a sense of joy and then a panic

PYM by Mat Johnson is a whole bunch of awesome (as pgtremblay promised it would be).  It is, basically, the kind of science fiction/fantasy* that I really enjoy and get a lot out of.  That is:

• Well-written.
• Written with passion.  I don't know how to describe this really, I just know it when I see it.
• Overflowing with sharp, biting, often-funny social commentary. 
• Smart.  The whole thing is a sequel and satire of Edgar Allen Poe's rather racist, open-ended fantasy The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, and the narrator is a black-but-looks-white literature professor who's just been denied tenure for refusing to go along with the college's pointless Diversity Committee.  The original story features an undiscovered island full of extraordinarily black, blacker than black people, as well as an Antarctica that's home to an extraordinarily white, whiter than white giant.  That's all I'll tell you, because finding out what happens after is the good part - the journey is the reward itself, etc.  PYM is mental acrobatics - not difficult to read, though, and very engaging - but the set-up is mental acrobatics. 
• Not an exercise in authorial wish fulfillment.  I mean, there is a ton of desire and wishing going on, but... the best laid plans, etc.
• Just a little bit wacko = kind of like the endearing quality "whimsy," but a lot less cute and a lot more WTF. 

It's also a lot of fun and occasionally laugh-out-loud funny, most of the way at least (the tone changes near the end).  Mostly this is due to Johnson's evident great talent for voice.  And another thing (I may get flack for this, but whatever...)?  I don't think this could have been written by someone who wasn't black.  Or at least it would have been extraordinarily hard.  So much of it - and I really mean this, it's basically the whole book - is about (the author's take on) being black in America, being black within the social and cultural history of America.

Good stuff.  Wish more stuff was like this.  

* But I'm pretty sure this would get shelved in the "literary" section of the library, despite the, uh, ice yetis involved.

You'll notice "suicidal mountain-climbing" is on my list of LJ interests, but I'm not sure how much I've talked about it.  I have read the wikipedia List of deaths on eight-thousanders many times.  I am especially partial to stories about K2 - its peril is not exactly a secret in the mountaineering world (and really I should start looking up Annapurna, the mountain with the highest fatality rate: over 40%), but I was surprised to read about K2 in college.  The overriding theme of most of these stories is the question of personal vs. social/communal responsibility: that is, if you pass a mountaineer in trouble on your way to the peak, do you stop your ascent and try to help them down, or do you say "well, he made the mistake of climbing without oxygen/training/equipment, we all have to look out for ourselves"?  See David Sharp.  Sir Edmund Hillary is by far my favorite participant in that debate (Hillary described Mark Inglis' attitude as "pathetic").  Also see the controversial Into Thin Air, which is probably the most famous contemporary mountaineering story.

I think the real reason these stories appeal to me, though, is the surrealism of the whole experience, the time spent "in the company of death," where frozen dead bodies who have been there for years are actually markers like "Base Camp" and "Camp IV."  The surrealism and the incredible desire of these chronic climbers to do something so difficult, so likely to lead to death.  You watch those Everest documentaries and these people just do not stop thinking about 8,000-ers, especially if they've already tried to climb them and failed.  It appears to be their driving purpose in life, one that subsumes family, work, health, finances.  These mountains fucking haunt them.  Then of course there's all the Type-A, competitive aspects of the whole endeavor (that tie directly into the responsibility question) - the "rarr I defy death and gravity and nature" triumph-of-the-human survivalism, the "oh yeah?  well, I'm going to climb WITHOUT OXYGEN" oneupmanship that more often than not leads to death, the extremely bitter disputes over whether the dead people reached the summit or not (I'm guessing it's a question of whether their death was "for nothing").  Note that this attitude does not extend to everyone - Anatoli Boukreev being just one exception: "Mountains are not stadiums where I satisfy my ambition to achieve, they are the cathedrals where I practice my religion...I go to them as humans go to worship."

So here I have watched three mountaineering movies.  Touching The Void is a documentary about Siula Grande, in the Andes.  K2 is "based on a true story" about K2 (obviously).  The North Face is "based on a true story" about Eiger, in the Alps.  Touching the Void and K2 are contemporary stories, while The North Face is set in the 1930s.

Touching the Void is a superb movie.  Simpson and Yates are descending from the summit of the Siula Grande.  Simpson breaks his leg and Yates is trying to rappel the both of them down (an extremely tough pill).  Eventually, Simpson is dangling off a cliff.  Yates can't see him and he can't support the weight of them both, so he hopes that Simpson is only a few feet from the ground and cuts the rope (and becomes known forever more as "The Man That Cut The Rope").  Oh dear, turns out Simpson is 100 foot from the ground.  Yates sees this and assumes Simpson's dead, then goes back to base camp.  But Simpson isn't dead, and has to crawl/hop out of a crevasse and onto a glacier and down to base camp by himself.  Touching the Void may have a leg-up on the other two just because it's a documentary.  But it's a well-done documentary that totally captures the hallucinatory weirdness (for lack of a better term) that Simpson experienced on his horrifically painful descent.  It is also very darkly funny - probably the most memorable part of the movie is when Simpson (on the mountain) has the auditory hallucination of hearing "Brown-Eyed Girl" by Boney M, a band that he hates.  And he's like, "Bloody hell, I'm going to die to Boney M."  My second-favorite part was the guys at base camp hearing this noise that sounds like Simpson crying in the wind but because they're sure he's dead, are too scared to go out because they think it's some undead spirit back to haunt them.  Trufax.  Note also that Simpson has always defended Yates' decision to cut the rope (he reasons that they both would have died otherwise).  Simpson also still climbs mountains.  Really highly recommended.

K2 is not so good.  I don't know what the true story is like, but this felt quite overwrought.  I didn't really understand the motivations of the climbers, and I was totally on the side of the porters that ran away from the Savage Mountain in fear (sherpas, I should note, are incredibly bad ass).  The set-up here is that because the first two guys who tried to go up to the summit fell and died, the two best friends that were "cheated out of their chance" got to go up to the summit despite the great risk of bad weather.  The rest of the group has gone back to base camp and is going to fly away with a helicopter because the one guy has altitude sickness and will die if he doesn't get off the mountain.  But no, the helicopter can't leave!  They must go pick up the two climbers!  Even if the one dude dies of altitude sickness because of it!  Granted this may all be a realistic situation - in which case, quite frankly, it would be a shitty, dire situation exemplifying the tradeoffs and deals-with-the-Devil that people make on 8000-ers - but the presentation was so one-sided, and so straight-faced ("hooray they're dead!  now we can go!"  Huh?), that I found it more than a little eye-rolly.  Besides, the mountain didn't look very threatening - it looked like a tame mountain on a controlled set.  There was no darkness in this movie.  Just triumphant electric guitar.  Give it a pass.

The North Face falls between these two (but closer to Touching the Void).  The main characters are German, and the mountain is in Austria.  The Third Reich is just coming into power, and the German expats are sort of basking in their country's perceived inflation in global value.  Two German mountaineers have decided to climb the never-before-conquered North Face of Eiger, and Germany lets them leave the military to pursue their suicide-dream because it's a good PR opportunity.  Thus the media and onlookers watch them from a little chateau, taking pictures, eating feasts.  An Austrian team is climbing at the same time, and they join forces after one of the Austrians gets a head injury and the Germans discover the dead bodies of a pair that had gone before them.  The mountaineers know both they and their national honor are fucked.  Given these high stakes, they make the profoundly suicidal decision to keep going, lugging up the half-dead Austrian with them, in piss-poor weather.  This movie does not have a happy ending.  It is actually quite brutal, despite the mountain itself being a lowly 4000-er (probably partly because they have shitty equipment).  The movie's also trying to transcend the mountaineering genre and get to something broader - about patriotism, and voyeurism, and living vicariously through a couple sturdy young men who are then thrown around like rag dolls (militarism woo-hoo) - and, of course, about conquest and the predatory state of Nazi Germany.  Also highly recommended.

This song just came on shuffle, and I think it oddly fits [the pretend world being the veneer of achievement and conquest that accompanies these mountaineering missions, and the real world being what actually happens]:

In the pretend world, we all are very awake
In the pretend world, we all look sterile and fake
In this atmosphere we all could chatter for days
In the pretend world, we never admit our mistakes

But in the real world, we're hiding alone and ashamed
And we can't live well because we're addicted to pain
You see I cannot feel this no matter how you try
In the real world, we can't deny

In the pretend world, we gaze into empty eyes
We amuse ourselves with tawdry tales and white lies

But in the real world, where fools tormented for sport
We just stitch up our mouths so we can't admit or retort
You see I cannot say this, please don't ask me why
In the real world, we can't deny

And God Said, Let There Be Wank.  And There Was.

I can see where this is going.  It's going in the direction of "women can write science fiction just fine!  women can use hard scientific concepts just like men can!"  Which, of course, is absolutely true.  I'm not going to comment on the idea that men and women write science fiction "differently," because I don't read science fiction enough to provide evidence, but I really doubt that's true in any meaningful way.  

I just want to add that it's also ok (for boys and girls alike) to suck at science fiction.  Or to take no pleasure in science fiction.  I don't write science fiction because I am just no good at science.*  I can identify fossils, and that's about it.  I know this is terribly un-PC to say (which is part of the problem) - but I am so tired - oh, so tired - of being made to feel that science and math are the world's only worthy pursuits, and inevitably fiction's only worthy pursuits.  There was some quote I found a while ago on some blog - a woman my age saying "our mothers wanted us to know that we could do anything, but the message we took from that was 'you must do everything'." 

I grew up with a mother who refused to accept that I did not want to go into scientific endeavor.  Why?  Because like many progressive women her age, she didn't want me to "feel like I couldn't do science because I was a girl."  My mother's biggest cause isn't feminism, but she is a knee-jerk progressive in that regard, a product of an upbringing that told her the best thing she could do was marry rich, and the only jobs she could hold were secretary, nurse, and school teacher.  When I was a kid there was a big backlash against teachers - especially in science classes - who would only call on boys, and there was a lot of progressive encouragement for girls pursuing science.  I read articles about it in this little progressive-preteen-girls magazine (yes, I know), New Moon, saying "it's cool to love science!"

Well, cool.  It is.  Except my mother got all ready to march me into the school system like a little token warrior - she was fiercely defensive of my ability to do math, for instance, and continues to put Lincoln Public Schools on her blacklist because they put me in a remedial math class for a semester (I tested out of it the next semester).  I don't know if this is because she thought I had been discouraged from pursuing math and science - my worst academic memory of fourth grade is undoubtedly crying during a math test because I could not make the numbers work and was the last one to finish, but the first one to finish in the class was my best friend, a girl, and I certainly don't remember any negative associations with girls and numbers.  But anyway, my mother evidently thought I needed to believe that I could excel at science (and math), and love the fuck out of it too. 

Didn't happen that way.  What I loved, what I excelled at, was English.  I was okay with history too.  This I knew from a very, very young age.  For my mother, however, admitting this became tantamount to defeat of the entire progressive feminist cause.  Around ninth grade, it became a subtle imperative (my mother's not an imperative type of parent) that I become a scientist, apparently only to show that I could (thank God she accepted that I hated sports, or else I would be cursing my way through volleyball).  I suppose in many ways this is why I found kinship with the children of immigrant families, who were also under tremendous pressure to excel at those bastions of American knowledge and become a doctor, an engineer, or a scientist of some kind.  Part of that stereotypical Asian-American push is in the money.  Part of it's in the status.  But the part my mother can relate to is pwning the American establishment, so to speak: you told me I couldn't do it - well, just watch my daughter kick your kids' asses! 

I didn't kick anybody's ass, except at fossil identification.  I want to do something with politics, I said.  Well, you can be a scientific consultant for governments, she said.  But I don't like science, I said.  And she ignored.  I want to write, I said.  Well, you can write like Michael Crichton, she said.  But that's not what I like to write about, I said.  And she ignored. 

Believe me, many of my female classmates were good at science.  And they certainly got many more congratulatory handshakes for excelling in the oh-so-macho Domain of Men, science, then I ever got for being good at, you know, English.  Because English isn't challenging, anybody can be good at English.  English is for the weak, i.e. girls, and if you're good at English all you're proving is that you're a girrrrrrrrrl.  Which is, of course, a lie - especially in my high school's English department.  Thank God for that English department, for the teachers that told me it was fine - more than fine - to be good at writing and analysis.  For my favorite English teacher, who said that I wielded the written word like a sword.  Eventually I developed enough pride in those pursuits that my mother could stop feeling so ashamed that she did not have a scientifically-minded daughter.

So just putting that disclaimer out there: I don't write science fiction; not because I'm a girl, but because I'm not good with scientific imagination.  There are guys that suck at it too - just like there are guys that suck at fantasy and girls that suck at fantasy (Stephanie Meyer, for instance, sucks at fantasy).  So I'm not hot on the idea of being a supposedly retrograde woman because I write fantasy.  I will write you a bad-ass political fantasy.  But I will stick to magic and the paranormal - and there is nothing wrong with that.  I think the larger problem is the perceived intellectual superiority of science fiction over fantasy, and all the associations of masculinity that go with that - the whole "fantasy is for ladies and girly-men" idea.  Which is of course why everybody wants to claim science fiction and stay the fuck away from fantasy - we all want to consume symbols of power, right?  It's bullshit. 

* I actually have received an A in every science class I've ever taken, and I do have a minor in environmental science.  I also watch nature documentaries (although Werner Herzog's relatively un-science-y ones are my favorites), go to science museums, and read articles about scientific discoveries, especially regarding astronomy and biology.  In other words, I'm happy co-existing with science and enjoy it from an educated layman's perspective.  But I don't have the knowhow or interest to make plausible FTL spaceships,aliens, or even plausible weaponry.  I suspect this is because I'm lacking in the final level of science knowledge as taught by my high school chemistry teacher: application.  What I lack is  scientific imagination - and quite frankly, I'm ok with that. 

"I.B.M. Said to Be Near Deal for Sun"

Well, that was my first thought.