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Sep. 1st, 2019 08:27 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shadowkat1. Ugh. South Carolina's Governor just called for mandatory evacuation starting at noon tomorrow of the coastline. Which ...is problematic, since my parents retirement community was planning on doing it on Tuesday. They need at least forty eight hours notice in order to hire buses, and get reservations, and get the people in the nursing home out. So they are evacuating the people out of the nursing home tomorrow morning, and everyone else in my parents community on Tuesday as originally planned.
Me: So frack the Governor?
Mother: Well, yes, but they have no other choice. They can't schedule it any sooner.
Stupid Governor. He couldn't make up his mind and waited to see what Jacksonville did and followed suit.
In regards to Hurricain Dorian? They have no clue what it is going to do next. Right now it appears to want to hug the coast up to Wilmington, North Carolina then float out to sea. But because it is hugging the coast, they need to evacuate the coastline in case of storm surge and flooding.
Why couldn't my parents have retired to Tuscon or Arkansas? Granted Hilton Head is nicer and up until recently not much of an issue. But alas, climate change.
2. Carrier Bag Theory of Storytelling or Why we should all be reading Ursula Le Quin.
Eh. I always found her tough to get into. I've no idea why. (Oh, wait the article explains why -- because the narrative structure meanders...there are no protagonists or villains.) Hmmm, maybe I'll try again, soon.
“The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction,” an essay Le Guin wrote in 1986, disputes the idea that the spear was the earliest human tool, proposing that it was actually the receptacle. Questioning the spear’s phallic, murderous logic, instead Le Guin tells the story of the carrier bag, the sling, the shell, or the gourd. In this empty vessel, early humans could carry more than can be held in the hand and, therefore, gather food for later. Anyone who consistently forgets to bring their tote bag to the supermarket knows how significant this is. And besides, Le Guin writes, the idea that the spear came before the vessel doesn’t even make sense. “Sixty-five to eighty percent of what human beings ate in those regions in Paleolithic, Neolithic, and prehistoric times was gathered; only in the extreme Arctic was meat the staple food.”
Not only is the carrier bag theory plausible, it also does meaningful ideological work — shifting the way we look at humanity's foundations from a narrative of domination to one of gathering, holding, and sharing. Because I am, despite my best efforts, often soppy and sentimental, I sometimes imagine this like a really comforting group hug. But it’s not, really: the carrier bag holds things, sure, but it’s also messy and sometimes conflicted. Like when you’re trying to grab your sunglasses out of your bag, but those are stuck on your headphones, which are also tangled around your keys, and now the sunglasses have slipped into that hole in the lining.
Le Guin’s carrier bag is, in addition to a story about early humans, a method for storytelling itself, meaning it’s also a method of history. But unlike the spear (which follows a linear trajectory towards its target), and unlike the kind of linear way we’ve come to think of time and history in the West, the carrier bag is a big jumbled mess of stuff. One thing is entangled with another, and with another. Le Guin once described temporality in her Hainish Universe (a confederacy of human planets that feature in a number of her books) in the most delightfully psychedelic terms: “Any timeline for the books of Hainish descent would resemble the web of a spider on LSD.” [In short it is harder to follow and isn't a clear arc -- beginning, middle, end or heroes journey.]
This lack of clear trajectory allowed Le Guin to test out all kinds of political eventualities, without the need to tie everything neatly together. It makes room for complexity and contradiction, for difference and simultaneity. This, I think, is a pretty radical way of looking at the world, one that departs from the idea of history as a long line of victories. Le Guin describes her discovery of the carrier bag theory as grounding her “in human culture in a way I never felt grounded before.” The stick, sword, or spear, designed for “bashing and killing,” alienated her from history so much that she felt she “was either extremely defective as a human being, or not human at all.”
The only problem is that a carrier bag story isn’t, at first glance, very exciting. “It is hard to tell”, writes Le Guin, “a really gripping tale of how I wrested a wild-oat seed from its husk, and then another, and then another, and then another, and then another, and then I scratched my gnat bites, and Ool said something funny, and we went to the creek and got a drink and watched newts for a while, and then I found another patch of oats…”
As well as its meandering narrative, a carrier bag story also contains no heroes. There are, instead, many different protagonists with equal importance to the plot. This is a very difficult way to tell a story, fictional or otherwise. While, in reality, most meaningful social change is the result of collective action, we aren’t very good at recounting such a diffusely distributed account. The meetings, the fundraising, the careful and drawn-out negotiations — they’re so boring! Who wants to watch a movie about a four-hour meeting between community stakeholders?
The introduction of a singular hero, however, replicates a very specific and historical power relation. The pioneers and the saviors: likely male, likely white, almost certainly brimming with unearned confidence. The veneration of the hero reduces others into victims: those who must be rescued. “The prototypical savior is a person who has been raised in privilege and taught implicitly or explicitly (or both) that they possess the answers and skills needed to rescue others,” writes Jordan Flaherty in his book No More Heroes. To be a hero is fundamentally privileged, and any act of heroism reinforces that privilege. [ One of the nice things about the soap opera serial format is it sort of doesn't follow that trajectory at all...there are no clear cut heroes there...there are, but not quite in the same way, but they also are more heroes than what Quinn is doing.]
The carrier bag story, with its lack of heroes, is a collective rather than individualist endeavor. It’s this that differentiates the carrier bag from Walter Benjamin’s “ragpicker,” an emblematic modernist figure who “early in the morning, bad tempered and a tad tipsy, spears remnants of discourse and fragments of language with his stick and throws them, grumbling, into his cart.” Engaged in endless bricolage, the ragpicker is a serial appropriator — it’s John Cage taking the Balinese gamelan as his own, it’s Picasso’s “primitivism.” The carrier bag gatherer, meanwhile, is no lone genius (genius being its own kind of heroism, after all), but rather someone rooted in a shared existence.
Sort of like reading The Lady Trent Chronicles, I guess?
It is harder to read and get into...because we like to see the heroes kill the bad guys, but I do agree with Le Quinn this isn't working. That's not how life works. And it's not how the universe works. Our stories, at least the majority of them, do not reflect the reality that we are navigating nor provide us with the tools to navigate it successfully.
Interesting.
What makes for a good story? And is it difficult to tell one? Should it be? (Note, I'm not talking about the craft of "writing", you can write and never tell a story. And you can tell a story and never learn how to write. I'm talking about telling a story, which is a completely different skill and doesn't necessarily have anything to do with writing. ]
Does it matter -- it being difficult to tell the story? To what degree does telling a good story relate to telling a meaninful one, one that can change how others think? To what degree do we, all of us, who tell stories and publish them to an audience no matter how small have a responsibility to tell a meaningful story and not just something for fun?
To what degree do we have a responsibility to the world outside of ourselves -- when we write? And to what degree does that responsibility effect the quality of the story?
I don't know. My opinions on this change on a daily basis.
3. Autism Kid Sits Next to Speech Language Pathologist who makes headway on helping the father figure out how to communicate with his son
Me: So frack the Governor?
Mother: Well, yes, but they have no other choice. They can't schedule it any sooner.
Stupid Governor. He couldn't make up his mind and waited to see what Jacksonville did and followed suit.
In regards to Hurricain Dorian? They have no clue what it is going to do next. Right now it appears to want to hug the coast up to Wilmington, North Carolina then float out to sea. But because it is hugging the coast, they need to evacuate the coastline in case of storm surge and flooding.
Why couldn't my parents have retired to Tuscon or Arkansas? Granted Hilton Head is nicer and up until recently not much of an issue. But alas, climate change.
2. Carrier Bag Theory of Storytelling or Why we should all be reading Ursula Le Quin.
Eh. I always found her tough to get into. I've no idea why. (Oh, wait the article explains why -- because the narrative structure meanders...there are no protagonists or villains.) Hmmm, maybe I'll try again, soon.
“The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction,” an essay Le Guin wrote in 1986, disputes the idea that the spear was the earliest human tool, proposing that it was actually the receptacle. Questioning the spear’s phallic, murderous logic, instead Le Guin tells the story of the carrier bag, the sling, the shell, or the gourd. In this empty vessel, early humans could carry more than can be held in the hand and, therefore, gather food for later. Anyone who consistently forgets to bring their tote bag to the supermarket knows how significant this is. And besides, Le Guin writes, the idea that the spear came before the vessel doesn’t even make sense. “Sixty-five to eighty percent of what human beings ate in those regions in Paleolithic, Neolithic, and prehistoric times was gathered; only in the extreme Arctic was meat the staple food.”
Not only is the carrier bag theory plausible, it also does meaningful ideological work — shifting the way we look at humanity's foundations from a narrative of domination to one of gathering, holding, and sharing. Because I am, despite my best efforts, often soppy and sentimental, I sometimes imagine this like a really comforting group hug. But it’s not, really: the carrier bag holds things, sure, but it’s also messy and sometimes conflicted. Like when you’re trying to grab your sunglasses out of your bag, but those are stuck on your headphones, which are also tangled around your keys, and now the sunglasses have slipped into that hole in the lining.
Le Guin’s carrier bag is, in addition to a story about early humans, a method for storytelling itself, meaning it’s also a method of history. But unlike the spear (which follows a linear trajectory towards its target), and unlike the kind of linear way we’ve come to think of time and history in the West, the carrier bag is a big jumbled mess of stuff. One thing is entangled with another, and with another. Le Guin once described temporality in her Hainish Universe (a confederacy of human planets that feature in a number of her books) in the most delightfully psychedelic terms: “Any timeline for the books of Hainish descent would resemble the web of a spider on LSD.” [In short it is harder to follow and isn't a clear arc -- beginning, middle, end or heroes journey.]
This lack of clear trajectory allowed Le Guin to test out all kinds of political eventualities, without the need to tie everything neatly together. It makes room for complexity and contradiction, for difference and simultaneity. This, I think, is a pretty radical way of looking at the world, one that departs from the idea of history as a long line of victories. Le Guin describes her discovery of the carrier bag theory as grounding her “in human culture in a way I never felt grounded before.” The stick, sword, or spear, designed for “bashing and killing,” alienated her from history so much that she felt she “was either extremely defective as a human being, or not human at all.”
The only problem is that a carrier bag story isn’t, at first glance, very exciting. “It is hard to tell”, writes Le Guin, “a really gripping tale of how I wrested a wild-oat seed from its husk, and then another, and then another, and then another, and then another, and then I scratched my gnat bites, and Ool said something funny, and we went to the creek and got a drink and watched newts for a while, and then I found another patch of oats…”
As well as its meandering narrative, a carrier bag story also contains no heroes. There are, instead, many different protagonists with equal importance to the plot. This is a very difficult way to tell a story, fictional or otherwise. While, in reality, most meaningful social change is the result of collective action, we aren’t very good at recounting such a diffusely distributed account. The meetings, the fundraising, the careful and drawn-out negotiations — they’re so boring! Who wants to watch a movie about a four-hour meeting between community stakeholders?
The introduction of a singular hero, however, replicates a very specific and historical power relation. The pioneers and the saviors: likely male, likely white, almost certainly brimming with unearned confidence. The veneration of the hero reduces others into victims: those who must be rescued. “The prototypical savior is a person who has been raised in privilege and taught implicitly or explicitly (or both) that they possess the answers and skills needed to rescue others,” writes Jordan Flaherty in his book No More Heroes. To be a hero is fundamentally privileged, and any act of heroism reinforces that privilege. [ One of the nice things about the soap opera serial format is it sort of doesn't follow that trajectory at all...there are no clear cut heroes there...there are, but not quite in the same way, but they also are more heroes than what Quinn is doing.]
The carrier bag story, with its lack of heroes, is a collective rather than individualist endeavor. It’s this that differentiates the carrier bag from Walter Benjamin’s “ragpicker,” an emblematic modernist figure who “early in the morning, bad tempered and a tad tipsy, spears remnants of discourse and fragments of language with his stick and throws them, grumbling, into his cart.” Engaged in endless bricolage, the ragpicker is a serial appropriator — it’s John Cage taking the Balinese gamelan as his own, it’s Picasso’s “primitivism.” The carrier bag gatherer, meanwhile, is no lone genius (genius being its own kind of heroism, after all), but rather someone rooted in a shared existence.
Sort of like reading The Lady Trent Chronicles, I guess?
It is harder to read and get into...because we like to see the heroes kill the bad guys, but I do agree with Le Quinn this isn't working. That's not how life works. And it's not how the universe works. Our stories, at least the majority of them, do not reflect the reality that we are navigating nor provide us with the tools to navigate it successfully.
Interesting.
What makes for a good story? And is it difficult to tell one? Should it be? (Note, I'm not talking about the craft of "writing", you can write and never tell a story. And you can tell a story and never learn how to write. I'm talking about telling a story, which is a completely different skill and doesn't necessarily have anything to do with writing. ]
Does it matter -- it being difficult to tell the story? To what degree does telling a good story relate to telling a meaninful one, one that can change how others think? To what degree do we, all of us, who tell stories and publish them to an audience no matter how small have a responsibility to tell a meaningful story and not just something for fun?
To what degree do we have a responsibility to the world outside of ourselves -- when we write? And to what degree does that responsibility effect the quality of the story?
I don't know. My opinions on this change on a daily basis.
3. Autism Kid Sits Next to Speech Language Pathologist who makes headway on helping the father figure out how to communicate with his son
no subject
Date: 2019-09-02 03:46 pm (UTC)