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elaz-ivero · 3 years

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The Worldbuilding Diaries- Chapter Two; Your Main Character

Main characters are the crux of a story and they can carry it well or sink it in seconds. As I began constructing and developing my main character for my fantasy series I realized that there are lot of things a main character can be and how the way we, as writers navigate creating our main characters can be super influential in the outcome of our stories.

This post is going to delve into a couple points

1. What are main characters and what’s their purpose?

2. How the rest of the cast can effect the mc

2. ...and how to make your mc memorable

Main characters are the vessels that the events of our stories pass through and their opinions, perceptions and interpretations of events can change depending on who they are, their purpose is to tell the story the way you want it told and to experience as many of the inciting incidents or main events as they can. Sometimes our desires for our main character are incompatable with the plans for our stories for example as I began drafting Project Sun Ballad I realized my main character was stupid...frustratingly stupid and a scaredy cat which was not intentional. He lost all the stubbornness and brute anger I initially intended and as a result the events of the opening chapter felt underwhelming and childish less adult fantasy and more scary Dr.Seuss book. This was because of his new personality and all the softer language I used in my first drafts, so I aged him up into his early twenties and made him slightly more cynical.

Your main characters personalities should help communicate or add to how your story is relayed. Their voice (the thoughts they add in) should help drive the story forward. Their actions should either have consequences or improve/propell them toward their goal. Your main character can care about everybody or nobody and still make decisions that help or hurt people. Figuring out those consequences or how they are going to learn about a secret meeting via non-coincidental means can help spur your creativity and can lead to some really interesting plot points or scenes. When making your main character imagine that they are the blurb of your story and details about them, their name, where they live and their personality should give the reader information and a basic idea of what they are about to read.

So you have a main character, they could be a lone-wolf ranger in the wild south with a trusty dog by her side or a glamourous prince suddenly trapped in a heavenly domain but whats just as important is their side kicks, the antagonist in the story, the wise mentor etc Your stories cast, whether that be a handful of small secondary characters or a full set of royal families and servants to suit are important and their engagement with the main character helps support your mc’s narrative and story. Compatability within your cast helps add life to dying scenes, banter, encouragement, calculated insults and emotive decisions are so much stronger and memorable than a main character with some sweet monologues. Whenever I read a book and the main characters and side characters, interact and remember each other and think about each other before they act???? It’s great and I live for it. In my book every three of the four main cast come from different cultural backgrounds, with differen’t patrons and goals, their differences helps them connect with each other and help my mc grow and establish his worldview and moral beliefs.

I like to place my main character in a room with every character even if they could never reasonably come into contact and forcing them to have a conversation, will they talk about similar things, will one apologize to the other it helps me identify whether certain characters are too similar or if my main character is terrible and has nothing to add or nothing to say to anyone.

There are billions of characters out there with varying physical descriptions and personalities and sometimes it can feel impossible for your main character to feel anything but another carbon copy of the usual main voice in your chosen genre. For my fantasy novel I took the time to step back and reflect on my main character and the tropes associated with the genre, young boy, small town, magical abilities, simple features, mentor figure he leaves behind. So I took him and pretended that he in my minds eye had levelled up like he would in a video game to level 20. I dropped the simple features and gave him violet eyes and made violet eyes as common as blue eyes normalizing it within my world but still giving my character a memorable physical description. I was also inspired by a lot of my favourite main characters, specifically Aang from Avatar and slapped a symbolic geometric shape on my mc’s face, an upside down triangle painted with black liquid chalk. It helped clarify his appearance in my mind and hopefully the readers mind. You can create memorability in an array of things simply by deviating from the carbon copy, cookie cutter mold and in order to do that I encourage you to actively look out media and stories no matter how short that feature unique and rarely seen main characters, voices and setting. By diversifying your reading you reduce the risk of seeing a simple pale unexciting cast as a normal background to prose perfected by watching writing tip youtube videos. One of the best ways is to treat your characters like people, humans have disabilities or simple issues, I’m a writer with inflammatory arthritis, vertigo and stunted fine motor skills from a bad birth, people have these issues today and people had those issues throughout history. Here are some other ways...

- Embrace culture, face paint is prevelenant in many cultures and a character that embraces their culture and/or wears it regularly can make them distinctively unique. Interesting clothing, jewellery, hair etc can make characters more recognizable and provide a good point of departure in a scene to explore some characters culture.

- Make their body unique in ways that can lightly impact them and show them growing to learn ways around it, an extra finger, deafness in one air, a physiological limp, rosacea, port-wine stains and other cosmetic things (I love giving characters who can shapeshift unique details that can subtly give them away like missing fingers, scars and/or birthmarks.

Overall how you decide to go about the construction of your main character and cast and whether you decide to change their designs or personalities is up to you!

Till next time, stay creative

#worldbuildingdiaries #worldbuilding #projectsunballad #wip #writingtips #writing #novel #fantasy #nanowrimo #maincharacter #characterdesign

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ryanmeft · 5 years

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Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse Movie Review

Spider-Man 2 set the standard for the wall-crawler’s celluloid escapes, and the movies have been trying to catch up to that ever since. Thanks in large part to poor decisions by Sony, it never came close until Marvel got a hand on the property again. The last thing I ever expected from Sony’s own spin-off movies was that they’d be any good, especially after surviving Venom. As it turns out, the soul of the character just needed animation to set it free. Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse is not only a great entry in the webslinger’s mostly forgettable filmography, it’s in the top tier of superhero films, period.

Miles Morales (Shamiek Moore) is a black teen being sent to a private school after winning a scholarship; his father (Brian Tyree Henry) is a by-the-books cop who struggles to understand his growing son but loves him anyway, which sounds cliche but works because the character is so well-written. His mother (Luna Lauren Velez) is unfortunately sidelined, and spending more time on her in the sequel would be welcome. He looks up to his uncle Aaron (Mahershala Ali), who shares Miles’s love of graffiti art but who is also some sort of a criminal. I mention Miles’s race because it’s important: the movie elects for a happily stable family and a smart kid with a bright future, a rare focus for African American characters in cinema. The movie is not political in the slightest, and treats this as if it’s not uncommon, because it isn’t. It’s a deliberate contrast to Peter Parker, whose life is a constant mess. Miles gets his powers with a similar spider bite and without much fanfare.

Speaking of Peter Parker, he shows up, voiced by Chris Pine, and gets in a big fight involving the Green Goblin (Jorma Taccone) and the Kingpin (Liev Schreiber), classic Spider-Man villains somewhat re-imagined for the setting. When things go wrong trying to stop a dimension-combining device, Miles lands the gig of stopping the machine from firing again, but can barely use his own powers. Another Parker (Jake Johnson), an older and out-of-shape one who has given up on life, shows up and doesn’t make a very adequate mentor. He’s eventually joined by numerous other versions. Spider-Gwen (Hailee Steinfeld), who is clearly here to launch her own spin-off, is cynical and calculating. Peni Parker (Kimiko Glenn) is an anime take on the character whose powers are actually invested in a machine that I think is piloted by a spider itself. I’ll be honest, I lost the details in the rush, but she works because she’s more homage to the form than parody. Spider-Ham/Peter Porker (John Mulaney) is sadly underutilized and didn’t really add as much as he could; there’s too many other Spider-guys for him to stand out. By far my favorite was Spider-Man Noir, a version who is almost all shadow, wears a fedora and trench-coat, and is voiced brilliantly by Nicolas Cage, who channels Humphrey Bogart and James Cagney. Indeed, the voice cast is so stuffed that Lily Tomlin and Zoe Kravitz end up in tertiary roles. Each of these alternate heroes got sucked into Miles’s universe and will see their molecules fracture like a bad radio signal if they don’t get back. For this, they seek the help of a batty-but-brilliant scientist (Kathryn Hahn), who provokes one of Parker’s best lines. Each is accompanied by a quick and humorous rundown of their respective origins, which both serves as a nice send-up of the now-tedious origin story and fills in whatever small amount of info the audience might need.

A disclaimer for those who are understandably confused about Spidey’s cinematic history: none of these Spider-People are the same one from the Marvel Cinematic Universe, that interconnected place of Guardians and Avengers. The Parker here appears to be some version of the one from Sam Raimi’s first trilogy, and considering the divided reception of that line, it’s an interesting choice (it still contains the best Spider-Man movie, and a couple lackluster ones). It matters far less than it does in the MCU, because this movie feeds more on energy, humor and heart than on continuity. To my recollection (it’s been a while), all of these characters exist in some way in the comics, but you don’t have to care. On screen, they play off each other wonderfully. The jaded Parker is like those wizened mentors from every movie ever made about a plucky kid finding his way, except this guy, while having the skills, doesn’t care. That’s a decidedly different look for Spider-Man, one that only an animated film, specifically only an animated film this unique, could pull off; an apathetic hero is just not something audiences would accept if he were the main character. The Noir version has the most potential for his own movie, as his universe is the most different from what we’ve seen before. Like Rey in Star Wars, Spider-Gwen is unfortunately given the least interesting character, but there’s room for development later. For some reason, the same people that decided we need more female heroes (which we do) also decided they always have to be---pardon the expression---the straight man. Will we maybe have a female take on Tony Stark at some point? I won’t hold my breath; the culture just isn’t there yet.

The heroes are of course opposed by the afore-mentioned villains, joined by many others: Prowler, a Batman-esque fighter, Scorpion (Joaquin Cosio), Tombstone (Marvin “Krondon” Jones III) and a surprise bonus pick who I will not mention because you should discover it for yourself, except to say this person really works while, in a way, bringing back a long-absent, long in demand foe. When machines are activated and villains are fighting, the movie does occasionally veer somewhat close to confusion, but it always recovers, with the exception of some of the villains being rather generic. Animation has unshackled the agility, speed and wit Spider-Man has always evoked in the minds of people flipping through comic panels. There’s a litheness to the movements of the characters that no amount of CG could ever replicate, and a boundless energy that the unique animation style---designed to look like comic panels in motion and, to my eternal shock, actually successful in this---works perfectly with.

Still, the most surprising thing is how the emotions carry through. Each Spider-Dude-or-Dudette has their own tragedy and loss, and the sense that no matter what universe he exists in, he’ll always have to deal with that is sadly poignant, especially for anyone who grew up on the Spider-Man mythos. There are actual stakes here; even the motivations of the Kingpin have real heft. The movie has been handled by Lego Movie producers Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, with a small army of co-writers joining along the way, and the surprise is that for once, so many cooks have managed to concoct something that feels so sincere.

If you aren’t a comic person, don’t worry. There’s enough heart here to sweep you up even if you don’t know your spiders from your bats. Stan Lee’s posthumous cameo feels fitting, in a movie that does right by his (and Steve Ditko’s) best creation. Nerds tend to declare amazing absolutely every comic movie that comes out. And every once in a while, they’re right.

Verdict: Highly Recommended (3 1/2 out of 4 stars)

Note: I don’t use stars, but here are my possible verdicts.

Must-See

Highly Recommended

Recommended

Average

Not Recommended

Avoid like the Plague

You can follow Ryan's reviews on Facebook here:

https://www.facebook.com/ryanmeftmovies/

Or his tweets here:

https://twitter.com/RyanmEft

All images are property of the people what own the movie.

#spider-man #marvel #Nicolas Cage #the lego movie #mahershala ali #hailee steinfeld #movies #shamiek moore #brian tyree henry #luna lauren velez #chris pine #jake johnson #zoe kravitz #lily tomlin #kimiko glenn #john mulaney #joaquin cosio #superheroes #comics

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ganymedesclock · 6 years

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i'm trying to understand where the idea that lotor is self-serving and only cares about himself and what he wants came from? we still don't even know his real plan, and his motive over going to voltron is to like... live, probably.

This is actually an interesting question, so, I wanna break this down a little and talk about Lotor, and reads on him, and what I think they’re playing off of.

1. History

I’m not sure how strong an influence this is, but the idea of Lotor as a pampered, materialistic, vain asshole is actually completely founded in other continuities. Quite a few of them- GoLion, DotU, and DDP in particular, depict Lotor literally keeping harems of beautiful women who waited on him, massaged him, poured him wine- and he drank a lot of wine.

Voltron Force broke away from the harem thing, but he was still shown drinking that’s-probably-an-alcoholic-beverage-but-they-won’t-say-so-because-cartoon in the bath while allegedly important things were going on. Admittedly with Force Lotor, this is moderately more understandable since he was undead and needed repeat exposures to a specific substance in order to keep the “un” part in there- and chose the sauna option over injection or radiation because he was sick of the alternatives.

It still comes back to, frankly, prior incarnations of Lotor absolutely deserved to be identified as spoiled, or at least used to the good life. While I’ve yet to find a single incarnation of Lotor that has a good relationship with Zarkon, in most other continuities, Lotor had ample resources separate from him (in a few, such as Force, Lotor is in charge as Zarkon is long dead) and was very inclined to indulge in them- and, as the very nature of a slave harem necessitates- often directly at others’ expense.

Of course that’s only as logical an explanation as making assumptions about VLD Lotor based on other incarnations of the character, when Lotor, like every other character in VLD, is a very different creature from his prior selves. Never in VLD’s canon have we witnessed Lotor doing anything that looks like partying or relaxing- or even not immediately related to his ambition. This continuity sets him up as a counterpart to Shiro, after all, and Shiro is a rather dedicated workaholic.

The only pleasant company Lotor entertains is the generals, and that’s about the furthest thing from a “harem” as you can get- the generals are autonomous, ambitious people, and, like Lotor, they spend their onscreen time working. Their relationship is businesslike in nature, and while Lotor clearly considers them friends and is more personal with them than mere coworkers, we have no evidence their relationship ever moved out of the territory of allies and conspirators. And Lotor hasn’t shown romantic or sexual interest in anyone else, much less acting on it.

It’s a facelift very similar to Zarkon, when prior incarnations of his character were also inclined to extravagant opulence. However, while in VLD Zarkon’s case, his spartan inclinations still come with their own flavor of ostentation, and it’s simply that he has nothing to prove as he’s already considered something approaching a god- in Lotor’s case the specific lack of pampered settings is used as one word in a different ongoing message- that Lotor’s ambition and calculation in this continuity is rooted not in entitlement, but a deep, abiding bitterness.

Other incarnations of Lotor were selfish people, and their unhappiness rooted in Zarkon’s abuse drove some of their selfish grabs, but even then, their behavior was neither understandable, nor sympathetic. (GoLion’s Sincline, for example, lusted after Allura out of misplaced grief over the traumatic loss of his mother, but he was still trying to abduct and forcibly wed an unrelated teenager who happened to look like his mom)

And that leads into my second point…

2. Self-serving versus selfish

Talking purely VLD here, Lotor is established as a manipulator, and someone who’s not afraid to lie through his teeth to other people. Given that this is the same context in which his more noble, political reform ambitions also come to light, I think many people have come away with the assumption that Lotor is inherently selfish- that his manipulation and behind-the-scenes discarding and mockery of Throk is evidence that Lotor is ultimately a cruel person.

And this very flavor of guile, on prior incarnations, did have the take-home that Lotor was ultimately a nasty guy only in it for himself.

However, again, in VLD, Lotor is a good deal more desperate, and more vulnerable, than his prior selves.

There is no Altea left. It’s dead and gone. And Lotor is not only biologically half-Altean, but frankly, from a cultural perspective, even down to his accent- he’s basically an Altean with a thin coating of just purple and pointy enough to be palatable to the average galra. This puts a very different spin on his relationship with the empire, and with his father, especially given the latter very actively and deliberately is trying to complete his earlier genocide of the Altean people.

Prior incarnations of Lotor didn’t have this problem- even Sincline, who was half-Altean, still felt safe enough that he acted as a conqueror in furthering Zarkon’s empire, and actually, before he started to struggle against Voltron, entertained a fairly cozy position.

VLD Lotor, however, is a vulnerable minority neck deep in the heartland of the empire and he has basically no illusions whatsoever that his title won’t save him. He’s not scheming against Zarkon because “boy, it sure would be neat to have more power here, too bad my smelly old dad is immortal, is there any way I can help the natural process along here” nearly as much as “it’s inevitably going to be me or him, and if I don’t shoot first, he will.”

Lotor’s a survivalist. And in that sense, he is self-serving, but not in the way of someone who’s gonna use your tears to salt his martini, so to speak. We see this a lot in, say, his interactions with Puig, or in s4e5 when he bails on the generals.

Lotor does, in fact, make decisions that serve himself. Sometimes this is at others’ expense. His attitude, virtually always, is “I don’t particularly want to be doing this. I can tell you’re hurting, and I don’t really want you to be. But… if I don’t take this, I’m going to die, and I also don’t want that. Well, then. take care of yourself.”

The only people Lotor’s consistently shown to have no sympathy for is Zarkon, Haggar, and people like Throk who are gleefully and unabashedly part of their empire. And that’s not really surprising, and it’s certainly not a villainous trait. Our heroes are the same way- they really don’t have much empathy for the commanders and generals that are happy under Zarkon.

The specific way Throk frames his criticism of Lotor in s3e1 boils down to Throk perceives Lotor’s more merciful approach as a threat to the empire. Compassion and empathy are hazards to Throk, who is, in short, an aristocrat who bought his way to the top with other people’s blood and tears. He brings this up repeatedly when fighting Lotor- that he has hurt others, that he is proud of his violence and cruelty onto others.

And Throk? Throk is the guy Lotor genuinely throws under the bus, chews him out and spits him out coldly, and I’m willing to bet there is more than a little bitterness and vengefulness in there. But pulling this back to our original topic:

Guile, manipulation, scheming, are in short, not stereotypically heroic traits. Seeing Lotor lie to Throk, from a viewer’s perspective, awakens a reflexive discomfort in us, because seeing people lie to each other and undermine them behind the scenes is stereotypically villainous behavior. The audience becomes suspicious and on edge towards Lotor, and this causes them to read the rest of Lotor’s behavior in a very cynical light- any compassion or empathy we see out of him going forwards has to be a lie, has to be a trick.

The thing this read misses is that Throk again, defined himself by his cruelty and vindictiveness. He isn’t a guy we should be weeping for all that hard. Our heroes would have messed him up just as much had they gotten their hands on him first. That’s why Throk is given so much time to speak for himself, and establish that yeah, he’s a violent bigot and proud of it, and how heavily, thematically, Lotor’s manipulation of Throk is framed as a counterattack.

Because both practically in the duel and in the larger situation, Lotor hangs back and lets Throk pound on him, only focusing on blocking and protecting himself. He doesn’t even come out of it unscathed- there’s a notable moment of Throk clipping Lotor’s hair, which Lotor doesn’t once acknowledge.

The entire time Throk and his friend are speaking of Lotor, we see Lotor in the ring, set upon by his larger opponent- dodging, evading, weaving around. This is a very direct visual allegory- Lotor is an underdog. If there’s anyone who picked this fight first, it’s the thousand injuries of the galra empire Lotor’s endured first.

So what this all comes back to, I think, is that there’s a failure to distinguish prior continuities’ selfish, arrogant Lotor, who had plenty and wanted more, from VLD’s Lotor, who’s more of a starving wolf on the prowl. Both are dangerous- both will take what they want and if need be hurt you to get it.

But one of them wants without any real need behind it- wants, in the way that someone sitting in a comfortable room surrounded by beautiful people sees someone that doesn’t belong to them and salivates. And that’s unsympathetic, even if it’s rooted in genuine tragedy- because GoLion’s Sincline made the choice to fill his void by trapping other people inside of it.

VLD Lotor is not a selfish person. He’s aggressive, he’s ambitious, he’s calculating, the same way prior incarnations of his character were. But need and want are really the same for Lotor- there’s nothing he doesn’t try to hold onto that he doesn’t need, and those needs are unfulfilled.

It’s actually really kind of a fascinating contrast to look at DotU Lotor who has so many people waiting on him hand and foot that he throws them away and basically ignores them (I don’t think we ever learn any of his attendants’ names, nor are they treated as full characters who have lives outside of him, with the exception of other people he tries to kidnap, such as Romelle) and compare that to Lotor where the only four people whose company he genuinely seems to enjoy, all named and full characters, all left him one way or another, partially through his own actions, but with an overwhelming sense of helplessness from him the entire time.

People have compared the generals’ betrayal of Lotor to the fall of Azula, when one of the meaningful differences is that Azula was completely outraged and shocked to lose Mai and Ty Lee.

Lotor, once he gets over the initial surprise of being shot? Just kind of takes it as a given.

It comes down to the difference between a glutton and someone who’s been living on the street without reliable food for years. Both of them are going to be preoccupied with their next meal, but in very different contexts- one goes “ho hum, what shall I eat today,” and the other one is going “will I be able to eat today?”

And to me, I think sympathy entirely aside, that’s something that makes VLD Lotor a lot more dangerous than his DotU self. Because DotU Lotor could be counted on to indulge (the oft-quoted birthday party episode) and this was something his enemies could exploit- he’d lower his guard to have a good time.

VLD Lotor is a terrified, embittered person who takes almost nothing for granted and even if he’s far more ethical than his older incarnations, Narti’s fate alone is a magnificent case study in how far Lotor will go doing things he doesn’t want to because he lives his entire life with his back to a wall knowing if he doesn’t personally carve a way out here through whatever might be in his way, he’s not leaving.

#voltron legendary defender #vld #Lotor #readmore #Anonymous

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architectnews · 3 years

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Dezeen's top 10 most talked-about stories of 2020

This year had its fair share of provocative stories, from Donald Trump drafting new legislation on federal buildings to Bjarke Ingels plotting to redesign Earth. For our review of 2020, digital editor Karen Anderson looks at 10 of the most talked about.

Harikrishnan's inflatable latex trousers create "anatomically impossible" proportions

Readers debated our coverage of menswear designer Harikrishnan's billowing latex trousers, which were created for his graduate collection at the London College of Fashion.

"I really like the pear shape of the white pants," praised Rose Winkler. "I picture them with the same shaped arms on a stage. They feel very medieval. Reminds me of Popeye when he eats his spinach."

"Absolutely love the concept!" added Karen Thomas. "Mad technical skills have gone into creating such art. Especially the time invested in getting those beautiful beads made. Curious to see what's next!"

Find out more about the inflatable latex trousers ›

AIA opposes President Trump's draft rules for Making Federal Buildings Beautiful Again

One of the biggest stories this year was news that the Trump Administration planned to introduce an order that all federal buildings should be built in the "classical architectural style".

In response to the draft order, called Making Federal Buildings Beautiful Again, the American Institute of Architects called on members to sign an open letter petitioning against it. The story on Dezeen attracted more than 323 comments.

"Does this sound familiar? Hitler did that." said Pam Weston. "Similar in aesthetics too. Is anyone besides me scared yet?"

"What's the big deal here?" asked Elrune The Third. "This classical style is part of the national identity and design language of the USA. No one will die because Studio BIG doesn't win the next contract for a courthouse."

Find out more about the opposition to Trump's draft order ›

Zaha Hadid Architects and Grimshaw among architects to criticise Autodesk's BIM software

The story that received the second most comments this year was news that Zaha Hadid Architects and Grimshaw were two of 17 architecture studios to sign an open letter to software company Autodesk, criticising the rising cost and lack of development of Revit.

The president and CEO of Autodesk responded to criticisms of its software, admitting improvements "didn't progress as quickly" as they should have but rejecting claims it is too expensive.

Readers weren't convinced. It's "like charging 2020 prices for a Cadillac on a 2005 Ford Focus," said UTF.

"This software is bad," agreed Michal C. "My life got way shorter thanks to constantly fighting its limits and bad design. Using it in building design is like doing brain surgery using two bricks as the only tools."

Find out more about criticism of Autodesk ›

Masterplanet is Bjarke Ingels' plan to redesign Earth and stop climate change

In October, commenters furiously debated news that BIG founder Bjarke Ingels is creating a masterplan for redesigning Earth.

Approaching Earth like an architect master planning a city, Ingels calculates that even a predicted population of 10 billion people could enjoy a high quality of life if environmental issues were tackled holistically.

But some readers struggled to take Ingels seriously. "Please wake me up when BIG reveals a plan to redesign human behaviour," said Chris Becket.

Don Griffiths was more optimistic: "Lots of good things come from dreaming and scheming outside the box. This man might not have all the answers, but the future is better attended to by the actions of thinkers from the past."

Find out more about Ingels' plan to redesign Earth ›

Coronavirus offers "a blank page for a new beginning" says Li Edelkoort

Some readers reacted with cynicism to Li Edelkoort's predictions for a post-coronavirus future.

Edelkoort described how the disruption caused by coronavirus will lead people to grow used to living with fewer possessions and travelling less.

"How many times has history shown that's not how this works?" responded Rd. "Things will just go back to normal and change will happen slowly over time."

Others found the article comforting. "I take a lot of solace in what Li Edelkoort is saying," said Gerard McGuickin. "In a way, the Coronavirus is perhaps a reckoning for things that have gone before."

Ukrainian architect Sergey Makhno also shared his predictions on how our homes will change once the coronavirus pandemic is over whilst Airbnb co-founder Brian Chesky shared his thoughts on how the coronavirus pandemic is likely to change travel.

Find out more about Edelkoort's coronavirus predictions ›

Steel and concrete steps cut through facade of Stairway House by Nendo

Opinions were divided over Japanese design studio Nendo's unusual addition to a multigeneration house in Tokyo – a giant decorative staircase dividing the house in two.

Some felt that the sculptural stairway was too much of a health and safety risk. "I can't imagine living there with a kids," worried Salamoon.

And Room advised people to live a little more dangerously. "If everyone here wants a run-of-the-mill cosy little cottage or bungalow or timber-framed three-bedroom suburban potted plant safety palace, why are you reading this magazine?" they quipped.

Cliff Tan weighed in with some important cultural context. "This is really obvious if you are East Asian," said Tan. "In Feng Shui terms, this site, sitting at the top of a long road, invites too much energy into the site," he added. "The staircase takes all this energy and swoops it towards the sky, keeping the rest of the home calm and protected."

Find out more about Stairway House ›

Bjarke Ingels meets Brazil's president Jair Bolsonaro to "change the face of tourism in Brazil"

Bjarke Ingels previously made headlines when the architect met with the president of Brazil Jair Bolsonaro to discuss developing a tourism masterplan for the northeast region of the country.

"Glad to still see starchitect clamouring to work with corrupt governments," said WYRIWYG. "As long as the fees are high enough..."

"Yeah, because a Danish architect knows exactly how to deal with beaches and the social background of our country," added Edson Maruyama. "We have great architects and urbanists in the country.

Ingels released a statement defending his decision and rejecting the idea that countries such as Brazil should be off-limits to architects.

Find out more about Ingels meeting Jair Bolsonaro ›

Eva Franch i Gilabert fired as AA director for "specific failures of performance"

Another controversial story in 2020 was news that Architectural Association (AA) director Eva Franch i Gilabert was fired.

The decision was taken by the London school two weeks after Gilabert lost a vote of no confidence in her leadership.

"Eva absolutely deserved an opportunity to lead," said AA Dipl. "AA is a testbed for creative ideas and methodologies and sometimes an experiment doesn't prove successful. Yet AA is the only place where one can try and fail and we should admire the school for that reason. "

Hotel Sphinx also commented: "Surely those of us outside the AA community cannot truly understand what has transpired over the past two years, culminating in this decision."

Find out more about Gilabert's dismissal ›

Groupwork designs 30-storey stone skyscraper

Amin Taha's architecture studio Groupwork attracted attention when it designed a conceptual 30-storey stone office block.

The studio said the building would be cheaper and more sustainable than concrete or steel equivalent, but some readers thought it was dull.

"The discussion is all about the material and nothing about the boring design," said Egad.

"I'd rather call it straightforward rather than boring," replied K Anderson. "It's an elegant and well-proportioned tower while taking advantage of the material's natural qualities and production process. Gold doesn't have to glitter.

Taha himself responded in the comments section, saying: "The tower is a simple, sober, yes boring design for the purpose of comparing like for like against standard commercial offices. It is after all only a material, not a style."

Find out more about Groupwork's stone skyscraper ›

Urban planning is "really very biased against women" says Caroline Criado Perez

British writer Caroline Criado Perez wrote a book claiming that cities haven't been designed to suit the lives of women, sparking debate amongst readers.

"I agree with this completely," said Sim. "Last week the design for the longest cycling bridge in Europe was revealed. While it was hailed a triumph, as a woman all I could think of were the evenings I would be cycling home alone and the idea of this bridge scared me."

"Come on!" replied Architecte Urbaniste. "This whole man versus woman urban design discussion is missing the point. Most architecture is designed by teams of people containing both men and women. I've seen groups of women designing completely unliveable urbanism too."

Find out more about Perez's book ›

Read more Dezeen comments

Dezeen is the world's most commented architecture and design magazine, receiving thousands of comments each month from readers. Keep up to date on the latest discussions on our comments page.

The post Dezeen's top 10 most talked-about stories of 2020 appeared first on Dezeen.

#Architecture – Dezeen

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l0nemuse · 6 years

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On Healing After A Break Up by Lauren Sarrantonio

In late 2017, memories of my long ended relationship flooded me. These were memories I had not recalled since they happened. I hadn’t made the space for myself to reflect on any of it until over two years after our breakup, two years that were comprised of harbored resentment, spiteful acts, and shame. My delayed grief was self inflicted; I established thinking-about-it-after-the-fact as an impossible option. In retrospect, he was too much a part of my everyday, and so to sit and attempt to calculate that loss in its immediate aftermath would have stifled me. I had to keep moving.

Life belongs to those who are unafraid to feel. In a world where our senses are constantly being exploited and capitalized on, it can sometimes be hard to feel anything amidst the overstimulation. Merely being present on a street in New York will render your sensory cortex to the saturation of smoky smells, screeches and bangs, lights and faces. In other words, we’re not allotted the space to feel from anyone. We need to show up and make that space for ourselves.

For me, carving out that space means sitting at my desk and journaling, even if it hurts to hold the pen that day. Even if I can only write a sentence at the moment.

It means driving up the mountain to see my small, stirring world beyond the overlook.

It means breathing deep enough to feel the heaviness in my chest stretch and wake.

It means doing the exact thing I am afraid of doing, because I already know that it’s still good and important for me to do. Because even though I am afraid, I still want to.

Vulnerability, fear and love are inextricably linked and they play vital parts in our lives every day. You know how you can’t really see the sun? You can look toward it for a few sparing seconds, but then you’ve got to look away. And yet, this burning star illuminates everything else in its path, and we may look at these other things for however long we’d like.

Vulnerability, like the sun, cannot be contained, stopped or blocked. At least, not for long. It will come, and when it does ,in the right situations, it will shine light onto everything right in front of us. No, vulnerability is not like the light. It is the light. At high noon we can see that what it makes visible is love.

Fear rests in shadows. It’s important to distinguish that fear is not the shadows themselves, but something more elusive within them. I don’t mean to stigmatize darkness. But fear is comfortable there. Hidden, still. One day in the red hue of a traffic light, I was thinking about what it means to be afraid. The notion, ‘fear is the absence of love’ didn’t seem totally accurate to me. Besides, there cannot be shadows if there is no light. Rather, fear is the burial of love. And fear likes shadows because they are weightless graves. The love is there, it’s just not able to breathe. Love, paired with fear, is hidden away in the shadows.

The grief over the end of my relationship was only deferred, not diminished. It stayed with me. I carried my grief like an object. I took it everywhere I went. Briefly I’d forget about it, as if it had moved to a back pocket. But it was there.

That’s the thing about grief. You don’t have the luxury of forgetting. It will tint your relationships and dreams and health until you decide to pay its respects. You may defer the grief, but time will bring it back. And finally after two years, instead of running, or chasing, or hiding in shadows, I saw the option to surrender.

If a smell triggered a memory, I wouldn’t escort it away like before. I would search that memory and remember the sweet moments I got to share. The sweaty dance studio. The dying cornfields. The empty auditorium. One particularly vivid memory was triggered while I was in warrior one at yoga. Okay, maybe I’m supposed to let thoughts go in yoga, but I explored this one. Suddenly I felt the space that lived between us become a tenderness. My recollections were warm gifts, not threats of abandonment, or doubt, or anything other than loving moments that I had the privilege to experience. I think these moments were waiting to be honored, they were stuck inside my grief, and now that I have acknowledged them, they feel much lighter; they are allowed to be in the past.

My healing became the antidote to what our overstimulating, productivity-obsessed culture says we must do. I sat quietly with my emotions. I let bad dreams have their way with me. I didn’t tune it out. It took years to come around to it, but I faced the ache until it was tended to enough so that it may begin to dissipate.

Growing up, it had been natural for me to avoid vulnerability. I could A) deflect any emotionally stimulating conversation with quick-grab humor, B) wear my cynicism armor (which appeared to solve everything and make me look cool while doing so), C) not raise my voice at all and play the doormat, or D) a nauseating cocktail of all of the above. This issue is not unique to me, in fact, the reason it became natural behavior growing up is because it was just that for everyone else around me: normal. Sure, everyone has their own style of running, chasing, hiding.

What matters is that there is a light waiting for you beneath, where you can be vulnerable—where you can be brave. There are no bells and whistles. Come as you are. The light will envelope you in warmth. And it feels important to note that each of our light comes from the same source.

I forgive myself for deferring my grief. I know it was because of my fear of vulnerability. If I admitted to being sad, and hurt, and lonely, that meant that I was breakable.

But the problem is not that I am breakable, the problem is that I was never told that breaking open allows the light to meet me in new places, so long as I don’t hide from it. It’s actually a blessing to get broken. I am not alive in spite of my heartbreak, I am alive because of it.

Let me make clear, I’m in no way cured of heartbreak, nor exempt from experiencing it ever again. But I know that if I go forth without the fear of feeling, and trusting myself in my capability to make space to heal, I will be rapt for whatever life may bring.

By Lauren Sarrantonio

#healing #love #breakup #happy #identity #self #heartbroken #ny

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mcmansionhell · 7 years

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MMH Does Architectural Theory Part 5: Empiricism & The Picturesque (Conclusion)

Hello Friends! Boy is this going to be a little bit of a wild post. This is the part where ish hits the fan and things fall apart. It’s also just going to be a long post, so I’m sorry.

The architectural theory we’ve known and loved so far revolved around a Platonic concept of absolute harmony, or innate beauty, a concept the Renaissance tied to proportions in architecture.

However, what if it’s not proportions in architecture that make architecture beautiful? What if beauty really is relative? What if there’s more to great architecture than beauty alone?

Bickering About Beauty

Is Beauty Absolute or Relative? Or both? Why, if we don’t have any innate thoughts, do we find the same things beautiful?

As it turns out, it was mostly the Irish and the Scots who argued this one out while mainland Britain was content with its cool new gardens.

Francis Hutcheson, an important Irish philosopher, found a loophole that, while clever, was ostensibly of the past.

In his 1725 essay “An Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue,” Hutcheson describes beauty not as an external attribute, but as an innate sense in all people. AKA, absolute beauty is not an objective quality, but an actual part of the human mind. This was Hutcheson’s way of getting around Lockean ideas of sensation - by calling beauty a sense within us rather than a reaction to that which is perceived by our senses.

Hutcheson was very into the writings of Shaftesbury, which attached our ability to determine what is beautiful to our moral character. Therefore only good people or geniuses could have good taste. Sure, claimed Hutcheson, all people can sense things, but only an elite few can use their senses in the “correct” way.

This is, of course, total bullsh*t.

George Berkeley, another Irish philosopher, rebuked these ideas savagely. Berkeley believed in Lockean empiricism, but unlike other philosophers, emphasized perception and human rationality rather than blind sensation or abstract thoughts.

Berkeley, in his rather humorous “Third Dialogue” of Alciphron (1732) uses a fake conversation (aka a dialogue) to completely wreck Hutcheson’s idea.

Basically, these two dudes Alciphron (Hutcheson) and Euphranor (Berkeley), are arguing. In the beginning of this conversation, Alciphron says that beauty is not just that which pleases but is actually that which is perceived by the eye, namely proportions. To paraphrase:

E (playing extremely dumb): but these proportions aren’t the same for everything, right? A: of course not, idiot. the proportions of an ox don’t work for a horse, dummy. E: so proportion is the relation of one thing to another A: Duh, idiot. E: So, these parts and their sizes and shapes must relate to each other in such a way to make up the best possible, most useful whole. A: dude, of course. E: So, like, you’re using reason to choose and match and assemble this whole from each part. A: y-yeah... E: So, proportions aren’t just perceived by sight, but by reason by the means of sight. A: k E: So beauty isn’t really of the eye but of the mind, right? The eye alone can’t tell if that chair is a great chair or that door is a great door, right? A: Dude, where are you going with this? E: To put it this way, you see a chair, right? Could you think this chair to be of good proportions if it looked like you or anybody else wouldn’t be able to sit your ass in it? A: I guess not. E: So you admit that we can’t find the chair to be beautiful without first knowing its proper use, which is of course, the domain of judgement. A: Fine. E: After all, if an architect finds a door to be pretty cool, and have its proportions just right, what use or beauty is left to that door if the architect instead turns it 90 degrees so it opens like, a doggy door but for people? It’s not beautiful, then, right? So the proportions don’t necessarily matter, the use of the proportions matter, u feel me, my dude? A: gasp

This goes on for a while. But the point is the same: there’s more than just an innate sense to beauty, it must have an application or context and therefore is relative and not absolute.

ENTER MY HOMEBOY DAVID HUME

Aww yiss, it’s time for by main dude David Hume, the Scottish philosopher that would blow so many minds of other philosophers while also being less of a reactionary asshole than his contemporaries. (I’m not sorry)

Hume claimed that beauty was relative to our personal experience, and that because we all share similar experiences and a similar psychological makeup, we tend to find similar things to be beautiful. Hume, like Berkeley, believes in some sort of functional component of beauty, and even links this to architecture in his A Treatise of Human Nature (1739-40):

“In like manner the rules of architecture require, that the top of a pillar shou’d be more slender than its base, and that because such a figure conveys to us the idea of security, which is pleasant; whereas the contrary form gives us the apprehension of danger, which is uneasy.”

AKA, the rules of architecture are derived from a practical standpoint, one of structural integrity, and that appearance of stability makes us feel relaxed because, well, the building doesn’t look like it’s going to fall down, right?

But Hume is most known in aesthetics for what has become a rather pithy adage: the statement that beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

‘‘Beauty is no quality in things themselves: It exists merely in the mind which contemplates them; and each mind perceives a different beauty.’’

But then the question is if each mind perceives a different beauty, which brain perceives the right beauty? Thus enters the question of “taste”.

Bickering About Taste

We’re still bickering about good taste. In fact, this blog is primarily a treatise on, well, bad taste. One of the more important documents in architectural theory about taste was a dialogue by the Scottish painter Allan Ramsey, a best friend of David Hume (he painted the above portrait).

(In fact, Hume, Ramsey, Adam Smith, Alexander Gerard, and Robert Adam formed a group in 1754 called the Select Society, which I’m sure has provided for ample historical slashfiction at some point in time.)

Anyways, Ramsey’s “Dialogue on Taste” is important because it’s the first clear articulation of relativist aesthetics in architectural theory.

The dialogue occurs between Col. Freeman, a clever, roguishly handsome, free-thinking modernist and Lord Modish a good boy who loves his traditions. Yes, this is Perrault v Blondel all over again, but with savage wit.

you, dumb & trad: there are objective rules for architecture. Proportions!

me, incredibly mod & smart: uh, those are more knowledge than taste. It doesn’t take any genius of taste to follow a dumb Palladian recipe. Anybody can read a cookbook and make a boring dish. These so-called rules are only an analysis of what others find to be culturally acceptable, and don’t actually point to any natural standard beauty.

me, continuing to slay it: give me one reason that isn’t cultural why a Corinthian column in all its proportions isn’t as beautiful if I turn that SOB upside down. Like, what if, somewhere out there there are cultures that would find my upside-down column sick af - maybe they’d be horrified to hear about our right-side up traditions.

me, increasingly sassy: after all, these so called traditions and “tastes” are just the works of powerful rich people. If a poor dude wore a coat with triangular cuffs everyone would laugh at him and call him a big dummy. If a rich dude did it, suddenly you’d start seeing triangular cuffs everywhere no matter how stupid it looks. Tell me architecture ain’t the same way.

This is probably one of my favorite hot takes of the 18th Century, especially since it calls architecture a “fashion” explicitly, which was, like, unacceptable even though it’s ultimately true.

Regardless of this relative nature of taste, the centuries have still seen general consensus on what pieces of art are superior to others, and there must be some underlying theme other than cynicism regarding why this is the case.

Hume sought to answer this question in his 1757 essay “On the Standards of Taste” where he claimed that this consensus did not lie in specific rules of artistic composition, but rather in the universal makeup of the human psyche, which must be “rightly formed” to allow the emotions related to beauty to form.

“Though some objects, by the structure of the mind, be naturally calculated to give pleasure, it is not to be expected, that in every individual the pleasure will be equally felt. Particular incidents and situations occur, which either throw a false light on the objects, or hinder the true from conveying to the imagination the proper sentiment and perception.”

AKA you’re not going to find the Parthenon to be all that great if you’re, say, stricken with food poisoning or just got a call telling you you’ve been laid off.

We all have the potential to be stricken by a beautiful thing, but beautiful things strike us differently depending on how we feel at the moment or because of our pre-existing experiences. For example, you’re not going to find that Talking Heads album to be all that great because your jerk ex used to be really into them, even if the music is objectively pretty good.

However, sometimes art strikes us in ways that are different than mere beauty - sometimes art smacks us in the face and leaves us breathless, awed even. The non-beauty reactions to art are what will be discussed in the second half of this post, after the break.

Introducing the Sublime (With Bonus Wrestling GIFS)

No, not that one.

Basically, the sublime (in art) is the quality of greatness, that which cannot be comprehended or imitated. A bunch of smart philosopher dudes wrote about it, often after visiting the Alps.

Photo by Steve Evans (CC-BY 2.0)

Addison’s Foreshadowing of the Sublime

It was Addison, the guy from the end of last week’s post that foreshadowed thoughts about the sublime. Addison was not an architect, and sought to leave debates about the techniques and praxis of architecture to the experts. His essay revolves around the idea that it isn’t just beauty we should be talking about here, and offers a view of art as being either “Great, Uncommon, or Beautiful.”

What’s most important of the three is what Addison calls “Greatness” referring to “the Bulk and Body of the Structure, or to the Manner in which it is built...”

By Greatness of Manner, Addison referred to that familiar feeling of walking into a great place, the “Disposition of Mind he finds in himself, at his first Entrance into the Pantheon at Rome, and how his Imagination is filled with something Great and Amazing.”

This idea was taken further by Alexander Gerard, a member of Hume’s Select Society, who proposed that in order for something to be truly sublime it had to be both massive and simple.

“Large objects can scarce indeed produce their full effect, unless they are also simple, or made up of parts in a great measure similar. Innumerable little islands scattered in the ocean, and breaking the prospect, greatly diminish the grandeur of the scene. A variety of clouds, diversifying the face of the heavens, may add to their beauty, but must take from their grandeur.“

Basically:

This was an important precursor to the most lasting ideas on the sublime from everybody’s favorite reactionary philosopher who thought the French Revolution was bad (and monarchy was good) but that the guillotine was #^$%#ing sweet:

EDMUND “PAIN AND DANGER” BURKE

This is the greatest thing I’ve ever done with my time.

Burke’s treatise A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757) claims that there are not only “some invariable and certain laws” behind our judgements of taste, described by him as “that faculty or those faculties of the mind, which are affected with, or which form a judgment of, the works of imagination and the elegant arts.”

This essentially puts the smackdown on the classical ideas that beauty is somehow related to utility or reason, as well as form or proportions destroying all of the theory we’ve learned about in the last four posts.

Burke then goes ahead to lay out and define some qualities of art and the reactions they engender in us:

The Sublime

I’ll just let ol’ “Pain and Danger” Burke speak for himself on this one:

“Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime; that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling. I say the strongest emotion, because I am satisfied the ideas of pain are much more powerful than those which enter on the part of pleasure.”

TL;DR: Sublime, is pain & danger, the strongest emotions we can have, and pain is way more powerful than pleasure.

Qualities of the sublime, according to Burke include: vastness, infinity, succession (or consistency/repetition), and uniformity.

Specifically related to buildings, Burke focused on concepts such as difficulty, which he describes as “When any work seems to have required immense force and labour to effect it, the idea is grand.” He cites Stonehenge as an example - the labor needed to move such huge stones is more impressive than the end product.

He also discusses (and is one of the first to do so specifically) the important role light plays in building, especially on mood:

“I think then, that all edifices calculated to produce an idea of the sublime, ought rather to be dark and gloomy, and this for two reasons; the first is, that darkness itself on other occasions is known by experience to have a greater effect on the passions than light.

The second is, that to make an object very striking, we should make it as different as possible from the objects with which we have been immediately conversant...to make the transition thoroughly striking, you ought to pass from the greatest light, to as much darkness as is consistent with the uses of architecture.”

AKA dude was a huge Goth.

Most importantly to this blog, Burke had this to say about McMansions:

“Designs that are vast only by their dimensions, are always the sign of a common and low imagination.”

Burke’s writing set the course of aesthetic and architectural thought from this point on, eclipsing many that came before him, including Hume. Now that architecture had been liberated from the ties of proportion and function (for now), a new era of thought (and building) could begin.

I’m not sorry lmao

Well, that does it for Part 5! Stay tuned for this week’s Certified Dank Massachusetts McMansion on Thursday, and next Monday’s wrapping up of the 18th Century in which we see what’s up with the rest of Europe. Have a great week, and sorry for the technical delays!

If you like this post, and want to see more like it, consider supporting me on Patreon! Not into small donations and sick bonus content? Check out the McMansion Hell Store - 100% goes to charity.

Copyright Disclaimer: All photos without captioned credit are from the Public Domain. Manipulated photos are considered derivative work and are Copyright © 2017 McMansion Hell. Please email [email protected] before using these images on another site. (am v chill about this)

#architecture #history #architectural theory #theory #philosophy #18th century #edmund burke #david hume #burke #hume #empiricism #aesthetics #aesthetic theory #philosophy of art

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mjvliteraryblog-blog · 5 years

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Do People Actually Judge A Book By Its Cover? Why Your Book’s Cheap Exterior Might Be Hiding A Literary Gem

Photo by rawpixel.com from Pexel

“You can’t judge a book by its binding.” Passage from the African journal American Speech, 1944.

Just two years after this phrase was coined, it would go on to be adapted into mainstream idiom and pop culture, first and most notably in the book Murder In the Glass Room, by Edwin Rolfe and Lester Fuller, which featured the phrase “You can never tell a book by its cover.” On the surface, of course, this is a self-explanatory term, and even as a metaphor for any large number of scenarios and character assessments, its meaning is clear. However, metaphors and analogies aside, perhaps ironically, a field in which it is quite difficult to simply nod agreement with this is when actually judging a book by its cover.

WHY JUDGING A BOOK BY ITS COVER SAYS MORE ABOUT YOU THAN IT DOES ABOUT THE BOOK

To many, the answer may be straightforward: yes, we do judge books by their covers and no, perhaps we shouldn’t, but that doesn’t stop us. Absolutely, this is true on both counts for many people. However, there are many reasons why the answer to this question is actually more profound than it may first appear, and why its answer – individual to each of us - actually reveals far more about our own personality traits than it does about the writer, the book, the designer who created it, the publisher who chose it, or even the decision to print it. What it raises in us - those actually making the judgement - is questions of how much importance we place on perceptive visual importance, stereotypical presumptions, patience, openness to and tolerance of new talent, respect for opportunity, assumptions of financially social inferiority and perhaps more than anything else, loyalty.

IS READER LOYALTY EXCLUSIVE TO THE RICH AND FAMOUS?

To add a measure of context to that list, let’s first consider the last of them: loyalty. If I explain that in this case I mean loyalty to authors with which we have already established our position in their fandom – most likely famous – then perhaps the list might start to make more immediate sense. Consider the newest novel you bought by your favourite best-selling author – you may remember the title (you actually might not), but can you recall, without checking, the cover? Try to, right now. One thing which will almost certainly have been true of it, assuming your best-selling author is a famous one, is that his or her name was in much larger font than the actual title of the book, itself. Check your latest Stephen King or Michelle Obama book – it is a safe bet that the author’s name is at least 30-40% larger than the title. What kind of a message does this send, then? That if you are a famous, established author the cover doesn’t matter – even the title of your book doesn’t matter? If it’s a horror, it used Chiller font and a dark theme… probably; perhaps there were pictures of balloons or a pram, but who can remember? All that matters is the author who wrote it, and that it is the one you don’t own yet. The book might be bad – the cover might be terrible - but you’ll still probably buy his or her next one.

Compare this, now, to a new, unknown author. Those of us fortunate enough to work in the literary industry with up-and-coming authors should see things – including shabby book covers - very differently, and should pride ourselves on an inclination to appreciate the less superficial qualities mentioned in that list: openness, opportunity and new creative talent; this is, of course, a vital element of our profession. As a book reviewer, beta-reader and copy-editor, I myself am acutely aware that amongst every dozen or so rough stones there is a diamond (to shamelessly use yet another clichéd metaphor). That diamond may be hidden within a low-resolution crust of an exterior, which is offensive to the eye and needs not just polishing, but entirely discarding – of course, I won’t know this unless I dig. Many new authors may be unpublished; they may also be broke financially, unable to commission anything more expensive than some free or cheap Photoshop-alternative. So, rubbing their hands in excitement and anticipation of their new graphic design hobby, they become hands-on and expand their skillset to include book covers. With glee and relish, the author then prides himself that he is able to make a cover and can now do Photoshop-ish. But, is it right? Quite simply, is it good enough?

WHY BOOKS BY UNKNOWN AUTHORS HAVE TO LOOK TWICE AS GOOD – AND BE INSTANTLY RECOGNIZABLE!

By this rationale, is it therefore fair to say that if you are a famous author - probably wealthy with a loyal fan base - we have a right to judge your cover critically and view it cynically, whereas if you are an up-and-coming new face, we should afford you leniency for your budget and withhold judgement until we have read it? After all, for all we know behind that cover may be one of those hidden gems – and, behind some there absolutely, undoubtedly will be. Well, no actually; this is the very reason why you should not expect leniency! You don’t have the luxury of a half-page author name self-selling your new book – you have yet to achieve that status. Besides, the better your book is, the more enticing your cover should be! I designed all of my own book covers, and whilst deeply proud of every single one of them, they have been upgraded and reissued over the years. Why? Because they weren’t good enough to reflect what was inside them. Whilst you should always strive to create the best art you can – both inside and outside of the cover – your book’s cover is invariably little more than a shop window, with one primary objective: to get people inside it. And, even whilst those in the business are less likely to judge a book so harshly by its cover, they are still going to have an inevitable, innate aversion to really bad covers; avoiding creating a terrible cover is a good place for you to start selling your book. In fact, I’ll admit that there is undoubtedly still some degree to which a cover might help me select my next review read. In spite of this, take a look at the BOOK REVIEW BLOG – seek out the books which have been awarded 5-star reviews and take a look at the poor quality of some of their covers; they gave no indication of the immense quality of what I was about to read.

Image property of MJV Literary Author Services

Whilst you are there, by the same inverted principle, look for the lower scoring reviews; those with a professionally created and undoubtedly more expensive high-res cover – it would perhaps be a safe bet to assume that these would have more sales on Amazon than the rough gems do. This is a tragic waste, and all the more reason why a good cover is so important. By earlier asking “is it good enough”, of course the question refers to its defining measure: good enough to sell. As far as the paying readership goes, sadly, and often inaccurately, they undoubtedly judge a book by its cover, if not totally, then to enough of an extent that this factor cannot be simply ignored when conducting your analytics – the number of Amazon sales will probably speak for themselves, as far as professional covers goes. Whilst I am certain there is a huge number of people with the sense to acknowledge that an extremely good quality book may be hindered by its unknown author’s lack of budget, there are also most definitely particular universal expectations of the cover, which are consistent with genre – if you can’t tell your reader how good the book is, at least tell them what it is about, by its cover; at the very, very least, your cover must ascertain genre, even to be visible to your market audience. Too many books hide their action-thriller credential behind a stock cover of a mountain – this means very little to a browsing reader. I earlier mentioned the horror theme, briefly; sci-fi fans will probably expect high-resolution, technologically stunning imagery and artwork; period or romantic readers may be looking for beautiful scenery or lavish, costume-wearing characters; action readers will prefer a gripping, rousing cover, maybe featuring weapons or cash; family drama may invoke expectations of emotional people in melancholy and poignant poses; take a look at the colour themes of other books in yours’ genre, because they all have them… The point is, if there is only one piece of advice to be taken from this article, it is that your cover, at the very least, must be recognizable to your target reader at first glance – or at least enticing - otherwise your marketing work is going to be a whole lot more difficult! When you are rich and famous, your cover might not need to be memorable or even good, but at first glance it will still meet the genre theme, and that will be enough.

A GOOD BOOK COVER IS AN INVESTMENT

As far as goes any degree of importance readers place on the character traits mentioned - perceptive visual importance, stereotypical presumptions, patience, openness to and tolerance of new talent, respect for opportunity, assumptions of financially social inferiority and loyalty – all people are different, and each respects some of these qualities more than others; this is a calculation you must make for yourself, as the author or indie publisher paying to produce your book, and adapt to your buyers’ persona. One thing is clear, though, and probably made more so by looking at the not-so-good books which are selling well, rather than by the good ones which aren’t: a professional book cover may not be a creative necessity, but it is a business one - a relatively cheap investment, too, considering it is your book’s shop window. Take a look at some AFFILIATED COVER DESIGNERS and their rates – you might be surprised.

Posted by Matt McAvoy: 31st July 2019

#book cover #cover designer #author #writer #publishing #books #book creation #judge a book by its cover #ReturnToRealBooks

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theantisocialcritic · 5 years

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This AntiSocial Life: Revenge of the Outsider

I’m furious today. I’m rarely ever mad but today I’m furious. In the light of the horrifying terrorist attack by an extremist in New Zealand that resulted in the death of 49 innocent people, I’m more furious than I’ve ever been in one of these public massacres. It’s easy to be cold and cynical and let the numbers pass by in the background at work while you move on with your daily life but today I’m stewing in my anger.

Christchurch, New Zealand

A monstrous white nationalist and self-described “eco-fascist” psychopath (and apparently three of his friends) sought to end the lives of dozens of innocent people and succeeded. What followed was the usual cavalcade of cynical bi-partisan political pandering. The side loosely affiliated with the attacker obfuscates any involvement and/or distances themselves from their actions. The other side begins pandering about how the violence proves their arguments right and tries to push legislation that goes nowhere. We’ve all seen this song and dance dozens of times at this point.

What became more frustrating in the hours that followed was the slow realization of just how bad things had gotten. Even beyond the horror that was the Australian Senator blaming Islamic immigration for the massacre, it quickly settled over the situation that the normal debate and bi-partisan dehumanization was something the shooter was actively seeking to perpetuate. In the shooter’s own manifesto he stated that the entire purpose of the shooting was to be as politically calculated as possible to spark mutual disdain and purposely accelerate reactions.

Beyond the obvious uncontionable violence he inflicted on an innocent house of worship, he did everything he could to make his event as infuriating as possible. He used weapons he knew would start firearms debates across the world. He namedropped contentious political and cultural figures like Candace Owns and Pewdiepie. At a time when the edgiest parts of the internet are hotly contested (in Europe, copyright laws are about to become so strict that they could effectively ban memes) he lined the weapons he used with memes just to draw attention to them. He did everything in his power to make sure his act of violence translated into vicious political discourse in a purposeful attempt to get contentious conversations about gun control and social media censorship rolling as a backdoor means of brewing hostility.

We’re at the point in discourse where vicious politics are so predictable that psychopaths can read the room enough to direct the outrage to purposely make discourse of difficult topics more broken. He actually thought he could go as far as to start a race war with his actions. Remember, the second bloodiest war in human history was caused by one man being assassinated. It could’ve worked. We’re already so far beyond the pale already that there’s hardly been any discussion of the actual people who were victimized in the massacre. Nobody cares about the dead and wounded beyond how useful they are as tools for political gain. Ask yourself, what did you hear first: the names of the victims or calls for a political response? For all the discussions of gun control, far right extremism, far left extremism, radical Islam, toxic masculinity, mental health reform, overzealous media coverage and hate speech that spins every time these events happen there’s never a truthful discourse about the most important things that matter. What is causing young men to actually become so nihilistic and disenfranchised in the first place?

The Revenge of the Outsider

I’m primarily a film writer but I do most of my writing for websites that primarily cover politics and religion. Outside of my Flawed Faith series, I very rarely talk about these issues outside of the venues in which I’m generally encouraged to do so. Simply put, I’m not a confrontational person and I don’t want to spend my entire life litigating contentious issues. My entire ethos as an entertainment writer and TV host has been that entertainment is the last bastion of shared culture in the modern world. There is a reason that films become hotly debated topics like Ghostbusters, The Last Jedi and Captain Marvel. People recognize the politicization of films is effective and either see it as useful or as innately divisive. Historically I’ve attempted to stay out of these conversations because they’ve seemed innately useless to me. Today however I need to make an exception.

Prior to today, I’d been deliberating a lot about the messages of a number of recent films. I’d been thinking of it ever since I saw The LEGO Movie 2 last month. That movie crystalized an interesting idea in my mind about the nature of villainy in recent popular films. There's an undercurrent of satire that covers a number of the most popular films of the past several years. In this movie, I finally understood it in the character of Rex Dangervest. Spoiler for The LEGO Movie 2 but it turns out that Rex Dangervest is an older version of Emmet who was lost for several years and decided to take revenge on his friends for abandoning him to suffer alone for years without hope of rescue. In order to do this, he foments hostility between The Man Upstair’s children to cause the LEGO equivalent of the apocalypse as retribution. With this character, I suddenly began to realize how much this story is repeated in recent films.

In Black Panther, we have a version of this with Killmonger, a man who was abandoned as a child by Wakanda after his father betrayed them and who was left alone to suffer in poverty now seeking his claim to the throne as a means of overthrowing the world and fomenting a worldwide revolution.

In Star Wars, we see this embodied in the character of Kylo Ren, a young man once destined to inherit the ways of the Jedi who was failed by every adult and institution in his life except for the leader of the First Order who offered him the opportunity to blow up the system that betrayed him. His most famous lines in the recent movies have all been variations of letting the past die. The moment the power reaches his hands and he takes control of the Imperial Death Cult, all he wants to do with it is reign destruction down on the Galaxy and destroy every institution before him.

Of course, the most famous example of this story is unquestionably The Dark Knight. In that film, the battle of the soul of Gotham City is literally played out by a battle of minds between symbols of order and chaos. It predicted the modern world of escalation and reactionary impulses that drive radical movements across the political spectrum. The Joker in that film doesn’t actually have a singular motivation for his impulse but that doesn’t matter in that film. He’s the embodiment of chaos, meant to call the hypocrisies of the world out as he sees them and create some semblance of equilibrium as he sees it.

It struck me just how frequently this kind of story pops up in modern fiction. What’s interesting in these stories is that at the end of the day, the heroes facing off against these villains ultimately come to the conclusion that society itself is at fault for the disenfranchisement of the villains. The order they perceived in the world was a lie that could only be set straight by ending the circumstances that gave the ideologies of each of these characters are very different, coming from identity, abandonment, oppression of the minority at the fringe of society, etc. What’s important is what they have in common. Regardless of the ideology of the viewer, there is a shared collective sense that society is fomenting the forces that seek to destroy it unintentionally. These characters all share a combined desire to destroy order and rule over the ruins.

Unfortunately, this is the very story we’re watching play out in Christchurch.

The Crisis of Modernity

There is a term used In Christian circles known as the “crisis of modernity”. It speaks to the notion that despite the entirety of humanity’s social, economic, technological and ethical progress that people still aren’t happy. There is a sense in the world that something is amiss in spite of the fact that there has never been a more prosperous and free time to be alive as a human than this very moment. As a result, young people specifically are seeking out meaning in alternative avenues. Most dull their senses in enormous amounts of food, drugs porn or video games to make their senses feel less lacking. In the case of the latter with video games, young men don’t seem to be seeking out relief from stress but an artificial form of challenge. Video games provide an artificial sense of completion and journey for young men to hone a set of skills and exercise them at their needs. The same is true of pornography. The only alternative to this is for young people to see out meaning in radical ideologies. People become so attached to their narratives that the thought of losing causes them to radicalize. We fear for an uncertain future so badly that we come to the conclusion that we must win by any means necessary. We compromise our values and punching down on innocent people. Then the other side reacts and does the same thing and the world spirals.

We see this crisis playing out in the zeitgeist across the world. It’s easy to write these anxieties off as toxic masculinity or unconscious bigotry but the problems go far deeper than mere anxiety or prejudice. There’s a more primeval issue at the core of modern life’s failures. People are unhappy. There is a reason why so many people resonate with these revenge of the outsider characters like Kylo Ren and Killmonger. People sense that the order of modern life is spiritually killing them. Modernity as we know it doesn’t feel normal to people. Modern life is unfulfilling and lacks meaning. It’s easy to become disenfranchised and look upon the greatest creations of man and find them wanting. At that point, what choice is there left but to burn the past? What choice is there but to accelerate political tensions to burn down the old corrupt order. In the Post-Christian world, where every ideology and institution from the church, to the government, the country, the family and even the individual has been so thoroughly deconstructed, laid bare and revealed corrupted, where is there left to find meaning in?

These characters, these real-life men exist and they’re looking out into the void and desperately aching to lash out and cause as much damage as possible. We talk so much about abuse and broken men but we rarely talk about where these men are coming from. To quote C.S. Lewis’ The Abolition of Man, “We make men without chests and expect from them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst.” We’ve raised generations of young people who have been gifted with the spoils of history and yet who lack the inner strength to enjoy them. These problems begin with how we raise our children. These problems begin with what we teach our children to believe about the world. The only solution to the crisis of modernity, the epidemic of mass shootings and the bifurcation of American life is to resolve the meaning crisis. Until then, expect the worse.

#christchurch #new zealand #kyle ren #star wars #black panther #revenge #disenfranchised #the joker #the dark knight #crisis of modernity #the lego movie 2

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popcartoonkabala · 7 years

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Trinities, dualities, retirements and euphemisms: division into clarity (Chesed-Gevurah-Tipheret she b Malchut) PART I! [Superman is not Batman]

Phillip K. Dick z”l likes Kabbalah, as a tool for making sense of the mad world around him through a kind of schizophrenic observation of patterns around him to testify a larger message. The greatest and most perfect vessel for this, as testified in the Gnostic tradition, is trash culture, pop garbage i.e. the only place where divinity is expressible, where the evil demi-urge isn't looking to stop the holy serpent from emerging with original light. In order for there to be a world at all, the world has to be ruled by the unfair, ugly, and chaotically inconsistent. Not like heaven at all, right? Almost by definition, by Platonic or Aristotelian standards. But where does cosmic order emerge? Only at the margins, only at the fringes, and, ironically, there at the center stage too.

That's commercial fiction and idolatry for you: at the center stage, selling for all the most cynical and manipulative purposes, through a penetrating insight and resonant rightness bound to all the trouble, which of itself reflects the larger pattern ultimately. Nature of stories, and this is why the different degrees of meaning that can be understood from a story go so far, from the very literal, to the allegorical, to the practical to the sublime. And so, the patterns manifest themselves beyond the wills of the ostensible authors of the stories, and hide themselves from the more over philosophers and theologians. Because the heart of the most crass and cynical yearns to speak truth the most completely, he will testify, like the reactionary with the profoundly naked insights.

Who's a cheaper whore than Superman? Maybe the word “cheap” is inappropriate, but maybe not. American/Roman Pop morality is naught but infinitely flexible and adaptable to new concerns and insistences; always ready and curious to be impressed. This is universal religion, “Catholic”. This is the aspect of Jesus on the cross, god manifest through his degradation, into and for the sake of, accessibility. Superman becomes whatever he is needed to be-- whatever powers whatever vulnerability, whatever issue, whatever justification we need for doing something or nothing at all, superman will stand for it. If not the Warner official version, then surely some instant satiric analogue.

There was a great legal case once over the Adventures of Captain Marvel: a visual and capable rip-off of superman, with a twist of course, seeing as he was a kid who could turn into the superman at will, and existed through magic. The lawsuit came and went, and in the end, DC comics and Warner just went out and bought the rights to Captain Marvel, realizing that it was the best they could do to get a handle on a hero successful enough to be identified as distinct, with a narrative and identity suddenly irrepressible. All super-heroes are twists on the superman model, it turns out, and even he is a twist on something older, almost infinitely and unknowably older. Generational waves of sub-character tend to be expressions of the original character into another era, I.e the Dick Grayson into Batman, or better yet, the evolution of the Blue Beetles from classic old school adventurer into whatever a Blue Beetle must become. Aspects reincarnate into the next necessary amendment of the original character, which occasionally (but rarely) effectively supplants the original character, as in the case of the silver age DC heroes like Flash or Green Lantern. If only there was some guide to identifying the pattern that made a change resonant, helpful, or necessary; there is a long history of embarrassing attempts at revamping, gropes for relevance ending as repulsive and unwanted as desperate, blind insensitive groping tends to.

One of the most important of the Kabbalistic traditional practices has been the hope of charting the exact moment where good becomes bad, the exact moment when the shark is jumped, in the hopes of seeing the face of the divine in that interchange, in that second where something goes from either problematic to helpful, or from helpful to problematic. Helpful to problematic is easier to gauge because it's relatively easy to watch something “good” and appreciated go on, while abuses and crimes turned heroic tend to be more spontaneous, but the story of both or either are precisely the story of how and when G-d creates the universe, and splits the read sea.

There is a certain kind of apocalypse inherent to the cartoon narrative: i.e. The day the Golem went mad. Superman and Jean Grey are the most helpful of heroes, and every integral problem solver MUST GO BAD-- ULTIMATELY! This is inherent to any narrative that goes on forever, the day the hero either got mind controlled, justifiably corrupted, or just crushed by tragedy-- and became more of a problem than a help. In the biblical book of Lamentations, one of the most striking moments is when the G-d who often defined helpful friendliness throughout much of the bible, has suddenly become “Like an enemy, his bloodlust insatiable.” This is an inevitable moment with especially the most likeable and powerful of super-helpers, and this end is certainly the profound apocalypse most feared, who's fulfillment is the end of the heroic purity myth.

Superman ends like this a million times: the very first superman sequel, and the very ultimate Batman story (DKR), the last two episodes of the Superman cartoon, and the whole second season of the Justice League Unlimited, feature this nightmare tension, of a superman entirely corrupt, either sensibly (as is the case of the cynical political superman of Red Son, Justice League episode “Justice Lords” the Reagan lackey of Dark Knight Returns, and the marvel analogue Hyperion in the orginial Squadron Supreme) or from corruption or madness (like under Darkseid's control, or that of Red Kryptonite, or just frustration and natural alienation from humanity, like in Mark Waid's brilliant extended series Irredeemable, or John Arcudi and Peter Snejbjerg's sublime meditation on power and humanity A God Somewhere.) Alan Moore's Marvelman/Miracleman split the difference by having the maddened Kid Miracleman be the horror apocalypse, and then fighting the enlightened mature Miracleman, who defeats him and becomes the art messiah who fixes the whole world at last, just like we'd like superman to in our most ideal of fantasies.

In Gath Ennis's affectionate take on the problem, as well as the ones of other ostensibly cynical voices like Grant Morrison, Mark Millar and Jack Kirby: Superman's only able to do so much, and is strikingly tolerant and welcoming of criticism and alternative support. Many writers prefer the earnest and noble invincible hero to the crafty and cynical plotter, hence greater cynicism about Batman or Iron man gone awry than for Superman or Silver Surfer, those so powerful who haven't ALREADY become monsters might be trusted never to do so, or at least, not for long, and not without being sorry.

Even Ennis's twist on Superman in The Boys isn't as vicious as he initially appears, at least not because of his own selfish obliviousness, one that generally seems even more noble than that of every other corrupt hero around. But part of Ennis's art is humanizing and contextualize the most dangerous of monster-people, the war criminals and punishers alike, even as he refuses to take away from the horror of what people do, all the time. But these are the three extremes that define the end of Superman: Benevolent divinity vs. Malevolent divinity vs. Death/alienated immortality. His death can only be tragic and heroic, but how much is his virtue lost in through his power? Superman is defined as the guy who becomes as awesome as a situation demands, in all and any ways-- that is infinitely helpful or infinitely dangerous or just only possible for finite time.

But what Sephira is Superman?

Lets say there were ten sephirot, or even lets say there's just seven: one of the biggest issues in Kabbalistic accounting and equalization is where does One stand relative to Two? Does Three come after Two, or does Four? We might want to just assume that One is before Two, but it's not always clear that Three is before Four, because the rumor is that Three and Four are created simultaneously, in much the same way that One and Zero are. Let me say it better: Superman is obviously a certain kind of hero number One.

But is Hero #1 Chesed or Tipheret?

Let me explain what I mean: Everybody knows...

...Chesed Is Original Kindness, infinite utterly and unitive, the right arm. Gevurah Is Original Restraint, infinite utterly and divisive, judgemental, the left arm. And Tipheret Is the Original Harmony, perfect in it's balance between Kindness and Restraint, relating infinitely, the central trunk of the tree, aka “Truth” and “Mercy.”

The First is identified often/sometimes with Jupiter, especially in Hellenistic models. This is fair if/when he rules the Heavens and makes rightness (צדק) between the other highest forces. Enthusiastic, appreciated but too comfortable to be too respected: so is a certain cosmic ruler and standard. The middle pillar, on the other hand, generally ultimately identified with the Sun, which confounds the order of days of the week, implying that Sunday is not the natural first day of the week, but rather should be the Third! But this is not how the ancient Romans calculated. Our modern international sequence comes from, as described in Ptolemy's Almagest and the Talmudic Shabbos BT (100-102), emerges from observation of which star was most visible in the first hour of each given evening. Is that arbitrary? Or full of meaning?

---

There's a parallel from the iconic super team of Marvel to that of D.C.-- While the Fantastic Four was commissioned to exploit the popularity of the Justice League of America, the Avengers were the authentic doppelgangers-- in different aspects, certainly, but with certain fundamental similarities inherent to the iconic pantheistic model. Once one is collating the assorted gods of all regions into a proper pantheon, one starts to notice syncreticsms and synchronicities. Both teams, maybe the Avengers more so, just because they had less overt precedent than the Justice League, grew and grow through a process of throwing more and more shit on the wall to see what sticks. There have been incarnations of both teams with an absolute minimum of iconic team players, and those experiments honestly tend to be much less successful, because who cares about peripheral characters? Who wants to identify with, or feel safe because of, the peripheral? Even heroes of the periphery like Spider-man stop being peripheral as soon as they emerge into action mode, and suddenly become the most visible and important people in the room. Same with spy heroes like the Black Widow or The Vision or Bronze Tiger or The Huntress or any of them: their value in the team dynamic only comes from the moment where they too become central to the narrative.

If Aquaman can't maintain his functional centrality, he's not gonna be on the A-team for long-- unless the whole concept becomes boring, and some urgent manic experiment offers to make him fundamentally central, as in the case of Justice League Detroit, or Martian Manhunter's JLTask Force. From this process emerges the true iconic figures, hero or villain: Divinities are defined by their never-endingness. That's why the days of the week are named after, and associated with, gods: because they keep on coming, forever. The mystery of identifying patterns in that infinitude are the beginning of all wisdom.

The heroes, like gods are defined by their values and priorities. The gangster extreme of self-indulgence, the scientist extreme of blind unapologetic exploration-- to be resonant, they just need to be inspiring-- but to be national myths, they must be tempered with moral limitations pleasing and comforting to the controllers of the mediums expressed through.

One of the first great American pop heroes of the 20th century, avatar of the electrical media of radio and television, and precursor to the model of secret identity bonded to uncompromising moral code is of course, the Lone Ranger. Composed very intentionally as a moral alternative to the traditional savage, cynical and self-interested Western hero-model, much of the strange-but-endearing commitment to Certain Social Principles of profound civic idealism, which in the Lone Ranger's case includes subtleties as square as a refusal to use any slang or pidgin english, but also as inherent to mainstream cartoon heroes as the commitment to avoid killing any villain whenever possible, despite actually carrying a sacramental pistol, packed with specifically silver bullets, a metal with very noble alchemical associationsi. This shifting of the wild, independent loner into the trustworthy hero depends on his commitment to these social principles, much as the biblical Samson and David are able to be pious warriors, once they've committed themselves to mosaic law, and made clear that there is a charming and co-identifiable limit to their violence that will not degrade into the most disruptive of role models.

Through this kind of covenantal circumcision of the heart, the modern hero is able to be trusted by even his enemies within the conservative mainstream, otherwise afeared of the wildness of the West inverting into the romantic lawless relative amorality that becomes the gangster, once the expanse of the West gives way to the cramped urban jungle of the Cities that become America. This is observed strongly in the relationship between Spider-man and J Jonah Jameson, as opposed to Superman and Batman who are ultimately more than tacitly encouraged and appreciated by their local constabulary and media, who know that these heroes are only here to help and would never do certain terrible things, any terrible things, by definition and nature. This may be because spider-man is an avatar of instability, stepping between margins that a bat, super or wonder person would gracefully step over and avoid the weakness and vulnerability of. The spider-tipheret-middle pillar walker will be elaborated, but first, I just want to clarify:

In Thirty Two Paths of “Awesome Science”!

Jah Deus

The Lord of Hosts Odin

Living god Thor

El Shaddai Freya

High and Guiding Sun

Staying until (forever) and Sacred his name Moon

Superior and Holy he Saturn/Loki

Created his Universe in three spheres

1) In Digit, ספר

2) Media, ספר

3) and Narrative סיפור

10 spheirot ספירות(“cyphers”) “without-what?”

And 22 signature-marks אותיות (“letters”)

3 mothers אמהות and

7 doubles כפולותand

12 simples פשותות

Sepher Yetzirah (1:1)

I'm saying!

3 mothers = The Trinity, a term openly used in DC cosmolopgy to mean

Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman

the foundation and inherent electoral board of the Justice League,

without these three IN SOME FORM OR ANOTHER there is no democratic team dynamic

The Marvel Trinity is obviously

Captain America, Thor, and Iron-man

and

Captain America is NOT a founding member! But the team did not glue until he was aboard, and this is the secret of Tipheret/Harmony coming down from Daat/knowledge-- Captain America joins the team to guide it and ground it:

Man out of time? Not far out of time, he is the only ancient Marvel Hero to join the team from recent modernity-- Thor is an ancient hero, but not originative in the medium-- he's notably absent from the Golden age except as a villain (in Kirby and Simon's Sandman reboot)! Unlike Samson or Hercules, ancient heroes inoffensive in their relative moral grounding with relationship to democracy. As opposed to Germanic Thor, only identifiable then with the “cursed Hun” and his nihilistic confidence.

But by the sixties, comics enter The Silver age, and any alchemist who knows knows that Silver is so much more divine and resonant than Gold. By then, the redeemed Captain could descend, specifically from the moment in history that created the pop-superhero, the World War 2. All three foundational Justice Leaguers come from Golden Age to Silver, intact as opposed to their mostly rebooted comrades like Green Lantern, Hawkman/Hawkgirl and Flash. Not so with the Avengers: only one of the marvel heroes returns from recent antiquity, That war-- but is he Chesed or Tipheret?

Michael, identified with Chesed is a war god, master of legions, but in the context of the Avengers, Cap is the balancier, not the childish infinite power that Marvel's Thor, or the Powerpuff girls's Bubbles, represent.

On the other hand, the shield is identified with Abraham, not Jacob, and Thor is more the Eternal Son, killed and resurrected, and humbled by the sublimation of his divinity into human form so that he might change his essential nature and gain new sensitivities; This Is the aspect of “Israel”: similar to Jacob, Joseph, and Jesus, except more into hitting than getting hit, dying only in order to win better. Compare with heroes on the level of King Saul and Solomon alike, who must be defeated in order for the love they represent and embody to be expressed.

3 becomes 7 by doubling, and then the axis that both are on is the 7th. This is Shabtai/Saturn/Shiva: conceptualized ultimately as Time itself (Cronos/Shabbat) this star is what binds the week and initiates creation, by being willing to be, and satanically shuts down time, as soon as he doesn't care anymore. Identified with the god of Israel by the Romans, Saturn is identified with and synchretized with Dionysus(Liber) in his exctatic/nihilistic aspect (the Attic/Anatolian/Ancient-Eastern “Sabezius”). This same Saturn initiates law and civilization, all by being the axis that the other Celestials revolve around, which all the rest do in their way, at their point. They all imitate their absented-defeated father, as is the way. Shabatai/Saturn/Shiva encompasses all and implies the rest-- if you have Shiva, then you have had Brahma and all the rest at once. Cronos/Saturn similarly devours all his children, not destroying them, but just encompassing them, in the hopes of keeping All One and All Whole and All Self until Jupiter/Guru/Tzadek cuts him open, making space for story, peace and generations. Mothers, Doubles, Etc.

But

Every version of the Sepher Yetzira i've seen has a different sequence for the correspondences between the seven planets and the associated days of the week. Why?

I asked a rabbi who had published my favorite version of the Sepher Yetzira, tidily framed like a poetry book, like a modern translation of the Dao De Ching, one simple quatrain per page. His version, as with a predominant majority of the extant Hebrew versions of the Sefer Yetzirah in circulation, has the planets and days in an order contrary to the Julian order that seems to be almost universally popular in the world. You know the order i'm talking about, right? Sun, Moon, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus and then Saturn. The order of the days in Norse, Vedic, and Greco-Roman tradition. Ostensibly based on emergence of the celestial body during the first hour of a given day, it's really popular... and yet almost no version of The Sefer Yetzira, which lists those same 7 deities along with the seven days of the week, helpfully numbered (The first day, second day etc) has them in a order like Sun on the first day Moon on the second, etc. Why not?

I found him at a wedding, Avraham Leader, and I asked him. He looked off into the sky, closed his eyes, and testified: “they're changing all the time, rotating.” There's something honest and authentic in that very witty deconstruction-- the pattern is observed, 3 mothers and 7 doubles, but which is which shifts, as is the nature of dynamic relationships. Maybe there's some pattern to how, i'm sure some number of people have tried to chart it, always, from all angles. And maybe that's one of the blessings of pop-cartoon media: the constant unfolding of the stone, and the chance to watch the same divinities engage each other in different permutations according to the new clarity of each new day. New comics come out on Woden's day, but they are printed on Moon day and shipped on Tyr's.

But all that would change as the technologies and conveniences do, because no tradition is more stable than the context that nurses it. Subsequently:

There's a problem in identifying which day of the week is which Sephira

Lets say there are three intial “mothers” as the sepher yetzira insists. One forms the other, and then a balance is found it between it's two infinite extremes that is the third that defines the polarity forever, it's harmony and balanced aspect.

For example-- heat, when created, immediately exists in the context of cold, and right there, are the two mothers חום/heat and קוּר/cold, and the balance that forms between them is the harmony that becomes known as רויה/temper(ature), and time is defined by these extremes.

This pattern is also itself triplicate in the Sepher Yetzirah, the above triumvirate reflecting Time, another triumvirate reflecting Space and a third personifying Psyche, a.k.a. Soul, a.k.a. Feeling.

The absurdity of these narratives is that the third, the harmonizer, in all case must actually be the first, in some conceptual sense, and tends to actually be listed first in most versions, despite being defined only by its relationship to balancing the other two infinities. This is expressed by the three letters through which the idea of the Three Mothers is first elaborated: מ (“Mem” )initiates, ש (Shin) stops and א (Aleph) balances. The joke is: א is the original letter, the first, identified with the moment before creation. The aleph is the original alpha, yet here it comes only to balance the conflict between an initial oM and a silencing Sh-- as if to say that, although it's initial conception predates all existence, it only comes into functional existence in the context of the schism that the world itself is made of. The schism between before and after that creates history, the schism between close and far that invents space, and the schism between gut and head that facilitates experience-- they are all founded in the tacit and unexpressed primordial distinction between being, unbeing, and the liminal space inbetween that actually, naturally, predates the distinction.

This space is not to be identified with God, who is still defined as implicit in, and beyond, this whole game and process. But if one would identify it with a degree of God, it would be the degree yearned for and sought by the gnostics who insisted that all else of power and presence in the world of lies was only extant to repress that pure initial light. That's the prize for everyone and anyone trying to get beyond the distinction and the world, but the whole and true G-d is only encounterable in the whole entirety, being and non-being and the bridge all together at once with everything AND nothing.

All the stories are about the invasion of these patterns into each other, and the hilarity, terror and novelty that ensue. But they are just decorations so that we have some impression of the invisible Queen, who cannot be known except by the veils she wears, which ironically free her to be as public as she would be. The veils have patterns because the shape of the face has patterns: Most of Kabbalistic meditation is looking at a thing and then it's opposite, and then at once glancing at what they have in common, through which they are bound and ground.

The first creates the second. The second splits into both third and fourth at once. But one and two have an eternity together. An eternity to work out as much as is interesting or meaningful in their interaction. Any two characters on a given situation comedy are inevitably going to have time to do everything there is with each other than can be milked for humor and/or pathos. One and two live together, depend on each other, especially veiled as 0 and 1. Notice how the Latin word for god parallels the number two “Deux” rather than the number one “Uno,” identified with the moment before creation. No wonder the ancient west had no concept of “Zero”: they just called it “One” instead, with Two being the triumphant god “Tiwaz” vs. One/”Wotan, (Three/Thor, Four/Freya, etc.) Pop-culture, especially of a sort geared toward children, has trouble acknowledging post-romantic sexual dynamics, limiting the possibility of super-hero couples as being viable outside of a larger team dynamic. This is one of the tremendous distinctions between normative pagan hierarchy and that of both Kabbalah and Pop-Cartoons: the ability to acknowledge a divine couple that is male and female equally. A great recent example is the Sym-bionic Titan, G. Tartatovsky's ambitious, epic and rightly awesome but short lived follow up to Samurai Jack. Princess and Protector and Awesome Robot supervisor vs. Evil alien empire and G. I. Joe in the form of armored Transformers, that can bond into a full mini Voltron. Here, the problem is adressed by defining the roles distinctly, mythically, and idealistically-platonically. He is there to protect her, She needs not protecting but wants to help Everyone, and Awesome Robot is the Knowledge resource that helps them bridge their gaps of priority and inherent personal distance, without need for ultimate compromise of personal identity. So sometimes a way is found, to relate to the masculine and feminine in a dynamic in its entirety, but this rarely happens. It's hard on pop cartoons, made for kids assumed to be in relatively homo-genderous stages of developmental priority, not to just decide to pander to Boy Fantasy of infinite play-war, or Girl Fantasy of infinite play-drama.

In Pop culture sitcomedy, it's easy: the tension between a central couple is the source of all tension and humor, and generally there's at least one secondary Dyad (Fred and Ethyl Mertz, for classic example) to take the pressure off the starring couple, to split with them into sub-teams, and then come back together in the comic denouement, often in paroxysms of laughter and celebration at an episodes end. Something similar plays out in the ancient story of Dumuzi and Innana, where Dumuzi's sister-twin comes out of nowhere to play a central role once her bro has been dispatched to Hades for his insensitivity. His twin sister represents his interests, from a feminine perspective, to his feminine counterpart, who lives as a lover-foil, rather than as an empty gender-switched reflection. I believe this is the secret of the difference between an opposite and a contrapositive or an inversion, depending on which direction the wheel of priority turns.

In both the Hebrew Bible and the Pop Comic Book, power couples do emerge, and the stronger dualistic framework is that of the Hero/Villain dyad, where the tension is infinite, and the room for betrayal just as much. Romance is expressed mostly through this format, with “partners” existing in a sibling limbo of proffessional-sacred uneroticism. Notice how much silver-age Lois Lane ultimately functions as something more like an enemy than a partner, disrupting in the hopes of courting, Superman's tantric greatness being his ability to maintain integrity and grace while still dodging the compromise that Lois is constantly trying to insist. Superman and Batman don't have to be lovers to be PARTNERS, neither do Jonathan and David. But they ARE lovers, as mythicly bonded as Dumuzi and Innana-- and maybe even more securely.

In the great future, they have a fight to the death, says one vision of the end of the Batman/Superman team. One goes awry (or appears to) and the other must stop him. The only constant hope of salvation that the team/coupling has in this model is to be interrupted by a greater villain, watching, clapping, laughing, or invading, who they are then united against. This is the great model of ALL super-hero encounters in the original Marvel way, to the point where an immediate camraderie and spirit of co-operation becomes suspect, ominous, and due to inevitably collapse, because of mind -control or some other subversion.

Because the characters are MADE to ENGAGE each other, generally with violence, because this is a visual medium. Whereas Sherlock Holmes and Moriarty only came to fisticuffs once, and even then, not in a manner choreographed through words, but instead described almost passingly, and with more attention to detail given to the environment that they were to have their final encounter in, rather than lovingly detailed Biffs! And Pows! Because analog literature prized the narrative and insight form of conflict much more than what Warren Ellis calls the Explodo! Model, of action prized far over lush description.

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redrobin-detective · 7 years

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I'm a writer and I've gotten a couple complaints that my characterization/psychological state is off. I was wondering if maybe you could give me a little synopsis/character analysis of the main Batfam? Especially Bruce, Damian, and Tim? Those are the ones I'm weakest with. I've looked to many of your answers for more information on the characters and I just want to thank you for being so in depth!!!

It’s hard man and, wow, thank you for the compliment but I’mnot perfect either. With Batman there’s so much history and variability that Icherry pick the parts I like best and combine them to create the ‘ideal’character for my tastes. So keep that in mind, there’s no one right answer.

Bruce- Bruce is one of the most caring people you will evermeet. Such a big heart that loves super intensely. But he’s afraid and he’svery damaged from his experiences. He has all this love but he a) doesn’t knowhow to healthily express it and b) is afraid to acknowledge/express hisemotions for fear of being hurt again. So he comes across as kind of a coldjerk a lot of times. But as he adopts his children (big heart again) he reallydoes make and effort and does as much as he’s capable. He messes up, a lot, buthe still cares. The mission is the most important thing, just slightly behindhis family enough even he forgets sometimes. Motivated and obsessed, hesometimes pushes himself and his feelings too far with consequences.

Dick- Outwardly very bright and cheery, happy and full ofhope and love. It’s one trait he maintains but as tragedies continue in hislife, he hides of that away and instead puts up the mask of a goofball tocompensate. Refuses to be like Bruce but sometimes acts like him anyway. Such apeople person, can make friends in an instant. Observant and caring, sometimesa little overconfident and patronizing but he means well. Being a bigbrother/mentor is very important to him, he loves trying to help out thoseyounger than him to avoid repeating his mistakes. Wracked with guilt and griefand anger that he keeps bottled up cause he hates those negative emotions butthey manifest and cause lots of damage cause he never learned to deal withthem. While he seems easygoing, he’s very stubborn and hardworking and wouldmove literal mountains for those he loves.

Babs- Barb was a very cynical, mature young woman who becameBatgirl as a fuck you to her dad for not letting her join the police force.Eventually she came to love the thrill and intellectual challenge and doinggood. But she grows up and decides Batgirl is a child’s thing and puts it awayjust before her accident. The accident changed her, once a sassy but playfulknow-it, now she’s bitter and angry at her circumstances. It’s unfair whathappened and she broods in her loss, lashes out and pushed people away. Onceshe realizes that she’ll never not miss her legs, she moves on. She’s harsher,more cutting but she’s got her life back and she won’t let her paralysis defineher. Forms the BOP, works with Batman and makes a real difference as Oracle.She’s still angry a lot, bitter but she’s learned to work through it, channelher feelings into positive manners. She’s warm and comforting to those underher wing, an unofficial mom/big sister but a vicious storm to those she fights.

Jason- Jason was a street rat from day one. He grew up incrime alley with a criminal father and an addict mother, he learned to be toughand survive and fight dirty. But despite everything, he still avoided doingmuch crime himself and maintained a good heart. Despite this he has angerissues and insecurities and fears of being just what everyone said he was.Death didn’t help. The Pit scrambled his head, amplified his negative traitsand made him a bit crazy for a while. It calmed down eventually but he’d made alot of enemies and he didn’t regret too much. Through that all, he still caresfor people though, all his murders are done to save people. He’s still bitterwith the batfam, angry about being replaced but he’s tentatively working hisway back in. It’s not easy and they’ll never truly be on good terms, he’s adarker hero now and the Pit still influences him, but he wears the Bat and thatcounts for something.

Tim- Tim’s parents were away a lot as a child so he neverreally developed any bonds. He grew up quiet and alone, honing his intelligencefor lack of anything better to do and a bone deep understanding that he wasn’timportant or worthy of love. He love B&R, looked up to them as heroessaving the city, being important was lowkey obsessed as lonely kids are. Hetook over as Robin, unwillingly at first but then he saw it as an opportunity todo some good in his life, help people. He didn’t think he’d last. As a Robin hewas quiet and contemplative, always hung back and observed rather than jumpingin. Prone to depression and extreme anxiety. Probably the closest to B butstill very warm and friendly, he put everyone else before himself. He gainedsome confidence and grew into himself. When things turned bad, Tim nearlycrumbled. His eternal hope and optimism was darkened and made smaller. It madehim harsher, more willing to bend, not break, the rules. He became more self-reliantbecause people let him down and he won’t make that mistake again. Bitter still,but underneath he’s still that lonely boy who just wanted to help but he coversit with meticulously plans and calculated moves.

Cass- It took Cass a while to learn how to be a personinstead of a weapon. She hated herself and what she’d done (been forced to do)as a child. She was wandering, aimless until Batman found her and gave her backher purpose. Batgirl is so fulfilling for her, to use her skills for goodinstead of hurting people. She’s very kind, she doesn’t want to hurt but shealso will fight against those who do wrong. Very out of touch with culture andpeople in general, especially because she can’t read/write and doesn’t speakwell either. It makes her feel isolated but she tries to move past that. Very curious,loves to explore new things and meet people. Confident in herself but like haveyou seen Cass, she’s every bit as skilled as she insinuates. Loves her newfamily to death would do anything for them. Falls in love with beauty, sheloves dance because it’s a chance to use her natural body reading and movementsto make something beautiful instead of deadly.

Stephanie- Steph is a bit of a wild child, a normal kid but incrediblybrazen, even more so than most teens. When she starts as Spoiler, she reallydidn’t understand the risks and what she was getting into. But as she gotdeeper into the hero gig, she learned how treacherous and demanding it is butshe fell in love with the rush and feeling of accomplishment and also Robin.She wanted to be helpful too, she wanted to feel important and on top becausefor all of her life, she’s just been Cluemaster’s stupid kid. Bubbly but not tothe point of ignorance. She’s happy because she chooses to be and not let theworld drag her down. But it covers a bitter mean steak. Has a mean punch andwill take down anyone threatening or demeaning her. She’s angry at her dad, atTim, at Bruce, at Gotham for how things went down. But she took a page fromBarbara’s book and squared her shoulders, looked her troubles in the eye andsaid fuck off. Very open and playful because if she gives in to all thehardships in her life, that would feel too much like losing.

Damian- Damian was raised a killer but, more importantly, hewas raised to be Batman’s downfall and to eventually become Ra’s vessel. He’sarrogant and rude and doesn’t think he needs anyone. But time with the Batstells him that he doesn’t know everything and the way he was raised wasn’t thebest thing. Dick absolutely changes him; he looks up so much to the acrobat andactively tries to change for him. But changing comes naturally, he develops hiscompassion and builds a relationship within the family and a connection withRobin. He really comes to enjoy this new family and life but he’s insecure andterrified that it will all get taken away: Robin and his family and he’ll besent back to the League. He’s afraid that no one will see that he’s changed or,worse, that he really hasn’t. Covers his fears with sass and false bravado, ‘fakingit until making it’ so to speak. He’s still angry and more violent but he’sworking hard against those ingrained ideas. Feels a strong connection withanimals because they trust him and don’t judge him for his past. Awkwardlyformal and uncomfortable with people, especially kids. He was never allowed tobe a kid himself so he’s very mature but also aching for love and attention.

Also throwing in this bad boy for relationships between the fam, hope that helps!

#batman asks #character meta

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dustedmagazine · 5 years

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Why Brecht Now? Vol. III: Ute Lemper sings “Nanna’s Lied”

“Nanna’s Lied” originally appeared as a song in Brecht’s Die Rundköpfe und die Spitzköpfe [The Roundheads and the Pointyheads], a broadly satiric anti-Nazi play first staged in Copenhagen in 1936, directed by Ruth Berlau. Die Rundköpfe… featured music by Hans Eisler, Brecht’s frequent collaborator following the crescendo of the legal fireworks the effectively ended his relationship with Kurt Weill. By 1930 Brecht and Weill were no longer working together; of the dissolution of their partnership, Weill famously quipped, “I couldn’t set the Manifesto of the Communist Party to music.”

Whatever the state of their personal and political differences, Weill loved the lyric to “Nanna’s Lied.” He created an alternate musical arrangement for the song, and legend has it that he gave it to his wife Lotte Lenya, whose interpretations of the Brecht/Weill songbook helped popularize the men’s work outside of northern Europe.

But perhaps the best performance of Weill’s version of the song was recorded by Ute Lemper, on Ute Lemper Sings Kurt Weill, released in the U.S. in 1988. Below find Lemper’s performance, Brecht’s lyrics in German and in an English translation (as performed by Frankie Armstrong), and lastly my thoughts on the song and Lemper’s rendition.

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Nanna’s Lied

Meine Herren, mit siebsehn Jahren Kam ich auf den Liebesmarkt Und ich habe viel gefahren. Böses gab es viel Doch das war das Spiel Aber manches hab’ ich doch verargt. (Schliesslich bin ich ja auch ein Mensch.)

Gott sei Dank geht alles schnell vorüber Auch die Liebe und der Kummer sogar. Wo sind die Tränen von gestern abend? Wo is die Schnee vom vergangenen Jahr?

Freilich geht man mit den Jahren Leichter auf den Liebesmarkt Und umarmt sie dort in Scharen. Aber das Gefühl Wird erstaunlich kühl Wenn man damit allzuwenig kargt. (Scheisslich geht ja jeder Vorrat zu Ende.)

Gott sei Dank geht alles schnell vorüber Auch die Liebe und der Kummer sogar. Wo sind die Tränen von gestern abend? Wo is die Schnee vom vergangenen Jahr?

Und auch wen man gut das Handeln Lernte auf der Liebesmess’: Lust in Kleingeld zu verwandeln Ist doch niemals leicht. Nun, es wird erreicht. Doch man wird auch älter unterdes. (Schleisslich bleibt man ja nicht immer siebzehn.)

Gott sei Dank geht alles schnell vorüber Auch die Liebe und der Kummer sogar. Wo sind die Tränen von gestern abend? Wo is die Schnee vom vergangenen Jahr?

[At 17 I went to market: The market where what’s sold is love They tell me it was good experience Much was bad, god knows That’s the way it goes Sometimes I told them just where to go (After all, I’m only human)

God be praised, it all will soon be over Love included, the heartache and fear Where are the tears we shed last evening? Where are the snows of yesteryear?

Yes, you learn to play that market With increased facility! You’re handing out embraces wholesale Though you get the pay Feelings fade away If you hand them out too generously (After all, every supply runs out)

God be praised, it all will soon be over Love included: the heartache and fear Where are the tears we shed last evening? Where are the snows of yesteryear?

Study as you may that market Haggle as you also may You’re selling kisses, and for peanuts Easy? No they ain’t! Still I’ve no complaint Though we don’t get younger day by day (After all, one can’t stay 17 forever)

God be praised, it all will soon be over Love included: the heartache and fear Where are the tears we shed last evening? Where are the snows of yesteryear?]

By the time Die Rundköpfe… was first staged, Brecht had theorized his theatrical praxis of Verfremdungseffekt, or “defamiliarization effect.” You can hear it at work throughout Eisler’s version of “Nanna’s Lied”: the comically jaunty tone of the verses gives way to the introspective first line of the refrain, then collapses into the abject longing summed in the refrain’s last line, which Brecht cribbed from Villon. It’s an exhaustingly varied performance of affect, culminating in the multiple ironies of the prostitute’s nostalgia for the crystalline purity of snowfall; the thematic upshot, one supposes, is that Nanna has just cooly rehearsed for us the dangers of reified sexuality, in which passion must be studied and kisses must be calculated. A prostitute is in a position to know, and to crack a joke or two about it. We laugh when we should reject her cynicism, our hearts swell when we should recoil. It’s Brecht at his ruthlessly clever best.

Weill’s version of the song smooths away many of those jarring transitions. The tone is more consistent. Lemper’s lissome alto builds slowly through the verses, winding silkily into the first two lines of the refrain, and then finding a more vivid intensity as Nanna’s attention drifts toward vague remembrance: “Wo sind die Tränen von gestern abend? / Wo is die Schnee vom vergangenen Jahr?” For some reason, while listening to Lemper, I see Nanna abed after her trick has left. She’s enervated, sweat cooling on skin and sheets. Weill’s arrangement invites such a vision; his is a more deliberate arrangement than Eisler’s acrobatics. The Eisler version for me summons Nanna on the street, under the public eye, still needing to ply her knowing, hyperbolized performance of manufactured desire. That these two scenarios can be evoked by the same song demonstrates the forceful logic of Brecht’s lyrics. Whatever the setting, the song’s defamiliarization inevitably does its work. Nanna’s misery and alienation are its manifest realities.

Of course, none of that solves the riddle of the refrain. Why is Nanna so nostalgic? If she wants to conjure the vivid intensities of love long past, why does she think of tears so recently shed, why the cold of snow? Likely that’s more Brechtian defamiliarization. When we romanticize (as all nostalgia does), we tend to emphasize what’s readily recognizable as warm and lovable. We fall back upon the goods in our culture’s storehouse of stereotyped images. The images that Nanna invokes come from a different inventory—perhaps her own, which has been subject to the dehumanizing effects of her labor. Those of us in the audience, settled in seats and in the theater’s warmth, know nothing of her pain, and Brecht wants to shatter any superficial identification or bourgeois “sympathies” for her plight. Such ideologically constructed psychological reactions can only dampen the force of the Real. They distort.

Accounts of Brecht’s own life have been subject to significant romanticization and distortion. Some claim him a propagandist for Stalinism, citing as evidence that Brecht was one of the few intellectuals to voluntarily live in the G.D.R., which offered him a residence in East Berlin and the resources to establish the Berliner Ensemble. Others claim him a life-long Marxist and indefatigable critic of capital’s evils and excesses. Both generalizations are tin-eared to the complexity of his work, and blind to the even more volatile distinctions between the writing and the man. It’s true that he found a home in East Berlin, after years on the run through Scandinavia, a doomed few years in America and a subpoenaed appearance before the H.U.A.C., which demonstrated that the U.S.A.’s claims to political freedom were (and are) largely hollow sloganeering. But Brecht never joined the East German Communist Party, and the only consistent political element in the plays, poems and essays of the last two decades of his life was a fiery contempt for fascism.

Given our historical vantage, it’s hard not to subject Lemper’s version of “Nanna’s Lied” to similar retrospective distortion. 1988 is tantalizingly close to the collapse of the Soviet Union and, more urgently, the celebratory destruction of the Berlin Wall. By the late 1980s, East Berlin had become a hive of brutally repressive Staasi activity, political paranoia and economic desperation. Portions of East Germany’s populace spilled into Hungary and Poland, as Soviet dominance of the region began to show cracks. Pressure was building. We think of that time and feel the tide of history turning—but that’s a tendentious misremembering. In June 1987, Reagan’s Brandenburg Gate speech still recognized the Wall as an entrenched symbol and dangerous barrier. On 9 October 1989, barely a month before the Wall’s fall, East German officials granted police and military forces permission to shoot at the demonstrators gathering nightly on the Alexanderplatz. No outcome seemed certain. The world was on fire.

We also occupy a period of intense crisis—the world is on fire. The specifics are different, but the scale is similar to the Cold War’s geopolitical totality, and to the late-1930s global fascist moment. And our language and inventory of historical knowledge is currently subject to tremendous distortion. To say “socialist” today is to summon cartoon phantoms of Stalin, even Hitler. A Vermonter who has continuously served in the U.S. Congress since 1991 is called a “radical.” The Democratic Party is derided as “leftist.” Never mind that the D.N.C. and nearly every Democratic candidate for the presidency are complicit in neoliberal corporate capitalist interests (save, perhaps, that aforementioned guy from Vermont). Never mind that upon achieving power the Nazi Party privatized massive sectors of the German government, especially social services, banking and transport infrastructures. Never mind that the rise of Hitler in Germany sent leftist thinkers and radicals—like Brecht and Adorno and Horkheimer—into exile, to save their very lives.

For some, our contemporary crisis is best answered by the charms of a M.A.G.A. hat, with its implied longing for a past America, some romanticized time of freedom and plenty that, we are told, Trumpism can bring back. When, precisely, that period of greatness existed is less important than the shared conviction that it was. There’s a quality of vagueness to the nostalgia. A vapid blankness. A whiteness. Where are the snows of yesteryear?

Nostalgia doesn’t want to recognize the ugliness upon which America’s putative greatness was constructed—the relations of economic exploitation that opened the way to massive wealth production, and the equally massive cynicism that governed its distribution and investment. Nanna lives in the abject space that sort of cynicism requires, her body among the thousands upon thousands that labor and barely survive by making daily calculations: how much of my humanity can I surrender today to live through to tomorrow? Black bodies, brown bodies, workers’ bodies, women’s bodies—in Brecht’s Weimar Germany and in the 1930s Jim Crow South; in East Berlin and in El Salvador in the 1980s; in concentration camps, behind barbed wire then and now. Right now. Someone is making the calculation, trading in the market for bare life. Listen to Nanna. She’ll tell you.

Jonathan Shaw

#why brecht now #Dusted magazine #feature #ute lemper #jonathan shaw #bertold brecht #kurt weill

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med20 · 5 years

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In 1993, Ruth Riechl, the new restaurant critic for the New York Times, penned a memorable review of Sirio Maccioni’s elegant Manhattan restaurant Le Cirque (which closed, at least temporarily, in January 2018). Riechl described two distinct experiences she had at the establishment, first as an anonymous diner, then as a recognized Times food critic; in the first instance, she received a bad seat after a long wait, was treated rudely, then served food that was (relatively) mediocre. But once she was recognized as a VIP, she was duly treated like royalty – felicitous seating, solicitous service, and sublime food. In presenting these experiences together, Riechl highlighted both the typical meal experience of most diners as well as the transcendent experience that was possible. (I went to Le Cirque in the mid-80s to celebrate my high school graduation, in my pre-low-carb days; while I can’t remember where we sat, the food, particularly the legendary potato-wrapped bass, was delicious).

It occurred to me that in many ways, innovation at large pharmas can be experienced very similarly – so often, disappointing and stifling, but occasionally, under the right circumstances, transformative and elating.

This dual-nature of pharma innovation may explain both why so many innovators are repelled by large pharma companies, yet some – including those focused on digital and data – are deliberately seeking out opportunities in these corporations.

In contrast to big drug companies, the appeal of startups is easy to understand – the self-actualization, the sense that your individual contribution not only matters but is essential, the feeling of David vs Goliath, the allure of significant upside, both in terms of impact (disruption, making the world a better place, etc.) and financial return. You can really get a good feel for this by watching the HBO Theranos movie, The Inventor, where you can see how so many people were drawn to the startup for this powerful combination of reasons. According to this documentary at least, Theranos offered all these elements, lacking only an actual, functional product and an achievable plan to create one. (My thoughts on Carreyrou's Theranos book, Bad Blood, are here.)

What’s interesting to me is the increasing number of well-trained, innovative people I seem to be running into, particularly on the digital and data side, who are coming to large companies after spending time in health tech startups, not because they’ve somehow given up on their dreams, but rather because, in some ways, they’re more serious about them, and are seeking more than the superficial accouterments of tech startups (so brutally described in Disrupted, by Dan Lyons). Moreover, these innovators are joining large companies with eyes wide open; they recognize the very real, and highly problematic challenges large companies have with agility and decision-making. Nevertheless, it seems like these innovators (at least the few I’ve met) hunger for the chance to really make a difference in the application of tech to health and drug discovery and development, to work towards a result not twitter-worthy but FDA-worthy, in the context of a well-resourced and credible organization capable of responsibly delivering it.

(Disclosure/reminder: as a corporate VC, I arguably have a foot in both pharma and startup camps.)

The Bad News

First, the bad news. The equivalent to entering Le Cirque as an anonymous patron in 1993 is joining pharma and trying to innovate against the grain. Everything is arrayed against you.

Large organizations tend to be remarkably risk-adverse, essentially because they have an established, successful enterprise and generally worry more about the downside risk of any given opportunity then the upside possibility it could represent. The implicit calculation is pretty simple: one screw-up could bring the whole organization down, while one striking success is unlikely to move the needle all that much. In contrast, startups tend to have very little to lose, and if they’re lucky and/or good, a lot to gain – hence their view of risk is quite different.

To be sure, in most large organizations, no one wants to inhibit innovation -- at least not explicitly. Innovation, like failure, is something to publicly cherish and visibly celebrate – the kind of thing that’s abstractly good for an organization to value, but generally not needed or welcome in your operational group, where you’re already plenty busy trying to get defined tasks completed, thank you very much.

But even if you’re skeptical about innovative proposals, to operate successfully in large, highly matrixed organization, you need to maintain generally cordial relationships with as many people as possible. The result is what I first wrote about in 2011, when a senior pharma executive who had recently transitioned to industry from a top Harvard hospital remarked to me that:

“his greatest shock upon joining the business world, the thing he was least prepared for, wasn’t the business vocabulary, the timelines, the quarterly expectations of wall street analysts – none of the above. Instead, it was dealing with the passive aggressive behavior he discovered everywhere around him.”

It’s a phenomenon I’ve described as “innovation dissipation,” where no one explicitly says “no” to a new idea, it just winds up ping-ponging through an organization until it eventually peters out.

Recently, a colleague offered what I thought was an astute explanation for this phenomenon: “Why spend political capital saying ‘no?’” he asked me. He’s right. The savviest, most senior players in complex organizations seem especially adept at this, politely taking meetings and pursing their lips while listening thoughtfully, and then suggesting several follow-up meetings they know full well aren’t likely to lead anywhere.

It turns out, there’s even a phrase for this mindset: “trust the process.” This may not have started out as cynical in spirit, but in practice, in a large organization, it basically means let the process play out, and don’t try to rock the boat by interfering. The result – as Safi Bahcall brutally describes in Loonshots (my WSJ review here, and my more detailed discussion of this exact point here) – is a culture where everyone is highly attuned to the (perceived) views of those at the apex of the hierarchy, and original, orthogonal, or non-incremental perspectives will struggle to be heard. That’s the system, and often the fate of bottom-up innovation within it.

At this point, would be innovators out there might be ready to don their Allbirds, sling their Herschel backpacks over their shoulders, grab their Sightglass lattes, and head off the to closest WeWork.

Not so fast. I’ve recently spoken with several health tech innovators who actually did something more or less like this early in their careers, then quite deliberately choose to take their talents to large pharma companies with many of the liabilities enumerated above. What were they thinking?

The Good News: The Three Rs

Turns out that, like VIPs dining at Le Cirque, innovators who find themselves aligned with and integrated into pharma strategy may be treated to an exceptional experience. According to several such well-situated innovators, large, incumbent companies have a lot going for them; in particular: resources, redundancy, and results.

The resource aspect is fairly obvious: when a large company truly commits to a particular strategy, approach, or technology, they are able to pursue this goal in a deep, remarkably thorough way, deploying people, capital, and leveraging (as well as acquiring) institutional know-how. Example: a few months ago, I heard a senior pharma oncology leader describe the way they were approaching a particular category of high-priority targets, and it was mind-blowing in scope, staggeringly comprehensive. Multiple options were systematically evaluated at almost every step in the process – truly the “mutually exclusive, collectively exhaustive (MECE)” concept applied to a particular area of biological discovery. Offerings from many startups were considered at each of these stages, and it was hard not to be struck by the observation that while a small company could potentially optimize one particular solution or approach, the large pharma could effectively afford to choose from among these to pick the best one.

The second, often underappreciated aspect that several innovators kept returning to is the redundancy and depth you see in big pharma; I was regaled with stories of how, in startups, you often have only a single person in a key area like legal or regulatory, and you are disproportionately dependent on their expertise, not only in terms of what they know, but also their ability to recognize their own gaps. Obviously, there is a huge emphasis in startups in hiring excellent people, but in many ways, startups operate largely without a net, a precarious situation which can, and often does, prove disastrous to young companies.

The last, and in some ways most important difference between startups and large companies is that at the end of the day, many startups just need to look promising enough to justify an acquisition or an IPO – sizzle with the promise of steak. But at a large company, the buck stops with you in many ways; your business depends not on the glamor or glitz of an emerging technology, but on actually getting it to work, and getting it to market. Thus a buzzy startup like Stemcentrx could make billions for its investors, yet ultimately fail in the hands of the pharma company who acquired it and tried to bring the products to market. The jury still seems to be out for the early CAR-T companies (including Juno, acquired by Celgene [itself acquired by BMS], and Kite, acquired by Gilead). (Disclosure: my wife works at Gilead though not in oncology.)

Just as academia tends to attract researchers who pursue novel science, and biotech startups often attract researchers keen to turn raw science into promising therapeutics, pharma attracts many researchers with the determination and patience to see raw science and promising therapeutics through to approval and into the clinic. Their mission is achieving clinical impact at scale, and it’s a powerful draw for some innovators.

Bottom Line

Pharmas are attractive for innovators pursuing approaches that are strongly endorsed by senior leadership and reasonably welcomed by the operational areas of the organization. The way some pharmas are working through the complex supply-chain logistics required for delivering CAR-T therapy or gene therapy at scale offer striking examples.

On the other hand, pharma organizations generally prioritize caution over agility, and incremental change over radical new approaches. Thus even innovation welcomed by the C-suite (like a lot of the original digital and data efforts) can run into the grindstone when those in the trenches can’t see the benefit, and experience only burden.

In general, large pharmas, like other big companies, are likely to remain generally resistant to profound innovation, though they will embrace and really go after specific opportunities they view as adequately validated or promising. Such traction requires explicitly endorsement and constant, active support from the top echelons of management if the approach is to even have a chance. Meanwhile, detached innovation initiatives reliably garner transient publicity but tend to achieve little durable organizational impact.

There’s likely a considerable opportunity to harness the many bottom-up innovative ideas to which pharma seems constitutively unable to respond; the robust startup ecosystem offers an attractive alternative or salvage pathway for some but not all of these promising approaches.

#Digital Pharma #DigPharm #SXSH #Health Innovation #Digital Health #Big Pharma

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sexassaultnormalizationinme-blog · 5 years

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How Gender Influences Sexual Assault in Movies and TV

We’ve all heard the term “film noir”, a filmmaking style that is defined by Brittanica as being “characterized by such elements as cynical heroes, stark lighting effects, frequent use of flashbacks, intricate plots, and an underlying existentialist philosophy” (brittanica.com). Double Indemnity, The Big Sleep, They Live By Night, as well as many other popular films fall within this category. Often times films that are given the title of “noir” are viewed as a more artistic venture than just your average movie. As a result, Lindsay Steenberg, argues in her article, “The Fall and Television Noir”, that television shows often “use noir as a legitimation strategy, often to excuse prurient stories of sexualized violence” (Steenberg 58). This article looks in particular at the 2013 BBC series The Fall, however Steenberg insists that this trend is very prevalent in many other television series.

Many classic “noir” titles rely heavily on the trope of the femme fatale. These female characters are usually portrayed as being strong and dangerous women who are extremely open and love to explore their sexuality. In more modern TV and film however, the homme fatale is making a bigger appearance. The homme fatale is described as “enigmatic, duplitious, and destructive. . . an exciting mixture of cool calculation, manipulative, charm, and deep-rooted sexual sadism” (Spicer 89). The creators of The Fall pride themselves in being a feminist TV show. They credit their use of a female as a strong and intelligent detective as their statement that women can do anything men can. Many feminist scholars however have a big problem with this statement. One of the main characters, Paul Spector, plays a sexual predator. Paul however is depicted as a homme fatale. Lisa Coulthard argues that “the series thwarts this self-reflexivity and diegetic critique of voyeurism through its representation of sexualized violence and its own fascination with the killer’s good looks and fit body, his psychology, and his family life” (Steenberg 60).

( https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/1527476416664185 )

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We’ve all seen, or at least heard of the 1984 film, Sixteen Candles. Jake Ryan, the beautiful senior boy is the physical embodiment of a homme fatale. As the movie opens, he is dating Caroline, a beautiful senior girl who parties hard and is portrayed to be a little bit promiscuous. When Jake starts to develop feeling for nerdy sophomore, Samantha, he begins to despise Caroline. The film however makes it seem okay that Jake is treating his longtime girlfriend like crap because “she has breasts, and she drinks. She’s potentially a little bit sluttty” (Grady 2018). One night at a party she gets drunk and passes out in Jake’s room, a place where she has presumably been many times and feels safe. When Jake sees this he comments, “I could violate her 10 different ways if I wanted to” (Grady 2018). However, Jake has become tired of Caroline and would rather pay attention to Sam. So, Jake hands Caroline off to Ted, as if she’s an object that can be handed from one person to the other. Ted is a geek who is not at all experienced with girls, so in this moment, he, his supporting characters, and even the audience, are hoping that maybe he’ll finally get his chance, even if the girl is unconscious. He has his friends take pictures of him with Caroline’s body like she is a prop to be used in a photoshoot. The next morning, she wakes up where she is told the pair had sex the night before. Ted asks her if she enjoyed it and she responds with, “you know, I have this weird feeling I did” (Grady 2018).

As Grady outlines in her Vox article about sexual assault portrayals in the 1980s, ultimately, “ Caroline had sex she didn’t consent to, and the movie expects its audience to respond to that development with righteous glee” (Grady 2018). This unnecessary plot line teaches its audience many different, extremely harmful, lessons about rape. To begin, it supports the claim that girls who party, drink, and wear revealing clothes are asking to be sexually assaulted, therefore when she does get raped, she does not have the right to complain about it (Grady 2018). It also makes it seem as though every boy deserves a girl (Grady 2018). There are plenty of girls who do not have much luck with guys but nobody tries to hand a boy to them, because that is simply not how sex works. Sam was that nerdy girl who did not get guys. Nobody handed her Jake, he came to her willingly and consensually. Next it teaches girls that they need to have an in with the guys in order to avoid being sexually assaulted (Grady 2018). If their surrounding male friends approve of them, they will not be taken advantage of. It is only the girls who are not liked by men that will be harmed. It is important to note however that even though men like you at one point, does not mean that that approval will not be taken away from you (Grady 2018). Therefore, it is in your best interest to remain invested in the well-being of your male friends, in whatever way that may be, to assure that you will not be sexually assaulted by their friends. Grady also points out that it is not only bad guys who are partaking in this kind of behavior. Good guys are also perpetrating these crimes, but their reputation as a good guy will not be taken from them (Grady 2018).

( https://www.vox.com/culture/2018/9/27/17906644/sixteen-candles-rape-culture-1980s-brett-kavanaugh )

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The television show Mad Men is best known for their toxic relationship between men and women in the workplace. Within the show, “men loudly assess women’s bodies in the corridors and secretaries cry in the bathroom” (Press 2018). It may seem ironic then that the creator of the show, Matthew Weiner, has been accused of making the same sort of workplace advances that his scum of the earth characters are seen doing weekly. In November 2017, Kate Gordon, Weiner’s former assistant and a writer on seasons two and three of Mad Men, accused the man of telling her during a late-night writing marathon, that “she owed it to him to let him see her naked” (Press 2018). Weiner does not deny these accusations but says that he does not remember saying this line to Gordon. Marti Noxon, a consulting producer on Mad Men tweeted that Weiner had created “the kind of atmosphere where a comment like ‘you owe it to me to show me your naked body’ may – or may not- be a joke. And it may –or may not- lead to a demotion or even the end of a career” (Press 2018). It seems that the male dominated and sexist workplace environment that Weiner created on screen is the same sort of place that he created at his own job. This is just a perfect example of how life imitates art.

( https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2018/09/matthew-weiner-romanoffs-in-the-mirror )

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Works Cited Grady, Constance. “The Rape Culture of the 1980s, Explained by Sixteen Candles.” Vox.com, Vox Media, 27 Sept. 2018, www.vox.com/culture/2018/9/27/17906644/sixteen-candles-rape-culture-1980s-brett-kavanaugh.

Press, Joy. “Matthew Weiner in the Mirror.” The Hive, Vanity Fair, 30 Sept. 2018, www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2018/09/matthew-weiner-romanoffs-in-the-mirror.

Steenberg, Lindsay. “The Fall and Television Noir.” Television & New Media, vol. 18, no. 1, 2016, pp. 58–75., doi:10.1177/1527476416664185.

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wbayne · 6 years

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Your Boss Wants You to Be Happier. This Is Not a Good Thing.

Work often sucks. Broadly speaking, people have agreed upon that idea since the first time someone did some crap he or she didnâ€™t want to do because they needed the dough. Ah, but bosses and corporations are a bunch of sneaky (and increasingly sophisticated) Petes, and in his fascinating, somewhat depressing new book The Happiness Industry, English sociologist and economist William Davies uncovers and deconstructs the ways in which our workplace masters have turned to science and measurement to influence theirÂ employees'Â happiness â€” which takes a regular beating from institutional factors (poor work-life balance; intense competition) that these same bigwigs aren't nearly as interested in examining or changing.Â

Deeply researched and pithily argued, Davies's work is a welcome corrective to the glut of semi-scientific happiness books that have become so popular in business and management circles, and which rarely, if ever, acknowledge the larger ideological goals of workplace well-being. Science of Us spoke with the author about the pitfalls of the quantified life, why it's important to be misunderstood, and Google's insidious Jolly Good Fellow.

You lay out in the book all these different ways that corporations have become increasingly attentive to employee happiness and well-being: everything from giving out gym memberships to engaging in biophysical monitoring. You also say that, in the long historical view, caring whether or not your employee is happy is a relatively recent phenomenon. Isnâ€™t a shift toward happiness a good thing? It seems like you see some nefarious dynamics behind it. Yeah, I understand that to be critical of any suggested move towards happiness is to put oneself in an absurd situation, but the problem is that the drive toward happiness is the result of a set of power relations that are both potentially manipulative and slightly clandestine. What the book is trying to do is bring some of this to the surface, because it's better that people are aware of the strategies that are shaping their environment.

Like what? The rise of wearable technology is something to be worried about. There's potential for managers to track the movements and behavior and stress levels of their employees. That in itself is not malignant, but itâ€™s often presented as being purely for everyoneâ€™s benefit, and thatâ€™s just not the case.

Whatâ€™s an example of how itâ€™s not beneficial? If you talk to people at companies like Jawbone and Fitbit, one of the things they say is â€œeverybody wants to live a better life.â€ Of course the way that they say you should achieve that is to quantify your existence. Where things get tricky is when existence becomes inextricable from work. Thereâ€™s the idea that how we feel about our work and how we feel about the rest of our lives is intertwined. So workplace well-being strategies often include emotional counseling, nutritional advice, all this stuff which suggests no separation between what we do at work and how we are as human beings in some broader sense. The irony is that work often creates the conditions that lead to the unhappiness.

Because work has become all-encompassing? Yes, among other things. Long-hour cultures, a dominant highly competitive ethos, people striving to outdo each other or outdo themselvesâ€”thatâ€™s what creates a lot of the stress that then needs to be alleviated through things like meditation and mindfulness. All the workplace happiness gurus ever say is, "we need to teach more happiness habits to people." Theyâ€™re not saying, â€œWe need to reform workplaces.â€Â

Itâ€™s like if someone was punching you in the face and their idea for how you might feel better about that situation is for you to learn to take a punch better, rather than they stop punching you in the face. Does my convoluted metaphor capture what you mean?

Yeah, I think thatâ€™s right. You know, a lot of the early efforts to affect and measure happiness come out of what's called the Social Indicators Movement, which is associated with things like humanist psychology and began in the 1960s. There was this idea that the human being should flourish and grow and enjoy the simple things in life. But when you extend that idea, it potentially puts quite a critical bite on the excesses of market competition and materialism.

Has there been any backlash to that notion? I think what's happening now, which is a countervailing force to a more humanist approach. Neuroscience and happiness economics are repositioning our understanding of happiness as something physical and chemical that happens in the brain, and are interested in things like how happiness manifests itself in terms of, for example, vocal inflection or facial monitoring. There's a company called Beyond Verbal that measures happiness by your tone of voice, and then that information is used to, say, direct telesales so that you can alter your sales pitch accordingly.

But the underlying point Iâ€™m trying to make with all this is that businesses are increasingly taking a cynical economic view of how emotion is triggered, altered, monitored, and then integrated into managerial and marketing-type strategies. Thereâ€™s no room for happiness for happinessâ€™s sake. Itâ€™s all understood in the context of workplace efficiency.

The idea that human beings might treat happiness as a scientific problem meant to be â€œsolvedâ€ feels like something out of a dystopian sci-fi movie. Well, the issue, or one of them, is that work society is organized around the logic of behavioral scientists: You have the majority of people going about their day-to-day life and a very small group of experts who observe and then come up with the facts of whatâ€™s really going on. That way of thinking is not just true of happiness science, itâ€™s true of things like behavioral economics, too. Weâ€™ve arrived at this moment where thereâ€™s this utopian expectation that there is a scientific answer to questions like â€œwhat makes an employee happy?â€

Do you think Americans have different expectations about workplace enjoyment than people from other countries? It always seemed absurd to me that itâ€™s not enough for us to just do the job, but weâ€™re supposed to demonstrate pleasure in doing it â€” especially in jobs that arenâ€™t even public-facing. Why? Itâ€™s hard to imagine, I donâ€™t know, the French or Russians feeling obligated to evince pleasure at engaging in work-for-pay. Differing cultural attitudes toward work could be the topic of a whole other fat book. But there is a sense in America that if you donâ€™t love your work then youâ€™re not striving properly. One of the bits in the book where I address this a little is in relation to the Chicago school of neoliberal economics.

I hate those ding-dongs. [Laughs.] I think theyâ€™re misunderstood at times. It strikes me that what the Chicago school really believed in wasnâ€™t actually markets. Everyone thinks they were the market fundamentalists, but really what they believed in was the American spirit of refusing to accept defeat in various respects, which is associated with an old-world class consciousness â€” whereas America has a new-world entrepreneurial consciousness. The way in which neoliberalism worked as an ideology so successfully was in the way it shackled the vision of the entrepreneur to a 1960s version of individual flourishing.

That sounds like a bad mix for workers. What you get is the very clichÃ©d new economy worker who is keeping up with football and loving every minute of it, but also working a 16-hour day.

How do you keep an employee feeling engaged for 16 hours a day?

I donâ€™t know the answer to that, but I do know that businesses are keenly aware that the costs of disengagement are dramatic. Gallup does a huge amount of work on the issue of employee disengagement, and they say that something like less than 20 percent of the U.S. workforce is actually psychologically engaged, and they calculate the cost of that employee disengagement to the U.S. economy as a remarkable 500 billion dollars per year.

And that cost causes business to think of happiness as a form of labor capital? Yes, which is why companies are doing things like appointing Chief Happiness Officers. Iâ€™m not sure what this person does exactly, but Google has something they call a Jolly Good Fellow, who goes around the company spreading happiness and mindfulness to try and combat the mental impact of living a 24/7 work-life. Google is always held up as the exampleÂ par excellenceÂ of this kind of thing worker well-being, with their amazing free lunch service and the endless perks and so on. Again, itâ€™s difficult to be against that, but itâ€™s about building a workplace culture that says you have to put your entire self to work, and therefore the company has to kind of nurture the entire person.

Itâ€™s not enough anymore that you bring your particular skills, that you come in and put your work hat on and then leave and take your work hat off. This goes back to digital technology â€” I donâ€™t think that all managers are exploiters who want their employees to be plugged into work all the time, but very few places are introducing institutional norms and practices to stop that from happening.

It seems to me that with increased measurement of, and attention to, employee happiness, what happens is that the burden of well-being really ends up falling on the individual rather than the company. Because then these places can say, â€œHey, weâ€™ve got wellness expert on-staff, but youâ€™re still not happy. So you have to go, and itâ€™s your own fault.â€ Absolutely. This is also an American phenomenon. There are these people, these corporate happiness experts like Tony Hsieh, who's the CEO of Zappos [and author of Delivering Happiness] â€” his recommendations are some of the most brutal. He basically just advocates laying off the least happy 10 percent of your workforce. This is when happiness gets repositioned as a business resource, and it's up to each of us to either invest in it or let it depreciate, and if the latter happens, you become extraneous. That attitude renders happiness into something completely joyless.

It's happiness as an economic investment. Itâ€™s blaming unhappy people for being unhappy. The origin of the word happiness comes from happenstance â€” something that just falls on you unexpectedly. When you look at happiness as a form of capital, weâ€™ve gotten pretty far away from that original meaning.

Isnâ€™t that also an inversion of how economics historically treats happiness? I think so, because instead of it being an output of the market, it's an input. Since the late 19th century, economics has been interested in whether our purchasing decisions bring us pleasure or not. The underlying assumption of neoclassical economics is that the way we spend our money is an indicator of what might cause utility or pleasure. The management trends now are to see happiness as the opposite â€” something that we bring to work and run down and then have to build it up again. It doesn't correspond to any ordinary understanding of what happiness means to people.Â

Okay, this is all a giant drag. Itâ€™s not likely that corporations will suddenly decide that decreasing the work week is going to be a happiness method that fits in with their larger economic goals. So is the future of workplace happiness necessarily grim? So one of the things that I argue quite strongly in the book is that we've developed a society that's become more and more expert at being able to detect and monitor the notion of happiness, and yet the question of, "Why do you feel like that?" is no longer really a question that we really ask. Thatâ€™s what psychoanalysis was interested in â€” the effort to try and understand happiness and unhappiness, not just monitor it and measure it. Thatâ€™s what the new frontier of happiness research is abandoning.

We need to recover from that and actually listen to people when they tell us what theyâ€™re feeling. Weâ€™ve become dislocated from our emotions. We think of them as like blood-pressure levels or something. I think it might be idealistic, but we should aim for more democratic types of workplaces, where people can actually voice what's bothering them and be listened to and dealt with rather than be given a tool that will monitor their facial muscles or a survey that says "How do you feel on a scale of 1 to 10?" Economists and behavioral scientists too often say â€œpeople think they know why they do what they do, but theyâ€™re wrong.â€ That, to me, is a problem.

I think in that â€œwrongâ€ is where personality and culture and humanity exist. Itâ€™s fundamental! Culture is people telling stories to each other, saying, "I had a bad day today because of this, that, and the other." As a society we're undermining the authority of the explanations that people give about their own lives and their own feelings. Because we're more and more obsessed with detecting the so-called facts about those things.

So the key problem is that happiness and workplace science make a kind of category error about what happiness means to us as individual minds? We're fascinated by the unconscious, but it's an unconscious that well-being experts claim to have some sort of perfect scientific view of. It's not the unconscious that someone like Freud was interested in, which is a much darker, more unruly thing that really only emerges through the messy, ambiguous, flawed tools of human conversation. It doesn't come out through some sort of scientific indicator. There's a neurotic fear that comes with a lot of behavioral science, that if we rely on conversation to understand each other, that we might misunderstand each other, and that that might be disastrous.

When really it's just a part of life. Our relationships go well, they go wrong; politics goes well and politics goes wrong. We have to live within the limits of our understanding of each other, and if you can't cope with the flaws in the human condition, you can't encounter any of the joys either. This desire to live in a fact-based, quantifiable wayÂ â€”itâ€™s actually not what the experience of being a human is about on any deeper, more meaningful level.Â