Normalization & The Tragedy of the Academy

So I've been married for just over 1 week, 1 day and an hour. Neither the wife or I feel particularly different. After all, we had been dating for practically 5 years and living together for 3 of them.

I did have a primordial and emotional realization, about a half hour ago, that I can't just end our relationship with a couple tasteless, thoughtless words. Don't plan on it or even desire it, but it's just something that popped into my head while letting it ruminate randomly. Then again, knowing that a divorce costs about the same, if not more than a wedding, is just one more argument for staying together. . .which really doesn't compare to the emotional benefits of being married.

Anyway, the major adjustment now is more returning back to the regularly scheduled life I had say. . .a year and a half ago, just in a different city, a different job in the same industry, different people and just a different details. Other than that stuff and actually having my ass together enough to work substantially on the novel, the project and the time management to make it all happen, life really has normalized to some extent, just new and improved.

Today really sets the example of executing the time management skills to get work done. I've done a fair amount of reading and writing today. Back during the Fannie Mae days, I had gotten good at writing a page or so when I got home from work M-Th then dedicating my afternoon and early evenings on Sunday to writing and reading. I got quite a bit done then, and I intend on getting a lot done now that I've got a regular job and don't have weekend wedding jaunts to make.

After doing a fair amount of writing the novel and reading Alasdair MacIntyre's, A Short History of Ethics: A History of Moral Philosophy from the Homeric Age to the Twentieth Age, I've stumbled onto something of a tragedy of some academic disciplines, especially when the practitioner hasn't really become comfortable with innovating original ideas. Not to worry, I'm not talking about Mr. McIntyre.

I'm talking about myself. A Short History of Ethics: A History of Moral Philosophy from the Homeric Age to the Twentieth Age is a smashingly good book. It doesn't provide an indepth comprehensive history of moral philosophy, but it has introduced some good bits of information, answered some of my own questions (if not completely) and Mr. McIntyre does a good job of keeping the narrative of this short history interesting and, dare I say it, somewhat exciting.

The main tragedy, however, is that I don't think I won't be satisfied enough at the end of the book. I can't fault the author. Rather, the topic of ethics and morality in history obviously hasn't reached a good solid, conclusion. I know that Mr. McIntyre has written books about virtue ethics and that he really digs Socrates, Plato and Aristotle but has the humbleness to accept that these three philosophical powerhouses don't have all the answers. If anything, they have the roots to the important answers.

Basically, a book like this one acts as a great introduction to the topic. It's pretty much intended to get someone interested in the topic and get them to read more into it. To some degree, it's a needed over sized marketing brochure for a discipline and a great mind. This book will give me great ideas, but since the topic is incomplete, I will need to do some original thinking in addition to gathering the information Mr. McIntyre has provided. When it comes to this project, I've got a little sick of original thinking and could deal with a little hand fed thoughts and concepts. I've been working on this thing for years and years, and I'm ready to move on.

I guess, like a friend has said, though, that this project really has inspired me to do what these projects are supposed to do: provide a broad range of research and knowledge through my own instrumental action and research. But dang, couldn't I have done something like this when I had more experience?

Alas, despite all my venting, I got myself into this mess, and I'll need to get myself out of it. It's just amazingly frustrating when I have generally had more ambition than I necessarily have the conceptual ability to handle. Well, at least I'm not satisfied with accepting pat answers like "That's just the way it is" or "You just ought to!"

Ugh.

The Last Workshop Before the Wedding

Tomorrow night, I get to reap the benefits of the Chicago-SF writing workshop without having to put any selfless work into preparation. I get to bring a book with writing exercises, but I don't have the fairly demanding responsibility of criticizing other people's work. They certainly provide some entertaining stuff to read, but providing constructive reactions and advice can get somewhat strenuous. It requires a good deal of attention while reading and dedicating some time to read pieces more than once.

I've submitted a total re-working of the piece revolving around the high school kid who has some powers, some angst and a bit of growing up to do. It only amounts to a page and half, but it takes a scene from the middle, puts it in the beginning and provides a little more of an introspective viewpoint from the main character's viewpoint. I hope it provides something more compelling and original. The last workshop really did a constructive number on both my ego and writing skill, creating quite a challenge for me by someone saying that one character came off as stereotypical and both "colleagues" telling me that they wanted more detail about the main character. Has it really only been a month since the last meeting?

The workshop meeting also marks a turning point, being the last writing workshop I attend as a legally single man. Our first out of town wedding guest arrives this Friday. My wedding "vacation" from work starts next week, on Wednesday. I have a bachelor party Thursday night, the rehearsal dinner on Friday and the wedding happens on Saturday. The future wife (let's toss the whole fiancee thing) and I have practiced our foxtrot Sunday and Monday. After doing some errands and meeting with the photographer, we were too tired to practice tonight, and tomorrow, I'll have the writing workshop. After that, though, we plan on practicing more every night that we have the chance. And, of course, tons of stuff to be done to prepare for the big day.

My first real gut feeling of getting married hit me this morning. It's really pretty hard to describe. Things just felt grounded, and my gut felt a little droopy, not in a sad kind of way. . .more like a "things will be changing and this is realization setting in." It didn't feel bad or good, just real and focusing. Up to now, I've just been thinking, "It's going to happen. Maybe it won't be perfect, but we're going to get married. Things will change but how much can they really change? We've been dating each other for so long, been living together for awhile, we've worked through some difficulties, we realize that we'll go through some tough spots and throw wedding rings at each other and around the room. . .but really, how much will things change?"

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi makes a good point in Flow.

When two people choose to focus their attention on each other, both will have to change their habits; as a result, the pattern of their consciousness will also have to change. Getting married requires a radical and permanent reorientation of attentional habits. (p. 177)

Heavy stuff. Nonetheless, it sounds like a good thing to keep in mind, especially since there will be some big deflation after the wedding. Our attentional energies will be changing. Tonight, I said I'm looking forward to the wedding to get done with, so I can focus my attention on finishing my bachelor's project. The future wife looks forward for the wedding to end so that she can focus more attention on classes and hopefully longer work hours. The strange thing, really, is the realization that we don't just work to do these things to just realize ourselves and our goals, we do them also to make our relationship stronger and push the existence of our marriage and relationship stronger, further and onward. This is just the beginning of the journey, and I think tomorrow's workshop makes for a good "final" marker. . .the death of single writing The_Lex to the married writing The_Lex.

I could probably go on forever about this whole thing, and it probably could be beneficial for me to do so. It's getting late, though. Besides, I probably have plenty of gut feelings to experience as the wedding grows closer. Here's to the gut, truthiness and getting married.

Representing Gays in Narrative

OR REFLECTIONS ON FANS AND THE ADVOCATE THINKING CHARACTER ON HEROES IS/WAS GAY

I copy and paste the following entries I made to discussion at the Chicago Speculative Fiction Group:

12/26/2006 5:39 pm:

I got the following 'official news' from a Hollywood e-mailing I get regularly:

'NBC Counters Claims That 'Heroes' Character Is Gay
NBC has denied that Zach, the young superhero played by Thomas Dekker on Heroes is gay, despite the fact that on his MySpace webpage he describes his sexual orientation as "not sure." The issue had been raised by the gay-oriented blog afterelton.com. However, at least one other blog has noted that Dekkar has been signed to costar in The Sarah Connor Chronicles, based on the Terminator film franchise and that his character is likely to be written out of the story line. Meanwhile, Heroes creator Tim Kring is quoted in the gay magazine The Advocate as fending off the speculation about Zach's sexual orientation. Kring sent out an email message to websites where the claims appeared saying, "We apologize for misleading the audience and wish that we could have handled things better on our end. But making a TV show is often a very imprecise business. As you stated, Heroes is a big sprawling drama, and there is no reason to believe that a gay character will not be represented on our show in the future. It is my hope that if we do, we do it with honesty and dignity."'

12/27/2006 6:13 pm:

Kring's e-mail was clear?

Honestly, I think it could go either way. When I watched it, I never caught any gay subtext. I caught 'invincible cheerleader' not being interested in the guy and the 'popular' kids being Fing assholes, like 'popular' kids will be in high school.

And from what I've read from writers and producers when it comes to making TV shows, fans can totally misinterpret things happening in a show. On top of that, good writers and producers often don't like to reveal information that's more than needed about characters, settings, situations, etc. etc. so that they can have the flexibility to provide surprise or change something if it works better for the story. Half the time, that's where a conflict between fans and writers/producers can come from: fans think that a certain direction goes against continuity while writers/producers never created continuity about certain issues.

Heroes never outright said anything about the character. Except for 'outside the TV show' franchise outlets, the show never really made any clear references to the sexual orientation of the character, except to show one characters lack of sexual interest in him (when they had become quite close as friends) and high school antagonists acting like real jerks to him. Then again. . .I'm not saying the character isn't gay. . .I'm just saying it was never officially established, which I think is actually pretty cool.

As for Kring's e-mail, it sounds like they would want to present homosexuality in a different light, unless the letter's just smoke & mirrors. I just don't think there's enough established evidence to say either which way.

And why the hell am I so worked up about this matter. . .other than I think, inside the show which I take as canon compared to the franchise and media sources, that the writers and producers have left it open enough that they could make him gay, not gay or not even make it an issue.

12/27/2006 7:07 pm:

Quote [from Out.com]:
Heroes will feature a gay character, according to Kring and Fuller, who is now writing for the show. In the pilot a popular high school cheerleader with superhuman invulnerability selects a loner from her class to divulge her secret to—though he’s not revealed as gay in that episode. Kring admits, “I’m feeling a little odd about it, because I literally haven’t even discussed it with the actor yet.”


Remember the argument that Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda were working together. I'll admit that there's no clear cut evidence for or against it, but that whole premise was created in a similar manner as this. I don't see anything in quotes about the cheerleader's friend being gay. It's a conclusion that the article writer came to.

A musician friend of mine once told me how interviewers will write something in an article about her as if she had said it. In reality, though, the musician friend never said anything of the sort and doesn't even think that way.

Honestly, that's one of the main reasons I would rather ignore apochrophyllic sources other than fan discussion about the a piece of work, based on what the piece has released as information.

This whole topic, frankly, does make me see some merit to the Right wing accusation of a gay agenda. If The Advocate makes loose connections about what a head writer/producer says and it has something to do with homosexuality, THEN IT HAS TO BE TRUE. . .kind of like if the United States President creates loose connections through rhetoric by bringing up Saddam Hussein the day after 9/11/2002 and mentioning Hussein and Al Qaeda close together, THEN IT HAS TO BE TRUE.

I'm not trying to make any kind of political statement. I'm just saying that people fall victim to a rhetorical device that creates loose connections, which they believe. And if enough people believe it, then it becomes a meme and a social truth. . .which is not rational.

12/27/2006 7:09 pm:

PS I don't mean fans necessarily make truth. I'm just saying that I enjoy discussing ideas and hypotheses that fans have about pieces of narrative and art.

12/27/2006 11:03 pm:

Gosh, I'm stuck on this for being a straight guy.

Nonetheless. . .the argument on the
http://popculturejunkies.com/2006/12/13/heroes-closeted/ Website pretty much perpetuates stereotypes of what a homosexual is, simply by their taste in movies.

And:

Quote [from show]:
"Are you flirting with me?" "Oh god no, really, no."


I totally read that as me in high school being majorly shy around a girl I like. I can count on three hands how many times I would have tried flirting with a girl then reject that I was doing it. I don't think I'm gay. . .you can ask my fiancee.

In other words, assuming a character on TV or in a movie is gay. . .hell, talking about your "gaydar" strikes me as something that perpetuates the stereotype of what it means to be "gay."

Now, I'll admit, stereotyping can sometimes be used for good use, especially when used not to offend anyone. In this case, however, I can see it expressed negatively, not necessarily by you, [name struck], but society, in general.

I see in a world that has people attracted to the same sex wanting to have equal treatment when it comes to romantically loving someone, the "this character is gay" really doesn't come off as responsible (unless you hate gays and want to perpetuate the stereotypes) when the conclusion is based on arguments of stereotype.

If Heroes, in the end, decided to retract the storyline, then I think it's actually somewhat dumb to criticize them for it. If the argument is based simply on the representation of characters attracted to the same sex on a pure statistical level, they have half of a worthwhile argument. If the gay character thrown in simply for representation acts as a stereotypical gay person and is the only gay character on a show, then I think that could be very irresponsible. . .unless it's making a clever point.

Heroes might be able to make some kind of clever point about how society reacts to homosexuality, but that would involve a point about gay people being "mutants," which isn't necessarily reponsible, either.

I guess what I'm saying is that I agree with the supposed "smoke & mirrors" Kring e-mail. If you're going to have gay people on the show, it has to be done in a responsible manner that doesn't perpetuate stereotypes nor try to point out same-sex attraction as an aberration. After all, I would think with the whole same-sex marriage v. civil union controversy, gay people would rather be portrayed as a norm rather than a point about how different they are from the rest of the human race.

But then again, I'm sure there's a responsible and clever way to approach this one. After all, there's the controversy now about the people that argue American citizens should just consider themselves "Americans" and not have to parade their ethnicity around and be proud of it. If a gay person doesn't get portrayed stereotypically, then there's probably something to say about them conforming to the "keeping it in the bedroom" ideology when straight people are allowed to have PDA, marriage and other "normal" things.

So, in the end, I guess Tim Kring can't win. I wonder. . .in my novel, if I don't have any gay characters or describe the color of people's skin, have I caved into pressure. Especially since I wouldn't know how to approach it without possibly misrepresenting the experience of non-white people.

I'm even scared of having women in my novel. . .how am I supposed to represent the women's experience when I'm a man?

OK. I've rambled on too long.