Raritania

Friday, April 19, 2024

My SSRN (Social Science Research Network)-Published Papers

I have been publishing through the Social Science Research Network since 2018--or about six years. My papers vary greatly in subject and length, but the total number of them now comes to 170 at last count.

Given the number it seems to me appropriate to do something about organizing them for the reader--and so I have decided to here organize those relevant to this blog's themes by subject, allotting a page of this blog to each of those subjects that I have found myself writing about time and again. Where its subject matter makes this appropriate, I have listed some papers on more than one page, or even under more than one heading.

The links to those subject pages are listed below in alphabetical order.

The 1990s.

Politics and Popular Culture.

Science Fiction.

Social Withdrawal.

Spy and Military Techno-Thriller Fiction.

Social Withdrawal and the Cost of Being with Others

In writing about social withdrawal I have tended to write mainly about the economic and socioeconomic factors that seem to me to encourage this--the way the gap between "middle class" aspirations and what people are actually achieving, for example, has grown, the high monetary costs of participating in social life, and how all these create inducements for people to just "drop out" of the job market, the dating market, every market, and stay home, and immerse themselves in the world of Azeroth (or whatever has replaced it these days).

Still, it does seem to me that the quality of interpersonal relations does enter into this. I recall, for example, David Foster Wallace writing that the lonely are often people not willing to bear the costs of being with others--emotional as well as financial. It stands to reason that those who give more and get less satisfaction out of the experience of being with others--who, around others, find themselves repressing themselves all the time, for example; who find themselves enduring rather than enjoying the company of other people--will simply have less to do with those others. The resulting isolation may not be what they really want out of life--but as is much more often the case than those pampered idiots who speak so pompously about "choice" admit, life for most people, most of the time, is about what seems "least-worst" within a fairly unappealing range of options rather than the truly desirable.

It also seems to me the case that there is an interaction between the economic and the emotional here. Those who have not managed to live up to social expectations and "fit in" for whatever reason have fewer contacts and less status. Their choice of personal relations is smaller, and whatever their range of choice the people they deal with are likely to treat them less well--leaving them with that much more incentive to keep to themselves.

The Automation of Rejection

In that truest portrait yet of the struggles of the aspiring writer, Jack London's Martin Eden, the eponymous protagonist, in the course of receiving one form rejection letter after another, begins to wonder if he is dealing not with human-staffed organizations, but with a machine that returns form rejections for submissions in exactly the same manner that a vending machine would give a stick of gum in return for a coin.

If there is any difference between that experience and the writer's experience of today it is that, especially these last few years, the process probably has become genuinely more automated--and continues to become more so all the time. For many years it has been common for writers to submit work to publishers through online forms.

Given what we know about how employers automate the sifting of job-hunters' résumés to weed out much before there is call for any human to look at anything, and indeed job interviews now seem to be handled by artificial intelligence it is very, very easy to picture publishers turning over the low-priority work of dealing with the slush pile that turns the interns who deal with it into nasty little trolls pouring forth their abuse on aspiring writers in publications whose editors ought to know better (Salon, Guardian) over to algorithms and chatbots--which then dutifully arrange the dispatch of yet another copy of that e-mail saying "Please excuse the impersonal nature of this reply . . ."

"Please Excuse the Impersonal Nature of the Reply": What Rejection Letters Really Say to Those Who Get Them

It is a truism that those pursuing a career as a writer, and submitting their work for publication, experience a great deal of rejection, overwhelmingly by way of form rejection slips. Those who acknowledge the fact commonly wear on their faces that "smelled a fart" expression that stupid people think conveys gravitas and say something like "Rejection? Yes, terrible that," as if the emotional wound of a "No" in reply to one piece of their work was all that they suffered.

Of course, that is not at all the case.

There is the fact that submitting that work was a time-consuming, sometimes costly, never pleasant process--and the time, effort, money that went into that submission was completely wasted.

There is the reminder, not least by way of that "impersonal" reply, that the other party has all of the power in the relationship, they have none, and the other party makes the fullest use of its advantage in controlling the terms of the exchange so completely--with that impersonal rejection letter that rendered no satisfaction whatsoever peremptorily cutting off the conversation. ("Don't call us. We won't call you.") Because they are of no account whatsoever in the eyes of those who sent that form letter, and it matters not in the slightest if they do not excuse the impersonal nature of the reply.

And there is, for those who have been at the activity of collecting such rejection letters for a while, the way that each and every one of those letters affirms them in the increasing suspicion that those rejection letters are all they will ever get--because, contrary to the Big Lie that keeps alive that vast industry living on the hopes of aspiring authors (the books and workshops and courses and the rest), publishing is not some big meritocracy, the slush pile is in fact exceedingly marginal within the publishing world's release schedules, and, as Jack London's Martin Eden began to wonder amid his own struggles, he was not dealing with human beings, just a machine that took in submissions and returned rejections the way a vending machine takes coins and gives out sticks of gum.

The wastage, the humiliating treatment to which they are subjected as inferiors, and the impression of fraud and futility--all that is also conveyed by the rejection letter, and it is all the more devastating when trying to get published was not some whim, but their sole hope of a life they would find worth living, as it was for Eden.

But of course, this is more than the sort of person whose idea of expressing gravitas is pulling a "smelled a fart" face can wrap their small mind around.

On Not "Quitting Your Day Job"

It is, of course, the case that the artist endeavoring to make a career for themselves but not yet making it pay, and at the same time not independently wealthy or supported by other people, usually holds a "day job" to support themselves until they can make a living from their true vocation.

Most people see no great difficulty in that--and react to any suggestion that there may be difficulty with glib dismissals such as "T.S. Eliot was a banker!"

Those people, of course, are quite stupid--as they demonstrate by speaking such non sequiturs.

Not only is it the case that a day job automatically leaves less time, energy and freedom for artistic activity (for which those trying to make a real start are likely to find there are never enough hours in even the best of circumstances), but, while Day Jobs are not all the same, they are especially unlikely to be Dream Jobs. Few are the positions that are secure and pay well and yet open to someone whose real interest is elsewhere. Many are in fact insecure, ill-paid, unpleasant--and in the process take a lot more from the artist than the hours they consume.

A day job one cannot stand, the material hardship they may have to endure as a result of low pay with its additional toll on their time and energy, etc., have their effect on artistic output--and contrary to stupid remarks about how "The artist must suffer!" (a lame excuse for society's denying aspiring artists support, if not sadistic punching down at a low-status group), not a positive one. In the worst cases the day job may make the night job an empty pretension--the artist only hoping to create, rather than actually doing so because after a long day's work at that day job they are simply too run down to do anything more (as Martin Eden finds when he tries juggling a day job with his authorial efforts). Even if they do have some opportunity to create left, with the day job having the first claim on their time and energy, and their time chopped to bits by its demands, and learning the hard way that their creative faculties do not necessarily obey the clock (they may be readiest to produce just when they have to run off to work, least productive when they do have the time, etc.), there is just less of them to put into the work as, fighting for hours and even minutes in which to get something done, everything but the day and night jobs gets squeezed out--outside interests, social life, all those things that all people need, and which are also indispensable to enriching the work of the creative (the writer will find they no longer have time to read!), as they go about overtaxed all the time, exhausted all the time, rushed all the time, doing far from their best all the time, and maybe miserable all the time, especially if there is not much to buck up their hopes. Indeed, in the absence of what David in Lost Illusions called a "sublime cynicism" toward their hardships (a matter of saintliness rather than artistic genius), they are likely to find themselves aiming for low-hanging fruit rather than the masterpiece that may be the work of a lifetime, while an emotional and intellectual impoverishment is apt to produce work to match.

Grinding and frustrating as this all is it might be tolerable if it goes on for only a little while--the artist finding some alleviation of their situation, some encouragement, some practical relief after the initial hardships. But many are likely to find the hardships simply going on and on, themselves living this way for years--decades--of giving everything and getting nothing in return, perhaps not even a piece of work they can be proud of, as they look down to find themselves still standing on "square one." A particularly cruel irony for those who had thought that following an artistic career would permit them a broader, richer, freer life than the narrow existence they could expect (and most people get) from the workaday job, they are likely to feel they have wasted their lives--the more in as whoever is left in their life is likely to say to them "I told you so" at any and every opportunity (empathy and sympathy from even their nearest and dearest, as Balzac and Jack London candidly acknowledged, not something an aspiring artist is likely to have in their lives).

Given the economic realities that mean so few artists have any opportunity to gain any recognition at all, things would likely go the same way for many of them even if they did not have to hold down a day job. But there is no denying that it made the road harder, that it meant less realization of their potential than would otherwise have been the case, and all the hand-waving of the unsympathetic does nothing but advertise their essential meanness whenever anyone points out any of the less pleasant facts of life.

Getting Superhero Fatigue Before it Was Cool: My Early Case

As my blogging here shows, I had anticipated a collapse of interest in the superhero film genre long before the annus horriblis of 2023 that saw The Flash, Captain Marvel 2 and Aquaman 2 all crash and burn at the box office, throwing WBD and Disney-Marvel into crisis.

I guess that part of it was my taking a deeper interest in the genre than the general audience--familiarizing myself with the history of the form, not only picking up a comic now and then but actively trying to get to know the classics (reading my way through many a volume of the Marvel Essentials, etc.), and looking at it with the same critical gaze I had grown accustomed to applying to science fiction (for instance, thinking about whether there was any room for meaningful innovation left within the framework of the genre). It seemed to me that by Alan Moore's time the superhero comic book was already fairly late in its life cycle as a genre, and that impressive and significant as his work was, it just testified to the genre's approaching the end, rather than offering any source of renewal. (In art as in other things "deconstruction" is an end, not a beginning.)

However, there was also the fact that long before the twenty-first century boom in big-budget features about A-list Marvel and DC superheroes I had already seen plenty of the genre, and much of that stuck with me. There was the original 1978 Superman: The Movie and its first sequel (Superman II)--against which every other screen incarnation of the character would be measured and found wanting, precisely because later filmmakers failed to respect the spirit of the original vision as they indulged their pretensions to "adult" and "dark" and "gritty" matter, not that we had not already seen plenty of that before 2000. (Recall Tim Burton's Batman? Recall the '90s-era feature films depicting the Crow and Spawn and Blade?) And there were all those memorable small-screen versions, of which I have tended to grow more appreciative with the years--the old Adam West Batman, the Lynda Carter Wonder Woman series, and of course, the animated X-Men series (testimony to the lingering cultural presence of which is this X-Men '97 thing).

Of course, in spite of that I did enjoy many of the twenty-first century films--especially the first two of the Sam Raimi Spider-Man films, while if I became less impressed with them over time, I was also appreciative of the first two of Christopher Nolan's Batman movies. I was in fact favorable to many a film that the common run of opinion treated fairly brutally--like the 2008 Hulk film, and the 2009 adaptation of Moore's classic Watchmen.

But it was, like everything else, part of a broader body of work that extended further into the past, all as I had developed likes and dislikes and standards the way everyone does when they see a lot of a thing. This left the offerings of the Marvel Cinematic Universe and DC Extended Universe thin and flat and trite from the start. Meanwhile the X-Men movies, if increasingly dazzling visually, were far along the path of diminishing returns narratively, the reboot of Spider-Man with Andrew Garfield retreaded the same path far too soon, and Deadpool's ostentatious postmodernism (its self-awareness, its edgelordism) were wearisome. I still managed to have some positive words for 2015's Fantastic Four--but if there were some interesting elements there was no denying that taken as a whole it was a misfire, and amid a growing sense of creative exhaustion and sameness and desperation in arguing for the novelty of the newer offerings, it seemed less and less worth my while to try and catch every single new movie the way I once had done, as I wondered just how long all this could go on.

The financial catastrophes of last year, alas, answered that question--though it remains to be seen how the people in Hollywoodland will respond to that.

Of Old Genre Fans

As I have often remarked in the past, the history of science fiction has in the main been written by science fiction's writers and fans (in which capacity the writers tended to be operating when they took up historiography), rather than the kinds of scholars who generally handle literary history--especially when we look away from the college professors handling bits of the genre in abstruse ways to those attempting to provide a broader picture of the field.

Reading my way through their books I was often surprised, and not pleasantly, by how negative those writers often were about their field, not least in their constantly trashing its classics.

Later I ceased to be surprised. The eager fan new to a genre is likely to be very open to different kinds of material, and comparatively uncritical about what they look at, and respectful of received opinion. But as they get to know a genre better they form preferences--and develop antipathies. It also takes more to impress them, because they have something by which to judge what they see. And as a result they can get a lot more questioning of the "conventional wisdom." By the time they are in a position to write a book they are likely to be well past that point--and indeed many seemed simply cantankerous.

However, they often had plenty of insights to share, too, insights I often came to appreciate a good deal later--and which in hindsight seemed to me to make the cantankerousness well worth bearing with.

Gripes of an Old Science Fiction Fan

I may as well admit it--I read, and watch, a lot less science fiction than I used to, with this especially going for new stuff.

To some extent this is because I pay less attention to new stuff in general, as I no longer review books regularly, as my research concerns again and again direct my attention back to older material--and as, certainly in the media world, new production is ever more dispersed among a plenitude of streaming services with which no one can keep up.

However, there is also the reality that, as is commonly the case with longtime fans of anything, I have developed distinct likes and dislikes, and so much of what is abundant these days falls into the "dislike" category.

At this point I have absolutely had it with Frankenstein complex stuff about rebellious artificial intelligences and the like. If I want disaster drama and apocalypse and dystopia I will just look at the news instead. Superheroes? I was already feeling superhero fatigue back in 2010. And I never really found zombies all that interesting, or "young adult" stuff, while I never really got hooked on urban fantasy . . .

I can go on and on, but I think it is easy to see how all this automatically leaves many of the most popular themes less than appealing, even before I get to my broader wariness of the misanthropy, Luddism, irrationalism, edgelordism and the rest of the tones and shades in which today's "artistes" tend to work--all as the "literature envying" middlebrowness and bulkiness of today's more respectable work leaves me only the more appreciative of, alongside the brisk and dash and freshness of yesteryear's "idea men," also the good old-fashioned pulpy storytelling of a Smith or a Howard or a Dent.

Might I be induced to give something a chance in spite of that? Of course. Conceptual originality may get me to take a look--but having read and seen so much my bar for what I would regard as original is pretty high these days, and there seems to me to be no more originality about than there was back when I penned "The End of Science Fiction?" back in 2007. Humor might also get me to take a look, but the truth is that comedy is very hard to do well--and what passes for comedy these days is not often to my taste (all as, admittedly, the obscenities and absurdities of the era we live in make satire particularly difficult to pull off).

Still, if something is to get my attention that would be the way to do it.

The Interaction of Identity-Making and Stereotype

Not long ago I had occasion to remark the stereotype existing in many American minds of the Japanese initially, and later as nations like South Korea, Taiwan and China achieved Japan-like successes, other East Asians, as conservative, ultraconformist, overachievers--and the mixed feelings it produces in them. If they see East Asia as other and oppressive, those Americans also seem to envy that conservatism, that conformism, and very ready to chalk up that overachievement to those qualities.

In considering those images I tended to focus on one side of the matter--American misapprehension. Yet there is also, arguably, the way in which those cultures' elites tried to make their countries fit that model, and portrayed them that way to the outside world. Identity is a fundamentally conservative game, after all, and conservative elites define their countries in those terms they find desirable.* In Japan's case this was especially easy given that, in contrast with China, it never went Communist, or even had anything Westerners have been prone to recognize as a genuine bottom-up revolution. (Indeed, the highly conventional George Friedman and Meredith LeBard, in offering their analysis about Japan in Psychology Today, made much of this fact.) Thus they slight the history of dissent in Japan (a Bernd Martin in his comparison of Nazi Germany with World War II-era Japan, for example, pointedly doing so), figures like the novelist Takiji Kobayashi (tortured and killed by the country's secret police in 1933) simply not part of even relatively informed observers' image of the country.

The result is an interplay between the conservative prejudices of elites in one country, and in others.

* In considering the vision of Japanese society then prevailing in the United States it is well worth remembering that Japanese far rightist Shintaro Ishihara's book The Japan That Can Say No, which in many ways played into the prejudices discussed here (on both sides of the cultural line) was a New York Times bestseller in English translation.

Conservative Identity-Making and the Politics of Our Times

Since the Enlightenment what we think of as progressive, "liberal," "left," has stood by belief in a common humanity and the essential universality of the human--the idea that what people have in common is more important than the comparative superficialities of "culture." (Not nationalism, but internationalism, is the cry of the left.)

It is those who opposed them--the conservative, the reactionary, the right--who placed the stress on difference between one group and another, who defined their group against others, and conventionally did so in line with their desire to shore up existing social hierarchies and the elite privilege they undergirded. Thus those elites defined their countries in terms of what they wanted it to be, rather than what it actually was--their vision of its supposed age-old identity a demand they made of their "lower orders" rather than how things had always been, as reflected in the plain and simple rewriting of history to make it conform to their project.

Consistent with this, in one way or another they all ended up arguing that all that talk about reason and individuals and rights and freedom was a noxious alien import that had nothing to do with them. "Faith, each individual in their place, obligations, subordination--these things are who we are," they say, and if a foreigner proves skeptical, they add "You Others just cannot understand the profundities of our national soul."

Ironically, the "difference"-singing conservatives proved surprisingly universal in their answer to universalism--while it is a demonstration of the essential character of postmodernism that, in contrast with the left that treated such claims as self-serving exercises in obscurantism, they defer to them completely, to the point of presenting the most nihilistic and brutal of the Counter-Enlightenment as gentle hippie multiculturalism, the high-handed imposition of an identity on a people for the sake of a reactionary elite agenda as a glorious recognition of some group's supposedly innate specialness, and the most vicious act of Othering of another group as an embrace of "diversity."

Raritania

Friday, April 19, 2024

Spy and Military Techno-Thriller Fiction

Social Withdrawal

Science Fiction

Politics and Popular Culture

The 1990s

My SSRN (Social Science Research Network)-Published Papers

Social Withdrawal and the Cost of Being with Others

The Automation of Rejection

"Please Excuse the Impersonal Nature of the Reply": What Rejection Letters Really Say to Those Who Get Them

On Not "Quitting Your Day Job"

Getting Superhero Fatigue Before it Was Cool: My Early Case

Of Old Genre Fans

Gripes of an Old Science Fiction Fan

The Interaction of Identity-Making and Stereotype

Conservative Identity-Making and the Politics of Our Times

Subscribe Now: Feed Icon

Search This Blog

SITE BASICS

My Other Pages and Sites

Blog Archive

Contact Form

Blogs I Follow