Bricolage 4
Fourth in an ongoing series of links, asides, and quick hits
1.
This substack’s primary purpose is for me to publish my non-fiction; it’s tertiary purpose is for link-posts and asides (such as the rest of this post is). But it’s secondary purpose is to promote my fiction, which is being published elsewhere. So while I have harped on this before, I am about to do so again. If you’re reading along in Retcon, feel free to scroll down to section 2. If not, please give me a moment of your time and read on.
Retcon is a series of short stories, each complete in itself, but which also sum up to a larger story. (I am using the phrase “mosaic story” for that actually-incredibly-common, somehow-lacking-a-standard-name form.) It’s about a secret research program into time travel at Cornell University, and what it does to the members of that group—especially when they discover that nothing has ever come back from any farther than April 4, 2031.
The third story in Retcon: A Mosaic Narrative in Three Movements, “Xu Ming’s Second Time Down”, was published two days ago. It tells the life story (in particular, the second half of the life story) of Xu Ming, the time traveler who returned with news in “Zero Second”. What is it like to live the same period of time, twice over? What would your relationship with your younger self be like? How does it feel to approach doom, twice, without learning what sort of doom it is (if, indeed, it is doom at all)? Read it to find out!
“Xu Ming’s Second Time Down” (and the two earlier installments) available for purchase as an ebook (for $0.99 per installment) at:
My web site (link to the new story • link to purchase the whole series in one go)
Apple (link to the new story • link to my author page with all the stories)
Barnes & Noble (link to the new story • link to my author page with all the stories)
Kobo (link to the new story • link to my author page with all the stories)
Smashwords (link to the new story • link to my author page with all the stories)
I hope you’ll give the series a try. If you like this newsletter, I think you’ll enjoy it (and actually even if you don’t like this newsletter, which tends to be rather more obsessed with small, out-of-the-way corners of the human experience than the stories are… but then, if that’s the case, why are you reading these words?)
2.
I’ve never read Dangerous Liaisons, although of course I’ve seen several movie adaptations, including the 1988 one of that title starting Glenn Close and John Malcovitch, and Valmont which came out around the same time. But the actual novel has long intrigued me, since I’ve heard it described as the pinnacle of the epistolary novel form. This terrific essay by Cathy Young bumped it up a couple of rungs on my tbr list, though. She captures the reason why I have been interested in it:
…in contrast to Clarissa or Héloïse, the letters are of plausible length, always have a plausible purpose, and exist within the flow of daily life in which people hurry to finish writing by dinner or mail collection, or write long letters on sleepless nights or rainy days; moreover, letters are not just a narrative vehicle, but an essential part of both plot and psychological development.
But she also adds this, which I hadn’t known before:
[Aside from] the bare facts; what really happens is profoundly ambiguous. Does Valmont “really” come to love the virtuous Tourvel, or does he always see her as his “project”? Does Merteuil love Valmont, or only want to win their battle of wills? Does she seek his death in provoking his duel with Danceny? Does he seek death? The list could go on and on. The inherent, Rashomon-like subjectivity of the epistolary format is compounded by the fact that, more often than not, words can’t be trusted. When Merteuil writes wistfully to Valmont, “In the days when we loved each other, for I do believe it was love, I was happy; and you, vicomte…?”, is it a sincere emotion, or well-placed bait, or both? Even Valmont’s apparent cri de coeur to Danceny while lamenting Tourvel’s loss, often regarded as the novel’s key line—“Believe me, there is no happiness except in love!”—is interpretable as a tactical move to coax Danceny away from Merteuil and back to his earlier love, Cécile. Add self-deception to deception, and things grow even more complicated.
As I said, Young made me want to read the book more than I had before. Check out her essay and see if you agree.
Young also informed me of the new cinematic versions, including (ugh) a prequel, although Young thinks they aren’t as good as the novel and doesn’t really recommend them, a stance pleasingly consonant with my preexisting prejudices and which I have no inclination to second-guess. I am more interested, however, in the various (prose fictional) adaptations, such as Dangerous Tweets (a modern updating by Marc Oliver) and Marcus James’s Where the Vile Things Are (a contemporary gay adaptation, with a male Merteuil, set in San Francisco in 2016). But I really ought to read the original first!
3.
A word for an important phenomenon: “paltering”, which means “using statements that are technically true, but also leave out critical information in order to mislead people.” Climate writer Emily Atkin explains:
Paltering is one of three scientifically-defined forms of deception. Introduced in 2016 by Harvard University and University of Pennsylvania researchers, it refers to the active use of true statements to create an overall false impression. It’s also known as “lying by telling the truth.”…
Lying by omission is similar to paltering, as both involve failing to disclose relevant information. But where lying by omission is defined by passively avoiding the whole truth, paltering is defined by actively telling selective truths.
Paltering is when you say, “I finished my math homework,” when in reality all you did was take 5 minutes to write “666” in all of the answer boxes. So you did technically finish your math homework, but you did such a bad job that you’re still going to fail. The only thing you achieved is getting your parents off your back by actively misleading them about your activities.
This is what oil and gas companies do in their advertisements. Technically, they tell the truth—they’re investing in greener, cleaner technology. But the investments are small, the technology is unproven, and their companies are overall failing to reduce their emissions. The selective truth they choose is designed to create a false impression, so everyone gets off their back about climate change.
4.
Other links:
Ozy Brennan, as part of their series on “weird people of history”, narrates the life of one Samuel Derrick (1724-1769), a bad poet, rake, charmer, partyer, friend to sex workers, social climber, and many other things, who was most famous for ghost-writing a guidebook to London’s prostitutes, Harris's List of Covent Garden Ladies, which was published annually for decades (long after Derrick’s death). Derrick’s life is a fascinating tale, with many twists and turns and reversals of fortune, and is well-told by Ozy, and is a really interesting bit of history. Trigger warning for the sort of things you’d expect from a biography of a man famous for ghost-writing a guidebook to sex workers.
Via a link in Ozy’s essay, this analysis of the financials of Jane Austen’s characters is quite fascinating & covers the complexities well.
This guide to now-dead rules of linguistic usage is quite charming.
A lot of the popular talk about AI is about the possibility of an AI killing us all. What I found fascinating about this Ezra Klein podcast (transcript here), along with its accompanying prologue, which is separately found here (essentially this column) is that it doesn’t focus on that: rather, it focuses on the way that AIs might—probably will—change society in dramatic but not existential-threat kind of ways. (It does spend a little time on the existential risks, but then gets back to the other threats.).Since these seem less fantastical, they are easier to take seriously—and, honestly, are also really terrifying in many scenarios (somehow the utopian ones are harder to take seriously). Unlike the existential threat, the idea that they will have a huge change—with a range of what that means, of course—is fairly uncontroversial (although, as they note, by no means guaranteed). Worth a listen/read.
The White Rose was an anti-Nazi resistance group that, with a crazed bravery, decried the crimes of the regime in 1942-3. They were eventually found, arrested, and most of them were executed. But a few survived. The last surviving member of the White Rose died this past March at the age of 103. May her memory be for a blessing. (h/t)