Sunday, January 11, 2015

Study Notes: Jan 4-10, 2015: "Janelle Monae: Contemporary Queen of Science Fiction," &c

This is commentary. And this is really good. 

What I've been watching and reading this week: 
Other notes: 
Homework for the future: 

"What the inside of a spaceship might really look like"
  • "Armstrong is an advocate of making our habitats beyond the Earth-- space stations, craft, colonies and starships-- much more like our existing starship, the Earth." 
  • "Her point is that on Earth we rely on a delicate and balanced ecosystem to support us. This includes the billions of bacteria that line our gut to help us digest food, the plants we eat and the trees that supply us with oxygen and absorb carbon dioxide; functions that need to be artificially sustained in space." 
  • "Ultimately Armstrong imagines giant floating biomes drifting through the cosmos. Self-sustaining organic spaceships with fields, lakes and mountains." 
  • "Take one of the most complex systems on the ISS, for instance, the toilet and urine processing system. This $250m device makes boldly going a costly undertaking, using a technologically advanced filtration system to recycle human waste into drinking water. The same process happens on Earth for a lot less money. When we drink tap water-- particularly in urban areas-- there is a good chance it has already passed through several other people before us. Most of the 'cleaning' of that water has been carried out by bacteria or plants in the natural environment... or by cultures of bacteria in sewage treatment works." 
  • Armstrong: "We can imagine these being bubbling, flowing, tubes or tanks that are situated around the wall spaces. Already this is starting to be a visually interesting environment-- creating an aesthetic experience that makes us feel good." 
  • "Water is also an excellent radiation shield and, as an added benefit, these bubbling tubes could be used to protect astronauts from dangerous cosmic rays or solar storms. Armstrong also envisages growing tanks of algae-- fed with sewage and sunlight-- that could be harvested for food." 
  • "So when, in 2151, the real starship Enterprise sets out on its maiden voyage, its interior may look very different to how we imagine it today. Instead of featureless corridors, they might be lined with bubbling tubes of algae. There will be grass, instead of carpet, on the floor and trees will grow on the bridge." 
"On Murder, Considered as One of the Fine Arts"
  • As Wikipedia says it, "a fictional, satirical account of an address made to a gentleman's club concerning the aesthetic appreciation of murder." 
  • "They profess to be curious in homicide; amateurs and dilettanti in the various modes of bloodshed; and, in short, Murder-Fanciers. Every fresh atrocity of that class, which the police annals of Europe bring up, they meet and criticise as they would a picture, statue, or other work of art." 
  • "People begin to see that something more goes to the composition of a fine murder than two blockheads to kill and be killed-- a knife-- a purse-- and a dark lane. Design, gentlemen, grouping, light and shade, poetry and sentiment, are now deemed indispensable to attempts of this nature." 
  • The idea presented by the Society of Connoisseurs of Murder is that, while you should of course do all that you can in order to prevent a murder, once it has happened it is then done and over with, and so why should you not consider it according to taste? 
  • "We dry up our tears, and have the satisfaction, perhaps, to discover that a transaction, which, morally considered, was considered shocking, and without a leg to stand upon, when tried by the principles of Taste, turns out to be a very meritorious performance." 
  • "The first murder is familiar to you all. As the inventor of murder, and the father of the art, Cain must have been a man of first-rate genius. All the Cains were men of genius... But, whatever were the originality and genius of the artist, every art was then in its infancy, and the works must be criticised with a recollection of that fact." 
  • "Assassination is a branch of the art which demands a separate notice; and I shall devote an entire lecture to it. Meantime, I shall only observe how odd it is, that this branch of the art has flourished by fits. It never rains, but it pours." 
  • "But there is another class of assassinations, which has prevailed from an early period of the seventeenth century, that really does surprise me; I mean the assassination of philosophers. For, gentlemen, it is a fact, that every philosopher of eminence for the two last centuries has either been murdered, or, at the least, been very near it; insomuch, that if a man calls himself a philosopher, and never had his life attempted, rest assured there is nothing in him; and against Locke's philosophy in particular, I think it an unanswerable objection (if we needed any), that, although he carried his throat about with him in this world for seventy-two years, no man ever condescended to cut it." 
  • "As to the person [who is the best candidate for murder], I suppose it is evident that he ought to be a good man; because, if he were not, he might himself, by possibility, be contemplating murder at the very time; and such 'diamond-cut-diamond' tussles, though pleasant enough where nothing better is stirring, are really not what a critic can allow himself to call murders." 
  • "For the final purpose of murder, considered as a fine art, is precisely the same as that of tragedy, in Aristotle's account of it, viz., 'to cleanse the heart by means of pity and terror.' Now, terrors there may be, but how can there be any pity for one tiger destroyed by another tiger?" 
  • "It is also evident that the person selected ought not to be a public character." 
  • "The subject ought to be in good health: for it is absolutely barbarous to murder a sick person, who is usually quite unable to bear it... And here, in this attention to the comfort of sick people, you will observe the usual effect of a fine art to soften and refine the feelings. The world in general, gentlemen, are very bloody-minded; and all they want in a murder is a copious effusion of blood; gaudy display in this point is enough for them. But the enlightened connoisseur is more refined in his taste; and from our art, as from all the other liberal arts when thoroughly cultivated, the result is-- to improve and to humanize the heart." 
  • "A philosophic friend, well known for his philanthropy and general benignity, suggests that the subject chosen ought also to have a family of young children wholly dependent on his exertions, by way of deepening the pathos." 
  • "As to the time, the places, and the tools, I have many things to say, which at present I have no room for. The good sense of the practitioner has usually directed him to night and privacy. Yet there have not been wanting cases where this rule was departed from with excellent effect." 
"10 Writing 'Rules' We Wish More Science Fiction and Fantasy Authors Would Break"
  • "Third-person omniscient used to be the default mode for a lot of novelists-- a lot of the classics of literary fiction as well as science fiction are written in third person omniscient." 
  • "When you have a tight third person with multiple viewpoint characters, it often feels like an omniscient narrator who's choosing to play games." 
  • "Anyone who's serious about writing genre fiction should read Henry Fielding, who makes third-person omniscient into an art form. In novels like Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones, Fielding draws these brilliant tableaux where he pauses to show what everyone's thinking, and how much at cross-purposes everyone is." 
  • "Prologues have their uses, especially if you want to set a mood or establish some crucial backstory before you start introducing your main characters." 
  • "We've heard many people say that 'portal fantasy' is over, and so is the neophyte who learns about the magical work over the course of a book... But as we argued a while back, there's still a lot of awesomeness lurking in the concept of an ordinary person traveling to a strange world." 

"The Ballot or the Bullet"
  • "Mr. Moderator, Brother Lomax, brothers and sisters, friends and enemies; I just can't believe everyone in here is a friend, and I don't want to leave anybody out." 
  • "Whether we are Christians or Muslims or nationalists or agnostics or atheists, we must first learn to forget our differences. If we have differences, let us differ in the closet; when we come out in front, let us not have anything to argue about until we get finished arguing with the man." 
  • "Don't let anybody tell you anything about the odds are against you. If they draft you, they send you to Korea and make you face 800 million Chinese. If you can be brave over there, you can be brave right here. These odds aren't as great as those odds. And if you fight here, you will at least know what you're fighting for." 
  • "I'm not a politician, not even a student of politics; in fact, I'm not a student of much of anything. I'm not a Democrat. I'm not a Republican, and I don't even consider myself an American. if you and I were Americans, there'd be no problem... Everything that came out of Europe, every blue-eyed thing, is already an American. And as long as you and I have been over here, we aren't Americans yet." 
  • "Sitting at the table doesn't make you a diner, unless you eat some of what's on that plate. Being here in America doesn't make you an American. Being born here in America doesn't make you an American." 
  • "I don't see any American dream; I see an American nightmare." 
  • "I say again, I'm not anti-Democrat, I'm not anti-Republican, I'm not anti-anything. I'm just questioning their sincerity, and some of the strategy that they've been using on our people by promising them promises that they don't intend to keep." 
  • "You and I in America are faced not with a segregationist conspiracy, we're faced with a government conspiracy. Everyone who's filibustering is a senator-- that's the government. Everyone who's finagling in Washington, D.C., is a congressman-- that's the government. You don't have anyone putting blocks in your path but people who are a part of the government." 
  • "You haven't even made progress, if what's being given to you, you should have had already. That's not progress." 
  • "I don't usually deal with those big words because I don't usually deal with big people. I deal with small people. I find you can get a whole lot of small people and whip hell out of a whole lot of big people. They haven't got anything to lose, and they've got everything to gain." 
  • "Civil rights, for those of us whose philosophy is black nationalism, means: 'Give it to us now. Don't wait for next year. Give it to us yesterday, and that's not fast enough.'" 
  • "Whenever you're going after something that belongs to you, anyone who's depriving you of the right to have it is a criminal."
  • "Civil rights means you're asking Uncle Sam to treat you right. Human rights are something you were born with." 
  • "Nowhere on this earth does the white man win in a guerilla warfare. It's not his speed." 
  • "Our people have to be made to see that any time you take your dollar out of your community and spend it in a community where you don't live, the community where you live will get poorer and poorer, and the community where you spend your money will get richer and richer." 
  • "They don't know what morals are. They don't try and eliminate an evil because it's evil, or because it's illegal, or because it's immoral; they eliminate it only when it threatens their existence." 
  • "Don't think because they're church leaders that they don't have weaknesses that make them envious and jealous-- no, everybody's got it. It's not an accident that when they want to choose a cardinal, as Pope I over there in Rome, they get in a closet so you can't hear them cussing and fighting and carrying on." 
  • "You let that white man know, if this is a country of freedom, let it be a country of freedom; and if it's not a country of freedom, change it." 
  • "A segregated school means a school that is controlled by people who have no real interest in it whatsoever." 
  • "When you're under someone else's control, you're segregated. They'll always give you the lowest or the worst that there is to offer, but it doesn't mean you're segregated just because you have your own. You've got to control your own." 

"Janelle: Contemporary..."
  • Janelle Monae: "Whatever way you can get the audience's attention to listen to your message, a strong message at that, then by any means."
  • Cindi Mayweather: "I imagined many moons in the sky lighting the way to freedom." 
  • "Up till that point I had generally seen different media treated as fundamentally segregated from each other-- you wouldn't see a list of the best Sci Fi stories of all time including a concept album, a short story, a novel, a live action movie, a TV series, and an anime all listed together. You still wouldn't, I think." 
  • "Cindi Mayweather is an android in a dystopian future city-- Metropolis-- who falls in love with the human Anthony Greendown, and is consequently sentenced to destructed. Cindi isn't going down without a fight, though, and across (so far) one EP and two albums Monae's relayed the story of her rise as a symbol of resistance for other droids... and the realization of her destiny as the savior-figure The Archandroid."
  • "Concept albums tend to be either super hard to follow because the music is emphasized over the coherency of the narrative, or the music gets a bit narmy because the band is trying to convey a whole narrative via people singing their entire motivations and actions, or both get real goody because they're just trying to do too much at once and it falls apart." 
  • "Monae's three discs are exceptional largely because they dodge these problems entirely by building a network of symbols, motifs, bits of information about the world, and so on. The structure of the narrative is semi-nonlinear, each song does not necessarily correspond to a particular story beat and what song corresponds to what story beat in what context can change..."
  • "Monae's working here in a long hip hop tradition of layered meaning and complex allusions." 
  • "The story of Cindi Mayweather is intriguing precisely because of its applicability-- a term I'll borrow freely from Tolkien as a stand in for allegory. Cindi Mayweather as the Other can represent queer folk, women, people of color, immigrants, folks with disabilities of various sorts... anyone shut out and othered, transformed into something other than human, by society. So when Monae slips in and out of her Cindi Mayweather persona like a misaligned hologram, she's not losing track of her narrative, she's revealing the fundamental applicability and fluidity of that narrative, and the way that narrative refracts across time and space." 
  • "I guess if you're expecting an escapist story about cyborgs, sure, suddenly getting hit with a discussion of poverty and segregation in present day Kansas City would be kinda uncomfortable. But it's a discomfort that is profoundly valuable." 
  • "This is an artist that absolutely, positively, knows her stuff and can articulate some extremely complex ideas born of half a century of theory in the context of over a century's science fiction traditions. She's jumbling Critical Race Theory with Philip K Dick allusions..., the fight for queer rights with the Three Laws of Robotics, and discussion of the Technological Singularity and the inevitability of hard AI with lines straight from Fritz Lang's Metropolis. Like, the level at which she's working is the level someone like Grant Morrison is working at, you know?"
  • "Oh, and of course there's the way she plays with the gender binaries of the genre, Anthony Greendown declaring to his lover, 'I saved you so you'd save the world,' acknowledging that his role as knight is to facilitate Cindi's own quest, rather than an act of heroism that will conclude the story." 

"Janelle Monae: Sci Fi..."
  • "I can't speak too much to the significance of Afrofuturism or its history, as I am in many ways peripheral to the whole thing and haven't done the minimum requisite reading that'd make me comfortable talking in more detail, but the basic idea is to blend African and African-American experiences and traditions with the tropes and ideas of science fiction, often in order to reimage current and future conditions and sometimes in order to challenge white supremacist beliefs." 
  • "To someone that draws their identity from outmoded conceptions of gender and sexuality, Monae's genderqueer persona and her unstated, ambiguous sexual desire (Monae isn't out by any stretch of the imagination, but if she's happy accepting the desire of queer female fans and is happy singing about romantic and erotic relationships with women, I'm happy to accept her as a queer cultural touchstone!) is probably 'uncomfortable.'"
  • "If there's one thing geeks hate, it's not being smarter than everyone else in the god damn room." 
  • "It's no wonder, if critics cannot make a leap from live action cinema to Japanese animation, that Monae has received so little acclaim as a remarkable science fiction author." 
  • "Even the familiar has to be whitewashed and sanitized for consumption, so all the Hobbits in Hobbiton have to be white despite the fact that such casting decisions contradicts Tolkien's own bloody writing." 
  • "Social unfamiliarity is wedded to genre unfamiliarity is wedded to medium unfamiliarity, and all have their root in people's unwillingness to embrace the actual frontier rather than, and I know I'm going to be slaughtering the proverbial sacred cow here, someone like George RR Martin, whose central innovation seems to be the same innovation that Moore and Gibbons brought to superhero comics 34 years ago. Or make Drizzt Do'Urden or the X-Men superstars for the social metaphors in their stories while ignoring stories about, like, actual black humans and prejudice." 
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