Cobb

The Purpose of Identity in Fiction

Not the monkey but my friend George makes something of the shock some New Yorker readers got from discovering that Tweeters were dismayed to find that Hunger Games protagonists weren't all white.

You can't make anything of this without considering the purpose of fiction writing itself. The catch line in the New Yorker article is the last - "“But then again, whenever I read something, I wonder, ‘where can I find the character who represents ME?’ ”. 

The way multiculturalists have politicized the 'problem' of identity in fiction is to respond with a call to a new representational flowering of fiction writing that must be both exceptional and broadly accepted. It does so with the presumption that there is an element of unambiguous oppression in such writing not deemed appropriately representational. This underlies the assumption that there is something *wrong* with the idea that internalizing a 'white' character is somehow detrimental for a reader who is not nominally white. The irony of course is that it can only be detrimental when the principle of modernity is erased - that principle that says human experience is human experience and not essentially racial. If my terms are somewhat off, it is because I associate and equate modernism with humanism. 

The multicultural argument is familiar to me. I have made it myself, but in service to an agenda of cultural production that was conceived to be both one of anti-racist and ethnic chauvinist intent. While the first component is admirable, the second cannot be ignored. I don't have the time nor inclination to demonstrate the extent to which multicultural literature and literacy are chauvinist but rely on the reader's familiarity with the term 'positive role model' when considering the ethically correct sort of fiction. 

But let us consider what I consider to be the neutral case - which is that authors need to make fiction writing with respect to the complexity of their characters fit into a more rainbow like spectrum. Even the color of that rainbow is biased by the American black/white polarity and other politically charged dimensions of the multicultural agenda. If you doubt this, consider the reaction you would expect if you were to suggest that authors would do just as well to make complex characters to be Czech or Eastern Orthodox. It's all rather well to consider that the Ezra Jack Keats Foundation makes its point until you try to consider a Ludwig Bemelmans Foundation making a similar point about childrens books featuring young Catholic French girls like Madeline. And what, pray tell are we to think about Bugs Bunny? Is there something fundamentally wrong with the fact that we learn and internalize stories and lessons from talking rabbits? What about curious monkeys? 

If it's OK to learn from an animal, is it OK to allow readers to make racial and ethnic identifications of characters read from text? I mean is there anything that tells us quite specifically what Sherlock Holmes looks and sounds like? I've read several of Conan Doyle's books and I'm still stuck with the images I had gotten earlier from TV. And now I particularly favor the spin I get from Guy Ritchie's two films. It is difficult for me to imagine Robin as anyone other than Burt Ward. Is it OK for the reader to make what they will of a fictional character? It seems to me that the best way to answer that is to consider the alternative, which is that an author must make racial and ethnic choices for all of their characters and the reader must not stray from that interpretation. That doctrine seems further than any other in the pursuit of anti-racist aims.

It is my opinion that the best thing is done by the 'counter' fiction which is unselfcounsciously that, but it's difficult to unring the bell of political correctness. So I expect to find those black Americans writing about people they knew personally, before there was any call in the literature for such characters, to be what's best - for what it's worth. Surely those readers feeling the oppression of absence or over-simplification would find libraries worth recommending. As one who has used the multicultural argument, my recommendations are as good as any. What I have found then, is a set of a few books that makes the case, the implication being that there were so many others which ended up being a waste of my time. And then of course even as I wrote the recommendation, it was in the context of a cultural and political project, this blog. 

I am finally apt to say, paraphrasing Hugh Laurie who was likley paraphrasing someone else, that there are exactly two types of fiction, good and bad. I think that what has stood the test of time as good is all we should concern ourselves with when it comes to picking what to read and how to assess them. It is only when our heads are full of that which we know to be good that we can say with any certainty whether 'the character that represents ME' is a a good character at all. After all, if ME is so damned important, then ME should write a book about ME.

Drag Out the Dickens

This evening I watched Jean Reno in The Professional with my two daughters. It's movie night. I'm figuring out what I might do to deal with foul language. I'm unsure.

When he was about 12 I told my son that he shouldn't curse - not because cursing is bad, but because he doesn't have a real reason to curse. You shouldn't say that your life is fucked up unless your life is fucked up, and he doesn't know what fucked up is. And so while there is something to respect about Jay Z, I do puzzle about my daughters' choice in music. They do have the decency to listen to it out of my earshot, as do their addictions to the petty bullshit that runs through pop culture. I was listening to Fishbone's 1991 single "Bonin' in the Boneyard" and recall that their record corporation wouldn't even let them say 'funky ass bass'. Times have changed for the worse and people curse, but we really don't know what fucked up is.

His name was Charles John Huffam Dickens and he died during Reconstruction. I have yet to determine how much it might have been on his mind, and when time permits, I will. He was certainly one of the coldest eyes for detail in the detrius of civilization of the English speaking world; he could not have been immune to the charms of American slavery. That is, for what it's worth, our darkest chapter, and for all that - it's not so damned dark. The darkness of Russia's 20th century is so overwhelmingly ghastly that it's difficult for me to give us any credit for spine, though you must admire our nerve. 

So while I poke around for the equivalent of Conquest to plumb the depths of Chinese depravity, I do know what I want to get from Dickens - some flavor for the shit smell of London in the days when workhouses were the norm. I want to get the feel of what it's like a half to a full order of magnitude more socially polluted than what's going on here in the - Dont Tase Me Bro Generation. I know I ought to have a gun or two for my dumbbell strategy, but knowing when to shoot is more important than knowing how. 

You see, every day on Google Plus, middlebrow America is pissing and moaning and yes, cursing, about how depraved American society is. I ain't buying it. The ATM networks may charge you 3 damned dollars for an out of bank transaction, but they still count the money out right, and maybe we ought to pay that much for the convenience. In fact, maybe I'm going to join the ranks of those selling leeches for the boneheads seeking immortality. It only makes sense that for Charles Dickens, and Shakespeare, Milton, Donne, Hopkins, and two dozen others - all of their works can be had for free or close to it. But if you want tickets to see Justin Beiber, well.. I'm not buying the expensive insanity or Linsanity of going Gaga over anything. That's for the young, bored and illiterate who, with any luck, will be out of a job and learn to live without all the disposable income competing in our economy for people with brains. What was it that Neal Stephenson said about the best minds of a generation writing spam filters?  Our society is not depraved, it's just lazy and uncomfortable. But that's an opinion as of yet uniformed by the details of the Dickensian.

Not for long. 

London, like the Holy Grail's Monty Pythonite who the Witch turned into a newt, got better. And all of the blather going on America's lightweight media, both old and self-righteously new, sounds to me like the illogic of the ensuing discussion about whether our society is actually a bitch of a witch. To much free fucking speech and no real thinking. 

How bad was London and how did it get better? I think maybe Dickens has the answer I'm looking for.

 

Harold Bloom and The Western Canon – The Books and School of the Ages

shamelessly stolen from Pops

Without fear of contradiction or being accused of unwarranted hubris, I start here by saying that I have something in common with the illustrious and famed critic, Harold Bloom.  First, we were both born during the 1930s.  But as it is commonly known, there are countless (albeit dwindling numbers of) folks who can claim that spirited decade as the point of their earthly entry.  Second, our surname begins with the same letter.  However, “B” is a common letter for last names, so that’s no big thing.  And, third, we have/had an attachment to Yale University.  I was born at Grace-New Haven Hospital on Chapel Street, a few blocks from that esteemed institution; and grew up on Dixwell Avenue in the Elm Haven Housing Project, a scant mile north of the university.  Still, geographical proximity is a no brainer and few flags can be waved because of it.  Anyway…now that our questionable but unplanned kinship has been duly established, I’ll move on to other concerns.

I must say that I consider myself to be a late Bloomer in that my familiarity with Haughty Harold [and I say this with unfettered admiration] comes many years after reading other lesser known literary critics.  But Bloom has a special “touch” which I find appealing, unique and off-putting all at the same time.  I am kinda sorta sadly nearing the end of his well known and widely read The Western Canon – The Books and School of the Ages.  Tradition and common sense might suggest that I wait until (finally!) closing the well-worn cover of the tome before attempting to craft any kind of assessment or review.  But I am thoroughly convinced that neither his style, reach, wisdom nor attitude will diminish by the time I reach “endgame.”  If nothing else erudite Harold Bloom is nothing if he isn’t consistent.  I find reading him as much a labor of literary love and just plain and simple labor.

Bloom has a way of more than casually hinting that those who venture to read him should [make that must] likewise read extensively or, at the very least, be vaguely familiar with the broad sweep of literature that he has absorbed over the years.  I am convinced that this is an all but impossible undertaking.  I am furthermore convinced that he was reading prenatal hieroglyphics on the lining of his mother’s womb well before his rush into the waiting world – or perhaps some waiting New York library– on July 11, 1930.

A personal contradiction and wake-up call immediately came to my mind after reading his early (p 16) observation that “…literary criticism, as an art, always was and always will be an elitist phenomenon.”  If there was/is anything that I did not and do not need it’s the well-intended machinations of elitists of any and all genres.  Years ago I had read with measured albeit real disdain, E.D. Hirsch’s Cultural Literacy – What Every American Needs to Know.  It galled me that someone would have the (excuse the intentional redundancy) gall to actually construct a list of what one should read in order to be – and I did not excuse the expression – culturally literate.  It stuck me as paternalistic on the one hand and highly presumptuous on the other.  But I suppose that’s another review for another time.

Fast-forwarding to bombastic Bloom, I self-queried: “Why am I wasting my time with this Elm City academia elitist dude?”  And I had and have no sane and sensible response except that there was and is something about what he does so well that I continued to pour through his insightful and enlightened pages with no small measure of struggle coupled with appreciation.  To my surprise and delight I very early learned of Bloom’s virtual worship of no less a literary giant than William [the Bard] Shakespeare.  One cannot even casually think of Harold Bloom absent frequent and unabashed reference to Shakespeare.  Whether extolling the contributions to world literature of Emily Dickinson, Dante, Milton, Beckett, Neruda, Proust, Molière or Cervantes, Bloom magically and intentionally weaves his views around the accompanying indispensability of – what I will designate – William the Great.  My conscious bias comes from an earlier not-to-be debated list of Hillhouse High School English class readings.  We read lots of Shakespeare.  Period!  And in those days, the word “canon” was better understood as the “cannon” that would be leveled at the posterior of students rebellious enough not to memorize and, on occasion, act out what the Bard had penned centuries before.  So, in terms of relative familiarity, Bloom most competently treads on turf that isn’t all that strange or unattractive to me.  He places an unbending emphasis on originality, which can also be viewed as unprecedented creativity.  For example, he says  Shakespeare:

 “…wrote the best prose and the best poetry in the Western tradition”

and that he

“…will not make us better and he will not make us worse, but he will teach us how to overhear ourselves when we talk to ourselves.” 

Wow! Not even parents can achieve this result!

Harold Bloom cannot be faulted for readily falling into line with some all too often accepted and unchallenged contemporary thinking on topics or persuasions.  He will and does find himself at odds with those in and out of academia over such matters as social justice, multiculturalism and most assuredly feminism.  He doesn’t spend much time addressing these issues but then neither does he back away from his occasionally combative convictions.  Whether this makes him a stubborn literary elitist or the skilled provocateur of a good argument is the choice of the reader.  Just as it is the reader’s choice to “buy into” his predispositions on a headache-inducing list of authors and insights, which he takes for comfortable granted.

To his quasi-credit – at least from my perspective -- Bloom asserts “the Canon will never close” even with the caveat that “it cannot be forced open by our current cheerleaders.”

 There is a small measure of contradiction to his non-stop journey through the broad literary landscape when Harold the Hun offers this morsel of reassurance to the reader:

 “No one has the authority to tell us what the Canon is.” 

 I cannot help but wonder then what good purpose is served by some 500 plus pages of Bloom making a rather convincing case to the contrary.  Perhaps hanging out in New Haven for too long has its New England downside…a well-earned Yale PhD in tow notwithstanding.

Finally, one might ask, is Harold Bloom “worth” reading?  Well, to quote someone Bloom probably wouldn’t, I say:

    “You betcha!!”

Chris Kyle: The New and Last American Soldier Archtype

The first chapters of American Sniper are a perfectly suited introduction to the aw shucks, God, Country Family school of American kickass manhood. It is mind-bendingly simple to understand exactly why this nation will continue to be greatly defended for generations to come, because anyone who reads Chris Kyle's book and knows where Kyle is coming from (I do!) will recognize in a heartbeat the kind of Texas cowboy we will always have millions of. Kyle himself would never tell you that he's a one man army, but he is just the kind to fill the top ranks of the best army on the planet so long as it's funded.

There's only a little to say about the metastory here, as I will be slightly intrigued but much informed and entertained by the story to come. That is that you see in Kyle's story, the new soldier - the prototype by which humanity will be defended for generations to come.

He is not an outsider. He is not from the dregs of society. He loves his father and his family - his is not desperate for approval. He rises to the challenges of defending his country, and it makes all the difference that he is a volunteer and that this remains a free country. So long as our military institutions retain their transgenerational links, then they will be the fuel that will power militaries of the future. We must hope and indeed pray that armies comprised of such free men will remain victorious from here on.

It's corny. It's easy to understand. Because of that we are most fortunate. We retain the formula. He's just a fighter and he hates to lose. He understands that he has become a weapon and he is serious about his patriotic committment. His mission is a job and he is remorseless and relentless. He understands the deal of morality he has made, and he values an American life first. That is the kernel of it. The rest is training and experience, and now his knowhow is plowed back into instruction. That, my fellows, is a professional, and that is what we want our military forces to be. 

Are those Raybans or Oakleys?

A Cobbian Library Tour

Library Tour from Michael David Cobb Bowen on Vimeo.

I don't know what's up with these video services. All my stuff plays perfectly natively, but when they stream from Vimeo or YouTube the audio gets ahead of the video. Short videos aren't a problem but the longer ones seem to baffle the streamers. Oh well. Better than nothing, I suppose. Most of these books, btw are fairly old, which is to say they reflect where my head was at (with the exception of the technical books and the spy books) from around 86 through 96. 

I think next time I'll go a shelf at a time and get a bit more into detail.

Updated Bookage

I rarely get a chance to talk about the books I read. It has never been a way for me to socialize. Maybe the whole reason I'm online is to find the people who read the same things I do. Anyway, I'm slowly seeing myself disengaged from various aspects of online society - after 18 years, it's finally getting tiring. To wit - the books.

Ringworld
I now have read this in the original and see the ideas of many other sci-fi guys out of disguise.  It must have been absolutely mindblowing back when it was originally published. Smells very 70s with the idea that humans could be bred for luck and that luck would dominate physics, also that all civilizations are constrained by population and that they wouldn't bother to control it. Fascinating that an advanced civilization could terraform without superluminals but be wiped out by a meteor. Sounds preposterous to me. I mean if you can harvest a solar system's worth of planets, how does a meteor destroy your greatest creation. Aside from that bogosity, it was very enjoyable with such a small cast of characters. But 'Puppeteer'? Really?

Steve Jobs
As said elsewhere, it was just a must read with only a few big surprises. The coda is worth remembering.

Napoleon's Wars
Never quite finished it. Never got what I wanted out of it which was some idea of how the Napoleonic Code came to be, what it meant and how the ancien regime was swept out. But still some very interesting stuff to put alongside what was going on in the Americas at the time.

Reamde
Neal Stephenson makes an action movie. Enjoyable. But my buddy Lee and I agree that The Diamond Age lies unsurpassed as his greatest work, followed closely Anathem and then Cryptonomicon. The entirety of the Baroque Series is magnificent, and I re-read it all this year. Too bad there aren't many folks to talk to about it. 

Micro
Crichton's last book is probably his darkest yet. He just inexorably butchers academics with the most hideous details. It is not a cautionary tale but one that makes you supremely glad that you are not stuck with the dilemma of the main characters - which is that they have been shrunk down to half-inch size and let loose on the slope of a lush Hawaiian rain forest. You had no idea that bugs could be so vicious - but that's the point. We romanticise nature without acknowledging the destructive nature of life itself. Dog eat dog is child's play, and Crichton and his ghostwriter deliver with a wallop. 

Endurance
One of the most enjoyable adventure stories ever. I think I have discovered something about myself in this one. It is quite refreshing to see another culture so closely related to our own that rewards the kind of knowledge which has fallen mostly out of favor. 

If I Never Buy Books Again

There's a hard drive at auction for five million dollars. It has a torrent-load of fiction and music and software and other random digital junk obsessively collected. A lot of it is good; I've checked out the list. Most of it, I think, is destined to fall to a value of zero. Now that 'everybody' knows, perhaps only a few will be interested. As I checked, there were only about 4 seeders for the $300,000 collection of English fiction. 

Last evening I remembered an old dream of mine which was to become a digital archivist. Once upon a time, I wanted to be the steward of all the richness of African American cultural artifacts that could be put online. I am satisfied at this point, however, that is unlikely to be very useful considering the dilemmas of funding housing for the actual items. Still, there must be some intellectual properties out there worth scavenging and hoarding. But I think that those that do exist are unlikely to be made digital.

This past weekend, I visited BooksOff, the new discount retail meatspace bookstore. The First Daughter and I perused the shelves of $2 Compact Disc recordings. I found exactly 3 worth considering having browsed a complete aisle and told the tale of how all record shopping used to be so risky and tedious. I much prefer the contemporary method, and really don't have all that much nostalgia even considering John Cusak's High Fidelity. 

My latest audiobook is Gayle Lynds' Book of Spies which opens with a murder at the annual meeting of the most exclusive roundtable of book collectors on the planet. They quiz each other on the existence of rare histories. 

It has been a while since I've visited the Gutenberg Project. So far as I can tell, they keep chugging along, exploiting the gap between lack of attention, liberal arts nostalgia and intellectual property law such as it stands today. If we could compile a list of the people who have read A Pilgrim's Progress, how many would there be? In my spelunking of Western Civilization (what's worth keeping?) I keep finding little but the Long Tail, and most people bedeviled by arcane obsessions or shallow zeitgeist. 

I'm preparing to write a book review of Michael Crichton's last book, Micro. But maybe I won't.

Having a life of material comfort is indeed its own reward, but our society doesn't quite know what to do otherwise. There is no Europe for guidance, there are no cherished traditions, there is no canon of literature serving as a framework for the Examined Life. I may have to reconsider the University with my new understanding of its hermetic nature. I think most people of my inclination are in relative hiding. More's the pity.

All that goes to say that it is no longer worth my while to spend money on those artifacts which I and a few others might treasure but hard times and twisted priorities have devalued in society. I shall pinch pennies and torrents and await the New Victorians.

Umberto Eco & The Moral Superiority of MOBI

There is none. .mobi is a brand. But it is less a brand than that it is a format, except when it is not. Consider the following:

Short post – more of a call to arms, to discuss burning point for many people today. That is, What Platform to choose to purchase this iconic Steve Jobs biography eBook. I am completely at a loss – what could have been price war between heavyweights in this category, turned into a paralyzing situation for consumers (like me) preventing our purchase completely. My interpretation is that Publisher insisted on same pricing across all platforms! What Gives?

Anyhow, let’s recap the contenders

• Kindle – Interestingly, I don’t own any – and yet I have Tons of options for reading Kindle books (iPhone, Tablet, PC, Mac, etc) and already own many books on the platform. This is truly an achievement, which I applaud Amazon for!
• Nook – I really have nothing against them, but I have virtually no prior books on the platform and no dedicated eInk reader. Still, their readers looking better all the time and they caught up to Amazon with Nook software reader being available on most platforms. Good job, B&N!
• Kobo – Once partner of failed Borders, is an independent maker of eInk devices and the software platform. They are also present on many platforms and ironically I do own that eInk reader I picked up at Borders closeout. We use it once in a while, but who knows about long term prospects?

It is possible to care about this, and Ari does. But I think he cares like the guy at Uniroyal who is convinced that you will appreciate your vacation more if you drive there on his tires. 

Content is king. On the other hand, as a reference book, the Jobs biography is not particularly referencable. This should matter much more to students, in which case, Amazon has already proven to have the right foresight. In fact I'm going to make a prediction, and please rememeber that I said so.

If the internet has value, it is only partially because of content, but mostly because of network effects. That matters most for consumer networks for the exactly the same reason television commercials and super bowl ads. It provide markets.They are delivery vehicles for consumer markets. Period. 

But when it comes to knowledge. Amazon has the superior strategy over Google. To get the same amount of knowledge, Google has to surf a whole lot more web. Amazon already has it in a book. 

Now let us presume that you are some sort of savant, or just extremely well-read. The marginal value of a Google search decreases in proportion to the amount of knowledge you actually already have.

Getting back to the original question: Likewise the more well-informed you are, the less you will care to look backwards to what you already know. Therefore the marginal utility of the openness of the digital publishing platform is less significant. 

Somewhere, I have read about a conversation between an admirer and Umberto Eco. Upon seeing Eco's vast library, the admirer was shocked to find that Eco didn't put much stock in it. "I've already read those books". What was interesting to Eco was what he had yet to read.  From Eco's perspective, the format that mattered most was the internal format of his mind. 

Oh. And for the record, I got the audiobook.

Factoring The Universe with Lieibniz

Quote of the Week

Leibniz answered. “For every human being who is born into this universe is like a child who has been given a key to an infinite Library, written in cyphers that are more or less obscure, arranged by a scheme — of which we can at first know nothing, other than that there does appear to be some scheme — pervaded by a vapor, a spirit, a fragrance that reminds us that it was the work of our Father. Which does us no good whatever, other than to remind us, when we despair, that there is an underlying logic about it, that was understood once and can be understood again.” “But what if it can only be understood by a mind as great as God’s? What if we can only find what we want by factoring twenty-digit numbers?” “Let us understand what we may, and extend our reach, insofar as we can, by the making of engines, and content ourselves with that much,” Leibniz answered. “It will suffice to keep us busy for a while. We cannot perform all of the calculations needed without turning every atom in the Universe into a cog in an Arithmetickal Engine; and then it would be God —” “I think you are coming close to words that could get you burnt at the stake, Doctor 
Stephenson, Neal (2009). The Confusion (P.S.) (Kindle Locations 5837-5846). HarperCollins e-books. Kindle Edition. 

I do indeed love Neal Stephenson's writing. 

Big Mother

Over the past couple of weeks I have been indulging the warrior sentiment. The last book I finished was the new SEAL Team Six memoir of Wasdin from Georgia. Just before that was the extraordinary King of the Vagabonds and now I'm a third way through the latest Tom Clancy. Last night I watched True Grit. All of this is making me wonder what the point of feminism is in our civilization. 

True Grit has one of the most extraordinary characters I've seen, Mattie Ross a fourteen year old girl out to avenge the murder of her father. Smart as a whip, crafty and headstrong she is a gal of grit herself. But in each of her bold actions in the Wild West, there is a power behind her words that come indirectly from the barrel of a gun. She threatens with a lawyer. She employs with money. She understands her claims. True Grit does a great deal of justice to the genre of the Western which,  I think my generation never learned. We have outsourced the word of the warrior to Bruce Lee and his descendants, the Kung Fu film. Steven Segal never made it. Jet Li did. And so what we mistake for something Asian, courage, honor and determination is something we had in Westerns all along. I didn't quite know it until I started watching the best John Wayne films, the finest being Red River, and in this, the Coen Brothers remake, the workings of honor and deceit are sparkling. 

Mattie Ross was not made for the trail, nor for hunting down fugitives in Indian territory. She was made for exemplifying and enforcing those edifications our civilization and our human nature demands. Sobriety, honesty, thrift, industry. 

We have made another mistake. That is to call the tyrannical forces that array to stifle our freedoms in masculine terminology. Our enemy is not Big Brother, but Big Mother. In every way that we might conceive as artfully as the Coen Brothers have presented, a woman child leading two bickering bounty hunters on a mission of deadly revenge, we are reminded of the tyranny of order, logic and justice which is so often pursued against our lazy wills. There is no romance in it. It is as searingly compelling as the demand of a child for protection against monsters. 

There is something useful in us, I suspect, that resists duty. I am reminded of Aaron from Titus Andronicus. The world is upside down often enough that slacking is equally often the best protector of our souls. Moral discipline is exhausting and its rewards are inconsistent. We too should be so inconsistent so as not to grow completely weary of seeking those rewards. 

It has been said that a soldier's experience of war can be accurately characterized as long periods of interminable boredom interspersed with moments of extreme terror. That sounds about right. And so too it is not romantic. We have been inundated with myths of warrior mentalities - of constant vigilance. Let us put that myth to bed. There is nothing for it. Constant vigilance is the enemy. It is paranoia. It is Big Mother.

Instead let us be the periodically brilliant but generally sated lion. Let us enjoy our rest and let things go to shit while we snooze. We'll wake up and clean up, but now we relent. I think it is more manly. 

I'm on vacation this week. 

King of the Vagabonds

I have decided to return to the Baroque Cycle by Neal Stephenson. I have determined that the only reason I really like science fiction is because the kind I really enjoy make me think of history. Historical fiction is my favorite literary form. So perhaps I am now officially an old man.

I don't feel old. I feel slow, and I see no good reason to hurry up, because I know what's on the other side of the mountain. It's another mountain. 

Stephenson's Quicksilver, which I read long ago, is now available in audiobook. So I'm wasting my money on that old mountain. But now that I have a peasant theory, the misadventures of Half Cocked Jack Shaftoe are all the more fascinating. In fact, I think he becomes much more of an archtype in my mind. 

Fay Politics in the Never Never

I've become devote to the exploits of Harry Blackstone Copperfield Dresden and have been trying to figure out something in the well-crafted stories. It is the transcendance of the value of life.

You see, one of the things that happens all of the time in these books is that Harry Dresden and other mortal humans bump heads with creatures that do not die. So I keep wondering why the immortals bargain with humans and find them worthy opponents. The immortals obviously have access to orders of magnitude more information / knowledge / wisdom, and yet with scorn and disgust, they deal with mere mortal humans whose powers are so much weaker. Doesn't it make sense that if you could not die or be permanently injured that you wouldn't particularly hesitate? 

There may be somthing engineered in the narrative of author Jim Butcher that suspends our disbelief, and perhaps there is no need to be logical when we're reading fantasy, but then I came upon an insight yesterday listening to a particular passage. It had to do with the idea of the infinite politics in the Never Never, that netherworld where the magical immortal creatures live. Without the consolation of death, nothing focuses the mind of eternal beings. When you have all eternity to exist, you might very well waste 100 years being a bitch just to be that. You might learn to connive everything possible without the use of intellect, but soley on physical beauty for 200 years. Or you might decide that revenge and dark perfidy is all you want to do for a millenium. 

As a programmer, I am always put in the position of telling people who don't know what I think they need to know about the limits of systems. But that doesn't stop them from wanting what they want, nor does the absolute no of a product limitation stop the politics from trying to squeeze blood from a stone. One might be the general the president wants to defend and indefensible position on the battlefield, and you are just one mortal general in a line of hundreds of men who want your job, none of whom can produce the impossible result. But when you're immortal, you don't need to care. 

When you're immortal, politics are infinite. Every faerie, ghoul, ghost, zombie, and vampire can be what they want, when they want, made real and solid because of their desire. It is the only the drama of desire that animates the spirit world, the laws of physics can be ignored when the time horizon expands.

The other thing I think I figured out was that mortals had to be interesting because they were either foolish of poignantly prescient in the extreme short period of time they have, relatively speaking. It makes each of their limited decisions that more important. Each of their 4000 orgasms more meaningful. All of their energies and discipline directed towards something that had to be transcendent. 

There's a lot to this - exactly why immortals would care about mortals. Perhaps in the same way men care about dogs. 

Harry Dresden After Six Books

Harry Dresden is an instinctual hero, and he is so because he survives. He is a  blockheaded, stubborn, self-absorbed, overpowering man guided by simple instincts - to protect the weak- who is beleagured by his burden and often overwhelmed. But he manages to triumph against all odds by being resigned to his mortal fate. He is not angry, nor vengeful. He is not often misunderstood. He is only awkward from having been orphaned and has come to love the people of the city of Chicago as his own without them acknowledging his gifts and many good deeds. He treads an arcane path having been born with a mystical talent and has nurtured this talent and stretched it to his limits through trial by fire, and he has saved the world. You see, Harry Dresden is a wizard, and his talent is magic.

I speak of the character Harry Dresden whose sixth file, Dead Beat, I have just completed to the narration of a cat named Marsters scripted by a dude named Butcher. Marsters *is* the voice of Harry Dresden and Butcher is the mind, and they have created a combination of fiction that is as emblematic as any in the literary sci-fi world. 

Dresden started off as a sighing, beleaguered mystical gumshoe who stumbled around within the well marked boundaries of the hard boiled detective novel. But somewhere around the middle of the third book, he suddenly burst beyond those boundaries into a ragged but elegaic prince. He not only got the girl, he saved the city, then lost the girl. He not only resisted temptation, he faced his own deep psychological weakness and admitted his desire for the prize offered. Dresden has metaphorically died and been resurrected into the same tired bones and in each episode has reached new heights and depths. Surely there is a narrative type at work that keeps the drama ripe for human consumption, but there is an unremitting yet slowly twisting core that surprises us with its simultaneous ability and lack of depth. In almost every way, Dresden is on the verge of being anti-heroic, but he is unable to restrain his desire to do the right thing. He is the man who never had a woman or children, who never managed to be a father and consequentially he is inevitably and shamelessly drawn to save them at his own peril. He is the man shouting the loudest "Women and children first!", adopting them in their moment of terror against any foe. 

Harry Dresden is an American urban gothic practitioner. He seems to take no great pleasure in eating or drinking, except in drinking in the curves and features of the odd number of beautiful women who plop into his world, but almost never into his arms. He's not excited by fast cars, deep contemplation of the universe, art appreciation or spectator sports. He's something of a loner. A guy with a cat who lives in a basement with no electric lights, computers or stereo equipment. He harbors suspicions about the people who protect him. He pisses off the few that understand him, and he of course always confounds and destroys his enemies, the nefarious characters of the Never Never and their minions who defy the Laws of Magic.

One could say that the Dresden series is like Harry Potter for grownups. The challenges facing Dresden have gotten exponentially more difficult and consequential each outing. There is more death and destruction with Dresden responsible for more and more each time, but Dresden has become more complex and faces greater internal perils each time. In Dead Beat, for the friendship of a woman who seems to be his last friend, Dresden makes a deal with a metaphorical devil - he delivers the equivalent of Dr. Mengele's research to a literal queen vampire. Unlike Potter, Dresden has no arch-rival he is fated to confront. In the end it may be himself. He finds himself offered no honor or official position in which he can see dignity bestowed. Instead, he merely survives the calamities he gets worked into either by his own hardheaded morality or conniving parties in conflict.

You see Dresden is a member of the White Council of Wizards but has been on something like a lifelong probation for having killed his own Jedi Master in his youth. It was self defense, for his master had gone over to the dark side. The White Council is now engaged in a global war with the three courts of vampires, the White Court of life draining seducers, the Red Court of bloodthirsty shape shifters and the Black Court of nightcrawling monsters. Dresden himself is partly responsible for escalating the millenial conflict and has all types of prices on his head from various factions. As he has survived, he has been exposed to the most extraordinary circumstances, even for a wizard, and events have consipred to have him in a position to have been offered eternal life. Literally strung up in a dungeon with a knife at his throat he was offered the choice between death or treachery in the form of one of the original thirty pieces of silver paid to Judas. He touched the coin and locked it away, but its spirit has been working away at him, giving him the unexpected dark power of Hellfire. Moreover, he has discovered that he has a brother and that brother is an expatriate of the White Court of Vampires. With each episode, Dresden is exposed to more and more dark knowledge and must find ways to use it in an ever escalating war between great powers with whom his relationship grows increasingly complex.

Dresden is the superman in the middle, and he knows too much. He can't win, he survives despite of himself and he cannot get out of the game.

Bad Blood

Virgil Flowers. It doesn't sound like a detective's name, nor is the character described by John Sandford one who looks like a detective. I often imagine that he looks and acts rather like James May. A bit pensive, more definitely spiritual, and at ease with the ladies. Although I'm not sure that May is ever completely at ease - then again neither is Flowers. He is after all a detective.

He does a fair bit of detecting and as Sandford writes more for Flowers, his books move past hard boiled into something much more subtle, and yet he never fails to kick us in the pants so that the book flies along to a satisfying conclusion. You couldn't pick a better theme for the times a tale of a religion gone bad and the distinction between privacy and secrecy.

What if, Sandford asks in this detective story, there was a small church somewhere in America suspected in murder and child pornography? What if they had only one person who ever left the fold, who was hard to find, and afraid to talk even if you found him? What business is it of any lawman to go snooping around with no evidence that points to other members of the church, but you suspect them?

It's a good story. I continue to read Sandford.

Sense Amid Madness, Wit Amidst Folly

Iain Banks' latest Culture novel 'Surface Detail' is on the street and in my Kindle. I'm a few days and approximately 28% into the book and the stage is set for the drama to come. It has moved along rather nicely and gives us yet another view into Banks' galactic historical drama, and it is satisfying although a bit lighter than I recall his other books. Despite the fact that I have already visited one of his Hells, perhaps there are even murkier events to come.

The ambit of this venture into our galactic future involves the afterlives. Banks whose 'Notes on the Culture' I have just discovered has gone and done something rather bold. He has held up the idea of Hell as an option. What if your civilization was so advanced that it could preserve all of the thoughts of a human being into such an arrangement that you consciousness could be maintained essentially permanently? To put it crudely, put your mind into the Matrix and keep your self alive without the goofy provision that if you die in the Matrix that you are actually dead. Would your civilization choose for there to be Hell as well as Heaven? Is there actually a good reason for Hell? What could anyone possibly do in life to deserve eternal punishment & torture? If you had godlike power, or if your civilization could contract out for a godlike power, why would you create, staff and maintain an inescapable Hell?

With this premise, Banks brings us into a story that seems to be headed for some smashing revenge - a woman who essentially comes back from the grave to avenge her own murder; the murderer being the rough equivalent of an evil Richard Branson, the most powerful, wealthy and charismatic man on his planet. But of course it's much more than that, since this man has become significant in the multi-civilizational *virtual* war over the morality of Hells that now threatens to become a real shooting war.  The anti-Hell side lost and the Leviathan Culture, although anti-Hell, decided not to interfere in the virtual war. Now that a real war is possible, the rules may change.

Banks' Culture, which I have been considering at length now reveals the author in his experimental purposes. As a large set of fictions, his Culture novels reveal more and more of the optimism of moral intellect which is part of the essential design of science fiction.

Let me state here a personal conviction that appears, right now, to be profoundly unfashionable; which is that a planned economy can be more productive - and more morally desirable - than one left to market forces. The market is a good example of evolution in action; the try-everything-and-see-what-works approach. This might provide a perfectly morally satisfactory resource-management system so long as there was absolutely no question of any sentient creature ever being treated purely as one of those resources. The market, for all its (profoundly inelegant) complexities, remains a crude and essentially blind system, and is - without the sort of drastic amendments liable to cripple the economic efficacy which is its greatest claimed asset - intrinsically incapable of distinguishing between simple non-use of matter resulting from processal superfluity and the acute, prolonged and wide-spread suffering of conscious beings.

It is, arguably, in the elevation of this profoundly mechanistic (and in that sense perversely innocent) system to a position above all other moral, philosophical and political values and considerations that humankind displays most convincingly both its present intellectual [immaturity and] - through grossly pursued selfishness rather than the applied hatred of others - a kind of synthetic evil.

Intelligence, which is capable of looking farther ahead than the next aggressive mutation, can set up long-term aims and work towards them; the same amount of raw invention that bursts in all directions from the market can be - to some degree - channelled and directed, so that while the market merely shines (and the feudal gutters), the planned lases, reaching out coherently and efficiently towards agreed-on goals. What is vital for such a scheme, however, and what was always missing in the planned economies of our world's experience, is the continual, intimate and decisive participation of the mass of the citizenry in determining these goals, and designing as well as implementing the plans which should lead towards them.

Of course, there is a place for serendipity and chance in any sensibly envisaged plan, and the degree to which this would affect the higher functions of a democratically designed economy would be one of the most important parameters to be set... but just as the information we have stored in our libraries and institutions has undeniably outgrown (if not outweighed) that resident in our genes, and just as we may, within a century of the invention of electronics, duplicate - through machine sentience - a process which evolution took billions of years to achieve, so we shall one day abandon the grossly targeted vagaries of the market for the precision creation of the planned economy.

The Culture, of course, has gone beyond even that, to an economy so much a part of society it is hardly worthy of a separate definition, and which is limited only by imagination, philosophy (and manners), and the idea of minimally wasteful elegance; a kind of galactic ecological awareness allied to a desire to create beauty and goodness.

It only takes a slight tweaking of mind to understand the possible beauty of an evolved planned economy. After all, isn't this what working for the best company is all about? Nobody doubts that an enterprise such as Steve Jobs' Apple Computer exists in a free market, but inside of Apple the economy is planned. Your salary as a programmer doesn't have labor market volatility inside the company, only outside of the company. Inside the chaos is reduced to with reasonable, planned limits. Apple is a great place to work because the plan is generous and wise - that Apple as an entity must compete at a higher level doesn't mean the external dynamics must bet transcendent. The ability for Apple to exploit the market does not translate. The same thing applies to Google, Cisco and other large, cash rich and employee friendly corporations which are now the most successful in America. It is as Banks suggests the post-scarcity future of space-faring civilizations will be, chaos outside but socialism inside. (Cue Intel jingle).

Granted, there are a number of assumptions that must be engineered in order for such things to be held together in his fiction. I might come around to scrutinizing them after I've digested the whole of his Notes. The Culture series is so damned entertaining, suspension of disbelief is entirely enchanting and easy. Especially for gearheads like myself. But I expect to understand with greater capacity why it is that scientists and technologists tend to be more than ordinarily compelled to beleive in Leviathan. With an future that might be as stunningly attractive as life in the Culture it's not hard to see why for surface reasons, but the deeper reasons are more revealing, and I believe that Banks has considered most of them. I call this the Virtual Utopia Problem:

The problem of the virtual utopia is then, a dilemma of choosing whether or not to believe if human progress is inevitable. The proper life, is it to be pursued with the assumption that we enable the achievable utopia? Or should we relent and live in the relative utopia of today?

If it is possible to alleviate suffering through the establishment of a better society, is it more noble to accept those betterments achieved by prior sacrifice or to make additional sacrifices in the attempt to make what's already good better still? At what point does it all become hubris? Should we make plastic surgery affordable for everyone, so that everyone can look beautiful, or is the very idea a conceit? Should we make university education affordable for everyone, so that everyone can be informed and smart, or is that chasing rainbows? Should we strive to improve air quality so that nobody will have their life cut short by lung disorders or are we playing God here? One man's trash is another man's treasure, on man's floor another man's ceiling. And it's all here, all now, merely unevenly distributed. We have a scarcity problem. Some people are already living in utopia.

I pose this as a problem of 'utopia' rather than as a problem of class because I am thinking of the possibilities of a post-scarcity world. Americans, for example, have no scarcity of calories. Pollan spells it out. As the nature of work and learning is undergoing massive change, we cannot necessarily depend on our current understanding of class. There are conspiracies afoot to make many things post-scarce. Surely the upper classes will see them first, but as they pass through society, they lose their class significance. As they become commodified, they lose their marginal significance. Like ATM cards. 30 years ago, almost nobody could get cash out of the bank on Saturday. Electronic funds transfer is a commodity today. So is Viagra, something men have killed every beast, plant and fungus possible to find.

Banks solves this problem by removing human agency from the dealings of galactic sized problems. He steps us into a world where the Leviathan is already established, the wars already won, the technology already developed and the human already acclimated to the utopian regime long ago accomplished. His Leviathan is the community of Ship Minds that run the Culture. He takes the term 'good ship' to the extreme. Godlike all-knowing minds that manage the affairs of billions of humans and sentient creatures in giant volumes of space and still have time to speak to you on an individual basis exist in his world. They are powerful enough to destroy worlds, and yet ethical enough not to read your mind without your permission. They are fundamentally respectful of millions of years of history and yet work democratically with peer-minds. What's not to love? This is profoundly enhanced by the understanding that humanity had something to do with their creation millions of years ago. It makes us creators of our own God and it validates on a galactic scale that the sort of intelligence we possess is indeed part of the singular sort that requires moral consideration. Our intelligence is our soul and the nature of the universe's laws (at least to the extent that humans can exist in its various space-time dimensional combinations) is consonant with our will. We are indeed on a path of destiny.

Whatever that path, humans will be humans, and our nature is well taken care of in Banks' imagination. There seems to be no avenue of human behavior he has ignored or given short shrift. Given what the Culture is, his situation of humans in it is perfectly natural. That is why his take on internal socialism is important. Once again to his theory:

The thought processes of a tribe, a clan, a country or a nation-state are essentially two-dimensional, and the nature of their power depends on the same flatness. Territory is all-important; resources, living-space, lines of communication; all are determined by the nature of the plane (that the plane is in fact a sphere is irrelevant here); that surface, and the fact the species concerned are bound to it during their evolution, determines the mind-set of a ground-living species. The mind-set of an aquatic or avian species is, of course, rather different.

Essentially, the contention is that our currently dominant power systems cannot long survive in space; beyond a certain technological level a degree of anarchy is arguably inevitable and anyway preferable.

This idea was also encountered in some recent sci-fi I read. The premise was reversed. Some powerful creature had reduced humankind to living on a large flat disk whose gravity and enormous size precluded space travel, global positioning or communications. It was the perfect prison.

So space remains the final frontier with the greatest promise of liberty, there has got to be enough Uranium out there, perhaps planets full, that someday we might use to fuel the dreams of trillions of humans. Until then, we read on.

Himes of Memory

I've been reading like a mad man in the gap between projects, and catching up and reorganizing. A thoughtful reader added to my Goodreads list reminded me of Chester Himes. And so I wrote:

Chester Himes, now that was something I could barely stand. I read 'If He Hollers' just through a couple dozen pages and could take no more. He so brilliantly made me angry, and brought to mind so much of what I felt that I couldn't take it. There have been books like that - too painful to read. And Himes was the last of his kind that I read in the days before the LA Riots, before I left Los Angeles at the age of 30. One image stands in my mind of the man described by Himes, of the black man so angry that he drank hard liquor alone in his room and only got up for the fresh breeze of the open window in order to throw empty whiskey bottles at the white men in the street. It was the dead end of despair I know I was not born for, and so I left Himes alone.  

There is that canon of black American literature I read once upon a time. At the beginning it was so very frustrating. Intensely painful it was as I tried desperately to connect with any black literary scene. It was part of my fête manqué out of technical school and clueless about the higher elements of the humanities. When I decided to be purposeful in reading contemporary black American literature I first found Gloria Naylor's 'Women of Brewster Place'. I purposefully didn't want to read the older authors that I had known - no more Richard Wright, James Baldwin, LeRoi Jones-Amiri Baraka, Alex Haley, Ralph Ellison. Nobody old. Nobody ghetto. It left almost nobody. It took me almost forever to find an author that actually spoke to me in a way I wanted to share in joy and pride. It took a lot of long hard looks inward and outward. I didn't know what to expect - I didn't know how my literacy would serve me. I didn't know what to make of what I learned. After a few years, I became comfortable with exactly that. It took from 1989 to 1993 to make peace with that itch. I didn't give it up finally until 1996. 

In the end, I was most satisfied by Ernest J. Gaines, Jean Toomer, Darryl Pinckney, Paul Beatty & Toni Morrison. I can't describe in any small way what they meant. They were each an Emerald City that pointed my home, each a patch of blackness in serious literature I needed to see and experience, each a solid stepping stone in a garden of forking paths.  

Himes sat out there like Iceberg Slim and Donald Goins and John Edgar Wideman. Just all blue collar and urban, so unlike my father, the soft-spoken Connecticut Episcopalian photographer, Sierra Club hiker and part-time poet. It was impossible for me to accept stories of the mean streets as real literature, as impossible as it is for a Hebrew to accept Baptist ministry as Gospel. It all may have had the ring of truth, but not of destiny. 

I wonder how much literature has served an existential purpose for me, and yet some part of me resists the question. I know who I am and who I must be, but it is ever the case that I am engaged with writers far more than with neighbors. Sooner or later, I find a part of myself waiting for me in the words of strangers. What will I find in Tolstoy? Another part of me. 

I reflect on that aspect of my generation immersed in a struggle for self-reflection in the arts and in the mainstream. It seemed so god-awfully important and significant and momentous. Just standing in line for a Spike Lee movie or a play by August Wilson or a book signing by Toni Morrison was portentous. There was a day in the 80s when George C. Wolfe snarked about the world's last 'mama on the couch play', and I think that time has come and gone, then again I've only seen one Tyler Perry. 

An Intriguing Idea I'm Supposed to Fear

One of the cool things about being on the conservative side of life having previously been on the progressive side, is that I have developed senses for the narratives that are supposed to appeal to me as the Peasant I am. Which is to say that since I get propaganda from MoveOn.org as well as RedState.com I'm familiar with the diatribes.

Just a bit ago I tripped by the names of Barthes and Levi-Strauss. By way of my now fully developed conservative spidey senses, I know that I'm supposed to be wary of such French intellectuals and all of their mumbo jumbo, especially Barthes who is one of those guys who talks about coded speech, which is something Progressives like to say we conservatives do when we open our mouths. Be that as it may, there is something I think I like about Structuralism, being a programmer and all.

The last book I finished was a re-read of 'The Diamond Age', and as much as folks like CD hate that I prefer to get my moral instruction from literate fiction instead of social science white papers, I remain addicted to excellent prose and imagination. Which I think rather disqualifies great swaths of post-modern mumbo jumbo and academic publications. I suppose if I could bother to get on with Adam Smith's Moral Sentiments then I might be immune to any tedium. My point however is that one of the striking premises of 'The Diamond Age' is that there is a book that adjusts itself to the young reader and immerses them in a set of instructional and interactive videogames of her own life and education. It is a book to be read over a series of many years. Its adaptation by 50,000 girls known as the Mouse Army fuels a righteous insurrection that begins the overthrow of a corrupt regime.

The interesting thing to me, of course, is the book itself as a mutable lesson, a sort of sandbox RPG of the self full of moral tales and intellectual & moral puzzles. That is not so much the actual story of The Young Lady's Primer, but it's close enough. Barthes for his part in this intrigue is the popularizer of a Russian by the name of Vladimir Propp who authored a book called Morphology of the Folktale. This book is like a Dewey Decimal system of fairy tales, wives tales and all other sorts of basic lit.

There's a joke about a group of comedians who are close friends who know all the jokes being told in the country. Since it's bad form to tell somebody else's joke, this is something they must know. When they get together, all they have to do is tell the punchline and they laugh it up. After a while they come up with a numbering system and all they then have to do is speak the number to illicit guffaws. After a couple years of this, they start to sound like accountants. "42!", Hahaha!. "607!" Heeheee.

Propp is the expert in this field of identifying the skeletal structures of folktales / narratives and categorizing them by type. Wouldn't it be cool to have all of the world's folktales translated into all of the popular languages?  With these frameworks, you essentially have a narrative creation machine. It only takes a little imagination to see that there are endless variations on various themes that can be used for just about any purpose. The human mind wants to hear stories. Propp shows the universal framework upon which all such successful stories work their magic.

-

Having just finished Vernor Vinge's 'Rainbows End'. I find some of that a bit obscured by the number of characters he uses. Of course I listened to the book rather than read it, and it seemed to go on a bit overlong. The extent to which the intrigue went was not quite deep enough for my fandom, but was nicely blended with a broad cast. There were enough real people in the book to give the events adequate dramatic investment and there was a fair share of twisty stuff, nicely playing on the old crypto-terms of Bob, Alice and the Rabbit. 

But the main event of the book, and a constant theme, was the extent to which seemingly spontaneous events might garner global audiences and the monetization of same based upon an adhoc virtual marketplace of labor and consumption was a bit too much. One could think about 'Rainbows End' and 'The Diamond Age' as two ends of a spectrum of market speed and assimilation. In Vinge's world, propriety is reduced to almost nothingness in the events of ordinary people. They live in a cyber-reality-based contest world where people make commercials based on creative tweaks of prior aired commercials. It's a world of long-tail aggregation in the extreme, where competing worldviews don't really exist except as matters of avatar style.

In Vinge's world, the poet is an outcast, isolated and thus seeks the comfort of isolation. Power extends only from military necessity, and entertainment market share. The subversion of network security is the great crime. But surely Vinge didn't mean to describe the whole world in the ways that Stephenson does, consequently his characters are a bit more resilient. It's a good enough story of character in a strange new world. 

The point of bringing in Vinge is to consider whether or not it will matter that variations of the enumerated themes of folklore will be human generated or not. The prospect of literary Singularity exists if the voice of the author becomes subjugated to the sweep of the plot within the context of the finite world of the morphologically proper tale. That's where the rubber meets the road. If the author ceases to matter, and all we do is come up with more interesting avatars who do more dramatic things or 'creative' things in the context of the narrative, then that's when we lose. It won't matter if books are virtual or real if that happens. Just like it doesn't matter if we read Harry Potter or watch the Harry Potter film - so long as Rowling disappears.

So what's necessary is the human bit of wrangling over the context of creation. A successful critical thread is the thing that humanizes literary production. What astonishes us is the wisdom of the creator, his grasp of not just morphology but the human condition, and that is gotten through understanding the context of his will to create. This will always differentiate those who write in service to the individual from those in service to the mass market. 

 

 

Hitch-22: First Look

The first thing I started doing as I put Hitch-22 on my MacBook Pro and broadcast the voice of the man reading his own memoir into my bedroom, was start to clean up. Like many, I have the reflex of picking things off the floor and earnestly cleaning up when I'm taking a browbeating. It comes from childhood of course, as Mom delivered her 'cyclone hit it' harangue as I cleaned up that mess I'd been making all day - taking the bedsheet tent down from the top bunk and removing the staples from the carpet.

Except with Hitchens, the reflex was not defensive against his words, rather my own sort of browbeating I give to myself. After all, it has been five months since I last downloaded an audiobook from Audible and I have been falling back in my reading. It all started tumbling back, that odd state of mind - peaceful and restlessly hungry at once that I once possessed back when I subscribed to Granta and poured over the shelves at Waterstones on Newberry Street.

--

There is a great deal that I have to say about Hitch, and that is because I come somewhat late to having an actual living intellectual hero, and it took me quite some time to get Cornel West out of my system. West is a teacher I should have had in my undergrad years so that I might get in touch with the ideas of the Pragmatists and understand how much of what I actually believed to be transcendently true of life was actually welcome within the US. I suffered the neglect many students of 'social justice' do in recognizing virtues of Ralph Waldo Emerson were my own and not something, as multiculturalists would have us believe, completely alien to dead, white, European males. Since I spent my aculturative years in the streets and in the harder sciences, I didn't have much ammo to push back with, and so my tardiness and ignorance. So now having followed him and Amis, more or less for some time, I am convinced that he has the perspective often lacking in purer natural philosophers - which is the real world of dodgy and inspirational politics. Along with Niall Ferguson who provides the sensible attitude towards economics, I'm getting there. So there are places of coherence I would like to address Hitchens which will not be complete, but let me scatter my shot.

Firstly, by joining the Conservatives as a direct result of recognizing what Amis said so clearly about the evil excess of Stalin, I opened myself up to the Straussians. And so it comes as no surprise that I worry about Hitchens as an anti-theist, as God comes so clearly evident in the American Tory package. Suffice it to say that my model in this regard is John Adams. As brilliant and comprehensive a life as Hitchens has had, I don't think even he could consume enough of it to be charged by too many philosophies. Having read his memoir I understand that he simply couldn't be much more than a Trotskyite by study and habit, but it is a habit that might have been born by any other number of disciplines. At some point, you can't simply swap out your networks for an entirely new, and so his is what it is. Except that in the whole of his book with two chapters to go, I can't recall him quoting Trotsky at all. Rather, Hitchens is more appropriately a steward of the best impulses of Liberalism and is thus committed  to the cause of Liberty itself.  His is a character to be admired, and so he appropriately shines a light on those attributes of character which ought to be found in the leaders we want but more often exposes and excoriates those defects in the leaders we have. He does so without being small minded or petty and most importantly to a true Liberal without the godawful smugness of those with solutions to pimp. He is an intellectual who understands and respects moral and physical courage, something we seem to have lost in the scholar-squirrels of the postmoderen Left.

Reconciling Hitchens protest and Christianity is something it is important for me to do because it will always be the case that we'll have more time to hear the echoes of our Christian society (as distinct from a purported Christian Nation or even Christian Society) than we are to hear the dons of Balloil. And since there is clearly no better International Socialist movement than there is a Prophetic Christian movement, we all are going to have to take our enlightenment and moral reinforcement where we can get it. That we must get it, Hitchens surely cannot be, witness to horrors that he is, some slavish Rousseauvian seeking some holistic, tattooed Natural world. Christianity can and does civilize. But here's the key and the thing I think that suggests that Hitch protests too much. There are many a slip between the act and the law, and Christianity in America - despite its reactionaries, does not approach the Christian Nation. Our secular law is not threatened by canon law and Christians understand and respect that. It is the ease with which American law and Christian ethics coexist in this, his adopted homeland that gives us security and enables the People a moral check on the balances of power. It is surely not only Christian ethics, but it has integrated better than any other religion.

I'm not sure how much Hitchens would have the State he knows, polluted by the likes of his enemies Kissinger and Stanley Baldwin, take more responsibility for the moral instruction of the populous, and seeing that he mentioned no scathing indictment of our free educational system to inculcate the greater values of the Enlightenment one wonders if he might be satisfied simply by the right and proper Great Man. For surely, like few others, Hitchens recognizes how the American Left has been reduced to pettiness. There has got to be more satisfaction than mere irony. Not if America falters enough to be done in by the certainty of devils.

There is a gap between Hitchens and the soldier he inspired to go to Iraq. It is a mediation Hitchens doesn't appear to know or connect with - not that it's his responsibility. I think he had bridged the gap admirably as an individual of palpably tender integrity. But we can't all fall in love with such a lovely man as he and do the necessary work of upholding liberty thought such mechanisms as email and like buttons on Facebook. There must be a democracy between us that works, and Hitchens seems to exist on the periphery of that democracy - or at least at a level far above my head where people actually read literature and use it to inform their sensibilities. 

So I have puzzles to figure out, and perhaps in time will do so. This is the first set of questions that itch me, and so I will continue on to get to know Auden a bit more, as well as immediately continue his Contrarian Letter. But I do understand the man much better now, and I will seek the company of his literary fellows, maybe McEwan, certainly Conquest, and more Amis, especially since the latter has pronounced his fondness for Merkel, whom I like too.

This is why to this Hayekian, he is my kind of writer, whose not inconsiderable love an talent with English ought to make those who speak of 'critical thinking skills' absent beauty's content pause and discover that they are actually defending nothing. Hitchens has found a world worth defending and celebrating, the texture of which can only be approximated by the finest of writers.

Acting White: I Still Don't Get It

There's a thin line, I imagine, between willful ignorance of scholarship and non-recognition. How much should one pay attention to a problem one doesn't have? Analogously speaking, what kind of nutritional advice do you give to the man who is one pound overweight? This is what puzzles me about Stuart Buck's new book and the phenomenon of 'acting white'.

I am in a quandary about how to deal with something (race) that used to be of compelling interest to me but no longer is. Part of it is related to my personality. I can only accept a certain amount of geeky expertise as I approach the level of having read, say five books on the matter, I constrain my ability to socialize with any but those similarly well-read. And there are only so many hours in the day and I do have a day job and a family. 

I was graciously considered to preview Buck's book but I declined, (hopefully graciously enough in kind) because I couldn't manage to sustain the conversation at my own dinner table. I asked my kids about it and they had basically nothing to say. I'm from a small town called Black and it seems to get smaller every day, but it doesn't change how much being black has meant to me over the years. Except that now that I am who I am, less and less of that matters. In other words, in retrospect I can think of a dozen 'black' choices I made (according to the ethics of my small town called Black) that I could have made another way without any consequence to my life. And there are probably others I cannot think of that only somebody else from that small town could remind me of. But all of that is because there hasn't been much in the way of my black identity that has interposed itself between me and my education. 

The fundamental thesis (I think) of why 'acting white' stigma is a problem is because it socializes black youth into educational under-achievement. OK so that's education. What else you got? What about church? What about music? 

Reading McWhorter's review of Buck leaves me even more confused. I think perhaps we need Inigo Montoya to tell us that maybe that phrase doesn't mean what we think it means. It's not big bad deadly racism. Acting white doesn't ever get IDF paratroopers onto the boat and attacked with metal pipes. It is a subtle psychological erosion of some basic positive middle class values. But it doesn't frighten me. It is an epiphenomenon. And I know that I walk directly into the criticism that McWhorter pitches at suburban whites(!), it's easier to pretend it doesn't exist than to pay attention to the scholarship and make it relevant to your life. Well, I think it's irrelevant to my life and I'm black. Or at least that's what I grew up thinking.

But there's a second possibility here, and it's something I rather profoundly hope. That is that my upbringing was so proper and that I ended up so well-adjusted that the psychological problem of racial identity is simply, in me and in my children, overcome. I'm going to stay attached to the meme and read up Buck's interview with Dreher and see if maybe this is a real thing that to me is an anklebiter I've already kicked to the curb and forgotten. Or perhaps I have 'acted white' for so long that the criticism fails to arouse any inner conflict or concern for the approval of my critics. I am, after all, a conservative who votes Republican. 

It certainly makes sense for me to make sense of how other people make sense of acting white. Unfortunately for my Boohabian legacy, I simply don't care enough. And having said that three times, I need to assert what it is I must feel is the problem. The problem is that no matter how finely crafted is this scalpel of academic discipline, I'm concerned that it will act as a mere shiv for people who are not the sharpest tools in the shed. Because at bottom, the fundamental issue is that black Americans who lob this criticism have interpreted as concrete their racially defined position of inferiority. I wonder if people are willing and able to say that clearly. To racialize educational achievement, and moreover to racialize the cultural component of such racial rationalizations is a double whammy against that 'black community'. 

It's a serious charge I've been beating around the bush. That is to say what to make of those people who make it their business to call certain black Americans 'Uncle Toms'. My standard refrain is "When will black people realize that they don't own black people?", but there is going to be a point at which (I reckon) America may face the problem that portions of black America knows all too well. Some blacks are some of the vilest white supremacists around. It is their acceptance of racial essentialisms that makes it so, and theirs is a culture of racism within black America that makes their tirades both inescapable and corrosive. Perhaps this is the thing that Buck sees. If so then he's onto something which is much larger than just education. He is onto the reason for the collapse of the Talented Tenth itself which is the real success of post-Civil Rights integration. It has created within those semi-autonomous black communities, a brain drain that leaves the hypersegregated with nobody to lead them but the Sharptons and Jacksons of the world. That's kind of an old story though, bigger than acting white. But seeing that the subtitle hints at the ironic failures of integration, it would be a marvelous place for Buck to start his next book. 

Prior Cobbage:

• Acting Right
• Acting White, Acting Not

Howard Zinn: Dead

'A Peoples History of the United States' is the book for everyone but history majors. It gives a crunchy satisfaction to all of our hungers to confirm that we have been hoodwinked, bamboozled and led astray. It comes to the top of the list just ahead of 'Lies My Teacher Taught Me' in the query of what *really* happened in America, now that we can say so. But it is far from the most profound book I've ever read. In fact, I think it led me a different color of astray, in that it gave me a sense that there were once brave, young, intelligent men and women who decided once and for all that good government was the highest calling and things went from worse to better. Howard Zinn's great work is a sweet categorization of the good, the bad and the ugly in American government. But.

The most profound book I have ever read has to be not a single book but the Neveryon Trilogy. It is the encapsulation of a mythical period on a distant world that tells the story of a feudal society's evolution into literacy. Anyone who would study history must surely be aware of the essential paradoxes of, as Niall Ferguson puts it, communing with the dead. But Neveryon as fiction did not have that problem, and yet it reads very much like a history complete with archetypal stories of slave uprisings, creation myths, golden children, errant knights, evil tyrants and prodigal sons. The key to Neveryon and how it affects me greatly is it show a society that minds its own business because it is illiterate and then it shows how literacy changes what is on the minds of peasants and how this new skill, once privy to the nobility now set free, changes power.

When I read Neveryon, I was very much interested in matters of the canon wars and cultural production. Now it speaks to me on a broader basis which is that basis of understanding the forces that provide the gift of literacy and content. That is to say, whose interest does it serve for the masses to know anything? What does it matter what you know, and therefore who owns your attention?

It is in this context that Zinn's People's History should be taken into account because its very existence substantiates three myths. The first and most important myth is that 'knowledge is power' when in fact power uses knowledge to whatever ends power wants. But if you believe that myth, then you can believe the additional two, that history before Zinn was less informed and that after Zinn we are better informed. If Zinn corrects, then there was something wrong before Zinn and something right after Zinn. But that is not actually within our place to say because we, idiot peasants like me, are drawn to the book because of this promise.

Where is Zinn's revolution? It is a question somebody will have to write down and sell. Or perhaps that was Zinn's end in and of itself. He raised the question that stuck. What was America before it had a People's History, and what is it now that it does?

The End of Books

Dizzle & The Hollow Man

It has been a long time coming, me getting into Jimi Izrael's book. There has been a clumsy conspiracy of comic errors that has kept me from it, including a forgotten freezer full of fish and a hotel clerk with an African name. But all that's in the past and I have read the introduction.

The introduction you say? And already I'm raving. Yeah. Well, that's OK because I have learned that there is a kind of genius that doesn't need a great deal of explication. If you know that there is something true in love at first sight, then you understand how a lifetime can be changed in an instant. I hate the utopian opportunism implied in that now common phrase 'teachable moment', but yes there are moments when suddenly you know something weighty is approaching on that train coming round the mountain - and all you've heard is that mournful whistle. Like the first notes of a Sade song you're hearing for the first time, you already know that you're going to fall in love with somebody slow dancing to it one day. Intuition tells you it's coming.

I'm at that delicious point. Teased to be ready for it - the rest of The Denzel Principle, the new book about what's going wrong with some people we know, some people we are sometimes. It's all by a man I thought I knew but I know better already, and did I say the word 'genius' already? 

Let me tell you why I love Jimi Izrael as a man. It's because he is one of those men who lives in his skin. A man who could hang with all that thoughtful reflection - except he's all about the now. It comes out of him in real time, preternaturally instinctual it seems.  I mean if you put him together on paper you wouldn't imagine that he is what he looks like. He looks like a man of action, but he's deliberate and deep. He's got emotional intelligence.  Every moment that I've been hanging with the brother, in person, on the radio, in online forums, he has given me the impression that he's all right there in the moment. Like he never turns off. Moreover I know what he looks like and sounds like going after a woman which is an extraordinary thing to watch. It is a spontaneous, loving, bottom line interview, sprinkled with hot pepper and dirt. Like we are talking about X, and suddenly he starts with an off the cuff remark to the woman in our orbit, and it sounds like a compliment that is going to go maybe two sentences and that's the end of it - like he's just trying to be suave and leave an air of cool. But then he's back to talking to me about X again, and he continues with the woman and getting into her life and her people and discovering her everything. He's telling her in so many words, I already know I could love you, I'm just finding out how much. I'm like damn. It's like that Hmong wise man in 'Gran Torino', he's already there feeling her insides and pushing the pressure points. These aren't throw away lines. Jimi gets into your life like that.

I love that as a man because I love the company of men who don't play games, and when it comes to the big things you need somebody who can handle the truth. And that's the difference in character that we all ought to know. I'm going to bring forth a poem that I taught my children and you said you would too when you saw Akeela say it:

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It's not just in some of us; it's in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.

Now I'm going to tell you that I've only seen him do it on two brief occasions, once with a white girl and once with a black girl, but that's where he was, letting his love light shine and giving her permission to do the same. Until I read the introduction to his book, I couldn't know where that was coming from or how deep it went. But I always knew that the man doesn't play.

Now I don't mean to suggest that he's totally serious 100% of the time, I'm saying that he's the kind of man that doesn't work at being some kind of emotional Tootsie Pop. What's at the inside isn't some kind of moldable chewable center that's a different color, flavor and consistency from the outside. He's all that sweet and hard inside just like on the outside. Same stuff. There's no trap and surprise. At least that's the man I see, consistent with the man I read, and the man I appreciate that much more today.

Jimi hustles. He's working all the time and what you watch is his work in progress. It's himself and his words and his passion. He has a passion against bogus motherfuckers. It's something we share as black men tired of being mistaken for him, tired of cleaning up after him, tired of sharing a world of vulnerable people when he's around jacking them and we're too distant to slap him about. But Jimi also knows the female of the bogus species and he's calling her on her madness and mess. He ain't afraid. And he hustles and is not shamed by hustling because he's inherited nothing but a good heart and an eye and ear for truth. Most of us are ashamed by what we know and let go. Jimi must testify. It's hard, but it's fair. 

All that is important in a world that's the world we have today - when nobody is quite sure of the value of anything and people are trying to sell you something about themselves because they aren't quite sure what their own value is. They just know what worked last time and what the suckers buy. So what I'm conveying is something about the character of a man I know who has survived among the snakes with his mind and soul intact. And the way it works out with Jimi is in the language of emotional truth, one that he speaks well.

The language of emotional truth, even about love and devotion is not hearts and flowers. I don't know what the deal is with 'Sleepless in Seattle' because I've never seen that movie. People tell me it's a great movie but I just don't think of that when I think of Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks. Sorry. I don't even know why the genre 'romantic comedy' can be taken seriously. Maybe it's because people desire so much for emotional truth to be fun and entertaining. For me, it was more like Al Pacino and Ellen Barkin in 'Sea of Love' or Larry Fishburne and Irene Kennedy in 'Deep Cover' or maybe even Nick Cage and Elizabeth Shue in 'Leaving Las Vegas'. The language of love has overtones of risk, desperation, passion, urgency, fate and fear. So when you hear Izrael talking about it, there's none of that Nubian Queen bodewash. He doesn't need a lot of windmilling and pre-gesturing to get to it. It's bam pow, a swift combination of the right words, tough like the sweet science. You read a few swift paragraphs that seem like simple street brogue of a hiphop bohunk and then the idea comes around inside your sense of time and knocks you out. 

That's how I'm seeing Izrael's angle on the Dizzle, The Denzel Principle. He has identified something important and true without being all Dr. Phil about it. He has invested the contemporary argot with some righteous matters about character in the fundamental interactions between men and women. And he starts with his own story and his epiphany. I know Jimi, and I know him better now and I see why he had to write this book. Now you know what you're in for. Pick it up. 

eBook Wars

My first impression is that Steve Jobs is overconfident, and the reason is that I don't buy classical music from the iTunes store. So I wonder what kind of books are going to drive Apple's iBookstore revenue. No matter what size the reading market is, people who are accustomed to buying books at Amazon, are going to need a powerful incentive to switch their hardware and content formats. 

How big is the Kindle market? Forrester says 2.5 million. How long will it take for Apple to sell that many units? Hard to say, but they won't all be for eBook reading. So it would have to be some goodly period of time before Apple starts eating into the Amazon base - let's remember that Amazon was first to go pure MP3. Will there be a price war? Privately, there's surely a bunch of negotiation going on right now behind the doors of publishers. But for the public, I don't think so. That won't get current customers moving one way or another until the market is relatively standardized, and then it will have to be loss leading.

In the meantime, you've got to be wondering what's going on in the minds of publishers that they would switch from Amazon to Apple or Google. I find it very difficult to believe that relations between Amazon and its publishing keiretsu are so dismal.  But Jobs did talk last year about his new extended digital format. Whereas Amazon has multiple copies and versions of a number of low priced titles, I don't expect to see much of that on Apple. So I expect market differentiation with Apple taking a multimedia theme, Amazon taking traditional bookbuyers and Google taking the long tail. 

The latest word is that Amazon just bought a little six man team of touch specialists out of NYC. They will join the leagues of extraordinary folks at Amazon and work big things. My advice to Amazon is to stay a low price vendor and make up the difference in retailing. Which is to say don't be afraid of the hardware business but do those things at cost and make the money on the content, which you've always done. Amazon will never be as good in hardware as Apple, and despite what's said about the iTunes Music and Apps Store, I don't think Apple will ever be as good in retailing as Amazon. Amazon knows how to make low cost items pay dividends, and Apple will never do that. 

--

I'm a little disappointed that Adobe isn't front and center in this mix. Coming as I do, originally from Xerox and document-centricity, I have always been very impressed with Postscript and the PDF. PDF stands for Portable Document Format and it is the cool beans behind Acrobat. Now despite the fact that it was hacked by the Chinese and that's what got them on Google's bad side, PDF is a brilliant technology (and the hole has been plugged) Now that I've found my old copy of Acrobat 6, I'm using it more and more. I might even upgrade. But when I stick a PDF of mine on the Kindle, it really fails to perform. That for me is a big disappointment and even though there aren't many PDFs I'd like to read on my plane ride home, it's a shame that my iPhone works better on the format.

While I'm at it, I should add some obligatory seriousness about the eInk technology. Sometimes, as with my GShock Casio watch, LCDs are just better for reading outdoors. Bezos was smart to have the Kindle marketing emphasize that sort of portability, and I'd go that one better as he goes upscale to have the Kindle ruggedized. I'd like the Kindle in my backpack when I'm hiking the Sierras, the iPad is for Starbucks, Virgin America and the lounge at the W. 

--

Anecdotally, Kindle folks are going to stay Kindle folks, or they will be gearheads and whales like me who will have both. But seriously, does the Apple demographic even read, you know like books?

Apple + Amazon + Adobe > Google

Somebody out there thinks that an Apple gaming platform would be really nice. That somebody is obviously not a gamer. 

The quick and dirty answer to the question of whether or not Apple could float a decent gaming platform out there is yes. yes in lowercase letters. If a reasonably priced Apple game plaftorm came out, it could do as well as the Nintendo DS in 2 years, but that's about it. It would have to be the iPhone or iTouch when they cost less than a Wii, which is when? Then they have to be as good as the Wii. But what drives the console market are blockbuster games with millions of units sold and DLC that keeps online players happy for months. There are NO games that compelling for the handheld market. Even Twitter can't make that kind of money.

But what Wingert was thinking was that Apple TV could be a gaming platform and a convergence appliance. It can under one condition which is that Apple uses leapfroging technology for HD on demand and makes their deals with studios to get them into everywhere DirecTV, Comcast and Verizon FIOS already are. Perhaps many people don't recognize that I can get Netflix on demand right now through my XBox360. You've got to go a long way to beat out Netflix market share, and I already went through all the deliberations of thinking through Apple TV. The bottom line is that the people at Microsoft were already ahead of me and offered me cool stuff I never imagined I'd want. So I paid 150 bucks to get the big hard drive for my XBox and haven't looked back yet.

To compete with the $400+ platform that is the full blown XBox360 + XBox Live is a tall order for anybody. Apple is probably the one company that could do it, but they would have to make a big strategic investment and really desire to take over the world. I just don't see Jobs doing it - not when there's the publishing industry opportunity out there. Apple's entry into the eReader market (ha, I just named it  - the iReader) is 75% certain according to a Wall Street analyst I heard a few weeks ago. The entry of Barnes & Noble's Nook raises the stakes. So I was particularly intrigued when I got a notice on my last Apple Store download that the terms of service were changing. The first incredibly large paragraph of fine print was all about Amazon's 1-Click. That's enough cozy to make me think that Apple is doing the very right thing if it is partnering with Amazon and the iReader will be the high-end machine. For Apple and Amazon to join forces... well cloudwise it could be the beginning of a new era, and suddenly Google doesn't sound so cool any longer. I believe that Amazon is as technically smart as Google when it comes to infinite scalability, and Amazon has been around longer and I'd bet is better managed. 

Speaking of well managed. I have to say that I have a fresh coat of respect for Adobe. In my ridiculously vast personal library of software, I dug up an old copy of Acrobat for which I spent 300 bucks several years ago. It's still packed with features I haven't even bothered to learn, and it actually does things that I let my imagination imagine - like embedding interactive goodies into pre-existing PDFs. It's truly brilliant. So now I'm going to give Adobe Flex a good look, because I'm really starting to get fed up with my browsers.

Speaking of which, I turned on my process explorer and started tracking which of my applications are giving me the most page faults and gobbling up memory. It turns out to be SQL Server, which apparently launches itself with no prompting from me and no good reason. But right behind that is Chrome, which sprouts all kinds of pseudo-independent processes yet locks up all of them when one starts farting up the system. I don't know WTF is up with Firefox, but the latest version 3.0.13 has been a huge disappointment, which is why I'm using Chrome. Oh wait. I left that on there to have the Google Notebook Add-In.. Hmm. Maybe I should upgrade. 

But back to Apple gaming. There's one great game for the iPhone (and it wasn't Myst). It's called geoDefense. Awesome. I knew it the first time I saw it across the aisle on my plane home from San Jose. We'll talk if and when the tablet comes out. 

SciFi 10

From Amazon

This is an unabridged audio collection of the best of the best science fiction prose originally written in 2008 by current and emerging masters of the genre as narrated by top voice talents. Exhalation, by Ted Chiang, tells the story of a world totally unlike Earth where mechanical men use the gas argon as air, replacing their lung tanks daily from an underground well. Exhalation won both the 2009 British Science Fiction Association Award for best story and the 2009 Locus Award for the best short story. The Ray-Gun: A Love Story, by James Alan Gardner, tells the story of a boy who discovers a ray-gun that affects his life in unanticipated ways, both good and bad. This story won the 2009 Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award. In Stephen Baxter s Turing s Apples two brothers reluctantly work together to decode an alien signal picked up by a radio telescope on the far side of the moon. In a homeage to H.P. Lovecraft, a black naturalist, just before World War II, investigates the biology of shoggoths (blobs of jelly) on the New England coast in Elizabeth Bear s Shoggoth s in Bloom. A scientist slowly goes mad trying to prove that the distant stars are made of diamond and that matter is just light slowed down in Jeffrey Ford s The Dream of Reason. In Kij Johnson s 26 Monkeys, Also the Abyss, a woman buys a traveling monkey show that pretty much runs it self as all the monkeys know what they re doing. A steel company will do what it takes to prevent two scientists from releasing the secret of making carbon nanotubes in The Art of Alchemy by Ted Kosmatka. In Paul McAuley s The City of the Dead, the town constable in a settlement on a planet in the Sagittarius arm of the Milky Way befriends a woman who researches dangerous hive rats. A genetically enhanced psychopathic secret agent battles the Rebirths for the survival of the human race in Robert Reed s Five Thrillers. Finally, in Fixing Hanover, by Jeff VanderMeer, a man reluctantly repairs the remains of a mechanical man that washed up on a beach and may be a link to his enigmatic past.

Five Thrillers
This is my favorite as it surprised me through the ending. In some ways it is a shorter telling of 'The Use of Weapons' by Iain M Banks, without nearly as much drama in the telling. However Reed's protagonist remains convinced of his purpose all the way to the bitter end. There hasn't been such a hard-headed assassin such as this character since Colonel Jessup. Except nobody carts this hero away. With what we have been dealing with in covert arts literature, with the inevitably burned out and dissolute assassins employed to the extreme a la Jason Bourne, here is finally one with humankind's best interests at heart who never wavers. Thus we know him to be psychopathic, and ourselves all too willing to go quietly into oblivion. 

The Dream of Reason
Brilliant concept, to show the scientistic and the parallels between the possession of world changing ideas and madness. Really fun to read having just finished 'The Invention of Air'.

26 Monkeys
Not much science in this fiction. Felt like summer fiction.

The Art of Alchemy
This one's a great movie script. It has beauty, brains, intrigue, money, power and a BMW. It's about an invention so revolutionary that the world's most powerful corporation lives in fear of its discovery and the two young lovers that find it.

City of the Dead
This is the most well rounded of the stories, I think. It has just the right quality of feminine heroism. A woman sheriff on a distant planet finds a mad woman anthropologist who has studied a colony of hive rats all of her life. Deep in that colony of cat-sized creatures with deadly claws and ant-like efficiency is an artifact that alien overlords are interested in. They hire thugs to fetch it against the treaty that makes this a neutral planet, and so the sheriff investigates what's going on with her strange hermetic friend.

Turing's Apples
This is a better Contact story than Contact, and delivers a nice set of lessons in basic speculation about matters of SETI than any other I've encountered. The great twist is that it is much like Martin Amis' 'The Janitor of Mars'. Sweet read.

Shoggoths in Bloom
A moral tale of unexpected dimensions, SIB takes one through the investigations of a mild-mannered black American scientist who stumbles on the extraordinary biology of a creature that is much more than anyone imagines. When is the perfect slave the most powerful thing in the world, and what is the cost of freedom?

Exhalation
The most uplifting of all the tales, Exhalation is the wonderous side of scientific discovery told from an alien perspective. It is the sort of essay that, my dear reader, speaks to you as I do, on a rational journey of the mind that captures the spirit of the soul by considering at length the nature of the beauty, complexity and tragedy of our very existence. It is the story of thermodynamic entropy, the recognition of the heat death of a universe and the nobility of facing it with reason.

Fixing Hanover
A personal story of alienation, the greatest engineer of his age tries to escape the weapons of his invention. Alas. Oh well. Spoiled that one.

The Ray-Gun: A Love Story
Every teenager should read this story. It is absolutely perfect.

Rudyard's Rolling R

I tend never to forget the fact that I speak and write English, and I recognize in my fondness for the language by the shapes which it forms in my thinking, but also in my regard for the British and their way with the world and the word. I wonder if they were not an Empire would Henry V not be so stirring and I must conclude it would. But the matter of Rudyard Kipling is a bit more difficult, for he is the inevitable sort of 'English' one only gets from immersion in the business of Empire. So he is therefore a controversial figure amongst those who were instructing me towards the ideals of equality. I know looking at them today one needs to challenge the imagination but the British once ruled this planet, and the consensus of my elders say they did a rather cruel, if efficient job of it.

I'm fully prepared to take the wonders of my native tongue at face value, which I thought I was going to be doing when picking up a volume of Percy Bysshe Shelley over the weekend. Instead, I found an intense mix of oceanic metaphors, polemic castigations of Kings and countries, and the word 'Poesy'. But in that second measure of Shelley, I found nothing so blistering as this:

I met Murder on the way -
He had a mask like Castlereagh -
Very smooth he looked, yet grim;
Seven blood-hounds followed him:

All were fat; and well they might
Be in admirable plight,
For one by one, and two by two,
He tossed them human hearts to chew
Which from his wide cloak he drew.

I'm going to have to come up with a new exclamation to describe such a powerful image as this. Speaking of which, I'm sure you have noticed on television programs broadcasting the world's most incredible destructions caught on (tape/film/digital media) how we have, in the face of tragedy been reduced to the ubiquitous Oh My God and perfunctorily bleeped Holy Shit. Is nothing so tragic any more, or is that merely all these train wrecks and explosions deserve?

And yet not even David Cronenberg has manage to be so succinctly descriptive of evil as Shelley in those two stanzas in any scene of his filmic horror. I am becoming more convinced that we, some of us, lack even the ability to see the simply awful for all our investments in entertaining grotesqueries. We're stuck on the Arendt phrase and pass over evil as merely banal. Yet in Shelley there strides Murder, capitalized.

So we live in times, insufficient to the task of appropriately guaging the measure of man, and it is in that mismeasure that the shadows surrounding the colonial cheek of Rudyard Kipling have been handed down to me. I should not complain so much about the lack of a noble arena and edifying air to breathe. One has to shut up and read the books after all. I hadn't; my bad. But now that is rectified. I am quite happy to ignore the implications of Kipling's N-bomb, which is supposed to be so emblematic of all that was wrong with the colonial world and the British. There is no colonial world, there is only our world such as it is, and one of the delights of it is that it has preserved Kipling's way with words.

Such Tortoises and Hares and Boys and Wolves and Thumbelinas and Hansels and witches wicked East and West fall short, far short I think of what we might have gotten were Kipling's stories told just so. And years we wasted on one unwanted boy whose magicks never traveled beyond a muggled world might have been spent in consideration of more inspiring things. But there are traps deeply laid in the matters of British mind and the place of its gentlemen and soldiers in the recent history of the world. I cannot say that I'm immune to their springing - so how exactly should one read the tale of the Ethiopian who changed his skin and gave the Leopard means to change to spots? No better explanation than the eminently contemporary Wikipedia entry:

Rudyard Kipling's Just So Story "How the Leopard Got His Spots" tells of how an Ethiopian and a leopard, who are originally sand-colored, decide to paint themselves for camouflage when hunting in dense tropical forest. The story originally included a scene in which the leopard, who now has spots, asks the Ethiopian why he doesn't want spots as well. The Ethiopian's original reply, "Oh, plain black's best for a nigger", has been changed in many modern editions to read, "Oh, plain black's best for me."

Rudyard Kipling uses the word in his "A Counting-Out Song", from Land and Sea Tales for Scouts and Guides, (1923). The rhyme reads "Eenie Meenie Mainee, Mo! Catch a nigger by the toe!"

It gave me a start when I heard it at first, in the audiobook I was hearing.
I drove over railroad tracks just at the moment, but which had affected my steering?
I smiled at the moment of shock then I laughed calming my own mental waters.
Glad that I could take it not as an affront, but still keep it away from my daughters.

And that was the last that I thought about the matter and kept on listening, growing ever more satisfied with the quality of each successive tale, until at last the tale of the The Cat and then of the Butterfly revealed themselves to be purest genius.

Like all frat rats of my generation, I was pledged to recite Rudyard's If from memory, and was rather glad I could at last. And I recognize it called out by bits in the course of my reading and writing and speaking of larger matters. I daresay nothing of Jungle Book survives as much of a lesson to me except for the Disney songs, most annoyingly sweet Bare Necessities. And in passing through the brief and expected harangue of Pops', there's something about Gunga Din. But for the most part in this and most of my discoveries I am on my own in finding, interpreting and integrating literature and the reputations of the authors.

I wouldn't know any place but here to get a word in edgewise about my impressions of authors and their works but I am now completely fond of Kipling. At the center of Kipling is a question of standing import to my current investigations. What is the difference between Imperialism and Evangelism? There isn't much really. They are merely aggressive, convinced forms of "Hey, I've got an idea you should try." Kipling is a piper alongside the troops of Great Britain's ideas. I can't imagine the world was ever discovered or built up differently, because as in the evasion of Kipling we find that many people study at being small minded and offendable. Such people need conviction, I think. Then again there are certainly enough of us who have conviction.

The reader of the audiobook reminds us of a time when the English language was closer to something it oftimes seems unable to convey, which is conviction and respect, even authority. He rolls certain Rs in words for emphasis. It used to be a more common practice to do so, even here in America. Did Dorothy Parker roll the occasional R? I can't imagine that she didn't in the course of her discourse. And so I am remembering Kipling, and Poesy and the discipline and song of adventures into the world, thankful I have been reminded of my great fortune to inherit the language of Liberty.

The Road

The Road by Cormac McCarthy

My review

rating: 1 of 5 stars
Some books don't teach you anything but the arcane depths of despair that human beings can reach. Very much like 'Life in the Time of Cholera', this book was a tour through a macabre mind, a desolate wilderness of the desperate soul.

If by some feat of technology or magic, one could take a guided tour through the hell of another's life, any sane person would ask - of all human experience why go here?

McCarthy scores for those who are such tourists of despair. But even on technical merit, there is no redemption for this exercise in spiritual torture. Get it out of my head - it's like the mind chewing grubs from the Wrath of Khan.

View all my reviews.

Race Matters - Cornel West

Michael Hicks just recently dropped by. He's one of the folks who has known me online for at least a decade. As I was dealing with Uptown Steve's one liner on blackfolks and economics, it came to mind that I should switch up a bit and see what he or others might consider to be thoughtful ideas from blacks to blacks. IE books. And so when I started to deal with his response to my critique about black left academics I wanted to go straight to Cornel West.

West was, most notably, one of those dude who had a sophisticated excuse for blackfolks that seemed perfectly plausible to me back in the day. I know a lot more about West and the Left now than I did then but basically his deal, that I accepted went a little something like this:

Q. If blackfolks are poor and their material conditions in America are under par, why don't they just do what other people do? That is to say what is wrong with black people using enlightened self interest and work the system of America like everybody else? Why must blackfolks resist the class system seeing how it worked for other ethnic minorities?

(this is essentially beating (progressive) West over the head with (conservative) Sowell, who explicitly calls for black Americans to read America and play the game like a player)

A. (xxxxx)
I'm going to find my copy of Race Matters and find his exact quote and I don't want to do it any injustice. But what I recall agreeing with is the nut of his answer. Black people don't want to be like other people. They want America to change. They don't want to get any respect from playing the system, they have other existential needs that go beyond material prosperity. In other words blacks play America like millenialist Christians play the world: In it but not of it. America is only real and moral when it works like xxx, xxx being the realized soulful black agenda perfect world blah blah. See? That's why I have to get the quote, because at this distance of 15 years I'm choking on the smell of remembered manure.

But hey, I freely admit that I was smoking West's crackpipe.

(from the archives May 1993)

Newsgroups: soc.culture.african.american
Subject: BOOK CLUB: Cornel West - 'Race Matters'

Keywords: race economics politics culture relations
I. Nihilism in Black America
II. The Pitfalls of Racial Reasoning
III. The Crisis of Black Leadership
IV. Demystifying the New Black Conservatism
V. Beyond Affirmative Action: Equality and Identity
VI. On Black-Jewish Relations
VII. Black Sexuality: The Taboo Subject
VIII. Malcolm X and Black Rage

Well, y'all don't have to listen to me any more. All you have to do is go out and buy this book, and other than the discussion of the practical politics, strategies and tactics of black cultural production and political activism in computer mediated fora, I will be completely redundant. It is the sad truth that 80% of the time West speaks my mind better than I do. I don't know how I forgot to put 'culture' in the keyword list. Anyway, each and every chapter is mostly on target with me.

Watchmen: Hire a Woman!

Everybody is on pins and needles worrying about if the director of 300 is going to ruin the upcoming movie version of Watchmen. Well, somebody may already have. It's not a good sign. Whatever they were thinking, they didn't think long enough. OK. Here's the deal. You take Watchmen, arguably the greatest comic ever, and you animate it in a kind of noir fashion. You distribute it in segments on iTunes and charge 2 bucks an episode.

Brilliant.

Except this. They only hired one guy to do every voice in the book. I understand the concept, and it works for audiobooks, but it crashes and burns like Slim Pickens on a nuke for an animated comic. It is the creepiest sensation, I tell ya, to hear a dude's voice while you're watching a chick's body, especially when the chick is telling that same dude why good times aren't the same any more.

It's an astonishing psychological effect to recognize this particular cognitive dissonance. For all of the audiobooks I've consumed, at least a dozen including several Harry Potters, a number of Jeeves and Woosters and most recently a John Sandford mystery having a single narrator has never been a problem. In my imagination, it works just fine, whether the character be male or female, young or old, good or bad. I've been very impressed by most of the voice talent - even the guy who did Marley and Me. But for Watchmen, it's just not working at all. And it all kind of hit at once in a particular scene where I just stopped and said whoa!

I'm still jazzed about the upcoming movie even though the fanboys are freaking about Sony's legal chicanery. I'm certain it's going to be a big hit; the buzz is unstoppable. But these guys at Warner Premier Motion Comics need to do a serious bit of thinking before they add the next ep to iTunes. For the love of rationality, hire a woman.

Friedman vs Pausch

One of my team is challenging me to read more stuff directly tangential to my work. I suppose that's fair but I think 90% of business writing is marketing and 70% of marketing is happy talk. Still, I would have never watched Seinfeld back in the 90s had my staff not talked about every episode at work. Sometimes just knowing what a soup Nazi is goes a long way. And so I have made the concession to read Thomas L. Friedman's 'The World is Flat' even though I generally don't like Friedman and that book is so 2005. But anyway, here goes.

I bought the Audible last week and started to listen to it this evening on the road from Dayton to West Chester. I even hate the voice of the guy they have reading it. So I switched to the other Audible I bought: The Last Lecture.

I've heard that Pausch died within the past few weeks and people have been lauding. He was on my list and so I've stepped things up a bit now listening to his four hours ahead of Friedman's nine. By this weekend I should be done with both. Especially if I have another travel day like today (and I finish the latest Banks). I'm digging his last lecture, but...

Pausch reminds me of the me I might have been if I had gone straight through school. In many ways we were raised similarly and had some of the same simple but honest values of people I call Second Worlders. (Wow, I haven't talked about the Second World in a long time). I have a lot of respect for 2W and I feel that it's my duty to guarantee its integrity... well let me go on about that for a moment.

First of all, I have an oversized ego, and some of it is natural, some of it is nurtured and some of it is inevitable. The inevitable stuff comes from reading history, becoming jaded and understanding that injunction of Hillel's. But deep down I am reserved and private and really like connecting with people in their work and lives. I have a great deal of respect for people who do their work expertly and cheerfully, and I noted that the other day of the woman who prepared my sandwich at Quizno's - her economy of motion, swift precision and expert timing in her task. I noted the same kinds of things in more people oriented work, especially with the dozens of travel and security related hands I pass through on a weekly basis. My point is that even though Pausch's work is very corny from one perspective, it is exactly the right kind of corn. There is, from my West Coast upbringing a goodly amount of HBO snark reaction to any popular Tuesdays with Morrie kind of non-fiction. And on the surface, I can be violently dismissive of those who don't address the kinds of questions of life beyond the fun storytelling of the Marley & Me sort. That's what it's like to grow up a black nationalist with the dangerous assumptions inherent in such a radical political life - you dismiss the childhood dreams of middle class suburban kids as naive fairytales in a corrupt system. Just breathe deeply at Nulan's joint or P6 for a few to see what I mean. Brains from the hood, man we caustic. But I have grown reasons to support all of the mediocrities and even the semiotic swamps of ordinary ambition. And so I am respectful of the light disciplines of geekery, cookery, shrubbery. Whatever. I want to hear Pausch out, like Seinfeld.

I'd much rather hear that than Friedman. Why? Because Friedman is a megatrender. I don't know how to describe the intelligencia of pseudo-liberty except that I hear it in his pretenses to New World trends. I need a Niall Ferguson to remind everybody that human history is ugly and vicious in the main and that the geekery manages to keep heads in low profile - the same heads which trumpeting world flatness too loudly would get flattened. Empowerment isn't a verb, it's a state of being tricked. When I hear Freidman explain how flattening (although I'm barely through 30 minutes of intro) makes us all somethingier, it's like he's congratulating a swimmer inside one of the locks of the Panama Canal for treading water and raising his own elevation. We're all swimming in this tide, but we're not the moon. I think Friedman, at best, will describe globalism's effect on the ordinary worker, but I think his and his readers conceits are that they're talking about anything other than the ordinary worker. And quite frankly I'd rather hear the story of the ordinary worker, like Pausch whose humanity becomes transcendent because even through his mediocre geekery, he has become wise and overcome death. I expect no such transcendence in Friedman. 20 years from now, we'll be teaching Pausch's lessons, and Friedman will be as useless as John Naisbitt.

Meanwhile, I'm almost done with 'The Use of Weapons' and I'm thinking that perhaps this is Banks' finest work. A full review and cycle back on my state of change by this weekend.

One more thing. I'm thinking about the effect of gospel music on the shaping of black political thought vis a vis Pausch's corny thesis of realizing childhood dreams. Didn't you dream of having a very long funeral procession with at least four motorcycles and ten Cadillacs? Oh no I know it was not just me...

Excession

Excession is Iain Banks' clunkiest book so far. It is certainly enjoyable as it introduces us to Infinite Fun, but it just had too many distractions and too many characters, with far too many of them Minds whose personalities and loyalties simply didn't make quite enough sense through 400 pages. It might have helped if I had the full sized paperback, but I had the airport sized one and.. it just got tedious. It could not have felt like a page-turner otherwise.

On the whole however, Excession is a very good story, a weird ass love story, a fairly decent alien story and an excellent introduction to how machine intelligences might work. Impossible to do in a movie, this one. Something of an absolute necessity in understanding the Culture and how Minds work together or separate, with some still unrealized questions about how exactly it is the Minds regard humans - symbionts? pets? masters?

Well, actually I shouldn't say that, because one of the major motivations of a major character in the book, the Eccentric ship Sleeper Service is to make amends for a decision that lead to the catastrophic injury to a man and the psychological trauma of a woman whe were once lovers. As part of this weird ass love story between a man who enjoys the company of a race of cruel brutes who resemble in character the slobering tentacled aliens of The Simpsons and a woman who has decided to remain pregnant for 40 years keeping that man's child in a state of suspended animation.

As Culture stories go this one is about the ship Minds, what they say to each other and what they do when they encounter the unfathomable. It's somewhat all over the place, but still recommended.

The Player of Games

I just finished my fourth Iain Banks novel, his most famous, The Player of Games. This is the one that I think would probably best be made into a movie. That's because, of the four, it's the simplest and most straightforward.

It's clear that Banks has been (this being his second of the Culture series) making it up as he goes along. In PoG, as a description of The Culture, he makes it seem to be a great deal more human-centric than it could possibly be. This book works well as an allegorical critique of contemporary society as well, and it could very well do so for some time to come. At the moment, I am wondering if I have some kind of brainy self-satisfaction that readers of Philip K. Dick might have had on the eve of the making of Blade Runner into a film. Much of Banks' future I am using as a sort of framework for What Can Be. I think I'm onto some things but I've only just begun.

You see, last summer, my best friend at a remove came to town. He's an AI researcher who is privy to some national security stuff and is doing well in advancing his career that-a-way. He has also done remarkably well in evading the inevitable lines of query, as well he should. Still, there is an appreciable gap between those who think about doing and those who do. Naturally we have only the foggiest notions of what we are on about in our respective industries even on the subjects we can mutually gab about. But one thing he did many years back was introduce me to one of my favorite books of all time, Cryptonomicon. So I thought he might do something of that order again. My love hate relationship with sci-fi is all love now, considering that I'm reading the more literate of the literature. I asked for something thick and considerable, and he gave me Banks. What I hope is that my imagination can be inspired in the same ways that those responsible for thinking about doing on the cutting edge of what is possible in computing. Now I have some bigger ideas, whereas two years ago I might have been thinking of the future in terms of product cycles.

All this has to do with Gurgeh, the protagonist, in a circular fashion. Like most merry metrosexuals in our decadent society, his greatest challenges are certainly as erudite as one might hope - however they have nothing to do with life or death. The practical application of all of the knowledge of our infoverse (Google + Wiki + whatever) hardly gets us to any greater understanding of how power is applied for our benefit. I certainly read that allegory into the dilemma of the post-scarcity, post-post-modern human. When most of the drama has been removed from our lives, should we bother to test ourselves? Gurgeh lives out that question unconsciously as he takes a dare and challenges the entire hierarchs of an empire to the very game upon which their society's power is based. He does so, unwittingly, as a pawn in a much greater game. We witness him change as this fascinating game unfolds.

I have long been fascinated, deeply as I am leveraged by the compute world, in human willingness to take the abstractions of life at face value. So I am returned in many ways to the dance around the semiotic swamp. I do so with a bit of tongue in cheek. On the one hand I understand, as surely every grown man must, that life can come down to blows at any time. Anyone who thinks they live in the Matrix only needs to be waterboarded for that illusion to be shattered. And yet decisions we make through apparatuses which do everything to comfort us can deliver us from evil. It is the central paradox of living in a complex society which aims to and actually is successful in providing material comfort. We all know the idea, like the eTrade baby.  Some talking infant makes an online trade through a computer interface and increases his wealth. Some winner of the Super Bowl says five magic words into the camera after victory and makes another small fortune from the coffers of the magic kingdom. Some fraction of humanity is partially there in that stress free world where comfort and security are taken care of simply because it's a good idea. And yet we must be aware at some level that somebody somewhere must pay the price for that good idea, even if it's only the crushing of all their ideas and therefore their way of life and all of their identity. In Iain Banks' future, all of this has been done and except for a few holdout or obscure species. In Player of Games, the view is from The (massive) Culture down to a (puny) Empire. The man of leisure's ethics, and his revulsion over the barbarity of anything that draws actual blood must be finally vindicated by overwhelming force. Or must it? Can you game an inferior society into collapse by beating it at its own game?

There is a great quote in this book that merits repeating and probably incorporation into Cobb's Rules. That is: The corrupt system recognizes no innocents. That hit home for me on a number of levels, not the least of which was my appreciation of the differences between schools for rich kids and schools for poor kids in my own life.

Matter

I just completed Iain Banks' latest Culture novel 'Matter'. He is something less of a yarn spinner in this one and I was stalled at page 20 for a while, but by the time I got to page 120, I could tell it was going to be a great story.

Unlike 'Phlebas' which was the second Banks book I read (after the Algebraist), Matter was a bit more predictable. The intrigue from this book comes from knowing in some detail what Culture SC operatives and their technology are capable of. So the drama builds in this story by knowing that several species at various levels of sophistication are going to be met with the wrath of god, god being a relative term - achievable by humans in already achieved by one woman exiled from a doomed world.

The other interest in this story comes from the seemingly infinite hierarchies of species which are so incredibly alien to human emotions and storytelling. A fascinating device to be sure. Here you have the story of essentially almost modern humans in something of a Napoleonic age who live in a world dominated by the Oct, a species that most resemble nothing more or less than crabs. Not giant man-eating crab-people, but dinner plate sized creatures who smell funny, think and talk sideways. The Oct were described as possessors of the most untranslatable language in the galaxy. Every year they win the prize and nobody can understand their acceptance speech. The Oct are enmeshed in a constant struggle for power with the Aultridians, an even more smelly race of creatures that resemble doormats. Above the Oct are an insectile race, and above them a race of waterborne creatures which I can best say resemble a cross between porcupine fish and sea urchins.

If you can imagine how difficult it might be to live in America if your candidate doesn't win in November, imagine what it must be like to be ruled by crabs inferior to ants inferior to fish and that the fish basically own a volume of space containing two million stars. This is the predicament of Ferbin, the playboy prince whose father, the King is assassinated. He must plead his case up this motley chain of command while running for his life. Unbeknownst to him, his exiled sister a secret agent for the Culture, the masters of the galaxy, is working her way down back to her home planet and finding it not difficult to care even in her post-ghetto life. Family still matters. But her lust for revenge is tempered by her new sophistication and the rules of engagement, or is it?

Banks shines in his description of the Shellworld, a new invention into his great galaxy. And the appendix adds to the wiki-able knowledge base that attaches to his interstellar inventions. There is great multi-species drama and intrigue in this novel, and yet another reason to read all of Banks.

By the way, the title, like 42 is an answer to one of the great philosophical questions of our age.

Yon's Moment of Truth

Michael Yon's book is about equal to the sum of its parts, but in certain ways it is a disappointment. I think greatest of all it stands as testament to the fact that we have almost no indepth coverage of this war from the perspective of battlefield reporting. There are only several reporters that we've been able to pay serious attention to, and Yon has been one of them. Yet his 'Moment of Truth in Iraq' reads like journalism - the sort which almost doesn't matter in retrospect. I would have liked a more sophisticated and comprehensive report on everything going on in Iraq, but I realized that would be impossible from a ground up report. That's what this book is, a view from boot level of Iraq, and it is exactly what we Americans, and everyone else around the world, needs to see.

It boils down to this. The American military is awesome and is representing our nation an order of magnitude better than our politicians in support of the war are, and two orders greater than those opposed. It is required reading for all those who thought that 'cultural differences' were an insurmountable obstacle to American peacekeeping. It refutes the characterization of our troops as a callous, unprofessional or incompetent occupying force. It destroys myths about the scale and intensity of the fighting and it makes the nature of the fighting transparently clear.

But best of all Yon illustrates exactly the effect that American Army and Marine commanders in the field deal with civilians, terrorists, allies, insurgents and all of the various parties on the ground. It demystifies the logistical issues and the dynamics of the politics surrounding the rebuilding of the country of Iraq.

Moment of Truth is fast and easy reading. I got through it rather quickly and I recognize many of the stories which I had previously encountered on Yon's blog. It's nothing like Fiasco or The Looming Tower in terms of sophistication, it is a popular book meant to be read by the masses, and so it should be. I think it will be the definitive introduction to the popular understanding that the US is not only capable of evolving the military capability of counterinsurgency, but that we're damned good at it and have proven it in spade in Iraq. This book is required reading for everyone, but especially people whose heads are stuck in Vietnam. This is not your old uncle's military.

Phlebas Considered

The worst thing you could do is read Consider Phlebas back pages first. Once upon a time I used to take the first and last sentences or first and last words as a brief synopsis of every book. It kinda works for the Bible. "In Amen". But to do so for Iain M. Banks celebrated sci-fi would almost obviate the great adventures contained therein.

Consider Phlebas is a space opera, something of a cowboy story with a trick ending, an amoral tale of the actions of civilizations on conflict down to the deadly combat and scheming of individuals from different parts of the galaxy.

In one way I didn't follow my own advice. I was advised to read 'Player of Games' first but didn't find this Culture book of Banks available. So I read his most recent treatment of the galaxy 'The Algebraist' and then to his very first, Consider Phlebas. There is no doubt that Banks is a much more accomplished writer now than 20 years ago and so I can see that he has clearly gotten to where he was trying to go which is to convey the essence of the practically infinite scale of galactic events and put the actions of humans in scale. He does so without making humans any larger or smaller than humans. Which is to say that in the largest scheme of things imaginable, human drama still counts for something, as it inevitably would to us humans. And in that regard Banks is an extraordinarily good sci-fi writer, standing just below Samuel R. Delany as the best ever.

But Banks gives us something one better than Neveryon which is a continuing series of novels about the Culture and it is in the matters of the Culture that Banks shines. What is the Culture? It is utopian, and infinite in the ways we are most constrained here on earth. It is a cultural empire that fights for philosophical reasons, and it is run by machines which were created by humans. They are the Minds each of which is capable of nearly god-like intelligence and they work to integrate every alien species into harmonious existence in which all sentient beings are accorded rights.

Of course not every species is interested in following the Culture's scientific and logical perfectionism, chief among them are the Idirans, a race of 3 meter triped giants who evoke the deep religiosity of a warrior cult. In fact they were a perfectly peaceful people, in total harmony with the ecology of their bountiful planet until provoked by the Culture. At that point they realized everything foreign to them as a threat and transformed into a race of annihilation still steeled by religious discipline. So war was inevitable and it is in the midst of that war that our story begins.

It is the story of a lost and crippled Mind, a planet of the dead, a Changer, an intelligence agent of the Culture and a Firefly-like crew of freebooting pirates. The Changer, allied with the Idirans, and pursued by the agent, seeks to capture the Mind from the neutral planet of the dead. He ingratiates his way into the pirate ship and the adventure takes off from there.

Phlebas is a work of great imagination whose galaxy makes extended human sense and yet is not extensively human. I suspect, that in that regard I am going to have to complete about 1000 more pages of the Culture novels to get at what Banks might be implying. To that end I have just begun Matter, his latest.

Even without that these are excellent tales of enormous scale.

The Culture

Here is my book quote of the week, taken from Iain M. Banks in Consider Phlebas.

It was the Culture's fault. It considered itself too civilized and sophisticated to hate its enemies; instead it tried to understand them and their motives, so that it could out-think them and so that, when it won, it would treat them in a way which insured they would not become enemies again. The idea was fine as long as you didn't get too close, but once you had spent some time with you opponents, such empathy could turn against you. There was a sort of detached, non-human aggression required to go along with such mobilized compassion, and Balveda could feel it slipping away from her.

The Algebraist: First Look

I did a little bit of reading this weekend. So I am struck by the universe of Ian M. Banks finally. I was bored to tears by Canal Dreams so many years ago, but The Algebraist is cooking my braincells.

There is but this simple idea. What does a race who lives millions of years do? They float around in gas giant planets, tired of conquering the universe, or bored with it perhaps, and hunt their young.

Ruling the universe is for people who dress up in scary costumes. What do they do? They establish massive hierarchies. It has occurred to me how massive are our hierarchies. I am stuck on Chris Rock's story. He thinks he loves his wife, but he has to risk everything he has to come to that realization. That's learning the hard way. So what if you don't matter? What if your ambition is a curse? What is the point of learning anything at all? Why not simply hunt your youth? I don't know how Banks is likely to answer those questions, but I am well-prepared for his history of the distant future which encompasses millions of light years and billions of years. The loss of a million lives is oil for the greatest events. In that way you might be useful. The best thing that might happen is that you see it coming.

Christopher Bracey: First Look

All day I have been listening to Winston Churchill's history of the Second World War and although it is not astonishing that I hear it, nevertheless I am braced by the extent to which I find the laxity in leadership of any modern nation capable of reducing its quality until such point that it is unable to stand in its own defense. I daresay I am more attuned than ever to that precarious balance. And so it is with that in mind that I offer my first daring critique of Christopher Bracey's new book Saviors or Sellouts, having only read short way in and briefly browsing for my own and contemporary mention.

Within the first few pages Bracey makes it clear that he is, while earnestly attempting to be open-minded and fair in his investigation, rather beholden to the concept of racial empowerment. It seems that there is very little else any black partisan can do of moral import from this perspective other than pursue the aims of a sort of equality that is presumably measured in percentages. I may mischaracterize his premises, and only a complete reading will tell, but so far it appears that he has rigged the game, or at least defined the choir to which he intends to inform. Of course it is reasonable in some  ways to presume his intended audience is most concerned about the implications of race [group] relations. We certainly don't lack for multiculturalists, but I'm afraid I must complain about this aim as a benchmark for the evaluation of black conservatives - or at least make an exception for myself.

For I have been born into a generation and raised in a class which has prepared me to consider the brotherhood of blacks and non-blacks with relative ease and think in a critical way such as to regard all racial traffic with suspicion. Not merely because of some lighthearted aspiration to colorblindness, but rather to a clear appreciation of the perversion of our accumulated wisdom which is availed by entreaties to racial empowerment of any sort. So while I am apt to find much to be admired in the demeanor of the first Philadelphia Negroes and of Booker T's admonishments to blacks to live righteously, it is not that same exact paternalism which causes me to criticize my liberal and progressive fellows, black and otherwise. It is, rather, my appreciation of the crimes of Hitler and Stalin, not coincidently brought to my attention by conservative scholars, which enjoins me to cast my opprobrium.

It must be said, that having converted slowly and lately to the form of conservatism I now profess, I am struck by the extent to which my perennial cries for 'social justice' had blinded me in my selfish quest to see American blacks equal American whites in every way to the abhorrent crimes perpetrated man against man in the whole of world history. The way some black partisans wail, one would think there were no greater victims of treachery than our own forbears 'through 400 years..'. Even considering the grave horrors of the transatlantic slave trade's middle passage, what manner of justice can be had today? Indeed, are we aiming for some cosmic adjudication, or perhaps someone to finally come to power in America to exact the toll in proper pounds of white flesh?  Our complaint can only be minimal. Were we to properly enjoy and defend that liberty which is our birthright, our righteousness would lead our quest for true justice in more pressing realms, and not heed the putative vengeance of long dead  ancestral ghosts of 'our race'. Every day someone else calls for such 'social justice' is another day of retardation.

Nevertheless, I hope to finish both Churchill and Bracey by this time next week and will surely have more reflections on his assessment of the black conservative movement of which I am some small part. I can't say with any certainty that I am not a savior or that I am not a sellout. Only time will tell. 

Cheney So Far

I'm about halfway through Hayes' biography of Dick Cheney. It's rather a good thing that I'm listening to it rather than reading it. I think I might be a bit more bored by the book. I thought that perhaps Dick Cheney was going to be a fascinatingly complex guy, but it turns out that he's not. He's got a very strong stripe of Midwestern competence, of cowboy grit, of puritan low-key. In other words, he is nowhere near as dubious or extraordinary a character as we've all be led to believe. Perhaps what is most extraordinary about Cheney is that he makes perfect sense as a straight character of exceptional competence who hasn't been distracted by power. At least not halfway through the book.

He's very likable but in a non-heroic way. If Colin Powell were to have had someone else write his book, it might have been half as long and very much like Cheney's, I think. What's common between them is that they simply do all the work and they don't spend a lot of time complaining about it. Where are Colin Powell's rules?

1.  It ain't as bad as you think. It will look better in the morning.
2.  Get mad, then get over it.
3.  Avoid having your ego so close to your position that when your position falls, your ego goes with it.
4.  It can be done!
5.  Be careful what you choose. You may get it.
6.  Don't let adverse facts stand in the way of a good decision.
7.  You can't make someone else's choices. You shouldn't let someone else make yours.
8.  Check small things.
9.  Share credit.
10.  Remain calm. Be kind.
11.  Have a vision. Be demanding.
12.  Don't take counsel of your fears or naysayers.
13.  Perpetual optimism is a force multiplier.

You wouldn't think that such a small set of terse axioms could create the kind of success that Powell created. And yet I think Cheney's set would be smaller still.

What's striking about Cheney is his apparent lack of personal political ambition. He seems to be something of a machine - he just does what's set in front of him without any arch schemes. One is put in mind of a kid walking through a snow field looking only a few yards ahead of their own feet instead of at the fencepost over yonder. Cheney does so and yet makes very straight lines.

There's also an expectation of competence instead of ideology that comes from Cheney's direction. Working for Gerald Ford seems to have set him on a path that seems to defy partisanship. There seem to have been a set of reliable Democrats, notably Henry Hyde, that made Cheney's sensibilities not seem so extraordinary as they seem in today's red vs blue landscape. I notice some of the same names that I'd
always respected, Sam Nunn, George Schultz popping up from time to time as well as others I've never heard written about in ways you don't often hear. Neutrally and with regard to their skills, rather than the appeal of their political profile and opinions. One notices of Cheney, he's not the sort who tells funny little stories that illuminate the character of his peers, superiors or subordinates. For him, it's all about the work.

More later.

As I Like It: Favorite Books Now

These days I read books strictly for pleasure. As a young adult, I always had some pang of guilt if I wasn't reading a book that I thought was important or significant in some way. I also had a rather circumspect personal life, and quite frankly I enjoyed reading at home a lot more than meeting the kinds of people I mostly ended up meeting.

I've always had a love-hate relationship with my intellectual curiosity. That is because I always ended up satisfying it, and having done so removed myself from the social sphere of people I knew. I have never known anyone - or had an active social life with anyone who read the same things I did, and I always felt that every new page I turned was a step into further isolation. It was very difficult being me at the time. I was unmoderated because I was always trying to be what I knew.

That was then.

Today, my guilt twinges me ever so slightly when I think about various classic pieces of literature I have yet to read. And yet I was only recently comforted even more by a lecture by Dr. Larry Arnn who said that the most intelligent man he ever knew said it's useless to try to know much about any more than one thing. So the very idea of broadmindedness is, perhaps, a survival skill of the mediocre. Enough of that.

Cryptonomicon
This is by far my absolute favorite book. I came upon it entirely by accident having given up entirely on the genre of science fiction. A friend recommended it and I could not put it down. Only Foucault's Pendulum before it had the sweep and scope of it, and I found it a great kind of secret revelation of the sort I am most fond - given my fascination with nukes. As an IT guy, I found various aspects of it perfectly riveting. Anyway great, great book. Top shelf of my bookcase.

Underworld
You may be coming to see a pattern here, and I suppose there is. I have mentioned before that I truly dig big fat historical fictions. The only thing better are histories themselves. Unfortunately, most writers of history, well all I've seen, are fairly boring. DeLillo, however, tells a ripping great story with, I think, the mind of the modern American man rightly nailed. If yesterday's man was something like characters of Updike, then today's belong to DeLillo. And yet DeLillo has gone completely off my radar. I haven't had the passion to read him other than that one work. I wish, I suppose, one could combine the narrative skill of DeLillo with the flair for the factual of McPhee. That would be a hell of a stunning writer. Maybe when I'm 60.

Overworld
Bracketing DeLillo's mastery of the internal is my most favorite of the external, Kolb. I think there is, perhaps, no greater adventure than that of the secret adventure on the geopolitical scene. This is what it looks like to knock about among machers.

The Neveryon Series
I basically asked one day what is the greatest science fiction book of all time. Most people conlucded that Samuel R. Delaney was number one, and so I went to his legendary work. The best thing I can do to describe it is to talk about society on the verge of formalized education. How did it come about? What was the inflection point when learning about things you didn't do every day became something of the province of the ordinary man, as opposed to royalty?

The Pentagon's New Map
This is the best big idea book I've read in a long time. I've been trying to eat up some of those, but neither Kaplan, nor Friedman, nor Gleick have done it for me. I probably will go back and read more Halberstam, but man Thomas PM Barnett is on top of things. I'm actually looking for an economic view of the same things. That search continues.

Also rans of the era:

The Company / Modern Manners / Freakonomics / Confessions of a Street Addict / My Life as a Quant / Quicksilver / The Ender Series / The Prey Series / The Hitchhiker's Guide / Basin and Range / Irons in the Fire / The Diamond Age / Great Apes

Showdown At Hogwarts

The latest Harry Potter book, The Deathly Hallows, is the most action packed adventure in the series, and it shows Harry as a very different kind of hero than we might have expected him to be. If you don't want to know any more, go away now.

Influential Books: Young Adult Version

Like most of my yuppie peers I spent a lot of time between being a kid and having a kid. So I think the young adult period should be considered. These would be the books that I felt made me more of the man I wanted to be, knowing what I should know, before I thought I was that man.

The Mind's I
I basically have powered my career based on the inspirations of this book. My entire orientation towards the process of decision-making in all its forms is based on the premises that they might be represented in machinery and objectively improved. As well, very serious implications to the ethics of identity and sentience were kicked off by this book. Again, I think my reaction was like everybody else's. I was 21. 

Ethnic America
This is rather a tough one. Although I had read 'The Economics and Politics of Race' and perhaps one other book by Sowell earlier (and decided that I was a neocon, around 1982), it was Ethnic America that really stuck in my head. It was this book that helped me to see African America as an emerging class that while it had its own special qualities, was bound to succeed in ways similar to other ethnics. It was also the first history book that I ever really enjoyed. It is the book that convinced me to delay marriage until I was more established in my career.

Atlas Shrugged
What can I say, I was a computer science major. How could you blame me?

The Black Power Imperative
I wonder if I'll ever read this book again. It was, after I dealt with the fact of the broken monolith, the singular reason I thought that black politics mattered any longer. Now in retrospect I'm not so sure our premises are correct. Almost nobody talks seriously about Cross' theories - essentially that African American disenfranchisement whether active or passive puts a black mark on our democracy and brings into question the very existence of representative democracy in America.  I cannot imagine that Lani Guinier has not thought through this matter. I think you can read Guinier and skip Cross, but man it blew me away in 87.

Sun Tzu's Art of War
Yep. I did the whole immersion into the tao. It was an extraordinary moment in my life. I think I'm actually ready to try it again. Wow.

Beloved
I read Beloved completely stunned. It stood head and shoulders above any fiction I had read before with its power and flow. It was like reading an improvised symphony. I have never seen the English language do the things it did before I read that, the first of many Morrison books I would read. I think Toni Morrison singlehandedly gave the multicultural movement the lion's share of its substance.

American Mythologies
There are two kinds of people in the world. Those who understand the semiotic sleight of hand of modern life and those doomed to forever chase the cheddar in the epistemological maze that is Western Civ. Far beyond McLuhan's predictions, Blonsky ripped straight to Heidegger in his journey. Amazing book. It exposes post-modernism completely.

Drylongso
Drylongso is the book I should have read in 87 instead of The Black Power Imperative. Instead I read it in 93. The years in between I spent as a prisoner of my interpretation of a generational imperative vis a vis what blackfolks needed from people like me. I have never shaken myself of that entire responsibility, but Drylongso has given me a new golden rule I should have learned long ago. Black people will survive without any further assistance from anyone. Don't second guess them.

Another Country
When I was ready to have children, I began reading James Baldwin because I knew that he would moderate my passion for the revolutionary. He did. Another Country made everything personal. It took all of the politics out of life.

Also rans of the era:

Malcolm X Speaks / Tropic of Cancer / Economics and Politics of Race / Manufactured Consent / Breaking Bread / Race Matters / Turing's Man / Foucault's Pendulum / White Boy Shuffle / High Cotton / A Gathering of Old Men /  Candide / American Evasion of Philosophy / Shogun

My Favorite Book: Kid Version

Geoff Bennett asks an impossible question.

Another month, another in-depth series. For the month of August, we're tackling the black literary imagination every Tuesday and Thursday.

We're going to explore African Americans' connection to the written word and how our history and experiences shape what we read.

We want to hear from you: What's your favorite book or who is your favorite author? And what's the one book you wish you could read again ... for the first time?

There are probably 10 books that changed me more than any other, but all for different reasons. So I suppose I should go into that.

Call It Courage / The Secret Language
These two books were assigned to me in the fifth or sixth grade. I didn't want to read them, I thought they were stupid and I was insulted that my teacher wanted me to read them. Call it Courage was about some cowardly, skinny dark kid running around in a loincloth. The Secret Language was about two white girls away at boarding school. I read them. I loved them. I couldn't believe it. It was my first real experience of 'you can't judge a book by its cover', and my first real understanding that I could learn from the experiences of people who were nothing like me.

2001: A Space Odyssey
I read this book in the sixth grade. It was my first big book, an adult book that when I read it impressed everybody. This was the book that made me fear no books, no matter how big. Plus, it started me into loving science fiction.

Hiroshima / Fail Safe
I read these books in the 7th grade and they began my lifelong dread and fascination with nuclear weapons. My 7th grade project was about the process of nuclear fission which I understood quite well. But these were the books that really cemented in my mind what was really possible in this world. Around the same time, Nixon was impeached. I came to understand that the smartest people in the world could make huge mistakes.

Roots
Roots affected me like pretty much everybody else. I thought it was a great story and I enjoyed the affect I got by dragging this huge bestseller around and reading it in public. I was in the 10th grade.

Breakpoint

Richard Clarke's Breakpoint is a thriller of bizarre proportions. Reading it on the heels of Michael Crichton's Next makes me feel that perhaps there certain fairly interesting ideas out there that makes the future full of interesting possibilities. It is one of the more entertaining books I've read this year. I recommend it.

Richard Clarke is another person whose material contributions to the country have been completely obliterated by the politics of vicious ripping and staunch defending of the Bush Administration. As I parse back through a large number of unfinished posts, this pattern is emerging - details that have become politically insignificant as the MSM, opposition, loyalists and blogosphere move their debates to new ground.

These days Petraeus is about to become another symbolic goat or hero in the same way. I am rather ashamed at how juvenile our democracy can become.

Mitt Drops a Softball

Mitt 'The Gameshow Host' Romney has uttered the first genuinely stupid thing I've heard all season. Kevin Drum picks up the story:

Today's mandatory blogging is about Mitt Romney's declaration that his favorite novel is L. Ron Hubbard's Battlefield Earth, a bad science fiction book made into an even worse John Travolta vehicle a few years ago (Scott McLemee provides a precis here). Several people have suggested that Romney must be telling the truth about this since no one in his right mind would lie about liking this book, but I suspect something else: I suspect Romney just doesn't read much fiction and was stuck for an answer. His neurons fired away momentarily searching for something to say, and Battlefield Earth is what popped up.

Following Drum's meme:

Needless to say, I'm here to help. Sort of.... I promised to follow up with a selection of "safe, patriotic, audience friendly 'favorite books,'" but I never came through. So let's do it ourselves! Here are the original categories:

• Moderately intellectual choice, suitable for being interviewed by George Will
  

• Funny choice, suitable for being interviewed on MTV
  

• Multicultural choice, suitable for being interviewed by New York Times
  

• Populist choice, suitable for being interviewed by Parade
  

• Safely patriotic choice, suitable for being interviewed by Rush Limbaugh
  

• Thoughtful choice, suitable for being interviewed on PBS
  

• Anti-terrorism choice, suitable for being interviewed by Andrew Sullivan

These are actual favorite books of mine:

George Will: Freakonomics by Levitt & Dubner
NYTimes: Cloudsplitter by Russell Banks
Parade: Timeline by Michael Crichton
Rush Limbaugh: Theodore Rex by Edmund Morris
PBS: Foucault's Pendulum, by Umberto Eco
Andrew Sullivan: The Bourne Ultimatum (just to see what he'd say), then The Looming Tower, by Lawrence Wright

What Drum doesn't get is that Romney is probably catering to people who read the 'Left Behind' series of Christian fiction in order to make bonds across Christian sects. But he couldn't come out and say so, but people who know, know.

America Alone

Mark Steyn isn't a great writer, in fact his book, America Alone isn't a very good book. I think he's way better as a radio commentator and columnist. So this effort seems a bit scattershot for me. But I think it's just the kind of book that someone like me needs to have read. It gives me a handful of double-ought shotgun shells of red hot facts to spew. By 'someone like me' I mean someone with a reason to defend America in the face of all the gibberish that passes as constructive dissent.

The other day, I was talking with some friends about global warming. 'Jack Jones', is Boy's best friend's dad. We're kind of 'best neighbors'. Jack's an investment adviser with a rather serious portfolio of clients. So he gets paid to make sense of global events. He reminded me that there's some interesting things going on in the commodities markets with corn. I told him that I look to the supermarket shelves: when we're down to just 3 kinds of corn flakes, then I worry. He agreed. More likely the price will go to 7 bucks a box first. On global warming, he reminded me of something we can all try at home. Put ice cubes in a glass, then fill it with water. When the ice melts, the level of the water goes down, not up. So let's not worry about flooding Manhattan.

Mark Steyn has given us a signal to worry about and it is the fall of Europe. If there's anything completely coherent in 'America Alone' it is that it paints a bleak picture for the EU's undeclared war against Islamism. The EU, according to Steyn, is outsourcing its democracy to Muslim youth. So what we Americans need to watch, instead of corn flakes and coastlines, are what concessions EU ministers will do in the face of its losing demographic battle against Muslim youth and how bold the radical Islamists will be in that rising tide. Here are some buckshot for you, the most popular name for male babies in Amsterdam is Muhammed.

The current talking point on Right Radio these days is whether or not Liberals and Democrats have any idea of the size of the Islamic foe. The answer is no, of course not. The correct estimate is that it may or may not matter because nobody, it seems, has any strategy to help 'Moderate Islam' actually moderate the rest of Islam. But the syllogism works something like this:

Who is the enemy? Jihadis?
Where do they get support? Islamists
Who are the Islamists? People who want to live under sharia.
Where do Islamists get support? From all sorts of Muslims.

There are dots to connect for sure. Let the FBI do that. But the fact of the matter is that Jihadis only get support from Muslim communities, and Muslim communities in the West are working their way towards and through all sorts of concessions via a multicultural imperative of Western liberals. The only chance to have Jihadis are through politically active Muslim population bases. And these bases are all over Europe.

Steyn isn't long on solutions. He tends to offer a rather dim outlook. His gripes are classically conservative but he doesn't do so much to rally the troops. He speaks in the voice of someone who thinks it should be obvious that what we have in the West is worth preserving, so he doesn't go into all that. In that regard he's not got a popular book. He's not likely to win any converts to his vision through any cheerleading, however he does show a hundred different examples of what we generally understand in the conservative movement. That's good enough.

What Steyn gives me is a reason to be a bit more strenuous in my questioning of our ethics with regard to the tolerance of Islam. I've never bought into the 'Clash of Civilizations' theory, primarily because I don't regard Islamists as particularly civilized, nor do I give much credit to the Iraqi militants in their free for all. So I am more likely to ask whether or not the momentum in political Islam is pro- or anti-Western and who arises to block or accommodate cultural concessions. I think that my experience with emergent American populations will be instructive in this, especially since I believe I see clearly through the hokum of multicultural politics. I know a self-hating, self-destructive white liberal when I see one, and I know exactly how loud minority activists walk all over them. And I see their mutual disinvestment in patriotic faith work its retarded miracles. So I'm watching, and guess what? I'm not beyond consideration of loyalty oaths.

I have a great deal of confidence that American prejudices against Europeans can and will be easily awakened from slumber if we see more of the sort of sissyfied crumbling that Spain demonstrated in the wake of the Madrid bombings. And I now expect to see more of that sort of event in the near future. What 'America Alone' does is prepare me to understand how it was that the British allowed their sailors and marines to be captured, Europeans truly are far along the road towards capitulation. They're much worse than we are. We at least still have red states, whereas all of the EU has seemed to have gone baby soft blue.

Americans on the whole will recognize what's up. Half of us do already. It's not close to being too late.

Confessions of an Economic Hit Man

I'm trying to figure out what the appropriate subtitle for this book should be and I can't decide among the following:

• Travels Through Guilt with the World's 33rd Richest Hippie
• The Mind of an Empty Suit
• A Self-Important Revisionist History
• How I Learned to Hate Myself and Love the Third World
• Memoirs of a Cold War Paperpusher

Confessions of an Economic Hitman by John Perkins is an exclamation point riddled history of a few financial manipulations of the Cold War by a man who had no stake in his own ambition.

The first thing you notice about this account is that it is written by a man who thinks he was sitting on top of the world, when in fact he was just a cog in the energy industry. If you are credulous enough to believe that the debts and revenues associated with the energy business is indeed the core principle of the global economy, then the moral outrage of this book makes sense. But there's a whole lot to swallow.

On the plus side, it's a fast and somewhat entertaining read. Otherwise it is a exercise in the slow revelations of a kind of self-loathing that takes about 20 years to surface.

One of the things that I've had in mind as I was reading this screed was the sense of geography as destiny. As I look at the 20th Century, I think of most of it focused on the economics of . Perkins was one of the people who made the truth a narrative of economic exploitation. He falls in love with Socialist charismatics in Latin America, rues the lives of poor peasants, and bemoans the basic nature of corporate capitalism without ever acknowledging or even understanding the basic nature of socialism.

Perkins is a perfect example of a cultural relativist. a perceptive reader can see how much he hates his hometown and parents and idolizes romantic ideals associated with revolutionary rhetoric. But you can't imagine that he even had the temerity to read Marx, Weber, Engles, Friere or anyone. Back when I was a bit more blackified, I referred to such people as culture vultures. If it's indigenous, it's good. But you'll never see him once talk about infant mortality statistics, literacy rates, crime rates or even inflation.

I discovered a bit too late that this book would teach me nothing about the business of foreign direct investment or the workings of the World Bank except that he saw it as evil. Technically, you'll get a great deal more insight reading Wikipedia. Basically, Perkins assumes that his game was the only game on the planet, his company was smack dab in the middle of it and that it was all being subtley directed by the CIA and NSA and that this is, was and always will be the American way. You really get a foggy view of the Evil Empire of America from Perkins, who resembles nobody quite so much as a cynical wanker who is too soulless to quit the game. It's a confession all right.

By the time I got 2/3rds of the way through, reading the book began to become annoying. The incredible vacuity of this man was staggering. There are no personal relationships in the book worth speaking of. He found loyalty only to his bosses worth mentioning. It is a stunning revelation about his character that he never once had a kind word to say or any personal quality worth mentioning about his staff that stands out in memory.  We learn that he took one of his charges (female) on a yacht cruise to some isle in the Caribbean, but that when he got there, he was so sickened by his guilty conscience that he banged his head against the coconut trees.

If you want to understand something about the life of an economist and high finance, the best book I've read is My Life as a Quant. If you want to understand something about the life of a reluctant spy, the best book to read is Larry Kolb's Overworld. If you want to get well-written account of a man who was too spoiled to find himself while being a toady in the economic hardball of the Cold War era, then this is your book. But it's nowhere near as good as, say The Quiet American.

You can imagine that Perkins, who is a great admirer of Graham Greene, might have had aspirations to be such a character as Greene might pen. He is earnest to tell such a story that would portray himself thus, but he is to honest to consider himself heroic, and I suspect that he'll be working off his guilt for the rest of his life. In that regard, 'Confessions of an Economic Hitman' is (now prefaced and extended in the paperback edition) a blueprint for American liberal guilt. If there was ever someone who truly believed that global warming and a host of other blowbacks are destined to doom America to a well-deserved kharmic smackdown, it is John Perkins. He has always been a citizen of the world pretending to be a patriotic American, down to the repetitions of his undying faith in the words of Thomas Paine. You'd think, being a pseudo-economist, that he'd have some room in his heart for Alexander Hamilton. Ahh but that would mean that he'd have to admire courage.

I didn't want to be a harsh judge of Perkins. I thought I might learn of an extraordinary life, one of conviction and then epiphany. Instead I learned of a small yapping dog who was always on a leash he lacked the spirit to gnaw through.  Someone who would tell us in the end that we should use less oil and that 'corporatocray' is evil. This book has been a disappointment in many ways. I may well be very happy to read Thomas Friedman after this.

Good parts?

Yeah there are a few. He speaks about a few South American presidents who might have been contenders. He gives a few details about Saudi Aramco. But compared to Larry Kolb's fascinating and detailed portraits of Daniel Ortega and Adnan Khashoggi, this is Romper Room. If Perkins thought he was an agent... don't make me laugh.

 

Every Mufti Ain't Mufti

(from the archives July 2002)

mendez' book throws a new light on the spy business which has not been exploited very well in other fiction about spycraft - the value of disguise. not since watching 'the killing fields' in which dith pran keeps mumbling 'ankertill brewer' over and over, has the drama of exfiltration been so dramatically portrayed. i found it very interesting to consider the possibilities now open in identity theft and spoofing given the role of hollywood effects artists in disguise anticipating the technology mendez describes (which must already be quite dated). if eddie murphy can do it, the cia could be having a field day. think about it, does anyone know what michael dorn (worf) really looks like?

in these days as we chase down individuals in a global 'war' on terrorism, understanding this bag of tricks add a new and fascinating dimension to our thought process. this is a very worthwhile book to consume.

Crichton's Next

Michael Crichton has written yet another science-fiction / reality adventure movie in book form. It's a lot more disjointed than his last and is not quite nearly as dramatic as either 'Timeline' or 'State of Fear'. Instead 'Next' delivers a powerful set of scenarios illustrating the legal, political and ethical dilemmas surrounding the business and science of genetic engineering and biotech.

Crichton is as his least high-minded and most conservative in Next. There is not much in the text that preaches, he simply give brilliant examples of the kind of confusion and corruption that he believes will inevitably occur given the world historical possibilities of transgenic creatures and gene therapies that make for strange and unpredictable results in humans and animals. In that Crichton goes straight for the jugular and shows what might occur as people respond to changes that are afoot in research labs and biotech companies.

He starts with a very simple dilemma. What if your father dies, and you never believed him to be your father? You ask, as his daughter, for a DNA screening and it shows that he is actually not your father. Did you have a right to demand such a screening based on the standing that you've just disproven? It gets even more tricky. It is a set of scenios such as these that Crichton applies his vivid imagination. When people have failed to do the disciplined analysis of complex and powerful technologies, the results are a frightening mix of base human emotions played out with scary consequences. This is, of course, Crichton's theme, and he does not fail to deliver yet another example.

Next is a great fleshing out of scenarios to confront in the future of genetics. It's not so much a novel as a mash-up in print. It's an interesting way to communicate ideas and for that you have to give him credit. But it has weaknesses as well as strengths.

This time out, Crichton's sense of humor and cant are at its height. There has never been such a funny character as Gerard in MC's writing. I was splitting my sides with laughter. People would ask me what's so funny, and I'd have to respond, a transgenic parrot. But instead of using that spirit, which he did amply well in 'State of Fear' and briefly here for skewering one would-be genetic performance protester, it can only be a spice rather than the base for his stew. The book would have been a great deal more interesting if he had taken a snapshot of life a bit forward into the future, but Crichton seems bent on making political points for the now instead of allowing his scenarios to mature into perhaps more memorable. In this he has turned away from being our contemporary Huxley and made himself rather into a super-pundit. That bodes well for making his contribution timely, but ill for making it timeless.

It is a book perhaps better blogged that written, for if the scientific references and policy discussions are indeed reference-quality then it should be online for citation in what will certainly become intense debate in the blogosphere. In the meantime, it fails as a narrative, but succeeds as a set of cautionary mini-tales.

I recommend Next for its breadth. It's got a lot of eye-popping examples. Unfortunately it lacks the emotional appeal it might have had if its cast of characters were more deeply drawn. Aside from that, there are too many, they loop too closely together to make sense in a novel. This kind of stuff only works for movies like (ironically) 'The Day After Tomorrow'. That being Crichton's aim, then Next makes perfect sense. One can only hope something this well-researched gets made into the movie or web portal it should be.

No Fire This Time

The first book I read about sex was "If Beale Street Could Talk". I don't remember much about it except for the sexy parts, and what I recall of that was that it was gentle and not dirty. It was a love story, an honest love story which reinforced that which I wanted to believe about love. I cannot remember if it was my parents who thought I should read the book, but I seem to remember that Pops was pleased that I enjoyed it.

Fast forward 20 years or so and I found myself reading James Baldwin once again, after all that time. This time it was 'Another Country'. Again, a love story. But an entirely new set of details was embedded in my skull from that reading, which is the danger that love poses against the expectations of society, and how difficult it is to love with your whole heart if you are afraid of the consequences of love. How distorted a person can become for not being able to love honestly and what a mockery of a society of lies one can make if one finds the courage to love honestly.

So when I got married a few years after having read Another Country, I was certain that the rest of James Baldwin would be teaching me something about black love and not revolution. I put down my Cornel West and my organic intellectual hat for the promise of sated wisdom, surrounded by the anti-revolution that is Baldwin's truth. In Baldwin I had found the understanding that it is through the courage to change that freedom is achieved.

And now it has come to today, when at the spur of the moment yesterday I decided to pick up and read 'The Fire Next Time'. As it is my intention to do a great deal more reading and a lot less interactive writing with the blogosophere, an overview of literature is in order. You see, my current byline on blackness (which is in the process of being reconstructed) is 'Why Do I Bother'? It's a very serious question and at bottom it is the question of whether or not it is interesting or necessary to be culturally black at this moment in American history. I think it is akin to asking the question of whether or not it is interesting or necessary to be Roman after the fall of Rome, or even today in modern Italy whether or not it is interesting to be Roman.

My preliminary answer is that I haven't found the right connections as of yet to know. Which means that I have to make better sense of Western Civilization. Which means I have a lot of reading to do, starting with Jacques Barzun and James Baldwin. What I expect to find are a few salient reasons to be black which I will share with an ever shrinking number of individuals in my generation, and a deeper insight into the principles which make The West what it has become. I will emerge with stronger connections to both which will perplex and astonish myself and my readers. Chances are that the blog will survive, but in a yet unknown third form. Most assuredly, I will emerge with a harder head, at least that is my hope.

This may very well be 'The End of My Blackness, Part 7', I've lost track of the number of times I've shed my skin. But at this moment the impetus is manifold. Most recently it was made more pressing by the reading of the intro to Montaign's Essays. You see, he began writing because he had lost his best friend. I continue to write because I have no best friend. The impetus began particularly in September of this year when I started writing something I still haven't finished called 'What It Feels Like to Become Unblack'. The import of that was basically a meditation on living in the American diaspora - something I share with my homies, growing up in the hood, moving somewhere to do college, moving somewhere else to do work, moving somewhere else to get married and have kids, moving somewhere else entirely as your family grows. For myself personally, I have probably lived about 7 places, and other than the home in which I lived until I was 19 or so, I've never stayed in one place for more than 5 years. What does that do to someone who is supposed to belong to a 'black community', is the substance of that still unfinished essay. There are only perceptions and articulations there at the moment, but not much speculation as to meaning. Because, after all, what is black?

What you can know is what it means to you and what it means to people who write about it, and one could do considerably worse than James Baldwin. But actually, that depends...

I'm not sure the blackness of James Baldwin holds up over time, and so I have to look deeper into Western Civilization, as I have said. We face enduring challenges and I desire to be on the proper side of it whether or not that side is identifiably black. In the end, it may only be identifiably Michael Bowen. If that is to be black then all audiences will have to compare my black diasporic experiences in America to those of Mr. Baldwin. And I can tell you straight away that as I read 'The Fire Next Time' I am awestruck by the contrasts.

I should not be so quick to dismiss this Baldwin as I am wont to do. After all, he wrote it in 1963, and there were fires the next time. I should move, and probably will, up to his last collection of essays and leave this older stuff alone. Completeness has its merits. Yet there is so much fear in his narrative that I am stunned. It has been so very long since I have experienced the head raising efforts of my own father to make me fearless that I forgot how crucial it was. Reading about Baldwin's Harlem, his church and the pimps and whores on his Avenue served to remind me what a distance has been traveled by the consciousness embedded in my family away from those elements of society that mash down the spirit.

Now I'm going to get some lunch and then finish reading the book today or tomorrow depending on what work I get done. But so far, I'm beginning to wonder what part of James Baldwin's literature isn't flavor.