Abhijeet Makes Things

Tag: books

  • No think. Only do.

    I don’t know anything about Daoism except that Ursula K LeGuin thought it was cool and good.

    This is relevant because I just finished China Mountain Zhang by Maureen F. McHugh, a 1992 alt-history about an American-born Chinese man in a unipolar world where Socialism (with Chinese Characteristics) appears to be hegemonic.

    I first heard about the book in one of Zachary Gillian’s bluesky posts and bought it immediately because that man knows ball. It went into my DNF pile after I ran into an uncomfortable amount of slurs in chapter one. Then I heard glowing praise about it several times from Patrick Nielsen Hayden at Viable Paradise, and decided to pick it up again.

    Hate when something I want to hate is actually extremely good.

    The slurs really weren’t necessary, and it needs a massive trigger warning slapped across one of its chapters, but it is one of the finest books I’ve read in a long time.

    In summary, the novel covers ten years of Zhang’s life as he moves between New York, China, and Canada, with occasional diversions into other lives that touch his. McHugh uses these stories of mostly marginalized people to sketch out a world with a wild alt-history, peculiar social norms, and novel technologies. Readers more attuned to actual Chinese culture (or Chinese-American culture) will have more to say about this book than I could (both positive and negative) but as an outsider to both these cultures (USAmerican and Chinese), I was fascinated.

    The prose is invisible and the characters are irresistible to follow. Zhang’s miserable lavender date in chapter one alone is well worth the price of the book. Her skill with Man vs The Man plots is staggering, especially how she personifies the wielders and victims of the systems that govern her alt-Earth. It’s very engaging, to the point that I now have opinions (probably wrong ones) about Martian council processes and Daoist engineering principles.

    Speaking once again of Daoism, the title of this post is how I understood the book’s interpretation of the Dao, specifically of wu-wei, the Daoist concept of non-doing. As a non-expert, it sounds to me like wu-wei refers to doing without analyzing, allowing experience to lead to outcomes without the mind getting in the way.

    It’s an interesting counterpoint to a tendency I see in my own reading nowadays, that of trying to reverse engineer why something works. Trying to work on on my craft has turned me into a “no do only think” nerd when it comes to reading, almost the anti-thesis of the Dao.

    Someone recently said to me that a good book teaches you how to read it. If China Mountain Zhang is a book about the Dao, then it certainly taught me how to read it. A few chapters in, I disappeared into McHugh’s world and writing, re-entering the mode of “no think only do” after a very, very long time. Cannot recommend it highly enough.

    TLDR: China Mountain Zhang good. Look up trigger warnings. Remember it’s from 1992. Please correct me if you’re culturally Chinese.

  • Giant Chips, Giant Shoulders

    I’ve been reading more short fiction to try and understand where the market is today. When people hear this, many tell me this is a Bad Thing for writers to do. From seasoned pros to random relatives to people in my writing group, there seems to be no dearth of people who believe creative work should appear ex nihilo from the genius artist’s brow. I don’t think I can agree with this.

    To me, writing feels like a conversation with past works. Everything I write is the meeting minutes of my own imagined salon starring Pratchett, Roy, Erikson, and so on. Newer writers (Jemisin, Ha, Chiang) also chip in, usually with more interesting and current suggestions. I don’t think I can write if I don’t read.

    Maybe it’s a Me Problem. I’m an engineer who grew up in the STEM-lord hegemony of post-90s India. I always feel behind on reading compared to my peers. I’m hesitant to even call them my peers. In one sense, I’m ahead of them in that my intuitions on physics and causal inference are stronger than many active writers. In a much more important sense, I’m far behind them; my impoverished intracranial salon is significantly more parochial than someone who grew up reading The Canon or someone who works in Real Science (TM)(C)(R) and can summon cutting edge speculation at the drop of a pipette.

    It’s also possible that those complaining about my reading approach are pointing to a different problem: they’re worried I’ll get stuck trend-chasing. People who believe this are unaware of how much work it would be for me to actually accomplish this. I don’t have the skills or fortitude needed to (a) identify a market trend (b) translate that into a story outline and, (c)rucially, actually write a story that I’m not interested in on its own merits.

    “Understanding the market” is just me trying to understand what I’m stepping into, so I know what I’m in conversation with. Imagine I sat down to write a story set in the impact of LLMs on creativity without knowing that Thomas Ha already wrote a great story about that (The Mub.) Whatever I could come up with might be an interesting story, but it would also be a shallower one.

    There’s a perverse similarity between the people telling me to avoid marketomancy, and the people who (incorrectly) defend LLMs as extensions of this behavior. Though the former would vehemently deny this connection, both approaches treat writing as a coin-operated machine: insert ideas here, just add terajoules. This is also, ironically, STEM-lord logic. The mental model of writing as a conversation is much more interesting to me, and has the added benefit of being more human.

    The final irony of this formulation is that treating writing as a conversation is already common wisdom in a particular set of fields: science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. The nerds who built those LLMs didn’t also invent calculus from scratch. And I shouldn’t have to invent multi-POV short stories to know that they’re an option. We all stand on the shoulders of giants.

    Now that I have used the STEM-lord in me to defeat the STEM-lordism in my well-wishers, I will now return to my stories. Because, and this may be the most important part, I LIKE TO READ.

  • Unperson

    Neil Gaiman is most likely a monster, as we have all heard by now (trigger warnings.) The main story here is the bravery and well-being of the women who dared testify about this immensely popular author in the public eye.

    My feelings about these revelations are meaningless in comparison. However, compounded across the millions of people touched by Gaiman’s work, even the minor harm per former fan aggregates into something worth addressing. Distinct from and far lesser than the harm (allegedly, but credibly) inflicted on the women who spoke up, it still exists. And I don’t know what to make of it.

    These are all questions that have become familiar by now, with the key one being: what comes next? As with Polanski, Louis CK, Woody Allen and many more, I want to know what to do with the love I once held for Gaiman’s works. Do I exorcise my shelf by throwing away all copies of his novels and comics? Or do I bury them under the floorboards? Burn them as effigy? Do I tear Good Omens down the middle?

    Nobody really seems to know. When I ask these questions of people with their heads screwed on tight, they usually diagnose me with a case of idolatry, going on to prescribe that I discard this parasocial attachment and any aspirations of a moral celebrity. They explain that expecting moral perfection from anyone is a losing bet, so why hold artists to these standards? Why agonize over the morality of a creator? Why care about their actions? Why not let the art speak for itself? I appreciate the thoughts behind this diagnosis but it doesn’t help me. Unlike the legions of former adoring fans grappling with monstrous idols, I have no difficulties discarding Gaiman himself.

    American Gods is a different problem. Gaiman’s 2001 novel was formative for me as a writer. Past and present me often disagree on matters of taste, so the book may not have aged well even outside of its author’s crimes (alleged, but credible.) Even so, that doesn’t erase the book’s profound influence on me. Even though I will never again read the book again, repulsed by its association with Gaiman’s alleged (but credible) monstrosity, this rejection wouldn’t change the evenings I spent sprawled on my cot in Bangalore, my legs up against the wall, leafing through my second hand paperback. Nothing will un-write the Mr. Ibis fanfictions I turned in for creative writing contests and nothing will un-recommend that book to the hundreds of patient, glassy-eyed men and women who met me in the 2010s. The book is indelibly part of my past, and so I want to explore what I can do about American Gods.

    Claire Dederer’s 2017 article What Do We Do with the Art of Monstrous Men is often referenced as a starting point for such inquiries, and I can see why. In this deeply personal piece, Dederer traces the evolution of her feelings about Woody Allen’s oeuvre, beginning at an initial enamorment and passing through post-exposé disgust, only to culminate in a begrudging, tentative reacceptance of Allen’s art, though not of Allen the artist. Of interest to my problem, even in this final phase of indulgence, Dederer can’t bring herself to accept Manhattan, the movie where Allen’s script coincides most closely with his crimes. Though she steadfastly opposes universalizing her own experience, I can use this difference between Annie Hall and Manhattan and Dederer’s own direction in the piece to sketch the outline of an answer that appears satisfying: the path forward can only be a personal one, one where your own moral feelings about individual pieces of art guide you. For Dederer, this is a path where Annie Hall is acceptable, but Manhattan isn’t. In short, she offers a cogent, emotional defense of separating the artist and art where possible (Annie Hall), while allowing that it might be impossible in some cases (Manhattan.) A pick-and-choose art-minus-artist, appealing in its simplicity.

    My experience, or perhaps my perspective, departs from Dederer’s perspective in one key aspect. She appears content to never rewatch Manhattan or, at least, doesn’t appear upset about the loss. I’m not as equanimous about American Gods. I want retribution. I want a proportional and appropriate punishment for Gaimain for the (alleged, but credible) crime poisoning parts of my past. Whatever the legal system does or, sadly and more likely, does not do to Gaiman for the tangible harms he has (allegedly, but credibly so) inflicted on these women, he will remain indelibly attached to American Gods, as well as The Sandman, Good Omens, and The Doctor’s Wife. People like me will have to choose between severing a part of ourselves or becoming complicit in Gaiman’s legacy as a literary giant. The only escape from this choice is to somehow make it so that American Gods has nothing to do with Gaiman, and never had anything to do with him. Perhaps we wipe Gaiman from the record and claim it was plucked from a Borgesian Babel, as if the book itself was a virginally birthed, American god. 

    Fantastical as this seems, it isn’t without precedent. Even today, many people are only famous for never existing. Nikola Yezhov, the former leader of the Soviet secret police, is one of them. There is a famous photo of Yezhov strolling along the banks of the Volga river alongside Stalin and other Soviet luminaries. In this photo, Yezhov wears a pleased smile, one that shouldn’t rest as lightly as it does, for Yezhov, too, was a monster. In the year the photo was taken, Yezhov led a campaign of arrests, torture, and executions all across the USSR, transporting hundreds of thousands into camps or the afterlife. In modern times, we expect such monstrosity to go unpunished but, happily, this tale ends with comeuppance. Shortly after the purges abated, Yezhov fell afoul of Stalinist court politics, was put on mock trial for crimes during the purge, and was executed. At some point after this belated end to a horrific career, the Soviet press took the photo by the Volga and airbrushed Yezhov out, systematically erasing him from the public record, unpersoning this monstrous man.

    For all the USSR’s missteps, this anecdote has a whiff of parable around it. Could you invent a worse punishment for an artist, a being that exists to create and be heard? Is there a more poetic way for me to punish the poisoner of my memories than by erasing all memory of him? A capital punishment for a capital crime.

    If we agree this is a fitting punishment, I must next ask: how can I do it? Turning to history for instruction, we find a new name for this practice: damnatio memoriae (lit. the damnation of memory.) The oldest example we find is of the slave Herostratus, sentenced to damnatio memoriae in the 4th century BCE by the Ephesians, for his alleged torching of the Temple of Artemis. Taking the cases of Herostratus and Yezhov together, we can see what is needed to accomplish an unpersoning. Whether Greek, or Mesopotamian, or Irish, or Soviet, an unpersoning can only be attempted by a coordinated exercise of far-reaching power: in other words, the power of a state. Yezhov couldn’t have been unpersoned by a stray apparatchik, nor could a passing helot have damned Herostratus. A corollary of this, of course, is that I can’t erase one of the most prolific and recognizable writers today. Whatever retribution I seek must lie within my own sphere of power, a sphere far tinier than a state, being approximately Abhijeet-sized and Abhijeet-shaped.

    Let’s say, for a moment, that I do have the power to attempt this unpersoning, should I expect it to succeed? After all, I can’t ignore that both these attempted unpersonings were spectacular failures. Though this is trite enough to be cliche, it’s worth noting that I only know of Yezhov and Herostratus because of the attempted erasure. There is no other Earthly reason for me to have even heard of those names.

    So does that mean all hope is lost? Happily, no! As the historians who study damnatio memoriae note, the goal of this practice often wasn’t obliteration, but condemnation. For example, while human memory still remembers Herostratus, it is not as a husband or father or son, or even as a slave. Herostratus is remembered a sinner, an alleged criminal who burned down the Temple of Artemis, one of the seven wonders of antiquity. The hope isn’t in attempted erasures, but in condemnation.

    You might assume condemnation requires the same, vast state power as erasure, but erasure requires a vast conspiracy of silence to be maintained across all of time and recorded history, while condemnation requires only one loud voice. While attempted unpersonings are beyond most individual people’s reach, condemnation isn’t, and it appears to be more effective as well. As it turns out, Dederer was right for me after all. Returning to her instinctive reliance on the personal, I can now synthesize a path forward for me.

    Without trying to answer the impossibly complex question of what We, The People should do, I can resolve the far more tractable conundrum of what I, An Abhijeet, can do. Through this tangle of possibility and feasibility and acceptability, only one solution stands out to me. Happily, it is a regression to the mean, in both senses of the word.

    The answer for me is to become a hater, that is, a vocal, prejudiced and unfair critic of Gaiman, the kind of person who brings up these allegations in all conversations about Gaiman, the kind of person that replaces “Brock Turner” with “the Rapist Brock Turner” all the time, the kind of person that makes art-artist-separationeers roll their eyes. This seems like the only proportionate and possible retribution against monsters who poison their own art.

    Unlike the doomed nature of erasure, being a hater is driven by hope: the hope that, if I do this for long enough, around enough people, with enough clarity, and without being off-putting, the monsters behind my poisoned memories will be seen by everyone as monstrous and nothing more; the hope that, eventually, I will contribute toward tarnishing their legacy, just as they have tarnished my past; that all their achievements will bear an asterisk: Chinatown, by Polanski the auteur pedophile. The Persistence of Memory, by Dali the surrealist Francoist. And American Gods, written by Neil Gaiman, the credibly alleged rapist.

    As this isn’t about what We The People should do, I won’t be advocating for what you should do, but it sure would be cool and good if everyone did do this. If nothing else, I hope this helps explain if I’m being a hater in the future about Gaiman or Louis CK or Rowling etcetera. And, for that matter, if you find someone going off about the latest monster that has retroactively poisoned their minds, it might be worth cutting them some slack. There’s a non-zero chance they may simply be seeking justice in small ways for small wounds.