The Terrible Simplifiers

"The lack of a correspondence between abstraction and reality is all the more significant, since the real world is profoundly complex and contingent and an abstraction is inevitably simple. The terrible simplifiers who love abstractions cannot stand conditions and conventions muddling their perfect, clear theory. If life does not fit the theory, then it is life that has gone awry and must be made to fit. The terrible simplifiers are always perfectly willing, then, to embrace ideological crusades, violence and upheaval to better realise their 'principles'...."
from Eunomia


The promise of violence always follows in the wake of the terrible simplifiers, but the violence to the soul actually occurs at the outset, and sets the stage for the physical violence or coercion. The physical violence is a consequence of the re-barbarization that goes hand in hand with the simplification which sanctions the violence by encouraging man to be less than he is.
from One Cosmos

All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace

by Richard Brautigan

I'd like to think (and
the sooner the better!)
of a cybernetic meadow
where mammals and computers
live together in mutually
programming harmony
like pure water
touching clear sky.

I like to think
(right now, please!)
of a cybernetic forest
filled with pines and electronics
where deer stroll peacefully
past computers
as if they were flowers
with spinning blossoms.

I like to think
(it has to be!)
of a cybernetic ecology
where we are free of our labors
and joined back to nature,
returned to our mammal brothers and sisters,
and all watched over
by machines of loving grace.

Reprinted in The Pill versus The Springhill Mine
Disaster, copyright 1968 by Richard Brautigan.
Buy Richard Brautigan's Trout Fishing in America, The Pill versus The Springhill Mine Disaster, and In Watermelon Sugar

fractal drama

Andrew Johnston's cogent analysis of American TV Drama uses the series Mad Men as an example of a new trend in the long form drama.

His thoughts, influenced by Michael Chabon’s collection of critical essays on genre fiction, Maps and Legends and Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art, come from his observations of the such classics as Dallas, The X Files and The Sopranos.

He describes the influence of the short story on the form of the episodic drama and the evolution and eventual synthesis of "mythology" and "arc" episodes into a kind of "fractal drama" which displays some structural self-similarity at different scales (individual episode, season, full story arc).

From the House Next Door
"... Weiner has seen fit to fully embrace Chase’s vision and offer a sort of fractal drama--one that contains conventional continuity, to be sure, but also one where the narrative model is layered rather than strictly linear, and in which it takes quite awhile (unlike with B5 or The X-Files, which wore their complexity as a badge of pride) to realize that the whole is more than the sum of its parts."

Emily Zants points out other fractal properties of post-modern narrative structures in her book Chaos Theory, Complexity, Cinema, and the Evolution of the French Novel (Studies in French Literature)