[Image ID: Daniel Danger's art print, 'To all who home to this happy place,' depicting a ruined Disneyland castle in a post-apocalyptic landscape with a statue of Walt and Mickey in the rubble.]
There’s this behavioral economics study that completely changed the way i thought about art, teaching, and critique: it’s a 1993 study called “Introspecting about Reasons can Reduce Post-Choice Satisfaction” by Timothy D Wilson, Douglas J Lisle, Jonathan Schooler, Sara Hodges, Kristen Klaaren and Suzanne LaFleur:
The experimenters asked subjects to preference-rank some art posters; half the posters were cute cartoony posters, and the other half were fine art posters. One group of subjects assigned a simple numeric rank to the posters, and the other had to rank them and explain their ranking. Once they were done, they got to keep their posters.
There was a stark difference in the two groups’ preferences: the group that had to explain their choices picked the cartoony images, while the group that basically got to point at their favorite and say, “Ooh, I like that!” chose the fine art posters.
Then, months later, the experimenters followed up and asked the subjects what they’d done with the poster they got to take home. The ones who’d had to explain their choices and had brought home cartoony images had thrown those posters away. The ones who didn’t have to explain what they liked about their choice, who’d chosen fine art, had hung them up at home and kept them there.
The implication is that it’s hard to explain what makes art good, and the better art is, the harder it is to put your finger on what makes it so good. More: the obvious, easy-to-articulate virtues of art are the less important virtues. Art’s virtues are easy to spot and hard to explain.
The reason this stuck with me is that I learned to be a writer through writing workshops where we would go around in a circle and explain what we liked and didn’t like about someone’s story, and suggest ways to make it better. I started as a teenager in workshops organized by Judith Merril in Toronto, then through my high-school workshop (which Judy had actually founded a decade-plus earlier through a writer in the schools grant), and then at the Clarion workshop in 1992. I went on to teach many of these workshops: Clarion, Clarion West and Viable Paradise.
So I’ve spent a lot of time trying to explain what was and wasn’t good about other peoples’ art (and my own!), and how to make it better. There’s a kind of checklist to help with this: when a story is falling short in some way, writers roll out these “rules” for what makes for good and bad prose. There are a bunch of these rulesets (think of Strunk & White’s Elements of Style), including some genre-specific ones like the Turkey City Lexicon:
A few years ago, I was teaching on the Writing Excuses cruise and a student said something like, “Hey, I know all these rules for writing good stories, but I keep reading these stories I really like and they break the rules. When can I break the rules?”
There’s a stock answer a writing teacher is supposed to give here: “Well, first you have to master the rules, then you can break them. You can’t improvise a jazz solo without first learning your scales.”
But in that moment, I thought back to the study with the posters and I had a revelation. These weren’t “rules” at all — they were just things that are hard and therefore easy to screw up. No one really knows why a story isn’t working, but they absolutely know when it doesn’t, and so, like the experimental subject called upon to explain their preferences, they reach for simple answers: “there’s too much exposition,” or “you don’t foreshadow the ending enough.”
There are lots of amazing stories that are full of exposition (readers of mine will not be shocked to learn I hold this view). There are lots of twist endings that are incredible — and not despite coming out of left field, but because of it.
The thing is, if you can’t say what’s wrong, but you know something is wrong, it’s perfectly reasonable to say, “Well, why don’t you try to replace or polish the things that are hardest to do right. Whatever it is that isn’t working here, chances are it’s the thing that’s hardest to make work”:
But if I could change one thing about how we talk about writing and its “rules,” it would be to draw this distinction, characterizing certain literary feats as easier to screw up than others, having the humility to admit that we just don’t know what’s wrong with a story, and then helping the writer create probabilistically ranked lists of the things they could tinker with to try and improve their execution.
Which is all a very, very long-winded way to explain why I bought a giant, gorgeous art-print at Comic-Con this weekend, even though I have nowhere to hang it and had sworn I would absolutely not buy any art at the con.
I was walking the floor, peeking into booths, when I happened on Daniel Danger’s booth (#5034, if you’re at the con today), and I was just fuckin’ poleaxed by his work.
http://www.tinymediaempire.com/
[Image ID: Daniel Danger’s ‘It stopped being about the panic,’ depicting a ruined mansion interwoven with the skeletal branches of a tree, with a weeping statue and two human figures]
Now, see above. I can’t tell you why I loved this work so much (and that’s OK!), but boy oh boy did it speak to me. I just kind of stood there with my mouth open, slowly moving from print to print, admiring works like “It stopped being about the panic.”
[Image ID: Daniel Danger’s ‘headlight in the path of,’ depicting a ruined mall with a pair of stags standing at the top of the escalator.]
On the surface, this is moody, post-apocalyptic stuff, heavily influenced by classic monster/haunter tropes, but it’s shot through with hope and renewal and the sense of something beautiful growing out of the ashes of something that has toppled. There’s real “(Nothing But) Flowers” energy in “Headlight in the path of”:
[Image ID: Daniel Danger’s ‘We are no longer able to protect you,’ depicting a ruined factory with a coming-apart sign reading ‘We can no longer protect you forever,’ and a statue of a sword-bearing angel.]
Danger isn’t just a
very
talented artist, he’s also an
extremely
talented craftsman. As a recovering pre-press geek, I was (nearly) as impressed by the wild use of spot color and foils as I was by the art, like in “We are no longer able to protect you”:
[Image ID: Daniel Danger’s ‘made of smoke and chains,’ depicting a ruined landscape with a pair of derelict subway trains at the foot of a hill on whose peak is a rotting mansion. A pair of human figures, holding hands, are approaching the mansion.]
Danger himself calls this work “weird sad hyper-detailed artwork of dreamy buildings of ghosts and trees,” which is a very apt description of this work, as you can see in “Made of smoke and chains”:
So I looked at this stuff and sternly reminded myself that there was no way I was going to buy any art at the con. Then I walked away. I got about two aisles over when I realized I had to go back and ask permission to take some pictures so I could put a little link to Danger in my blog’s linkdump, which he graciously permitted:
[Image ID: Daniel Danger’s art print, ‘To all who home to this happy place,’ depicting a ruined Disneyland castle in a post-apocalyptic landscape with a statue of Walt and Mickey in the rubble.]
But then I got all the way ass over to the other ass end of the convention center and I realized I had to go back and buy one of these prints. Which I did, “To all who come to this happy place,” because fuckin’ wow:
This was unequivocally the best thing I saw at this year’s SDCC, but I also got some very good news while there, namely, that Emil Ferris’s long, long-awaited My Favorite Thing Is Monsters Vol 2 is finally on the schedule from Fantagraphics:
It’s coming out in April, which gives you plenty of time to read volume one, which I called, “a haunting diary of a young girl as a dazzling graphic novel”:
If you are or were a monster kid or a haunter, this is your goddamned must-read of the summer. It’s a fully queered, stunning memoir for anyone whose erotic imagination intersected with Famous Monsters of Filmland.
(Also, if you’re that kind of person and you’re in the region, you should know about Midsummer Scream, a giant haunter show in Long Beach; I’ll be there on Sunday, July 30, for a panel about the Ghost Post, the legendary Haunted Mansion puzzle-boxes I helped make:
https://midsummerscream.org/
Now Favorite Thing book two was the best news, but the best experience was watching Felicia Day get her Inkpot Award and give a moving speech:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inkpot_Award
And then learning that Raina Telgemeier also got an Inkpot; I love Raina’s work so much:
If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
The first edition of Popham’s Telegraphic Signals or Marine Vocabulary was printed in 1800; a more comprehensive version was produced in 1803, and a further much expanded edition using letters as well as numbers in 1812. This was issued to the navy in 1813, and from that time, vocabulary signals were part of the official flag signalling code of the Royal Navy.
Nelson’s signal to the fleet before the beginning of the Battle of Trafalgar on 21 October 1805 read ENGLAND EXPECTS THAT EVERY MAN WILL DO HIS DUTY and was made in Popham’s vocabulary, using the numerical flags of the general Signal Book as re-arranged in 1803. The signals officer of the Victory at the time was Lieutenant John Pasco, who gave, many years later, this account of the incident:
His Lordship came to me on the poop, and after ordering certain signals to be made, about a quarter to noon, he said, ‘Mr Pasco, I wish to say to the fleet, “England confides that every man will do his duty”’, and he added, ‘you must be quick for I have one more to make, which is Close Action’. I replied, ‘if your Lordship will permit me to substitute the “expects” for “confides”, the signal will soon be completed, because the word “expects” is in the vocabulary, and “confides” must be spelt.’ His Lordship replied in haste, and with seeming satisfaction, ‘That will do, Pasco, make it directly’; when it had been answered by a few ships in the van, he ordered me to make the signal for Close Action and to keep it up, accordingly I hoisted No. 16 at the top-gallant mast-head and there it remained until shot away.
— Timothy Wilson, Flags at Sea
In J.M.W. Turner's 1822 painting, The Battle of Trafalgar, 21 October 1805, part of the word DUTY may be seen in the visible signal flags of HMS Victory.
There existed already in the 18th-century signalling codes for the use of the ships of the East India Company, but there was no generally understood flag ‘language’ by which ordinary merchant ships could signal to one another, except for certain conventions such as the hoisting of the ensign upside-down as a signal of distress.
This gap was successfully filled in 1817 when Captain Frederick Marryat, RN, produced his Code of Signals for the Merchant Service. The principle of Marryat’s code, like Popham’s, was numerary, with ten basic numeral flags. By hoisting groups of numeral flags beneath one of various distinguishing flags or pennants, reference could be made to the various sections of the code: names of men-of-war; names of merchantmen; names of ports, headlands, etc.; sentences; vocabulary. [...] Although artists by no means always get it right, it is sometimes possible to identify a ship portrait by reference to an edition of Marryat’s code of the right date.
— Timothy Wilson, Flags at Sea
image: The Barque 'Frederica' of Yarmouth, by unknown artist, making her number in Marryat's code
The suspect wanted to bomb a facility treating coronavirus cases to cause severe harm, the FBI says.
Another Very Fine Person.™
“Officials said the man was motivated by racist and anti-government beliefs. He had allegedly considered a range of targets before settling on the hospital because of the current outbreak. The suspect, identified by authorities as Timothy R Wilson, had been under surveillance for months, which revealed him to be a ‘potentially violent extremist’ who had expressed racial and religious hatred ... Wilson had previously considered attacking a school with a large number of black students, a mosque and a synagogue.”
“Most organisms avoid that which has previously caused them pain and approach that which has previously given them pleasure.
Humans are better at this than most other animals because they do more than merely associate stimuli with their affective consequences.
People are naive scientists who explain events to themselves, and the sophisticated causal theories people generate allow them to pursue pleasures and avoid pains with an unusual degree of success.”
(…)
“People are motivated to recover from negative emotional events, and the kind of sense making they engage in often involves coping, psychological defenses, and rationalization.
Like the physiological immune system that fights threats to physical health, people have a psychological immune system that fights threats to emotional well-being.
These defenses have been well documented by social and personality psychologists and include dissonance reduction, motivated reasoning, self-serving attributions, self-affirmation, and positive illusions.
A feature that all these defenses have in common is that they are largely unconscious, and in fact are more effective by operating behind the mental scenes.
When trying to cope with a romantic breakup, for example, people usually will not be able deliberately and consciously to adopt a more negative view of their partner in order to make themselves feel better.
Instead, the ex-partner will come to seem less suitable, with no awareness that one’s own psychological immune system was responsible for this shift in view.”
(…)
“Because people do not recognize that they have reduced the impact of negative events by explaining and rationalizing them, they sometimes attribute their unexpected resilience to the work of powerful, insightful, and benevolent external agents.
For example, employees who are transferred to undesirable locations might be surprised by how happy they are;
by failing to recognize that they produced their own happiness with non-conscious coping and defensive processes, they might attribute their good fortune to the guiding hand of an external agent, such as God.”
Source: Wilson, Timothy D., and Daniel T. Gilbert. "Affective forecasting: Knowing what to want." Current Directions in Psychological Science 14.3 (2005): 131-134.
On Friday, 9.15.2017, former police officer Jason Stockely was found not guilty of killing Anthony Lamar Smith. The Advancement Project explains why another case of a white officer fatally shooting a black man with impunity is not a surprise, but still hurts deeply, especially considering the evidence against Stockely.
This was a bench trial, not a trial by jury. St. Louis Circuit Judge Timothy Wilson has further codified police brutality and anti blackness into law in St. Louis. This was NOT justice. Not even close.
Instead of everyone telling justifiably outraged protesters to be even more docile as street gangs dressed in blue repeatedly get away with murder, maybe someone should tell the police to give “being peaceful” a try. For once.
“How well do people know the causes of their judgments, feelings, and actions?
There are cases in the psychological literature of people who are so ignorant of why they respond the way they do that they have to invent explanations.”
——
“Ah, Nisbett and I argued, it is true that people have privileged access to a great deal of information about themselves, such as the content of their current thoughts and memories and the object of their attention.
But these are mental contents, not mental processes. The real action in the mind is mental processing that produces feelings, judgments, and behaviors.
Although we often have access to the results of these processes— such as my memory of the lunch-dropping incident—we do not have access to the mental processes that produced them. (...)
The customer was aware of part of the reason she ordered what she did—her conscious thoughts preceding her action—but unaware of what triggered these thoughts.”
——
“The key is to understand that introspection does not open magic doors to the unconscious, but is a process of construction and inference. (...)
Not only is the mind a black box for scientists, Bem argued; it is often a black box to the person who owns that mind.
The only way to determine the contents of the box is to make an educated guess, based on what people do—and that goes for scientists, people observing each other, and for people observing themselves.”
