Road Trip Report

Forthcoming... as soon as Blogger and the local network connection stop misbehaving....

News noted

* Lawyer tries "D&D Defense" (ICV2.com)

* When North Korea Falls (Robert D. Kaplan, in The Atlantic)

* GOP and Man at Yale (Daniel McCarthy, in The American Conservative).

The intellectual dexterity that once distinguished campus conservatives has given way to mindless Republican boosterism.... The time when Young Americans for Freedom wore badges blazoned with the slogan “Don’t Immanentize the Eschaton” has long passed. Now College Republicans parade in shirts proclaiming “George W. Bush Is My Homeboy.”

I'd suggest that this is the result of conservatives' uncontested dominance of all three branches of the government, plus the existence of conservative-blinkered media channels which permit those of a conservative bent to take their positions for granted, as self-evident truths which need no logical or evidentiary justification. The college conservative of 1960 needed to intellectually justify his dissent from many of those around him; the college conservative of today may have grown up getting all his (or her) news from conservative-friendly media mills in which the ideas such as "the free market automatically solves all problems" or "homosexuality is intrinsically wrong" are assumed to be self-evident at such a fundamental level that they need not even be stated, much less defended. Any contrary ideas from college faculty can safely be dismissed as "campus liberalism", and thus need not be taken seriously. And mindless boosterism is really all that is required for the go-along-to-get-along style of networking that rising young stars in business and politics gravitate toward. In fact, a too-intellectual disposition, prone to asking awkward questions and taking inconvenient stands on principle, is not particularly useful when dealing with a dominant establishment of any kind.

Perhaps it's inevitable that every movement which attains dominance thus becomes intellectually lazy.

On the road again

So here I am busily blogging away from the lovely campus of Mizzou U. After a frantic day finishing a contest submission yesterday, went to sleep at 11 pm with alarm set for 2 am to beat Chicago rush hour traffic and get to Mizzou U. and spend the afternoon pestering the good folks at the Western Historical Manuscripts Collection.

Woke up, amazingly.

Driving at 3 am is a somewhat surreal experience, but you don't have to share the road. Not much, anyway. Who are those other people out driving at 3 am, anyway?

Ah, the joys of early morning radio! Learned about the improbable evolution of bees and the discovery of the fossilized head of a prehistoric 9-foot-tall carnivorous Terror-Bird from BBC World Service. Very glad that 9-foot-tall carnivorous Terror Birds are extinct.

Heard Jimmy Swaggart give master class in evangelistic emoting. Good exegesis of story of Hosea, but some overuse of the rhetorical trope of repeating everything three times. Lambasting of homosexuals, psychologists, etc. I don't know where the tirade about not kissing the Pope's big toe came from. Then he's off on some tangent about the perfection of the body that Jesus sacrificed on the cross. He seems really, really interested in the perfection of Jesus's body. Right after ranting about homosexuals. Maybe he needs a psychologist.

And then he's gone (Hallelujah! Can I get an amen!). Replaced by James Dobson discussing pornography in a very earnest voice, and various stations playing Christian rock. If aliens are listening to our radio programs in the early morning, they must think we're very pious. One program had a kids-only Bible trivia call-in show. At 7:30 am.

Other radio alternatives: soybean price report. Extended commercial about genetically pure corn seeds. Oldies station that played "Morning Has Broken" just as eastern sky began to slowly shade into blue somewhere in mid-Illinois.

Also heard the final chapters in the tale of Uhtred, about which more later.

Was immensely amused at driving from Michigan to Missouri by way of Louisiana and Mexico. Perhaps I will also go to Nevada?

Spent afternoon at WHMC. Picked jaw up off of floor after opening first archival folder and seeing original operational data for a defunct railroad that I and another railfan have been trying to reconstruct from scattered scraps of inconsistent data for the last six months. Laughed involuntarily when one of the telegraph flimsies had the words "go to sleep now" scrawled on it in 1926 handwriting. Archival staff member looked at me funny.

Ordered many photocopies. May now be worlds second leading authority on a long-defunct railroad that only two or three people care about.

Got distracted by all kinds of fun index entries about abstruse topics. Those who think that the surreal early-day train trip depicted in Buster Keaton's Our Hospitality is somewhat exaggerated, take note:

Houck's railroads were never model lines, either in construction or equipment.... The road was known locally as the "peavine" because it was so crooked, and sometimes for days at a time there would be no trains, because the one engine and coach would jump the track. IN fact, we were passengers on the train in some instances when this occurrence would take place. At one place just south of Benton Houck had felled two trees and laid them across a small creek, building his track on this structure instead of the regulation trestle. This caused the track to rise up in order to get on the trestle, and we recall the warning which the conductor always gave the passengers: "Look out, she's going to jump!" in order that they might prepare themselves for the sudden change in the level of the roadbed." - Missouri Historical Review, v. 21 (1926-1927), p. 133

Just how firmly the columnist's tongue was planted in his cheek may remain forever unknown.

Accumulated many citations which will keep interlibrary loan department busy busy busy in future weeks.

Paused for a pensive moment and a photograph with one of Mizzou's most famous alumni. But you'll have to wait to see who it was, for the night has come, and Motel 6 awaits with open arms.

Too busy to read?

Six words.

News noted

Put down the Vegemite, and back away slowly!

Making connections (from whole cloth)

A Collision of Prose and Politics (from the Chronicle of Higher Ed.)

A professor of Iranian studies and comparative literature at Columbia accuses Azar Nafisi, author of Reading Lolita in Tehran, of saying nasty things about the Iranian regime because she's "a prop for American imperialism", "reminiscent of the most pestiferous colonial projects of the British in India", "the personification of the native informer and colonial agent, polishing her services for an American version of the same project."

His insistence that anyone who fails to sing the praises of current Iranian cultural practices (such as raping teenage girls so that they can beheaded, hanged, or shot the following day without violating a Koranic rule against executing virgins) is therefore a tool of the big bad CIA is no more convincing that the shrieking of the right-wing US pundits that anyone who fails to vote straight-ticket Republican is an "enemy of America".

Believe it or not, some people do observe and comment on matters of culture and literature and yes, even politics, for their own sake, not for the sake of promoting some political faction's nefarious schemes. Pretending that they do so only to serve a political paymaster is a cheap and shoddy rhetorical trick, usually resorted to by people who have some other agenda to promote, but don't have the evidence or the logic to directly criticize the target of their attack. And so they paint an invented connection between that target and some conveniently despised straw man. It's sort of like using Photoshop to insert Adolf Hitler or Josef Stalin into a photo of someone you dislike, and then pretending that the obloquy deserved by one should therefore be transferred to the other.

As it happens, Mr. Dabashi's real complaint seems to be Ms. Nafisi's choice of reading matter. Or, as he puts it, "seeking to recycle a kaffeeklatsch version of English literature as the ideological foregrounding of American empire." (I think I must be missing something. F. Scott Fitzgerald and Vladimir Nabokov, sinister propaganda agents of the CIA?)

In other words, she failed to make her students read books in HIS area of academic specialty. Boo hoo. If applied here in the US, his insistence that teaching literature from other cultures amounts to hostile political propaganda would result in, well, the elimination of his own job.

Isn't this a matter better suited for bitch-sessions around the faculty lounge, rather than a purportedly serious publication?

Two views of freedom and God

Islam and the western world have very different definitions of freedom, says Rebecca Bynum in a recent issue of the New English Review.

Freedom : True and False

"Freedom is a word invoked constantly in America as a descriptive term for self-government and the concept of sovereignty of the people...

Less understood is the fact that the mujahadeen are also fighting for freedom, but a freedom very differently defined. According to the Muslim philisopher Sayyid Qutb,

This din [religion] is a universal declaration of the freedom of man from slavery to other men and to his own desires, which is also a form of human servitude. It is a declaration that the sovereignty belongs only to Allah, the Lord of all the worlds. It challenges all such systems based on the sovereignty of man, i.e., where man attempts to usurp the attribute of Divine sovereignty. Any system in which final decisions are refered to human beings, and in which the source of all authority are men, deifies human beings by designating others than Allah as lords over men. (Milestones p. 47)

In Islamic terms, the western concept of political sovereignty resting with the people is a form of idolatry....

One way to look at this is to see it as a contrast between permissive freedom and prescriptive freedom.

In one definition, freedom means the absence of restraints, the ability to choose rightly or wrongly or anywhere in between. In the other, freedom means the ability to live in a certain prescribed way, most particularly the absence of any restraints which would keep one from following that prescribed way and steering others toward it. Thus concepts like Constitutional restrictions against government involvement in religion are good only when they permit Islam to exist in an otherwise hostile environment, but bad when they prevent Islam from dominating an environment over which it has the opportunity to exert control.

Of course, Islam is not the only religious tradition to make this argument. Some occasional readers of this blog will no doubt remember, more clearly than I, the long-running philosophical and theological arguments over whether human beings should have the freedom to choose "wrongly", which consumed so many reams of paper -- and occasionally consumed human lives -- during the European Enlightenment. These arguments continue in some forums to this day.

Another way to see this difference is to see it as a clash of priorities.

The "permissive freedom" worldview places the highest value on individuals' power of making choices, and the benefits that individuals can derive from those choicess. Restrictions on those choices are justified in terms of what effect one person's actions have on another person, not on the basis of obedience to a certain pattern of behavior. Such systems can be either exploitative, in which people with secular authority seek to expand their own freedom and benefits at the expense of others, or egalitarian, in which there's an attempt to establish an set of commonly-accepted rules that protect the freedom of all in the society.

The "prescriptive freedom" worldview, by contrast, places the highest value on obedience, whether or not individuals choose it voluntarily, and whether or not they benefit from it. (There's a secular mode of this worldview, as well as a theistic one, but it's outside the scope of this essay.) Therefore the Islamist Qutb disavows all "system[s] in which final decisions are referred to human beings, and in which the source of all authority [is] men." Note that even the arch-theist does not expect God/Allah to personally and visibly intervene in every controversy. Hence the careful wording which logically steers the reader toward an endorsement of systems run by human beings who attribute their source of authority to some source other than men, i.e., rule by clergy. (In practice, the latter effectively means "rule according to the wishes of the religious faction currently in power" -- but, again, that's outside the scope of this essay.)

Does this mean that all who believe in the western version of permissive freedom are therefore obliged to disavow belief in God or in any sense of right or wrong that has more than temporal (and, hence, temporary) authority? And that anyone who believes, truly believes, in a God with moral standards must advocate theocratic absolutism and seek to compel others' obedience to those moral standards in order to properly honor that God, on pain of being labelled a hypocrite?

Theocrats like Qutb would argue that this is the case.

However, one of the key concepts of post-Enlightenment Christianity is that a belief in permissive freedom in secular government and a belief in a moral God are not mutually contradictory. That the creator's endowment of human beings with free will was not an unfortunate accident, but an intentional part of the design. Obedience to principles of right and wrong is desired, of course, but it's even more important that human beings have the opportunity to accept that obedience without compulsion. Only obedience from a person who could have done otherwise truly honors God. Otherwise, it has no value.

To put this in terms of priorities, obedience to God's will is placed at the top of the list, but the human freedom to make moral and spiritual choices is, itself, part of that will. Thus secular governments are, by God's will, limited to regulating only secular matters. To do more, to compel obedience in religious matters, would be to blasphemously assert an authority which God himself chose not to exert.

If the creator had intended human beings to have no choices other than the right one, there would have been no serpent in the garden of Eden, nor any tree from which humans could pluck the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil.

And thus it is that Christians can endorse both a permissive definition of freedom, in the secular world, and obedience to God. One is necessary in order for the second to have any value.

Recent viewings

The Grudge (2004). A stylish but vacuous horror thriller.

The intro to the film tells us, in typically portentous horror-movie style, the "when someone dies in the grip of a powerful rage... a curse is born. The curse gathers in that place of death. Those who encounter it will be consumed by its fury." Apparently this means that anyone who subsequently comes in contact with the site of the death is doomed to a horrible death at the hands of gray-skinned revenants with 80s-style raccoon-eyes mascara who follow the unfortunate visitor around, materializing and dematerializing at will.

The film does not explain, precisely, why one specific house in Tokyo is afflicted with such revenants as a result of one specific violent death, while the trailer parks of rural slums, the crack-ridden housing projects of the inner city, and other violence-ridden locales remain free of spooky gray-skinned ghosts with raccoon mascara.

Sarah Michelle Gellar is attractive as always, but appears curiously expressionless in her role as the visiting American nurse who is bedevilled by the creepy revenants. This flat affect was highly effective in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, where it served alternately as comical irony, in the show's lighter moments, or an indication of her character's growing alienation from the world around her in the later and more "angsty" episodes. It doesn't work so well in a genre which, by definition, is intended to portray terrifying events and provoke a similar, sympathetic emotional response in the viewer.

The director's repertoire of special effects and suspense-building techniques, plus a few genuinely startling visual images, make for some effective jump-inducing moments. But on the whole The Grudge doesn't inspire me to go see its sequel.

The minimalist approach

I am writing to inform you that the position of Reference Librarian (position number) has been filled. Thank you for applying for this position.

Best wishes for success in your future endeavors.

Recent reads

Ghost, by John Ringo.

This is quite simply the most repulsive book I've read in years.

It begins as a standard military action-thriller, with an honorably-discharged military vet stumbling across an apparent kidnapping and getting involved. From shortly after page one, though, the story spins rapidly into a very unpleasant Wackyland. It would be hilariously inept if it weren't so fundamentally revolting.

You see, these unimaginatively stereotyped Middle-Eastern terrorists aren't just kidnapping a cute American co-ed off the streets of a college towns in order to commit garden-variety crimes like rape, murder, or hostage-taking. Oh no. They're kidnapping HUNDREDS of cute American co-eds, then drugging them with sedatives, stripping them naked, occasionally raping them, and packing them in boxes to ship to the Middle East in giant cargo aircraft.

Yup.

No one seems to notice this going on except for Our Hero. Eventually The Authorities are called in, but of course the American military can't do anything about it, despite the woodenly heroic posturing of the author's thinly-disguised Bush and Rumsfeld analogues.

Oh no. This is a job for one man. Our Hero!

And so Our Hero stows away in the wheelwell of the Concubines-R-Us Express, survives depressurization and the subarctic cold of high altitudes, and then sneaks into the terrorist's secret base, where Osama bin Laden and the president of Syria sit around in a glass-walled control room chortling with glee while their bearded minions force all the naked American coeds to sit naked in regimented formation, chained to chairs, while watching other naked American coeds be tortured, disembowelled and dismembered. Yes, the author does mention repeatedly that they are naked. Naked naked naked. He seems to have a thing about naked young girls in chains being tortured and killed.

And so, he informs us, does Our Hero....

Meanwhile, Our Hero slaughters Osama bin Laden, the president of Syria, and several dozen interchangable extras who happened to wander onto the set. Then he hands out guns and ammunition and grenades to the more capable of the naked coeds so that they can run around nakedly shooting at the Evil Terrorists. First, though, he orders them to respond only to the new names that he's giving them. The author, in a rare moment of tenderness, describes how much Our Hero enjoys the sight of blonde "Bambi" bending over (yes, yes, naked) to pick up a box of ammunition.

And then, just when you think it can't possibly get any sillier or more exploitative, Our Hero orders all the women to vote Republican for the rest of their lives in return for being rescued.

As Dave Barry says, I Am Not Making This Up. I'm not that creative.

In due course, the rest of the military catches up to Our Hero and rescues everybody. A happy ending! But wait a minute, we're only a third of the way through the book....

There follows an extended interlude in which we learn that Our Hero has been supplied with a yacht, a mooring berth on the Gulf coast, an extended vacation at the expense of the government, and, oh by the way, a stateroom full of thousands of dollars worth of state-of-the-art weaponry. This is apparently so he'll be handy in case someone tries to do some terrorist stuff in the Gulf of Mexico. In between fishing trips, Our Hero cruises the singles bars along the coast, where he picks up a couple of cute co-eds, one brunette, one blonde. Over the course of several leisurely, descriptive chapters, he introduces them to the joys of sexual slavery. When one of the young cuties calls up her parents before going away for a fun-filled Caribbean holiday of humiliation, exhibitionism, and group sex, her mother cheerfully tells her things like "There is a terrible glory in a good whipping" and expresses an interest in doing a mother-daughter "scene" with her daughter's new "master". The other student's mother responds the same way.

Um, what parent wouldn't?

At a certain point, I must admit that I lost interest in what little plot there was, and started skimming the book solely for the purpose of writing this review. The book consists of alternating "military" sections of sadistic violence, in which dozens of nonentities with Middle Eastern names are introduced only so they can be graphically slaughtered by Our Hero within one page, and lingering "sex" interludes in which young women are introduced only so they can be happily fucked, degraded, and "enslaved" by Our Hero. Most of the women enjoy it immensely, of course, since Our Hero helpfully informs us that over 50% of women secretly desire to be raped and beaten.

In a later chapter, the reader is treated to a pornographically detailed desciption of how Our Hero buys an Eastern European prostitute from her pimp and bludgeons her to a bloody pulp in the course of an evening's indulgence. There's no suggestion there that the woman is enjoying her "exploration of submission". But Our Hero doesn't seem to have time to notice such things, since by morning he's off mowing down Evil Terrorists again. Ho hum, all in a day's work. The book closes with Our Hero bitterly complaining about society's failure to properly appreciate him.

No, I'm not making that up, either.

The author introduces this smorgasbord of pornographic pandering with a heavy-duty quote from George Orwell: "People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf." Apparently this is supposed to prepare us to believe that in order to be protected from one set of scary evildoers, we are obliged to approve of the type of "rough man" whom he portrays as his hero. Perhaps if one wanted to find "redeeming social merit"' in the book, one could see the "hero"'s progression from violence while surrounded by naked girls, to consensual sadomasochistic sex, to outright brutalization of prostitutes, as a cautionary tale. But why bother constructing these airy academic theories? Here's what the author has to say about his Great Work, taken from the CD of textfiles that accompanies it:

It is not PC. It is not PG-13. It is not understated. It is a raw, bawdy, kinky, violent, over-the-top story of an ex-SEAL who is approaching life, love and the pursuit of bad-guys with no-holds-barred. James Bond without the bedroom door closing. Dirk Pitt meets Harold Robbins. Jean Auel writes a Mack Bolan book. With details. Kinky, kinky details.

Doesn't sound like a "cautionary" tale or serious social commentary to me. Sounds more like the author is getting his thrills and vicariously fulfilling some psychopathic, misogynistic fantasies. The dedication to his dog "for not getting too upset when I'd make weird hand movements like I was shooting or something" further reinforces this view. Ghost is sadomasochistic porn, pure and simple. And that's the only market for which it would be possible to ever recommend this book.

Recent reads

The Last Pink Bits, by Harry Ritchie. Ritchie, a former literary editor for The Sunday Times, takes the reader along on a madcap, disjointed tour of those far-flung colonial outposts that the British Empire had not yet managed to discard as of 1997.

This includes not only places of strategic importance like Gibraltar and sites of recent military conflict such as the Falkland Islands, but tiny specks of land like Tristan de Cunha, so far from continental shores and oceanic trade routes that its inhabitants' sole contact with the outside world comes from the BBC World Service radio and a twice-a-year supply boat. Fiend might enjoy his description of the Caribbean Turks and Caicos islands, where the local economy seems to be stuck in a perpetual state of slightly seedy, pleasantly lazy bemusement. (Did anything further ever come of the 2004 proposal that Canada annex the islands? A desultory search of GoogleNews doesn't reveal any recent articles on the subject....)

Ritchie is a tourist and a newspaperman, not a historian or anthropologist, so it's no surprise that his portrayal of these tiny outposts and their inhabitants is sometimes arch and frivolous. But he does provide an entertaining, if somewhat shallow, look at life in a collection of places that are completely unknown to most of the world.

Recent reads

A Catskill Eagle, by Robert B. Parker. The 12th installment in the continuing saga of Boston private detective Spenser, published in 1985, opens with a quotation from Henry David Thoreau:

And there is a Catskill eagle in some souls that can alike dive down into the blackest gorges, and soar out of them again and become invisible in the sunny spaces. And even if he forever flies within the gorge, that gorge is in the mountains; so that even in his lowest sweep the mountain eagle is still higher than the other birds upon the plain, even though they soar.

Something a bit darker than the usual private-eye caper is going on here. The Catskill eagle, obviously, is a metaphor for Spenser himself, and he's about to dive into some very dark gorges indeed.

"It was nearly midnight...." (p. 1) Spenser's lost his lover and emotional touchstone, Susan, who has left him to begin a new relationship with a man she met while interning in Washington DC. ("Control has been an issue....") He's still competently "detecting", halfheartedly following embezzlers to their lunch appointments, but without much verve.

When he receives a desperate, pleading letter from Susan, we get to see a hint of what a Spenser with no ethical principles might be like. It's not a pretty sight as Spenser and Hawk leave a trail of intimidation, brutality, and even murder and assassination across the country while searching for her. But through all the carnage, despite even the dangerous idea of the Nieztschian ubermensch that is called up by the "Catskill eagle" quotation, Parker still manages to portray Spenser as being fundamentally good, a paladin of destruction who commits atrocious acts because it's the only way to protect the woman he loves. His usual ethical principles are, if not broken, definitely bent in the process.

It's all a matter of priorities, I suppose. And absolute personal loyalty, once granted, can force even a high-flying ubermensch to dive into some pretty dark gorges.

Recent reads

The Day of the Triffids, by John Wyndham. This 1951 end-of-the-earth tale is widely considered a classic. I found it disappointing.

Part of the disappointment results from the fact that the author's chosen antagonists, the carnivorous plants known as triffids, are so slow-moving and predictable that the only way he could justify them being a threat to humanity was to introduce an entirely unrelated catastrophe: a mysterious green meteor-shower which inexplicably blinds everybody who views its light. The narrator is one of the few human beings who missed out on seeing the celestial event and thus retained his eyesight.

No, the evil meteor shower isn't explained. Ever.

I suppose there is a moral here about the potential dangers of bioengineered creatures, since it's speculated that the triffids are probably the work of those pesky Russians and their amoral scientists. The conflicts and struggles that our small band of survivors go through as they try to find safe places to live and defend themselves against both the triffids and other groups of survivors, are moderately interesting, somewhat like Terry Nations' unfortunately forgotten television series Survivors. But the buildup is simply so implausible that it's impossible to take the story seriously.

Recent reads

Balshazzar's Serpent, by Jack L. Chalker. Space opera from a long-time master of the craft. It's the first book in a series of three. According to his website and Wikipedia, this series is the last long fiction he completed and published before his death in Feburary of 2005.

Although it's clear from the title that the planet Balshazzar will eventually be centrally important to the story, most of this first volume is devoted to the trials and tribulations of one Doctor Karl Woodward, a spacegoing evangelist, and his missionary crew. Woodward's starship, The Mountain, travels from world to world seeking to spread the word of God. The cultures that his crew of missionaries encounter are scattered fragments of an advanced civilization that has disintegrated due to the mysterious disappearance of all contact with Earth and the rest of its central, governing, industrialized core. Religion is one of the only threads that still binds humanity together, and sometimes it's a mighty thin thread. Occasional unsuccessful missions are expected, and The Mountain and its earnest acolytes go forth well able to defend themselves should the necessity arise.

It's notable to see a Christian evangelist portrayed favorably in a science-fictional setting, although religious themes are secondary to a fairly conventional exploration-and-conflict narrative through most of the story.

As the story opens, Woodward and his crew make contact with a previously uncharted populated world. Tentative first contact leads gradually into suspicion, intrigue, and conflict as it becomes clear that there's more to the planet and its population than is immediately apparent. Most of the book is devoted to plotting the course of this conflict. Occasional hints are dropped about a legendary set of three planets once found by an interstellar scout, but since lost. It should come as no surprise when, near the end of the novel, information regarding the location of the legendary "Three Kings" is discovered, and our intrepid evangelist sets course toward them. Unfortunately, the missionaries' discovery of the lost "Three Kings" system of planets is given short shrift. I presume that their landing on Balshazzar, the most apparently Earthlike of the three, is intended to lead to further adventures and revelations in succeeding volumes.

The plot device of multiple planets in an unusual orbit, each holding some unique hazard or secret, is of course familiar to anyone who's read Chalker's Four Lords of the Diamond series (1981-1983). However, my biggest objection to the book is not the duplication of this plot device, but the fact that the mysteries of Balshazzar -- the "serpent" of the title -- are overshadowed by the long-drawn-out space-opera conflicts that lead up to its discovery. The "serpent" itself, when it finally makes an appearance, is rather underwhelming. As the book ends, a contest of sorts is proposed, with some parallels to Biblical precendent. But there the book ends, and we don't find out anything more about it. Presumably the "serpent" of Balshazzar, and the way that Woodward's missionary crew deal with it and the other hazards of colonization, will be addressed more fully in subsequent volumes.

The story's exciting and competently told, but the bulk of the story is not what the title would lead one to expect, and the ending is weak. Perhaps the book should have been titled Finding Balshazzar, to more accurately reflect the true focus of the narrative.

Fantagraphics responds

... to the washed-up has-been who recently sued them for saying things he didn't like. Text of response here; discussion here.

Riverbend's back!

... with a post discussing the Johns Hopkins/Lancet study on war-related Iraqi deaths. There is great rejoicing on DailyKos and elsewhere as fears for her safety are allayed.

It must be strange -- both exhilarating and intimidating -- to have so many people around the world hanging on one's words while living in the middle of a violently disturbed society in which one's own safety may very well depend on being, and remaining, anonymous. Lapsing into long silences is an understandable response. What would you do, if you were an educated, modern, twenty-something woman in today's Iraq?

Although bright and knowledgeable as ever, it seems to me she sounds a bit weary and depressed. Not only weary of living with the deadly dangers and constant small annoyances of a country wracked by invasion and civil war, but of reading the self-promoting internet pundits who pontificate about the horrors and tragedies taking place in her backyard as dispassionately as they might discuss the weather or the latest stock market reports. And perhaps weary of the stress and responsibility of being regarded as representative of an entire culture.

As Billmon over at the Whiskey Bar points out, many of us on this side of the great divide must look into the mirror of her allusions to internet pundits and see some hint of ourselves. And, in the process, contemplate our own complicity in the crimes of our government.

Perhaps we voted against Bush. Perhaps we've whined and bitched online. Is that enough?

If the November elections on Diebold machines inexplicably yield Republican "victories" despite overwhelming opposition in nonpartisan exit polls, and Bush proclaims this as a "mandate" for yet more disastrous adventures, what will be "enough" then?

It's wonderful to know that Riverbend, whoever she is, has not become a casualty of Bush's cynical war. I hope that one day she will be able to write freely and casually and openly about recipes, or music, or books, or computers, or politics, or whatever takes her fancy, without cause for fear. About family gossip, or friends' escapades, or silly jokes, or some circumstances happier than present ones. Or choose not to write if she prefers, without giving rise to fears that such silence portends disaster.

On justice and atrocity

It's impossible to call this a "good" thing. But it's necessary.

The atrocities described are not something that most of us want to read about or even think about. They sound like the actions of horror-movie psychopaths, but they are in fact the actions of US troops who decided to rape a teenage girl, murder her and her parents and her five-year-old sister, and then mutilate and burn her corpse.

We don't want to think about what it would have been like to be that girl, or to be a friend or relative of hers and know what was done to her and her family. But we have to. Because we paid them, we trained them, we sent them to Iraq, and the friends and neighbors of that girl and her family see them as just one more extension of us.

Some conservative commentators of the "little green football" variety jabber that US soldiers shouldn't be held accountable for raping and murdering civilians. That they should be allowed to rape any "Hadji Girls" they can catch, and gleefully spray machine-gun bullets in all directions at anyone who they can successfully murder, like some sick parody of a violent adolescent power-fantasy. I suggest that such commentators place themselves at the disposal of the nearest hostile military force that behaves in the way they prescribe. The US military is held to a standard of behavior and honorable discipline higher than that of murderous barbarians, just as the US government is held to a standard of Constitutional behavior higher than that of tinpot dictators or totalitarian Communist regimes, and for very similar reasons. When it fails to meet those standards, at Abu Graihb or Guantanamo Bay or anywhere else, it becomes a clear and present danger not only to innocent foreign civilians near its theater of operations, but to all civilized society, including that of the United States.

But even if these psychos are isolated aberrations from a military that mostly adheres to higher standards, it's disgusting to think that they were recruited, trained, and paid with my tax dollars. Not only are their actions in Iraq hideous to contemplate, but like the author of this article, I wonder if we're creating more such creatures to be turned loose on ourselves when they're discharged from military service into civilian society, like Timothy McVeigh.

I'm glad that they're being put on trial, and I'm glad that it's public. For a while after the initial reports surfaced, I feared that the military might try to cover up this atrocity. From the tone of the CNN article, it seems that the evidence against them is strong. The article states that two of the soldiers could face the death penalty. The gallows or the firing squad would be an appropriate fate for the main instigators. Murder is murder. And the same goes for the three soldiers mentioned in connection with a separate case near the bottom of the CNN article, if they're proven guilty, and any other soldier who disgraces the country in like fashion.

The revolting Abu Graibh scandal -- and the possibility that similarly disgusting things are going on in other US facilities -- have badly damaged both America's reputation abroad and America's own sense of itself as a nation with ethical principles. It's possible -- likely -- that these soldiers were encouraged in their twisted sadism by the sense that there are no moral standards for their behavior, that anything goes. The ethical free-fall has to stop somewhere with a resoundingly public example, and this is where it has to stop. The soldiers involved, and any officers who knew of their actions and failed to stop them, or seek disciplinary action against them after the fact, should be made a very public example. If this isn't hitting bottom, then there is no bottom.

RELATED NOTE: Commentary about the way that the way the US media has treated two different murders of two different girls.

This is just what we need...

The Boston Globe reports that leading officials of the Mormon church are actively organizing a network of Mormon business-school alumni and "prominent Mormons" to "help [Mitt] Romney capture the presidency in 2008." Romney is a Mormon, rich, and (surprise, surprise) a Republican who's well known for his anti-homosexual rhetoric. He's also governor of Massachusetts, although the residents of that state seem to feel that he's rather neglecting them lately. (Apparently he has more important things than them on his mind.)

Always taking the side of freedom's enemies, the radical fundamentalists of the religious right have their tentacles everywhere.... oh, I forgot. Only the ACLU is "radical" and has "tentacles". These here are just kindhearted religious folk who want to help the US government show us all the ONE TRUE PATH THAT GOD HAS ORDAINED FOR HIS CHILDREN.

The church claims that its support of Republican Romney's political campaign is neutral and nonpartisan.

It seems unlikely that the Republican-controlled IRS will choose to investigate the Mormon church's tax-exempt status, no matter how blatantly it campaigns for partisan political candidates. After all, it's not as if they were advocating peace on earth, goodwill to men or some other subversive, America-hating treason like that.

Related story: The Houston Chronicle ponders whether evangelical-Christian theocrats will vote for a Mormon theocrat.

An improvement

Thank you for expressing interest in the Public Services Librarian position at (...) University. We received many applications for the position representing candidates with excellent qualifications. After much consideration by our search committee, we selected a candidate with extensive circulation and course reserves management expertise.

This one at least supplies a sensible and non-humiliating reason for their choice.

I wonder. Is there a market for reviewers of rejection letters?

Liberals hate America, yada yada yada.

From the current issue of National Review:

"John Kerry has spent a career taking the side of America's enemies...."
(Investor's Business Daily advertisement, p. 33)

"Always taking the side of America's enemies, the radical lawyers of the ACLU have their tentacles everywhere...." (ibid.)

"Of the making of conspiracies to undermine the political well-being of the United States, it seems, there is to be no end...." (Review of Damon Linker's The Theocons : Secular America Under Siege, p. 53)

When the only argument left to a political party is to shriek over and over again that anyone who disagrees with it HATES AMERICA!!!!, without offering any kind of support for that slander, it's a pretty sure sign that they have no logical or factual arguments left standing. Nothing but hatred, the rolling of eyes, the pounding of shoes on podiums, the spewing of spittle.

Will National Review next inform us that liberals are planning to ritually sacrifice American children to Satan so that they can make matzoh-bread with their blood?

Silence on the line

Riverbend, of Baghdad Burning, seems to have vanished from the blogosphere after an August 5th post in which she wrote of neighbors, freinds and family members receiving death threats and fleeing the city.

But I'm sure George W. Bush doesn't consider her any more "credible" than The Lancet. Or any more important than 655,000 other Iraqis.

No comment

Angry Librarian (from Youtube)

Inconvenient deaths

The Lancet, the premiere medical journal in Britain, publishes a study by a statistician at Johns Hopkins University, one of the best-respected medical schools in the U.S., which estimates the number of Iraqi deaths resulting from Bush's fraudulent and botched invasion of that country at 655,000 (give or take a few hundred thousand).

Allow me to repeat: 655,000. That's six hundred and fifty five thousand. Just a couple of wedding parties shy of two thirds of a million people. (Hey, there's a benchmark that Bush might actually be able to achieve in time for the November election!)

It's just slightly less than the total population of Memphis, Tennessee, and slightly more than the total population of Baltimore, Maryland. Or perhaps Mr. Bush would have a clearer comprehension of the number if he mentally compared it to the population of Austin, Texas, which is approximately 690,000 according to this list.

655,000 people is approximately 200 times the death toll for the September 11th attacks... which is totally irrelevant, when you think about it, since everyone except the Bush Administration's most mindless followers has now acknowledged the fact that Iraq had nothing to do with that attack.

What is The Decider's response to this information about the number of human lives sacrificed in fire, blood, torture, and agony?

Denial, of course. "I don't consider it a credible report." And so the illusion is perpetuated. Because the only "credible" information sources are those which say what the Bush Administration finds it politically useful for them to say.

George W. Bush. Credibility. Write your own punch line.

De rerum academica

* The truth about academic "careers". As nearly as I can tell, if you don't get a tenure-track job while you're still in graduate school, you might as well tattoo LOSER on your forehead and stamp DO NOT HIRE! in three-inch-tall red letters on your resume. Anyone who has worked as a "temporary" or adjunct academic is marked as a failure.

* And getting a tenure-track job doesn't mean much anyway, since spiteful academic colleagues love to torpedo people's tenure bids for no apparent reason, dumping them onto the job market after six years with "DENIED TENURE!" gleefully stamped on their forehead. And as the author of this article finds out, job experience is of negative value on the employment market. A clueless newbie with ink still wet on his diploma is more likely to get a job offer than someone who knows what he's doing.

News noted

* Bill Moyers on Net Neutrality.

* The Armour of God pajamas!

* Following in the footsteps of Penelope Ashe, mysterious author Travis Tea sets out to test the editorial standards of a certain publishing company.

* Garrison Keillor on who supports torture:

I got some insight last week into who supports torture when I went down to Dallas to speak at Highland Park Methodist Church. It was spooky. I walked in, was met by two burly security men with walkie-talkies, and within 10 minutes was told by three people that this was the Bushes' church and that it would be better if I didn't talk about politics. I was there on a book tour for "Homegrown Democrat," but they thought it better if I didn't mention it. So I tried to make light of it: I told the audience, "I don't need to talk politics. I have no need even to be interested in politics - I'm a citizen, I have plenty of money and my grandsons are at least 12 years away from being eligible for military service." And the audience applauded! Those were their sentiments exactly. We've got ours, and who cares?

The Methodists of Dallas can be fairly sure that none of them will be snatched off the streets, flown to Guantanamo Bay, stripped naked, forced to stand for 48 hours in a freezing room with deafening noise. So why should they worry? It's only the Jews who are in danger, and the homosexuals and gypsies. The Christians are doing fine. If you can't trust a Methodist with absolute power to arrest people and not have to say why, then whom can you trust?

Hm. If you're a Shi'ite, then you'd trust another Shi'ite. And if you're a Sunni, you'd trust a Sunni. But clearly you can't trust anyone who isn't a member of your group of Righteous People like you, so obviously they have to be banned from holding positions of power over Righteous People like you. And if they insist on perversely seeking such power so that they can do Evil Things to the Righteous People Like You, then obviously they have to be rounded up and sent to prison camps so that they can Learn Their Place. Or maybe you can just save some time by shooting them down or blowing them up in the streets.

* As part of a world tour intended to boost his rather bedraggled public image, Mike Tyson proposes to fight women. Yep, that'll make him look good.... whether he wins or loses.

Gospel Tracks Through Texas

This book may represent one of the very few intersections between Carlos's avocational interests and my own.

I keep threatening to build an HO scale chapel car and send it peregrinating about a model railroad club layout. Perhaps with a little sound mechanism mounted inside the car to play appropriate sounds. Broadway Limited recently introduced HO scale livestock cars that emit mooing and bawling sounds whenever the car is moved. Surely it wouldn't be much more difficult to make a sound unit that would play church music and/or the sound of a tiny little preacher winding up into a storm of soul-saving whenever a motion detector and a simple little electronic brain detected that the car had been stationary on a siding for a suitable period of time?

The Fighting Sioux fight back

An interesting wrinkle in the ongoing academic squabble over sports teams named after native-American tribes: North Dakota officials sue NCAA over 'Fighting Sioux' ban (First Amendment Center)

From the Chronicle of Higher Ed.'s subscription-only article on the story:

North Dakota officials also contend that the NCAA's policy is unfair because it does not hold all institutions to the same standard. For example, the Executive Committee did not single out colleges and universities with non-American Indian ethnic references, such as the "Fighting Irish" of the University of Notre Dame, as being subject to the policy.

And the committee has failed to apply the same standards to all of the institutions that have appealed its policy, the complaint says. The committee reversed its ban on one university's use of American Indian imagery after the institution received support from one Indian tribe, the suit says, whereas the NCAA sought more than one tribe's input when deciding North Dakota's fate.

An amusing little game

... with some practical educational value. Thanks to Fiend for the link to this cute little online parking game. There's ten or fifteen minutes I'll never get back....

I want to be an ornamental hermit.

Every English grotto back then had to have one: a robed, bearded figure who now and then emerged from his hutch to amaze guests with his visionary mumblings. Of course, ornamental hermits in effect had tenure: health care, room and board, free robes. They merely had to have theatrical sense and impeccable wisdom -- which, as Ms. Mentor knows, was as rare then as it is now. But if you had it, you could make a career of flaunting it.

Sadly, says Miss Mentor, "Jobs for smart misanthropes are harder to come by nowadays."

Rec'd in the mail today

Thank you for your interest in (Town) Public Library. Our two librarian positions have now been filled.

I apologize for the length of this search process: our library has been undergoing some very exciting changes!

We are at the end of an expansion project; we migrated to a new Integrated Library System; and we welcomed a new library director.

Best of luck to you in the future!

I'm not sure whether vaguely impersonal rejection letters or perky and chipper ones are more annoying. I sure am glad they're undergoing exciting changes, though.

Recent reads

Brother to Demons, Brother to Gods, by Jack Williamson.

I've often noticed that science fiction and fantasy stories have a tendency to simplify grand social conflicts by distilling them into the clash of super-powered individuals. Thus in the 1930s serials, the governments of Earth do not enter into complicated, drawn-out negotiations, military campaigns, and economic treaties with hostile alien forces. Instead, Flash Gordon and Ming the Merciless face off, man to man. The Kings of Gondor do not contend with economic downturns, religious upheavals, and overseeing the day-to-day ethical behavior of petty royal bureaucrats. Instead, they face the Dark Lord one on one, with perhaps a little help from a close personal friend who can spare the time to go drop a magical ring into a volcano. And when the one great big personified Force of Darkness is conquered, good prevails. (At least until the next exciting episode.)

In this tale of bioengineered superhuman "gods" in the far future, Williamson, an old-time grandmaster of science fiction, follows the same simplifying tendency. The supernaturally powerful "gods" and "demons" of the title are the result of genetic tampering by human beings, but like Frankenstein's monster, they have long since rejected their makers, relegating the surviving unmodified humans -- or, as they call them, pre-men -- to desolate and scrubby reservations while setting themselves up as potentates who rule over entire planets and exert supernatural forces with a flick of their fingers. As the novel opens, we find that one of the last reservations of pre-men is about to be removed from Earth and relocated to a lethally dead planet, the better to make way for a pet construction project of the "god" Belthar.

Unfortunately for Belthar, but fortunately for the human race, a couple of adolescent "pre-men" from the doomed reservation manage to attract the attention and favor of a visiting young "goddess", and then escape from his machinations. Adventures ensue; the secrets of the family of eccentric scientific geniuses who created the "gods" are explored, and a long-buried heritage, a mythical prophesied messiah for the last bedraggled remnants of the unmodified human race, may turn out to be more than just a myth.

And so it all comes down to the classic showdown between superpowered individuals, rather than the inchoate, disorganized, long-running clashing and blending of opposing forces that more often characterizes major conflicts in reality.

A minor but competent work.

Recent reads

The Stone Ship, by Peter Raftos. A surreal journey into a Kafkaesque parody of a university. The narrator, despondent after the death of his wife and child, goes to an isolated island where he intends to commit suicide. While contemplating different methods of self-annihilation, he's confronted by the spirit of a past suicide, who persuades him to undertake a mission of revenge against a distant and unnamed party.

The destination of the resulting journey proves to be a grotesquely funny, Gothically grim parody of a university characterized by casually corrupt bureaucrats, senile administrators, and perpetual organizational infighting which occasionally results in violent riots between feuding factions of the faculty and staff.

"Does this happen often?" I asked.

Vance shrugged. "Often enough. They reorganize the circles every so often, and that's the most likely trigger for a librarian's riot. But really, they just need to get it out of their system every now and again. It's a venting of spleen."

"One of them tried to brain me."

"Oh yeah. They'll kill you if they catch you. At first they fight each other, then they'll blame it on the 'outsiders', by which they mean any non-librarians. Then it's torches and pitchforks, and the hunt is on for us, people who neither understand nor care abut [sic] the Dewey Decimal system. Not even the poor old porters are safe,", he noded to the p[orter who shared our shelf, "and the porters work here. They're as liable to lynching as any of us."

This seemed like a good time to load my pistols.

It's as if the denizens of Jane Smiley's Moo or Robert Grudin's Book had set up shop in Gormenghast. Like Gormenghast, the immensely convoluted University seems to exist in a kind of parallel world which is different from our own, but similar enough that even its most surreal aspects resonate with a kind of reflected truth. The Place of Dead Books -- where books that have remained on the library shelves untouched so long that the ideas in them have died and leached out of their pages, leaving them completely blank, are stockpiled in vast anonymous heaps -- seems uncomfortably familiar for a place that of course does not, can not exist. (Can it?) The sublimely clueless narcissism of tenured faculty, and the lengths to which they will go to viciously avenge purely imaginary offenses of which no one but themselves is even marginally aware, is pitilessly portrayed. Then, of course, there's the undermonster, who dwells in the lower levels and is rumored to feed on those rejected by the University....

Recent reads

MacPherson's Lament, by Sharyn McCrumb. A lightweight but enjoyable outing from the author of the Elizabeth MacPherson Mysteries. In this outing, Elizabeth's haplessly naive brother, Bill, is the center of attention as he opens a fledging law practice in the small town of Danville, Virginia. His partner, the ferociously competent Amy P. Hill, prefers to go by the initials which shares with her ancestor, Confederate general A.P. Hill. This is partly because it distracts clients from the fact that she's cuter and blonder than successful lawyers in that part of the country are expected to be. While she tangles with officious park rangers who see fit to try to prevent her from participating in historical battle re-enactments, Bill takes on the apparently simple task of helping a bunch of charming old ladies sell the Home for Confederate Women, a pre-war mansion once owned by an official in the Confederate government. Meanwhile, the MacPherson parents have suddenly and inexplicably announced that they're going their separate ways. Complications ensue on all fronts.

Recent reads

Bhagavati : Blood of the Goddess, by Kara Dalkey. Dalkey brings her historical fantasy to a dramatic close with a climactic battle and a multitude of revelations and betrayals. The identity of the Goddess whose miracle-working blood has led English herbalist Thomas Chinnery and others to the hidden city of Bhagavati is finally unequivocably revealed, after being hinted at in the prior volume. Along the way, Dalkey indirectly addresses the effect of extraordinary power on both the wielder of the power and those over which it is wielded. In the course of winding up her exotic trilogy, Dalkey, like Tolkien and Peake, brings matters to a violently dramatic climax only to have a key character renounce the fruit of his extraordinary adventures and very deliberately return to a wholly mundane existence. One can almost imagine that the last line of the book could very well have been cribbed from Sam Gamgee's prosaicly respectable "Well, I'm home."

Recent reads

Please don't come back from the moon, by Dean Bakopoulos. A coming-of-age tale with a difference. In the middle-class Detroit suburb of Maple Rock, the responsible adult men, the fathers and husbands, have disappeared without a trace. Some of them suddenly vanished in the middle of the day; others walked away in the night, or simply drove away with no explanation other than rueful and vague apologies. The author never quite explains these disappearances, although he hints that they're connected in some way to the disappearance of the stable, good-paying manufacturing jobs that used to be the economic foundation of the community. But this is not the author's purpose here. Instead of theorizing about the disappearance of the responsible adult men, he writes about the difficulties that their sons, in particular one Michael Smolij and his small circle of freinds, encounter while growing up in their absence.

It's impossible not to think of this as a fictional, magical-realist analogue to the real life difficulties of young men growing up in communities where responsible adult men, and the economic factors which allow men to honestly support their families and be respected by those around them, are absent. But the tone of the story isn't preachy or political or prescriptive. The story told by Michael is one of boys learning, earlier than they should, about freedom, beer, cars, violence, and women, and then, belatedly, about their need for education, financial skills, and the ability to be good and responsible men. I found it easy to sympathize with the difficulties that Mike encounters in trying to sustain a relationship with his high school girlfriend once she goes to the University of Michigan and has the opportunity to make alliances with more successful men; dealing with older women whose husbands are absent; and with the comically pathetic experience that he and his more assertive friend Nick have in trying to organize the harried retail staff of the shopping mall where they both work to seek better pay and working conditions.

Recent reads

Operation Chaos, by Poul Anderson. The futuristic cover on the 1999 paperback reprint of this book is not only ugly, it's downright misleading, as is the tagline declaring it to be "Poul Anderson's Science Fantasy Masterpiece".

It's not futuristic or science-oriented at all. Instead, it's an adventure tale set in an alternate version of the present day where creatures from medieval superstition like werewolves, witches, vampires and incubi not only exist, but are used in organized modern warfare and spycraft. The story begins with the protagonist, one Steve Matuchek, observing a military encampment on the eve of the battle in terms as dismally realistic as any real-life war memoir.

There's nothing so discouraging as a steady week of cold rain. The ground turns liquid and runs up into your boots, which get so heavy you can barely lift them. Your uniform is a drenched rag around your shivering skin, the rations are soggy, the rifles have to have extra care, and always the rain drums down on your helmet till you hear it in dreams. You'll never forget that endless gray washing and beating; ten years later a rainstorm will make you feel depressed.

But before too long it becomes evident that this is not the army we know, as our narrator comments on the insignia of the Air Force -- "the winged broomstick and the anti-Evil-Eye beads" -- and passes by the encampments of other service branches:

Beyond was the armor. The boys had erected portable shelters for their beasts, so I only saw steam rising out of the cracks and caught the rank reptile smell. Dragons hate rain, and their drivers were having a hell of a time controlling them.

Perhaps I should not reveal any further plot details. Our narrator is not exactly a garden-variety infantryman himself, and his adventures, and those of the beautiful red-haired witch from the unicorn-riding US Cavalry with whom he is assigned to work on a scouting mission against the headquarters of the supernaturally-augmented Army of the Caliphate, might lose some of their appeal if too many details are disclosed.

Structurally, the story seems to be divided into three or four parts which are linked only by the setting and two central characters. A glance at the copyright page confirms that parts of the novel were indeed published as short stories in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction between 1956 and 1969. It holds together well enough for coherence even if the seams are slightly visible, but even after reading it twice I still can't figure out what the preface, a rambling three page disquisition on alternate worlds purporting to come from a drugged speaker from the future, has to do with anything else in the book. Perhaps the editor of the first printing of these collected stories felt that readers in 1971 weren't quite ready for the concept of alternate worlds, and insisted that such a preface be tacked on. At any rate, once the first chapter begins, Anderson seems to have forgotten about this introductory personage as thoroughly as E.R. Eddison forgot about Lessingham after the first chapter of The Worm Ouroboros. I would suggest that other readers -- as well as future republishers -- do likewise.

The tone of the novel is frequently reminiscent of Heinlein's books of the same period, and the dedication -- "To Robert A. Heinlein, who first incorporated magic, and his own red-haired Virginia" -- suggests that this is not an accident. (The aforementioned witch is named Virginia, or, when more convenient, just Ginny.)

As usual, I find myself wondering not only about the influences that acted on the author of this story (did some knowledge of the Mormon church inform Anderson's description of the "Johannine Church" in the last segment of the book?) but also wondering what influence it may have had on later authors such as Harry Turtledove and Naomi Novik.

Recent Reads

Changer : a novel of the Athanor, by Jane Linskold. In Linskold's modern-day fantasy, the Athanor are nearly-immortal, preternaturally powerful beings who have been recognized by humans throughout history as gods or as legendary beings like King Arthur, Lilith, Davy Jones, Orpheus, or Elvis. Changer, one of the oldest of them, is the shapechanging trickster-figure known to various cultures as Coyote, Proteus, etc. A solitary by choice, he's forced to once again become entangled with the feuds and politics of the other Athanor when his current family is attacked by an enemy.

Linskold's book, published in 1998, works with some of the same ideas found in Charles de Lint's urban fantasies or Neil Gaiman's American Gods. I found it more immediately appealing than either one, although the continued absence of Christian, Jewish, and Islamic figures from the fantasy-writers' pantheon of modern-day "gods" continues to be notable.

Recent viewings:

Sledge Hammer (Season 1, disc 3). It's still intermittently funny, but after a dozen episodes or so the series' limited repertoire of jokes has gotten a bit stale. I find myself thinking that it would have made a better movie than television series.

Verily, the swindlers are with you always

From a 1911 article from The World's Work comes proof that the fraudulent stock-touting schemes that clog our electronic inboxes every morning are fundamentally nothing new.

Recent reads

The Young Engineers in Arizona, or, Laying Tracks on the Man-Killer Quicksand, by H. Irving Hancock. From time to time I pick up rather unpromising ancient series fiction from the library's donations pile and find a piquant unknown treasure. This 1912 boys' adventure book wasn't one of them. At best, perhaps its musty, acid-pulp smell could be described as piquant. And there's good reason why it's unknown, except, perhaps, as a reminder of why the Ripping-Yarns school of writing is such an easy target for satire.

As the text makes clear on several occasions, it's part of The Young Engineers Series, apparently intended for young and impressionable schoolboys. The titles of previous and succeeding volumes are recited several times, apparently in hopes of inciting purchases of said titles.

The subtitle refers to the primary task facing Our Heroes, the Young Engineers, in this volume of the series: laying tracks for the "Arizona, Gulf, & New Mexico Railroad" over the "Man-Killer Quicksand", which apparently extends over a good proportion of the state of Arizona and is in the habit of maliciously and insatiably sucking men, horses, and inanimate objects toward the center of the earth. For some reason, there is an all-male town called Paloma on the edge of the Man-Killer Quicksand, which is inhabited by the usual assortment of cowboy-movie stereotypes except for The Saloon Girl and The Schoolmarm, whose charms the author evidently considers either unwholesome or uninteresting. The shady gamblers and rapacious saloon keepers of this town look forward to fleecing the railroad workers with intoxicating liquors and rigged games-o-chance. Imagine their shock and dismay when Our Hero Tom Reade, the Young Engineer, makes a wooden speech in which he righteously forbids the railroad workers to partake of such pleasures! What nerve!

In Chapter Three, entitled Tom Makes a Speech Against Gambling, he... oh, well, never mind. You already know what he does. Instead of spending money on drink and gambling, says Tom, the workers should all deposit their paychecks with a bank clerk of whom they know nothing, and whom he has had brought in by the railroad company in the same train that delivered the payroll. Most of them agree, and express awe and gratitude for the opportunity, like this worker:

"I've got forty dollars in bank," he continued in something of a tone of awe. "Forty friends of mine that I've put away to work and do good things for me! If I don't touch this money for some years then I'll find that this money has grown to be a lot more than forty dollars....

"The next time you find anything about a savings bank that has failed and left the people in the lurch for their money, you show it to me. Savings banks don't fail nowadays! No, sir!" (pp. 55-56)

One or two troublemakers object to Our Hero's subsequent edict forbidding workers from leaving the newly purified construction camp between work shifts, thus giving Our Hero a chance to reluctantly-but-righteously use his hammer-like fists to enforce their dismissal from their jobs.

Meanwhile, an undercover agent from the so-called "gloom department" of a rival construction company is in town and just happens to have a hefty bankroll with which to fund a disreputable gambler who wishes to disrupt the Young Engineers' work with dynamite and other amusing diversions as revenge for his lost opportunities. (And, as Our Hero makes clear, there is no such thing as an reputable gambler: they are a class of men wholly corrupt, entirely without redeeming virtues, whom all Honest Men must regard as beneath contempt.)

I was initially interested in the railroad angle of the story, but quickly became tired of the clumsy prose, the priggish attitudes of The Heroes, and the author's thinly disguised racism.

"You'll be with me, won't you?'' coaxed Tom. "You'll stand by us, shoulder to shoulder?"

"I certainly will, Mr. Reade!"

"And the foremen? You can depend upon them?"

"On every one of them," declared Hawkins promptly. "Even to the Mexican foreman, Mendoza. He's a greaser, but he's a brick, and a white man all the way through!" (p. 34)

How fortunate for the "greasers" that an proper White Man from the educated elite is on the scene to force them to make the right decisions. They're properly grateful, of course, as we saw in the excerpt above.

Our Heroes worry about disapproval from the people of Paloma no more than they fear, say, an outbreak of union organizers among their tracklayers. Anticipating Richard Nixon by half a century, Tom proclaims the doctrine of the Silent Majority:

"Whom do you men represent?" asked Tom.

"The citizens of Paloma," returned Duff.

"All of them?" Read insisted.

"All of them -- with few exceptions."

"I understand you, of course," Tom nodded. "Now, Mr. Duff, I'll tell you what I propose. I'm curious to know just how many there are on your side of the fence. Pardon me, but I really can't quite believe that the better citizens of this town are behind you. I know too many Arizona men, and I have too good an opinion of them. Your kind of crowd makes a lot of noise at times, and the other kind of Arizona crowd rarely makes any noise. I know, of course, the element in the town that your committee represents, but I don't believe that your element is by any means in the majority here...." (p. 62)

One of the most disturbing aspects of the story is the ambivalence which the author seems to feel toward lynchings. On p. 155, Our Hero gallantly dissuades the Silent Majority of Good Citizens from dispatching the Disreputable Gambler “by the Tree and Rope Short Line”, but we read in an authorial aside that “[a]n Arizona lynching can only follow an upheaval of public sentiment, when honest men are angered at having their fair fame sullied by the acts of blackguards.” Apparently the author simply cannot bring himself to categorically condemn lynching without simultaneously defending its practice, claiming that some kind of natural law prevents it from being used for improper purposes. And yet on at least two other occasions in the story, the villains plausibly threaten to lynch Our Heroes for reasons which, one presumes, the author does not consider honorable. I suppose the dramatic demands of his plot clashed with his expressed belief in the law that only “honest men” of “fair fame” made use of the legal expediencies of Judge Lynch.

Plot fought the law, and the plot won....

After sundry conflicts with the disreputable gambler Duff, his confederates, and various malcontents who fail to appreciate the good that's being done to them, plus a complaint to the Railroad President (which results in the Young Engineers' prompt vindication by that wise and avuncular eminence), plus a suitably dramatic dual rescue from Certain Death in the Man-Killer Quicksand while being shot at by an insane hotel manager galloping about on horseback, Our Heros finally succeed in Laying Tracks, etc., as promised by the subtitle. Somewhat to my surprise, the Young Engineers do actually use a plausible construction technique to stabilize the unstable ground. (Described on p. 84 and p. 124, in case anyone's curious.) That's about the only competence on display here. I suppose it gives the book a certain minimal educational value, but it's far overshadowed by the clumsily contrived plot, the clunky prose, and the kind of incipient moral fascism that pervades it.

A amusingly abhorrent period piece of juvenile pop culture, impossible to recommend for any other purpose than to demonstrate the kind of wretched prose and equally wretched attitudes that were abroad in the land and actively promoted to young boys circa 1912. If anyone wishes to dispute this conclusion, they are welcome to peruse the story themselves by way of Project Gutenberg.

Shoggoth alert

It looks like Charlie Stross, author of The Atrocity Archives and other exposes of the frightening things we Should Not Know, will be at PenguiCon next April. Rumor has it that A Shoggoth On The Roof will also be performed.

Another thing...

... that I hope one of my alternate selves in some parallel universe will someday be aboe to enjoy.

From Madelein L'Engle's And It Was Good, found in a library booksale:

A young friend told me of an East Indian Christian who had suggested to her that we are not called to be Christians; we are called to be Christs. I find this both challenging and freeing when I am confused by all the things which Christians are doing all over the planet, in teh name of Christ, which seem incompatible with all that Jesus taught.

I distrust the word Christian as an adjective; it has become less an adjective than a label, separating those who call themselves Christian from the rest of the world. How can those who would follow Christ assume that they are more beloved of the Creator than any other part of his creation, when God created everything, and saw that it was good?....

(p. 51)

Not that I can do anything about it

And so, the Congress of a nation once known for its principled rule of law, once thought of as a Shining City on a Hill, a pattern of freedom and humanity for the world to follow, tosses that heritage into the sewer and becomes just one more despotism seeking power, wealth and ever-expanding ego inflation through secret-police raids, perpetual imprisonment without cause, and sadistic torture. The self-proclaimed Decider-in-Chief is now officially authorized by our noble legislature to seize, "detain" and torture random individuals indefinitely in secret prisons without ever allowing them to ask why, denying them a right which has been the foundation of western political freedom for 800 years.

(Other links here, here, here, here.)

Forget turning back the clock to the 1800's. This adminstration wants to turn the clock back to the 800's, when kings ruled by "divine right", the peasants were not consulted, and Royal Torturer was an honored profession.

The Halliburton machine must have one of John McCain's children locked up in a basement room with a gun at her head. Otherwise why would someone who survived treatment as a prisoner of war favor the establishment of perpetual torture of prisoners as a standard policy? And why would someone who actually served courageously in the *real* military during a war kowtow to someone who instead spent the time swilling liquor, swerving drunkenly down the street, and using his daddy's political apron-strings to dodge military service?

Unless, of course, he's simply a venal hypocrite who simply doesn't give a damn about anything except begging for whatever pathetic scraps of privilege the boardroom boys are willing to toss his way while they chow down at the adults' table.

It's now up to a Supreme Court packed with Bush appointees to save what's left of the founders' Noble Experiment.

The November elections? Well, there's plenty of time for scripted October Surpises to stampede the sheep between now and then. And with Diebold counting the votes, well, ya know, the self-proclaimed Party of God may just have an extra ace or two up its sleeve. KnowwhatImean, Vern? *wink, wink.*

May Providence protect us.

News noted:

Lou Dobbs on the progress of the class war in America. If your name is Rockefeller, Bush, or Cheney, you're doing pretty well. Try to refrain from twirling your mustachios while cackling with glee at all those contemptible Little People working fifty hours a week without medical coverage while sinking deeper into debt and losing their home equity.

The biomechanical sorrows of giant ants, spiders, squids, gorillas, etc. "Here's the trick to defeating the giant ants. You don't want a rifle, you want a pile of bricks and a good pitching arm...."

News noted:

Breakfast Serials seeks to revive the tradition of publishing fiction in serial installments through printed newspapers, magazines, etc. The Austin American-Statesman is reported to be currently carrying a story by YA author Avi.

Shopcraft as Soulcraft. And, incidentally, as profitable profession. Perhaps I should have been a successful carpenter or roofing contractor or septic tank technician instead instead of a failed would-be intellectual.

Recent reads

1632, by Eric Flint. An action-oriented counterfactual romp in which a West Virginia coal-mining town is suddenly and mysteriously transported in time and space to the titular year, in the middle of the tangle of cutthroat religious and secular wars which later came to be known as the Thirty Year's War. I enjoyed the story, even when I could tell that the author was stacking the deck in favor of his idealized crew from the United Mine Workers of America. Reminiscent of Leo Frankowski's Cross-Time Engineer, a paperback series that I read many years ago, in which modern technology and political ideas remake the world in their image.

Not just Republicans...

Bytes in Brief, an e'mail digest of news stories relating to law and the internet, carried a link to the story of a Jewish rabbi caught in an Internet pedophile sting operation.

The folks running it seem to mean well and may be doing some good, but is Perverted Justice a well-chosen name?