To the tune of “We Didn’t Start the Fire”

Critical Failures (which is what I’m called in my private life) was in New York and then, after a brief break, in Portland. This extensive course of family-mandated and personal travel doesn’t explain why I’ve been conspicuously silent, but it probably hasn’t helped.

The real reason is that I haven’t been particularly inspired lately. I’m seeing a lot of things and consuming a lot of media. Some of the media has been good, and some of the things have been remarkable, but the good things have tended to be the kind that don’t benefit from elaboration. Likewise, the mediocre ones haven’t been the kind to suggest long posts on their potential improvement.

So here’s a simple list of what I’ve been thinking about, just to clear my mental cache.

1. “Three Guineas” by Virginia Woolf lacks the clarity of “A Room Of One’s Own”; many parts of it sink hopelessly into a thick ooze of costume and 1930s salary figures. It contains sections, however, which are so blazingly correct and so impossible to summarize (particularly her self-Godwinned defense of self-publishing) that I think it’s at least as necessary as “Room.”

2. The first Thief: not much to say. The game shows every sign of being cobbled together crudely from parts of a kitschy fantasy hack-’em-up and parts of an elegant steampunk-noir robbery simulator, which is correct apparently. It neither lights a brief match in the cavern of games’ storytelling potential (as does Thief II) nor, as did the much later Thief III, show terrible signs of publisher demands for something “more violent, more action oriented, less intensely cerebral [...] more forgiving of a nonstealthy approach.”

(Quote sourced from Four Fat Chicks’ worthy Thief retrospective; it starts here, quote on page 2).

3. When I read Woolf and Forster, I’m amazed by the brio-laden formality of their style. People don’t write like this anymore, with a solid prose that marches forward like a army in good morale; perhaps English people come closer, but Americans under forty who don’t take a tone of affable chatter risk feeling pretentious and silly. I don’t really know why this is, and don’t entirely trust my observation to be separate from my own fears of looking pretentious and silly, but I wish a more formal style -a long sentence with light use of contractions and heavy use of subordinate clauses and a lean toward precision over clarity in wording- were still more of a practical option.

I don’t remember much of James Baldwin’s criticism, for example, but I remember that he was one writer who made great use of a volleying back and forth between levels of diction. Demonstrating mastery of both “high” and “low” diction exposes their constructed nature and their use as class and racial markers; this demonstration was doubtless part of Baldwin’s point, but surely he also meant to show off his mastery of language for its own sake. I think that, at some point, Americans decided that because elitists use complex sentences, to use a complex sentence is elitist. In fact, if we are going to go ahead and agree that diction level and a person’s class and a person’s worth are not inherently related, than we may as well write in whatever voice (or range of voices) is most helpful at the moment, provided we can always be clear.

4. Fans should have more social leeway to morally criticize characters (and artists). Of course our response to a piece shouldn’t be a flat “he does bad things, and I see books as instructive, so this is a bad book,” but does the alternative have to be “he does bad things; what an interesting portrait of a monster?”

I’m sure this is a thought many have had before. It’s probably what leads a lot of intelligent writers to reject what they call “aestheticism”; they see aestheticism, which I call simply the perception of art in terms of an elusive transcendent beauty, instead as a rejection of moral responsibility (leading directly to “interesting-portrait-of-monster” responses). I doubt aesthetes in this mode are common, though it would be interesting to speak to one. Such a person would be a remarkable example of either total un-self-awareness, or of an awareness which is startlingly complete.

Anyway, I think that moral disgust with an immoral character’s actions is an important part of empathy. We should feel morally disgusted, at times, with characters somewhat like ourselves; this little hit of self-disgust is part of recognizing the character as a human thing.