The Breaking Time

Building a phyle

Though, let's face it, the Neo-Victorians wouldn't cut it.

This blog (when I can post) frequently focuses on social organization and the ways people are trying to adapt to changing times, especially as the nation-state and other traditional institutions lose their old sway. 

So I'm overdue to delve into one that's stuck with me for some time: the phyles from Neil Stephenson's fascinating (though massively flawed on several levels) novel The Diamond Age. Phyles are cultural groupings powerful enough to largely replace nation-states. Despite being in an ostensibly post-national era, the Phyles largely break down on old lines (China, India, Japan), with some throwbacks like Maoists or Stephenson's BFFs, the Neo-Victorians.

Naturally enough, the actual workings of the phyles are largely in the background (this is a novel, after all, not a social treatise, and is usually awful when it stumbles in that direction), but as shorthand for "socioeconomic group that could supplant aspects of nations" it's useful for the following thought exercise.

How would a phyle actually work?

First they came for the libraries

By Damien Williams

Photo by Gregory Maxwell

News came yesterday that radical Islamists have burned the ancient library of Timbuktu.

When I was twelve years old, one of the most important resources for my family was our local library: RL Christian Public Library, on H Street in Washington, DC. Though the area has changed, quite a bit, as any DC Metro-area resident can tell you, it's certainly not the best part of town. Nineteen years ago it was even rougher around the edges.

As funding for city libraries was cut, the operating hours of R.L. Christian were some of the first things on the chopping block. My sisters and I, along with other children from our neighbourhood, wrote essays and went before the DC City Council and explained to them —clearly but forcefully — what this library represented to the neighbourhood.

RL Christian Public Library had free after-school programs for children whose parents worked late. Study resources for those who would need them. A place to be off the street, later in the evening, in a part of town then still coping with regular gang violence. We, the children most affected by this, not our parents, made this case. And they shortened the hours anyway. Eventually RL Christian Public Library closed its doors.

People who know about but don’t fully understand history may ask, "Why do conquerors and fanatics always go for the Libraries?" Our most famous example has always been the Library of Alexandria, but it is by no means the sole instance. And if you take a look at that list, you can see something of a distinction: sometimes invaders burn libraries and loot them, and sometimes they just burn them. Why is that?

It's because a library, more than any other thing humans have ever made, is the physical promise of a wider, more inclusive world.

Someday this will all be yours

by Damien Williams, a follow-up to Life in the so-called space age

The Last Judgment, Heironymous Bosch

Come close and I'll tell you a secret.

The Breaking Time is really just the continual state of the post-Lapsarian condition. Everything we are and everything we do is a result of the Fall of Man, and that Fall makes itself evident in everything we ourselves create. All decay, all rot, all moral failures and lawlessness, all attempts by mad to trespass into God's domain with works like artificial intelligence, artificial life, and genetic manipulation are just the side-effects of humanity's experience and expression of evil; today is God's Judgment.

This is what I would tell you if I were a fundamentalist Christian-- that we are all sinful in some basic fashion (because of some basic action), and that nature has infected everything we do. But I'm not a fundamentalist Christian, so let's try something else.

The Breaking Time is just the precursor to the coming of the Messiah, and the fulfilling of YHVH's ultimate covenant with Man. We must strive through, as best we can but also spur on progress toward the time when this Messiah will make itself known. As such, we tolerate lawlessness, immorality, and decay, as we know that it will bring us closer to the time of Messianic Fruition.

 No? Okay, how about this:

That which we call "evil" is really just the effect of the workings of evolutionary biological processes, selfishness, procreative need, tribalism, and the insular nature of the preferred size of human social groups. The only thing that exists which can rightly be called "evil" are those forces of ignorance which lead us away from inquiry and scientific understanding, and those forces must, indeed, be stamped out and shown as false, broken, harmful, and dangerous, at all costs. Only then will the true nature of the universe be able to be known, free of antiquated moralising and repression.

What about this: The return of Maitreya has meant that there will be a world-wide awakening of consciousness, and His work must be helped along by those willing to make the world over in fire, and who are willing to do whatever it takes to survive these end times.

If you don't see your particular flavor of armageddon above I could go on, if you'd like.

Farewell Coilhouse (and may it rise again)

Coilhouse commanders Nadya Lev and Meredith Yayanos. Image by Star St. Germain.

Last Wednesday, Coilhouse, "a love letter to alternative culture" magazine and blog near to my heart, announced an indefinite hiatus. Nadya Lev and Meredith Yayanos have both been struggling with health issues and "in its current form, Coilhouse is not financially solvent."

Yeah, I teared up.

For five years the Coilhouse crew produced one of the most beautiful, unique creations to grace the ever-evolving media landscape. If you're interested in alternative culture or simply love good writing, check out some of their greatest hits. There's a few of my pieces in there, along with a lot of incredible writers grappling just about every subject under the sun. Their amazing print issues are also available as free pdfs.

Up to their last day, Coilhouse intelligently tackled issues like misogyny in industrial music, race in the gothic subculture and fashion as identity.

My final piece, a personal take on alt culture's relentless spirit ended up being the last before their farewell, something for which I'm honored beyond words. 

Coilhouse gave me a chance when I'd not had much published outside of local reporting. They were willing to say things like "hell yeah we'll give you a column on deviant sci-fi!" which, believe me, is not something a writer hears very often. They pushed me hard, with honesty and respect, to expand my perspective while improving my craft. I was far from the only one.

Thank you, Nadya, Mer, and everyone else involved. You've already made the world a better place. I thank Coilhouse for how it's helped all of us who came in contact with it, and I look forward to its revival.

Until then, 

David Forbes

RIP Jacques Barzun

“Let us face a pluralistic world in which there are no universal churches, no single remedy for all diseases, no one way to teach or write or sing, no magic diet, no world poets, and no chosen races, but only the wretched and wonderfully diversified human race.” -Jacques Barzun

Last night Jacques Barzun died. He was 104, and remained active past the century mark as an incredible public thinker. Six years old when the lights went out across Europe, he endured the shelling of Paris and began his academic career when Calvin Coolidge was in office. In the years of upheaval that followed, he taught Allen Ginsberg and a score of other thinkers, wrote 30 books along with countless essays, and wrapped it all up with his masterwork, Dawn to Decadence, still one of the best sweeping histories I've ever read.

He ended his life as the last living link with the intellectual ferment of the Belle Epoque and the Roaring '20s. I wrote in more depth about his contributions a few years ago on Coilhouse.

Personally, Barzun's work was among the inspirations for the Breaking Time. His relentless embrace of pluralism — of history and culture with all the mess intact — is one of the best approaches I've seen to understanding a time of upheaval.

Above all, in my mind Barzun represented the balance between discipline and passion that makes civilization beautiful. He thought a lot, and made all the mistakes that come with over eight decades of mental engagement with the world. Still, he was frequently prescient, and never lost his faith in humanity's ability to define itself, noting in Dawn that "finding oneself was misnomer; a self is not found but made."

Barzun diagnosed "decadence" not as a loosening of mores but a loss of motion, a refusal to face the future. But renaissance is always waiting to break out, this day or the next.

“Reading history, one finds that there have been periods, say toward the end of the Middle Ages, the late fifteenth century, when everything looked very much as it looks now. And even though we may say their difficulties were lesser, their powers were less too. The interesting question is whether our greater powers and our greater knowledge — and by that I don’t mean our deeper knowledge, I mean our more extensive awareness of what’s going on everywhere at once — are going to be helpful or harmful."

Turning Wal-Marts into libraries: Abandoned space as resource

Wal-Mart no more. Photo via Inhabitat.

Yes, Wal-Marts turned into libraries. That's the glorious word from Weburbanist:

There are thousands of abandoned big box stores sitting empty all over America, including hundreds of former Walmart stores. With each store taking up enough space for 2.5 football fields, Walmart’s use of more than 698 million square feet of land in the U.S. is one of its biggest environmental impacts. But at least one of those buildings has been transformed into something arguably much more useful: the nation’s largest library.

Meyer, Scherer & Rockcastle transformed an abandoned Walmart in McAllen, Texas, into a 124,500-square-foot public library, the largest single-floor public library in the United States.

The design won the International Interior Design Association’s 2012 Library Interior Design Competition. MSR stripped out the old ceiling and walls of the building, gave the perimeter walls and bare warehouse ceiling a coat of white paint, and set to work adding glass-enclosed spaces, bright architectural details and row after row of books.

Holy f'ing hell that's awesome. I'm obviously not the only one who thinks so either, after I tweeted this particular piece of news this weekend (a tip o' the hat to Joshua Ellis for alerting me) people pounced on it: it ended up retweeted more than any item I've put out into the ether in awhile.

I think it partly struck a nerve because it represents the reverse of a widely-disliked corporate giant in favor of a wonderful public institution that's recently seemed in irreversible decline.

But there's something else here too: the last decade has seen a rise in "ruin porn," especially of blighted urban areas like Detroit. It's an admittedly addictive genre and I've occasionally succumbed myself. For much of the modern era, especially in America, the emphasis was "build," with the implicit assumption that cities and towns were perpetually on the make. The reverse of that trend in constant photos of grand old abandoned buildings fits into a narrative of perpetual rollback.

That's got it's allure certainly — there's a reason apocalypses are wildly popular — but people like tales of rejuvenation too. In a day when streetlights are going dark and roads are turning back to dirt, it's energizing to see something to the contrary, especially as big box stores themselves aren't exactly doing well.

McAllen's success also highlights that abandoned space is, in its way, a resource. Building shit from scratch is expensive, and the bigger it is, the more expensive it tends to be. People who want to try new models of living or development usually don't have a ton of resources, so places where they don't have to compete for space are particularly appealing.

This actually happened in my own city: downtown Asheville's a thriving place today because it had a bunch of old buildings left around that were initially cheap to renovate and try some interesting ideas in. Detroit's ruin porn too has been rebutted by a narrative of revival (and suitable skepticism). Berlin's a cheap place to live because it's got a ton of old buildings left around.

While the usefulness of old space isn't exactly new (Jane Jacobs was harping about it 50 years ago), it does seem resurgent as cities have regained their importance relative to the suburbs. The reuse of big-box albatrosses in particular seems to bode well for smaller cities and rural areas, where this has been the primary form of development boom for too long.

Of course, once one starts reusing those spaces, the next battles come up: gentrification, city governments' political limits, and more. Nonetheless, this is a lovely example of using a supposed detriment as an advantage.

All Times Break

I was extremely happy when Damien Williams agreed to become a contributor here and submitted this piece for our relaunch. In his own wonderful style, it pulls together classic lore, poetry, mysticism, and pop culture for a fascinating meditation on this blog's core theme.

They tell you never to start a story with a quote, so I won't. I'll start with two. Here we go:

“It is said that what is called 'the spirit of an age' is something to which one cannot return. That this spirit gradually dissipates is due to the world's coming to an end. For this reason, although one would like to change today's world back to the spirit of one hundred years or more ago, it cannot be done. Thus it is important to make the best out of every generation.” - Yamamoto Tsunetomo, Hagakure: The Book of the Samurai, 1716

“. . .The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;

Surely the Second Coming is at hand. . .” — "The Second Coming," William Butler Yeats, 1920

And then there is, of course, the ever-popular I-Ching Hexagram 23 (~1,000 BCE), aptly titled Breaking Apart:

This pictures a time when inferior people are pushing forward and are about to crowd out the few remaining strong and superior men. Under these circumstances, which are due to the time, it is not favorable for the superior man to undertake anything.

The right behavior in such adverse times is to be deduced from the images and their attributes. The lower trigrams stands for the earth, whose attributes are docility and devotion. The upper trigram stands for the mountain, whose attribute is stillness. This suggests that one should submit to the bad time and remain quiet. For it is a question not of man’s doing but of time conditions, which, according to the laws of heaven, show an alternation of increase and decrease, fullness and emptiness. It is impossible to counteract these conditions of the time. Hence it is not cowardice but wisdom to submit and avoid action.

 We have always lived in the breaking times. We have always felt that every period of major upheaval is the end of the world, the final days, the utter Apocalypse, come at last. And we're right. Every major shift of perspective ends the world in which we lived, and brings to bear a completely new perspective. In fact, most often that perspective is necessarily new, because the only ones who survive the shift (or collapse, as some would have it) are those who can adapt to the radically altered contexts in which they find themselves.

As ever, we must adapt, or we will perish, and this isn't news.

Textbook racket attacks fair use

A good column by Quinn Norton highlights a fresh outrage:

In their ongoing quest to punch every puppy they can find, rights holders have turned to suing those most rapacious of pirates, professors. Academic publishers are asking a judge in Georgia for an injunction against Georgia State University for a liberal fair-use policy. What these publishers are objecting to is unapproved and unpaid-for book and article excerpts in class materials—essentially quoting and anthologizing. They want everything that can be paid for to be paid for. Specifically, professors couldn't use more than 10 percent or 1,000 words of an in-print book, whichever is less. That's about two pages. And it's campus wide—if I use two pages of Robert Jackall's Moral Mazes in my class, no student or teacher can use a third page without paying or getting sued by the publisher of Moral Mazes.

---

But that's not what fair use is about. It's a limit to copyright baked into the law. In the act itself, it cites a teacher making copies of classroom materials as a fair use. It's part of the copyright bargain; we grant these rights in exchange for material that improves our society as a whole, not so a group of publishers can get a piece of that mad college student money.

Absurd doesn't even begin to cover it.

Look, it's not like college textbook publishers don't have an extortion racket going on already. Hell, there's even recent legislation trying belatedly to curb the worse excesses.

I was somewhat fortunate: ASU was one of the few universities with a book rental system. While helpful, that didn't stop professors from assigning lots and lots of additional books, preferably expensive new editions. Barely having money for food, buying these was out of the question. I managed to pass my classes by borrowing, copying pages, taking copious notes, having a good memory and spending A LOT of time in the library. I was far from the only student in this situation, and I'll never forget the day when, after complaining about the price, a professor told a number of us to "just ask your parents for more money." Fewer things crystallized more clearly the assumption that education is the domain of the wealthy. This is one more move to worsening that divide.

 

There's also a risk here I think rights holders still don't grasp. Ideally, when crafting a law, you want something that satisfies both competing interests: publishers get money, the public gets information. The point of this is while neither party gets completely what they want, they get enough that most people obey the law most of the time.

The increasing tilt towards rights holders is reaching such a ludicrous extreme that eventually people just cease obeying the law, consequences be damned. Determined students and professors will just make the copies anyway. What, are the publishers going to find all of them, much less sue?

The result is the equivalent of legal civil war: the occasional brutally sued defendant, but far more people who simply ignore the law. That this sort of scorched earth tactic never works never seems to stop companies from using it.

Want to help spur a dark age? Close a library

I woke up this morning to this heartbreaking post by Charles Simic:

All across the United States, large and small cities are closing public libraries or curtailing their hours of operations. Detroit, I read a few days ago, may close all of its branches and Denver half of its own: decisions that will undoubtedly put hundreds of its employees out of work. When you count the families all over this country who don’t have computers or can’t afford Internet connections and rely on the ones in libraries to look for jobs, the consequences will be even more dire. People everywhere are unhappy about these closings, and so are mayors making the hard decisions. But with roads and streets left in disrepair, teachers, policemen and firemen being laid off, and politicians in both parties pledging never to raise taxes, no matter what happens to our quality of life, the outlook is bleak.

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I don’t know of anything more disheartening than the sight of a shut down library. No matter how modest its building or its holdings, in many parts of this country a municipal library is often the only place where books in large number on every imaginable subject can be found, where both grownups and children are welcome to sit and read in peace, free of whatever distractions and aggravations await them outside.

I've written here before about the decay of public infrastructure for some similar reasons, though it focused on nuts and bolts like roads and street lamps. Libraries are just as vital a piece of infrastructure.

This one hits home for me. The main family heirloom, passed down by my great-grandfather, is a set of 1912 Harvard classics. My mother, a schoolteacher, found ways to make sure that what ever else went on in our lives, whatever lack of money we were struggling with, there were always books around. Frequently, that was possible because of a public library.

For the short-sighted, it's an easy target. Books, after all, will still exist and, besides, goes the dismissal, there's the internet.

Yeah, no shit. Undoubtedly even the occasional Victorian street urchin had some access to books and outside knowledge, but that misses the damn point.

Libraries' greatest service isn't for the well-off, who can get education and information relatively easily in any era. Instead, its crowning achievement is opening up knowledge to those large parts of society — the unfashionable neighborhoods, the rural swaths — that the tastemakers and futurists usually ignore.

Ignored doesn't mean nonexistent, of course, and for those populations, libraries are a major resource. One, that unlike a lot of other services, doesn't lecture. We're open, read what you want. 

It is the best kind of egalitarianism: available to everyone, relatively cheap, and rewarding initiative. Libraries don't require the upfront cash or monthly bills that internet access does, and are open to non-tech savvy parts of the population. Often, they include local collections or obscure texts that the internet has, for the large part, ignored. Hell, they even open access to that same new media to those who can't afford it.

As if all that wasn't enough, libraries complement the education systems in place, because even if those are magically reformed, tomorrow, there's inevitably things their curriculums will leave out.

Even at points in my childhood when public education was lacking, access to a library took up some of the slack. Thanks to them, I first learned about dueling political theories, Alexander the Great, Chinese history and evolution, to name just a few.

If you think I'm drawing too much from my personal past, consider that there are millions out there who owe the same debt.

The presence of a library, even in the smallest community, is a reminder that the world is more than what's right in front of you, and that ideas aren't just the province of the rich.

History, from one view, can mark catastrophes by the destruction of libraries. For the power-hungry and zealous, the rooms full of books were a threat, or expendable.

Today, we don't need invaders. Just a smug belief in our own advancement, and a blind refusal to pay the bill.

Triumph of the book

"What an astonishing thing a book is. It’s a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you’re inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic."

-Carl Sagan

I'm an unrepentant book addict. I have more of the lovely things than places to put them, and I'm always finding and getting more. Being a book lover, however, I'm familiar with the widely held belief, held by both print enthusiasts and others, that my favorite method of transmitting knowledge is kind of a dying breed. I don't believe it personally*, but it's out there.

Recently, as a friend and I discussed the return of Futurama and various series each of us should check out ("You really need to see The Sopranos, a fascinating character study"), it occurred to me that not only are books not dying, their method has infected other media. Television, one of the primary media that was supposed to replace books as better suited to the needs of a smaller attention span starved public is now more like its old-fashioned rival than ever.

Television has increasingly embraced longer plotlines, deeper characterization, more literary themes and definite, planned endings than ever before. The best, most-talked-about shows (like The Wire) are compared to novels. Series are perceived as more permanent things, not to be forgotten about after they're cancelled, but worth watching and savoring (sometimes, as with Futurama and Family Guy, this even leads to an eventual resurrection). Meanwhile, the sitcom is being slowly garroted in the closet.

Hell, there's even a booming industry in going back and overhauling old school TV stalwarts (Battlestar Galactica, V) to make them more like literature and less like, well, old school television.

The changes haven't just affected the elements of television programming, but how it's received as well. It's less common to see people gather around for a particular episode, unless they're particularly avid or the episode a landmark of some sort. Instead people seek out series, either online or on DVD, and watch them, often several episodes at a pop. Like chapters of a damn book.

Nor is television alone, over the last decade and a half, comic books have scrambled, with varying degrees of success, to embrace literary methods. Writers have received increasing prominence while people read whole story arcs in a sitting more frequently than before and older work is sought in collected editions instead of individual issues. The very name of the medium's even considered slightly disreputable. No, no, these are now graphic novels (the term dates back to the '70s, but it's become much more common in recent years).

There's a lot of factors behind these changes, of course, but one reason for television and comics increasingly mirroring books in format and consumption is that literature is a really old medium, and so there's been far more time to find some common ways to hold people's interest, methods that continue to have staying power. As they come of age, television and comic producers seem to be learning that crafted surprises, interesting plots, realized characters and immersive worlds never go out of style as long as the human brain continues to function. Perhaps, even, audiences don't mind some bleakness and ambiguity. 

Something Sagan nailed about books is their endurance. Perhaps those dark, magical little lines will have the last laugh, after all.

* Exhibit A in reasons books ain't dead is the fact that one of the most massive media phenomenons in memory was the Harry Potter series, something that should dispel any notions that coming generations aren't willing to read long, complicated things on old-fashioned dead tree sheets, as long as they find them interesting.