“The Internet”: Part poem, part meditative salve

20 Wednesday Jun 2012

Posted by in Life, Memory, Reading

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An interesting claim, don’t you think, calling the Internet “part poem, part meditative salve”? At first I was going to start by telling you that the Internet referred to in the title isn’t the Internet, the global computer network through which you have reached this blog post, but, in a way, it is. You see, the title of this post refers to an essay entitled “The Internet,” written by Lisa Schamess and published in the inaugural issue of TOSKA Magazine last Friday. (( Yes, yes, yes, Lisa is my fiancée. As I’ve said before, I was a huge fan and promoter of her writing long before I had any clue I’d be marrying her. )) While it was Lisa’s friend Kevin McMamara who called her essay “Part poem, part meditative salve,” Lisa, I think, would argue that our shared global computer network is “Part poem, part meditative salve.”

The essay is one of her memoir pieces, and those are always hard for me, have always been hard for me, for a number of reasons. They’re hard for me because they focus on the 13 months between the birth of Miss Mo, Lisa’s daughter, and the death of Gil, Lisa’s husband. At first I found them difficult because Lisa has always been a real person to me, a friend whose writing I began reading because she was a friend, and so the struggles and difficulties and pain and loss she writes of have never been experiences of a stranger but of someone I cared about. And now there’s lots of layers. With each new piece I learn more about a pivotal event in the life of the woman I shall marry in 25 days, and I learn more about the man whose daughter I am raising, a daughter, I’m realizing, I will soon have been actively parenting longer than he was able to. They’re hardest on me, though, because while Lisa has made peace with her past, I feel an intense need to reach out and comfort the woman she was 12 years ago, a woman I wouldn’t even know for another 5 years, a woman who is very real and is very much in need of comfort. I want her to be spared from that pain and loss. I want her to have the life with her husband and her daughter denied to her. And much of my reaction is rooted in the fact that I love her so deeply. There’s no easy way to navigate that.

“The Internet” is different from her other memoir pieces, though. Different than pieces like “Light & Shadow” or “House of Memory” or the unpublished pieces that are making up the memoir. It is part poem, part meditative salve. It’s also got force to it. I want to say it has an edge. It does, but it’s not all edge. Somehow Lisa’s made some of the gentlest parts hard and the hardest parts gentle. It’s an attempt to capture and share something that can’t be captured and shared. It’s not quite like anything I’ve read by her. While “Light & Shadow” and “House of Memory” are my favorite published pieces, “The Internet” surpasses them as a work of art. And it is very much a work of art.

But don’t just listen to me. I’m biased. I mean, I am marrying her. You could also say that her friends and my friends are biased, and they are, but in sharing her essay on Facebook last Friday, they didn’t need add comments like these: “This is big in all the beautiful ways that matter”; (( Bernard Balizet )) “Sad, sexy, sweet and smart. Read it”; (( Tammy Seltzer )) and “Brilliant, clever, and painful – the kind of writing that stays in my head long after I’ve read it.” (( Liza Potts )) I could go on, but I won’t. I think you’ve got the idea. So just read it and find out for yourself how the Internet and “The Internet” are part poem and part meditative salve.

And take a look at the rest of TOSKA while you’re at it. They’ve produced a good inaugural issue. It’s worth reading and they are worth following.

Accelerando Resources

19 Tuesday Jun 2012

Posted by in Charles Stross, Science Fiction/Fantasy, Teaching Resources, The Singularity

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I regularly promote Charles Stross’ novel Accelerando which traces three generations of the Manx family as we pass into the Singularity. It’s one of my favorite SF novels. I’m currently rereading it and stumbled upon the Accelerando Technical Companion, a glossary of various concepts and terms in the novel, useful for even some regular SF readers and a godsend for anyone teaching the book.

You haven’t read Accelerando? You should give it a try. In fact, Stross offers it for free download in the following formats: ePub, MobiPocket, Aportis, and Rich Text Format.

And You Think You’ve Got Copyright Issues

18 Monday Jun 2012

Posted by in Science Fiction/Fantasy, The Singularity

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Back on World IP Day, I argued that as part of our reflection on “how patents, copyright, trademarks and designs impact on daily life,” the point of World IP Day, we should consider “the original purpose of copyright laws and concept of intellectual property, we should consider how the concepts of copyright and intellectual property as products of the printing press are modern creations which post-date Shakespeare, and we should consider how vastly the concepts of copyright and intellectual property have changed during their few hundred year history.” Among other things, I noted, we should reflect upon the fact that the first copyright law in the United States, passed in 1790, granted a creator a copyright of 14 years plus an additional 14 years if they exercised their right of renewal, and its purpose was to “promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.” In contrast, today individual copyright lasts for the life of the author plus 70 years and corporate copyright lasts for 120 years.

This matters for many reasons and it may matter far more than we currently realize. Consider, for a moment, a posthuman future (( Or at least the brave new future of lobsters. ))

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One Year Ago

30 Wednesday May 2012

Posted by in Life

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My family with the Washington Monument in the background.

My parents, sister, and me, ca. 1978.

One year ago today, I arrived in Washington, DC. Moved to DC, actually. This isn’t the first time I’ve lived here, however. I first lived in DC the summer I turned seven. My father, a FBI agent, needed to spend three months at the national headquarters, and he arranged the timing so that we could spend the time with him. We stayed in a suite with kitchenette in a hotel then known as the Guest Quarters, less than two blocks from the Foggy Bottom Metro Station and just a few blocks from the Watergate complex. Not long after moving to DC last year I tracked down where we’d stayed. It’s still there, 801 New Hampshire Ave, NW, now a Double Tree. I have lots of good memories of my time then. I don’t know that I had much conception of DC as a city, but I have many memories of specific places within the city, and I liked being here.

Lisa and Mona

Lisa and Mona at our favorite picnic spot in Rock Creek Park

Now, 35 years later, I am much more aware of Washington, DC as a city, and my feelings about being here are far more complex, far more complicated. A year on and the city doesn’t feel like home. I’m not sure that it ever will. This isn’t to say that I’m having second thoughts about moving to DC. While the city may not feel like home, where I live in the city is the truest home I’ve known since I packed up and moved off to college. I arrived in DC one year ago today because 14 months ago Lisa and Mona asked me to come be with them. I moved here so that we could become a family.

We’ve long since settled into the mundane day-to-day of family life: parental permission slips that need to be signed, a dog that needs to be walked, trash that needs to be taken out, homework that needs to be done, moods and schedules that need to be accommodated, floors that need to be swept, bills that need to be paid. We walk to the local coffee and crepe shop and Mona takes my hand. I look up from my work and Lisa is doing her own work nearby, sometimes close enough to reach out and touch. We three gather together and one of us reads out loud from one of our favorite books. Through all the mundane day-to-day and stresses and difficulties of daily life and the weight of a city that’s too busy and too densely populated and too unfamiliar, through it all I am daily struck with awe: I am here with the two of them. There is no place I’d rather be.

Mediated Memories

27 Sunday May 2012

Posted by in Media Ecology, Memory, Mnemonic Practices, Social Memory

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In her book, Mediated Memories in the Digital Age, José van Dijck introduces the concept of “mediated memories,” media-produced personal mementos such as those one might keep in a shoe box. (( With this post, I hope to be getting back to one of the original functions of this blog: that of a commonplace book for my thinking about and research into memoria. )) “These items,” she explains, “mediate not only remembrances of things past; they also mediate relationships between individuals and groups of any kind (such as family, school classes, and scouting clubs)” (1). As memory objects, van Dijck argues, mediated memories represent both our autobiographical memories and cultural identity.

While social memory studies has always claimed that autobiographical memory—personal remembering—is entwined with the social, (( Quite literally: this claim was first made by Maurice Hawlbachs, the sociologist who proposed the concept of collective memory. )) her focus on these mediated memory objects which have a simultaneous personal and cultural connection has led her to also coin the term “personal cultural memory,” which she defines as “[t]he acts and products of remembering in which individuals engage to make sense of their lives in relation to the lives of others and their surroundings, situating them in time and place” (6). She then explains that within this construct the terms personal and cultural are “threads that bind memory’s texture: they can be distinguished, but they never can be separated” (6).

This conception of personal cultural memory is important she argues because it

allows for a conceptualization of memory that includes dimensions of identity and relationship, time and materiality […] The term emphasizes that some aspects of memory need to be explained from processes at work in our society that we commonly label as culture—mores, practices, traditions, technologies, mechanics, and routines—whereas the same processes contribute to, and derive from, the formation of individual identities. Yet by advocating a definition of cultural memory that highlights the significance of personal collections, I do not mean to disavow the import of collective culture. Quote to the contrary, if we acknowledge that individual preferences are filtered through cultural conventions or social frameworks, we are obligated to further explore the intricate connection between the individual and collective in the construction of cultural memory (8).

I’ve been greatly enjoying reading van Dijck’s book as it compliments, complicates, overlaps, and extends my own thinking on mnemonic practices and mnemonic objects and the complicated and blurry boundary between autobiographical and social memory. I find particularly useful her conception of the relationship between the personal and the cultural as threads that can be identified but can not be separated.

Charles Stross on SF as the Literature of Big Ideas

26 Saturday May 2012

Posted by in Charles Stross, Science Fiction/Fantasy

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A couple of days ago I pointed to Lev Grossman’s discussion of genre fiction vs. literary fiction, which was written for his weekly book column in Time. Among the things Grossman takes issue with is the charge that genre fiction is escapist. Since I’ve been known to take issue with this claim as well, I note with some bemusement that Charles Stross, one of my favorite SF authors, has suggested in a recent blog post that most science fiction is escapist. It’s not the focus of Stross’ piece, however, so I’ll set the issue aside for another day.

Stross’ blog post “SF, big ideas, ideology: what is to be done?” is a slightly revised version of an essay he wrote in response to a SF Signal Mind-meld question of whether or not SF is still the genre of big ideas. Specifically, they asked, “Are SF writers “slacking off” or is science fiction still the genre of “big ideas”? If so, what authors are supplying these ideas for the next generation of scientists and engineers?” As is clear from SF Signal page, the question has its origins in Neal Stephenson World Policy Journal article “Innovation Starvation,” in which Stephenson argues that SF is in a dystopian rut and is, therefore, no longer serving to inspire future scientists and engineers as SF did during the Golden Age. (( The Hieroglyph Project was started, in part, in response to Stephenson’s critique of current SF. )) As with all SF Signal Mild Meld forums, multiple SF authors respond to the question, so Stross’ essay is but one of many responses, which means you really should visit both SF Signal discussion as well as Stross’ blog.

In the essay, Stross argues that SF has not really been the genre of big ideas although there have been big ideas within SF from time to time, and that SF has been “spinning its wheels” for some time now with only cyberpunk and the singularity being its only innovative subjects in the past 30 years. Furthermore, he argues that the really big ideas authors in SF are largely ignored. (I’ll leave you to read the piece to see who they are.)

Ultimately, Stross argues that the big problem SF faces today is that the sense of wonder it is so good at evoking is becoming harder and harder to engage. He explains:

We’re living in the frickin’ 21st century. Killer robot drones are assassinating people in the hills of Afghanistan. Our civilisation has been invaded and conquered by the hive intelligences of multinational corporations, directed by the new aristocracy of the 0.1%. There are space probes in orbit around Saturn and en route to Pluto. Surgeons are carrying out face transplants. I have more computing power and data storage in my office than probably the entire world had in 1980. (Definitely than in 1970.) We’re carrying out this Mind Meld via the internet, and if that isn’t a 1980s cyberpunk vision that’s imploded into the present, warts and all, I don’t know what is. Seriously: to the extent that mainstream literary fiction is about the perfect microscopic anatomization of everyday mundane life, a true and accurate mainstream literary novel today ought to read like a masterpiece of cyberpunk dystopian SF.

We people of the SF-reading ghetto have stumbled blinking into the future, and our dirty little secret is that we don’t much like it.

Stross ends his essay asking a different question: “If SF’s core message (to the extent that it ever had one) is obsolete, what do we do next?”Both his essay and the responses from readers which follow are well worth reading.