2011 Books 7-9

[subplotkudzu]

 7) Bed of Roses by Nora Roberts: This is the second of the Bride Quartet - I read the fourth a couple weeks back, and the basic premise is the same. This was easily the least satisfying of the lot: very little time was spent on the target (1) character's reason for being reluctant. It was there, but so understated that we got no sense of the character's conflict so the required... um, what's the romance fiction equivalent to anagnorisis? ... about needing to open his life to true love. Instead the entire conflict was inside the pursuer's head - when to push, when to fall back - so as to not spook the target. This made her come across as very passive aggressive when the pursuer flips out because the target failed to have the desired if unstated response to a sudden massive relationship shift. Worse, said sudden massive shift felt very much driven by the author's imposed rules of pairing off one of the four core characters each season, so a relationship that would have very comfortably and naturally played out over a year turned into a forced mess at 3 months. 

(1) I'm coining some terms here by making the reluctant future spouse the target and the desirous future spouse the pursuer. This isn't meant to imply some predatory relationship, but that in the form one of the protagonists is the one trying to move the relationship forward to the requisite committed monogamy,  even if the characters can trade off that role over the course of the narrative. 

8) Hamlet's Hit Points by Robin Laws: this is brilliant, and every GM, even those who don't approach gaming as a narrative form, should give it a read. Laws provides a theory of narrative beats - procedural and dramatic, questions and reveals and so on - and then applies it to three classic works of fiction: Hamlet, Dr. No and Casablanca. The results are not only fun to read but illuminating on how narratives get their power through the building up and reversals of up and down beats, the separation of questions/anticipations and reveals and so on. While this is difficult to apply in a hard and fast way to the free form narrative construction of gaming the ideas inside it can easily be internalized and applied (something I think I may already do on an uninformed level) to improve the emotional power of game sessions. I will definitely be doing this analysis of Pride & Prejudice before embarking on Mech & Matrimony next year. 

9) Idiot America by Charles Pierce: when you're trapped in an airport for 9 hours you run through what you bought to read. So you try to find something light to keep you going. This worked. I know Pierce as a frequent guest on Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me, the title caught my attention. Pierce's accurate dissection of the difference between cranks - valuable forces in civil society who can push the social boundaries, or not, without care of what society thinks of their ideas - and the charlatans and frauds who resemble them but are paid, and for some unguessable reason respected, members of the central debate is helpful. As are his three rules of Idiot America: any theory is valid if it moves units; fact is that which enough people believe, trust is determined by how fervently they believe it; anything can be true if said loudly enough. Just because you really fervently believe that dinosaurs interacted with Adam and Even doesn't make it true, and if you believe it but don't care if anyone else does you're just a crank. When you demand that your fervent belief means that people have to take your stance seriously and teach as if it were true you're part of a problem in American discourse.

 

Comments

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

I don't think I understand the distinction you're making between cranks and charlatans. Is it solely that the latter get money out of the deal? It's not at all obvious to me that people who get money for voicing their opinions are therefore automatically respected; nor that everyone who gets money is a fake.

[brianrogers.livejournal.com]

That's because the two aren't necessarily in opposition. Being a charlatan (or a demagogue)is what some cranks do to get money, though some charlatans aren't cranks at all, but crass opportunists.

Pierce's full explanation of cranks is too long to excerpt, but he posits that the American crank is a by-product of the American experiment - since the country was founded on radical, untested ideas the crank was a pioneer exploring the lands past conventional thinking. They returned with their wild untested thoughts and society would either refute what the crank is saying or assimilate the worthwhile parts of it into the mainstream. If the idea was accepted the crank would then either fit into the new mainstream or would go out and find some other wacky idea to propagate. If it wasn't the crank would't force their idea on others - the rest of the world was just mad, that's all. Pierce referred to them as American's living imagination.

He ascribes a source of the current problems in national conversation to the power of TV and the internet to instead grant cranks instant authority and their ideas instant validity. Their ideas aren't effectively refuted or mined for nuggets of value but are immediately accepted as having a validity equal to well tested, scientifically proven ideas simply because some people loudly and passionately believe them. Worse, some crank ideas dovetail with existing cultural markers so that their validity becomes a point of pride within a tribe.

Hence B-List celebrity Jenny McCarthy's opinion on the vaccine to autism link holds as much weight in the media as an epidemiologist's because she passionately believes it. Blogger Alec Rawls firm conviction that the design selected by the families of the victims for the Flight 93 memorial was actually a subliminal tribute to Al Queda is also worthy of plenty of deep, earnest debate for as long as he keeps insisting its true. These people are cranks, but rather than being refuted and left to their own passionate, if ignored, beliefs they're instead given publishing gigs and made 'experts' and allowed to steer the national debate on their points of passion.

Now, there are charlatans who don't believe what the cranks are yelling but know that they can make money selling it. The fact that there are charlatans who believe that their radium laced snake oil heals in addition those that leave town when the Geiger counters come out does complicate things, but I'm using Pierce's terminology.

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

Is there a category for cases where unsound, untested ideas become the authoritative opinion of the elites and the establishment? Like, oh, the need for eugenics in 1920, or the simple thermodynamic model of weight gain in 1950 (not to venture into more controversial territory like economics)?

[brianrogers.livejournal.com]

Not as such - the main focus of the book is the last few decades and the aspects of media that support "experts say the world is round; some disagree" conversational state. The closest he comes is discussions of how tribal/cultural group identification causes people to latch onto untested ideas to show allegiance to their tribe.

[drcpunk.livejournal.com]

I want to see your analysis of Pride&Prejudice. I remember a panel on Austen at an sf con where the panelists explained things that weren't obvious to me -- why Lizzie's mother risks her oldest daughter's life, how badly the daughter who runs off jeopardizes the odds of marriage for all of her sisters and the reason that's such a problem, that sort of thing.

I think Robin forgot to bring on the gaming bits when analyzing Casablanca, because he got caught up in how great a movie it is, but I can forgive that, because it really is that great a movie. I also think he tends to overlook or ignore some of the important differences between a television show / movie and an rpg. But, yes, definitely a book worth reading.