wait, then where do baby protagonists come from?

I found this quote and the following reaction by Tyler Cowen on his blog puzzling:

In his new book Encounter, Milan Kundera writes:

I was rereading One Hundred Years of Solitude when a strange idea occurred to me: most protagonists of great novels do not have children. Scarcely 1 percent of the world's population are childless, but at least 50 percent of the great literary characters exit the book without having reproduced. Neither Pantagruel, nor Panurge, nor Quixote have any progeny. [...] and Kafka's protagonists, except for the very young Karl Rossmann, who did impregnate a maidservant, but that is the very reason -- to erase the infant from his life -- that he flees to America and the novel can be born. This infertility is not due to a conscious purpose of the novelists; it is the spirit of the arc of the novel (or its subconscious) that spurns procreation.

Toss in Melville and Conrad while you're at it. What I find striking, however, is that contemporary writers seem more likely to give their protagonists children (Roth, Franzen, Updike, for a start, plus the rise of female authors helps this trend). And that is precisely at a time when more people are having no children at all. The decline of the heroic ideal in literature, and the decline of the journey of adventure, seem to be stronger forces in predicting fictional family size.

I find Cowen's comments at the end not really puzzling in themselves, just that he passed on the quote from the book as self-evidently interesting. And maybe there is more after that quote from the book that clears it up, but my reaction to the quote is, "Because Western novels are about people who do shit." In fact Cowen acknowledges that when explaining why there are now fewer childless protagonists: the decline of the novelistic "journey of adventure."

The quote is a good discussion prompt, but not so much because it is so mysterious why protagonists are childless as because there must be like a dozen really good reasons. First in my mind, the Western protagonist is by definition and intent of creation, an exceptional adult, who gets to do interesting things (things normal adults only fantasize about) because of 1)ability, 2) immediate circumstance, 3) larger circumstance (not being hindered absolutely). Parenting hinders absolutely. There are disabilities that might make a novel more interesting, like if the protagonist is narcoleptic, but if he or she has kin, then the whole novel would just be 250 pages of other people yelling "Please! Tammy, you really shouldn't be doing all this novelly shit and need to take your kids to the pool!" Even if the old middle class which birthed the genre of novels could in practice outsource their real-life child-rearing without reprobation, the identity of parenthood interrupts the reader's conception of the protagonist's selfness. It strips them of that nervous intellectual self-concerned energy whereby they will usher the reader onto an absurd testing ground for unpractical ideas.

Second, the Western Protagonist is driven by conflict. Romance and Warfare, for example, are conflicts whose structure and shibboleths are really genetically similar. Other traditional fictional/nonfictional (doesn't make much difference in Western writing because we use the same conventions of narrative for both) other traditional conflicts have large-percentage DNA matches to those. Child-rearing is not just a different animal but a different kingdom, say the plant kingdom. Child-rearing can have drama and triumph, but it is not self-centered. Romance and war build up the ego of the Western protagonist; those make the Western protagonist more heroic by result of conflict. Parenting is not a struggle that makes the ego stronger, it is a process of self-subsumation.

And there are probably more reasons for the childless protagonist, that can be added to that list. But the idea that novels have been devoid of parents as some type of commentary on procreation is silly: novels are devoid of parents because they are incapable of commenting seriously on procreation within the bounds of fictional convention.

Not that this is as it should be: I think you can make a good fiction about a parent and generally there should be more fiction that takes place in a conflict-null universe. I find the prevalence of the Western convention of conflict-centric narrative in fiction and non-fiction a little boring now that I am no longer 16 years old, generally.

Drone attacks and the battle of ideas

These last two weeks there has been increased blog discussion about unmanned drone bombers (summary: we're using more and more of them; we can't figure out what percentage of the people killed by them are civilians, but it's a percentage), and in this very good post by Dominic Tierney about the broader stylistic opposition in the "war on terror" between more impersonalized warfare on our side (robots controlled by off-battlefield joystick wielders) and more super-personalized warfare on the other side (a suicide vest brings a killer closer to his victims than a gun), Tierney provides the following quote which I found interesting:

Rami Khouri, a scholar and editor based in Beirut, described how the Lebanese viewed the Israeli drones in the 2006 war in Lebanon: "the enemy is using machines to fight from afar. Your [Lebanon's] defiance in the face of it shows your heroism, your humanity...The average person [in Lebanon] sees it as just another sign of coldhearted, cruel Israelis and Americans, who are also cowards because they send out machines to fight us."

I find it very easy to sympathize with the conditional attitude expressed here: that, in the face of an enemy (the US) that is so well-off and insulated from death not just as an effect of war but as a property of human existence that it devotes unimaginable resources and innovative power toward staying even more insulated from war (when our human army is already really willing and capable of accomplishing these goals), death is a strength. Which is to say, I can't imagine not having this reaction in my value system if a remote and prosperous enemy were bombing my land with robots. What else would I do? Leave a bitchy blog post and then go order trades of comics about punk-rock zombies? No, I am going to venerate death as strength. And it is precisely that attitude which informs the idea for a potential recruit into extremism that large-scale civilian death attacks ("terrorism") are a legitimate tactic of battling the enemy (the US), on not so much a strategic but a metaphysical level.

At the same time, it is very easy to sympathize with the insulated society's response: their absolute existential antagonism toward the idea that death is an ok thing to make them experience (that one's a no-brainer). The insulated enemy is going to perceive the embrace of the idea of death, that embrace itself, as an act of war, even if that embrace doesn't really lead to significantly different tactical threats compared to the broader, older definition of terrorism as 'angry fucker with moderate resources gets bombs, drives truck to building.'

My point being, that while we generally cast these stylistic or philosophical distinctions in warfare methods as being elements in an ideological conflict -- either modern versus pre-modern, or Western versus fundamentalist-extremist, or the recently revived demagogic fantasy struggle in the mind of the American right of Christianity versus Islam -- and while some of those ideas are definitely factors and valid perspectives on the motives behind individual actions in this war, on the other hand there is a way to just see the difference broadly as a factor of who has the fucking robots, and who just has the vacuum of fear.

From the Weberspace: 9.5.2010

Here is some recommended long-reading that probably I think came to me as so much else does via the Daily Dish:

"The Real War 1939-1945" by Paul Fussell, in The Atlantic, August 1989.

The piece is a rambling, extremely broad reflection on the disparity between general public conception of the war -- purposeful, morally organised action in which heroes died clenching their shoulders with grimaced faces -- and the reality for those who actually fought it -- dirty, disorganized ennuie and horror in which terrified men died without their faces attached to their bodies. It took me a week to get through it, but I highly recommend it even though it never resolves to any unified conclusion. It also serves as a good guide to recommended reading for a realist history of WWII:

But in a strictly literal sense the result of the years of the bombing of Berlin and its final destruction by the Russian army was, for much of the population, actual madness. Just after the surrender, according to Douglas Botting, in From the Rains of the Reich, some 50,000 orphans could be found living in holes like animals, "some of them one-eyed or one-legged veterans of seven or so, many so deranged by the bombing and the Russian attack that they screamed at the sight of any uniform, even a Salvation Army one."

And the most arresting, horrible moment of the article comes from Fussell's favorite history, With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa by Eugene Sledge:

But for Sledge, the worst of all was a week-long stay in rain-soaked foxholes on a muddy ridge facing the Japanese, a site strewn with decomposing corpses turning various colors, nauseating with the stench of death... "If a marine slipped and slid down the back slope of the muddy ridge, he was apt to reach the bottom vomiting. I saw more than one man lose his footing and slip and slide all the way to the bottom only to stand up horror-stricken as he watched in disbelief while fat maggots tumbled out of his muddy dungaree pockets, cartridge belt, legging lacings, and the like."

Fussell is a WWII vet who has written several books on the war; this blurb from his Wikipedia page sums up his life and the relationship between his service and his authorial career in the following somewhat quirky, romantic manner:

On November 11, he experienced his first night on the front lines. He was wounded while fighting in France as a second lieutenant in the infantry, and was awarded the Bronze Star and the Purple Heart. Fussell suffered from depression and rage for years following his military service. In his 1996 autobiography he associated those problems with the dehumanization of his military service and his anger at the way the United States government and popular culture romanticized warfare. Since the 1980s Fussell has been an outspoken critic of the glorification of armed conflicts. An early influence was H. L. Mencken, but he shed Mencken as a mentor, calling him "deficient in the tragic sense", after his wartime experience.

Adding to all the non-fiction works mentioned in Fussell's article, I think there is a fiction series which would meet his exacting standards: the extensive collection of devastatingly good stand-alone WWII stories released since 2001 in Garth Ennis' War Stories, Enemy Ace and Battlefields comic series share the same realist, moral-voidist world view, and I would recommend those basically above any other reading material in the world. War Stories volumes 1 and 2 are available in trade paperback and the first Battlefields set, including the stunning tragedy "Dear Billy" is in hardcover, but retardedly I can't find any online previews, I'll see if I can scan something onto here in an edit.

NASA joins flickr, soon will have DSLR photos of spaceship crotch

Five days ago NASA dumped some photos onto a Flickr Commons account, at http://www.flickr.com/photos/nasacommons/:





So far only 180 photos. The Flickr blog says "Their Commons account will feature photos from across the agency’s many locations and centers, chronicling the history of space and lunar missions, and the people and places of the organization," so maybe they will be adding more.

NASA already shares lots of photos at http://nasaimages.org and of course the now like 90 years old APOD but the more limited, curated selection in the Flickr account makes it more approachable.

Curation is everything when it comes to disseminating media now; after Wikipedia was created it was proven maybe that just putting all the world's knowledge online improves how we get information but not how information gets to us. Curation is the new creation.

Pallophotophones and the problem of stereo sound

Back in June there was an interesting story that unknown recordings of Edison's voice had been discovered in tapes that have been sitting in a library: and the tapes were created in a format and technology that no one knows how to use anymore. Edison announced the date on the tapes as October 1929. Of course, Edison having invented the working phonograph, there are recordings of his voice from way before then, but the very awesome part of this story is that in order to hear Edison, someone had to figure out how to play this extinct tape format. So these two engineers spent two years retro-building a player for the unknown recordings based in part on photographs of the extinct device:

The unlikely resurrection story began when archivist Chris Hunter grew curious about 13 undocumented film canisters tucked away on a bottom shelf among 5 million items in the basement archives of the Schenectady Museum & Suits-Bueche Planetarium....

The pallophotophone was a technology developed by GE engineer Charles Hoxie in the early 1920s and it bridged the gap between cinema's silent era and "talkies." The big, boxy recorder used 35 mm sprocketless film, with each strip containing a series of eight to10 parallel soundtracks etched on acetate and nitrate film. It used light bouncing off a tiny mirror to expose each strip of film and to capture the sound.

DeMuth had very little to work with, aside from a few archival photographs of the original machine. He had to scour eBay for old film reels and other long-out-of-production parts to build his device. He was not at all confident of its functionality.

The end result being that these dudes went from this:



To living audio. Which is really cool. If this were an example of a larger principle I guess that principle would be called "information archeology" or something. It is similar to finding ancient, unknown written language in a way. Such as the story two weeks ago of a 350-year old unknown language scribbled on a note in the ruins of a church which collapsed in Peru in late 17th century, preserving hundreds of documents. But different, since in this case what is recorded in forgotten encoding is sound itself, not written words.

~~~

Whenever I read about the history of 20th Century audio and video recording, I feel an tinge of nostalgic regret that we live in an age where digital reproduction has rendered the science of perfecting mechanical recording methods irrelevant, because to me there's as lot more of a fantastic and magical character to the former field. We carved music into fucking solid objects.

I wanted to do a cursory bit of research to make sure this Edison article wasn't simplifying or exaggerating the find or its context for the sake of narrative before posting my comments here. It turns out most movie audio tracks have always used optical audio. Film is printed with a little line of varying width and that is the sound.

So that the video and audio can be played back at the same time, they are offset several frames. On theater projectors, the audio pickup is calibrated to be the correct physical distance from the video projector so that the audio is in sync. For optical soundtrack, a light is shot at the film and a variable-width transparent line manipulates the amount of light that passes through to the photocell, which pushes electrical signal to the speakers. Later, magnetic audio tracks were developed too, which allowed for better quality and thus multi-track playback. But both methods still had limitations: magnetic was expensive, and deteriorated on film; optical could only be mono -- there was too much background noise to play back more than one track. (More at http://www.howstuffworks.com/movie-sound1.htm), and a neat discussion touching on variable-density optical recording (as opposed to variable-width) and editing magnetic audio by playing the film next to a magnet to erase audio at http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/42273-6-optical-audio-16mm-film.) Basically the limit of purely mechanical film audio quality was achieved in the 50s, but in practice theaters were still using the same technology as the 30s.



Dolby, a one-year old computer company, resolved the impasse and brought us closer to the digital age by creating the Dolby-A method for optical audio recording in 1966, using a processor to separate audio into bands and deemphasize noise while it was being recorded as optical track, and again during playback. This was next applied to make Phillips' compact cassette invention suitable for music. Then later, Dolby made backwards-compatible stereo optical soundtrack for movie film, encoding a 4-track matrix into the same variable-width optical track to bring surround sound and stereo to theaters in 77, with Star Wars. Before then, because magnetic film had proven too expensive and mono Dolby-A's impact was modest, theater-goers in the 70s were still listening to basically the same quality audio as the first on-film sound playback in the 30s:

To forestall compatibility problems after a decade of theatres racing to install sound equipment and filmmakers rushing "talkies" into production, in the late 1930s the film industry adopted a standardized theatre playback response that today is called the "Academy" characteristic. While this resulted in a system of recording and playback that made it possible for just about any film to sound acceptable in any theatre in the world, it lacked the flexibility to incorporate improvements beyond the limitations of the 1930s. Indeed, well into the 1970s conventional optical sound reproduction in the theatre had a frequency response little wider than a telephone's.

Upon investigation, Dolby found that many of the limitations in optical sound stemmed directly from its significantly high background noise. To filter this noise, the high-frequency response of theatre playback systems was deliberately curtailed (the "Academy" characteristic). To make matters worse, to increase dialogue intelligibility over such systems, sound mixers were recording soundtracks with so much high-frequency pre-emphasis that high distortion resulted. (http://www.dolby.com/about/who-we-are/our-history/history-3.html)

So, thank god for digital enhancement.

And reflections on Ethel Jones and gun ownership

So, riffing off the Ethel Jones story below, as someone who doesn't feel strongly about the rights or culture issues attached to gun ownership, what I find interesting in the safety and crime issue is how hard it is to attribute the presence or absence of a firearm to overall improved social results. Here's the AP blurb again (not for the Nellie photo on the left):

"Sixty nine year-old Ethel Jones poses with her .38 caliber snubnose revolver behind the glass door window she shattered when she fired three shots at a burglar who broke into her Decatur, Alabama home Monday, August 30, 2010. An 18-year-old suspect was taken to Huntsville Hospital with a gunshot wound to the abdomen."

So in this case, Ethel Jones is out a window, but lots of things can break windows. Zooming out, the hospital has to put an 18 year old man's stomach back together, and somebody has to pay for that -- can the hospital do that for less cost than the items a single burglar can carry out of a house on their person? That really depends on whether he found her jewelery case.

And now he is to be entered into the criminal justice system. In the case of burglary, applying justice via legal framework may prevent greater ills that would have come from this man later, or maybe he just wanted a couple dvds to hawk, and now his life is very likely non-valuable (i.e. fucked up), and there are no refunds on the social inputs that go into a life. Whether catching a robber in action is really better for society is a crapshoot.

Zooming out further, the counter argument is that without a framework for occasional, inefficiently over-sized punishment falling on individuals who are caught, profoundly more people would commit the crime in question. I don't think that's true, social motivations don't seem to be affected by the deterrent threat of remotely possible punishment that way -- lots of people die in car wrecks but that doesn't decrease the amount of driving that people chose to do much. But it's a valid argument nonetheless, it's an argument that can be made. The point is that it is really just left to opinion, the complexity of factors which go into actually determining as fact whether firearm possession leads to more good or more bad social outcomes is staggering.

I'm not trying to suggest that Ethel should have to have her stuff taken just because there are costs to protecting it. But on the other hand, stealing isn't the same as destruction. Somebody would still have that stuff, and at a reduced price than what they would pay at Target. Imagine then if the social response to robbery was for the neighborhood, town, whatever, to just say, "Aw shit, here's some replacement stuff or gift certificates Ethel".

Broadly speaking, I don't feel safe around civilians who have a gun, but I don't feel profoundly safe around police who have guns either. I do not think possessing a gun makes a person less likely to die by being shot by a gun. I do not think trying to suppress gun ownership can be done without huge problems and costs, but on the other hands there are probably some pretty low-cost ways to discourage gun ownership and criminal use. For example, why do police need to carry guns? What would happen if regular police didn't, instead only SWAT squads or the like? If all beat police were known not to have guns, would any criminal really ever shoot at a police officer, knowing he could just run away instead? Maybe. Ethel shot at somebody she could have just threatened away.

Still on the subject of internet photos

This image appeared on my screen today with the AP caption I have reprinted below

Sixty nine year-old Ethel Jones poses with her .38 caliber snubnose revolver behind the glass door window she shattered when she fired three shots at a burglar who broke into her Decatur, Alabama home Monday, August 30, 2010. An 18-year-old suspect was taken to Huntsville Hospital with a gunshot wound to the abdomen.(AP)

It was very reminiscent of this photo which I remembered having just seen on Melisaki:



"Nellie with Gun" by Stan Healy from Melisaki. Melisaki seems to post photos that are scanned from books to his own computer which is why there is relatively really great accreditation.

I was still a bit puzzled though. Researching "Nellie with Gun by Stan Healy" very briefly, I didn't find anything except the blurb for a book that may or may not contain that photo: "Missoula newspaper photojournalist Stan Healy produced thousands of photographs in his lifetime. Healy is praised for his unique ability to capture a story and do it with an artistic aesthetic that is captivating."

From the Weberspace: 9.1.2010

This is a really really exceptionally well-curated photo-tumblr named Melisaki

It has a lot of great selections from professional photography of the second-half-of-20th century which is usually invisible to the internet's view of history:





And last-decade stuff which I am always like "where the hell has this awesome photo been??"



And fucked-up collages



and lots of naked women, as stipulated in the Tumblr terms of service