Friday, October 26, 2012

The Speech Squeeze

My most recent peace on Iran commissioned by Article 19:

Learning the language of self-censorship


Poker. Rumi. The US Postal Service motto: Neither snow nor rain nor heat…Serendipity. All have their roots in ancient Persia. No matter how much you think you know about Iran, there’s always more. It’s no surprise, then, that you know so little before boarding a plane to take you to Tehran.

Maybe you’re nervous. Pulling the unfamiliar scarf close around your head. Tucking in loose strands as the plane rattles over the Alborz mountains for its landing. You expect prying eyes, secrecy, and suspicion. What you don’t expect is the friendly welcome from strangers and family, the chaos at the airport, the sheer number of women in black hijab everywhere you look.

The first week you are in Iran is a revelation. Everyone you meet speaks to you. Strangers try out a few words of English, speak to you in simple Persian. They express opinions. Slam the government. Make jokes about clerics. Shout out: We love you miss, in heavily accented English.

There are people and cars everywhere. You see women in sheer headscarves braving the treacherous pavement in high heels and challenging the limits of acceptable hijab. You see daredevil teenagers roller blading in and out of traffic and up and down the cement steps in Tehran’s largest park.

Read more at Article 19.

Sunday, October 21, 2012

Cringeworthy (part 2 of 3)



Close up of Marching through Georgia, by S.M. Stirling

What is it about writing so powerful that it evokes a physical reaction from the reader?  Beyond cringing, the best and most memorable writing made me exhibit other physical effects that I began classifying in my previous entry and have continued here:

Insomnia

SF, fantasy, and alt history author S.M. Stirling wrote a trilogy of books in the 1980 and 90s that are now referred to as the Domination saga - a dystopian alternate history where a militaristic, slave-holding "anti-America" in an industrialized Africa conquers Europe, Asia, and finally - the world.

In Stirling's books, the British Cape Colony of Drakia (our South Africa) absorbed far more Loyalist refugees that in our world after the American Revolution, as well countless refugees from the Confederacy during America's Civil War. Culturally embittered by this defeat, the descendants of these settlers begin their systematic conquest, enslavement, and industrialization of Africa.

When the first book, Marching Through Georgia begins, The Colony of Drakia has become "The Domination of the Draka" - a society based on conquest now in pursuit of territory and resources during the "Eurasian War" (their world's version World War II). What ensues in this first book is a graphic account of small-unit combat between elite Draka airborne soldiers (male and female) accompanied by an American journalist, against armored regiment of German Waffen-SS in the Caucasus - with the occasional Soviet partisan thrown in.

Don't let the cover fool you. Yes, this is pulpy military fiction, but what's riveting is the fascinating and horrific world Stirling has created. He has given us the Confederate States of America that could have been: a world of lush plantations and dehumanizing factory towns; a refined ruling class that preserve natural beauty even as their mines dispose of broken workers as they do slurry. Stirling has taken great pains to describe this civilization, economy, social mores, history, and a culture influenced by European immigrants such as Nietzsche (when the Draka still accepted outsiders). Stirling even creates a dialect of English embossed by Confederate descendants.

In the second book, Under the Yoke, the Domination has gained control of Eurasia from the English Channel to the East China Sea. While ostensibly a Le Carre-style story of an OSS man on a mission behind enemy lines, Under the Yoke is really a study of the society the Draka begin establishing in Europe. The picture he paints isn't a pretty one. On a broad level, European institutions, moral leadership, and education are wiped out. On the ground level, the reader must witness the awful repercussions of warfare since ancient times wreaked on the protagonists - destruction, rape, pillage, torture - not as some tragic byproduct of Draka conquest, but as a cornerstone of Draka policy. Their culture is conquest, and they've turned domination into a science. The hapless Europeans (foremost among them a Polish nun, who's forced into servitude as a clerk on a new plantation) stand no chance. The remaining free people on earth realize too late that the rules of warfare, decency or simply mercy do not apply to Stirling's Draka. They are unconquerable Spartans. They are the Roman Empire at its peak, but unlike the Romans, they're not going to fall. Once they master genetic engineering in the third book The Stone Dogs, they become the true Supermen of Nietzsche's dreams.

Seeing the yoke applied so personally, step-by-painful-step in Under the Yoke and the third book The Stone Dogs, was physically exhausting. There is simply no hope, and it's awful watching one protagonist after another fail and perish. I found myself wide awake at night, poking holes in Stirling's assumptions and postulations: how could their weapons development be so much better than America's? How could they have conquered Afghanistan and China when no one else has done so (and successfully held it)? How could they not fall apart from within? How could they be so bereft of mercy or human decency?

Although Stirling does answer some of these within the books (and other authors tackle them in the anthology entitled Drakas!) the author has taken great pains to point out that it is - after all - a dystopia. This is the story where everything does go wrong for the good guys. It says it right there on the cover "You don't know how lucky you are boys." Perhaps that's the source of my insomnia: the darkest dreams alway bear a frightening resemblance to waking reality.

To make it worse, Stone Dogs and the Drakas! anthology (and a fourth throwaway SF book called Drakon) explain how the Draka have also mastered inter-dimensional travel. The authors don't playfully suggest that the Draka might leap out of a wormhole into our world; they warn us that they're already here.

As if I didn't already have enough trouble sleeping.

- Chris


Next entry: plaatsvervangende schaamte thanks to Jonathan Franzen.

Monday, October 8, 2012

Cringeworthy (Part 1 of 3)

American Psycho, by Brett Easton Ellis (UK 1st edition)
What is it about writing so powerful that it evokes a physical reaction from the reader? I don't refer to the cheap thrills of an airport purchase or arousal from a dime store bodice ripper, I mean fiction that pulls you in and doesn't let go. I mean writing that sets up a character, a scene, and a plot that is so convincing,  so effective, that you cringed while reading. Okay, maybe you didn't cringe, but perhaps you had to take a deep breath before continuing, or maybe you put it down and walked away. I've cringed, but amongst the best writing I've exhibited a number of physical effects beyond cringing. I've finally decided to classify my symptoms along with the authors who caused my distress:

Nausea, cold sweat, vertigo

When the blade and the blood first appear in American Psycho, by Bret Easton Ellis, it's only after you've been lulled by the first 100 or so pages of the glamorous-yet-rote life of a yuppie investment banker in 1980s Manhattan. Patrick Bateman seems to have it all: a cushy, high-profile job, a string of girlfriends, and a fine apartment on the Upper West Side. In reality he's miserable, in a cutthroat race with his peers to have the finest business cards, the newest electronic equipment, and the hottest reservations in town. As with any race for consumption, Patrick is destined to lose. He seems to know this, and his anguish, fears, and frustration regularly erupt in fits of predatory violence.

He starts by spontaneously victimizing a homeless man and his dog. From there, the violence - mostly premeditated - escalates in quantity, intensity, and sadism. There's usually a pause in between each orgy of butchery - perhaps a visit to a new restaurant, or a work out session - but then the body count resumes its climb: street walkers, high-end call girls, prep school girlfriends (Bateman conflates all the three), yuppie competitors, an unfortunate jellyfish, and even the occasional cop.

Nothing is left to the imagination here. To paraphrase Scott McCloud, the reader is not a silent accomplice to crimes happening "off-camera," instead the reader is a silent witness, helpless while reading very clinical descriptions of torture and finally murder. While it's possible to make it unscathed through a singular scene, the pointless - and apparently plotless (at least at the outset) - violence is unrelenting, and has a cumulative effect on the stomach and psyche. For me, there was no fighting the urge to put the book down, get some fresh air, talk to other people, and tell myself everything was gonna be all right.

The consume-brag-dismay-kill zoetrope plays over and over, until you realize that it's Bateman's tacit, reluctant acceptance of his life that is the story. Despite his despicable nature, it was difficult for me to completey hate Patrick Bateman. Perhaps it's the alienation he suffers as an anti-God. Perhaps it's the remote chance that he hasn't committed these killings at all - except in his head. That you can somehow sympathize with a creature who lashes out (consequence-free) at a world he's seemingly trapped in is a tribute to Ellis' writing.

I may read it again one day, to determine if he really kills or not. It may be a while, though. Years later, it's still hard for me to look at German brushed steel kitchen appliances or high thread count luxury bed sheets once the mind's eye has seen them with splattered human fat and dripping, atramentous ichor.

Chronic itchiness / sensation of bugs crawling on your skin


Basically, anything written by Irvine Welsh is enough to make you shift in you seat as if you've got crotch rot. Trainspotting is the obvious top contender for its detailed explanations of the ins-and-outs of heroin use. Do you know what kinds of scabs and abscesses can form on the skin when you shoot too long and too often in the same spot on your arm? Or between your toes? Or on your penis? Aficionados of Welsh will demand places on the podium for the necrophilia and bestiality in Acid House, the terrible skin and colonic conditions of the dirty cop in Filth, or the pub porn and rape in Porno.

Heroin. Coke. Ecstasy. Sex. Power. No matter the drug of choice in his novels, novellas, and short stories, Irvine Welsh's true talent lies in his ability to give you a colorful character who's life is a runaway train headed for the buffers. His stories have forced me to laugh and cringe on a number of levels. The gun that goes off at the end of each story is right there in plain sight - one last score that can't go wrong, one last drink, or a chance for revenge - and I itch like mad waiting for the self-destructive protagonist to reach for it. When it finally goes off with its usual disastrous consequences, the character gives a figurative shrug of the shoulders. They may be dead, widowed, dismembered, banished, or incarcerated, but they "didnae gie a fuck" in the first place. "Ye ken?"

In his 2009 anthology, Reheated Cabbage, Welsh dials it back a bit, but he still can't let Trainspotting favorite Francis Begbie get through Christmas lunch without chinning his sister's boyfriend. (I laughed aloud at that one; it was like a high school reunion where the crazy kid shows up and is still reliably crazy.) He does grant reprieve to two other recurring characters in the short story "I am Miami." Oh sure, they're still self-destructive - what with their drink and drug abuse - but the repercussions at the climax of the story (during a rave) are buffeted by a sensible girlfriend and their fearsome grammar school teacher - Albert Black, who's inadvertantly come along for the ride. Perhaps even Irvine Welsh himself has become exhausted by nihilism, and finally made a little room for redemption?

Next entry: Insomnia with S.M. Stirling and plaatsvervangende schaamte thanks to Jonathan Franzen.

- Chris