Tortured English

Just started Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun.  First reaction: while Science Fiction is by no means the only offender in this regard, I’m immediately suspicious of any book that flatters me for reading it (with a spattering of word games throughout the text).  Discerning readers should be rewarded, not congratulated.

Second reaction: I wouldn’t even have noticed, but Wolfe puts so much into his Latin-root neologisms that the use of excruciate for torture not involving an actual cross seems unnecessary, and practically invites nitpicking.

The Sunset of Good Taste

So the Twilight books each feature a different monster boyfriend for the heroene?  Did the Mummy make the list?  Also, I’m disappointed that although I was able to find Boo-Berry this week, no one was selling monster cereals in single-serving boxes for trick-or-treaters.

God’s Advocate

Everybody likes St. Augustine, but not always for the same reasons.  I don’t much care for Confessions, although I appreciate that Augustine enjoyed far more the subsequent guilt than the fruit he stole from his neighbor’s yard as a boy.  And although he’s not a conventional thinker, he’s given to the kind of pronouncements that one could imagine appearing in school yard philosophy. (Is it more virtuous for the virgin to yield to rapacious marauders or to save her chastity by throwing herself in the lake?  Answer: she should yield, but by no means should she enjoy herself.)  And he clearly enjoys demolishing his opponents’ weak arguments while setting up not a few of his own.

But none of these is what draws me to the man.  What I love about Augustine is that he’s a scholar who hates to study.  He refuses to educate himself in Hebrew letters and gets by on poor Greek, barely apologizing as he issues grand pronouncements of exegesis (which are really fun to read, and should put today’s radio preachers and science fiction authors to shame for their relative poverty of ingenuity).  He refuses to formalize his arguments, or even to remain consistent with his own pronouncements.  He knows that his brain is simply bigger and better than everyone else’s and he swings it like a cudgel, taking all comers.  And why not?  The Almighty doesn’t dole out first-rate minds to second-rate men, does He?

It’s hard not to long for the days when the most excellent churchmen were also total bastards.  Whence came the foolish belief that saints should make pleasant company?

Tintin, Racist

An item at The Atlantic mentions that Tintin in the Congo has been Indexed for the vault in New York. [The same and Tintin in the Land of the Soviets are the only volumes I haven't read; perhaps I've missed my chance.]  The tail of the article brought a chuckle:

Another is the resolution introduced by Georgia Republican Paul Broun encouraging the President to designate 2010 the Year of the Bible — a book replete with sex and violence.  Maybe Congress can redact Lot’s offer to pimp out his daughters.  Or maybe people who hold the Bible sacred can come to understand that deeply offensive literature can also be deeply redemptive.

Banning literature because of its failure to conform to current standards of decency is a crime against the past and against the future.  I’m aginnit.  On the other hand, I wouldn’t mind a ban on impotence pills during the evening news and golf, though such a move would bankrupt the networks from the look of things.

More Clunkers

Replace the old with the new, and just to be sure, pulp ‘em.

Books have been getting the “clunkers” treatment.

Since the law became effective the very next day, there was no time to waste in putting this advice into practice. A commenter at Etsy, the large handicrafts and vintage-goods site, observed how things worked at one store:

I just came back from my local thrift store with tears in my eyes! I watched as boxes and boxes of children’s books were thrown into the garbage! Today was the deadline and I just can’t believe it! Every book they had on the shelves prior to 1985 was destroyed! I managed to grab a 1967 edition of “The Outsiders” from the top of the box, but so many!

I had no idea the Kindle lobby was so powerful.

This idea of destroying the old to make markets for the new is sure to catch on.  I predict that the next “clunkers” singled out for annihilation will be grandma’s house (we’ve got to sell those McMansions somehow) and later, grandma.

Who Goes?

Only recently did I realize that Horton Hears a Who is a classic science fiction story.  At its heart is a tale of first-contact between two worlds, each invisible to the other.  Its cast are a dull but dogged hero, a scientist-Cassandra, and a frightening apparatchik who invokes Psychology to raise a lynch mob.  If the story were removed of the rhymes and replaced the animal characters with humans it would become a serviceable episode of the Twilight Zone, perhaps starring Burgess Meredith as Horton.

July Core Dump

Just as the week begins on Sunday, the New Year ought begin in August, don’t you think?

I finally saw Alphaville.  I can’t tell whether I like it or not.  Too often Science Fiction (and French) films are posed in the form of a riddle with no answer.  It’s certainly inferior to La Jetee, which appears to have been remade into a summer romance film about time-travel.  It’s an open question whether the summer films for men or women are dumber.  Bring on Predator vs. Bridget Jones.

Speaking of films, I think on reflection that it was a mistake for George Lucas to release Episode VII in the summer of 1989.  Not only because it killed the nascent Batman franchise and sent Michael Keaton back to making comedies for a decade, but also the plotline involving Leia, Han and Luke heading competing factions within a restored Republic was too sophisticated for the Star Wars audience.  Sure the scene where Han and Luke come to blows was fun, but there wasn’t even time for a tacked-on starship battle at the end!  He really should have gone another direction; maybe waited longer for a fresher script.

Recommendation: Pohl’s short story “The Gold at the Starbow’s End.”  The end is not the one you expect.

I’m not sure Howard’s Conan stories are for me.  They’re almost too entertaining.  And as brief as a daydream.  I’d like to read Orlando Furioso–or more accurately, I would like too have read it, but even the introduction to the Penguin edition is a hundred pages.  Why didn’t I tackle this in High School, instead of re-reading Dante for the third time?  Ed’s been pestering me to read Gibbon and I’ve cried off for the book’s length.  What excuse will I use now?

That’s all for now; I’m off to have a beer with the President.

The Well-Worn Path

Not long ago, the Angry Scientist posted an appreciation of Fred Saberhagen’s fiction.  (It was because of his recommendation that I picked up Empire of the East for $1.50 at a second-hand store.)  Saberhagen is most impressive when re-treading old ground.  Men have been visited in prison by spirits to be granted a boon and a mission in literature countless times (including in the Bible), but Saberhagen’s telling is the most pure and most enjoyable I’ve seen.  Vainglorious ladies find their comeuppance as often as plain girls spin tales, but the Satrap’s daughter’s is among the most delicious yet.  Larry Niven praised Empire of the East as better than Tolkien’s books; I didn’t find it so, but a scene-by-scene rewrite of Lord of the Rings by Saberhagen might be more fun than the original.

Not fun

Book clubs have made the jump to on-line bores.  I suppose this makes sense for people who dislike reading and want to talk about it with strangers.

Athwart History

As one of those jerks who reads the Forward and Afterward of books before rushing them back to the library, I had chance to quibble with Jack Womack’s contribution to a late edition of Neuromancer.  It’s a curious habit of Science Fiction writers to claim that theirs is the first generation to embrace sexual themes or pessimism, as though no one read Huxley or Capek [unforgivible] or did not consider them Science Fiction [curious].  Credit goes to Gibbon for adding cyberspace to the language, just as Asimov added robotics.  But his book, like Asimov’s, is still of a future not yet realized.  Except in film, that is: The Matrix is surely an unauthorized production of Neuromancer, and while I was willing to forgive the film for poaching big chunks of Plato in the expository scenes, Gibbon’s book isn’t yet in the public domain, and he seems actually to have been deprived of something by this film’s intrusion.  [In fairness, his own Johnny Mnemonic (also starring Reeves) was a deserving flop--was Ice T talking to a dolphin in that one?  That can't be right.]

I don’t mind having the legs knocked from under The Matrix; I never went ga-ga for the first film and actually enjoyed more the second, which was more earnestly ridiculous and ridiculously earnest (and I never saw the third).  But I fear reading Neuromancer also spoiled Shadowrun for me, which I have enjoyed on rare occasions, but now see only as a way of getting inside Gibbon’s book.

Well, no thank you.  To the degree that Gibbon’s future is already upon us, I’m a’ginnit.  I’m not trading my tuna for krill.  I’m not spending my days watching glowing rectangles.  And I’m not limiting my philippics to 140 characters. I’ll make my stand with Ol’ Freebee.