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Mar. 12th, 2007 06:45 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
my_window_seatMost who know me know that I have a deep and abiding fascination with post-apocalyptic fiction. Set that up as a premise, and I will read. Doesn't mean that I'll praise it just because it's probably my favorite genre, but I'll at least be eager to like it, if it's well done.
This isn't a book review, but I have a book in mind.
This is more a moment of exhaustion and bone-weariness that brings a particular book to mind.
WARNING: If you haven't already read it, I'm about to spoilerize Earth Abides by George R. Stewart. It's not a recent book - it won the International Fantasy Award in 1951, so yeah, it's been out for a while. But if you are interested in this kind of reading (I'm lookin' at you, Jack) - you might want to skip over this entry and pick up the book, as it really is THE great-grandaddy of the all the other classics - Nevil Shute's On the Beach, Stephen King's The Stand, etc. Stewart was doing it first, folks.
This particular book takes a different tack from many of the end-of-days sci-fi. It starts out predictably enough (now it's predictable - was a pretty new idea then) - massive plague, everyone dies - except Our Intrepid Hero, who eventually gets bored enough to go out a wandering, and lo! discovers he's not the last man alive! Duh. Followed by the equally predictable banding together of survivors and an attempt to reestablish society. How do we turn the power back on? How do we grow food? How do we deal with medical issues - illness, birth, death, etc.? Yadda yadda.
The direction this book takes that veers off from the norm is that it doesn't end with a rosy-tinted wave toward a brighter, less-populated future.
And the spoiler moment - This book ends with the next generation of children in this bare-bones community showing a marked disinterest in being molded into the previous patterns of a world they've never known. They don't want to learn how to read or learn agriculture. They don't care about turning the lights or water back on. They are creatures that have tumbled generations back toward a hunting and gathering tribal nature that has no ties to place or person. They reject their parent's world. 'Civilization', in this future, is lost.
While there is some romance in the idea of stripping back the false propriety of our current society, the thought that all thoughts, all history, all the art created in so many hundreds and thousands of years can be so easily thrown away - really leaves me feeling limp. Yes, there is something beautiful about the idea of a life that recognizes the seasons as being more important than a man-made concept of time- a desire to be moved to explore the world more like an animal, smell it, taste it - free from constraints of labor for hire -
But to lose everything passed down in print - lovingly enscribed in sculpture and architecture - the voices of drama and dance, the mapworks of color and emotion in paintings - all gone. Rotting away unnoticed. Of no concern to the bodies running through open fields, interested only in filling the stomach and finding a place in the weeds to rut or sleep.
And I'm thinking about all this why....?
I'm typing up the 'work' that we've been doing with Anna's Theatre in the Community Class down at the Community Center.
For the last couple months, we've been going down there once or twice a week and working with the kids to try to get some material out of them to build a show out of. Last semester, we got a story idea from the kids - had them suggest some characters and rough plot ideas - and the college students wrote a script that we brought back and had them use for their show. Conceptually, it was all right. It was too long, and the director should have weed-whacked it down, but oh well.
This time, Anna wanted the original material to be entirely created by the kids. Her idea, which was a good one, was to work at creating small, simple pieces of poetry that the kids would write themselves, and which we would then string into a show.
I was given the task of taking the things that have been worked on over the last couple weeks to type them up. I'm supposed to then e-mail them out to the handful of college students in the class so that they can write some simple dialogue to go in between the pieces.
I started sorting the pieces for typing tonight.
I'm not finding what I expected.
We've been working mostly in small groups, because the kids, when we get them into one room, are usually so wild and completely out of control that the only way to work with them is to break them into small groups and try to keep their attention focused with fewer distractions. Because of this, I've only seen what the groups I was in were working on. Even that was challenging - what I was able to get with the kids I was working with felt really rough, but I figured that out of all the different groups, we'd be able to get enough material to piece something together.
I'm sitting here now with a stack of papers and scraps. And I'm wondering what the future is going to look like.
I'm looking at so little coherency of thought that I wonder what kids are learning in school. I'm wondering where their interests lie, because I can't see trains of thought that I can follow. Except where there's an obvious influence from an adult, there's nothing here that makes any sense. I can see the room where we were working in my head, and all I can see are kids flinging themselves at the walls and at each other, like electrons in a lead box, all energy and no control or desire for anything besides collision and confusion.
They're kids. Of course they are. They've just been released from school when we get them, and of course they want to just - well, be kids.
But these kids - where are their minds? Why isn't what they see and feel and process somehow visible in this collection of magic-markered caucaphony?
I don't know what I'm doing here. I don't know if the future has a love of words any where in it any more.
Rehearsal tonight - not at the community center, with Theatre in the Making - was also an energy drain. Of a completely different kind. I wish I could say it was a good one, but - eh. Another story for another time. Anyway, words are still very much alive and well for that group. For the predominantly white, middle-to-upper class well-educated kids that are enrolled in that program.
They're the minority now. The axis is shifting. And what direction is society going in now, with this move away from thought and toward - what?
I'm so tired I don't want to move.
I don't know where I belong in this new world.
This isn't a book review, but I have a book in mind.
This is more a moment of exhaustion and bone-weariness that brings a particular book to mind.
WARNING: If you haven't already read it, I'm about to spoilerize Earth Abides by George R. Stewart. It's not a recent book - it won the International Fantasy Award in 1951, so yeah, it's been out for a while. But if you are interested in this kind of reading (I'm lookin' at you, Jack) - you might want to skip over this entry and pick up the book, as it really is THE great-grandaddy of the all the other classics - Nevil Shute's On the Beach, Stephen King's The Stand, etc. Stewart was doing it first, folks.
This particular book takes a different tack from many of the end-of-days sci-fi. It starts out predictably enough (now it's predictable - was a pretty new idea then) - massive plague, everyone dies - except Our Intrepid Hero, who eventually gets bored enough to go out a wandering, and lo! discovers he's not the last man alive! Duh. Followed by the equally predictable banding together of survivors and an attempt to reestablish society. How do we turn the power back on? How do we grow food? How do we deal with medical issues - illness, birth, death, etc.? Yadda yadda.
The direction this book takes that veers off from the norm is that it doesn't end with a rosy-tinted wave toward a brighter, less-populated future.
And the spoiler moment - This book ends with the next generation of children in this bare-bones community showing a marked disinterest in being molded into the previous patterns of a world they've never known. They don't want to learn how to read or learn agriculture. They don't care about turning the lights or water back on. They are creatures that have tumbled generations back toward a hunting and gathering tribal nature that has no ties to place or person. They reject their parent's world. 'Civilization', in this future, is lost.
While there is some romance in the idea of stripping back the false propriety of our current society, the thought that all thoughts, all history, all the art created in so many hundreds and thousands of years can be so easily thrown away - really leaves me feeling limp. Yes, there is something beautiful about the idea of a life that recognizes the seasons as being more important than a man-made concept of time- a desire to be moved to explore the world more like an animal, smell it, taste it - free from constraints of labor for hire -
But to lose everything passed down in print - lovingly enscribed in sculpture and architecture - the voices of drama and dance, the mapworks of color and emotion in paintings - all gone. Rotting away unnoticed. Of no concern to the bodies running through open fields, interested only in filling the stomach and finding a place in the weeds to rut or sleep.
And I'm thinking about all this why....?
I'm typing up the 'work' that we've been doing with Anna's Theatre in the Community Class down at the Community Center.
For the last couple months, we've been going down there once or twice a week and working with the kids to try to get some material out of them to build a show out of. Last semester, we got a story idea from the kids - had them suggest some characters and rough plot ideas - and the college students wrote a script that we brought back and had them use for their show. Conceptually, it was all right. It was too long, and the director should have weed-whacked it down, but oh well.
This time, Anna wanted the original material to be entirely created by the kids. Her idea, which was a good one, was to work at creating small, simple pieces of poetry that the kids would write themselves, and which we would then string into a show.
I was given the task of taking the things that have been worked on over the last couple weeks to type them up. I'm supposed to then e-mail them out to the handful of college students in the class so that they can write some simple dialogue to go in between the pieces.
I started sorting the pieces for typing tonight.
I'm not finding what I expected.
We've been working mostly in small groups, because the kids, when we get them into one room, are usually so wild and completely out of control that the only way to work with them is to break them into small groups and try to keep their attention focused with fewer distractions. Because of this, I've only seen what the groups I was in were working on. Even that was challenging - what I was able to get with the kids I was working with felt really rough, but I figured that out of all the different groups, we'd be able to get enough material to piece something together.
I'm sitting here now with a stack of papers and scraps. And I'm wondering what the future is going to look like.
I'm looking at so little coherency of thought that I wonder what kids are learning in school. I'm wondering where their interests lie, because I can't see trains of thought that I can follow. Except where there's an obvious influence from an adult, there's nothing here that makes any sense. I can see the room where we were working in my head, and all I can see are kids flinging themselves at the walls and at each other, like electrons in a lead box, all energy and no control or desire for anything besides collision and confusion.
They're kids. Of course they are. They've just been released from school when we get them, and of course they want to just - well, be kids.
But these kids - where are their minds? Why isn't what they see and feel and process somehow visible in this collection of magic-markered caucaphony?
I don't know what I'm doing here. I don't know if the future has a love of words any where in it any more.
Rehearsal tonight - not at the community center, with Theatre in the Making - was also an energy drain. Of a completely different kind. I wish I could say it was a good one, but - eh. Another story for another time. Anyway, words are still very much alive and well for that group. For the predominantly white, middle-to-upper class well-educated kids that are enrolled in that program.
They're the minority now. The axis is shifting. And what direction is society going in now, with this move away from thought and toward - what?
I'm so tired I don't want to move.
I don't know where I belong in this new world.
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Earth Abides
Date: 2007-03-13 05:07 am (UTC)You ever watch "Jericho"? I'm finding it flawed but engrossing.
I share your attraction for post-apocalyptic stuff, but my fascination includes dumb movies like "the Blood of Heroes", and even "the Postman" and "Waterworld" (the long version).
But not Mad Max, oddly enough.
A WAYYYY different post-apoc sci-fi book is Alien Earth, by (I think) Margaret Lindholm. Enjoyable in and of itself, I think it also contains some dark satire of the green movement. Plus it's a mystery..
no subject
Date: 2007-03-13 07:24 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-03-13 02:08 pm (UTC)