / supersoldier, and ends as a repentant and a transcender of human limitations.
]]> Yes, it's The Count of Monte Cristo rewritten as SF, but no one minded. (Certainly not me.) The rewrite was so stylish and loaded with so many ideas that have not only endured but gained relevance with time that it's hard to complain. But on the whole, Destination is the exception in more ways than one. Two, actually.The first problem is something I have groused about a great deal: the way SF all too often becomes about an idea, a concept, a situation or a punctuated equilibrium rather than a person. It might be easy to say that's what SF is -- it's "a literature of change driven by technology", and so the people are gonna get at least some short shrift because of that. But that all too easily turns into either an excuse to ignore character development entirely or a backhanded way to forgive a writer who's simply not very good at doing such things. I would gladly take dimes for every single instance where I've been told "Well, _____ is not great when writing about people, but his ideas are awesome!"; I'd have enough dimes to pay off my mortgage twice over. (Isaac Asimov is often cited as one such author, but frankly Asimov's handling of character, rudimentary as it can be, is a lot better than some of the other stuff I've seen.)
The second problem is an outgrowth of the first, and this is where I go from Observation into Soapbox. Any literature that develops a built-in excuse to not be great with character will eventually develop that many more excuses to not be great with character. People read books, and if we don't see at least a little of ourselves reflected well in the books we read we're going to feel that much less satisfied. And, worse yet, maybe never quite knowing why.
On a side note, the whole concept that a protagonist doesn't have to be sympathetic was essentially demolished with the popularity of A Game of Thrones. The new problem seems to be writing a sympathetic character without making him seem like a sissy who'd be eaten in his sleep by the Starks. That said, I'm of the opinion Gully Foyle would make the Starks look like pikers on a camping trip. Here is, after all, a guy who is trying to extract information from a man who may die from a coronary -- and Gully's approach is to cut his heart out and put him on life support.
]]>The point of speculative ideas and science fictional treatments is not to foster propaganda (though many do so, usually obviously and unsuccessfully), but to make us think. As a literature of change driven by technology, science fiction presents religion to a part of the reading public that probably seldom goes to church.
The piece as a whole is only okay -- it was written in 2003, and it doesn't trot out a lot of stuff that we haven't heard before and since -- but the above comment deserves some expansion.
]]> I like the definition of SF as "a literature of change driven by technology". It one-ups a definition I came up with myself a long time ago, which was something like "a literature that could only exist in the presence of the scientific worldview's influence on life". (The exact wording eludes me.)What I'm a little confused by is his statement that "science fiction presents religion to a part of the reading public that probably seldom goes to church." Does he mean that SF readers are not on the whole religious? That clashes badly with my own experiences; the SF readers I've met are on the whole more spiritually inclined than those who are not. They take the business of existing in the universe that much more seriously than even a lot of churchgoers I've known. The article itself doesn't provide much disambiguation.
I suspect what Benford meant was something like "most SF readers are not religious in the churchgoing sense", which certainly squares with my experiences. t's hard to treat religion in any form of fiction without it becoming propaganda. An element of skepticism matters -- not in the sense of whether or not there is a God, but in the sense of whether or not what we believe actually supports our lives.
A book that leaves us knowing, or wondering, no more than when we first opened it is not much of a book no matter what the label. SF has that much more of a duty to be like that, if only because it draws on so many things which are automatically imbued with that much more of a sense of wonder. A Canticle for Leibowitz explored why and how we think of something as sacred, and whether or not that has the power to liberate us from our own cyclical foolishness. Belief gives strength; skepticism gives power -- the two are not as mutually exclusive as we choose to believe.
Some of the best works about belief begin with its absence and burrow deeper. The Stranger (not SF, but valuable all the same gives us a man who is indifferent to the presence of God, and whose indifference is used as evidence of his depravity by others when he commits a crime in a way that makes him appear to be nothing more than an object in the service of unheralded forces. He prefers honest indifference to a dishonest deathbed conversion. The book is not about whether or not he is right for choosing such a course, but more about asking us to look into our own responses to such a thing. With a book like that, you get out of it only as much as you bring to it.
Sounds like much of SF, actually.
]]>Writers shouldn't think of adopting a genre as selling out or pleasing the market, but rather as an homage to their heroes, and a small step towards saving society: an opportunity to reinvigorate the calibre of popular fiction by writing it well.
Good advice and thoughts all around, and it's nice to see more folks coming out of the woodwork and saying something that's been unjustly ignored or snubbed for too long: genres are not evil.
]]> Genres are not evil, but they're not holy either. They're starting points. They give you a base from which to build, a handy way to let a broad swath of readers know up front what kind of story you're going to tell (the human impulse to slot things into categories is not going away any time soon, folks), and -- this part gets overlooked a lot -- a set of constraints which you can learn to master and then creatively break.When I first read Gravity's Rainbow, it was proffered to me under the general heading of "literary fiction". It could have been (and often is) science fiction; it could have been a historical novel about WWII; it could have been a military thriller; it could have been surrealism. Check "all of the above", though, and an odd thing happens: your prospective market for the book dwindles instead of expanding.
There's an apparent paradox here, but it's worth thinking about. The more open-ended and inclusive your description of something is, the harder it is for people to know what you really mean. (I'm reminded of the Shel Silverstein poem where someone tries to describe the color of their eyes and ends up running through the whole of the spectrum.) It's easier for people to make one solid comparison, or maybe two, then five or more.
This is why movie pitches are often framed as in terms like "Casablanca meets Lethal Weapon" (er, yecch). Right there you have two major points of reference you can draw on. Sometimes you only need one, and from there you can build a fairly good idea of what to expect. People need at least some hint of what they're getting themselves into when they start reading a book or watching a movie.
The other week I finished reading, and am still trying to figure out, Epitaph of a Small Winner. I love the sheer unclassifiability of the book, but I know that is precisely the kind of thing that will send most people screaming from it into the comfort of the latest Janet Evanovitch comedy-thriller. (See what I did there? With two words you know exactly what Stephanie Plum is all about.)
Sure, Small Winner is "literary", but if I'm going to talk about it in a way that will attract more than, oh, the six people that read this blog, I need to find a better way to do it than to say "just read it and find out for yourself". This is a cop-out, a tacit admission that you haven't really thought about the work or how to get people to connect with it.
Too much of the truly ambitious and "serious" writing produced since the early years of the 20th century falls into this trap. It forces the reader to approach it on its own terms, but in doing so ends up divorced from any kind of real tradition of reading. The end result is a lot of books that all want to be #1 in a category of one, or which disavow that accepting influences and building on existing traditions is a good way to, you know, tell a story.
None of this bothered Georges Simenon when he wrote his -- literally -- hundreds of novels, some of them among the finest produced in the last century (we're still getting caught up with him, it seems). He wrote books that we would call psychological thrillers, and I don't think he would have been upset with the label. If it gave that many more people an excuse to pick up his work and get to know it, how is that anything other than a sensible strategic advantage?
The project I've recently started, Flight of the Vajra, is unabashedly far-future space-opera -style science fiction. I have no problems calling it that. But I know that I've got a responsibility to both live up to and transcend that label, each in their own measure.
]]>Not long ago, in another part of the web, I watched a discussion wherein someone attempted, very unconvincingly, to defend the position that money should be abolished. He had no coherent idea about what to replace it with; in fact, he didn't seem to be of the opinion we should replace it with anything.
From what I could tell, he had far bigger problems than the fact he was stumping for a not-very-defensible idea in the first place. He could barely hold a train of thought long enough to complete a sentence, let alone complete it coherently.
But out of that grew some thought on my end: would there come a time, far enough in the future, where money might well be abandoned as no longer serving any useful purpose? Note that I'm not talking about a "cashless society", but a society where the very concept of money has been ditched.
I didn't think this would happen, and here was my reasoning for same.
]]> One of the things I hear widely bruited is the idea that after we reach a "post-scarcity" society, money will serve no real purpose and will simply wither away. (Gee, where have I heard that terminology before?) The first problem I have is with the term "post-scarcity"; the second is with the concept of "withering away".The exact definition of "post-scarcity" is a bit nebulous, but it seems to refer mostly to a way of life where all the basic material needs of civilization have been satisfied. Problem is, the whole idea of what constitutes "basic material needs" is a constantly moving target, since civilization itself is also a moving target.
Five hundred years ago, nobody had electricity. Thing is, nobody worried about not having electricity, because there was absolutely no demand for it. Today, most anyone who lives without electricity is regarded as living under conditions of privation that most of us would abhor. A hundred years from now, not having a cortical uplink to the world-grid will be seen as unbearably crippling. And so on.
The way I see it, there is never going to be any such thing as a "post-scarcity" society because there will always be something of value to us that is in short supply. Always. The fact that human nature constantly seeks out new horizons of all kinds is a guarantee of that. The only "post-scarcity" society I could envision is one where mankind has essentially become the Beings of Pure Energy that came along every dozen or so Star Trek episodes to give the Federation a terrible hassle.
Incidentally -- and my memory's a little hazy on this part -- but if I recall correctly one of the more Utopian concepts in Star Trek was the obsolescence of money. I think this was downplayed or dropped completely after a while, especially in any universe where you have "credits" (read: money) or "gold-pressed latinum" (read: money). (Most of the arrangements I've seen for doing away with money, in either fiction or reality, simply involved creating a substitute for it with a different name.)
Anyway, until we all turn into the Lights of Zetar, the Q or the Organians, there's always going to be something in short supply somewhere. It might not be material -- then again, it might well be. As long as such things exist, there's always going to be a need for abstraction of labor.
That's what money is: an abstraction, a way for you to compensate me without having to go through the hassle of bartering or swapping work. Money's not going to vanish just because we suddenly all have the ability to synthesize material objects, because our needs are going to be shifted into other directions.
Who knows? Maybe just because we can synthesize material objects doesn't mean we'll find that a useful, wholesale replacement for creating things the old-fashioned ways. It would certainly complement it, but there's nothing that says it would automatically replace it. We're discovering that a mass-manufactured world is not always the most comfortable or appealing one, and even attempts to mass-manufacture things that have a non-mass-manufactured flavor to them fall short of the real thing, because once we're aware of the difference, it bugs us. (I'll have more to say on this in a future post as well.)
None of this is meant to imply I'm cool with the excesses of unregulated capitalism, or any of the other things that can be done with money that leave a bad taste in the mouth. I'm just being realistic: as long as there's a situation where certain things are unevenly distributed -- and from where I sit, there always will be something like that -- there's going to be a corresponding need to buy and sell, and a medium to perform that exchange with.
Money is too useful, in too many ways, to simply dismiss as an archaism or a social obstacle. To simply say "Let's get rid of money" is as thoughtless and counterproductive as saying "Let's get rid of written language". Yes, I've heard of some people who have in fact stumped for the latter. Last I checked those guys didn't have a whole lot of adherents.
The most common replacement for money is barter -- an ad-hoc transaction of some kind. This works on a small scale, and we do it every day of our lives. Not a thing wrong with it. It's a handy thing to be able to give someone a lift and have them spot me lunch, or what have you. What's onerously complicated, and I would argue unsustainably so, is the idea of replacing all economic transactions with such things. The work I do isn't going to be of much direct use to a farmer, or someone who doesn't read English, so having an abstract medium through which we can arrange trade is a massive help.
Maybe at some point down the line money will be replaced with another social convention, one far more elegant and all-encompassing, the way Roman numerals or carbon paper all worked in their day but were eclipsed by better things. I, in my less-than-infinite insight, have yet to come up with such a thing.
If you do, by all means let us know. I'd hazard there's a Nobel in economics to be had.
(For bonus points, feel free to mention in the comments any works of SF (or fantasy) that have interesting approaches to the problem described here.)
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