Month: June 2009

Monday various

  • Liz Hand asks, “So do kids even know about dummies anymore, let alone know to be scared of them?” If they follow the link she provides, I think they will be. I know some of those dummies scare me.

  • Say…wanna win a piece of the moon? You have until June 29. [via]

  • Dan Meth’s Futuristic Movie Timeline. [via]

  • Harold Ramis on Ghostbusters:

    The comic edge of Ghostbusters will always be the same. It’s still treating the supernatural with a totally mundane sensibility. In the world of ghostbusting, there are certain givens. You’re always going to have some new invented technology, some pseudo-science that sounds right because we drop enough familiar terms from physics and engineering, and pseudo-methodology, something that people will think they may have read something about before. People may have actually thought there was a Zuul or a Gozer. You say “ancient Sumerian deity,” and that’s enough, people will think you read a book and you know something.

  • And finally, though you’ve probably seen it already, here’s the very funny John Hodgman at the Radio and TV Correspondents Dinner:

    • Hodgman himself talks about it in a little more detail here, suggesting, “If the protesters in Iran have never heard of Doctor Who, their efforts now are undeniably geekish.”

The Perils of Picoult

There’s an interesting profile of author Jodi Picoult in yesterday’s New York Times Magazine — albeit one focused more on the type of books she writes than on the author herself, and one in which Picoult emerges as sometimes almost strangely non-present even when the focus of the piece switches back to the biographical:

Asked at the time to recall her adolescence, she found herself agreeing with the idea that the things we remember from those years are often the most vivid occasions of melancholy and humiliation. Picoult can summon up the memory of having her fingers smashed into a locker by a hallway bully but little else of her younger life in any great detail, she told me.

It must be said, I have never read any of Picoult’s books, and I was only vaguely familiar with her name before I saw the trailer for My Sister’s Keeper. But, as the Times notes, she “has found enormous commercial success as the most visible and dedicated practitioner of a subcategory of contemporary genre fiction that might best be described as the literature of children in peril.”

Or, as Michael Schaub of Bookslut puts it, “Jodi Picoult wants you to know your child is probably dying right now.”

From the trailer for the film, and my basic understanding of the plot — “Anna Fitzgerald looks to earn medical emancipation from her parents who until now have relied on their youngest child to help their leukemia-stricken daughter Kate remain alive,” says the IMDB — that definitely seems to be the case. More than anything, the basic story seems to force one into taking an ethical stand on something that is unlikely and contrived, spelled out in what the Times calls “tidy ironies and florid prose.” Well yes, I do think raising a daughter solely as donor stock for her older, cancer-stricken sibling is probably a bad thing. Morally dubious at the least. So thank you for telling that me I’m right in thinking so. If anything like that should ever actually, you know, happen, I’ll be sure to know that it’s a very bad thing.

However, as the Times points out, “[w]hile Picoult’s notion of what constitutes domestic incident may stretch ideas of plausibility, it rests on a level of forensic detail that requires wide-ranging research.”

Which makes me wonder: if the story wasn’t set in the real world, would its being unrealistic bug me? If Picoult’s novels were, that is, science fiction, would suspension of disbelief take me the distance I need to go in order not to smirk at their implausibility? Isn’t this the “what if?” we expect, or even demand, from genre fiction — this extrapolation of real-world ideas and research that takes us beyond the possible and to the extremes, in order to see just where those extremes lie? Science fiction is by no means exempt from the requirements of believability, but there’s a big difference between asking readers to imagine a “what if” scenario (and the ethical quandries such a scenario implies) and asking them to believe that it does exist, in the here and now, and ooh, isn’t that scary?

And yet Picoult isn’t envisioning a near future in which genetic planning is commonplace; she isn’t writing science fiction. As the Times notes:

Tellingly, Picoult does not see herself as a genre writer but rather as a purveyor of social commentary (as if the categories were mutually exclusive) and of what we might call service fiction. “Maybe the average reader is not facing the daily challenges­ of a mom whose child is dying of cancer, for example, but she probably had an argument with her teenager that morning about something inconsequential that left her feeling frustrated and certain there’s no middle ground between them,” she told me. Picoult said she hoped in some sense that her books were the way to that middle ground.

We shall see. I don’t expect to run out and read the book anytime soon, but it does look like I’ll be dragged into seeing the movie this weekend. Neither looks especially bad — despite some pretty mixed reviews of the book and the Times‘ warning that the ending is “so insistent in its shock value that it may inspire the reader to deposit the book under the wheels of a minivan.” — but clearly I have some reservations.

Iran all the way home

Forgive the pun of the title and the silly photo to the left (which I found via GersonK).

As you might have heard, there are some things going on in Iran recently, and much has been made of the role that Twitter is playing in the unfolding events, both there and abroad. I myself Tweeted about helpiranelection.com earlier this week, a site that asks you to get the word out by turning your Twitter icon green. (Green was the campaign color of Iranian opposition opponent Mir-Hossein Mousavi and has therefore become closely linked with his supporters and others protesting supposed election fraud in the country.) It doesn’t seem to have worked for me — my icon stayed just the same — but maybe that’s okay. I’m starting to wonder if Heather wasn’t right when she wrote, “The thing is…this whole ‘green twitter for Iran’ thing reminds me of the whole #amazonfail thing.” Because we all know how that turned out. A lot of well-intentioned but misdirected fervor, it showcased Twitter’s incredible ability to communicate and organize people quickly — but also to more quickly spread disinformation and rumor than more conventional means.

Which is why it didn’t seem completely out of left field when Joshua Kucera asked, What if Twitter is leading us all astray in Iran?

None of this is to excuse the behavior of the government after the election results came out. Or to diminish the bravery and courage of the people who are out in the streets in Tehran getting beaten. But what if it’s based on a lie? A Twitter-fueled, mass delusion of a lie? That the one third of people who voted for Mousavi convinced themselves, via a social media echo chamber that selectively picked rumors and amplified them until they appeared true, that they in fact represented two thirds of the country? And then tried to bring down the government based on that delusion? Maybe it’s not the case this time. But doesn’t this entire episode seem to show how such a thing could happen? And then what? [via]

It’s why I’m more and more agreeing with David Simon, who writes:

…high-end journalism is a profession. It requires daily full-time commitment by trained men and women who return to the same beats day in and day out. Reporting was the hardest and, in some ways, most gratifying job I ever had. I’m offended to think that anyone anywhere believes American monoliths, as insulated, self-preserving and self-justifying as police departments, school systems, legislatures and chief executives, can be held to gathered facts by amateurs presenting the task—pursuing the task without compensation, training or, for that matter, sufficient standing to make public officials even care who it is they’re lying to or who they’re withholding information from.

Twitter can be a valuable tool, but it is not an unbiased news source, and it will very often get things wrong, even if only unintentionally. Maybe we should think before we accept everything we read there, before we rush to turn our icons green in support of a cause we don’t quite understand, or to throw fuel on a fire that’s already led to riots and death. As Chris McLaren puts it:

In many, many cases it is essential that we learn to engage our damn brains before our emotions get involved to the points that it becomes nigh impossibly difficult to do so.

Update (9/21/09, 8:46 PM): The New York Times lays out the problems with Twitter in the Iranian election aftermath much better than me. Which I guess is sort of the point. I’m an occasional blogger, with opinions certainly, but who knows practically nothing about Iran. What I’m not is a professional journalist. And neither, as it turns out, are many of the people Tweeting about this.