The Clarion Workshop at UCSD

From the “You Can’t Make This Stuff Up” file, a Reuters story out of Ashgabat, Turkmenistan, summarizing the slow diminishment of the cult status of Turkmenbashi, ‘Father of All Turkmens,’ the nation’s dead former dictator: 

A rotating gold statue of Turkmenistan’s former leader is to be removed from the centre of the capital, state media said on Saturday, as his successor chips away at the late president’s personality cult.

Saparmurat Niyazov spent his 21 years in power building Turkmenistan into one of the world’s most isolated regimes while imposing his mark on the gas-rich Central Asian state.

He styled himself Turkmenbashi, or “Father of all the Turkmen”, and spent giant sums building sumptuous memorials to his own wisdom, including a 75-metre-tall (246 feet) tower in central Ashgabat whose summit is a statue of himself.

But President Kurbanguly Berdymukhamedov has ordered the giant syringe-like structure that towers over low-rise Ashgabat to be removed to a southern suburb, state media said.

If you ever need source material for creating some insane dictator for a story or novel, you can find boatloads of material in the life of this nutcase.  The only problem: would your readers believe it?

With thanks to the glorious Mr. Lewis Carroll, and in recognition perhaps of a renaissance in Carroll-ish strands within literary science fiction and fantasy, I point tonight to the marvelous blog post at the UK’s Guardian books site by 2008 Clarionite Damien G. Walter.  Damien, along with classmate Emily Jiang, is a respondent to this blog, something that the new blog etiquette requires me to disclose; their equally stunning classmates so far seem less forward (less interested perhaps?) as they prep for the crazed six-week phenomenon that is Clarion. 

Damien’s blog post heralds the excitement of the Mundane movement — a rather joyous dichotomy, this idea of a wondrous Mundane.  I won’t try to summarize the piece, because it makes its own case so well.  What strikes me as wondrous about the  post is the simple fact that the Mundane movement, for all its power, is but one of several tremendously important strands emerging from the literatures of science fiction and fantasy.  Whether you choose to focus on Geoff Ryman and the Mundane as Damien does, or Kelly Link and magical realism, or Jeff VanderMeer and the New Wierd, or Neil Gaiman and the intersticial storytelling that bridges between graphic novels, novels, young adult novels and film, and then back again, the world of science fiction and fantasy literatures is becoming as varied and exciting as the field of ‘Literatures in Spanish’ that replace the old Western-centric approach differentiating between Spanish literature and the novels of the so-called New World; or ‘Literatures in English’ that brings English (UK) Literature, American Literature and Caribbean literature in English together into a single topic. 

Damien’s piece announces the death of the starship and the birth of the mundane reality at the core of sf and fantasy.  (Okay, that’s a gross exaggeration, but I’m trying to make a point here.)  I would argue that the starship, in partnership with the vampire and comic heroes such as Iron Man, live on and indeed reign supreme in the other media that reflect the sf and fantasy genres: film, television, the web.  They will continue to dominate in those genres well into the future, since the emerging ‘Literatures of SF/Fantasy’ have more power in the written word than in other media.

Meantime, where our past focus in the study of literature writ large was framed largely by the dichotomy between ‘High’ and ‘Low’ literatures, the emergence of so many powerful variants within sf and fantasy may herald a new age.  Where it goes, well, only time will tell.  Or time travel.

As we approach the 2008 Workshop, I thought it might be helpful to troll for perspectives on the value of the Clarion experience, and how to think of it.  Two particularly interesting perspectives come from alumni Nicola Griffith and Richard Paul Russo.  They parallel each other, with Nicola providing the short version and Richard a longer, more detailed version of the same thought.

Nicola’s quote comes from her website, in an interview that she labels “Colorado” dated “sometime in 1998.”  As part of discussing her background, she notes, “Clarion didn’t teach me how to write–the only way to learn to write is to write–but it showed me how it might be to be a writer.”

In a May 2000 email interview with Richard Paul Russo, Nick Gevers at Infinity Plus, noting that Russo had described Clarion as a “turning point,” asked, “Was it crucial for personal reasons, or because the course imparted good technical literary counsel? Or both?”  The response:

Primarily personal, though you could say both, given a broad enough definition of “technical literary counsel.” It has always been difficult for me to articulate what I learned and discovered at Clarion, because it has more to do with the approach to writing than it does with concrete “rules” or “guidelines” of the craft itself, though those are important as well. I did gain some technical knowledge about the craft of writing, but the most critical thing I came away from Clarion with was an understanding and acceptance of what it would really take — personally — to become a good writer. An understanding of both the personal honesty and the true commitment that were necessary.

I learned that having a facility for language and beautiful writing were not enough if there was no story underneath it all. And I learned that not just any story will do — I need to dig deep inside and find a story that matters to me on some level, that I am convinced is worth telling. Because if the writer doesn’t believe the story is worth telling, the story will not be convincing to the reader. Additionally, I came to appreciate the need for being open to criticism while at the same time having enough self-assurance to stick to my guns when I feel specific criticism is misguided — a fine balance, but a crucial one to strive for. Most of all, I learned that not only do individual stories need to be approached with seriousness and honesty, but writing as a whole — as a career or vocation — needs to be approached with the same sense of honesty and purpose, discipline and dedication.

How, exactly, I learned all this at Clarion is unclear. It was more experiential than anything. After Clarion, I stopped writing completely for over a year. I was assimilating the experience, assessing my own life, my motivations and desires, thinking about writing in general terms. When I began to write again, my stories were significantly better — not just in technique, but in some overall sense. In the years before Clarion, I’d had a large number of stories rejected, and one mediocre story published. In the years since Clarion, I have sold nearly every story I have written (though some were drastically revised and re-submitted before I sold them). That’s also when I began writing novels, and I’ve published every novel I’ve written as well.

A few items of interest from the 2007 Nebula Awards:

• Nebula Award winners with Clarion links include Karen Joy Fowler, president of the Clarion Foundation and author of Wit’s End, for her short story, “Always”; and alum Ted Chiang, for his novelette, The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate.  Two out of five isn’t bad, I guess.
• Another contribution to the ’are we mainstream or are we not?’ debate surrounding sf and fantasy came when literary mainstream author Michael Chabon won the Novel award for The Yiddish Policemen’s Union.
• Ted Chiang’s win reminded me of a December 2003 interview available here, in which he had the following to say about Clarion’s effect on his writing: ”Clarion encouraged me to keep on writing. Before I was accepted to the workshop, I hadn’t received any encouragement about my writing, and I was on the verge of giving up. Clarion was the first time anyone told me they liked my work. Clarion also introduced me to the SF community. Before I attended, I hadn’t known anyone who read SF, let alone wanted to write it, so meeting my fellow students there was like discovering a family I’d never known I’d had.”
• And lastly, the runup to the Nebulas, held in Austin, TX this year, included a very nice Dallas Times piece on science fiction in Texas, home to 71 members of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America.  Robert E. Howard was perhaps the most famous and most quirky of the state’s sf progeny, but now only one among many.  Most of those, it notes, are clustered around Austin, the state capital — not overly surprising, if you’ve seen the rest of Texas.

Today’s PopMatters has a post by Mae-lee Chai on Adilifu Nama’s Black Space: Imagining Race in Science Fiction Film, on the slim presence of blacks in the genre:

How one quarter of the Earth’s population suddenly disappears in the future is not an issue generally addressed in any of these films. How then, does one write a book about black people in a genre that for the most part has deliberately excluded them? The answer: by examining the erasure as well as the limited depictions of black people in science fiction.

The review begins with an anecdote that Nama’s friends, upon learning of his planned study, would tell him it was “going to be a short book.”  According to Chai, however, the depth that the book covers — and what it leaves out, including the treatment of black women, other races, children — indicates that Nama’s volume is only a starting point on a long journey to reconsider race and science fiction.  Octavia Butler once described one of her novels as follows:

I talked to members of my family, and did some personal research that didn’t really have anything to do with the time and place I was writing about, but that gave me a feeling of the experience of being black in a time and place where it was very difficult to be black.

Nama’s work implies that most filmmakers in sf and fantasy have focused on imagining ‘the experience of their (white) world’ in a different time and place without noticing who they were leaving out.  Then again, the relatively smaller numbers of prominent black filmmakers, let alone sf and fantasy filmmakers, begs the question of what one would expect to come first, the filmmakers or the films.

This summer’s Clarion workshop presents an interesting opportunity to discuss issues of race in literature.  We’re hoping to bring Nalo Hopkinson together with some of our Literature Department faculty specializing in African diaspora literature — like Fatima El-Tayeb, Camille Forbes, Dennis Childs or Sara Johnson – together with Clarion students for a conversation.  Just another way we hope that the Clarion workshop’s new UC San Diego home can serve as a resource to the students and broaden the community dialogue.

One of UC San Diego’s most interesting faculty members is Teddy Cruz, a Visual Arts professor specializing in urban architecture who is rethinking the very nature of the urban environment.  For writers thinking about imagined worlds, Teddy’s an exemplar of the ways that reimagining our current society can make for a better future.

Teddy – whose work can best be understood in its political context, as in his Political Equator II project – was the subject of a New York Times Magazine profile a couple of years back, and his work in Hudson, NY, the subject of a more recent article in that paper.  Last week’s issue of San Diego CityBeat described some of Teddy’s work in an article on the future of Barrio Logan, an inner-city neighborhood of San Diego facing much-needed redevelopment:

“It’s about complexity,” he said. “This is an opportunity to think of incubator spaces, to rethink the street itself, how it is appropriated by informal economies, farmers markets. There is a series of histories in these neighborhoods, how the structure is used, how community-based agencies are active in producing social culture.”

Cruz has garnered an international reputation for his work implementing this idea, which he refers to as “pixelation.” Much as a computer image comprises many dots of different colors, a neighborhood comprises many small structures that form a coherent whole. In urban planning terms, that means avoiding exactly the types of projects already underway in Barrio Logan, be they affordable housing or luxury apartments. Three years ago, Cruz persuaded some of his architect friends to purchase nine lots south of the Coronado Bridge in Barrio Logan. The plan was to create a new kind of community-based urban architecture.

“For me it’s been very compelling to imagine that housing or density can be evaluated as the amount of social exchanges per acre,” he said.

Teddy, recently added to the board of the Center City Development Corporation by San Diego Mayor Jerry Sanders, further explains the concept of pixelation in a recent interview with online news source Voice of San Diego.  Teddy’s firm, estudio teddy cruz and its projects like Mi Pueblo — in collaboration with the community development organization Casa Familiar – presents a major opportunity to rethink the ongoing redensification of America’s cities.

The Economist has a fabulous “Special Report” on mobile telecoms in the April 12, 2008 issue, “Nomads at Last.”  It’s about the rise of connectivity as virtually every form of IT and communication goes mobile:

Urban nomads have started appearing only in the past few years. Like their antecedents in the desert, they are defined not by what they carry but by what they leave behind, knowing that the environment will provide it. Thus, Bedouins do not carry their own water, because they know where the oases are. Modern nomads carry almost no paper because they access their documents on their laptop computers, mobile phones or online. Increasingly, they don’t even bring laptops. Many engineers at Google, the leading internet company and a magnet for nomads, travel with only a BlackBerry, iPhone or other “smart phone”. If ever the need arises for a large keyboard and some earnest typing, they sit down in front of the nearest available computer anywhere in the world, open its web browser and access all their documents online.

Another big misunderstanding of previous decades was to confuse nomadism with migration or travel…. Humans have always migrated and travelled, without necessarily living nomadic lives. The nomadism now emerging is different from, and involves much more than, merely making journeys. A modern nomad is as likely to be a teenager in Oslo, Tokyo or suburban America as a jet-setting chief executive. He or she may never have left his or her city, stepped into an aeroplane or changed address. Indeed, how far he moves is completely irrelevant. Even if an urban nomad confines himself to a small perimeter, he nonetheless has a new and surprisingly different relationship to time, to place and to other people. “Permanent connectivity, not motion, is the critical thing,” says Manuel Castells, a sociologist at the Annenberg School for Communication, a part of the University of Southern California, Los Angeles.

The link above brings you to the first of seven articles in the report; you have to go through them one by one to read the entire report (note the The Economist: Web 2.o=free content).  The whole thing sounds a lot like the visions of Vernor Vinge, especially in “Fast Times at Fairmont High,” reviewed here on Ray Kurzweil’s website.  But it divides the analysis well; pay particular attention to the sixth story in, “A World of Witnesses,” on the democratic pressures that ubiquitous cameras and other digital artifacts will bring.  Great stuff.

Today’s New York Times asks that question in an article titled in my print edition, “Asking a Federal Judge to Save the Planet, and Maybe a Bit More “, and on their website, “Asking a Judge to Save the World, and Maybe a Whole Lot More“:

None of [today’s other news] will matter a bit, though, if two men pursuing a lawsuit in federal court in Hawaii turn out to be right. They think a giant particle accelerator that will begin smashing protons together outside Geneva this summer might produce a black hole or something else that will spell the end of the Earth — and maybe the universe.

… Walter L. Wagner and Luis Sancho contend that scientists at the European Center for Nuclear Research, or CERN, have played down the chances that the collider could produce, among other horrors, a tiny black hole, which, they say, could eat the Earth. Or it could spit out something called a “strangelet” that would convert our planet to a shrunken dense dead lump of something called “strange matter.”

I know I’ve read sf novels with that as the premise.  My first question, of course, is whether the New York Times thinks losing the planet is “a bit” important or a “whole lot” important, and why their headline writer could come up with anything more descriptive than those two terms.  But on the same day that lawyers won a case returning copyright rights to the heirs of Superman’s creators, taking them back from corporate giant Time-Warner, anything is possible.

Pardon my riff on Pogo, but I couldn’t help thinking of my favorite possum while reading the Los Angeles Times‘ article this morning, “Reporting live from a cellphone near you …” It focuses on Bay Area start-up Qik.com, leading us to a “dystopian” future by letting “users send live video directly from their Nokia phones to the web.”

 ”The worst moment in almost everybody’s life is going to be captured on film,” [Jason Calacanis, a New York-bred, L.A-based entrepreneur and tech-world celebrity] said. “But if those bad moments can be avoided or we can learn from them, that’s going to be very powerful as well.”

Wait, hold the phone . . . optimism about constant mutual surveillance? How does that work? Well, mull it over and see if Calacanis’ view doesn’t start to make sense. The key is not to think of it in Orwellian terms, in which some unseen entity is monitoring your every move. Not that Big Brother couldn’t happen or that we shouldn’t be vigilant about its creeping up on us — but that’s a different story altogether. What I’m talking about here is Little Brother — since we’re the ones with the cameras….

Consider too that it might not be so bad, collectively, to have more of our unflattering moments out in the open. It seems to me that for a long time now, we’ve all been laboring under the Puritanical myth that to be good is to be perfect.

I’m not so sure that I agree with him on that, but certainly Little Brother seems a bigger threat than Big Brother at this point.  Especially when you think what then-rare video did in the Rodney King case, and jump to today’s New York Times piece on haggling, about the increasing ability of eBay-aware shoppers to negotiate prices downward in department, electronics and other chain stores, particularly as the recession deepens.  And it’s not just pricing information or police-brutality videos that are reshaping the power of the collective individual: at UC San Diego, we have a start-up technology in the works that will put real-time air-quality monitoring in the hands of cell phone users, allowing urbanites to track pollution levels in their neighborhoods and identify hotspots.

 The power of the ‘collective individual’: Childhood’s End, anyone? 

UC San Diego Physics B.A. Philip Rosedale has decided to move up within Second Life, the virtual world his Linden Lab created, to make room for an experienced manager who can manage the world’s explosive growth:

Rosedale founded Second Life, the 3-D virtual world in which players can fly, look like rock stars and build their own palaces, as well as pursue less savory endeavors, in 1999. The fanciful role-playing game now has about 500,000 active users.

The virtual world grew rapidly over the last two years. The number of people who pay $9.95 or more for a premium membership (you can also use the site for free) nearly doubled to 93,219 in late 2007 from the year before. Corporate sponsors such as Nissan Motor Co., Dell Inc. and Best Buy Co. bought virtual land and set up shop in Second Life with the hope of marketing to its residents.

Dean Takahashi at VentureBeat has an interesting review of The Making of Second Life: Notes from the New World, the recent book by Catherine Winters.  It’s a nice take on where Second Life is, as we contemplate where it’s going.