User:Anville
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On Creativity
- DRUMMOND: Ever been in love, Hornbeck?
- HORNBECK: Only with the sound of my own words, thank God.
I'm very tired of wiki editing, wiki politics and the pettiness which festers in the wiki mindset—of the bush wars which erupt over inconsequential articles while entire regions of human inquiry fust undocumented. I think it's about time I hung up my hat and went off to write something which will make me happy, or at least bring me fame and fortune. Because my heart is a shriveled cinder, however, I thought it best to provide a parting gift. I wanted to make it something which would really infuriate as many people as I could—when I act small, I do it on the grand scale—while being as careful and scholarly as I could possibly manage.
There are more footnotes on heaven and earth than are dreamt of in Wikipedia philosophy.
So, I took a couple days when I probably wouldn't do anything else anyway, and I put together a little essay entitled "Influence and Criticims of Atlas Shrugged". Yes, the canonical Big Thick Book for the first subculture to be seen as over-representing itself on this encyclopedia. Given that nothing I could ever write would please the hard-core Objectivists, since a free encyclopedia is really only a way to let the Looters of this world get away without doing research on their own (isn't it?), I figured that my most rigorous scholarship would still start a pissing contest.
I'm vaguely curious to see how it looks, in a few months. Until then, let me note that the paragraph on "Influence" as it stood before was not just pathetically short but also unforgivably sloppy. It managed to mis-represent the two sources it did cite, while making an unjustified claim about the entire libertarian science fiction sub-genre. It included a phrase in quotation marks which did not appear in any of the sources it cited, which tends to support my intuition that nobody checks sources anyway. I included a reference to Eric S. Raymond's essay "A Political History of SF" to address the first problem; not that I agree entirely with ESR's conclusions, but he addresses the topic, and does so in what I consider an admirably rational manner.
For the curious, or those worried about copyvios, my rough draft is available at User:Anville/Atlas Shrugged Criticism. If its style seems a little jarring, I can only reply that I wrote it the same way I did my material for the Three Laws of Robotics, i.e., the material which pushed that article to FA status. I used the same standards and the same nerve circuits as I did for Isaac Asimov or Calvin and Hobbes, and nobody has taken those off the FA list, either. Yes, if what I say stands the way I said it, somebody will probably go away thinking that Atlas Shrugged is too childish for consideration. That means I've done my job. It's now up to somebody else to present whatever counterarguments, literary or historical, which competent critics have made. I would really prefer those arguments to come from outside sources, paraphrased and summarized with proper attribution, but I won't be surprised if they aren't.
One of the perks you discover while being a writer is that, thanks to revision, you can make something which is actually better than any given thought which goes through your brain on a day-to-day basis. Just like Einstein's mother didn't have to be a great physicist, and just like natural selection can make thumbs opposable without a Grand Designer's whim, the product can turn out better than its creator. Kind of funny, actually.
One or two people can probably make a book which will not only outlive their bodies but also live more grandly and with greater subtlety than their quotidian lives can manage. I remain to be convinced that an encyclopedia, produced by the conflicting jibber-jabber of ten thousand web-surfing yahoodim, can really attain more sophistication than the original Humanity which it mirrors.
- Self-taught and referential,
- Drunk on your own potential,
- That cool impatient chuckling
- Is just your inner duckling. . . .
- If you were really clever,
- You'd make it live forever.
- Pray God that when the drought hits
- You'll get to keep the outfits.
—Mary Prankster, "Swan Dive", from the album Roulette Girl
Anville 01:31, 26 May 2005 (UTC)
Articles I have abused
I have made a total of 2002 edits, beginning in February 2004. I'm stopping now. The following is a list of articles which I have edited in (what I believe to be) significant ways.
- Atlas Shrugged
- Brave New World
- Breakfast of Champions
- Calvin and Hobbes
- A Clockwork Orange
- The Crying of Lot 49
- Cyberpunk
- D-brane
- Dead White Males
- Evidence (Asimov)
- Falstaff
- Fictional chemical substances
- Gathering Blue
- The Giver
- The Hidden Curriculum
- King Lear
- Kokopelli & Company
- Kurt Vonnegut
- The Last Question
- List of fictional cities
- List of fictional companies
- Liouville's theorem (Hamiltonian)
- Lolita
- Messenger (novel)
- Massachusetts Institute of Technology
- Multivac
- Neutrino
- Nambu-Goto action
- Omnipotence paradox
- Pale Fire
- Postcyberpunk
- The Sirens of Titan
- String theory
- Supersymmetry
- Supersymmetric quantum mechanics
- Supernova
- Tachyon
- That Thou art Mindful of Him
- Three Laws of Robotics
- Transmetropolitan
- The Truman Show
...and there are probably a couple more besides.
I categorically deny ever having touched Postmodernism. The edit history and talk pages may claim otherwise, but I was never there. In particular, I never wrote the following, and anyone who says I did is a scurrilous lier.
- The cartoonist Bill Watterson argues a similar point in his comic strip Calvin and Hobbes. His six-year-old protagonist often claims that his snowmen and school-notebook doodles are "avant-garde", backing up his contention with prose similar to that which Sokal generated. Once, Calvin pencils a book report entitled, "The Dynamics of Interbeing and Monological Imperatives in Dick and Jane: a Study in Psychic Transrelational Gender Modes". Displaying his creation to his friend Hobbes, he smugly remarks, "Academia, here I come!" These strips and others of note are reprinted in The Calvin and Hobbes Tenth Anniversary Book (1995), in which Watterson explains that his "art criticism" was derived from published postmodern rhetoric, with minimal changes.
See, if I had written that, I would certainly not have forgotten to mention the strip where Calvin explicitly announces that he is a postmodernist. Walking through the woods with Hobbes, he muses, "The hard part for us avant-garde post-modern artists is deciding whether or not to embrace commercialism." (The strip is reproduced on page 59 of Deranged Killer Mutant Monster Snow Goons!) Of course, Calvin decides to take the plunge into the commercial world, not that he reaps much profit from it.
- I have spliced this bit of research into the Calvin and Hobbes article's genetic material. We'll see what grows, and if this is a more hospitable environment. Anville 04:03, 17 May 2005 (UTC)
Licence to shill
In the spirit of giving, I agree to multi-license all my contributions, with the exception of my user pages, as described below:
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