Recent reads

Stainless Steel Visions, by Harry Harrison.  This is a 1993 collection of science fiction short stories by Harry Harrison, best known to most as the author of Make Room, Make Room!, the novel that inspired the classic 1973 dystopian film Soylent Green, and second best known, among readers of science fiction, for his long series of comical stories featuring futuristic supercriminal "Slippery Jim" DiGriz, the "Stainless Steel Rat".

Both of these commercial high points are represented here.  The collection includes Roommates, the 1971 short story that Harrison later expanded into Make Room, Make Room!, and, as suggested by the allusive title, it also includes a new (in 1993) short story about Slippery Jim, The Golden Years of the Stainless Steel Rat.

The former is still gritty and galling, and well worth the price of admission to anyone who hasn't read it before.  The invasion of the detestable Belichers into the protagonist's living space at the end of the story is a psychically crushing and deadening blow after the other slow-grinding losses and defeats he has suffered, as it was meant to be -- even though middle aged readers, with some life experience at dealing with bureaucracies, might wonder why Andy and Shirl didn't pre-empt the situation by having her apply to move into the recently vacated space as his new "roommate" immediately as soon as it became available.  Forethought in such situations does pay off in real life, but of course it does not lead to so dramatic an ending.

The latter, in which the infamous Stainless Steel Rat is sent to a prison for retired supercriminals and predictably organizes a breakout, is so slight and flimsy that it might as well not be there.  I remember the Stainless Steel Rat stories I read in the past as being full of clever conceit in both senses of the word, with Slippery Jim opining frequently about his own brilliance and the dunderheadedness of the authority figures whom he outwits.  But in this outing, I couldn't help but note that intelligence seems to be utterly absent in the prison guards and in practically everyone else he encounters.  Conceitedness has given way to a kind of authorially-imposed solipsism in which it seems the protagonist is for all practical purposes the only functioning intelligence in his universe.  This may be amusing for the protagonist, but it hardly makes for exciting storytelling.

Both stories, of course, reflect an attitude that was and is quite common in science fiction, the presumption, correct within the world of the story, that the protagonist is intellectually superior to most of those around him.  Many science fiction readers no doubt believe this to be true of themselves, consciously or unconsciously.  On average, they might be correct.

This is also true of the other high point of the collection, Harrison's 1962 The Streets of Ashkelon.  Thanks to the mental debris of long-ago Sunday Schools and many interminable sermons in which I amused myself by poring over the colorful maps appended to my childhood copy of the Bible, I vaguely recognized the name Ashkelon, but I failed to pinpoint the exact source of Harrison's allusion, which is 2nd Samuel 1:20:

Tell it not in Gath, publish it not in the streets of Askelon; lest the daughters of the Philistines rejoice, lest the daughters of the uncircumcised triumph.

The applicability of that verse in its original context to the plot of Harrison's story is actually a bit murky, but it's a good story nonetheless.  As the story opens, the protagonist, an atheistic spacegoing trader, is slowly and methodically educating some ponderously literal-minded aliens in the scientific method.  He is greatly annoyed when a zealous missionary arrives and sets out to convert them to Christianity.  The result of this conflict of ideas was shocking enough in 1962 that, as Harrison describes in his introduction, he had great difficulty finding a publisher for the story, especially in the United States.  Since that time, standards of shock have changed.  Streets of Ashkelon remains, perhaps not shocking, but thought-provoking.

Most of the other stories come from Harrison's long career as a writer for the pulp SF magazines of the 1950s, 60s, and 70s.  As such they have limitations.  As Harrison observes, they rely greatly on such staples of magazine fiction as the "O. Henry" twist ending, and they also have the limitation of being perforce self-contained without the opportunity to tell an extended story or deal with any long-term or complex interactions.  But they are all good entertainment.  One of the most interesting parts of the entire collection is reading Harrison's account in the introduction of some of the tricks of the trade that he learned during his long career as a short story writer and editor -- and then seeing, up close and personal, how he applied his own advice in his stories.

Those who own or have read Harrison's previous short story collections should note that there is nothing here, other than the introduction and the slight-to-the-point-of-vanishing Golden Years of the Stainless Steel Rat, that has not been previously published in another collection (see this list).  But for casual readers new to his work, it's well worth a glance.  Or, in my case, a dollar to pick up a discarded public-library copy, enjoy it, and melancholicly reflect that each such withdrawn copy means that fewer readers in the future will have the same opportunity.

News noted

Barbarians continue to be barbarians.  Apparently the more self-confident and energetic a religion is, the more inevitable it is that its adherents will adopt the viewpoint of the Caliph Omar.

Selfies in voting booths -- free speech, or incipient threat to democratic elections?  How much do you suppose the Koch Brothers -- or George Soros, if you prefer -- would pay for my vote?

Can the SCA and pop-culture fascination with the middle ages save Medieval Studies?

On the Ashley Madison imbroglio: 

Jennifer Weiner points out that the people who signed up for Ashley Madison's services with their real names and email addresses are just plain stupid (on top of being dishonest).  As for the people who signed up from .gov and .mil addresses -- or, so help us, the Vatican -- they're well into the realm of Idiocracy, but without the funny parts. 

More trenchantly, a DailyKos blogger points out that even before it was hacked, Ashley Madison was almost certainly a scam.  If something looks too good to be true, well, you know the rest of the saying.  And if you're going to a website for the express purpose of cheating and lying, don't be too surprised when the people you meet there are just as dishonest as you.

Why hello there, little weblog.

I'd almost forgotten you were still here.  Still following me around like a good and faithful servant. 

I've neglected you, I'm afraid.  I got distracted by something new and flashy.  And also by other things of greater import.  There has been much sturm und drang in the life of Felix over the past few years, as well as sweetness and light.  We needn't go into that in much detail.

Suffice it to say that that flashy distraction has turned out to be kind of shallow.  All looks, no substance. The kind of place where all they care about is what you look like, not what you have to say.  And it's so crowded!  Every day, every hour, dozens -- hundreds -- of impassioned pleas for attention.  Look at me!  Sign my petition!  Like me, like me, like me!  Please like me!  Like my joke!  Like my cartoon!  Like my church!  Like my political party!  Or else a little kid with cancer will die if you don't like me RIGHT NOW!

It's exhausting.

So the little space of peace and quiet that you offer is quite welcome.  And -- I have to be honest about this -- I like the exclusivity of our relationship.  I guess I'm just egotistical about things like that.

Oh, I'll still visit That Other Place, too.  It's a good place to see and be seen.  But for more reflective discussions, I'll be coming here to hang out with you. 

Good to see you again.

Signs of the times V

Capture and control?

This 2002 article by H. Keith Henson provides a lot of food for thought for those who would understand human behavior, particularly the psychological aspects of religious cults and captor/captive relationships.

Law and the Multiverse

A few works of pop culture, most notably The Incredibles, have speculated about how superheroes might be affected by the legal system. Few have actually attempted to apply the real-life legal system to such sticky superhero problems as testifying in court, maintaining a secret identity, or accumulating and holding property for longer than a normal human life span. And these are simple when compared to the huge snarl of legal difficulties that might arise from dying and being resurrected even once, let alone spinning around in a revolving door of temporary mortality the way some denizens of the comics multiverse seem to do. This very interesting blog, apparently written by an attorney or law student who is also a raging comics fan, attempts to fill the gap.

The political populist in me notes that corporations, which lack not only mortality but most of the other positive attributes of human beings, have rather neatly managed to evade all of these difficulties. Perhaps superheroes should simply incorporate themselves.

Recent reads:

Losing Mum and Pup, by Christopher Buckley. The author of several successful novels of political satire (Thank You For Smoking, Boomsday, etc.) tackles a much bleaker subject: the deaths of his mother and father within a year of each other, and his own memories, thoughts and reactions to those losses. His parents, of course, were notable in their own right. William F. Buckley was one of the most influential political writers of the twentieth century, founder of National Review and a leading figure in the decades-long attempt to give political conservatism a respectable intellectual foundation. Patricia Taylor Buckley, though less well known to political mavens, was a prominent social figure in New York and a formidable personal presence to her family.

Buckley's reminiscences of his parents are both illuminating and entertaining, and some portions of the book read like the humorous stories told about a person at their wake. A chapter about his father's love of sailing, and of the many adventures and mishaps which resulted from his almost recklessly sanguine approach to seamanship, had me laughing out loud: "Over the years, my father took out entire sections of docks up and down the eastern seaboard. His crew bestowed on him the nickname 'Captain Crunch'...." And yet Buckley also has the respect and the awareness to note that "Pup's greatness was of a piece with the way he conducted himself at sea. Great men always have too much canvas up. Great men take great risks."

The literally morbid subtext of the book also gives Buckley plenty of room to exercise his bleaker, blacker sense of humor, as when he describes the unctuousness of funeral directors or the very strange world of funeral price accounting. And also discuss much more serious matters, such as his famously intellectual father's struggle with the gradual loss of some of his physical and mental agility.

Would that all of us accomplished so much with the time available to us, and were remembered in such fashion.

Neat link of the day:

FedFlix. Free downloadable US government films, including documentaries, training films, etc. "Duck and Cover!"

Neverwas Haul

An industrious crew busily exploring the applications of neo-Victorian steam-powered gadgets. Although their lumbering self-propelled multi-story turretted house is impressive, I'm pretty sure the peppy little steam car is more fun to drive.

Dulce et decorum

"The necessary supply of heroes must be maintained at all costs."

-- Sir Edward Carson, supporting a Bill for Compulsory Military Service, sometime prior to 1916. Quoted by Robert Graves in The Double Dealer, Jan. 1924, p. 19.

Recent reads

His Wanted Woman, by Linda Turner. If any scholarly, librarianly, or archival types are obligated to read a genre romance novel for any reason, this might be one to look for. I came across it as a result of an online discussion of an LA Times article about the Archival Recovery Team that tracks down and attempts to recover items stolen from the National Archives which are being offered for sale on the internet or through rare-books dealers. The article vaguely mentioned that this team had been the subject of a "Harlequin romance". A little librarianly cooperation, mixed with some serendipity and a helpful romance writer, identified the "wanted" title.

I have to say that the cover -- viewable at Amazon -- is unsettling in a way that the artist probably did not intend. The man and woman portrayed are attractive individuals, and they appear to be quite fond of each other, but it appears that in order to give a "suspenseful" ambiance to the scene, the artist has bathed both figures in an eerie green glow emanating from below. This, combined with the woman's closed eyes and inert posture, has the unfortunate effect of appearing more necrophilic than suspenseful. Surely this was not the intent. Also, for some reason, a glowing scale model of the US Capitol building and a purple Christmas tree appear to be stuck to the man's elbow.

The book seems to be the first of an intended series dealing with three brothers. The O'Reilly brothers, we find out in a brief prologue, are all strapping, handsome men who work in different branches of law enforcement and all got divorced nearly simultaneously: "A bunch of cops with bad taste in women." They get together on St. Patrick's day for a very masculine brotherly ceremony of drinking beer and tossing their old marriage certificates into the pub bonfire while vowing to "never get married again". Their loving mom, in between cooking delicious lasagna (O'Reilly? lasagna?) meals, helpfully pushes them to find "nice girls". What do you suppose will happen in this volume? And how many books do you suppose the series will include?

I suppose I should not mock the inherent predictability of romance novels. That is, I take it, what many romance readers expect: the reassurance that Things Will Work Out, that there are Happy Endings in which a Good Woman and a Good Man are irresistably drawn to each other and find a way to Live Happily Ever After despite all the betrayals, bitterness, and fears that dog them as individuals, and despite every worldly obstacle that rears up to oppose them. The fact that reality does not always follow this script no doubt only increases the hunger to have it confirmed in fiction. And why should I condemn or mock that desire for reassurance? Is it really any more laughable than the innumerable fantasy and SF epics in which obscure country bumpkins rise to overthrow dictatorial overlords whose armies have overrun the known world/universe? Both posit, indeed insist on, reassuringly happy endings that readers crave.

But enough generalia. In the volume at hand, once the prologue is past, we find ourselves meeting Mackenzie Sloan, a smart young woman who has recently acquired a master's degree in an unspecified subject, broken up with a boyfriend, lost her father, and inherited the latter's livelihood, a rare-books store in Washington, D.C. Shortly after she reopens the shop, a dark-haired "hunk" walks in with a improbably rare document to sell, and an even more improbable story to explain his possession of it. He's one of the O'Reilly brothers, naturally, the one who works for the Archival Recovery Team, and he's checking her out. Checking out her honesty, that is. He's checking to see if the current proprietor of the store will buy tempting items of suspicious provenance, because it turns out that some of her father's inventory that she's recently sold on eBay was stuff that should have stayed in the Archives. Is she a thief? Was her father a thief? Or a duped victim who bought stolen documents? Where did they come from, and will the investigation tarnish her good name and damage her business?

In any case, the two of them are very shortly checking out more than just each other's credentials, the more so when she is impelled to seek police protection after someone breaks into her store and steals, not books or maps, but routine business paperwork. Each has fears and bitterness from the past to overcome before becoming emotionally involved, although the physical sparks of attraction are flying in short order, along with some hints of mild kinkiness. (Something about handcuffs...)

I found the characters interesting and the story entertaining. I would have liked more emphasis on the process by which historical documents wind their way through the labyrinthine, sometimes clandestine world of archival institutions, dealers, and collectors. I would have liked to have seen more detailed description of how the Archival Recovery Team identified and tracked such documents, and I would have enjoyed reading at greater length about the investigation of the particular case at hand. The resolution of the case, though unfortunately plausible, seemed rather sudden and deus-ex-mechanical. It so happens that I subscribe to the school of thought that in a well-plotted mystery novel, the criminal, when revealed, must be a character who has been previously introduced in the story, and whom the reader has had fair chance to consider as a suspect.

But this is not, of course, primarily a mystery novel, and I fear that I am not part of its prime target demographic. The primary emphasis is on the exposition and expulsion of the personal demons of the two romantic principals, and their growing involvement with each other. This is, in fact, quite well done. But of all the people who read His Wanted Woman, I wonder if I am the only one who started getting impatient with the descriptions of lusciously soft lips, hungry kisses, and pounding hearts, and looked forward to the next chapter in which the erotically enflamed investigators pulled themselves away from each others' arms and delved once more into tracking the prospective buyers of a stolen presidential diary or hand-scribbled Civil War map.

So you want to be....

I guess one of the hallmarks of a lost friendship is that you continue to see things that remind you of the other person's interests and sense of humor, and wish that you could share those things with them. These short animations, for example. Peace and success in all things to absent friends, even (or especially) ones who will never read these words.

Recent viewings

Never Take Candy From a Stranger / These Are the Damned
I ordered this double DVD of 1960-vintage thrillers because someone on a listserv said interesting things about These Are the Damned.

Never Take Candy From a Stranger is an uncomfortable film, and I'm not sure whether to dismiss it as mere sensationalistic pandering. On the one hand, it's subject matter -- pedophilia -- is decidedly sensationalistic. On the other hand, the movie does not go out of its way to portray the child victims in a prurient manner, the actual offense is relatively tame by the standards of today's daily news, and most of the film's attention is devoted to one victim's parents as they attempt to goad the corrupt local government into prosecuting the wealthy and politically-connected offender. It all ends up as a courtroom thriller, in which the emotional state of a young girl facing a hostile, overbearing and manipulative defense attorney evokes as much tension as the fate of the defendant himself.

These Are the Damned is almost two movies in one, not quite seamlessly joined. It begins as the tale of an American tourist in a postwar English seaside town. Lured into a backstreet by the charms of a sultry local girl, he's promptly set upon, beaten and robbed by a weirdly well-organized gang of black-leather clad, motorcycle-riding "teddy boys". How weirdly well-organized are they? After apparently spending most of the day draping themselves over a 18th-century statue on the waterfront and scaring tourists, when their suit-and-tie-clad leader gives them a signal, they all get up and march in formation into the alley to await their prey, all whistling their bizarrely cheery theme tune in unison like the British POWs of The Bridge on the River Kwai.

Black leather, black leather, smash smash smash!
Black leather, black leather, crash crash crash!
Black leather, black leather, kill kill kill!

First heard in a rock-n-roll arrangement while Our Hero and his duplicitous date walk down the street, this happy little tune makes several thematic appearances throughout the film: whistled in unison as a marching song, above, and later whistled, this time solo, by various gang members signalling to each other during a tense nighttime stalk.

It's in the middle of this nighttime stalk that the movie shifts gears into a completely different story. A mysterious British military officer and his foreign mistress, who has arrived to take up residence in a guest house on his seaside property and pursue her artistic calling of creating strange lumpy sculptures, have made cryptic appearances earlier in the film, most notably as Knowledgable Locals to whom our bruised and bloodied American tourist commisserates after his unfortunate back alley encounter. Turns out they're not just background extras after all, and we're not watching a cautionary thriller about motorcycle gangs after all. No, there's some kind of sinister secret military base on the seashore, ringed with barbed wire fences and patrolled by soldiers with guard dogs. And the purpose of this military base appears to be to supervise a group of young children who are being raised in underground caves, educated via closed-circuit television, and visited only by soldiers in heavy protective gear.

I won't give away any spoilers, other than to note that the movie is based on a novel entitled The Children of Light, that the "teddy boys" so important to the first half of the movie are almost completely forgotten in the second half, and that with Hammer Films at the helm, the operant rule of horror movies -- "anyone can die" -- is in full effect, and British filmmakers do not, like many Hollywood filmmakers, insist on producing happy endings.

Poetry Wednesday

Dirge

by William Alexander Percy

Tuck the earth, fold the sod,
Drop the hollow-sounding clod.
Quiet's come; time for sleeping,
Tired out of mirth and weeping,
Calmed at last of mirth and weeping.
Tuck the earth, fold the sod;
Quiet's here, maybe God.

(Published in The Double Dealer, Nov. 1923, p. 201)

NaBloPoMo prompt #3

"Describe the plot of the next book you want to read, even if the book doesn't exist yet."

I expect the plot to be unknown and to unfold as I read the book, not to be a preconceived given.

Cleaning house

Updated sidebars: Friends of Felix and Biblioholism. Added new sidebar: Authorblogs. Combined the surviving shreds of YpsiAnniana with Michiganiana.

He knew eldritch evil when he saw it

"As for the Republicans—how can one regard seriously a frightened, greedy, nostalgic huddle of tradesmen and lucky idlers who shut their eyes to history and science, steel their emotions against decent human sympathy, cling to sordid and provincial ideals exalting sheer acquisitiveness and condoning artificial hardship for the non-materially-shrewd, dwell smugly and sentimentally in a distorted dream-cosmos of outmoded phrases and principles and attitudes based on the bygone agricultural-handicraft world, and revel in (consciously or unconsciously) mendacious assumptions (such as the notion that real liberty is synonymous with the single detail of unrestricted economic license or that a rational planning of resource-distribution would contravene some vague and mystical `American heritage'…) utterly contrary to fact and without the slightest foundation in human experience? Intellectually, the Republican idea deserves the tolerance and respect one gives to the dead."--H.P. Lovecraft

Attributed to a 1936 letter by this site; elsewhere stated to be cited in S.T. Joshi's A Dreamer and a Visionary, to which, sadly, I have no quick and convenient access.

Refgrunting

Where can I type up a paper? Try the computer lab.

Gorgeous blonde girl: I'm researching sex appeal. Can you show me where to find it?

Stapler is empty.

You know that room, like, on the second floor, where you can do stuff, is it open? Yes, the media computer lab is open.

I put my thing in the computer and it won't let me open stuff. What kind of document is it? Like, Word or something. Try the computer lab.

News noted

The work of religion continues apace. Congratulations to the religious leaders on both sides who continue to successfully divide people and turn them against each other. Another slaughter accomplished.

McDonalds orders workers to vote Republican.

SF writer Charles Stross excorciates the runaway popularity, lagging originality, and selective historical amnesia of steampunk.

Controversy over whether companies can patent the human genome. US Justice department says nay.

The Battlin' Boomers' first baseman is profiled by the NYT in the wake of his victorious trip to the World Series. At the ripe old age of 33 he's described as a grizzled, widely-traveled veteran. Also as a north Texan who grew up listening to the same Rangers games I listened to in college. Steve Buechele is not forgotten.

NaBloPoMo prompt #2

"Tell us the story of a piece of jewelry you own. Where did it come from, and what does it mean to you?"

Well. Let's see. A gold chain given by grandparents, never worn. Two neckerchief clasps from Boy Scout days, one broken. One orphaned cufflink, never worn. A black button-cover, never worn. A couple of watches given by various people, both non working and not worn for years. Make of those what you will.