Unready Player One - Spoilers

Of course in many ways this is a book I would have liked to have written: for the replete references to games, the popularity and wish-fulfillment. As it is, I could hardly justify skimming it, but I could hardly put it down, either. Beautiful trash. Buttery popcorn.

Is this a book about escaping into nostalgia and fantasy, or embracing their lessons to better live in and seek to understand the real world? Yes.

Ernest Cline wants to have his metaphysical cake and eat it, too, and the result is just not nourishing, while probably not actually corrupting. With so much of popular culture, which is like a media plague, you can't unsee it, and so it's not only the time wasted taking it in, the malaise is in what you feel ever after as you have those images, that impression of futility or macabreness or whatever stamped on you, perhaps molding you, depending on how impressionable you still are--and you become a carrier for it, sharing it, talking about it, or simply influenced by it in subtler ways. It spoils you, and then you spoil it... But I mainly meant spoilers in the usual sense when I put it in the title, so if you want to read the book or see the movie, be warned.

I don't think Ready Player One is as bad as all that. Rather, it seems ambivalent or downright confused about the message implicit in its story, not cynical about the importance or even the possibility of stories or of the meanings they carry.

Throughout the quest for the game creator's Easter egg (the deep yearning for resurrection trivialized, the search for hidden meaning tropified and conventionalized), the main character and his love interest represent two competing ideals. He wants to win the game to take the money, outfit a spaceship, and escape the dying planet earth; she wants to use the money to feed its starving masses and rebuild the crumbling infrastructures of society. But both, in their dedication to the quest and determination to win, have already sunk their sense of self into the creator's dying wish, perhaps with the best of intentions, to tyrannize by love. Not, like Lear, by demanding that they show love and gratitude to him, exactly, but by demanding that they love the same things he loved. Wade and Art3mis devote their time to pastimes and trivia and by extension to Halliday's biography and everything he ever said in an effort to solve the puzzle of his egg-hunt. It's the distortion of the concept of a living tradition of great works, replacing canon with trivia (the way the word canon is often used now in referring to pop-culture works, ie. Star Wars, etc).

Of course they win, interestingly enough thanks to a trinity (three keys in the final door), a resurrection (the extra life coin from the Pacman machine), and a deus ex machina (the aid from his former co-creator, who represents something of the balance the story seems to want to strive for, since he and his wife--successful human relationship!--created the virtual education modules which seem to work so well at raising kids with the ability to track allusions and make snappy repartee). But no real sacrifice has to be made to get there--other than their freedom, which they gave up long ago, and all the time they've sunk into the game, their childhood and much of youth. But we're never given the sense that this was even a choice, they seem to have had only the future at stake, and once it is secured, they live happily ever after as the new god within the machine and the benefactress of the beleaguered planet.

Even if Wade somehow can be imagined to manage to follow in the co-creator's footsteps, using his godlike powers with restraint and for the good of players both in and outside of the simulated universe, and Art3mis to use her funds to teach people to fish, then, on the last page of the acknowledgements, the author basically undercuts the entire message of the book, which was driven home by the final scene of the story. He writes of his sci-fi and pop-culture heroes: "These people have all entertained and enlightened me, and I hope that--like Halliday's hunt--this book will inspire others to seek out their creations." That just seems completely wrong. If all the book is is an extended advertisement for already famous, recent, derivative artists, if Cline like his Halliday is aiming to tyrannize by love, to make us love the things he does, then we had better speak up before the egg-hunt consumes us.

Bookwarm Games 1: Welcome to EarthBound

Stephanie made me this video :D

New Bookwarm episodes up

St Patrick's Day weekend edition of Bookwarm Games

Comments on episodes so far--thanks!

Below, Earthrise:

'Apollo 8, the first manned mission to the moon, entered lunar orbit on Christmas Eve, Dec. 24, 1968. That evening, the astronauts-Commander Frank Borman, Command Module Pilot Jim Lovell, and Lunar Module Pilot William Anders-held a live broadcast from lunar orbit, in which they showed pictures of the Earth and moon as seen from their spacecraft. Said Lovell, "The vast loneliness is awe-inspiring and it makes you realize just what you have back there on Earth." They ended the broadcast with the crew taking turns reading from the book of Genesis.' -- from the NASA website from which the image is taken.

Tutorial and Two Towers on Outschool: pragmatic considerations

So we just wrapped up the second in our Lord of the Rings courses on Outschool. The first one on The Fellowship of the Ring ran twice with only one or two students each time, but this go-round there were five students signed up, which made it more of a discussion, less of a tutorial. Nothing against tutorial, august and essential format that it is, whether in the Oxford or St John's incarnation, but I was billing the class as a live discussion, so I'm glad that it got to happen this time.

Some of the kids' favorite parts were our discussions of the faces in the Dead Marshes and Tolkien's experience in WWI, his friends and his sense of duty to their memory, and the warriors Sam sees fall by the oliphaunt and wonders about. Also Sam hitting Bill Ferny in the face with an apple, or imagining what would happen if a squirrel got the One Ring.

The folks at Outschool have made a renewed push for enrollments in the new year--concomitant with a larger percentage of any costs remaining in-house, naturally, so they can continue to grow at a clip that will make their big venture investors happy--but their advice to try offering shorter classes so as to build a following was also instrumental, I think, in helping more people take the plunge on the six-week Tolkien class. I found designing and running the one-off class on myth in popular fantasy and video games really interesting, and I'm looking forward to running it every so often in the future, or even recording it as a free version to help with advertising; however, longer courses on single works and series are where the ideas sparked by a single conversation have the room and fuel to get a'kindling.

Still, I'd like to see what the demand is for online tutorial, if there are kids and adults out there who would pay for the time spent reading and discussing books and games together. If people pay for tutoring, for music and language lessons, I feel like the reading of great books and discussion of other art forms can't be too unreasonable. Whether it is a kind of sophistry is another question, but facing that frankly might be more honest and simpler in the long run than continuing to sub in the public schools and pretending I am having great any impact so long as they are gradually being hollowed out by social reclamation initiatives and any actual teaching and learning is shifted to the online and private sphere. Perhaps it comes down to whether one thinks a community of learning is resilient enough to subsist despite the countless interruptions and distractions of the public schools, whether a genuine relationship of teacher and student is still possible there where the state administration of tests and metrics looms over everything that might have intrinsic value; whether one thinks it is better to embrace Corey Olsen's insights about online and so to speak independent learning vs institutional academia, that online learning makes scholarship accessible and facilitates actual connection between people, and go for it.

I mean, it is one thing--and something incredible to really think about--that we can listen to something like Bach's St Matthew Passion and look up any line of Shakespeare or Proust for free at any time; it is something else again to find people willing and able to talk meaningfully about them, if so articulating one's thoughts about such works is supposed to go hand in hand with integrating the truths they point towards into one's own soul, to be a light to one's neighbors in one's life and actions, as Dostoevsky's Underground Man caustically, sadly remarks, as Kierkegaard yearns for, along with that one reader he hopes to find...

In the meantime, for those interested in reading books together, check out the discussion on the mythgard forums. For those interested in playing games together, starmen.net is the place!

Careful wishes

A significant victory for teachers - Huzzah! - but some caveats:

In the preamble of Bookwarm Games Ep 3: My haunting melody
And some way into the new Classical Conversation (link below)--

To sum up another way: teachers are getting what they asked for and continuing to complain--saying we can’t teach because kids are coming to school with so many problems from home, society--but then schools turn into therapy centers and food banks and social work offices rather than communities of learning, more and more the more the very resources that teachers demand, that students need, are provided there. Which is a great and tragic irony, but perhaps some of us are starting to cotton on. What then? Bifurcate the school between haves and have-nots, contributing to an ever-widening gap? Capitulate entirely and give up the pretense of public education for public welfare, day-care, health-ditto--or prison by another name? Or stand firm and set high expectations and do the impossible work to give kids both the material and emotional and intellectual and probably spiritual supports to rise to them, which may not be within any human being’s power, much less a public school teacher instructed in curriculum development and union rights but hardly having read a book, never having time to. But then again which may be, or so we believe, and so we rise to it ourselves, following the guide sent by Beatrice in the dark wood and down before back up...

What follows is a lengthy comment/addendum to the Classical Conversation video. I thought I better put it here, too--

So I meant to bring this up even though it would be a pretty big tangent, but I was flagging there, fighting the spring forward and the hungry katzen, and it slipped my mind--

Spoilers ahead for any who've not read what is far and away the best fantasy series by a living author, Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials. If that includes you, then stop reading this and go read that now, shame on you! :)

A major theme there, especially in the third book, is the death of God. It's handled exquisitely in the story, though Pullman makes much of the provocative potential of the topic in his interviews and public statements to garner attention and sell books, and good for him! Much more could be said about this, of course, and I intend to be one of the ones to say it one of these days--it's one of those imaginary courses I most look forward to after EarthBound--but to cut to the chase for now: on the last page of the book Lyra and her daemon are talking. Pan first:

 "...But there was something else."

"I remember. He meant the Kingdom was over, the Kingdom of Heaven, it was all finished. We shouldn't live as if it mattered more than this life in this world, because where we are is always the most important place."

"He said we had to build something..."

"That's why we needed our full life, Pan. We would have gone [...]"

"Yes. Of course! [...]"

"But then we wouldn't have been able to build it. No one could if they put themselves first. We have to be all those difficult things like cheerful and kind and curious and patient, and we've got to study and think and work hard, all of us, in all our different worlds, and then we'll build..."

Her hands were resting on his glossy fur. Somewhere in the garden a nightingale was singing [...it's such a beautiful passage that follows here but I cut it for brevity's sake, and to forfend the worst of the spoilin'...]

"And then what?" said her daemon sleepily. "Build what?"

"The Republic of Heaven," said Lyra.

--So, that's how the story ends. It's up to us. It's not primarily a metaphysical claim, as I think it was when Nietzsche used it, "God is dead," echoing Plutarch's "The great god Pan is dead"--though it is that, too, certainly, I think it is compatible with some sort of metaphysical belief in God and an afterlife so long as that's understood the way a theologian like Oscar Romero understands it--he uses the same language about building, but keeps the phrase Kingdom, of course (I'm afraid I only borrowed the book and can't supply a quote or exact reference)--but that is all very deep to wade into now. It's more pragmatic here. "Live as if" is a very significant phrase here, echoing language in Plato's Meno as well as in Pullman's best essay, in my opinion: http://www.philip-pullman.com/cm-content/pdf/miss_goddards_grave.pdf

As I just texted in our esoteric thread, with added footnotes: Hmm yes always got to contrariwise things a la SK and his pseudonyms (http://newschoolnotes.blogspot.com/2018/02/this-years-read-pluripotent-kierkegaard.html). I feel the dominance hierarchy only means anything if you remember that bit about who is greatest in the kingdom of heaven (https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew+18%3A1-4&version=NIV;KJV and http://biblehub.com/matthew/23-11.htm, or the disciples racing to the empty tomb where the women were already there first). As MLK jr put it: everyone can be great because everyone can serve (https://www.cityyear.org/everybody-can-be-great)

Whew!

The pilgrim's shell, the girl's name: food, frame, and the flood of memory

Last month was on dialogue, excerpts from Dillard, Teaching a Stone to Talk. Here's the reading for March:

The petite madeleine
Excerpts from Swann’s Way (1913)
Marcel Proust, Moncrieff translation

Many years had elapsed during which nothing of Combray, save what was comprised in the theatre and the drama of my going to bed there, had any existence for me, when one day in winter, as I came home, my mother, seeing that I was cold, offered me some tea, a thing I did not ordinarily take. I declined at first, and then, for no particular reason, changed my mind. She sent out for one of those short, plump little cakes called 'petites madeleines,' which look as though they had been moulded in the fluted scallop of a pilgrim's shell. And soon, mechanically, weary after a dull day with the prospect of a depressing morrow, I raised to my lips a spoonful of the tea in which I had soaked a morsel of the cake. No sooner had the warm liquid, and the crumbs with it, touched my palate than a shudder ran through my whole body, and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary changes that were taking place. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, but individual, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory—this new sensation having had on me the effect which love has of filling me with a precious essence; or rather this essence was not in me, it was myself. I had ceased now to feel mediocre, accidental, mortal. Whence could it have come to me, this all-powerful joy? I was conscious that it was connected with the taste of tea and cake, but that it infinitely transcended those savours, could not, indeed, be of the same nature as theirs. Whence did it come? What did it signify? How could I seize upon and define it?
...
And suddenly the memory returns. The taste was that of the little crumb of madeleine which on Sunday mornings at Combray (because on those mornings I did not go out before church-time), when I went to say good day to her in her bedroom, my aunt Léonie used to give me, dipping it first in her own cup of real or of lime-flower tea. The sight of the little madeleine had recalled nothing to my mind before I tasted it; perhaps because I had so often seen such things in the interval, without tasting them, on the trays in pastry-cooks' windows, that their image had dissociated itself from those Combray days to take its place among others more recent; perhaps because of those memories, so long abandoned and put out of mind, nothing now survived, everything was scattered; the forms of things, including that of the little scallop-shell of pastry, so richly sensual under its severe, religious folds, were either obliterated or had been so long dormant as to have lost the power of expansion which would have allowed them to resume their place in my consciousness. But when from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, still, alone, more fragile, but with more vitality, more unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, the smell and taste of things remain poised a long time, like souls, ready to remind us, waiting and hoping for their moment, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unfaltering, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection.

Theses and antitheses from the Tolkien-Beowulf class on Signum

On Grendel as symbolic of kin-slayings:

I actually think this read of Grendel fits well with the thesis that's been proposed now and then about there being some kind of implicit critique of the heroic ethos which is also in more overt ways celebrated in the poem. Passages I'd point to in support of this possible metaphorical read are wherever we're told about Grendel not being amenable to the wergild system--so he sort of embodies the breakdown of that system. Connect this to the other explicit breakdowns: feuds, outbreaks of violence in halls. And as to kin-slaying, the passage I've always found most moving in the whole poem is the so-called father's lament (line 2054 and following in T's translation) where the argument Beowulf is making seems to be that in kin-slayings there is no point in recompense. It's like the snake eating its own tail. Then contrast all this with what Shippey calls the "poem's warm center": the genuine affection and trust in the Geatish court. But since that's all too liable to be wiped out by time and rash decisions, edwenden-forgetting of the kind Hrothgar points to in his long sermon, the turn from heroic vengeance to Christian forgiveness ultimately seems to be the poem's response, or at least it's heading thataway, as Tolkien argues in Monsters and Critics. Once all men are brothers, all killing is kin-slaying; once the sacrifice has been made in Christ's death and resurrection, all recompense has been paid. But what an enormous leap of faith from the heroic ethos and its representation in the actual structure of society to this revelation, this cosmic revaluation!

To a reference to John Gardner's Grendel:

I read Gardner's Grendel recently, found it interesting as a work of art in its own right, though it didn't seem to offer all that much insight into the original poem. It's short, so I think it's worth a read. But I'd say it's a travesty that some English curricula replace Beowulf with Grendel, and a sad comment on/emblem of the shifts in education and culture that seem to be getting Mike all worked up :)

In response to Mike's question, What is a monster?

Interesting inquiries indeed! 

P 159 of the commentary offers one helpful distinction at least, between 'physical monsters' and 'a creature damned irretrievably,' a distinction Grendel seems to blur. The category monster seems to be characterized by uncanny, mysterious vagueness by definition, at least for a poet working on the threshold between heroic paganism and Christian theology.

I think of monsters in terms of a dialectic with heroes: monsters are those evils which heroes slay to establish new order out of chaos. George and the dragon, sort of thing. The difference between the hero and the monster lies not in raw power or potential for destruction, but in creative use of that power. Purposelessness, then, is the great danger, along with self-deception/despair. The challenge seems to be to set up higher and higher targets to shoot for, while not setting it too impossibly high. This can become a little absurd, right, with a hero like Superman who is too OP. So your hero has to have his flaw, or there has to be some flaw in the system itself to keep things interesting. Love is a good one: Aragorn and Arwen, Launcelot and Guinevere. Or pride/hubris, like Hygelac or Dante's Odysseus. Or anger: Achilles. Heroic stories and the encounter with monsters/evils of all sorts help with establishing some kind of framework for the even more mysterious category of the human. So I think we tend to find these stories endlessly fascinating.

A good recent take on it is the game Undertale, if people have played that. Kat brought up Gardner's Grendel. It has an interesting take on the hero-monster question, if people have looked at that one.

Or if people have read Monsters and Critics, that might be a good place to turn, too. I don't have a copy to hand, but maybe there are some passages in there which would be illuminating for more of Tolkien's ideas on the question?

Brave New World in February

Last month the reading group met at the library to discuss Huxley's Brave New World. We looked mainly at the nature of the dystopia and its dismal claims about human nature, and at the tilt between freedom (the grounds for meaning) and soma-based comfort (empty of purpose), though we also touched on the flavor of the borrowings from Shakespeare. We wondered about the sequel, and what life on the islands was like.

Huxley was, in hindsight, a most regrettable digression from our winter focus on women writers. We're still figuring out what to read this month to make up for it--perhaps a Flannery O'Connor story? Send in suggestions, especially if you live around Spokane and would be able to join us in the library the last Saturday of the month, 4pm.