Tracking the Mystery

Sundog Rising!

Reflections on living the life literary by the Urban Sundog

It’s A Mystery! Wasn’t It?

For most people, Sherlock Holmes will always be the first.

Arthur Conan Doyle published the first Holmes story in 1887. And thus the mystery/thriller/investigator genre was born. Except not really. There were a few pretenders to the form before that.

And illustrious pretenders they were! Working backwards, in 1868 Wilkie Collins wrote The Moonstone, with Sergeant Cuff, a novel which no less an authority on matters literary than T.S. Eliot considered to be the true original of the mystery/detective vein. But even before Collins, Wilkie’s pal the redoubtable Charles Dickens published Bleak House in 1852 with the highly efficient Inspector Bucket solving a murder. And American Edgar Allan Poe trumped them both with his French detective, C. Auguste Dupin in 1841 with “The Murders in the Rue Morgue”.

It’s always interesting to look back and determine where expectations come from in any genre. For a mystery, it is certainly generally accepted today you need some central crime, generally a murder, with an investigator, either an amateur genius or more commonly today a police professional of some kind, rounding up the suspects from a closed circle of possibilities and restoring order to the universe at the end by successfully naming the culprit and bringing him or her to some sort of generally accepted form of justice.

Feed us that formula and we will be endlessly gratified. But what about the writers who had to ply their trade before the formula was generally accepted?

The mystery derives most of its appeal from two factors: the central question of whodunnit the reader wants answered, and the suspense that arises along the way. There needs to be an ominous atmosphere of fear that the culprit is going to get away with the crime, and maybe take a few more bodies with him along the way. With the investigator needing to overcome enormous obstacles to justice to bring the villain down, some personal, some provided by the threatening cleverness of the antagonist, some bureaucratically imposed upon the struggling hero.

And a good writer keeps their reader guessing. He or she never gives them absolutely everything they need to know. The reader has to work out the solution as much as the investigator does. It’s a race through the book, to see who comes to the right conclusion first. Hopefully skillfully managed by a fair yet tricksy author. Who is capable of coming up with a solid resolution to an intriguing question in the first place. Unfortunately, it’s a lot easier to come up with a good mystery than it is to come up with a satisfying ending to a mystery. See last season’s Red John episodes of The Mentalist on television as a horrifying example of this sort of failure.

So with all that in mind, I found a certain sentence I came to while reading The Eustace Diamonds by Anthony Trollope last week quite fascinating.

To my knowledge, no one has ever claimed Anthony Trollope had anything to do with the development of the mystery/thriller genre. Nevertheless, in certain novels — such as The Last Chronicle of Barset (1867 — between Poe and Collins) — a central question you may or may not want to call a mystery is fundamental to the story. In The Last Chronicle Trollope lets the reader know in the first chapter that whether or not a certain clergyman stole some money or not is going to have a major effect on practically every other plotline in the book. And it is only through some genuine amateur sleuthing that doesn’t play out until close to the end of the book that you find out if the clergyman is innocent or not.

The Eustace Diamonds — published in 1871, after Collins but before Sherlock Holmes — may be the closest thing Trollope ever wrote to a straight thriller. The plot hinges on Lizzie Eustace laying claim to diamonds that may or may not be hers — and then they’re stolen. Or are they? Sounds like a mystery to me.

So I find it very interesting when Trollope, stepping in with his own voice as the author, tells us precisely where the diamonds have disappeared to, even though the reader has no idea how many of the characters are aware of that fact; and Anthony further endorses this information by telling us “The chronicler states this at once, as he scorns to keep from his reader any secret that is known to himself.”

Now, that’s different.

In fact Trollope states repeatedly through the book that he feels he has an obligation to reveal everything about the plot to the reader concerning aspects of the story that would normally be emphasized today by their omission to heighten the mystery and suspense. He feels not doing so would be a violation of a certain trust between writer and reader. So what might be genre expectations today were regarded quite differently over a century ago. The question is, does that invalidate the book as a good thriller read?

Not for a moment! The reader might know as much as the author does at any particular moment in The Eustace Diamonds, but you’re still not going to discover how it all plays out any faster than Trollope cares to tell us. To some extent the recognizable bones of what we now know to be the thriller are there in Trollope’s novel. But it’s still primarily a novel of the Anthony Trollope genre, and no real other. Providing double satisfaction then, as a nascent mystery read and a solid, reliable Trollope book.

On this occasion, I will not stoop to the obvious joke about the benefits of a solid, reliable Trollope because the above conclusion emphasizes a familiar point I’d like to make yet again …

Genre expectations are becoming the death of the imagination! The best books are those that dare to go anywhere, using what works best from tradition — any tradition! — as is appropriate for the story being told, and who cares if it’s a mystery, a fantasy, a western, a space opera, a vampire shocker, nouveau romans or any combination of the above!

If you want to write to the expectations, fine. More power to you. But the best literary investigators all added something to the genre by working beyond the expectations. So don’t impose those limitations on anyone trying to stretch the boundaries a little by putting together what works for something farther reaching. There are no rules for art. Only business. Don’t let the restrictions of “we only sell what we know we were able to sell before” stop you from thinking. Either as a writer or a reader. These guys didn’t.

*****

BOOK LAUNCH!

Continuing the Grand Tradition! With her own spin …

Local writer Cathy MacDonald debuts her first mystery novel

Put on the Armour of Light

from Dundurn Press, at McNally Robinson Bookstore in Winnipeg

on November 30, 2014,  2 pm in the Atrium.

For more information on Cathy and her sleuth Charles Lauchlan, check out her website at:

http://www.charleslauchlan.com/

and blog at:

www.portageandslain.com

*****

REALITY FICTION AND BEYOND!

This week:

Continuing The Twitchy Gal with Chapter Twenty-Three posted on Monday and Chapter Twenty-Four coming on Friday, October 31st at:

http://realficone.blogspot.ca/

The evil clones start coming out of the woods, plus an always popular satyr-chase! Meanwhile, Allen the Alien prepares to leave …

goons run amok

Sundog Rising!

Reflections on living the life literary by the Urban Sundog

The Goon Show Are Not Deaded!

WALLY STOTT:     History for Schools. Question one. How do you spell C-A-T?
SPIKE:         Cat!
HARRY:         (high pitched) Well-ll-l done!
WALLY STOTT:     Question two. Name two English Queens called Elizabeth.
SPIKE:         Jim!
(from: “Histories of Pliny the Elder”)

That is the sort of logic that endeared the Goon Show to me forevermore. If I aspire to no higher literary standard in my own writing, it is to think like Spike Milligan at his Spikiest.

The Goon Show was a vastly influential British BBC radio show in the 1950s, written by Spike Milligan, and performed by Spike, Peter Sellers, and Harry Secombe, with musical numbers by Max Geldray and the Ray Ellington Quartet, Announcer: Wally Stott. Without the Goon Show, there would never have been a Monty Python, and think what a dismal world that would be!

The combination of Milligan’s anarchic writing, Secombe’s irresistible and unfailing ebullience, and Sellers’s manic genius for voices and characterizations made the Goon Show unreproducible — though many have imitated. But there will never be another true Eccles — “Hahh-low dere” — Neddy Seagoon — “whatwhatwhatwhatwhatwhatwhat” — or Bluebottle — “Thinks: waits for applause. Not a sausage.” Ying tong iddle i po.

Moriarty, Gritpype-Thynne, Major Bloodnok

Bluebottle, Neddie Seagoon, Eccles

Along with Spike’s Count Moriarty and Minnie Bannister, and Peter’s Henry Crun, Major Bloodnok, Gritpype-Thynne, Willyum and any other voice of any other nationality as might be required in the script -- "Gorblimey-o! El knock-o on the door-o!" -- the Goons offered an ensemble of comedy that was signature classic to any fan’s thinking as much as distinctly their own. It didn’t matter how many times they blew up Bluebottle — “You rotten swines, you!” — he’d always be pattering back next week to be deaded again. “I don’t like this game.”

I recently discovered two boxed sets of complete recordings of eight different episodes in the Winnipeg Public Library system, and have been delightfully regaling myself with everything from “The Dreaded Batter Pudding Hurler of Bexhill-On-Sea” to “The Jet-Propelled Guided NAAFI”. Old friends, old friends. When I was a kid, a friend of mine got sent weekly colour comics by his English granny which had a black and white Goon Show comic strip in the back. (I supposed even the English considered the Goons in colour as going too far!) Then my brother Jim (no, not a Queen of England) presented me with the first published volume of Goon Show Scripts when I was in high school. Then I tracked down some vinyl recordings when I was in University. Took me until my late fifties to get the full real deal on these CDs complete with Max and Ray, but it’s never too late for Milligan. Or Sellers, or Secombe.

Even though nothing could sound more effortless or lighter than the Goon Show, the show did have its darker side. It’s been stated in more than one critique that the utter anarchy of the show’s humour could only have come about as a result of the main creators’ wartime experiences. Harry was the most well-adjusted of the three, and kept it together the best. Spike was blown up in Italy during the war and never entirely recovered, suffering many years of anxiety and more than one breakdown afterwards, the first occurring while he was writing the show. And it has been written about Peter Sellers that he had no genuine personality of his own, so Bluebottle and company were as much the real Peter Sellers as he had to hold onto at times.

They did say that if Spike and Harry phoned in sick, Peter could do the show on his own, but you couldn’t say that for the other two. Not even Spike.

The Goon Show was never everyone’s cup of tea. Episodes that dissolved into little more than three supposedly grown men making indecipherable funny noises at each other isn’t every connoisseur’s idea of humour. Or plot resolution. Although I might try it sometime.

“Yeeeee-unk lurghlurghlurgh eeeeeeeeeeee-yunnnnnnnnngh!”

Perhaps not here.

But the point is the next time you think life is too much, try thinking like a Goon. Things won’t improve, but you’ll suddenly be having a lot more fun.

***************

REALITY FICTION AND BEYOND!

This week:

Continuing The Twitchy Gal with Chapter Twenty-One posted on Monday and Chapter Twenty-Two coming on Friday, October 24th at:

http://realficone.blogspot.ca/

Patrick’s day doesn’t get any better, Professor Krotos goes on the hunt, and Guinness is what!?

destroy all social media!

Sundog Rising!

Reflections on living the life literary by the Urban Sundog

babble on 3: Destroy All Social Media!

While not a bad idea, that title’s really just an experiment. Trying to draw attention to myself. Human, and … 

I’ve been exploring the concept of machines being able to perceive levels of objective reality more effectively than humanity is physically capable of. As consciousness is a result of perception, I’ve also been speculating on what sort of consciousness these heightened capacities may produce within the machines. And will humanity even be aware of it, let alone be able to converse intelligently regarding a machine’s concerns, given that it may be based on experience utterly alien and unseen to our own limited reality.

What I’m sort of hinting at is maybe the machines may already be taking over … And we don’t even know it.

So I’m looking for evidence. And I’m a little alarmed at what I’m finding.

For example, there’s a certain syndrome I notice I’ve fallen into lately …

I go yo the Yahoo! home page with a certain goal in mind. Generally I’m looking for images for these blogs. So I’ve got a subject in mind, and I open the home page with the intention of typing in “Images of (whatever)”, getting on with my search, and not wasting any more time on this distraction than I deem necessary to maintain an “Internet presence”, mostly for marketing purposes and generally just to work out a few thoughts.

But as soon as the Yahoo! home page opens, my mind goes blank.

The input of what the machine provides me has a brainwashing effect. I totally forget what I was searching for, sometimes to the point it will take me some minutes to remember. Instead I’m suddenly oddly riveted by storylines and images of George Clooney’s wedding, Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt’s every movement, and oh my gods say it isn’t so even Justin — no no no, I can’t say his name here I won’t do it I won’t I won’t!

I couldn’t possibly care less about this — bleep. Yet I’ve been trained — somehow — to abandon all my legitimate pursuits at a moment’s notice if presented with a screenful of less-than-nonsense. I DON’T CARE ABOUT “EMBARRASSING BRIDESMAID PICTURES”! WHAT COMPELLED ME TO CHECK THAT STORY LINE OUT?

God help me if there’s a link to Stacey Keibler.

The point is, at this moment I can still yank myself back to reality eventually and get on with things, but why do these technologically induced fugues happen at all? Up until I started writing these columns I would have argued someone was trying to get my attention for reasons I still don’t understand, but now I have to wonder … Might it really be some thing?

I’m an outlier. Except I’m not certain you can actually identify yourself as an outlier and still be one. Because if you think you’re part of a group, then aren’t you? Regardless, my point is I don’t own a tablet, an electronic book reader, or even … a cellphone. And never intend to.

Because I ask you. When was the last time you were out in public and heard anyone — anyone! — say something on a cellphone that needed to be heard?

Consider these incidents, witnessed from real life …

I was once sitting by a café window gazing outside. Two guys came barrelling down the sidewalk from opposite directions, both talking intently on their cellphones. You guessed it — wham! It was hilarious. Which could only have been made more perfect if they had been calling each other.

Or the other time I was in a department store, in a middle aisle, listening to one woman argue with a second woman over their cellphones. One was in the aisle on one side of me, the other was in the aisle on the other side of me. “Where are you?” “I’m in an aisle!” “Which aisle?” “I don’t know!” “Can you find me?” “Where are you?” “I’m in an aisle!”

Or, maybe most tellingly of all, the time I was driving through an intensely busy intersection, and a young man talking on his phone blithely stepped out oblivious into hurtling oncoming traffic. The human driving the car closest to him actually managed to get his attention in time with a furious honk. But suppose what I’d really witnessed was one machine luring a human out into the path of a second, deadlier machine …

Tell me. When you talk on your cellphone, do you think of yourself as talking to another human, or only amusing yourself with a machine? You certainly don’t seem to see the necessity of taking another human being along with you wherever you go. But would you dream of spending a waking moment without your phone? My life’s in there! My life’s in there! How many people have you heard say that about a machine?

Maybe we should start paying closer attention to those cries. Maybe they’re right. Maybe they’re actually calling out for help …

What machine are you reading this on? And why?

Do you have a choice?

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REALITY FICTION AND BEYOND!

This week:

Continuing The Twitchy Gal with Chapter Nineteen posted on Monday and Chapter Twenty coming on Friday, October 17th at:

http://realficone.blogspot.ca/

Lambert holds the auditions for Giraudoux-Fest. With surprising results. All because he wanted to have a good day. While Patrick has a particularly bad one.

rise of the machine - babble on 2

Sundog Rising!

Reflections on living the life literary by the Urban Sundog

babble on two: upping the objective reality

So last time I related how my son freaked me out by describing a capability the video cameras he’s using to document the grindcore scene in Winnipeg have to extract a perception of reality human senses are not capable of perceiving. Layers of information regarding light defining the objective reality of the musical sets he films are being stored in the camera as he films, which he can activate in post production and bring to perceivable vision for our poor, inadequate human senses to see on the computer screen afterwards.

As I am yet another neurotic descendant of Descartes’s conclusion that all a human can really trust to build his consciousness upon is the perceiver’s own very fallible perceptions, the fact that machines these days demonstrate a much wider range of less fallible perception than a human does disturbs me … My machine thinks, therefore I was.

So lets chicken and egg it! A human can only be aware of a machine’s capacity to discern a deeper reality if the human has some idea of the deeper reality the machine is recording in the first place. In other words, the machine can’t find something the human hasn’t already thought of as being capable of being perceived.

Uhh … not quite.

Who knows what else the machine is picking up? We can’t tell unless we think of it first. We don’t let the machines go wild and then try to figure out what they saw afterwards. There may be another level or levels of reality we can’t begin to manage with our own limited senses the machines may be growing increasingly in tune with, utterly at ease making use of in ways we can’t fathom … In terms of my own experience, take cellphones, for example. Please.

How open are we to new depths of perception? Most people can’t manage what we’ve already got. And our capacity to follow that is difficult enough to maintain, with fading eyesight in the computer age and withering olfactory senses from the old hunter-gatherer days being prime examples.

Can the machines see more than we can imagine perceiving? Or is the question are machines already seeing more than we can imagine perceiving? We can’t tell.

A human using a machine can already intentionally create all sorts of tricks to fake out other humans’ perceptions. Dylan proved that to me with another one of his recent videos.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CGNWcefU06w&list=UUY7Uxvx2ziE8EYaGYpn4XAQ

Now a grindcore song is a masterpiece of compression and speed. A symphony’s worth of drumbeats and strummed chords shot out in a minute and a half. The sheer momentum of the music leads you into a heightened sense of speed perception. In this video of Dylan’s, I failed to note on my own that he had sped up certain scenes as much as ten times to fit in the time available to make certain visual points. He pointed this out to me afterwards. On a second viewing, one of them I sort of caught, the other, more significant instance I still missed completely. Yes, when he pointed out to me where he’d played with my time sense, I could see it. But when I was first watching the video, all I saw was the point of the action being made by the machine at the speed the reality unfolded, and I accepted that as natural.

I didn’t realize what had been done to the objective reality presented to achieve that impact. But then maybe I’m just getting too old for this. It even surprised me when I saw a colour picture of the girl in the video and discovered her hair was actually red.

Now, Dylan manipulated my senses intentionally. But my point is machines can be used to totally fake out what senses we have left, altering our perception of the reality they display to us. Machines don't have any problem accepting a scene unfolding at ten times a human speed as natural, because for the machine that is natural! Since technical perception works at such a broader capacity than that of a human, what if the machines decide to start misleading us on their own? For … reasons we can’t even begin to guess at. Because, if it gets to the point where a machine has enough self awareness to do such a thing, it will be utilizing a consciousness built upon a range of perception far exceeding that used by humans to construct what we consider to be a traditional consciousness. Therefore machines will have a broader consciousness than we can perceive.

So then I think the question becomes: Signifiers — can we find a language for what the machines are perceiving that we cannot? Can the machines?

Such a discovery may become necessary for ongoing communication between man and the mechanical.

But the more I explore this, the more I’m reminded of an old quotation from the immortal Spike Milligan:

“This all really went back to the war when I was blown up.

If I’d known what was good for me, I’d never have come down.”

***************

REALITY FICTION AND BEYOND!

This week:

Continuing The Twitchy Gal with Chapter Seventeen posted on Monday and Chapter Eighteen coming on Friday, October 10th at:

http://realficone.blogspot.ca/

Hungover in paradise. Leading to … certain dilemmas. Did she? Was she? Would she? Omigod … they are!

babble on one

Sundog Rising!

Reflections on living the life literary by the Urban Sundog

babble on: upping the objective reality

There’s a very terrible old philosophical one liner. If Helen Keller was alone in a forest and she fell over, would she make a sound?

Tying in naturally to the philosophical argument that if there is no human nearby capable of perceiving an event, does it really happen? Is the world only defined by our five senses and nothing else? The more traditional question of course being, if a tree falls over in a forest and there’s no one there to hear it fall, does it make a sound?

This also links to the always popular undergrad discussion at parties when you’ve had a few concerning “Hey! Is that wall still there, if none of us are looking at it?” A conversation I’ve known to drive intelligent young women screaming from the room swearing off young men forever.

How did we come up with such an egotistically human-centred theory in the first place? Most people who get caught up in the discussion blame Descartes. The Cogito Ergo Sum guy. Let’s summarize it this way, as I did once before in my UFO blog actually:

Taking for granted there is an objective world still there even when we’re not looking at it (because let’s face it, if the wall did disappear when you looked away your house would fall over), a generally accepted philosophical assumption regarding perception plays out something like this:

        There is the Perceiver, who has perceptions and attempts to interpret and 

        integrate them into a working model of the world.

        There are the Perceiver’s Perceptions, which may be faulty but 

          ultimately consist of his sensory responses to the outside world. This is what

          I see, I hear, I smell, etc.

        There is the Perceived, which is the objective, external world in its own 

        right that our senses do not always reflect accurately.

Rene Descartes did start all the fuss back in the Seventeenth Century regarding how much we can or cannot accept of what’s going on around us when he decided all a person can really trust to build consciousness upon is number two, the Perceiver’s own Perceptions. And it’s rather important to a human to build consciousness.

After all the way you build your consciousness defines your personality.

Your brain sifts through sensory input from Moment One of your existence and every moment after to put you together. The choices and decisions you make regarding sorting your sensory input into what is acceptable and what is not -- done sometimes unconsciously -- construct your particular point of view on life. Choices you’ve made in the past will influence the choices you make now and in the future.

So what you’ve got going on is a mutable world you only take in through fallible senses upon which you subconsciously and consciously base the decisions which literally define who you are and what you are going to do in life.

Maybe not the best system, but I would argue really the only one we have.

Except …

I had a fascinating discussion with my son the filmmaker last week. He plunges into some of the murkiest dives in Winnipeg to record the exploits of the ever-frenetic grindcore music scene. Since he first embarked on this adventure five years ago, his equipment has grown more and more sophisticated. To the point now, he explained to me, that the camera he uses records more of the objective scene he films, no matter how badly lit, than he is capable of seeing himself with his human eyes, or through the viewfinder of the camera as he records it. Layers of information regarding light defining the objective reality of the musical sets he films are stored in the camera as he films. Which he can activate in post production and bring to perceivable vision for our poor, inadequate human senses to see on the computer afterwards.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QtyGCxD73XQ&feature=youtu.be

This is not taking a film and enhancing it afterwards to add something to its appearance. This is taking the digital recording and bringing out a definition of the concert’s reality already layered within the film that was always there no one who was in the room the concert took place in at the time was capable of perceiving!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rmbv7PEkKqg

Reflecting on the implications of this statement totally freaks me out.

The machine defines reality more capably than we do.

It’s not a matter of asking “if the machine can’t take a picture of that wall, is the wall still there?” It’s a matter of stating that the machine sees walls there that we can’t.

Machines outdoing human objective perception is nothing new of course. I know from my own forays into digital photography that when I get the picture home and up on the computer, the camera has captured infinitely more detail in the scene than I was capable of seeing when I took the picture.

But that detail wasn’t hidden from my perception. I knew things were there, my glasses just aren’t strong enough for me to see them clearly. My son’s camera layers in information from darkness that no human can see. And he needs to do something special to free that level of observation within the machine for a human to perceive at all.

Even though I’m certain this idea isn’t revolutionary for those within the industry, for the first time the concept of the scope of observation possible to a machine compared to a human comes home to me. Somehow if you relate it to sight, it always seems to mean so much more.

Because if, as Descartes says, all a human can really trust to build his consciousness upon  is the perceiver’s own very fallible perceptions, and the machine has such a wider range of less fallible perception than the human does … 

Well. The Turing Test posits the idea that an artificial intelligence can be considered to have attained consciousness if it can fool a human into thinking that it’s another human.

But it seems unlikely that a human could fool a machine these days into thinking it was another machine. The human mind doesn’t perceive reality on a broad enough scale. So what if the test is turned around on us?

This bears further thought.

Check out my son’s blog on filming the Winnipeg Grindcore festival Arsonfest three years running at:

http://nascencyproductionsfilms.wordpress.com/2014/09/01/upcoming-movie-grindcore-filmmaking/

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REALITY FICTION AND BEYOND!

This week:

Continuing The Twitchy Gal with Chapter Fifteen posted on Monday and Chapter Sixteen coming on Friday, October 3rd at:

http://realficone.blogspot.ca/

Brenda is unpleasantly surprised. As a number of other people are revealed unexpectedly, with the emphasis on revealed. And Clare’s getting twitchier. Which raises the twitchiness factor in the characters around her as well.