What I read last month.
Of special interest to political bloggers: The autobiographies of Sully Sullenberger and Helen Keller, criminology works by Richard Rhodes and Mark Fleisher, Frank Norris's seminal novel The Octopus, and most especially, Charles Pierce's Idiot America, which is both funny and a warning.
Capitalist Misery: The Octopus, by Frank Norris :
For a moment, Dyke was confused. Then swiftly the matter became clear in his mind. The railroad had raised the freight on hops from two cents to five. All his calculations as to a profit on his little investment he had based on a freight rate of two cents a pound. He was under contract to deliver his crop. He could not draw back. The new rate ate up every cent of his gains. He stood there ruined.
"Why, what do you mean?" he burst out. "You promised me a rate of two cents and I went ahead with my business with that understanding. What do you mean?"
S. Behrman and the clerk watched him from the other side of the counter.
"The rate is five cents", said the clerk doggedly.
"Well, that ruins me," shouted Dyke. "Do you understand? I won't make fifty cents. Make! Why, I will owe...I'll be..be...That ruins me, do you understand?"
The other raised a shoulder.
"We don't force you to ship. You can do as you like. The rate is five cents, and I think you're getting off easy."
Dyke stared in blank astonishment. For the moment, the audacity of the affair was what most appealed to him. He forgot its personal application.
"Good Lord," he murmured. "Good Lord! What will you people do next? Look here. What's your basis of applying freight rates, anyhow?" he suddenly vociferated with furious sarcasm. "What's your rule? What are you guided by?"
But at the words, S. Behrman, who had kept silent during the heat of the discussion, leaned abruptly forward. For the only time in his knowledge, Dyke saw his face inflamed with anger and with the enmity and contempt of all this farming element with whom he was contending.
"Yes, what's your rule? What's your basis?" demanded Dyke, turning swiftly to him.
S. Behrman emphasized each word of his reply with a tap of one forefinger on the counter before him:
"All...the traffic...will...bear."
This American classic from 1901 is best known for two famous passages: the one quoted above, and a later one in which the Evil Railroad Overlord falls into a cargo hold and is drowned in an avalanche of wheat. I've seen both in several of the kind of anthologies that try to represent every great American author and include little excerpts from the novels of those who never had the grace to contribute a good short story. In fact, The Octopus has many long self-contained passages, powerful images, and well-developed characters (my favorites were the imposing patriarch Magnus Derrick and the ornery cuss Annixter).
Did I like it? It was one of the most painful reads I've had since last year's Sister Carrie and for the same reasons. It sets out to make the reader's blood boil with indignation, and it does so very very well. Entire families of innocents are figuratively and literally crushed under the wheels of the railroad (whose tracks, stretching into every corner to grasp everythin in sight, are the "octopus" of the title), the fruits of their labor ripped off by monopolists, their lands stolen, the men murdered outright and the widows turned out to starve with their children while the obscenely wealthy railroad plutocrats indulge in conspicuous waste.
More than 100 years later, The Octopus is a needed antidote to the extreme libertarianism preached by today's Republican Party and the Ayn Rand idiots who troll the internet. The portrayal of what actually happened in the days of unfettered laissez-faire capitalism, when the "limited government" took a hands-off policy as the big players broke contracts, stole assets and colluded to bankrupt competition because they could, should be a wake-up call to anyone who works for a living. To this day, it astonishes me that the farm belt, whose pioneer farmers are the primary victims in The Octopus, and which benefits from federal subsidies contributed by the "blue" states, is one of the most reliable voting blocs for the Republican Party that actively promotes the killing of their subsidies and a return to the days of helplessness against the wheels of industry.
The Eighth Continent: Islandia, by Austin Tappan Wright :
"Read me another fable, won't you please?" she said. I opened the book, waiting till sure of my voice.
It was about a man who wished to marry a woman, but she caring for someone else would not have him. To another woman, a friend, he told all his troubles and she was sympathetic. She also made clearer to him the feeling that the one he had lost had toward him. She disclosed to him matters concerning herself to illustrate the nature of the problem from a woman's point of view. Becoming wiser, he found that his loss was less unbearable...
Reading on, careful of my voice and pronunciation, I wondered about the visit that I was to make to the Upper Farm next month and remembered that she spoke as though I might wish to change my mind. Did she mean that if my feeling increased I ought to want to do so? It was hard to hold to the sense of the fable.
Thus, continued, Godding, this woman rendered the man a great service of which he was fully appreciative. He often told her of his gratitude. "You are," he said, "of great value to me. I hope I may be of value to you." She answered that she enjoyed seeing him...so he came often and told her about himself and about his love, which he wished to see clearly. He frequently described the beauty of the lost one most poetically.
"Sometimes", read the fable, " we see upon the road a figure of another. Our thoughts are elsewhere and that figure is unfamiliar to us. We approach and suddenly find that one whom we assumed to be a stranger is one who is close and dear. It is like the emerging of a bright light where one thought only to find darkness."
This is one of those stories in which the modern civilized hero finds himself stuck on an Amish farm or a hippie commune or something, undergoes culture shock, and eventually finds himself unwilling to return to the city life he came from. Islandia is a fictional continent, in size and location somewhere between Australia and Madagascar, and invented by Wright with as much thorough detail as Tolkein devoted to the creation of Middle Earth. I'm a little puzzled that it was shelved under "Science Fiction"; unlike a lot of other proposed Utopias, the inhabitants of Islandia are regular humans; they have no special powers or technology; pretty much refusing most of the technical advancements of the rest of the world (maybe they read The Octopus and wisely decided that the introduction of railroads and industry might not be a good idea); and their government is fairly ordinary. The primary differences between Islandians and other cultures are their technological simplicity and a decidedly sensible approach to relationships that would infuriate the neo-Calvinists of today's America. Islandians have four words for "love" that connote, respectively: patriotism, sexual attraction, strong friendship bonds, and the desire to share life and raise a family.
Islandia is huge. Over 900 pages, a lot of it given over to descriptions of geography, clothes, linguistics, and similar details that make it clear how much of the author's life was devoted to making Islandia REAL by golly! Apparently, the book has a cult following of people who pore over the tale's minutiae as fanatically as die-hard fans of Star Trek or Sherlock Holmes obsess over their respective canons. For those of us not moved to that kind of devotion, however, the amount of detail can be downright boring. Despite the promise of the back cover, I was not moved to wish I could live in Islandia, farming land in a climate comparable to that of Newfoundland. I might visit for the conversation, but I need at least the cultural amenities of my small college town and the lush forests and temperate climate of my chosen homeland. If your mileage varies, I wish you happy traveling.
Hudson River Hero: Highest Duty, by Capt. Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger :
One thing that has always helped make the airline industry strong and safe is the concept that pilots call "captain’s authority." What that means is we have a measure of autonomy—the ability to make an independent professional judgment within the framework of professional standards.
The problem today is that pilots are viewed differently. Over the years, we’ve lost a good deal of respect from our management, our fellow employees, the general public. The whole concept of being a pilot has been diminished, and I worry that safety can be compromised as a result. People used to say that airline pilots were one step below astronauts. Now the joke is: We’re one step above bus drivers, but bus drivers have better pensions.
Airline managers seem to second guess us more often now. There are more challenges. Thirty years ago, it would be unheard of for a mechanic or ramp worker to vociferously disagree with a captain. Now it happens.
A few years ago, in Flying magazine, I read a column written by an airline captain who was nearing retirement. He was remembering his earliest days as a pilot, and comparing those days with today, when all airline employees, including pilots, are judged on their ability to follow rules. "We were hired for our judgment," he wrote. "Now we are being evaluated on our compliance."
For reading on an airline flight this month, I appropriately chose the autobiography of the pilot who, in January 2009, suffered an unprecedented double engine failure and safely brought his plane down in the Hudson with the survival of all on board. That flight, described in detail here, with the transcript of the entire transmission record, was described in exhaustive detail in the media after the event. What wasn’t described were the management rules that required pilots to make every effort to save the expensive plane by landing at the nearest airfield rather than attempt a water landing...rules that Sullenberger consciously ignored, believing unlike the airline beancounters that his "highest duty" was the safety of his passengers. Had his choice not caught the public’s admiration and respect so intensely, Sullenberger might well have faced punishment from management for his choice.
Sullenberger says that the way he lived his life prepared him to do what it take to save his passengers in those few minutes; not only his pilot training but his development of ethical priorities such that decisions were made without hesitation. He’s used his new fame to act as a spokesman for airline safety and for better professional treatment of pilots. Good causes and a good read.
Deus Ex Machina: I, Robot, by Isaac Asimov:
The robot spread his strong hands in a deprecatory gesture. "I accept nothing on authority. A hypothesis must be backed by reason, or else it is worthless—and it goes against all the dictates of logic to suppose that you made me."
Powell dropped a restraining arm upon Donovan’s suddenly bunched fist. "Just why do you say that?"
Cutie laughed. It was a very inhuman laugh—the most machinelike utterance he had yet given vent to. It was sharp and explosive, as regular as a metronome and as uninflected.
"Look at you," he said finally. "I say this in no spirit of contempt, but look at you! The material you are made of is soft and flabby, lacking endurance and strength, depending for energy upon the inefficient oxidation of organic material...like that." He pointed a disapproving finger at what remained of Donovan’s sandwich. "Periodically you pass into a coma and the least variation in temperature, air pressure, humidity or radiation intensity impairs your efficiency. You are makeshift.
"I, on the other hand, am a finished product. I absorb electrical energy directly and utilize it with an almost one hundred percent efficiency. I am composed of strong metal, am continuously conscious, and can stand extremes of environment easily. These are facts which, with the self-evident proposition that no being can create another being superior to itself, smashes your silly hypothesis to nothing."
I was surprised to find that this was not a novel so much as a set of stories around a common theme. I was more surprised to find that it had so much in common with Asimov’s Tales of the Black Widowers mystery series. In that series, a club consisting of a lawyer, a chemist, a historian, and some other professional intellectuals get presented with a problem by the guest at their monthly club dinner; they all poke at it from their respective niches of expertise, like the blind men touching the parts of the elephant; and eventually the problem is solved by the club’s waiter. The tales of I, Robot depend on the given "laws" of robotics: A robot must never harm a person; within that limit, a robot must obey human orders; and within those two limits, a robot must preserve its own existence. From there, each story posits a problem: the robot is where the human can’t get at it, and has been told in a not-quite "order" way to do something that risks harm to itself, with the result that it runs around in circles in a state of paradox. How to get the robot out of the cycle? Or, a politician’s opponent says that the politician is really a robot. Without the politician’s approval, how can you prove or disprove it? The solutions are satisfying and fair, with due attention to the usual ethical dilemmas involving created, intelligent beings. Highly recommended.
Thus Spake Arthur: 2001, by Arthur C. Clarke:
The political and social implications were immense; every person of real intelligence—everyone who looked an inch beyond his nose—would find his life, his values, his philosophy, subtly changed. Even if nothing whatsoever was discovered about TMA-1, and it remained an eternal mystery. Man would know that he was not unique in the universe. Though he had missed them by millions of years, those who had once stood here might yet return: and, if not, there might well be others. All futures must now contain this possibility.
Floyd was still musing over these thoughts when his helmet speaker suddenly emitted a piercing electronic shriek, like a hideously overloaded and distorted time signal. Involuntarily, he tried to block his ears with his spacesuited hands; then he recovered and groped frantically for the gain control of his receiver. While he was still fumbling four more of the shrieks blasted out of the ether; then there was a merciful silence.
All around the crater, figures were standing in attitudes of paralyzed astonishment. So it’s nothing wrong with MY gear, Floyd told himself; everyone heard those piercing electronic screams.
After three million years of darkness, TMA-1 had greeted the lunar dawn.
As sci-fi goes, this just isn’t my kind of book. I saw the Kubrick movie, and the final sequences just left me scratching my head. The book at least explains the intent that I missed—why that floating bone is so significant and what’s actually happening in that hotel room on Saturn’s moon (Jupiter in the movie)...but it still left me scratching my head. Where the tales in I. Robot are self-contained if thematically related, the various parts of 2001 depend on one another, and yet they’re too disjointed for me, progressing from prehistoric times to the moon to the Saturn voyage to the whole episode with HAL to the end that doesn’t seem like an end. Obviously, I’m in the minority here, especially among the fannish tribe I claim to be part of, but there we are.
Fans famously group Clarke with Asimov, Heinlein and sometimes Bradbury as the three or four original grandmasters of science fiction. Clarke always seemed to me to be the odd and least of the four. Maybe I’m prejudiced because my real introduction to Clarke was a Myst-like computer game based on Rama where the puzzles depended not on exploration, finding keys, creative uses of objects, or deduction so much as on doing math in base 8. Fun for some geeks, but not for me. The game also featured commentary from Clarke himself, well into his dotage and less than photogenic or coherent. First impressions are a bitch.
2001 is a classic sci-fi tale that probably everyone should read once. As with cooked spinach, it may be good for you, but I can’t promise that you’ll like it.
Heart of Lightness: Lord Jim, by Joseph Conrad :
He stood elevated in the witness box, with burning cheeks in a cool lofty room: the big framework of punkahs moved gently to and fro high above his head, and from below many many eyes were looking at him out of dark faces, out of white faces, out of red faces, out of faces attentive, spellbound, as if all these people sitting in orderly rows upon narrow benches had been enslaved by the fascination of his voice. It was very loud, it rang startling in his own ears, it was the only sound audible in the world, for the terribly distinct questions that exhorted his answers seemed to shape themselves in andguish and pain within his breast--came to him poignant and silent like the terrible questioning of one's conscience. Outside the court the sun blazed--within was the wind of great punkahs that made you shiver, the shame that made you burn, the attentive eyes whose glance stabbed. The face of the presiding magistrate, clean shaved and impassible, looked at him deadly pale between the red faces of the two nautical assessors. The light of a broad window under the ceiling fell from above on the heads and shoulders of the three men, and they were fiercely distinct in the half light of the big courtroom where the audience seemed composed of staring shadows. They wanted facts. Facts! They demanded facts from him, as if facts could explain anything!
There have been other tales like this, in which the protagonist is condemned, convicted and executed by Fate while he's still wrestling temptation in the first place. Here, the scandalous act is a leap from a boat that might have been instinct or cowardice, for which the man pays for the rest of his life. In fact, he has a pretty damn honorable life, but for the tendency of him and those around him to reduce the entire meaning of his life to that one moment in the air. Almost the antithesis of Conrad's Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim takes to the jungle as a source of redemption, and finds it a better and more humane place than the outer world, savages and pirates and all.
It's a great book for character and atmosphere, breathing life into the clunky old iron ships of the late 19th century, the slummy dockyards and the fortified outposts of the East Indies. More important perhaps is the object lesson given by the example of the man who can never forgive himself for his past, long after everyone else has forgotten.
Marching Morons: Idiot America, by Charles P. Pierce :
Libraries are still good places to visit while you consider what's gone wrong in the country. They're one of the few places left that are free and open and, at the same time, reliably well-ordered. Fiction is on one set of shelves. Nonfiction is on another. Books on theology lean on one another. Nobody puts them on the shelf with the scientific volumes. Aquinas and Mendel are in different places. Ignatius Donnelly's work does not abut that of Percival Lowell or Edwin Hubble. And, if libraries sometimes seem to be evolving into Internet cafes, still, once you step away from the computers, a library is a good and steady place, where the knowledge you're looking for is in the same place it's always been.
Idiot America is a strange, disordered place. Everything is on the wrong shelves. The truth of something is defined by how many people will attest to it, and facts are defined by those people's fervency. Fiction and nonfiction are defined by how well they sell. The best sellers are on one shelf, cheek by jowl, whether what's contained in them is true or not. People wander blindly, following their Gut into dark corners and aisles that lead nowhere, confusing possibilities with threats, jumping at shadows, stumbling around. They trip over piles of fiction left strewn around the floor of the nonfiction aisles. They fall down. They land on other people, and those other people can get hurt.
This one is a bit more than the usual witty but depressing attempt to demonstrate the Infinity that is human dumbth. It sets forth three "Great premises" in the modern "War On Expertise" in which everybody with a mouth or a keyboard is considered an expert and the only people not trusted are the "elites" who have actually studied the subject and know what they're talking about. The three premises are: Any theory is valid if it sells books, soaks up ratings or otherwise moves units; Anything is true if someone says it loudly enough; and Fact is that which enough people believe.
Pierce goes to great lengths to distance "Idiot America" from mere "cranks". Cranks, he says, are a cherished American Institution and venerated second career to pursue in retirement (and, I suspect, a career to which Pierce himself aspires to). Idiot America is a more recent threat, brought about by the rise of profit-oriented television and radio, with a vested interest in keeping the public gullible and uninformed for their sponsors, and in feeding them the infotainment and irritainment they pay for rather than the news and information they need. Hence the nonstop coverage of sensational crime stories; manufactured scandals that are considered newsworthy because, if repeated often enough, they might affect an election; endless hand-wringing about how "some say" we should abolish science education and teach impressionable children The Bible instead. The modern cranks are not holding court at the local bar in Newark or ranting from a soapbox in St. Louis about how the CIA killed Kennedy and the Chinese are trying to poison our water supply; they've got their own blog and a talk radio show and a news anchor suit, and they're asserting baldface lunacy with deadpan experessions on their faces, urging people by the millions to spend their lives terrified, buying expensive consumer products and supporting fucktard politicians to fill the void. And they're breeding and voting.
Pierce can pick just a handful of the most entertaining mass dumbth and "common sense" that is neither common nor does it make any sense, to laugh at: John Miler's laughable list, in National Review, of allegedly "Conservative Rock Songs" (not very significant in the big picture, but particularly funny as described by Pierce: Miller can listen to the Kinks while being completely deaf to Ray Davies’s sense of irony, which is roughly akin to listening to the 1812 Overture and failing to hear the canons.; The Dover School Board's attempt, aided by national fringe right organizations, to force the teaching of Creationism as fact; death threats sent to the architect of a memorial to United Flight 93 after some talk show host decided that the arc shape of the monument looked "muslim"; the sinister popularity of convicted felon and terrorism advocate G. Gordon Liddy; the mass portrayal of Terri Schiavo as a walking, talking captive begging for release from hospice captors; hordes of tourists who flock to the Louvre looking for clues to the location of Mary Magdeline's skeleton; a Creationist museum in Kentucky that proudly displays T-Rex models wearing saddles. And once again, the staff of The Onion gives up and jumps out the window. Intelligent readers of Idiot America may be tempted to despair and follow their example, but I'm sure the human race will make it. I just feel it in my gut.
Reading the Waffle Iron: The Story of My Life, by Helen Keller :
I read King Lear soon after Macbeth, and I shall never forget the feeling of horror when I came to the scene in which Gloster’s eyes are put out. Anger seized me, my fingers refused to move. I sat rigid for one long moment, the blood throbbing in my temples, and all the hatred that a child can feel concentrated in my heart.
I must have made the acquaintance of Shylock and Satan about the same time, for the two characters were long associated in my mind. I remember that I was sorry for them. I felt vaguely that they could not be good even if they wished to, because no one seemed willing to help them or to give them a fair chance. Even now I cannot find it in my heart to condemn them utterly. There are moments when I feel that the Shylocks, the Judases, and even the Devil, are broken spokes in the great wheel of good which shall in due time be made whole.
A very short autobiography, and a good one, especially the later parts. Many people know the first part: how Keller lost her hearing and sight in toddlerhood; how she supposedly became feral and uncontrollable; how Anne Sullivan, the "miracle worker", enabled her to communicate starting by tapping the word ‘water’ into onto her hand; how, when she cussed, her parents would wash her hands with soap. But that part is over by page 30. They don’t know that she became an ardent socialist, or the numerous poets, scholars and others she corresponded with over the years.
Recommended for descriptions and commentary of the many books Keller read. If you like my book ramblings, you’ll probably like hers. Then again, I may have picked the wrong time for this book. For the last half of the month, when people who should know better have claimed that the President spent last year losing popularity by attempting to govern from the extreme left, I’ve had to restrain myself from dragging them over to the sink and tapping on their hands under the faucet.
Out of the Frying Pan: Beggars and Thieves, by Mark Fleisher :
"Why", I exclaimed in a judgmental way, "do parents let their sons join gangs?"
He reached into his left shirt-pocket and took out a few photos of Junior posing alone, and of Junior and himself dressed in matching gang clothing. I felt foolish.
"When you going through those trips [gang involvement], you want your sons to be like you. Junior comes up here [to the penitentiary] and says to me, ‘Smiley and Wino [two of Junior’s homeboys] want me to get into their set.’"
I interrupted him. "You’re not going to let Junior join a gang are you Wolf Man?" I insulted him.
Aggressively, but patiently, Wolf Man explained how he felt about Junior’s involvement in gang life. "I’m his father, and I don’t want to see him get hurt. When my kids were babies, man, and I was riding with them in the car, we’d cover them with a blanket so they wouldn’t get hurt ‘case anything jumped off.
"man, the gang’s the neighborhood. I counseled him about both sides, you know."
"But he can get hurt gang banging, or even killed," I said.
"You can get killed anywhere, man. We talked about it and I said, ‘The choice is yours. You got to decide yourself.’"
This book, and the next one on the list, were found via the bibliography of Rory Miller's Meditations on Violence (bookpost, December 2009), which ought to tell you a little about that book if I cared enough to look at the bibliography. Both are about the psychology of criminals. Beggars and Thieves enters the world of run of the mill street hustlers, most of them from dysfunctional families, failed by parents and schools, and left to fend for themselves on the streets with no marketable skills, no self esteem, no future.
I found it jarring on several levels. For one thing, a lot of the street interviews are in Seattle, in neighborhoods and with landmarks I have seen. For another, it consistently seems to claim that street people welcome long prison sentences because prisons are a cushier environemtn than the outside--shelter, meals, leisure, programs and the like. This has not been my experience with the street people I've known who have faced jail or prison...they usually beg me to do something to get them out, and it's hard to see why they would make that request so urgently if they didn't care or if they welcomed the sentence. I also found it disturbing to confront my initial tendency to picture most of the drug addicts and dealers as African-American, especially in majority-white cities and states of the Northwest. Even more so when most of them were later revealed to be, in fact, African-American. Race issues around crime can be nasty.
Contains a good deal of graphic profanity, stories of not very quiet desperation, a couple of memorable Mercutio-ish personalities and many more utterly mundane, depressing personalities. Highly recommended because this subculture has already entered our lives, and Beggars and Thieves gives us a chance to safely enter theirs in return, and perhaps to come away with an understanding of it.
Into the Fire: Why They Kill, by Richard Rhodes :
These self-appointed authorities generally advocate "breaking the will" of children--punishing them to the point of "unconditional surrender", unqualified obedience, beginning in infancy, before the child can talk. "If the punishment is of the right kind", Christenson asserts, "it not only takes effect physically, but through physical terror and pain [sic] it awakens and sharpens the consciousness that there is a moral power over us, a righteous judge and a law which cannot be broken." J. Richard Fugate, a Christian school administrator, specifies the dimensions of the legendary weapon in his contribution to the canon: "The rod is to be a thin wooden stick like a switch. Of course, the size of the rod should vary with the size of the child. A willow or peach tree branch may be fine for a rebellious two year old, but a small hickory rod or dowel rod would be more fitting for a well-muscled teenage boy." James Dobson favors a leather belt.
Punishment, these authors advise, may continue to the point of raising welts, if necessary, and in no case should last less than ten or fifteen minutes. "Making stripes on a child is not the objective of chastisement", Fugate rationalizes, "but parents must reasonably expect them to be a necessary by-product of the child's rebellion on some occasions." According to Dobson, crying beyond the "genuine release of emotion" is a form of further rebellion. "Crying quickly changes from inner sobbing to an exterior weapon. It becomes a tool of protest to punish the enemy. Real crying usually lasts two minutes or less, but may continue for five. After that point, the child is merely complaining. ...I would require him to stop the protest crying, usually by offering him a little bit more of whatever caused the original tears." As Greven observes, none of these authors specify when enough is enough. "Chastisement" is supposed to persist until the child unconditionally surrenders--"if the child repeatedly disobeys," Dobson comments, "the chastisement has not been painful enough"--and failure to attain that goal is claimed to risk the child's soul.
Partly a description of the "violentization" process by which dangerously violent criminals are made, not born, and partly a biography of criminologist Lonnie Athens, himself a survivor of parental abuse, this book is highly recommended reading for the liberals and conservatives alike who have been fiddling around with the criminal justice system and have any interest in finding and undoing their expensive mistakes. Rhodes...and Athens...describe a four step process that begins, usually in early childhood, with a subject being forced to submit to violence from an aggressive or authority figure; continues with the resolution to resist violence with further violence and successful performance leading to respect and fear from others, and concludes with the acceptance of violence as an acceptable means of dealing with others.
Serendipitously, right after reading a particularly nasty chapter about children who were beaten by their parents as a first step to a life of crime, I stumbled on Facebook friends becoming fans of a group called "My parents didn't put me in Time Out--they whupped my ass!" Among those who would qualify for membership in that group would be Mike Tyson, Perry Smith, OJ Simpson and Lee Harvey Oswald. Rhodes doesn't mention the trenchcoat mafia of Columbine High School, but I imagine they'd be the poster children for the predictable results of Christian "chastisement".
Mary Sue Mindworm: Telzey Amberdon, by James Schmitz, edited by Eric Flint :
Telzey let a minute or so pass before she gave the creature another prodding thought. This time, he was slower to react, and when he did, it was with rather less enthusiasm. He mightn't have liked the experience of having his thrusts bounced back by the bubble.
He had killed a human psi and tried to kill her, but she felt no real animosity towards him. He was simply too different for that. She could, however, develop a hate-thought if she worked at it, and she did. Then she opened the bubble and shot it at him.
The outworld thing shuddered. He struck back savagely and futilely. She lashed him with hate again, and he shuddered again.
Minutes later, he suddenly went squirming and flowing down the rocks and into the oily yellow liquid that washed around them. He was attempting panicky flight, and there was nowhere to go. Telzey stood up carefully and went over to the enclosure, where she could see him bunched up against the far side beneath the surface. He gave the impression of being very anxious to avoid further trouble with her. She opened the bubble wider than before, though still with some caution, picked out his telepathic channels and followed them into his mind. There was no resistance, but she flinched a little. The impression she had, translated very roughly into human terms, was of terrified, helpless sobbing. The creature was waiting to be killed.
A collection of stories about "one of the most powerful telepaths in the history of the galactic civilization", so powerful as to make meaningful conflict impossible, like Superman without kryptonite. She not only reads minds, but can hurt other beings with psi energy, take their memories, make them senile, throw her mind like a ventriloquist throws her voice...and doesn't have much of a personality other than as an intense problem solver.
The telepaths of Babylon 5 were consistently interesting because their stories explored the ethics of invading the minds of others. Schmitz's stories are just about how neat the power is to play with...or how neat it would be for those who haven't already looked at the possibilities in the B-5 universe. I didn't find it inspiring. Your mileage may vary.
Noble Favage: Oroonoko, by Aphra Behn :
He was pretty tall, but of a Shape the most exact that can be fancy’d: The most famous Statuary could not form the Figure of a Man more admirably turn’d from Head to Foot. His Face was not of that brown rusty Black which most of that Nation are, but a perfect Ebony, or polished Jet. His Eyes were the most aweful that could be seen, and very piercing; the White of ’em being like Snow, as were his Teeth. His Nose was rising and Roman, instead of African and flat: His Mouth the finest shaped that could be seen; far from those great turn’d Lips, which are so natural to the rest of the Negroes. The whole Proportion and Air of his Face was so nobly and exactly form’d, that bating his Colour, there could be nothing in Nature more beautiful, agreeable and handsome. There was no one Grace wanting, that bears the Standard of true Beauty. His Hair came down to his Shoulders, by the Aids of Art, which was by pulling it out with a Quill, and keeping it comb’d; of which he took particular Care. Nor did the Perfections of his Mind come short of those of his Person; for his Discourse was admirable upon almost any Subject: and whoever had heard him speak, would have been convinced of their Errors, that all fine Wit is confined to the white Men, especially to those of Christendom; and would have confess’d that Oroonoko was as capable even of reigning well, and of governing as wisely, had as great a Soul, as politick Maxims, and was as sensible of Power, as any Prince civiliz’d in the most refined Schools of Humanity and Learning, or the most illustrious Courts.
Aphra Behn, who wrote during the late 18th Century, was the first significant female playwright, way below Shakespeare but superior to Farquhar and Kyd; and people who argue about this sort of thing argue about whether Oroonoko was the first novel. It’s closer to a long story, and is a heavy handed melodrama about an excessively heroic African prince sold into slavery on a plantation in South America where the corrupt Governors make Simon Legree look like George Bailey. It’s hackneyed, but you might as well say Shakespeare was full of cliches. It paints a moving and memorable portrait, such as it is, of a tragic hero, and the language is meant to be read out loud.
A Savage Place: Surfacing, by Margaret Atwood :
They must find it strange, a man his age staying alone the whole winter in a cabin ten miles from nowhere. I never questioned it; to me it was logical. They always intended to move here permanently as soon as they could, when he retired: isolation was to him desirable. He didn’t dislike people, he merely found them irrational; animals, he said, were more consistent, their behavior at least was predictable. To him that’s what Hitler exemplified: not the triumph of evil but the failure of reason. He found war irrational too, both of my parents were pacifists, but he would have fought anyway, in defense of science perhaps, if he’d been permitted; this must be the only country where a botanist can be classified as crucial to the national defense.
As it was, he withdrew; we could have lived all year in the company town but he split us between two anonymities, the city and the bush. In the city we lived in a succession of apartments and in the bush he picked the most remote lake he could find, when my brother was born there wasn’t yet a road to it. Even the village had too many people for him, he needed an island, a place where he could recreate not the settled farm life of his own father but that of the earliest ones who arrives when there was nothing but forest and no ideologies but the ones they brought with them. When they say Freedom they never quite mean it, what they mean is freedom from interference.
A multi-layered short novel published about a decade before Atwood’s instant classic The Handmaid’s Tale. It concerns the narrator’s return, with three friends, to her remote childhood home following a report that her father, living alone, has disappeared. Once at the cabin, she begins opening physical and mental boxes that should have been left alone, and Bad Things happen.
I tend not to be a big fan of "psychological" novels showing a narrator’s mind falling apart to the point where you can’t trust what you read, but Atwood does it very well. There are all sorts of interwoven, repeating thematic images—werewolves shedding their skins; Indian paintings; death as a transformative ritual of empowerment; civilization as a cabal of sterile, labcoated doctors chaining their victims/patients down.
The cover blurb claims that the book evokes immediate comparison with The Bell Jar. The main comparisons that came to my mind were with Walden and certain Peter Gabriel lyrics about elements of Gods and beasts inside the human soul.