literary analysis

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Kainos host Alexander Beiner exploring cultural sensemaking around psychedelics, popular culture, philosophy, psychology, alternative economics, and spirituality.

How to really tick me off as a fiction writer, and part 2 of my review of Carr's multiply named novel.

There's this move that writers of fiction sometimes make. I've seen it in novels, movies, tv shows. It's most often a little thing. A throwaway line. And I hate it so much.

It's when a character says something like "It's not like it is in the movies"

or "This isn't one of your fairy stories"

or "Things might work like that in a mystery novel, but this is real life"

You've heard some version of this a hundred times in different works of fiction. I can't stand it. 

I think they (the writers) think they're being clever? Giving a sly wink to the reader. But it's not clever. It's a weird tick, and all it achieves is to remind you that the events of the story ARE a fiction, and to pull you out of it and back into the world.

This is directly counter to the first job of fiction, which is indeed to make you forget that you're a reader, consuming fiction.

A couple of weeks ago, I was reading Carr's Hollow Man / Three Coffins, and he did a little version of this. That's actually what prompted me to start writing this earlier post, but I never got to round to kvetching about this thing there. Christie is also sometimes guilty of this, a rare lapse from the queen.

I've now finished Carr's book.

And something happened towards the end that was frankly shocking. Mild, non-plot spoilers for the book incoming!
In the last quarter, Carr indulges in the mother of all immersion breakers.

So, the reason I started reading the book is because of the famous "locked room lecture" that's what the book is known for. This is mentioned in the third Knives Out Movie. In the lecture, the detective Gideon Fell gives a run down of every possible kind of solution to a "locked room murder."

This kind of murder was Carr's stock in trade, and it is of course quite an interesting idea: someone is found murdered in a locked room, with no obvious way that anybody else could have gotten in or out. (Fun fact, the earliest well known locked room mystery is "The Mystery of the Yellow Room" by Gaston Leroux, who also wrote the novel "The Phantom of the Opera". I read both a long time ago. Phantom is quite fun, I don't remember anything about Yellow Room).

So I was looking forward to hearing a lecture from a master of this genre, about all the possibilities. And when it arrives, here's how he sets it up:

“I will now lecture,” said Dr. Fell, inexorably, “on the general mechanics and development of the situation which is known in detective fiction as the ‘hermetically sealed chamber.’ Harrumph. All those opposing can skip this chapter. Harrumph. To begin with, gentlemen! Having been improving my mind with sensational fiction for the last forty years, I can say—”
“But, if you’re going to analyze impossible situations,” interrupted Pettis, “why discuss detective fiction?”
“Because,” said the doctor, frankly, “we’re in a detective story, and we don’t fool the reader by pretending we’re not. Let’s not invent elaborate excuses to drag in a discussion of detective stories. Let’s candidly glory in the noblest pursuits possible to characters in a book."

Carr, John Dickson. The Three Coffins (The Hollow Man) (pp. 210-211)

!!!

So, the first line, he commits the sin I started this post discussing; he refers to the existence of detective fiction within a piece of detective fiction. I rolled my eyes.

But then, he commits the much more egregious, and frankly insane, move of having his characters just start talking about the fact they're characters in a novel. For no reason. It's a completely unforced error. He could have delivered the lecture through the mouthpiece of Fell, completely in fiction, and it would have worked fine.

And, to add insult to injury, the lecture is not that great. He rattles off a bunch of different ideas, but it's just a laundry list, he doesn't really extract general principles or broader conclusions.

After this, the characters go back into character, never acknowledging again that they're in fiction. The resolution of the mystery IS very clever, but the book as a whole is chaotic, long winded, self-indulgent, psychologically unconvincing, and transparently artificial. So, idk if I recommend it.

Now, The Hollow Man was published in 1935, 6 years before Borges' "Garden of Forking Paths", which I think is the earliest stirrings of postmodern, deconstructivist, fiction writing. (Honestly it's pretty upsetting to mention Carr in the same sentence as Borges).

So you could say that Carr was ahead of his time with this move, a move that anticipates the postmodern, fourth wall breaking antics of Wes Craven's Scream, the Deadpool franchise, or (most interesting) the work of comic writer Grant Morrison.

But Morrison, and Craven, and even the writers of Deadpool, are breaking the fourth wall deliberately, purposefully, to create a new kind of experience, a new kind of fiction.

Carr's book is squarely in a modern, generic mode, chugging along, promising to deliver one thing, and then just randomly breaking the fourth wall for a chapter, before going back to it's completely conventional format.

Anyway, it made me mad. I'm back to reading Christie, and having a lovely time. Read Borges, Christie, and Morrison. Skip Carr.

ps - Every jacket illustration of Fell makes it look like the character was modeled on GK Chesterton (another comparison that does no favors to Carr)

Severance is great, but it gets one thing weirdly wrong. (Very mild) Spoilers for season 1 of Severance ahead.

First, if you haven't seen Severance, I recommend it! Bookmark this, go watch season 1, form your own opinions, and come back to chat.

Ok, people who have context for what I'm about to say, read on!

I couldn't finish the show the first time I tried. I got about half way through, but the fundamental horror of the protagonists' situation was simply too disturbing for me. Friends would say "Oh it's so great, it's so funny and weird. What a thought provoking idea!" 

And I'd be sat there barely able to breathe at the idea that someone's life could be an unbroken experience of being at work, in a windowless building. 

Based on these conversations, I genuinely think many people aren't actually fully imagining what's happening to the characters. It might also be because I was working as a full time employee, in front of a computer all day, during that first attempt.

Second attempt, I managed to dial down my vicarious horror enough to get through the season, and it is a great show.

Now the part I think the writers get wrong. 

I think, in one important way, they also failed to fully empathize with the situation. 

Mark, the main character of season 1, is presented as having chosen to become severed and work at Lumen as a way of dealing with and escape from the grief of the loss of his wife.

Superficially, this makes sense. It's a common trope, and makes psychological sense to me, that people often deal with grief by pouring themselves into work. So that, for at least those hours of the day, you have a distraction from the pain.

But getting severed would actually have the opposite effect. It would remove that tool from your life. It would mean you had one less way to escape the grief. Rather than waking up filled with grief, then going to work, and getting a few hours of relief, before going home and picking up the grief, you would wake up with the grief, head to work, and then immediately be coming home where your grief filled existence could continue, uninterrupted.

You might argue that it was Mark who missed this, when he made the choice, and now he's dealing with the consequences. But that's not in the text. What's in the text is just the implication that getting severed was Marks strategy for dealing with the grief, with no exploration of the fact that actually that's a horrible strategy. 

Thoughts? Counterpoints? What did you think of the show?

(ps, I'd just like to say how delighted I am that the generated images are now optional 🙏)

Reading as Interaction, as Encounter. This is something I've been reflecting on, and which I wish had been shown/taught to me earlier.

I used to think of books as something like repositories. Of knowledge stuff, of stories, of experience.

And so reading was like a process of extraction. Extract entertainment, joy, information, knowledge. Get thee into the reading mines!

Note: this model of what reading is isn't wrong. It captures some important things, but it feels incomplete. And leads to bad pedagogy, I think.

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Now I see reading as interaction.

A book (or piece of media, or person, or world) is no longer a static repository. It's a potential. 

What feels more important now is the reading itself, the whole process of encountering material and, well, meeting it. 

This feels like it opens up more possibilities. There are certainly uncountably many kinds or modes of encounter, but here's one that has been very rewarding: treating reading as conversation. How do I respond to this idea, this turn of phrase? What does it make me think of and feel? How am I implicated by this? What is it missing? What does it point me toward?

This makes reading different. Slower, in many ways, but more rewarding. I'm more engaged, and putting more of myself into the reading, which seems to result in getting more out of it.

---

This leads me to something I want. I want there to be recorded traces of readings (this is what notes/marginalia are, in a way), performances of reading.

The performance would not be like a poetry reading, restricted to just the text, but like a public performance of an individual's (or group's) live encounter – including thoughts/asides/etc.

I want this to exist for two reasons: (1) I wish I had learned about this way of reading much much earlier in my life. So having examples of this and venerating it might help more people encounter this way of reading sooner. (2) I want traces of past encounters, for historical reasons. I want to be able to see how my (or our) relationship to a text has changed over time. 

On Aspiration. In a recent Relateful Flow session, I said that I was aspiring toward something and that, to me, aspiration is an active principle.  My comment was met with strong disagreement from a person who said that aspiration is passive and only concrete action of a physical kind, actually "doing" something, is active.  I was a bit shocked and then realized that I might be in the minority on this subject.  To me, "aspiring" is actively signaling Life/God that I am now ready and willing to receive the thing I have been saying I wanted.  It is an energetic "yes"!  Other more physically tangible actions may follow, but aspiration is first , especially in things which have always seemed to be beyond my grasp. 

However, I understand what the person was pointing to.  There is a world where action is physical; aspiring may be useful in some way, but it is a passive practice.  

Would love others' thoughts and experience with this.

Erotic energy is often not about sex.
I think it is mostly an impulse to create something together. I don’t have a good model for the causal mechanism of how it works, but I think that attraction essentially hints at a specific potential between the two parties. Sex and “baby” is the creation-potential only a tiny fraction of the time.

Here are some of the many alternative creation-potentials, in no particular order. Would love to hear what else y’all notice, as this is not an attempt at an exhaustive list:

• A project for you to create together

  • as small as a party and as big as an organization

• An emotional gift one of you has for the other

  • eg: a piece of advice, sharing of life experience, an introduction to someone important

  • Similarly, information share—eg: a mutual friend needs to be taken care of 

• A quality or characteristic for you to integrate/embody more: The classic projection of a “golden shadow”

  •  Eg: “She’s so strong” because I’m not claiming my strength, or “he’s so smart” because I’m not comfortable admitting my own intelligence 

• A psychodynamic transformation (aka "healing")

  • Eg: you projecting your mom/dad stuff onto each other can be seen as a beautiful chance to make it conscious so you can be more present and available in all your relationships

• A different kind of relationship: Ongoing friendship, mentorship, employment, or some other awesome/potent relationship

• A chance to see what you’re avoiding in other relationships. This is the classic where someone cheats rather than deal with stuff at home.

---

You meet someone new and feel that sudden frisson of erotic excitement. That’s a crush—must be romantic love, right? We’ve watched it happen so many times in ourselves, our community, our movies and books, that it’s almost taken for granted. But I think as soon as I point out the alternatives, they seem obvious too. I wonder if there are other media and cultural narratives to help support more awareness of the alternative? I feel like this would help people be more open to different kinds of love, different kinds of relationships, and suffer a lot less. I feel like this awareness has done so for me, at least.

Hat Tip to Ken Wilber, where I first heard of using the word “eros” as the creative impulse of the universe driving to more novelty.

Vance affect. His affect seems like Listen, children. A bit of disgust. Gives me ick get this opponent [Walz] away. But then Watz, by constrast, doesn’t seem like a kid to me, he seems earnest.

What’s Walz’s vibe… Annoyed. A little hurt. I guess I feel a little more sorry for him more than want to follow him.

I think Kamala had a better contrasting vibe to Trump’s vibe in the first presidential debate.

Noticing how I'm watching the debate. My system is naturally watching for whose answers seem more solid, confident. So far, JD Vance seems a little more stable. Tim Walz seems comfortable when attacking, but very nervous and uncertain when trying to answer the core content of a question. It’s a little funny and surprising to see his nervousness – e.g., constantly repeating and overusing the term fundamental.

Vance seeming better is kinda unfortunate for me because on values I’m way more aligned with Walz!

Also noticing that I’m initially much more focused on style than substance and who’s winning… will see if that shifts.

On Things I Loved That I Dropped. In a workshop I attended several days ago, everyone ended up sharing, one-by-one, about their experience or relationship with the subject of God (with a capital G). When it was my turn, I described being very young, with no training around religion or God, experiencing a very personal relationship with a God that cared about me and that was the still point at which all the chaos in my young life (and in the whole world) made sense. From this, I rested on a belief that somewhere beyond my understanding, life made sense. In many ways, this relationship not only comforted me but actually saved me.

Later, in college, I was exposed to traditional Christianity and took all the traditional teachings and trappings of it on as my own. I was a devout believer and I ended up leading the bible studies, not because of my expertise, but because of my earnest belief. And then, I began to find things about this Christianity I had learned, that I could not make sense of. As the questioning grew into serious doubt, I found I could no longer believe what I couldn’t believe. Through tears, I formally broke up with the very personal God of my youth, still vibrant in my experience, because I falsely believed that I could not have my real experiential God if I could not believe in the teachings that were associated with him. It has taken my years to begin to reclaim my God (different now, much more expansive, but still experientially real), leaving behind what no longer feels integral.

There are other things that I have loved and left behind based on trappings associated with it rather than on the essence of the thing (reading fiction, singing and playing the guitar, for example). As I move toward more integration in my life, I find myself rediscovering some of those things I loved from my past. They are not the same, having been laid aside for decades, yet rediscovering them is bringing my joy.

Do you have things that you loved that you dropped because of the trappings?

lol gen z. lol these two don’t know they can laugh at tropic thunder https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KymaI0op3N8

Premature Ejaculator? Try edging! I’ve gotten into some conversations lately with heterosexuals and How do I not prematurely ejaculate? has come up a lot.

I never really thought about this how because from a young age I used the when you get close to cumming and it’s too early, use the grandma visualization. Grandma meaning: someone/something I don’t want to have sex with. Pick a different word if you want to boink your nana.

This kinda got me over the hump and I never had problems but recently I filmed a scene with a tantra teacher who gave me a crash course in edging. Edging is a masturbation practice where a scale of 1-10 is used. 10 means I’m going to blow no matter what. 9 is I’m going to blow if the status quo remains. 8 is I can sense myself getting close. 1 is I’m not really horny.

This tantra teacher ejaculated multiple times in the span of 90 minutes (5 or so?). He also had a few orgasms where he didn’t ejaculate. He said it was the result of edging training. Those further heights stimulated my interest.

Key points:
1. Jerk off as much as you want.
2. Decide whether you’re going to shoot before you start.
3. Imagine the possibility that all the energy generated somehow stores in your sexiness when you don’t cum (the teacher edges to get ready for things like social events or even sex.)
4. Get as close to 9.5 as you can get without shooting.
5. The practice of building it up is equally important to the practice of not hitting 10.

I spent about a week on it and it was really clicking and enjoyable, porn or no porn.

Then I had the idea of trying it during sex instead of masturbation.

Key point:

I told my boyfriend.

I told him because he REALLY likes when I cum inside of him and our healthy codependency on that was it was a sign of connection for me to nut in him.

I said, I’m practicing this thing. I hope you like it. You can support me in it by staying completely still when I say, hold still.

If he wiggles or flexes his anal muscles it can take my 9 to 10.

The first time we did it, as I got to 9, my cock was kinda dry heaving but not shooting, maybe just a drop or two came out AND he actually thought the sensation of my cock pulsating inside him was hotter. Now I probably hit 9.5 a few times each session. We still always finish with a 10 but because of all the cardio that last build up is crazy vigorous so he gets a really intense ride out of it.

I think straight guys who tell their ladies they’re trying this are in for a treat. Sex has co-vulnerabilities. For the receiver, at least when I’m receiving, I want to be simultaneously objectified and subjectified. I want to be a hot person who’s loved. For the penetrator, at least for me, if I’m not high enough on the scale, say 5 or 6, I’ll lose my erection. If I go too high too fast I’ll blow my load too soon.

It seems REALLY hard to hold these vulnerabilities in consciousness. I think edging while fucking addresses all these issues in a very collaborative and fun way.

The first time I described it to a couple and asked the woman if she was ok if he tried it, she responded with a sly joy and said, Sounds fun to me. <3

Happy fucking!

Roads as interconnection of all, metaphor for selves. This is kinda silly and obvious in some ways, but the other day I was really struck by a simple fact I’d never considered: All the roads are really one road…

I live on Bryker Dr, and it dead ends into 34th street on one end and 30th on the other. So I think of this as a singular, discrete street that is 4 blocks long, and a couple car lengths wide. That’s how most people think they’re thinking about it.

But actually we’re all thinking of it as something much greater than that, we just don’t always realize we are. The street is my access to the rest of the world—and it is concretely (pun intended) connected to every other street in North America.

So is it really my street, or is it one giant system? My finger is obviously a finger, and obviously doesn’t exist separately from my body. If I were dismembered, it wouldn’t be my finger for very long, would it?

I think this is a beautiful metaphor for a self. We usually think we’re thinking of ourselves like we do roads, with beginnings and endings. But we’re actually the entire system, wholly interconnected with every other part. Getting from a small street in Austin to a small street in Winnipeg takes a long time, but in some incredibly real and grounded sense, there’s no separation between them.

( technically minus a few old roads that maybe don’t have any connections, but c’mon )