Author: J.S. Bangs

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We are preparing for a blizzard.

This morning the sky was robin’s-egg blue, and the white winter sun made the snow blaze. It was warm all day, and the snowpack melted, compacted, and retreated in preparation for the coming onslaught. Right now, if I go outside and get a handful of the stuff it’s wet and heavy, ideal for packing into snowballs and building snowmen. This snow is from a few days ago, and when it fell it was light and airy, like flakes of sugar. It’s taken a few days of sunshine to condense it into the dense, serious stuff we have now.

Unfortunately, there’s no time for building much of anything, now. The weather reports predict a 100% chance of snow tonight. (Total certainty: the weathermen don’t often allow themselves such confidence.) They have red blazons across their bottoms warning people not to travel, to beware of cold, to stock their pantries. There will be wind and darkness, and in the morning we’ll wake up to find the air whirling with newborn snow. It will cover over the cantankerous slush of the last snowfall with fresh, youthful flakes, reblessing the landscape with untrodden white.

When we were little, my brother treasured the look of a freshly snowed lawn. He would get angry with anyone who marred the pristine white. I think he had the right idea.

I love winter.

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Chuck Wendig has this to say:

You learn early on how to write. But for most authors it takes a long time to learn how they in particular write. Certain processes, styles, genres, character types, POVs, tenses, whatever — they will come more naturally to you than they do to others. And some won’t come naturally at all. Maybe you’ll figure this out right out of the gate. But for most, it just takes time — time filled with actual writing — to tease it out.

(Warning: the rest of the post at link, as well as nearly everything ever written by ol’ Wendig, is NSFW.)

So, Chuck is exactly right here. And this is one of the hard things for newbie writers to grok — or at least, it was hard for me to accept. There were lots of books written by Famous and Successful writers, people who have sold way, way more books and stories than I probably ever will, and they tell you the way to do it. And who are you to disagree?

(Actually, pretty much every writing book I’ve ever read says that you may do it differently. But eager young writers looking for the keys to the kingdom tend to overlook those.)

And in that vein, I’d like to tell a story about how I broke through five years of writers’ block.

I got two pieces of advice as a young writer. The first was not to just write one thing. Don’t just have The Novel that you work on for years and years and years, as that leads to stagnation and spinning your wheels on something that just isn’t gonna work. The second was to recognize that you have a million words of garbage to write before you write something worthwhile, so you should just accept the fact that your first n stories/novels are going to suck.

Unfortunately, these interacted in a really bad way in my head. My problem was that I had The Novel that I wanted to write. It had been occupying headspace in my thoughts for over a decade, and I loved it. But I knew I should write other things as well, and I knew that if I just plunged into The Novel without any experience it would probably suck. So I tried to write other things: short stories, flash fiction, and one or two novellas. None of them were bad, but none were very good. And then, after a while, my well of ideas (other than The Novel) dried up. I was blocked. I didn’t write anything at all for about five years.

Over this time I continued to think about The Novel, but I knew I still wasn’t good enough to write it properly. And I still felt the itch to write something, but I didn’t have the ideas and the motivation to work on anything else. Until, one day, I literally woke up and thought to myself, “Screw this. I’m just gonna write the novel.”

I wrote four chapters (about 50 pages) before I went to bed that day.

I finished the novel in 2-3 months. And guess what? It wasn’t very good. It wasn’t terrible, either, but all of the problems that the writing books said I would have showed up, especially bad pacing and flabby prose. I spent probably another year polishing it, and then a long time trying to submit it and get editors or agents interested. But they all turned it down, for very good reasons, and the book was eventually trunked.

But in the meantime something interesting happened: once I had actually written the big novel that had occupied my mind for so many years, I found I had lots of other stories to write. My writers’ block was destroyed by the simple act of writing the story that I wanted to write, and not worrying about doing it “right.”

That was several years ago. I will eventually return to that first novel and do it in the way that it deserves, but in the meantime I have lots of other things to write.

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So I finally finished The Road to Wigan Pier, as I blogged previously. And did I say this wasn’t a political book? Ha ha! I guess that shows how far I had read, since the second half of the book is entirely concerned with politics, specifically Orwell’s apologia for Socialism.

This, in and of itself, is not something that I would name among Orwell’s mistakes. Orwell makes it abundantly clear that he believes the only real alternatives available to men in his age are Socialism and Fascism, and between the two of them he chooses Socialism. This is a defensible choice, as it’s the choice that the major Western powers all took, banding together to crush fascism utterly, but allowing Socialism (or at least its doppelganger Stalinism) to persist for the next sixty years.

But along the way, Orwell makes two significant errors which are indicative of his time and prejudices. The first is a simple error of fact: Orwell believed that the British were getting smaller, on average:

… [I]t is probable that the physical average has been declining all over England for a long time past, and not merely among the unemployed in the industrial areas. This cannot be proved statistically, but it is a conclusion that is forced upon you if you use your eyes, even in rural places and even in a prosperous town like London. On the day when King George V’s body passed through London on its way to Westminster, I happened to be caught for an hour or two in the crowd in Trafalgar Square. It was impossible, looking about one then, not to be struck by the physical degeneracy of modern England. The people surrounding me were not working-class people for the most part; they were the shopkeeper–commercial-traveller type, with a sprinkling of the well-to- do. But what a set they looked! Puny limbs, sickly faces, under the weeping London sky! Hardly a well-built man or a decent-looking woman, and not a fresh complexion anywhere. As the King’s coffin went by, the men took off their hats, and a friend who was in the crowd at the other side of the Strand said to me afterwards, ‘The only touch of colour anywhere was the bald heads.’ Even the Guards, it seemed to me–there was a squad of guardsmen marching beside the coffin–were not what they used to be. Where are the monstrous men with chests like barrels and moustaches like the wings of eagles who strode across my child-hood’s gaze twenty or thirty years ago? Buried, I suppose, in the Flanders mud. In their place there are these pale-faced boys who have been picked for their height and consequently look like hop-poles in overcoats–the truth being that in modern England a man over six feet high is usually skin and bone and not much else. If the English physique has declined, this is no doubt partly due to the fact that the Great War carefully selected the million best men in England and slaughtered them, largely before they had had time to breed. But the process must have begun earlier than that, and it must be due ultimately to un-healthy ways of living, i.e. to industrialism. I don’t mean the habit of living in towns–probably the town is healthier than the country, in many ways–but the modern industrial technique which provides you with cheap substitutes for everything. We may find in the long run that tinned food is a deadlier weapon than the machine gun.

As he indicates by his allusions, Orwell seems to have gotten this idea from romantic images of what pre-Edwardian people were actually like, embellished by childhood memories. But there’s an abundance of evidence showing that people in Orwell’s age were already much bigger than they were before, and WWI wasn’t give more than a blip on the overall historical trend. Orwell states that his intuition "cannot be proved statistically", which is hardly an encouraging sign when making statistical generalizations.

The second error which Orwell commits is one of economics, and it concerns the relationship between technological innovation and profit. He states the following near the end of the book:

The Socialists are right, therefore, when they claim that the rate of mechanical progress will be much more rapid once Socialism is established. Given a mechanical civilization the process of invention and improvement will always continue, but the tendency of capitalism is to slow it down, because under capitalism any invention which does not promise fairly immediate profits is neglected; some, indeed, which threaten to reduce profits are suppressed almost as ruthlessly as the flexible glass mentioned by Petronius. [For example: Some years ago someone invented a gramophone needle that would last for decades. One of the big gramophone companies bought up the patent rights, and that was the last that was ever beard of it.] Establish Socialism–remove the profit principle–and the inventor will have a free hand. The mechanization of the world, already rapid enough, would be or at any rate could be enormously accelerated.

This is almost exactly backwards. Mechanization proceeds rapidly in a capitalist society precisely because it provides the opportunity for profits, and in the absence of a profit motive mechanization and innovation slow down or cease. The actual history of the world’s socialist states bears this out: they were rather quickly able to achieve a base level of industrial mobilization, but after that time their technical progress almost always lagged that of the West. The only exceptions were in military technology (and space exploration, the step-child of the military), where innovation was spurred on both sides by state rivalry rather than market forces.

It’s easy to see how Orwell made this mistake, though: Russia had, in the space of a few decades, turned from being a feudal, agrarian economy into being a competing member of the industrial world. Never mind that this development was essentially unrepeatable, depending on the forced migration of millions of serfs to the cities, and that it was accomplished by grotesque applications of force and the evisceration of whole provinces. (Mao would later condemn a few million of his countrymen to starvation attempting to repeat the trick.) From a certain point of view, the fact that this transition had occurred was proof of the common propaganda point that industrialization and science would speed up under Socialism.

Despite these errors, the book is very good. In fact, it’s rather shocking to discover that a Socialist apologetic could be as good as this was. Let Orwell’s mistakes merely be a reminder that the best writers were still capable of simple errors of fact.

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Our language only gives us one way to greet each other ("How are you?") and only one way to answer ("Fine"). It’s a lie. But somehow the transparency of the lie makes it easier to bear. We greet each other in the way that people do, and then we slip into silence or share silent embraces, and niceties slip away.

None of us are fine.

The relationship between cousins is interesting. Growing up, my cousins were people that I saw every few months, during holidays and vacations, for a few intense days of card games, fishing, fighting, and laughing. As we’ve become adults, several of us moved further away, and every few months turned into every few years, when we’d gather again for Christmas or a wedding, packing into the house of our mild and patient matriarch to recreate the explosive camaraderie of our youth. But my relationship with my cousins suffers from the great blessing and the great curse of all family relationships: the bond is unchosen and indelible, so in the end it doesn’t really matter how long it’s been since you’ve seen each other. You’re still family.

We’re all bigger now, and many of us bring girlfriends, spouses and children to the reunion. My grandmother is a great-grandmother several times over, and when we get together our children coalesce into a raucous mob that stirs my memories of what the get-togethers with cousins were like when I was little. Of course, our children are actually further removed than cousins, and we spend several conversations failing to remember the details of the nomenclature. Are Luke and Sophia second cousins, or first cousins once removed? Is Tasha Sebastian’s aunt or great-aunt?

It’s the little ones that keep us sane. When we gather for the wake, we take over one of the church’s nurseries and allow our kids to run wild in the play room, taking turns watching over them. They don’t understand what’s going on—for them, this is just a few days’ vacation, extra time spent playing with the cousins. Getting out of the wake and into the childcare room, to see the children shrieking and giggling, is quite a relief.

It is late on a Friday night when I got the call from my mom saying that my uncle had died. My initial reaction is no reaction at all. I immediately turn my attention back towards whatever I had been doing beforehand, and over the next few days I don’t spare much thought for the funeral, other than making the necessary arrangements to attend. There are some cracks here and there, but mostly I’m holding it together.

Then I see him in the casket. He looks really good. Not overly made-up or plastic. He looks like he’s resting. Only his hands give him away, as they seem to have shriveled and taken on a black undertone.

But I go to pieces.

I burst out crying nearly as soon as I go in to see him, and it’s a while before I can even think anything coherent. The family shares embraces, and we wet each others shoulders with tears. There are words, but they don’t matter. There’s nothing we can say that defeats the reality of the resting man in the front with shriveled black hands.

Laughter and weeping alternate like the steps of a dance.

It’s been so long since we were all together—we have to laugh and tell ridiculous jokes and insult each other and laugh at the insults. This is what we do. To do any different would cede too much to death.

The night after the funeral, we all gather in the hotel, all of the cousins and spouses and aunts and uncles, the siblings and children of the deceased, and we have fun. We eat pizza and tuna salad and cookies, and we tell stories. About Uncle Brian growing up. About fishing trips and diarrhea. Things his kids got away with. Things his kids didn’t get away with. No one cries tonight. It’s a good night.

I’ve written nearly a thousand words now, and hardly said a thing about my uncle himself. This doesn’t seem right. But it’s is partly deliberate: most of you who read this didn’t know Brian, and no eulogy I could write would communicate even a speck of who we was. But everyone knows grief and loss (or will come to know it sooner than they think), so I hope that talking about our grief will somehow connect with others who have grieved, or will grieve.

But please don’t think that we grieved in the abstract. At the funeral, we didn’t cry because someone died. We cried for Uncle Brian. And we still miss him.

The funeral lasts nearly three hours, but I don’t mind. My uncle had six children, and all of them speak. I wouldn’t trade those hours for anything.

Afterwards we make a brief procession to the graveyard, where the casket is laid out over the grave. All of the immediate and extended family have taken yellow roses, and one at a time we come and lay them atop the casket and say a final goodbye. My aunt lays her head on the top of the casket and weeps for a minute before leaving her rose. All of the children come by, ending with the youngest, a beautiful ten-year-old girl. She touches her cheek lightly to the casket lid as if giving her father a final kiss.

I’m normally rather cynical about the conventional Christian comforts that people trot out at times like this. But at the funeral my cynicism is shattered. I do not care for philosophical dithering and theological complexities. I do not care whether my atheist, pagan, and other friends think I sound stupid. I care that my uncle is with Jesus.

Bless the Lord, oh my soul

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Today, I am lazy, and have outsourced most of my blog-writing duties to George Orwell. We continue our readings from Chapter 7 of The Road to Wigan Pier, with Orwell talking about the social conditions in the working-class areas of the industrial north:

Take for instance the different attitude towards the family. A working-class family hangs together as a middle-class one does, but the relationship is far less tyrannical. A working man has not that deadly weight of family prestige hanging round his neck like a millstone. I have pointed out earlier that a middle-class person goes utterly to pieces under the influence of poverty; and this is generally due to the behaviour of his family–to the fact that he has scores of relations nagging and badgering him night and day for failing to ‘get on’. The fact that the working class know how to combine and the middle class don’t is probably due to their different conceptions of family loyalty. You cannot have an effective trade union of middle-class workers, be-cause in times of strikes almost every middle-class wife would be egging her husband on to blackleg and get the other fellow’s job….

In a working-class home–I am not thinking at the moment of the unemployed, but of comparatively prosperous homes–you breathe a warm, decent, deeply human atmosphere which it is not so easy to find elsewhere. I should say that a manual worker, if he is in steady work and drawing good wages–an ‘if’ which gets bigger and bigger–has a better chance of being happy than an ‘educated’ man. His home life seems to fall more naturally into a sane and comely shape. I have often been struck by the peculiar easy completeness, the perfect symmetry as it were, of a working- class interior at its best. Especially on winter evenings after tea, when the fire glows in the open range and dances mirrored in the steel fender, when Father, in shirt-sleeves, sits in the rocking chair at one side of the fire reading the racing finals, and Mother sits on the other with her sewing, and the children are happy with a pennorth of mint humbugs, and the dog lolls roasting himself on the rag mat–it is a good place to be in, provided that you can be not only in it but sufficiently of it to be taken for granted.

This scene is still reduplicated in a majority of English homes, though not in so many as before the war. Its happiness depends mainly upon one question–whether Father is in work. But notice that the picture I have called up, of a working-class family sitting round the coal fire after kippers and strong tea, belongs only to our own moment of time and could not belong either to the future or the past. Skip forward two hundred years into the Utopian future, and the scene is totally different. Hardly one of the things I have imagined will still be there. In that age when there is no manual labour and everyone is ‘educated’, it is hardly likely that Father will still be a rough man with enlarged hands who likes to sit in shirt-sleeves and says ‘Ah wur coomin’ oop street’. And there won’t be a coal fire in the grate, only some kind of invisible heater. The furniture will be made of rubber, glass, and steel. If there are still such things as evening papers there will certainly be no racing news in them, for gambling will be meaningless in a world where there is no poverty and the horse will have vanished from the face of the earth. Dogs, too, will have been sup- pressed on grounds of hygiene. And there won’t be so many children, either, if the birth-controllers have their way….

Curiously enough it is not the triumphs of modem engineering, nor the radio, nor the cinematograph, nor the five thousand novels which are published yearly, nor the crowds at Ascot and the Eton and Harrow match, but the memory of working-class interiors–especially as I sometimes saw them in my childhood before the war, when England was still prosperous– that reminds me that our age has not been altogether a bad one to live in.

One reads with horror Orwell’s description of the "Utopia" awaiting far in his future. A century from Orwell’s time is only twenty years from now. And while some of his vision has come to pass (invisible heaters, furniture of rubber, glass, and steel), horses are still with us, and so are dogs.

But now contrast Orwell’s discussion of the working-class family with this discussion of the British riots. Some things have gone better than expected. Some things have gone worse.

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George Orwell, it turns out, wrote things other than Animal Farm and 1982. For some reason (I can’t actually remember, now), I started reading Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier a few weeks ago. It’s a remarkable piece of writing. Orwell’s voice drew me in immediately, depicting with clear, compelling prose prose the miserable conditions in a working-class boarding house:

I never discovered how many bedrooms the house contained, but strange to say there was a bathroom, dating from before the Brookers’ time. Downstairs there was the usual kitchen living-room with its huge open range burning night and day. It was lighted only by a skylight, for on one side of it was the shop and on the other the larder, which opened into some dark subterranean place where the tripe was stored. Partly blocking the door of the larder there was a shapeless sofa upon which Mrs. Brooker, our landlady, lay permanently ill, festooned in grimy blankets. She had a big, pale yellow, anxious face. No one knew for certain what was the matter with her; I suspect that her only real trouble was over-eating. In front of the fire there was almost always a line of damp washing, and in the middle of the room was the big kitchen table at which the family and all the lodgers ate. I never saw this table completely uncovered, but I saw its various wrappings at different times. At the bottom there was a layer of old newspaper stained by Worcester Sauce; above that a sheet of sticky white oil-cloth; above that a green serge cloth; above that a coarse linen cloth, never changed and seldom taken off. Generally the crumbs from breakfast were still on the table at supper. I used to get to know individual crumbs by sight and watch their progress up and down the table from day to day.

The shop was a narrow, cold sort of room. On the outside of the window a few white letters, relics of ancient chocolate advertisements, were scattered like stars. Inside there was a slab upon which lay the great white folds of tripe, and the grey flocculent stuff known as ‘black tripe’, and the ghostly translucent feet of pigs, ready boiled. It was the ordinary ‘tripe and pea’ shop, and not much else was stocked except bread, cigarettes, and tinned stuff. ‘Teas’ were advertised in the window, but if a customer demanded a cup of tea he was usually put off with excuses. Mr. Brooker, though out of work for two years, was a miner by trade, but he and his wife had been keeping shops of various kinds as a side-line all their lives. At one time they had had a pub, but they had lost their licence for allowing gambling on the premises. I doubt whether any of their businesses had ever paid; they were the kind of people who run a business chiefly in order to have something to grumble about. Mr. Brooker was a dark, small- boned, sour, Irish-looking man, and astonishingly dirty. I don’t think I ever once saw his hands clean. As Mrs. Brooker was now an invalid he prepared most of the food, and like all people with permanently dirty hands he had a peculiarly intimate, lingering manner of handling things. If he gave you a slice of bread-and-butter there was always a black thumb-print on it. Even in the early morning when he descended into the mysterious den behind Mrs. Brooker’s sofa and fished out the tripe, his hands were already black. I heard dreadful stories from the other lodgers about the place where the tripe was kept. Blackbeetles were said to swarm there. I do not know how often fresh consignments of tripe were ordered, but it was at long intervals, for Mrs. Brooker used to date events by it. ‘Let me see now, I’ve had in three lots of froze (frozen tripe) since that happened,’ etc. We lodgers were never given tripe to eat. At the time I imagined that this was because tripe was too expensive; I have since thought that it was merely because we knew too much about it. The Brookers never ate tripe themselves, I noticed.

[…] It struck me that this place must be fairly normal as lodging-houses in the industrial areas go, for on the whole the lodgers did not complain. The only one who ever did so to my knowledge was a little black-haired, sharp-nosed Cockney, a traveller for a cigarette firm. He had never been in the North before, and I think that till recently he had been in better employ and was used to staying in commercial hotels. This was his first glimpse of really low-class lodgings, the kind of place in which the poor tribe of touts and canvassers have to shelter upon their endless journeys. In the morning as we were dressing (he had slept in the double bed, of course) I saw him look round the desolate room with a sort of wondering aversion. He caught my eye and suddenly divined that I was a fellow- Southerner. ‘The filthy bloody bastards!’ he said feelingly. After that he packed his suit-case, went downstairs and, with great strength of mind, told the Brookers that this was not the kind of house he was accustomed to and that he was leaving immediately. The Brookers could never understand why. They were astonished and hurt. The ingratitude of it! Leaving them like that for no reason after a single night! Afterwards they discussed it over and over again, in all its bearings. It was added to their store of grievances.

On the day when there was a full chamber-pot under the breakfast table I decided to leave. The place was beginning to depress me.

This isn’t a book of advocacy, exactly. As far as I’ve read, Orwell concerns himself with journalistic, nearly novelistic depiction of the work and lives of the British working class, and he does not spend time arguing for any particular policy or politics. He doesn’t need to. His book accomplishes its purpose merely by presenting the lives of the proletariat in vibrant, grim detail, creating the potent mix of sympathy and revulsion evinced by the quoted paragraphs above. Political action is left as an exercise to the reader.

I came across this book fortuitously, as I had also just started reading Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China by Leslie Chang, an account of the lives of the working class in the new industrial China, specifically the city of Dongguan. The similarities are numerous. Like the miners in Orwell’s account, the girls in the factories that Chang visits work long hours, live in crowded, uncomfortable dwellings, work for astonishingly low wages, and are subject to a variety of abuses and indignities at the hands of management. Such conditions are universal in the annals of the global proletariat.

But the differences are even more indicative. First, the cleanliness. Orwell evokes the omnipresent filth of the British slums, but the dormitories that Chang visits are tidy and always smell faintly of bleach. The girls are so pressed for time that they bathe only occasionally, but neither do they spend hours doing hard labor at the coal face. They may not be adequately protected from industrial chemicals, but they do not inhale air that’s black with coal dust.

Chang’s girls live in what seems like an enormous, unisex high school. Most of them are in their teens or early twenties, and they live in an environment where they only see each other, living in an isolated social bubble, almost entirely cut off from the rest of the city. They only contact their families occasionally, though most of them send money home. They may have boyfriends and friendships, but the conditions in Dongguan are so chaotic and fluid that few of these relationships last long. Impermanence is the rule of the new China.

Orwell’s mining families, on the other hand, have at least the advantage of being families. They have permanent residences, small and miserable as they are, and they have neighbors and relatively stable social arrangements. In this sense, they seem to have it better than the factory children of China. The girls in Chang’s book seem so lonely. Orwell’s slums have many vices, but loneliness does not seem to enter them.

In yet another serendipitous coincidence, last week This American Life ran a story about the factories where iPhones are made, with excerpts from a hilarious, moving story about a man who went to China to see them for himself. The second half of their podcast included a defense of sweatshops from Paul Krugman, who offers the familiar apologetic: the miserable factories one currently finds in China and elsewhere are an important stepping stone towards First World prosperity, and as bad as they are, they are still an improvement over the poverty of subsistence agriculture.

I don’t know exactly what to say to this defense, but I find it deeply dissatisfying. I want to push back; I want to ask whether it is really an improvement to move from plowing behind an ox for twelve hours a day to laboring in a factory for sixteen. I want to know whether the social chaos, gross inequality, and rank exploitation of industrial China are really describable as progress. It seems to me that a peasant farmer may be poorer in monetary measures than a factory worker, but he has a dignity that the wage slave does not. I could be wrong about all of these things. But I wonder.

Most of all, I cannot shake the stench of complicity off of myself. I own a bevy of Chinese-manufactured devices. Who doesn’t? Is it even possible to live in the world today without profiting from sweatshop labor?

I turn again to Orwell:

The most dreadful thing about people like the Brookers is the way they say the same things over and over again. It gives you the feeling that they are not real people at all, but a kind of ghost for ever rehearsing the same futile rigmarole. In the end Mrs Brooker’s self-pitying talk–always the same complaints, over and over, and always ending with the tremulous whine of ‘It does seem ‘ard, don’t it now?’–revolted me even more than her habit of wiping her mouth with bits of newspaper. But it is no use saying that people like the Brookers are just disgusting and trying to put them out of mind. For they exist in tens and hundreds of thousands; they are one of the characteristic by-products of the modern world. You cannot disregard them if you accept the civilization that produced them. For this is part at least of what industrialism has done for us. Columbus sailed the Atlantic, the first steam engines tottered into motion, the British squares stood firm under the French guns at Waterloo, the one-eyed scoundrels of the nineteenth century praised God and filled their pockets; and this is where it all led –to labyrinthine slums and dark back kitchens with sickly, ageing people creeping round and round them like blackbeetles. It is a kind of duty to see and smell such places now and again, especially smell them, lest you should forget that they exist; though perhaps it is better not to stay there too long.

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Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes
Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes by Tamim Ansary
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

World History, says Tamim Ansary in his introduction, is always the story about how we got to be where we are. It therefore always includes an implicit notion of who "we" are, and what our current place in the history of the world is.

Most people with a basic college education feel that they know how history works. First there was the ancient world, from whose murky depths emerged the cultural brilliance of the Greeks and the political might of the Romans. Then the Roman Empire fell, plunging the world into an age of superstition and darkness, from which we finally emerged during the Renaissance. Shortly thereafter we discovered science, democracy, and industrialization. Now the First World has reached the pinnacle of human development, and all that remains is for the rest of the world to finally bring itself up to our level.

This history is false.

Or at least incomplete and parochial. This is the historical narrative of a particular civilization in a particular time, and it clashes and competes with alternate historical narratives told by people from outside our cultural milieu. But by conflating our history with the history of the whole world, we not only marginalize and insult those whose historical narratives are different, but we make ourselves incapable of understanding the interactions that we have with the other worlds around us.

And so we come to Destiny Disrupted, Tamim Ansary’s attempt to write an Islamic history of the world accessible to Western readers. According to the very brief autobiography in the book’s introduction, Ansary was raised in a traditional Islamic household, but all of his formal schooling was in Western-style schools, giving him a bifurcated view of the world which he struggled to integrate. His book is part of that resolution.

Destiny Disrupted is a world history, but it’s a world history as understood by the Islamic world. As such, it features a very different set of actors and key events than the more familiar world history given above. The Roman Empire is a footnote in this story; the universal state which defined the classical age is the early united Khalifate. The central geographical regions are Arabia and Persia, with the latter being the cultural and intellectual center of the world for most of its history. The frontiers of civilization were the Sahara Desert in the south, the Central Asian steppes in the north, barbarian Europe in the west, and the Indus river in the east. Within this area the drama and tragedies of civilization played out, only occasionally interrupted by incursions from the outside, such as the catastrophic invasions of the Mongols or the nuisance of the Franji (Franks, i.e. Christian Crusaders).

Ansary does an excellent job of presenting the narrative of this world history so that it’s accessible and interesting to a reader who knows almost nothing about it. His history is not overly detailed—he occasionally skips over entire centuries with a few paragraphs—but it suffices to make one understand who the actors are and how they see the world. More importantly, he gives his narrative a sense of flow, so that every subsequent development makes sense in light of earlier ones, and one can gain the feeling that history is going somewhere and means something.

And that, of course, is why it’s heartbreaking when the whole story turns sideways.

The period that we think of as the Renaissance, Enlightenment, and colonialism comes across in this book as a series of bitter catastrophes. It isn’t simply the case that the European powers overwhelmed the Islamic world militarily—military setbacks and invasions had happened before, and anyway the Europeans didn’t actually conquer the Islamic world except in a few places at the outskirts. Rather, the problem is that the Islamic powers were suddenly changed into pawns, and they found themselves being played around by foreigners who didn’t have any role at all in world history up to that point. Ansary does a masterful job of getting you into the perspective of the Islamic world on this point, so that the sudden domination of Europe feels like a shock, and the crisis it precipitates is profound.

There are weaknesses in this presentation, and if you have a deeper familiarity with the historical epochs Ansary visits you may find much to criticize in his approach. When he discusses the Christian middle ages, the description is so brief that it severely distorts several things, and his presentation of the Reformation is a caricature. But in some ways these distortions are part of the logic of the story. After all, the doctrinal nuances which agitated the Protestant Reformers are of no interest at all to the Islamic world, and so who actually cares if he gets them right? What is more important—and what Ansary does very well—is presenting the internal logic of the Islamic world.

Ansary ends his story on a cliffhanger, with the events of 9/11 and the assurance that, contra Fukuyama, history is not over. Events since then are too recent to recount as history. Nonetheless, this book changed my perspective on one event more recent even than the publication of this book: the "Arab Spring" of 2011. Here in America, coverage of the uprisings presented them as a liberal phenomenon, a recapitulation of the revolutions in the West in which a democracy-seeking populace overthrow the old monarchs and aristocrats. But Ansary’s book makes it clear that this misunderstands the history of the region. The dictators which were overthrown were not in any way the ancien regime of the Islamic world, but were what Ansary calls "secular modernists." They were committed to a secular state (run by them), modernization (by force if necessary), growing a modern, capitalistic economy (at least for the elites), and imitation of Western forms and customs. The revolt against these powers was democratic exactly insofar as it reflected the popular ethos of the Islamic heartland, for which the centrality and ubiquity of Islam is non-negotiable and the West is a corrosive foreign invader rather than a model for emulation.

Events in Egypt since the revolution have largely played out along these lines, with one more secular party (the army) trying to hold on to power against a coalition of popular "Islamist" groups. (The term "Islamist" conflates a number of different streams with wildly different ideals and aspirations together, a fact which Ansary also discusses.) The error that the popular media of West made with regards to the Arab Spring is very similar to the error that we’ve been making all along: we assume that the Islamic world is replaying a scene from our own past, rather than enacting a drama of their own.

We repeat this mistake to our peril.

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So it’s that time of year again, when we look back on what we’ve accomplished in shame and embarrassment, then set ourselves unrealistic and unachievable goals for the next year! I’m perhaps a little late, but, hey, I have a once-a-week posting schedule and I’m sticking to it.

Here’s the highlights of 2011 in my writerly life:

  • In January, my story The Last Free Bear was published at Heroic Fantasy Quarterly.
  • Also in January, Last Words was published at Eschatology Journal.
  • In November, The Judge’s Right Hand was published at Beneath Ceaseless Skies.
  • Aside from the sales mentioned above, I submitted seven other stories a total of 31 times to various markets.
  • I completed the first draft of my third novel, The Wedding of Earth and Sky.
  • I completed the first drafts of two other short stories.
  • I wrote 55 blog posts. In December 2011 I had four times as many visitors as in January 2011!
  • I moved across the country, bought a house, and changed jobs. (This was not, strictly speaking, a writing accomplishment, but it has to count for something.)

All in all, not a terrible year. So what am I hoping to do in 2012?

  • Complete more short stories. I’m sort of embarrassed that I only finished two last year. For 2012, I’d like to get at least six first drafts put away.
  • Completely revise The Wedding of Earth and Sky.
  • Decide whether to self-publish this or any subsequent novel.
  • Keep up with my once-a-week blogging schedule.
  • Get all of my short stories published and optioned into movies starring Hugh Jackman and Scarlett Johansson. The plot will be changed beyond all recognition and it will only get 68% at Rotten Tomatoes, but hey, Hugh Jackman and Scarlett Johansson.

Happy New Year, everyone!

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After writing my review of Shogun, there was one aspect of the book and its larger context which I wanted to comment on, but which wouldn’t fit into a book review. That is the issue of race, and the general idea of a white POV character surrounded by people of color.

This story template is known in SFF circles as What These People Need Is A Honky (and do read the linked article there — it’s interesting and funny), and it crops up frequently. Shogun is frequently mentioned in discussions of this topic, because it’s an excellent example, falling pretty neatly into the fake outline given at the link above:

White guy flees from his own culture for personal reasons (to set him up as different from those with white privilege). White guy meets natives. Natives educate white guy. White guy learns the way of natives, possibly also converting a native person who was originally doubtful of him, thereby proving white guy’s worthiness. White guy fights for natives. White guy makes dramatic escape while the native guy dies, possibly trying to help the white guy. The movie then ends with a dramatic coda and captions that inform the audience that despite white guy’s triumph, the Situation Remains Dire.

Shogun departs from this template mostly in the ending: the final victory belongs to the daimyo Toranaga, not the English sailor Blackthorne, and the Situation does not Remain Dire. Nonetheless, it’s easy to see how an actual Japanese person might be irritated by the presentation of feudal Japan in the book. The Japanese characters, while extremely sympathetic and often more compelling than the European characters, are thoroughly exoticized. The standard of comparison is always Western, the intended audience is assumed to be Western, and the Japanese civilization is presented as an object of fascination and evaluation by Western eyes.

And not just any Western evaluator, but a modern Western evaluator. James Clavell clearly loves Japanese culture, and he sets of a variety of contrasts in which we are meant to side with the Japanese against the early-modern European visitors: the relative religious neutrality of their monarchs, the sexual license and experimentation, the relative equality of the samurai women, their cleanliness, and their diet. The intended audience of the book may be Western, but the reader is clearly meant to side with the Japanese.

This story trope nearly always works this way: the story is presented to an audience that is presumed to be white and Western, yet the audience is asked to engage their sympathies against the West and for the "natives". But this presents us with a paradox. Why should stories which implicitly normalize the Western POV also explicitly criticize Western culture? And why is it that stories of this sort are often simultaneously accused of Western racism and colonialism and anti-Western revisionism?

The answer, I think, is that this story trope has a place in an ongoing argument within the confines of Western culture about the relationship between technology, culture, and human flourishing. The essence of the honky narrative is to present a dichotomy between Western society, which is technologically advanced but artistically and spiritually deficient, and a non-Western society which is technologically backwards, but rich is culture and spirituality. In Shogun, Blackthorne brings Western guns, cannons, shipbuilding, and navigation techniques to the Japanese who lack them, while he acquires a Japanese aesthetic sense and spiritual peace. The same pattern repeats in Avatar, Dances With Wolves, and other notable stories in this type. In every case, the non-Western culture is used as a mirror for the West, casting into relief the tension between technological and spiritual excellence, and its sympathetic presentation of the "natives" is a way of arguing for the incompleteness of technological society.

This explains why the honky narrative is so often reviled for being anti-Western. The West has achieved its current position of global dominance with a combination of technological and scientific ingenuity, and the core tenet of the honky narrative is that technological prowess is ultimately less important than artistic and spiritual wholeness. Furthermore, the audience-members are themselves steeped in technological society (and in the case of Avatar, the presentation of the story itself is a technological masterwork), so the white protagonist’s struggle to understand and integrate himself in the native society reflects the audience’s reluctance to give up their own technological comforts. The argument of all of these stories is that we, the white, Western audience, are missing out on something.

None of which mitigates the complaint from the other side of the aisle about the shallow and insulting depiction of the natives, and the assumption that the audience is white and Western. Non-Westerners and non-whites do not necessarily appreciate being press-ganged into service as object lessons for the more privileged. Nor should they.

And this is why I find myself conflicted about the honky narrative. I understand the complaints lodged against it, but I’m still very sympathetic to the core argument of the trope. Technological and scientific triumphalism leave me cold. I cheer on the protagonist as he questions his certainties about what constitutes "progress". Plus, I’m kind of white myself, so it’s convenient and comfortable to learn about another culture from a POV similar to my own.

It is probable best to simply judge every instance of this trope on its own merits. Shogun seems to me to avoid the worst excesses of the trope, as its Japanese characters are more interesting and have more agency than the white characters. (It’s also well-written and fantastically paced.) Avatar is worse on both counts, with a derivative storyline and more racially problematic overtones. Other books and movies run the gamut. Your mileage may vary.