Friday Quotations: Song and Dance

"But back the wedding the band had struck up now, and what a grand noise, for the legendary red-faced fiddler who played all the best weddings had come, and had had a drink, and had got out his fiddle, he was the man to turn curved wood and horsehair, cat-gut and resin into a single blackbird then into a flight of blackbirds signing all the evenings at once, then into a spawn of happy salmon, into the return of the longed-for boat to a port, into the longing that waits in a lucky place for two people who don't yet know each other, the borders cross themselves." --Ali Smith, Girl Meets Boy.

Bibliophyte: The Literary Equivalent of a Magpie.

Once a week, I browse through the new books listing at my university library. I thought I might start noting what catches my eye.

Devil wears nada : Satan exposed / Tripp York.
I appreciate puns.
Bismarck : a life / Jonathan Steinberg
I also appreciate brevity.
Space, time, and crime / Kim Michelle Lersch, Timothy C. Hart.
And rhymes. Gotta love a rhyme.
Michaël Borremans : eating the beard. Michaël Borremans
Points for the interesting subtitle.
Everything is obvious : once you know the answer / Duncan J. Watts.
I've always suspected that this is the case.
Shakesqueer : a queer companion to the complete works of Shakespeare / edited by Madhavi Menon.
And then there's the pun that goes for broke. We.. done, Dr. Menon. Well done.

Later Days.

It's Time for Buddha Lite.

Remember a week or two ago when RIM pulled the Blackberry network offline? And Apple chose the same time to put out a new version, and it was crashing for some people? Well, as the owner of outdated, outclassed, antique 3G World phone, I looked up the term "schadenfreude" on Wikipedia, so I could properly spell exactly how I was feeling on the Facebook. According to the austere wikipedians, schadenfreude refers to "feeling happiness in the misfortune of others." Which I already knew; I was looking for spelling, not definitions. But what interested me was the related terms list, which was formed basically by taking the schadenfreude definition and cycling through the binary possibilities:

"feeling unhappiness in the misfortune of others" -- empathy.
"feeling happiness in the fortune of others"--envy.

And, most interestingly: "feeling happiness in the fortune of others"--mudita.

If you're not familiar with the last term, don't worry; it wasn't exactly a common occurrence in my daily vocabulary either. It's a Buddhist term, and its more expanded definition is sympathetic joy, taking delight in the well-being of others rather than begrudging them of it. I'm not a Buddhist; there's something about their emphasis on non-being that doesn't mesh with my Western sense of the importance of individuality. And everything I know about Buddhism comes from a second year religious studies course I took nine years ago. (Man, I'm old.) But it seems to me that mudita is a concept worth adopting. So yes, I thought, moved considerably from my initial contemplation of cell phones and smart apps, I will try to cultivate a spirit of mudita.

It is surprisingly hard. According to the research (okay, Google search) I did, mudita is directly contested by jealousy and envy. And it is hard (maybe just for me?) to look at someone else's joy without envy. Even just thinking, "I want that." And if you do share in something similar, it then becomes a sort of self-congratulatory smugness: I'm doing pretty good, too. And that relates directly to another issue: it's not mudita if you are congratulating yourself on helping the person get to that happiness--if you're thinking about your contribution and investment, then you're thinking about how awesome you are, not the other person.

The "non-obvious" opponent of mudita is interesting as well--exhilaration. That is, it resembles the joy of mudita, but it is a joy that you cultivate in order to mask some sort of lack in yourself. So to a recently dumped individual, for example, going to a wedding is risky business. You not only have to evade jealousy and envy, but you also have to keep from throwing yourself into it emotionally to cover up for your own loss.

Again, I can see how the mudita concept relates to some core Buddhist philosophies. There's a level of detachment involved--thinking of others, feeling for others, without drawing your own baggage into things. At the same time, I wonder if that's really possible. We're all individuals, and our experiences are subjective experiences. There's always a filter on what we perceive, and trying to pretend it's not there seems like it could cause greater problems down the road. Dealing with your emotions shouldn't mean suppressing them.

But for the moment: mudita. Even if you don't subscribe to the Buddhist way of thinking, keeping mudita in mind, for me, has really drawn attention to how much jealousy and envy could influence my actions, if I let them. So let's all try to be a little more aware, and cultivate some mudita in our lives.

...Oh, I just know you're cultivating more mudita than me. And I hate you for it.

Later Days.

Amusing Comedy / Horrible Embarrassment Avoided

The latch on the screen door of my jointly-shared rented house was broken. Specifically, it was broken in such a way that were it allowed to shut entirely, it would be impossible to open from the outside. One of my roommates cautioned me about this state of affairs, and told me that since he had to both break into the house and to fix it last time, he was leaving it up to either myself or the third roommate.

"Pssh." I said, exactly like that: "Pssh. We just move the washer on the bottom so it doesn't close entirely. Beyond that, it's not going to affect me at all, so I'm not going to bother worrying about it."

Now, to the universe, them's fighting words, on par with "God himself couldn't sink this ship," and "man, if I lost this memory stick on the way home, I'd be screwed." So today, while I'm heading out the door to go for a run, I suddenly reflect on my roommate's words, and decide to take a quick look at the door. 30 seconds later, I'm standing outside and have successfully locked myself and my roommates out of our house.

At this point, I have very few resources. I'm dressed in bunny hug and gym shorts. I have no wallet, cell phone, or other communication device. I do have my house key (I keep it on a chain around my neck now, after certain badexperiences), but it's not going to do me much good, as there is another door in front of the door it opens. So I do the only thing I'm dressed for: I jog to campus, log onto a university computer, and tell my roommates the problem. By the time I get home, one of them has arrived, and has opened the door with a screwdriver. After I watch him for a few minutes, he says that I could probably just go about my day, since it was a one person job. So I go to the library, read a few pages of Love in the Time of Cholera, and when I come back, the door's fixed.

I know, the story's a bit of a let-down. Previous narratives concerning me being locked out of places have been much more interesting, or at least a lot longer. Necessity may not be the mother of my invention, but it does seem to be the source of my muse. Sure is a shame that I have roommmates and friends that I can count on for help. *finishes his blogpost wrapped in a warm blanket rather than huddling desperately outside on his front porch.* Yeah, that sure is terrible.

Later Days.

Movie Buff: Math Rules Everything Around Me--A Review of Moneyball

Moneyball tells the story of what happens when you put sabermetrics in charge of a baseball team. It stars Brad Pitt as Billy Beane, the Oakland A's general manager, and Jonah Hill as assistant GM Peter Brand. The basic plot of the film is that, faced with the loss of several key players at the start of the 2002 season, Beane embraced sabermetrics to answer the team's pressing deficits--sabermetrics being the analysis of baseball purely through statistical means, with no concern for extrinsic factors that determined a player's worth. It's based on the A's real-life results, which were somewhat mixed: on the one hand, they set a new record with a 20 game winning streak, but on the other hand, they lost out in the first round of the postseason. The movie's story, however, is less about the rise and fall of the team and more about the life of Billy Beane in regards to the sport of baseball.


In terms of acting, the film has a relatively small main cast, with a number of lesser but significant performances. In comparison to most sport films, the players themselves are mostly bit characters. Stephen Bishop does a good job as the aging pro, and Chris Pratt (of Parks and Recreation) plays a more realistic version of his Andy character as a ball player who lost his confidence after suffering some nerve damage to his arm. Philip Seymour Hoffman plays Art Howe, the team's manager. As someone resistant to Beane's methods, Howe has the thankless task of serving as the closest thing the film has to a villain, but to the credit of both Hoffman and the script, Howe's viewpoint is offered not so much as a demonized view but misguided one--which is perhaps slightly more patronizing, but you can't have everything. (I'm gathering there was some acrimonious discussions over Howe's characterization at some point--according to the wikipedia article, Art Howe in the film is "a fictional A's manager named after the actual A's manager.") Moving up, the supporting cast role is definitely Jonah Hill as Peter Brand, the economics graduate Beane hires to do the bean counting. Hill plays a much more subdued character than his usual "raunchy comedy" schtick, and it's good to see some range for him. Of course, the star role is Brad Pitt. I spent most of the film trying to decide exactly how I would characterize his performance. I finally decided that he reminded me of a mix between the father on Gossip Girl and George Clooney, which meant that he was more or less exactly like Coach Laundry on the Friday Night Lights TV series. The GM role is usually a money-obsessed villain in a sports movie, so it was nice to see the role take the lead here.

And that's what really struck me about the film--the way it very consciously engages with the genre of the sports film, and breaks away from it. To continue my wikipedia perusal, it seems that the earlier director for Moneyball was Steven Soderbergh, who wanted to frame the film with interviews from the actual players and use other touches that would distinguish it from the typical sports film. Soderbergh was replaced with Bennett Miller, and Aaron Sorkin was called in to rewrite the script, but that sense of "the anti-sport film" is still there. There's barely any focus on the players, the movie doesn't end with the team's triumphant victories, and, in one of my favorite bits, Beane's attempts to delivering rousing speeches in the locker room fall awesomely short: "Nobody likes losing! So... don't lose!" This falls a little short from Al Pacino's "Six Inches" in Any Given Sunday.

And of course, there's the focus on math over players. Though it works for a fantasy league, I imagine it was a tough sell for managing an actual team. It's an even tougher sell for the basis of a movie, as it counters our basic narrative principles--nobody, with the possible exception of mathematicians, really favors looking at numbers over looking at people. Personally, I have virtually no love for baseball, but I do have a bit of a soft spot for sabermetrics. As a former mathematician who once specialized (or at least dabbled heavily) in abstract algebra, I don't really care for math that has a "practical" application. But sabermetrics is different. First, it has the name--even though the name's origin has nothing to do with weaponry, (It actually comes from SABR, The society for American Baseball Research), it still translates into sword-math, which is awesome. And I have a fondness for it because, as Barton notes in Dungeons and Desktops, sabermetrics is a distant predecessor for the stat-based Role playing game, making it an ancestor of the modern video game and Dungeons and Dragons. But I still recognize that to a normal person, math = underdog is a hard sell.

The film manages to make it work through two main methods. First, by appealing to a different cultural zeitgeist--the constant, and perhaps growing, anxiety of the average Westerner that the top 1% perhaps don't deserve to be on top. The argument here is that the top ranked players in the league are overrated--their wages are based less on performance and more on inflated egos. Sabermetrics is a way of evening the field, and brings to the front those players who are technically better, but underrated. Thus, the math of sabermetrics isn't dehumanizing, but a way of recontextualizing value to something more fair. Or to put it a different way: you're not going to lose sympathy arguing against the salaries of the New York Yankees.

The other way the film garners sympathy is by casting sabermetrics in the lens of the Billy Beane's personal struggle. As a former player turned manager, Beane is constantly trying to keep himself emotionally distant from the game he once loved. An early scene of the film shows him, as a younger man, being recruited under the pitch (heh) that you only get one chance to do what you really love. Later, he tells Brand that you can't get emotionally involved with the players, because you might have to fire them. He makes a point out of not going to the games in person, because he finds himself too personally involved. The viewer gets the sense that, out of necessity, Beane has taken to treating his entire life at the same emotional distance, as demonstrated in a scene where he treats his ex-wife and her new husband with polite cordiality. In fact, there's another clear difference with your typical sports film: there's no love interest here. The only major female character is Beane's 12 year old daughter (played very well by the 14 year old Kerris Dorsey). So Beane keeps everyone and everything at arms' length, and sabermetrics is a part of that distance. The film's point, however, punctuated three times by a first baseman's winning hit, a heavyset player's home run, and Beane's daughter's song, is that distant isn't uncaring, and that numbers don't have to be dehumanizing--by giving them space and encouragement, Beane inspires these people to be more than they are.

In a lot of ways, Moneyball reminds me of my other favorite sports film, Fever Pitch. Both address a fan-based approach to the game: Fever Pitch, the obsessed fan compelled to attend every game, and Moneyball the desire to understand and master through numbers. And both are about individuals dealing with their attraction to something they recognize as much bigger than themselves, Fever Pitch by asking how you forge a normal life in the wake of such an obsession, and Moneyball... well, it's about the same thing, really. And that's what I like about both films, that at the bottom, they're not about baseball, but about people, and what they need to do to make it through the day.

Later Days.

Friday Quotations: Megalomania

The fantasy of disembodiment is that of autogenesis, a megalomaniacal attempt to provide perfect control in a world where things tend to become messy, complicated, or costly; it is a control fantasy. The idea that one could take on a second-order or virtual body and somehow leave one's body behind with no trace or residue, with no effects or repercussions is a luxury only afforded by the male subject." --Elizabeth Grosz.

Conversely, in the essay "Looking for Gender: Gender Roles and Behaviors Among Online Gamers," Consalvo et al argue that according to their findings, it's the casual female player that seeks control and escapism, whereas the hardcore female players accept technology into their lives in a more integrated fashion. (Not that that's exactly what Grosz is talking about, but still.)

Later Days.

Book Review: The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss

"It was night again. The Waystone Inn lay in silence, and it was a silence of three parts.

"The first part was a hollow, echoing quiet, made by things that were lacking. If there had been horses stabled in the barn they would have stamped and champed and broken it to pieces. if there had been a crowd of guests, even a handful of guests bedded down for the night, their restless breathing and mingled snores would have gently thawed the silence like a warm spring wind. If there had been music... but no, of course there was no music. In fact, if there were none of these things, and so the silence remained.

"Inside the Waystone a man huddled in his deep, sweet-smelling bed. Motionless, waiting for sleep, he laid wide-eyed in the dark. In doing this he added a small, frightened silence to the larger, hollow one. They made an alloy of sorts, a harmony.

"The third silence was not an easy thing to notice. If you listened for an hour, you might begin to feel it in the thick stone walls of the empty taproom and in the flat, grey metal of the sword that hung behind the bar. It was in the dim candlelight that filled an upstairs room with dancing shadows. It was in the mad pattern of crumpled memoir that lay fallen and unforgotten atop the desk. And it was in the hands of the man who sat there, pointedly ignoring the pages he had written and discarded long ago." --Patrick Rothfuss, The Name of the Wind

I'd like to begin this review by stating that I hate Harry Potter. I don't mean the books, or the movies (though the existence of each makes the other a little redundant), or the multimillion dollar franchise. I quite like the concept of Hoggwarts (though "school of wizards" is hardly a new concept in fantasy lit), and Ron and Hermine are quiet nice. And I'll always be a Luna/Neville shipper, authorial statements be damned.

No, what I hate is Harry Potter, the character. I hate his insufferable, unshakable smugness. I hate the way Dumbledore, particularly, fawned over his quote unquote genius. I hate the way the entire fictional universe seemed to bend over backward to reinforce his importance. I know this reinforcement is largely there to enable the reader to project themselves onto Harry, but mostly, what it mainly did was make me root for Snape.

The reason for this digression will become clear later.

The Name of the Wind is the first book in The Kingiller Chronicle (not the best of names) and the debut novel of Patrick Rothfuss. The plot starts off simply: a man known as the Chronicler tracks down the innkeeper of a small, isolated hamlet. It turns out that the innkeeper is actually Kvothe, a man of near legendary exploits. After some posturing, he agrees to tell the Chronicler his life story, over a three day period. Each book, then, is supposed to represent one day's worth of story telling. This first book covers a lot of ground: Kvothe's early childhood in a traveling circus, a brief period as a city beggar, and, for the most part, his teenage years as a member of university. The framing device is in third person, but most of the book proper is Kvothe telling his story, so it's told in a first person format. I've seen first person/third person switches in fantasy novels before (L. E. Modesitt, Jr.'s The Magic of Recluce comes to mind), but it flows much more organically in this context.

The single main character fantasy story is a bit of an odd beast. In a lot of ways, the genre works better with an ensemble cast, ala Lord of the Rings; even the Harry Potter series places a lot of emphasis on the Rest of the Group. The single hero format places a lot of weight on a main character, and the author has to walk a pretty thin line. If the hero is too down-to-earth or non-heroic, then the reader has trouble accepting them as a the savior of a fantasy world; Stephen R. Donaldson walks this line a lot, and Peter David's Sir Atropos of Nothing explores a similar area. The other route to go is to make your hero some sort of super being, performing one amazing feat after another. The risk with this path is that the author has to not only continually one-up the last amazing feat, but keep the reader interested in the action of this uber-man. Two relevant examples here are the aforementioned Harry Potter (who also tries to play the "ordinary" card, with mixed success) and Geralt of Rivia in the Witcher series. Rothfuss is mostly trying this second tact, starting his character off in a sort of Potter mode of "amazing youth," but, as we see through the framing device, Kvothe will be becoming the Witcher soon enough.

I enjoyed the book, to the point where my complaints feel petty, but that doesn't make them any less valid. First, as you might guess from above, Kvothe's heroic balance isn't always in place. Usually, his valiant actions are appropriately valiant, but sometimes they're so idealized as to be eye-rolling. And the opposite problem is at work too--if you construct a hero that's supposed to be superhuman, then explaining away their stupider actions becomes a little harder. Rothfuss can blame most of Kvothe's errors on youth and tragic circumstances, but some of them get a little wearing. And with all the focus on Kvothe, that means that the other characters are given a bit of a short thrift--but many still shine through, from the mentally scarred magic teacher to Kvothe's own parents to his first tutor in the academic arts.

Speaking of unrealistic narrative actions, though, here's a complaint I never thought I'd be making in a post-Game-of-Thrones fantasy genre: there's not enough sex. Not enough, at least, for the way the character is set up. The book has at least four attractive potential love interests: the beautiful scholar whose life he saves, the scatterbrained wild girl, the sultry older woman who was thrown out of school in disgrace, and the shady girl who will, as we know from the narrative frames, be the love of his life. Because of his masterful ways, at least three of these are clearly interested in him, and he is an extremely handsome, late teens male growing up in a fantasy world, a genre where the age standard for these things is somewhat lowered. And yet the story tells us nothing happened. Either we're supposed to see an untrustworthy narrator (and there's not a lot of evidence to support that), or we're supposed to buy his excuse that he was "inexperienced with women." As a former teenage male myself, I can tell you that for your average teenage male, if a plurality of attractive girls were throwing themselves at you, it wouldn't matter how inexperienced you were--you would learn. You would make a point of the learning.

Ahem. My final problem with the book is the same as can be levied against my review posts--too damn long. There seems to be an issue with fantasy novels, especially recently, where length is equated to quality. If the stories were of the same quality as their shorter brethren, then it would be a simple matter of improved value. But in many cases, they're not. It's why you get things like the 16th book of the Wheel of Time series: forced to add such size to the proceedings, what the authors produce is really a lot of padding. Great swathes, in my humble opinion, could have been exorcised from the latest book in the aforementioned Song of Ice and Fire series. And at over 700 pages, some of The Name of the Wind could have been lost without me shedding a tear. I mean, it's 50 pages into the book before we're even finished setting up the framing device.

And yet. This isn't a book like Infinite Jest where every page must be pored over, the mood constructed laboriously sentence by sentence. While The Name of the Wind aims for, as the quotation above suggests, a literary quality higher than your average fantasy novel (and generally hits it), it is, for the most part, a quick read. There's a lot of dialogue, which flows pretty quickly, and a lot of action, which keeps moving as well. Despite all my complaints, I read it cover to cover in four days. That speaks to a pretty compelling read. So, while the hero balance issue may become greater in future volumes, in here, everything works out pretty well. If you're a fan of the genre (and you're either a quick reader or have a lot of time), it repays you nicely for your effort.

Later Days.