Blog Going Dormant

Some plants turn brown for a season, and even disappear for months, then burst forth anew in wild glory, more beautiful and stately than ever. They don't die, they are just taking a pretty heavy semester and are still writing like fiends, just not on their blog. They expect to pop up in December during winter break, but until then they are hiding.
Perhaps they will post papers from creative writing classes, but not much else. This plant is sorry that it could not finish its Fantasy musings. Did anyone care about that, anyway? Probably not. This plant feels so immersed in academia and that it's not sure what is important to its audience. Is academia a kind of fertilizer, though? Opposed to plain soil, but good for the development of the plant?

Does the plant need to go to sleep?

Yes.

Fantasy I

The more I think about fiction genres, the more I get confused about why they are divided the way they are. There’s the Romance section, with their bulging pectorals, antebellum lace and unrequited lust. Thrillers have their busty femmes fatal, unknown viruses and protagonists with names every bit as improbable as their authors’. Then there are Mysteries, solvable only by those with the curious cross section of knowledge concerning entomology, braille, and the method for discovering where magnetic north was on November 26^th, 1978 (which our detective fortunately has). Science Fiction has its warp drives, blasters and androids and for some reason it's always hyphenated with the oddly named Fantasy genre.

Most of these genres have to do with expectations of plot and sometimes character. Romance, for example, is centered on love. This love is typically heterosexual involving at least one idealized male. All other elements are up for grabs; it can be in virtually any setting with any number of supporting characters, and can have any number of plot twists and outcomes including happily or tragically ever after, but there must be love, otherwise it is not Romance. Mysteries also have plot requirements, though very different ones. A mystery must have a problem to which the reader is curious to learn the resolution, usually centered on a murder. The protagonist is typically unusually apt at solving such cases, and if the author is any good, there are enough clues sprinkled throughout the narrative that the reader may figure out the answer just one or two paragraphs before the big reveal, so they can feel smart (it was either the butler, or the “victim” faked their death and is living it up in Monte Carlo having cashed in on their own life insurance). Science Fiction is essentially speculation based on a theoretical technological, societal, or environmental change or changes. This can often lead to outlandish settings, but does not specifically call for it. In fact, pure or “hard” sci-fi settings are typically nearly identical to our own, using our own physics, and most of our existing technology. Fantasy, however, is purely based on setting. You could have a heterosexual relationship involving an idealized male, but if it takes place in Discworld the narrative is Fantasy, not Romance*. You may have a plot that follows all of the classic hallmarks of a Mystery, but if the murdered party was an elf, the narrative is Fantasy.

This is curious to me for two reasons. The first is in the name. Isn’t all fiction a fantasy to some extent? Escapism is inherent in fiction, which is obvious when we use Patterson to help dull the boredom of Boston to Denver with a layover in Atlanta, but even the boring stuff is an escape. Fiction is what we read and write when reality won’t do the job, whatever that job may be. Charles Dickens, Ian Fleming, Upton Sinclair, Ernest Hemingway, Arthur Conan Doyle, each of these authors experienced enough of real life to write nothing but pure truth, but they thought they could do a better job with a few well-placed embellishments than with a straight journalistic essay or a biographical case study. From Seuss to Steinbeck it’s all fantasy, so why is there a genre that specifically names itself as such?

The answer is, of course, that Fantasy offers an escapist experience above and beyond the normal fare. While Harper Lee is telling us about killing metaphorical mockingbirds, Larry Coreia tells us about killing actual monsters. The difference is that no one is perusing Monster Hunter Vendetta to pick out the symbolism and contemporary themes. That doesn’t mean those things aren’t there, it’s just that we assume that this particular novel was written to entertain, not to call attention to social inequality or the moral crisis of a godless age or relativism or any of the other pretentiously contrived objectives that literary novels have. When you think about it, though, this is a strange assumption to have. There are ample opportunities for symbolism in Fantasy, in fact, one could argue that the flexibility afforded by this genre allows for even more double and triple meanings and sneaky significance than “normal” settings do. C.S. Lewis certainly seemed to believe so, and storytellers have been using fantastic elements to make their point for centuries. Consider Aesop’s talking animals, or Grimm’s witches and fairy godmothers, or Scheherazade’s djinns. Fantasy appears to be the perfect genre for literary writers and readers, but is typically only used for children. I’ve already alluded to TheChronicles of Narnia but there are many other children’s Fantasy books that are considered good literature; Peter Pan, A Wrinkle in Time, and Harry Potter are just a few, but something happens when we get older. Around the period the writing industry calls “Young Adult,” Fantasy starts to lose its literary legitimacy and I have only vague, accusatory guesses as to why.

Regardless of the reasons that Fantasy becomes pariah to literary fiction aficionados, non-literary readers seem to enjoy it immensely. I have said before that all fiction is an escape to some degree, but if escape is the reader’s primary objective than there is no greater distance a person can put themselves from the aggravating, tedious, demoralizing and disappointing harshness of reality than a Fantasy world. How else do we explain the success of Lewis Caroll’s Wonderland, and Frank L. Baum’s Oz series? There are those that believe these were intended to have profound metaphorical significance but the message flew right over our heads because Wonderland and Oz are whimsically whacky places to be. Instead of rubbing our chins and quietly commenting on the deft comparison of the Cowardly Lion to Britain’s royal house, we giggled uncontrollably and said, “more of this in my entertainment please,” and the market delivered. Now we have a full section in each and every bookstore and library labeled “Sci-Fi/Fantasy,” for no other apparent reason than blasters and necromancy are fun to read about. 

This leads me to the second reason that Fantasy’s existence as a separate genre from the rest puzzles me; why is this extreme variation of escapism in such high demand? 

To Be Continued...

 *knowing Terry Pratchett, the romance would be hilariously subverted anyway

Sweet Dreams are Made of These: A Cursory Examination of the Uses and Abuses of America's Favorite Social Network, Part II

We previously explored what Facebook is and some of the informal rules of use that go along with it. Today we look at how Facebook has changed the socio-cultural makeup of the United States, and our behavior in general.

Some of the most apparent changes Facebook has wrought on us are a direct result of violating the rules mentioned in the last post. Failure to control who is inside a users’ network and a lack of prudence in what information is broadcast, sometimes one in conjunction with the other, has resulted in less than favorable results for many users. Facebook has been utilized by both sides of the law. Thieves, for example, sometimes use the network to select targets and time their robberies, while law enforcement officers often learn when and where parties will occur so that they may troll for under aged drinkers. Information on the network is also admissible in court, which has assisted the prosecution in both criminal and civil cases. Employers are also known to use Facebook as a means for learning more about their prospective employees. This could be considered a positive development for business though the practice is sometimes considered ethically questionable, especially since other social media sites such as Linkedin cater to the professional demographic whereas Facebook is typically considered a more personal venue. Another socio-cultural change is in bullying. Not all social interactions are positive ones, and Facebook allows harassment to continue when the parties are not physically present, just as it enables friendly interactions to continue under the same circumstances. Subjects of such harassment, or “cyber bullying,” find that even their homes are no longer a safe place from antagonism. All of these negative changes may be controlled and even eliminated through careful management of personal behavior on Facebook. Essentially, these are changes that do not have to exist if the user is shrewd enough to protect his or herself.

There are other changes, however, that have not resulted from user error. Friends are not the only people monitoring Facebook user’s online behavior. Corporations are also paying attention to which links are clicked and by whom, how much time is spent on applications, and which users “like” what. The data is recorded, sold and “mined,” then used to tailor advertisements to specific users. The full implications of this kind of technology have not yet been felt, but it is cause for concern. When used for its original intent data mining is fairly benign, helping to connect businesses with consumers that want their products and creating more wealth for both parties. However, there are potential uses for all of this accumulated data outside of its original intent. It doesn’t take a novelist’s vivid imagination to explore the potential for abuse, by the hands of the corporations that gather the data, by criminals that could potentially steal the data, or by the government who may find pretense to seize the data. The only real way for a Facebook user to protect her data is simply to not be a Facebook user at all. However, she would also have to avoid all of the most popular social media outlets as well as search engines. The risks of exposing data must be weighed against the rewards of the connectivity that Facebook offers.

The most important consequence of Facebook is not in the way it is misused, however. Facebook is at its most powerful when it is employed as it was intended; as a way to bring people closer together. Basic human behavior has not changed as a result of social media, but that is not to say that it hasn’t brought out something new in us. We still flirt, still fight, we still tell one another really bad jokes and compete for attention, we just do it all faster and more effectively. Facebook is like a social enzyme, facilitating and accelerating human interaction on an unprecedented scale. Thanks to Facebook, we can literally spend time with a hundred friends all at once. Because humans are social creatures, this accelerated interaction operates on our endocrine system like a drug. All of the frustrations and pleasures that we normally receive from communication, the tiny ego boost from a friend who laughs at a joke, for example, or a sarcastic contradiction, may be multiplied a dozen times over. Paradoxically, research has found that this constant interaction can play a role in preventing people from growing relationships. Doctoral student Russell Clayton found that the more time individuals spent on Facebook, the more likely they were to “experience Facebook-related conflict with their romantic partners, which then may cause negative relationship outcomes including emotional and physical cheating, breakup and divorce.” As individuals pursue multiple relationships with friends, they fail to invest in a deeper, more meaningful relationship with their spouse or romantic interest. This is even more likely when the relationship has been recently established, possibly because one or both parties do not perceive as much reward in the new relationship as with their established cohorts on social media. Though Facebook is addicting, however, we still tire from it. The emotional rollercoaster is exhausting, prompting many users to periodically take a break. According to the Pew Research Center, 61% of Facebook users have ceased activity for several weeks, and sometimes even longer. The reasons vary from time constraints to boredom with a very few citing security concerns, but the vast majority of those taking a breather from the social network plan on coming back. It would seem that the old, limited form of individualized communication continues to be necessary and even preferred, but alone it is not enough to sate our need for socialization. Facebook, or at least the idea behind Facebook, is here to stay.

In conclusion, Facebook is a useful tool to help us do the thing we perhaps love the most; to share ourselves with one another, for better or worse. Grandparents use it to keep tabs on grandprogeny while sharing Youtube videos of adorable kittens, frat brahs organize and ferret out their next big kegger, romance is both cultivated and destroyed through giddy flirtation, and narcissism is courted in every degree as users vie for attention and validation from their peers. It’s a gloriously hot, sweaty mess of sarcasm, affection, capriciousness, hilarity, pettiness, activism, and every kind of racism, sexism, marginalization and mortification alongside a smattering of thoughtfulness, compassion, encouragement and forgiveness. In short, Facebook is used to engage in the full spectrum of emotional and intellectual interaction between human beings. It may not alter humanity on a fundamental level, but it does subtly shape how we behave and, consequently, who we are.

Sweet Dreams are Made of These: a Cursory Examination of the Uses and Abuses of America’s Favorite Social Network Part I

Since its infancy, humans have been using the Internet for what we do best; create communities and grow relationships. It began as a trickle with the UseNet newsgroups in the early 1980’s, and awkward email provider AOL continued it in the 90’s. Yahoo! And MSN made instant messenger popular, and then Friendster and MySpace made the first attempts to evolve social media into its full potential. None of them anticipated Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook. Originally available only to college students, Facebook graduated with the Millennial generation and followed them to work, rapidly subsuming the majority of demographics in North America and eventually drawing even grandma into its gaping maw. Now we have many networks to choose from, each addressing a slightly different social need. Linkedin is for professionals, Twitter is for celebrity hounds, and Instagram is for illiterates*. But Facebook, the social media geared for personal life, is king of them all. Social media has created new ways for people to interact, resulting in much confusion and testing our adaptability. Though human nature remains unchanged by the advent of Facebook and social media in general, our nature is prodded into new behavior by the exponentially larger audience we may engage with through these social networks than before. This post explores exactly what Facebook is, how it works, and some of the rules that have emerged regarding its use.

Because many social media accounts are linked to multifarious activities on the web, it is difficult to accurately determine how many active users any one brand has. However, it is a safe gamble to say that Facebook is perceived as the social network, beating out competitors such as Twitter and Google+ not by thousands or even tens or hundreds of thousands, but by millions of users. This favored social network is used to maintain contact between people via Internet, with every variation such an open ended application implies. The social aspect of Facebook is easy to spot. Users are encouraged to fill out a profile citing where they live, work and general interests, and to make their page available to people they know in real life. The program helpfully asks “what’s on your mind?,” and if you respond your friends and acquaintances that you have added have instant access to your private musings so easily made public. Pictures may be uploaded and discussed, and various applications may be used to tweak the experience, typically by allowing friends to play games with one another. Furthermore, comments made on a status update or picture are visible not only to the original poster, but also to all of the original poster’s friends. The results are that on Facebook, all of the social circles that were once kept apart from one another may be merged in a spectacular Venn diagram of human interaction, allowing friends of the user to see a side of them that they have never seen, and possibly never wanted to see, before. This semi voluntary network is what separates software like Facebook from any other social medium. Where phone conversations are typically personal interactions between two parties, and emails require a user to individually list every recipient, Facebook is an inordinately easy method for firing information in a scattershot to all friends at once, provided they are also users. This ease has provided a somewhat socially acceptable means for communicating and displaying whatever takes the users’ fancy, from mundane complaints and favorite quotes, to news articles links supporting favored causes and “selfies,” or pictures taken of ones’ self with a camera phone in the mirror, with apparent bonus points if the lips are flattened to mimic the bill of a duck. 

In some cases relationships are formed and facilitated exclusively through the medium, but more often Facebook is used to supplement offline relationships. Facebook is particularly helpful in maintaining contact between individuals that are geographically separated to a degree where regular face to face interactions are not practical, such as an interstate or transnational relationship. However, when coupled with smartphones, Facebook enables individuals to interact with every one of their friends simultaneously, and from any location. Thus, users may live in constant community with every individual of personal consequence to date, from the old high school bestie now living in Toronto to the roommate who is currently using your soap.

Like any other social medium, Facebook has acquired its own set of rules for acceptable behavior. Individual communities will always have their idiosyncratic mannerisms, but on a broad scale Facebook users have established a set of general expectations for those that share the network. Though Facebook taboos are too numerous to discuss in detail here, a few of the most important ones will be highlighted. The first concerns who a user should invite into their network in the first place. Though some users have a tendency to “friend” even their most casual acquaintances, it is generally considered wise to accept only individuals that would be considered friends in real life. Thus, bosses and subordinates, distant relatives, and a fellow classmate you once had an interesting conversation with may not be the best candidates for a Facebook friend. The second important rule is selecting what to say on the network. Since many users have learned to socially interact on a far more limited scale than what Facebook offers, it is easy for them to forget that every other user in their network can see what they type. Conversation topics that are acceptable for some relationships could be too much information for others. Additionally, since Facebook takes place on the Internet, everything posted on it is essentially permanent. Words typed in anger, passion, foolishness or ignorance, can never be taken back or deleted. Thus, users are encouraged to be mindful of what they say on Facebook.  “Tagging” a friend in a photo or post that they may find embarrassing is equally taboo, as it indicates that the tagger is only concerned with their direct relationship to the tagee, without any regard for the tagee’s other relationships. This leads to the next Facebook rule; narcissism should be held in check. There is a small degree of selfishness that is expected; by posting a status update a user assumes that at least a few of their friends will care about what they are saying. However,  persistently bombarding friends with pictures of a pet or child, links and comments with a religious or political theme, a sickeningly public romance, or even simply making too many posts, monopolizes the conversation and implies that the user thinks his own life is more interesting and worthwhile than his friends. Finally, though Facebook was created to bring people together, it is possible to use it to isolate and persecute others. Negative comments can be made just as easily as positive ones, for example, and since the default setting is to send information to everybody, deliberately omitting individuals from seeing posts can be a subtle but powerful way to demean other users. These are just a few rules established on Facebook, but they are largely informal and are often discovered only after they have been violated.

This concludes part I

*Instagram is a very cool idea with some amazing artistic possibilities, but in practical application it falls short of its potential

You Don't Know Dick About Fairy Tales

Some of you may know that the original Grimm’s Fairy Tales are a little more, um, gruesome and terrifying than good ol’ Walt has led us to believe. I’m not talking about the paradoxically life affirming kind of terrifying that we get in those classic slasher films like, I dunno, Friday the 13^th or Texas Chainsaw Massacre (has a nicer ring to it than New Jersey Weedeater Manslaughter, but only if you’re not from New York). I’m talking about the ucky, existential terrifying that you get after you realize that the Middle Ages were packed so full of woman hate, they must have eaten it for breakfast. Like, you could stop at any Olde Taverne and get some dirt stew, a spoonful of plague and a heaping side of misogyny. There was so much it that it simply has to be ground up in your DNA and you will never get rid of it, no matter how much Virginia Woolf you read. I submit to you Sleeping Beauty as an example. It begins like you would expect, beautiful girl, witch not invited to the christening, spinning wheel blah blah blah, but when the handsome prince discovers her sleeping he doesn’t exactly stop at a kiss, and she doesn’t wake up. He just does his thing and goes on his merry, and she wakes up nine months later after she gives birth and her baby sucks out the splinter in her finger that made her fall asleep. The moral of the story? Lucky people are always lucky, even when they are asleep. 

What?!

Feminists get all upset at Disney because in their version, the princess isn’t empowered and she just kind of sits there waiting for the prince to rescue her. In Grimm’s she’s the exact opposite if empowered; they celebrate her abuse! “It’s a good thing that witch cursed you,” they say, “Otherwise the prince never would have given you a rape baby and then where would you be?!” Relatively speaking, Walt Disney is a veritable bastion of equality and progressive thinking.

So the old Grimm’s are terrible, but in this last semester I learned that modern interpretations of old folktales are somehow worse. Impossible, you say? Oh you poor, sad naïve soul, you underestimate the perversions of liberal academia. I submit Little Red Riding Hood for your, uh, well, “pleasure” isn’t the right word unless you have some pretty weird kinks, and “edification” doesn’t quite fit either. I guess “education” is going to have to work, and you can see what you are missing by not getting a liberal arts degree.

You know the story. Wearing her new cloak, Red skips off through the woods to see grandma and gets stopped by the Wolf, and he is erm, big, if you get my meaning. And bad, he’s also bad, and he chats with her a bit and learns where she’s going. He then takes a shortcut through the forest, eats grandma whole, then gets dressed up in her clothes because no one will ever know!  In the meantime, Red takes the long way and says hi to the woodsmen/man because foreshadowing! then arrives at grandma’s cottage. This is where the old versions take a turn for the slightly bizarre. Big Bad “Grandma” Wolf asks Red to take off her clothes and snuggle because “I’m so cold.” Right. Red complies, then starts the infamous “what big (insert body part here, if you get my meaning) you have” dialogue culminating with the “better to eat you with” line, and then the tale can vary. Sometimes a woodsman busts in just in time to save Red and cuts grandma out of the wolf’s belly. Sometimes there is no woodsman, and the wolf eats up Red if you get my meani­- oh screw it, it’s about penises ok? The whole thing, according to Professor P., is about sex, and anything that is vaguely shaft like or even roughly associated with masculinity is a phallic object. The woods are phallic, the wolf is phallic, the woodsmen are phallic, their axes are phallic, and if you think it ends there you are so pathetically wrong. The wolf’s ears, nose, tongue, tail, and especially teeth are all phallic too*. He’s just this big ol’ penis monster, and there’s nothing you can say to convince us otherwise. When you think about it, at all makes sense.

Ever wonder why the hood has to be new and red? Because it represents her first menses, that’s why. This girl is a woman now, and she is headed off to her sexually mature grandmother’s to get a Little Talk about how the birds and the bees ate the cabbage. The Wolf represents a sexual predator that wants to take Red’s innocence. By cutting ahead to grandmas and eating her up, he removes Red’s access to sexual knowledge so that he can easily take advantage of her. Asking Red to take off her clothes is not as symbolic as you think it is, he just wants to see her nekkid. Red complies, and then she starts making comments. Not the pertinent comments she should be making like, “You sure don’t look like grandma” or “Grandma, you sure are acting kind of pervy.” Instead she comments on the size of “grandma’s” ears, nose, teeth, tail, ey- wait, tail? Red notices that grandma has a tail and still doesn’t act like she knows what’s up. That’s because she kind of already knows what is going on and she secretly wants it. She’s kind of suspected what the wolf was after since he started hitting on her in the penis woods, and she could have notified the woodsmen that she met in the interim, but she’s sexually curious so she’s going along with it. When the Wolf discards his “disguise” that nobody was buying and makes his attempt to destroy Red’s innocence, she doesn’t save herself because, truth be told, she’s not all that interested in being saved

There you have it, with a great meta-twist I have stolen your innocence, and Little Red Riding Hood will never be the same.

*the Wolf’s eyes are not phallic, that’s too big a stretch even for English instructors. Instead, the Wolf uses his eyes to visually objectify and “devour” Red, much like the camera does to women in many Hollywood films, but that’s a lesson for another day