Little Big Numbers
OR: Alec – How to be an Artist, and why some stories are just too fucking massive not to be told
As a writer of some of the best autobiographical fiction around, Campbell’s talent for using the right story at the right time has been carefully honed over the years, so it’s no surprise that account of the story of Big Numbers adds to the totality of How to be an Artist. The factors that prevented the series’ completion have just the right mixture of the predictable and the arbitrary, the personal and the financial, to bring Campbell’s narrative home, and you find yourself truly appreciating the depth of Campbell’s craft when you figure this out.
On a third, even more careful reading, however, you realised that How to be an Artist doesn’t just contain the story of the unmaking of Big Numbers, but that it actually is Big Numbers. Or at least, it’s Campbell’s version of it – let’s call it Little Big Numbers, for silliness’s sake.
ALEC: The Years Have Pants has my highest recommendation. At the very least, it’s very thick and will prop open the stoutest of doors.
For as Watanabe said in the film when asked why he wasn’t angry at being stymied and turned down over and over again by the politicians and bureaucrats who preferred the status quo of doing nothing rather than taking action to help others:
I can’t afford to hate anyone. I don’t have that kind of time.
I have come to the absolute conclusion that foundation X [sic] is completely genuine and sincere and that it directly wishes to make the United Kingdom one of the principal points that it will use to disseminate its extraordinarily great wealth into the world at this present moment, as part of an attempt to seek the recovery of the global economy.
The lampshade’s current proprietor […] won’t keep it in his home and says that, even now that it’s here, safely in storage, he feels more at ease when he knows the shade is shut away in its white cardboard box. The longer I am left alone with it, standing by a window as the daylight is beginning to fade, the more I can understand why.
He wasn’t especially careful with his repainting, which is a clue to how closely he expected people to look. Art historians have noticed his change of mind, and it has been said that before the early 1920s, Mondrian thought of his compositions as part of an infinite plane, which could go on indefinitely in all directions. Starting with paintings like this one, the canvas is the whole object, the whole universe, and there is nothing beyond it.
[…] they’ve evidently been friends for years.
[…]
Le Guin works very comfortably under the mantle of science fiction, having penned some of the classics of the genre, while Atwood waffles, preferring to stay in the mainstream literary conversation.
With respect to SF, Le Guin is invariably right and Atwood is almost always wrong.
Atwood: “What about Star Wars?”
Le Guin: “There have been really few science fiction movies. They have mostly been fantasies, with spaceships.”
That the Globe would fire him is indicative of the final stage of the Canadian political and economic elite’s betrayal of the country’s traditions and values. It’s all just business now and anything that isn’t business – certainly anything that questions it’s “natural” dominance – is simply dispensable. I can just imagine the suits at the Globe having a brief conversation about Rick’s column: “By the way, why are still publishing Rick Salutin?” Long silence. “Rick who?” I wonder if any of these guys ever even read him. It reminds me of a Star Trek episode where a representative of a race completely dedicated to trade and commerce, looks at Captain Picard who is trying to engage him in civilized conversation and says “Why are we speaking?”
What they don’t tell you is that they don’t pick the writers randomly. From that mob of people who want to be games journalists, they can pick. And, because these are not stupid people, they pick the best available. They’re not going to pay for better writing, but since it doesn’t cost them any more, they may as well have it.
In other words, don’t think about the fact you’re replaceable. Think about the fact that out of the enormous mob of people who wanted your job, you’re the one who got it. No matter how much they treat you with disdain, they actually think you’re the best.
And when a group of Pharisees caught an adulterous couple, they figured they had the perfect trap for Jesus. You see, the holiness code very specifically prescribes the death penalty for adultery (Leviticus 20:10). However, Roman law said that only the Roman governor could prescribe the death penalty. So by bringing him the woman caught in adultery, they figured that they could force him to choose between offending the Jews (and losing his followers) or offending the Romans (and being put to death). Instead of answering, Jesus just crouched down and wrote on the ground with His finger for a while, then stood up and said, “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.” The Pharisees slunk away in cowardice and shame, which raises the interesting unanswerable question, what the heck was Jesus writing? My theology professors’ favorite speculation was that it was a list of other death penalty offenses that the Pharisees might reasonably suspect Jesus of somehow knowing they were guilty of, daring them to start a stone-throwing festival that would have left the hypocrites as dead as the adulteress. Nonetheless, as fun as this story is, let’s not miss part of the point here. Jesus was specifically asked whether or not we as human beings should continue to enforce the holiness code in the Law of Moses, and Jesus very specifically said no. (John 8:1-11)
