Monday & Tomorrow

What? What do you mean, things look different?

Just trying out some new approaches. I’ll probably dump the slider above, but for now I like it. The photos are all shots I took over the last few weeks here at Jasperwood, using the good camera.

At the moment I’m in the gazebo; the sun is coming in and out, and a bruise-hued mass of clouds is approaching from the southwest. In the olden times a fellow would have to study the clouds, judge whether they bore rain, and act accordingly; now I can just call up a weather app and see what’s going on. Hold on, let me do exactly that . . .

Well, according to my weather app, there’s a bruise-hued mass of clouds approaching from the southwest, and they might contain rain. Technology! It makes every aspect of life so much easier.

Wife and child just got back from a Girl Scout trip up north – they were gone all weekend, so it was me and the dog. It rained most of Saturday, and he refused to go outside to void himself – he’d walk up to the door, look out, walk away. Repeat every half hour. I went out to run errands when the rain eased up, and stopped off at Southdale. Passed Eddie Bauer; they had a sale. Imagine that. If you bought anything, you could buy a collapsible stool that had a cooler built right into it, one of those will-wonders-never-cease things, and I bought a small umbrella for the car. It’s one of those that comes with a sleeve, and once you get it out of the sleeve it never goes back. The sleeve migrates around the car, around the house, and is often still around when the umbrella has broken and been discarded. Ideally, you never have to use the umbrella, and it stays perfect in its sheath forever.

When I got outside it was pouring. Had to use the umbrella. This meant removing it from the sheath. For a moment I actually considered running to the car with the Eddie Bauer bag over my head, but reproached myself for being a complete idiot even to think such a thing.

Had a small pathetic supper, then sat outside listening to the BBC World Service service the world on my iPad. The dog sat on the stoop, sheltered from the rain – and then the sun blared through. Came through like a brass band playing a C-Major chord. The dog got up, went to the yard, and relieved himself, then barked at me as if I could have done this all along, but was being mean.

The rest of the night I worked on the upcoming Gallery of Regrettable Food, an overhaul / redesign that began months ago, and proceeds in spasms and lurches. Redesigning old sites is a remarkably unrewarding job, and makes me feel as if I’ve been painting the same house over and over. When I could take no more I watched “Sherlock Holmes in the London That Only Has One Color, Which is That of Hay in a Filthy Stable.” I liked it. I like Rathbone’s Holmes – upright, English, ascetic, with a hint of paralyzing neuroses kept at bay with steely resolve – but that has much to do with the idea of Victorian England, the calm and decent place. Clopping hooves on cobblestones, men in tall hats explaining “By Jove,” the confident culture of England at its acme, ready to invent things and build great ships. Gaslight and fog. Nonsense, of course, but it’s oatmeal, cream, and brown sugar: hearty and comforting.

(1930 ad)

The movie has a bit of “steampunk,” a term that’s annoyed me for years, partly because the “punk” suffix has morphed into meaninglessness, and partly because it replaces the perfectly good use of “Jules Verne” to describe late 19th century speculative technology. (Or “spec-tech,” as no one calls it, but should.) (Until it gets annoying.) Which reminds me of this piece I read on i09 concerning the next thing we will all tire of, once we’ve had our fill of steampunk and zombies. I was never crazy about zombies anyway, less so when people started appending them to everything as they did with bacon: add it and it’s awesome! Bacon zombies are inevitable, I suppose. (Sigh. Googling . . . . of course.)

Anyway, it seems steampunk represented a cool hopeful future we never got, and zombies represent our pessimism about the future. So the article says. This is the problem with nostalgia and futurism: it’s either Cool or it’s Bad. It’s either Good or it’s Dystopian. It’s inevitable, with speculative fiction, because you have to come up with something that defines the future, some twist, some condition, some invention, some new idea that dominates and animates the culture.

In “Clockwork Orange,” for example, it’s the government’s use of mind-control training to remove the individual’s ability to use free will to choose evil. Are you less human if you are unable to be anything else but good? More moral? It’s a book about ideas and language, but it’s known mostly for the “ultra-violence” of the film version and Malcolm McDowell’s turn as yet-another-charismatic-70s-antihero. But the society in which the story takes place is not dystopian. There are trashed public-housing complexes and tony private homes. Violent gangs in the bad part of town. Drugs for some and civilized claret for others. It was set in the late 70s, and aside from the oversized codpieces and fancy forms of drugged milk, it more or less came true. Yet no one would say we live in a dystopia now, or in 1978, because it never arrives all at once. It happens in the margins of the big places; abetted by celebrants in the high and low culture, it happens in small place. And then it becomes the norm, neither dys- nor u-, but just where we all are.

Would today look like a dystopia to someone in 1974? 1962? New rockets blasting off, an international space station, tiny computers in our pocket, widescreen TVs – with politics grinding on as they always have, hairshirt prophets fixated on doom from this while keen-eyed futurists promising salvation from that. In short, the usual. Underneath it all in the daily quotidian sense it’s always the usual, and barring an asteroid or the Utter Collapse of Everything it will always be the usual. Or so I think, which made this line stick out:

I’m going to crawl out on a limb and say that our world will keep feeling apocalyptic for the foreseeable future. And our fiction will continue to represent our panic about the hopeless present, and maybe a nostalgia for the hopeful past.

Oh, whatever. Panic away, it’ll do lots of good. And when you talk about the hopeful past, make sure you never wonder too much about the culture that produced such optimism, because this may bump up against the shibboleths held by members of modern Enlightenment.

It is the particular conceit of the young and the old that things have never been worse – the latter because pessimism conveys false authenticity, the conviction that things are being seen through the faultless lens of new eyes, and the latter because the Old Ways are ignored or mocked. But no one can point to the exact day when it all went off the rails, because there’s no such moment. Change never arrives all at once – each year is fresh paint and new toys, but otherwise the same mix prevails, the bestial and the angelic. The proportion varies. That’s the bad news, and that’s the good news as well.

Let me put it another way: when they write the history of the early part of the 20th century, people who worried about the impact of long hot showers on the Climate, or  wondered what would replace zombies, will not figure high in the roll call of significant actors.

–

No updates today, but tumblr’s q’d up and ready to roll, starting at 10 AM, and PopCrush begins at 9 and updates throughout the day. See you around!