And Now for Something Completely Different

I think the internet and my lack of attentiveness might be destroying my son...

Heavy statement I know, but seriously:

So I've been letting my 6 year-old use the iPad to watch Netflix - "Just for Kids," in the early morning hours for about 3 months now. I thought the whole arrangement was amazing -- I get to sleep, while he is entertained, I can see him from my bed because of the way our rooms are connected so I know he's safe, and I'm thinking that the "Just for Kids" feature is fantastic because he can't see anything potentially harmful or scary.  Ha!

About three weeks ago, the account was changed so that when we logged in, we had to select a person who was watching.  Just about a week ago, the smart little bastard selected another user and watched a Goosebumps episode when I was asleep.  I had no idea this had happened, but that night he woke up around 3 am and did not go back to sleep until about 5 or 6, getting up every 5 minutes because he was scared of something.  I had to have him sleep on the floor next to the bed.  It was godawful.  I had been wondering what had spooked him so much, and then, lo and behold! I logged on to the other user on the account last night and saw it in the "Recently Watched," section.

Needless to say, I feel super guilty.  For some reason I didn't think of the possibility that he would watch something scary by himself on purpose. Just the intro to that show is kind of creepy for my son. He's pretty sensitive, and I can't imagine how scared that stupid show made him.  If not for my laziness and desire to sleep in, he might not have come across the show alone and made that decision. He was obviously embarrassed about being scared, but what kid wouldn't be scared by that crap?! It's creepy.  Anyway, like I said, I feel extremely guilty for letting that happen. I know how I've come to rely on internet-based entertainment for my kid, and I'm kind of ashamed.  I'm the only one to be blamed.

So now I am insisting that I be present whenever he's watching Netflix, or playing games (however, the good thing about the XBOX is that I can set good parental controls). Welp. Back to being super vigilant crazy paranoid sleep-deprived mom (yay!).

I mean, the worst part about this is that when he gets up in the morning, he doesn't want to do anything. He doesn't want to eat or play games really, aside from Minecraft and such. So it's back to being stuck just sitting on the couch watching dumb shows instead of sleeping... SAD FACE.

/Something Completely Different 

Thoughts on Academic Philosophy and Unifying Theories

One of the biggest problems with "doing philosophy," academically is that students go into it thinking that they will study great thinkers and then write original material after they study, and then realize that there are so many thinkers, so many movements, so many revolutions in thought, and so many schools of thought, that they never get to the original stuff.

This problem stems, in part, from the fact that academic philosophy programs insist on endless commentary of old thought. (I mean honestly, how much is there left to say about Plato for god's sake?)  In one of his writings, Karl Rahner, the 20th century Jesuit theologian, discusses the sheer amount of information that is in the world to digest, and how we are never really going to be able to process all of it. Specialization within specialized fields has already developed (inevitable especially in historical studies), but this may be a double-edged sword, so to speak. Rahner agrees with me here (or I agree with Rahner? Yeah, that).  It is fascinating to analyze the various facets of our lives - sociological, biological, psychological, religious, theological, linguistic - but do we lose sight of the whole? I think we do. Rahner here would say we're losing sight of the whole that is our life in God.  I say we're losing sight of the whole as a unified existence.

I don't claim to know enough to even begin to describe some sort of unified theory of everything, but I do think that individual specialization is hindering different groups of specialists from collaborating to  investigate unifying aspects of their work and how they relate to the universe as a whole.

This relates back to just the study of philosophy; in that philosophy, at its inception, was the study of universal education. In India, philosophical discussion sought to explain the universe.  In Greece, philosophical discourse was born out of de-mythologizing the universe. We have deviated from that. Of course this was inevitable, and indeed necessary for the evolution of humanity. But if the existentialist movement has taught us nothing about universal truth, it has taught us to be true to our own nature. And that tendency to unify experience, to unify our lives within the greater universe itself seems (at least to me) to be a part of human nature. (And if Kant has taught us anything about metaphysical truth, it's that even if it's impossible to discern, our minds still desire to brazenly declare that we know it, just based on our own tendency to universalize everything - we jump from experience to metaphysics because that is what we think we should do).

Many people still believe that the mind and body are separate, or that one has more power than the other. Philosophers and theologians and medical doctors all want to have claim over one speciality or another. Theologians claim the soul/mind, doctors claim the body, psychiatrists claim the mind, and neuroscientists claim the brain. My point is that if they each claim difference, humanity will never move forward. Further relating humans to the rest of the universe will be even more difficult, but I think is something that academicians should be working on together, and be accepting new theories, new writings, without worrying about merely commenting and dissecting earlier philosophical writings.

[I'd like to forgo proper grammar and put the following in brackets: My desire for academic philosophy to change its standard operating procedure is not to be confused with academic scientific research's tradition of utilizing established scientific theories for reference. Although I of course think that many breakthroughs in science happen because some dare to break tradition, I understand that in a field such as physics, it would be flat out stupid to just discount the last hundred years of discoveries and just start making crap up.]

All of that said and considered, I understand why philosophers find the need to explicate old thought for new generations and I don't have a problem with that, necessarily. I just think that there is a lack of creativity in academic philosophy programs and that is precisely why some of these programs are being cut from universities - because there are deemed wholly impractical or useless. (While I of course disagree with these conclusions, I still think creativity is desperately needed to save the programs and the art of philosophizing altogether). 

The Future of Useless Passions

I am back! (I was only here for one post! But still!) It's been so long since I blogged or did much of the internet at all, that it kind of feels weird, but I've made a decision to actually post on at least a monthly basis. There's a bunch of crap swirling around in my cranium, so I might as well get it out there for people to pick over, munch on, and eventually crap on. Here goes...


I have been out of grad school (MA in philosophy) for about a year now. Oh, uh, I quit, just to clarify. I don't have an MAPhil. I've been thinking a lot, and I realized I'm kind of bitter about academia... So, what better way than to look back at something I'd written a few months ago? (This writing will appear in the next post).

Long story short: Despite my bitterness at my academic training being for nought at this point in my life (it really did teach me a lot, I'm just being hyperbolic), I am indeed concerned for the future of academic studies in fields other than Math and the Sciences. I worry because fields such as philosophy don't really appear "useful." I have a bachelor's in history, and many people feel that that, too, isn't very useful. It's true, it hasn't really made potential employers throw jobs at me, but the research and analytical skills I cultivated are really valuable. (I try to explain this on job applications, but no one seems to care lollol!)

Long story:
Anyway, I fear that as a civilization, we're kind of forgetting where we come from as we explore new territory in technology and the way we attach ourselves so adamantly to such technology. (It's kind of ridiculous how addicted I am to playing dumb games on my tablet.) Aside from things like iPads, however, lies the real and omnipresent digitalization of our lives in ways that I think we forget about. We forget about them because the technology, and the demand for the maintenance of it has become so deeply entangled in the way that we do everything. (I mean, for a good example, I'm writing on a blog that no one reads on the internet instead of writing an editorial in the newspaper... Not that people still don't do that, but they all tend to be much older than I). The touch screen technology that rules our lives right now won't save us from ourselves, is what I'm saying.

I think about the digitalization of archives and historical records, especially personal accounts such as diaries all the time.  A former politics professor of mine back in 2009 actually raised this point as he was researching for a biography he was writing on a cardinal. I believe he said something to the effect of, "How are you going to do your historical research if the person you're researching hasn't physically written anything down?" And it's so true. On the one hand, it simply means that we will develop new research guidelines and techniques utilizing the internet. (Even though the verity of the documentation is going to be much more difficult to determine based on the changeable nature of the internet, etc.) On the other hand, though, I ask myself the question: "What happens if the internet goes kaput?" Seriously!

What do we do then? How do we know things? In more than many ways, the internet is an amazing and wondrous tool. However, what happens when something really bad happens and things go horribly wrong and we don't have it anymore? Can that ever happen? I'm not sure, but I think the recent trends in education that rely so heavily on the internet are slightly dangerous. I'm also worried, because, as I mentioned above, fields that teach critical thinking and analysis (such as philosophy, history, and literature), are getting less funding and are shoved to the back burner for more important things - such as computer science, for example. I was told in a grad school seminar that getting a job after our graduation was going to be incredibly difficult because more and more schools were actually shutting down entire philosophy departments. We're not talking like, you can't major in it anymore. I'm saying, they're closing the departments. No more philosophy classes at all. Poor Socrates.

I seriously hope no one reading this thinks that I'm not a proponent of mathematics and science research. Because I heart NASA so much.

Anyway, in all seriousness, I do hope that love of education for education's sake does not go down the tube. And I don't mean the YouTube.

On that note, my next post will deal more along the lines of why I am bitter towards academic philosophy and how it's kind of ruining the spirit of inquiry and understanding...

TTFN

Females in Fantasy or Fantasized Females?

[Some rambling thoughts on the lack of relatable female characters in epic fantasies…]

At times it feels quite odd to be a female and a fan of fantasy and science-fiction. I could (and may possibly in another post) probably analyze this “situation,” in much more detail, but there is one thing in particular that has bothered me, as I’ve grown older and explored more of these genres; that thing is the dearth of relatable and likable female characters in many fantasy stories.

Now, because it’s been a while since I’ve really sat down and explored all the genre has to offer, I’ve decided to look at two staples to make my case (whatever that is exactly, I’ll find out when I’m finished writing this out): Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, and Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire.  I’d like my caveat, or rather, pre-critical statement to be that, I do, in fact love both of these sagas. By love, I mean… compulsively plowed through Rings because I cared so much about what happened to Frodo and Sam, and could not put down Ice and Fire (admittedly quite possibly just to make sure that Martin didn’t kill off Jon Snow… oh and the fact that after reading the final scene of A Game of Thrones I squee’d at the sheer brilliance of it… and oh, still think that the character POV endings in A Storm of Swords are quite possibly the best sets of dénouement ever written…).

Now that that’s out of the way, I’d like to try to explicate a few insights I’ve had, that I’m sure a lot of other women (and maybe men?) may have already thought about as well.  I’d like to start with a shorter analysis of The Lord of the Rings because of its age. (Perhaps another caveat is needed here: I’m a fan of hermeneutics. I’m not really sure I agree with Heidegger’s so-called ontological turn, and I do believe that although some human archetypes may persist throughout history, we must analyze written works within their historical context. I’m not sure this means works can’t have perennial meanings, but I do believe we can look at them and make some good-old-fashioned common sense observations regarding thematic structures. We can also look at the setting in which the work was written and make some more common sense observations about the author’s motivations and intentions.) What I wish to convey here is that many people like to hold up LOTR as a perennial classic of fantasy fiction – and yeah, he kinda paved the way for fantasy to become a part of contemporary popular culture ­­– but, and this is a big but, his style of writing and his choice of characters is basically archaic at this point. Don’t get me wrong, this is part of the appeal of the story for me personally, and it’s not like it doesn’t have an insanely large following, but it’s not contemporary fantasy as we know it. It’s not full of graphic sexual encounters – mainly because of the fact that there are so few female characters ­– though at times the violence can be quite graphic (I mean come on, the heads of the Gondorian soldiers being sent over the walls of Minas Tirith? Ew), but it’s no Battle of the Blackwater, and even the dialogue is not what we’re used to – it’s a vestige of a type of storytelling long abandoned.

So anyway, the reason I’m rambling on about the age of Tolkien’s story, and the gaping differences between his style of writing fantasy, and say, Martin’s style, is because I’m trying to provide a groundwork where we can think about why there are so few female characters in the story, and why they seem to be formed from religious and basically medieval stereotypes. So here are the facts that are pretty common knowledge: Tolkien wrote LOTR because he wanted to tell a story that followed a mythical heritage he had created with his friends for England. He was a scholar in Anglo-Saxon culture and language and loved epic poetry. Ergo, The Lord of the Rings. (I know, I’m cringing already at that oversimplification and lack of verification of those “facts,” sorry). What I’d like to actually say in my own voice, is that I think if we continually look at Tolkien’s female characters in the following way, we do something very dangerous: It’s great that Tolkien has such strong and important female characters such as Galadriel and Eowyn. Galadriel resists the temptation to take the ring for herself and Eowyn kills the Witch King for crying out loud! How awesome is that! Galadriel has amazing powers and is almost like a goddess. She’s so beautiful and full of virtue. Blah, blah blah. (I actually had an English major in college say something along those lines to me).

Basically what I want to say here is: I enjoy LOTR because it literally makes me believe that Middle Earth existed, that I’m listening to Tom Bombadil talk about time immemorial to the Hobbits during their stay in the Old Forest, and that friendships like Frodo and Sam’s do exist. I don’t enjoy LOTR because there are literally no relatable female characters that I can identify with and actually want to survive whatever this strange and wonderful world has to throw at them. They don’t exist, period. The only female character I even have reason to “root for” is Eowyn because she’s a human and she wants to be a part of something – “The Battle of the Pelennor Fields” to be precise. The problem is that she kind of does this thing out of desperation. (My copy is the 50^th Anniversary One-Volume Edition, so look for this stuff on pp 841-843 if you’re following along). She disguises herself as a man, and when the evil Witch King of Angmar shows up and his fell beast kills her uncle’s horse (Snowmane, we barely knew thee), she reveals herself to be “no living man,” but “a woman”! So Tolkien has this clever thing in his appendices where he actually says that there was some prophecy that no man could kill this Lord of the Nazgul guy. “What’s the problem?” you may ask. Men and women are the same species, dude, so this whole prophecy thing saying “man” which sounds a lot like we should read as “human,” is ridiculous because men and women are both human. How could a woman kill this guy and not a man? C’mon.

And herein we can see the main problem that really lies at the heart of the Tolkien’s writing (and his generation, for that matter):  there’s a tendency to make women this Other, this mysterious sex who can be both goddess, good, benevolent, and powerful, and fickle, tending toward evil, (OR, in the case of Eowyn, a silly girl who’s in love with Aragorn, not because she knows him, but because “she loves only a shadow and a thought: a hope of glory and great deeds, and lands far from the fields of Rohan.” Aragorn says this to Eomer, her brother, on p 867 in my edition). The other females in the story are all Elves. Galadriel is a powerful female character, but she’s not a human and certainly not really relatable at all to the average gal like me reading these stories.  Not to say that there are a lot of dudes out there able to relate easily to Aragorn, Theoden, Eomer, Frodo, Sam, or Boromir the way that Tolkien writes them, with their dialogue sounding like it comes out of some Homeric verse; however, there are character traits that I think a lot of people can relate to. And the dude characters get all the action!

I mean, God bless Peter Jackson et al. for giving Arwen a bigger part in the films, and having her rescue Frodo at the Fords of the Bruinen, but seriously, she’s still just an annoying love-interest distraction from all the awesome orc-action. Why couldn’t there be a woman part of the Company in the books, period? The answer is that historical context I mentioned earlier. Tolkien wasn’t coming from a post-1960s American perspective. He was writing what really amounts to a small story in the history of a made-up world. He was versed not only in Anglo-Saxon but obviously all the literary traditions of the Western world, and let’s face it, that tradition is pretty dude-centric. So, there’s no one of my sex I can relate to in LOTR, but oh well. I guess I can forgive him. The man is dead after all. And his story allows us to re-visit the age of epic poetry and myth that continues to fascinate us, so I guess he’s excused.

You know who’s not excused? George R.R. Martin. GRRM, you are NOT excused. We have a plethora of female characters in ASoIaF. And they’re all pretty freaking crazy. Let’s look at some of them, shall we? (SPOILERS)

Catelyn Tully-Stark: When I first read the first three novels in ASoIaF series, I was approximately 17 years old. I hated Catelyn when I first read those books. I hated her because of her treatment of Tyrion. Then, after I became a mom myself, I re-read the books about twice over. I still hate book Catelyn. SPOILER ALERT for those who haven’t read the books yet and/or do not wish to read them and are just watching Game of Thrones on HBO. I hate book Catelyn because I can’t relate to her, even after becoming a mom. She basically lets her 7 and 3 yr-old kids alone in a castle while she goes to talk to her husband halfway across the realm, and then doesn’t go back to them even after her husband’s dead because her dad is dying. Seriously, dude. As a mom, I’d be allllll about making sure my kid who was in a coma when I left him was OK, and making sure my 3 year-old was, you know, surviving without his mother! The only time I actually felt pity for her was during the Red Wedding. That was it. Oh yeah, and she’s super nasty to Jon Snow for no other reason than she’s pissed she thinks Ned cheated on her. Not that poor kid’s problem, bitch.

Sansa Stark: So fucking whiney in the first book that I can barely read through it without rolling my eyes. I can kind of understand her, and actually feel more affinity for her character by the end of the 3^rd book and her short treatment in the 4^th book because she realizes how vulnerable she is as a young woman in the hands of a man like Littlefinger.

Arya Stark: One of my favorite characters, but she’s pretty crazy. She’s supposed to be about 9. (Sansa’s supposed to be about 11 BTW). So again, nothing really relatable there? I may remember what it was like to be 9, but not what it was like to be 9 in the SoIaF universe? She also beats some kid until he shits his pants at one point, and then wants to be an assassin and kill people for a living.

Daenerys Targaryen: One of my favorite characters until the 5^th book, when Martin just made her start acting completely different than she had been acting in the previous 3 books (she wasn’t in the 4^th book). So Dany is supposed to be 14 I think (I could be wrong, but it’s somewhere around there) when the epic opens. She, also, has kind of a crazy streak: she likes to set things on fire with her dragons (which is awesome). She also has some interesting and strange ideas about love and sex.

Cersei Lannister: Crazy fucking bitch. Much less nuanced in the books than in the TV series. She’s power-hungry, vindictive, and generally rash in her decisions. She even gets disgusted by her youngest son because he’s not violent and crazy enough. The only thing that can possibly redeem Cersei in any reader’s eyes is the fact that she has been used by her father, and her late husband, and politics in general, and you kind of feel bad for her and understand her desire to rule. But she’s totally nuts and has sex with her twin brother.

Brienne of Tarth: She’s a fantastic fighter, but she’s got really stubborn ideas about loyalty to the point of absurdity. Oh yeah, and she’s super ugly. Thanks, GRRM. Apparently to be a great fighter, a woman has to look like a disgusting man.

So, there’s a (super) brief and oversimplified overview of the female POV characters in Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire. It’s pretty bad, but there it is. (If anyone other than me reads this, I expect criticism).  I’ve actually read (and no, I have no citations for this, sorry) that some people are touting Martin’s series as feminist because it has a lot of strong female characters; however, I believe they were referring to these characters’ depictions in the HBO adaptation Game of Thrones. Not only are the characters slightly different on TV, but this statement is kind of absurd in any case. Why? You ask. Here’s why, in a really brief set of statements:

Martin’s universe gives women crappy status across the board, and the way he has the female characters respond to this gives away his bias as a male writer. The adult women – Catelyn, Cersei, and Brienne – all act in ways that are totally foreign to me. Catelyn has no compassion for Jon Snow. Usually, the trait of treating one’s non-biological children like crap is a male one. (Yes, fling the nasty comments my way! I’m begging for them at this point, with that statement). She prefers the company of her dying and dementia-ridden father to the company (and safety!) of her small children, the one of whom was practically dead and permanently disabled the last time she left him. And she does everything she does on impulse. Cersei seems to do the same – and so does Dany to a degree. So basically, GRRM, you’re trying to tell us that women may be strong in some ways, but are capable of making really stupid decisions much more so than cold, rational, calculating men. Brienne is infatuated with Renly Baratheon and is constantly obsessed with how inadequate she is. Wow, I guess women can relate to that, but it’s not exactly the best kind of relating? Sansa is a child in the beginning, and she’s obsessed with everything being perfect and pretty and fairy-tale-like (irritating!), and Arya is a tomboy who’s really great at acting rashly and getting people killed. Dany loves her dead husband to the point of weirdness, and she can’t make up her mind what to do about this whole gathering an army and trying to take over Westeros thing. Gods, she’s so indecisive!  Cersei… must I really even go there? She’s so narcissistic she loves having sex with her twin brother. Come on. Everyone can relate to that. *Head desk*

I guess what I’m getting at here is that I’m not sure where the feminism comes in during these books. All that said, I think GRRM does a great job at showing the grey areas of human behavior and existence. No one is all good, nor are they all bad. The way he writes makes the universe very realistic. It’s fantastic. But, let’s face it, readers: who are you rooting for when you read these POV chapters? Are they women? If they are, why are you rooting for them? I personally feel that GRRM kind of takes his own ideas of what women are like (or should be, or should think – especially about loyalty and sex) and just writes it down shamelessly. I love Arya’s story, and I love Dany’s, but the characters themselves outside of the story are not particularly likeable. …Just something to think on.

In the meantime, I’ll be working on writing about a sci-fi universe that actually has likeable, strong, female characters. And it’s written by a woman. So maybe the problem is that men can’t write about women in fantasy/sci-fi settings realistically enough for the characters to be likeable and relatable to female readers.

Hmmm….