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mjp
Username: mjp
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Tuesday, August 05, 2008 - 12:52 pm: | |
I was slightly baffled by the weekend Guardian article about fiction and sport: mainly by the authors they managed to leave out. They talked all about American fiction and sport but failed to mention Hemingway, a writer who very substantially derives his fiction from his sporting interests. I would have thought he was the central defining figure. In any case I have never much admired Mark Lawson's literary tastes. They also left out James Salter and fiction based on mountaineering - so MJH didn't get mentioned either.
Clearly, Hemingway is somewhat out of favour at the moment and so is any kind of hard thinking about what might constitute sport.
On the other hand, PKD is in favour, very much so. I think Blade Runner did alot for him in this respect. But in my view he still hasn't really been much understood. There is still alot of vagueness about what is good about him for instance, and a lot of confusion. A paradox still needs sorting out: what can be good about a 'crap artist'? |
mjp
Username: mjp
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Thursday, August 07, 2008 - 12:29 pm: | |
There is sport in fiction and sport as fiction. They aren't always the same. Sport as fiction represents a kind of fictional transparency: it works as a symbol of the thing you are reading itself: you hold it up to the light and no seeming resistance is offered - one can still see the world through it because if obliquely that is what it still is: the world. I think this is the essential attraction of sport as fiction, and the attraction of game playing in general: that it can capture our attention as a world does. 'Gaming' is essentiallly a means of self-creating the world. Suppose you have 22 players on a field demarked and organised by lines; the games rules partly based on them effectively constitute a world even if outside the game's arbitrary rules the only human necessity is human inconsequence. The key issue is that nothing of any consequence is provided by game playing in the sense of being represented by it: unlike say money, where the dollars, pounds, krona, pops, represent distinctive real possibilities. The players play the game (the components of which are nowhere to be found in nature) someone wins and someone loses and that is that. Game over. Dream evapourated. Something is at an end and time has passed in its agony and ecstasy. This way of rendering as if apparent the non-existent makes it a key science fictional and mainstream fictional theme. I am trying to think of writers who have developed worlds on the basis of games or rule following. Van Vogt's The World of Null A is an obvious example. Then you have Dick's The Game Players of Titan; Clans of the Alphane Moon; Time Out of Joint. A writer who has explored game playing with the most thoroughness I think is Piers Anthony; first in Steppe; then in Split Infinity and a few other volumes in that series. |
mjp
Username: mjp
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Friday, August 08, 2008 - 2:41 pm: | |
Days of Perky Pat - Dick's short story comedy masterpiece - I should admit I have only just read it for the first time - contains themes incorporated into The Three Stigmata novel that if you look at them with some of its other strands (Dr Smile the suitcase psychiatrist; the Can D and Chew Z drugs); are all predicated on the idea of game playing or rule following that sits under a big ugly cloud of unknowing. Game playing, or more specifically role-playing - or even more specifically *aspirational* role-playing - forms the sensible human world; gives it its dimensions, provides it with a face; as opposed the Beckett-like landscape of ash and rubble, or the wilderness, that situates this human world - gives it a place to be in - in actuality. In each case what the story or novel tells us is that reality is in abeyance and that we are only truly able to get to grips with substitutes for it in an irreal universe.
Did I mention the Olympics?
(Here we can draw in Virgil's bk 5 of the Aeneid.) |
mjp
Username: mjp
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Friday, August 08, 2008 - 3:00 pm: | |
Sport as fiction, game playing as fiction, they are of the same coinage. Sport is fiction; game playing is fiction. Clearly to play a game is to indulge in a kind of fiction. To spend hours, days, months, years, playing chess or Mahyong or World of Warcraft for that matter, is to lose oneself into a fiction. To use playing cards to fortell the future or to use the I Ching to diagnose how to plot a novel - that is a species of game playing; all of it. I have an oblique recollection here. This is that Dante (and one could easily construct a game out of Dante's circles and mountains and spheres) calls his *body* a fiction in Purgatorio. He is alive and surrounded by shadows, dead souls, if that is the correct term, people who aren't alive, but he himself being alive is physically a fiction according to his own understanding. This particular unexpected twist he gives to the term is nagging at me. |
mjp
Username: mjp
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Monday, August 11, 2008 - 10:23 am: | |
Well before I pack up my easel and box my paints and continue on my solitary way up the mountain path, here is something else. If the advent of the film industry represented a step into a physically dimensioned imaginary or fictional world that was yet understood to be real, then tv was another step into that world; and computing is yet a third even deeper one. Sitting at the computer one interfaces with the real world - one thinks. But after all, what could be more imaginary: more fictional than this activity of staring at a screen and (in many cases) engaging in a wish-fulfilment life of pornography and gaming? ... One can look at the writing of fiction as such in terms that bear witness to these changes; such as one finds in Ubik. One way of engaging with unreal role-playing is to mirror it with an exploration of unreal role-playing within the context of a deliberately fictional artefact. Or more generally, finding inversions of real-life machineries in their fictional tokens. So for example, in war games. There is a Dick story where weapons are disguised as childrens toys to get them through interplanetary customs: into reality! They consist in soldiers and a castle. Toy soldiers! |
mjp
Username: mjp
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Thursday, September 04, 2008 - 12:21 pm: | |
'playing at': It is such an obvious ubiquitous gesture that it goes unnoticed. Eric Brown's New York Blues and New York Dreams (avoid the first volume, New York Nights). Everyone lives in Virtual Worlds in escape from an environmentally devastated Earth, playing at living, or whatever, rather than actually engaging in it. When E M Forster speaks of the 'factitious' experience of his protagonists in A Passage to India (in alluding to experience born of illusion) one wonders what it is that can't be ruled out as factitious. My experience of place is certainly in some sense 'factitious'; I have suggested this before. For example (even though it may be completely arbitrary) works of fiction tend to colonise the world around me. Millwall ftball ground which I pass on the train every day has been colonised by M John Harrison, namely by Signs of Life. The scene outside a ftball ground. Arbitrary; but for me everything is like this - in one or another way a 'visible fiction': a mood or atmosphere that implies a world, however factitious it may be ... |
mjp
Username: mjp
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Thursday, September 11, 2008 - 12:59 pm: | |
This doesn't bother many people but I am deeply troubled as to what the real world is. How meaningful what we regard as real and the real world is, in any given moment or for any length of time or for the duration of human history. The most complicated machine ever built (at Cern) produces energies that existed at the beginning of time. How much is that just a social convention - this idea "the beginning of time"? A kind of hocus pocus as silly as the priests indulging in human sacrifice at sunrise ... At random in the real world. When I was a child I used to catch crabs and put them in the bottom of a bucket for bait; for what kind of fish I was never sure. I feel like one of those crabs staring out through an inch of dirty water inadaquate. |
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