Here’s a great excerpt from the book I’m cur­rently reading.

“This after­noon Sallie’s three youngest pups, Sue’s Sir­ius, and Mrs. Chippy, the carpenter’s cat, have to be shot. We could not under­take the main­te­nance of weak­lings under the new con­di­tions. Mack­lin, Crean, and the car­pen­ter seemed to feel the loss of their friends rather badly. We pro­pose mak­ing a short trial jour­ney to-morrow, start­ing with two of the boats and the ten sledges. The num­ber of dog teams has been increased to seven, Green­street tak­ing charge of the new addi­tional team, con­sist­ing of Snap­per and Sallie’s four old­est pups. We have ten work­ing sledges to relay with five teams. Wild’s and Hurley’s teams will haul the cut­ter with the assis­tance of four men. The whaler and the other boats will fol­low, and the men who are haul­ing them will be able to help with progress, but each mile counts. Crean this after­noon has a bad attack of snow-blindness.”

The weather on the morn­ing of Octo­ber 30 was over­cast and misty, with occa­sional falls of snow. A mod­er­ate north-easterly breeze was blow­ing. We were still liv­ing on extra food brought from the ship when we aban­doned her, and the sledg­ing and boat­ing rations were intact. These rations would pro­vide for twenty-eight men for fifty-six days on full rations, but we could count on get­ting enough seal and pen­guin meat to at least dou­ble this time. We could even, if progress proved too dif­fi­cult and too inju­ri­ous to the boats, which we must guard as our ulti­mate means of sal­va­tion, camp on the near­est heavy flow, scour the neigh­bour­ing pack for pen­guins and seals, and await the out­ward drift of the pack to open and nav­i­ga­ble water.

“This plan would avoid the grave dan­gers we are now incur­ring of get­ting entan­gled in impass­able pressure-ridges and pos­si­bly irre­triev­ably dam­ag­ing the boats, which are bound to suf­fer in rough ice; it would also min­i­mize the peril of the ice split­ting under us, as it did twice dur­ing the night at our first camp. Yet I feel sure that it is the right thing to attempt a march, since if we can make five or seven miles a day to the north-west our chance of reach­ing safety in the months to come will be increased greatly. There is a psy­cho­log­i­cal aspect to the ques­tion also. It will be much bet­ter for the men in gen­eral to feel that, even though progress is slow, they are on their way to land than it will be sim­ply to sit down and wait for the tardy north-westerly drift to take us out of this cruel waste of ice. We will make an attempt to move. The issue is beyond my power either to pre­dict or to control.”

That after­noon Wild and I went out in the mist and snow to find a road to the north-east. After many devi­ous turn­ings to avoid the heav­ier pres­sure ridges, we pio­neered a way for at least a mile and a half, and then returned by a rather bet­ter route to the camp. The pres­sure was now rapid in move­ment and our floe was suf­fer­ing from the shakes and the jerks of the ice. At 3 p.m., after lunch, we got under way, leav­ing Dump Camp a mass of debris. The order was that per­sonal gear must not exceed two pounds per man, and this meant that noth­ing but bare nec­es­saries was to be taken on the march. We could not afford to cum­ber our­selves with unnec­es­sary weight. Holes had been dug in the snow for the recep­tion of pri­vate let­ters and lit­tle per­sonal tri­fles, the Lares and Penates of the mem­bers of the Expe­di­tion, and into the pri­vacy of these white graves were con­signed much of sen­ti­men­tal value and not a lit­tle of intrin­sic worth. I rather grudged the two pounds of allowance per man, owing to my keen anx­i­ety to keep weights at a min­i­mum, but some per­sonal belong­ings could fairly be regarded as indis­pens­able. The jour­ney might be a long one, and there was a pos­si­bil­ity of a win­ter in impro­vised quar­ters on an inhos­pitable coast at the other end. A man under such con­di­tions needs some­thing to occupy his thoughts, some tan­gi­ble memento of his home and peo­ple beyond the seas. So sov­er­eigns were thrown away and pho­tographs were kept. I tore the fly-leaf out of the Bible that Queen Alexan­dra had given to the ship, with her own writ­ing in it, and also the won­der­ful page of Job con­tain­ing the verse:

Out of whose womb came the ice?
And the hoary frost of Heaven, who hath engen­dered it?
The waters are hid as with a stone,
And the face of the deep is frozen.

The other Bible, which Queen Alexan­dra had given for the use of the shore party, was down below in the lower hold in one of the cases when the ship received her death-blow. Suit­cases were thrown away; these were retrieved later as mate­r­ial for mak­ing boots, and some of them, marked “solid leather,” proved, to our dis­ap­point­ment, to con­tain a large per­cent­age of card­board. The man­u­fac­turer would have had dif­fi­culty in con­vinc­ing us at the time that the decep­tion was any­thing short of criminal.

Sir Ernest Shack­le­ton — South: The Last Antarc­tic Expe­di­tion of Shack­le­ton and the Endurance

I just fin­ished read­ing A Deep­ness in the Sky by Ver­nor Vinge. Since I’ve been cul­ti­vat­ing a gestalt knowl­edge of the sci­ence fic­tion canon for nearly two decades, I was able to notice nods and reflec­tions of past works. The book owes an obvi­ous and huge debt to James Blish’s Cities in Flight, but there are also Tolkien ref­er­ences, Hal Clement’s Mis­sion of Grav­ity nods and more.

The most sur­pris­ing aspect of the book was its not-so-nuanced cham­pi­oning of free mar­ket cap­i­tal­ism. I’m used to sci­ence fic­tion that puts forth some sort of com­men­tary on con­tem­po­rary life or a spe­cific philo­soph­i­cal or polit­i­cal posi­tion, but I’m also used to these aspects being just one or two of the story’s many sup­ports. In A Deep­ness in the Sky the tri­umph of the free mar­ket is the story.

The mut­li­ple POV story-telling con­ceit keeps the pace lively, and the well placed plot twists main­tain engage­ment, but I think the story could have ben­e­fited greatly from sig­nif­i­cant edi­to­r­ial culling. It is a good choice for lovers of hard sci­ence fic­tion and thick volumes.

I finally had the chance to try out the Euclid Cor­ri­dor today, rid­ing the #6 to a Flash Action­Script class at the Cole Cen­ter for Con­tin­u­ing Edu­ca­tion. When I started at the ISC just over a year ago the direc­tor empha­sized his encour­age­ment for us to take skill-building classes. If there was an award for most classes taken, I’d prob­a­bly win it. I haven’t quite fig­ured out how the whole Euclid Cor­ri­dor thing works, but the bus dri­vers know it, and step­ping off a bus right onto the bus plat­form was much nicer than step­ping off a bus into a big pud­dle of snowmelt, and I only had to walk half a block to get to the Center.

First snow­falls and morn­ings are hand-in-glove. It was very quiet and dark wait­ing for the bus, then chat­ter­ing brightness.

Now all the days and nights of jour­ney­ing through the for­est drew together and were behind Falk. He was not camp­ing: he had come to a place. He need not think at all about the weather, the dark, the stars and beasts and trees. He could sit stretch­ing out his legs to a bright hearth, could eat in com­pany with another, could bathe in front of the fire in a wooden tub of hot water. He did not know which was the great­est plea­sure, the warmth of that water wash­ing dirt and weari­ness away or the warmth that washed his spirit here, the absurd elu­sive vivid talk of the old man, the mirac­u­lous com­plex­ity of human con­ver­sa­tion after the long silence of the wilderness.

Ursula K. Le Guin — City of Illusions

Time for class.

The way home wasn’t nearly as fun. The #6 doesn’t run west­ward on Euclid just yet, and the 9X, with its sta­tus as an Express, doesn’t stop and runs rel­a­tively rarely on Chester, so I had to walk 30 blocks to Pub­lic Square, where I was just in time to catch the 23. On the plus side, dur­ing the walk I saw a roller-blading Santa Claus wield­ing a ski pole.

The Eco­nomic Nat­u­ral­ist by Robert H. Frank was a fairly easy read and inter­est­ing to me from the stand­point of eco­nomic ethnog­ra­phy. I don’t know much about eco­nom­ics in an aca­d­e­mic sense, but after read­ing this book and reflect­ing it is obvi­ous that I use it on a daily basis. In ret­ro­spect this makes sense because eco­nom­ics is a method of cod­i­fy­ing every­day behavior.

Although the vol­ume is slim it gets repet­i­tive fairly quickly. Every­thing seems to boil down to oppor­tu­nity costs, which could very well be cor­rect, but is cer­tainly bor­ing. The premise is based on a method Dr. Frank used in his classes where he would have his stu­dents come up with an inter­est­ing ques­tion and obser­va­tion about every­day life and then explain it in eco­nomic terms. One ques­tion I was hop­ing for, but which wasn’t there is “Why do spam­mers con­tinue to send out spam email when the emails no longer make any sense?” I could prob­a­bly try to exer­cise the lit­tle knowl­edge I picked up from the book to answer this myself, but I’m feel­ing a bit lazy today.

The book also reminds me of the trivia books I’d read when I was lit­tle; The Quin­tes­sen­tial Quiz Book, How Did They Do That?, Why Did They Do That?, et cetera. Although, as a point in Frank’s favor, it did man­age to teach a bit of actual method­ol­ogy in addi­tion to the straight fact-laying. It is a good book for light read­ing, or toilet-sitting, many of the ques­tions and answers are brief, so the book can be read in small doses.

I ordered The Road from the library a day before I found out it won the Pulitzer, because of a year-old review from an old copy of Stop Smil­ing that I picked up at Pitch­fork. The Pulitzer noti­fi­ca­tion, com­ing as it did from a thread about lit­er­ary crit­ics and their deri­sion for genre fic­tion, stayed in my mind as I read the book. It is the first thing that I’ve read by Cor­mac McCarthy, and I picked it up because the Stop Smil­ing review indi­cated to me that it was sci­ence fic­tion writ­ten by a non-sci-fi author.

What is imme­di­ately evi­dent is that McCarthy doesn’t care for tra­di­tional read­ing cues like quo­ta­tion marks around dia­logue and chap­ter breaks. I’m a big fan of exper­i­men­tal nov­els, but at times in The Road it is very dif­fi­cult to fig­ure out who is talk­ing to whom. Sim­i­larly, no char­ac­ter has a proper name. In fact, I don’t think there is a proper noun in the entire book. So when the man runs into another man and they talk to each other or have a tus­sle it is pretty much impos­si­ble to fig­ure out who is doing what. The writ­ing itself is often superb, but it seems to stum­ble just as reg­u­larly, as when words like ensepul­chraled and croz­zled sit together in the same sen­tence and have lunch. The qual­ity of the writ­ing doesn’t enhance or uphold the plot either, which to me seems like a fairly large prob­lem, since I read books for the sto­ries, not the writ­ing. What I mean is that McCarthy seems inter­ested in writ­ing inter­est­ingly for its own sake and using the story itself to manip­u­late the reader into a cer­tain mind­set as opposed to writ­ing and devel­op­ing a plot purely for the sake of storytelling.

It could be argued and I would agree with the asser­tion that all story-telling is a manip­u­la­tion of the audi­ence, but what I’m think­ing is that McCarthy is more inter­ested in evok­ing a spe­cific emo­tional reac­tion from his audi­ence than telling the story. It is a deter­mi­na­tion of vec­tors. The story is about a man and a boy in a post-apocalyptic world [just what destroyed the world is unclear, but from infer­ence I gather that it was some sort of meteor impact] where every­thing is dead except for a few other humans, and life is hid­ing from the oth­ers and scav­eng­ing canned goods.

They boy and man are depen­dent upon each other, but as the book pro­gresses it becomes evi­dent that the boy is the one best suited and morally under­stand­ing enough to live in this new world. The man can­not let the past go. The boy has no mem­ory of it. The basic plot actions are eas­ily fore­seen; you know they’re going to find a fall-out shel­ter and that this will be the high point of the nar­ra­tive, you know that their belong­ings will be stolen, you know that at least one of them will die [most likely the man, due to var­i­ous other clues] and that this will be the low point of the narrative.

In the end, I wasn’t that impressed. The writ­ing was excel­lent about half the time, but the story never got me going. I’ve read more effec­tive and bet­ter writ­ten apoc­a­lyp­tic lit­er­a­ture, and sto­ries with just as much despair in less than the 241 pages of The Road. The dust jacket said this would be McCarthy’s mas­ter­piece, and if that’s the case, I’ll pass on the rest of his stuff.

Dur­ing unend­ing hours in the back of a con­ver­sion van and brief respites on land in Canada I read Chuck Klosterman’s Fargo Rock City. This book was rec­om­mended to me by Nate Scheible dur­ing a dis­cus­sion out­side of Parish Hall while wait­ing for a noise show to start and over a few Com­modore Perry IPAs. He found out that I was a metal fan of old and rec­om­mended that I read it.

The book’s essence is how glam-metal [bands like Möt­ley Crüe, Poi­son and Cin­derella] gave Chuck an entrance into the wide world out­side of North Dakota. His point is, that no mat­ter how derided glam-metal was, is and prob­a­bly ever shall be, since it was an impor­tant part of the growth of a gen­er­a­tion it shouldn’t be. Now, this wasn’t the kind of book I was hop­ing it would be. I hate glam-metal. To me there is noth­ing really metal about dudes with with flam­ma­ble hair nanc­ing about in span­dex and singing about bang­ing. That’s fine, but it’s not metal. I’m more of the Iron Maiden, Metal­lica, Megadeth, Slayer, Ozzy fan for first-gen metal and Pan­tera, Anthrax and oth­ers for second-gen. I hate nü-metal, [Korn, Linkin Park, Limp Bizkit] and technical-metal noodlers like Yng­wie Malm­steen and Mastodon don’t do much for me either.

So basi­cally, like every other metal fan, I’m a huge jack­ass about what I like.

Chuck’s book is good, although he men­tions fly-fishing for wall­eye, which I think, while not impos­si­ble, is utterly inef­fec­tive. ANYWAY, there are digres­sions, tan­gents, anec­dotes and the sorely desired lists and name-drops of ran­dom bands to dig for, but mixed in with all of this is some excel­lently pen­e­trat­ing com­men­tary on both metal itself and its place within the zeit­geist of the 80s and 90s. These are the best parts. The most inter­est­ing parts of the book came at the end for me; when he got away from the hair and Axl Rose and started talk­ing about what qual­i­fies a band as metal, what bands are car­ry­ing on the metal torch [still, for him, in terms of glam] and how grunge killed it off.

He’s good at putting things in con­text, giv­ing depth to what appears to be shal­low­ness and rub­bing his the­o­ries against pos­si­ble crit­i­cisms to see what holds and what tears. He does some straw-manning, but hey, he’s a jour­nal­ist. The book is often hilar­i­ous, as when he lists the kind of women each band likes to fuck, and geek­ily earnest, as when he lists his favorite metal albums and how much you’d have to pay him to never lis­ten to it again.

One area I think he missed out on was talk­ing about Euro-metal and its con­tin­u­ing mas­sive pop­u­lar­ity over there. That’s prob­a­bly a com­pletely dif­fer­ent book though. If you’re even a slight fan of metal, or a fan of 80s glam or some­what ana­lyt­i­cal dis­cus­sions about Tawny Kitaen hump­ing a Corvette, this is the book for you.

This spring/summer seems to be turn­ing into biog­ra­phy time so far. I’ve been pick­ing up books at Vis­i­ble Voice, and the Walker Evans biog­ra­phy was one of them. For the most part it is an inter­est­ing well-written and infor­ma­tive look at the per­sonal life and moti­va­tions of my favorite pho­tog­ra­pher. Chrono­log­i­cally it gets a bit bor­ing toward the end, mainly because Evans wasn’t doing much with his life but rest on his lau­rels. It suc­ceeds admirably in defin­ing Evans’ ini­tial quest for direc­tion and the impor­tant rela­tion­ships that pro­vided him with the nec­es­sary impe­tus to actu­ally com­plete his work. Namely, James Agee. The fact that Evans is known mainly for the 18 months of work he did for the FSA is a bit telling about his entire career. I’m left with the dis­tinct impres­sion that no mat­ter how much I admire his pho­tog­ra­phy, I wouldn’t have enjoyed his com­pany very much.

As I wait for Ama­zon to ship me the lat­est Tolkien release, The Chil­dren of Húrin, I find myself dis­agree­ing with sev­eral reviews I’ve read, in terms of plac­ing this work in con­text with his other stuff. The lede in the Wash­ing­ton Post review:

If any­one still labors under the delu­sion that J.R.R. Tolkien was a writer of twee fan­tasies for chil­dren, this novel should set them straight.

From the Salon review:

If you’re look­ing for the acces­si­bil­ity, lyri­cal sweep and above all the opti­mism of “Lord of the Rings,” well, you’d bet­ter go back and read it again.

This idea that Tolkien’s works are mainly pos­i­tive, light-hearted adven­tures is so super­fi­cial that it dri­ves an ama­teur Tolkien scholar like me up the wall. If you judge Middle-earth by the aber­rant text of The Hob­bit [a tale writ­ten for his chil­dren; inten­tion­ally dif­fer­ent from the actual Middle-earth that was first put to scraps of paper dur­ing the First World War] then I can see where you’d get that idea. The film treat­ment of LotR was reworked so exten­sively because the book was too bleak for mass appeal as a film.

Gal­adriel speaks Tolkien’s over­ar­ch­ing world­view when she says

Through the ages of the world we have fought the long defeat.

nearly ver­ba­tim from his own words on his faith. More on that here.

Tolkien’s works are thor­oughly Mod­ernist in their tone and focus. This is some­what wry since much of the tone is taken from the most ancient North­ern tales. I think that the review­ers are right in point­ing out that The Chil­dren of Húrin is a bleak tale, but have made a mis­step in equat­ing it as excep­tional rather than stan­dard. Nits picked.

US Guys is a book by jour­nal­ist Char­lie LeDuff; a series of vignettes that are mar­keted as an exam­i­na­tion of man­hood and mas­culin­ity in Amer­i­can cul­ture. It starts off well enough, the writ­ing is crisp and the obser­va­tions are fresh and inter­est­ing, but by the end Char­lie seems to have run out of obser­va­tions about mas­culin­ity and sim­ply recounts his expe­ri­ences, it ceases to be jour­nal­ism and becomes more of a mem­oir. I was expect­ing some­thing a bit meatier, and less filled with self-aggrandization. Part of LeDuff’s modus operandi is this sort of self-revelatory no-holds-barred truth­ful­ness, but at times the book becomes more about him than the folks he’s there to learn from.

In some ways this is good, as LeDuff becomes a promi­nent exam­ple of the very thing he sets out to chart, but the per­spec­tive is a bit lack­ing. It is ethnog­ra­phy with­out con­clu­sions, and there­fore, ulti­mately just so much pop­corn. Unfor­tu­nate. It is a good read, but not much more.

I’ve got a cou­ple of cheap pulp nov­els that have to do with my name. The first is Don­ald Barr Chidsey’s Cap­tain Adam:

The his­tory of an auda­cious young sea­man from the Amer­i­can colonies who duelled and prayed and sinned his way to mag­nif­i­cent adven­ture on the law­less seas of the early 18th century!

The cover [not this one, but like it] has a tall skinny dude with a sword on it and a hot red­head who is chained to the deck of a sail­ing ship. I picked that one up from the [now closed] Antiques and Curios store that was just down the street from me.

Another one, picked up from Mac’s Backs, is John Boyd’s Barnard’s Planet, which hap­pens to be a really really really shitty sci­ence fic­tion novel. The only good parts are quotes from bet­ter writ­ers. I’ll prob­a­bly try read­ing Cap­tain Adam after I fin­ish this one.

One of these days I’ll find a cheesy book with Har­vey in the title worth com­plet­ing the collection.

James Agee has long been one of my favorite writ­ers. Recently I received a book of his film crit­i­cism from the library. It is pub­lished by one of my favorite pub­lish­ers: The Library of Amer­ica. Typ­i­cally I’m not a fan of any par­tic­u­lar type of jour­nal­ism or jour­nal­ist, but Agee doesn’t really fit a type; his earnest­ness, pas­sion and frank­ness make his bell-like prose all the more interesting.

I’m cur­rently really enjoy­ing read­ing his old reviews from The Nation in the 1940s. A fair num­ber of the films I’ve seen; some I’ve never even heard of, but want to track down now. He thought Casablanca was maudlin. His writ­ing is also a very acces­si­ble cul­tural snap­shot of the US dur­ing WWII. His poetry isn’t the best, but some­times it can be insid­i­ous. From Let Us Now Praise Famous Men:

(To Walker Evans.

Against time and the dam­ages of the brain
Sharpen and cal­i­brate. Not yet in full,
Yet in some arbi­trated part
Order the façade of the list­less summer.

Spies, mov­ing del­i­cately among the enemy,
The younger sons, the fools,
Set some­what aside the dialects and the stained skins of feigned
mad­ness,
Ambigu­ously sig­nal, baf­fle, the eluded sentinel.

Edgar, weep­ing for pity, to the shelf of that sick bluff,
Bring your blind father, and describe a lit­tle;
Behold him, part wak­ened, fallen among field flow­ers shal­low
But undis­closed, withdraw.

Not yet that naked hour when armed,
Dis­guise flung flat, squarely we chal­lenge the fiend.
Still, com­rade, the run­ning of beasts and the ruin­ing of heaven
Still cap­tive the old wild king.

He’s also the man who wrote the motto I try to live by, again from Let Us Now Praise Famous Men:

Isn’t every human being both a sci­en­tist and an artist; and in writ­ing of human expe­ri­ence, isn’t there a good deal to be said for rec­og­niz­ing that fact and for using both methods?

What should I read this summer?

Ear­lier this year I finally fin­ished a book list from the Sci­ence Fic­tion Book Club, and since then I’ve been search­ing for another list to cut my teeth on. I’ve finally set­tled on one. I’m going to watch every movie issued on DVD by The Cri­te­rion Col­lec­tion. To eas­ily keep track of this, I’ve made a page list­ing the cur­rent spines and the dates I’ve reviewed the films. Three or four are already listed. I’m actu­ally already ten per­cent done, as I’ve seen a lot of the Japan­ese films, noir and some of the French New Wave stuff on the list [30 all told]. I fig­ure if I watch one movie a week, I’ll fin­ish the list some­time in the next six years.

I’m also con­sid­er­ing that I might start to read all of the lit­er­ary col­lec­tions pro­vided by the Library of Amer­ica, which is a non-profit preser­va­tion pub­lish­ing com­pany. I’ve looked over their cat­a­log and it seems to be a quite var­ied selec­tion of Amer­i­can lit­er­a­ture, much of which is unfa­mil­iar to me. If I start work­ing on that list and have a goal, I’ll be much more likely to buckle down and read some Her­man Melville or William Faulkner. I believe they only have about 155 spines in their cur­rent cat­a­log, so I think I should be able to go through that in a sim­i­lar amount of time as the Cri­te­rion list. I must be crazy.

This entry brought to you with­out hyphens and a dis­tinct short­age of commas.

Free Live Free by Gene Wolfe is a book by Gene Wolfe in a con­tin­u­ing series of books by Gene Wolfe that I have been read­ing a lot of Gene Wolfe lately, haven’t I? I’m now read­ing a col­lec­tion of short sto­ries by Gene Wolfe called The Island of Doc­tor Death and Other Sto­ries and Other Sto­ries.

Free Live Free takes place in what was at the time of pub­li­ca­tion con­tem­po­rary Chicago. Four down on their luck sol­diers of for­tune take up an adver­tise­ment on its offer, free liv­ing space. The sol­diers of for­tune include an extremely short and near­sighted unli­censed detec­tive, a door to door joke sales­man, a fat pros­ti­tute and Madame Ser­pentina. This book pro­ceeds as a com­edy of errors until the last ten pages or so when in typ­i­cal Gene Wolfe fash­ion all the tum­blers finally fall into place and a lit­tle door opens shed­ding bright light all over the place and mak­ing you squint your eyes a lit­tle bit because the light is so bright it hurts a lit­tle since you’ve been wan­der­ing around in the dark for so long that you for­got you were in the dark.

Ben Free’s house is con­demned and the four ten­ants are enlisted to help defend it. They do a pretty good job for a cou­ple of hours, but end up boot to back­side and home­less. They sneak their way into a hotel and decide that the now dis­ap­pa­rated Ben Free had dropped enough hints to indi­cate that he had some sort of trea­sure hid­den in the house. The ten­ants bicker and bitch and even­tu­ally decide to go in together find the trea­sure and split it.

At this point the story inten­tion­ally frays into its com­po­nent parts and you won­der what the hell hap­pened to the plot. At one point all the threads come back together in an illu­sion of cohe­sion. Hilar­i­ously, all of the main char­ac­ters and var­i­ous sup­port­ing char­ac­ters end up com­mit­ted to Bel­mont Asy­lum when all they tried to do was go visit some­one there. That part goes on for a while, but is so tongue in cheek and absurd that it doesn’t get old. Each per­son they run in to psy­cho­an­a­lyzes them and finds them irrepara­bly insane even though they aren’t. Need­less to say they end up tak­ing over the asy­lum and then escape. Every­thing frays apart again and they each pur­sue their own par­tic­u­lar heart’s desire. They get them, and find out that their heart’s are lacking.

I won’t spoil the ending.

Link of the day: For all my veg­e­tar­ian friends and fam­ily: Veg­e­tar­ian Beer List.

There Are Doors is Gene Wolfe’s ver­sion of the ancient Indo-European leg­end of the Goddess/Queen of the Wood and the Horned King. Of all the var­i­ous ver­sions I’ve read of this story, Wolfe’s def­i­nitely has the most inter­est­ing and nuanced por­trayal of the these fig­ures. In this iter­a­tion the rela­tion­ship between The Wood and The World is described in sev­eral dif­fer­ent ways, as reflec­tion, fre­quency, and per­haps most strongly as Sea and Land. Mr. Green [Horned King] is in search of Lara/Lora/Marcella/Tina [The God­dess] through both worlds. Once a per­son from The Wood has met a per­son from The World, doors take on a spe­cial sig­nif­i­cance and act as por­tals between the two areas. I’m used to read­ing about the God­dess as a cold-hearted and puis­sant woman who is mourn­ing the loss of her lover, usu­ally with­out explain­ing why is this way. Wolfe adds sub­stance to her dis­tant nature by mak­ing her the only immor­tal in either world, and by adding a twist that every man from The Wood who has sex dies imme­di­ately after, like drones in a bee colony. When the Queen seeks love she has to go to The World, but also has to leave her lover after­ward. So her cold­ness is a way for her to pro­tect her­self from the pain, As she takes other lovers, each of the pre­vi­ous ones becomes a bit sar­don­ically a cuck­olded ver­sion of the Horned King. We find that she does indeed love all of her Kings, and ones that are per­sis­tent enough to pur­sue her and catch her are allowed to serve her. The ser­vice isn’t sub­servience, but an expres­sion of love.

Gene Wolfe is rapidly becom­ing one of my favorite authors. His books move slowly and appear to jump around until sud­denly the pieces fall into place and run smoothly and rapidly to a con­clu­sion. His great­est strength seems to be his abil­ity to lace a story with enough ambi­gu­ity that uncer­tainty never really leaves you until the last page, if then. Mr. Green is in and out of men­tal hos­pi­tals through­out the novel, so we’re not sure if the world through his eyes is true or not. The type of sto­ry­telling isn’t like Peace, but the doubt is ever present. I’m start­ing to round up any­thing I can find by him.

Peace by Gene Wolfe is a per­verse fic­tional fic­tional mem­oir writ­ten from the point of view of a maybe senile maybe stroke vic­tim named Alden Den­nis Weer. Def­i­nitely an untrust­wor­thy nar­ra­tor. This book is really fuck­ing dis­turb­ing. At no point are you sure where or when the actual nar­ra­tor exists. Since it is a mem­oir, it is very pos­si­ble that the entire book takes place dur­ing the afore­men­tioned stroke as a sort of extended life-flashing-before-the-eyes mon­tage. But there are hints that the mem­oir even con­tin­ues after the death of the nar­ra­tor. Basi­cally the only things approx­i­mat­ing sub­stance that we ever get are hints. There are hints that Mr. Weer is a seri­ously evil man, a socio­pathic mass-murderer, and more hints of rape and child molesta­tion [Mr. Weer being the one molested, although he does pork a 16 year old who offers her­self as a sort of bribe to him] as well. The upshot of the novel is that you really don’t ever know what the fuck is going on, apart from the fact that you know some­thing is going on that Mr. Weer doesn’t want to talk about.

Apart from that the book is also filled with nos­tal­gia and regret; tak­ing place in the early 20th Cen­turty Mid­west and going from kerosene to tele­vi­sion. A regret for the loss of inno­cence that is likely mir­rored in Weer’s own dis­turb­ing life. There are con­stant ref­er­ences to death, iso­la­tion, abnor­mal­ity. It reads like a book an out­sider artist might write, which is tes­ta­ment to the skill of Mr. Wolfe, since Weer who is writ­ing the book is an out­sider in his own home­town. It’s no won­der that this book is appar­ently one of Neil Gaiman’s favorites. I def­i­nitely rec­om­mend read­ing it. I’d appre­ci­ate hav­ing some­one to talk to about it.

A Case of Con­science by James Blish is, on the sur­face, a novel about a cri­sis of faith when a priest is con­fronted with a per­fectly moral and eth­i­cal alien soci­ety that has no sense of faith, or doubt or even guile. But James Blish is one of the most intel­li­gent sci­ence fic­tion authors I’ve ever read, so the novel is also much more than that. Blish was an athe­ist for most of his writ­ing career, or as Greg Bear men­tions in the intro­duc­tion to the ver­sion I read, an “appar­ent agnos­tic”. Since he has writ­ten a Hugo-winning mas­ter­work of reli­gious sci­ence fic­tion, I’m lean­ing toward the agnos­ti­cism angle myself.

I’ve had lit­tle to no con­tact with the Soci­ety of Jesus, despite my life­time immersed in Roman Catholi­cism. But from all I’ve heard and read, the Jesuits seem like my kind of Catholics, not afraid to wres­tle with thorny prob­lems of faith. Blish’s Father Ramon Ruiz-Sanchez is not excep­tion in A Case of Con­science. The book opens with the padre work­ing his way through a labyrinthine moral dilemma in Finnegan’s Wake, and we then find out he’s doing this in his spare time, since he is actu­ally a xeno­bi­ol­o­gist on Lithia, an alien world 50 light years from Earth. So Fr. Ramon is a man who has no trou­ble rec­on­cil­ing sci­ence and faith, since he places faith as a higher order of mag­ni­tude in his world. The cri­sis of faith comes to him sub­tly. His role on this planet is to deter­mine its via­bil­ity for human col­o­niza­tion. The padre doesn’t do this through a purely sci­en­tific cri­te­rion. First and fore­most he feels that it is nec­es­sary to deter­mine the sen­tient alien species state of grace. They are called Snakes and their soci­ety has no deviants, no taboos, no restric­tions of any kind, and runs like a pre­ci­sion instru­ment. As I men­tioned before, their com­plete lack of philo­soph­i­cal and moral thoughts creeps Fr. Ramon out. When he finds out how the Lithi­ans repro­duce and raise their young, he falls close to the heresy of Manicheaism which is some­thing along the lines of believ­ing that Satan has cre­ative power; or more broadly, in a dual­is­tic uni­verse. In my under­stand­ing, this is con­sid­ered heresy because Satan is defined by absence and oppo­si­tion, he refuses to be any­thing that God is, and there­fore can­not be cre­ative, he can only spin illu­sion, or some­such. Need­less to say, it is explained suf­fi­ciently in the book.

He comes back to Earth with a gift from the Lithi­ans, one of their chil­dren. As Egtver­chi grows up he becomes quite fright­en­ing, rem­i­nis­cent of Ivan Kara­ma­zov, but even more nihilis­tic and dan­ger­ous. I think Blish intended this marooned being to be as close to Satan incar­nate as he could get. The reader gets hit with a big old guilt-hammer here since we know that the only rea­son Egtvertchi thinks in the way he does, is because of the mis­takes his care­tak­ers made in rais­ing him. I guess that makes his claims of ulti­mate free agency all the more fright­en­ing. Once a genet­i­cally pre­dis­posed ratio­nal mate­ri­al­ist gets a bit of phi­los­o­phy, look out! Not even the exis­ten­tial­ists took their idea of free­dom in such a self­ish light.

I read this book in an evening, it is about 250 pages, and very inter­est­ing. Blish is a lot like C.S. Lewis, I think. A very intel­li­gent man work­ing his way through his own cri­sis of faith, his own case of con­science, for per­sonal rea­sons. I get the sense that Blish was wrestling with these issues merely because they are always going to be there to be wres­tled with and since he isn’t bound to either of the dual sides he picks, he can make each of them equally potent. He’d’ve made a good Jesuit.

A tan­gen­tially related link: a few thou­sand sci­ence fic­tion mag­a­zine cov­ers.
If you’d like more sci­ence as your reli­gion instead of reli­gion as your sci­ence, I rec­om­mend James Blish’s Cities in Flight

When I was nine years old, way back in 1990, Robert Jor­dan pub­lished a fairly large and inter­est­ing fan­tasy novel called The Eye of the World. It was one of a new breed of fan­tasy story, the mega-giganto-epic, tales that are planned from the out­set to exceed the typ­i­cal tril­ogy set-up by vol­umes and vol­umes. Terry Good­kind and George R. R. Mar­tin join Robert Jor­dan as the top three super-enormo-epic writ­ers [and prob­a­bly J.K. Rowl­ing now that I think of it…]. Terry and Robert have another thing in com­mon, they both betrayed their sto­ries in favor of a larger bank account. They’ve both turned their worlds into ser­ial killers, into Sto­ries From The Black Lagoon, things that never seem to end. Each book is around 700 pages. Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series was ini­tially slated as an 8 vol­ume tale, but after vol­ume 4 popped out, it was obvi­ous he was get­ting seri­ous pres­sure to drag out the tale as long as pos­si­ble. Now it is set for a twelve vol­ume series. After read­ing vol­ume 11, I think num­ber 12 is going to be unabridged OED in size, unless, of course, he extends it again.

Jordan’s writ­ing style [and now that I’m quite grown up, I real­ize he couldn’t write his way out of a paper bag. Tell a good story, yes. Write, hell no. He’s a physi­cist.] is very detail ori­ented and descrip­tive. It got way overblown when vol­ume five came out and instead of skim­ming over descrip­tions and travel sequences we started get­ting details about what each and every char­ac­ter, no mat­ter how minor, looked like, wore, you name it. The plot basi­cally dragged to a stand­still and sprouted sub­plots like a sow drop­ping piglets. And now he’s stuck like Peter Jack­son and the third LotR movie, with tons of ground to cover and not much time to do it. Knife of Dreams starts to get back to the action, but it is obvi­ous that turn­ing to the tale back on course is tak­ing a lot of torque. Pon­der­ous is still the word. I think the end might be in sight though. I’ll be glad, that is for sure. I’m tired of being on this road for 15 years. I’ve really turned away from fan­tasy nov­els because of the ten­dency to blovi­ate, peo­ple imi­tat­ing Good­kind and Jor­dan. There isn’t much good fan­tasy that gets the recog­ni­ti­tion that it deserves. Instead the focus is on cre­at­ing a fran­chise. Thank­fully John Crow­ley and Patri­cia McKil­lip stick to one book sto­ries and write robustly.

This is a reminder to note the triple stack-flare and sul­fur stench ema­nat­ing from the steel mill on my pol­lu­tion form once I get home. The Sheep Look Up by John Brun­ner is spec­u­la­tive envi­ron­men­tal dis­as­ter fic­tion, first pub­lished in 1972. It takes place in the near future, at the turn of the cen­tury, our con­tem­po­rary; so it is a bit dated, but also eerily pre­scient in some respects. Brunner’s strength lies not in the tech­nol­ogy and mate­r­ial change of his futures but in his under­stand­ing of broad spec­trum social inter­ac­tion [See my review of Stand on Zanz­ibar]. Con­text is impor­tant when read­ing this book. In 1972 the EPA was barely two years old, no one had any idea about HIV/AIDS, DDT, and defo­liants, napalm and even thalido­mide had peo­ple pretty leery of chem­i­cal impacts on the envi­ron­ment. But no one expected dig­i­tal tech­nol­ogy or hyper­in­fla­tion or peak oil.

Brun­ner takes the cur­rent fears of his time and extrap­o­lates them into future impacts. Envi­ron­men­tal sci-fi doesn’t scratch my belly like other stuff, for the most part it never seems done too well [Nevil Shute’s On the Beach is strong because of the char­ac­ters, not the jet-stream borne radi­a­tion and Gre­gory Benford’s Timescape is strong because of its firm foot­ing in physics, not the impromptu behav­ior of bio­log­i­cal sys­tems]. The Sheep Look Up does a bet­ter job than most, with a con­stant bar­rage of impacts that are in your face, or quite sub­tle. In your face: fil­ter­masks, which just about every­one has to wear to fil­ter out the pol­lu­tion in the rank air. The Mekong Desert. The abi­otic Great Lakes. The dead Med. Sub­tle: the Japan­ese busi­ness­man who spreads enteri­tis pan­dem­i­cally through­out the US when he comes for a visit. You only fig­ure that out after you real­ize the order of the cities that were hit is the same as the itin­er­ary of the busi­ness­man. [SARS did this and avian flu could eas­ily do it as well.] The con­t­a­m­i­nated Col­orado water that ends up dri­ving thou­sands of Africans and Hon­durans bat­shit insane. Most bac­te­ria and viruses and insects have under­gone rapid evo­lu­tion­ary selec­tion due to the indis­crim­i­nate use of antibi­otics and pes­ti­cides and now “shrug off any­thing but a direct blow with a brick.” Can you say super­bugs? The pes­ti­cide thing was prob­a­bly well known by 1972, since the mos­quito and malaria pop­u­la­tions in Panama went through a sim­i­lar dras­tic selec­tion process while the canal was built.

The social side of things seems a bit pre­scient too. Ter­ror­ists attack the United States, sen­sa­tion­al­ism du jour is the enter­tain­ment and media access to gov­ern­ment infor­ma­tion is heav­ily restricted. An Amer­i­can city is a dis­as­ter zone because of pol­luted water. Scape­goats and whip­ping boys abound. The pres­i­dent has a dumb nick­name, “Prexy”, and is only avail­able for war-mongering “Why Do You Hate Amer­ica?” sound-bites when he is not on vaca­tion. Seri­ously. I can’t make this shit up. The book is too heavy-handedly polit­i­cal, but the writ­ing is good and the build-up of panic is good, even if the moral seems exactly the same as Stand on Zanzibar.

Link of the day: The Leg­endary Tube Bar Record­ing.

Dark Mat­ter: A Cen­tury of Spec­u­la­tive Fic­tion from the African Dias­pora is right up there with Dan­ger­ous Visions in terms of qual­ity and per­spi­cac­ity in sci­ence fic­tion antholo­gies. I could go spout­ing off on how won­der­ful it is to see black writ­ers grow­ing in a field nor­mally dom­i­nated by white guys, but all the is addressed in the book, espe­cially in Samuel R. Delany’s essay “Racism and Sci­ence Fic­tion” at the end, which is one of the most cogent and thought­ful essays on racism that I’ve ever read. [excerpts at the bot­tom]

Instead I’m going to briefly delve into the qual­ity of the sto­ries them­selves, as works of craft, and then give some thoughts on my own reac­tions to some of them. Briefly, the qual­ity of the sto­ries is very high. The first half dozen or so required me to put some time aside after read­ing them for mas­ti­ca­tion and diges­tion. They are potent tales. W.E.B. du Bois, Octavia But­ler, Amiri Baraka, Samuel R. Delany are just a few of the slew of folks who have tales in this book. I now have a bunch of new authors to check out as well, espe­cially Nalo Hop­kin­son. For me, the qual­ity slowly tapered off after the first few head­chew­ers, again much like DV. Not to say that any of the sto­ries were bad [none of them are], but amidst the mas­ter­pieces the oth­ers don’t shine as brightly.

Since I’m a cracker from down­coun­try Indi­ana and attended a pri­vate Catholic col­lege whose per­cent­age of black stu­dents sus­pi­ciously matches up with the per­cent­age of non-Catholics on cam­pus and the per­cent­age of non-white ath­letes, I don’t have a whole lot of expe­ri­ence when it comes to diver­sity. Hell, I don’t think I even met a Jew until I was in my twen­ties. The clos­est thing I knew to a minor­ity grow­ing up was the old coun­try Ital­ian grand­mother down the street. Basi­cally, I’m say­ing that what I’m about to say is most likely going to be some­what ignorant.

It seemed like many of the sto­ries could be eas­ily inter­preted as ful­fill­ing black stereo­types. For instance, prob­a­bly a good half of the sto­ries have music and rhythm as cen­tral themes and tropes. Thank­fully they are often used to high­light other con­cerns, avoid­ing a truly shal­low and unpro­duc­tive inter­pre­ta­tion that black folks can dance and sing while white folks have rhythm like a fat man’s heart­beat [although Evie Shockley’s “sep­a­ra­tion anx­i­ety” doesn’t do so well at that]. Sim­i­larly, there are con­stant ref­er­ences through­out of slav­ery and the slave trade, often with anger still seething under the sur­face. This is some­thing I can’t under­stand at all, and I’ve tried. My ini­tial reac­tion to the resent­ful men­tions of slav­ery was “Man, that was over 150 years ago, you should be over it by now.” Unfair to say the least, since I can have no idea how long it takes to heal the eth­nic trauma of hun­dreds of years of slav­ery. I also don’t have any per­sonal expe­ri­ence with con­tem­po­rary race rela­tions from the black side of the equa­tion. What I’m deplor­ing here is my igno­rance and also my inabil­ity to effec­tively find sources to alle­vi­ate that igno­rance. I learn best through empa­thy, but how can a priv­i­leged white boy empathize with blackness?

I guess I had the expec­ta­tion that black sci­ence fic­tion writ­ers would be more likely to avoid what I per­ceive as a heavy-handed use of America’s less than savory past. I think I expected to engage in exam­ples of black­ness that wasn’t defined by dis­en­fran­chise­ment and ostra­ciza­tion. Instead I felt that these writ­ers don’t have much hope that things will get bet­ter for them and theirs. For us. But then, maybe I was expect­ing black writ­ers to write like white writ­ers. I don’t really know. Dark Mat­ter is the per­fect name for this anthol­ogy on a whole bunch of lev­els [dark­ness of con­tent, dark­ness of out­look, dark­ness of the authors, not to men­tion the main metaphor of the anthol­ogy; that black influ­ence is the dark mat­ter of our soci­ety] and it is def­i­nitely some­thing I want to add to my sci-fi book collection.

These are some of my imme­di­ate reac­tions, tem­pered a bit by sub­se­quent thought. Obvi­ously I’ve not been able to untan­gle the skein of my soci­etal pre­con­cep­tions. I’ve known I’m never really going to do that on any topic, which is why I try to ignore the sub­con­scious mur­mur­ings of sex­ism and racism that bub­ble up from time to time and deal with each per­son as a per­son and not some spe­cific thing in a pigeon­hole. Every­body seems to live much hap­pier that way.

Excerpt from Racism and Sci­ence Fic­tion by Samuel R. Delany [via]

Racism for me has always appeared to be first and fore­most a sys­tem, largely sup­ported by mate­r­ial and eco­nomic con­di­tions at work in a field of social tra­di­tions. Thus, though racism is always made man­i­fest through indi­vid­u­als’ deci­sions, actions, words, and fee­ings, when we have the lux­ury of look­ing at it with the longer view (and we don’t, always), usu­ally I don’t see much point in blam­ing peo­ple per­son­ally, black or white, for their feel­ings or even for their spe­cific actions — as long as they remain this side of the crim­i­nal. These are not what sta­bi­lize the sys­tem. These are not what pro­mote and repro­duce the sys­tem. These are not the points where the most last­ing changes can be intro­duced to alter the system.

[…]I don’t think you can have racism as a pos­i­tive sytem until you have that socioe­co­nomic sup­port sug­gested by that (rather arbi­trary [place­ment of walls]) twenty percent/eighty per­cent pro­por­tion. But what racism as a sys­tem does is iso­late and seg­re­gate the peo­ple of one race, or group, or eth­nos from another. As a sys­tem it can be fueled by chance as much as by hos­til­ity or by the best of inten­tions. (“I thought they would be more com­fort­able together, I thought they would want to be with each other…”) And cer­tainly one of its strongest man­i­fes­ta­tions is as a socio-visual sys­tem in which peo­ple become used to always see­ing blacks with other blacks and so—because peo­ple are used to it—being uncom­fort­able when­ever they see blacks mixed in, at what­ever pro­por­tion, with whites.

[…] As such, [the sys­tem] is fueled as much by chance as by hos­tile inten­tions and equally by the best inten­tions as well. It is what­ever sys­tem­at­i­cally accli­mates peo­ple, of all col­ors, to become com­fort­able with the iso­la­tion and seg­re­ga­tion of the races, on a visual, social, or eco­nomic level—which in turn sup­ports and is sup­ported socioe­co­nomic dis­crim­i­na­tion. Because it is a sys­tem, how­ever, I believe per­sonal guilt will never replace a bit of well founded sys­tems analysis.

Links to other stuff on DM:ACoSFftAD:

SciFi.com- Makes the DV com­par­i­son right off the bat too!
The AALBC has an excerpt of W.E.B. du Bois’s “The Comet” and a Table of Con­tents.

As was rec­om­mended to me, I read J. M. Coet­zee’s Dis­grace. And indeed it was a good book. Folks seem to like call­ing Coetzee’s writ­ing “sparse;” and I guess you could say that. I tend to think that writ­ers who are wordy don’t really know what they are try­ing to say. What comes through with Coet­zee is that he has a keen and deft mind. Any­way the book
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The Edna Web­ster Col­lec­tion of Undis­cov­ered Writ­ing by Richard Brauti­gan came in the mail yes­ter­day. This is a col­lec­tion of Brautigan’s writ­ing from when he was young [21 or so] and unpub­lished. It sat in a safe deposit box for years until Edna Web­ster, the mother of his first girl­friend, con­tacted a pub­lisher.
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The Unrea­son­ing Mask by Philip José Farmer is yet another first edi­tion hard­cover I picked up for 50 cents. I’d been impressed with his book To Your Scat­tered Bod­ies Go, so when I stum­bled across some­thing else by him, and for such a good price, I picked it up. It was alright. I think Mr. Farmer does a much bet­ter job with char­ac­ter­i­za­tion instead of tale­spin­ning. Spoil­ers past the jump.
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A few months back I picked up a first edi­tion hard­cover of Philip K. Dick’s Ubik for 50 cents. I finally read it, yes­ter­day. It is typ­i­cal, full of mind-bending Dickisms, so worth a read. Spoil­ers past the hoo-ha.
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By rec­om­men­da­tion I read Sophie’s World by Jostein Gaarder. It is a novel about the his­tory of phi­los­o­phy, writ­ten in such a way the the con­cepts from the pre-Socratics through Kant and up to Sartre could be grasped by a juve­nile. Spoil­ers past the jump.
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Pol­ish sci­ence fic­tion was new to me. Stanisław Lem is great. His Cybe­riad is appro­pri­ately sub­ti­tled Fables for a Cyber­netic Age and con­cerns itself with two wily con­struc­tors, Trurl and Kla­pau­cius, who are just stu­pid enough to get into all kinds of scrapes, and just smart enough to get the best of every­one in the end.
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The Most Sig­nif­i­cant SF & Fan­tasy Books of the Last 50 Years, 1953–2002

I finally man­aged to track down every book on the above list, many are/were unfor­tu­nately out of print. But I did it. I’ve read them all. Mini-Reviews of all 50 are inside.
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I just fin­ished The Chron­i­cles of Thomas Covenant the Unbe­liever by Stephen R. Don­ald­son [who is, inci­den­tally, from Cleve­land]. It is com­prised of three books: Lord Foul’s Bane, The Illearth War and The Power that Pre­serves. With this series I have finally, after three years, fin­ished the Sci­ence Fic­tion Book Club list: The Most Sig­nif­i­cant SF & Fan­tasy Books of the Last 50 Years, 1953–2002 which I will pro­vide a large review of some­time this week. First a review of Thomas Covenant.
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All My Sins Remem­bered is the sec­ond book I’ve read by Joe Halde­man. The first, The For­ever War, was a really good book about the social and psy­cho­log­i­cal effects of extended space travel when it screws with sub­jec­tive ver­sus objec­tive time. All My Sins Remem­bered is sim­i­lar but dif­fer­ent.
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The Book of the New Sun is a tetral­ogy com­posed of The Shadow of the Tor­turer, The Claw of The Con­cil­ia­tor, The Sword of the Lic­tor and The Citadel of the Autarch. It is sort of a blend of both fan­tasy and sci­ence fic­tion in terms of genre, but with chap­ter titles like “Escha­tol­ogy and Gen­e­sis” it is also much more than that.
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I’ve read every­thing Cord­wainer Smith ever pub­lished now. That is some­what dis­ap­point­ing because I like him and his tena­cious sto­ries quite a bit. Norstrilia is one of the clas­sic sci­ence fic­tion books I bought for 10 cents apiece while antique shop­ping last week.
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I’ve read a lot of Philip K. Dick and while this novel is sup­pos­edly his break­through work, The Man in the High Cas­tle is my least favorite of his works. The basic premise is that the United States of Amer­ica and Britain lost World War II and now the USA is split between Impe­r­ial Japan and the Third Reich.
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I hon­estly don’t know why this book was in the Top 50 Sci­ence Fic­tion books list. Death­bird Sto­ries by Har­lan Elli­son is a col­lec­tion of short sto­ries that wres­tle with gods and wor­ship­pers, both new and old, and from dif­fer­ent angles.
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Wilmar Shiras’s Chil­dren of the Atom is a hard book to come by. It had been out of print for quite some time until rel­a­tively recently. I now only have four books left to read on this list. Thank­fully, I can find them all in the Cleve­land library sys­tem.
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I’m cur­rently read­ing John Brun­ner’s Stand on Zanz­ibar. I man­aged to get my hands on a first edi­tion in fair con­di­tion. Paper wasn’t acid-free in those days, so the paper is get­ting a lit­tle soft, but it is still very read­able. First off it reminded me a bit of Samuel R. Delany’s Dhal­gren.
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A few weeks ago I fin­ished read­ing The Redis­cov­ery of Man, a col­lec­tion of short sto­ries by Cord­wainer Smith. His real name is Paul Myron Anthony Linebarger and he was the god­son of Sun Yat Sen, a pro­fes­sor of Asi­atic Stud­ies at Johns Hop­kins, spoke sev­eral lan­guages, wrote the sem­i­nal work Psy­cho­log­i­cal War­fare and was a spy [more here].
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I fin­ished Auto­bi­og­ra­phy of Red by Anne Car­son this morn­ing because I woke up at 5am, for no rea­son, for the third con­sec­u­tive day. It is a “novel in verse” and a blend­ing of Greek myth and con­tem­po­rary life.
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What a curi­ous book. This guy is lay­ered a bit like an onion and there really isn’t any rea­son to trust any­one who claims any­thing in the entire book. The humor is droll, very Scotch, and the type that makes you want to smack the peo­ple upside the head for being goof­balls. It was an enjoy­able, some­what rib­ald read that is rem­i­nis­cent of a Jerry Springer Show, with a bit more class.
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I’m almost fin­ished with all of the books I received for Christ­mas. I cur­rently have around 75 pages left to read in Alis­dair Gray’s Poor Things and then I have to read Auto­bi­og­ra­phy of Red by Anne Car­son and I will be with­out read­ing mate­r­ial once again. Here is what I read while my site was wigged out:
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I fin­ished read­ing my first Christ­mas book today. The Changeling Sea by Patri­cia McKil­lip. Despite the fact that she writes fan­tasy aimed at a mainly female audi­ence she remains one of my favorite fan­tasy authors.
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I am still 6 feet, one and one half inches tall, I am 167 pounds, my heart­beat is 71 bpm and my blood pres­sure is 133/81. I also voted today and am dis­ap­pointed that I did not receive a sticker.
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I’ve been run­ning low on things to read lately. Most of the sci­ence fic­tion and espe­cially the fan­tasy stuff looks like com­pletely shal­low and uno­rig­i­nal tripe. And while there are plenty of other things to read besides sci­ence fic­tion and fan­tasy, I don’t really know where to start.
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Over the week­end I had a con­ver­sa­tion with B rd over at edlun­dart about time and since then I’ve coin­ci­den­tally read sev­eral short sto­ries deal­ing with time travel by Michael Swan­wick.
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I fin­ished read­ing Ivan­hoe the other day. It was good, sur­pris­ingly so. I ended up lik­ing the main vil­lain more than any other char­ac­ter.
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I went to Half Price Books on Fri­day and man­aged to not buy the whole store. Instead I bought three illus­trated books of fables and folk­tales. All brand new and all rather cheap.
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“There are… two con­cepts of the artist. The one gives all to his work, in a very real way; if he does not pro­duce vol­umes, at least he goes through many, many drafts. He neglects his life, and his life tot­ters and sways and often plum­mets into chaos. It is pre­sump­tu­ous of us to judge him unhappy: or, when he is obvi­ously unhappy, to judge the source of it.
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…if I repent of any­thing, it is very likely to be my good behav­ior. –Economy

I read two books in two days. Yes, I’ve already fin­ished the books I picked up Sun­day at the library. Besides both hav­ing the word ‘heaven’ in the title and both using the word ‘mil­que­toast’ in the expo­si­tion, they are very dif­fer­ent.
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I’m on riley­dog today!

I’m almost done read­ing Louis Aragon’s The Adven­tures of Telemachus. Appar­ently, this is also a par­ody of a story writ­ten by Fenelon in 1699. I’ve had pre­vi­ous expe­ri­ence with Dadaist films and visual art, but not lit­er­a­ture. This expe­ri­ence has been appro­pri­ately strange. Aragon warps every­thing for his own plea­sure. Greco-Roman is wres­tled into some­thing resem­bling farce after a night of hal­lu­cino­genic drug use. [not that i know any­thing about that, mind]. Min­erva is Men­tor, the guide or some­thing or Telemachus. A foul ball, Mentor/Minerva’s inces­sant pros­e­ly­tiz­ing is an end­less source of amuse­ment — while at the same time con­tain­ing the meat of the book. sweet­meat i sup­pose. i would think her a les­bian if she didn’t bang Calypso in quite such a mas­cu­line way. Telemachus and nymph Eucharis do the nasty a few times as well, as for Telemachus, that saucy Greek, i’m not sure his heart is in it. When they see an oner­ous play called “The Adven­tures of Telemachus” it takes noth­ing more to con­vince me that Aragon is mock­ing Fenelon.
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Min­utes ago I fin­ished read­ing Sir Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. It is, undoubt­edly, one of the best sci­ence fic­tion nov­els I have ever perused. It makes no bones about its sta­tus as alle­gory [which I, like Tolkien, have cor­dially dis­liked for some time]. But it does not strike me as an alle­gory about human­ity as much as it is for human­ity. The story is about uni­ver­sal poten­tial. It also works as a good accom­pa­ni­ment to the film.

Sir Arthur deserves his knight­hood for Con­tri­bu­tions to Lit­er­a­ture from this book alone. The writ­ing is superb, con­cise, and poignant. He is able to keep a theme run­ning for over three mil­lion years by the use of a sim­ple sym­bol and a remark­able grasp on basic human impulses. Per­haps hard­est to fully appre­ci­ate is Clarke’s inti­ma­tion that an extra­so­lar entity is respon­si­ble for the the suc­cess of human­ity. Although it could very well seem insult­ing to stan­dard man-ape that we are merely an exper­i­ment, Clarke some­how man­ages to con­vince the reader to be proud that we are an exper­i­ment — mostly because we are a suc­cess­ful one.

This is def­i­nitely a book I plan on pur­chas­ing at the next avail­able opportunity.

I’ve been wend­ing my way through Fritz Leiber’s refresh­ing short story fan­tasy lately. I con­sider myself some­what of a con­nosieur of oth­er­worldly lit­er­a­ture, and Fritz, I must say, is not a stale author. Much fan­tasy is either bad Tolkien imi­ta­tion or based on an RPG of some sort. Need­less to say, I’d rather read Tolkien and the other Inklings than bad imi­ta­tion, and I’d rather play an RPG than read about one.

But I digress.

Fritz started writ­ing about Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser way back in the for­ties, con­tem­po­rary to Tolkien, in a mag­a­zine called Fan­tas­tic. Pulp fic­tion back then was the low­est of the low, and even though Dashiell Ham­mett and Ray­mond Chan­dler made do, short story writ­ers for mags didn’t. Thus, his ideas were estab­lished in a com­pletely dif­fer­ent medium from Tolkien that he did not suc­cumb to toothy mim­icry [bad Tolkien bites]. That is not to say that Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser are tooth­less. These sto­ries are swash­buck­ling, and if you can see in the swords­man­ship and other qual­i­ties of this duo, the seeds of D&D then you might not be all wrong.
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This is the sum­mer of sci-fi for me. Last year was the beat gen­er­a­tion, and distopias. Philip K. Dick could some­how qual­ify in each of those cat­e­gories. What I find most inter­est­ing how­ever, is the ease with which his sto­ries are con­verted into films. Blade Run­ner is based on his novel Do Androids Dream of Elec­tric Sheep?; Total Recall is based on the short story ‘We Can Remem­ber It For You Whole­sale;’ Minor­ity Report and Imposter are based on short sto­ries of the same titles; and Scream­ers is based on his short story ‘Sec­ond Vari­ety.’ All of which I have now read.

It has been said that the dif­fi­culty in con­vert­ing a story to a screen­play and then a movie lies in the inevitable loss of detail and nuance that is present in the writ­ten form. The rea­son it seems that Dick is so eas­ily con­verted to film, is not because his work is shal­low, far from it, but the fact that he pro­vides impli­ca­tions for his read­ers to pon­der. The open-ended themes point to a feel­ing in Dick’s writ­ings that the sto­ries are not book­ended, what he writes about is some­thing that is always con­tin­u­ing. This allows a great deal of manip­u­la­tion to be present in the con­ver­sion from writ­ten to visual, while keep­ing Dick a pres­ence. I’m glad I’ve read him, it has given me a few insights into both writ­ing and film. hoo-eee!

I’ve been burn­ing my way through the Top 50 Sci­ence Fic­tion books of the last 50 years. I’ve recently read Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game, Williams Gibson’s Neu­ro­mancer, and Anne Rice’s Inter­view with a Vam­pire. Cur­rently I am read­ing Robert A. Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land. I am 28% fin­ished with the list.

Last evening I fin­ished Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End. It was a fab­u­lous book.

After fin­ish­ing the last page, clos­ing the book, and sit­ting up straight, I was over­come with awe. Truly, this book was like no other sci­ence fic­tion I had ever read. Was the end­ing pos­i­tive or neg­a­tive? Bit­ter­sweet per­haps? But I get ahead of myself.

Once upon a time, at the begin­nings of the Cold War, man was poised to thrust him­self with reck­less aban­don into the cold embrace of outer space. Before he could do this how­ever, earth was vis­ited by what man came to call the Over­lords.
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The Sum­mer Read­ing List cur­rently contains:

1. High Fidelity — Nick Hornby
2. Ulysses — James Joyce
3. The Hawk­line Mon­ster — Richard Brautigan
4. The Wasp Fac­tory — Iain Banks
5. His Dark Mate­ri­als Tril­ogy — Philip Pullman
6. Gravity’s Rain­bow — Thomas Pynchon
7. The Cor­rec­tions — Jonathan Franzen
8. Some­thing by Kafka

I’m always tak­ing sug­ges­tions as well, espe­cially poetry.

Tomor­row I get my St. Joe County Library Card.

I fin­ished The Bell Jar last night. I can’t really say that it blew me away. The obvi­ous auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal ref­er­ences to Plath’s own life were rather…obvious, and the depic­tion of men­tal decay and rebirth didn’t do much for me either. Granted, since the nar­ra­tor is the crazy one, the nar­ra­tive is going to be col­ored by and twisted by hes­ti­tancy and out­right refusal to tell us every­thing. For instance, Esther hates Buddy Willard. But if you think about the times you actu­ally meet Buddy he’s not that bad of a guy. I didn’t like the asy­lum bits either. they seemed clich , per­haps this is because of my dis­tance from when peo­ple still got shock treat­ments. of course they are hor­ri­ble. also, since it is set in the ber-restrictive and con­ser­v­a­tive post-war years, the McCarthyite era, the proper things to do etc. that Esther has prob­lems with just bored me. things have changed, but The Bell Jar hasn’t. it is one of those works that is rad­i­cal for its time but seems stuffy and whiny to us young’uns.

i think i don’t like it because it is too attached to the time it was writ­ten. now it seems a period piece, and the ‘50s are kitschy that any­thing about them doesn’t inter­est me much.

I don’t lis­ten to them any­more: they annoy me. They’re going to sleep together. They know it. Each one knows that the other knows it. But since they are young, chaste and decent, since each one wants to keep his self– respect and that of the other, since love is a great poetic thing which you must not frighten away, sev­eral times a week they go to dances and restau­rants, offer­ing the spec­ta­cle of their rit­ual, mechan­i­cal dances.…

After all, you have to kill time. They are young and well built, they have enough to last them another thirty years. So they’re in no hurry, they delay and they are not wrong. Once they have slept together they will have to find some­thing else to veil the enor­mous absur­dity of their exis­tence. Still … is it absolutely nec­es­sary to lie? (p. 111 of Nausea)

that about cov­ers it.

upon reread­ing Nau­sea i am inter­ested in the exis­ten­tial­ist take on regret. Roquentin seems less alien­ated to me than he did the last time i vis­ited him, instead he seems more con­cerned with what used to be and what has changed. he does not accept this change to Nau­sea and mourns for his past. is this Sartre’s exam­ple of Kierkegaard’s ‘knight of infi­nite res­ig­na­tion?’ and why is the extreme aware­ness of being-in-itself so dis­gust­ing? why is this knowl­edge of dif­fer­ence nau­seous instead of euphoric? it doesn’t sicken me…

“I must not put strange­ness where there is none. I think that is the big dan­ger in keep­ing a diary: you exag­ger­ate every­thing. You con­tin­u­ally force the truth because you’re always look­ing for some­thing.” — Antoine Roquentin (p. 1 of Nausea)

Robert Jordan’s newest Cross­roads of Twi­light will be released on the sev­enth. and i must say that i am ready. since i started his Wheel of Time series in 1994 and it offers very few signs of impend­ing clo­sure, i have become slightly impa­tient and per­turbed and even at times apa­thetic regard­ing the series. it has taken so long for him to write it that i have out­grown my teenage nerd inter­est in the series. that doesn’t mean how­ever, that i won’t fin­ish it. i’ve invested enough time and cash into pur­chas­ing and read­ing the books that i must fin­ish what i have begun. i just wish Robert Jor­dan could do the same. the first four books in the series were very engag­ing but he has sput­tered ever since, i think, because he is try­ing to stretch the story into a few more books to make a few more bucks. i’m expect­ing to be dis­ap­pointed. hope­fully i’ll be wrong.

Book Review: Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves

i’m not one who has much knowl­edge of lit­er­ary trends in novel-writing but House of Leaves strikes me as a book that could very well be the great work of post­mod­ern lit­er­a­ture. which means every­thing and noth­ing. as an exper­i­men­tal novel it is a remark­ably well con­structed thing. i had a bit of trou­ble get­ting in to it, but the book teaches you how to read it as it goes along. at my last count there are three and a half sto­ries all revolv­ing encased within each other. start­ing from the core we have The Navid­son Record, a non-fiction film and doc­u­men­tary in the true mean­ing of the word, of the Navidson’s house on Ash Tree Lane that is larger on the inside than it is on the out­side. within the depths of this house, or per­haps within the depths of the souls of the peo­ple that live in the house dwells the shad­owy mino­taur. this story is the sub­ject of a pseudo-academic exam­i­na­tion of The Navid­son Record by the blind Zamp no. this per­son is dead. but Johnny Tru­ant who knew Zamp no takes it upon him­self to orga­nize and foot­note this paper, almost at the cost of his san­ity. the half story comes from the edi­tors who take it upon them­selves to pro­vide trans­la­tions for the numer­ous pas­sages in for­eign languages.

the entire work is heav­ily foot­noted which effec­tively keeps the reader from becom­ing too engaged in any one story at a time. also, 4 dif­fer­ent ver­sions of the book exist. in the super-duper de-luxe ver­sion, every occur­rence of house is in blue and the word mino­taur and struck pas­sages are in red. plus, one struck line is in pur­ple and there are braille pas­sages and color plates.

as a film stu­dent i was fas­ci­nated with the crit­i­cism of The Navid­son Record. i want to make this film. As for what the book intends to do, i have only slight clues. i need to read it sev­eral more times and enjoin myself to the mes­sage boards on the book. i sus­pect that the mean­ing will be dif­fer­ent for each per­son. if you like to read, then add this book to your list. i loved it.

i’m about 75% through Screams of Rea­son by David Skal. Its mostly about Hollywood’s fas­ci­na­tion with mad sci­ence. Its ok. but a good shot in the dark by my mother who bought it for me. i can see many dif­fer­ent tracks where expan­sion and deeper aca­d­e­mic dis­course would add some insights but it is pretty hard to find good aca­d­e­mic texts on film since most are tar­geted to hob­by­ists and film buffs instead of aca­d­e­mics. yes i’m pompous. fuck off.

3 days till back to school.

It was sim­ply and well writ­ten and I was impressed with Huxley’s knowl­edge and insights into social con­di­tion­ing, yet as the author him­self said in his fore­ward, it has many flaws. I am now con­vinced that every utopia is at the same time an antiu­topia. Granted, Hux­ley presents a world free of virtue or vice, that cre­ates an Eden for the clones: but all this is at the price of their human­ity. For all intents and pur­poses the major­ity is a rigidly cas­ti­gated hive mind whose abil­i­ties and dis­abilites have been for­feited by the hatch­ery. Pre­des­ti­na­tion blows. It is a world with­out moral­ity, with­out choice and with­out free­dom. Like The Sav­age, I choose mis­ery and free­dom when the other option is only the lit­eral life of an ant or worker bee.

A world is too stag­nant, too sta­ble, if there is no black or white but only grey. Every­thing becomes vanilla fla­vored. No vice means no virtue, no ugli­ness means no beauty. These con­cepts only exist in dichotomy. A human cre­ated world that removes the pas­sion and leaves only hypnopaedic bio­log­i­cal exis­tence is not for me.

Hux­ley acknowl­edged this lim­i­ta­tion and said if he had to write Brave New World again The Sav­age would be given a third choice: life in exile among the few sane per­sons on the Reservation.

Now I am start­ing in on Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. I hope she isn’t too heavy handed. I have met one of her advo­cates and he was a lit­tle on the abra­sive side. but maybe that is just him.

Yes­ter­day, I read Naked Lunch by William S. Bur­roughs. It has been on my list of books to read since Dr. Ledman’s US His­tory class junior year of high school when Phil cor­rectly answered one of his father’s ridicu­lous extra credit ques­tions. They never had any­thing to do with US his­tory per se and were always con­cerned with either the beat gen­er­a­tion or Pink Floyd. Well, now I lis­ten to Pink Floyd and have pretty much exhausted the beat authors so US His­tory wasn’t a waste. Oh yeah, Pres­i­dent Taft was one fat mofo, I remem­ber that as well.

Any­way, Naked Lunch was not as good as I had hoped. It was, for the most part, pure hal­lu­ci­na­tory descrip­tion rife with explicit homo­erotic imagery. There were moments of strik­ing satire, but the con­stant indwelling phi­los­o­phy on addic­tion took its toll. A few posts ago, I bitched about overly clever descrip­tion that ful­fills no pur­pose. I’ve just read a whole book full of it.

It also seems that I am begin­ning a new unit in my sum­mer read­ing enti­tled DRUGS. The next book I am start­ing today is Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. I know Hux­ley was an addict, and all I know about Brave New World is that it is a dystopia either along the same lines as 1984 or it has some­thing to do with cloning or per­haps the tra­vails of an addicted soci­ety. hellifiknow.