“Easy Words” and the Tyranny of Literature

Social media doesn’t allow complex thought, nuanced analysis, or Socratic discussion. I think everyone can appreciate that. Anybody who’s ever tweeted “I like apples” and gotten dogpiled for not including oranges, kumquats, and jackfruit in their synopsis knows what I mean. Especially on platforms like Xitter, Threads, and Bluesky, which cap post lengths, the internet flattens difficult topics, squelches humor, and rewards anger. That’s why I still blog.

I don’t want to rehash last week’s Threads debacle over what constitutes excessively difficult language. The two accompanying images should suffice. One platform user requested authors to “use easy words,” citing scrying as an example of needless difficulty. (Some defenders claim this was a joke, though the humor eludes me.) Following a Kelly Marie Tran-level pile-on, another user posted a defense that made things worse by correlating dictionary use with ableism.

The post that created the controversy

I’m more interested in the underlying assumptions about literacy, ability, and writing. As a sometime writing teacher, I recall struggling with students who used clipped vocabulary, short sentences, and especially passive voice construction. I don’t like getting involved in the controversy surrounding America’s purported literacy crisis, mostly because it feels like a media-fueled moral panic. But youth do, anecdotally, have difficulty writing nowadays.

Which is, on consideration, weird. If anything, young adults write more today than my generation did. Emails, text messages, social media posts—these remain mostly language-based communication modes. Youth share in online discussion boards, chat-based RPGs, and other participatory, text-centric communications. Platforms like Smashwords, AO3, and Wattpad have turned youth into published authors without kowtowing to the Big Five publishing conglomerates.

Yet that practice didn’t translate into greater writing capability in my classroom. I recall students using the justification that “I write how I speak,” which I think they believed meant they used a casual tone and relaxed grammar, without a lot of pausing to consider the nuances of word choice. Which, fair enough, I often do too, especially when writing fiction and trying to capture a character’s authentic voice.

So why the difficulty? Students came into my Freshman Comp class having written far more than my peers did outside the classroom (notwithstanding us aspiring authors). They use their own characteristic tones, rather than trying to affect a scholarly tone. They should be able to produce something beyond the short sentences, sweeping generalizations, and tedious reliance on “to be” verbs that plagued me attempting to read their output.

Not to get all Marshall McLuhan on you, but the difference probably involves not what content youth read, but where they read it. Yes, youth write copious text messages. But the SMS format, and the difficulty typing with thumbs, discourages long sentences and nuanced vocabulary. Heck, it even discourages punctuation. I used to wonder why students had such difficulty with comma placement, but texting discourage comma use altogether.

The attempted defense that made things worse

Scrying seems, to me, a pretty straightforward word. I discovered it in grade school while reading Grimm’s Fairy Tales. But the Brothers Grimm, besides being adults themselves, were also transcribing oral tales delivered by community elders, tales which had been passed down, largely intact, across generations. I read books commensurate with my reading ability, mostly published by conglomerate publishers, written by experienced professional authors, who were mostly adults.

You might detect an element of elitism in this, and I won’t deny it. Not just anybody who constructs a sentence is an author, but the person who learns from the best sentence builders of the past and present. Just like not everybody at karaoke is a singer, but the ones who take the time to learn vocalism and breath control and range, the capacity to write comes from apprenticing oneself to better writers and working at it for years.

Instead, youth write copious texts to their friends, but much of their reading consists of texts from their friends. Too many aspiring authors who post fanfic to Wattpad mostly read other fanfic authors on Wattpad. Rather than giving them something to strive after, and challenging content that refines their thinking, it results in a persistent regression toward the mean, as all new writing resembles what came before.

That original Threads user didn’t deserve the abuse they received, a dogpile so severe that they apparently fled social media. But “easy words” is a request for reading as a passive activity, which readers fall into without resistance. It’s a request to feel good enough as we are, to have authors hug us and say “good job.” That’s not a kind of reading I want to do.

Trek vs. Wars, or, Who's the Better Star?

The original Star Trek bridge crew, sitting comfortably with their moral certainty

Throughout my lifetime, one defining debate in niche culture has been: which is better, Star Wars or Star Trek? Which franchise reflects what we latterly call “nerd culture” in the most practical, incisive way? I’ve always disagreed with the question, because it seemed to me that the two franchises served different purposes. Arguing which was better seemed like debating whether you loved your pancreas or liver more, as though removing one would kill you less.

Star Trek always tried to be more concrete, humane, and values-driven. The structure always featured a new encounter with an alien species, rampant technology, or breakaway sect. And each conflict was, each in different ways, solved by the characters applying Gene Roddenberry’s humanist philosophy. Exactly what that means changed over time—the original series was more swaggering and colonial than TNG, for instance—but it was built to change. It was designed to remain open-ended.

By contrast, George Lucas designed Star Wars to end. It intended to encompass Luke Skywalker’s transition from provincial peasant to galactic hero, and at least as Lucas outlined, it would then end. Whether we want that “original” ending to be the medal ceremony at the conclusion of the first movie, or the destruction of the Empire at the conclusion of the third, either way, the story intended to resolve with Luke assuming his mature role.

So Roddenberry wrote one franchise to continue, while Lucas wrote the other with an arc that resolved. Yet time hasn’t allowed either outcome. The recent release of The Mandalorian and Grogu, the twelfth canon Star Wars feature film, accords it with the MCU and James Bond for stories that just continue, long after the cultural milieu that created them has ended. And Star Trek has, if anything fared even worse, at least in fan accounting.

Recent Star Trek outings like Strange New Worlds and Starfleet Academy have received pummelings from fan critics. Admittedly, the internet has given cranky fans a nearly limitless platform to complain about virtually everything. Especially with popular franchises, new entries have suffered in the ratings because of advance fan opposition; outings like Captain Ake or the Fifteenth Doctor have been lame ducks before their episodes even appeared, because of closed-minded, hostile, and even violent fan reactions.

The Abrams movies resurrected Yoda, because Luke wasn't allowed to finish growing up

Put another way, Star Trek’s core audience doesn’t experience the show anymore, they revere it. Most current Star Trek fans weren’t alive when the original series aired, and even first-generation TNG fans are in their fifties and up. The most vocal and committed audience base didn’t experience Star Trek in its cultural context on Cold War belligerence and America’s struggle with its own imperialist history. Star Trek wasn’t an abstraction, it manifested America’s fraying conscience.

Like holy texts, like the Bible or the Koran, Star Trek seems (falsely) to speak for itself. The cultural conflicts it commented upon have become fodder for historians and schoolbooks, not something the audience is steeped in. You could say something similar about Star Wars, which certainly commented upon the post-Vietnam landscape. But Star Wars held itself aloof, a willingly timeless goulash of space wizards, samurai movies, and Flying Tigers splendor that pretended to neutrality.

J.J. Abrams, who sanded Roddenberry’s humanist morals off Star Trek, also snipped off Star Wars’ Jungian roots. He turned the Starship Enterprise into a Lucasian circus, while he rendered the Millenium Falcon into a time capsule that, somehow, must keep fighting. Admittedly, he didn’t do that alone. Besides the connivance of producer Kathleen Kennedy, the process included Lucas himself, who licensed new content in 1990 and flooded the market with novels, comics, and canon movies.

In other words, Star Wars, like LotR or Narnia, was always supposed to end. But, controlled by America’s largest media conglomerate, it can’t; not while money exists to wring from audiences. For thirty-six years (as I write), Skywalker and company have been forced to re-fight their original battles, amended only by meaningless set dressing. They never get to govern the galaxy they liberated, because they’re busy constantly resisting another apocalyptic empire that, somehow, never dies.

Meanwhile, Star Trek had no limiting arc. It had little canon continuity until The Wrath of Khan; it simply responded to surrounding culture. This fluidity reflects in how the franchise constantly moves Khan Noonien Singh’s birthdate: Trek isn’t designed to be consistent, it’s designed to be current. Yet fan reverence for its roots keeps the most strident audiences from seeing the story in the present, reducing it into a lifeless artifact, a fly in amber.

The First and Last Days of AI TV

When this screencap of a hypothetical AI-generated sitcom hit social media, critics focused, perhaps not unfairly, on the phantom hand holding the floating guitar. Notice also that it mashes Penny’s kitchen together with Monica Geller’s living room, or that some pieces of furniture are vanishing into other pieces, Beetlejuice-style. Or that both women are clearly Alyson Hannigan circa 2010. Visually, it’s a mess.

The source video was yanked shortly after posting, so heaven only knows whether this “sitcom” is funny. But how many of them are? Based on this orphaned screencap, it looks like an unholy collaboration between Chuck Lorre and Hieronymus Bosch. Worse, it looks like an inbred bastard child of every White sitcom of the last thirty years. Which explains why the poster, a generative AI enthusiast, thinks it’s great.

It also explains why, if programmers could successfully remove the psychedelic artifacts, networks will likely buy it. Since Friends debuted in 1995, most American sitcoms have featured some variation on its beat sheet. How I Met Your Mother, The Big Bang Theory, Everybody Loves Raymond, and Community have been largely reskinned variations on Friends. But even Friends itself simply scrubbed the Blackness from Living Single and resold it.

Generative AI consumes the largest possible sample of existing media, whether images or text, and regurgitates something passably similar. The law of averages foretells that, the larger our core sample, the more the product will drift toward the middle. Thus, an AI enthusiast will regard the blandest, most derivative product as a triumph of the art form. We know it works because it resembles everything we’ve seen before.

Unfortunately, the network commissioners who buy content will probably also love it. I’ve written before, primarily about music, how the corporate conglomerates that control our media have become risk-averse. They literally have analytic software and focus groups, modeled on the latest behavioral economics, to reassure shareholders that all new content sufficiently resembles everything that’s been successful before.

We could argue that this happens because corporate overlords see their product not as art, but as content. It also reflects chokepoint capitalism, since all music, to succeed, must pass Spotify’s filters, and all TV ultimately heads for Hulu, Netflix, or Disney+. But it also reflects changes in consumption. The streaming services that control our viewing and listening require massive audiences to keep subscription prices low, and 🌟art🌟 can’t do that.

Gone are the days of subcultures and audience segmentation. Streaming services generate audiences, not by creating something innovative or uplifting, but by remaining minimally offensive. Admittedly, this isn’t new in mass media, as network TV’s largely interchangeable Westerns of the 1960s segued into spy thrillers in the 1970s. I’ve already commented on how Friends’ cinematic, character-driven style displaced Norman Lear-style three-camera sitcoms anchored to bankable stars.

Generative AI will reduce this trend to silliness. The nameless spec clip memorialized above shows how the system reduces storytelling so thoroughly, it pinches the same actress twice. If the existing model reduces BIPOC actors to contract players holding supporting parts, generative AI will eliminate them completely. One needn’t ponder hard how it will treat disabled actors, or even capable but slightly funny-looking actors. Like me.

Children and the aged are also underrepresented on existing TV, and often reduced to stereotyped, moralistic roles. Aging actors already struggle to get parts, especially if they don’t have established star power—and that goes double for women. If existing sample TV shows and movies have few children or older adults, the middle-of-the-road produce will inevitably have even fewer, a trend likely to only compound over time.

I don’t want to romanticize the past, especially the recent past. Disney currently shepherds talent like Ariana Grande or Olivia Rodrigo from childhood, molding them according to data and metrics, creating a media landscape already struggling with anodyne blandness. Constant remakes of lucrative IPs like Dune, Harry Potter, Gossip Girl, and Stephen King, reveals corporate leadership paralyzed with fear at even the most rudimentary innovation.

AI is thus not a declension, but an extension of already existing trends toward the mean. It accelerates corporate media’s desire to produce the blandest, most studiously inoffensive oatmeal. In the constant struggle between art and commerce, it supports the bean counters. By controlling the kinds of stories and faces available to viewers, it promises to continue starving the public imagination at a pace once unimaginable.

In short, it helps nobody but the shareholders. One wonders what will help them, when we shut off the TV and read a book.

Some Thoughts on Cursive

“You know why we need to teach cursive in public schools?” someone belted at me on social media. “So kids can read important historical documents!” This has apparently become something of a clobber argument online recently, in the debate over whether schools should maintain the curriculum of good penmanship. As usual, this fellow hit me with links to the most common “cursive” documents, the U.S. Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.

Back during my teaching days, students already railed against teaching cursive writing. They regarded elegant handwriting as retrograde in an age of cheap digital printing. Cursive is rarely mandatory outside schools, mostly in rare official government paperwork. Beautiful handwriting has become an unnecessary luxury from another time.

Except, looking at the Declaration of Independence, something struck me: that isn't cursive. The most common version we all know, Timothy Matlock's transcription of Thomas Jefferson's text, was written in Copperplate, a form of calligraphy. Printer John Dunlap reproduced Matlock's handwriting with a typeface called Caslon, popular in the 18th century but mostly forgotten now.

Because of the way public schools teach cursive, I understand why people might lose the distinction between cursive and calligraphy. I studied in the waning days of Parker penmanship; by the time my sister was in grade school, D'Nealian had largely supplanted Parker. But in both cases, teachers heavily emphasized precision, elegance, and cleanliness. Cursive isn't meant to be any of these things.

I don't recall anybody telling me that the purpose of cursive isn't to write beautifully, it's to write quickly. Where the printing we all learned in kindergarten sought to create legible text that others could read, cursive meant to write at the speed of thought, letting students take notes or get thoughts onto the page quickly. Legibility to others should be secondary in cursive writing, at least in its origin.

To serve that, print writing is done mainly in the fingers and wrists. Any college student who's tried to take notes through an interminable lecture course knows how painful that becomes at speed. Cursive should move the effort of writing into the elbow and shoulder, letting the hand stay still while the arm does the effort of writing. This should result in copious quick writing with a minimum of fatigue.

But nobody ever told me that. All the emphasis in my grade-school cursive instruction stressed beautiful, elegant text. That is, calligraphy. As anybody who has ever practiced any art knows, you can have grace and precision, or you can have speed, but not both. By teaching cursive as beautiful writing, my teachers made it burdensome and impractical. No wonder my classmates and I mostly abandoned it when it stopped being mandatory.

I don't want to disparage calligraphy. In an era where text has become utilitarian and bland, I don't want to see beautiful letters disappear. But willfully beautiful handwriting is slow and time-consuming, and like oil painting or guitar playing, not meant for everyone. Those who stand to benefit should definitely practice calligraphy. But again, calligraphy and cursive are not synonyms.

Considering all the time I spent taking notes, and later watching my students take notes, we could've all benefited from real cursive. All the time squandered trying to massage out painful hand cramps or fend off carpal tunnel syndrome, could've gone instead toward art or science or business. If we'd understood how to write quickly, without fatigue, we could've had so many more hours in our days.

Instead, we were misled into thinking we had to accept hand pain as necessary for quick, practical writing. I don't think my teachers misled me deliberately. As with other subjects, their own instruction on how to teach skimmed past the “why” and onto the mechanics. While I believe teachers, at least the ones who last, are good people who love students, the school system sadly inculcates incuriosity and anti-intellectualism, in spite of teachers' best intentions.

Excessively precise handwriting therefore falls onto the same spectrum as “skillz drillz” math exercises and translating Shakespeare into “plain English.” It makes educational administrators feel useful, and gives test writers something to measure, but alienates children from their natural curiosity. Kids need cursive, not because penmanship is elegant and historically significant, but because it's a mode of thinking. Kids need to learn that getting ideas out of their heads, and onto paper, is how we turn abstract thoughts into useful action.

Writing is the bridge between thinking and doing. And cursive is how we cross that bridge without getting tired.

“The Wild Robot” and the Problem with Metaphor

Fink the fox and Roz the robot in Dreamworks’ The Wild Robot

Chris Sanders (writer/director), The Wild Robot

When the service robot identified only as Roz washes ashore on a rugged Pacific Northwest island, it wants one thing: instructions. It races around the island, pestering wildlife with its preprogrammed spiel of helpfulness, cheer, and obedience. The animals won’t have it. Until circumstances make Roz responsible for an orphaned hatchling goose, which imprints on it as his mother. Suddenly Roz has purpose and a mission.

This film’s creators intended a message. Roz (Lupita Nyong’o) is a complete cypher, even to herself, until nurturing the gosling Brightbill defines her. A local fox, Fink (Pedro Pascal), initially sees Brightbill as an easy appetizer, but Rox manages to turn him into an ally. As the island’s wild inhabitants teach Roz to become a mother goose, they also learn together to overcome their natural enmities and live in trust.

For its intended audience of older children and their parents, this inclusive, communitarian message should ring true. I appreciate the intention behind it. The thesis, that nobody on the island is beholden to their natures, and can unify to protect their homeland against encroaching human technology, seems timely. As powerful forces in American society find creative ways to divide citizens and enflame culture-war animosities, the moral of overcoming division matters.

I enjoyed the underlying conceit. In less judicious hands, Roz could’ve become needlessly messianic, especially in later scenes, when her manufacturers try to reclaim her from a flying platform, literally on high. But Roz isn’t a messiah; like Paddington Bear, her guileless attempt to manufacture a place in life inspires those around her to evaluate their own choices. She makes everyone better, not through exhortation, but through simplicity and action.

However, there we encounter the problem with this storytelling approach. Linguist George Lakoff contends that human communication depends heavily on metaphor, the comparison of one form to another. Hope is the thing with feathers, Emily Dickinson wrote. (That’s a simile, yes; bear with me.) Dickinson doesn’t contend hope is a literal bird, but that it has sufficient bird-like qualities to bear the comparison, which she justifies in succeeding stanzas.

But any metaphor, pushed sufficiently hard, breaks down. Is hope migratory? Does it hunt or scavenge or live on carrion? Is hope a sweet songbird or an aggressive Canada goose? Metaphors are, by necessity, inexact, and don’t support extensive scrutiny. Many birds are dangerous to handle, bear diseases, and could kill humans. They also have a frustrating tendency to leave at predictable intervals, which undermines Dickinson’s metaphor.

This movie presents the differences between animal species as something Roz can overcome through honesty and innocence. The animals that disparage Roz for her attempts to teach Brightbill to fly come around to her position, slowly at first, simply because Roz’s need for purpose inspires them. Eventually, they learn to trust her enough that she inspires them to trust one another and huddle together during a violent winter storm.

Except, animals aren’t human communities, which could hypothetically pause their divisions to work together. The movie shows predators like foxes and grizzly bears consciously choosing not to eat prey animals—something they cannot do, because their digestive tracts can’t process vegetable matter. I’m reminded of Timothy Treadwell, the notorious Grizzly Man, who thought his big-heartedness defended him from grizzly bear attacks. Spoilers: the bears he loved killed him.

The broken metaphor leaves me struggling. We need the message of overcoming inherited divisions to resist the corporate invaders who would steal our resources. From Bacon’s Rebellion to today, wealthy oligarchs profit when they keep ordinary people divided and belligerent. This movie tells audiences that, supported by a shared purpose, we can overcome those divisions and unite to protect our island from the third-act invasion.

But it conveys that message in language that doesn’t withstand scrutiny. Grizzly bears aren’t disobedient puppies which need trained out of their aggression; they are muscular predators whose consumption serves an important role in forest ecosystems. Anthropomorphizing animals works well in movies like Disney’s Robin Hood, which shows animals outside their habitat, enacting human roles. The forested island ecosystem behind the story undermines this division and gives false ideas.

Please don’t misunderstand me. This movie has received accolades for its storytelling, visual design, and message, and I wouldn’t take anything away. But misplaced metaphors give honest, well-meaning people like Treadwell false ideals about how nature works. The idea that predators can stop being predators because they learned from an honest, naïve ingenue, teaches child audiences falsely optimistic lessons about how animals, and possibly human societies, work.

Some Stray Thoughts on the Futility of Language

I think I was in seventh grade when I realized that I would probably never understand my peers. In church youth group, a young man approximately my age, but who attended another middle school, talked about meeting his school’s new Egyptian exchange student. “I could tell right away,” this boy—a specimen of handsome, square-jawed Caucasity who looked suspiciously adult, so I already distrusted him—said, “that he was gonna be cool.”

“How could you tell?” the adult facilitator asked.

“Because he knew the right answer when I asked, ‘What’s up?’”

Okay, tripping my alarm bells already. There’s a correct answer to an open-ended question?

Apparently I wasn’t the only one who found that fishy, because the adult facilitator and another youth simultaneously asked, “What’s the correct answer then?”

“He said, ‘What’s up?’” my peer said, accompanied by a theatrically macho chin thrust.

(The student being Egyptian also mattered, in 1987, because this kid evidently knew how to “Walk Like an Egyptian.”)

This peer, and apparently most other preteens in the room, understood something that I, the group facilitator, and maybe two other classmates didn’t understand: people don’t ask “What’s up?” because they want to know what’s up. They ask because it’s a prescribed social ritual with existing correct responses. This interaction, which I perceived as a request for information, is actually a ritual, about as methodical and prescriptive as a Masonic handshake.

My adult self, someone who reads religious theory and social science for fun, recognizes something twelve-year-old Kevin didn’t know. This prefixed social interaction resembles what Émile Durkheim called “liturgy,” the prescriptive language religious people use in ceremonial circumstances. Religious liturgy permits fellow believers to state the same moral principles in unison, thus reinforcing their shared values. It also inculcates their common identity as a people.

The shared linguistic enterprise, which looks stiff, meaningless, and inflexible to outsiders, is purposive to those familiar with the liturgy. Speaking the same words together, whether the Apostle’s Creed or the Kaddish or the Five Pillars of Islam, serves to transform the speakers. Same with secular liturgy: America’s Pledge of Allegiance comes to mind. Durkheim cited his native France’s covenants of Liberté, Egalité, et Fraternité.

This confused me, a nerdy and socially inept kid who understood life mainly through books, because I thought language existed to convey information. Because “What’s up?” is structured as a question, I perceived it as a question, meaning I perceived it as a request for clarifying information. I thought the “correct” answer was either a sarcastic rejoinder (“Oh, the sky, a few clouds…”) or an actual narrative of significant recent events.

No, I wasn’t that inept, I understood that when most people ask “How are you today,” it was a linguistic contrivance, and the correct answer is “fine.” I understood that people didn’t really want to know how you’re doing, especially if you’re doing poorly. But even then, the language was primarily informative: I’m here, the answer says, and I’m actively listening to you speak.

However, the “What’s up?” conundrum continues to nag me, nearly forty years later, because it reveals that most people don’t want information, at least not in spoken form. Oral language exists mainly to build group bonds, and therefore consists of ritual calls and responses. We love paying homage to language as communication, through formats like broadcast news, political speeches, and deep conversations. But these mostly consist of rituals.

Consider: when was the last time you changed your mind because of a spoken debate? This may mean the occasional staged contacts between, say, liberals and conservatives, or between atheists and Christians. Every four years, we endure the tedium of televised Presidential debates, but apart from standout moments like “They’re eating the pets,” we remember little of them, and we’re changed by less.

For someone like me, who enjoys unearthing deeper questions, that’s profoundly frustrating. When I talk to friends, I want to talk about things, not just talk at one another. Perhaps that’s why I continue writing this blog, instead of moving to YouTube or TikTok, where I’d receive a larger audience and more feedback. Spoken language, in short, is for building bonds; written language is for information.

Put another way, the question “What’s up?” isn’t about the individuals speaking, it’s about the unit they become together. Bar chats, water cooler conversations, and Passing the Peace at church contain no information, they define the group. Only when we sit down, alone, to read silently, do we really seek to truly discover what’s up.

Artists and the Schizoid Personality

J.K. Rowling—great artist, bad person

I’m trying to write a vampire novel. It’s a cheap grab for marketable attention, yes, but I need to restart my long-delayed writing career. Therefore I’m trying to overstuff the novel with cultural motifs of capitalist resentment, misplaced sexuality, and status envy, the three benchmarks of mass-market vampire fiction. I find myself facing a problem, though. I simply don’t know enough about nonstandard sexual expression to write about it comfortably.

Sure, I know something about the fear, anger, and desperation which all monsters and their victims share. But since at least Bram Stoker, and certainly since Anne Rice, authors have used vampires as metaphors for sexual appetites so socially repellent that one must squelch them. Vampires are, by nature, dominant, violent, and voracious, preying on trust and innocence—all things I’m not. I’m doubting my ability to finish this project.

I’ve had this problem before. I’m more than competent organizing words in ways that readers find pleasing, and multiple trusted sources assure me I should seek wider audiences. But it’s a writing truism that stories require conflict, and for every protagonist with a goal, they require some antagonist willing to do anything necessary to impede that goal. Somebody must always, from the storytelling perspective, be the villain.

Especially in this age of Marvel craptaculars and Starwoid blockbusters, readers feel dissatisfied with ordinary human-scale conflicts. MFA workshops continue producing countless “literary” conflicts of the Kramer vs. Kramer style, which indie presses publish for prestige, and which seldom get a second printing. To snag enough readers to buy groceries, authors must mass-produce generational traumas, planet-destroying weapons, and truly demented monsters.

Roman Polanski—great artist, lousy person

And to write those monsters with the full dimensionality audiences have grown accustomed to, writers must occupy the monstrous headspace. One cannot write monsters without, at least occasionally, thinking like a monster. After all, truly terrible creatures like Dracula, Iago, and Lord Voldemort aren’t mere mustache-twirling villains in the Snidely Whiplash mold; their evil comes from someplace, and serves some motivation deep within the character.

Crafting fully fleshed monsters, though, means the monster’s thoughts live within the author. We see this sometimes in what authors affirm, or what they deny. J.K. Rowling, for instance, created Lord Voldemort, a thinly coded Hitler analogue. But in creating that character, she also incorporated Churchill-era war propaganda about an assertively fair-haired Britain becoming overrun with foreigners and, ahem, bankers. Then these beliefs spilled into her private life.

Shall I continue? Cinematic genius Roman Polanski wrote, directed, and starred in The Tenant, a thriller about encroaching urban paranoia and isolation, in 1976. In 1977, he was accused of—and confessed to—drugging and raping a minor, and has remained a fugitive from American justice ever since. Knowing what we do about sexual violence, the crime for which he got caught almost certainly wasn’t his first. Personal secrets undoubtedly drove artistic paranoia.

Many of Neil Gaiman’s best stories involve hurting women. Coraline, Stardust, and several Sandman plots all involve women fearing for their lives, going insane, or being held in captivity. Though Gaiman never went the full Green Lantern and stuffed women in refrigerators, he nevertheless motivated many of his best stories by causing fictional women pain. We now know that torture didn’t exist entirely in his imagination.

Neil Gaiman—great artist, terrible person

Art doesn’t emerge from whole, balanced, healthy minds. Like an oyster creating a pearl, the object of beauty begins with irritation and injury. Worse, in order to produce enough content to make a living in this media-saturated world, artists must do more than tolerate the irritation; we must prod it, feed it, and rip previously healed wounds open again. Even when it doesn’t produce literal violence, artists are unbalanced people.

When I describe artists as “schizoid personalities,” I don’t mean in the clinical sense. I mean in the older Greek sense, where the “schiz-” prefix refers to something torn or cut in two. The same prefix used in schizophrenia is the same root used in the word scissors, signifying something thoroughly torn, in ways it can never be completely repaired. Artists must tear themselves asunder to create fully realized conflicts.

And I must ask myself: am I willing to risk becoming torn likewise? Do I love art enough to create those thoughts within myself, knowing that I’m not immune to their lure? What if I create the monster capable of expressing such eloquent trauma—and then, like Rowling, Polanski, and Gaiman, I can’t control it? If artists aren’t unbalanced people when they begin, most will be so before they finish.

In Dispraise of “Originality”

Jimmy Page (with guitar) and Robert Plant of Led Zeppelin

“You mean other people are allowed to use and repurpose music that already exists?” Sarah exclaimed, eyes wide and jaw dropped. “When I took the composition class in college, they insisted I had to invent my music out of whole cloth!”

I’ve forgotten how we reached the topic—casual conversation is frequently winding and byzantine. But I’d mentioned the multiple lawsuits surrounding Led Zeppelin, who have costly judgements against them for appropriating works by Black American songwriters, making fiddling changes, and slapping their own bylines on them. I’d explained the likely explanation: there’s a long blues tradition of songwriting by jamming around existing songs until a new song emerges.

This left Sarah flabbergasted. “My professor so thoroughly insisted on complete originality that she demanded we start composing with random notes, and building the piece around that.” I could completely believe that, too. Having attended our college’s new music showcase a few times, I remembered the preponderance of discordant, atonal music. I thought every undergraduate considered themselves another John Cage. Turns out the professor liked that effect.

Sarah felt faux outrage at the injustice of having been told that every composition had to be original. (Okay, “outrage” is overselling it. But definitely astonishment.) Yet while classical and orchestral composers, trained in frequently grueling college and conservatory programs, have an ethos of complete originality drilled into them persistently. Meanwhile, working songwriters crafting genres people actually pay money to hear, pinch and repurpose existing themes regularly.

Bob Dylan described his early songwriting style as “love and theft.” His earliest recordings show how frequently he lightly reworked existing Woody Guthrie or Dave Van Ronk tunes. Only with years of experience did he develop his own songwriting voice. Lennon and McCartney are among the bestselling songwriters ever, yet three of the Beatles’ first four albums are half cover songs, because the Beatles hadn’t found their voices yet.

I have no songwriting experience; I’m about as musical as a steel anchor. Yet in college creative writing and playwrighting classes, my textbooks espoused a similar ethos of complete originality. I remember one textbook pooh-poohing genre fiction as a “guided tour” of existing repurposed themes, while “literary” fiction always strives to be completely original. Don’t be like those popular paperback writers, the textbook urged; always create something new.

Our professor smiled ruefully and reminded us that textbook authors have their blind spots, too.

The Beatles, photographed at the peak of their star power

Literary authors and playwrights mimic one another relentlessly, and their genres are intensely fad-driven. As a playwright, it too me years to shed David Mamet’s influence, like songwriters struggle to differentiate themselves from Dylan. Most college-educated American writers pass through their John Steinbeck, Elmore Leonard, and Toni Morrison phases before achieving distinct voices. The lucky few see those exercises published.

Originality emerges in art, where it does, only gradually. Both Salvador Dalí and Pablo Picasso, famous for nonconforming paintings, began their careers with Renaissance-style portraits and church scenes. Jackson Pollock tried several techniques before uncovering his dribbling, wholly non-objective Abstract Impressionist style. Importantly, all these artists were disparaged when their approaches first appeared; they achieved acclaim only latterly, sometimes posthumously.

Yet even incidental mimicry draws ire. Returning to music. Former Beatle George Harrison’s signature hit, “My Sweet Lord,” made his solo career. Yet within months of release, lawyers fired off a lawsuit because it resembled the Chiffons’ forgettable 1963 hit “He’s So Fine.” That lawsuit commenced in 1971, and wasn’t wholly resolved until 1998, dominating his solo career, and rendering him timid as a songwriter forever after.

This trend achieved its culmination with the “Blurred Lines” lawsuit. Heirs of Marvin Gaye claimed the songwriters behind Robin Thicke’s icky 2013 hit stole Gaye’s “groove.” That is, they claimed the song resembled, not something Marvin Gaye wrote, but something Marvin Gaye could have written, and therefore was plagiarized. And they won. This sets a courtroom precedent that simply imitating venerable artists, even while creating wholly new art, is plagiarism.

No wonder Sarah’s college composition professor (now retired) favored originality over tone. Instructors, textbook authors, and now courts demand that artists constantly reinvent the wheel. Blues icons jamming in some underlit cellar are now plagiarists, not artists. Don’t build your next track around a riff from “Crossroads” or “John the Revelator,” boys, the boundaries of ownership are set!

Artists aren’t unique individuals; they’re a community of give-and-take, constantly improving one another’s raw material. Yet the ownership ethos demands nobody pinch from anybody, even incidentally. The mere fact that working artists have never done this doesn’t change the story.

How To Write in the Middle of the Road

As the website formerly known as Twitter continues its slide into irrelevance, posts like this one have become more common. Don’t, says the would-be teacher, whose name was removed from their post before I encountered it, ever begin a sentence with the word “so.” Similar posts rehash Stephen King’s notorious demand to excise every possible adjective or adverb. Others include some variation on Quiller-Couch’s orphan injunction: “Kill your darlings.”

I acquired my distrust of gnomic advice early. In grade-school creative writing, teachers warned students to avoid the word “said” in dialog tags, lest our writing become monotonous through repetition. Somewhere between there and college, the zeitgeist shifted. Now writing teachers admonish us to avoid any word other than “said” in dialog tags, lest we become overblown, adjectival, and show-offy. Thus I realized that writing advice is faddish and insubstantial.

Stephen King warns writers to avoid adjectives and adverbs, and to remove all unnecessary content, advice he notably doesn’t follow. His books are often so overwritten, they’re physically difficult to hold. Matching advice to trim supporting characters, side plots, and world-building digressions, aim to reproduce the terse, telegraphic prose famous from Ernest Hemingway or Elmore Leonard. In other words, it’s about following the crowd to bestseller status.

This week, as I contemplated how to rebut these specious proverbs, seemingly designed to produce work that authors and audiences inevitably hate, news came down the pike. According to The Chronicle of Higher Education, Arizona State University has launched a pilot program with OpenAI, owner of ChatGPT, to tutor freshman composition students. This becomes another opportunity to trim boring old teachers, with their salaries and demands, from the education process.

Despite the popular rhetoric, ChatGPT isn’t artificial intelligence; it’s a computer learning heuristic, a dynamic program designed to let computers learn from existing material. In particular, ChatGPT browses existing prose content, and teaches itself how to construct content passably similar. Technology philosophers argue whether it has any capacity to understand the content it reads or creates, but it doesn’t matter. ChatGPT is essentially a high-tech mynah bird.

Stephen King

Therefore, if we expect ChatGPT to teach college-level writing, we can at best anticipate that it will encourage students to write sentences and paragraphs which fit the program’s heuristic. It will regard individual voice, unique narrative, or personal interest as distractions. Just as ChatGPT itself only produces prose that satisfactorily resembles existing prose, it’ll demand likewise from students. This will produce bland, unoriginal writing that its own writers hate.

Much like the rules-based writing taught on Xitter.

Learning heuristic writing defies the purpose of college writing. It presents prose not as an attempt to explore the human condition, convey valuable information, or spin a constructive line of bullshit, but as a product to extract, like coal from a mine. If extracting text from human writers proves too costly, time-consuming, and laborious, fire them; outsource it to machines. Human writers are dangerous anyway, and use excessively big words.

Elaborate, oppressive writing rules share the same message. Excising adjectives and adverbs, the words that give nouns and verbs their flavor, or trimming side quests to create a sparse narrative that translates to film, all declare authors the enemies of prose. Anything that shows individual personality or a spark of character impedes slick commercial prose, which should roll out like cars from a Detroit assembly line.

Please understand, I’m not exaggerating. I’ve used this example repeatedly, but it remains relevant: according to Charles Duhigg, record label executives expected Outkast’s single “Hey Ya” to become a runaway hit. Not because they particularly liked it, but because in-house software declared it sufficiently like previous hits that passive listeners would devour it. When it initially struggled, industry insiders gamed the market to achieve the software’s projected outcomes.

Now we’re applying similar principles to writing. By making new prose sufficiently similar to existing prose, and excising any spark of character or enjoyment, we ensure readers can consume writing passively, like they consume petroleum. It matters not one whit whether writers craft novels, scripts, business reports, or journalism. We expect everyone to read as submissively as if they’re doomscrolling Xitter.

As a teacher, I cajoled students to use their own voices; several of them succeeded. Several youths who grew up resenting reading and writing found an unanticipated joy when they discovered writing wasn’t just crinkum-crankum grammar exercises. But now forces want to walk this progress back. Whether it’s human-made rules or computer learning heuristics, some forces would make writing as bland and joyless as possible.

The Great Stratford-on-Avon Noise Machine

I don’t like deleting anyone from my online friends lists. I sometimes hold onto friendships that have shuffled along, zombie-like, for years. To get ejected from my social media lists, you generally must pick fights, engage in personal insults, or use my page to spread lies. Recently, I had someone attempt all three, and it involved one of literature’s most tedious questions:

Did Shakespeare write the works of Shakespeare?

Anti-Stratfordianism is a pseudoscience, akin to antivax or Flat Earth conspiracies. Adherents “prove” their propositions, not through evidence, but by “poking holes,” finding supposed inconsistencies in the documented narrative, and “just asking questions.” As my overuse of scare quotes indicates, anti-Stratfordian arguments rely on obfuscations and innuendo, not evidence. Yet my now-ex-friend insisted I must “engage” every specious argument, or surrender the debate.

That, immediately, should’ve been a clue. Flooding the market with unsourced innuendo or anecdotes, then claiming victory on every point somebody can’t immediately rebut, is the tactic of ufologists and Bigfoot hunters, not serious social scientists. Bullshit artists, like Steven Crowder with his “change my mind” schtick, love barraging the unprepared with binders full of photocopied talking points, demanding on-the-spot answers.

My ex-friend began by demanding why we should consider Shakespeare the author of Shakespeare, when we have little documentary evidence of his life. As though the absence of documents, in a time when creating and storing documents was expensive, proves anything. In fairness, professional doubt manufacturers use this same technique on Homer, Socrates, Pythagoras, or Jesus Christ. Rhetoricians call this the “argument from ignorance.”

Jon Finch (left) and Francesca Annis in Roman Polanski's Macbeth

Sometimes we must focus on gaps in our knowledge. Law enforcement and counterterrorist experts do this frequently. But formal argument considers this fallacious in most contexts, because absence of knowledge usually proves little, except that nobody can document everything. Shakespeare, a poor boy from the provinces, didn’t merit physical documentation until relatively late in life.

Well, the anti-Stratfordian argues, what about Shakespeare’s lack of education? Most playwrights of the English Renaissance attended Oxford or Cambridge; how could Shakespeare write great literature without academic credentials?

Yes, most late-Elizabethan playwrights attended universities. We remember Christopher Marlowe, Robert Greene, George Peele, and Thomas Nashe as the “University Wits.” Greene wrote a notorious pamphlet condemning Shakespeare as an uneducated bumpkin. However, Greene’s one surviving play isn’t worth reading. Of the University Wits, only Marlowe bears reading now—and he nearly flunked his education, until the Queen personally intervened.

Insisting that Shakespeare couldn’t write well without a university education is classist. As a former university composition teacher, I can attest that some people write well without higher education, others write poorly with higher education, and some write well despite higher ed. (When I mentioned social class, my ex-friend said I’d engaged in “ad hominem attack.” Not so, sir. If there’s a fallacy there, it’s hasty generalization.)

The anti-Stratfordian shifts tactics: how could Shakespeare write about foreign lands so authoritatively? We have no evidence he ever left England. (Again with the “argument from ignorance.”)

Except Shakespeare didn’t write authoritatively about foreign lands. In Hamlet, he misnames Denmark’s royal palace, and gives nearly every Danish character Greek or Latin names. He sets several plays in Italy, including Verona, Venice, and Padua. Each feature explicitly English scenes, including women speaking in public (verboten in Renaissance Italy), court cases argued on English common law, and common English courtship rituals. Shakespeare’s “foreign lands” are exotic names draped over English scenes.

Kenneth Branagh as Hamlet

Next, the anti-Stratfordian demands I explain how Shakespeare,a poor country boy, could write about aristocracy? How could a provincial merchant’s son understand noble households and aristocratic families?

First, Shakespeare’s playing company had aristocratic sponsorship. As first the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, and later the King’s Men, Shakespeare’s company were members of the royal household, and therefore aristocratic insiders. Even without that, though, the poor have always understood how rich people think, as rich people don’t understand the poor, because they have to. Then as now, social class matters.

Finally, my ex-friend deployed the low blow: why was I getting emotional? “You don’t sound,” he wrote, “like a dispassionate academic here.” I realized that he’d gone for the troll argument, saying provocative things until I lost my composure, then crowing over my anger. His statement was a prettied-up version of “U mad bro?” So I blocked him.

I don’t brook bad-faith argument or underhanded tactics. I won’t engage future anti-Stratfordian arguments, and if anyone tries them on me ever again, I’ll show them this narrative, then mute them forever. It’s better than they deserve.

Hollywood Is Awful, and It’s Getting Worse

Annie Murphy in Black Mirror S6E1, “Joan Is Awful”

If you watched entertainment news this week, you saw two weird events almost simultaneously. SAG-AFTRA, the actors’ union, voted to strike, the day after a spokesperson for the affiliated studio heads announced Hollywood’s intent to simply endure the Writers’ Guild strike until the writers were too broke to negotiate. In response to SAG-AFTRA, a press release postulated several possible studio responses, including performing digital scans on background actors, preserving and reusing their image, uncompensated, forever.

For those playing the home game, this is the premise of “Joan Is Awful,” a Black Mirror episode which distributed on June 15^th—not even thirty full days ago. Though the episode is more complex, the pivotal premise is that everyone, from Hollywood A-listers to seeming nobodies, has signed away their names, life stories, and images. Hidden in “Terms and Conditions” contracts so abstruse that literally nobody can read them, the ironclad clauses prove humiliating.

Simultaneously, my online feed became jammed with the same ad repeated endlessly: trailers for the upcoming Wonka movie. Timothée Chalamet, who recently became the third actor to play Paul Atreides in Frank Herbert’s Dune, now becomes the third actor to play Willy Wonka, Roald Dahl’s wacky chocolatier and slave-owner. My long-time readers know I despise how risk-averse Hollywood has become, recycling the same piddle while serious writers beg for work. This only proves my point.

When writers demanded pay commensurate with the value they create, defenders of the status quo warned that studios would simply replace writers with artificial intelligence. They weren’t dissuaded by the fact that AI hasn’t yet produced much worth reading, and requires human editors to force the product into a shape. Because AI text generators can currently only create grammatically correct sentences, and cannot judge their own writing holistically, their product is generally rambling and mushy.

Further, AI only outputs what its algorithm generates from its inputs. Text generators like ChatGPT, and image generators like MidJourney, scrape the internet for representative samples, and reassemble the product into something that looks just different enough to sail under copyright guidance. At least currently, writers and artists can maintain their advantage by creating conspicuously new content and constantly breaking new ground, something AI just can’t do. Easier said than done, yes, but still possible.

But I can’t tell whether audiences want anything groundbreaking and innovative. Thanks to Timothée Chalamet’s memorable face, Dune and Wonka currently embody slick franchise redundancy. But Disney, the largest entertainment conglomerate, makes most of its substantial bank on two lucrative properties: Lucasfilm and Marvel Comics. Meanwhile, the second-largest conglomerate, Warner Bros. Discovery, is trying to salvage its would-be tentpole franchise, DC Comics. Studios are banking everything at least for now, on reliable, uncontroversial franchise content.

Timothée Chalamet in an advance promo image from Wonka

Whether audiences want that, however, is questionable. Without Chris Evans and Robert Downey, Jr., recent MCU box office numbers havebeen lackluster. Lucasfilm properties have been hit-or-miss, especially anything outside Star Wars; the Willow relaunch fared so poorly that Disney flushed it down the memory hole to avoid paying outstanding taxes. Studios create the appearance of demand for lucrative franchises through saturation marketing and media monopoly, but in practice, audiences seem something other than impressed.

The digital solutions which studios propose to overcome this loss don’t look particularly promising, either. Consider the difference between 1994’s Jurassic Park, and the Jurassic World sequels. Though Park was ballyhooed in 1994 for its pioneering CGI imagery, the movie only used about six minutes of digital art, mostly in long shots. By contrast, the latest films consist almost entirely of pixel illustrations. Nearly thirty years later, the original remains eminently watchable. The sequels don’t.

I’ve complained about this before. Much current science fiction and fantasy places human actors centrally, very obviously inside a studio before a chromakey background, then digitally mattes in the surrounding environment later. The product looks exciting when it’s new, but doesn’t bear repeated watching. When studios promise digital actors and AI scripts, they pledge stories stapled together from the undead remains of past success, performed by actors you can’t stand to watch more than once.

Things don’t have to be this way. If studio executives accepted a smidgeon less money, and paid their creative and technical personal commensurate with the value they create, everyone could get back to creating art, and everyone would be happier. But, like President Bush before the second Iraq war, Hollywood execs think technology has made human labor obsolete. President Bush found out how wrong he was, and soon Disney and Netflix will find out, too.

Reality Has a Lousy Plot and a Slovenly Editor

There was no thunder and lightning the day my mother fell and injured herself, which, as a writer, I found anticlimactic and disappointing. We writers are always taught that we need appropriate foreshadowing before a big plot event, but life isn’t so obliging. My mother’s injury—a frustrating reversal of all the progress she’s made in a year of physical therapy—wasn’t heralded by meaningful story elements. It just happened.

It was Easter Sunday, April 9th, 2023. She was headed to church, where her daughter, my sister, was scheduled to play with the bell choir; my sister’s music has made her a small-time local celebrity. Mom stepped out of the truck, something that would’ve been impossible for her a year ago as her joints were becoming increasingly brittle, but which she’s been handling with grace and ease, supported by only a telescoping trekking pole.

There was no pavement crack to trip over, no surging crowd pushing her back. Nothing in the plot to justify her falling backwards. She simply lost her balance and fell against the truck’s bumper with sufficient force to break three ribs, one pretty severely. Lying on the emergency room gurney later, she wracked her brain for explanations why she fell so suddenly, but explanations weren’t forthcoming. It just happened.

In writing, as in other mass-media arts—filmmaking, game design—storytellers need justifications for life-altering events. If somebody falls, shattering bones and becoming paralyzed, we need somebody to first portentously say, “Y’all better fix that sidewalk before someone gets hurt.” Because in storytelling, we recognize the existence of a storyteller. There’s a genuine person present, making decisions, and those decisions need support.

Roland Barthes called this tendency to value the author’s choices “theological.” Centering the storyteller’s choices too closely resembled looking for God’s mission in life, and like many mid-20th Century French academics, Barthes pooh-poohed the idea of a personal God. But Barthes replaced the storyteller’s choices for those of the audience. He disparaged theology, while arrogating theological power to the reader. This, to him, seemed a reasonable trade.

Roland Barthes

Thus, even as the literary world has moved away from its belief in a just and ordered universe, it nevertheless persists in believing in human agency. Whether we believe that God ordained universal values, or humans make values where we find them, we still look for an orderly world, because we recognize that there’s a storyteller and an audience, and both of them make choices.

Early novelists believed that, because they were making choices in writing, they needed to have a moral thrust. Before the Twentieth Century, the novel’s denouement needed to reward the virtuous and punish the culpable. Moving into the modern era, novelists increasingly recognized that the universe is seldom so just, and made their stories reflect this change. But they often followed the opposite extreme, visiting sadistic cruelty on the innocent.

Modern audiences have become savvy to these authorial choices. We recognize that authors are either moralistically pious, or nihilistically savage, and instead of traveling where the storyteller takes us, we often start the book, movie, or game by looking for clues. We don’t want to undertake a journey, we want to “beat the game,” anticipating whatever twist or convoluted conspiracy we assume the author has buried in the story.

Then we act surprised when some people seek those same clues in the outside world. QAnon cultists and Flat Earthers look for fiddling, insignificant signs of an organized universe in frivolous word choices or inconsistencies in flight plans. They’re engaged in a pattern Barthes would disparage as “theological,” looking for concealed truths of an underlying storyteller making choices. And their behavior is every bit as silly.

As Christian as I am, I can’t help laughing at people looking for God (or a God analogue) in worldly clues. It’s about as nonsensical as making offerings to Babylonian water spirits to propitiate the rain and create a bountiful harvest. Even if you believe that God exists, faith doesn’t exist to ballyhoo evidence in the past; that’s arrogant and self-justifying. Faith doesn’t justify the past, it helps you make the next right choice in the present.

My mother’s injury is a frustrating, disappointing setback and loss of progress. But it wasn’t foreshadowed, because reality isn’t a story. Maybe there’s a God, but that doesn’t mean every life event represents a choice. Sometimes things happen because they happen, and humanity’s vainglorious tendency to look for purpose is ultimately disappointing. For us writers, that’s a very bitter pill to swallow.

The Making of a “Classic”

Agatha Christie

“Is there a reason a video game can’t be considered a classic?” I remember a student asking in English 102. “Why can’t a video game be ‘literature’?” Our class that semester was dedicated to researching and writing about the meaning of education, especially higher education, and what it means to be an educated person. The student was an English major, but uncomfortable with the canon that the discipline considered “classic.”

I recalled this student this week, when publisher HarperCollins announced that Agatha Christie would be the latest popular dead writer to have their work rewritten to exclude inflammatory language. Christie, whose work hasn’t gone out of print in a century and whose novels have been more widely translated than Shakespeare, used a number of late-Empire attitudes in her writing. Her protagonists often disliked “foreigners” and used vulgar racist language.

My student got a discussion rolling over what works were considered “classics” in high school English classes. Why, for instance, is The Great Gatsby considered classic literary art, but The Maltese Falcon still lumped with “genre” fiction? Why Shakespeare, but not Neil Simon? We never reached a satisfactory conclusion in class, but I repeated the question to other sections, and eventually, I think we reached a provisional definition of literature.

A work becomes a “classic,” we tentatively decided, when it says something about the time when it was written, and also about the time we read it. In other words, classic literature isn’t transcendentally timeless; it belongs to the time when it was written. This sometimes means outdated attitudes, such as Atticus Finch’s White Savior mentality. But even outdated content says something about us, now, reading and interpreting the text.

(Incidentally, by this definition, a video game narrative could potentially become a classic. The game itself couldn’t, however, because the technology necessary to read it becomes outmoded and illegible to future generations. Thus popular video game adaptations, like the current TV series The Last of Us, might potentially outlive the games that spawned them.)

Roald Dahl

That returns us to the current mania to rewrite classic literature. Sure, sometimes that’s necessary. The widespread outrage over rewriting began with Roald Dahl’s novels, which often contained jarring racism. In Dahl’s 1964 novel Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, the Oompa-Loompas were explicitly described as African pygmies working without pay. First-generation readers considered this so offensive that Dahl himself rewrote that aspect for the 1973 rerelease.

But there’s a difference between an author acknowledging public taste (and his own egregious cock-up) and correcting it, and uncredited outsiders imposing another era’s views on that author. One author being heavily rewritten is Ian Fleming, who created James Bond. In Fleming’s telling, Bond was racist, frequently anti-American, and had little patience with anybody not British. Far from the cinematic hero depicted by MGM, Bond was a lousy human being.

Yet I’d contend that’s the point. Like John le Carré or Frederick Forsythe, Fleming wrote about the kind of bottom-feeder who generally worked in international intelligence. Anybody who reads the history of international affairs knows that the Cold Warriors working for spy agencies like MI6 or the CIA were often little better than the miscreants they hunted. These novels usually featured what one critic called “the pretty bad standing against the truly awful.”

When ghostwriters shave Bond’s chauvinism, nationalism, and bigotry away, they lose something of the Cold War milieu that produced him. James Bond emerged from an atmosphere of realpolitik that found his skills useful. But Britain also sent him overseas because it wanted to put men like him as far from the homeland as possible. James Bond is, simultaneously, a British national asset, and a liability to a global superpower’s self-image.

Ian Fleming

Ian Fleming, Agatha Christie, and Roald Dahl wrote during the British Empire’s final crumbling years. Britain’s economy, culture, and self-image were in a state of flux, one that arguably paid off in the ignominy of Thatcherism. Their racist ideas reflected at least a portion of Britain at the time, watching burnished imperial splendor wither, exposing the moral rot that had always laid underneath. Arguably, they handled the change badly.

Except I believe that’s the discussion readers need to have when reading these works. Poirot and Miss Marple upheld the law, which included parroting top-level White supremacy and late colonialism. James Bond defended a homeland that was embarrassed by him. Charlie Bucket inherited an economy based on enslaved labor. These works are “classics,” not in spite of, but because of these traits, and the questions they ask us, the readers.

Some Pessimistic Thoughts On “Plagiarism”

Last summer, when historian Kevin M. Kruse was accused of plagiarism—a serious accusation in academia, and one that submarines careers—I wrote a lengthy examination of the concept. My views on plagiarism have shifted substantially since my “zero tolerance” teaching days, when we were institutionally encouraged to distrust any writing that was too well-written. I’ve come to accept that the workload schools impose on students is simply too exorbitant to permit serious original writing.

So I congratulated myself for my Gandhi-like enlightenment and walked away from the discussion. Dr. Kruse was eventually cleared by a council of like-minded nabobs, and the issue retreated from public consciousness. Then yesterday, I received a Facebook message from a stranger identified as Emmett Cullinan, admitting he’d repurposed one of my reviews for a classroom assignment. He wasn’t even circumspect about it. He acknowledged he hadn’t read the book, simply repurposed my written review.

Suddenly I found myself back in “teacher” headspace, cueing up platitudes about the evils of slapping your name on somebody else’s words. Though I doubt an online scolding will discourage any undergraduate brazen enough to actually tell a writer after lifting another’s words, I at least went to Cullinan’s Facebook page to find his school. Turns out, Cullinan has set his Facebook profile to private, making him inaccessible to anybody he doesn’t already know. Crafty.

Cullinan’s message initially looked smug, boasting in performing an act of intellectual dishonesty. But the longer I live with it, the more I suspect there’s something more going on. Yes, this kid (I’m assuming youth and inexperience drive this cocky impudence) acknowledges slapping his name on my words. Considered in a vacuum, these words imply a galling level of self-importance, since he not only performed the plagiarism, but wanted me to know he’d performed it.

But he says this pilfering “really saved my life” and “legitimately saved my grade.” These aren’t the words of somebody rubbing my nose in his dishonesty; they’re the words of somebody scared of falling behind and losing out. Indeed, his use of the word “legitimately” suggests that although he knows his actions are illegitimate, he feels his necessity is more than legitimate, or at least legitimate enough to justify his actions, taken out of desperation.

In other words, the longer I live with Cullinan’s message, the more I realize they’re written from a place of inner fear. He writes with an exterior mask of audacity and entitlement, perhaps because he believes his position as a student is precarious enough that he can’t admit terror. Students frequently learn early that professors, whose own position is frequently shaky, can smell fear. Therefore, with professors and with me, Cullinan masks fear behind arrogance.

College degrees, once a signifier of aristocratic erudition, have become job credentials for most Americans. The time spent getting a degree has become a mandatory buy-in for a middle-class life. Many jobs that, in the past, simply required an apprenticeship or on-the-job training, like office managers, industrial technicians, and law enforcement, now actually do require higher education. Sometimes the requirement is unofficial and simply customary; but some employers or jurisdictions have made this requirement official.

This means that an upwardly mobile life increasingly requires not only college, but frequently a graduate degree, to stand out and move ahead. This means a commitment of years, effort, and debt. Undergraduates and grad students are nominally adults, but see the period of juvenile dependency dragged out for years, sometimes until they’re pushing thirty. It’s even worse for anybody hoping to change careers in adulthood, which can mean more years studying for more credentials.

Emmett Cullinan’s message sounds ballsy, at first. But it reflects childhood fears dragged out onto an adult, a grown-ass man who is considered culpable as a grown-up if he mishandles a car or a beer, but who isn’t allowed to take responsibility for his working life yet. Like kids throughout history, he acts brazen because, perhaps, it’s the only power he has. Far from the unashamed plagiarist I first assumed, I think he’s just scared.

Of course that doesn’t stop me from using his real name, or screenshotting his message. I’m no longer angry enough to pursue consequences, but I’m passive-aggressive enough that, if consequences find him, I won’t cry. Because that, too, is part of higher education. Students learn to have opinions about books they haven’t read, or experiences they haven’t experienced, but they also learn to get called out when they fib. Learn to live with it.

In Dispraise of Realism

George R.R. Martin

A confession: I have only watched a few episodes of Game of Thrones, and none of its spinoff, House of the Dragon. I tried reading George R.R. Martin’s novels, and couldn’t. Nothing against either Martin’s writing, which has a strong voice and command of nuance, or the adaptation’s execution; I particularly like how they took Peter Jackson’s LotR ethos and made it sootier. Martin and his adapters work well.

Rather, I’ve struggled with the underlying ethic. Martin is probably the foremost proponent of a fantasy subgenre called “grimdark.” This neologism is sloppily defined and, like porn, we know it when we see it. Rather than having parameters, grimdark fantasy has a core interpretation of humanity defined by pessimism, and a petty, captious interpretation of human nature. Grimdark writers read humans as base, vile creatures, and depict this belief luridly.

Martin’s tone isn’t unique. Writers like Genevieve Valentine, Glen Cook, and Joe Abercrombie presume similarly that humans lack core values, honor doesn’t exist, and the best we can expect is to find the least awful antihero. Grimdark often exists in direct rejection to J.R.R. Tolkien, who aggressively rejected religious interpretations of his novels, but who nevertheless wrote from an essentially Catholic belief that justice must ultimately prevail.

This pessimism often gets characterized as “realism.” Both inside and outside literature, many people who pat themselves on the back for their supposed clear-eyed ability to see the truth, actively seek the bleakest, most hopeless interpretation for everything. Recall Tolstoy’s famous thesis statement of realism in Anna Karenena: “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Then he sets out to prove it.

Similarly, in politics, “realism” often justifies history’s worst atrocities. Otto von Bismarck pioneered realpolitik, a PoliSci thesis contending that everybody’s a bad actor, and the wisest course is to destroy other nations before they destroy you. It’s easy, with historical hindsight, to draw a straight line between Bismarck and two world wars. Today, American politics is tainted by “race realism,” a primarily conservative principle that race-based conflict is inevitable.

J.R.R. Tolkien

It strikes me, however, that Tolkien and his weird shadow, C.S. Lewis, weren’t ignorant of the worst possible interpretations. Tolkien fought in the trenches at the Somme. Lewis’s allegorical Pevensie family stumbled into Narnia while literally fleeing the London Blitz. Tolkien and Lewis lived through the Twentieth Century’s most ignoble and hideous moments. And despite that, they believed goodness, Christianity, and capital-T Truth still existed.

Lewis himself, in describing Chretien de Troyes’ Arthurian romances, noted that Chretien set his stories in a distant land, at a distant time. (Chretien was French, but in the 12th Century, overland travel was ponderous, and undertaken only with great purpose.) Because, Lewis writes, true virtue is always in another land, at another time. Historically, fantasy has shared that belief, whether Tolkien’s iron-age severity, or Lewis’ playful mythic candyland.

Contrasting the sociopolitical forces that steered Tolkien versus Martin, I notice two divergences. First, though both men were baptized and confirmed Catholic, Martin lost his faith moving into adulthood. He stopped believing that capital-T Truth existed, or at least was knowable. But no substitute source of moral confidence took Christianity’s place. Faced with a panoply of philosophical and theological moralities, Martin essentially surrendered to indecision.

Meanwhile, as Martin lacked any moral compass, he also lacked urgency in context. Lewis and Tolkien were shaped by literal war, with fascism, which was itself the final instaur form of imperialism. (America take note.) Martin and his grimdark cohort, by contrast, grew up amid the Cold War. They didn’t have the option to win or die trying. Instead, they lived beholden to powerful governments that were deaf to the people’s entreaties.

Actual violence, actual war, convinced Tolkien and Lewis that truth claims matter, and virtue exists. By contrast, the lingering threat of violence, with the pervasive reality that they could neither join in nor flee, convinced Martin et al. that nothing really matters, and humanity is necessarily execrable. It seems belief in truth and virtue emerges, butterfly-like, from the need to act. But the persistent inability to resist evil starves virtue.

And in both cases, True Believers cast their belief in virtue, or lack thereof, onto a distant land unreachable across countless miles and centuries. Because closer to home, we have to acknowledge that neither virtue nor vice are absolute. Real life is sloppy, and doesn’t move according to theory. In either case, Christian idealism or agnostic pessimism, the truth only exists in a mythic land.

Quantum Leap: Time Travel Fiction in a World Without a Future

Caitlin Bassett and Raymond Lee in the Quantum Leap soft reboot

I’ve heard good things about the newly-launched soft reboot of the 1980s TV series Quantum Leap. Though only the first episode has streamed at this writing, friends and reviewers who’ve watched it describe it as a worthy relaunch of the story concept, without trying to retell the exact story. Yet I can’t bring myself to watch it. The very thought of yet another soft reboot from the Hollywood dream factories just makes my skin crawl.

Fans use the term “soft reboot” to signify a story that’s technically an extension of the original, but which attempts to shoehorn new characters into the protagonists’ role. The way, for instance, Disney gradually wrote the original trinity of characters out of Star Wars in favor of younger, handsome successors. Or the way Terminator: Dark Fate slowly squeezed Sarah Connor and the T-101 in favor of a new resistance and a new, looming future terror.

According to reviews, this Quantum Leap exists in parallel to the original. It’s unclear whether any actors from the original series will appear, though Scott Bakula has given interviews from the sideline. (The only other actor to appear throughout the original series, Dean Stockwell, passed away in 2021.) The new series features entirely new characters, and apparently mentions the original characters, so it’s possible that original protagonist Sam Beckett will reappear in the unspecified future.

Thus Quantum Leap joins the ranks of previously ended shows, like Roseanne, iCarly, and The X-Files. These series had clearly delineated final episodes, and came to definitive conclusions, sometimes under poor circumstances. Sure, Quantum Leap was remembered more fondly in its absence than when it actually aired. But Roseanne languished for literally decades, its final season a subject of mockery and scorn, before somebody decided to try again.

But somehow, nostalgia won out over derision.

It’s easy to pooh-pooh these studio reboots. In an era when instant digital interconnectedness puts thousands of writers within easy reach, the studios aren’t seeking new ideas or new thinkers; they’re ransacking the vaults to retool old ideas with minimum effort. But this isn’t a new complaint. Cultural snobs disparaged the love of remakes and sequels at last back to the 1980s, when I began paying attention. This is something worse.

I don’t think the studios believe there’s a future anymore.

Scott Bakula and Dean Stockwell in the original Quantum Leap

This is perhaps remarkable to say when so many reboots, hard and soft, are in the science fiction realm. We currently have four Star Trek series currently in production, the largest simultaneous output the franchise has ever seen. But the future depicted in Star Trek is the future Gene Roddenberry envisioned sixty years ago. Resurrecting characters like Captain Pike and Mister Spock isn’t visionary, it’s downright cowardly and retrogressive.

Quantum Leap takes this to new heights. Though it’s an essentially optimistic show, grounded on the idea that we can be better people if we’re given the opportunity to make better choices, it’s also necessarily based on regret. Series protagonist Dr. Ben Song wants to rewrite the past and make historic mistakes just disappear—a feeling familiar to anybody who survived middle school. On some level, he just wants to make the past go away.

In fairness, this approach possibly could help audiences deal with today’s issues. Faced with a present where old issues—racism, war, religious nationalism, and environmental devastation—are happening all over again, maybe it helps to revisit past mistakes and consider what choices we could’ve made, but didn’t. It depends on how showrunners handle the developing story. We’ll need to see whether they show imagination and courage, or retreat into low-friction storytelling and cheap fan service.

I’m not entirely averse to reboots and relaunches. Both Doctor Who and Battlestar Galactica came back from the Hollywood graveyard with new approaches to addressing modern issues. When America felt adrift post-9/11, with little unifying us except a poorly defined enemy, Galactica made that mission drift appear literal onscreen. It gave Hollywood appropriate tools to dissect America’s political malaise, and our need to find an identity if we wanted to handle our modern problems competently.

But these are outliers. Most reboots, hard or soft, aren’t addressing today’s problems with today’s tools. The recent Twin Peaks third season or today’s orgiastic Star Wars smorgasbord are attempts to snuggle up in past media products like a security blanket, and avoid addressing today’s issues. Hollywood studios are essentially throwing their hands in the air and refusing to even look at the world around them. And it shows in the reheated product they’re producing.

See also: Quantum Leap, the Enlightenment, and “Laplace’s Demon”