by Quentin Lewis

Quentin's Weeknotes 9/27/20-10/3/20

weeknotes movies teaching museum writing politics

This Week:

  • I watched “It Comes at Night”, another in a line of of moody, character-driven horror movies from A24. I like movies where it’s unclear what the horror actually is, and the best thing I can say about “It comes at night” is that it’s a zombie movie without any zombies. Recommended!
  • I taught wikipedia to our students this week, using the amazing wiki-edu infrastructure.
  • I started planning for the Museum’s Halloween storytelling event “The Horror in the Museum” as well as for an artist conversation with Luke Swinson, whose work is currently on display at the Museum.
  • I read this old essay by M. John Harrison entitled “Very Afraid” in which he shoots across the bow of most speculative fiction’s insistence on something called “world building,” which he describes as “an attempt to exhaustively survey a place that isn’t there,” and later as “an attempt… to rationalise the fiction by exhaustive grounding, or by making it ‘logical in its own terms’, so that it becomes less an act of imagination than the literalisation of one.” It’s a long-ish essay, and there’s a lot in it for writers, but Harrison provides a rigorous intellectual scaffold for my essentially unformed aesthetic opinion that most exposition in science fiction, fantasy, and especially horror is pretty boring and patronising. But Harrison goes further, and links the world-building impulse to our currently decaying post-modern/neoliberal order of intellectual (and political-economic) libertarianism and the unbridled superiority of humans over nature that it implies.

The originally vertiginous and politically exciting notion of relativism that underlies the idea of “worlds” is now only one of the day-to-day huckstering mechanisms of neoliberalism. My argument isn’t really with writers, readers or gamers, (or even with franchisers in either the new or old media); it is a political argument, made even more urgent as a heavily-mediatised world moves from the prosthetic to the virtual, allowing the massively managed and flattered contemporary self to ignore the steady destruction of the actual world on which it depends.

It shook me to read this piece, especially given the news that the world-building which organizes so much of American politics right is at this moment collapsing like a dying star.