Back when I was a starry-eyed MA with hopes and dreams a non-expanding waist line, I dabbled in creative writing. God help me, I dabbled in poetry. Particularly, I had an idea that I'd do a collection of poems that was based on reflections on the characters from Peanuts. I only finished two poems (sadly, the world will never hear the wonder of "I Am the Pig Pen.). One is titled "The Little Red-Haired Woman" and the other I'm going to share today. I'd like to put some heavy caveats in front: first, I really don't get poetry, generally, and I think this reflects that. Second, it really works better as a spoken poem, when I can add some inflection and emphasis. And third, I'm really very bad at poetry. And with that...
I Love Lucy
Lucy is a bad sister.
She berates her brothers’ blankets and knocks over their blocks.
She gives orders that Must Not Be Denied.
She plays the big sister card so often, it’s the only one in the deck.
Years from now, Lucy is the sister you only see at weddings and funerals.
Lucy is a bad friend.
She misses the catch, and makes excuses.
She takes your money, and gives bad advice.
She always pulls the ball away.
Lucy is the friend you can’t afford to trust.
Lucy is a bad person.
She kicks dogs and picks on children.
She is bossy and crabby and mean.
She is pride without humility.
Lucy is the devil before the fall.
But every day, after Lucy mocks her brothers,
after Lucy ridicules her friends,
after Lucy alienates herself,
She goes to a man with a piano and asks him to love her
more than his music.
And she knows.
She knows what the answer will be,
Better than she knows herself.
Every day, Lucy’s heart is broken.
And every day,
This creature of hate and anger and rage and fear
And jealousy and arrogance and human
goes home
and dreams of someone who will not dream of her.
It's sort of a clumsy ending, but... eh. Not the worst thing I've done.
Later Days.
Wednesday, December 7, 2011
Sunday, December 4, 2011
Bibliophile: Wet Works
Books, books everywhere, and not a word worth reading. Or is there? Lead it to Bibliophile to find out.
There's no place like home : the empowering potential of the midwifery model of childbirth. 1991. Squire, Denise C.
The university appears to be slowly digitizing its decades' worth of theses and dissertations. I'm against it, purely because it means more work for me when reading through the titles. Ah, the passions of the true scholar. I mention this title because most are so mundane that a Wizard of Oz reference really brightens the proceedings.
Is conservatism an artifact caused by dissimilarities between the laboratory and the real world? 1992. Kamenetsky, Stuart B.
Essentially, are people less likely to sacrifice other people if they know they're real people and not just numbers? Answer: results cannot be generalized. That's somewhat ironic--that the study investigating how people come to make generalizations ends in a conclusion that can't be generalized.
Bald truth : determining the need for a Canadian alopecia association / by Bonnie Lipton.
I'm imagining the Canadian equivalent of Stan Sitwell here.
Gender differences in perceptions of sexual and nonsexual cues in dating. Alksnis, Christine.
Through analysis of surveys, Alksnis found that men are more likely to associate sexual encounters with a "good" date than women, and that women are more likely to describe a "bad" date as one that includes sexually-charged situations. So in other words, if there's sex involved, men aren't going to have a bad date. Science, everybody.
Empathy and intergroup relations : do people empathize less with outgroup members? / by Gillian Macdonald.
Interesting question. On the one hand, I'd say that in general, we're more likely to empathize with people we know better and identify with, which includes people we're in groups with. On the other hand, I'd say there's a point where you're so familiar with a person's problems that you're too close to see them for what they are--that you get so used to them, their concerns become a sort of background noise. I think it happens with families, especially. The actual study appears to be based on ethnic groups, though, and it found no difference either way.
Never call them "jerks" : an approach to responsible pastoral leadership in the face of difficult behaviour in the congregation. 1997. Boers, Arthur Paul.
Well, that's just good advice.
Bye, Bye, Miss American Pie? The Supply of New Recorded Music Since Napster by Joel Wadfogel, 2011.
The typical music industry complaint against file-sharing and so forth is that it damages the industry, whereas respecting copyright encourages creative growth. Wadfogel's findings basically show that there's been no decrease in the quantity of new artists or material coming to market since the proliferation of Napster and after its decline. Without any data at all, I'd argue that digital distribution has been a real boon to emerging artists in general, as it's easier to develop an audience.
Deleuze and Guattari's immanent ethics : theory, subjectivity, and duration / Tamsin Lorraine. Albany : State University of New York Press, c2011.
Finally, finally, we are out of the theses/special papers section, and into the new books proper. And what better way to kick that off with this week's Deleuze and Guattari tribute?
Concept of time / Martin Heidegger ; translated by Ingo Farin. London ; New York : Continuum, c2011.
Speaking of major figures in modern philosophy, we have this translated entry from one of phenomenology's heavy hitters. All I know from Heidegger is what I've derived from my Stiegler readings, but it's more than enough to know that this would be an intense reading.
Yuck! : the nature and moral significance of disgust / Daniel Kelly.
Other books that include "Yuck" in their titles: "What the Yuck?: The Freaky and Fabulous Truth About Your Body," a book on the female body; "Yuck!: The Grossest Joke Book Ever!" ("Man: I'd like some toilet paper please. Lady: What colour would you like? Man: Just give me white, I colour it myself!"); and "Oh, yuck!: the encyclopedia of everything nasty." Can Kelly's book live up to this illustrious pedigree?
Religion and democracy : a worldwide comparison / Carsten Anckar.
I like books with a simple, modest scope. It does appear that Anckar is addressing something more specific than the title suggests. He is apparently testing Huntington’s claim that democracy and religion are tightly connected, and that western Christianity is the only religion capable of supporting democratic institutions. Anckar finds quantitatively what I would call the intuitive answer, that local political context matters more than declared religion. It gets more complicated when you factor in that religion is also determined in part by political context, and determines it as well, but in general, it seems like Huntington is confusing causation with correlation.
Terror of history : on the uncertainties of life in Western civilization / Teofilo F. Ruiz. Princeton, N.J. : Princeton University Press, c2011.
Man, if there was ever a title that seemed to encapsulate the "First World problems" meme. What the book actually argues is that Westerners generally have three responses to large-scale disaster and trauma: religion, worldly success and pleasure, and art and knowledge. That's a good thumbnail sketch of the classic Faust story, where the good doctor gives up the first in the name of the last and winds up thoughtlessly going after the middle.
Architecture of doom [videorecording] / POJ Filmproduktion AB ; First Run/CARUS Film production ; a film by Peter Cohen. New York : First Run/ICARUS Films, 1991.
I was hoping this would be about sinister buttresses and evil archways. It is instead a book on Hitler's theories of architecture, which isn't far off, come to think of it.
Stone and dung, oil and spit : Jewish daily life in the time of Jesus / Jodi Magness.
I like the contrast Magness was clearly going for--mixing the typical sense of the sacredness of Jesus with the ordinary and profane.
Job search in academe : how to get the position you deserve / Dawn M. Formo and Cheryl Reed ; foreword by Kristina Mesaros, Carla Maroudas, and Kevin Degnan. 2nd ed. Sterling, Va. : Stylus, c2011.
...I'm listening.
Big thirst : the secret life and turbulent future of water / Charles Fishman. 1st Free Press hardcover ed. New York : Free Press, 2011.
Water management's an issue that's not going away--as the book's description tells us, major American cities are only 90 days away from running out of water at a given time. Fishman's book seems more positive than most environmental-oriented examinations, arguing that we do have enough water and we will have enough, provided we can manage it properly. It's sort of a training resource; it's the closest we have to something that's actually renewable, and if we can properly manage it, then maybe there's hope that we can responsibly use a few other things.
Better angels of our nature : why violence has declined / Steven Pinker.
Catchy title. For those wondering his argument, he backs up his point that we're living in the most nonviolent time in history with pages and pages of graphs and statistics. The main three factors he identifies is the influence from the Enlightenment, that promoting education lowers propensity for violence; the prevalence of the state, in that people have less need to personally defend themselves; and the global spread of commerce, which makes it in everyone's best interest to play nice. I think there's a case to be made against all points--the State has led to some massacres on a far wider scale than any other, the education factor may be construed as intellectual elitism, and the commerce issue ignores just who's making money off of all those guns. But it's hard to argue that we're not as bellicose, as a species, as we once were.
Cold breezes and idiot winds : patriotic correctness and the post-9/11 assault on academe / Valerie Scatamburlo-D'Annibale. Rotterdam : Sense Publishers, c2011.
Somebody sounds a little peeved. Although I'll admit that there does seem to be a bizarre anti-intellectual strain in American discourse.
Book of rotters / Alan Bold & Robert Giddings. Edinburgh : Mainstream Pub., 1985.
Putting "rotter" in the title of your book improves it by 8.67%. Fact.
Later Days.
Future species : Hybrids, Exoskell, Cyborg living, Makeover madness. Toronto : Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, c2009.
I wish I was still teaching a course on digital media. Ah, well. I might check out this book anyway.
Agonizing love : the golden era of romance comics / Michael Barson. New York : Harper Design, 2011.
Another entry for the comic book historian.
Blackout / Connie Willis. 1st ed. New York : Spectra Ballantine Books, c2010.
Time travel romps. There's nothing that can go so bad as a time travel story, but it should be fun.
Close to Spider Man : stories / Ivan E. Coyote. Vancouver : Arsenal Pulp Press, c2000.
Sadly, not an anthology of characters ranging from Aunt May to Flash Thompson.
Virtual water : tackling the threat to our planet's most precious resource / Tony Allan. London ; New York : I.B. Tauris, 2011.
And for a different perspective on the water debate, Tony Allan argues that water is finite, and running out fast. We need to be better appreciate the value of this resource, while we have it. Or so his argument goes.
Inventing Iron Man : the possibility of a human machine / E. Paul Zehr. Baltimore : Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011.
A book in the "Science of Superheroes" sort of vein.
Later Days.
There's no place like home : the empowering potential of the midwifery model of childbirth. 1991. Squire, Denise C.
The university appears to be slowly digitizing its decades' worth of theses and dissertations. I'm against it, purely because it means more work for me when reading through the titles. Ah, the passions of the true scholar. I mention this title because most are so mundane that a Wizard of Oz reference really brightens the proceedings.
Is conservatism an artifact caused by dissimilarities between the laboratory and the real world? 1992. Kamenetsky, Stuart B.
Essentially, are people less likely to sacrifice other people if they know they're real people and not just numbers? Answer: results cannot be generalized. That's somewhat ironic--that the study investigating how people come to make generalizations ends in a conclusion that can't be generalized.
Bald truth : determining the need for a Canadian alopecia association / by Bonnie Lipton.
I'm imagining the Canadian equivalent of Stan Sitwell here.
Gender differences in perceptions of sexual and nonsexual cues in dating. Alksnis, Christine.
Through analysis of surveys, Alksnis found that men are more likely to associate sexual encounters with a "good" date than women, and that women are more likely to describe a "bad" date as one that includes sexually-charged situations. So in other words, if there's sex involved, men aren't going to have a bad date. Science, everybody.
Empathy and intergroup relations : do people empathize less with outgroup members? / by Gillian Macdonald.
Interesting question. On the one hand, I'd say that in general, we're more likely to empathize with people we know better and identify with, which includes people we're in groups with. On the other hand, I'd say there's a point where you're so familiar with a person's problems that you're too close to see them for what they are--that you get so used to them, their concerns become a sort of background noise. I think it happens with families, especially. The actual study appears to be based on ethnic groups, though, and it found no difference either way.
Never call them "jerks" : an approach to responsible pastoral leadership in the face of difficult behaviour in the congregation. 1997. Boers, Arthur Paul.
Well, that's just good advice.
Bye, Bye, Miss American Pie? The Supply of New Recorded Music Since Napster by Joel Wadfogel, 2011.
The typical music industry complaint against file-sharing and so forth is that it damages the industry, whereas respecting copyright encourages creative growth. Wadfogel's findings basically show that there's been no decrease in the quantity of new artists or material coming to market since the proliferation of Napster and after its decline. Without any data at all, I'd argue that digital distribution has been a real boon to emerging artists in general, as it's easier to develop an audience.
Deleuze and Guattari's immanent ethics : theory, subjectivity, and duration / Tamsin Lorraine. Albany : State University of New York Press, c2011.
Finally, finally, we are out of the theses/special papers section, and into the new books proper. And what better way to kick that off with this week's Deleuze and Guattari tribute?
Concept of time / Martin Heidegger ; translated by Ingo Farin. London ; New York : Continuum, c2011.
Speaking of major figures in modern philosophy, we have this translated entry from one of phenomenology's heavy hitters. All I know from Heidegger is what I've derived from my Stiegler readings, but it's more than enough to know that this would be an intense reading.
Yuck! : the nature and moral significance of disgust / Daniel Kelly.
Other books that include "Yuck" in their titles: "What the Yuck?: The Freaky and Fabulous Truth About Your Body," a book on the female body; "Yuck!: The Grossest Joke Book Ever!" ("Man: I'd like some toilet paper please. Lady: What colour would you like? Man: Just give me white, I colour it myself!"); and "Oh, yuck!: the encyclopedia of everything nasty." Can Kelly's book live up to this illustrious pedigree?
Religion and democracy : a worldwide comparison / Carsten Anckar.
I like books with a simple, modest scope. It does appear that Anckar is addressing something more specific than the title suggests. He is apparently testing Huntington’s claim that democracy and religion are tightly connected, and that western Christianity is the only religion capable of supporting democratic institutions. Anckar finds quantitatively what I would call the intuitive answer, that local political context matters more than declared religion. It gets more complicated when you factor in that religion is also determined in part by political context, and determines it as well, but in general, it seems like Huntington is confusing causation with correlation.
Terror of history : on the uncertainties of life in Western civilization / Teofilo F. Ruiz. Princeton, N.J. : Princeton University Press, c2011.
Man, if there was ever a title that seemed to encapsulate the "First World problems" meme. What the book actually argues is that Westerners generally have three responses to large-scale disaster and trauma: religion, worldly success and pleasure, and art and knowledge. That's a good thumbnail sketch of the classic Faust story, where the good doctor gives up the first in the name of the last and winds up thoughtlessly going after the middle.
Architecture of doom [videorecording] / POJ Filmproduktion AB ; First Run/CARUS Film production ; a film by Peter Cohen. New York : First Run/ICARUS Films, 1991.
I was hoping this would be about sinister buttresses and evil archways. It is instead a book on Hitler's theories of architecture, which isn't far off, come to think of it.
Stone and dung, oil and spit : Jewish daily life in the time of Jesus / Jodi Magness.
I like the contrast Magness was clearly going for--mixing the typical sense of the sacredness of Jesus with the ordinary and profane.
Job search in academe : how to get the position you deserve / Dawn M. Formo and Cheryl Reed ; foreword by Kristina Mesaros, Carla Maroudas, and Kevin Degnan. 2nd ed. Sterling, Va. : Stylus, c2011.
...I'm listening.
Big thirst : the secret life and turbulent future of water / Charles Fishman. 1st Free Press hardcover ed. New York : Free Press, 2011.
Water management's an issue that's not going away--as the book's description tells us, major American cities are only 90 days away from running out of water at a given time. Fishman's book seems more positive than most environmental-oriented examinations, arguing that we do have enough water and we will have enough, provided we can manage it properly. It's sort of a training resource; it's the closest we have to something that's actually renewable, and if we can properly manage it, then maybe there's hope that we can responsibly use a few other things.
Better angels of our nature : why violence has declined / Steven Pinker.
Catchy title. For those wondering his argument, he backs up his point that we're living in the most nonviolent time in history with pages and pages of graphs and statistics. The main three factors he identifies is the influence from the Enlightenment, that promoting education lowers propensity for violence; the prevalence of the state, in that people have less need to personally defend themselves; and the global spread of commerce, which makes it in everyone's best interest to play nice. I think there's a case to be made against all points--the State has led to some massacres on a far wider scale than any other, the education factor may be construed as intellectual elitism, and the commerce issue ignores just who's making money off of all those guns. But it's hard to argue that we're not as bellicose, as a species, as we once were.
Cold breezes and idiot winds : patriotic correctness and the post-9/11 assault on academe / Valerie Scatamburlo-D'Annibale. Rotterdam : Sense Publishers, c2011.
Somebody sounds a little peeved. Although I'll admit that there does seem to be a bizarre anti-intellectual strain in American discourse.
Book of rotters / Alan Bold & Robert Giddings. Edinburgh : Mainstream Pub., 1985.
Putting "rotter" in the title of your book improves it by 8.67%. Fact.
Later Days.
Future species : Hybrids, Exoskell, Cyborg living, Makeover madness. Toronto : Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, c2009.
I wish I was still teaching a course on digital media. Ah, well. I might check out this book anyway.
Agonizing love : the golden era of romance comics / Michael Barson. New York : Harper Design, 2011.
Another entry for the comic book historian.
Blackout / Connie Willis. 1st ed. New York : Spectra Ballantine Books, c2010.
Time travel romps. There's nothing that can go so bad as a time travel story, but it should be fun.
Close to Spider Man : stories / Ivan E. Coyote. Vancouver : Arsenal Pulp Press, c2000.
Sadly, not an anthology of characters ranging from Aunt May to Flash Thompson.
Virtual water : tackling the threat to our planet's most precious resource / Tony Allan. London ; New York : I.B. Tauris, 2011.
And for a different perspective on the water debate, Tony Allan argues that water is finite, and running out fast. We need to be better appreciate the value of this resource, while we have it. Or so his argument goes.
Inventing Iron Man : the possibility of a human machine / E. Paul Zehr. Baltimore : Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011.
A book in the "Science of Superheroes" sort of vein.
Later Days.
Saturday, December 3, 2011
Book Review: Do The Gods Wear Capes? by Ben Saunders
"This phenomenal development of a national comics addiction puzzles professional educators and leaves the literary critics gasping. Comics scorn finesse, thereby incurring the wrath of linguistic adepts. They defy the limits of accepted fact and convention, thus amortizing to apoplexy the ossified arteries of routine thought. But by these very tokens the picture-story fantasy cuts loose the hampering debris of art and artifice and touches the tender spots of universal human desires and aspirations, hidden customarily beneath long accumulated protective coverings of indirection or disguise. Comics speak, without qualm or sophistication, to the innermost ears of the wishful self." --William Moulton Marston, creator of Wonder Woman, circa 1940s, quoted in Ben Saunder's Do The Gods Wear Capes?.
I know, two book reviews in a 24 hour period. It's been a long day. Hopefully, this one will be a little abridged.
About a year ago now, I was pressing a friend for his opinion on a trio of superhero comics we'd both read. He was somewhat reluctant to voice said opinion, but under further pressure, he finally blurted out that he hated them. Not only did they raise his ire, but they reminded him of everything that he was sick of about the genre: overblown, oversimplistic morality, downright misogynist portrayals of women, and a celebration of violence and carnage. I was, as you might imagine, somewhat surprised. The worst part was that I could tell this wasn't a conclusion he'd come to casually. He was a bigger comic fan than I was (if you can imagine such a thing), and he wouldn't willingly dismiss any part of its history, capes or no capes, unless he felt he had very little choice. And the hell of it was, I couldn't really marshal an argument in favor of the current crop of spandex-sporters. A lot of the time they ARE depicting the adventures of misogynistic, hyperviolent hypocrites. And the hell of it was, I'd probably keep on reading them anyway.
Saunders' book, Do The Gods Wear Capes?: Spirituality, Fantasy, and Superheroes, isn't exactly the answer I was looking for, though that's mostly because of its era of focus--it's stretching the whole of superhero comics history, from pre-WWII onwards, but there's not much about the current era; the closest it gets is some Warren Ellis-penned stuff in the early 2000s. Each chapter looks at a different comic book superhero and the seminal work on him or her to argue for the philosophical representations each one conveys. Chapter 1, for example, is on Superman. Supremely powered, Superman's story isn't about power, but about pursuing moral goodness. The catch is, this goodness is constantly being reinterpreted--Siegel and Shuster saw him as a rebel figure, best typified in an early issue where he tears up a car manufacturer's factory for producing unsafe vehicles, then kidnaps the mayor to get him to promise stricter guidelines. Later, he becomes a bastion of public order, and later still, something more ambiguous. Spiritually, Saunders connects him to the difficulty of pursuing goodness, as its definition proves elusive.
But it's chapter two where things really get interesting. Saunders here looks at the inception of Wonder Woman, by psychiatrist turned comic book writer William Moulton Marston. Marston's predilection for bondage scenes is well-known, but what's less known is that this bondage was based on a very complex system of beliefs. Marston thought that, using some questionable biological arguments, that women were naturally dominant, and men submissive, and that much of the evils of world persisted because both sexes had forgotten the pleasure of being in bondage. As Marston put it, "The only hope for peace is to teach people who are full of pep and unbound force to enjoy being bound." It's a very weird idea, but a pretty interesting one--especially when juxtaposed with Bernard Wolfe's Limbo. Limbo, as I'm sure you'll all remember from the book review I never wrote, had the premise that in the future, men disavowed themselves from aggression by voluntarily removing their limbs. The endeavor failed because they were just as aggressive as ever--they replaced the limbs with constructed limbs that they built in competition, trading a nuclear arms race for a literal arms race (and with Wolfe, the pun is always intended). At the same time, their sexuality all but vanished--the world was fun of women desperate for male attention and men who ignored them. Perhaps Marston's bondage is a way of channeling that aggression into pleasure?
Saunders' own contribution of the argument is that the value Marston favors--submission--is an original Christian value, but one that's fallen out of favor. He suggests that Wonder Woman, as a character, presents a utopian model combining submission to a higher power with the ecstasy of the flesh, seeing that combining sex and spirituality has been a problem at least since the Songs of Solomon.
Chapter 3 is Spider-Man, and in this figure, Saunders sees a merger of Freudian trauma theory--Spider-Man's constant return to the death of his uncle and Gwen Stacey--to the existential philosophy of Kierkegaard. Specifically, Kierkegaard argues that we pass from a state of no moral order, to some system of moral order, to a realization of that no moral order is capable of encompassing all experience, and that rationality is always limited. Those three stages are represented in Spider-Man by his original moral-free acceptance of his powers, his "great power comes great responsibility" shift with the death of Uncle Ben, and the unpreventable death of his girlfriend, Gwen Stacey. (There's also a brief section on Gwen's role, as the innocent woman sacrificed so Peter can reach this enlightenment.) One wonders, given this analysis, what Saunders makes of Peter's recent deal with Satan to his aunt's life, at the cost of his memory of his marriage. Yeah, that happened. Comics!
The final chapter is on Iron Man. Here, Saunders argues that Tony Stark's reliance on technology is similar to his reliance on alcohol, that in both cases, it's about control, and it's through the lenses of alcoholism that the series portrays the follies of overreliance on technology. Saunders weaves this interpretation with a discussion of the posthuman, represented by Stark's merging of man and machine. The spiritual issue touched on here is one of acceptance of the limitations of the individual, as in the form of the AA program. A coda follows, in which Saunders cautions against comic book studies creating a divide between super hero comics and the more auteur-based indie books. Preach it, sir.
Saunders' interest here is not in showing how these superheroes function as springboards for philosophical discussions, but to argue that these philosophical issues have always been built into these characters to begin with. Thus, the value of superhero comics aren't escapism or wish fulfillment, but the way they address, intrinsically, the same values and questions that have driven philosophy for centuries. And while Saunders does get a little preachy at times, for the most part, he does exactly that. It's probably a testament to his writing that I was left wondering what could be done with other superhero characters. If Gwen was a sacrifice, then what do we make of Jean Grey, a woman who died not just once but twice, the second time explicitly so her husband could progress as a person? Batman is notoriously missing in Saunders' analysis, save for a reference that his morality is not so much complex as contradictory, but surely there's something to be made out of a man who dedicated his life to vengeance and wound up with a family? And then there's the Fantastic Four. If Tony Stark represents faith in technology, then Reed Richards is the poster boy for rationalism and modern science. And Ben Grimm is essentially the archetype of "bad things happening to good people." Ah, the endless possibilities. Comics!
Later Days.
I know, two book reviews in a 24 hour period. It's been a long day. Hopefully, this one will be a little abridged.
About a year ago now, I was pressing a friend for his opinion on a trio of superhero comics we'd both read. He was somewhat reluctant to voice said opinion, but under further pressure, he finally blurted out that he hated them. Not only did they raise his ire, but they reminded him of everything that he was sick of about the genre: overblown, oversimplistic morality, downright misogynist portrayals of women, and a celebration of violence and carnage. I was, as you might imagine, somewhat surprised. The worst part was that I could tell this wasn't a conclusion he'd come to casually. He was a bigger comic fan than I was (if you can imagine such a thing), and he wouldn't willingly dismiss any part of its history, capes or no capes, unless he felt he had very little choice. And the hell of it was, I couldn't really marshal an argument in favor of the current crop of spandex-sporters. A lot of the time they ARE depicting the adventures of misogynistic, hyperviolent hypocrites. And the hell of it was, I'd probably keep on reading them anyway.
Saunders' book, Do The Gods Wear Capes?: Spirituality, Fantasy, and Superheroes, isn't exactly the answer I was looking for, though that's mostly because of its era of focus--it's stretching the whole of superhero comics history, from pre-WWII onwards, but there's not much about the current era; the closest it gets is some Warren Ellis-penned stuff in the early 2000s. Each chapter looks at a different comic book superhero and the seminal work on him or her to argue for the philosophical representations each one conveys. Chapter 1, for example, is on Superman. Supremely powered, Superman's story isn't about power, but about pursuing moral goodness. The catch is, this goodness is constantly being reinterpreted--Siegel and Shuster saw him as a rebel figure, best typified in an early issue where he tears up a car manufacturer's factory for producing unsafe vehicles, then kidnaps the mayor to get him to promise stricter guidelines. Later, he becomes a bastion of public order, and later still, something more ambiguous. Spiritually, Saunders connects him to the difficulty of pursuing goodness, as its definition proves elusive.
But it's chapter two where things really get interesting. Saunders here looks at the inception of Wonder Woman, by psychiatrist turned comic book writer William Moulton Marston. Marston's predilection for bondage scenes is well-known, but what's less known is that this bondage was based on a very complex system of beliefs. Marston thought that, using some questionable biological arguments, that women were naturally dominant, and men submissive, and that much of the evils of world persisted because both sexes had forgotten the pleasure of being in bondage. As Marston put it, "The only hope for peace is to teach people who are full of pep and unbound force to enjoy being bound." It's a very weird idea, but a pretty interesting one--especially when juxtaposed with Bernard Wolfe's Limbo. Limbo, as I'm sure you'll all remember from the book review I never wrote, had the premise that in the future, men disavowed themselves from aggression by voluntarily removing their limbs. The endeavor failed because they were just as aggressive as ever--they replaced the limbs with constructed limbs that they built in competition, trading a nuclear arms race for a literal arms race (and with Wolfe, the pun is always intended). At the same time, their sexuality all but vanished--the world was fun of women desperate for male attention and men who ignored them. Perhaps Marston's bondage is a way of channeling that aggression into pleasure?
Saunders' own contribution of the argument is that the value Marston favors--submission--is an original Christian value, but one that's fallen out of favor. He suggests that Wonder Woman, as a character, presents a utopian model combining submission to a higher power with the ecstasy of the flesh, seeing that combining sex and spirituality has been a problem at least since the Songs of Solomon.
Chapter 3 is Spider-Man, and in this figure, Saunders sees a merger of Freudian trauma theory--Spider-Man's constant return to the death of his uncle and Gwen Stacey--to the existential philosophy of Kierkegaard. Specifically, Kierkegaard argues that we pass from a state of no moral order, to some system of moral order, to a realization of that no moral order is capable of encompassing all experience, and that rationality is always limited. Those three stages are represented in Spider-Man by his original moral-free acceptance of his powers, his "great power comes great responsibility" shift with the death of Uncle Ben, and the unpreventable death of his girlfriend, Gwen Stacey. (There's also a brief section on Gwen's role, as the innocent woman sacrificed so Peter can reach this enlightenment.) One wonders, given this analysis, what Saunders makes of Peter's recent deal with Satan to his aunt's life, at the cost of his memory of his marriage. Yeah, that happened. Comics!
The final chapter is on Iron Man. Here, Saunders argues that Tony Stark's reliance on technology is similar to his reliance on alcohol, that in both cases, it's about control, and it's through the lenses of alcoholism that the series portrays the follies of overreliance on technology. Saunders weaves this interpretation with a discussion of the posthuman, represented by Stark's merging of man and machine. The spiritual issue touched on here is one of acceptance of the limitations of the individual, as in the form of the AA program. A coda follows, in which Saunders cautions against comic book studies creating a divide between super hero comics and the more auteur-based indie books. Preach it, sir.
Saunders' interest here is not in showing how these superheroes function as springboards for philosophical discussions, but to argue that these philosophical issues have always been built into these characters to begin with. Thus, the value of superhero comics aren't escapism or wish fulfillment, but the way they address, intrinsically, the same values and questions that have driven philosophy for centuries. And while Saunders does get a little preachy at times, for the most part, he does exactly that. It's probably a testament to his writing that I was left wondering what could be done with other superhero characters. If Gwen was a sacrifice, then what do we make of Jean Grey, a woman who died not just once but twice, the second time explicitly so her husband could progress as a person? Batman is notoriously missing in Saunders' analysis, save for a reference that his morality is not so much complex as contradictory, but surely there's something to be made out of a man who dedicated his life to vengeance and wound up with a family? And then there's the Fantastic Four. If Tony Stark represents faith in technology, then Reed Richards is the poster boy for rationalism and modern science. And Ben Grimm is essentially the archetype of "bad things happening to good people." Ah, the endless possibilities. Comics!
Later Days.
Friday, December 2, 2011
Stealth Status Update
Normally, this would be a Facebook post, but it's a little too geeky to broadcast on quite so public a scale. Currently, I'm in the university library. I'm switching back and forth playing Shining Force II while listening to a YouTube channel (Reboundary, BTW) on "Great Video Game Music," and occasionally taking a break to read 2008 Rock Paper Shotgun posts and choice bits from a philosophy book on superheroes and religion that I'm probably going to do (yet another) book review tonight. It's Friday night, and it's a combination of sad and awesome how much I'm enjoying myself.
Later Days.
Later Days.
Book Review: Tomb Raiders and Space Invaders by Geoff King and Tanya Krzywinska
“Realism might, in one sense, be intended to create a relatively transparent effect, based on not drawing attention to the deficits in the level of representation achievable in the playable parts of games, or reducing somewhat the gap between visual resolution of the game and audio-visual media such as film and television. But it also offers what can often be termed a 'spectacle' of realism: degrees of graphical realism that are flaunted and designed to be admired as striking or impressive images in their own right. As a form of spectacle of this kind, as in other respects, realism can be a source of appeal in the realms of either real-world reference or more outright fantasy.” --Tomb Raiders and Space Invaders by Geoff King and Tanya Krzywinska.
Every time I finish a book on video game theory, I feel obligated to write a review of it, for posterity's sake, if for no other reason. And so, we come to Tomb Raiders and Space Invaders: Videogame Forms and Contexts by Geoff King and Tanya Krzywinska. Published in 2005, this book has had a relatively modest (to be generous) effect on videogame scholarship as a whole. And that's a shame, because while many of its claims are a little too widely accepted to be really innovative, and its organization could use some refinement, in general, Tomb & Space (my oh-so-clever shorthand) has some very useful ideas on subjects such as immersion and realism.
The book starts with a very brief introduction that establishes a continuity between the two title games, then segues into the authors' main argument: that games need to be studied in terms of both their gameplay and their wider context. Again, not exactly an approach that is very controversial, but their dedication to the stance throughout the book is admirable. The first and longest chapter is loosely on explicitly that subject: gameplay and its context. More specifically, they cover a very wide variety of subject matter. It starts with some definitions of gameplay and games, taking some well known definitions from Johan Huizinga and Roger Callois. The play vs. game notion is explored in some detail, with the conclusion that play occurs within a system, allowing them segue nicely into the next topic, how games function in larger cultural contexts. This leads them to examine gameplay in terms of hooks that motivate the player, and a very thorough discussion of the concept of flow, as defined by the commonly cited Mihaly Csikczentmilhalyi. That leads to the official discussion of game context, with a discussion on how games draw on common cultural narrative frameworks and genres, such as the quest motif or the fantasy setting. In general, they argue, this setting helps with establishing immersion, though it tends to disappear from attention once that flow is established. (Jesper Juul argues something very similar in his book Half-Real.) To put their work in context with the narratology/ludology debate (is a videogame a system of rules or a story?), they're essentially arguing that while games vary greatly, in general, narrative is used as a secondary element, but a really important secondary element. And its effect depends on the background of the player as much as the game itself. And that's chapter one. Yes, that's all chapter one.
Chapter 2 examines the notion of gamespace, and how a game offers the player opportunities for exploration and presence. The amount of freedom offered in a game vvaries greatly; on a most basic level, there's the range from the single screen representation (Pac-Man) to fully 3D worlds (Mario 64). There are hard boundaries, which are impassable, often invisible, boundaries in the game world, as well as soft boundaries, which are temporary, and used to direct player's progress (ie. you need a key to open a door in Tomb Raider.) There's also a variety of navigational aids, ranging from game maps to NPC advice to the presence of enemies. Familiarity with game space is a form of knowledge that can be leveraged for power in game communites, especially for players in MMO games (online games such as World of Warcraft). That brings us to presence. They distinguish between perceptual and psychological immersion--particularly, the closer the presence in the game world, the greater the perceptual immersion, the feeling that the player is actually there. Thus, a game in first person view is more perceptually immersive than an overhead view. But because you can't see behind you in a such a game, it would be harder to play, which creates frustration, which disrupts the psychological immersion, or flow, as it was defined last chapter. It's one of the many useful distinctions that King and Krzywinska make, one that I can't recall being made elsewhere. The chapter covers other issues of presence as well: sound, camera control, player death, and HUD (head's up display--the information the game presents on screen), concluding the chapter with a brief section on how, following Kendall Walton, we turn games into objects that enable imaginary play, and thus psychological immersion may be more significant than sensory immersion.
Chapter 3 is the one most useful to my own work, a chapter on realism, spectacle, and sensation. Here's another handy distinction: the authors distinguish between visual realism, which is how closely the graphics resemble the real world, and functional realism, which is how closely the gameplay resembles the real world (ie. an enemy combatant dies with a single head shot, or the player character has to eat regularly). Much of game design and commercial promotion revolves around claims of superior graphics, but the authors note that it's not so much real-world versimilitude that's being pursued, but accepted mediated versions of the real world. For example, a sports game doesn't present the game as experienced in real life so much as how it's experienced through TV cameras. And the functional realism has to maintain a balance--familiar enough that we can relate it to the real life equivalent, but not so identical that it's as difficult as its real-life equivalent. Think Guitar Hero--it presents playing a guitar, but a simplified, less difficult version. Finally, there's a brief section on spectacle, and how games use various forms of spectacle--expansive vistas, big explosions, dizzying sequences--to direct player experience.
The fourth and final chapter examines games within cultural and political contexts. After briefly mentioning overt political games such as Frasca's September 12th, they take a broader approach, noting that games follow conventional Western notions of the power of the individual, the evils of science amok and shadowy corporations, and a hodgepodge of myths cribbed from various cultures, especially fantasy. Character representation tends towards reinforcing white masculine fears. The female heroine straddles a line (a very familiar line, in video game arguments) between empowerment and sex object. And race is almost erased entirely, with few games allowing any focus on racial difference in their protagonist.
The above covers the "visual" part of the ideological context; the rest of the chapter looks at ideology in terms of gameplay. Again, going as broad as possible, the competition aspect of games fits nicely with late capitalism, especially the imperialist model found in your basic strategy game such as Civilization. In the discussion of game violence, they raise the notion of Althusser's interpolation, that video games are ideological apparatuses trying to assign players subject positions. The complication here is that they distinguish between the player's subject position and the player character. Generally, the player-character is put into a position of the hero fighting evil; the player is put in the position of someone playing a game in a particular manner. Thus, a shooting game doesn't turn the player into someone who's likely to shoot things in real life, but into someone who's likely to shoot things in the context of a videogame. I should be opposed to this idea, because it really wrecks a paper I wrote on Mass Effect, but it's actually rather appealing. they continue in this vein for a bit, and then end with a section on game industry, largely derived very explicitly from De Pueter, Kline, and Dyer-Witheford's excellent book, Digital Play. The brief afterword reminds us that game studies is very big, and there was no way for them to cover everything.
I have a few niggling points with some of their choices. For example, they argue that hardcore players prefer to focus on mechanics and it's casual players who want better graphics, which doesn't really work as an argument in face of the massive casual player embrace of less graphically superior things as phone games, browser games, and the Wii (in comparison to other current consoles, at least). And ending your book on a section that relies very, very heavily on someone else's book is an odd decision, to say the least. But overall, I agree with their arguments. I don't think you'll find many who dispute that games need to be considered within wider contexts, and the study of narrative and genre is broad enough not to ruffle any but the most steadfast ludologists, while still being applicable enough to be useful. And many of their distinctions I know I'm going to find very useful--player vs. player character interpellation, pscyhological vs. preceptual immersion, and most importantly, visual vs. functional realism. So that's all good.
What's less good is the way the information is portrayed. Let's start with the use of games. It's rare that King and Krzywinska focus explicitly on an individual game for an extended period of time. Rather, they bring the game up, move on, and bring it up again, in the next section or chapter where it happens to be mildly relevant. It creates an unfocused feeling. Moreover, there's no real sense or argument that the specific games they chose were particularly significant for what they wanted to discuss. For example, while I personally have very fond memories of Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Chaos Bleeds, with the best intentions in the world, I wouldn't hold it up as exemplar for promoting cooperative gaming, just based on the fact that its characters talk during cutscenes and you play as different characters.
But for my largest complaint, let's go back to the issue of focus. My main problem with the book is that focus exists only on the macro level, and even then, in very broad strokes. Within a single section, the authors will switch from setting to character to gender to race to violence, all with nothing but a brief segue that sometimes ranges on a non-sequitor. It left me with a constant uncertainty over where the argument was going, and how everything fit together. It's a shame, because it's really a problem in terms of editing and presentation rather than the argument per se. A longer introduction or a few chapter subheadings could have made a world of difference.
So yes: it's a good book, with useful ideas, but its content is hurt somewhat by its disorganized form.
Later Days.
Every time I finish a book on video game theory, I feel obligated to write a review of it, for posterity's sake, if for no other reason. And so, we come to Tomb Raiders and Space Invaders: Videogame Forms and Contexts by Geoff King and Tanya Krzywinska. Published in 2005, this book has had a relatively modest (to be generous) effect on videogame scholarship as a whole. And that's a shame, because while many of its claims are a little too widely accepted to be really innovative, and its organization could use some refinement, in general, Tomb & Space (my oh-so-clever shorthand) has some very useful ideas on subjects such as immersion and realism.
The book starts with a very brief introduction that establishes a continuity between the two title games, then segues into the authors' main argument: that games need to be studied in terms of both their gameplay and their wider context. Again, not exactly an approach that is very controversial, but their dedication to the stance throughout the book is admirable. The first and longest chapter is loosely on explicitly that subject: gameplay and its context. More specifically, they cover a very wide variety of subject matter. It starts with some definitions of gameplay and games, taking some well known definitions from Johan Huizinga and Roger Callois. The play vs. game notion is explored in some detail, with the conclusion that play occurs within a system, allowing them segue nicely into the next topic, how games function in larger cultural contexts. This leads them to examine gameplay in terms of hooks that motivate the player, and a very thorough discussion of the concept of flow, as defined by the commonly cited Mihaly Csikczentmilhalyi. That leads to the official discussion of game context, with a discussion on how games draw on common cultural narrative frameworks and genres, such as the quest motif or the fantasy setting. In general, they argue, this setting helps with establishing immersion, though it tends to disappear from attention once that flow is established. (Jesper Juul argues something very similar in his book Half-Real.) To put their work in context with the narratology/ludology debate (is a videogame a system of rules or a story?), they're essentially arguing that while games vary greatly, in general, narrative is used as a secondary element, but a really important secondary element. And its effect depends on the background of the player as much as the game itself. And that's chapter one. Yes, that's all chapter one.
Chapter 2 examines the notion of gamespace, and how a game offers the player opportunities for exploration and presence. The amount of freedom offered in a game vvaries greatly; on a most basic level, there's the range from the single screen representation (Pac-Man) to fully 3D worlds (Mario 64). There are hard boundaries, which are impassable, often invisible, boundaries in the game world, as well as soft boundaries, which are temporary, and used to direct player's progress (ie. you need a key to open a door in Tomb Raider.) There's also a variety of navigational aids, ranging from game maps to NPC advice to the presence of enemies. Familiarity with game space is a form of knowledge that can be leveraged for power in game communites, especially for players in MMO games (online games such as World of Warcraft). That brings us to presence. They distinguish between perceptual and psychological immersion--particularly, the closer the presence in the game world, the greater the perceptual immersion, the feeling that the player is actually there. Thus, a game in first person view is more perceptually immersive than an overhead view. But because you can't see behind you in a such a game, it would be harder to play, which creates frustration, which disrupts the psychological immersion, or flow, as it was defined last chapter. It's one of the many useful distinctions that King and Krzywinska make, one that I can't recall being made elsewhere. The chapter covers other issues of presence as well: sound, camera control, player death, and HUD (head's up display--the information the game presents on screen), concluding the chapter with a brief section on how, following Kendall Walton, we turn games into objects that enable imaginary play, and thus psychological immersion may be more significant than sensory immersion.
Chapter 3 is the one most useful to my own work, a chapter on realism, spectacle, and sensation. Here's another handy distinction: the authors distinguish between visual realism, which is how closely the graphics resemble the real world, and functional realism, which is how closely the gameplay resembles the real world (ie. an enemy combatant dies with a single head shot, or the player character has to eat regularly). Much of game design and commercial promotion revolves around claims of superior graphics, but the authors note that it's not so much real-world versimilitude that's being pursued, but accepted mediated versions of the real world. For example, a sports game doesn't present the game as experienced in real life so much as how it's experienced through TV cameras. And the functional realism has to maintain a balance--familiar enough that we can relate it to the real life equivalent, but not so identical that it's as difficult as its real-life equivalent. Think Guitar Hero--it presents playing a guitar, but a simplified, less difficult version. Finally, there's a brief section on spectacle, and how games use various forms of spectacle--expansive vistas, big explosions, dizzying sequences--to direct player experience.
The fourth and final chapter examines games within cultural and political contexts. After briefly mentioning overt political games such as Frasca's September 12th, they take a broader approach, noting that games follow conventional Western notions of the power of the individual, the evils of science amok and shadowy corporations, and a hodgepodge of myths cribbed from various cultures, especially fantasy. Character representation tends towards reinforcing white masculine fears. The female heroine straddles a line (a very familiar line, in video game arguments) between empowerment and sex object. And race is almost erased entirely, with few games allowing any focus on racial difference in their protagonist.
The above covers the "visual" part of the ideological context; the rest of the chapter looks at ideology in terms of gameplay. Again, going as broad as possible, the competition aspect of games fits nicely with late capitalism, especially the imperialist model found in your basic strategy game such as Civilization. In the discussion of game violence, they raise the notion of Althusser's interpolation, that video games are ideological apparatuses trying to assign players subject positions. The complication here is that they distinguish between the player's subject position and the player character. Generally, the player-character is put into a position of the hero fighting evil; the player is put in the position of someone playing a game in a particular manner. Thus, a shooting game doesn't turn the player into someone who's likely to shoot things in real life, but into someone who's likely to shoot things in the context of a videogame. I should be opposed to this idea, because it really wrecks a paper I wrote on Mass Effect, but it's actually rather appealing. they continue in this vein for a bit, and then end with a section on game industry, largely derived very explicitly from De Pueter, Kline, and Dyer-Witheford's excellent book, Digital Play. The brief afterword reminds us that game studies is very big, and there was no way for them to cover everything.
I have a few niggling points with some of their choices. For example, they argue that hardcore players prefer to focus on mechanics and it's casual players who want better graphics, which doesn't really work as an argument in face of the massive casual player embrace of less graphically superior things as phone games, browser games, and the Wii (in comparison to other current consoles, at least). And ending your book on a section that relies very, very heavily on someone else's book is an odd decision, to say the least. But overall, I agree with their arguments. I don't think you'll find many who dispute that games need to be considered within wider contexts, and the study of narrative and genre is broad enough not to ruffle any but the most steadfast ludologists, while still being applicable enough to be useful. And many of their distinctions I know I'm going to find very useful--player vs. player character interpellation, pscyhological vs. preceptual immersion, and most importantly, visual vs. functional realism. So that's all good.
What's less good is the way the information is portrayed. Let's start with the use of games. It's rare that King and Krzywinska focus explicitly on an individual game for an extended period of time. Rather, they bring the game up, move on, and bring it up again, in the next section or chapter where it happens to be mildly relevant. It creates an unfocused feeling. Moreover, there's no real sense or argument that the specific games they chose were particularly significant for what they wanted to discuss. For example, while I personally have very fond memories of Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Chaos Bleeds, with the best intentions in the world, I wouldn't hold it up as exemplar for promoting cooperative gaming, just based on the fact that its characters talk during cutscenes and you play as different characters.
But for my largest complaint, let's go back to the issue of focus. My main problem with the book is that focus exists only on the macro level, and even then, in very broad strokes. Within a single section, the authors will switch from setting to character to gender to race to violence, all with nothing but a brief segue that sometimes ranges on a non-sequitor. It left me with a constant uncertainty over where the argument was going, and how everything fit together. It's a shame, because it's really a problem in terms of editing and presentation rather than the argument per se. A longer introduction or a few chapter subheadings could have made a world of difference.
So yes: it's a good book, with useful ideas, but its content is hurt somewhat by its disorganized form.
Later Days.
Friday Quotations: Like Rickey Rouse or Monald Muck
"Juvenile literature is a father surrogate. The model of paternal authority is at every point immanent, the implicit basis of its structure and very existence. The natural creativity of the child, which no one in his right mind can deny, is channellled through the apparent absence of the father into an adult-authoritarian vision of the real world. Paternalism in absentia is the indispensable vehicle for the defense and invisible control of the ostensibly autonomous childhood model. The comics, like television, in all vertically structured societies, rely upon distance as a means of authoritarian reinforcement." --Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart, How to Read Donald Duck: Imperialist Ideology in the Disney Comic.
Later Days.
Later Days.
Thursday, December 1, 2011
Apple and Snow
I ate an apple outside yesterday, and it brought back one of my earliest memories.
I don't know if it's this way for everyone, but once you start delving back into the early years of my childhood, "earliest memory" becomes a distinction that's hard to grant with any degree of accuracy. Once you go back a certain point, memories get confused with photographs, dreams, and the stories other people tell you. But this memory is clear enough.
It's winter, I'm in Saskatchewan, and I'm sitting in a snow bank. Across from me, in the neighbor's driveway, there's a furious game of street hockey going on, and it's been going on for a while. I have been watching--I've been allowed to watch---nearby, and I contemplate the events solemnly, periodically taking a small bite out of my apple. I couldn't tell you how old I was. I was old enough that my teeth were in, thus making apple consumption a possibility. But I was young enough that I wasn't allowed to play with the older boys, not in a game of street hockey, anyway. I think that puts me somewhere between 4 and 8, which gives me an admittedly large margin of error.
It's almost as if we were deliberately trying for a cliched Canadian tableau: rural Saskatchewan,piles of snow everywhere, a half dozen or so boys zooming around nets, and another younger one, bundled up in a comical manner, watching them. Clearly, we were trying to reconstruct a scene from the Hockey Sweater. I can't even remember who any of the other boys were; it can be safely assumed that at least one was a grandson of our neighbors, but beyond that, it could have been any of a number of suitably aged town kids.
What I do remember, though, is the apple. I was wearing mitts and I ate it slowly and fumblingly, in part because it's really hard to eat an apple while wearing mitts, and in part because I knew if the apple was gone, I'd have to make a move--I'd have to go inside to throw it out, or get a new one, or something, and I'd miss some of the game. I remember feeling very strongly that if I didn't have an apple with me, my presence would, for some reason, become suspect. Such are the logical certainties of a child in the 4 to 8 age bracket. You'd think the apple would be incredibly cold in such conditions, and in fact I do remember actually dropping it in the snow more than once. But while I was reluctant to go inside, I'm certain that I did, maybe more than once, just to put the apple quickly into the microwave to heat it up a bit. And so the time passed, me gnawing on my warmed up apple core, watching some kids play hockey.
And that's it. That's the memory, in its entirety. I'm not going to say it's a life-changing moment, or that it had a profound effect on my feelings towards hockey, fruit, or winter general. But whenever I eat an apple outside in the winter months--granted, not something that happens often--this is what I remember. And in some small way, I feel a little better, just for the connection to my younger self.
Memory's funny, isn't it?
Later Days.
I don't know if it's this way for everyone, but once you start delving back into the early years of my childhood, "earliest memory" becomes a distinction that's hard to grant with any degree of accuracy. Once you go back a certain point, memories get confused with photographs, dreams, and the stories other people tell you. But this memory is clear enough.
It's winter, I'm in Saskatchewan, and I'm sitting in a snow bank. Across from me, in the neighbor's driveway, there's a furious game of street hockey going on, and it's been going on for a while. I have been watching--I've been allowed to watch---nearby, and I contemplate the events solemnly, periodically taking a small bite out of my apple. I couldn't tell you how old I was. I was old enough that my teeth were in, thus making apple consumption a possibility. But I was young enough that I wasn't allowed to play with the older boys, not in a game of street hockey, anyway. I think that puts me somewhere between 4 and 8, which gives me an admittedly large margin of error.
It's almost as if we were deliberately trying for a cliched Canadian tableau: rural Saskatchewan,piles of snow everywhere, a half dozen or so boys zooming around nets, and another younger one, bundled up in a comical manner, watching them. Clearly, we were trying to reconstruct a scene from the Hockey Sweater. I can't even remember who any of the other boys were; it can be safely assumed that at least one was a grandson of our neighbors, but beyond that, it could have been any of a number of suitably aged town kids.
What I do remember, though, is the apple. I was wearing mitts and I ate it slowly and fumblingly, in part because it's really hard to eat an apple while wearing mitts, and in part because I knew if the apple was gone, I'd have to make a move--I'd have to go inside to throw it out, or get a new one, or something, and I'd miss some of the game. I remember feeling very strongly that if I didn't have an apple with me, my presence would, for some reason, become suspect. Such are the logical certainties of a child in the 4 to 8 age bracket. You'd think the apple would be incredibly cold in such conditions, and in fact I do remember actually dropping it in the snow more than once. But while I was reluctant to go inside, I'm certain that I did, maybe more than once, just to put the apple quickly into the microwave to heat it up a bit. And so the time passed, me gnawing on my warmed up apple core, watching some kids play hockey.
And that's it. That's the memory, in its entirety. I'm not going to say it's a life-changing moment, or that it had a profound effect on my feelings towards hockey, fruit, or winter general. But whenever I eat an apple outside in the winter months--granted, not something that happens often--this is what I remember. And in some small way, I feel a little better, just for the connection to my younger self.
Memory's funny, isn't it?
Later Days.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)