Breakthrough

[faustus]

I am a bad researcher. I ought to sit down with texts and work my way through them, taking copious notes, and then assemble these elements into a coherent argument. Most of the time, however, I start with an idea and find the evidence to fit it. There's a cultural connection between food, music and sex which will explain The Sparrow. The medusa chimes with Joanna Russ. This has scary ramifications for my practice - the three papers I delivered in February were all written at the last minute.

The metaphor I reach for is Michelangelo - although I am hardly he. In each block of stone he found his statues, by chipping away the stone that didn't fit.



I'm working on a book on 1970s sf - witness http://flares.wordpress.com - and for two years now I've had a plan. I knew what happened during the period, and how sf changed during the period - and ... well I've wanted to avoid a masternarrative that simplified the period as having one thing at stake. Yet, there was still something missing. Perhaps the big so-what?

Yesterday, in the Carbuncle Cafe I sat and read the start of Stephen Paul Miller’s The Seventies Now: Culture as Surveillance - a book I lent my copy of six years ago - and something fell into place. Imagine a thousand tumbling dominoes, in the shape of a bud coming into bloom. That explains why those films have amphicatastrophic endings - and indeed why Star Wars is eucatastrophic. That explains part of what's going on in feminism, and why there are so few gays in 1970s sf. Everything makes sense in a way it hadn't yesterday afternoon. I'd also for a while had the sense that the Doctor Who story "The Invisible Enemy" was key (as well as Flow My Tears the Policeman Said) - and now I know why.

My statue has a face.

Comments

[buffysquirrel.livejournal.com]

eucatastrophic? amphicatastrophic? do I need to read the Miller book too?

:D

[drasecretcampus.livejournal.com]

Depends whether you're interested in reclaiming the 1970s as a period when things did happen, rather than as an intermission between the 1960s and 1980s.

Eucatastrophe and amphicatastrophe are two terms for endings; Tolkien coined the first, I the latter:

The consolation of fairy-stories, the joy of the happy ending: or more correctly of the good catastrophe, the sudden joyous “turn” (for there is no true end to any fairy-tale): this joy [...] is a sudden and miraculous grace: never to be counted on to recur. It does not deny the existence of dyscatastrophe, of sorrow and failure: the possibility of these is necessary to the joy of deliverance; it denies (in the face of much evidence, if you will) universal final defeat and in so far is evangelium, giving a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief.

The amphicatastrophe is the 1970s ending - usually a downer but not necessarily bad, more often open-ended, and not invoking either satisfaction nor catharsis: "the seventies ending, you know the one where it's sort of downbeat, but you can't be sure, because there's no real sense of resolution." Amidst much waving around of hands.

[buffysquirrel.livejournal.com]

Hmm, well, I've always thought the seventies (which I remember, a bit) often get a raw deal. The music was more mature than that from the '60s, and less commercial than what came after. Certainly the '70s were nothing like so soul-destroyingly awful as the '80s.

Thanks for the definitions :).

[buffysquirrel.livejournal.com]

(oh, and amphicatastrophe seems to me, at first glance, to describe the ending of my story "Sundown", so obviously I really am a seventies child! lol)