muse-lettre: Mink & Mutant Temperamented

In a message dated 2004:02:21 11:24:23 PM, "Clemens" wrote me, askin':

> it must be a hard feeling to rush over the love they cannot sense to
>want to give you. i felt that many of us preached before we learned. but
>from madness your fellows would prefer to learn distance ... what did you
>learn, strange friend, to teach compassion from?
>
> with a non/freaks love,
> clemens.

In a message dated 2004:02:21 02:35:42 PM, BooRad*** quotes:

> Mink
>
> A mink,
> jointless as heat, was
> tip-toeing along
> the edge of the creek,
>
> which was still in its coat of snow,
> yet singing --- I could hear it! ---
> the old song
> of brightness.
>
> It was one of those places,
> turning and twisty,
> that Ruskin might have painted, though
> he didn't. And there were trees
> leaning this way and that,
> seed-beaded
>
> buckthorn mostly, but at the moment
> no bird, the only voice
> that of the covered water --- like a long,
> unknotted thread, it kept
> slipping through. The mink
> had a hunger in him
>
> bigger than his shadow, which was gathered
> like a sheet of darkness under his
> neat feet which were busy
> making dents in the snow. He sniffed
> slowly and thoroughly in all
> four directions, as though
>
> it was a prayer to the whole world, as far
> as he could capture its beautiful
> smells --- the iron of the air, the blood
> of necessity. Maybe, for him, even
> the pink sun fading away to the edge
> of the world had a smell,
>
> of roses, or of terror, who knows
> what his keen nose was
> finding out. For me, it was a gift of the winter
> to see him. Once, like a hot, dark-brown pillar,
> he stood up --- and then he ran forward, and was gone.
> I stood awhile and then walked on
>
> over the white snow: the terrible, gleaming
> loneliness. It took me, I suppose,
> something like six more weeks to reach
> finally a patch of green, I paused so often
> to be glad, and grateful, and even then carefully across
> the vast, deep woods I kept looking back.
>
>
>
> Mary Oliver
> What Do We
Know

http://www.scifi.com/sfw/current/cassutt.html

Persecuting the Mutants

------------------------------------------------------------------------
By Michael Cassutt
------------------------------------------------------------------------

The story is as old as sci-fi itself, from the days of the almost
forgotten A.E. van Vogt's 1940 novel Slan to the feature film X-Men: Mutants will be
shunned. Freaks will be persecuted. Even the most open-minded "normal" humans
will ultimately turn on those who are different.
Like so many sci-fi concepts—flights to the moon, all-seeing computers
and six-lane superhighways—this fantasy has become reality. Over the past few
weeks we have seen the persecution of a small group of humanoids:
I speak of the Jacksons.
Michael Jackson is currently on trial in Santa Barbara County, charged
with child molestation.
His sister, Janet, is on the run, charged in the court of public opinion
with upsetting millions of Super Bowl viewers by allowing part of her costume
to be ripped open during the halftime festivities.
I can't address the truth of the case against Michael Jackson. That's now
a legal matter.
But I can look back at Michael Jackson's public career 30 years ago, when
he was the youngest and cutest member of the Jackson 5 group, or 20 years
ago, when five different singles from the Thriller album became hits, and see a
human being whose entire life has been lived in an environment so unreal, so
isolated, so indulged, so "handled," so artificial that he might has well have
been raised on Mars.
You can say the same thing for his sister.
We created these mutants, and now, of course, we're turning on them. And
all it took was a wardrobe malfunction at a football game.

The practice of standards and practices

I have conflicting views about censorship. On one hand, I'm a writer, and
I revel in the freedom to write freely about sex, politics and violence in
the service of a story.
On the other hand, I am acutely aware of the need to keep your audience
in mind, to engage them without causing them to change channels. You see, I
used to be a network television "censor." I was an editor in the program
practices department for CBS in the early 1980s. (ABC called its in-house censors
"standards and practices," which is probably the best-known title.) I was one of a
fairly large staff of people who read every script produced for CBS in its
prime-time series, made-for-TV movies and miniseries, children's programs,
daytime soaps and game shows.
I certainly had no personal agenda. If anything, I was amused by some of
the "standards" I had to apply. (In fact, I never met anyone in the program
practices staff who relished telling writers no.)
A decade after I left program practices, the department's staff had been
cut in half and most of its functions parceled out to program executives. This
was partly a result of financial cuts, and partly a result of "relaxed"
standards.
Are we better off? The fragmentation of the television market, and the
resulting lack of "censorship," has made it possible for truly adult drama such
as The Sopranos to be produced and find an audience.
But it has also cost us those "shared experiences" I wrote about in
Science Fiction Weekly #344 ("The Value of Shared Experience").
And there are practical, financial penalties. One well-known and talented
sci-fi producer filmed a whole season of his series for a pay cable
outlet—episodes replete with frequent use of the F-bomb as well as nudity.
Fine. Except that he neglected to shoot alternate versions of these
scenes in which dialogue did not contain the four-letter words and the actresses
were covered up.
Computer-based editing systems can do wonders, but they're not magic
wands. There is no way to cut the "offending" material without destroying the
scenes.
Which means that there is no American broadcast aftermarket for this
series. Now, maybe that market no longer exists (see last month's column, "The
Aftermarket", in fact), but I can't help thinking that it would be better for all
concerned if the producer or his studio had had a memo from a broadcast
standards editor asking them to shoot "coverage" ...

Sci-fi's taboo moments are memorable

Sci-fi used to be dangerous. The genre allowed writers to address taboo
subjects without offending the same General Public that now wants Janet Jackson
and MTV punished.
In the 1950s, Rod Serling turned from writing acclaimed contemporary
dramas to The Twilight Zone precisely for this reason.
The original Star Trek also managed to touch on such hot-button or
third-rail issues as racism—when white male Kirk kissed African-American female
Uhura, it was daring. (What would have happened if they'd had a "wardrobe
malfunction"? Nothing, of course. Recorded entertainment is subject to restrictions
that don't apply to live, or should I say "live," programming like The Super
Bowl.)
In bookstores right now you can find a "new" novel by Robert A. Heinlein
titled—For Us, the Living—. It was actually written in 1938, before Heinlein
commenced his career as the best and most influential sci-fi writer of the age.
The novel is not an artistic success—it is a series of lectures, what
author, editor and critic Gardner Dozois used to describe as "tours of futuristic
gasworks and other wonders." But it is fascinating, anyway. Sexual freedom,
radical economic systems, new methods of parenting, they're all here, embedded
in a work that completely fails as fiction.
Heinlein learned better: Within two years he had developed into a
talented storyteller and was the most popular and highest-paid writer in the sci-fi
pulps. He later broke into mainstream slick magazines, hardcover books and
television.
There he continued to promote the same dangerous ideas, especially in his
classic novel, Stranger in a Strange Land—about a human raised on Mars who
comes to Earth, shakes people up (by having deliberate wardrobe malfunctions,
among other radical activities) and is martyred.
I don't believe that dangerous ideas are valuable simply because they're
dangerous, but I like to be challenged. I like a paradigm shift, a new way of
looking at things.
That's what sci-fi is suppose to give us.
The most controversial moment I can recall from any televised sci-fi I've
seen over the past few years is the unduly prolonged "decontamination" scene
involving T'Pol and Archer on Enterprise two seasons back. Some fans were
outraged, for the same reason people were upset by Janet Jackson: It's not the
nudity they object to, it's the cynical nature of its presentation.
Suppose it had been Phlox, the alien doctor, naked, rubbing ointment on
Archer?
Now, there's a real sci-fi moment.

------------------------------------------------------------------------
Since leaving the ranks of network censors, Michael Cassutt has published 11
books (most recently Tango Midnight, a novel), a hundred pieces of short
fiction and non-fiction and 60 television scripts.
-----------------------------------------

--- º°`°º ø,¸¸,ø º°`°º ø,¸¸,ø º°`°º ø,¸¸,ø º°`°º º°`°º ø,¸~->

Hanuman "Mister Sinister" Zhang, Sloth-Style Gungfu Typist
- "the sloth is a chinese poet upsidedown" --- Jack Kerouac {1922-69}

"We don't read & write poetry because it's cute. We read & write poetry
because we are members of the human race. & the human race is filled with passion.
& medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits & necessary
to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay
alive for." - Robin Williams, _Dead Poet's Society_

"Chance is the inner rhythm of the world, & the soul of poetry." - Miguel de
Unamuno

"One thing foreigners, computers, & poets have in common
is that they make unexpected linguistic associations." --- Jasia Reichardt

"There is no reason for the poet to be limited to words, & in fact the
poet is most poetic when inventing languages. Hence the concept of the poet as
'language designer'." --- O. B. Hardison, Jr.

"La poésie date d' aujour d'hui." (Poetry dates from today)
"La poésie est en jeu." (Poetry is in play)
--- Blaise Cendrars