N is for the Novel

Okay... here's one that I knew very little about before discovering it last month.  D. H. Lawrence became (in)famous for racy novels such as Lady Chatterley's Lover and Sons and Lovers, but he also wrote reams of essays on a huge range of topics.  In 1923, he wrote a scathing manifesto about the future of his craft (shades of our friend Jerry!)  titled "Surgery for the Novel -- Or a Bomb."

It was a bit hard to find information on this essay.  It has a slightly more famous cousin ("Why the Novel Matters," online here).  "Surgery" was heavily edited when it was first published in a periodical, and the original sat in a drawer for much of the 20th century.  But after seeing just a few choice quotes in various places, I knew I had to find the whole thing.  Hooray for libraries!

How do we feel about the novel? Do we bounce with joy thinking of the wonderful novelistic days ahead? Or do we grimly shake our heads and hope the wicked creature will be spared a little longer?

Is the novel on his death-bed, old sinner? Or is he just toddling round his cradle, sweet little thing?

It turns out that he wasn't a fan of the introspective, stream of consciousness style that James Joyce and Thomas Mann were pioneering at the time.  Lawrence considered that the height of childishness...

It really is childish, after a certain age, to be absorbedly self-conscious. One has to be self-conscious at seventeen: still a little self-conscious at twenty-seven; but if we are going it strong at thirty-seven, then it is a sign of arrested development, nothing else. And if is still continuing at forty-seven, it is obvious senile precocity.

Thus, this 1923 essay was essentially a manifesto for the novel to wake up, grow up already, and cut out the navel-gazing.  Interestingly, he looked to the past to find examples of "little novels" that he found worthwhile: the Gospels and Plato's dialogues.

They don't care about how it is just now, or how it was in the past.... What they want is to put a new impulse into the world.

For Lawrence, those ancient texts were a healthy blend of religion, philosophy, and STORY.  Ever since those days, he claimed, the emotional, personal engagement was leeched out of philosophy... and the deep meaning was leeched out of fictional narrative.  Put 'em back together, he says!

The novel has got a future. Its future is to take the place of gospels, philosophies, and the present-day novel as we know it. It's got to have the courage to tackle new propositions without using abstractions; it's got to present us with new, really new feelings, a whole new line of emotion, which will get us out of the old emotional rut. Instead of snivelling about what is and what has been, or inventing new sensations in the old line, it's got to break a way through, like a hole in the wall. And the public will scream and say it's sacrilege: because, of course, when you've been jammed for a long time in a tight corner, you get really used to its stuffiness.... You back away from the cold stream of fresh air as if it was killing you.

Hey, there's that blood-pumping manifesto verve.

The weird thing is that -- to me -- Lawrence seems to embrace many of the same modernist tropes that Joyce was exploring... honest reporting of sexuality, themes of exile and loneliness, and a playful syncretism of ideas made possible by 20th century travel and communication.  I think that Joyce was trying to achieve much of the same thing Lawrence describes in this essay.  But Lawrence was kind of an expressionist, and Joyce was a cubist.  :-)

M is for Man of La Mancha

Sub-title: "I was a Teenage Carrasco."

Man of La Mancha has been a popular Broadway musical since before I was born, and it was based (in part) on a novel that turns 400 this very year.

You might be wondering where the manifesto is, here.  It's not the play.  I'd like to make the case that its most famous song, The Impossible Dream, contains lyrics worthy of nailing up on a church doorway.

To dream the impossible dream
To fight the unbeatable foe
To bear with unbearable sorrow
To run where the brave dare not go

To right the unrightable wrong
To love pure and chaste from afar
To try when your arms are too weary
To reach the unreachable star

The original story of Don Quixote was often slapstick and sometimes a bit cruel.  However, playwright Dale Wasserman's take on the conjoined lives of Miguel Cervantes and his fictional knight became something sublime.  The play contrasts the lives of two people: one successful and "sane" -- but cynical and selfish -- and the other "insane" but also kind, magnanimous, and super-inspiring to those around him.  Who's to say that the first one has more of a right to make his way in the world than the second one?

The second one, Don Quixote himself, sings The Impossible Dream as an encapsulation of his chivalric quest.  The repeated impossibilities in the lyrics make it seem he already knows that his worldview is out of step with everyone else's.  He doesn't care.

This is my quest
To follow that star
No matter how hopeless
No matter how far

To fight for the right
Without question or pause
To be willing to march into Hell
For a heavenly cause

For people my age, and a bit older, this song a bit of an old cliché.  We heard the likes of Robert Goulet and Jim Nabors belt it out on TV shows, after all.  But it was the 60s, and unrealistic idealism was in the air.  I wonder if the sky-high hopes of the Space Race were an inspiration for the lyricists.  This song was also was my first peek through some narrow cracks in a completely rationalist point of view.

I was first introduced to Man of La Mancha in a high school English class.  Our teacher (who was something of a 60s throwback himself) gave us all copies of the script, assigned each kid to a role, and had us read it.  When the script called for the songs, the teacher played them from a vinyl record of the original cast recording -- so we wouldn't embarrass ourselves trying to sing.

I was a bit upset with this whole situation at first, since I was type-cast (ever the science geek) as the rationalist villain of the story, Dr. Sanson Carrasco.  But, if you're familiar with the play, you'll know what I mean when I say this was a mirror that I needed to be faced with.

I'm not sure if I live my life up to the ideals of this song, but I strive, I strive.

And I know if I'll only be true
To this glorious quest
That my heart will lie peaceful and calm
When I'm laid to my rest

And the world will be better for this
That one man, scorned and covered with scars
Still strove with his last ounce of courage
To reach the unreachable star!

L is for Luke

This is a slightly weird one.  I'm not on Tumblr, but I do browse a few interesting accounts.  The informal Star Wars themed manifesto that I'm about to re-post (or re-blog, or re-tumble, or whatever those darned kids are calling it these days) came from a pair of people whose only names I know are their Tumblr handles.  It's long -- and there's some salty language ahead -- but if you're a Star Wars fan, it's worth it.

First, someone named fialleril posted the following, in response to a challenge to provide the "Top Five Things About Luke Skywalker:"

Okay friend, well I hope you are prepared for an explosion of feelings here.

1. His character arc. I adore Luke at all stages of his character development (and tbh I really have no patience for people who talk about “whiny Luke”). I love him because he goes the whole journey - from this relatively inexperienced, but still profoundly earnest young man to someone who is wise and compassionate and absolutely himself. I love that his journey is hard-fought. He’s a fundamentally good person, yes, and that’s one of my fave things about him too, but he’s not this naturally all-forgiving incarnation of compassion. His compassion is burning and hard as the twin suns, and he works at it, makes a conscious decision to live that way, and has to keep re-making that decision, over and over and over again, often in the face of what everyone around him is telling him. And he makes that decision because he’s been through the depths, because he survived the annihilation of self that was Bespin for him, and he came back out from the underworld, carrying with him the knowledge of death and resurrection. He has one of the best executed mythical story arcs out there.

2. His earnestness. I mentioned that above, too, but I gotta mention it again. I really love characters who are just unapologetically decent, earnest people - people who care, people who dedicate themselves wholeheartedly to what they believe in, people who are idealistic and live their lives in that idealism, who are often wrongly assumed to be naive or foolish or unrealistic because they choose to believe in the goodness of humanity. Luke is all of those things, and often in spite of what quite a lot of people would consider evidence to the contrary, and I love him for it.

3. His goofiness. Characters who are all of the things listed above and also enormous dweebs are my greatest weakness of all. I said that the scene where they’re captured by Ewoks and Luke is just giggling behind his hand as Threepio insists he’s not allowed to impersonate a deity is one of my favorite Luke scenes ever. I was not exaggerating.

I don’t think Luke is much of a prankster, though he probably enjoys other people’s pranks. But I do think he’s probably (in)famous for his ridiculous puns. Han is constantly groaning about it. Leia is more likely to sigh fondly and say, “Well, that’s Luke.”

Things only get worse when he starts chatting more regularly with his father’s ghost. (Anakin’s jokes are awful. And I have a headcanon that ghost!Anakin, who is finally free for the first time in…ever, has really cut loose and is probably the kind of overly intense, overly dweeby person who’s just so awed by life and existence and everything that he’s caught in a state of constant wonder. And terrible jokes. But I digress.) Anyway, sometimes Luke passes on Anakin’s jokes, which always make Leia groan even more, and Han just stares incredulously every time, like, “Darth Vader told you that joke?! I refuse to believe that. It’s a fucking terrible joke.”

Then eventually Han and Leia have kids and Luke becomes the cheesy-but-awesome uncle, which is literally everything he ever wanted out of life.

Oops, I guess this became a headcanon entry. Oh well!

4. The way he interacts with Artoo and Threepio. Luke never seems to think of them as “just droids.” Even when he first meets them, he treats them like people with their own thoughts and experiences - thoughts and experiences that he is genuinely interested in learning about. His relationship with Artoo undergoes a character development arc all its own, just like his relationships with the biological characters, and I adore that. The way they talk to each other is just wonderful.

5. Luke is more Jedi than the Jedi. Or, to put it the way I’ve been saying it for years (and wow, it really is years now, what a horrifying thought!), he’s the only one who ever really gets it.

Say what you will about Anakin in AOTC, but I actually really like his definition of compassion there. And he claims it’s central to the Jedi way of life, but the cold hard truth is that we don’t see any prequel era Jedi ever actually living that way. Compassion is hard, so much harder than fighting, or even than controlling your own feelings. Compassion is knife-edged and burning like the sun, because true compassion makes you see - the other, and yourself.

In the first numbered point I talked about the journey into, and back out of, the underworld. In some ways I think Luke is the only one of the Jedi who actually makes the anabasis, the journey back from the depths. Everyone else gets stuck in that place of death. Anakin’s stuck-ness is most obvious, but Obi-Wan and Yoda, too, are trapped and largely powerless in their respective exiles. There’s no way forward for them. They can teach Luke, but all they can teach him is what they know, which is a binary, Dark and Light, good and evil absolutes, the fullest and final expression of which is Obi-Wan’s flat-out admission that they’ve trained Luke to kill his own father, because that’s the only choice.

None of the Old Republic Jedi ever could have done what Luke does, which is to throw away his sword and stop fighting. And I love that THAT is the moment when he says, “I am a Jedi” - that moment in which he is, in so many ways, acting least like the Jedi of old. There he is, a Jedi confronted with two Sith Lords, and his greatest action is to refuse to fight. Something that would have been literally unthinkable for any of the Jedi of the old Order. But not just “I am a Jedi,” no, he says, “I am a Jedi, like my father before me.” Everything about that statement is like a perfect antithesis of the old Jedi Order, from the words he says to the actions he takes along with them.

“This weapon is your life,” says Obi-Wan, and he makes it sound like a common Jedi aphorism. This weapon is your life, and Luke throws it away. Because Obi-Wan and Yoda and all the other Jedi were good, and they were wise, and they had millennia of tradition, and they were wrong.

So Luke throws away his lightsaber and rejects the binary understanding of reality, and that’s when Luke names himself, both a Jedi, and his father’s son.

And the thing is, he’s right. He is a Jedi. If compassion is central to a Jedi’s life, Luke Skywalker may very well be the only Jedi that has ever been.

- - - - - - - - - - - - -

Wow.  Very cool.  Harry Knowles kind of foreshadowed some of these sentiments in a quote that I once posted here, but this went much further.

Back on Tumblr, someone named karigan-gladheon (whose account doesn't seem to exist any more?) made a pithy, but insightful follow-up comment:

Also Luke setting an example which makes other people feel compassion:

Han Solo, no-strings-attatched smuggler who risks his own life because of that stupid boy with his stupid ideals who somehow became his true friends.

Fucking Darth Vader, children-murdering super evil villain, who cannot stand to see his boy die who so long ago was the proof of Anakin Skywalker’s love and dreams.

And Mara Jade, brain-washed professional assassin, who somehow can’t go through with killing that one annoying farmboy who keeps offering her options and second chances and friendship and is so kind even though actual people aren’t supposed to be like that.

Luke is a fucking Disney princess and his super power is love.

- - - - - - - - - - - - -

Need I say more?  :-)

K is for Kipling

"Do you like Kipling?"

"I don't know, you naughty boy; I've never kippled."

Today's manifesto is a well-known poem.  Well-known?  Probably well-worn and cliché, to lots of people.  It's Rudyard Kipling's If—  (The only work of art I know with an em-dash as part of its title.)

Though lots of people leave off the dash—

I'm sure that many see it as dated and utterly Victorian, but I'm still charmed by it.  The poem is framed as advice given from father to son.  Each stanza starts a thought, then pauses to start another.

If you can keep your head when all about you
  Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
  But make allowance for their doubting too;

You'll see where these thoughts are headed at the end.  But before then, the stakes get raised.  Critics have made hay about the stereotypical English upper-class stoicism that Kipling suggests be the proper response to life's troubles...

If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
  And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
  Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
  And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
  And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
  And never breathe a word about your loss;

...but in some arenas of life we could probably use more of this grown-up approach.  There's more, but it's the last four lines that are the most memorable.

If you can fill the unforgiving minute
  With sixty seconds' worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
  And -- which is more -- you’ll be a Man, my son.

I didn't learn about this poem until I was about 21, when I saw it referenced in a slightly mopey 1980s comic book story about how the Flash's sidekick was having a tough time living up to the glory of his superhero mentor.  It was kind of silly and melodramatic, but at least the "sixty seconds worth of distance run" was a decent fit with super-fast-running costumed capers.

Even more recently, I discovered another poem -- similarly full of lines that start with "If..." that is quite inspiring, too.  In 1945, Alma Androzzo wrote a song called "If I Can Help Somebody."  It was later made famous by Mahalia Jackson and several other popular singers, and it inspired Martin Luther King Jr. throughout his life.

If I can help somebody as I pass along,
If I can cheer somebody with a word or a song,
If I can show somebody he is travelling wrong,
Then my living shall not be in vain.
. . .
If I can do my duty, as a good man ought,
If I can bring back beauty to a world up wrought,
If I can spread love's message as the Master taught,
Then my living shall not be in vain.

Does it have anything to do with Kipling's poem?  Not really, but when you look at them side by side, they serve as two neat "bookends."  Remember the two extreme impulses of manifestos that I've been thinking about?  "Do your own thing" versus "Be nice to one another."  These two If's certainly personify the two extremes, don't you think?  (Long-time readers will know that I'm a sucker for these kinds of quasi-symbolic idea pairings...)

J is for Jerry Maguire

At the beginning of Cameron Crowe's 1996 movie Jerry Maguire, the main character stays up all night to write a mission statement (more a manifesto than a memo) about the future of his business.  It takes him by storm.

"I am not a writer but I can’t stop from writing this. It is something pure, from the deepest part of me."

Of course, he gets into trouble after he impulsively makes a few hundred copies of it, complete with the Holden Caulfield-esqe cover, and distributes it to everyone at his sports agency company.

In my opinion, the movie kind of goes downhill from there.  But that first scene grabs me every time.  Only recently I learned that Cameron Crowe actually wrote the whole mission statement, not just the snippets that we hear on screen.  You can read all 5,600 words of it here.  It's really quite good.

How can we do something surprising, and memorable with our lives? How can we turn this job, in small but important ways, into a better representation of ourselves? Most of us would easily say that we are our jobs. That’s obvious from the late hours we all keep. So then, it is bigger than work, isn’t it? It is about us.

How do we wish to define our lives? 

The lesson Jerry learns, which gets him into all that trouble, is that quality matters more than quantity, and people matter even more.

The answer is fewer clients. Less dancing. More truth. We must crack open the tightly clenched fist of commerce and give a little back for the greater good. Eventually revenues will be the same, and that goodness will be infectious. We will have taken our number oneness and turned it into something greater. And eventually smaller will become bigger, in every way, and especially in our hearts.

True confession time.  I've had a text file sitting on my computer called "quo-vadis.txt" for almost 10 years.  Every so often, I think of something to add to it... one more little snippet about where I think my own professional field should be headed.  The bullet items are in the second person imperative, addressed to future-me.  Maybe to future-us.  Here's how a few of them begin:

• Give...
• Rail against...
• Don't half-ass...
• Be wary of...

Someday I plan to get myself into trouble, too.  I'm with ya, Jerry.

Let us start a revolution. Let us start a revolution that is not just about basketball shoes, or official licensed merchandise. I am prepared to die for something. I am prepared to live for our cause. The cause is caring about each other. The secret to this job is personal relationships.

I is for Independence

I think today's post might be the most explicitly political of my A-to-Z series, but since the topic is about 240 years old, I don't anticipate it stoking up much heated partisan argument....

It may be naive American parochialism, but I have an unabashed love of the Declaration of Independence.  Although it's been drilled into the minds of schoolchildren for centuries, it's still very much a fiery manifesto.  Have we always upheld its words?

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

No, but our own failures should not detract from the worthiness of the ideal.  The original abuses that led to rebellion and revolution were laid out "to a candid world" in the Declaration, and capped with an air-tight conclusion,

A Prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.

Although on the face of it this conclusion may not be controversial, it's the application that's tricky.  What happens when some people think the situation applies, and others don't?

Thomas Jefferson wrote the original draft of the Declaration in June of 1776, and the Continental Congress in Philadelphia proceeded to do lots of editing by committee.  That's not usually a good thing.  However, it did prune away some of his more flowery flourishes (like shouting "our everlasting Adieu! eternal separation!" to Great Britain).  Unfortunately, the need for compromise between all 13 colonies also pruned away Jefferson's strong language against slavery.

My own connection to the events of July 4, 1776 is inevitably tangled up with the celebration of the U.S. bicentennial in 1976.  For those of you who weren't alive or old enough to know, the bicentennial was everywhere.  As a 9 year old kid, I couldn't help but get swept up in it.  Around that time I grew to love the musical 1776, which attempted to tell the story of the drafting and adoption of the Declaration as accurately as possible... with people breaking into song and dance for no reason.

Whovians will know that Ben Franklin there was the narrator of Tom Baker's imported adventures on PBS

Being that the bicentennial was also taking place within a decade of the Apollo moon landings, the patriotic imagery kind of got mixed up a bit.  At times it seemed like we were we celebrating our ultimate independence... from the Earth's gravity!  :-)  Still, I loved the lunar-themed reverses of the silver dollars from that era...

And how could I forget the anthem of the time, written (ironically?) by two Brits for their American friend's newly formed tennis team?  I've always identified with the lyrics -- especially since I spent many of my formative years in Philadelphia itself.  The analogy between America's independence and the hard-won freedom of a lone young person, striking out into the world, has always been with me.

The whippoorwill of freedom

H is for Hacktivism

Over the last few decades, computers have changed the world.  Later in this challenge I'll have at least one more post about how they might continue to change our lives in the fuuuuuture, but for now I'd just like to look back.

The highly individualistic "hacker ethic" is something that's attracted manifesto writers since the early 1980s.  Combine a love of sharing and openness with pie-in-the-sky dreams about changing the world, and you've got a perfect storm of virtual optimism.  Back in 2013, I discovered some early manifestos that took the form of magazine ads.  Another early codification of this ethic was set down in writing in Steven Levy's 1984 book Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution:

1. Access to computers -- and anything which might teach you something about the way the world works -- should be unlimited and total. Always yield to the Hands-On Imperative.
2. All information should be free.
3. Mistrust authority -- promote decentralization.
4. Hackers should be judged by their hacking, not criteria such as degrees, age, race, sex, or position.
5. You can create art and beauty on a computer.
6. Computers can change your life for the better.

Right about the same time, Richard Stallman (sometimes called the last of the old-school hackers) began the GNU project...

...which of course came along with its own honest to goodness manifesto.  Stallman's purpose was to use grass-roots collaboration to create quality free software that wasn't beholden to corporate interests:

I consider that the Golden Rule requires that if I like a program I must share it with other people who like it. Software sellers want to divide the users and conquer them, making each user agree not to share with others. I refuse to break solidarity with other users in this way. I cannot in good conscience sign a nondisclosure agreement or a software license agreement.

It becomes more manifesto-ish when the ultimate societal goal is revealed: increasing everybody's leisure time!  :-)

In the long run, making programs free is a step toward the postscarcity world, where nobody will have to work very hard just to make a living. People will be free to devote themselves to activities that are fun, such as programming, after spending the necessary ten hours a week on required tasks such as legislation, family counseling, robot repair and asteroid prospecting. [...] We have already greatly reduced the amount of work that the whole society must do for its actual productivity, but only a little of this has translated itself into leisure for workers because much nonproductive activity is required to accompany productive activity. The main causes of this are bureaucracy and isometric struggles against competition. Free software will greatly reduce these drains in the area of software production. We must do this, in order for technical gains in productivity to translate into less work for us.

In subsequent years, Stallman came to realize that people came to have different expectations of the word "free," so some clarifications had to be made to the manifesto.

When we call software “free,” we mean that it respects the users' essential freedoms: the freedom to run it, to study and change it, and to redistribute copies with or without changes. This is a matter of freedom, not price, so think of “free speech,” not “free beer.”

See more details here.  I'm not sure I understand all the nuances.

Of course, a wild west mentality can produce black-hatted villains alongside the white-hatted heroes.  We're all familiar with the bad stuff that can be done with computers.  However, dipping our toes back in the original wellsprings of idealism can remind us why the wildness was (hopefully!) worth it.

No gnews is good gnews