What I Was Up To
(I remain interested in the question of whether and how made up people become real.)
posted by John Green @ Thursday, August 06, 2009
41 Comments
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41 Comments:
John. You never cease to make me laugh. (Or screw with my brain.) I think you're spot on. Why won't Oprah have you on her show to discuss this topic? Seriously. Thank God for Youtube! :) (Else you'd have a much smaller voice.)
There is a real human being (imagined by God, so to speak) who underlies the Robert Pattinson of our collective but merely human imaginations.
There was a real human being (imagined by God, so to speak) who underlay the fantastically romanticized image I had of the guy I had a mad crush on in ninth grade.
There is no such real human being underlying Paige Railstone. And our collective human imaginations, be they ever so clever and brilliant, be they a million million million strong, yet they pale comically in comparison to the imagination (so to speak) of God.
You said it yourself, John: "[S]ome of Robert Pattinson's beauty is just his pure, natural, God-given good looks." This is no minor point to concede!
i played 20q whiel thinking of paige railstone & its first guess was marilyn manson XD
a guess it had later was maureen johnson! but it never got paige railstone
This just reminded me of the new Wuthering Heights cover which, in a small red sticker, claims it to be "Bella and Edward's favorite book!" Fictional characters have really dominated our world.
Okay. The Paige Railstone thing has got to be the coolest thing I have ever heard of. You rock.
Carol:
I'm not sure the theological argument really holds up. I mean, God created me, but He did not do so in any direct way--in the direct way, my parents created me.
Similarly, one could argue that God created Paige--not in any direct way, but through the nerdfighters (in a way that is precisely analogous to the way that you and I were created).
Now, the Robert Pattinson idea is centered around a person who has a physical reality; I'm happy to grant that. But I think it _IS_ a relatively minor facet of the real Robert Pattinson, who is almost exclusively a construction. (Albeit a totally real one!)
reminds me of a great quote from Harry Potter---"Of course this is all inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?"
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John,
You've now given me a new way to teach my high schoolers why they should not believe everything they read on the Google.
Excellent. Thanks!
Jill
Nerdfighter/Librarian
John:
Thanks for the response. This idea of something that can be "imagined by God" (but not by man) is my sloppy philosophical shorthand for a class of things including those with the following two characteristics: first, that they are part of the physical world and therefore could presumably be imagined or understood by a perfect, unlimited intelligence; and second, that they are too complicated to have been dreamt up or understood (in their rich entirety) by our limited human minds, either individually or collectively. We are (thank God!) surrounded by such things, including ourselves and our fellow human beings. That underlying, beyond-human-comprehension complexity, however buried it may be beneath layers of human fantasy, is the essential difference between, say, Robert Pattinson and Paige Railstone. And that beyond-human-comprehension complexity makes real human beings fascinating in a way that fictional characters can't be.
I agree that the beyond-human-comprehension parts of Rob Pattinson are utterly swamped, from a faraway fan's perspective, by the froth of his human-manufactured image. So I agree that Paige is an interesting tool for exploring our fascinations with celebrities. But I don't think she can hold a candle to the people we encounter more directly in our lives (my 9th-grade crush; your brother Hank; etc.), even though our perceptions of those people too are greatly influenced by our own and other people's imaginations.
hi john,
(mr. green?!),
i really laughed at this one. i mean, sitting at my computer, laughed. nobody else was in the room to see, but i still felt like i was going crazy and was incredibly embarrassed. that was a bad start to my day.
my friend once told me that there's no such thing as reality. there's also no normal, but that's an entirely different matter. why is something considered real? if you think it is, and enough people agree with you. if i think my friend sarah is real, and enough people agree with me, then she is.
but when my four-year-old cousin says that her friend ginger, who is part mermaid, is real, no one agrees with her. they say that she is imaginary. ginger is then not real.
it's a little odd. then you start thinking about really unsettling things- how real are you?
Oh MY. Would you please tell us where you got the fantastic squirrel shirt you are wearing in your video?
Here's a funny one John... When I was playing 20Q, it guessed that Paige Railstone was Maureen Johnson. Makes me wonder how it thought that.
Made-up people become real to us. This is all pretty existential, but I think that in many cases, we see people in our minds as we want to believe they are. As you have pointed out many a time, we are human and thus limited by only having access to the inner thoughts of our own minds. All other people, even those closest to us, can only be experienced through what we see of their external expression.
As such, why is the Robert Pattison, with his media constructed image, exist any less than the enigmatic hipster fashionista I see at starbucks who clearly defines herself through her clothes. She exists that way, in my mind, and I imagine who she might be in other ways that I can't see. But she is real.
This all kind of gets at the purpose of fiction...We read to understand ourselves and the struggles and joys of humanity. The best way we can do this, I believe, is through literature. And that means that the best way we have to understand people is by making up "fake" people who show us what it's like to be a real person. And if that isn't real, it's as close to real as we human beings are ever going to get with one another.
I guess my point is that we are all, to an extent, fake. Fiction, and living in an effort to connect with others, are the processes by which we become as real as possible.
Robert Pattison may be far less real than I am to myself, but he may be only moderately less real than, say, you John Green, are to me.
Paige Railstone is as real to me as any stranger in another country (or indeed my own) may be. I'll never be able to meet her physically, just as I'll never be able to meet a vast majority of the world's population.
She may not have a physical body (or vessel... whatever you wish to call it) and yet she exists. She IS, however, believable, and is based-in-reality.
So she exists, and the above criteria constitutes real in my books. She may not be physically 'real', but who's to say there isn't ACTUALLY a DJ Paige Railstone out there! We just haven't met her yet.
Alternatively, supposing there isn't a Paige Railstone out in the vast world then she's still as real as any other fictional character in a book, or a movie, or a perfomance.
In my definition of real, the object doesn't just have to be physically tangible; a concept can be just as real. But then again I'm a drama kid, so I suppose on some level I need to believe that the character I'm portraying is REAL, even if they are just a concept.
...hopefully that made some sense. ^_^
Dear John,
You cost me thirty-six dollars today. Not that I didn't mind paying for the library's audio book version of Paper Towns that I lost (it fell out of my car), but I just wanted to let you know. I really enjoyed listening to the first four discs. I just wish I could have finished it before it disappeared...
Also, if I'm correctly following your argument, Robert Pattinson is kind of like Margo in Paper Towns. We often force our own perceptions, beliefs, ideas, hopes, and dreams on other people. Their very presence is strengthened by the projection of ourselves onto them. Although Rob is someone I will most likely never meet, he seems real because I have seen him through the medium of film. I've seen him through the eyes and ears of other people, and he has become a person through my own eyes and ears. But that doesn't make, say, Edward Cullen real. The person who plays him may be real, but the character is not. The community that created DJ Railstone is real, but DJ Railstone is not real in the living and breathing sense. She IS real in the thoughts/ideas/actions that created her imaginary presence. I could potentially meet Robert Pattinson. I couldn't actually meet Paige or Margo or any other fictional character, except in my head or through their creators. And now...I've argued myself into a hole. Oh, well.
And I think the only reason people think Rob is attractive now is because he plays a character who is meant to be extremely attractive. A year and a half ago, teenage girls seemed outraged over Summit's decision to cast him as Edward Cullen. Now, they can't help but swoon whenever he's on the screen. Have we projected the character of Edward Cullen onto the human body of Robert Pattinson? I think so. And I feel bad for him because he seems not to enjoy the spotlight.
20Q thought Paige was Melissa Anelli and then Maureen Johnson and then Julia Nunes... too funny.
Well, it really depends on how you define a "real person." I would say a "real person" is someone that never ceases to be complicated. Following that argument, Robert Pattinson strikes me as someone that is spectacularly uncomplicated, but the mystery of who Paige Railstone is keeps confounding me. So theoretically, Paige Railstone is more "real" than Robert Pattinson.
Per your last post about what you are working on, I'm assuming if it takes 2-3 years to complete a book you are not an outliner?
Do you have a set number of pages or word count you attempt to accomplish daily, once you have the characters/situation solid?
(struggling writer wants to know)
While trying to convince 20Q that Paige Railstone is real, I thought I'd see what 20Q thought of John Green. When it guessed correctly after 17 questions, the screen read, "You are John Green. Similar Objects:
Dwight Eisenhower, Neil Armstrong, John F. Kennedy, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, Alex Jones, Harry S. Truman, Jimmy Carter, Theodore Roosevelt, Douglas MacArthur, Ron Paul, Gerald Ford."
Are you flattered? Heh. (:
Hey, John! I think it's great that you and other Nerdfighters help to decrease World Suck and I just wanted to bring Givoogle to your attention. Givoogle.com is essentially the same as Google, but the organization that runs the site gives all of the proceeds from the site advertisements to the American Cancer Association. Hopefully you can use Nerdfigheria to spread Givoogle and help raise money for cancer research!
Ha! This is an awesome e-prank. That's all; I don't really care to weigh in on the metaphysical/philosophical/theological underpinnings of identity. My taste buds are real, cheese is real, my life is pretty awesome, QED.
(Also, I never found Robert Pattinson all that attractive. Sorry, universe.)
definitely fake...people like edward, not robert pattinson
^^^ a similar search engine to Givoogle is goodsearch.com...it gives you the option to choose which charity the roughly one cent per search you accumulate goes to.
Hmm. Deeeep, man. Deep. Very, very interesting, though. I've been interested in the nature of reality recently too. I know you enjoyed 'Infinite Jest' and that book really explored this topic, I think, through Himself's films. Like the idea that you could make a movie by picking someone from a phonebook at random, then proclaiming the next hour of their life to be your film? Somehow I see the Paige Railstone project as that idea, but reversed.
Sorry for the pretentious ramble.
Getting a bit deconstructionist, are we?
--Not that there's anything wrong with that. Unless, you know, you're doing it to hide some sort of sordid past like some of the originators of the theory.
John, any chance Sunday's video could be about the whole public health care hullabaloo? You've always been good at explaining these things in a way that we can all relate to, and right now there's so much coverage on the controversy surrounding it that I think it would help a lot of us understand what's going on, and why.
And you could always eat five sheets of toilet paper while discussing it, if that helps. ;)
Why, Mr. Green! I love that you did this. On truth and reality; you're getting awfully postmodern, no?
Another good example for people who are having trouble seperating Robert Pattinson and Edward Cullen is Stephen Colbert. He plays a fictional version of himself on his tv show, he has his "real" self that he portrays outside his tv show or shows when he accidentally breaks character, and then there's the actual Stephen Colbert, who hangs out with his wife or whatever. Just because he's more honest about putting his fictional selves forward doesn't make him less real, and just because fictional Colbert is constructed and played by atual Colbert doesn't make him more real than, say, Paige Railstone. We are all, to an extent, fictional, regardless of who is dreaming that fiction up.
This has nothing to do with your video, which I enjoyed highly, as I do all your videos. I was just wondering, as someone who just recently heard of you (what are universities teaching kids these days?), in which order you think your books should be read. Maybe starting with your first first, and Paper Towns last, or Katherines first and Alaska last, or maybe just put them all in a blender with some yogurt and muscle milk and drink them like a smoothie?
Hey John, how are you coming along with Infinite Jest? I bought the book and was ready to start reading, but then I bought Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World by Haruki Murakami and I completely forgot about DFW. xD I hope you made more progress than I did!
Right now, I'm watching you clean out your book collection (on blogtv, that's not creepy. 1179 people are also watching) and I just did the same. Thank you for motivating me to get rid of lots of my books. Meanie.
I'd like to say I just played 20Q, and you were their third guess after John Edwards, and David Coperfield. Weird. :)
please forgive me as this has nothing to do with dj railstone or rob pattinson, but instead the youtube video where you asked people to vote for charities to donate to....i realize this is not youtube, but i have major sign-in problems with youtube, so anyway---charity--->http://www.traveltheroad.com/index.html
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so i have two big fat questions for you, john green, and you have to answer them because you're my favorite author. seriously. i will be so disappointed if you don't.
first: so i'm staring college in about two weeka, and since "you can become anyone you want to be in college" i want to tell everyone my name is alaska. but i feel like that would be completely stealing from you, but even if you say no i'm going to still tell everyone my name is alaska because 1) it's not my fault you wrote a kick ass book with a kick ass lead character with a kick ass name and also 2) everyone who hasn't read that book still thinks it's a kick ass name. but if you give me permission i will not feel like such a bad person.
okay second question (and this one is way more important to me than the last question) i'm trying to write a book. well, trying isn't the word since i'm already twelve chapters into it. but i am super self concious about it. like, people want to read it and i won't let them because i'm scared that, im my head, it's a crazy awesome book but in real life it sucks. so i was wondering if you ever felt like that when you first got started and how you got over that. thanks.
John,
It sometimes seems that you have a bit of a sore spot when it comes to Robert Pattinson, so I just wanted to gently point out that me, and lots and lots of other girls, would pick you over "Bobby" any day!
Hannah
Hunger Games discussion please!
John, do you not like historical fiction? The only one I can think of you reccomending is Octavian Nothing, which doesn't count because MT Anderson is 1. incomparably brilliant and 2. your close personal friend. Is there some stima against them in YA, or with you, or something? If you do like them, would you ever write one?
This reminds me of a book I had to read for class called Sophie's World. You should read it.
You have to read all of it for this comment to make any sense at all. It's kind of dry and weird at first but the last few chapters make it all worth it.
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