Professors as Writers (1990)

Robert Boice, Professors as Writers. A Self-Help Guide to Productive Writing, Stillwater: New Forums Press, 1990.
My rating: *****

Professors As Writers by Robert Boice

I have read quite a few books on writer’s block and Robert Boice’s work on this subject is by far the most helpful and practical. Even if this particular book is aimed specifically at academic writers, all other writers can benefit from its advice. Having said this, the problem of academic writer’s block is seldom addressed – with most manuals focusing on other types of writing.

In some ways, perhaps, academics are viewed as somewhat on the periphery of the general fold of ‘writers’. Academic writing is something that occurs without the romantic identity of ‘writer’ coming into play. There is an assumption, perhaps, that academic writing is merely reporting on research, rather than engaging in the creative craft shared by other writers.

There are rigorous and practical exercises in Boice’s book which include examining and changing the internal self talk that takes place when the writer thinks of writing. His plain, organised and painstaking academic approach is, for me at least, more helpful than some of the other new age and often slightly kitsch self help manuals available on the market.

Also of interest is the following: Boice set up a study involving 3 groups of academic writers:

1. The first group continued on with their usual habits – which were binge writing in occasional large blocks. This group produced an average of 17 pages a year;

2. The second group wrote every day and kept a personal record of their activity. They wrote an average of 64 pages a year;

3. The third group undertook daily writing AND shared their productivity records with others. This group produced an impressive 157 pages of writing a year.

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The Singing Detective (2007)

Glen Creeber, The Singing Detective, London: BFI TV Classics, 2007.
My rating: ***

The Singing Detective by Glen Creeber

Television doesn’t always age well, but Dennis Potter’s The Singing Detective more than twenty years later is still just as riveting and confronting. I saw the series when it originally aired in 1986 and was completely fascinated, even if I didn’t entirely understand it. Watching it at this remove, I have a better insight into what’s going on and the fascination remains.

It reminds me – as it did when I last saw it – of one of my favourite films, Alain Resnais’s 1977 film Providence. In this film, as in The Singing Detective, a seriously ill writer (played by John Gielgud) imagines a novel to keep himself sane and to distract himself from the pain. As in the later series, The Singing Detective, the narrative is fractured and layered and often interlaced with surrealist elements. The story is also continually interrupted by and affected by the real life plight of the author. Music is likewise centrally important.

The author of this BFI TV Classic book on The Singing Detective, Glen Creeber, notes that Resnais became a huge fan of Dennis Potter’s work and dedicated a film to him after his death: On connaît la chanson. There are many similarities between Renais’ approach and Potter’s, but the former has a lighter touch: a subtle humour and amusement pervades much of his work.

Creeber provides an interesting account of the series and makes the essential point that a television series is always a collaborative effort and it was not only Potter who made the series what it was. The director, Jon Amiel, who had a background as a script editor, insisted that Potter’s first draft of the series needed considerable changes. The actors – in particular Michael Gambon and Patrick Malahide were also crucial to the success of the series as was the incidental music in addition to the songs chosen by Potter.

Another interesting observation is Creeber’s report that Potter summarised the series as the invitation by Christ to the sick man in the gospels to ‘Pick up his bed and walk’.

Creeber’s treatment of The Singing Detective gives it a more recognisably ‘film studies’ treatment than do the authors of the BFI TV classics books on Doctor Who and Star Trek, making the book more skewed towards a purely academic audience. But arguably this is the type of audience The Singing Detective attracts in any case. One minor quibble I did have with his approach however is his reliance on Freudian and psychoanalytic approaches – but this might be just prejudice on my part as one could argue that the source material readily lends itself to this kind of treatment.

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Star Trek (2008)

Ina Rae Hark, Star Trek. London: BFI publishing, 2008.

My rating: ***

Star Trek by Ina Rae Hark

The author of this book, Ina Rae Hark is a long-standing fan of the series, dating back to the original 1960s series. She is currently professor of English and Film Studies at the University of South Carolina. In preparation for writing this short but detailed overview of a huge franchise, the author (re)watched a massive 700 episodes of all the Trek series.

She makes no bones about the fact that her two preferred series are the original and Deep Space 9. She also demytholigises Gene Roddenberry’s role in the series. It appears he was a womanising sex addict who stole other people’s work and was impossible to work with. Other sources indicate that he would change the canon of the series at a whim, at one stage saying that the original series was no longer canon and that Star Trek: The Next Generation was henceforth to be regarded as the true canon cancelling out earlier efforts.

Hark mounts some interesting arguments about some of the fears explored by each series. The original series she says, explored the contrast between embodied emotion and non-embodied intellect, coming squarely down on the side of the former. STNG demonstrated a fear of consciousness being invaded or taken over by another. Deep Space 9 expressed an anxiety about identity and its invasion, takeover or anihilation and the co-existence of multiple identities in one body or even bodies with no fixed identity like the shape changer Odo. Voyager played with themes of death and the afterlife in various guises. Enterprise exhibited fears of being held hostage or prisoner against one’s will. Hark argues that this latter fear may be as much the result of a post 9/11 American paranoia as the result of the writers and others involved in trying to perpetuate the Star Trek franchise under increasing pressure from changes in production companies and ratings requirements. (pp. 147-8).

I will take the opportunity to state my own preferences here. My preferred series is Star Trek: The Next Generation. Its critics lambast it for its too perfect characters, corporate overachievers, who avoid family entanglements and interpersonal conflict. Further, they inhabit a space ship which is always spotlessly clean and always luxurious – like the hotels preferred by the CEOs of 1990s corporations. As for myself, I found the overachieving calm orderliness soothing after a hard day at work. I also enjoyed the intellectual problem solving often presented in the episodes.

If there is one criticism I do agree with in relation to this series it is the use of the ‘reset button’ at the end of each episode. There is rarely any reference to previous episodes and nothing ever changes with a static status quo reigning from one episode to the next. This is obviously an artefact of the need to play the episodes out of order when the series went into American syndication, but it is very tedious for the long-term viewer and was already increasingly out of place in a world where fans could either cheaply tape the series or buy it on video. Incidentally, Hark seems to imply that the term ‘reset button’ was coined in response to Voyager (p. 130), but the context in which I personally first heard it was in relation to STNG. And it is obviously used extensively beyond Star Trek. It was Joss Whedon’s series Buffy: The Vampire Slayer which finally had the courage to adapt to changes in video recording technology and serialise mainstream genre television.

But even STNG is still not sufficient to tempt me to want to own the DVDs. I find I have generally exhausted my interest after one or two viewings of episodes. For all the elegance of the series and its interesting philosophical discussions, the characters are simply too bland and develop too slowly if at all. But I am less keen on the other series. The original I find unwatchably cheesy, and in spite of the mythology surrounding it, I find it too reflective of the imperialist, sexist and racist tropes of its time. The melodramatic acting also becomes tiresome.

As much as I would like to enjoy Deep Space 9, particularly after reading Hark’s account, I always stall in my viewing due to my general lack of interest in political intrigue involving struggles for territory and over the governmental or sovereign rule of populations. When these intrigues involve imaginary alien species my interest is even further diminished. This was also a stumbling block for me (apart from the endless tracts of pompous monologue) in relation to Deep Space 9’s rival space station series Babylon 5.

Voyager is depressing viewing as the lost spaceship becomes more and more isolated in its desperate adherence to Starfleet values at any cost, values which seem out of kilter with its surroundings and ultimately with the natural development of its crew members. Perhaps this feeling is generated by, as Hark interestingly explains, the lack of fit between the Star Trek status quo and the 1990s. She notes ‘The repeated rehearsals of disaster [with reset button at the end of the episodes in question] show a writing staff yearning to explore the grittier and edgier territory of 90s’ science fiction television. The repeated resets show the timidity about altering the status quo that was making the franchise increasingly irrelevant as it entered the twenty-first century.’ (p. 134)

The final series, Enterprise, is a ‘prequel’ to the other series and is notoriously the lowest rating of all the franchise. One of the problems, as Hark observes, was that the writers wanted to return to 1960s basics. She reports commercials for the show ran the line: ‘Experience a future when the Klingons were still bad guys, the women were green and the Captain got all the action’. After the cultural and gender diversity of the later series and their sometimes complex philosophical and ethical argumentation, this was not what the new millennium audience wanted to see. An even bigger mistake, Hark suggests, was turning the Vulcans into devious, manipulative racists (p. 145). Incidentally, this view of the Vulcans seems to have been taken up to some extent in J.J. Abrams 2009 ‘reboot’ film and is perhaps one of my major quibbles (amongst many) with this particular film.

I personally found the first two seasons of Enterprise really interesting, with a strong and charismatic female character in T’Pol performed wonderfully by Jolene Blalock. There were interesting problems on show with translation of the language of other species and procedures for protection against pathogens. The humans were also portrayed as just one species out there exploring the universe, rather than the reigning human (read North American) superiority of earlier series. Unfortunately, all this was undone in Season 3, as the effects of the real life Gulf War kicked in: Captain Jonathan Archer’s character is abruptly changed in response to a terrorist attack on the earth and embarks on a rampaging and morally dubious quest to find and punish the culprits. T’Pol is rewritten as a female victim – making her the subject of an AIDS like illness and of drug addiction and also unexpectedly pairing her up with the Captain’s first mate and then making sure the relationship could never go anywhere. Interestingly, as a long time Trek fan herself, Jolene Blalock voiced her dismay in an interview in The New York Times at some of the un-Trek like aspects of the new series (p. 140).

As a non-American viewer of Enterprise, I found the return to a certain chauvinistic American-ness and maleness rendered the series hard to watch. I have always felt more than a little ambivalent about the military and often imperialist framework of the entire franchise and its often unconscious assumptions of human (read American) colonial superiority in the Trek universe. As the chorus of The Firm’s song ‘Star Trekkin” runs: ‘We come in peace. Shoot to kill. Shoot to kill.’

Enterprise had one of the most criticised endings of all the Trek series with the gratuitous killing off of one of the main characters, a drastic change of moral direction and status for another and the smug framing of the entire story on a future holodeck by two characters from the earlier STNG series. In fact, the series had two effective endings – the second last episode being written by Manny Coto who had been brought in in the last season to save the series – an episode which at least left the possibilities open – and the last by the two original creators which they claimed, rather inexplicably, to be a ‘valentine’ to the fans. One suspects that political struggles were raging behind the scenes.

Much has been made of the ‘optimism’ and ‘utopianism’ of Star Trek, but in my view Voyager and Enterprise are almost unwatchably bleak in their entirety, with endless moral compromises made by the characters while at the same time assuming moral superiority over everybody else, reset buttons in abundance, and dreary militarism all round.

To return to Hark’s book, however: Hark advances a number of interesting ideas and details about Star Trek which fans will no doubt be interested in discussing and picking apart and impressively manages to cram a detailed overview of the entire series into a short space.

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Doctor Who (2005)

Kim Newman, Doctor Who. London: BFI publishing, 2005.

My rating: ***

Doctor Who by Kim Newman

Kim Newman is a well-known and prolific author of genre novels, overviews on cult and horror film and TV and a reviewer for the film magazine Empire.

This book, an entry in the excellent BFI TV classics series, is an enjoyable if sometimes hastily written, short handbook. It manages to provide a nicely opinionated overview of ‘classic’ Doctor Who with a few references to the new post 2005 series with Christopher Eccleston and David Tennant.

There’s no strong argument unifying the book but there are a number of thought provoking tidbits, a few of which I will dip into below.

It is good to see Newman confirm my own long held prejudice that from ’1963 to K9, Doctor Who was important and from 1977 to 1989 it wasn’t.’ (p. 7) Like Newman, I stopped watching not long after the introduction of K9, the metal robot dog, which Tom Baker would kick in frustration behind the scenes. I didn’t mind K9 so much as Baker’s increasing tendency to treat proceedings as all a bit of a joke. I was more interested in the serious science fiction offerings of the Troughton and Jon Pertwee eras. After around 1977, as Newman says, the series degenerated into failed comedy, pantomime and self-referential fan-fiction.

Newman also provides a number of other insightful observations. For example, in relation to the fixed (and ghastly) costumes of the later Doctor Who. These costumes he describes as a ‘comic-book invention … unsustainable in live-action where audiences wonder if the hero is wearing the same, never cleaned, never-worn-out clothes for years on end’ (p. 97) The earlier Doctors if they had a certain style (ie Jon Pertwee’s Carnaby St Edwardian style) they still had different sets of clothes to their wardrobe.

I also enjoyed Newman’s remark in relation to Who merchandising that it became difficult to be scared of monsters like the daleks that had been turned into soft toys. (Speaking of soft toys, there is an excellent blog at Live Journal titled Who_knits: Time and Double Pointed Needles in Space which details a variety of Dr. Who knitting projects. And this is by no means the only Dr. Who knitting site on the net.)

Newman also notes with a surprising ambivalence for someone who has been involved in cult genre and fandom for so long, ‘in the 1960s, fictional events were not obsessively covered by the national press. Now no popular television drama can surprise audiences by writing out a character through murder, marriage or act of God (or have them outed as gay or a serial killer) without a leak making the front page of the tabloids’ (p. 40) He is discussing here the lack of fanfare that heralded the regeneration of William Hartnell into Patrick Troughton.

It would have been interesting to see some further elaboration on why these changes have occurred. My own view is that this shift marks a welcome move away from the hide-bound stranglehold of the scientific and Hegelian world view where only the rational and the empirically visible had any value, returning to a much earlier view that there is more to existence than what we can see immediately before our eyes. This earlier view is described by French historian Jacques Le Goff in his book The Medieval Imagination. It is a view which didn’t draw a rigid division between the fictional and the non-fictional.

Another observation I thoroughly approved of was Newman’s comment about the propensity of American series not to understand that ‘viewers who enjoyed the adventures, didn’t want to listen to whining characters who only wanted to get home and lead boring lives’ (p. 20). The Wizard of Oz has long been an exemplary fan disappointment on this front – as was its ending – ‘it was all just a dream’, a generic resolution universally loathed by fan viewers whenever it appears in a series or film.

Unfortunately, Doctor Who was not entirely exempt from this irritating hankering after home theme. One of the later companions, Tegan, was particularly tedious in this respect. This is something that Russell T. Davies (a hater of The Wizard of Oz ending) has deliberately gone out of his way to counter in the new series of Doctor Who – even if I do find these new outings problematic on a large number of other fronts. The Outland Institute blog very aptly describes the new series as ‘Neighbours in Space’.

Also of interest in this book, is Newman’s broad knowledge of other cult and genre television which he is able to reference in his discussions which goes a long way to contextualising Doctor Who in the context of other contemporaneous cult TV and film.

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Foucault and television

Posted on my site michel-foucault.com

What bothers me is the quality of French television. It’s true! It is one of the best in the world unfortunately!…
What bothers and irritates me horribly in France, is that you are obliged to look at the program in advance to know what you can’t miss, and you have to arrange your evening as a result.
And then there is Le Pain Noir on Mondays. Result: every Monday is booked up … It is this which is the strength of television. People end up living according to its schedules. The news has been delayed by a quarter of an hour: well, you know that restaurants will see their diners arrive a quarter of an hour later.’

Michel Foucault, (1994) [1975] ‘A quoi rêvent les philosophes?’. In Dits et Ecrits vol. II. Paris: Gallimard, p. 705. This passage translated by Clare O’Farrell

Foucault talks about having to program one’s life in terms of the television schedule. Of course he was saying this in the days when there were no cheap ways of recording television and there were only three television channels in France – all government run. Foucault also talks entertainingly about a trip to America where he was able to sample the vast range of ten channels on offer, all showing rubbish (‘it was somewhat degrading using your brain to watch that’) – but with the advantage nonetheless that he could pleasantly surf from channel to channel.

Foucault waxes lyrical in the best fan traditions about Le Pain noir – a lavish high quality historical miniseries with a cast of thousands, based on a multi-volume saga by Georges-Emmanuel Clancier. This series traces the life and times of a female rural peasant who is forced to become an urban worker. Her life plays out against the backdrop of a number of major historical events in France from 1880 to 1936.

In 2009, however, the musician and artist Brian Eno claimed, indeed militantly declared, that television was dead because its rigid programming had been superseded by the current possibilities for on demand delivery of content. In my view, however, the fixed schedule of television is precisely its advantage. It connects people through a shared sociability of common and simultaneous viewership. It also exposes the viewer to things they might never otherwise have come across locked within the confines of their own choices and opens their eyes onto a wider world. There is still a role for television as it currently stands in terms of these social functions.

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Foucault and lolspeak

Lolspeak is the ‘pigeon’ language that is used to caption cats on the I can has cheezburger site. Lolcats, as I have mentioned earlier in this blog, have become an internet meme.

I suppose it’s inevitable that people have started making Foucault lolcats – given the popularity of both the cats and Foucault. I feel somewhat ambivalent about these as Foucault tended to be somewhat more articulate than the average cat.

You can see them here

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