Since it's the last day of the year, and I've been really behind on my essays, I thought I'd do a bit of a grab bag of things that are on my mind but I don't want to dedicate an entire essay to. So here's my end-of-year take on a handful of different subjects. Milton and a Book A couple years ago, I requested a Norton Edition of Paradise Lost. It's a thing that a teacher can do, in order to sample a text to see if the teacher is interested in setting up that copy for the class. In my case, I wasn't planning on buying a copy of Paradise Lost, since we use public domain copies, selected and annotated by me. As such, I didn't need to sample the book, but, hey, free copy of Paradise Lost? My mommy didn't raise no dummy. I scooped that up and happily read my little heart out. I got an email from Norton this month asking for me to fill out a survey on the book. Now, I try to do surveys when I have the time, as I try to contribute to other people's work, but I knew it wouldn't be a "Did you like it? Yes/No/Other" kind of survey. I put it off, waiting for when I had a bit more time, which happened to be today. It was a lengthy survey that focused on the extras that they'd included in their edition of Paradise Lost. While I didn't read all of those extras, I was able to throw my two cents into the discussion, offering alternative texts (e.g., I said that I thought Eikonoklastes might be a better addition than Reason of Church Government and if that sentence doesn't make sense to you, then you're a lot more normal than I am) and throwing out some of my favorite Miltonic scholars (shut up I have favorite Miltonic scholars). At the end of the survey, they offered me one book from a short list of their back catalogue. To my surprise and delight, one of my favorite Shakespearean scholars (shut up I have favorite Shakespearean scholars) had a book about Adam and Eve. I had spotted this book before whilst at Barnes and Noble earlier this week, and I was this close (holds thumb and finger close together) to buying it. In the end, I walked away, which I'm really glad I did. Now I get a second free book from Norton! Huzzah! Chuck E. Cheese's My nephew turned eight this week, so we went up to Chuck E. Cheese's to celebrate. For those of you who aren't familiar with the place, it's kind of like Pizza Planet from the first Toy Story movie, in that it's a bright, noisy arcade with a fire marshal's nightmare of kids packed into a seizure-inducing, light flashing, bowling-alley sized petri dish of vectors of disease and surprisingly edible pizza. Because it was my nephew's birthday party--and the birthday party of approximately the sum population of the state of Wyoming--we had a table filled with boisterous kids, spilled root beer, and a large, animatronic rat (mouse? What is Chuck E. Cheese?) with a Santa hat dangling off one ear. Occasionally, the robot rodent would shudder into wakefulness, blink its dead, baleful eyes at the assembled crowd, and tremble as it rotated on its bolted-down legs. Loud music blared over the speakers, and large TVs played puppets singing Christmas carols (even though Christmas was earlier this week) and, the true gift of the magi, a music video of N*Sync singing "Happy Holidays" in front of a green screen, a young Justin Timberlake rocking the frosted curl tips of his hair the way that only a teenager from the late '90s could. My youngest, Demetrius, was given a plastic card with 150 credits on it with which to play any of the arcade games. Though there were some--and the more capitalistic, conniving children orbited around these--which dispensed tickets (used to trade in for plastic trinkets so bereft of any value that being given them would seem insulting), Demetrius was more interested in the Transformers: Human Alliance on-rails-shooter. That sucker cost six credits a go, and since Demetrius is four, I had to swipe twice and join in, blowing away Decepticons and watching Optimus Prime scold those ne'er-do-wells. Since we were double-timing the arcade, Demetrius ran out of credits before his older brothers, but in a fit of niceness, my middle son, Theseus (I guess), donated some of his credits so that little D could do some of the other games.
By the end of our time with the table, we were running a bit behind schedule. The birthday boy had to open all of his presents in a twenty-minute window, which is pretty rushed when one has over a dozen presents to unwrap. The passive aggressive announcements from the employees over the intercom--"If you're at one of our party tables, you will need to finish up in five minutes"--was a nice touch to the frantic gift-stripping activity. Rip, rip, rip. "Wow! LEGO! Thanks!" Toss. Rip, rip, rip. "Wow! LEGO! Thanks!" And so on. Despite the migraine-levels of stress and noise, the entire party was really enjoyable. I liked seeing my boys have fun with the arcade games, figure out the economics of a party place like that, and walk away with some flimsy plastic that they have already misplaced. It was a good day. Santa and Son My oldest, Puck (I guess), is now ten and a half. It was obvious this Christmas season that his grip on believing in Santa had slipped--but, as Ralphie points out in A Christmas Story, "Let's face it, most of us are scoffers. But moments before zero hour, it did not pay to take chances." I'm not saying that Puck was hedging his bets, but…better safe than sorry. Now, I should point out that this is a delicate subject in our household. My wife is all about the Santa myth, having them write their letters in the palsied handwriting of early elementary age, pointing out Santa in displays, and generally doing a fair job of the whole myth. For me, I don't talk about him. I don't ask what Santa brought anyone for Christmas, I don't put any emphasis on it. I find it disingenuous at the best and while I understand why some people like it and buy into it, it's just not for me. This is a flashpoint for controversy between me and my wife, so we'll leave it at that. In the case of Puck, he kind of Encyclopedia Browned the whole thing: In a copy of Jurassic Park and Philosophy (shut up I love both of those topics), he read a part about learning the truth about Santa. He'd had conversations with his friend, who no longer believed. Then he overheard my wife talking to her mother, who asked Gayle how much the Kindle Fires cost (the "Santa present"). That was enough for Puck to figure it out. He confessed that he was sad to learn the truth, but my wife pulled him out of the funk by letting him know that it was now his job to help his brothers enjoy this aspect of Christmas. I like the idea of him learning about service and helping others, and the idea that he can practice doing anonymous acts of service is great. But, at the same time, it's a definitive moment in late-childhood. Finding out the "truth" of Santa Claus is something that happens to most kids in this area. That there really isn't a benevolent, bearded old man living far above us whose sole purpose is to dispense gifts to those who've behaved correctly can be a hard thing to wrap your head around, I suppose. I guess learning the trick behind the magic is always hard. A New Year Despite the fact that most years are hard, I feel more worn down by 2017 than I was even by 2016--which is saying something. The current administration has done a pretty poor job of doing anything positive, and I've been nothing but disgusted by my own representatives and their unending capitulations in order to secure power. My job hasn't changed, but, as I mentioned before (I think? Somewhere…), I'm not getting as much excitement out of the same things. I'm not saying I want to quit, or that I want to change a lot, but the work isn't fulfilling me as much as it used to, which is worrisome. Not only that, but this year has seen, for the first time since our early marriage, a genuine financial strain. We normally live frugally--the combined incomes of two teachers is enough to keep us firmly middle-class--but we splurged this year, what with a handful of expensive vacations and some unexpected expenses (like the garage door spontaneously breaking a month or two ago). All of these different stressors have taken their toll: I'm one tired fellow. Yet I always have some optimism for the new year. Yeah, I know it's arbitrary. The calendar isn't perfect, and changing over from a 7 to an 8 doesn't really make a huge difference in a practical way. But there's that nagging hope that this time, I can make the corrections I need to so that my life really improves. In 2018, I'll be on my medication to help reduce my depression. In 2018, I'll be making a greater push toward submitting my work. In 2018, I want to finish three novels. In 2018, there will be spring, there will be summer. The winter's bitterness will fade. Here's hoping that 2018 will see the changes that we truly need. This morning, instead of eating I sat down and typed up about 1,200 words in my on-again, off-again story that I've called The Town. This book, as I've mentioned before, is about a town (shocker) in Central Utah. I don't know what it's really about, at this point, though I've pushed out over 27,000 words about these people.
The thing is, I'm not writing it very consistently--only when things come into mind and I finally have the energy to get them down. Though I've written almost ten chapters, there isn't a main character that's coalesced, nor a main conflict. I've never written an ensemble piece like this before, where each chapter is a new character with a new voice and a new point of view on the small town in which everything is happening. At this point, I have four or five main stories all going haltingly along with one another: A family is struggling with being poor; a woman gets hit by a car; a teenager accidentally shoots his girlfriend; and a gay teen gets outed at the stake dance. I feel like any of them could be interesting stories in and of themselves, but focusing on any one of them means that I'm changing the format in which I'm telling the story. Have you ever read Seedfolks by Paul Fleischman? I went through it in college in my Young Adult Literature class. It's a short book--my 27,000 words for The Town dwarfs it--but each chapter is written from an entirely different person's point of view. You never revisit any of the characters directly. The community itself is the focus, and the garden that they make. Now, I haven't read the book since college, so maybe I'm forgetting how the story works, but that's the format that I was thinking of following: We get to know everyone in the town through their intersections and seeing them pop up again and again in different chapters. The problem is, since I don't know what the story's focus is, I don't know how to put it all together. I guess it'll work out…or it won't. The circumstances that put me in the position I find myself in currently are pretty straightforward: I proposed a Winterim to travel to Staunton, Virginia to go on a Shakespeare-related trip. Five kids signed up, including one who wouldn't be able to go to the Winterim because of bad grades.
As a result, I had--for the first time in nearly a decade--been denied my Winterim. This meant that I had to scramble to figure out what I was going to do, as all my plans were now toast. I decided to pull my Video Games Winterim out from the past, dust it off, and give that a go. A lot has changed in the gaming world since I started my teaching career. Now that I'm on the cusp of teaching this class, I'm feeling overplayed. In the past month or so, as the Winterim has become funded and I could collect more games and peripherals to use during the first three weeks of January, I have spent easily a hundred or more hours playing video games. I've tried a lot that I wouldn't normally do, such as Child of Light (a side-scrolling RPG), What Remains of Edith Finch (more of an interactive movie), Batman VR (a murder mystery game in virtual reality), The Last Guardian (an escort-mission game that was one of the best ones that I've played), and many, many more. I replayed Final Fantasy VII (and will likely write an essay or two on that experience) and have found that some of my oldest experiences gaming are the best. With my end-of-year sickness being so horrendous this year, I found that I was too exhausted to play video games before Christmas hit--that's right: I was so sick that video games were too much effort--and that has put me into a "cramming mode" of gaming. Often it's because I want to--last night, for example, was a choice between reading a new book and playing Portal 2, which went in favor of the video games--though sometimes it's because I'm close to finishing something and I need to put it down. I realize that it doesn't sound like a large sacrifice, but anything done to the exclusion of all else can easily become work. That's the case right now. I got Injustice 2 for Christmas and I'm pretty close to beating it--at least, I think I am; narratively, it's finishing up--but the idea of picking up the controller again is, honestly, hard to justify. I'm enjoying the game and I like how they're working the storyline (there may be another essay in there, too), but there are other things I'd like to do with my life. The irony of this is that I'm essentially putting in all of the effort that I'm expecting my students to do, albeit in a more pointed manner than they will, because I have assigned all of the students to play at least ninety minutes of narrative-based video games every school night, then write about it in a journal. I wrote about 900 words today in my journal about video games, including details about the way my boys and their friends interacted with the VR--all of which is a good "practice what you preach" approach to teaching. But it also means that I'm wearing myself out on the whole prospect before I even start. The last thing I want to do is teach this class without passion. This is a recurring issue for me, though: I know about something, I want to teach it, I love teaching it, but I get stuck in this level of exhaustion and boredom (that may be the wrong word) that doesn't really reflect how I truly feel, but interferes with my ability to enjoy my topic. Example: One of my favorite things to teach is Enlightenment philosophy. I usually not only communicate what it is better than I did this year, but I've always been happy and excited to teach the lesson. Not this year. I don't know what it is, but the stuff that I used to thrill at, though it is still near and dear to my heart, no longer gets me excited. I didn't particularly enjoy much of anything that I taught in my 10th grade classes, which alarms me. Is the same thing happening before I even get to the class? Have I overplayed--over extended?--myself too much? If so, how am I supposed to recharge if the things that I love don't do that? I'm in an editing phase with my writing, so I'm unhappy with every word I've put into the manuscript. I'm burning out on video games. I don't want to read any Shakespeare--or much of anything, for that matter. I know part of it is the residue of my sickness, but…what will I do if I don't love what I love any more? While I don't shy away from discussing something political here, this particular topic is trickier than some of the other things I've brought up. Part of its complexity is that it's centered around a private citizen in the public sphere, and since he isn't a public official, giving additional attention to him is largely the reason he's as polemic (to put it in the nicest terms possible) as he is. Added into that is the fact that I can't stomach any of the man's philosophies and view his "contributions" to the world as mostly harmful and revolting--which, again, only adds to him, as my antipathy for him is viewed as not only his purpose, but also his preference. Another impulse is that it's about book publishing, which is something that I aspire to be a part of, despite knowing that it is rife with all the problems of storied establishments, including gender biases, racial biases, and outdated and -moded economic policies. Nevertheless, there's one angle on the whole story that makes me frustrated, and it goes back to when Dangerous by Milo Yiannopoulos was first announced as having been purchased by Simon & Schuster. This article from The Atlantic sums up a lot of what I feel, with this quote being the core principle here: Yiannopoulos’s literary agent, Thomas Flannery Jr., made similar arguments in an op-ed for Publisher’s Weekly. “I’ve been continually shocked by the willingness of many in the publishing industry to stifle Milo’s opinions,” he wrote. “The right to speak freely, even if your opinions are unpopular, should be the bedrock of our industry.” But not giving someone a book deal isn’t suppressing their right to free speech—while publishing their work means elevating their voice above countless others. As Gay wrote in a statement when she pulled her book in January, “Milo has every right to say what he wants to say, however distasteful I and many others find it to be. He doesn’t have a right to have a book published by a major publisher, but he has, in some bizarre twist of fate, been afforded that privilege.” It's this fundamental misunderstanding of what the First Amendment is and how free speech works that really gets me. Flannery gets it completely wrong that the "publishing industry [is trying] to stifle Milo's opinions." That isn't what happened. Milo's opinions had--and continue to have--immense exposure and massive amounts of support (even though he advocates things like pedophilia, hunting obese people, and white supremacist/Neo-Nazi views). His time on Brietbart News gave him a gigantic platform off of which he built his own notoriety and said all of the horrendous, hateful things he's said. The fact that the government didn't shut him and the company for which he worked down? That's what the First Amendment is there for.
That's it. The interesting thing about the Bill of Rights is that it contains mostly negative rights--that is, areas in which the government is constrained from interfering. It agrees not to interfere with freedom of speech, religion, or press. There are a handful of positive rights (right to a lawyer, even if you can't afford it, for example), but most of the time, the Bill of Rights is a rule book for what the government can't do rather than what the people can. So, as far as Milo's--and those who enable, support, and adore him--argument, he has the right not to be stifled by the government. Nowhere in the Constitution am I compelled to listen to him, and nowhere in the Constitution does it say that the publishing industry has to give him a venue in which to share his ideas. Consider this: I have ideas that I want to share; I have books that I've written. Why am I still unpublished? The publishing industry is suppressing my free speech! They just don't like what I have to say and so they're trying to keep me from making money on the words I've written! I have a right to be heard! It sounds pretty stupid an argument, but it is the exact one that Yiannopoulos is employing here. Simon & Schuster likely didn't want to push the book, considering the backlash that many gave for Dangerous in the first place. I even wrote about how to consider financial support of one of The Big Five publishers in light of Yiannopoulos' book deal. But the idea that Yiannopoulos is somehow being censored or suppressed by the business decisions of Simon & Schuster is ludicrous. Not only does he have more avenues for spouting his filth than ever before in the history of mankind, but there's a deeper irony here. One of the things about alt-right, far-right, neo-con, and neo-Nazi philosophy is that, economically, they're far to the right. They're also authoritarian, but that's not the point here: One of the issues that far-right economics adheres to is the inviolability of the market and the idea of individual responsibility for one's success. That is, nothing should be given away (except tax breaks to the already wealthy), nothing should be provided by the government. Yet by having this far-right darling sue Simon & Schuster, the far-right movement is essentially appealing to the government to demand a service be given to someone who has clearly violated* his own terms of contract and failed to provide the company with what they requested. With the lawsuit now officially filed, the story of a man's dangerous speech being forced into the country's discourse is not going away. But, at least from where I sit, it's not going to go well for Milo. And that's good news. --- * The lawsuit against Simon & Schuster has given insight into the editorial process, which, to put it mildly, is not indicative of a good book. The editor has many more edits that Milo and his ghost writer needed to make, were the book to continue forward. It's clear that Simon & Schuster argues that Milo didn't/wasn't willing to make the requested edits, which violates the contract. No writer that I know of could have a catalogue of edits, refuse to do them, and then think she was justified in suing the publisher when the book deal was canceled. Yet, unless I'm missing something pretty important, that's exactly what happened with Yiannopoulos. I am aware of the internet's tendency to amplify the voices of dissidents and cultural malcontents. Not only do I have a Twitter account--ground zero for a lot of that vitriol--and see this kind of behavior in real time, but I also follow people who, because they're more visible, get a lot more attention for their opinions. Some of that's warranted--they're critics, so their job is to consume some media and give a review of what they thought about the property--but most of the time it's some serious hatred because the person liked (or didn't) a movie or game that the poster didn't (or did).
I'm hardly the first one to note that it's a stupid thing for people to do. I'm also not the first to point out that people blitzing Metacritic and Rotten Tomatoes and IMDb in order to drag down the rating of the film--it's usually films where I see this happening--because of their personal disillusionment about a piece of entertainment. To anyone with semi-functioning logic, it would be apparent that if you don't like a film, then, having seen it, you tell anyone who solicits your opinion that you didn't like it. Then you stop. If I have a lousy salad at Zupas, then I don't make it my personal mission to see the closest storefront get so many negative reviews online that it has to close its doors. I had a bad experience. If someone asks, I say what happened. I move on with life. But there are fanboys (and they're overwhelmingly males who do this) who seem to think that films were made for their exclusive consumption and appreciation, that they--as enjoyers of the product--are the owners of the product. That they are the sole purpose for the product's existence. That their opinion on it matters enough to enforce upon people. I can't quite wrap my head around this mode of thinking. In case it wasn't clear, I'm thinking particularly of The Last Jedi, the eighth canonical film in the Star Wars universe and the third film to be released since Disney acquired the franchise's rights. Now, I like Star Wars films just fine. They're fun--most of the time--and have some interesting ways of telling stories. I don't find them worship-worthy, and an objective look at the first two trilogies shows that, out of six films, maybe two of them were pretty good. That isn't a very high batting average. In fact, I already talked about my puzzlement over Star Wars itself, and that confusion has only been increased by the fanbase's response to the perceived political agenda of The Last Jedi. Now, I haven't seen the movie yet, so I can't speak to that particular argument. On paper, though, it's clear that there's a greater focus on diversity of the cast, increasing the roles of women in the franchise, and broadening the scope of the galaxy far, far away. All of these goals are worthwhile. If nothing else, it helps underscore the vastness of the galaxy by having so much on-screen diversity. All for the better in my mind. That seems like a good and wholesome direction to go. But there seems to be a lot of conflating of personal taste with more objective measures of a film's worth. I liked Batman v. Superman, as far as it goes. That doesn't change the fact that its version of Superman is boring and its version of Batman is unintelligible, or that the story has needless complications and a climactic battle that doesn't really fit in with everything else the story was trying to accomplish. Batman v. Superman is not a particularly good film, even if I enjoyed it for what it was. And the same argument can be said about Wonder Woman: It is a great film, with plenty of non-critical flaws, that I personally liked a great deal. But me liking it isn't what makes it a great movie. So within this fandom set of Star Wars junkies--which is an enormous canon of films, comics, video games, and cartoons, where people of color abound (sometimes literally: Check out Ahsoka Tano, who is literally orange) in many different ways--there seems to be a set of people whose love of the series marches more in line with the fascism of the Empire or the First Order than with the freedom-loving rebels who provide the moral weight of the overarching plot and are, oh yeah, the heroes of the story. It's a baffling bit of mental gymnastics. For me, it would be like a bunch of fans grousing about the ending of the last Harry Potter film because the Slytherin par excellence (Voldemort) lost. Well, his is the moral philosophy that's dehumanizing (ironic, considering what the guy looks like by the end of the series) and clearly parallels the Third Reich and its horrors (which, by the way, even the word "stormtroopers" invokes Hitler and Nazism, so the idea that the Empire is anything other than Space Nazis is simply wrong). While there's certainly a fair critique in using Nazis as short-hand for "the bad guys", there's a reason that they're used as short-hand for "the bad guys". As I'm writing this, my computer screen is showing me pictures of my trip to Berlin, reminding me of that incredible trip but also returning to mind how bad the Second World War was. And, of all the problems with people hating Star Wars for being anti-fascist (I guess is the baseline critique here), this is the one that matters the most: We have generated a tolerance to the terrors of World War II--and we've completely forgotten the war that was tearing Europe apart one hundred years ago, which is its own failing--so that we want to look at the 1940s as an idyllic time, except for the war, of course, which was terrible. What I mean is, our attempt to recreate the realities of World War II into a comprehensive and clear narrative of good versus evil has done some damage to how we respond to the genuine evil that came out of Germany and Japan in that time. This isn't a history post, so let me say this: No one--not a single country--walked away from World War II without demonstrating to history of their own barbarous monstrosity. None. But that doesn't mean that everything done was of equal moral corruption. When it comes to our popular culture, we have relied on historical short-hand for so long that we have started using the reality of our history that "none of us is perfect" as an excuse for renewed veneration of that which is definitely evil, as if there is moral equivalency between the camps in America and the camps in China. Camps are wrong--experimentation, rape, starvation, forced labor, and execution* are far, far worse than what happened in America. Through some disgusting moral jujitsu, some people have found comfort in on-screen validation of fascism and its attendant ills of racism, sexism, authoritarianism, and white supremacy. What's worse, is they now feel as though their stories deserve equal exposure--but that's wrong on two levels: One, there isn't anything about equality within fascism: It consumes all it can, and that which it can't subsume, it destroys. There isn't parity doctrine with fascism--it's not how it works. The second problem with this idea is that fascism is something that "needs" to be rendered sympathetically. There are things that are wrong and there are plenty of syllogisms that can prove that: Fascism is one of them. We don't need fascism to be sympathetic in our stories--we need it to be shown destroyed, dismissed, and dismantled. Sure, a worthwhile story will give us complexity within the system--the sympathetic character who's tied up in the fascist system--and that's fine. Remembering that "Nazis are people too" is something that can be done well without implying that "Nazism is okay too". But to assume that we need a "both sides" approach to our films is, frankly, stupid. Oh, and I guess there's a third problem about those complaining about the way that Star Wars is now interested in pushing against prevailing prejudices--and, I imagine, this will also be brought up when Black Panther comes out--is that they're interested less in hearing more voices and instead in hearing their own voices echoed at them. There's definitely a sense of zero-sum calculations in some circles, as if a movie that celebrates diversity means that there can no longer be movies about homogeneity. That's the kind of thinking that I dislike--probably because it's within the wheelhouse of things that I do like. Maybe we can all do better trying to understand other points of view--except crap like fascism. That stuff sucks. As far as personal development goes, I made it a goal to improve how much I read this last year. While 2017 is, like the sickness in my guts, lingering long past its welcome, on that front, at least, I definitely made progress. I wanted to read 100 titles--which averages to not quite two a week--and would count any way of getting those titles down: Some were podcasts, a big swath were audiobooks, and some were comic books and graphic novels. Almost all were new titles, though there are always a solid six titles that I reread every year--Hamlet, Les Miserables, Pride and Prejudice, Things Fall Apart, All Quiet on the Western Front, and both volumes of Maus--because they are part of my job. I don't read them as deeply as other texts, in large part because I have read them, in some cases, ten times in the past decade. Still, they're texts I've read, so they count toward my goal.
But as the year trickled onward, I noticed that there was an imbalance: I could read a graphic novel in a single sitting, but knocking out It took a couple of weeks in the summer time. I could finish off a podcast series--Revisionist History season 2--in a handful of dishwashing days, but "finishing" Philosophize This! was basically impossible short of dropping hundreds of hours into the podcast. Reading Hamlet is a breeze for me, while Les Miserables takes a significant portion of time. This imbalance made me realize that I was prioritizing the concept of a novel and putting that up as the goal and ideal, when in reality I wanted nothing more than to document what I'd consumed. So the list shifted part way through the year and I started including time- and story-intensive video games as part of the documentation. I've made some mental notes about television series and movies, too, all of which are part of improving myself. By that I mean, I have been calling myself a storyteller and a writer for a long, long time, yet I'm also unhappily ignorant of a lot of things in the world. There are too many incredible stories and brilliant thoughts to enjoy out there, and I have found myself as far too insular. As a result of this unexpected realization, I decided that it was time for me to broaden not just my reading vocabulary, but the ways in which stories are currently told, to say nothing of the fact that I don't want to be culturally ignorant. There's a large, deep pool of cultural creation that's happening constantly throughout the world, and I want to see how it matters. Admittedly, there's too much to read, watch, listen to, and enjoy to ever be caught up on it all. But that isn't the point--I'm trying to better myself by listening to others. To do this, I have kept better track of my time and areas of growth than ever before. As you look over the list, you'll probably recognize a bunch of titles, as well as being like, "What is that?" One of the things that is a conscious choice is to learn about other points of view that I don't necessarily agree with. The one that springs to mind the quickest is 10 Books That Screwed Up The World, but there were a lot of parts of David Sedaris' stuff that made me uncomfortable (I'm not a fan of drugs, so I tend to shy away from stories that involve their use) as well. I wasn't sure how to feel about But What if We're Wrong? and I struggled to get through Thomas Jefferson Education. I don't regret reading any of these books, even if I disliked them, because it's so useful for me to grow through exposure. I read new genres (horror novels, Nos4a2, It, and The Shining), finished some major restructuring of my paradigm (David and Goliath, All the Single Ladies, and We Were Feminists Once), spent time in familiar worlds (Dragon Harper, Dragonquest, The White Dragon), shared important books from my youth with my boys (Maniac Magee, All the Weyrs of Pern), and grew in my understanding of the World Wars (Dead Wake and In the Garden of Beasts). I tried to hit some more classics, like the Shakespeare plays listed, Paradise Lost, and I even put a few more pages down of The Iliad and Canterbury Tales (neither of which I finished this year, so they're not on the list). On the whole, I feel like I've improved myself through exposure to so many texts, to say nothing of working to improve my understanding of film criticism via YouTube series, that I really am a better person for this concentrated effort. Now, I realize that there's a criticism for this kind of thing: Focusing on so many things in a slipshod, as-the-mood-strikes-me manner means that specific improvements in a lot of areas were neglected. I'd likely have more titles on this list if I weren't concurrently reading a good dozen books right now. But that's only one way of looking at it. I'm not trying to read "it all" or even generate a consistent theme. I'm reading and consuming the content that's made in order to expand my mind, thoughts, and sympathies. Sometimes I'm in the mood to learn more about feminism; sometimes I want to learn more about World War I. Shutting down the one impulse because I'm "in the middle" of the other isn't helping me to grow, and it certainly isn't part of what I'm trying to accomplish. Instead, I like to think of this as an achievement chart, one that gives a glimpse into where I've spent my time and how I have changed. *** As a matter of clarity, I didn't note the author (save in rare occasions), and the small degree symbol (°) indicates when a title is a video game. I only selected games with a strong narrative component and something that I completed during the year to include in this list. Those with an asterisk are podcasts. I have more titles than this, things I'd written down in the hopes that I'd get them read, but I decided to focus exclusively on what I've finished here. It didn't matter when I started them, only that I finished them during 2017. Also, there are still a few days left of the year, so this list might increase after you've looked it over. Lastly, if you're interested in any of the books that I've read, I would encourage you to, where possible, buy local. I live too far from The King's English to shop there regularly, but it's cool if you can afford it. Otherwise, buy from Barnes and Noble instead of Amazon (I'm guilty of not following through with this as often as I should), preferably at the brick-and-mortar. Enjoy!
Back on Friday night, I got hit with some bug. I got hit hard, harder than I've had sickness almost ever in my life. I can count on one hand how many times I've felt this crummy. Not that I wanted to die, but I sure wasn't looking forward to suffering through the next few days.
Now it's, what, Tuesday, and I got out of the house for the first time since the sickness. It was to visit the doctor, who told me that it was a virus and there wasn't a lot that could be done save rest and patience. Since the semester ended on Friday, I have that small relief: I don't have to figure out subplans or worry about my job. I'm on Winter Break and becoming permanently attached to my bed. As a result, I've not had the energy to write at all for the last couple of days (though I managed not quite 200 words by hand the other night, which left me exhausted). Even playing video games has been hard to do, though I've put a lot of time into Final Fantasy VII, what with it being on my phone, and that is not in and of itself a waste. Nevertheless, I found myself without the energy to write, read, or play games. Instead, I picked up the Netflix series Daredevil season 2, which I had started awhile ago and thought it would be interesting to return to it. And it definitely was interesting…among other things. First of all, the second season is significantly more violent than the first one, which is saying a lot. And while I expect Daredevil to be a gritty, bloody brawl, the violence got stale for me. This isn't to say I didn't cringe or look away during some of the more gruesome moments--torture in movies/games always makes me uneasy--so I'm not saying that what they did to the characters lacked ingenuity (if you want to call it that). No, it's that I stopped caring about the punches, shots, kicks, cuts, slashes, stabs, and other things going on throughout the series. Part of this is because the end result is a given--Daredevil is going to win. But a bigger part is that they were action sequences that served no purpose save as an obstacle to Daredevil and his posse. That is, the violence had turned almost like a video game, where the "gameplay" segments are used simply to string together the "cutscene" segments, plot points strung together like pearls on a necklace. Could more care have been put into the action scenes to make them feel more significant? I don't know. I don't know budget or time constraints. As with all of the Marvel Netflix series, this felt two or three episodes too long, so it's possible that some of the action could've been taken out and the series wouldn't have suffered because of it. The additional bonus would be that the violence would feel a bit more real if there weren't so much of it. Daredevil gets shot through with an arrow, stabbed, punched, kicked, shot, and a lot of other things--yet he seems pretty much okay. The permanent consequences of his behaviors are missing. Yeah, they give him scars--which is good--but hardly enough time to recuperate from his injuries. Maybe it's because I’m sick right now, but the idea that "he's so tough!" as an excuse to get him dying on the floor in one scene and then up and at 'em in the next rings hollow. I'm not a tough person, but I know that healing takes time, which Daredevil never avails himself of. The second thing that stood out to me was the Punisher. I know a lot (comparatively) about comics, and the Punisher interested me for a few minutes when I was a kid. Originally a Spider-Man villain, he really was too dark an anti-hero for the web-head to tangle with too often, so he drifted around the comics. I saw some of the original Punisher movie, the one with Dolph Lundgren, when it was on TV when I was a kid. There weren't a lot of comic book movies back then, so I was interested to see what it was all about. I was disappointed when the guy didn't even have the right costume--no large skull on his chest--and it made the movie such a poor connection to the source material that I lost interest. As I've grown older and my feelings about things have ossified, I have less and less sympathy for Frank Castle. He's a killer, even if he only kills "bad guys". There's no gray there. From a moral point of view, the guy's wrong to do what he does--and he likely doesn't care that he's wrong, either. Remorseless and ruthless, the guy is one of the more grotesque of the Marvel lineup. Yet… I found Jon Bernthal's portrayal of the Punisher entrancing. I couldn't possibly root for the guy, but his soliloquies--particularly the one in the graveyard when he's talking to Daredevil, early in the season--are so well rendered I found myself glad the director hadn't intercut the conversation with flashbacks. Not only would that have diminished his words, but the whole point was for the Punisher to explain something to Daredevil. As a result, we gain the same insights the same way. That put me on the same emotional moment as the two characters, which pulled me in more deeply than I expected. I think the last bit I took away from this season was that they set out to do a lot of stuff at once, and as a result, the focus became scattered. In season 1, the focus was always on the Kingpin. In this one, Punisher, Elektra, and the Hand all crop up in unforeseen ways. I disliked that broad approach--it became too splintered so that, by the end, there wasn't a feeling of having tied up all of the loose ends--but I admire the audacity. I don't think I'd ever revisit these shows, but a single pass gave me some food for thought. The characters wrestled with some large questions, and though they didn't ever really come to a conclusion, they did create a sense of exploration of the themes that I appreciated. And that's not bad for a sick boy on his Christmas break. For my Winterim in 2018, I will be facilitating a discussion about video games. We'll be looking at the way that they're made, what kind of thinking needs to go into them, how they can be read as texts, and many other topics that spin out from the medium. This isn't the first time I've taught the class, but since I did it back in 2009, a lot has changed. Because the video game landscape has shifted so drastically since the end of the aughts, I have been playing (pun) catch up on a lot of the currents within video gaming that I've avoided the last few years.
Part of the reason that I've distanced myself from video game and video game analysis is because of life demands. I have a big, full-time job (big to me, at least), three kids, and a commute of an hour a day. There are also books to read, essays to write, manuscripts to edit, and feeds to scroll. My days are pretty packed. Additionally, I have three kids (as previously mentioned), so playing most of the games in my library became "audience inappropriate". Because the games I was most interested in playing weren't available--or, when they were, for a really contracted amount of time in the evenings--I found my gaming habit sliding. Not only that, but I also felt a strong urge to distance myself from the toxicity within the gaming community. And though a #NotAllGamers could apply, the point is that most of the industry is so phallocentric that I was getting sick of hearing of the unbelievable harassment and vitriol thrown at women creators and critics. The entire Gamergate trash fire is an embarrassment that I still don't have a way to understand. I would encourage anyone who's curious to simply avoid doing the research on the entire debacle. It's disgusting (and ongoing) and the idea of being associated with a subculture of such perversity was not something I really wanted to deal with. In a real way, Gamergate was my breakup with video games, pushing me along to other aspects of my life. Yet, I still love playing games. I still like buying a new one, throwing it in, waiting for it to update and install (jk I hate that), and going into a new world. So it has become doubly problematic for me. In many ways, video games are the quintessence of the idea that there's nothing that doesn't come with baggage. While I personal reject Gamergate and its alt-right brethren, my hobby and skin color associate me with them. To love the video game hobby means that I'm in love with the same thing as misogynists and neo-Nazis and racists and many other dregs* of the hobby. So it's a strange experience for me to be a part of this Winterim. Not only am I having to play more games--as many as I can fit in before the Winter Break ends--which includes a revisit to Final Fantasy VII and all sorts of new titles, like Batman VR and a couple of other VR-exclusives. On one hand, I legitimately have to say that everything that I'm doing that isn't playing a video game is a secondary-priority, and that's pretty great (if strange). "I need to get home so that I can beat Child of Light. Sorry I can't help clean up." Like, that's a fun sentence to be able to say.** On the other hand, I know that I'm giving mixed signals: "I don't want to endorse or condone the negative behaviors of corporations as they exploit workers, nor a community rife with homophobia and misogyny," quoth I. "But you just bought $900 worth of games and peripherals," quoth the industry. "Crap," quoth I. "So we assume we're doing something you support," quoth the industry. "Double crap," quoth I. "Haha," quoth the industry. In the end, I will do what I always do with systems that I find morally bankrupt but hopelessly caught in its orbit: I'll point out what bothers me and then keep doing the same thing. Perhaps, once this whole game time ends, I may find a way to square the circle--or maybe get better at telling my voice of hypocrisy to shut up. We'll see. --- * I recently heard a PlayStation advertisement that talks up this cool new game party, and then, when the female voice actress says, "That sounds fun!", the ad goes on to say, "Sorry, it's more of a guy thing," and I wanted to scream. Even the builders of the video game systems have bought into this garbage. That makes me exceedingly reluctant to keep giving them my money. And yet… ** I've long felt that the best way to know what is morally correct is the thing that makes me least happy. So when the right thing is also enjoyable, then I get worried that I'm doing something wrong. I'm not going to talk about Sandy Hook, now that it's the fifth anniversary of that tragedy--a tragedy and its real consequences denied by some of the people whose vile thinking is promulgated and accepted and embraced by those in the White House. I'm not going to talk about America's gun problem, despite the fact that a single man stole over five hundred lives in Las Vegas not even three months ago and we have stopped any momentum for change that it could have inspired. I'm not going to talk about the false assumption that any schoolchild's life is the price we have to pay for freedom, when those who clutch their guns most forcefully aren't required to sacrifice the weapons that they love more than life. I'm not going to talk about the fact that the Constitution is a sublime document in need of revisiting because that would mean we would have to look at our history and realize that our moral outrage over Constitutionally protected rights can and has changed the Constitution itself, fixing the errors the Founding Fathers couldn't. I'm not going to talk about how people argue for keeping guns in order to prevent the tyranny of the government while supporting a lobby that gains membership and donations every time America bathes itself in the blood of its own. I'm not going to talk about how we've abdicated our ability to think because the side that wants to maintain the status quo is comfortable with the theft of life--that metal and gunpowder deserve more protection than children huddled in classrooms or bathrooms--and that their passion for killing is more important than my right to life. I'm not going to talk about the rank hypocrisy of a political platform that claims to be "pro-life" but lets bullet holes in the bodies of its own members pass through anyone and everyone--who want to bring every potential life into the world as a future target. I refuse to talk about pointless statistics of times when guns have made a life-saving difference but fail to render into stark reality the PTSD that comes from tearing another life from this world. I'll avoid pointing out that we don't have to take guns from everyone, just white males and 98% of mass shootings and 90% of all murders would go away. I won't add that making guns illegal would, out of a definitional necessity, mean that everyone who had a gun was a criminal, and maybe we should worry more about the criminals that turn to the gun to enact their first crime, since that's the problem, top to bottom. I won't talk about how the people who most need guns to protect themselves from the government are those who can't get them, and instead are executed in the streets, in the hotel hallways, in their cars. I'm not going to bring up the sickness that has infected America. I'm not sending thoughts. I'm not sending prayers. I'm not saying anything… Because none of it should have to be said. * * * When Sandy Hook happened five years ago, a friend sent a social media post telling us to all hug our kids extra tightly today, because some wouldn't be able to. As the reports came trickling in, as the subsequent fallout occurred, as my grandmother said that my uncle told her that he had seen a video of Obama-hired actors plotting the tragedy at Sandy Hook in order to provide a pretext to "take away our guns", as the realization that twenty-six families' holiday joys had been stolen, as it became clear that our world could be safer but that we refused--because of fear or money or ignorance, I don't know--I have to admit that I didn't know what to think. Then San Bernadino. Then Orlando. Then Las Vegas. It's five years since Sandy Hook, and since I only had one child in school at the time, and he was safe, I didn't let myself feel more than the typical shocked sadness that mass shootings have made a ready habit for most "unaffected" Americans. I now have all three of my boys in school, and the world is only more dangerous, guns come closer to outnumbering Americans as the years go by. I even told myself that I wasn't going to write anything today. That I wasn't going to step into this quagmire (because, apparently, saying "I don't think we should have a society that has so much death" is a political thing), I wasn't going to spend time doing this. Then I saw this picture and I couldn't get it out of my head and I feel like I've been silent for too long. Part of the problem is that we aren't saying anything. We're too busy trying nothing and getting nowhere. We're too busy ignoring the problem.
We're too busy saying, "Don't shoot!" and we're freezing. We have to thaw. We have to heat up. We have to find a way to stop these atrocities from happening again. In order to prepare myself for the video game Winterim that's coming up this January, I've been playing a lot of video games. In the same way I would be reading a lot of books for the Lord of the Rings Winterim or watching a lot of documentaries for the dinosaur Winterim, I am cramming in as much context and experience points (lol) as I can in order to give the students something worthwhile. For the most part, that means that I'm playing a lot of new games--Batman VR, The Last Guardian, and Child of Light have been gracing my PlayStation 4 for the last week or two--but I'm also revisiting some of the greats of the past. I have both Portal and Portal 2 as my next stop, as well as Final Fantasy VII. I've played FFVII since it came out in 1997. With twenty years' time passing, there are some aspects of the game that have not aged well. The LEGO-esque form of the characters (except, confusingly, in battles and some--not all--the cutscenes) is distracting and hard to enjoy. I think I tolerated them back in '97, but now that gaming has come so far, it's less cool. The battle system is still superbly balanced and enjoyable, but the process of playing the game isn't as good as it was in the old days. (Who holds down a button in order to run? Seriously.) Those minor parts aside, one of the things that had a surprising impact on me was while I was playing the section where (spoilers…I guess? I mean, the game is two decades old, plus the moment is fairly fresh in the game--only three hours or so into it, maybe) the Sector 7 plate is dropped onto the village below. The entire thing is set up to frame the group my character, Cloud, is working with. AVALANCHE is essentially a grassroots environmental terrorist organization that is pushing against the oligarchical control of the Shinra Company. The Shinra is a monolithic business--energy business, as a matter of fact, done by extracting mako energy from the Planet and turning it into electricity and the magic of the world, materia--that is also a monopoly. The de facto president of the entire city-state (as it were) of Midgar is also the president of the company. There's a lot to unpack there, including the ideas of what kinds of rights a company has when there isn't a state to rein it back, as well as the ethics of having a company creating its own super-soldier army and using those troops to wage war with a country on the other side of the Planet. (There's a not-so-subtle stand in for corporate imperialism coming into an island nation filled with Buddhist-stand ins and ninjas, but that's worth looking at on its own terms.) The Shinra is also so committed to its energy-extraction policies that it is literally killing the Planet, draining it of the Life Stream in order to line its own pockets with gil. Add on top of that the desire by the president to get to the Promised Land--a world of bliss and painless existence--via human (and sentient animal) experimentation, and you have a top-to-bottom "bad guy" as the primary antagonist of the story. There is more to Final Fantasy VII (a lot more), and it gets weirder (like the talking cat/marshmallow puppet guy), but that should be enough context for the next part. See, I've played this game three or four times (which, considering its 40+ hour run time, is no small feat), yet I've never had a strong emotional reaction to any of the things that have happened. But as I was watching the plate drop down on the citizens of Sector 7, an action that could only be authorized by the President of the Shinra Company, I realized how brutal a move this was. In the past, I was more worried about making sure that I got off the plate in time to keep the game going--one of the strange tendencies of video game logic and priorities. This time, however, I took in the way the game designers told the story. Yeah, there's a dramatic escape on a magical-Tarzan-vine-like wire, but this time I noticed the people running away, looking up in surprise. There's one shot, in particular, of an empty room that has a view of the toppling plate. In the foreground, a news anchor is silently reporting the news. Then he looks up to his right, recoils, and the image goes to static as the explosions worsen. The plate drops onto however many thousands of people, with the camera zooming out until we see the president, standing at his window, looking over at the destruction. The unmitigated heartlessness of it shocked me. Part of it is because I'm in a more sensitive mindset right now (finals always do that to me). Part of it is because I'm more aware of the real tragedies that always swirl around ruthless greed, which is embodied in the corpulent President of the Shinra Company. There are likely other pathways that carved this response, but I found myself deeply empathizing with Barret, the one-armed man who was also the leader of the now-discredited and -disbanded AVALANCHE. As he stares at the ruble that was his home, he screams and fires his weapon uselessly at the tons of debris. Inside it, he believes, is the ruined body of his only daughter, Marlene. Though he'll soon learn that she's still alive, his grief felt tangible to me in a way that I had never felt before. Then he shouts at the uncaring pile of destruction, "What was it all for?" What is it all for? Not the game--there are lots of reasons over in that direction--but the bigger question that this blocky character asks from the depths of his digital despair. What is the purpose of suffering? How do we make meaning from tragedies and senseless violence? What do we do in the face of the disgusting violence of unbridled capitalism? How do we justify actions that take us away from what we truly love (in the case of Barret, his quest to save the Planet for Marlene--which means, if he wants to accomplish his goal, he has to abandon Marlene)? My own growth of a person since I last played this game--and, being more attuned to the story that it's trying to tell--has made it so that I have new ways of contextualizing the problems that I've long had when looking at war and violence in entertainment. The wars of video games are fictional, fantasy--even when based on the real life inspiration, no matter what Battlefield and Call of Duty would have you think--but sometimes I worry that we feel that real wars are just as fictional, just as fantastical. I don't have a solution to this; I know only that this is something that I need to address again and again until I can understand it. And, since the topic is war, I know I will never really comprehend what it is or why it keeps happening. |
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