The Connie Willis . Net Blog

WEBSITE UPDATE–CHARLOTTESVILLE–8-17-17

ON TRUMP’S PRESS CONFERENCE

“I decline to be impartial between the fire brigade and the fire.”

Winston Churchill

“You had a group on one side that was bad and you had a group on the other that was very violent.”
Donald Trump

Since this is my author website, I try for the most part to post about writing rather than politics, but there are times when remaining silent is not an option.

This is one of those times. Last weekend neo-Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan held a torchlight rally in an American city, a rally bearing a chilling resemblance to both lynch-mob Klan rallies and the Nuremburg rallies:
–A rally at which the participants displayed swastikas, Confederate flags, and Klan paraphernalia and shouted, “Jews will not replace us!” and the Nazi slogan, “Blood and soil!” and “Heil Trump!” while doing the stiff-armed Nazi salute.
–A rally at which people shouted, “F–k you, f—-ts!” and “Go the f–k back to Africa, n—-rs!” and stood, armed with semi-automatic rifles across the street from a synagogue while Nazi websites encouraged them to burn the building.
–A rally during which a woman and two police officers were killed and dozens of other people were injured, including a University of Virginia librarian who was hit in the neck, partially dissecting his carotid artery and causing him to have a stroke.

President Trump said this about that rally on Saturday:

“We condemn this egregious display of hatred, bigotry,
and violence on many sides, on many sides.”

And then, just in case we didn’t understand what he was saying, followed it up on Tuesday with:

“What about the alt-left that came charging at the, as you say, the alt-right? Do they have any semblance of guilt? Let me ask you this: What about the fact that they came charging, that they came charging with clubs in their hands, swinging clubs? Do they have any problem? I think they do.”

And:

There “was blame on both sides.”

And:

“You had a lot of people in that group (the Klan and neo- Nazi rally) that were there to innocently protest and very innocently protest…”

And:

“You had a group on the other side that came charging in without a permit and they were very, very violent.”

In other words, both sides–the neo-Nazis and KKK people and the people who came out to protest their hateful rally–were morally equivalent. You know, like the Nazis who bombed London and the RAF who tried to stop them. Or the Nazis who ran the death camps and the Allied forces who liberated them. Or the Civil Rights workers in the Sixties who went to Alabama to register voters and the good ole boys who murdered them. Exactly the same. Equally to blame.

Well, they’re not. And all the spin (the White House sent out talking points today encouraging news outlets to blame both sides) or the parsing of Trump’s words, or the claims that that isn’t what he meant or that he isn’t really a racist down deep, can’t make them the same. As House Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said, “There are no good neo-Nazis.”

And letting Trump get away with this means we’re okay with a President who sides with the neo-Nazis and white supremacists, one of whom said on TV today, “I’m sorta glad that them people got hit and I’m glad that girl died” (Justin Moore, Grand Dragon for the Loyal Knights of the KKK in Pelham) and another (neo-Nazi Christopher Cantwell) proclaimed, “We’re not nonviolent–we’ll f–king kill these people if we have to.”

It also means we’re okay with what’s likely to happen next as a result of Trump’s emboldening these people. (And just in case you don’t think Trump was doing that, look at what David Duke, the former head of the KKK, and Jason Kessler, the organizer of the rally, tweeted in response to Trump’s comments.)

Their representatives were on TV all day yesterday excitedly planning rallies (nine planned for this weekend), intimidation, and violence, convinced that Trump is on their side. Cantwell predicted “A lot more people are going to die before we’re done here,” and a twenty-three-year-old man was just arrested for attempting to bomb a bank building in Oklahoma City in tribute to Timothy McVeigh.

So what’s next? Another car driven into a crowd of peaceful protesters? Another Murrah Federal Building bombing? Another Kristallnacht?

I don’t know, but, listening all day to reporters say that Republicans are really, really upset with Trump but are afraid to call him out by name for fear of alienating “his base,” I can see exactly how Hitler happened. It was because people refused to speak up until it was too late. Or hoped it would all blow over. Or thought if they kept their heads down, like General Kelly, they’d be okay.

We won’t. We have to speak up.

Thankfully, a lot of people already have:

Charles Krauthammer, conservative columnist: “It was a moral disgrace.”

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg: “It’s a disgrace that we still need to say that neo-Nazis and white supremacists are wrong–as if this is somehow not obvious.”

AFL-CIO President Richard Trumko: “On Tuesday President Trump stood in the lobby of his tower on 5th Avenue in Manhattan and again made excuses for bigotry and terrorism.”

The head of every branch of the military released statements that the military do not tolerate racism.

USA Today is calling for the Congress to censure President Trump.

Senator Patrick Leahy: “Mr. President, Heather Heyer was not murdered by both sides.”

Chuck Todd: “President Trump has likely lost moral authority to speak for the country and the Republican Party.”

J.K. Rowling: “One good thing about that abomination of a speech, it’s now impossible for any Trump supporter to pretend they don’t know what he is.”

And Tony Schwartz tweeted: “The end game is on. Trump goes down or we do. He will blow up the world to prove he matters. We must stand up in opposition every day.”

But it’s not enough. We need to speak up, too. Tweet. Write posts on Facebook. Call your Representatives and Senators. Call somebody else’s Representatives and Senators. Shout it to the rooftops! Tell them there’s no place in America for the KKK or Nazis! Or for a President who makes excuses for them, sides with them, and eggs them on!

Connie Willis

Website update 8-9-17

There’s nothing SF writers hate worse than being proved right. That’s because our predictions that come true hardly ever turn out to be the positive ones.

I should say right off the bat that SF writers aren’t actually in the business of making predictions, which is a good thing. Our record in that department is lousy. True, Heinlein predicted the credit card and the microwave, but he also predicted we’d all be using rolling roads by now and taking our slide rules with us into space. Clarke predicted space elevators and space stations, but had us sinking in fifty feet of sand on the moon. William Gibson may have predicted multi-national computer hackers in NEUROMANCER, but he didn’t see either Facebook or middle-school cyberbullying coming.

That’s because prediction like the psychics claim to do isn’t what we’re doing. Our job is to extrapolate, an entirely different thing, to look at trends and possibilities and say, “If this goes on, here’s what’s liable to happen.” But even though we’re not trying to be John Edward or Jeane Dixon, some of what we write about does come to pass. In my short story, “Samaritan,” I had apes being taught sign language, returning to their zoos, and teaching the rest of the primates to sign, which actually happened a couple of years after the story came out.

That’s about the only good thing I’ve ever predicted that came true. Everything else–from over-the-top ridiculous Christmas décor (“deck.halls@boughs/holly”) to duct-tape-fashions (BELLWETHER), has been stuff I’d rather hadn’t have happened.

Especially all the stuff I proposed in REMAKE. When I wrote the book back in 1995, CGI was limited to a few space ships blowing up, but in the years since nearly everything in the book has come to pass, from CGI-constructed stars to resurrecting dead actors. And messing with the classics to suit current sensibilities.

In REMAKE, my hero’s job is the “clean up” classic movies, removing the smoking and drinking and other no longer socially acceptable things from CASABLANCA and NOW, VOYAGER and IT HAPPENED ONE NIGHT. And now here’s Sony announcing they’re going to release “clean” versions of movies for viewing by “a wider family audience,” removing graphic violence, offensive language, sexual innuendo, gore, and “adult content,” (whatever the heck that is) from such movies as SPIDERMAN, GHOSTBUSTERS, MONEYBALL, CAPTAIN PHILLIPS, and CROUCHING TIGER, HIDDEN DRAGON.

It’s hard to see exactly what that family audience is doing watching CAPTAIN PHILLIPS (you know, the one about the Somali pirates who kidnapped everyone on a ship and began murdering them) or Judd Apatow movies in the first place, which makes me wonder if this wasn’t done more to sell movies to the religious right, who’ve responded enthusiastically to the idea, praising the initiative, which would make watching “high quality films without crude scenes and language” possible and protect them from the “worldly influences” of most films.

But, that aside, there’s still the issue of whether people should be able to mess with someone else’s work of art. The people defending the initiative say movies aren’t works of art, but products, and as such, can be endlessly retooled to appeal to the public, like Coca-Cola and iPhones. As one blog put it, censoring out profanity in a “sometimes disposable diversion like STEP-BROTHERS” is hardly akin to modifying “a historical and timeless work of art.”

Actually, that’s exactly what it is. Every movie (and book and poem and painting) is some artist’s creation, and the only one with the right to change it (or give permission to change it) is the author.

This is not a new issue. Look at all the attempts to censor and/or bowdlerize everything from Mark Twain’s THE ADVENTURES OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN to Shakespeare’s ROMEO AND JULIET. (The word “bowdlerize,” in fact, comes from Thomas Bowdler, who changed Ophelia’s death to an accidental drowning and changed Lady Macbeth’s “Out, damned spot!” to “Out, crimson spot!”) And it’s not the first time for the movies, either. Even before Sony’s initiative, there were numerous filtering and expurgating programs out there, like VidAngel and Utah’s CleanFlicks and the ClearPlay DVD Player (all currently being sued by the movie industry).

The cleaning up is always done for the best of reasons. When five of Emily Dickinson’s poems were submitted for publication in the local paper, the editor helpfully “fixed” all the punctuation (eliminating those awful dashes!) and changed her “near-rhymes” into real rhymes, completely butchering them. In like manner, groups have cut WHEN HARRY MET SALLY’s famous orgasm scene out, left the main action scene out of THE MATRIX, and made the two women in the award-winning CAROL “just friends.”

Which is the other reason fiddling can’t be allowed. It’s the slipperiest of slopes. I mean, since you’re taking the smoking out of CASABLANCA, why not get rid of the scene where the Nazis shoot Peter Lorre? It’s “graphic violence,” and so is Rick’s shooting the Nazi at the end. And that ending’s such a downer. Let’s fix it so Rick and Ilsa fly off together instead. Only that’ll change that other scene in WHEN HARRY MET SALLY where they discuss CASABLANCA’s ending, too, so that’ll need to be taken out, too, and while we’re at it….

Luckily for those of us who want the movies left alone, the response to Sony’s initiative has been furious. Judd Apatow went ballistic with a decidedly non-clean tweet, followed by Seth Rogan’s slightly less profane message: “Holy sh*t please don’t do this to our movies. Thanks.” Andrew McKay objected and the Directors Guild went to battle, demanding Sony take down the movies already released and get directors’ permission before altering any others, and they’ve now
pulled back, but you can be sure this’ll be tried again, especially since modern tech makes fiddling with film–and books–so easy.

Which was what I was trying to say in REMAKE. And it, by the way, was supposed to be a cautionary tale, not a how-to manual!

Connie Willis

BOOKS I LOVE, PART 2: OXFORD BRANCH

When I visited England the first time, the place I most wanted to go was Oxford, the home of some of my favorite writers.  I wanted to see the Bridge of Sighs where Lord Peter proposed to Harriet, and the gate of Christ Church where Peter’s nephew collided with Harriet and spilled the bag of meringues, and the deanery garden at Christ Church, where Charles Dodgson first met the Liddell girls, and then I wanted to go have a pint (well, of shandy) at the Eagle and Child, where the Inklings used to meet to read and critique each other’s manuscripts.

Many of my favorite writers are associated with Oxford and/or wrote about it.  Here are some of my favorite books of theirs:

THE PERELANDRA TRILOGY by C.S. Lewis

I discovered the Inklings, that band of writers who assembled at the pub, the Eagle and Child (or, as they called it, the Bird and Baby) and which included C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Charles Williams, and assorted other professors and writers, through C.S. Lewis, whose work I first read in college.  I loved his religious allegories–THE SCREWTAPE LETTERS and THE GREAT DIVORCE and A GRIEF OBSERVED–and his reworking of the story of Psyche and Eros:  TILL WE HAVE FACES.  It’s probably his best work.  Because his faith is so intertwined with his writing, he can sometimes be annoyingly preachy, but in TILL WE HAVE FACES, he’s working outside that world, so that he focuses entirely on the story, and when he does that, there’s nobody better.

But my favorite C.S. Lewis work has got to be the PERELANDRA trilogy–OUT OF THE SILENT PLANET, PERELANDRA, AND THAT HIDEOUS STRENGTH.  It’s part science fiction, part religious allegory, and full of fascinating ideas.  Especially about the nature of evil, which Lewis sees not as grandly Mephistophelian or even clever, like Ray Walston in DAMNED YANKEES, but petty and pointless and gratuitously cruel.  His scene with Weston and the Venusian frogs has stayed with me for fifty years.  Plus, THAT HIDEOUS STRENGTH has a great Merlin in it.  And Coventry.

Lewis is one of those writers who’s just exploding with ideas, and is full of opinions, with the result that the meetings of the Inklings were often contentious (especially after Lewis, who’d refused to allow women into the group, insisted that his wife be included), and I have a feeling that if I’d been allowed into the Inklings, I would have been mad at Lewis most of the time.  As it is, I disagree with lots of what he says, but he’s still one of the most interesting writers I know, and I highly recommend his work.

THE LORD OF THE RINGS by J.R.R. Tolkien

J.R.R. Tolkien was responsible for my getting married.  I’m not kidding.  When I was a senior in college I flew out to Connecticut over spring break to break up with my boyfriend (which for some unknown reason I thought it would be kinder to do in person).  Flights took even longer than they do now, so I went to the bookstore to find something to read on the flight, and picked up a trilogy with strange pinkish and purple creatures on the front.

I knew nothing at all about Tolkien at that point–it was way before “Frodo Lives” and decades before Peter Jackson and Viggo Mortensen, but the blurb on the back looked intriguing, and from the moment I opened up the first volume and read, “In a hole in the ground lived a hobbit,” I was entranced.  Here was a fairy tale–for grownups!

By the time I arrived at Newark Airport, I was so deep in the story and so worried about Frodo and Sam and Merry and Pippin I couldn’t think about anything else.  “The Black Riders are after them,” I told my boyfriend, “and nobody knows what’s happened to Gandalf, and I’m not sure they should trust Strider,” and completely forgot to break up with my boyfriend.  As a result, we are about to celebrate our fiftieth wedding anniversary, and I’m still in love with him, and with LORD OF THE RINGS.

Tolkien gets all sorts of praise for creating languages and inventing an entire world, complete with geographic, history, and maps, but it’s the story that keeps us riveted–the tale of a small, ordinary person (just like us) who finds himself caught up in events beyond his control and beyond his abilities, facing enemies of great power, somebody who can’t possibly win but who simply has to.  It’s a timeless story that never gets old.  I’ve read it many times, and it only gets better each time.

If you’ve never read it, you should probably start at the beginning and read THE HOBBIT first.  And I’d also recommend Tolkien’s essay, “On Fairy Stories.”  But skip The SILMARILLION.

3. DESCENT INTO HELL Charles Williams

Charles Williams, the third of the Inkling triumvirate, is the least known of them.  I once got into a fight with a clerk at Blackwell’s because they didn’t have a single one of his books.  “How can you not have Charles Williams?” I said.  “He was an Inkling.  He lived here.  And he worked for the Oxford University Press!”

He may be the least known, but to my mind he’s the best of them.  Tolkien’s the best storyteller, C.S.  Lewis has the clearest prose style, but Williams has the most imagination.  I know that sounds like an unlikely claim when you’re talking about the authors who invented Perelandra and Middle Earth, but it’s true.  Williams’s books are so strange and visionary that there’s simply no way to describe them.

Some reviewers have called them “supernatural thrillers,” which has an element of truth to it, but gives completely the wrong impression.  Others have called them “religious mysteries,” and one even said he wrote about the occult and “talking animals,” which gives totally the wrong impression.

But I can understand their difficulty–I have no idea how to describe them either.  They do deal with the supernatural–and I guess they are thrillers–there are villains and car chases and even murders–but none of those definitions do his books justice or tell what they’re actually about.  WAR IN HEAVEN, for instance, begins with the finding of the Holy Grail in a little church in rural England.  ALL HALLOW’S EVE begins with the heroine standing on Westminster Bridge, looking across the Thames at the plane crash in which she has just been killed, and in THE GREATER TRUMPS, the figures on the Tarot cards come to life and head out into the world. And they’re all full of unsettling insights about love and faith and reality.

DESCENT INTO HELL begins with the heroine, on her way home from a play rehearsal, seeing her doppelganger walking toward her.  It also involves a suicide, trapped in a half-constructed netherworld of two-by-fours and ladders and scaffolding.  It’s also about a martyr being burned at the stake and a play that may be more than a play–and the true meaning of bearing one another’s burdens.  A brilliant book.

It’s like no other book you’ve ever read, eerie and touching and infinitely strange, and the only things remotely like it are Williams’ other novels.

They’re sometimes difficult to read.  Reading Williams’ prose can sometimes be like hacking your way through a thicket, and on several occasions I’ve reached the end of a page only to think, “I have no idea what I’ve just read,” and have to go back and read it again, but his books are definitely worth the effort.

4. GAUDY NIGHT by Dorothy L. Sayers

Dorothy Sayers didn’t just live in Oxford, she went to Somerville College and worked at Blackwell’s Bookstore.  She also wrote about it, and her mystery Gaudy Night is probably the best novel ever written about Oxford.

Not only does it have punting on the river, the May Day celebration on top of Magdalen Tower, dinner in a college hall, getting caught out after hours, and a concert at the Sheldonian, but it’s about Oxford, the scholarly research and the faculty infighting and the undergraduate excesses.  And the spell it casts over anyone who spends time in the “city of dreaming spires.”  Plus, it has the delightful romance between Lord Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane, though to get the full effect of that, you need to read STRONG POISON, HAVE HIS CARCASE, GAUDY NIGHT, and BUSMAN’S HONEYMOON in order.

I took a walking tour in Oxford one time with a bunch of tourists who yawned at the sight of Shelley’s Memorial and Lawrence of Arabia’s college and Einstein’s blackboard.  But when the tour guide showed us the Bridge of Sighs, and said, “This is where Lord Peter proposed to Harriet Vane,” everyone took their cameras out and began clicking madly away, in spite of the fact that they weren’t real.

But that’s just the point–they are real, and they’ve made just as indelible a mark on Oxford as Einstein and T.E. Lawrence and Percy Bysshe Shelley.

Sayers’ other mystery novels are good, too.  I especially recommend Murder Must Advertise, Clouds of Witness and Nine Tailors.

5. ALICE IN WONDERLAND and THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS by Lewis Carroll.

Charles Dodgson is even more of an Oxford writer than Sayers or the Inklings.  Not only was he a professor at Christ Church his whole life, but his rooms overlooked the deanery garden where he saw the Liddell girls playing and were right across the street from the little shop he immortalized in THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS as the Sheep Shop and just up the way from the river up which he took Alice and her sisters on that most famous of all picnics.

ALICE and THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS are quoted far more than they’re read (in fact more often than anything else besides Shakespeare and the Bible and there’s been a sharp increase in these Wonderland-like times.  I must have heard, “We’re really down the rabbit hole now,” at least a dozen times in recent days, followed closely by references to Alice’s telling Humpty Dumpty, “The question is whether you can make words so many different things,” and Humpty Dumpty’s replying, “The question is which is to be master–that’s all” and to the Red Queen.) but you really should read the books themselves, especially if you haven’t since you were a kid.

Alice is wonderful, the voice of common sense in a world in which everyone else is clearly mad.  Except for the White Knight, who’s one of my favorite characters in all of literature.

I’d also recommend watching DREAMCHILD, a movie about the real Alice and Charles Dodgson, and SyFy’s miniseries, ALICE, a Nick Welling miniseries set in Wonderland a hundred years after the original Alice visited.  It’s a science-fictional take on the story, with Wonderland a dystopian place, Hatter as a drug-dealer, and unexpected takes on the Dormouse, Owl, and Caterpillar.

DREAMCHILD is a British film about a real event.  In 1932, Alice Liddell was invited to accept a posthumous honor for Dodgson at Columbia University, and the movie tells the story of her trip to America, during which unsettling memories of her childhood and the books begin drifting to the surface.  It stars Ian Holm and Coral Browne, and is unfortunately nearly impossible to locate, but it’s worth the search.  It’s my favorite movie of all time.  Absolutely beautiful.

Connie Willis