Entry #18, Day 27

From the new one.

Jeannette’s returned. She staggered out of the forest this afternoon, her clothes all torn. She’d suffered some lacerations from foliage, apparently, and was bleeding. After we fixed her up she told me about where she’d been. She said she went out alone into the jungle, and about a kilometer deep she found a clearing. In the middle of the clearing was a pattern of concentric circles cut into the grass, and in the center of the circles was a large stone. She said it was like a lectern, so she stood at it, and when she did the circles in the grass began to glow yellow. Then they began contracting, closing in on her and she realised that it wasn’t just the dirt beneath the grass that was glowing, it was the slugs that had emerged from the ground. They were bioluminescing this radioactive yellow, and surrounding her, coming closer. She panicked and ran, stepping over some and crushing others, running without looking back towards the treeline, to safety, only before she could leave the clearing she felt a sudden impact all over her body, and fell to the ground. When she woke up, the glowing slugs had completely covered the stone lectern, their light uniformly pulsing. She felt that they weren’t dangerous, and even approached for a better look. When she tried to leave the area, to tell the rest of us, she couldn’t. She said there was a wall, the same thing that knocked her out. Some kind of invisible wall surrounding the perimeter of the clearing. It felt smooth and cold to the touch, and give a soft vibratory ringing sound when she put her ear up close. But there was no visual evidence of it existing at all. She rammed her shoulder up against it to no effect. She threw rocks but they went straight through, disappearing into the forest behind. She was stuck. As an experiment, she used a stick to pick up one of the glowing slugs off of the stone to see if it would pass through the wall, which it did. She was there for hours, she said, and over the time she noticed the mass of slugs covering the stone gradually shrinking, as if the stone itself was shrinking. And at one point, when it was about 20% its original size, she said she saw someone walk out from within the jungle and directly up to her. A man in a green suit. Green tie. He walked straight up to her and stood on the other side of the invisible wall, facing her.

‘Who are you?’ she asked, frightened. He reached out his arm toward her forehead, right through the invisible wall as if there was nothing there. Before he could touch her she stepped back, stumbled and tripped. She was lying on her back, looking up and he stood over her, blocking the sun behind him, silhouetted. He knelt down, and gently put his hand over her face, covering her eyes.

That’s the last she remembers. She said when he touched her she must have blacked out. She’s vomiting now, but besides that seems okay.

A short review of Elysium, the nature of Sci-Fi

I just saw Elysium, the new one by Neil Blomkamp of District 9 fame. It was pretty much what you'd expect for the big budget successor to D9. The same blending of CG robotics with live action footage, awesome visual design, and a thinly veiled commentary on how unfair the world is. Where District 9 was about racism, Elysium is about both immigration and the rich 1%, who are universally depicted as evil. Seriously, William Fitchner and Jodie Foster are bad, the President turns out to not be reasonable, the civilians are prejudiced against Earthlings. Even Matt Damon's supervisor, a non-Elysium citizen, was a bad guy with no regard for human life. In fact everyone on earth seemed to be either an evil minion of the Elysium regime or a criminal, and this was arguably supposed to reflect how the poor conditions of Earth drive people to monstrous extremes. The only really good people seemed to be the love interest and her sick daughter, and of course, the hero at the end after undergoing his personal transformation. The juxtaposition between shitty Earth and fantastic Elysium was so stark it was silly. The conditions on Earth were so totally comically bad, and Elysium was so ridiculously utopic, both environments appeared more or less unsustainable. There seemed to be no sign of government on Earth except for police robots controlled by Elysium. Nothing was clean, the only jobs I saw were in some robot-disposal factory and a hospital. Everybody else seemed to live in squalor. There was apparently money on Earth, but it was unclear whether there was money on Elysium. The only jobs up there seemed to be governmental. Could this have been suggesting that a strong public sector leads to a utopia while a sort of anarcho-capitalism leads to slums and crime? Who knows.

A guy once told me that all science fiction invariably involves some metaphorical subtext about society. I think that's bull. Or, I've misunderstood the entire science-fiction genre. In fact, I don't even actually think of science-fiction as a genre, to me it's a setting. Western is also a setting but there are particular plot tropes that characterise westerns. You can have a western set in the modern day, or in Japan - remember that Tarantino described Inglorious Basterds as a western. However you cannot take away the fictional science of a sci-fi film and have it still be sci-fi. If you take away the robots and futuristic setting of Elysium, it would be an action/drama. My point is that you can still tell a story about society without using science fiction, which is only necessary to mask the social commentary in metaphors so that the superficial story is free to be an action film (or comedy, or romance, or whatever). Science fiction is a tool to change one genre into another. Similarly, I reject that guy's statement also because I don't believe that a story with science fiction elements necessarily has metaphors. Consider Transformers. Here I'll also obviously point to my own work as an example, in that I write stories to be fun tales, ripping yarns, not to make a point. Sometimes points about society arise organically, sure, but they're never the driving force of my stories. I leave that to people who care more about issues than I do.

So if the definition of science-fiction is, "using fictional science to create metaphors for real world issues" then I don't write sci-fi, I write horror or action or something else, and a lot of movies and books in the sci-fi shelf don't belong there either. If the definition is, "containing scientific elements which aren't real," then I reject that as a genre, as it does not say anything about what happens in the story. Action movies are characterised by action. Comedies have jokes. Romances have love. Horrors are scary. Sci-fis have science fiction, yes, but that's not a plot or even an event, merely an enabler for events.

Elysium was a pretty good movie. There were a couple of laughs. My main disappointment was the childhood bits near the beginning, and the drilling in how unfair life was, how everyone deserves a shot at the good life even when it's literally very out of reach.

I give it five out of seven.

0.0 Foreword

Growing up in a Catholic environment, that is, a Catholic primary and middle school education along with a church-going father, I was exposed from an early age to a multitude of hymns, prayers, parables, biblical tales, sentiments, sayings, phrases, metaphors, stories, analogies, songs, and poems to do with the Christian faith. One of these articles, the subject of this inquiry, was a particular favourite both of my school and of my paternal family, pa included, but it was not until my late teens that I actually considered the poem in any depth. Throughout my childhood it had simply been, along with many other texts in the same category, a thing which the authoritarian people around me, i.e. adults, found incredibly interesting, and yet which I did not. I attributed my disinterest to simply being too young to understand, however once I grew older, and was confident that my capacity to understand incredibly interesting texts was sufficient, I was surprised to find that I still failed to be awed by it to the extent that the elders of my youth were. Indeed, perhaps this failing caused me to resent the poem itself, or perhaps my resentment was due to disliking the poem of its own merit, but regardless, I eventually decided to compile this analysis, in order to bring to bear, or perhaps uncover, some of the issues with the text, both in composition - the construction of a comprehensive narrative - and in interpretation - how the poem might affect people’s decisions and indeed lives. In the former I feel I have succeeded, although in the latter I have failed. Over the course of writing this analysis I lost track of the second goal, and instead focused completely on a number of specific interpretations. I feel that while this analysis does admittedly contain a certain amount of unverifiable speculation, I have not sufficiently studied ethics to say whether or not the poem gives an appropriate message to those who have lost hope or may otherwise turn to religion in a time of strife. Because of this, the analysis will remain solely a literary one, without delving into such meta-issues.

Cultivated identity, the Saw franchise, a shady past

Before I came to Canada, and as my moving date approached, I and some other people jokingly threw around the idea (some with concern) of me creating a new persona - Canada Felim.
According to Beatrice, I've been prone to do this in the past. She used the example of the stageplay I worked on with UniSA in 2011, where she was surprised to find that everyone involved knew me as "Philly", and probably had totally different perceptions of me as my parents do, or she does, or you do. They treated me differently and I probably even acted differently. When I was around those people only, and not around other people, I was, more or less, a different person. However I didn't mean to be, my transformation was unintentional. It was merely because they were exposed to attitudes and behaviours in me which other groups of people do not get a chance to observe. You obviously act differently at work than when around family, or your friends, or an intimate partner, or alone. When you go for a job interview you dress nicely and speak clearly to try and convey an image which may be a slight variation on any of your others. Does this necessarily make you a different person? This is getting dangerously close to a philosophical discussion about the Ship of Theseus (that had all it's components replaced with newer ones until none of the original material remained, and asking whether it's the same ship or not.) Let's steer away from that. That way madness lies.

So you've spent your entire life cultivating a certain persona, and as you've aged your ideal may have changed, so your instantaneous persona - your thoughts, beliefs, actions - at a particular time are different from those at another time in life. Maybe you're stressed one day, or a neo-con, etc. An observer, say a friend or family member, who's known you for all that time would aggregate these historical aspects and come up with an interpretation of you that is different to someone who's only known you for, say, a week. Maybe it was the week you were really into hairstyling and doesn't really reflect who (you think) you are. As more pieces of your personality are revealed to that person over time their idea of you will adapt and, probably, approach what lifelong friends think. Obviously bar any fundamental changes to your character that happened before they meet you. In fact, the new friends perception might be a truer description of you than the old friends, as the latter will be influenced by actions you might never repeat, or beliefs you no longer adhere to. Old friends views are tainted by vestigial components of your ex-personality, and new friends lack exposure to create a complete description of you.

I met someone who's seen the latest Saw movie only and because of that, obviously hated the entire series. (I should point out I haven't seen the latest saw, the 3D one. I think I've seen up to five. I'm just extrapolating and assuming any that follow are just as bad or worse) I asked if she'd seen the first one, which she hadn't, and no matter how much I tried to I couldn't convince her that the original Saw is an amazing film. Because of the first one (and to a certain extent the backstory introduced in two and three) my opinion of the Saw series is higher than hers. If someone was lucky enough to have only seen the original one, or the first three, they would hold the series as a whole in higher esteem than I do. As a side note, Tarantino said that the Matrix sequels made the first one a worse movie, because of the backstory introduced.

In this metaphor, you're the franchise, and chapters of your life are films (in case you didn't get it). So, make sure people see the best ones and retroactively credit yourself as Alan Smithee on the bad ones. It's still you that they're seeing.

Is that bad advice? Maybe you're a Julian Assange, information transparency type and want people to see the whole lot, even bits that no longer accurately reflect who you are presently. Is that worse? Sounds almost like lying.

Project list

Here is a list of all of my current projects and their stages of development.

Footprints
This is the academic satire, critical analysis of the Footprints In The Sand poem. It's more or less complete and has been for some time now. I'm leaving it for a few months to later come back to with a fresh head and decide if it needs more work, or is ready to publish, and more importantly, where to publish. If it can get into a real publication that would be... interesting, but my hopes are low. This will probably wind up being independently sold as an eBook.

Race Theory
A multi-part essay about competitions. Currently sitting at three and a half thousand words, it might go to four thousand, or it might go to ten thousand. There is very little way of knowing, but I feel I'm running out of things to say. This is a fairly dry, serious thing, but interesting nevertheless.

Sophomore novel
This one doesn't have a name yet. A time-travel story featuring aliens and/or ghosts who torment anyone who comes into contact with a little thing. First draft is unfinished so don't hold your breath.

Fiction piece to accompany Race Theory.
It involves a train, a device which can construct anything from anything (post-scarcity), and a big global race like a modern version of Hidalgo. It's basically not even started yet.

Wilkinson IV
This one only needs marketing. I've also had the idea of, down the track, re-releasing it with some changes. These changes would be conducive to and exist within the fiction, so, where the original volume is labelled "Second Edition", this one would be "Third Edition".