what a little gem

I’m the kind of person who can take a lot of stress, you know, and I seem fine with big, important matters, for a long time, and then something stupid sets me off, and people wonder how that could get me in a lather. and that’s what this is. it’s just the last straw for all the recent days, is what.

right now, though, it seems like the author is a troll. (so I shouldn’t let it get to me, right?) if it is trolling, then I can almost understand Discover magazine running it, but then Utne picked it up too? if Utne thinks that is balance… I used to subscribe to them, years ago, but they’ve got way too much crap lately. they used to do a better job, I thought. maybe I was just even more naive…

science fiction is obsolete

really, the author amazes me. stereotype, stereotype, stereotype… I’m surprised he didn’t finish the article with a round of wedgies…

oh, haven’t you seen it? well, probably that’s for the better. I advise you to avert your eyes, in order to spare you.

this is a jock VS nerd fest. he uses dripping sarcasm throughout, with no professionalism at all, and this is supposed to be made okay by the few instances in which he turns the sarcasm inside-out (re Jules Verne and the launch of the Columbia)(and aren’t we so impressed that he knows Jules Verne’s middle name?). Fictional Reality indeed, the man lives in a world of stereotypes and indoctrination.

has the quality of science fiction gone down since Wells and Verne? well, sure… when you average all the science fiction works of the year together! when there was only Wells and Verne, both masters in their own way, of course the median standard of the genre was higher than now when we have all kinds of things being published under the scifi umbrella. god save us all; math, did we learn math in school? now if you compared the works of two current masterminds with that of Wells and Verne, I think you’ll find the quality to still be much the same.

not that Maddox would probably know; once he gets past Wells and Verne, he draws solely on… Michael Crichton for examples!

Would we even be bothered by the proliferation of surveillance cameras if we didn’t recognize the phenomenon as “Orwellian” and know, therefore, that it is bad? Probably, but I think you see my point.

ok, the point of all science fiction is not to predict the future, but apparently he has missed this. he thinks that because Wells did not “correctly” predict the future of the Soviet Union (????) 1984, that the work was a failure. did he get nothing of the essence at all?

and ARE WE any different than the citizens in 1984? examples abound, people, they truly do. they had a propoganda division called the Department of Truth. because it was called the Department of Truth, well, it must be telling the truth, right? we have legislation that undermines the human rights of Americans and non-citizens, and weakens the framework for promoting human rights internationally. but it’s called the Patriot Act, so, well, it must be a good, wholesome thing designed to protect the citizens as long as they are patriotic. and if you argue against it, you must be unpatriotic. and yet, I don’t see Bruno Maddox bothered by this at all…

For one, it was around that time, the mid-1990s, that fiction— all fiction —finally became obsolete as a delivery system for big ideas.

this is along the lines of: “Everything that can be invented has been invented.” Charles H. Duell, U.S. Commissioner of Patents, in 1899. it is as ridiculous and small-minded as almost anything I can think of, and I’d never be caught dead saying such a thing, much less attach my name to it and publish it across the country.

can you imagine anyone saying: Music is obsolete as a delivery system for big ideas. Art is obsolete as a delivery system for big ideas. ??? I hope not. and yet it’s the same stretch… how blatantly wrong and exacerbatingly ignorant can a person be?

Why would I spend my money on a book about amazing-but-fake technology when we’re only a few weeks away from Steve Jobs unveiling a cell phone that doubles as a jetpack and a travel iron?

yes, because scifi is just about predicting the future and blinding us all with technogadgetry.

the Utne article actually is shorter but has some different passages in it (?). among the first thing that upset me was his complaint that the convention was not being held in a futuristic pavillion, etc, etc, no; and he then went on to complain how the salsa was being served directly out of the jar… don’t think I am taking only those comments, but, to sum up, the whole mood behind it all made it clear that he honestly didn’t see the point of anything less than a phantasmagorical, materialistic, consumeristic display of wealth and priviledge and American-style corporate jet-setting… that anything less was a sign of failure. truly, he’s still entirely entrenched in the doctrines of the industrial revolution! the environment doesn’t matter, other cultures and people don’t matter, even the disadvantaged of one’s own culture don’t matter. that was the underlying vibe. plus an amazing misunderstanding of science itself and scientists as people…

this is exactly the type of mind that needs to be broadened by literature. the kind that eschews not only science fiction, but also fiction, and indeed even science itself. but he was never taught to appreciate it in school; and apparently there’s enough people all across the country to agree with him and give him an audience.

:\

ok I’m going to chuck e cheese now.
really I’m fine ;)

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The Hamlet, by William Faulkner. rating = 5

I could go on, maybe I shouldn't. really, the man did not win a Nobel prize for nothing. I'm sure you already know why I liked it :)

but I've got to share with you some of this absolutely magnificent description! wow, what descriptions!

41. The horse made one swirl, it looked round as a ball, without no more front or back end than a Irish potato.

105. It was a forensic face, the face of invincible conviction in the power of words as a principle worth dying for if necessary. A thousand years ago it would have been a monk's, a militant fanatic who would have turned his uncompromising back on the world with actual joy and gone to a desert and passed the rest of his days and nights calmly and without an instant's self-doubt battling, not to save humanity about which he would have cared nothing, for whose sufferings he would have had nothing but contempt, but with his own fierce and unappeasable natural appetites.

205. He was not wild, he was merely unbitted yet; not high-spirited so much as possessed fo that strong lust, not for life, not even for movement, but for that fetterless immobility called freedom.

211. Geography: that paucity of invention, that fatuous faith in the distance of man, who can invent no better means than geography for escaping; himself o fall, to whom, so he believed he believed, geography had never been merely something to walk upon but was the very medium which the fetterless to-and fro-going required to breathe in.
(I wonder what the atevi would make of that remark...)

231. For an instant he saw it, spinning slowly. Then it splashed, not sinking but disintegrating amoung that shattered scurring of broken stars.

277. The pear tree across the road opposite was now in full and frosty bloom, the twigs and branches springing not outward from the limbs but standing motionless and perpendicular above the horizontal boughs like the separate and upstreaming hair of a drowned woman sleeping upon the uttermost floor of the windless and tideless seas.

Ah, the South. the story? the story is of a small little crook in the road really, in Mississippi, right at about the time of the beginning of the Great Depression. not that anyone there knew it was the Great Depression; they were too poor to tell. When your entire worldly belongings consist of one set of clothes to a person, one set of mismatched shoes for five people to share, a pot, a brush with no handle, and a hammer head with no claw tails set upon a stick of firewood... yeah, well, Wallstreet is nothing but a name to you. literally ;)

there is not really a main main character, but ostensibly one could claim this is the chronicle of the origins of Flem Snopes, a crusty frog-like individual who raises himself from an incredibly impoverished and common enough beginning to the highest possible level in that society, by way of his own bootstraps and heartless, almost soulless, manipulation of other people and their expectations. since the trilogy is called the Snopes trilogy, and since the last scene of the book includes Flem and his new wife and child leaving to set up in Jefferson, I'm pretty sure I'm justified in saying so.

oh, and yes I did pick up the accent again just by reading the books. I found myself saying "Sholy" several times in the past week or so. although this is not as noticeable as when, after a long stint of Bronte, I was cut off in traffic and shouted, "dog in the manger". /embarrassed to death...

70. "Here. Bring me a piece of pie while I'm waiting."
"What kind of pie, Mr. Bookwright?" the counterman said.
"Eating pie," Bookwright said.

Arrow of God, by Chinua Achebe. rating: 5

right now I have a fever and all I can say is, Chinua Achebe is awesome. I’ve read three books by him (Things Fall Apart, Anthills of the Savannah, and Arrow of God) and they are all first-rate, #5, everyone should read these books.

repeating myself:

the man is amazingly talented with words, world-building, and characterization. he can be very economical in his writing, straight to the quick and every word, every image is exactly what is necessary to convey his meaning and carry the story. he can also be very philosophical and soul-searching, when his characters are and when the situation calls for it. his stories are very human and real--- there's no real heroes or villains or any "correct" viewpoints involved (though a character might think of his viewpoint as supreme) or preaching of a moral. you feel as if you know the people personally somehow, as if they are quite real, and correspondingly complicated without being constructedly so. you come to understand the world they populate in a short time, as if you've been there, as if you could put the book down and find yourself there.

amazingly talented.

Arrow of God is told primarily from the viewpoint of a chief priest of an Igbo village (Umuaro; several villages as one, really), but also from that of the British man on the spot and his subordinates. the reality each person experiences (not only each side- ie, white/black- but also, yes, each person) is very different, and yet as they interact more and come to their own (often bizarre yet predictable) understandings of each other, their realities began to converge. not that either side ever really fully and truly understands each other, but they go from being separate entities to sharing in a common future.

Achebe's thorough discussion of the events brings the reader to realize many aspects of life and truth in the story. for just one example,the book documents the disintegration of the traditional religion (again, not total disintegration, but the toppling from its dominance in the community and taking a diminished and quite secondary or even forgotten role) , and in a way that makes total sense in the context of that religion (and the accompanying culture). not just, the Christians came and the Christians shone their truth forth and yeah verily we all converted. no, we get the real, complicated story of how the priest and even the god itself misstepped and fell from power, with the white religion as a context, but not as the defining factor.

he's such an engaging writer. I actually picked this book up after I had already started The Hamlet (see next), and I couldn't put it down. even though I had already started in on William Faulkner! yes, if I may be so bold, I think Chinua Achebe is the William Faulkner of Nigeria. truly great, truly great.