if i were to read All Tomorrow's Parties on my own and not for any course i probably would not pick up on half the messages or underlying ideas of this book. i would read it on the surface and walk away mildly entertained. however, after going to lecture and listening to Professor Ogden, i have taken so much away from this book. Gibson's satire on today's society really hits home, i think. he makes so many soft, indirect criticisms on today's society, that i think everyone should hear. if we keep on going the way we are, we very well could end up in a future similar to the one painted by Gibson. and that is scary. i for one wouldn't want to live in that world. the sad thing is though, that in today's society people aren't taking the time to read works such as this. or if they do, they could just do what i said i would have done if not in this course and read it for pure entertainment. this causes the message of the satire to get lost. and what i think is especially sad about this is if a high-budget movie were to be made of this movie, millions of people would see it and instantly pick up on the satire (people are always searching for hidden meanings in movies. more so than books i think). i hate that we are so technologically oriented today that a movie would be able to affect more people than a book...but that is the reality of fiction today.

Prophetic Fiction

The idea of prophecy in fiction was mentioned in lecture and there are examples of it in a few of our assigned readings. Vancouver Short Stories begins with The Prophetess which introduces the idea of the possibility of prophecy in regards to an Indian wild woman/oracle who predicted the Vancouver fire. The real teen violence that is escalating in the Vancouver area that was mentioned on the course fictionandreality blog and as was pointed out by Dr. Ogden in lecture, matches Coupland's vision in Hey Nostradamus!. All Tomorrows Parties is also presenting a prophetic vision of the future in regards to the technocratic consumer society model that the majority of the planet is emulating. The three English writers consisting of Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, and H.G. Wells are also extremely prophetic in regards to both the utopic and dystopic descriptions of the future. These writers all posited visions of the future that have all manifested themselves in a number of ways and frames the idea of the various prophetic truths that can be found in a work of fiction.

Color in Fiction

Margaret Avison uses a lot of color is her poems. Pauline Johnson also introduces color to describe the landscape of Vancouver. Color evokes emotions, feelings and imagery. Color has a subjective perspective. There are different shades of each color and each person sees color in a different light. The popular colors people can easily identity like red, blue, yellow, green, but when the colors start to blend together, more complex colors are formed and people have different opinions on what they are called. To one person it could be turquoise but to another it could be aqua-marine. But is it the name of the color or the color itself that provokes an image. If so how do you show a color is writing? What about a person who is color blind. How does color look to them? Some colors will look right but other colors will all blend together. Color is a great way to describe something and connect the reader to imagery, but I think all the senses should be used to truly convey the full image.

for some reason, the part of Hey Nostradamus! that just sticks in my mind is the part in which Reg tells his son Jason that he is a murderer, even though as the reader percieves it, Jason is a hero. Upon reading this the reader flares up against Reg, because it appears so obvious that Jason didn't kill the shooter out of malice or a will to kill some one, he did it to protect all of his innocent classmates. i completely agree with that, i don't believe Jason is a 'murderer,' but if you stop to think, as far as everything that Reg believes, and what he holds to be true, he is correct in the way in which he labels his son. to me this goes back to the discussion we had in tutorial about what truth is. in both different sets of views or ideals (those of the reader/Jason vs. those of Reg) there is a truth to each respective side. the problem is that those two truths are in conflict and that there is no way to say whose truth has more validity. does this make all truth subjective? there obviously are some subjective truths in the world, actual facts, but a lot of the content of this course have led me to believe that the big truths out there, the moral truths,have to be looked at subjectively and relatively. but when you start looking at truths relatively, everything sort of starts to lose meaning. you need to have some basis of comparison if everything is relative, but if everything is defined in it's relation to other things you can't do that. ahhhh. i don't think i'm even talking about what i started talking about anymore. basically what i was going for was that if truth and thereby reality are subjective can there be a point in searching out truth and separating from fiction?

reminder

i really feel like All Tomorrow's Parties encapsulates the theme of this blog. the whole book is full of things that cross the border between what is real and what isn't. stuff like Rei Toei, you can't really ever be sure whether or not she is is real or not. it forces the reader to step back and reanalyze his or her world. what things are really real? things that we take to be true often times are not, and vice versa. a lot of ideas and information that we are fed are things that are fabricated, while at the same time we don't receive a lot of information we should. like stuff about wars and genocides. they are often given minimal news coverage and when they are reported pictures and descriptions of the actual horror are omitted. i feel like lots of times we don't even think about this, despite the fact that it is so pervasive in today's technological society. books like this are such a good reminder that we should be scrutinizing our surroundings and the information that we are given.

"All Tomorrow's [Simulations]"

Rei Toei, a character from William Gibson's novel, "All Tomorrow's Parties", can be described as a simulation. She is something that pretends to be or represents something else, which is a beautiful woman. Unfortunately, Rei Toei is completely false and only represented through a simulation, for example the silver canister Laney gives to Rydell creates this depiction of Rei Toei. Simulations are also a construct that can be recognized throughout the novel. Silencio, with his headset that connects him to a field of data, allows him to enter a simulation of an individual’s safety deposit box and its inner contents. Also, the Lucky Dragon, with its mass of television screens that connect it to Lucky Dragons world wide, creates a simulation of a different place/country, just by watching these screens. Another representation of a simulation would be when Rydell and Laney enter the field of code and visit abstract beings, such as the Rooster. They are actually conversing with simulations of code that represent the real, not an actual real human form.

"All Tomorrow's Parties", really emphasized the combination of the real with the false. Since technology has taken over, and everyone in this novel is driven by it, they have lost site of what is true and replaced it with false simulations of things that used to be real. Basically, truth is lost in a sea of endless data that produces simulations that are false representations of the truth. As you can see, this is how Gibson combines fiction, or false simulations, and truth.

Nodes

The concept of nodes is well known. For example, the nodal system of the people you know continuously grows and becomes more complex. Firstly you have your family, then the people you meet in elementary school, high school, and then university. Then you met your friend’s friends and so on. The number of nodes continuously increases with no end in sight.
In lecture, Professor Ogden described how William Gibson uses a complex nodal system with his characters in his novel. Each chapter starts out fragmented with a set of characters, but as the plot develops the characters interact with each other and connections between the characters are made. In the end all the characters are linked together through one another.

Gibson's Satire

William Gibson uses satire in All Tomorrow's Parties. According to Professor Ogden's lecture, satire is defined as the emendation of vices, strategic placement of characteristic features in an artistic setting to reveal their dangers or absurdities. I like novels with satire because they do not force ideals or beliefs on the reader. Instead they allow the reader to see the extremes of certain cases and decide for themselves what they believe in. It is an informative type of writing that allows you to form your own opinions, opinions that you can more strongly stand behind.

"The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth — it is the truth which conceals that there is none. The simulacrum is true."
Jean Baudrillard, Selected Writings, ed Mark Poster. Stanford University Press, 1998, pp.166-184.

The simulacra is defined as something that is 'an effigy, image, or representation'. Personally, I thought that this topic was very comparable, to ideas in William Gibson's "All Tomorrow's Parties". Basically, a simulacra could be compared to the character Rei Toei in the novel. Rei Toei is the clone of a non-existent model that, as described at the end, is cloned and re-created all over the world by the nanotechnology of the Lucky Dragon. Rei Toei is a purely abstract form. She does not exist at all and was created to fall in love with.
Simulacra are found in many other places in the novel; for example, the false babies, the inner decor of places, nanotechnology, etc. These false representations have been over done and over used that the originals have been forgotten. The false babies have become more popular than the actual living; replicas of the old are overtaking the new and real.
This novel definitely draws lines between the fictional and the truth; however, it seems to draw on the fictional representations intently, forgetting the real. In the futuristic dystopia, which William Gibson creates, the world is transfixed and run through the simulations and simulacra of the new age. The truth does not matter anymore, because the truth is seen as something that is old and has lost its relevance, due to the constant creation of past simulacra, its value is lost. For example, the decor of buildings that is supposed to simulate old 1940 decor is hard to distinguish because no one knows what it looks like anymore because it has been replicated and simulated and changed so many times.
William Gibson's novel really affected my perception of the reality and false reality. If the world did come to be a place like the one described in Gibson's novel, a place suppressed by technology, would it be the same? Would love, friendship, and family have a place in this world run by data and computers? The world depicted in this novel is very fictional, at this time; however I think that Gibson creates this mess of a world to allow society now to see that technology can overtake the world and cause the value of important things to be lost, like Laney's mind, which is solely driven to finding Harwood.
I personally hope that simulacra's will not take over our world and falsify creation. Truth cannot be lost and embodied by false depictions of the real, because if this happens personalities are wiped away and everything becomes lost in this sea of code we view as the Walled City. Gibson definitely caught my attention through his novel. So is a simulacra real, is this true? I don't think so.

layers of non-truths

so, in light of the fact that we're reading hey nostradumus! and there's a school shooting in the book, i thought i would take a look at the columbine shooting, and see if i could find two different representations of it. like, if there were conspiracy sites about it that offer different information and/or pictures of the event. while searching the internet i found a webpage (http://www.hardylaw.net/Truth_About_Bowling.html) that doesn't directly talk about the shootings, it goes through and proves why michael moore's documentary (bowling for columbine) was really more of a fabrication than an actual documentary. this caught my attention because people, i included, had watching this movie thinking that they were learning real facts about the causes of and things that contributed to the massacre. but, if david hardy is to be believed, it appears that everyone was just being fed more lies. moore took sections from varying points of interveiws and strung them together to make them appear as one coherent connected paragraph or idea. an idea that served his purpose and helped prove his point. he even combines lines from different interviews to do this. at one point in the movie one of these quotes was from an interview with charleton heston a year after the shooting and heston wasn't even talking about the shooting. throughout what hardy says there are countless more exapmles of ways in which moore intentionally misleads the audience and creates fasle information so that viewers will take his side of things.
i just thought it was so interesting that even one of the alternative sources for information on this subject, one that seems credible, might just be something else that feeds us propaganda. now i really want to look into what hardy says to find out if it's true.
where do you learn real things anymore???

TRUTH. How much of the truth do we actually want to know?

In The Innocent Traveller by Ethel Wilson, the character Topaz did not know a lot about the real world and about all of its hidden truths, but she did have a very enjoyable life. If she were to know about all of the evil in the real world would her life and view of the world be the same? The answer is a definitive NO. Her life was a bit distorted in that she never did realize how the world around her really was, but if she were to learn the truth about how much evil and pessimism was really in the world she would not have been the same person. Her "innocence" was like a shield from all the negativity in the world and left her unharmed. The amount of truth she knew which may be very little, was the perfect amount for her type of personality.

In Hey Nostradamus! by Douglas Coupland, after the shooting, Cheryl's parents do not want to know the real truth about the shooting or any part of the truth, the just wanted a scapegoat. They wanted someone to blame and direct their anger towards. They did not bother to question the media reports that accused Jason, their daughters boyfriend and hidden husband, to be the mastermind behind the entire shooting. They were satisfied with the truth that was fed to them by the media and blamed Jason immediately.

SO there is the truth and the "truth". I believe many people are just satisfied with the "truth" the stuff that makes their own lives easier.

The Nature of Reality: Three Positions

This site http://www.chemistrycoach.com/nature_of_reality.htm contains perspectives on the nature of reality from writers of fiction, scientists, and philosophers. This same idea can be applied to the four positions of perceived reality in the novel Hey Nostradamus! The four characters all have different experiences, reactions, and thoughts about the same event which is similar to the above website which contains very different perspectives of reality that are tied to the perceivers point of reference. Here is an example from one of our course writers William Gibson in regards to speculative fiction"Anyone who thinks science fiction is about the future is being naive. Science fiction doesn't predict the future; it determines it, colonizes it, preprograms it in the image of the present." In other words speculative fiction is a reflection of the present not some unknowable future reality. This site contains perspectives on the nature of truth http://www.chemistrycoach.com/truth.htm#TRUTH.

Truth Found In "Hey Nostradamus!"

"Hey Nostradamus!" written by Douglas Coupland, begins with one character account of her life and a tragic incident, a high school shooting. Cheryl happened to be in the cafeteria the day the shooting occurred, obtaining a first person account of the events which unfolded. Witnessing teenagers being killed in cold blood, for no apparent reason, just because the killers were unhappy, depressed, or had never fit in. Cheryl lived in every hour, minute, and second of this massacre. Being their, first hand gave her a real life, play-by-play, on the action that occurred within the cafeteria walls.
Is this account the truth? Does Cheryl manipulate information to fit her own individual view? Perhaps she does, because she is in the same room as many other teens who probably, if asked what they saw, would tell very different stories. Is it the shock that creates these fictional truths? Or, are the teenagers just interested in creating a larger shock factor to the public?

Shock does play a large part in the fiction that is created in situations where people are physically, mentally, and emotionally strained; however, I do not think many people would want to create more shock than necessary, due to the immense tragedy that they were forced to watch. Personally, I think that Cheryl does give a pretty general account of the attacks. Of course she probably misses some things other people may have witnessed, but by being in the middle of the cafeteria, she has a very broad, almost camera panning type view. Also, when Cheryl gives her account, she blatantly states that, she "can discuss the killings with the detachment I have from being in this new place" (14). Since Cheryl has passed away, it almost seems that she is giving an omniscient account of her memories from this day. Personally, I think that her being able to be detached, and stand back and look at this day with a different perspective, allows more truth to be told through Cheryl.
Tying Jason, Cheryl's husband, with his own unique account of the shootings into this thought, I can see that each person has a different view, mostly based on their whereabouts during the shooting, but since Cheryl has passed away, her account does not seem to hold as much emotion as Jason's does. Jason rushed into the cafeteria, after passing many fallen school members, like "Layla Warner...in a disjointed heap by the trophy case", to witness his wife murdered (57).
Jason viewed the cafeteria near the end of the killings. He never saw a person shot and killed in the school. He only viewed the product of the horrific scene, created by the three gunmen. Yes, he did kill one of the gunmen; however, Jason's account does differ significantly from Cheryl's. Cheryl was inside the cafeteria, but Jason shows less connection to the shootings and his surrounding environment, as he sits under the middle cafeteria table, after the gunmen have been killed, and holds his lifeless wife in his arms. Yes, Jason's account of the scene is valid, relating to what happened after the three gunmen were killed, and a short time before; however, Jason seems more focused on Cheryl than anything else. When reading Cheryl's account, it is evident that she pays much more attention to the details. Like when "Mark Something, came tottering in, his chest red and purple from what looked like really bad makeup...[and fell] like a bag of gym equipment" to the floor (14). There is a significant amount of detail shown in her memory recollection, which might be because she is disconnected from the living realm of the world.

Which account should be taken as truth then? How do we decide and differ? Personally, I think that both of these accounts are valid; however, since Cheryl was in the cafeteria the entire time, she expierenced more, therfore, she has a better idea of what actually happened.

A collection of essays by Mark Twain

This collection of essays at http://users.telerama.com/~joseph/wman.html is full of questions and answers about the varying concepts of truth and the formation of belief. Here is an example "I told you that there are none but temporary Truth-Seekers; that a permanent one is a human impossibility; that as soon as the seeker finds what he is thoroughly convinced is the Truth, he seeks no further, but gives the rest of his days to hunting junk to patch it and caulk it and prop it with, and make it weather proof and keep it from caving in on him. Hence the Presbyterian remains a Presbyterian, the Mohammedan a Mohammedan, the Spiritualist a Spiritualist, the Democrat a Democrat, the Republican a Republican, the Monarchist a Monarchist; and if the humble, earnest, and sincere Seeker after Truth should find it in the proposition that the moon is made of green cheese nothing could ever budge him from that position; for he is nothing but an automatic machine, and must obey the laws of his construction." This comment by Mark Twain can be applied to particular characters in Hey Nostradamus! For example, the Youth Alive members collectively held truths overshadowed and negated certain elements of the faith that they so staunchly espoused such as forgiveness, charity, and judgement. The same can be said for Reg whose strict adherence to the truth as he saw it was diametrically opposed to the very tenets he was upholding and in the process when adhering to a belief system or truth one can alienate oneself just as Reg did. Ascribing to an absolute truth has the effect of negating all other possibilities, leads to dogmatic thinking, and conflict. The majority of familial, personal relationship, academic, and global conflict is a derivative of this idea that Twain posits. I think?

Truth in a lab coat

The men of science, Darwin, Einstein, and Freud personify the idea that the legitimizing of truth resides in those who wear a lab coat. These authorized theories are collectively thought of as truth, especially within the hallowed halls of academia. I find this to be an interesting fact as all three of these theorists rely on methods a writer of fiction or a dare I say it a conspiracist might employ such as observation, speculation, imagination, conjecture, hypothesis, thought experiments, induction, and in Freud's case themes in Greek tragedy. The processes of the writer and the scientists are similar in that they are posing questions and theorizing about potentialities based on perceived and observed actualities. When juxtaposed the words theory and fiction are more congruous than are theory and fact, or theory and truth. Theory is speculative, as is fiction. Theories are not facts, they are a particular arrangement of facts that are so aligned as to the whimsy of the theorist, which is similar to the process involved in the production of fiction. If potential purveyors of truth wish to be taken seriously, the lab coat is the necessary accessory.

What defines truth?

Truth, what is it?

The dictionary states that truth is "the true or actual state of a matter"; however, when we obtain a said 'truth' from a newspaper article, television broadcast, or magazine, how are we to be sure it is the definite actualities of the event? Several news broadcasts discriminate, leave out important information, are extremely biased, and can create information for a theatrical response from their viewers. While watching tonight's nightly broadcast, are you sure you are getting the full story with all the relevant information and facts? The truth is...your not. What gives these people the right to feed information into society without telling the whole story? Perhaps I cannot blame the news broadcasters, producers, etc.; however, today people need to be extremely careful when deciding what to believe. As humans, should we not want the world to understand earth shaking incidents?
Evidently, it seems that Hollywood has found its way into the news world and created a more candid version that is exciting and contains suspense, but is also untrue. Then again, what do many people in society feed off of?Celebrity gossip runs the life of many tabloid mongers. Walking into a grocery store or standing in line at a gas station, one can not help but look at the magazines with their fluorescent headlines using words like 'sex, drugs, and murder' to catch interest. Is this fair? That information published in these magazines is utter garbage? What happened to humans wanting to tell the truth? Gossip in these magazines is just another incident where fiction overshadows the truth. Flipping through these issues and reading the text is just another form of news that lies to its readers. Also, how degrading is this for the people who are actually written about within these pages? Oh, but we don't have to worry about them they are multi-millionaires, remember? How vile has the human race become that lies sell more than truth? Then again, how can we discern between truth and fiction anymore?
Personally, I find it disgusting how the truth can be hidden and manipulated just to make it not look as boring? What sells more, a story about a celebrity having a child or a story about said celebrity having an illegitimate child along with a love affair on the side? You do the math! It is just the same in the news. Who wants to hear about soldiers being sent to the Middle East for no reason? No, there must be a search for nuclear warheads that have not been found, yes that's it, that will help sales and keep people reading!
How sad have we as humans become? Are we really that dull that we need excitement in every bit of news we read? I would like to say no, but evidence shows that we are a little too into the fiction we are fed.
I guess this leaves me back at my original question, 'what defines truth?’ I find it hard to decide what does, do you?

Moon Landing?

In the late 50's, the Russian satellite Sputnik, launched humanity into the Space Age. The Cold War competition between the ideological systems of capitalism and communism involving the United States of America and Russia created a space race intent on sending humans to the moon. Whoever arrived first could claim superiority thereby adding legitimacy to the ideology and system of government. By juxtaposing certain facts of the American Apollo missions of the late 60's early 70's with the present Space Shuttle program there is a compelling argument for the existence of a collectively held truth being in fact a fiction. Almost 4 decades ago the Apollo program posited astronauts 375000 kilometers from the earths surface into lunar orbit 14 times of which 6 of these excursions landed astronauts onto the lunar surface once with a 500 pound jeep. Each time returning the astronauts safely to earth in an aluminum pod that has a surface thickness of only 1 centimeter. Conversely, the Space Shuttle program has posited astronauts only 380 kilometers from the earths surface into orbit and in the process 14 astronauts have lost their lives in 2 seperate accidents. Could the fictional film Capricorn One about a faked moon landing really be based on truth? Incidentally, Peter Hyams who before writing and directing the film had a history as a war correspondent during the Vietnam War and also as a documentary filmaker, both of which are occupations that lay claim to reporting and representing the truth. Was this film really a former reporters attempt to wrap his unbelievable true story within the bounds of fiction?