Recent Reads : Gladiator-at-Law, by Frederik Pohl and C.M. Kornbluth

Many years ago, I wrote a rather bad short story in which attorneys, rather than arguing their cases before juries or judges, literally fought like gladiators on live television. It was intended to be an absurd satire of the American legal system and television audiences' love of vicarious violence. I didn't realizehow quickly the O.J. Simpson trial, The People's Court, and so-called "reality TV" would approach that level of absurdity in the next few years.

When someone on a fiction-related listserv mentioned the title of this book, I knew I had to read it. So I got a copy by interlibrary loan and read it over the course of my next few lunch breaks at Busy Bee College. I was somewhat relieved to see that despite the title, Pohl and Kornbluth did not have quite the same idea as I had expressed in my clumsy piece of satire.

Despite the title, and despite the rather misleading cover illustration on the 1986 Baen paperback reprint, the book does not actually feature attorneys resolving legal disputes with flaming clubs and elbowspikes. (There are gladiatorial combats in the book, but the attorney-protagonist enters the arena only once, toward the end of the book, and not as a combatant.) It's another of Pohl and Kornbluth's forays into social science fiction, projecting corporate and mass media trends into the future much in the style of other collaborations such as Venus, Inc. and The Merchant's War (originally published separately; later combined as The Space Merchants). In this book, as in the other two, society is portrayed as being dominated by giant, amoral corporations run amok. The seething masses of the population are kept (mostly) docile by updated versions of bread-and-circuses, including sadistic gladiatorial spectacles. In Venus, Inc. and The Merchant's War, the protagonists are in the advertising business, and the focus is on the potential excesses of that trade. In Gladiator-at-Law, the protagonist is an attorney, and the novel deals with the cutthroat world of corporate control.

There's plenty of social satire along the way, as P&K take swipes at shoddily-constructed suburbs, violent entertainment, the social deadweight of "old money", and other targets. There are other similarities between the books as well. P&K seem to have used a similar plot pattern in all three books: complacent drone begins by failing to recognize the flaws in his society, gets pulled into someone's attempt to right a wrong, becomes a target of his erstwhile employers/patrons, recognizes the evils of his society, and finally attempts to correct them through some clever stratagem.

The humor is about as black as it can be, as in this disquisition by a stadium manager planning an evening's program:

"Of course, it's rough -- the emotional values need bringing out. The comedy stuff with the vitriol pistols ought to follow a tense thriller like Man Versus Scorpions instead of another comedy number like the Octogenarians With Flame Throwers. But that's easy enough to fix. Race Against Man-Made Lightning is out too; Stimmens told me himself we couldn't get the equipment from Schenectady...."

The appeal of these books is in their satirical projection of a hypothetical future, not in their characterization, poetic prose, or innovative literary structure. For the most part, they work, even though a few of the authors' projections in Gladiator-at-Law fall flat from today's perspective. Suburbs, as a rule, have not decayed into anarchistic slums like the Belle Reve/"Belly Rave" portrayed in the story, although if gasoline prices continue to rise, and if other inventions projected in Gladiator-at-Law ever come to pass, it's still possible that they could. We do not -- yet -- have entertainment programs in which the contestants are stabbed with spears, incinerated with flamethrowers, or eaten by pirahnas. And yet what we do have is close enough that Misters Pohl and Kornbluth can be rightly regarded as minor prophets.

There are other faults. The female characters are not much more than plot devices. This is not surprising in a story originally published in 1953. Still, when a female character shows early signs of being something other than an ornamental prop, it would be nice if the authors followed up by having her do something other than get kidnapped and have to be rescued.

On the whole, though, it's a good adventure yarn laced with cautionary paranoia about corporate power and occasional flashes of blacker-than-black humor. And, as it happens, I enjoy such things. Recommended.

Overheard at the reference desk:

"Oh.... I thought Norman Conquest was a person...."

"Why does the title say You Can't Do It All? That doesn't make sense." (Person was looking for books about delegation.)

Recent Reads

Lipstick Jihad : a memoir of growing up Iranian in America and American in Iran, by Azadeh Moaveni

Personal update (or, I Am Cursed.)

I've been delinquent in updating this blog lately, and particularly neglectful of personal news.

For any readers of this occasional and desultory blog who haven't heard from me personally in the past few weeks, the first big news is that I've taken another part-time job in the library of a vocationally-oriented private college up in Michael Moore's home town. Let's call it Busy Bee College. This brings to three the number of part time jobs that I am scrambling back and forth between while trying to keep body and soul together in this so-called profession.

The second big news is that I may not be able to keep getting to any of them, since someone stole my car this weekend. I'll spend the afternoon trying to get the registration and insurance updated on the old truck. Won't it be fun commuting for 120 miles a day at 12 miles per gallon.

May pestilential, painful, incurable boils infest all car thieves everywhere. May their balls shrivel, their teeth fall out, their eyes go blind, and their limbs be struck by quivering palsy. May they live in excruciating pain, crawling upon their bellies for all to look upon and jeer at and kick them like the despicable animals they are.

Recent reads (in brief)

The Red Tent, by Anita Diamant

The fictionalized saga of several women from the Old Testament, as narrated by Dinah, the daughter of Jacob and Leah. A better read than most "bestsellers" and book club selections.

Bear Flag Rising : the Conquest of California, 1846, by Dale Walker

The U.S. of the nineteenth century was about as aggressive and acquisitive as they come. Walker tells a tale of hypocrisy, greed, and ambition.

Celtic Lore, by Ward Rutherford

An extensive but somewhat unfocused collection of examples of Celtic lore and customs that have survived in European culture. The author's thesis seems to be that the Celts had a greater cultural impact that is usually attributed to them.

Metaphors we live by, by George Lakoff

Lakoff's writings on politics and communication have been highly recommended on DailyKos and elsewhere. However, I wasn't particularly impressed by this book. He seems to expend a great deal of effort proving that much of the English language and the thought processes that underlie speech are made up of metaphors. No duh, Sherlock. Perhaps Don't Think of an Elephant will carry the analysis a bit further.

The Atrocity Archives, by Charles Stross

H.P. Lovecraft meets cyberpunk, courtesy of a secret government organization called The Laundry, which spends its time making sure that theoretical physicists, computer programmers, and "stoned artists from Austin, Texas" don't accidentally create energy patterns that will release the demonic beings that dwell "at the bottom of the Mandelbrot set." Great geeky fun.

The Double Shadow, by Clark Ashton Smith

This is a slim collection of otherwise hard-to-find CAS short stories recently collected and republished by Wildside Press. They don't quite hit the mark established by Smith's Averoigne stories, but they're pleasant enough. The Voyage of King Euvoran seems imitative of Dunsany. The Double Shadow is reminiscent of a Lovecraft story filtered through CAS's exotic fantastical settings rather than HPL's haunted New England. The other four stories are typical CAS exercises in literary decadance, in which plot is less important than the creation of a langorous and exotic atmosphere. The Maze of the Enchanter is atmospheric and disturbing, if a bit predictable to anyone who's read CAS's other tales of self-absorbed and self-indulgent sorcerors. The Willow Landscape is an uncharacteristically gentle story of an unusual enchantment. Not bad, although for those unfamiliar with CAS, Arkham House's collection A Rendezvous in Averoigne is a better place to start.

Recollections in black and white, by Eric Sloane

A slim collection of pen-and-ink drawings of historic buildings, with Sloane's commentary on their significance and his techniques for portraying them. I always enjoy glancing through his work, whether he's describing buildings, or old tools, or any other aspect of American life in days gone by.

Voelker's Pond : a Robert Traver Legacy, by photographer Ed Wargin, with essays by James McCullough

This book was given to me when I left the Queen City of the North. It's largely a collection of color photographs and personal recollections of its namesake, the private fishing camp of John Voelker. Voelker was a prosecutor and judge from the Upper Peninsula who, under the pen-name Robert Traver, wrote tales of courtroom drama such as Anatomy of a Murder and odes to troutfishing such as Trout Madness. His prescription for warding off the pestilential insects of the northern forests may be of particular interest to Fiend: "If you are hardy enough, smoke Italian cigars. They smell like burning peat bog mixed with smoldering Bermuda onions but they're the best damned unlabeled DDT on the market; all mosquitoes in the same township immediately shrivel and zoom to earth. {Fellow fishermen occasionally follow suit.}"

The Eye of the World, by Robert Jordan

I really can't put my finger on exactly why I haven't enjoyed this book. The characters are fairly well-drawn and sympathetic, and unlike some "best-selling" authors, Jordan does write coherent sentences that more-or-less make sense from one chapter to the next. But for some reason I just can't seem to get interested enough in the story to enjoy it.

The politics of questions and answers

I've mentioned before that I seem to be on the mailing lists of just about every political party in the U.S. Recently, among the stamp-signed photos of Our Leader and the hysterical pleas for money to fight the great menaces of America-Hating Liberalism, Right-Wing Radicalism, Radical Abortionists, Anti-Woman Activists, and so forth, I received yet another political survey form, this time from the Democratic National Committee.

I've seen these things before, and usually chuck them into the trash after briefly glancing over them and chuckling over the blatantly biased phrasing of the question. ("Do you support our President's war against those who seek to destroy American lives and values?" "Do you believe that government should take more of your paycheck in order to support radical left-wing social projects?" "Do you believe that women should be held captive to an outmoded view of male domination?")

Most such surveys are purely push-polls, designed to influence the emotions and opinions of those who receive them. Getting an accurate view of the survey-taker's preexisting views is the last thing on the mind of the people who write them. Instead, they're intended to arouse the True Believers to mail in money and march to the polls to vote the party line on Election Day. That's why they're mailed predominantly to people who have already been pre-selected as likely supporters of the group sponsoring the survey, by virtue of party membership lists or, in my case, probably because they subscribe to a political magazine of a certain type.

I was surprised to notice that the DNC's survey was phrased in relatively nonpartisan terms, and most of the multiple-choice options actually offered reasonably unbiased summaries of the most common arguments for or against the proposal under discussion. For example:

3. Do you support new tax cuts targeted at working families?
O Yes, with our economy struggling, working families need a tax break.
O No, additional tax cuts at this time will only worsen the federal deficit.

4. Should the government put a high priority on stopping American manufacturing jobs from being "outsourced" to overseas workers?
O Yes, the manufacturing jobs being lost are essential to our economy.
O No, American consumers benefit from cheaper goods made overseas.

5. Do you support raising the minimum wage from its current level of $5.15 per hour?
O Yes, the minimum wage should be increased to help workers make ends meet.
O No, raising the minimum wage will hurt small businesses an cost jobs.

My conclusion: the Democrats, who have lost a lot of political clout in the last decade or so, are genuinely trying to figure out what voters think and what voters want. While Republicans confidently use their "surveys" to blast propaganda into the ears of their likely voters, the Democrats feel the need to actually figure out what their supporters really think. This could be taken as a sign of political weakness, I suppose, or as evidence of basic confusion about what the Democratic party stands for. It could also be taken as an example of the difference between top-down and bottom-up political organizing that some posters on DailyKos and elsewhere claim to see between the Republican and Democratic organizations.

I didn't send the survey in, but I have to have a certain amount of respect for a survey that actually tries to do what surveys are supposed to do, and in the future, I'm more likely to respond to surveys like this one than to ones that demand I choose between "Yes, I support our President! My contribution is enclosed!" and "No, I hate America".

Recent Reads

Turning on the girls, by Cheryl Benard

Some months back, I read a book titled Moghul Buffet that turned up in the library's stack of unwanted donations. I enjoyed the book's ironically detached narrative voice, a kind of "Dear Reader..." narrative persona that helped coat the brutal sexism of its setting in Pakistan and the murders, deceptions, and betrayals of its plot with just enough satirical distance to help readers get through the story, but not so much as to make light of the sickening reality on which it's based.

Early this year, after reading some positive reviews of a book titled Turning on the girls, I requested an interlibrary loan copy without noticing that it was by the same author. Once I finally realized that I'd seen the author's name before and looked her up in the library catalog, I realized that she was also the author of a nonfiction book about women in Afghanistan that I had glanced at a year or two ago. That's the last time I'll fail to notice her name.

Turning on the girls is another fictional story laced with satire. This time, Benard's targets are closer to home for Western readers. Her scattered targets include militant feminists, smarmy/sensitive New-Age-Guys, old-style male chauvinist pigs, political Utopians of all flavors, and more than anything else the strange, strange world of romance novels, erotica, and other sexual fantasies.

From the blurb on the front flap: "It's 2000something, the world has just been taken over by women, and things are wonderful, or at least they will be just as soon as the new rulers finish fixing things. And here's Lisa, a dedicated young employee of the new government, ready to do her part. Why does she have stacks of pornography, love stories, and romance novels on her desk? Well, that's her job! To come up with politically correct sexual fantasies for women. No more lovesick simpering, no more masochistic daydreams! Women are going to learn to be turned on by healthier, more dignified fantasies -- just as soon as Lisa can come up with some...."

Benard's targets are almost too easy, but she skewers them beautifully. I enjoyed both the comically exaggerated machismo of the male-chauvinist resistance movement and the equally exaggerated dogmatism of the New Order's Ministry of Thought (Department of Values and Fantasies, Subdepartment of Dreams). The well-meaning attempts of the New (feminist) Order to re-educate men are good for a few chuckles, too. But the parts of the book that had me literally doubled up with laughter were our earnest young heroine's efforts to research her assigned subject. Her bewildered reaction to romance novels, and the ludicrous but plausible examples of her research materials that the author helpfully supplies, are worth the price of the book. And that's without even mentioning poor Lisa's puzzled attempt to figure out Anne Rice's "Beauty" books.

Some of the plot hinges are a bit creaky and contrived, especially toward the end of the book, but I enjoyed it thoroughly. Highly recommended. I'll be waiting for Benard's next book.

Recent Reads

The Book Shop : a novel, by Penelope Fitzgerald

A kindly, intelligent, book-loving woman in a decaying English town starts a small business. In the process she renovates a derelict building, helps revitalize the local economy, provides jobs for otherwise idle teenagers and self-proclaimed intellectuals, and makes the world of books and ideas accessible to an otherwise isolated population. Naturally, someone with money and political connections is offended, and takes legal and social action to halt this dreadful menace to their ego.

It's a story of hopeful idealism versus pigheaded selfishness backed up by money, social position, and sly legalisms, and it should be required reading for anyone in the US where the Supreme Court's ruling in Kelo v. New London makes such things the law of the land for anyone who is unlucky enough to own a house, business, or any other property coveted by the local government's golfing buddies, "campaign contributors", business partners, or corporate sponsors. (See here for more background on this egregrious sellout of citizens' Constitutional rights by the Court, and what Americans who believe in Constitutional rights are doing about it.)

Recent Reads

The Last Disciple, by Hank Hanegraaff and Sigmund Brouwer

Radio's Bible Answer Man responds to the "Left Behind" phenomenon by writing (or co-writing) a fictional treatment of the Book of Revelations which adheres to a more historically-oriented interpretation than LaHaye and Jenkins. The Beast of John's prophetic vision is identified as the depraved Emperor Nero, and the Tribulation as Rome's persecution of Christians under his deranged rule.

There's plenty of dissension among Biblical scholars about the proper interpretation of Revelations, but the version put forth by Hanegraaff strikes me as far more plausible than LaHaye's and Jenkins' projections of John's visions into the present day and the future. Hanegraaff acknowledges the difficulty of interpreting mystical visions both in an explanatory epilogue and through a character in the story, a former Jewish rabbi, who notes while analyzing John's cryptic writings that a skillful user of symbols can make them encompass multiple meanings, and use them to conceal as well as reveal meaning. Hanegraaff's epilogue states that his purpose is not to "call into question the orthodoxy of the Left Behind authors", but this doesn't keep him from quoting a passage from one of their books, in which LaHaye's and Jenkins' version of AntiChrist performs a miracle by raising himself from the dead, and arguing that this literal, rather than symbolic, interpretation of certain passages in Revelations violates several basic Christian principles:

In a Christian worldview, only God has the power to raise the dead. If AntiChrist could 'raise [himself] from the dead' and control 'the earth and sky', Christianity would lose the basis for believing that Christ's resurrection vindicates His claim to deity. Further, if Satan possesses the creative power of God, this would subvert the post-resurrection appearances of Christ in that Satan could have masqueraded as the resurrecting Christ. Moreover, the notion that Satan can perform acts that are indistinguishable from genuine miracles suggests a dualistic worldview in which God and Satan are equal powers competing for dominance...." (p. 394)

Unfortunately, the plot of the story in which these ideas are presented is both predictable and plodding, the prose is unspectacular, and few of the characters are more than stereotypes. Still, the book is a useful corrective for wild theorizing of the Left-Behind variety, and it's moderately entertaining as historical fiction set in the turbulent decline of the Roman Empire and the surreptitious growth of the early Christian church.

Recent Reads

Married to a Stranger, by Nahid Rachlin

I read this because Rachlin wrote a blurb for a friend's book, and because that friend seemed to have regarded her work highly enough to include her work in an anthology and in her writing classes.

I can see some reasons why Rachlin's novel would have appealed to S. The setting in pre-revolutionary Iran and the pervasive concern with family relationships and women's status in marriage and in the society as a whole also appear in S.'s work.

However, I never really felt the kind of direct connection that I felt with S.'s descriptions of similar situations, or with graphic novels such as Maryam Satrapi's Persepolis. The story Rachlin tells is interesting enough, but the prose and the characters' emotions, with one or two exceptions, seem rather flat. Perhaps this is deliberate on the author's part, an attempt to replicate the psychological repression that comes from living in a society such as she describes.

It may also be that my lack of personal experience with the milieu of the story makes me partially deaf to the story's emotional tones and undertones. Perhaps this is further proof that one can never quite fully understand how another person perceives the world, no matter how much one wishes to do so.

Recent Reads

The King's English : Adventures of an Independent Bookseller

Betsy Burton, proprietor of the King's English bookstore in Salt Lake City, describes the trials and tribulations that she's experienced in the story's twenty-plus years of operation. Along the way, she describes what it's like to organize booksignings, dinners and other events for authors ranging from the sublime (Isabel Allende seems to be a particular favorite) to the cranky (not named, but described in excruciating detail) to the eccentric (John Mortimer and his ubiquitous bottles of champagne) to the controversial (Jon Krakauer, whose book Under the Banner of Heaven was unpopular enough with Mormon fundamentalists that many local venues were unwilling to host them, and Burton was obliged to supply security staff.) Her accounts of censorship issues in the local schools, and of her observation of suspected "vice squad" cops suspiciously prowling the shelves of the bookstore looking for something to object to, are both disturbing and funny. (She makes a point of saying that it's not the fault of the Mormons, or at least not entirely so.) Her firsthand reportage of the ongoing war between independent bookstores and big-box corporate retailers, and the strategies that they use against each other, are invaluable. I particularly enjoyed her account of how TKE dealt with the Harry Potter frenzy after being stiffed by a book wholesaler who promised to deliver the books by the Big Day and then refused to do so. Keep the customer satisfied...