It’s All Story

Neofoxes may actually be said to be specialists in one thing: Story.

Telling, hearing, finding, living … Story.

The first book we worked on together was PragMagic (Pocket Books, 1991). We distilled a decade of reporting that had appeared in Marilyn Ferguson’s Brain/Mind Bulletin, a newsletter that had become a clearinghouse for all kinds of research and discoveries in science, health, creativity, psychology, social sciences, and education. We took this information and turned it into a whopper of a self-help book. Throughout the book we emphasized Story: How can this or that piece of information be used to enrich the story of your life?

We still see the primacy of Story reasserted all over the place. I’m just now looking at a video of the legendary split-brain research pioneer Michael S. Gazzaniga talking about “your storytelling brain,” and how the human is a “storytelling animal.” And it doesn’t much matter whether our stories are “real” or “made-up.”

We once had the privilege of collaborating with cognitive philosopher Daniel C. Dennett on an experimental essay/story called “Media-Neutral,” which eventually appeared in our first novel The Jamais Vu Papers. In it, a psychiatrist discovers that he’s a character in a book—The Jamais Vu Papers, in fact. Desperate to understand how being fictional affects his life, our character goes to Dennett for advice. “Media-Neutral” was great fun to work on, and Dennett threw himself into his therapist-philosopher role wholeheartedly. (The piece was reprinted in Speculations: The Reality Club 1—click to download.) Continue reading →

Concerning Height and Depth

Mutant foxes are shallow.

Or so you’ve likely heard. It’s not a flattering generalization, and I wish people would stop spreading it around. But like most stereotypical notions, it has some basis in fact.

As neofoxes hop about the cultural landscape, across all areas of speculation, creativity, and study, they cannot aspire to plumb the depths of human understanding as did the paleofoxes of lore. “Go an inch wide and a mile deep” is more than just a slogan; it is nearly a physical law in this age of hyperinformation. And the hedgehog dutifully obeys this law.

But the very law that states that it is no longer possible to go both wide and deep says nothing about height, as I proposed in my paper “Out of the Depths and Into the Heights,” which I presented at the International Conference for the Fantastic in the Arts in Orlando, Florida, in 1997. The depths are charted territories, while the heights open out into “a universe exploding with literally infinite possibilities.” Hedgehogs have trouble getting to the heights, but foxes are right at home there. Continue reading →

The More Things Change …

Pat and I really need to get down to business. As independent publishers we’ve got eleven books in print, and it’s time to start making money off them. A friend of ours, John J. Walters, was kind enough to send us a book to get started: Marketing Shortcuts for the Self-Employed, by Patrick Schwerdtfeger.

It’s an excellent book, and we’re eagerly squeezing it dry for ideas. That said, we have a not-so-small bone of contention beginning in Chapter 2 and continuing throughout the book. “In today’s information society,” Schwerdtfeger declares unambiguously, “you need to carve out a little slice of the universe and claim it as your own. You need to decide what your specialty is and become an expert in that field.”

It’s the conventional wisdom, of course. If you want to do business these days, you’ve got to have a platform. Now, that’s easy enough for hedgehogs (see previous post). But how do unregenerate mutant foxes like Pat and me “carve out a little slice of the universe”? Big slices—yea, even whole universes at a swallow—are more our thing. Continue reading →

Mutant Foxes

“The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.”

This aphorism by the ancient Greek poet Archilochus got quite a bit of currency during the last century. A lot of people asked whether, in the world of ideas, it was better to be a fox than a hedgehog.

As you know if you followed the polls, the 20th-century consensus wound up firmly in favor of the hedgehog. After all, the time had passed when one could be universally educated in all subjects and disciplines. There was too much stuff to learn about too many big things. Generalists didn’t stand a chance. The time of the specialist had arrived. And specialists are, by definition, hedgehogs—small, spiny, nocturnal, insectivorous, and extremely well-versed in one big thing.

Through the last phase of the 20th century and the first decade of this one, Pat and I defied this preference and steadfastly remained foxes—omnivorous, narrow-snouted, bushy-tailed, red-coated, and determined to learn as much stuff about as many big things as we could. Continue reading →