Andrew Hickey

Here we go… Book three in this series.

Book one was KILLING THE TOP TEN SACRED COWS OF PUBLISHING.

Book two was KILLING THE TOP TEN SACRED COWS OF INDIE PUBLISHING.

Both books are available everywhere in electronic, paper, and soon audio.

What I call a “Sacred Cow” is basically a myth spread around publishing like the truth. Myths such as “rewriting must be done for every story.” Myths such as “you need an agent to sell a book,” or “sell a book to a different country.” And so on.

You can either buy the first two books to get all twenty of the Sacred Cows, or just click on the tab above and read them here in their original blog posts for free.

For the first chapter, the first Sacred Cow in this new book, I’d like to take a stick and beat to death the silliness coming from all directions that novels must be a certain length. Usually I hear that a novel can’t be real unless it’s between 80,000 and 110,000 words.

Hogwash. And just a slight knowledge of history will cut the head off this silly myth.

So here we go once again into book three full of Sacred Cows of Publishing.

There sure are a lot of myths about publishing.

Sacred Cow #1: A Novel Must Be A Certain Length

You hear this myth spouted from almost every blog or young author or young editor at one point or another. The writers spouting this myth all go on about how a novel doesn’t have value, readers won’t like it, the author won’t feel complete unless the novel they write is at least 80,000 words long or longer.

Now granted, some stories need to be that long. Some.

But many, many novels are padded out and basically killed in quality because of this belief in a myth. I know, in over one hundred contracts with traditional publishing, I wrote to contract lengths and most of the books I wrote had to be padded out in one form or another to hit contract length.

I hated having to do that, but back in the 1990s and into this century, it was just the way life was.

I always believed that a story just needed to be the length the story wanted to be. Not some artificial length prescribed by contract or a false belief system.

So how did this silly practice and myth even get started?

Some History

As is the format of these Sacred Cows chapters, history explains a great deal about how a myth developed into a belief system in our modern world. And this myth has a creation of stunning stupidity.

Back in time, around the 1890s, there was a major rift that intensified the difference between “literature” and “stories for the masses.” That difference had always played out for centuries before as those who thought they were better than others often showed that superior attitude by buying thick leather books full of almost-impossible-to-read words.

The theory was that when something was hard to read and not fun, it had to be literature and thus it had to be good. For centuries, writers (now long forgotten) made money from that way of thinking. Usually patronage in one form or another supported them because supposedly it took great amounts of time to produce such difficult-to-read tomes. (That’s where the myth started of the longer a book takes to write, the better the quality of the book. That, of course, is another major myth. I covered that topic in another Sacred Cows chapter in another book.)

The unwashed masses wanted great stories, from the Dime Novels all the way into the pulps that started up in the 1890s and exploded into the next century. The great unwashed didn’t need to struggle over a story, they just wanted to be entertained.

The pulps existed up until the distribution collapse of the late 1950s, when the mass market paper replaced them completely as a way of getting cheap entertainment to the reading masses. (Mass market paperbacks had been around since the late 1930s, but only fully replaced pulps in the 1950s.) During those six or seven decades that the pulps ruled, they contained hundreds of thousands of novels and even more short stories.

The novel structure we know today was developed, for the most part, in the pulps. Entertainment story structure was worked out by the likes of Lester Dent and Max Brand and other great pulp writers. (Brand was a pen name of Frederick Faust. Dent wrote under many pen names including Kenneth Robeson.)

Novels in the pulps ranged in the 30,000 to 40,000 word length, almost without exception. A story around 20,000 words was called a short novel.

When paperbacks started to take over, almost all novels ranged in the same length, rarely topping out over 50,000 words. (Of course there were exceptions, but they were rare. And there were the excessively long literature novels published in leather as well.) And novels were still published in magazines, often serialized.

This lasted up until the 1980s when costs of traditional publishers started to rise. Shipping costs and a run-away returns system were just two of the major factors that drove publisher costs up. Also, since publishers remained in the high prices of New York City, the overhead of publishers shot up as well.

So as costs of publishers went up, the prices of books needed to go up or people would have to lose their jobs and their offices in New York.

So traditional publishers hit on a perfect idea to help readers not be angry at them for raising book prices. Simply make the books thicker.

The publishers, in author contracts, slowly forced authors to write longer and longer books over the decade of the 1980s and into the 1990s.

My first book contract in 1987 had a required length of 60,000 to 70,000 words. By the time I wrote my last traditional book, the contract wanted a book of over 90,000 words.

So let me be clear here.

Publishers forced writers to write longer books, not to make the books better, but to justify their need to raise book prices because of other costs. (Paper and printing were cheap, so most of the extra costs were in overhead and could be made up with just fatter books.)

Wow, the dumbest thing I have ever heard. Accountants forcing artists to change the very form of their art.

And yet writers had to go along, or they didn’t get published by the only accepted method of publication. And honestly, most never noticed. The increase in contracted word count just slowly went up. Over more than a decade until the word count topped out at around 100,000 words for most standard entertainment novels.

I remember clearly hearing in the 1990s how anything longer than 15,000 words and under 70,000 words was unpublishable. Wow, how stupid was that?

Now granted, some genre novels remained shorter, in the 80,000 word length, and category westerns and romance novels remained in the 50,000 word length.

But for the most part, a new generations of writers just grew up thinking that books should be around 100,000 words to have value.

All because greedy publishers needed to justify keeping their profit margins high.

Some Examples of Novels Under 40,000 words

This is just a very short list of some of the novels published in the pulp magazines and in what were called “slick” magazines and in the early days of paperbacks up until traditional publishing started jamming the length up. There are also a couple of the modern examples that also managed to get through in book form for various reasons, sometimes included in collections.

In this modern world, in a few genres, these are now called novellas. When most of them were published, they were called novels.

Imagine any of these books forced by contract to be padded out to 100,000 words. Again, all of these are under 40,000 words. Some a large distance under.

• J. L. Carr’s A Month in the Country
• John W. Campbell’s Who Goes There?
• Jack London’s The Call of the Wild
• John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men
• George Orwell’s Animal Farm
• Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange
• Isaac Asimov’s Nightfall
• Herman Melville’s Billy Budd, Sailor
• Truman Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s
• Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea
• Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
• Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol
• H. G. Wells’ The Time Machine
• Philip Roth’s Goodbye, Columbus
• Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness
• Thornton Wilder’s The Bridge of San Luis Rey
• Jack Kerouac’s The Subterraneans
• Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49
• Joyce Carol Oates’s Black Water
• Stephen King’s Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption
• Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Sharer
• Patrick Leigh Fermor’s The Violins of Saint-Jacques
• Clive Barker’s The Hellbound Heart
• Ira Levin’s The Stepford Wives
• John Steinbeck’s The Pearl
• Carson McCullers’s The Ballad of the Sad Cafe
• Brandon Sanderson’s The Emperor’s Soul
• Norman Maclean’s A River Runs Through It

(List from Wikipedia)

So Now What?

I write this in the early part of 2015 and thankfully, it’s a new world. Traditional publishers have lost control of just about all areas of publishing.

Indie and smaller press publishers can do books easily and quickly and get them distributed around the world and into bookstores.

Readers are slowly gaining control again by buying what they want when they want it, and for a reasonable price.

The traditional gatekeepers still require books of certain lengths to make a budget and price point.

Because of that freedom of indie and small presses, writers are finding themselves more and more just writing stories that are not bloated out to some imaginary “perfect” length.

Freedom to write, freedom to be an artist once again is returning to novelists. Thankfully. (It was a long three decades in the wilderness.)

In the last seventeen months, I have written seventeen novels, novels that I never would have been allowed to write in traditional publishing. All seventeen are between 40,000 and 55,000 words long. Why? The answer is simple.

I started reading as a kid in the 1950s and my formative years in reading were up until 1980 when I turned 30. Almost every book I read during those years was in the 40,000 word range. I read science fiction and mystery series such as the Travis McGee series. I collected old paperbacks and pulp magazines.

The classics of mystery and science fiction were written at the length of 40-50 thousand words or shorter. Blish, Budrys, Knight, Norton, Vance, Silverberg, Williamson, Boucher, McDonald, and so on and so on.

And as the economics of greed in traditional publishing forced writers to write longer, some very smart publishers  started publishing lines such as Ace Doubles that allowed two of the classic 40,000 word novels to be reprinted in one. Or the fantastic Doc Savage books were packaged with two or three of the old novels in a paperback to make the price right for the publisher.

So what now?

Simple.

Writers can write what we want, at any length we want.

If a story needs to be told at longer word counts, write it.

If a story is done at 40,000 words or less, write it.

The days of traditional publishing greed to try to sell books at higher prices is just about over. And the new world of allowing writers to write what we want is dawning.

So next time you hear someone spouting how all novels have to be 100,000 words to be right, just laugh and walk away. You now know that the only reason novels got that long was because publishers needed to raise prices to support their bloated businesses and high overheads.

And then write the story you want to write, at the length you want to write to make the story the best story it can be.

And, oh yeah, have fun.

—–

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And thanks.

Tip Jar

The Schmotezgreüber-Hackertini Family of Production Companies are pleased to announce the following casting calls.  If you meet the belowmentioned requirements, please have your representative contact Julii in our casting department, along with three head shots, the last nine digits of your Social Security number, and a gift basket containing no less than four (4) items flavored with salted caramel.

C17-AAM:  Actress needed for TV series, in the role of the senior administrator of a large New York City hospital specializing in cancer treatment.  The character is also a high-ranking espionage agent for the U.S. government, a war veteran, and a covert superhuman vigilante.  Blonde, no older than 26.

Z24-AMZ:  Actor needed for touring comedy show based on classic Vaudeville routines.  Must own a pair of baggy pants.  Primary role will be operator of the rear portion of a pantomime horse:  NOTE:  front portion of pantomime horse will be played by severed front half of an actual horse.

M66-KTC:  African-American actress to play African-American best friend of lead character on sitcom, who is not African-American.  Ideal candidate will be immediately identifiable as African-American, but not too African American, if you follow us.  Knowledge of African America a plus.

N21-ULR:  Established celebrities to play roles of Seven Dwarves in animated remake of Snow White.  Personalities will be based on pop-cuture phenomena to be determined at as close a time to filming as possible.  Please:  celebrities only, no professional voice actors.  This is a serious production.

E33-DMT:  Red-haired or brunette actress to perform guest spot as main character’s mother in prime time soap opera about wealthy teenagers in Orange County, California (filming to take place next January in Montréal).  Note:  as role is the mother of a teenager, no candidates over age 35, please.

K28-ABS:  Actor to portray the role of Charles Laughton in a biopic where Charles Laughton is not only a respected actor and innovative director, but fights an invasion force of mutant aliens only he can see.  Please resemble the actual Charles Laughton as little as possible.

B26-IOS:  British actor to play villainous mastermind in upcoming episode of suspense thriller.  Must have low, calm voice and impeccable Received Pronunciation.  Villain will possibly be Nazi, Russian, IRA terrorist, South African racist, Eastern European mobster, or maybe ancient Roman.

U14-TTW:  Dog to not eat the food in dog food commercial.  This is critical:  dog should not eat the food.  We know it looks yummy, but it’s our competitor’s food, so don’t eat it, okay, boy?  Please don’t eat the food.  We really cannot stress this enough.  It’s a high-paying jobs.  Just…don’t.  Please.

J17-KZZ:  A number of actors to portray international gang of terrorists resulting from alliance between ISIS and the Gulf Cartel.  For Arab terrorists, Jews, Israelis, South Asians and Latinos will be considered; for Mexicans, Puerto Ricans and South Americans.  Arabs and Mexicans not considered.

N24-LFV:  Seeking fit, attractive, charismatic young actor to play the role of Matt Murdock in new film reboot of the Daredevil franchise.  Must be willing to claim you were really into comic books as a kid in front of reporters.  Special consideration given to actors who are actually blind, and who developed superhuman senses after being hit across the face by a drum full of toxic ooze.

 

Spoilers.



So, my pre-ordered copy of the much-critically-fawned-upon 'horror' film The Babadook arrived this morning.  And I've just watched it.

What a load of crap.

Look, I get what was being attempted here.  And it was attempted with a lot of sincerity, and some excellent acting.  But, really, what was the point?  Depression is a terrible thing.  Yes, we know.  We all bloody know.  Even those of us lucky enough to have escaped direct experience of depression know that we have escaped something terrible.  Grief is a terrible thing too.  Likewise.  It's better to connect with and love your kids than to not.  Yes.  I don't have kids and I know that.  These are trite morals.

Of course, there's no reason why you couldn't make a film carefully exploring these issues, delineating the experience of suffering from grief and depression so bad that it paralyses even your ability to love your own child.  But if that's what you want to talk about, do so.  Make a film about depression.  Make a film about mental illness.  Make a film about a nervous breakdown.  Make it with sensitivity, and with the space and attention these issues deserve.  The Babadook isn't that film, though it seems to be under the impression that it kind-of might be.

If, on the other hand, you want to make a ghost story, then make a ghost story.  But don't make a film which uses the aesthetics of the ghost story as obvious and simplistic metaphors for depression and mental illness, especially if you're going to spend the entire runtime of the film essentially screaming "THIS IS A METAPHOR FOR DEPRESSION!!!!" at the audience, as if you blatantly don't trust them to twig.

It's possible that someone who has actually suffered from depression may disagree with me here, and I shall respect that disagreement from my lucky positionality, but it seems to me that all we get in The Babadook are trite morals dressed up in dark cloaks.  'DON'T LET HIM IN' says the book about the monster that will creep into your life through looks and words, attack you in bed, and get under your skin.  Well thanks.  I'm sure people suffering from debilitating depression never thought of that.  The story seems to also imply that, once in, depression is almost certain to lead to murder-suicide if left unchecked... which seems a dubious message to be sending out about the plight of millions of perfectly normal, innocent, non-dangerous people who are suffering from a disease.  Also, depression would appear to be a monster that attacks without much in the way of a social origin.  The monster sneaks into your life because of loss and boredom and family difficulties, not because of wider social problems.  Moreover, the monster must be slain by the lone individual deciding to belt up.  Apparently, according to this film, all you have to do to defeat the monster of depression is to pull yourself together.  Even at the point where you are a slavering, knife-wielding homicidal maniac who is breaking the necks of pets (a cheap, obvious and predictable shot that one, by the way) and attempting to strangle your own kid, all you have to do is summon up the will-power to shout down your inner demons.  Presumably, those people who don't manage to summon up the last-minute grit to simply intimidate the Babadook and lock him in a closet are themselves to blame for the catastrophes that follow.  Your own fault.  Should've been stronger.  This is the most simplistic and offensive metaphorical statement on depression since Paul Cornell had a go for Big Finish.

Aside from how dodgy the film's implications are when it comes to serious, real world issues, there is also the question of how the film disrespects the uncanny and the hauntological.  It repeatedly hammers home that we are seeing a mental breakdown rather than an actual haunting.  This is why, despite the hyperbole of reviewers which is larded all over the DVD case, the film isn't remotely scary.  It never takes the monster seriously on his own terms.  It never pays enough respect to the monstrous.  It refuses to be even faintly mysterious.  It puts little ironic clips of classic shockers on the TV that the protagonist stares at in a depressed fug, thus showing us the raw material from which she fashions her dark illusions.  It insists on explaining everything.  Every creepy glimpse or sound is clearly contextualised as a dream or a hallucination, or as a metaphorical depiction of a mental state.  The Babadook attacks a car and causes a car crash... but we are left in no doubt (through heavy implication) that what we have just seen is an accident caused by a woman's depressed and wandering mind.  The little boy in the film believes in the Babadook as an outside force, but the way he talks about it is clearly meant to imply an unconscious perception on his part that his mother is haunted by the demon of depression.  This leads, as the film progresses, to the boy's utterances becoming increasingly gnomic, as it becomes crucial for him to produce dialogue which furthers the metaphor.  This shows a contempt for the thought-world of children, which becomes nothing more than a kind of cargo-cult-style attempt to comprehend the doings of adults.  Speaking of which... even the origin of the spooky book (the best thing in the film, aside from the acting) is explained in a line about the protagonist once having been a children's author.

As with The Innocents - another wildly overrated 'horror' movie that everyone seems to think is a masterpiece except me - the aimed-for ambiguity fails in a way that smells of the film-makers' contempt for anything actually uncanny, resolving downwards into a crashingly literal co-optation of hauntological aesthetics in the service of an ostensibly more serious message.  (At least The Babadook manages to ultimately treat the psychological problems of the protagonist with sympathy, unlike The Innocents, which takes a patronising and misogynistic tone about a character who is, when all is said and done, depicted as nothing more than a prudish, repressed hysteric.)  In both films, the hauntological is disrespected, denied its own integrity and narrative reality, denied its own power to both mean and to defy meaning, denied its own power to be inexplicable or horrifying for the sake of it.  It is denied these things because it is being used for the purposes of inaccurately and simplistically expressing a psychological state.  It is clearly being put in a subordinate position, mined for usable material while its own potential is ignored.

The fundamental problem with using the horrific in such a specific and sceptical way is that it neutralises the power of the horrific to tug at threads deeper than those we know about, and thus to suggest the deep unknowability of ourselves and the world we live in.  Horror often tries to say stuff about the real world, or promote a salutary moral, via a depiction of the return of the repressed.  But it ultimately relies upon the repressed returning in a way that represents a fundamental rupture with what we like to think of as the real world.  The haunting in The Shining has political valences which refer to actual social issues and/or historical horrors, but because it is the story of a literal haunting rather than self-consciously a visualisation of 'just' a mental breakdown, it also insists upon the idea that there is a 'real' faultline in reality that we might fall into.  I don't believe in the literal supernatural, but I find uncanny fiction a far more powerful reflection of my experience of the world than 'realism', especially realism which cannot tolerate symbols and metaphors unless they be clearly announced as such.  The uncanny vision is of a reality riven by cracks, cracks that we all might suddenly tumble into without any understanding of what is happening to us, and with no potential for understanding it.  That's the experience of modernity, for me.  I'm not saying 'realism' has nothing to say to us.  I just generally think it fails to get at the experience of modernity in quite the way managed by the uncanny.  And it should say its own stuff without misusing the uncanny in the capacity of a disrespected servant.

When the boy is being thrown around by the evil force near the end of The Babadook, the way it happens directly in front of his mother's outstretched arms clearly informs us that we are seeing her dissociative perception of her own violence.  She sees what she herself is doing, and inserts gaps of empty space between her hands and the violence they produce.  This is a perfect summation of the film.  In conception and execution, it is very clever... but the ultimate effect is banal, limited and boring.

The Pitch: It’s the early days of Twitter, and someone’s had an idea for a parody account. Surely, nothing could be more amusing than a right-wing Tory MEP who continually misunderstands things, gets his facts wrong and continually blusters and insists he’s right regardless? So, our protagonist creates the account, and finds the perfect picture to illustrate it in an illustrated dictionary’s image for ‘harrumph’. The account – called Roger Helmer MEP – begins to pick up an appreciative audience

Soon, though, our protagonist discovers that someone, or something, else is posting to the Twitter account and it’s even more in character than he’s ever managed. Curiously, he also starts to notice references to things that Roger has supposedly done in the news, and gradually he begins to realise that not only has his parody Twitter account developed sentience, it has begun to manifest itself into the real world. Soon, a person claiming to be the real Roger is giving speeches in the European Parliament and having an impact in politics, culminating in him breaking free of his creator by defecting from the Tories to UKIP (which, the film implies, may be yet another parody that’s gone too far). Now completely free of his creator’s control, can anything stop Roger Helmer?

The Cast:
Roger Helmer: A CGIed version of Geoffrey Palmer from Fairly Secret Army
Roger’s creator: Craig Roberts
Nigel Farage: Chris Morris

Having last read it six years ago, I have been rereading Anne Frank's diary, the 2003 definitive edition of Het Achterhuis in the original Dutch, which includes the most recently rediscovered pages, and also comparing it page by page with the classic English translation of 1952, The Diary of a Young Girl. I have found some things that really surprised me. I was sufficiently intrigued to also get hold of Anne Frank: The Book, The Life, The Afterlife, by Francine Prose, which has a lot of useful detail on how the Diary came to be written and published (and also some unedifying details about the creation of the Broadway play, the movie, and its use by revisionists, but I recommend it as a book anyway). I'm assuming below that you have read the book and have at least vague memories of it; if not, go and get it now.

The life of the diary

There are three published versions of Anne Frank's diary, each of which has been translated. The best known, and the one you have probably read, is the 1948 edition, translated into English in 1952, which I'm referring to below as the "classic text". However, that text was itself constructed from the original diary entries, partly by Otto Frank and his editors, but mainly by Anne herself.

When the Frank family went into hiding in July 1942, Anne had already started keeping a diary (the "a" text). In early 1944 several things happened which kicked her creativity up a gear. On 6 January she wrote of a vivid dream about a schoolfriend called Peter (who she starts to identify with her housemate Peter van Daan), her two grandmothers and (not for the first time) her friend Lies (real name Hanneli, who the following year actually met up with Anne and Margot Frank in Belsen shortly before the sisters died). The dream marks the starting point for a lot of things in her inner life, including her romantic interest in Peter van Daan.

On 28 March the household heard the Dutch education minister in exile, Gerrit Bolkesteijn, making a radio appeal for people to keep their letters and diaries after the war; by Anne's account, everyone in the room immediately thought of her diary. Anne returned to the "a"-text and started to revise it with a deliberate view to publication, producing the "b"-text. She was averaging 11 large manuscript pages a day over the summer, as her infatuation with Peter van Daan cooled off and she invested her emotional energy into her own work. By the time of her last entry on 1 August, the "b" text was complete from June 1942 to March 1944.

That came to an end on 5 August when the eight fugitives were taken away, seven of them to their deaths; Anne's diary was preserved by their helper Miep Gies, but one of the "a"-text notebooks, covering the entire year of 1943, was lost and has never resurfaced. So for June to December 1942, we have both "a"- and "b"-texts; for December 1942 to December 1943, the "b"-text only; for December 1943 to March 1944, "a"- and "b"-texts again; and for March to August 1944, the "a"-text only.

After the war, Miep Gies gave Otto Frank the diary on the day that he learned his daughters had died in Belsen; though aware of its existence, he had not read it previously. It must have been pretty gruelling for him, but he decided to try to publish it, as that had clearly been Anne's own intention. The "c"-text, which is what we now know as the classic version, is therefore ultimately his choice of material largely from the "b"-text, though he apparently included several "a"-text passages that Anne had deleted in her revisions. He was also constrained by length and by the desire not to give offence to the living. (There remains even now a 24-word section that has never been published, presumably relating to someone who is still alive.)

The 1991 "definitive edition" (subsequently updated to include five new pages) edited by Myriam Pressler, claims to include pretty much everything. Of course it doesn't; where a passage was thoroughly revised by Anne between the "a"- and "b"-text, only one is used, and Pressler doesn't indicate which (though I assume it's usually the "b"-text). Anne's use of Dutch has been tidied up - everyone in the annexe had been born in Germany, and all were native speakers of German, and though they tried to keep to Dutch even at home, the adults in particular often slipped into their native tongue, and it had a bit of an effect on Anne's writing style too.

There is also a "critical edition" from 1989 which presents the "a", "b" and "c" texts in parallel. I am now sufficiently obsessed that I may have to go and buy it, if I can be sure that it has been updated to include the latest findings.

The bakvis and her development

The first thing to say is that, as so often, it is much more rewarding to access the text in the original language. Nine times out of ten, if there's a poorly formed sentence in the Englsh text it's an artefact of the translation. Having said that, Anne's Dutch was fluent and effective but does occasionally veer into stream-of-consciousness, which is tricky to capture, or slang, which is even trickier. One very concrete example of the latter: she refers to herself ten times as a "bakvis", a slightly pejorative word for a younger teenage girl, now I think a bit dated, meaning the kind of fish you would fry for a quick meal. There is no elegant English equivalent. For example, from the 27 March 1943 entry:

Definitive edition (Dutch):	Ik ben dol op mythologie en wel het meest op de Griekse en Romeinse goden. Hier denken ze dat het voorbijgaande neigingen zijn, ze hebben nog nooit van een bakvis met godenappreciaties gehoord. Welnu, dan ben ik de eerste!
Classic English translation:	I’m mad on mythology and especially the Gods of Greece and Rome. They think here that it is just a passing craze, they’ve never heard of an adolescent kid of my age being interested in mythology. Well, then, I shall be the first!

"bakvis" -> "adolescent kid of my age" isn't brilliant but probably the best of a bad set of options (there are a couple of other odd choices in the passage too, "neigingen" -> "craze" and "met godenappreciaties" -> "being interested in mythology", neither of which quite hits the mark).

The received wisdom (because it's more or less what he said he did) is that in the editing process, Otto particularly suppressed Anne's conflicts with her mother, and her thoughts about her own developing body. Actually the main points of her tension with her mother are perfectly fairly represented, and the omitted details of individual quarrels do not always represent Anne's best writing. More titillating is the 24 March entry about exploring her own body, which is really very sweet but perhaps the market wasn't ready for it in the 1950s. ("ik dacht dat de urine uit de kittelaar kwam. Toen ik moeder eens vroeg wat dit doodlopende ding betekende, zei ze dat ze dat niet wist, hè die doet nu ook altijd zo dom!" / "I thought that urine came out of the clitoris. When I asked mother what it was for, she said she didn't know - yeah, right!" I paraphrase that last bit for tone rather than content.) Even so, the 5 January 1944 passage about her friend's breasts was always in the classic translation; I remember reading it as a teenager. There are some less comprehensible but minor editing choices, one of which I will mention later.

The dentist and the boyfriend

My big finding is this. I haven't seen mentioned anywhere else in my (admittedly not very thorough) research that the one person whose reputation really was protected by the original editors of the Diary was the dentist, Alfred Dussel (real name Fritz Pfeffer), who joined the van Daan / van Pels and Frank families several weeks after they had originally gone into hiding, and uncomfortably shared a bedroom with Anne. The sanitisation of his reputation starts with the very first reference to him on 10 November 1942:

Definitive edition (Dutch):	...een tandarts genaamd Alfred Dussel. Hij leeft samen met een veel jongere en leuke christenvrouw, waar hij waarschijnlijk niet mee getrouwd is, maar dat is bijzaak.
Classic English translation:	...a dentist called Albert Dussel, whose wife was fortunate enough to be out of the country when war broke out.
My translation:	...a dentist called Alfred Dussel. He lives with a much younger, very nice Christian woman, who he probably isn't married to, but that doesn't matter.

The English version (and I suspect the first Dutch published text, which I haven't seen) simply lies about Dussel's family situation, and the lie is probably Otto Frank's. The reason is obvious: the "much younger and very nice Christian woman" was still alive after the war, and actually retroactively married Dussel/Pfeffer in 1950 (with effect from 1937 until his death); it's entirely understandable that Otto Frank toned down the references for the sake of her feelings and those of Dussel's son from his first marriage. Here's another passage (from 13 June 1944, so Anne never had a chance to revise it herself) where her disparaging references to Dussel, who had living relatives, but not for Mrs van Daan, whose family had all been killed, were simply removed for the first publication:

Definitive edition (Dutch):	Mevrouw Van Daan en Dussel, m’n voornaamste beschuldigers, staan alletwee bekend als volkomen onintelligent en, laat ik het maar gerust uitspreken, ‘dom’! Domme mensen kunnen het meestal niet verkroppen als anderen iets beter doen dan zijzelf; het beste voorbeeld daarvan zijn inderdaad die twee dommen, mevrouw Van Daan en Dussel.
Classic English translation:	Everyone knows that Mrs. Van Daan, one of my chief accusers, is unintelligent. I might as well put it plainly and say “stupid”. Stupid people usually can’t take it if others do better than they do.
My translation:	Mrs. Van Daan and Dussel, my most vigorous accusers, are both known to be completely unintelligent, I might as well put it plainly and say “stupid”. Stupid people usually can’t take it if others do better than they do; the best example of that is indeed those two fools, Mrs. Van Daan and Dussel.

She also mocks Dussel's accent, most memorably copying his pronuniciaton, "oitschtekend", of the Dutch work "uitstekend" meaning "excellent" (14 and 27 March 1944). Anne's intense dislike of Dussel did not always bring out the best in her, and on the whole suppressing her remarks was a sound editorial decision (one that she probably started herself).

The other plot line that I found the Definitive Edition bringing to light is the start of Anne's relationship with Peter van Daan. It's sparked by a dream, sure, but several very entertaining conversations - about sexing the cat (24 January 1944), about contraceptives (23 March 1944), etc - were dropped from the classic version, and while I can see why this made sense in marketing to the parents of 1950s teenagers, I must say I find it personally much more satisfying to see the detail of how the romance started; and it also helps explain how quickly it fizzled out when Anne realised that actually, Peter wasn't all that bright, and they didn't have much in common apart from being cooped up together.

Changing tone

There are some other odd bits of editing, where the paragraphing is different between the original English version and the Dutch. I've worked on enough manuscripts myself to know how tricky this can be, but in almost every case I find the Dutch version better. Sometimes this leads to a real change of meaning, as in the discussion of Hanukkah presents:

Definitive edition (Dutch):	‘Wil je Anne voor Chanoeka een bijbel geven?’ vroeg Margot wat ontdaan.     ‘Ja... eh, ik denk dat Sint-Nicolaas een betere gelegenheid is,’ antwoordde vader.     Jezus past nu eenmaal niet op Chanoeka.
Classic English translation:	“Do you want to give Anne a Bible for Chanuka?” asked Margot, somewhat perturbed. “Yes— er, I think St. Nicholas Day is a better occasion,” answered Daddy; “Jesus just doesn’t go with Chanuka.”

The words are the same, but the punctuation and paragraphing are not. In the Dutch definitive version, that final sentence is Anne's own reflective afterthought to herself; in the English classic text, it's her father's quip to Margot. Perhaps he simply remembered the incident differently to the way she wrote it.

Another example, in a particularly grim context, is of a real change of text between the two versions in the 9 October 1942 entry about the concentration camps, Anne here reporting what she has heard via Miep Gies and from English radio:

Definitive edition (Dutch):	Westerbork moet vreselijk zijn. De mensen krijgen haast niets te eten laat staan drinken. Er is maar een uur per dag water en een wc en een wastafel voor een paar duizend mensen. Slapen doen ze allemaal door elkaar, mannen, vrouwen en die laatsten en de kinderen krijgen vaak de haren afgeschoren. Vluchten is haast onmogelijk. De mensen zijn gebrandmerkt door hun afgeschoren hoofden en velen ook door hun joodse uiterlijk.     Als ’t in Holland al zo erg is, hoe zullen ze dan in de verre en barbaarse streken leven waar ze heengezonden worden? Wij nemen aan dat de meesten vermoord worden. De Engelse radio spreekt van vergassing, misschien is dat wel de vlugste sterfmethode.     Ik ben helemaal van streek.
Classic English translation:	Westerbork sounds terrible: only one washing cubicle for a hundred people and not nearly enough lavatories. There is no separate accommodation. Men, women, and children all sleep together. One hears of frightful immorality because of this; and a lot of the women, and even girls, who stay there any length of time are expecting babies.     It is impossible to escape; most of the people in the camp are branded as inmates by their shaven heads and many also by their Jewish appearance. If it is as bad as this in Holland, whatever will it be like in the distant and barbarous regions they are sent to? We assume that most of them are murdered. The English radio speaks of their being gassed.     Perhaps that is the quickest way to die. I feel terribly upset.
My translation:	Westerbork sounds terrible. People get almost nothing to eat, let alone drink. There is only one hour of water a day, and one washing cubicle and one lavatory for a couple of thousand people. Men, women, and children all sleep together, and the women and children often have their hair shaved off. It is impossible to escape. The people are branded by their shaven heads and many also by their Jewish appearance.     If it is as bad as this in Holland, however will they live in the distant and barbarous regions they are being sent to? We assume that most of them are murdered. The English radio speaks of their being gassed, maybe that is the quickest way to die.     I feel terribly upset.

These are small but puzzling details. It's probably fair enough to finesse the original description of the sanitary facilities, which were surely bad but not yet quite as bad as the rumours Anne was hearing. The line about immorality and pregnancy in the classic text has no counterpart in the definitive text, and frankly strikes me as unlikely to be by Anne; I look forward to finding out the truth if I get the critical edition. But the most jarring change is that Anne's morbidly sardonic remark about gassing being the quickest way (horrendously ironic, given her own lingering fate in Bergen-Belsen) is disrupted by the classic text, not only into a separate sentence but actually into a separate paragraph, badly breaking up the original flow of her thoughts.

Erasing Anne's feminism

I'm nearly finished, but here's one more surprise. On 13 June 1944, the day after her last birthday, a very long entry was heavily trimmed down for the classic edition. One change, the elimination of mentions of Dussel, has already been noted. The classic edition ends the day with a remark about her period being two months late - which has actually been shifted for some reason from 3 May 1944. The definitive Dutch edition has another two and a half pages for the day (in my Dutch paper copy), one page of love for nature which really powerfully conveys he emotions at being confined to the Achterhuis, and then a page and a half of reflection on the situation on women in society, inspired by reading a book about how antiseptics saved women in childbirth (the first chapter of Men Against Death, by Paul de Kruif, about Ignaz Semmelweis). The bit about nature appears in the classic edition shunted to the following day (which has no entry in the definitive edition); the proto-feminist essay is simply omitted. It's not deep stuff, but it is interesting, and Anne hits a number of nails on the head:

Definitive edition (Dutch):	Het is aan te nemen dat de man door zijn grotere lichaamskracht van begin af aan de heerschappij over de vrouw gevoerd heeft; de man die verdient, de man die de kinderen verwekt, de man die alles mag... Het is dom genoeg van al die vrouwen geweest dat ze tot voor enkele tijd dit maar stil zo door hebben laten gaan, want hoe meer eeuwen deze regel voortleeft, hoe vaster hij ook voet vat.
My translation:	It can be assumed that men dominated women from the very beginning because of their greater physical strength; it’s men who earn a living, beget children and do anything they want… [ellipses in original] Until recently, women silently went along with this, which was stupid, since the longer it’s kept up, the more deeply entrenched it becomes.

It's amazing what you can pick up from a diet of classic literature (mainly by men) and magazines about film stars; and it's a matter for regret that these thoughts, unformed as they may be, were kept from two generations of readers.

In conclusion

Otto Frank had no experience of publishing books and was coming to terms with unspeakable events. If one judges him as a historian, he may not match perfect academic standards. But he was not trying to be a historian; he was trying to commemorate his daughter's memory by completing the work she had started and which he had always encouraged her to do; and there he clearly succeeded. Between them, the meticulously written notebooks have been transformed into something that is still pretty amazing, no matter what language you read it in. Go and check for yourself.history: wwii

(TRIGGER WARNING: Discussion of misogynistic, transphobic and transmisogynistic violence, and transphobia more generally. DISCLAIMER: I’m a cis woman attempting to be vaguely useful; trans people, if I’ve got anything wrong, please do let me know.)

Feminists. I’m not angry, just disappointed. No wait, I’m also angry. As women, we have first-hand experience of oppression under patriarchy. As feminists, we understand how sexist men react when we point out that, well, society as it stands really isn’t all that fair. They mock, derail, try out all the usual tropes to avoid taking any responsibility for the problem, and/or losing any of their current male privilege. We’ve seen and heard it all before. We’ve questioned ourselves. We’ve learned how to not defer to them every time, we’ve learned to spot and dismantle those tropes as they appear. Basically, I’d like to think we know our stuff when it comes to how privilege and oppression works. So why is it that I keep seeing feminists go on to use those very same tactics to avoid taking responsibility for cis privilege and transphobia?

I’m going to use both the terms “transphobe” and “TERF”, so it may be helpful first to properly differentiate between the two. Transphobes are cis people who hate, and/or perpetuate the oppression of, trans people. TERF stands for Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists – basically, TERFs are transphobic feminists who use feminism to deflect criticism for their transphobia. Not all transphobes are TERFs, not all feminists (or radfems) are TERFs, but all TERFs are transphobic and all TERFs purport to be feminists. And no, “TERF” is not a slur. Slurs are words used against the oppressed group to remind them of their place, their historical oppression, the power that the slur-user has over them; in many ways, slurs are a threat. The word “TERF” does not remind TERFs of their historical oppression by trans people, because that oppression obviously does not exist. The word “TERF” simply reminds TERFs that they’re transphobic, and a lot of people seriously don’t agree with them. You know how misogynists don’t like being called misogynists? That’s the same reaction that’s happening here.

[Image description: A Venn diagram labelled “transphobes” on the left, “feminists” on the right, and “TERFs” in the middle]

In feminist circles (pun not intended…) the fight against transphobia tends to be focused on TERFs, so they respond with things like “but it’s not just us!” and “what about THOSE transphobes?”. I’ll look at that response in more detail later, but for now, suffice to say that many TERFs have media platforms, which means they have a great influence over others (particularly other feminists), and in many cases they are presented as the face of mainstream feminism, so other feminists have to work hard to ensure that trans women feel safe and are included in the feminist movement, and this of course requires standing up to the TERFs. Weirdly, despite being feminists, TERFs tend to use many of the same arguments as sexist men…

Misogynists: “I got told this was “misogynistic”! The “patriarchy” isn’t real!”
Transphobes: “part of a worrying pattern of intimidation and silencing of individuals whose views are deemed “transphobic” or “whorephobic”.”
The latter is, of course, a direct quote from That Free Speech Letter (which also attacked sex workers, because attacking trans people apparently wasn’t enough). Putting words in quote marks doesn’t make the concepts behind them any less real. Calling words “made-up” is futile too, because that’s true of all words.

Misogynists: “Not all men are like that”
Transphobes: “Not all cis people are like that”
TERFs: “Not all radfems are like that”
Who cares? Stop talking about how you’re Definitely Not Like That and start speaking out against those who are Like That. Calling out transphobia is not an attack on all cis people or an attack on all feminists (or radfems), it’s an attack on transphobia and our response as cis people and/or feminists should be to listen and change to avoid transphobia in future.

Misogynists: “But I don’t hate women! What happened was awful, but…”
Transphobes: “But I don’t hate trans people! What happened was awful, but…”
Our society has pushed awful oppressive ideas on us all our lives; even those of us who recognise this fact mess up so many times, because it’s just so normalised. You don’t have to actively hate an oppressed group to perpetuate hate against them; most people perpetuate this hate without realising. Don’t get defensive – look at where you’ve messed up and learn from it.

Misogynists: “And here is a token woman who agrees with me!”
Transphobes: “And here is a token trans person who agrees with me!”
Your one token does not negate the views of the many others disagreeing with them. Trans people are not a hive mind, just as women are not a hive mind.

Misogynists: “How come you’re focusing on women when gender stereotypes hurt everyone?”
Transphobes: “How come you’re identifying as non-binary when the gender binary hurts everyone?”
First I should point out the glaring discrepancy in this comparison: the former is a choice, whereas the latter is not. Having said that, both arguments are based on the same false idea that everyone being affected means that everyone is affected equally. Not true. The gender binary coerces cis people to conform to roles in which very few people (if anyone) actually fit. The gender binary forces trans people to conform to an entire gender which goes directly against who they really are. Trans people are being murdered and abused for not conforming. Men do not experience misogyny. Cis people do not experience transphobia. It’s that simple.

Misogynists: “Hahaha, Tumblr throws a tantrum over every little thing”
Transphobes: “Hahaha, Twitter throws a tantrum over every little thing”
The specific websites aren’t really relevant, they’re just the versions I hear most often from these people; however, what is relevant is that these people are often saying these things on the very websites they’re apparently criticising. Often on Tumblr, “Tumblr” is used as a euphemism for “the various oppressed groups who are making the most of this one space they have to talk about their own experiences”; basically, laughing at “Tumblr” sounds less obviously awful than laughing at women, or trans people, or anyone else who has the sheer audacity to exist whilst not being a cis straight white abled man. Substitute “Tumblr” for “Twitter” and you’ve got every tweet from a TERF over the past week laughing at how “Twitter” gets angry so easily. And for the record, “little things” aren’t quite so little when you’re actually experiencing them.

Misogynists: “Stop whining about sexist articles, what about women in other countries who can’t vote or work outside the home?” (usually accompanied by a load of racism too)
Transphobes: “Stop whining about transphobic articles, what about the mass murder of trans women?”
TERFs: “Stop whining about us, what about transphobic men/male violence?”
This week, several cis people have basically accused trans people of not caring about themselves enough. Really not okay. Usually, the person making this argument only ever raises the “bigger problem” when making this argument; they don’t care themselves, they just want the people calling them out to shut up. Aside from that, someone else’s bigotry doesn’t magically make yours okay, even if it is less violent. In fact, so-called “harmful views” are exactly that, harmful – transphobia perpetuates violence against trans people, just as misogynist men don’t have to be physically violent themselves to perpetuate violence against women. I’ve included the specific TERF argument I’ve seen everywhere because although it has the same basis as the first two statements, it’s wrong on a few extra levels; TERFs are being focused on because trans people and other feminists want to make the feminist movement safe for and inclusive of trans people, and because the TERFs are themselves focusing on hating trans people (trans women in particular) rather than combating male violence and/or using their cis privilege to confront transphobic men, plus many feminists and trans activists aren’t focusing on the “bigger problem” right now because the TERFs have caused harm which now needs to be undone.

Misogynists: “Focusing on violence against women is giving women special treatment, what about this other issue that affects us *all*?”
TERFs: “Focusing on transmisogynistic murders is giving trans women special treatment, what about this other form of sexism that affects *all* women?”
Nobody should have to wait their turn to be seen as full humans with full human rights. Nobody should have to wait their turn to not be murdered at an horrifying rate. Just because an issue doesn’t affect you personally doesn’t mean it isn’t important or urgent.

Misogynists: “Feminists are so angry and irrational, you can’t have an objective debate with them.”
Transphobes: “Trans people and their allies are so angry and irrational, you can’t have an objective debate with them.”
Nobody should have to debate their own rights, their own experiences, their own life, every single day. It’s much easier to stay calm, civil, patient and polite when you’re not the one whose existence is on trial. The experience of the dominant group isn’t objective; to say it is perpetuates the idea of the dominant group as the norm. Women are constantly dismissed for being irrational and emotional, putting us on the defensive whilst the initial misogyny goes without comment or criticism. Feminists must surely know how that feels. It really confuses and saddens me that some feminists, having experienced this themselves, go on to inflict it on others anyway.

Misogynists: “Men won’t listen to you if you’re this hostile all the time!”
Transphobes: “Cis people won’t listen to you if you’re this hostile all the time!”
Except they won’t listen if you’re nice, either, because to many of these people, “nice” means “quiet and compliant”. Sometimes this is twisted into “people just want to learn and you’re just driving them away”. Strangely, that argument only ever appears after somebody has either been malicious from the start or outright refused to listen after being called out. People who just want to learn, well, they listen, and learn, without major drama, and it goes unnoticed.

Misogynists: “You hurt my feelings! Apologise for pointing out that sexism just then!”
Transphobes: “You hurt my feelings! Apologise for pointing out that transphobia just then!”
The hurt feelings of the oppressed group – the ones attacked in the first place, and in the context of being attacked constantly – never come into the equation, because the harm done to them is normal, not noteworthy.

Misogynists: “I know I’ll get criticised for this, but *is sexist* LOOK AT HOW BRAVE I AM FOR SAYING THE THING FEMINISTS DON’T WANT ME TO SAY”
Transphobes: “I know I’ll get criticised for this, but *is transphobic* LOOK AT HOW BRAVE I AM FOR STANDING UP TO THE TRANS BULLIES”
See also the racist “we’re not allowed to talk about immigration” trope, when in fact that’s ALL the person is talking about. The idea of this is to frame the oppressed group as a powerful mob who somehow control us all; and yet, mysteriously, the “silenced” views are everywhere whilst the “dominant”, “bullying” views are rarely heard at all.

Misogynists: “Criticism and boycotts by feminists are taking away my freedom of speech!”
Transphobes: “Criticism and boycotts by trans people are taking away my freedom of speech!”
The Freeze Peach trope has been done to death already, and I discussed it only a couple of weeks ago. But take a look at this. Here is an interview with Dapper Laughs – yep, apparently he’s still a thing – in The Independent today (TW: rape). Look at what he says, and compare it with That Free Speech Letter. The gist of the arguments is terrifying similar. Actual literal Dapper Laughs, for crying out loud. Need I say anymore?

So there you have it – right now, certain feminists are starting to sound a lot like the misogynists they’re supposed to be countering, without a hint of irony or self-awareness. Identifying as a feminist does not absolve you of transphobia, no matter how you frame it. TERFs call it feminism, but this is not the kind of feminism that I want to be a part of.

Tagged: feminism, free speech, lgbtqia, no-platform, terfs, transphobia

“The devil is a human dream, a dream of the human, and that’s what makes him frightening,” Matthew Cheney writes at Press Play in the introduction to a fun short video surveying portrayals of the devil in film.

It’s a terrific video and a fine little essay, but like most people Cheney gets this backwards. He writes as though the devil were a character from the Bible who was later portrayed in movies. That’s not true. The devil is a character from movies who was later projected into the Bible.

The Bible gives us little more than a name or a title. We supply the rest. We read that name or title and we bring to it a vast panoply of connotations and associations that the writers of the text could never have imagined. We see the word “Satan” and, for us, it means 10,000 things it did not and could not have meant to the biblical writers. Our understanding of that word comes from elsewhere — from movies, TV, novels, poetry, folk tales, folk songs, apocryphal pseudo-Gospels and ideas stolen or borrowed from other religions.

Cheney’s infernal montage captures a key aspect of this cultural creation of the devil in that he doesn’t just include high-brow arty films made with lofty literary ambition. He also includes things like Little Nicky, Bedazzled, the South Park movie, and Vincent Price camping it up in The Story of Mankind.

That matters because Vincent Price is theologically significant. Price wore a devilish goatee that made him look like Satan. How do we know that’s what Satan looks like? We learned it from Vincent Price — and from a thousand other pop-culture and folk-culture figures preceding him.

Price carries a pitchfork — a red one, of course. That tells the audience that he’s the devil. What does a pitchfork have to do with the devil? Simple: It’s what we always see him carrying in movies. The pitchfork simultaneously references those folk traditions and reinforces them for future audiences.

But these pop-culture portrayals also reference and reinforce our “theology” of the devil. Sure, most Christians realize that the pitchfork and goatee don’t come from the Bible. But the devilish stuff that most Christians think does come from the Bible cannot be found there either.

Paul Davidson has a terrific discussion of this, “Princes of Darkness: The Devil’s Many Faces in Scripture and Tradition.” He lists five of the “main attributes generally associated” with the devil by Christians today:

1. He is the enemy of God.
2. He is a fallen angel.
3. He is the ruler of all the demons.
4. He is the ultimate source of all sin and evil on earth.
5. He is the ruler of Hell.

Some of those have been elevated to the status of dogma. Others are just Stuff Everybody Just Kinda Knows.

Davidson notes that the Hebrew scriptures don’t support any of those five points, while the New Testament only provides a bit of support for three of them. Those New Testament references, though, don’t so much teach these things as they do refer to such beliefs as ideas widely held. The Bible mentions and sometimes builds on such beliefs, but it does not introduce them — it is not their source.

The source of these beliefs lies outside the Christian and Jewish scriptures. As Davidson summarizes:

The popular Christian image of the Devil finds its roots in numerous ancient, unrelated theological strands. The two most important seem to be the Enochic story of the fallen angels (Watchers) influenced by Genesis and Greek mythology, and the highly dualistic Jewish theology that developed in the second and first centuries BCE under Zoroastrian influence. These ideas eventually coalesced around the figure of the Accuser who appears briefly in three books of the Old Testament. No systematic demonology can be found in the New Testament, but later theologians and writers fleshed out the ideas that are now considered to be a core part of “traditional” Christianity, including Satan’s origin as the angel Lucifer, his prideful rebellion, his banishment from Heaven to Hell, his involvement in the Fall, his authority over demonic forces, his role in mischief and misfortune, and so on.

Thousands of years ago, the idea of the devil was shaped by things like “The Book of the Watchers” and “The Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs.” It was filtered through Zoroastrianism, through Islam, through Dante and Milton.

And now, today, the idea of the devil is mainly shaped by movies and TV. The character of The Devil has 1,126 appearances in his IMDB filmography. That’s about twice as many as Jesus has — and it doesn’t even include the multitude of stories that mention or discuss demons and devils without including the Prince of Darkness as an onscreen character.

We started making movies about the devil pretty much as soon as we figured out how to make movies. Here’s Georges Méliès in his 1901 or 1902 short The Devil and the Statue — one of at least five times the pioneer filmmaker portrayed the devil in the early years of cinema:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Méliès seems more interested there in inventing new camera effects (check out the disappearing cloak at around 1:13 in that video) than in the actual story — a moralistic little vignette of divine protection against the wiles of the tempter. But this is, nonetheless, a theological document.

That movie — like the 1,126 others listed on IMDB — is a point on a line that begins with 1 Enoch, runs through Dante and Milton and Robert Johnson and Vincent Price, and continues now on the pages of Charismanews, where all of these centuries of stories and folklore are presented and re-presented as dogma and the “biblical truth” about Satan.

 

Longtime readers know that I’ve made a bit of an effort to help people understand, and perhaps even grow to respect, the Everett or Many-Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics (MWI) . I’ve even written papers about it. It’s a controversial idea and far from firmly established, but it’s a serious one, and deserves serious discussion.

Which is why I become sad when people continue to misunderstand it. And even sadder when they misunderstand it for what are — let’s face it — obviously wrong reasons. The particular objection I’m thinking of is:

MWI is not a good theory because it’s not testable.

It has appeared recently in this article by Philip Ball — an essay whose snidely aggressive tone is matched only by the consistency with which it is off-base. Worst of all, the piece actually quotes me, explaining why the objection is wrong. So clearly I am either being too obscure, or too polite.

I suspect that almost everyone who makes this objection doesn’t understand MWI at all. This is me trying to be generous, because that’s the only reason I can think of why one would make it. In particular, if you were under the impression that MWI postulated a huge number of unobservable worlds, then you would be perfectly in your rights to make that objection. So I have to think that the objectors actually are under that impression.

An impression that is completely incorrect. The MWI does not postulate a huge number of unobservable worlds, misleading name notwithstanding. (One reason many of us like to call it “Everettian Quantum Mechanics” instead of “Many-Worlds.”)

Now, MWI certainly does predict the existence of a huge number of unobservable worlds. But it doesn’t postulate them. It derives them, from what it does postulate. And the actual postulates of the theory are quite simple indeed:

1. The world is described by a quantum state, which is an element of a kind of vector space known as Hilbert space.
2. The quantum state evolves through time in accordance with the Schrödinger equation, with some particular Hamiltonian.

That is, as they say, it. Notice you don’t see anything about worlds in there. The worlds are there whether you like it or not, sitting in Hilbert space, waiting to see whether they become actualized in the course of the evolution. Notice, also, that these postulates are eminently testable — indeed, even falsifiable! And once you make them (and you accept an appropriate “past hypothesis,” just as in statistical mechanics, and are considering a sufficiently richly-interacting system), the worlds happen automatically.

Given that, you can see why the objection is dispiritingly wrong-headed. You don’t hold it against a theory if it makes some predictions that can’t be tested. Every theory does that. You don’t object to general relativity because you can’t be absolutely sure that Einstein’s equation was holding true at some particular event a billion light years away. This distinction between what is postulated (which should be testable) and everything that is derived (which clearly need not be) seems pretty straightforward to me, but is a favorite thing for people to get confused about.

Ah, but the MWI-naysayers say (as Ball actually does say), but every version of quantum mechanics has those two postulates or something like them, so testing them doesn’t really test MWI. So what? If you have a different version of QM (perhaps what Ted Bunn has called a “disappearing-world” interpretation), it must somehow differ from MWI, presumably by either changing the above postulates or adding to them. And in that case, if your theory is well-posed, we can very readily test those proposed changes. In a dynamical-collapse theory, for example, the wave function does not simply evolve according to the Schrödinger equation; it occasionally collapses (duh) in a nonlinear and possibly stochastic fashion. And we can absolutely look for experimental signatures of that deviation, thereby testing the relative adequacy of MWI vs. your collapse theory. Likewise in hidden-variable theories, one could actually experimentally determine the existence of the new variables. Now, it’s true, any such competitor to MWI probably has a limit in which the deviations are very hard to discern — it had better, because so far every experiment is completely compatible with the above two axioms. But that’s hardly the MWI’s fault; just the opposite.

The people who object to MWI because of all those unobservable worlds aren’t really objecting to MWI at all; they just don’t like and/or understand quantum mechanics. Hilbert space is big, regardless of one’s personal feelings on the matter.

Which saddens me, as an MWI proponent, because I am very quick to admit that there are potentially quite good objections to MWI, and I would much rather spend my time discussing those, rather than the silly ones. Despite my efforts and those of others, it’s certainly possible that we don’t have the right understanding of probability in the theory, or why it’s a theory of probability at all. Similarly, despite the efforts of Zurek and others, we don’t have an absolutely airtight understanding of why we see apparent collapses into certain states and not others. Heck, you might be unconvinced that the above postulates really do lead to the existence of distinct worlds, despite the standard decoherence analysis; that would be great, I’d love to see the argument, it might lead to a productive scientific conversation. Should we be worried that decoherence is only an approximate process? How do we pick out quasi-classical realms and histories? Do we, in fact, need a bit more structure than the bare-bones axioms listed above, perhaps something that picks out a preferred set of observables?

All good questions to talk about! Maybe someday the public discourse about MWI will catch up with the discussion that experts have among themselves, evolve past self-congratulatory sneering about all those unobservable worlds, and share in the real pleasure of talking about the issues that matter.

(Hoisted from comments on Tom’s thread re-exploring LP-listening in the age of the no-longer moored individual song)

So Tom had put Sketches of Spain by Miles Davis on his list, and in response the thread had discussed the mechanics of politics of tokenism: some idea how and why SoS so often ends up as a rock or pop listener’s one trusty jazz LP, and some suggestions as to better candidates. Inevitably, I ended up getting pre-emptively grumpy about Miles’s Kind of Blue, and was called on this. What’s my actual beef with KoB? And, given this beef, where I would I suggest starting? These were my semi-mulled thoughts, tidied up, with extras added, and responses to responses further down…)

My basic beef with Kind of Blue:
the short version (set out at speed) is i suppose this: that it is a sly, niggling, jittery record of odd subtle hard-to-pin-down not-very-nice emotions and evocations, which depends for its expressive intent on the listener having a pretty solid familiarity with the music of its day and what went before, for its devices and effects to come across properly (most famously the introduction of the modal approach to harmony, the details and purpose of which i’ve watched seriously learned and articulate musicians struggle to explain coherently or usefully)

and yet it has somehow become the stand-alone representative of the form it is on the whole sardonically setting itself against: something about the way it’s been made — its constituent parts, its presentation — exactly and completely masks this subtly hostile aspect of it, to the extent that it’s instead become a kind of nice-to-hear-in-the-background chill-out classic, which in my opinion suggests a flaw in its conception or execution: that it can’t (or anyway doesn’t) draw the newbie into its darker heart

i don’t think it’s bland or diluted, exactly the opposite — but there’s something about it that allows it to be excerpted from its somewhat snidey role in a larger conversation, and set up on a plinth that puts the rest of this conversation into shadow if not oblivion… which annoys me! miles was never not an argumentative man: he disliked a lot of the work his peers were making, but this almost always meant he came round to his own version of this work by another route

if my musicological chops were less rusty i’d write this up in more detail — tho if/when i attempt this will probably then merge itself into my long-awaited ever-expanding epic dissection of rattle and hum (the “angel of harlem” volume) –:D

[Expanding a bit: i don’t think it's an accident the record’s called KIND OF blue, or that the first song is called “so what”; i think there's deliberate misdirection going on. In one sense Miles remained the black face of the cool school, its prior enabler -- but the cool school was already controversial by the mid-50s, as a whitening of jazz (on-stage as well as conceptually) and Miles never had much time for the way his own (white) fans understood his music. I think there’s mindfuck going on here -- it’s never been a record I can just put on in the background -- and it’s not as he wasn't above sledging his own sidemen, even the loyal, long-term ones. Plus he favoured elision and ellipsis temperamentally -- he was never a flamboyant virtuoso and from time to time had harsh things to say about this side of jazz (Coltrane didn’t know when to take the sax out of his mouth etc; various beloved maximalist figures were “greedy”). So to me this is totally a problematic candidate for an “all you need to know is here, and hey! it’s ME!” (quite apart from the fact that this sentence is even less in the spirit of jazz in any era than the idea that composed or recorded contributions best typify it). Besides, there isn’t an era of the jazz he lived through that Miles wasn’t at odds with as he lived through it -- which is not an uninteresting fact, but it does mean that you have to know something about what he might be at odds with in any given moment to follow where he's taking it. And he sure as shit isn’t going to talk you through this dimension: he’s much more likely to remove explanatory props than supply them, just as he did with musicians, getting the performances he wanted not by discursive exploration among equals, but by undermining headfuck, borderline bullying, and sustained personal opacity. He is a great man! But he is neither a direct nor a generous artist; and much of his direction is counter-direction.]

The issue of homework:
Not unreasonably, Tommy Mack came back and asked if I was therefore saying that to understand jazz, you have to arrive (as tommy’s brother insists) with a well informed ear (implication: to understand any of it, you have first to listen carefully to the entirety of jazz in the historical order it was made). This isn’t quite what I meant.

i should add that my general view is not your brother’s! i don’t think you need to do lots of homework before jumping into jazz at any point other than the start: but i also think there are good and bad records to jump in at, and kind of blue is — for me, for the reasons given, not a good one (not least because it seems to end up being the first AND ONLY for so many ppl, which is i think telling)

i tried to put together a quick list of records that would be better places to start in roughly this era — obviously this cleaves to my own tastes (no coltrane) but i don’t think any of these are these days controversial or quirky or contrarian; all of them are strong and striking just in themselves, obviously you get more out of them if you do know more (this is true of everything) but you don’t need a run up.

Adding: what this list attempts to do is provide better routes into the whole of jazz, with the proviso that we’re starting from roughly this point, viz c.1956-64, rather than say 1921-29 or 1935-45 or 1967-75. All of these other startpoints are fine (any startpoint is fine!): all of them will run into their own difficulties. My task here is to outline and endrun the specific difficulties that starting with a LP from c.1956-64 likely runs into. In particular this means any given suggestion has to take into account salient issues in the jazz of the day, trends and beefs and so on, without assuming the newbie listener has any sense of same or orientation within same: in terms of immediate interest and (if you listen closely and often) exploration and development, the records present as stand-alone; you can learn everything you need to know, provided you’re alert and patient and have a goodish natural sense of aural recognition. They’re kind of a beginner’s portal and an advanced masterclass rolled into one. The list is down-page: before I get to it I’ve tried to flesh out my decision-making.

[this^^^ par edited a little on 21.2.15 in light of enitharmon’s comments below: it was clearer in the original discussion than it is here that i absolutely think there are multiple routes into jazz -- including hers! which was listening to live jazz as a kid made by people she knew! -- and that this exercise is about minimising the obstacles and maximising the potential if you decide to enter jazz via this specific portal]

Format wars!
The key development — the arrival in 1948 of the 33-third vinyl long-playing microgroove record — is discussed in the comments on the earlier thread, by me here and (somewhat argumentatively) here and here: I won’t c&p this here tho by all means request or initiate discussion (and disagreement!) in the comments below. Columbia’s reasons for the new format were better sound (vinyl is less brittle and more durable than shellac) and longer playing time (the microgroove fit more playing onto the same 12 inches; the initial vibrations were smaller so had to be amplified much more, but not-quite-paradoxically this also allowed for more subtlety of variation to be picked up by the new diamond needle). Columbia initially had the new format in mind for classical audiences bored with getting up 6-8 times per symphony to flip or change a 78: and while it offered great potential for jazz musicians to spread out and explore, a particular peril arrived with this — essential that the “serious content” arrived in hock to the values and listening habits of middlebrow classical listeners. Improvisers were already playing creative games — in far more curtailed listening spaces — with echo and anticipation, variation and juxtaposition, so the greater space and complexity wasn’t itself a surprise: but there was a danger that the imposition of classical form was obscuring the value already there. And of course jazz from the teens to the 40s had been brash, because cutting through the noise of a nightclub or a scratchy 78 surface was essential to being heard. Vinyl allowed you to play softly also: sonority or arrangement luxuriated in this new velvety richness of possibility; if quietness was never mistaken for quality, its absence was sometimes taken as a lack of it.

(No accident — as Ward Fowler gently jokes below — that bachelor pad loungecore also started here.)

Against the cool
Sometime around 1957, musician-scholar Gunther Schuller coined the term “third stream” to categorise music that (as a later time would put it) explored a fusion of classical and jazz elements. Now “classical” potentially covers all composed music from Gesualdo to Varèse; jazz by the mid-50s included everything from King Oliver up to if not quite including Cecil Taylor; Schuller had a more delimited territory in mind, hard to pin down w/o getting deeper into the weeds than I plan to here (he definitely saw it as covering Ellington and Strayhorn as well as Charles Mingus). Still — enabled by the new technology (and by the ever-increasing numbers of non-self-taught jazzbos who’d had first-class musical educations: Miles himself went to Juilliard, tho of course he also dropped out before completing his studies) — this was an encounter that was bound to happen; and one that was bound to get intensely politicised, in the era of civil rights struggle and the beginning of the drawing down of legal segregation in the US. On one hand, jazz was “black” and classical was “white’; on the other, there should be no bar wharever to black musicians entering white cultural enclaves, and presumably vice versa; on the third (problematic) hand, white musicians playing what was considered half-assed pseudo-classical jazz seemed to getting the lion’s share of the attention, the approval and the paycheques. (Brubeck as first jazzer on the cover of Time magazine was very much a “zap! bam! comics are not just for kids anymore!” type phenom, for example, marking the apparent enthronement of the cool school as the one that entailed genuine grown-up seriousness worthy of yr sunday arts supp attention…)

Schuller had proposed the term (at least in part) to take some of the political heat out of underlying situation: classical and jazz dudes were both getting territorial about experiments in combination that they felt were encroaching on the excellence of their favoured side. A third recognised zone could perhaps evolve in its own pace at its own way without threatening to spill over into and taint anyone’s considered values. And several figures in Miles’s various projects were good Schullerites and active Third Streamers. Pianist John Lewis had been a key player-composer in Miles’s original Birth of the Cool sessions (he’d co-founded the Modern Jazz Quartet in 1952; in 1960 the MJQ put out a collection called Third Stream Music). Teo Macero had worked with Schuller and Lewis before he teamed up with Miles.

Schuller was/is a front-rank musicologist and historian: always worth reading even when his tastes (or tone) bug you. If he wanted to act as an aesthetic peacemaker, though, he was hopelessly naive. Too much rankled; too many felt shut out. As styles, hard bop and soul jazz both functioned as resistance to the alleged deracination of cool or third stream (but also sometimes fallback and retreat: as invaluable training grounds for many excellent players who only flourished and found themselves after they left). Long story short: an LP from either side of this divide selected as a route into all jazz requires a better history lesson than ^^^this of the divide to operate as introduction; a self-consciously “third stream” item even more so.

The prisonhouse of harmony (a bit technical tho I’m doing my best that it not be)
If you’ve read Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon (or watched the middle two Pirates of the Caribbean movies), you’ll recognise the idea that the imposition on the entire globe of the full latitude-longitude grid changed the nature of travel-as-flight-out: in a very real sense, an adventurer always now knew where they were, and could increasingly draw on reliable accounts of what they’d find there. Quests became a matter more of careful pre-planning — and filling in small gaps on the map — than leaps into the unknown: and the tenor of the tales that followed changed along with this.

Something not dissimilar happened in music: twice, actually. In the 17th century, the 24 Preludes and Fugues of the Well-Tempered Klavier, J.S.Bach had helped establish the latitude-longitude grid for tuning and travels in harmony; by Wagner’s day, the adventures had changed in nature, PotC-style. Previous tuning systems had exactly tuned the home key (usually C major) by the cycle of fifths method; this meant meant that distant keys (like F# major) sounded super-weird, all its proportions wrong. Bach had pioneered a system of conventional mistunings and adjustments that allowed every key to sound in tune — each with its distinctive nudged flavour — and thus allowed harmonic modulation within quite short pieces to take you to remote keys without breaking the extant rules. The extant rules provided a logic within which note and chord choices were made; and thus a context of games with anticipation; expected directions and therefore surprise directions. By the mid 19th century, Wagner had demonstrated you could effectively demonstrate musically that every possible broken modulation rule was in effect a shortcut for a properly constructed route — you could dab in the clues if you liked, but a smart theorist could also supply them afterwards — and so the rules no longer presented composition with the spur of the Fruitful Obstacle or the challenge of a problem-solving. Every direction was now equally OK: and therefor no fun. Whatever you did (in terms of the exploration of harmony) you were still somewhere known on the map (and in fact, composition increasingly moved to explore sonority, which had no such in-built logics).

As its harmonic basis, jazz had inherited the pragmatic aftermath of European composition: composers like Ellington or Strayhorn or Gershwin were well versed in Debussy and Greig and so on. Popsongs were melodies with association chord progressions; improvisation increasingly explored the potential for chord substitions and alterations, and agile darting and leaping around the various spaces this allowed (a lot of bop tunes were essentially well known songs reworked — Bird’s “Koko” famously based on Ray Noble’s “Cherokee”, for example). But in the aftermath of bebop, a not-dissimilar impasse had been reached — the conventional range of altered chords so large, and the networked cycle of connections so pre-explored — that musicians began to feel they were merely glued into reruns. There didn’t seem to be an “out” anymore.

This is one of the reasons that Ornette Coleman’s free jazz project was so startling — exciting for some, terrifying and enraging for others. From the start he was a player with an endlessly melodic invention, a gorgeous ear for the expressively bent blue note at any point on the scale, and an effortless swing. Plus: completely uninterested in harmony as it’s understood in the two paragraphs above. He just somehow stepped entirely outside the self-imposed prison, and from Free Jazz (1960), the New Thing followed him en masse (a couple of players, notably Cecil Taylor, were there before him, though they got there by a very different route).

My contention is that (on the whole) to choose a post-Free Jazz New Thing LP is to make the route back to the earlier history of jazz something that requires a whole lot of in-fill explanation (as above, but, y’know, comprehensible). Which makes it a bad stand-alone start off point: because post-Free Jazz any New Thing thing is part of a larger conversation — a trend that’s also an argument, political as well as aesthetic. Does this stricture apply to Ornette himself? SEE BELOW :D

[adding (edit made six hours after posting): the modal approach to harmony found in Kind of Blue is *also* an escape route out of the exact same prisonhouse of harmony, albeit a less startling one than ornette’s leap into outer space -- roughly speaking (bcz there is no room in this margin for an adequate description/explanation) modal organisation is what came before “classical” harmony evolved: versions of it can be heard in the polyphonic church music of the 15th and 16th centuries, though this doesn’t help make deep sense of KoB really, except to underline its hidden peculiarities…]

Sociology: Biography | Politics

If there’s one thing that distinguishes the discursive jazz aesthetic of the 50s and early 60s from the the discursive rock aesthetic of the late 60s and after, it’s the issue of the role of the backstory (whether personal or social). Rock was never not also about stagecraft and performance, and (most importantly) the treatment of the public image (in print and on-screen) as a central part of the project (if not the most important part): before LeRoi Jones’s Blues People (1963) and A.B.Spellman’s Four Lives in the Bebop Business (1966), very little jazz discussion operated in this territory (Jones, or Amiri Baraka as he later became, is a hugely important writer for rock critics like Richard Meltzer or Lester Bangs). So again: I’ve looked for releases that don’t depend on this kind of backstory to establish their value, because in effect, from this specific era, I think it’s a bit anachronistic.

Jazz Expansive | Jazz Reductive | Jazz Evasive

I’ve dodged away from items in the second two categories. Hard bop or cool jazz would be jazz reductive, because only “representative” if you add explanatory context or other material not there in the groove — including records in the opposing camp. And later Miles — In a Silent Way (1969) or On the Corner (1972), both of which I adore — are jazz evasive: by then, Miles was off on his own exploring (and anticipating) other territories. This is my list of jazz expansive: if you start here, and listen well, you find yourself taken out into a larger world, and learning a little how to navigate that world, and respond to what else you find.

Anyway here (at last) is my actual list!

i:sonny rollins: saxophone colossus (prestige, 1957) [1]
ii: ornette coleman: the shape of jazz to come (atlantic, 1959) [2]
iii: charles mingus: mingus ah um (columbia, 1959) [3]
iv: oliver nelson: the blues and the abstract truth (impulse!, 1961) [4]
v: roland kirk: we free kings (mercury, 1961) [5]
vi: lee konitz: motion (verve, 1961) [6]
vii: eric dolphy: out to lunch (blue note, 1964) [7]

1 (colossus): rollins is possibly actually the player i’m most circumspect abt saying you can come to cold and get something out of, bcz (a) i came really late to him, and (b) actually maybe prefer way out west myself, which is a complex and playful argument abt quarrels in jazz in the late 50s (and authenticity! which it teases!) [adding: the west in the title tweaks at the fact that the the cool/anticool tussles fell into a west/east coast split]. rollins has enormous knowledge of the history of jazz (and other musics) so he always is talking about them, but i don’t think you have to bring any of this with you yourself, i think you can begin learning it from him! (others may disagree…) (miles by contrast is a really tricky place to start learning abt the rest of jazz, he has OPINIONS and a MANIPULATIVE AGENDA —> not that these are bad, quite the reverse, but caveat the newbie listener)

2 (shape): originally i went with ornette on tenor here, the first ornette i owned myself, but it is more of an oddity i suppose [adding plus free jazz]. — i am very fond of it though; ornette’s desired title for the shape of jazz to come was focus on sanity, haha x0x0 never change dude (he is probably my favourite player of all, forever) — if all you do is listen to the loveliness of the melodies and the sound and the interplay, you are discovering lots (certainly you don’t need to arrive with an exam passed in harmonic progression)

3 (ah um): kind of a history lesson in itself: mingus when not irascible or sprawling (he’s great when irascible and sprawling also, but keeps it very tight here — and establishes the links to black music that isn’t jazz very effectively); great title, great cover

4 (abstract): nelson probably the least widely known in my list; bcz he afterwards went to LA and mainly composed for the telly — as per the title, yet another stab at the question of how to combine composition, arrangement and the improvised encounter of individuals only just now in a group (a very 50s question, which many returned to), but again, entirely stands on its own; gripping, not least because the modern remaster means the sounds just leaps out and grabs you (i hadn’t listened for ages, just went to find it on spotify)

5 (kings): not yet “rahsaan roland kirk” (he found his extra name in a dream), kirk was blind, a multi-instrumentalist showman (he mastered strange-named instruments like the stritch and devised a means to play three saxes simultaneously), with a dramatising fascination for sound — like mingus (who he played with) he has a deep knowledge of black music history, so you’re learning upfront from him and the homework can come afterwards :) and he can also be wildly and weirdly funny [adding: there's an element in jazz that has its start in forgotten circus-act stunt-music -- the kinds of showman cornet players that louis armstrong originally took off from; the kind of sax that rudy vallee's inspiration rudy weidoeft played; kirk is in this tradition, which maybe sidelined him a bit the way it did the otherwise fairly dissimilar sun ra]

6 (motion): i saw konitz play at one of derek bailey’s company weeks, genuinely one the strangest and startling performances i’ve ever seen (he was way out of his apparent comfort zone — a white cerebral scion of the cool school far out into hardcore improv terrain — except he seemed not only comfy but composedly making more of the adventure than anyone else there); this is not *that* but in a curious way not entirely dissimilar, a deeply reserved man finding a space to make endless reflective plangent shapes

7 (lunch): this is of course the record everyone should have if they only have one :D
[adding: ward f below wonders if it's too demanding to jump right into? i don't believe so, but fair warning i suppose: not least bcz it strikes me that the title is a giveaway joke -- this is music that in one sense has stravinsky and varèse at its back, so yes, it’s “out”, but it’s out in a comfy cheerful way! out to lunch (and then back again…) (and you’re invited!)]

if i were actually to pick a miles i think it wd be live at the plugged nickel — in a silent way is lovely but no longer really “jazz” in the sense wichita and others are puzzling at (contentious i guess, but it’s miles’s own position also). as noted my list skirts the shores of the NEW THING (aka free jazz) without plunging in: like miles post in a silent way, free jazz is just i think a different issue — but it was actually my starting point (i think this is quite often true of ppl arriving from rockier territories), and declares itself more ab novo than it probably actually is (which i didn’t then realise, [ADDING: as also noted, essentially i think that both hard bop (as exemplified by the tireless and inspirational art blakey) and soul jazz (as it wasn’t yet quite being termed?: i mean ppl like horace silver) were retrenchments in the face of the issues of west coast cool and third stream]

quite pleased that i got seven difft labels there — this wasn’t done on purpose!

PUNCTUM: My starting point also, aged about five, when life is a big cartoon and so Ornette etc. were yet more crazy but lovable primary-coloured blocks-o’-fun. Before you fall into the trap of “learning” about anything.*

*”what do you mean, five, you poseur?” My father loved, bought and played the stuff (and Stockhausen, Xenakis &c. on parallel plane) and I listened.**

**but then you get to where I am now and have worked your way back to The Beginning Of Jazz with the starkly delightful revelation: oh, they were doing this kind of stuff from the off!

response: Yes, I completely agree here — a lot of what was presented as avant garde in the 60s actually required LESS backstory than the mainstream (if any), which was a big element in its success. So the new thing is as good a way in as punk would be a generation later: because you were literally being let off doing any homework before you started listening. (The extent to this this is true does vary though: Ornette is easy-entry because he is bypassing the conventions of 40s and 50s jazz harmony; Coltrane by contrast is absorbing and mastering and transforming them — all of them — which means you are certainly missing something if you haven’t absorbed at least some of them.) (It’s the apparent setting aside of generations of achievement in black music that tasks Wynton Marsalis, incidentally: he believes that the New Thing casually dispensed with decades of accreted value, as if it had never happened.) You can indeed hear all the connections and echoes if you go back by choice and plunge into the early music — and as punctum says that’s a good thing to do — but there’s an element of the rhetoric surrounding the New Thing that sometimes maybe discourages this? The kind of tone that allowed ppl to call Armstrong an Uncle Tom or a sellout :(

LENA: An American quartet called Mostly Other People Do The Killing (they are good and funny, yes humor does belong in jazz) have done a note-for-note cover of Kind Of Blue, which I am more & more intrigued by (like my mom I like things like Miles Smiles and Miles Ahead). A big co-sign from me on Sonny Rollins, as he once said that jazz is the umbrella that all other musics stand under, and his music proves it. Way Out West is great, but then so is The Bridge…

response: I’m delighted ppl are repping for Way Out West, but as noted I do think it requires a bit of homework/backstory in the disputes between west coast/east coast style, and even the cool jazz vs soul jazz factions, to get the context of the jokes, and the territories Rollins is blasting off out of. The issue of cover versions of entire LPs continues to intrigue me: why doesn’t this happen more often? (c.f. also newly performed versions of Stockhausen’s electronic pieces…)

TOMMY MACK: My dad too had a load of jazz and avant stuff though he rarely played it, having settled, by the 80s, into a dadrock diet of Joe Cooker, Eric Clapton and Dire Straits. He definitely played me On The Corner and In A Silent Way, possibly Bitches Brew and Live Evil too. I remember being intrigued but clearly not enough to return to them much. He was a big John McLaughlin fan and definitely played me a couple of Mahavishnu Orchestra albums which I tried to get into, being similarly awestruck by McLaughlin’s guitar playing but I found their sound harsh and ugly and their music impenetrable at the time. He also played me John Cage, possibly Stockhausen, definitely Steve Reich, who I found most interesting (It’s Gonna Rain sticks in my head – this must have been much later once I had re-embraced dance music as I remember hearing parallels with phase stuff DJs were doing). For the most part I plumped for the more rock/pop stuff in the parental record collection (Beefheart, Modern Lovers, Chuck Berry, Who, Zep, Atomic Rooster from my Dad, Nilsson and Nat King Cole from my mum, Beatles from both)

What I did haven’t mentioned is that in our late teens, my brother and I used to go to live jazz all the time. It was mainly dancing to jazz-funk at Dancehouse Cafe Bar but the odd sit-down modern jazz gig too. We were stoned most nights. While I don’t want to sound like a tedious weed enthusiast (haven’t smoked it for years) for a bit it definitely helped me absorb myself in rich and complicated music.

response: No comment re weed, except to say it’s never played a part in my own listening habits. There’s a big book still to be written here, about which drug-of-choice nurtures what music, and how much this is actually significant. Jazz is of course full of drunks and dopers and junkies. I am not the person to write it :)

WARD FOWLER: Yes! to Way Out West over Saxophone Colossus. Yes! to Blues and the Abstract Truth – EVERYBODY likes that when they hear it. Hmmm to Out to Lunch, because in my experience ppl who are new to jazz find it quite difficult to get to grips with – in some ways those semi-free Blue Note albs of the early-to-mid 60s are more daunting – abstract, elusive – than the fire-breathing stuff like Spiritual Unity. Yes! to Motion: just as the Nelson smuggles in Bill Evans (so Kind of Blue is present anyway!) Motion smuggles in Coltrane via Elvin Jones (tho’ yeah Konitz and Coltrane are a million miles apart as players and people).

My number eight wld be Speak No Evil by Wayne Shorter – because it’s quite ‘witchy’ modal jazz played by a stupendous group, and it has one of the great Blue Note front sleeves. “Where Flamingos Fly” on Gil Evans’s Out of the Cool also has some of this semi-exotic/post-Martin Denny spookiness – ‘cool’ as heroin-y numbness and emptiness (see also the Chet album w/ Bill Evans again.) And Gil always said it best about Ornette – “I like him. He swings, and he’s got a good feeling for melody.”

response: Yes, I completely forgot about Wayne Shorter (though of course he’s on the Live at the Plugged Nickel sets); apparently my unconscious filing system places him later chronologically, bcz Weather Report I guess :\

The Gil Evans/Martin Denny connection made me grin (because yes: grown-up 50s music does overlap with loungecore). See also response to Tom.

TOM: I have learned more from this excellent discussion than from Sketches itself, though I enjoyed it very much. It was at its most evocative in the car park outside Croydon IKEA waiting for a kids’ birthday party to finish at the nearby. bowling alley. Obviously what Miles and Gil Evans had in mind.

response: Replaying Sketches of Spain last night I realised that it’s pretty much the template that Ennio Morricone exhausted scoring the spaghetti westerns, something I’d actually never spotted before.

LONEPILGRIM: I’ve also glad to have a(nother) recommended route into jazz. I’ve never listened to Kind of Blue – it’s another of those monoliths like Pet Sounds that I tend to avoid. Knowing that it is open to other interpretations makes it more appealing. I think I got drawn into jazz through Prog: Mahavishnu Orchestra > Miles Davis. His name was also dropped from time to time in the NME (and later in The Face). Weather Report got played a bit on Nicky Horne’s show on Capital Radio and there was some crossover via Steely Dan and Joni Mitchell. There’s something about Wayne Shorter’s playing that really appeals to me. I went to see Art Blakey in the early 80s because he was playing near and near the end of the decade I saw Abdullah Ibrahim and Ekaya. Both shows were marvellous. More recently I worked at a (state) boys school which supports a big Jazz band and it was an astonishing privilege to listen to them as they rehearsed – the volume! the rich complexity of tones! I appreciate that I’m wandering into ‘jumpers for goalposts’ territory here – but it is music that stimulates me whenever I get to hear it so I’m glad to have another set of routes to explore

response: The link that wichita lineman notes — of John Barry as a Sten Kenton disciple — is good, I think. A lot of the orchestral wing of this music ended up helping shape 60s film scores and TV themes, not always as strikingly sui generis as Ennio Morricone’s, but still rich and vivid and effective. I guess I should also say that all of this is expanded out of a desire to ensure that the monolith isn’t just rolled against the door it’s meant to be helping you pass through. Kind of Blue is a great record! But there are better places to start from if you want to understand and enjoy the rest of jazz.

Most of you know that I do a lot of work with Subterranean Press, because they do an excellent job with my limited and/or off-the-wall projects. They are some of my favorite people to work with, and I’m not alone in this assessment: some of the best authors in science fiction and fantasy work with them, creating some amazing books.

Now you can get in on some of that for a very affordable price: SubPress is working with the Humble Bundle folks and has created a very excellent SubPress eBook bundle. Who is in the bundle? Well, for any price, you get:

• Peter Brett
• Harlan Ellison
• Caitlin Kiernan
• Cherie Priest
• Dan Simmons
• Connie Willis
• Jack Vance

Kick in more than the average amount for the bundle, and you also get:

• Kelly Armstrong
• Clive Barker
• Ted Chiang
• Maria Dahvana Headley and Kat Howard
• Barry Hughart
• Tim Powers
• John Scalzi (hi!)

And if you pay more than $15, you also get:

• Joe Lansdale
• Robert McCammon
• K.J. Parker

Basically, that’s a whole lot of excellent reading, from fantastic authors. Pay what you want, get everything you pay for completely DRM-free. And in doing so, you’ll also help out the Worldbuilders charity, as a cut of the proceeds goes to that.

Go get it now: Great authors, a great charity and a great value. This is totally worth your time and money. And tell your friends about it too — this bundle won’t be around forever.

We should be glad that having decided to emphasise something other than ‘Stronger Economy, Fairer Society’, the Liberal Democrat message of ‘opportunity for everyone’ is something clear and distinct that no other leader would ever use…

(Blair headline here, Major picture from here)

“Do you want to go get a coffee?” I want a coffee. I want to have a chat with you. I want a date with you.

“I had a nightmare on Friday.” I had a really bad dream on Friday night. Friday itself was awful.

“Don’t come unless you really want to.” Come, but only if you really want to. Please please please come. Please please please don’t come.

“It’s at 10.” We need to arrive before it starts at 10. We need to arrive at some point after 10. We need to arrive somewhere else entirely for pre-drinks at 9, and I have no idea what’s happening after that.

“This is against the rules.” This is against the rules. This is technically against the rules, but everyone does it and literally nobody cares – I mean, I’m only a sign, I can’t stop you – just use commonsense and don’t do anything dangerous, disruptive or harmful to others.

“I’d hate me if I were you.” If I had problems interpreting neurotypical language like you, I’d be really annoyed at me because I’m sometimes unclear and don’t say what I mean. Quick, reassure me that you don’t hate me. I think we’re a bit of a mismatch and you should direct your affections elsewhere.

“BYOB.” Bring your own booze. Bring your own beverage, whatever that may be.  Bring your own booze, but if you just want soft drinks, we have those already; they’re supposed to be mixers, but nobody will mind if you drink them on their own. Also bring cups. We have cups, you don’t need to bring those.

“I’ll just wait for everyone to settle down…” Quite a few people are still arriving and/or doing other things, so I’ll wait a few seconds until they’re finished. You there, the one that’s just arrived and is still ordering her diet coke, hurry up and sit down.

“Oh, you came, thanks so much!” Thank you so much for coming. What are you doing here?! YOU ACTUALLY CARE!! You’re creepy.

“Do you want to go get a coffee?” I want a coffee. We haven’t had the chance to talk in a while and I want to catch up. You asked me on a date a while back and this is me reciprocating.

(Inspired by this Dinah The Aspie Dinosaur comic, and also by my own cluelessness)

Tagged: Autism, language, literal thinking

Currently it is popular in the media to come up with all sorts of reasons my generation (I'm a Millennial) are awful and bad and worthless and all sorts of other unflattering things. It has nothing to do with the economy, nothing to do with the systemic devaluation of labor, no sir.

Apparently it's because youth sports leagues shifted to giving everyone a trophy or medal. That is what is wrong with my generation. Fifty sent lumps of plastic, not an economic depression and job market saturation, are responsible for all that plagues my ilk.

I have written about my participation in athletics here before: specifically youth basketball, dance as an adult (which has a lot in common with gymnastics as far as how I experienced navigating it while autistic), about benefits of sport in general. It's no secret, I like being active. I feel that everyone should have a chance to be active, and I feel that participation awards are part of that.

Something that was happening during my youth: programs were becoming more integrated. More people with disabilities were participating in mainstream sports, particularly kids like me who were 'too typical' in whatever way for Special Olympics but not actually, you know, good. This is a good thing, and it didn't just benefit disabled kids. It also benefitted the able kids who are just not good athletes. Opening the option to everyone is a good thing.


I'm going to tell you a secret about kids who got the medals that said "participant" on them: we know we weren't the best that day. Some were not the best any day. A whole lot of us were there anyway because we loved what we were doing, and we wanted to get better. Hell, I knew a 6 year old--this was over a decade ago, she's an adult now--who refused to take her first place trophy because she didn't even meet the requirements of her level, but all her competition fell attempting to do so. To us, the medal was an acknowledgement that we put in effort.

You know who got really intense about the trophies? Parents. My mother, at least, had it in her head that if a child is not succeeding at a sport, that child should not do that sport. It doesn't matter if they are enjoying themselves. What matters is that they are bringing home awards; if you can't possibly be the best, she said, why participate at all? It's like "because it's fun" never occurred to her, or many of the adults hanging around.

Participation awards convinced my mother that we were 'good enough' to continue in the sports of our choosing. We were succeeding! Look at the trophy! My first year competing tumbling, I was mediocre. Had I not come home from the first meet with a trophy, my mother would have yanked me out. Five months later I got 8th at State & qualified to Nationals. Six weeks after that I got 6th at Nationals. Many years after that I got 3rd at Nationals. But without the participation trophies, which to my parents meant success, I wouldn't have had the chance to get the real benefits from my chosen sport.

Things like strength. Things like perseverance. Things like learning to lose and win gracefully. Things like goal setting. Things like learning to cope with a bad day. Building frustration tolerance skills. In my case, building enough physical dexterity to move relatively gracefully through space. Friendships. Knowing how to compete with someone without them being The Enemy. Focus. Comfort in front of an audience. Poise. Working through fear.

It wasn't about the trophies, and I suspect it wasn't for most of my generation in the various activities we pursued. I had a lot of trophies. Some were even pretty impressive. The only one I was sad to have to leave when I moved?

It was the one that my coaches nominated me for & coaches & judges voted on. It wasn't for being a great athlete (I was pretty good. I wasn't Athlete of the Year material). It was for...sportsmanship, setting a good example for younger competitors, perseverance, grace in both victory and defeat.

It was for the things that mattered.

But I never would have gotten to that place without participation trophies because of the old idea that sports are only for the most gifted of athletes. Most of the people I did sports with? We did it because we liked it. Not for the trophy or medal. And we knew which trophies and medals really stood for something.

Every once in a while someone still ableistly denounces participation trophies with "it's not the Special Olympics". That's bigoted as all get out. Athletes with developmental disabilities are frequently participating out of love for the sport, too (I do have criticisms of SO, namely that it's segregated & run by able people; the way they set up an environment where every participant can succeed is not a thing to be criticized). Special Olympians are athletes, just like anyone who regularly participates in a sport. Their developmental disabilities do not change that, and a gold medal won at a national SO competition matters just as much as one won at any national sporting event. So even if I can't convince you that participation awards are a good thing, at least stop saying this & come up with a real criticism.

My generation has inherited a big huge mess. It's not our participation trophies' fault. The world would be even more screwed if we didn't grow up with programs where everyone was rewarded for their success, rather than just winning. We had the chance to learn a lot of things that you can't display on a medal, without which we'd be even more messed up.

So stop the hate on for the participation trophies; participating was not and is not a bad thing.

Some people say the War on Drugs is ‘unwinnable’. But there’s actually a foolproof solution that cures drug addiction approximately 100% of the time. That solution is – put people on welfare in Tennessee.

Or at least that is what I am led to believe by articles like Mic’s A Shocking Thing Happened When Tennesee Decided To Drug Test Its Welfare Recipients, which describes said shocking thing as:

1 out of 812 applicants tested positive for drugs. One. Single. Person. Tennessee conservatives suspicious that welfare recipients are a bunch of drug-addicted slackers were proven dead wrong. Big surprise!

After instituting dehumanizing drug-testing requirements to welfare recipients on July 1, 10 people total were flagged for possible drug use and asked to submit to testing. Five others tested negative, and four were rejected after refusing. As Think Progress notes, that means that just 0.12% of all people applying for cash assistance in Tennessee have tested positive for drugs, compared to the 8% who have reported using drugs in the past month among the state’s general population. If you assume the four people who refused were on drugs, it’s still a paltry 0.61%.

In other words, the plan intended to verify right-wing beliefs that welfare recipients are a bunch of drug-addicted slackers looking for a handout has demonstrated exactly the opposite.

The article has 11,000 notes on Tumblr right now, I’ve seen it all over my Facebook feed as well, and the same story has been taken up, with the same editorial line, by a host of other news sources. Jezebel: State Drug Program Busts A Whopping 37 Welfare Applicants. Wall Street Journal: Few Welfare Applicants Caught In Drug Screening Net So Far. New Republic: Red States’ New Tax On The Poor. Daily Kos: Tennessee Just Wasted A Lot Of Money Drug Testing Welfare Recipients. ReverbPress: Another GOP Fail: 0.2% Of Tennessee Welfare Recipients Found To Use Illegal Drugs. Mommyish: Results Of State Drug Testing Prove Gross Assumptions About Welfare Applicants Are Wrong. Washington Post: Scott Walker’s Yellow Politics.

These stories all make the point that we have many stereotypes about the poor, and one such stereotype is that the use lots of drugs, but in fact these sorts of welfare programs find them to use fewer drugs than the general population, and therefore we should stop being so prejudiced.

And if they were found to use only two-thirds, or half as many drugs as the general population, this might indeed be the lesson.

But look at the numbers in the quoted Mic article. Welfare users use only about one percent as many drugs as the general population. Really?

No. Not really at all. According to legitimate research in this area, poor people use as many drugs as anyone else and probably more. The National Household Survey on Drug Abuse found that illegal drug use was slightly higher in families on government assistance (9.6%) than families not on government assistance (6.8%). The National Coalition For The Homeless notes that about 26% of them use drugs, which is about 2.5x as high as the general population. I crunched some data I have from the hospital I work at, and it shows that poor people (defined as people who get health insurance through an aid program) have moderately higher rates of drug use related problems than the general population. So these articles are reporting a drug use rate in the Tennessee population about one percent of that ever reported in any comparable poor population anywhere else.

Kate from Gruntled and Hinged brings up another curious inconsistency. The false positive rate for drug tests is – well, it depends on the test procedure, but it’s usually at least 1%. So if every single welfare user in Tennessee was 100% clean, we would still expect between 1% to 5% positive drug tests. Instead, they got 0.12% positive drug tests. This isn’t just suspiciously good, it’s impossibly good.

So what’s going on here?

Before I explain, here’s a collage of the stock photos displayed above some of those news stories I linked to.

I now have a picture on my website called urine_collage.png

If you’re familiar with the state of the American media, you won’t be surprised to learn that urine was not involved in the ovewhelming majority of this program’s drug tests.

So how did they test people for drugs?

They gave them a written test, where the test question was basically “do you use illegal drugs or not?” You can see the exact procedure on the sidebar here.

And lo and behold, the overwhelming majority of people answered that they didn’t.

A more accurate stock photo they could have used

Now the numbers make sense. It’s not that only 0.2% of welfare recipients use drugs. All this tells us, if anything, is that 0.2% of welfare recipients are on so many drugs they can’t figure out how to check “NO” on a form.

Why would the government do something like this? As best I can tell, the plan was originally to give everyone urine checks, but in Florida the courts decided that urine-checking people without prior suspicion was unconstitutional. The Republicans were pretty attached to their “drug test welfare recipients” plan and didn’t want to look like they were wimps who backed down just because of one little court case, so they decided to give people the written test in the hopes of having prior suspicion for the people who said yes. Sure, it made no sense, but they could still tell their constituents they were drug testing those welfare recipients, and in principle they’d won an important victory. Or something.

Which raises another interesting question – how did Florida’s urine-based program do before the courts struck it down?

According to the media, abysmally. MSNBC: Drug Testing Welfare Recipients Looks Even Worse, “[Florida Governor] Scott’s policy was an embarrassing flop. Only about 2 percent of applicants tested positive, and Florida actually lost money”. TBO: Welfare Drug Testing Yields 2% Positive Results, “Newton said that’s proof the drug-testing program is based on a stereotype, not hard facts.” ATTN: Why Drug Testing Poor People Is A Waste Of Time And Money, “Florida tested welfare recipients for four months before its drug test mandate was thrown out by the courts. Only 2.6 percent of welfare recipients tested positive. The rest of the Florida’s population use drugs at a rate of 8 percent. So, again, welfare recipients used drugs less than everyone else.”

Now we’re merely at one-quarter of the drug use rate people with good methodologies find. Improvement!

So I looked up exactly how this works. Apparently welfare recipients were asked to pay for their own drug tests, and would be reimbursed if the results came back negative. 7000 welfare users did this, but 1600 declined to do so – numbers that were not mentioned in most of the pieces above.

Opponents of the program say that maybe those 1600 people could not find drug testing centers near them, or couldn’t afford to pay for the tests even with the promise of reimbursement later, or something like that. I am sure that some of them did indeed decline for reasons like those.

But also, people on welfare don’t have very much money [citation needed]. If I were a welfare recipient, and they were going to drug test me and not reimburse me if I came out positive, and I was on drugs, I would decline the hell out of that test.

Suppose that the poor in Florida use drugs at the same rate as the poor in various studies and surveys – about 10%. We have 8600 welfare recipients, so we would expect 860 drug users. Of the 7000 who agreed to testing, we know that 2.5% are drug users – that’s 175 people. That in turn would suggest that of the 1600 who refused testing, about 685 were drug users – 40% or so. That would imply that about 80% of drug users versus about 12% of nonusers refused testing.

These numbers seem pretty reasonable to me. Most welfare users want to keep their benefits, so the majority will agree to testing, but a few will inevitably fall through the cracks because they can’t reach a testing center or because they have moral objections to the tests. On the other hand, clued-in drug users will realize that for them, testing means a major inconvenience and monetary charge without any likely corresponding gain. So we would expect drug users to decline testing at a higher rate than nonusers. In order to use the Florida data to say that welfare recipients in general use drugs at a rate of 2%, we would need to assume that drug users were no more likely to refuse drug testing than nonusers, even though the testing rewarded non-use with money but punished use with a loss of money.

(note that there are some different numbers in different places for Florida. I assume that these represent different years, stages of testing, parts of Florida, etc, but I’m not sure. The only one that is seriously different from what I’m saying above is the one that says “only 1% of people declined testing”. After some search, I’m pretty sure that’s referring to that only 1% of people made appointments for testing, then cancelled later. But I am less confident in the Florida numbers than in the analysis of Tennessee)

So the Florida numbers are consistent with welfare recipients using drugs less, more, or the same amount as the general population.

So I have a question for you guys.

How come Brian Williams is being dragged over the coals for lying in the media, but everyone who publishes these kinds of articles gets off scot-free?

If I understand correctly, Williams said that his helicopter got shot at when he was in Iraq, but in reality he was just in a helicopter in Iraq at the same time as some other helicopter nearby was getting shot at. This is obviously stretching the truth, but it seems to me it could have been worse. No important policy decisions are going to hinge upon exactly which helicopter Brian Williams was in. And he didn’t get it infinitely wrong – for example, there was, in some sense, a war in Iraq.

On the other hand, discussions of how many poor people use drugs is pretty important for all sorts of policy questions, and these people completely dropped the ball. So why does nobody get reprimanded for this kind of thing?

You might argue that Brian Williams’ actions were obviously malicious and deceitful, but that screwing up drug numbers is an excusable mistake. I say it’s exactly the opposite. Brian Williams did exactly what I unfortunately do all the time – unthinkingly tell a story the much cooler way it should have happened, the way it happened in my head – rather than the way it actually did happen (my colleagues elsewhere in the psychiatry blogosphere go further and call this “normal brain function”).

On the other hand, I have more trouble imagining a situation in which I would accept the claim “only 0.1% of poor people use drugs, which is barely one percent of the rate in the general population” without wanting to do a little more research to see if it is true. If your reporters are capable of making this mistake honestly, get better reporters.

But I’m not sure it’s honest. A lot of these sources admit they took their story from a Think Progress piece on the issue. Think Progress does mention that the tests are a sham, although only in one sentence that is easy to miss. Either the secondary reporters didn’t read Think Progress thoroughly, or they consciously decided not to mention it.

But even if it was an honest mistake, I still have trouble excusing their arrogance. I mean look at that Jezebel article. The writer says this proves that people who think welfare recipients use drugs “consider ‘facts’ troublesome” and that their “entire social philosophy boils down to ‘Ew, poor people.'”

You’re saying that’s not as bad as a helicopter-related embellishment?

Yes, okay, drug testing welfare applicants is in fact probably a bad idea. It’s a bad idea because the courts have banned doing it in a way more effective than asking them politely if they use drugs or not, but it was a bad idea even before that. It’s a bad idea because drug tests have frequent false positives, but it’s a bad idea even without that. It’s a bad idea because quitting drugs is really hard and denying people benefits isn’t going to help.

But if, in the service of proving this to be a bad idea, you decide it’s acceptable to fudge the numbers to make your point, horrible things happen. First, you contribute to a culture of telling lies and lose the opportunity to protest when the other side does it. Second, you make it harder to trust you on anything else.

But most important, tell one lie and the truth is forever after your enemy. I recently argued that we need to reform suboxone prescribing laws, because it’s the best anti-addiction medicine we’ve got and right now poor people can’t access it. . Why should anyone listen to me now? They can just answer “Actually, that would be a waste of money. As per an article I read in Jezebel, pretty much no poor person has ever been addicted to drugs.” Then the laws don’t get reformed and people die.

Going around the psychiatry blogosphere recently: this segment by John Oliver about doctors who take pharmaceutical company money:

I will resist the urge to geek out about its minor medical errors¹ in favor of clarifying something more important.

The impression you’re supposed to get from this piece is a shady looking man handing you a briefcase full of cash and whispering “Hey, here’s $10,000 for you if you prescribe unnecessary medication.” The implication is the doctors who do this are awful and if you were in medicine you would have no trouble resisting this temptation.

In reality, pharma companies have figured out that some people have ethical qualms – “evil cannot possibly understand good” only works in movies – and adjusted their strategies accordingly.

We’ll start with a simple one. Imagine you’re a doctor, and your staff are complaining because the staff at every other doctor’s office has been getting these incredible free lunches every day – the video says drug companies aren’t supposed to give, like, Zagat-rated steakhouse lunches, but there’s still a lot of room between “Zagat-rated” and “Way better than the peanut butter and jelly sandwich you bring from home”. The nurses are grumbling and threatening to revolt and asking if you really appreciate them.

A drug company representative offers to provide your office with free lunches a couple of times a week.

You say “It would be really annoying to actually use the phrase ‘there’s no such thing as a free lunch’ here, so I will just ask what the catch is.”

They say “No catch. We don’t require you to ever prescribe any of our drugs. We don’t require you to listen to our presentation. We don’t even require you to read our promotional literature. Just accept our offer.”

You say “Why are you doing this?”

They say “Because every time you eat one of our lunches, you’ll associate the ice cold taste of Coca-Cola and the sweet warm chewy chocolate chip cookies with our company, and you’ll get positive feelings about it, and maybe those positive feelings will influence your prescription habits.”

You say “I think I’m a good enough doctor not to prescribe a drug solely because I get lunch from their company.”

They say “Look. We all know that most antidepressants are about equally effective. Sure, we split hairs and talk about how one has more anticholinergic side effects so it’s bad for patients with cholinergic sensitivity, and another has more chance of weird visual disturbances, but how often does someone come into your office and announce ‘Hey, I’m depressed, and also I have cholinergic sensitivity, but I LOVE weird visual disturbances!’? Although there are a few cases where one drug’s clearly a better choice than another, most of the time you’re about equally balanced between two or three options, and you just pick one at random. So maybe instead of picking one at random, you’ll pick the one you associate with delicious food. And if you do, so what? Nobody’s harmed. You would have just flipped a coin anyway.”

You say “I’d rather flip a coin than feel like I’m being pressured by what I had for lunch.”

They say “Look, you secretly worry anyway that you sometimes prescribe Effexor because the name makes it sound effective, or Paxil because the name makes it sound peaceful.”

You say “Wait, you can read my thoughts?”

They say “We’re a pharmaceutical company. Of course we can read your thoughts. Look. You already know that the mostly-meaningless choice of which of several equally effective drugs you prescribe is influenced by a bunch of silly marketing factors beyond your control. Why not add one more?”

“But -”

“Come to the Dark Side! We literally have cookies!”

Still not tempting enough for you?

Okay, imagine this. You’re a doctor and one of your patients comes in with incurable chronic pain that’s ruining their life. You try the normal medications on it and nothing works very well. There’s a high-tech next-generation medication available that you think is a good fit for your patient’s disease, but it’s not covered by their insurance and there’s no way the patient can afford it. You have to tell this guy that there’s nothing you can do for him.

Then a drug company representative comes to you bearing a big box of free samples. By “free samples” I mean hundreds of pills, enough to help the patient for the better part of a year – and maybe at the end of that time you’ll get another box of free samples. The drug rep doesn’t want you to sign your life away. She’s giving them for free, no obligation, maybe just listen to a sixty second speech on how to prescribe them safely and effectively (she wouldn’t want to give them to someone who won’t prescribe them effectively!) Are you really so fundamentalist in your approach to medical ethics that you won’t listen to a drug rep for sixty seconds in order to save a patient’s quality of life?

Most doctors – even the ethical ones who would refuse the briefcase full of cash – take the offer. This practice has come under increasing scrutiny recently. Some of the complaints are kind of dumb, but one very valid one is that a lot of the times what happens is you start off by giving the patient 100 days of free sample or something, then the free sample runs out, they’re fixated on that particular medication because it’s the one that worked for them, and they find some costly way to continue the (more expensive new) medication – instead of the two of you working harder to find some older less expensive medication that works equally well. A few drug companies have “fixed” this by giving out cards for “prescription programs” that solve some of the problems with free samples. These are even harder to resist, and they’re also given out by attractive drug reps who just want to tell you a few important facts about the drug before giving it to you.

Still not tempting enough for you?

Fine, then imagine this. You’re a doctor who really believes in a particular drug and is trying to convince the medical community to use more of it. For example, a couple weeks ago I wrote an article on suboxone saying it was one of the best medications for opiate abuse and I wish the medical community would pay more attention and prescribe it more often.

I wrote that article for free as a public service because I think that drug saves lives. But imagine that the company that makes suboxone approached me afterwards and said “Hey, you seem to have an important message to spread. Why don’t we sponsor you to go around the country for a week or two telling it to other doctors at medical conferences? We’ll get you first-class flights, put you up in five-star hotels, and give you a $10,000 stipend.”

I say “Wait a second, that sounds like taking pharmaceutical company money, and taking pharmaceutical company money is evil.”

They say “Look. You were trying to promote suboxone to people already. You were just doing a bad job because you were limited to one little blog. The more suboxone-promoting you do, the more doctors know about this drug – which you yourself have said is life-saving – and so the more lives get saved. If you’re willing to promote suboxone ineffectively for free, why not promote suboxone effectively for $10,000 plus nice hotels?”

I say “I’m still kind of uncomfortable with this.”

They say “Okay, well, it’s not our fault if hundreds of people die of drug overdoses because their doctors didn’t know suboxone was an option.”

You’re probably going to ask if I’ve ever accepted any of these offers. The boring truth is that I haven’t had to consider them because I’m a resident and residents are lower than dirt and the pharmaceutical companies know this and they don’t waste time trying to cozy up to us.

I have tasted the forbidden fruit only once, and it was my attending’s fault. She told us that there was a big dinner being planned for the entire psychiatric community of our city. The goal was to get doctors to meet nurses to meet therapists to meet social workers in one place so we could all get to know each other and talk about changes we could make to the system. It was very important that we attend, or else the nurses and therapists and social workers would think that the doctors were too snooty to interact with them and didn’t care about changing the system. Oh, and by the way the dinner was sponsored by PANEXA (here used in place of the real drug because I don’t want to get in trouble for calling them out) but there wouldn’t be any promotional material or pressure to prescribe PANEXA, honest, no sirree.

This was a tempting offer precisely because it was such a good idea. Everyone in the local psychiatric community deals with each other frequently, but we’d mostly never met before. I know them as the voice on the other side of the phone saying “No, no beds are available in our facility” or as the person who refuses to fax me my patient’s past medical history because the patient is too catatonic to sign a consent form. None of us are ever entirely sure what the others are doing, sometimes there are bad feelings, and it was reasonable to hope that maybe if we all met each other and socialized things would get a little smoother.

So we all meet at this restaurant, and immediately World War III breaks out. It’s like “Hi, I’m Mary, the clerk at Blue Sky Mental Health.” “MARY?! YOU’RE THE ONE WHO DIDN’T FAX ME THOSE RECORDS I NEEDED TWO MONTHS AGO! MY PATIENT WENT A WEEK ON THE WRONG DRUGS BECAUSE OF THAT!”

“Hi, I’m Dr. Alexander, I work at the inpatient unit in Our Lady Of An Undisclosed Location Hospital…” “WE HAD A PATIENT COME FROM THERE TWO WEEKS AGO AND HE ASSAULTED A STAFF MEMBER. IF YOU’RE A REAL HOSPITAL WHY CAN’T YOU DO PROPER VIOLENCE ASSESSMENTS?”

It turned out that the nurses hated the social workers for making them wait on the phone forever in order to get a straight answer. The social workers hated the nurses for always calling them up when they were busy about things and expecting an answer RIGHT NOW. The social workers hated the doctors for giving patients one measly prescription, then handing the case over to them to fix all of the impossible problems in the patient’s life. The doctors hated the social workers, because when we give patients one measly prescription and then hand the case over to the social workers to fix all of the patient’s impossible problems, sometimes the impossible problems don’t get fixed.

Anyway, in the midst of all of this, there was one guy who was staying completely calm, talking nicely to everybody, helping people see each other’s sides of the issue, just a really serene well-adjusted guy. I escaped over to his table and asked him who he was and why he was here.

“Oh,” he said “I’m a paranoid schizophrenic currently on PANEXA.”

Of course he was.

Then we all broke off into our own groups and got some incredible Italian food.²

What I’m saying is, pharmaceutical companies are sneaky.

Footnotes

1: By which I mean “succumb to the urge to geek out about its minor medical errors, but in the footnotes”.

The video says that a “horrifying example” of pharmaceutical company overreach was how AstraZeneca took Seroquel, “an antipsychotic with dangerous side effects” and marketed it to doctors for depression, sleep, and dementia, adding “You can’t just give people dangerous drugs and see what happens!”

But actually, lots of studies have shown Seroquel is effective for depression, lots of guidelines suggest Seroquel as a backup depression treatment, and doctors have been (correctly) prescribing it for such for a long time. Doctors also very commonly prescribe it for sleep and dementia; I think is less evidence-based, but it’d be a lie to say it wasn’t common as dirt or that it didn’t work for these things (safety is the problem).

So what was happening was that AstraZeneca was promoting Seroquel for the things it was actually being used for, as opposed to the thing the FDA said it was supposed to be used for. Doctors are allowed to use drugs for whatever they want based on their own analysis and their best judgment, but pharmaceutical companies are only allowed to promote it for the FDA-approved indication, which at that point was psychosis and bipolar depression.

The reason the FDA hadn’t approved Seroquel for depression wasn’t because it was a bad idea. It was because in order to get the FDA to approve anything for anything, you must perform the appropriate ritual of putting a zillion dollars into a big pile, then burning it as a sacrifice to the Bureaucracy Gods. AstraZeneca had performed the ritual for bipolar and psychosis, but was still in the process of performing it a third time for depression. Once they finished, the FDA approved it as an adjunctive medication for depression, but also fined them hundreds of millions of dollars because they had advertised it for depression – merely based on evidence and clinical practice – before the FDA had told them they were allowed to.

This is still not the whole story, because best clinical practice says to only use Seroquel as a third- or fourth-line antidepressant after some others have failed, and in conjunction with another medication. If AstraZeneca was advocating to use it for depression first-line on its own, this would have been a genuine overstep and something to get upset about.

(research and clinical practice say to use it for sleep and dementia approximately never, but there is enough wiggle room in that “approximately” for doctors to drive a bus through, and they do.)

This is still not the whole story, because The Last Psychiatrist thinks the way the FDA’s handled the Seroquel indication, and the subsequent culture of prescribing that grew up based on that indication, is stupid.

The other minor medical error in the video is much simpler. Oliver mocks Wellbutrin’s claim to be “the happy, healthy skinny drug” saying that “the only happy, healthy, skinny drug is amphetamine”. But Wellbutrin is actually amphetamine-based – its full chemical name is 3-chloro-N-tert-butyl-β-ketoamphetamine – and it shares a mechanism of action with amphetamines, which is why some of its effects are similar as well. So Oliver’s joke was a lot more accurate and a lot less funny then he thought.

2: Then later, and contrary to the promises I received, they gave us a presentation on PANEXA anyway.

The schizophrenic guy worked for one of the local psychiatric community services groups doing community outreach. I never did figure out whether he was there as a coincidence or whether the pharmaceutical company had arranged to have him there. I suspect the latter but I have no proof.

I've received a lot of mail about Gary Owens. Here's one from Pete McNall…

When I found out that Gary Owens was dead, it was another nail in the coffin of my youth. My Dad and I listened to him on KMPC as we drove home from work. As a 16 to 18 year old, I worked summers at Dad's workplace. This would be 1971 to 1973. On the drive home from South Gate to Walnut, California, on the AM dial, we would listen to Mr. Owens. Gary had a little audio clip clip called (I think) "The Nurney Song." He had some random audio clips, I don't know, silly tunes, but this is what I remember. There was a bunch, and lots of craziness!

And what about Laugh-In? It was a bonding experience, as I was really trying to relate to Dad, and have something to laugh about with him. I know he liked Gary Owens, too. I was learning to drive, and relations were a bit shaky. To say nothing of getting out of bed during the summer at 5:30 in the morning, and then getting my surly teenage ass to relate to real working people.

Mr. Owens helped a lot. Thanks, Gary. You are missed.

This reminds me of a story I can't believe I haven't told on this blog. It occurred about 10-15 years ago, during one of Gary's last gigs as a local radio personality. He had an afternoon show each day on KGIL where he played real oldies — a lot of Sinatra, Dino, Tony Bennett, etc. As with most music-type disc jockey gigs these days, Gary was not doing the program live as he did at KMPC and other stations for so many years. He'd go in, record all his spots for a three-hour show in about an hour and then the engineers would edit him, the songs and the commercials together. He probably worked one or two afternoons a week and was then broadcast Monday through Friday.

I was driving my mother home from a doctor's appointment one day and I put Gary's show on. My mother was about half-listening to it, enjoying the show but not paying serious attention. During it, I got a call from Gary and as in many cars, the audio from the call displaced the radio sound and came out of the same speakers. Gary on the phone sounded exactly like Gary on the radio.

My mother hadn't noticed that the call had come in and I'd switched over…so suddenly, her son was having a two-way conversation with the guy on the radio. Gary was talking directly to me. I was talking directly to him. She looked at me with amazement. Then Gary and I said our goodbyes, the call disconnected, the radio sound came back on and from the same speakers, she heard — seamlessly — the same voice saying, "And now, here's a great tune from Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gorme —!"

She looked at me and said, "Wow…the inventions they're installing in cars these days!"

During my time as both politician and internet pontificator, I have thought hard on the subject of elections and how to win them and thought it was time I shared my experience with the world. In the spirit of openness, I do not direct this at any leader in particular, but hope all will see it, follow it and we’ll have a better politics as a result. I have boiled down my mountains of wisdom into just five points that cover everything.

1) Promise things that I want: Your party has lots of policies. Lots and lots and lots of policies. You need to focus your appeal onto a specific area, and I suggest that should be based around things that I want. I know this might sound selfish, but my long experience of sounding off about things on the internet has told me that what I want is also wanted by the vast majority of people out there, so you won’t go wrong adopting that as your policy.
2) Campaign in ways that I approve of: I find organised Twitter hashtags, Thunderclaps and whatever else annoying. The same goes for repeated oversharing of messages on Facebook. You might have lots of evidence that suggests these things work, but I find them annoying, which means that the vast majority of people also find them annoying, so stop doing them.
3) Sack that guy: You know that person you have in an important job that I don’t like? Sack him and keep him as far away from the campaign as possible. I could give you a full detailed set of reasons as to why he’s dangerous to your electoral hopes, but it comes down to me having a visceral and irrational hatred of him and everything he stands for (as I don’t like him, I’ve decided that we must disagree on everything). Sack him, and watch your election campaign soar.
4) Make one weirdly specific promise: What you need to do to win is to promise that if you’re elected, you’ll definitely do X as the first priority when you’re in office. I know it sounds a bit weird, but I know for a fact that there are millions of people out there who want to see it happen and would definitely vote for you if your promised it. Yes, X is something I’ve gone on about repeatedly for years, but that’s only because it’s really important to so many people. Look at the dozens of people who’ve read my writing about the subject.
5) Me. Me me me me me me me. The leader who can release the power of me will win the election without a doubt. If in doubt, ask yourself what I would want and do that. Waste no time with polls or focus groups, and understand that I am the only person you need to appeal to. Follow my advice without question and you will win, because there’s no way someone on the internet’s advice can be wrong.

In short, party strategists hate me, because I can help you win this election if you follow this one weird trick.

(First, a disclaimer: this is not a prediction of anything that might happen at the general election. I’ve got no idea what will happen in Sheffield Hallam or any other seat in May, and I’m not making any predictions about what might happen in the election, nationally or locally.)

As ever, when actually asked to explain how the systems of British politics works, and not just repeat some juicy gossip, Britain’s political columnists have come up short. They can read the constituency polls that say Nick Clegg might lost his seat at the election, but when asked to think what that might mean, they have no idea. Sometimes, it feels that having knowledge of how things work is rapidly disappearing from our media, because it’s all too complicated to have to remember facts.

What’s most frustrating about a lot of the ‘nobody knows what might happen’ is that the Liberal Democrats have twice found themselves unexpectedly leaderless in the past decade, though both of those were because of sudden resignations rather than the actions of the electorate. The procedure established by the party in these circumstances is quite clear, even if it’s not in the party’s Constitution: the Deputy Leader of the Parliamentary Party becomes acting leader until such time as a new leader is elected by the party’s regular processes.

So, that’s perfectly clear, except for one small problem. The current deputy leader of the parliamentary party is Sir Malcolm Bruce, who’s not standing at the election, but appears to be holding on to his position until then, which means it will be vacant at the start of the next Parliament. It is important to note that while this role is often referred to as the party’s deputy leader, it is technically only deputy leader of the party in Parliament and as such is only elected by the party’s MPs.

So, if Clegg was to lose his seat in May, there’d be no one to replace him, and there’d clearly be chaos, right? Well, yes and no. Despite the party being full of many people who love nothing more than arguing over a constitutional clause for hours on end (and if you’re that sort of person, you too could become a member of English Council and do it to your heart’s content) I think all but the most stubborn would recognise that this is a case where force majeure applies.

It’s established that the Deputy Leader becomes acting leader when there’s an unexpected vacancy, and that the deputy leader is elected by the party’s MPs. While there may be an established procedure for electing a deputy leader, I can’t see anyone reasonably objecting to the remianing MPs following a very truncated process as soon as they’re able to meet, with their decision then further authorised by the party’s Federal Executive as soon as it meets. In that situation, I would expect the parliamentary party to meet as soon as possible on the Friday (the deciding factor on meeting time may be the timetable for flights from Orkney to London) and the FE to meet on Saturday morning. How urgent the process needs to be would likely be determined by the rest of the result – very rushed if it looks like the party will be taking part in coalition negotiations, somewhat more leisurely if a party has got an overall majority in the Commons.

Who might that interim leader be? I have no idea – I’m not making those sort of predictions, remember? All I know is that there is a simple way for the party to choose an interim leader if the current leader isn’t returned to Parliament, and it’d likely be a herald of some interesting political times if it had to be used.

First, go read this. This is only one dude, to be clear, but his defensive, angry and utterly terrified lament is part and parcel with a chunk of science fiction and fantasy fandom and authors who want to position themselves as a last redoubt against… well, something, anyway. It essentially boils down to “The wrong people are in control of things! We must take it back! Attaaaaaaaack!” It’s almost endearing in its foot-stompy-ness; I’d love to give this fellow a hug and tell him everything will be all right, but I’m sure that would be an affront to his concept of What Is Allowed, so I won’t.

Instead let me make a few comments about the argument, such as it is. Much of this stuff I addressed last year when a similar kvetch appeared, but let me add some more notes to the pile.

1. The fellow above asserts that fans of his particular ilk must “take back” conventions and awards from all the awful, nasty people who currently infest them, as if this requires some great, heroic effort. In fact “taking back” a convention goes a little something like this:

Scene: CONVENTION REGISTRATION. ANGRY DUDE goes up to CON STAFFER at the registration desk.

Angry Dude: I AM HERE TO TAKE BACK THIS CONVENTION AND THE CULTURE THAT SO DESPERATELY CRIES OUT FOR MY INTERVENTION

Con Staffer: Okay, that’ll be $50 for the convention membership.

(Angry Dude pays his money)

Con Staffer: Great, here’s your program and badge. Have a great con!

Angry Dude: …

I mean, everyone gets this, right? That conventions, generally speaking, are open to anyone who pays to attend? That the convention will be delighted to take your money? And that so long as one does not go out of one’s way to be a complete assbag to other convention goers, the convention staff or the hotel employees, one will be completely welcome as part of the convention membership? That being the case, it’s difficult to see why conventions need to be “taken back” — they were never actually taken away.

But the conventions are run by awful, nasty people! Well, no, the small local conventions (and some of the midsized ones, like Worldcon) are run by volunteers, i.e., people willing to show up on a regular basis and do the work of running a convention, in participation with others. These volunteers, at least in my experience, which at this point is considerable, are not awful, nasty people — they’re regular folks who enjoy putting on a convention. The thing is, it’s work; people who are into conrunning to make, say, a political statement, won’t last long, because their political points are swamped by practical considerations like, oh, arguing with a hotel about room blocks and whether or not any other groups will be taking up meeting rooms.

(Larger cons, like Comic-cons, are increasingly run by professional organizations, which are another kettle of fish — but even at that level there are volunteers, and they are also not awful, nasty people. They’re people who like participating.)

But the participants are awful, nasty people with agendas! That “problem” is solved by going to the convention programming people and both volunteering to be on panels and offering suggestions for programming topics. Hard as it may be to believe, programming staffers actually do want a range of topics that will appeal to a diverse audience, so that everyone who attends has something they’d be interested in. Try it!

Speaking as someone who once was in charge of a small convention open to the public, i.e., the Nebula Awards Weekend (I would note I was only nominally in charge — in fact the convention was run and staffed by super-competent volunteers), my position to anyone who wanted to come and experience our convention was: Awesome! See you there. Because why wouldn’t it be?

Again, science fiction and fantasy conventions can’t be “taken back” — they were, and are, open to everyone. I understand the “take back” rhetoric appeals to the “Aaaaugh! Our way of life is under attack” crowd, but the separation between the rhetoric and reality of things is pretty wide. Anyone who really believes conventions will be shocked and dismayed to get more paying members and attendees fundamentally does not grasp how conventions, you know, actually work.

2. Likewise, the “taking back” of awards, which in this case is understood to mean the Hugo Awards almost exclusively — I don’t often hear of anyone complaining that, say, the Prometheus Award has been hijacked by awful, nasty people, despite the fact that this most libertarian of all science fiction and fantasy awards is regularly won by people who are not even remotely libertarian; shit, Cory Doctorow’s won it three times and he’s as pinko as they come.

But yet again, you can’t “take back” the Hugos because they were never taken away. If you pay your membership fee to the Worldcon, you can nominate for the award and vote for which works and people you want to see recognized. All it takes is money and an interest; if you follow the rules for nominating and voting, then everything is fine and dandy. Thus voting for the Hugo is neither complicated, nor a revolutionary act.

Bear in mind that the Hugo voting set-up is fairly robust; the preferential ballot means it’s difficult for something that’s been nominated for reasons other than actual admiration of the work (including to stick a thumb into the eyes of people you don’t like) to then walk away with an award. People have tested this principle over the years; they tended to come away from the process with their work listed below “no award.” Which is as it should be. This also makes the Hugos hard to “take back.” It doesn’t matter how well a work (or its author) conforms to one’s political inclinations; if the work itself simply isn’t that good, the award will go to a different nominee that is better, at least in the minds of the majority of those who are voting.

The fellow above says if his little partisan group can’t “take back” the awards, then they should destroy them. Well, certainly there is a way to do that, and indeed here’s the only way to do that: by nominating, and then somehow forcing a win by, works that are manifestly sub-par, simply to make a political (or whatever) point. This is the suicide bomber approach: You’re willing to go up in flames as long as you get to do a bit of collateral damage as you go. The problem with this approach is that, one, it shows that you’re actually just an asshole, and two, it doesn’t actively improve the position of your little partisan group, vis a vis recognition other than the very limited “oh, those are the childish foot-stompers who had a temper tantrum over the Hugos.” Which is a dubious distinction.

With that said: Providing reading lists of excellent works with a particular social or political slant? Sure, why not? Speaking as someone who has been both a nominee and a winner of various genre awards, I am utterly unafraid of the competition for eyeballs and votes — which is why, moons ago, I created the modern version of the Hugo Voter’s Packet, so that there would be a better chance of voters making an informed choice. Speaking as someone who nominates and votes for awards, I’m happy to be pointed in the direction of works I might not otherwise have known about. So this is all good, in my view. And should a worthy work by someone whose personal politics are not mine win a Hugo? Groovy by me. It’s happened before. It’s likely to happen again. I may have even nominated or voted for the work.

But to repeat: None of this contitutes “taking back” anything — it merely means you are participating in a process that was always open to you. And, I don’t know. Do you want a participation medal or something? A pat on the head? It seems to me that most of the people nominating and voting for the Hugos are doing it with a minimum of fuss. If it makes you feel important by making a big deal out of doing a thing you’ve always been able to do — and that anyone with an interest and $50 has been able to do — then shine on, you crazy diamonds. But don’t be surprised if no one else is really that impressed. Seriously: join the club, we’ve been doing this for a while now.

3. Also a bit of paranoid fantasy: The idea that because the wrong people are somehow in charge of publishing and the avenues of distribution, this is keeping authors (and fans, I suppose) of a certain political inclination down. This has always been a bit of a confusing point to me — how this little partisan group can both claim to be victimized by the publishing machine and yet still crow incessantly about the bestsellers in their midst. Pick a narrative, dudes, internal consistency is a thing.

Better yet, clue into reality, which is: The marketplace is diverse and can (and does!) support all sorts of flavors of science fiction and fantasy. In this (actually real) narrative, authors of all political and social stripes are bestsellers, because they are addressing slightly different (and possibly overlapping) audience sets. Likewise, there are authors of all politicial and social stripes who sell less well, or not at all. Because in the real world, the politics and social positions of an author don’t correlate to units sold.

With the exception of publishing houses that specifically have a political/cultural slant baked into their mission statements, publishing houses are pretty damn agnostic about the politics of their authors. The same publishing house that publishes me publishes John C. Wright; the same publishing house that publishes John Ringo publishes Eric Flint. What do publishing houses like? Authors who sell. Because selling is the name of the game.

Here’s a true fact for you: When I turn in The End of All Things, I will be out of contract with Tor Books; I owe them no more books at this point. What do you think would happen if I walked over to Baen Books and said, hey, I wanna work with you? Here’s what would happen: The sound of a flurry of contract pages being shipped overnight to my agent. And do you know what would happen if John Ringo went out of contract with Baen and decided to take a walk to Tor? The same damn noise. And in both cases, who would argue, financially, with the publishers’ actions? John Ringo would make a nice chunk of change for Tor; I’m pretty sure I could do the same for Baen. Don’t kid yourself; this is not an ideologically pure business we’re in.

(And yes, in fact, I would entertain an offer from Baen, if it came. It would need many zeros in it, mind you. But that would be the case with any publisher at this point.)

Likewise, I don’t care how supposedly ideologically in sync you are with your publisher; if you’re not selling, sooner or later, out you go. These are businesses, not charities.

But let’s say, just for shits and giggles, that one ideologically pure faction somehow seized control of all the traditional means of publishing science fiction and fantasy, freezing out everyone they deemed impure. What then? One, some other traditional publisher, not previously into science fiction, would see all the money left on the table and start up a science fiction line to address the unsated audience. Two, you would see the emergence of at least a couple of smaller publishing houses to fill the market. Three, some of the more successful writers who were frozen out, the ones with established fan bases, could very easily set up shop on their own and self-publish, either permanently or until the traditional publishing situation got itself sorted out.

All of which is to say: Yeah, the paranoid fantasy of awful, nasty people controlling the genre is just that: Paranoid fantasy. Now, I understand that if you’re an author of a certain politicial stripe who is not selling well, or a fan who doesn’t like the types of science fiction and fantasy that other people who are not you seem to like, this paranoid fantasy has its appeal, especially if you’re feeling beset politically/socially in other areas of your life as well. And that’s too bad for you, and maybe you’d like a hearty fist-bump and an assurance that all will be well. But it doesn’t change the fact that at the end of the day, no matter who you are, there will always be the sort of science fiction and fantasy you like available to you. Because — no offense — you are not unique. What you like is probably liked by other people, too. There are enough of you to make a market. That market will be addressed.

Again, I am genuinely flummoxed why so many people who are ostensibly so in love with the concept of free markets appear to have a genuinely difficult time with this. It’s not all illuminati, people. It never was.

4. And this is why, fundamentally, the whole “take back the genre” bit is just complete nonsense. It can never be “taken back,” it will never be “taken back,” and it’s doubtful there was ever a “back” to go to. The genre product market is resistant to ideological culling, and the social fabric of science fiction fandom is designed at its root to accomodate rather than exclude. No one can exclude anyone else from science fiction and fantasy fandom when the entrance requirement is, literally, an interest in the genre, or some particular aspect of it. You can’t exclude people from conventions that require only a membership fee to attend. Even SFWA has opened up to self-publishing professional authors now, because it recognized that the professional market has changed. To suggest that the genre contract to fit the demands of any one segment of it doesn’t make sense, commercially or socially. It won’t be done. It would be foolish to do so.

The most this little partisan group (or those who identify with it) can do is assert that they are the true fans of the genre, not anyone else. To which the best and most correct response is: Whatever, dude. Shout it all you like. But you’re wrong, and at the end of the day, you’re not even a side of the genre, you’re just a part. And either you’re participating with everyone else in what the genre is today, or you’re off to the side wailing like a toddler who has been told he can’t have a lollipop. If you want to participate, come on in. If you think you’re going to swamp the conversation, you’re likely in for a surprise. But if you want to be part of it, then be a part of it. The secret is, you already are, and always have been.

If you don’t want to participate, well. Wail for your lolly all you like, then, if it makes you happy. The rest of us can get along without you just fine.

It’s hardly unsurprising that a letter in the Observer, ““We cannot allow censorship and silencing of individuals“, contains misleading statements and half-truths. After all, it has been signed by a number of high-profile campaigners against equality for trans people and sex workers who have long found any criticism of their position inconvenient.

What is surprising, and why the letter is deserving of closer scrutiny, is the inclusion of Peter Tatchell’s name at the bottom. My first thought was to check that this was the same Peter Tatchell as the notable gay rights campaigner and not just someone with the same name. Sadly, as can be seen from his twitter feed, it’s the same guy.

Lets take a look at the points raised in the letter one by one. It is a poor selection of arguments indeed as I do not need to cherry pick points from the letter – this is every item in the letter trivially and quickly taken apart by just a little knowledge of the facts and issues involved.

1. First up, the events surrounding Smirthwate’s show being cancelled. The letter says:
   

   The fate of Kate Smurthwaite’s comedy show, cancelled by Goldsmith’s College in London last month is part of a worrying pattern of intimidation and silencing of individuals whose views are deemed “transphobic” or “whorephobic”.

   What they didn’t mention was that the show was cancelled in part because of a lack of interest, with only 8 tickets sold. Goldsmith’s Comedy also provide us with more background via Tumblr – specifically, that Smurthwaite herself had warned (Falsely) of a picket of “hundreds”, which the university society simply wasn’t in a position to handle safely, and that “the show will end up being me crying”.

   Free speech does not include the right to an audience but the message here is “Nobody wants to hear me cry and that violates my free speech“

2. Next up:
   

   There were calls for the Cambridge Union to withdraw a speaking invitation to Germaine Greer

   This one really is a continuation of the last point: Cambridge Union decided to host the event, as is their right, so a parallel event was organised and was, by some accounts, more popular than the original.

   Message: “People talking about me violates my free speech, but I’m allowed to talk about them”

   (It is worth noting that free speech means that Cambridge Union are not free from the consequences of their choice to host Greer: We’re allowed to think that they acted immaturely with their pointless digs at CUSU LGBT+ on Twitter)

3. My personal favourite is about Cambridge PPC Rupert Read:
   

   The Green party came under pressure to repudiate the philosophy lecturer Rupert Read after he questioned the arguments put forward by some trans-activists.

   There is only one possible take-home statement from this: “The freedom of speech of the establishment trumps the freedom of speech of everyone else, because we can’t stand criticism.” For Tatchell to sign a letter stating politicians should be free from criticism is especially bizarre, given his history. I hope he simply did not read it properly before signing.

   In other words, “All people are equal, but some people are more equal than others“.

4. And finally:
   

   The feminist activist and writer Julie Bindel has been “no-platformed” by the National Union of Students for several years.

   No platforming is bad, right? Not if you understand what No Platforming is: As the name says, it recognises that someone does not have the right to demand a platform, nor do they have the right to demand to engage with debate against a group.

   The signatories of this letter are stating that they should be allowed to barge on to any university campus or private property anywhere in the land, despite any attempt to create a safe space policy, and start a discussion of their choosing. (For reasons unclear to me, this seems to be a one-sided right: Transphobes have a long history of involvement in events that prevent some women not just from a platform but from turning up at all)

   Or: “Even though we have already established we have free speech and you don’t, we still want more“.

Nobody trusts political parties, and everybody’s judgement is biased. Therefore, every General Election, a number of sites appear which tell you which party to vote for, based on their policies or some other blind, seemingly unbiased test.

Choosing Policies

As a test: based on these policies, which of these parties would you choose between?

Party 1

• giving the concerns of cyclists much greater priority;
• cut Ministers’ pay by 5 per cent, followed by a five year freeze
• develop a measure of well-being that encapsulates the social value of state action.

Party 2

• increase the private sector’s share of the economy in all regions of the country
• make sure Academies have the freedoms that helped to make them so successful in the first
  place
• amend the health and safety laws that stand in the way of common sense policing

And a second example. Based on these policies, which of these parties would you choose between?

Party A

• control immigration through our Australian-style points-based system
• make full use of CCTV and DNA technology: new weapons deployed to strengthen our fight against crime
• extend the use of our tough-but-fair work capability test

Party B

• ensure that people are not held back at work because of their gender, age, disability, race and religious or sexual orientation
• alcohol treatment places will be trebled to cover all persistent criminals where alcohol is identified as a cause of their crimes.
• reduce Britain’s dependence on imported oil and gas and increase our energy security

As you’ve probably guessed, this is a trick; the policies of Party 1 and Party 2 are all from the Conservatives’ 2010 manifesto, and Party A and Party B from Labour’s. It’s a fairly simple demonstration that picking from a sub-set of policies isn’t an objective way of finding out which party matches your views. While the creators of Vote for Policies claim no political affiliation, I would be wary of any possible connection between its founder blogging about reducing income inequality and the unexpectedly high support for the Greens and low support for the Tories among the test results (which are of course further biased by who takes the test, disfavouring parties with an older and less web-savvy demographic)

Choosing Parties

The second problem with these sites is matching policy positions with parties. As an example, iSideWith said I disagreed with the Lib Dems because I want to replace the House of Lords with a fully-elected chamber, which has been Lib Dem policy since forever! Their evidence for the Lib Dems’ stance on various issues also seems to be taken from our ministers voting with the Government rather than the party’s policy uncontaminated by Coalition.

I was spurred to write this piece because pretty much every Lib Dem party member I’ve seen taking the Political Compass test has ended up in the “left / libertarian” quadrant, roughly in the middle – some just edge over the axis into the right wing, and some are more or less libertarian, but they’re all in that area. This might be sample bias, but I think I have plenty of Lib Dem friends representing a wide variety of opinions within the party. Firstly, this reinforces my point (assuming the Political Compass model is valid) that there’s far more that unites us as a party than divides us.

Secondly, and more importantly, it’s interesting to note that none of the Lib Dem results I’ve seen match up anywhere near the Lib Dem “position” on the Political Compass website; I went to have a look at how the results are calibrated for the UK 2015 General Election, and found this quote:

The Lib Dems are now widely — and correctly — viewed as a party of few fixed principles, and their vote this time may haemorrhage more to the Greens than to Labour.

Political Compass is describing the Lib Dems as a right-wing, mildly authoritarian party, and the descriptions page seems to be written by a Green supporter. With pretty much every Lib Dem I’ve seen scoring where they put the Greens (and the Greens I’ve seen generally being further left and more authoritarian than the Lib Dems), I can’t see that they’ve calibrated on anything other than biased opinion. Also, their positioning of parties means that almost everybody who takes their test will show up closest to the Greens. I’ve seen Green supporters tell people they should vote for the Green Party on the basis of this, so it’s actively being used as a recruiting tool.

Choosing Politics

Ultimately, there’s a more fundamental problem than selection bias and calibration bias with these tools. They cater to the “supermarket shelf” approach to politics, where you pick and choose who to vote for based simply on a list of promises. This then leads to a race to the bottom with different parties just making bigger promises on the same things, which soon become undeliverable because the promise (and getting elected) is more important than the delivery or because events make delivery impossible, which leads to people becoming disenchanted with politics, which leads to bigger promises to get peoples’ attention…

Unfortunately, this is how a lot of people do decide how to vote – we get the politics we vote for, in a way. And these sites just contribute to that problem. Fundamentally, we elect representatives to the Commons to make decisions on behalf of their constituents, constituencies, and the nation as a whole; a constituency election is to decide the representative with the best judgement – as Edmund Burke said back in 1774. Manifestos and shopping lists of policies probably aren’t the best way to choose a representative.

As long as voters don’t listen to (or don’t believe) politicians talking about their values or beliefs, and do respond to these shopping lists, then taking this approach in campaigning won’t win you an election. This is one reason why I like the Lib Dems’ “Stronger Economy, Fairer Society” slogan. It may not pass the negation test – no party would call for a weaker economy (except the Greens) or a less fair society (except UKIP), but it’s a statement of intent, far more meaningful than “One Nation Labour” or whatever the hell the Tories are using as a slogan these days. The Lib Dems need to demonstrate more explicitly that our record of action in Government, and our promise of more in our manifesto, come back to that core message and to liberal values.

If we can do that, then perhaps “ideology” will no longer be a dirty word in politics, and maybe we’ll see undecided voters in 2020 visiting sites like “Vote for Principles” instead.

No publication has done more to pour oil over the fire at the heart of the debate over trans rights than the New Statesman, and last night it issued its latest incendiary broadside: an anonymous article purporting to explain the debate and condemn people like Mary Beard and Peter Tatchell for not wanting to be associated with people they consider to be Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminists, or TERFs.

Generally speaking, any writer who dredges up Joe McCarthy and George Orwell to attack their opponents should not be viewed uncritically; those are pretty clear red flags. I’m not intending to go through a line-by-line rebuttal of the whole article, suffice to say that much of it is grossly misrepresentative.

At its heart though, it is just blatantly misleading. The argument is not about whether trans women are biologically identical to cis women, or even whether trans women have different life experiences than cis women. The argument is about whether that should matter. The argument is whether cis feminists should extend the hand of solidarity out to trans women. To argue that all feminists do is blatantly wrong.

It seems strange to be even having to rebut this. If a major national political magazine were to publish an article arguing that white women are biologically different to women of colour, and that women of colour just have to accept this, the outcry would be near universal. The fact that this article is seemingly being approvingly quoted by people who otherwise consider themselves to be progressive and unprejudiced, shows us that this is a civil rights struggle over which there is still much work to do.

There’s a particularly revealing part of this article, in which the author states – with not inconsiderable alarm – that “in some circles it is considered transphobic for women to question the presence of people with openly displayed male sexual organs in spaces like communal female changing rooms” (my emphasis).

I can well understand that some cis women might be uncomfortable about this. The question is where those people, who a non-TERF would call women (simples!), should get changed. Is the discomfort of cis women so inviolable that the minority, trans women, should have to get changed with men? Or perhaps they should be allocated their own broom cupboard? Again, the analogy with skin colour is hard to avoid: 50 years ago, this was a big deal. Fortunately, we’ve moved on. Maybe your discomfort at getting changed in a room with someone who looks different to you is your problem.

I repeat: this is a civil rights movement. All successful civil rights movements have got in people’s faces, upset them, made them uncomfortable and, yes, occasionally crossed the line and made mistakes. They have to; that’s how they win. If you can applaud a film like Selma, or Pride*, and somehow consider that New Statesman article to be legitimate journalism, then you need to be aware that you are part of the problem.

* Actually, I had a number of issues with that film, but I’m not getting into that here.

If you enjoy this kind of thing, the best way of encouraging me to write more is to buy my book.


(The second best way is to buy the Kindle version)

The Pitch: There’s been a lot of complaint that TV mainstream doesn’t have much, if any, programming about books (rather than just being based on them). This show aims to change that by finding Britain’s Next Top Writer in a primetime show. Having made one giant leap of originality by doing a show about books in primetime, the rest of the show will be a complete ripoff of other talent formats. Thus, one round will feature wannabe writers reading a small sample of their work to celebrity writer judges, who’ll be sitting in the chairs from The Voice that have been badly modified to look ‘writerly’. Writers will be expected to jump across genre, style and form at a moment’s notice. (An amateur playwright protesting they know nothing about novel structure being berated by an angry Salman Rushdie will become a YouTube favourite) The life of a writer will be presented as effortless luxury, casually dispensing bon mots at cocktail parties between dashing out a newspaper column and being showered in money by benevolent publisher.

The climax will come in a live final at the Millennium Stadium, Cardiff where a book-wielding audience of thousands will watch as the four finalist writers discover that the hours they’ve spent sweating over their work, carrying out every edit and demeaning video diary task ordered by the producers, was utterly wasted as the executives have discovered no one really likes reading books, so they’ll be engaging in It’s A Knockout style contests with a vaguely books-that-have-become-well-known-movies theme. The winner will discover that there book was already published for free as a sample on Amazon that morning and they’ve made £2.35 from the millions of downloads.

Initially planned judges/mentors by the producers: JK Rowling, that one who wrote that thing that we were all reading last year in Tuscany, what was it, look, just get me JK Rowling. What do you mean, she doesn’t want to do it?
Actual judges: A generally confused looking Salman Rushdie, three other authors who could be made to look vaguely presentable on camera and are happy to appear on The One Show and regional radio programmes on an almost daily basis to plug this.
Likelihood of actually boosting book sales across the nation: Low

The legions of the Decent Left are on manoeuvres again. Armchair Generals Denis MacShane and Nick Cohen have both been criticising the Government for its lack of moral fibre foreign policy involvement. It’s pretty much Decent Left boilerplate bloviating, all assuming that what the world really needs is Britain throwing its weight around and the only people who can truly understand and advocate for this great cause are members of the Eustonite media-political complex.

What is interesting in these columns is the complete inability of both MacShane and Cohen to understand why a British government of any colour might be understandably reticent at telling the world ‘no, this is how you do foreign policy’. There’s a case sometimes for obfuscating about the effects of your previous advice, but this is simply ignoring it and pretending that the Blair years and their foreign policy never happened. (There’s no mention of ‘Iraq’ in either column, probably unsurprisingly) If you’re purporting to give advice, it’s usually best to begin by addressing the world you’re in, not the world you wish you were in. Foreign policy doesn’t take place in a vacuum, and Britain’s previous actions have an effect on its diplomatic strength.

But then, this complete ignorance of the past appears to have struck MacShane to such an effect he can’t remember important events in his own life and career, let alone military and diplomatic history. How else can you explain him writing the following with a (presumably) straight face?

Despite the UK’s excellent think-tanks on foreign policy from the venerable Chatham House to the newer European Council on Foreign Relations and Centre for European Reform fewer and fewer MPs of any party show an interest and very rarely attend foreign policy seminars and conferences.

Surely MacShane can recall very good reasons from his career why MPs might be somewhat reticent about going to foreign policy seminars and conferences? Yet again, that mistakes might have been made in the past are completely ignored, which leads to a bizarre vision of the present unhitched from any context or consequence.

So, the media offensive has been attempted, but by refusing to recognise the circumstances it’s taking place in, it’s not likely to have much chance of achieving its aims. Which, fittingly, is pretty much the same as the wars Cohen, MacShane et al advocated turned out too.

I’ve been thinking some more about devolution recently, particularly the ‘city region’/combined authority model that seems to be all the rage at the moment. I’ve outlined before why I think this isn’t a good way of going about devolution – not least because the people have been kept as far away from any discussions about it as possible – but I want to look in a bit more detail at the implications of part of that.

One of the mantras readily uttered by proponents of this method of devolution is that ‘people don’t want more politicians’, and so there are no major democratic institutions being set up to oversee these combined authorities. However, just because there aren’t new politicians doesn’t mean that there isn’t any new bureaucracy and like the LEPs before them, combined authorities seem to be a perfect way to create a whole new level of bureaucracy without any sort of democratic oversight. It’s a clever trick, in a way. If a combined authority did come with a new layer of politicians, there might be pressure to abolish something else to make up for that, but by using the distraction of ‘no more politicians’, a lot of bureaucrats can be sneakily created.

The important thing we are told about devolution is that it will hand lots of power to these new combined authorities, so there’ll be a lot of work for people to do, lots of reports to be written, circulated, consulted on, discussed some more and then perhaps approved. The bureaucracy of the combined authority will get to interact with all the existing bureaucracies – remember, nothing’s being abolished or even rolled up into the new authority – but democratic oversight of this process is going to be weak. Control is going to be in the hand of leaders of the local authorities that make up the combined authority, all of whom are going to be quite busy running their own authorities and not scrutinising the work of the combined authority in any detail.

So, we have a situation where there are more layers of bureaucracy than ever before, but fewer ways to keep check on them. What this gives is the possibility to develop what’s effectively a local deep state – a permanent bureaucracy that effectively sets the parameters of what is and isn’t possible within the political sphere and keeps everything within that consensus. An important part of this is having multiple bureaucracies that can feed off each other and give a seemingly democratic imprimatur to anything that emerges from their processes, despite the people having been kept as far away from it as possible.

The important part of having multiple overlapping bureaucracies is that you can give a policy document the impression of having had lots of involvement in it without it having strayed outside the bureaucracy. If there’s one organisation, it’s obvious that a document has just toured the departments, but once a whole host of different organisations are seemingly involved things take on a different complexion. Suddenly, a policy takes on a life of its own, with no clear origin, but lots of people trying to push it through on multiple fronts.

The important thing to note is that there isn’t any active conspiracy here, just people doing what comes naturally when bureaucracy is left unchecked. Their job is to make policy, and in a vacuum of any real political direction, they’ll go ahead and do what seems right to them, which will normally be whatever is the current political mainstream consensus. Even if an idea starts outside the boundaries of the currently acceptable, by the time its been bounced around several different layers of bureaucracy it will have become the requisite shade of grey.

Devolution should be about giving areas the chance to claim power for themselves and do things differently, but the current proposals don’t achieve that. All they’ll do is create a series of new local bureaucracies that are tied into the same way of doing things as everyone else, with no democratic oversight or control that would be able to control the bureaucracy. Instead, we’re likely to get a bureaucratically-dominated system where any democratic involvement is going to involve little more than rubber-stamping decisions that have already emerged from the deep bureaucratic consensus.

(A lightly edited reprint of a recent Nowa Fantastyka column.)

My stuff has been compared, on occasion, to the work of Stanislaw Lem. I find this intimidating. It’s kind of a high bar to clear; when expectations are calibrated to such altitudes, it’s easy to fall short.

Fortunately there’s a way to distract from that constant likelihood of failure; if you’re not quite up to scrambling onto the shoulders of giants, you can always rip into the efforts of others who’ve tried. So today I’m going to take a look back at what is probably Lem’s crowning literary achievement, as interpreted through the eyes of two outsiders. One of these is Russian— Andrei Tarkovsky— and his vision has been hailed as a cinematic classic: nominated for the Palme d’Or at Cannes, winner of the Jury Grand Prize there, winner of Japan’s Seiun Award and frequently cited as one of the greatest SF films ever made.

The other outsider is American. Steven Soderbergh’s vision won no awards, tanked so badly in theatres it never even recouped its production costs, and was reviled by no less a luminary than Salman Rushdie before it was even made.

I’m talking, of course, about Solaris. Guess which version I prefer.

It’s not that there’s anything egregiously wrong with Tarkovsky’s; it is in many ways a truly beautiful film, apparently conceived at least partly in opposition to Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey but somehow ending up as more of an homage to that film. Tarkovsky’s hypnotic opening sequence, framing a lush and beautiful Earth in a series of static shots,

both echoes and contradicts the arid, hard-focus desert vistas that boot up 2001. The closing reveal of an astronaut trapped in an alien simulacrum of home is conceptually identical to the final scenes of Kubrick’s masterpiece. There’s even a man-taking-an-extremely-long-time-to-pass-through-tunnels-of-light sequence, although in Tarkovsky’s vision the highways are of human construction, the bright streamers courtesy of headlamps and taillights rather than hyperspatial stargates[1].

Tarkovsky uses his lengthy earthbound prolog to frame Solaris in an epistemological context, to question the nature and utility of knowledge itself: what’s the worth of any pile of disjointed facts, no matter how impressive, if there’s no coherent way to fit them together? Should we seek knowledge at any price? These are essential elements of Lem’s novel, and it’s nice to see them included (although apparently Lem hated the prolog in which they were conveyed). And of course, Lem’s more central rumination on the futility of communication with any truly alien intelligence is right up my alley.

So, a lot to admire. The problem I have with Tarkovsky’s Solaris is not so much with its payload as with how it’s delivered. This is a movie that tells, not shows; it’s jam-packed with monologs and arguments that belabor obvious points. People witter on endlessly about the morality of data collection, or declaim upon Man’s Place in the Cosmos while generally being assholes to one another. (One of them helpfully remarks that “We are losing our dignity and human character!”, just in case we’ve missed that point). Near the end of the film, protagonist Kris Kelvin delivers a delirious ramble about Love and Suffering.

This fondness for discourse reaches an almost ridiculous extreme within minutes of Kelvin’s arrival on the station. Almost immediately upon debarking he starts glimpsing things and people that shouldn’t be there, apparitions presenting themselves in defiance of all logic and expectation. And yet—where you and I might be inclined to grab the nearest crew member by the lapels and say “What is that dwarf doing in your cabin and how did he get here?”— Kelvin just keeps arguing with the locals about the personal integrity of his dead friend Gibarian. It’s a level of incuriosity so profound as to be almost inhuman, a triumph of verbiage over logic that runs through the whole damn movie.

Let us take a moment here to allow you all to roll your eyes at the fact that I, of all people, have the nerve to complain about talkiness in a science fiction story. There you go. Get it out of your system.

Now let’s look at the 2002 iteration of the same story.

It took three quarters of an hour to get us to Solaris in 1972. Soderburgh gets us there in seven minutes; and when we arrive we don’t find the station littered with the refuse and dismembered power cables that Tarkovsky showed us. Soderbergh’s station is pristine, icy, all mirrors and edges and gleaming alloy— which makes the bloodstains smeared across those surfaces even more ominous. Less is more: there’s a minimalism here which heightens the impact.

Soderbergh’s characters are more believable, too. The first time Kelvin sees someone that doesn’t belong, he gives chase; finding someone who does, his first question is What are those things? His reaction to the sudden manifestation of his dead wife at his side— shock, denial, a struggle to rein in bubbling panic and stay rational, for chrissake— is perfect.

Soderbergh’s movie loses more of the novel than Tarkovsky’s does, but is arguably better for it. The epistemology is mostly jettisoned (Solaristics is no esoteric quest for knowledge here, but a grubby hunt for commercial applications), and the viscous self-modeling clay of Lem’s sentient ocean has been replaced by a luminous world suffused in flickering aurorae and sheet lightning. Maybe there’s still an ocean down there, generating all those lights. Maybe it’s something else entirely. The movie doesn’t say; nowhere throughout those stripped-down 94 minutes does anyone explicitly describe what Solaris even is, beyond alien and intelligent[2]. And yet there’s something undeniably synaptic about all those writhing flux lines, something that conveys intelligence without the need for exposition. We see the lights move as Kelvin dreams, we watch those bright filigreed tendrils make connections and forge luminous pathways, and somehow we know that Solaris is watching, and taking notes. It’s a brilliant bit of visual shorthand.

Soderbergh trusts us to connect the dots. That’s the difference. Both films, for example, thumbnail human anthropocentrism with an elegant observation from Lem’s novel: “We don’t need other worlds. We need mirrors.” But while Tarkovsky buries that gem in an extended framing debate between characters, Soderbergh presents it almost in isolation: a prerecorded snippet from a dead man, playing in the background.

And yet for all the frugality with which he doles out his data points, Soderbergh does offer up something that Tarkovsky denied us: a few moments of something that might pass as actual honest-to-God contact (assuming it’s not just another troubled dream— although can there even be mere dreams when Solaris is walking through your brain?). Kelvin awakens to find his dead friend sitting at his side, eyes glinting from deep within a featureless silhouette. “What does it want?” Kelvin asks the apparition, and I can’t help hearing does it turn into do you in my head. “Why does Solaris have to want something?” says the man-shaped thing in the darkness. “If you keep thinking there’s a solution, you’ll die here. There are no answers. Only choices.”

That’s Lem’s thesis in a nutshell, right there. If anything like those lines were ever spoken in Tarkovsky’s movie, I missed them in all the sound and fury.

There is also a profoundly human element to Soderbergh’s thought experiment that’s missing from Tarkovsky’s. It’s a bit paradoxical. Both movies tell the same story, draw their plots and characters from the same well. If words and emotions are the conduits through which relationships occur, you’d expect to find the strongest human interactions in the movie with the most verbiage, the loudest histrionics— not in George Clooney’s minimalist performance, which has been described as “wooden”. But Clooney’s Kelvin is not a man without emotion; he’s a man whose emotions would overwhelm him if he ever let them out. He doesn’t exposit about his backstory (he doesn’t have to— the movie does, through a series of flashbacks) but you can see it there in the eyes, in the tremor in his voice. As the final curtain falls, the sight of Kelvin in his kitchen— performing the same rote actions that occupied him at the start of the film— evokes the scene in 2001 where space-suited astronauts touch the unburied monolith in the same tentative way their ancestors did, four million years before.

Soderbergh’s subtext is more disturbing, though. Both echoes use repetition to convey a sense of stagnation— but while Kubrick was suggesting that Humanity, for all its artifice, hasn’t really changed, Soderbergh’s Kelvin doesn’t even exist by the end of his movie. What we’re seeing is another simulacrum. And the tragedy is not that this isn’t the real Kelvin, but that the real Kelvin had so thoroughly suppressed his own humanity that it doesn’t really matter that he’s been replaced. Solaris plays with itself, endlessly running its humanoid puppets through the same routines. Maybe it puts them through those paces in service of some profound alien insight; maybe it’s just mindlessly re-enacting the obsessions and rituals that shone brightest in human minds when it was listening in. It’s Lem’s thesis of cosmic futility made intimate, humane, and even more tragic. In contrast, Tarkovsky’s decision to close the same loop using tacked-on daddy issues— invented completely independent of the novel— feels contrived and empty.

There is a double irony in the way these movies were put together. Tarkovsky built his thought experiment in the mold of 2001, a philosophical investigation in which human characters are mere chess pieces to be moved in service of a greater agenda; yet his dialog-heavy approach is the very antithesis of Kubrick’s largely-silent masterpiece. Soderbergh, in contrast, layered a deeply human story onto Lem’s intellectual thesis and made me feel for his characters— yet paradoxically, he drew me in with the same minimalist tools that Kubrick used to put us at a distance.

Both directors created thoughtful, engaging experiments out of Lem’s canonical work. But Soderbergh made me care about the rats as well as marvel at the maze in which they found themselves. That’s a trick even Kubrick didn’t manage, and it’s one I’d love to learn how to do myself someday.

Perhaps that’s the biggest reason I prefer Soderberg’s vision: it gives me something to aspire to. It’s not just a better movie than Tarkovsky’s. Ignored, panned, commercially unsuccessful, I believe that— in a very real way— it’s a better movie even than 2001.

How astonishing, to find myself admitting that.

---

 

[1] It’s not just Tarkovsky. Both he and Soderbergh owe almost as much to Stanley as to Stanislaw, from the look and pacing of their films right down to the atonal, Ligeti-like soundtracks that back up those images.

[2] I thought they might, at one point. The simulacrum of Kelvin’s wife looks out the viewport and exclaims “What is that?”— to which Kelvin replies “Solaris”, setting the scene for a bit of helpful exposition. But Rheya only nods— “Oh my God, yes…”— and the moment passes. I suspect Soderbergh may have done that just to yank the chains of viewers who wanted it all spelled out…

My attention was drawn this morning to this open letter in the Guardian/Observer/Whatever signed by a long list of notable transphobes and whorephobes, and a few people who really should know better. “We cannot allow censorship and silencing of individuals”, it says.

It goes on to describe a number of examples of this “censorship and silencing”. They are:

1. The cancellation of Kate Smuthwaite’s gig at Goldsmith’s College last month.

   There was, it is claimed, “intimidation” over this show, which caused it to be cancelled. However, the organiser of the very same show paints a rather different picture, one where they only sold 8 tickets, where the only suggestions of a picket or protests appear to have been manufactured by Ms Smurthwaite herself (possibly in a misguided attempt to generate some controversy and sell some tickets?)

   This is all because Kate has curated a reputation of being a sex work abolitionist, and tends to be quite abrasive towards sex workers who take the view that they’d like to continue their livelihood in safety, without someone trying to coercively “rescue” them, than you very much.

   The show was cancelled because nobody bought tickets, for whatever reason, but in the two weeks since, the student volunteers who run Goldsmith’s SU and their comedy society have been the targets of some abuse as a result.

   @RozKaveney @commentisfree Goldsmiths SU did not no platform Kate Smurthwaite. We have no policy. Whole preamble false

   — Howard (@howardsaid) February 14, 2015

   @RozKaveney @commentisfree @NickCohen4 thinking about it. We are small SU mostly student volunteers (including comedy soc president)…

   — Howard (@howardsaid) February 14, 2015

   @RozKaveney @commentisfree @NickCohen4 ..who have had had all sorts of hate&smears directed at us for past 2 weeks over a show cancellation

   — Howard (@howardsaid) February 14, 2015

   It sounds like someone is being silenced and intimidated here, but I don’t think it’s Kate Smurthwaite.

2. Calls at the Cambridge Union to withdraw a speaking invitation to Germaine Greer.
   
   I actually know something about this one, because I was involved. The Union Society (an expensive bit of prime real estate in Cambridge City Centre with a debating society attached, known for being somewhere were aspiring political hacks cut their teeth, and not to be mistaken with Cambridge University Students’ Union) did indeed invite Germaine Greer to speak.

   Greer has a long history of transphobic bigotry, and managed to fire herself as a Cambridge lecturer over it. the Students’ Union LGBT+ society, who had a partnership with the Union Society for their weekly socials, felt this was a bit off and wrote to the Union Society outlining their concerns.

   The Union Society noted their concerns by way of reply, and said they would go ahead anyway. In response, the LGBT+ Society and the Women’s Society organised a separate event featuring noted trans feminist writer, Roz Kaveney, at which I also spoke. A couple of students also handed out some leaflets to those going to the Union Society’s Greer event.

   That’s not “silencing” and it’s certainly not “intimidation”. I saw the whole email chain between CUSU LGBT+ and the Union Society. It was all terribly polite and respectful, but the two sides did disagree. That’s ok, that’s allowed.

   The expression of disagreement is a fundamental part of freedom of expression. Shame on the letter signatories for trying to silence it.

3. Rupert Reed, the Green Party Prospective Parliamentary Candidate for Cambridge, recently got into something of a kerfuffle over comments he made in a blog and on twitter, initially about the use of the word, “cisgender”, but later compounded in a clumsy apology where he shot himself in the foot by suggesting there was a debate to be had about whether trans women should be allowed to use public toilets.
   

   All that I have done is join many feminists in saying that it is up to women, not anyone else – and certainly not me – to decide who gets let into women-only spaces, such as women’s toilets. All women have a right to be involved in making those decisions.

   Reed apologised again, properly this time. I understand some LGBT people in Cambridge who wanted to vote Green wrote to the local party saying they didn’t think they could while Reed was their candidate and … that’s it.

   The letter to the Guardian says, “The Green party came under pressure to repudiate the philosophy lecturer Rupert Read after he questioned the arguments put forward by some trans-activists”, but those “arguments put forward by trans activists” are basically just, “can we use the toilet, please?”

   Regardless, telling a politician that you thought something they said was out of order, and you’re not going to vote for them as a result, is not “silencing” and it’s not “intimidation”. What it actually is is democracy. Shame on the letter signatories for opposing it.

4. Julie Bindel is no platformed by the NUS LGBT.

   No platforming sounds terribly serious. In reality, it basically means, “we won’t invite this person to our stuff, and we won’t appear on the same platform as them.”

   Given Bindel is known for her transphobia and has spoken publicly in support of trans conversion therapy (remember Leelah Alcorn?), it’s hardly surprising that the NUS LGBT don’t want anything to do with her. The thing is, people are allowed to take their ball and go home, and they are allowed to express opinions about public figures and even protest about them. These are fundamental parts of freedom of expression, and not in any way an attack on it.

Some people around the world are actually oppressed because of the things they want to say. They’re not comedians engaging in publicity stunts, washed up academics getting invited to plush debating societies, politicians getting caught saying something stupid or transphobes with more newspaper columns than I can reasonably count. By signing this letter, you do a disservice to those who are actually denied freedom of expression around the world. Shame on you.

Those who signed and have a history of transphobia and whorephobia know what they’re doing and are being deeply cynical here.

To those who signed it because they were told it was about “freedom of speech” and didn’t research the context, I merely ask to please try to be a bit less credulous in future.

Oh, and maybe try to be a bit less “first world problems” about healthy disagreement, ok?

Thanks.

Are New Atheist authors and leaders trying to pull the same awful crime that Neopagan authors and leaders tried back in the late 1980s?

Despite what Stuart Whatley wrote for The Baffler today, I don’t think that it’s at all coincidental that the latest anti-Muslim hate crime was by someone who self-identified, online, as a Dawkins-style “New Atheist.” Whatley is complaining about a Washington Post article that said that the Chapel Hill murders were emblematic of the ongoing fight between the New Atheists and Muslims. Whatley’s annoyance at this, and his attempted refutation, can (I think) be entirely fairly summed up as “no true Scotsman” crossed with “#NotAllAtheists”.

To that end, all I can say is the same thing that so many of us were taught last year in the brilliant feminist response to the #NotAllMen twitterstorm: #YesAllWomen. Not all atheists are bigoted anti-Arab, ant-Islam wannabe hate killers, but yes all Muslims have to fear New Atheists. After the New Atheist communities’ most prominent authors have spent the last half dozen years or so beating this drum, I don’t see how anybody can call the New Atheists anything but an anti-Muslim hate group. These are people who can’t be distracted from their message of anti-Muslim hate by oppression or violence from any other religious community, whether it’s the veto on public policy the Ultra Orthodox hold in Israel or the anti-gay secessionist rhetoric of Alabama’s fundamentalist Chief Justice or terrorist acts by Christian Identity groups or anti-abortion groups or anti-Islam terrorism by Buddhists in Sri Lanka. Nope. Try to bring any of that up, and they change the subject back to, “the Muslims are coming to kill us all!”

But there’s something in the WaPo/Baffler argument that makes me wonder if I know what that’s all about, something even more awful than ordinary bigotry or the lazy intellectual sin of falling for your own country’s war propaganda. Because I may have been through this before.

Remember the Satanic Panic, the great “Satanic ritual sex abuse” conspiracy theory, the claim that occultists were raping tens of thousands of children per year, and making those children murder tens of thousands of babies per year, with cover-up help from all levels of government, in order to create an army of brainwashed assassins for the anti-Christ? Remember the resulting police and media panic, of the mid ‘80s through the early ‘90s? I certainly do; I was one of the lesser victims of it.

Well, during the Satanic Panic I was directly or indirectly contacted by five different NeoPagan leaders, all of them much more prominent than me: Ar nDraiocht Fein’s Isaac Bonewits, Aquarian Tabernacle Church’s Pete Pathfinder, Circle Sanctuary’s Selena Fox, and Church of All Worlds’ Otter & Morning Glory Zell, all of them demanding that I stop publicly questioning the evidence in the Satanic Panic scare and that I get on board with it, or they would do whatever they could to ruin me. Bonewits and Pathfinder were very explicit about why, too. They said that they didn’t care if the Satanists were guilty or not. They both said that they saw this as their opportunity to convince Christian America that we weren’t their enemy, by piling on a common enemy.

I told each and every one of them off, over the phone or in person or in writing. I told them that I was going to keep standing publicly with, and using my prestige as a board member of the Alliance for Magical and Earth Religions and as the founder of MagickNet along side of, the few Neopagan groups that were standing up for truth and justice, like Covenant of the Goddess and the Wiccan/Pagan Press Alliance. (I know I’m forgetting one, I always do.) For one thing, truth matters; seeking to get innocent people jailed (or worse) to protect your own skin is morally despicable behavior. Almost as importantly, the fact that so few of the persecuted victims of the Satanic Panic were even Satanists, or any kind of occultist, that so much of it was based on coerced testimony framing them for being Satanists, showed the folly of this idea: if they hate us, they’re not going to accept us as their allies, period; any Satanic Panic you feed will just eventually be used against you when they get around to destroying you.

So now it occurs to me to wonder. Because atheists are, in America, the single most hated belief group, with approval ratings on par with or maybe even below religious extremist terrorist groups. (Which, I have to say, strikes me as nothing less than deranged, but that’s not the point.) And atheists live in America, and Britain, two countries that have had thirteen and a half years of anti-Muslim war propaganda on almost every TV channel and radio station. How much of Dawkins’ and Hitchens’ and the rest of the New Atheists’ anti-Muslim hate is real and how much is opportunistic?