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.