rewrite project, a short life of Gene Wolfe, and depolarization (Across the Sundering Seas, #14)
Hello, readers!
Today, a missive in three very distinct parts.
I. rewrite: a project announcement
First up: as a few of you know after emailing me back last week, I did manage to get the newsletter for my new project online. Still having hosting/DNS issues so there’s no website yet. That’s okay; I’m currently going for the slowest/quietest of all possible “marketing” launches… since I expect it will be 2–3 years before this project actually goes anywhere.
The short version: it’s a research writing environment—because while there are a lot of pretty good writing apps out there, the story for research writing specifically is not great. To put it mildly. My absurdly ambitious goal is to build an app that is actually good at all the things research writing entails:
- finding resources, tracking references to them, and citing them correctly
- taking, and making good use of, notes—including quotes from those references
- writing large, complex, highly structured documents
- publishing in a very specific format for everything from typeface to page margins to citation styles
I detailed it a bit more, including some history, in the first issue of the official rewrite (working name) newsletter. And that’s the last you’ll hear on that subject in this space other than major milestones like launching a public beta of the app. You know, in two years or so.
II. Gene Wolfe
I’ve somehow never gotten around to reading anything by Gene Wolfe, despite having loved science fiction and fantasy for decades. His work has been on my list for a long time… but I’ve just never gotten around to it. Reading this brilliant account of his life—written in response to his death in mid-April—pushed the priority up a bit for me, though. This mix sounds right up my alley:
The tetralogy is one of the great, weird triumphs of American imaginative literature, a story that fuses science fiction with pulp fantasy, then fuses both with modernist narrative technique, Catholic theology, and Proustian meditativeness.
This is both a beautifully-written paragraph and the kind of thing that seems designed to hook me specifically.
For decades people will say it’s strange that a book this visionary and bizarre was written by someone with Gene’s background. But what does that mean, since The Book of the New Sun is a work virtually without precedent? If Henri Bergson and St. Augustine had collaboratively edited a 1930s issue of Weird Tales, this is the text they might have produced. It’s strange that it was written by anyone. That it was written by the guy who figured out how to cook Pringles is no more startling than any other possibility.
This whole little biography is written in the present-tense—“One year he crashes his bike and tears up his left leg so badly it hurts him for the rest of his life. He’s never liked sports. Now he likes them less. He learns, the way children learn these things, what kind of child he is: He is strange, brilliant, and lonely. Often this makes him unhappy.”—gives it a certain wonderful kind of punch. If every essay were written like this, it would be terrible. As a one-off, something written this way to give a bit of quirk to a biography that, it seems, deserves just that… I like it.
(I’d say much the same about the 2nd-person present tense narration of N. K. Jemisin’s rightly-lauded Broken Earth trilogy, which pays off that odd-seeming choice in a beautiful way in the end. Potential reader take note, though: the first book had a great deal more sex, and more explicit sex, than I am comfortable with in my books. Your mileage may vary.)
All of that to say—even if you’re not into sci-fi, or already have well-formed opinions on Wolfe, I commend to you Gene Wolfe Turned Science Fiction Into High Art as a lovely little piece of literature all its own.
III. Depolarizing people?
From a couple years ago—I wish my archive were older and deeper than this, that it goes back only three years is quite sad… but it’s delightful to be able to pull them out for my own part. The Seven Habits of Highly Depolarizing People is one of those I’m glad to have rediscovered, and its advice is good. It’s not magic; it’s mostly hard work; and… that’s encouraging, in its own way.
We Americans didn’t necessarily think our way into political polarization, but we’ll likely have to think our way out. A number of big structural and social trends—including the end of the Cold War, the rising importance of cultural issues in our politics, growing secularization, greater racial and ethnic diversity, the shift from the Greatest Generation to Baby Boomers as the nation’s dominant elites, the break-up of the old media system, the increasing ideological coherence of both of our two main political parties, among others [I would add social media to the list, as a major factor. –ed.]—appear to have helped produce our current predicament.
Yet over time, the intellectual habits encouraged by these underlying shifts developed a life and autonomy of their own. They became “baked in,” ultimately forming a new popular wisdom regarding how we judge what is true and decide what is right in public life. The intellectual habits of polarization include binary (Manichaean) thinking, absolutizing one’s preferred values, viewing uncertainty as a weakness, privileging deductive thinking, assuming that one’s opponents are motivated by bad faith, and hesitating to agree on basic facts and the meaning of evidence.
What are the antidotes to these familiar habits? We can recognize the mindset of the polarizer, but how does the depolarizer understand conflict and try to make sense of the world? Here is an attempt to answer these questions, by way of proposing the seven habits of highly depolarizing people.
There is nothing earth-shattering about the habits… but again, that’s encouraging. I’ve tried to practice these basic ways of discourse for a long time, and they never seem to be in style, but I will keep it up anyway. I encourage you to do the same!