Fiction and the Future

The not-so-distant future is a very popular setting, and for good reason. It’s interesting to wonder where we’re headed. We can extrapolate, but in a way the future is tabula rasa—writers can paint any picture they want, because no one really knows. I think it’s surprising how many similarities these futures tend to have, actually. The popularity of the dystopian setting isn’t hard to explain: it was a big trend (for a while), and also a broken world means built-in conflict.

I’ve written before about the fact that in an alarming number of these possible futures, actual food is no longer a thing. People eat blue pellets or pre-measured scientific portions. Nightmare. The other option is that we go backwards: for example, Katniss providing for her family by hunting in the woods.

Fashion is also a logical casualty in worlds like the one found in the Hunger Games series. For folks in the districts, it’s back to basics: whatever you can scrounge or make at home. This series is interesting because it has both kinds of future world: the futuristic dystopia of The Capitol, and the back-to-our-beginnings Districts. Fashion does seem to be the raison d’etre of the Capitol dwellers, along with the ritual slaying of children, that is.

One other part of modern life that's noticeably absent from a lot of dystopian futures is one a lot of us can’t imagine living without: Reading. Books. Literature.

In the case of characters like Katniss, it’s unclear whether or not there are still books around in her world, but either way she doesn’t have the money or the time to curl up with a new release. I also think it’s strongly suggested that in the Capitol they’ve mostly thrown over thinking for a neo-Roman bread-and-circuses mentality. In a lot of other back-to-basics broken future worlds, books have suffered a similar fate: no one has time to read, because they’re too busy running from the government, dying at twenty-one, or having the love-area of their brains removed.

In some dystopian/SF worlds, the fact that literature is gone is part of the point. In my favorite classic dystopian, Brave New World, literature has been taken away, on purpose, as part of the plan to end conflict—and cognition. Fahrenheit 451, Feed, Uglies—my bookshelf is full of cautionary tales about a world full of people who have lost touch with the great words and ideas contained in books, and this loss has contributed to—or caused—the people to be less than they might otherwise have been.

I could write here about the oncoming storm. The common core standards that quantify how much fiction (versus the preferred, more practical non-fiction) a public school student can and should be exposed to. David Coleman, the College Board president, has been widely quoted as saying that it’s rare in a working environment in which someone will ask for “a market analysis by Friday, but before that…a compelling account of your childhood.” No, Mr. Coleman. I don’t want a compelling account of a random market analyst’s childhood. Or of yours, thanks very much. But wouldn’t the world be poorer if no one ever read about Pip’s coming of age? Or even Harry’s or Katniss’s?

So maybe we are creeping in that general direction. Literature may not be directly practical. I have news: neither is algebra. I’m still waiting for that moment when I need to use something other than retail math (70% off!) in my life. Ever. But literature is communication. Which is sort of important in actual life (at least until we have our feeds installed).

But books are more than that. They’re part of the reason we’re here. Artifacts that testify, sometimes so eloquently that you want to cry, that we’re all trying to figure out what it means to be human.

That’s why I think the 2002 film version of The Time Machine is the most hopeful SF story ever. In that film, as in the book, the distant future’s version of humanity is broken nearly beyond repair, split into two, and the great ideas of the past are all literal dust. But in the movie, the contents of the New York Public Library have been preserved on some sort of self-powering future computer. One of the final scenes shows the hologram librarian of the past reading Mark Twain to a group of Eloi children. The subtext (something people who read literature learn to pick up on—another benefit) is that literature will save us.

As messages go, it’s not a bad one.

The Snark Reflex

I had fun live tweeting the Oscars this year, along with a huge percentage of my tweeps, and all the people I follow who have never heard of me and never will. Lena Dunham, for example, was very witty, as usual. She also had a sort of hall-monitor moment which struck me as rather odd. She addressed those being snarky about Anne Hathaway as “Ladies” and urged us to save our snark for those who are are not feminists/advancing “the cause.” 

Consider those of us who were at least initially puzzled by backwards necklaces properly chastised.

There are two things happening here. First, Dunham seems to be suggesting that it’s perfectly acceptable to make snide comments about people who do not share one’s political or cultural views. This is sort of a troubling idea if you really think about it.

Second, Dunham was not the only tweeter last Sunday to break in to the general merriment to chastise the “haters” and call for a more positive commentary.

Are you kidding me?

Dear Positivity Police,

When I tweeted about the fact that Kristin Stewart might reasonably have been expected to comb her hair…to present at The Academy Awards…I wasn’t under some delusion that I was being helpful. K-Stew does not care what we think—it’s sort of her thing. Also, again, to be clear, we’re talking about the freaking Oscars, people. Not grooming=tacit permission for snark.

I guess the thing is, my thinking is that it is and should be okay for the vast majority of the world who was not invited to an opulent event for shiny, wealthy people to engage in a bit of harmless commentary. We are not talking about picking on a group of insecure eighth graders here. Does every conversation have to be positive? It seems to me that it’s all too easy to carve out a little piece of the moral high ground by tossing off a tweet telling everyone to stop the hating.

I hope none of them were being hypocritical: I hope their profiles would reveal only cheerleading and supportive emoticons.  But I also think they kind of missed the point. For myself—I was not hating. I love the Oscars. I love the beautiful dresses, but I actually kind of enjoy the weird, disaster ones even more. I like the whole schmear: the bad jokes, the terrible pre-show hosts. Doesn’t mean I don’t sometimes cry watching some random person win an Oscar for Documentary Short Film—some person I’ve never heard of and a movie I’ll never see. Because there’s something really beautiful about watching someone’s dream come true.

I’m not just one thing or the other: all snark or meanness, or all sunshine and :)’s. I say, your target’s a multi-millionaire who was recently considered pretty enough to play Snow White, go ahead and obey the snark reflex. And feel free to make fun of me for crying when that guy thanked his grandma.

The Quibbler

I favorited a tweet last week about The Vampire Diaries. One of my tweeps observed that Elena—who’s a vampire—was carrying water on her hike, asking, “Why are you carrying water, Elena? Do you drink water?”

I laughed when I read it and was like, hehe, I noticed that too—go us! But then a few days later I read Dalton Ross’s article in this week’s EW: "How We Transformed Into Nitpick Nation.” Ross points out that we don’t just watch TV anymore, we nitpick: our fingers are on constant alert poised over our keyboards, ready to point out the next gaffe or implausible scenario.

He’s not wrong. I mean, I was feeling all smug about noticing that a vampire doesn’t need water, and feeling a sense of community that I wasn’t the only one. Meanwhile both of us clearly watch a show every week that’s about not only teenage vampires but also werewolves and the only reason Elena was hiking in the first place is that all the characters are currently on some ridiculous nature quest LOOKING FOR A MYSTICAL CURE FOR VAMPIRISM.

Why isn’t that the part that bothered me?

I could go all smarty pants and claim that I’ve engaged in what Coleridge called the willing suspension of disbelief in order to enjoy the story. And I could claim that the audience has a right to expect that the writers will adhere to self-consistent rules within the confines of the crack-smoking crazy universe they’ve created. That’s great and all, but I’m afraid it still doesn’t change the fact that Ross is right—I’m part of Nitpick Nation.

I think nitpicking probably goes with obsessive fandom like soup with crackers. First, if you watch something more than once, you’re going to notice little stuff. If you make your hobby splicing scenes into gifs, you’re going to notice even more. And then there’s the fact of the online forum. In Olden Times, when we might have discussed our favorite shows in person at school or work the next day, it was perfectly acceptable to rehash major plot points. But by the time you log on to Tumblr, the major stuff will likely already have been covered. We all want to contribute something new to the conversation. So we need to look closer. It becomes important whether or not our characters are carrying logical beverage choices. For example. 

Ross also points out in his article that entertainment used to be viewed as disposable. We were watching a movie on the National Film Registry in my Media Studies class last week. One of the archivists mentioned that one major studio actually threw away all their silent films in the fifties, because there was no thought that anyone would ever want to see them again. Imagine the idiot who made this decision in a room full of modern-day film history buffs. They’d tear the poor dude into pieces. Today, we watch and re-watch. We buy blu-rays, we download. The notion that a given piece of entertainment is only designed to fill one hour of airtime, and then never be viewed again is a thing of the past. This truth makes programs such as Buckwild or Dance Moms more difficult to understand.

But maybe no matter how much we nitpick, some mysteries just can’t be solved. 

Bad Boys

I have this problem in which my favorite characters are all bad boys.

Every time I re-read Wuthering Heights, I’m rooting for Heathcliff. He’s not a good guy. It shouldn’t really matter how much he loves Cathy. Mr. Rochester, Hamlet—all my favorite books are filled with jerks whom I can’t help but love.

Maybe it’s that storybook (or TV or movie) love is interesting because of the conflict, and nobody causes more trouble than a bad boy. Buffy said it best (in one of my favorite episodes, season 4’s “Something Blue”)

 “I know it's nuts, but part of me believes that real love and passion have to go hand-in-hand with pain and fighting.”

 She then turns and stakes a vamp and wonders where she got that idea…But for the rest of us, who lead a vamp-dusting free existence, where does that idea come from? In my AP class we’ve been talking a lot about the ultimate bad guy: Milton’s Lucifer.

First of all, poor Milton. I feel bad for the guy. Yes, he achieved immortality with his work. But he was a Puritan who set out to justify the ways of God to man. The fact that the Romantics of the nineteenth century embraced his Satan as an (anti-)hero would likely have upset him. A lot. I would actually argue that we’re still a Romantic era—after centuries cycling through alternating eras of reason and romance, we're probably stuck now. Reason is no longer strictly necessary. Instead, we have Google. Instant gratification (usually emotional) is what we want now.

So if we’re making a choice of favorite characters with our feelings instead of our brains, it’s bad boys all the way. It’s just not that much fun to root for the good guy. If you watch The Vampire Diaries, like I do, you probably root for bad-brother Damon rather than grim, self-righteous Stefan (if you’re a fellow TVD fan, are you feeling my pain over this protracted Professor and The Cure bit? Ugh).

Bad boys are more compelling for lots of reasons. One: cross them and they’ll get revenge. Milton’s Lucifer’s first speech promises vengeance, “All is not lost; the unconquerable will/And study of revenge, immortal hate/And courage never to submit or yield”

If you think about it, a lot of our favorite bad boys have Miltonian DNA. They are often outcasts—usually by choice. They want their freedom and will do almost anything to get it. They’re smooth talkers. These characters show up and steal the show—it happens over and over. The narrator of Gossip Girl in the early days was good-guy Dan. Snore. Bad-boy Chuck Bass was the character we tuned back in to see.

Maybe it’s the possibility of redemption that brings us back for more of the bad boys. It’s more satisfying to watch Chuck struggle to become a better man than it is to wait for Dan’s inevitable misstep, to be followed by his also-inevitable self-recrimination-filled moping.

Romantic-era writer and bad girl Lady Caroline Lamb probably summed up the bad boy’s appeal best with her famous description of Lord Byron: mad, bad, and dangerous to know. Swoon!

Would I want to actually deal with one of these mad, bad, dangerous dudes in real life? That’d be a no. But when it comes time to escape into a book or a show, bring on the bad boys.

Book Fair!

That Time I Joined the Circus arrives at my school’s book fair!

It’s load-in day at my school…the circus has arrived!

I wasn’t sure if the book would be out in the Scholastic Book Fairs before its hardcover release this April 1. But here it is! My friend in our high school library Michele cracked open one of the boxes and we set them all up, and then she snapped my picture. It’s so amazing/crazy (cramazing?) to see something that started as an MS Word doc on my laptop turn into forty-eight individual, shiny new books. Still can’t wait for the hardcover release, but so excited that the book fair version has finally arrived at my school. Some of my students have been hearing me talk about this project since their freshman year, and now they’re seniors! It’s been a long trip…can’t wait to take the next step in this crazy circus trip ;}