William Gibson
21 Oct 06
William Gibson’s fragmentary posts have a compelling quality, like pinpoints of light. You sense that there’s a finished work out there somewhere. Characters recur, and elements and themes come together. But there’s always the possibility that the finished work won’t. These fragments don’t stand alone, they insist that there is or will be more. And yet, just as a work of fiction can transport the reader out of themselves, these fragments capture moments that seem to hang with ripeness; like having only a moment to look through a peephole into another world. My favourite, so far, is SERE.
Posted by pzed on October 21, 2006 at 12.33pm
chasing tails
18 Oct 06
This blog is on the verge of being stricken by smallpox, or some such disease that kills infants before they can even walk. Fact is, I haven’t had a lot of time for reading lately; more importantly, I haven’t been reading anything particularly inspiring. I sometimes drift into reading too much non-fiction, but I haven’t had great luck with fiction lately either. I picked up D.M. Thomas’s White Hotel a few days ago, and am pretty unimpressed out of the gate. It all seems rather implausible, and the symbolism heavy handed.
I’m tempted just to stop reading it only about a fifth of the way in, and have actually already picked up something else: Fall On Your Knees, by Ann-Marie MacDonald. Like White Hotel, Fall On Your Knees is something I’ve been meaning to pick up for quite some time. The early going is much more promising, but I have to say I may not be able to finish it if it means I’ll have that godawful xmas carol in my head for the next month.
Posted by pzed on October 18, 2006 at 5.02pm
God’s Universe?
19 Sep 06
The Harvard University Press Publicity Blog recently referenced a new review of Owen Gingerich’s God’s Universe that appeared in the October 2006 issue of Scientific American. The Harvard post pulled the following quote from the review:
In God’s Universe, Owen Gingerich, a Harvard University astronomer and science historian, tells how in the 1980s he was part of an effort to produce a kind of anti-Cosmos, a television series called Space, Time, and God that was to counter Sagan’s “conspicuously materialist approach to the universe.” The program never got off the ground, but its premise survives: that there are two ways to think about science. You can be a theist, believing that behind the veil of randomness lurks an active, loving, manipulative God, or you can be a materialist, for whom everything is matter and energy interacting within space and time. Whichever metaphysical club you belong to, the science comes out the same.
Harvard also bolded the phrase “the science comes out the same” to add emphasis. Of course, you wouldn’t expect the Harvard UP publicity folks to include the fact that the SA reviewer dismissed Gingerich’s claim outright. But it occurred to me that, if in fact the science does come out the same in a universe created by a god, it is perhaps something of a contradiction to state that that god is active, loving, and manipulative. Let’s imagine that god created the universe as a giant simulation game in which the program was written and continues to run, but god has effectively gone away and plans to come back to see the results eventually. In that case, the science could in fact come out the same. But if that god sticks around, lovingly tweaking results every now and then, it seems to me that would make the science come out different. Suppose that god actually had to intervene, however slightly, in the process of evolution in order to ensure that humans came out human. Would that not effectively change not only the course but also the science of evolution? Would biologists, in order to explain human development, not eventually have to come up with a theory as to how and when god intervened?
The Scientific American article is actually a review article that covers three other books: The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief by Francis S. Collins, The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins, and The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God by Carl Sagan. The article’s conclusion falls decidedly on the side of Dawkins and Sagan:
But the universe is not all that hospitable–try leaving Earth without a space-suit. Life took billions of years to take root on this planet, and it is an open question whether it made it anywhere else. To us carboniferous creatures, the dials may seem miraculously tweaked, but different physical laws might have led to universes harboring equally awe-filled forms of energy, cooking up anthropic arguments of their own.
Posted by pzed on September 19, 2006 at 7.05pm
domestication
3 Sep 06
Last night I went to a party at a friend’s house just outside of Merlin, Ontario. Merlin is more or less a little town on a road to nowhere. My friends live fairly nearby in an old one-room school house that was converted to a house recently enough (I think they said 1967) that many of their neighbours went to school there. Come to think of it, I guess their neighbours are kinda old.
What they do there, among other things, is raise chickens. Their operation is very small, free-range (truly), and entirely unauthorized by any governmental inspection standards. So they can’t really sell the abundance of eggs or the occasional surplus chicken, but they can and do barter, and have a reputation for showing up at people’s door with a basket of eggy goodness to give away.
For dinner, we had chicken stew made from a cock that they had raised and killed. I had to confess that, as a city kid, I couldn’t really relish the idea of killing my own meat, especially meat that might have had a name and whose close relatives I had just been admiring for their beauty (yes, chickens can be beautiful). You’d be correct if you guess that I cried when I read Charlotte’s Web, and it was as much a release of the pent up tension worrying about whether Wilbur would become sausage as it was about Charlotte’s peaceful death. Of course, my friends grew up city kids too, and they’ve come to terms with killing and eating the same chickens who run around in their yard. Then today (funny how these things happen), I ran across this:
Domestication of both plants and animals occurred without any farseeing intention or invention on the part of the stewards of the seeds and studs. But what a stroke of good fortune for those lineages that became domesticated! All that remains of the ancestors of today’s grains are small scattered patches of wild-grass cousins, and the nearest surviving relatives of all the domesticated animals could be carried off in a few arks. How clever of wild sheep to have acquired that most versatile adaptation, the shepherd! By forming a symbiotic alliance with Homo sapiens, sheep could outsource their chief survival tasks: food finding and predator avoidance. They even got shelter and emergency care thrown in as a bonus. The price they paid—losing the freedom of mate selection and being slaughtered instead of being killed by predators (if that is a cost)—was a pittance compared with the gain in offspring survival it purchased. (Dennett 169-70)
And it became clear to me that my friends’ chickens are at least lucky enough to live happy, well cared for lives until slaughtered by people who care that it is done quickly and humanely. This should have been clear enough, but sometimes city kids’ brains take a while to figure these things out. Here, just for interest’s sake, is the rest of Dennett’s paragraph:
But of course it wasn’t their cleverness that explains the good bargain. It was the blind, foresightless cleverness of Mother Nature, evolution, which ratified the free-floating rationale of this arrangement. Sheep and other domesticated animals are, in fact, significantly more stupid than their wild relatives—because they can be. Their brains are smaller (relative to body size and weight), and this is not just due to their having been bred for muscle mass (meat). Since both the domesticated animals and their domesticators have enjoyed huge population explosions. . . there can be no doubt that this symbiosis was mutualistic—fitness-enhancing to both parties. (70)
Works Cited
Dennett, Daniel C. Breaking the Spell: Religion as Natural Phenomenon. New York: Viking, 2006.
White, E. B. Charlotte’s Web. New York: Harper and Row, 1952.
Posted by pzed on September 3, 2006 at 4.01pm
a poem
29 Aug 06
XX
Is it you standing among the olive trees
Beyond the courtyard? You in the sunlight
Waving me closer with one hand while the otherShields your eyes from the brightness that turns
All that is not you dead white? Is it you
Around whom the leaves scatter like foam?You in the murmuring night that is scented
With mint and lit by the distant wilderness
Of stars? Is it you? Is it really youRising from the script of waves, the length
Of your body casting a sudden shadow over my hand
So that I feel how cold it is as it movesOver the page? You leaning down and putting
Your mouth against mine so I should know
That a kiss is only the beginningOf what until now we could only imagine?
Is it you or the long compassionate wind
That whispers in my ear: alas, alas?Strand, Mark. “XX.” Erotikon: Essays on Eros, Ancient and Modern. Eds. Shadi Bartsch and Thomas Bartsherer. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2005. Reprinted from Dark Harbor. New York: Knopf, 1993.
Posted by pzed on August 29, 2006 at 11.47am
Otranto follow-up
28 Aug 06
Seems when I said Otranto “wasn’t particularly well written“, I wasn’t too far out in left field. Marshall Brown, while providing a plot summary, says “It would all be very funny if the stiff and awkward prose did not effectively stifle the tumultuous bustle of the action” (26). He finishes his plot summary with the following frank appraisal:
When slogging through the crowded incidents, one wonders how such an insane mishmash could have gained popular success. Much is totally unprepared, and nothing is adequately motivated; there is little consistency in the types of incidents, and the focus of interest shifts radically from moment to moment. Far from a coherent undertaking, the novel is best seen as an attempt to comprehend within a tiny compass as great a variety as possible. (27)
I’ll be writing more on Brown’s approach to the gothic in future posts.
Work Cited
Brown, Marshall. The Gothic Text. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2005.
Posted by pzed on August 28, 2006 at 11.42am
The Castle of Otranto
23 Aug 06
Walpole, Horace. The Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Story. Ed. W. S. Lewis. London: Oxford UP, 1964.
Perhaps the most disappointing thing about The Castle of Otranto is that Walpole took credit for writing it after the success of the first edition (1764). The unsigned preface to the first edition presents itself as having been composed by the translator, identified on the title page as the fictional William Marshal, Gent. The supposed Italian author is identified as Onuphrio Muralto. The preface tells how the book came to be translated from the Italian, with commentary on the style and subject matter to the effect that the translator admits to being quite fond of the work regardless of the author’s defects. The translator also (and this is critical) claims, “[t]hough the machinery is invention, and the names of the actors imaginary, I cannot but believe that the groundwork of the story is founded on truth” (5).
The preface to the second edition (1765) is signed by the author. Why did he choose to come forward? Well, because the first edition was a great success, and I suppose he wanted the credit:
As diffidence of his own abilities, and the novelty of the attempt, were his sole inducements to assume that disguise, he flatters himself he shall appear excusable. He resigned his performance to the impartial judgement of the public; determined to let it perish in obscurity, if disapproved; nor meaning to avow such a trifle, unless better judges should pronounce that he might own it without a blush. (7)
If I may paraphrase, “having something of a public reputation, the author wouldn’t want his name attached to a book that, because he was not confident that it was either well written or appropriate for polite company, might sully that reputation. However, having discovered the book to be rather popular, the author wants to make damn sure people know who wrote it.” Or something along those lines. Sadly, it seems a poor aesthetic judgement. I was much more satisfied with the first, fictional preface, in so far as it was itself part of the work. The second disowns the first and to my mind lessens the work. I wonder if Walpole wasn’t an early example of Wharton’s mechanical reader/author whose primary criterion for literary value is sales.
As for the book itself? We’re certainly in the realm of the gothic. The setting is a medieval castle; the period, the 11th or 12th century. There’s a ghost, and some kind of immaterial giant who drops bits and pieces of his equipment here and there. And, of course, there is blood. Turns out (in case you haven’t read the book, it comes as no surprise) that the noble-seeming peasant character is, in fact, noble. Much like Earl William in Longsword, Earl of Salisbury, the peasant Theodore (whose true nobility is ultimately revealed) behaves with impeccable noblesse throughout. By the same token, the tyrant Manfred is revealed to be the grandson of a usurper, hence the inheritor of that sin. Naturally, his behaviour leaves a bit to be desired.
Otranto is not particularly well written, but it is enjoyable. My initial sense is that it doesn’t contain remarkable depth as a work of literature. It is, of course, widely recognized as the first novel in which the various thematic elements that make up the gothic are all present, and so I was a little disappointed to find in it little more than a diversion; but it’s always possible that I am the one not reading deeply enough.
Posted by pzed on August 23, 2006 at 12.58pm
the enemies of life
19 Aug 06
Watts, Alan. The Way of Zen. New York: Vintage, 1957.
Reasonable—that is, human—men will always be capable of compromise, but men who have dehumanized themselves by becoming the blind worshipers of an idea or an ideal are fanatics whose devotion to abstractions makes them the enemies of life. (30)
Posted by pzed on August 19, 2006 at 10.56am
I Ching
18 Aug 06
Watts, Alan. The Way of Zen. New York: Vintage, 1957.
Indeed, an exponent of the I Ching might give us quite a tough argument about the relative merits of our ways for making important decisions. We feel that we decide rationally because we base our decisions on collecting relevant data about the matter in hand. We do not depend upon such irrelevant trifles as the chance tossing of a coin, or the patterns of tea leaves or cracks in a shell. Yet he might ask whether we really know what information is relevant, since our plans are constantly upset by utterly unforeseen incidents. He might ask whether we really know when we have collected enough information upon which to decide. If we were rigorously “scientific” in collecting information for our decisions, it would take us so long to collect the data that the time for action would have passed long before the work had been completed. So how do we know when we have enough? Does the information itself tell us that it is enough? On the contrary, we go through the motions of gathering the necessary information in a rational way, and then, just because of a hunch, or because we are tired of thinking, or because the time has come to decide, we act. He would ask whether this is not depending just as much upon “irrelevant trifles” as if we had been casting yarrow stalks. (14-15)
Posted by pzed on August 18, 2006 at 10.40pm
The Great American Novel
18 Aug 06
Wharton, Edith. “The Great American Novel.” 1927. Edith Wharton: The Uncollected Critical Writings. Ed. Frederick Wegener. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1996. 151-159.
More quote mining. . .
It would appear that in the opinion of recent American reviewers the American novelist must submit to much narrower social and geographical limitations [than the European] before he can pretend to have produced the (or the greatest, or even simply an) American novel; indeed the restrictions imposed appear to differ only in kind from those to which a paternal administration subjects drinkers of wine, wearers of short skirts, and upholders of the evolutionary hypothesis. (151-152)
First of all, the novelist’s scene must be laid in the United States, and his story deal exclusively with citizens of those States; furthermore, if his work is really to deserve the epithet “American,” it must tell of persons so limited in education and opportunity that they live cut off from all the varied sources of culture which used to be considered the common heritage of English-speaking people. (152)
“Main Street” has come to signify the common mean of American life anywhere in its million cities and towns, its countless villages and immeasurable wildernesses. It stands for everything which does not rise above a very low average in culture, situation, or intrinsic human interest; and also for every style of depicting this dead level of existence, from the photographic to the pornographic—sometimes inclusively. (153)
As she [America] has reduced the English language to a mere instrument of utility (for example, by such simplifications as the substituting of “a wood,” or, mysteriously, “a woods,” for the innumerable shadings of coppice, copse, spinney, covert, brake, holt, grove, etc.), so she has reduced relations between human beings to a dead level of vapid benevolence, and the whole of life to a small house with modern plumbing and heating, a garage, a motor, a telephone, and a lawn undivided from one’s neighbor’s. (154)
It is not because we are middle-class but because we are middling that our story is so soon told. (154)
The idea that genuineness is to be found only in the rudimentary, and that whatever is complex is unauthentic, is a favorite axiom of the modern American critic. (155)
. . . keeping in mind, of course, that this article was written in 1927.
Posted by pzed on August 18, 2006 at 3.01pm
