First thing this morning I blasted "Germ Free Adolescents" and sang along at the top of my lungs about a billion times while doing dishes and getting some breadmaking started.
And shifting gears almost completely, I'm sure you all know that the great Delia Derbyshire was making music like this almost fifty years ago, right?
She also invented IDM as a throwaway at least twenty-five years early, if you weren't aware.
In other news, Wendy Carlos is, as I'm sure you know, a genius. Here she is doing some Morricone-spaghetti-western-sounding delay-soaked ambient electronic music:
And here, from music she made for The Shining, a little over thirty years ago now, that Kubrick ended up not using, a track that would be called "hauntology" and be released on Ghost Box Records if it came out now:
Since I keep mentioning when these tracks were made, I should probably get around to writing that post on chronology and novelty that I keep meaning to write, but who knows if that'll ever happen.
Friday, June 24, 2011
Thursday, June 23, 2011
maclises
"you are not limited to one room - there are many rooms." - angus maclise from Astral Collapse
what angus maclise gave form to – in sound, in symbols, in living – is a departure. it stands outside in its strangeness, full of reflective creation. i know so little of what he did, but what i have been exposed to makes me happy. it’s a lens for me - one of many i’ve happened across recently, all important nonetheless. to me, it doesn’t impose a mode of life. it suggests one with many faces. like a diamond, residing among others, in the many rooms of being.
for those of you who don’t know of maclise, check out this blastitude article on him.
related - i only just came across the equally wonderful hetty maclise's old site. only skimmed it, but thought i'd pass it along: http://www.phantomlyoracula.com/
what angus maclise gave form to – in sound, in symbols, in living – is a departure. it stands outside in its strangeness, full of reflective creation. i know so little of what he did, but what i have been exposed to makes me happy. it’s a lens for me - one of many i’ve happened across recently, all important nonetheless. to me, it doesn’t impose a mode of life. it suggests one with many faces. like a diamond, residing among others, in the many rooms of being.
for those of you who don’t know of maclise, check out this blastitude article on him.
related - i only just came across the equally wonderful hetty maclise's old site. only skimmed it, but thought i'd pass it along: http://www.phantomlyoracula.com/
Wednesday, June 22, 2011
Unusual Event followup
In comments on my post about floodwaters around nuclear power plants in Nebraska, respjrat had this to say. You should read it:
So, this situation might not (yet!!!) be as dramatic as the one at Fukushima*, but to me I think it's an even better indicator of the astonishing stupidity of civilization. Fukushima was merely the astonishingly stupid placing of an unimaginably deadly technology directly in the known vicinity of frequent unpredictable natural disasters. But the situation in Nebraska is much more than that--it's so complicatedly stupid that I'm going to have to abandon the parallel structure I was going to use and say: it's going into an area which naturally has regular flooding--which we call a disaster, which the river calls life--and littering it with incredibly destructive technologies which in addition to the destruction they cause on their own also change the natural pulsation of the river into an unpredictable chaos of disastrous flooding, mismanaging this already unmanageable system, and then placing an unimaginably deadly technology directly in the vicinity of these human-made disasters.
*Which, you know, just incidentally, a "former nuclear industry vice president" described the other day as "the biggest industrial catastrophe in the history of mankind." Which if you even just consider only the extremely recent competition is saying a fucking lot.
As respjrat says, the waters rising another forty feet seems inconceivable. But what seemed inconceivable has happened before--indeed, is happening right now--and even so, those forty feet are only necessary if everything we've been told is true. Which it always is, right? I'd bank on it!
Meanwhile, back at the comment thread, an Anonymous left two CommonDreams links, first to an article about tritium leaks at nuclear plants around the US, and second to a video from Russia Today about Fort Calhoun specifically (I unfortunately don't have a transcript for it). Gratitude to you as well, Anonymous.
The article is terrifying, but routinely so:
Then there's the video. The anchor, whose name I don't know, sensibly points out that in the wake of the Fukushima disaster all the trusted experts said everything was fine, so even if we don't reflexively distrust the trusted experts, maybe we should be a bit suspicious when they say the same thing now about Fort Calhoun. She also mentions the terrifying fact that there is an "ongoing no-fly zone" in the area, supposedly having nothing at all to do with the plant, but, uh, well, what does it have to do with then? It seems like a bad idea to impose a no-fly zone over a flooded disaster area, no? And that's just the prelude to the rest of the video, which admittedly is speculation--but speculation is the only thing we have open to us, because as Tyson Slocum, the interviewee (director of the "Public Citizen's Energy Program" which I admit I know nothing about), points out,
Of course, you and I have a slightly different perspective on what this secrecy is "designed" for. Terrorism never stops being useful, ever.
So anyway, there's a lot of talk about working with congress (ha!) and more "cost-effective" renewable energy (ha!), but one valuable point they bring up is that even the insane evil geniuses who built these damn horrible things in the first place thought they would become dangerously in need of repair or replacement about....ten years ago.
Ha ha ha!
I guess really my summation of this whole thing is that no matter what level you look at any of this at, the whole situation is fucked. It's fucked when you look at the whole damn system of civilization, it's fucked when you look at individual pieces of it, and it's even fucked when you use the fucked assumptions of civilization to examine little bits of the ways that it's fucked.
i'm a resident of the omaha metro area. there are two nuclear power plants along the river being affected by the flood waters.Much gratitude to you, respjrat, for providing some essential, local information. Very glad to hear you have supplies and plans.
the fort calhoun plant, twenty miles north of omaha is in cold shutdown. an assessment last year concluded that it was at risk being compromised in a worst-case flooding event (the flood in 1993 was supposed to have been a thousand-year flood and it pales in comparison to what we're seeing now). apparently "corrective measures" have been implemented as of early 2011.
pulling from wiki some more "The Army Corps of Engineers indicated that with average precipitation, the Missouri River would not go above 1,008 feet (307 m) above sea level and OPPD officials stated that the current flood protection efforts would protect the plant to 1,010–1,012 feet (310–308 m) feet above sea level. Officials indicated the spent fuel pool is at 1,038.5 feet (316.5 m) above sea level." their precipitation models in relation to determining the release of waters from reservoirs upstream account for an inch of precipitation a week. we've had two nights of thunderstorms, blessedly short-lived, back-to-back. this week's forecast shows rain for four of the next 6 days. all rain that falls in the region is going to drain into the missouri.
since it's in cold shutdown, the spent fuel pool is the biggest concern. thankfully it is not fukushima-style and is elevated and not on the ground level, and the flood waters rising nearly 40ft is inconceivable. but then there's fun snippets like this.
[june 9th] "A fire in an electrical switch room on Tuesday briefly knocked out cooling for a pool holding spent nuclear fuel at the Fort Calhoun nuclear plant outside Omaha, Neb., plant officials said."
http://planetsave.com/2011/06/19/electrical-fire-knocks-out-spent-fuel-cooling-pool-at-nebraska-nuclear-plant/
the fire extinguishing systems apparently took care of it before the cooling pool water could rise more than two degrees, but it does not fill me with confidence that random fires can break out in the spent fuel pool at ft. calhoun. and by the way, ft. calhoun is where the spent fuel for all of nebraska's nuclear power plants is stockpiled.
the official word is that there is little to no risk of an event. anyone who reads blog like this would obviously be skeptical of such statements. keep in mind, this entire flood is more or less man-made. we have not seen particularly heavy rains this season (in fact up until this week it's been pretty dry). all of the water is coming from releases from reservoirs upstream, reservoirs that were well over normal capacity as far back as december. however, the large controlled releases started less than a month ago. for me it stands to reason that if you've got a lot of fucking extra water, you might wanna, you know, let it go? maybe not wait six months?
i've got pottasium iodide, an escape route the fuck out of here that doesn't include the only interstate still open (between I-80 and I-29, only I-80 is open), and i'm sure as fuck not drinking the water.
So, this situation might not (yet!!!) be as dramatic as the one at Fukushima*, but to me I think it's an even better indicator of the astonishing stupidity of civilization. Fukushima was merely the astonishingly stupid placing of an unimaginably deadly technology directly in the known vicinity of frequent unpredictable natural disasters. But the situation in Nebraska is much more than that--it's so complicatedly stupid that I'm going to have to abandon the parallel structure I was going to use and say: it's going into an area which naturally has regular flooding--which we call a disaster, which the river calls life--and littering it with incredibly destructive technologies which in addition to the destruction they cause on their own also change the natural pulsation of the river into an unpredictable chaos of disastrous flooding, mismanaging this already unmanageable system, and then placing an unimaginably deadly technology directly in the vicinity of these human-made disasters.
*Which, you know, just incidentally, a "former nuclear industry vice president" described the other day as "the biggest industrial catastrophe in the history of mankind." Which if you even just consider only the extremely recent competition is saying a fucking lot.
As respjrat says, the waters rising another forty feet seems inconceivable. But what seemed inconceivable has happened before--indeed, is happening right now--and even so, those forty feet are only necessary if everything we've been told is true. Which it always is, right? I'd bank on it!
Meanwhile, back at the comment thread, an Anonymous left two CommonDreams links, first to an article about tritium leaks at nuclear plants around the US, and second to a video from Russia Today about Fort Calhoun specifically (I unfortunately don't have a transcript for it). Gratitude to you as well, Anonymous.
The article is terrifying, but routinely so:
Radioactive tritium has leaked from three-quarters of U.S. commercial nuclear power sites, often into groundwater from corroded, buried piping, an Associated Press investigation shows.As I said to the Baronette the other day while we put on some sunblock that most likely had nanotechnology with unknown human-body repercussions in it, "Everything in the world we've made for ourselves causes cancer. What's one more thing?" Ha ha!
The number and severity of the leaks has been escalating, even as federal regulators extend the licenses of more and more reactors across the nation.
Then there's the video. The anchor, whose name I don't know, sensibly points out that in the wake of the Fukushima disaster all the trusted experts said everything was fine, so even if we don't reflexively distrust the trusted experts, maybe we should be a bit suspicious when they say the same thing now about Fort Calhoun. She also mentions the terrifying fact that there is an "ongoing no-fly zone" in the area, supposedly having nothing at all to do with the plant, but, uh, well, what does it have to do with then? It seems like a bad idea to impose a no-fly zone over a flooded disaster area, no? And that's just the prelude to the rest of the video, which admittedly is speculation--but speculation is the only thing we have open to us, because as Tyson Slocum, the interviewee (director of the "Public Citizen's Energy Program" which I admit I know nothing about), points out,
The bottom line here is that the lack of public information about our nuclear power plants, particularly after September 11, 2001, it was designed to keep critical information about vulnerable energy infrastructure like nuclear power plants away from terrorism, but what it's done is keep this critical information away from us.(Apply sics as necessary; he was speaking extemporaneously and wasn't on one of the mainstream news networks, so he most likely wasn't groomed for television appearances from birth.)
Of course, you and I have a slightly different perspective on what this secrecy is "designed" for. Terrorism never stops being useful, ever.
So anyway, there's a lot of talk about working with congress (ha!) and more "cost-effective" renewable energy (ha!), but one valuable point they bring up is that even the insane evil geniuses who built these damn horrible things in the first place thought they would become dangerously in need of repair or replacement about....ten years ago.
Ha ha ha!
I guess really my summation of this whole thing is that no matter what level you look at any of this at, the whole situation is fucked. It's fucked when you look at the whole damn system of civilization, it's fucked when you look at individual pieces of it, and it's even fucked when you use the fucked assumptions of civilization to examine little bits of the ways that it's fucked.
Tuesday, June 21, 2011
Thoughts inspired by recent reading
The widespread, largely unexamined*, notion that witch trials were (and continue to be) the products of "mass hysteria" is both a convenient bit of patriarchal propaganda and an utterly perverse choice of words.
The notion, again unexamined*, that at least I had about medieval and later religious persecution (the Inquisitions, etc.), i.e. that it was solely related to dogmatic issues, is another convenient piece of propaganda. The heretics didn't just differ over religious dogma; they were political and social radicals, and were persecuted as such.
The idea of "progress" is even more fucked than I thought it was. There might be more on this in upcoming posts, but if you look at the state of any political, social, and/or economic struggle at, say, two hundred year intervals for the past thousand years, the nature and site of the struggle will change, to be sure, but there is no sign whatsoever of anything approaching linear progress; some things will be "better," some "worse," for whatever definition of those words from whatever perspective, but the overall narrative is not one of progression; rather, it is one of oppression, revolution, and counterrevolution.
Power is very good at sowing the seeds of its own destruction, but I sure wish it was better at reaping that particular crop.
*By I think most people, myself included.
The notion, again unexamined*, that at least I had about medieval and later religious persecution (the Inquisitions, etc.), i.e. that it was solely related to dogmatic issues, is another convenient piece of propaganda. The heretics didn't just differ over religious dogma; they were political and social radicals, and were persecuted as such.
The idea of "progress" is even more fucked than I thought it was. There might be more on this in upcoming posts, but if you look at the state of any political, social, and/or economic struggle at, say, two hundred year intervals for the past thousand years, the nature and site of the struggle will change, to be sure, but there is no sign whatsoever of anything approaching linear progress; some things will be "better," some "worse," for whatever definition of those words from whatever perspective, but the overall narrative is not one of progression; rather, it is one of oppression, revolution, and counterrevolution.
Power is very good at sowing the seeds of its own destruction, but I sure wish it was better at reaping that particular crop.
*By I think most people, myself included.
Monday, June 20, 2011
Don't vote
Stan at Feral Scholar has written an excellent piece, the most comprehensive argument for abandoning the vote that I've ever seen. Everything that took me years of reading and thinking to figure out is right here. Funny how obvious it all seems now.
I kind of want to print copies of that piece off by the thousands and leaflet my neighborhood before every election. We should all do it! I mean, I can't imagine it would hurt much more than not doing it.
I kind of want to print copies of that piece off by the thousands and leaflet my neighborhood before every election. We should all do it! I mean, I can't imagine it would hurt much more than not doing it.
Commonplace digest 2
More links to nice quotes!
William S. Burroughs, from Naked Lunch, on a campaign of bureaucratic demoralization, on the nature of democracy (and, surprisingly, being genuinely funny while referencing both monkeys and pirates), and on, well, everything, sort of.
Susan Sontag, from On Photography, on photography. Ha ha! On cameras as both mediation and work-mimics, and as stand-ins for guns in our relationship with capital-N Nature. On the uses of photography in bureaucratic systems of control. On the endless co-optability of photography. And on the bureaucratic uses of photography again, but with more of a focus on capitalism and consumption.
Raoul Vaneigem, writing A Cavalier History of Surrealism as Jules-François Dupuis, on imperialism, nationalism, artists, and intellectuals and on the phases of the decline of art (and where it should be going).
Robert Sheckley, from Immortality Inc., first gives us a long, sometimes awesome, sometimes misguided (and I think that's on purpose), always interesting, revolutionary speech of the future, then puts life in its proper perspective.
Étienne de la Boétie, from "The Politics of Obedience: The Discourse of Voluntary Servitude," on situational leadership and how it should never be allowed to be permanent. On complicity. On bread and circus and how that bread is really just the partial return to its rightful owners of what has been stolen. On the use by rulers of pretty words to cover up ugly deeds. On delegation and bureaucracy. On the increase, rather than decrease, of servitude as you move higher up the hierarchy and get closer to the ruler. And on how true friendship is inaccessible to rulers. Unfortunately most of de la Boétie's humor, which is really fantastic, is too much of a slow-burn to really come across in those quotes; the essay's definitely worth a read; it's short and easily accessible in many places online--here, for example.
Still more to come.
William S. Burroughs, from Naked Lunch, on a campaign of bureaucratic demoralization, on the nature of democracy (and, surprisingly, being genuinely funny while referencing both monkeys and pirates), and on, well, everything, sort of.
Susan Sontag, from On Photography, on photography. Ha ha! On cameras as both mediation and work-mimics, and as stand-ins for guns in our relationship with capital-N Nature. On the uses of photography in bureaucratic systems of control. On the endless co-optability of photography. And on the bureaucratic uses of photography again, but with more of a focus on capitalism and consumption.
Raoul Vaneigem, writing A Cavalier History of Surrealism as Jules-François Dupuis, on imperialism, nationalism, artists, and intellectuals and on the phases of the decline of art (and where it should be going).
Robert Sheckley, from Immortality Inc., first gives us a long, sometimes awesome, sometimes misguided (and I think that's on purpose), always interesting, revolutionary speech of the future, then puts life in its proper perspective.
Étienne de la Boétie, from "The Politics of Obedience: The Discourse of Voluntary Servitude," on situational leadership and how it should never be allowed to be permanent. On complicity. On bread and circus and how that bread is really just the partial return to its rightful owners of what has been stolen. On the use by rulers of pretty words to cover up ugly deeds. On delegation and bureaucracy. On the increase, rather than decrease, of servitude as you move higher up the hierarchy and get closer to the ruler. And on how true friendship is inaccessible to rulers. Unfortunately most of de la Boétie's humor, which is really fantastic, is too much of a slow-burn to really come across in those quotes; the essay's definitely worth a read; it's short and easily accessible in many places online--here, for example.
Still more to come.
Sunday, June 19, 2011
Notification of Unusual Event
My brother sends me news of nuclear power plants in Nebraska with flood waters rising towards them. Very little coverage out there. Luckily, the Nebraska City News Press story I found says that "There is no threat to plant employees or to the public; the plant continues to operate safely. Appropriate local, county, state, and federal agencies were also notified." It's so self-evident that no source, confirmation, or investigation is needed! Why, we don't even need to know which local, county, state, and federal agencies are appropriate.
You know what this calls for? More nuclear power plants.
I just can't wait until we all relax and stop feeling the need to call flood water creating the risk or actuality of nuclear disaster an "unusual event."
BY THE WAY: Good timing on this one: DeAnander's excellent response to the argument that the nuclear "fail rate" ain't half bad.
You know what this calls for? More nuclear power plants.
I just can't wait until we all relax and stop feeling the need to call flood water creating the risk or actuality of nuclear disaster an "unusual event."
BY THE WAY: Good timing on this one: DeAnander's excellent response to the argument that the nuclear "fail rate" ain't half bad.
Friday, June 17, 2011
Arrgh
Wonderful!
But arrgh:
Fuck "legal issues."
In other "I should just learn Polish" news, can someone please just go ahead and translate The Lunar Trilogy into English, for the love of whatever?
The first ever direct translation into English of the Polish science fiction author Stanislaw Lem's most famous novel, Solaris, has just been published, removing a raft of unnecessary changes and restoring the text much closer to its original state.Solaris is one of my favorite novels, despite the fact that the only version of it that I've ever been able to read is a translation of the Polish original by way of a reputedly shitty French translation (why master Lem translator Michael Kandel never got a crack at it, I don't know). So this is exciting news!
But arrgh:
It has just been published as an audiobook download by Audible, narrated by Battlestar Galactica's Alessandro Juliani, with an ebook to follow in six months' time. Lem's heirs are hoping to overcome legal issues to release it as a print edition as well.I can't do audiobooks (and wouldn't want to hear Alessandro Juliani's smarmy face reading me fucking Solaris anyway), and would either have to sit at my computer or print out a ream of paper to read the damn ebook.
Fuck "legal issues."
In other "I should just learn Polish" news, can someone please just go ahead and translate The Lunar Trilogy into English, for the love of whatever?
Tuesday, June 14, 2011
Commonplace digest 1
While I was on hiatus I continued posting quotes from books I was reading onto my commonplace blog. Gonna start working on getting them crossed over here, because for some reason I feel like I have to. But there's a massive bunch of them, and I don't want to clog things up, so I'm posting them digested, with links to the original posts.
A.E. van Vogt, from The World of Null-A, on fear and death and on the callousness of legislating acts of war.
William S. Burroughs, from "Proclaim Present Time Over," the nifty, semi-meaningful fragment "concealed wheels spin the world."
Thomas Pynchon, a whole bunch from Gravity's Rainbow. On the banality of evil. On the numbness of repeated trauma and its function of removing us from love. On buying and selling being the real business of war. On fiction and reality, as well as rationality and humanity. On the gleeful brutality of empire. On motherhood in a hierarchy. The Proverbs for Paranoids. On progress as the erosion of freedom as well as that freedom being based upon the erosion of someone else's freedom in the first place. On ghosts, and the rage of the rescued. On the gleeful brutality of empire, again. On the interference patterns of two paranoias. On the scientific violence of civilization. On anthropomorphized Technology itself running things, and the truth and falsehood of this premise. On the gleeful brutality of cops and their opportunism in engaging in it. On ideological interpretations of scientific fact. On a society of trained dogs as a metaphor for guess-what. On the real, eternal War. And on the Man's branch office in our heads.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman, from "The Yellow Wallpaper," on one person's rationalism thinking it trumps someone else's lived experience.
The great Shirley Jackson, from "Pillar of Salt," on the runaway but still somehow willful progression to destruction.
Flann O'Brien, from The Third Policeman, on what might be behind the mask and on our limits on truth.
That's probably enough for now. More to come at some point, though of course if you feel like it you can just go there and look at what I've posted since then.
A.E. van Vogt, from The World of Null-A, on fear and death and on the callousness of legislating acts of war.
William S. Burroughs, from "Proclaim Present Time Over," the nifty, semi-meaningful fragment "concealed wheels spin the world."
Thomas Pynchon, a whole bunch from Gravity's Rainbow. On the banality of evil. On the numbness of repeated trauma and its function of removing us from love. On buying and selling being the real business of war. On fiction and reality, as well as rationality and humanity. On the gleeful brutality of empire. On motherhood in a hierarchy. The Proverbs for Paranoids. On progress as the erosion of freedom as well as that freedom being based upon the erosion of someone else's freedom in the first place. On ghosts, and the rage of the rescued. On the gleeful brutality of empire, again. On the interference patterns of two paranoias. On the scientific violence of civilization. On anthropomorphized Technology itself running things, and the truth and falsehood of this premise. On the gleeful brutality of cops and their opportunism in engaging in it. On ideological interpretations of scientific fact. On a society of trained dogs as a metaphor for guess-what. On the real, eternal War. And on the Man's branch office in our heads.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman, from "The Yellow Wallpaper," on one person's rationalism thinking it trumps someone else's lived experience.
The great Shirley Jackson, from "Pillar of Salt," on the runaway but still somehow willful progression to destruction.
Flann O'Brien, from The Third Policeman, on what might be behind the mask and on our limits on truth.
That's probably enough for now. More to come at some point, though of course if you feel like it you can just go there and look at what I've posted since then.
Sunday, June 12, 2011
Woo hoo!
(photo by The Baronette)
We vacuumed today, and not only did Boorman not hide right away, he also came out of hiding pretty much the instant we put the vacuum away. Now he's taking a nap with the Baronette. Last night we were watching a movie and he curled up in an unbelievably tiny space between us and slept happily. He loves it here.
In other news, anybody who uses Blogger--have you been getting "Service unavailable" 503 errors every five seconds for the past several weeks? Cuz I have.
Friday, June 10, 2011
Fences in context(s)
A neighborhood with one fence, that fence looks, seems, and is ridiculous. A neighborhood where fences are the norm, you've got one whether you want one or not.
* * * * * * * * * * * *
As a friend said to us, borders are an act of war.
* * * * * * * * * * * *
As a friend said to us, borders are an act of war.
Thoughts on We Who Are About To...
Well, it's five and a half weeks later and I'm finally starting my Joanna Russ-a-thon. I decided to start with a re-read, not of The Female Man as I originally planned to do first, but of We Who Are About To..., which I originally said I had read recently but which I realized I actually had read at least four years ago. In my own personal timeline, that's essentially forever. This book needed to be reread.
For those unfamiliar, the concept of the novel is rooted in (but not remotely limited by) a response to two (related) clichés of primarily pre-New Wave science fiction: first, what Kurt Vonnegut (as quoted by Samuel R. Delany in his introduction to my edition) called "the impossibly generous universe," i.e. a fucking spaceship fucking crashes on, out of all the infinite near-emptiness of the universe, a planet that just happens to be inhabitable, and everyone survives to have adventures; and second (and it sure ain't just sci-fi that's guilty of this one), the story (Delany mentions Tom Godwin's "The Cold Equations," but there are horrifyingly many others) in which a woman or women must be convinced to sacrifice herself or themselves for the survival of a man or men*. Where these overlap are the dozens and dozens and hundreds of stories about people crashing on an inhabitable planet and, for some hideous reason, finding it essential that they immediately begin to reproduce, populate the planet, conquer it! How the women feel about all this childbirth is, of course, not typically addressed--and when it is, there's usually a lot of simpering and delight and maternal instincts going on.
*Yes, that sentence has five sets of parentheses in it.
So Russ gives us the mixed-gender survivors of a wrecked spaceship. She even concedes to convention and throws them onto an inhabitable--or survivable, at least--planet (though as the narrator likes to point out, there are plenty of places even on friendly old Earth that will kill you in hours or minutes). But what happens there is struggle, not adventure, and when the talk of breeding starts up the already-anxious narrator gets frantic.
The book is sometimes compared to Lord of the Flies (e.g. Delany in his introduction calls it LotF's "guilty conscience" in part for being primarily about adults rather than children), but the comparison strikes me as inaccurate. (Though please note my only experience with Golding's book is of having hated it in 10th grade, so it could be that my memory and understanding of it are skewed*). My understanding of LotF is that the big Theme is that whole stupid thing of the thin veneer of Civilization, that we all are but one step from savagery, etc forever. Not so with Russ. Here, the problem is not the loss of civilization (though that is touched upon with Alan-Bobby's realization that, hey, there are no laws here, and hey, I'm the strongest person around), but rather its retention. The survivors don't waste much time thinking about simple survival before they start thinking about colonization--settling the wilderness, civilizing it and themselves. They get to work building a house (the narrator, sensibly, finds herself a decent cave), they form schedules and arrangements for reproducing ("the great womb robbery"). And more than that: these people, by and large, are not physically suited for this--they have the ailments and weaknesses and allergies that come with civilization and, as the narrator points out, "humanity had not exactly been breeding for survival for the past hundred years." Most telling of all is how quickly the two bureaucrats of the group begin facilitating themselves into leadership.
*And talking about high school English classes reminds me of all those facile constructions they taught us (or me at least)...10th grade was all about "man's inhumanity to man"--"The theme is man's inhumanity to man," my teacher would say almost every day, about every text--and the different types of conflict, "man vs. man" and "man vs. nature" and all those. Woman, of course, is assumed inhuman, to have no conflicts worth mentioning.
When I first read the book, I recognized its brilliance but found it frustrating and impossible (much the same words men have used to describe smart women for time out of mind); I kept wanting to shape its narrator, who I did sympathize with (to a point, oy, not realizing that my sympathy is entirely beside the point), into, and I hate to reveal that I thought this, someone more...rational. Someone more willing to (yeesh) compromise. More than that, I wanted to shape Russ's work into a simpler, more pleasant story of female solidarity. This was what I had expected to encounter, what I was prepared to understand and accept, so when faced with this difficult, bleak story of a difficult, bleak woman in a difficult, bleak situation, my mind rebelled, kept trying to convince me that I was seeing a differently shaped story, kept trying to force Russ into the pattern I wanted for her--my own little bit of patriarchal behavior, there. Feminism's all well and good, dear, but why can't you be nicer?
It actually astonished me how little I had gotten out of the book that first time, relative to what it has to offer--especially considering how much I did manage to get, back then.
I have seen several writers say that We Who Are About To... is about how to die, and how to live, and this is true--very true. But it is just as much about the right to say no--not just in terms of sex, or reproduction, but to anything and everything that you want to say no to, to everything that needs saying no to--or even to things that you just don't feel like saying "yes" to right now, for no good reason. It's about the right to not agree, to walk away from your society, and your culture, and your existence--and about the impossibility of exercising that right even at the most extreme remove imaginable from all these things.
When the other survivors discover that the narrator is a member of a small but well-known and much ridiculed religious group (a syncretic thing we later discover she may have played a part in creating), they taunt her; that and other of her views, such as her Communism, allow the others to safely disregard everything she has to say about their situation. One of the other survivors, the ostentatiously rich Mrs. Graham (who refuses, with the complicity of the others for a time, to acknowledge that she is no longer rich in any meaningful sense), mockingly asks how the narrator can reconcile her religion and her politics. She responds that her religion
Towards the end, the narrator--who has (as she says several times, Oh yeah, I forgot to tell you...) by the time of the crash become a lecturer in Renaissance and baroque music--semi-hallucinating, semi-remembering, hears music from everywhere and just throws in this gorgeously accurate description:
For those unfamiliar, the concept of the novel is rooted in (but not remotely limited by) a response to two (related) clichés of primarily pre-New Wave science fiction: first, what Kurt Vonnegut (as quoted by Samuel R. Delany in his introduction to my edition) called "the impossibly generous universe," i.e. a fucking spaceship fucking crashes on, out of all the infinite near-emptiness of the universe, a planet that just happens to be inhabitable, and everyone survives to have adventures; and second (and it sure ain't just sci-fi that's guilty of this one), the story (Delany mentions Tom Godwin's "The Cold Equations," but there are horrifyingly many others) in which a woman or women must be convinced to sacrifice herself or themselves for the survival of a man or men*. Where these overlap are the dozens and dozens and hundreds of stories about people crashing on an inhabitable planet and, for some hideous reason, finding it essential that they immediately begin to reproduce, populate the planet, conquer it! How the women feel about all this childbirth is, of course, not typically addressed--and when it is, there's usually a lot of simpering and delight and maternal instincts going on.
*Yes, that sentence has five sets of parentheses in it.
So Russ gives us the mixed-gender survivors of a wrecked spaceship. She even concedes to convention and throws them onto an inhabitable--or survivable, at least--planet (though as the narrator likes to point out, there are plenty of places even on friendly old Earth that will kill you in hours or minutes). But what happens there is struggle, not adventure, and when the talk of breeding starts up the already-anxious narrator gets frantic.
The book is sometimes compared to Lord of the Flies (e.g. Delany in his introduction calls it LotF's "guilty conscience" in part for being primarily about adults rather than children), but the comparison strikes me as inaccurate. (Though please note my only experience with Golding's book is of having hated it in 10th grade, so it could be that my memory and understanding of it are skewed*). My understanding of LotF is that the big Theme is that whole stupid thing of the thin veneer of Civilization, that we all are but one step from savagery, etc forever. Not so with Russ. Here, the problem is not the loss of civilization (though that is touched upon with Alan-Bobby's realization that, hey, there are no laws here, and hey, I'm the strongest person around), but rather its retention. The survivors don't waste much time thinking about simple survival before they start thinking about colonization--settling the wilderness, civilizing it and themselves. They get to work building a house (the narrator, sensibly, finds herself a decent cave), they form schedules and arrangements for reproducing ("the great womb robbery"). And more than that: these people, by and large, are not physically suited for this--they have the ailments and weaknesses and allergies that come with civilization and, as the narrator points out, "humanity had not exactly been breeding for survival for the past hundred years." Most telling of all is how quickly the two bureaucrats of the group begin facilitating themselves into leadership.
*And talking about high school English classes reminds me of all those facile constructions they taught us (or me at least)...10th grade was all about "man's inhumanity to man"--"The theme is man's inhumanity to man," my teacher would say almost every day, about every text--and the different types of conflict, "man vs. man" and "man vs. nature" and all those. Woman, of course, is assumed inhuman, to have no conflicts worth mentioning.
When I first read the book, I recognized its brilliance but found it frustrating and impossible (much the same words men have used to describe smart women for time out of mind); I kept wanting to shape its narrator, who I did sympathize with (to a point, oy, not realizing that my sympathy is entirely beside the point), into, and I hate to reveal that I thought this, someone more...rational. Someone more willing to (yeesh) compromise. More than that, I wanted to shape Russ's work into a simpler, more pleasant story of female solidarity. This was what I had expected to encounter, what I was prepared to understand and accept, so when faced with this difficult, bleak story of a difficult, bleak woman in a difficult, bleak situation, my mind rebelled, kept trying to convince me that I was seeing a differently shaped story, kept trying to force Russ into the pattern I wanted for her--my own little bit of patriarchal behavior, there. Feminism's all well and good, dear, but why can't you be nicer?
It actually astonished me how little I had gotten out of the book that first time, relative to what it has to offer--especially considering how much I did manage to get, back then.
I have seen several writers say that We Who Are About To... is about how to die, and how to live, and this is true--very true. But it is just as much about the right to say no--not just in terms of sex, or reproduction, but to anything and everything that you want to say no to, to everything that needs saying no to--or even to things that you just don't feel like saying "yes" to right now, for no good reason. It's about the right to not agree, to walk away from your society, and your culture, and your existence--and about the impossibility of exercising that right even at the most extreme remove imaginable from all these things.
When the other survivors discover that the narrator is a member of a small but well-known and much ridiculed religious group (a syncretic thing we later discover she may have played a part in creating), they taunt her; that and other of her views, such as her Communism, allow the others to safely disregard everything she has to say about their situation. One of the other survivors, the ostentatiously rich Mrs. Graham (who refuses, with the complicity of the others for a time, to acknowledge that she is no longer rich in any meaningful sense), mockingly asks how the narrator can reconcile her religion and her politics. She responds that her religion
"...is no bar to being a Communist. Which I was."Interestingly, in her narration just two pages earlier, she had referred casually to one of the other women--one who, much later, she will describe as "The only one I liked"--as "frigid."
"You're not one any longer?" she said.
"Mrs. Gee," I said, "none of us is anything any longer."
"Frigid little woman," she said, stepping back. I said, "Oh, call me a salad, why don't you, that makes as much sense."
Towards the end, the narrator--who has (as she says several times, Oh yeah, I forgot to tell you...) by the time of the crash become a lecturer in Renaissance and baroque music--semi-hallucinating, semi-remembering, hears music from everywhere and just throws in this gorgeously accurate description:
And they played and they sang and I wept, everything I ever knew, for Baroque music is keyed into Isaac Newton's kind of time; it's the energy of that new explosion of philosophic time: perspective, mathematics, instant velocity, the great clock, the great wheel, harmonies, the Great Godly Grid.She goes on to compare music post-Stravinsky to Einstein and relativity, unhappily ("it makes my head ache, referring to things in all dimensions and sometimes backwards"), and it's lovely musicology, but it's also, no matter how much the narrator might not want it to be, a reminder that everything is, in fact, relative, that the music we play and the religion we follow and the way society treats us and the way we treat others are all relative to the assumptions of the prevailing culture, even and especially when that culture goes away, because at this point there's nothing else left to us.
Thursday, June 9, 2011
Critical Free School
Via Mel, this could be interesting--the Critical Free School, an "an online, radical free school." Looks like there's not a huge amount there quite yet, but what is there looks exciting, and looks set to expand.
Tuesday, June 7, 2011
Men in power
So, Anthony Weiner, blah blah etc.
But also:
I mean, I need no specific, situational evidence to know, or at least strongly suspect, that any person in a position of power--any politician, any cop--is a huge fucking asshole. And I need no specific, situational evidence to know, or at least strongly suspect, that that assholery will extend both to those these people know personally and to all the nameless and faceless they affect with their actions as people in power. And, god, make that person a man, and give them power over women, and fucking watch out, here comes an asshole.
I'm betting ten times out of ten it's true.
But also:
Does a woman who claims to have been raped ask for a female detective? That’s taken as a sign of possible deception. “I am betting nine out of 10 times, when a woman asks for a female detective the story is going to be untrue,” says [commander of the Manhattan Special Victims Squad Lt. Adam] Lamboy. The operative theory is that women who are lying think female cops will be more receptive to their stories.(via)
I mean, I need no specific, situational evidence to know, or at least strongly suspect, that any person in a position of power--any politician, any cop--is a huge fucking asshole. And I need no specific, situational evidence to know, or at least strongly suspect, that that assholery will extend both to those these people know personally and to all the nameless and faceless they affect with their actions as people in power. And, god, make that person a man, and give them power over women, and fucking watch out, here comes an asshole.
I'm betting ten times out of ten it's true.
Friday, June 3, 2011
FYI
In case you were wondering, Isaac Asimov:
I thought maybe you could do that with human beings too. You could tell what huge masses of human beings would do, provided they didn't know what the predictions were so they couldn't distort their own behaviour, and provided you had a large enough number, and I felt that with the galactic empire you'd have a large enough number. I don't really believe it's going to work, but it made a good background for the stories, and I was always able to use my "psychohistory" to show how things became inevitable, economically or sociologically and so on. It made for interesting historical novels.....was much smarter--and vastly more humane--than Paul Krugman:
Not only are there not enough people, but actually their behaviour is far too complicated. They're not like individual molecules. Molecules have limited modes of behaviour and human beings are far less limited, so that human history is more chaotic. In fact, so chaotic that it probably can never be predicted, and in my later Foundation novels I dragged this in. But of course when I first started I didn't know anything about this new theory of chaos.
It is one of the few science fiction series that deals with social scientists—the “psychohistorians,” who use their understanding of the mathematics of society to save civilization as the Galactic Empire collapses. I loved Foundation, and in my early teens my secret fantasy was to become a psychohistorian. Unfortunately, there’s no such thing (yet). I was and am fascinated by history, but the craft of history is far better at the what and the when than the why, and I eventually wanted more. As for social sciences other than economics, I am interested in their subjects but cannot get excited about their methods—the power of economic models to show how plausible assumptions yield surprising conclusions, to distill clear insights from seemingly murky issues, has no counterpart yet in political science or sociology. Someday there will exist a unified social science of the kind that Asimov imagined, but for the time being economics is as close to psychohistory as you can get.
Thursday, June 2, 2011
The existence of nature
OK, New England-under-the-influence-of-climate-change, I've got you figured out. Between the tornadoes this year and the fucking flood last year, I guess your new deal is one different relatively minor but crazily unexpected natural distaster every Spring. Next year: volcano erupts in West Warwick, I don't know.
Anyway, I had planned to try to write a post summarizing some ideas the Baronette and I have been discussing recently about the nature of existence (which she touched on in her admirably brief way here; unfortunately, I suffer from the disease of wordiness), but it turns out that the day after tornadoes hit fucking Springfield, MA (and like a week after there were tornadoes in the fucking Vermont mountains, I mean, what?) is the most gorgeously beautiful day in living memory, so instead of writing about the nature of existence, I'm going to go experience the existence of nature.
O ye who regularly feast upon the well [sic] of my profundity: I apologize, but you will have to wait.
Anyway, I had planned to try to write a post summarizing some ideas the Baronette and I have been discussing recently about the nature of existence (which she touched on in her admirably brief way here; unfortunately, I suffer from the disease of wordiness), but it turns out that the day after tornadoes hit fucking Springfield, MA (and like a week after there were tornadoes in the fucking Vermont mountains, I mean, what?) is the most gorgeously beautiful day in living memory, so instead of writing about the nature of existence, I'm going to go experience the existence of nature.
O ye who regularly feast upon the well [sic] of my profundity: I apologize, but you will have to wait.
Wednesday, June 1, 2011
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