400 Words NOW #2

So I'm taking an anthropology course called National Identity, which is interesting, and not only because the nationality of the man teaching it is still unclear (Polish? Swedish? Danish?).

I was interested in the topic of national identity for reasons I won't go into now.

FLASHBACK: In an intro to something-or-other class early in my Marshall career, I had a very interesting professor who completely understood that the majority of his students didn't care about him or the topic he was covering, and stuffed the class-time full of mindblowing information with very simple take-home messages for the test.

One of these messages that we only spent about a day on was that a nation is not the same thing as a state. As defined by him, loosely, a nation is a group of people and a state is a political boundary, and many of the problems in the world today stem from the fact that political lines do not (and probably cannot) give each nation its own state.

Suddenly, a whole mess of things started making sense: Jews (including modern Israel and the Holocaust), Chechnya, Canada (and Quebec), Scotland (and Wales, and Ireland), the intifada in France, China (and Tibet, and Taiwan), etc. etc. Across the world, and across time, there have been hundreds and thousands of different peoples and millions of different lines drawn on maps and what we have today is a bizarre mash of treaties, threats, conquests, compromises, stagnation, trade and what have you.

FLASH FORWARD:

Where was I? Oh, yes, national identity. So the first book we've read on national identity goes into great detail about how thinking about people as nations with a shared mindset, habits, etc. didn't come about until the industrial era, and sees it as completely linked with capitalism, state education and a number of other things.

He links these things together, I'm told, because he's a structural-functionalist, which are something like the Mac users of the anthropology word. Or maybe the circular reasoning aficionados. Or the eternal optimists. Basically, they study the way things are set up and then proclaim that they work because they were set up properly. Structural-functionalism went out of style about 50 years ago, which brings up the question of why we were reading the book, which is a fascinating answer in and of itself

SEGUE: Gellner, the author of our book, describes many differences between agrarian and industrial societies, but one that I'd like to speak about briefly is that agrarian societies emphasize social stability, while industrial societies prize social mobility; the good of the group versus the needs of the individual. Of course, there are thousands of paradoxes and details, but the point normally remains the same.

SEGUE: I was watching a Russian version of the Little Mermaid last night with my girlfriend and a Turkish friend of ours, and we talked about how stories and entertainment reflect these attitudes, because the Russian version is the sad one, in which the titular character is turned into foam because the prince marries another.

CLIFFHANGER:

400 Words NOW

I haven't published since the 26th? I knew I had missed a few posts, but nothing like that. I consoled myself, saying that I'd do a double-post to catch up, but apparently I'll need to do a series of double or triple posts to get back to 400 words a day.

So as punishment - no, as restitution, here's at least 400 words.

I needed another class for this semester, and I was already taking all the journalism courses I could, so I looked through the online courses and found one on the modern Middle East. It looked interesting and relevant, so I signed up.

Today, I finally woke up and realized what's going on in Tunisia and Egypt. There is full scale, people-burning-themselves, flipping-over-police-cars, tear-gas-rioting for the downfall of tyrants and I cannot for the life of me understand why I didn't hear about this earlier.

In my journalism ethics course, we did a quick and dirty overview several major world religions and their implications on ethical decision-making. I was somewhat upset with the professor's treatment of Judaism and Christianity (as well as Atheism), but I realized I didn't know enough about Islam to comment on his portrayal.

Note to self: Read the Koran.

So, I got distracted as soon as I wrote those words and went off looking for a translation of the Koran I could download onto my Nook. Though I immediately found several translations on Project Gutenberg, I suddenly realized that I knew nothing about the people who translated them, and my own experiences with the Bible (and anime, and news) have taught me that who is doing the translations and why can very much impact the final product.

The two versions of the Koran that I can find easily are J. M. Rodwell's and George Sale's, neither of which seems to have much of a following in Muslim circle, despite being easy to find. At worst, Sale's translation was made intentionally to discredit Muslims and both have serious omissions and distortions, from what half an hour of research can tell me.

In the end, I think I'm going to track down of copy of Marmaduke Pickthall's translation. His work seems to be the most widely accredited, and several other good translation have been based on his. I found a text version, but that won't serve me well on a Nook, now would it?

Which brings me back to the point of this whole rant: I personally don't know enough about Islam and the Muslim world, and I intend to change that.

For my next 400 words, I'll probably discuss what's going on in my national identity class.

American Gods

So a while back I had an idea for a story in which all the gods of mythology really existed and were engaged in a power struggle set in the modern world.

I told this idea to a friend while driving in his car one day.

"It's already been done. American Gods. Neil Gaiman," he said.

I was quite let down.

Halfheartedly, I took it out of the library and read about a quarter of it. I appreciated what I read as excellent writing and a far more mature and powerful version of what I had planned. It quashed my desire to write that story, and to write any story at all for some time.

Since then, I've come to understand that all the stories that can ever be told have already been done. Everything that you've ever seen is a copy of something from 20-50 years ago, which is a copy of something 50-100 years ago, which was a parody of something 150-500 years ago, going all the way back to the dawn of man. Even then, the stories that they told were the reflections of archetypes they observed and believed, already shown before them in nature.

The goal of the writer (or other creative type) is to take these core images, goals, beliefs, archetypes and experiences and reassemble them in a fresh way to society.

So with that in mind, I'm reading/rereading American Gods and am slightly past the point that I stopped at before. I'll find out how similar my idea really is to his.

Of course, it's been about two and a half year since I first starting reading the book, and my own idea has evolved significantly.

In the original idea, the gods evolved and changed with time - morphing, splitting, growing - and that the current lack of divine intervention in the world was due to a war in the heavens that left Zeus abdicating his throne and no clear leadership among the gods. A young Dionysus, manifested as a woman, was seeking unite enough of the gods together to claim the vacant seat on Mount Olympus.

Or something like that.

The most recent versions of the story focus on a man named Sid who gets caught up in a war of the gods.

SPOILER ALERT

So I took a Buddhism class, the idea that challenged and inspired me most was Siddhartha Gautama's idea that gods, spirits and the like existed but didn't matter; what was most important was each individual's personal attainment of enlightenment.

Furthermore, he set forth that all living creatures needed to attain salvation and nirvana, but that human beings here had an advantage over the gods. Human beings are in the stage of their existence where enlightenment can most easily be reached; humans are intelligent enough to understand their situation, unlike animals, but fragile enough to be acutely aware of the inevitability of death. Gods, with their long life-spans and immense power, find it hard to humble themselves and face their weakness.

The idea that even the gods need salvation is the foundation of the most recent incarnations (if you'll pardon the pun) of my story.

A few thoughts on music

ON A SERIOUS NOTE:

I used music to define who I was for most of my high school and early college life. It wasn't just that I listened to songs and appreciated them, I found songs that, at least for a moment, completely summed up my beliefs. Laugh if you might, but I physical shook with emotion when I heard songs like "Disenchanted" by My Chemical Romance or "Illusion" by VNV Nation.

The problem is that a song never changes, but a human being, particularly a young adult, changes constantly. I found myself actively avoiding change when it clashed with the scriptures of my music. Alternatively, I tried to change myself to better understand lyrics that I loved but couldn't yet relate with.

Now, it's rare that I find an album that moves me.

ON A LESS SERIOUS NOTE:

I listen to parodies and remixes far more than can be good for me. Maybe it was an early introduction to Weird Al or my family's love for Zucker films, but nothing is funnier to me than a redo with a silly twist.

In fact, I often see parody as the higher form of art than the original, because a good parody is not merely a copy or a mockery: It captures the heart of the initial creation, while also building and expanding upon it.

ON A RELATED TOPIC:

A friend of mine is letting me rip a compilation that's basically a brief history of gothic music, Joy Division to Skinny Puppy, The Cure to AFI. It's amazing how many of the songs I've heard covers of (such as Kerli's version of "She's in Parties," by Bauhaus) or seen as an explanation of how a band I like sounds ("They sound sort of like if Clan of Xymox and Dead Can Dance played in a cover band of the Misfits, with vocals by Cocteau Twins").

I like to be reminded every now and then that everything has been done before, but never quite exactly the same way.

More on that later.

ON A SOMEWHAT PERVERSE NOTE:

Entertainment is mostly a spectrum of sex and violence. On the one end, you'll find something like One Hundred and One Dalmatians. In includes the birth of puppies (and, by definition, copulation), two human beings falling in love, the threatened death and skinning of the dogs and plenty of slapstick humor. On the other end of the spectrum lies hardcore pornography and graphic, senseless depictions of death and torture.

I used to joke that taste was the main consideration for why people watched one and not the other. As society became increasingly lax about explicit content and entertainers tried to top each other's attempts to shock viewers, I said, pop culture would eventually fall into a "pornography singularity" where the only entertainment produced would be obscenity interspersed with Coca-Cola ads.

"Ha ha ha," people would say.

BUT THEN:

Have you actually seen the video for Lady Gaga's "Alejandro" or Christina Aguilera's "Not Myself Tonight"?

It's not funny anymore; it's true.

Things to write about:

Hunger
Sadness
Protection/mothering
Luck
Magic/electricity

400 Words Now

Why am I starting a blog where I write 400 words a day?

Well, there's a number of reasons.

1. I need to write more.

I often say that I'm a writer or that I'm going into the field of journalism because I enjoy writing, but the truth of the matter is that I don't write much. Sure, I think about things to write about, I plan stories and I read other's works - but I don't take the time to actually bang out words on a screen enough.

If I want to get better, if I want to become a writer, I have to write. It's like calling myself an astronaut without ever getting on a space shuttle or calling myself a chef without ever cooking.

2. I want to create in a community.

I’ve become aware that all art and all creativity happens when people get together.
C.S. Lewis, one of my absolute favorite writers, met with other writers in a group called the “Inklings.”

Michael Card, one of my favorite artists, released a live album called “Scribbling in the Sand,” where he details how his songs came to be. None of them happened in a vacuum; all of them were the result of relationships and interactions.

I need to open my creative works to critique, examination and improvement.

3. I want to give myself specific goals for writing.

I picked the goal of 400 words a day from an anecdote about either Neil Gaiman or Terry Pratchet (probably from the introduction to the novel they co-wrote, Good Omens) that one of them at least wrote 400 words a day, every day. The story goes on that one of them finished a novel with 200 words to go, so they picked up a sheet of paper and wrote the first 200 words of the next story.

It’s a good story, and a good goal.

If for some reason, I’m unable to post, I will still write said 400 words and post them as soon as possible.

4. I write best when I’m forced to.

Well, maybe not forced to, but when I have some structure.

When someone says, “Write! Be creative!” I’m left drawing blanks.

When someone says “Write about spies! Write a poem! Write a historical comedy about poets who are also spies in 19th Century Great Britian!” I’m inspired.

So to that end, I will accept ideas from you, the reader, about things I should write about.

But whatever the topic, it’s 400 words a day, every day.