Read this book: Space Opera, by Catherynne Valente

 Time for something fun.  Read Space Opera.  I love this book.  Generally, when I tell you that "I love this book," that means the author plays with weighty themes, deals in serious social scientific concepts, fascinating counterfactuals, and leaves you thinking about the political and economic implications for days, weeks or months to come, or perhaps even years.  I just wrote a four-part series on Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle, after re-reading the books which were originally released a decade and a half ago.  Fuck that.  Space Opera is just fun.  It is hilarious.  I love it.  Read it.  I shall be somewhat professorial in this post, because I cannot help it, it's what I do, but this book is a breath of fresh fucking air.  Read it.

Here's the deal.  And I can't believe this works, because it sounds so stupid.  Eurovision.  In... space.  Cat Valente had an idea, and pitched the book as follows:  Eurovision meets Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy, and that's close enough to give you a concept, but not quite.  So aliens show up.  They have a treaty, after having gone through the Sentience Wars.  Basically, a newly discovered species must prove that it should be allowed to exist in galactic civilization.  If it fails to prove its worthiness, kaboom.  You're obstructing their view of Venus.  (Looney Tunes are a regular point of reference.  I should have made a reference to a Vogon highway, but whatever.  I already typed it.  Moving on.  How do you prove your species' worthiness?  Basically, you compete in the galactic Eurovision.  Come in last, and that Vogon highway replaces your planet.  Just don't come in last.

Yet, the performances are way, way, way over the top.

Earth is now on their radar.  Earth needs to compete.  Earth does not get to select its own performer.  Aliens put together a list, based on their tastes, including performers like Yoko Ono.  This is a few years in the future, with Yoko having passed away, along with everyone else on their list, except "Decibel Jones and the Absolute Zeroes," although their drummer is actually dead, having died much more conventionally than a Spinal Tap drummer.

Who is Decibel Jones?  Basically, a David Bowie wannabe, one-hit-wonder.

This is kind of all you need to know.  It sounds terrible, doesn't it?

It's genius.  It's one of those books that is so much better than it has any right to be.  Why is it good?  I must take a moment to recognize Valente's particular talent with the art of the run-on sentence.  This may sound odd.  You have been told by writing instructors that a run-on sentence is a bad thing.  It is a thing that you should not do.  It is a thing, like the passive voice, that is to be avoided.  Yet every rule which is merely a stylistic rule may be broken to artistic effect, if the artist is sufficiently creative, purposive, and thoughtful.  Valente is all of these things.

I love the written word.  Obviously, or I wouldn't do this.  After all, nobody pays me to write this stuff, and hell, nobody reads my weekend bloviations on science fiction novels, abstruse scholarly concepts, or whatever else I choose as a topic about which to rant.  The written word is to be savored.  But only when composed by those who know how to do so.  In other words, by those other than me.

Like Cat Valente.

This woman writes the greatest run-on sentences I have ever read.  I have no idea how many readers appreciate such things, but I derive great joy from such compositions.  Multi-page sentences with complex polyrhythms.  Not poetry, but prose, spitting in the face of Strunk and Fucking White!  Gleefully walking compositional tightropes, with no nets, high winds and blowing kisses to the nervous EMTs as she goes.

This woman can write.

Kids, if you're going to hand in papers with run-on sentences, they better be as good as Cat Valente's.

OK.  So that's why the book works.  It's about Eurovision in space.  Decibel Jones is a glam-rocker.  I... don't like glam.  I don't like David Bowie.  I never did.  When I think of "glam," I think of "Punky Meadows."  Do you know who Punky Meadows was?  Probably not.  His name has been lost to history, for the most part.  The only people who really remember him now are hardcore Frank Zappa fans.  Meadows was a glam-rocker long ago, and Frank Zappa looked at him and thought... seriously?  And the thing about Zappa was that despite his irreverence, he was a seriously badass guitarist, a mathematically complex composer, band leader... He was the real deal.  He garnered attention for the wacky stuff, but underneath the irreverence, Zappa was the guy who wanted to be Stravinsky.

And he could not take Punky Meadows seriously.  He just saw this glam photo, and the image, and... he wrote a song.  "Punky's Whips."  It became a staple of Zappa's live shows, so there are a lot of really good versions of "Punky's Whips."  When I first heard "Punky's Whips," it was in the pre-internet era, post-Punky, so I had no clue what the fuck was going on.  Meadows was a nobody at that point.  The song outlived him, because Zappa will be remembered.  (I'll get to this.)  Meadows?  Not so much, on his own, anyway.  It wasn't until the internet era when it really became feasible for those of us who got into Zappa later to find out all of the ins-and-outs of the Zappa-Meadows thing.

So, you can go and listen to Meadows.  I wouldn't recommend it, but then again, I don't care for Bowie, and I recognize that this puts me in a musical minority roughly the size of the minority that obsesses over jazz.  (Hi!)  But the point is, I don't care for glam.  Not Meadows, not Bowie, not any of it.

Not pop period.

I am aware of Eurovision, mostly because it is one of those things that is sufficiently famous that it is difficult not to know, but musically speaking, I consider it to be not quite a war crime, but only because the codes haven't been updated lately.

Still, read Space Opera.  I'd hate the music, I'd hate the whole schtick.  But this book is hilarious.

That said, let's do some commentary.  The basic premise is the notion that a world's worthiness to exist can be assessed by its performance in Space Eurovision.  Why?  Because Valente wanted to write the book.  Valente started with the concept, and then wrote the book.  At some point, Valente needed to justify the concept, so there is a philosophical interlude about where a society needs to be in order to produce the level of "glam" necessary to compete on this stage, and what that says about the society, but that's really just a rationalization concocted after the fact.  I'm not even going to bother.  It's bullshit, and I kind of think Valente knows it's bullshit.  It isn't the point.  Valente just needed to write something.  This is an exam.  One of the questions on the exam was a short-answer question justifying the plot.  Don't leave that question blank.  She gets a few points for writing something, even though her answer is bullshit, but since the purpose of the book is the journey itself, that question is not weighted heavily in the construction of her grade.  Translation:  it doesn't matter all that much that she can't really justify the gimmick.

There are authors who fail to justify the constructions of their worlds, and I criticize them harshly for it.  Why?  Because their goals are generally to make some fundamental point that follows from how they have constructed their worlds.  That's not what Valente is doing.  She's just having fun.  Her gimmick doesn't need to make any more philosophical sense than the Vogon highway.  Nevertheless, I will come back to it shortly, because I do think there is something to be said about assessing humanity by its art.  After all, misanthropy is rather a theme on this blog.

Before I get to that, though, I'll make a smaller point.  The protagonist here, Decibel Jones, is essentially a David Bowie wannabe.  Had David Bowie come up in 2021, given his ever-shifting, androgynous personae and the gender politics of this particular moment in time, today he might claim to be some variation of "nonbinary."  In the novel, Decibel Jones has, at one point, identified as "gendersplat."  What is "gendersplat?"

A while back, I wrote something about Jacqueline Carey's Starless, which I found to be a very good book, centered on a character who was sort of nonbinary (on another world, in a different culture).  I argued that a hostile, bad-faith reading of the novel might wind up portraying Carey as somehow "transphobic."  However, that reading would have required thinking through the presentations of gender in a way that is unlikely when the nonbinary character is presented as the hero of the book.  Doing so puts the author in good standing.  Yet, I think Carey was actually thinking in complex terms.

I don't think Valente was thinking much at all about this.  I think Valente was just being satirical, but let's actually go through this.  Here's what's going on.  Decibel Jones is basically doing the glam-rock thing, and in the Bowie tradition, is bi and kind of androgynous.  Dess uses the term, "gendersplat."  Meaning... what?  Dess uses male pronouns.  At one point early in the novel, Jones is picked up by government agents to get ready to head off to space, and the government agents are rather annoyingly insert-here-o-phobic, like the novel took place decades ago, and the agents puzzle over the term, "gendersplat."  The alien who showed up-- the roadrunner-- tries to explain.  The roadrunner is of the Esca, who have four sexes.  Their reproductive process involves four, rather than two, and the roadrunner had thought that "gendersplat" was somehow just one of the categories other than male and female in this process.  Decibel just shrugs and laughs agreeably to this.

Since Valente is presenting Jones as your hero/protagonist/Bowie type, in a fun-time satire, the reader is not meant to interrogate this.

So I'm-a-gonna.  What would an actual gender theorist say to this?  Gender is internal sense of self, distinguished from biological/physiological, and its role in reproduction.  The roadrunner gets it exactly wrong, and completely fails to understand the concept of gender.  It follows, then, that the Esca have no concept of gender, distinguishable from sex.

How would a gender theorist respond to this?  Quite negatively, if we're honest.

Yet how did Decibel Jones respond?  Dess didn't give shit!

So let's consider someone who feels, internally, as not precisely male and not precisely female, regardless of physiology.  What, precisely, this means is something under much discussion, and I'm not going to engage in that.  Instead, I'm simply going to ask how such a person would react.  It's really going to depend on such a person's willingness to confront, right?  Someone who is conflict-averse may just feel uncomfortable with this moment, but say nothing because that's easier than engaging in a conflictual situation.

Someone who is more, shall we say, in-your-face, may at least say, "no, that's not quite right."  Or something.  There are a lot of variations here, but Decibel Jones is no shrinking violet.  So this has me thinking of the following.

Y'all know who Jordan Peterson is, I assume.  He got into some hot water a while back because of the pronoun issue.  He was told that he was required to use peoples' preferred pronouns, and his response was that the requirement itself was so odious to him that he would refuse.  Because of the requirement.  Wackiness ensues.  Y'all wanna see him get challenged on this by someone smarter than him?  Here's a clip of him getting challenged on the point by John McWhorter.  You can't see him, but that's John.

So this is a very interesting exchange, and McWhorter shows how you take down Peterson.  Part of it is to give a partial agreement.  McWhorter gives Peterson a little.  He says, OK, maybe there are some people who are doing a little performance.  And you, Jordan, claim to know who is doing a performance, and who isn't because you are a psychologist.  How?  How do you perform this trick?

And of course, Peterson can't answer the question.  And McWhorter won't let him weasel out of it.  Peterson is slick, but McWhorter's specialty is cutting through bullshit.

The reason McWhorter says that he just uses whatever pronouns people want is not that he rejects the claim that there is performance, but that he can't tell who is performing, and who isn't, so he's just going to be polite and avoid what he considers the more harmful error.

Now if you are a hardcore gender theory type, you may get upset, not just at Peterson here, but at McWhorter, even though he's taking Peterson down.  Why?  Because McWhorter is saying that there is a performance element, somewhere in the pronoun thing, for some subset of people.

Now let's turn to Decibel Jones.  If Decibel Jones assents to the roadrunner's sex-based description, goes along with male pronouns, and all that, doesn't it kind of look like making up the term, "gendersplat," is performance?  And it would go along with the Bowie-esque stage image, right?  It's all about the glam.

So if I'm picking this apart analytically, I'd actually accuse Valente of characterizing the nonbinary thing as... performance.  Like, if you actually think of yourself as nonbinary, and feel truly uncomfortable with a categorization of male or female, it's hard for me to grasp what that means, but you don't need my understanding.  Just basic decency.  Valente, on the other hand, is kind of portraying this nonbinary thing as... performance.  You might be kinda bothered by that!

And yet when this is done with a protagonist, whom we are supposed to like, that's not the reaction.  Affect versus analysis.  I look at Decibel Jones, and I think, you know, had Valente thought this through, she probably would have done this differently.  It is very clear where her politics are.  Far, far left.  That's fine.  Most authors are lefties.  I'd like more variety, but the authors whose politics go elsewhere tend to suck.  [Cough, cough... Ayn Rand.]  This means, though, that Valente sends enough dispositional signals that she doesn't intend for anyone to do what I just did.  Yet, if you follow out the logic, this is where it goes.  So what happens is that readers are likely to say yay-for-the-genderbending, and miss the fact that Decibel Jones would be Exhibit A in Jordan Peterson's argument about the performative aspect of nonbinary identity.  I think Cat may have wanted to do a rewrite here.  Either that, or she'd find the greatest run-on sentence in history to tell me to fuck off.

Which I would fully deserve, because I am totally being an asshole here, but what's the fun of reading these books if I don't get to overanalyze them like a pedantic prick?

Oh, right.  The fun.

Anyway, moving on.

Let's actually take a moment to think about the concept itself at least semi-seriously.  Does a species rise or fall on the quality of its glam?  Um... if my life depends on galactic civilization's tastes, and they are most likely to get a kick out of some Korean boy band, then send in the fuckin' Korean boy band.  Yes, I'm gonna say that not only is Richard Thompson better, but that he is objectively better, but I don't want to die on that hill in literal terms.  Send in the fuckin' Korean boy band.

But you know what?  That boy band will be forgotten in a few years.  They'll be the punchline of a joke.  Richard has maintained a steady career since Fairport Convention.  Half a century.  And he will be remembered.  I look at my music collection, and it goes back nearly to the beginning of recorded music.  Louis Armstrong.  Charley Patton.  Blind Blake.  King Oliver.  Artists whose music endures, perhaps not in the public consciousness for most, although Armstrong remains quite famous, but whose work remains studied by scholars, and influential among the artists themselves.  Dark Was The Night, Cold Was The Ground.  Does that phrase mean anything to you?  It was the title of a Blind Willie Johnson song.  It was one of the snippets of recordings put out on Voyager.  Why?  To endure.  Yeah.  Fuck, yeah.

Whatever pop music you hear today?  It will be forgotten.  Even most of the critically-lauded stars will be forgotten.  Blind Willie Johnson endures today among every blues musician, and he's out in fuckin' space, man.

Louis Armstrong.  I have century-old recordings from that dude.  They're still amazing.  Yeah, the recording quality sucks, but there's more goin' on in his music than glam-rock, and metaphorically, I'll die on that hill.  Louis Armstrong will endure long past any modern pop star.

Miles?  Coltrane?

What pop will endure?  Some.  Yeah, The Beatles and some others, but mostly as pop culture history.  Miles will be studied the way we study Bach, Chopin, Beethoven... Stravinsky.

"We."  Who's "we?"  One of the alien races in the novel basically operates as a bunch of archivists.  They're... interesting.  Yet so much is produced here that you have a choice.  Either scholars and archivists remember it, or nobody does.  There was a lot of music being made in the 1930s.  Most of it is forgotten.  The only music from the 1930s that is remembered is what is remembered by those of us interested in what had that something special.  And we want something different from those who just want the pop flavor of the day.

Rhythmic and melodic complexity.  These are, in some way, measurable.  Alone, they don't necessarily make great music.  There are plenty of people who just plod away at the process of making the most complex time signature they can devise, and the result does not necessarily mean anything.  On the other hand, what appeals to the widest audience possible is the lowest common denominator, and that's not generally going to have a whole lot of true artistic innovation.  So it'll be forgotten.

Even Space Opera itself.  Will this book be remembered in 100 years?  Probably not, but it is leaps and bounds beyond the romance novels, Stephen King, Tom Clancy-TM and whatever else sells to the very few people who read at all precisely because of the kind of cleverness that would perplex the average reader.  That's my point.

Yeah, I hate pop.  Not because I feel any particular need to reject anything popular, but because the characteristics that tend to make music popular-- simplicity-- make it uninteresting to me, and historically kind of worthless.

Yet Richard Thompson is here.  Miles Davis, John Colrane, Charles Mingus, Roland Kirk, McCoy Tyner, Frank Zappa, Jimi Hendrix, the Allman Brothers... I'll just stop now.  And note some popularity, once upon a time, for some of them, even though "Voodoo Chile (Slight Return)" was never actually a number 1 hit, or anything like that.  (Hendrix had a number 1 hit, and it wasn't what you think.)

Bunch of dead guys, there, but how about this.  The Tedeschi-Trucks Band.  Tigran Hamasyan.  Gillian Welch & David Rawlings.  There is plenty of great music.  Great artists today who will be remembered.

There's a thing where we're supposed to say that humanity may not be around much longer.  Humanity won't die off completely, or at least, not any time in the near future.  Sure, climate change and disease are lookin' bad, and in a couple of centuries, civilization may look smaller and different.  However, there are billions of us fuckers, and for all of the jokes about how cockroaches will outlast everything, we're the fuckin' cockroaches.  And we're as bad.

We suck.

Except that unlike literal cockroaches, every once in a while, we have a Miles Davis.  Who, to be fair, was an asshole.  Coltrane was a cool guy, but Miles?  Total douche.  Unfortunately, he was also a genius.  But the thing is, we're cockroaches.  We suck.  Have you met us?  Just about the only defensible thing about us is that every once in a while, something like Sketches of Spain comes along.  No, I don't give a cockroach's cloaca about David Bowie or any other glam star, but Sketches of Spain?  First time I heard that, it knocked me on my cockroach cloaca.  And it still does.

So sidle up, Samsas.  Gregor's got some advice.

Listen to some good music.  Read a good book.

Everything else is cockroach crunchiness.  Why am I griping all of the time?  Because the world is annoying.  The only things that actually make the world less annoying are things like good music, and good books.

If you want to listen to glam-rock, or any other such shit, fortunately, you can do so without my participation, and I can listen to the latest Charlie Hunter album without bothering anyone who really just wants to watch some stage show performed by a dancin' model whose "voice" is just a computer program called "autotune."

Of course, I have the satisfaction of a sense of history, and the knowledge that actual guitarists will be studying Charlie a century from now.

One way or another, this is what actually matters, and everything else is just to produce it.

And some music.  Obviously, Frank Zappa, "Punky's Whips."  Here's a live performance.