Let’s start with the basics. I’ve talked previously about how the role of the protagonist can warp things: with the way that we construct stories, it’s very easy for people to sympathize with and focus on the actions of a protagonist and realign their understanding of right and wrong – at least within the context of a story – to the protagonist.
Read MoreDespite the fact that I’m listing off individuals, what I’m really pointing to are specific images of people crystallized in popular culture. Marcus Aurelius was not always the Marcus Aurelius that is remembered by history and popular imaginings. The historical figures, considered this way, are no more real than the most crudely drawn stock character: real people are complex and contain multitudes. Characters – even the most three-dimensional, deep characters – are often the opposite.
Read MoreThis is explicitly a function of nostalgia, but it is nostalgia had second-hand, where the original object is eerily absent, decontextualized and beginning to run down like William Basinski’s Disintegration Loops, where the original recordings were physically destroyed in the process of transferring them over.
Read MoreMy students, when they arrive, think they have mastered writing. They confidently hand in a paper with five paragraphs on it, and act confused when I tell them to change it. These students might as well have shown me five trees of the same kind planted in a perfectly ordered row on a lawn cleared of everything but those trees and the grass, and ask me to evaluate their forest.
Read MoreWhen I was a kid, I loved science fiction and this included alien abduction and UFO stories. I don’t think I really believed, even then. For a while, I even claimed to have seen one, though this was a lie. In this way, perhaps I better embodied the X-Files slogan “I want to believe” than the characters — I wanted to believe, but I simply didn’t.
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