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September 3rd, 2010
One of the most fascinating podcasts I’ve discovered in the last few years is The Bible Geek, hosted by Robert M. Price. Price recently mentioned on his show that his family is in some financial difficulty and could use whatever support listeners can provide, so I figured now was as good a time as any to mention his show:
One thing that makes this show so fascinating is that I’m never quite sure how much of it — if any — to believe, as Price cheerfully admits that his views are well outside the mainstream of Biblical scholarship. He’s a really interesting, quirky guy. He was raised as a hardcore fundamentalist and attended seminary, and at some point decided that the Bible was purely a product of human society and became an atheist, but he still goes to church, just because he enjoys it, and still loves talking about the Bible (and his enthusiasm is obvious), and he often puts out hours of show every week. He’s also a prominent writer and editor of Lovecraftian fiction and criticism, and has a great love of old grade-B science fiction movies, as evidenced by the titles of some of his books, such as The Incredible Shrinking Son of Man.
Price was a member of the Jesus Seminar, a group of scholars who convened in order to analyze the Gospels and separate the real history from the mythological gloss. (They received an enormous amount of publicity at the time for their method of voting on the veracity of Bible verses using colored beads.) At the outset of the project, Price had assumed, along with the rest, that there was some strata of historical data in the Gospels, and that all one had to do was strip away all the material that had plainly been lifted from earlier stories or had plainly been added in later, and the reliable history would stand revealed. As the project progressed, the group was stunned to discover just how much material could be shown to be non-historical. At this point, as Price tells it, the more conservative participants became uncomfortable with the whole endeavor and shut the project down. Price now believes that essentially nothing about the life of Jesus can be shown to be historically verifiable — there may have been a historical Jesus, but if so no convincing evidence of this fact remains. This is what has put him on the outs with mainstream scholarship. According to Price, none of the extra-Biblical references to Jesus that have turned up really prove much. Tacitus and Josephus are both writing decades after Jesus would have lived, and Josephus seems to have been tampered with by later authors. (Josephus was a Jew, but the one passage that mentions Jesus — and which seems to have been randomly inserted into the text — seems to have been written by a Christian.) And Tacitus is merely reporting on what the Christians of his day believed to be the story of Jesus — there’s no implication that Tacitus is vouching for the accuracy of those beliefs, or that he would have any way of knowing anyway.
Anyway, regardless of whether you think Price is right or wrong, his ideas are weirdly fascinating, particularly for fantasy fans. One idea he’s talked about on the show is the Gnostic belief that our world was created by an incompetent godlike being called the Demiurge, and that the reason our world is so messed up is because this being botched the job so badly. On this view, Jesus had come as an emissary of the true creator God, to deliver a message along the lines of, “Management is aware of your concerns and is taking steps to remedy the situation.” The Second Coming, in their view, would have been the true creator God coming in to clean up the mess. In the Bible as we know it, Goliath is described as being nine feet tall — truly a giant. But in an earlier version of the story found in the Dead Sea Scrolls, Goliath is described as being merely six feet tall — still unusually large in the ancient world, but a lot more believable. Clearly, sort of like the time your grandfather caught that fish, the story grew with the telling. When early Christians were spreading their religion, they encountered a lot of pushback from pagans who pointed out that the stories and rituals surrounding Jesus were totally ripped off from long-standing stories and rituals surrounding Osiris, Dionysus, etc. Early church fathers like Justin Martyr had an explanation for this: Satan, knowing that Jesus would come, had pre-emptively founded a whole bunch of fake religions with similar stories and rituals in order to confuse people once the real deal came along. I really can’t say what I’m more in awe of there — the ingenuity or the chutzpah.
The Bible Geek is particularly interesting for writers because you’re talking about extremely close readings of stories that have been rewritten and rewritten and rewritten by countless hands over centuries. I don’t think I’ve ever seen such detailed analysis of how and why a story might be edited, and how you can take a close look at a story and make reasonable inferences about what the previous drafts must have looked like, and what got moved where, and what’s clearly a piece of an earlier version that just doesn’t fit anymore. One thing that happens a lot in the Bible is that communities will get separated and their versions of a particular story will start to diverge, and then when those peoples unite again they feel obligated to maintain both versions as separate events, which is why you’ll often see the same basic sequence of events repeating itself. (One example is that there are two slightly different versions of the loaves and the fishes miracle. The second time, the apostles are just as confused and astounded as they were the first time, which doesn’t make sense. Obviously it’s two different versions of the same story.)
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September 3rd, 2010
Here’s an interesting interview with Jonathan Gottschall, adjunct assistant professor at Washington and Jefferson College, about his book Literature, Science, and a New Humanities, in which he argues for taking a more scientific approach to literary studies. On the problems with current methodology he says:
The idea you just identified — that what literary scholars do is go and hunt and peck around through texts for evidence that confirms their idea, no matter how far out their idea is — is the problem. If you do that, you will find evidence for your idea, no matter how weak your idea is. I say in the book that the problem with literary methodology is it’s never wrong … no determined literary critic has ever failed to find evidence for his preferred idea, so that’s a huge problem. If nothing can be wrong then nothing can be right.
And:
There’s this crippling reliance on the authority of gurus — on Freud and Lacan, Derrida, and so on. That is a bit of a scandal. It used to be that I would read papers, when I was in graduate school especially, and the first couple sentences would start with, “Jacques Derrida said, ‘There is nothing outside the text,’” and from that premise the whole argument is based, just upon what this guy said.
As an example of a more evidence-based approach, he cites his chapter The Heroine with a Thousand Faces, about using statistical analysis to evaluate claims about literature:
Feminist fairy tale scholars argue that there’s a lot of emphasis put on women’s beauty in Western fairy tales compared to men’s beauty, and little girls get the message — and it’s a damaging message — that in order to be valuable, in order to be the heroine in the story, you have to be beautiful. And they argue that that’s a cultural construct, it’s just made up, there’s no basis in human nature for that, it just comes out of certain historical elements of Western culture. Well, that’s an easy thing to test. What you do is you go and look at references to beauty in other folk and fairy tale traditions, and that’s what we did — we go all around the world, across centuries, across very, very diverse sorts of cultures … and you see it’s the same patterns pop up, and if the same patterns of gender and so forth keep popping up around the world, then it seems quite unlikely that all these different societies just happen to be culturally conditioning in the exact same way. If you find regularity across cultures in these variables then probably it has a basis in shared elements of human psychology. So for the beauty question we found that the feminists were right about Western culture — there are a lot more references to female attractiveness than male attractiveness in Western fairy tale collections, about 6 to 1 … but then if you look all around the world you find exactly the same pattern … and we’re able to check in female-edited collections versus male-edited collections and the patterns are still there. This does not seem to be a product of cultural conditioning.
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September 1st, 2010
Here are two pretty good songs that iTunes Genius turned up for me:
“Sweet Sweet Heartkiller” by Say Hi To Your Mom
“Lolita” by Elefant (NSFW)
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September 1st, 2010
Ha. Love this T-shirt. Words to live by.
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August 30th, 2010
So my parents asked if Scott Pilgrim vs. the World was any good, and I said, “Oh yeah, it’s one of the best movies I’ve seen in years … possibly ever.” And they said, “So should we go see it?” and I was like, “Oh, I don’t know. I predict you’ll find it fairly inexplicable.” I say this based on them not getting or liking various off-kilter films such as Donnie Darko or Napolean Dynamite that inspire rabid followings among young audiences, and the fact that Scott Pilgrim in particular will be enjoyed more depending on how much affection you have for video games, graphic novels, alternative rock bands, and 20-something slackers. (When I saw it, I swear there wasn’t a solid minute that passed in which the audience wasn’t laughing/cheering/orgasming, but that’s a pretty young hip crowd on Friday night in Manhattan.)
But my parents still want to see it, because they want to go see something and there just haven’t been many good movies this summer, so they asked if I could post some sort of “Geezer’s Guide to Scott Pilgrim.” They were also talking about maybe taking my grandma.
Okay, this is going to take a while.
The first thing you have to understand is that Scott Pilgrim fights people, and this makes no literal sense. There’s no logical explanation for why this scrawny kid is a martial arts master — no, I doubt he spends all day at the dojo. It’s sort of like in a musical when everyone just starts singing for no reason, and you just have to accept that a bunch of gang kids can all carry a tune and execute a perfectly choreographed dance number. It’s a storytelling tool that creates a heightened emotional effect. And the fighting in Scott Pilgrim feels right because it has metaphorical resonance. When you’re dating someone, something you have to grapple with and overcome are your feelings about the fact that the person you’re dating dated other people before you — people you may not think much of (in which case it makes you insecure about the person you’re with) or people you’re afraid you’ll never measure up to (in which case it makes you insecure about yourself). You wonder if the person you’re dating still has feelings for any of these exes, and whether they’ll get back together if given half a chance. Even if you never even meet any of these exes, they’re kind of like ghosts who haunt every relationship.
Scott Pilgrim takes this universal emotional experience and literalizes it, with Scott having to literally battle all of the exes. If it helps, conceptualize the movie as being how Scott pictures his life in his over-active imagination — an imagination colored by his obsession with music, graphic novels, and video games. Of course the confrontations are epic — that’s exactly how it feels. Of course he’s a hero — we’re all the hero of our own lives. And of course he’s a martial arts master — in emotional terms he possesses all the tools he needs to prevail. (I think it’s better not to view the movie as something that Scott’s just imagining, but rather to just accept that the movie takes place in a world that’s completely real and that functions according to its own skewed logic, but that’s an imaginative leap a lot of people seem unwilling/unable to make.)
Once you get that the fights are literal events laden with metaphorical resonance, the next thing you have to understand is that they’re conveyed using the visual vocabulary of video games and graphic novels, most obviously “fighting games” like Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat, or Soul Calibur, in which two players stand at the same arcade machine, each control one character, and attempt to beat the snot out of each other:
A key component of such games is “combos.” You only need to press one or two buttons in order to execute the basic punches and kicks, but to prevail against tougher opponents you have to start memorizing long combinations of buttons. Stringing together such sequences can enable you to strike your opponent over and over without interruption, quickly draining away their health and eventually causing them to be knocked out (KO’d).
When Scott strikes a death blow against an opponent, that person explodes in a shower of coins:
When you’re playing a video game, it’s fun to get constant rewards, and usually the only assets in the game are health, wealth, and points, and game designers want to provide a steady stream of all three to keep players hooked. This leads to the nonsensical but extremely common convention of players acquiring coins from killing just about any monster, even ones you wouldn’t necessarily expect to be keeping much money on their persons, such as rats or skeletons. Especially in older games with simpler graphics, often an enemy you killed would simply blink out of existence, leaving behind a coin, which is what the movie is riffing on here.
There are other types of video games in which you don’t literally fight your opponent, but you compete at some virtual task, such as dancing or playing the guitar. There’s a popular game called Guitar Hero where the game plays a song and then two players compete to see who can play the notes more accurately. In a real world “battle of the bands,” one act would play and then the other. In Scott Pilgrim, it’s more like in a video game, with the musicians both playing at the same time:
There are also games where players control a virtual skateboarder. In the world of skateboarding, one common trick is “grinding” — jumping the board up onto a curb or railing and sliding along it:
In skateboarding video games, you would press some buttons to make your character execute a grind, and then you would have to keep hitting particular buttons in sequence to maintain the grind, and the longer you kept up the proper button-pushing rhythm, the longer you would keep doing the trick and collecting points. Video games often feature gigantic, exaggerated skateboard parks and death-defying tricks far beyond what would be possible in real life, and the Scott Pilgrim movie plays off of this.
One of the ex-boyfriends in the movie is a vegan. Strict vegans don’t eat meat or consume any animal products. There are also less strict vegans, such as “lacto-ovo” vegans, who make exceptions and eat milk and eggs. Keeping vegan requires enormous discipline, and some vegans can have a smug, morally superior attitude. The Scott Pilgrim movie pokes fun at this. In this universe, keeping vegan gives one incredible superpowers, so that the attributes match the attitude:
In many video games, the player has multiple “lives.” That is, if the character in the game dies, their number of “lives” is reduced by one and the character starts over from a point in the game shortly before they died. When Scott collects a “1UP,” the audience is expected to understand that he’s now got an extra life, and will not die permanently if he’s killed.
(A funny novelty T-shirt I saw at Venice Beach once reads, “Video games ruined my life. Fortunately I have two extra lives.”)
In many video games, your character becomes more powerful throughout the game, both because you collect more powerful inventory items and also because your character’s attributes — such as “strength,” “magic,” and “health” — increase with experience. Often the character must earn a certain number of “experience points” in order to reach the next level, and when the character “levels up” (e.g., goes from Level 5 to Level 6), their attributes increase accordingly. This also happens in the Scott Pilgrim movie, and again it has metaphorical resonance — when Scott grows as a person and learns important life lessons, he simultaneously “levels up” and becomes a more formidable fighter:
In many video games, your ultimate challenge is to battle some dark, twisted version of yourself. One well-known example is from the second Legend of Zelda game, in which your shadow suddenly leaps out from behind you and attacks:
In the Scott Pilgrim movie, when Scott is confronted by the sinister-looking “Nega Scott,” it’s playing off this common trope.
Now go see the movie.
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August 29th, 2010
My story “The Skull-Faced City” is among the free samples over at the newly-launched website for the zombie anthology The Living Dead 2:
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“The Skull-Faced City”
A power-mad zombie rules over a city of the dead.
Text
Available Here |
This is a sequel to “The Skull-Faced Boy,” so definitely read that one first:
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August 28th, 2010
It’s a little hard for me to believe that anyone reading this hasn’t already seen or isn’t already planning to see Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, but just in case … go see Scott Pilgrim vs. the World. And don’t take my word for it. Simon Pegg, a man of impeccable taste, also urges you attend.
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August 26th, 2010
Since the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast went on hiatus, we’ve received a fair number of messages from people who like the show. Here’s a sample:
Antihippy: “I’m really sad to hear that it doesn’t sound like you’re doing this podcast any more. I really enjoyed it. You guys put me onto all kinds of cool stuff — I’ve been punting that trailer for Pumzi round all my mates. And I bought The Windup Girl and Hack the Planet almost exclusively because of the chats with the authors. I thought there was a ton of potential in the show as well. So I am giving you the sad face. :(”
Farris wheel: “I’ve bought and read The Anubis Gates, Wild Seed, The Windup Girl, and Boneshaker because of the podcast. So thank you.”
Sandikal: “I got hooked on Carrie Vaughn’s Kitty Norville series. I also pulled the Wastelands anthology off my to-read shelf and devoured it in a couple of days after the episode about apocalypses. The terrific reading list in that book led me to other good post-apocalyptic fiction, like Eternity Road by Jack McDevitt.”
Mike: “I’m a huge fan of the show, and am sad to hear there may be no more. I’m one of those guys who actually knew about every single video game reference you guys made! Wish there were a mention of Deus Ex, though — was close in theme to a number of the books discussed in the podcast. ;) Good luck on all future endeavors.”
Michael321: “I just discovered the Geek’s Guide podcast last week, and it has quickly become one of my favorites. You guys conduct great interviews, and you’ve turned me on to a whole ton of cool stuff I didn’t know existed. The banter between David and John is also very engaging; if you have trouble booking guests, I would be happy to listen to a podcast with just the two of you shooting the breeze. Count me as another one who is hoping the Geek’s Guide makes a comeback.”
Ed: “I am a guy who has listened to every episode of your podcast since the beginning. I have enjoyed every single episode (except number 16, that one just didn’t do it for me). I have noticed the story podcast hosted by Ms. Lafferty has been canceled, and my precious Geek’s Guide has not been released on its usual schedule. I am filled with disquiet as a result of these circumstances and wonder if it is my fault somehow. Please pass on the following sentence to your corporate overlords. It may help. Ahem, ‘I have been in the unusual position that every time I hear a new episode of Geek’s Guide to The Galaxy, I am inclined, nay compelled, to purchase thousands of dollars of merchandise from Tor. My psychiatrist says this condition is incurable.’ There, hope that helps.”
Pete S: “I note that the Geek’s Guide is ‘missing’. I hope it will return soon. I appreciate all of Tor’s efforts in podcasting stories as well as the Geek’s Guide, but when my time is limited, as it so often is, I find I look first for the Geek’s Guide each week. I’m 60+ and a reader of science fiction since I was 9 or 10, and a (continuing) purchaser soon after (if that is of any benefit to your marketing department). I do hope to hear from Dave and John again.”
Siznax: “I’ve really enjoyed GGG episodes so far, and I hope you’re able to continue producing more. I find your interviews fascinating and entertaining. I’ve been amazed by your thoughtful observations and random knowledge, and you guys just really crack me up. Also, you’ve expanded my reading list, gotten me excited about new books and authors, and led me to read a lot of awesome stories. I find myself replaying your post-interview talks while waiting for the next episode, and it just never gets old. I was wondering how in the world you guys can be readers, authors, editors, anthologists, and produce a podcast, so I’m not surprised to hear how difficult it is. I was really hoping for GGG#999, but in the meantime I’ll continue enjoying everything else you guys produce, and all the great fiction you lead us to.”
Fortunately for fans of the show, things are currently looking pretty promising for a Geek’s Guide relaunch in the near future. More news to come.
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August 26th, 2010
Night of the Living Dead: Reanimated is out now on DVD. The film, a collaborative effort by 150 artists, completely remakes George Romero’s 1968 movie Night of the Living Dead using a constantly shifting kaleidoscope of artistic styles, from animation to puppets, and features as a bonus an hour-long zombie discussion panel moderated by me and including John Joseph Adams, zombie authors Jonathan Maberry and Kim Paffenroth, and producers Peter Gutierrez and Rob Hauschild.
Here’s a photo from the panel as well as a graphic novel treatment. And here’s a trailer for the movie.
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August 25th, 2010
Robert Kirkman’s graphic novel series The Walking Dead is a must-read, a wise and sensitive portrayal of the psychological toll that surviving a zombie apocalypse would exert — week after week, month after month, year after year. A trailer for the upcoming TV series has just been released. Also, check out Kirkman’s first ever prose fiction publication, “Alone, Together,” in The Living Dead 2.
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