Friday Ephemera (705)
Judgement promptly validated. || Ice-cream scoop insertions and other medical emergencies. || Somewhat related: Things done to penises in 2023. || Recovered Kodachromes of New York in the Fifties and Sixties. (h/t, Lancastrian Oik) || Like conkers, I guess. || On crime and incarceration. || Question asked, answered. || Being so clever, he doesn’t believe in sky daddy. || Lion relocation. || If you got rid of the toaster, you’d have space for one of these. || Suboptimal road surface. || Set-up and payoff. || The progressive retail experience, parts 526 and 527. || Pressing oil. || For enthusiasts of diecast model cars, The Little Wheels Museum. (h/t, Things) || I laughed and I’m not sorry. || A little artistic licence. || At last, a shower-toilet combo. || And finally, a hawk encounters a kitten with a force field.
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Dune: I read the last book which was finished by his son after Frank died. You could tell when the son took over because he was in a hurry to get it over with. I was stuck in Germany with nothing else to read so I stuck it out. Last science fiction I ever read. I used to be a big fan.
I haven’t read a novel in at least a decade. That’s not some kind of boast, by the way. Just an observation.
Have I missed much?
I still read science fiction, but not nearly as much as I used to. More nonfiction than fiction. There are many authors I just don’t find interesting. Mostly, I am reading books that have been on my shelf waiting until I had time, and re-reading old favorites. [ Raises significant eyebrow in aelfheld’s direction. ]
It’s probably a good thing that Thomas M. Disch is not still alive and reading this blog: He would probably subject us to some flaming rants about the science fiction field. (Although he wrote sf, he seemed to dislike nearly all of it as being insufficiently literary. Conversely, I found his stories less than fun to read: His work was literary without being compelling. Ask me later about the short experimental film he did with Samuel R. Delany.)
Only the greatest works the West has ever produced.
[ Opens large crate. “James Patterson” imperfectly erased from each cover. ]
Only $30 per volume, $500 for the set. And that’s cutting my own throat.
Pity, that. Some excellent writing has been done in the genre.
See, I had to look up who James Patterson is. I have seen the film of Along Came A Spider, though I can’t recall whether I enjoyed it.
Depends. What genre holds your interest?
I din’t do nuffin’
Er, none.
Does that help?
Sounds like Michael Moorcock.
Never liked Disch well enough to read more than a couple of his works.
May I recommend Twain’s The Innocents Abroad for your consideration?
James Patterson churns out potboilers at a rate to make the Tom Swift author factory seem like monks writing with quill pens. Jokes and memes about him are commonplace.
And:
Ah, but we were supposed to like him, ’cause he was lit’rary.
Then why do I have volumes one and two of The Complete Sherlock Holmes sitting on my coffee table waiting to be read with pleasure…you bastard? 😀
Suddenly remembered the source! Here are the opening paragraphs of the essay:
Letter to a Critic: Popular Culture, High Art, and the S-F Landscape
Dear Sir:
How happy I was to have someone of your academic background and accomplishments turn his attention – as more and more of your co-freres seem to have been doing of late – to my sequestered precinct of genre writing, science fiction. And how exciting it was to hear you begin your evening talk: “Pornography, comics, science-fiction, poetry, westerns, and the serious novel ALL can and must be examined seriously by the serious critic.” … My reaction was blatantly “Right on!” – right up until your summation: “I hope science fiction does not lose its slapdash quality, its sloppiness, or its vulgarity.”
There, I grew angry.
Articulating it may sound self-righteous, but it comes down to this: Slapdash writing, sloppiness, and vulgarity (unless one means [and you didn’t] the sophisticated vulgarity implicit in Durrell’s “Good taste is the enemy of great art.”) are, no matter how you catch them, fat, diseased lice.
Some art survives in spite of them (Dreiser, Dickens, Dostoyevsky…); in some, the good is so infested with them you cannot separate it out (Edgar R., and William S., Burroughs, gnawing at the idea of civilization from their respectively fascist and radical positions); but slapdashery, sloppiness, and vulgarity only have camp value; where we giggle at what we, or our parents, were taken in by. That giggle is embarrassed nostalgia for lost ignorance.
Sometimes writing is good in spite of sloppiness.
It is never good because of it.
. . .
–Samuel R. Delany, “Letter to a Critic,” in The Jewel-Hinged Jaw, 1977, Dragon Press, 1977. First appeared in The Little Magazine, David Hartwell, ed., Vol 6, No 4, New York, 1973.
Look for The Case of the Reluctant Reader.
The field seems to be badly infested with neurotics and poisonously ideological cranks.
Bruce Gilley on the New York Times “Arts” section. Do read the whole thing
The spirit of “we’re pretty shit, anything worthwhile we’ve done is imported/stolen, and it’s a poor copy of the foreign original at that” isn’t sophisticated, it’s provincial.
And it turns out that what people find compelling in the imported Japanese/Islamic/whatever art is that it’s pretty darn sure of itself, it’s inward looking, it’s a sensibility and skillset developed over multiple generations.
If I turn up in Tokyo, spit on Japanese traditions and demand access/respect on the basis of being a marginalized gaijin, it’s pretty clear to everybody how crass and ignorant I am. The analogous thing happens in New York or London, and the “marginalized” artist gets access to the most prestigious galleries.
[ Returns to spending evening flicking tab ends at a wall. ]
“[…] when Holmes in one of his queer humors would sit in an arm-chair with his hair trigger and a hundred Boxer cartridges, and proceed to adorn the opposite wall with a patriotic V.R. done in bullet pocks, I felt that neither the atmosphere nor the appearance of the room was improved by it.”
You are likely much, much better off. I know I’ve said this unpopular thing several times now but it bears repeating, we consume way too much fiction. Especially from the very short time frame of the modern world. Call me ignorant, call me stupid, call me what you will. Call me late for dinner. Or even don’t call me at all. But at the very least stop and think about how much of our modern lives are bombarded with stories, mostly very weak, in various forms of plethora of books (once rather expensive to produce), movies, tv shows, pop music, etc that are barely informed by reality. Contrast that with the limited time and access people of past centuries had availability for. With the exception of books, most fiction from that time came in the context of stories repeated in front of the actual audience such that the audience was more likely to call BS on things that they had experience with. The only mass media back in that day were the relatively expensive books and maybe less expensive pamphlets.
Sympathy for evil: 9 immigrant men rob and forcibly gang-rape 15 year old German girl for 3 hours. Judge lets 8 go free with only probation and the 9th with only a 2 year prison sentence. Why? Because, according to the psychiatrist who testified, immigrants “who live on the margins of society, completely uprooted culturally, linguistically and socially” might face a “mix of emotions of anger, sadness, powerlessness, depression, fantasies of grandeur as a compensation attempt to cope with one’s own misery, and drug use.” and that “gang rape fosters identity and strengthens group feeling.”
The case has ignited a firestorm of public outrage, including threats and calls for violence directed at the judge, defense lawyers, and so on. Judges and lawyers are distressed at the public’s rage, oblivious to their own obtuseness regarding immigration facts and basic morality.
(Found via Ace of Spades.)
What is a tab end?
You know, for flicking at walls.
I never before encountered “tab” as slang for cigarette.
[ Opens notebook. Writes “search David for cigarettes before allowing in home.” ]
‘Tab end’ does sound better than ‘butt’.
[ Makes note to offer David ashtray. ]
Victorian plaster walls were a lot sturdier than our drywall/plasterboard.
Sturdy lath and horse hair in the plaster.
One of Samuel R. Delany’s 90’s sf novels had, as one of its themes, the idea that with sufficient computing power and sufficiently pervasive surveillance, a future society could overcome Friedrich Hayek’s Knowledge Problem and create a working centrally planned economy. That struck me as a laughably silly idea and a symptom of a Marxist longing to save his childish dreams. Why would any sane man want to implement a centrally planned economy? Fascist or communist, it’s a bad idea suggesting evil motives.
Caveat: Samuel R. Delany has written some insightful literary criticism, and a few entertaining stories, but he is also a Marxist and a member of NAMBLA.
At last, a shower-toilet combo.
30 years ago I stayed at a hostel in Florence that had that setup. We were woken one morning by the police, who had raided the place for violating occupancy laws…
I once watched someone demolishing a Victorian era plaster wall. Incredibly, intimidatingly hard work and slow.
sky daddy
First of all, this guy isn’t the first person in the world to not believe in God. Not really breaking news.
Second, those who attend church are in fact more likely to give to charity, to do personal charitable deeds, and less likely to commit crimes. Are they all angels? Of course not.
In history there were of course wars of religion. But also lots of good things. For example, in South America, the catholic church believed that Indian souls should be saved and struggled against the exploitation of the indians, with some success. In the early 1800s, it was the church goers in England who rose up against slavery and convinced the gov to work to stop it. The british navy waged war against the slave trade for 100 years. No small thing. In the US it was churches who led the way in the abolitionist movement, not athiests.
In Europe after the fall of Rome, it was the church that sponsored the only educational institutions for 1000 yrs, the first hospitals, the first poor-houses, the first orphanages. We take these for granted now and assume the gov will do them.
Yes.
What’s more, people need purpose in their lives, not to mention metaphysical/ethical systems to give structure etc. Atheists have this fantasy that without religion everyone will live lives built on Reason. You cannot abolish religion without replacing it with something else. People will construct or adopt other organizing systems. Today atheist kids are embracing leftism because it can take the place of religion, giving them purpose and meaning and a Cause to fight for. The result: a nightmare.
I believe thoughtful people have been warning against that atheist delusion for a very long time–at least since Dostoevsky.
Books: I read nonfiction. Here are a couple I recommend:
The Perfectionists (about how precision engineering came about) The author is a great story teller
Newton a biography. very brilliant very strange guy
How the Irish Saved Civilization St Patrick started a tradition among the monks of literacy and copying books by hand that led to a network of universities
The Horse the Wheel and Language
The Blank Slate by Pinker
A New History of Greek Mathematics The first part about how mathematics was born is fantastic, but then it got pedantic (every theorem from that early period is described).
The Ghost Army about allied deception in WWII
Re sky daddy, Vivek Ramaswamy responds to an atheist.
One recent non-fiction read was Goodbye, Dr Banda, recommended by Theodore Dalrymple. Interestingly, to me at least, it put me in mind of Goodbye to a River.
There needs to be more public discussion on this. And that Elite Overproduction thing WTP mentioned a few weeks ago.
Lots of malevolent and twisted people posing as benevolent “rescuers”.
And note how, for so many decades, the psychology and sociology professions pretended that authoritarianism was exclusively an attribute of the political right, and there was not and could not be such a thing as left wing authoritarianism.
They lied. They suppressed evidence. They tried to exclude conservatives from the professions (and still do.) For nefarious purposes. All while pretending scholarly benevolence.
So: What fraction of psychologists and sociologists are Dark Tetrad types?
Thanks for the book lists. I’ve read The Blank Slate and How the Irish Saved Civilization; both good.
Further down in Body Insertions thread:
…IS UNCIRCUMCISED SO HE TRIED TO CIRCUMCISE HIMSELF WITH A PAIR OF SCISSORS.
Now that it is in public domain…
Always has been. It’s just that we’ve become a society that fails to reject Cluster B behavior, because social media rewards it, and so our neurotics and cranks are orders of magnitude worse than before.
The wars weren’t about religion. All war is waged to settle one question:
Who’s in charge of this place: us or them?
How “us” and “them” is delimited might be along religious lines, but it could also be geographic or racial or linguistic or political or how you crack open an egg.
Catholics vs Protestants wasn’t a spat about transubstantiation, it was about who got to be in power, because whoever was in power got to persecute the other faction. Stakes were high.
Despite having tons of denominations, there have been no religious wars in the U.S., because no denomination can hold political power as The Official Religion that can jail the unbelievers.
The Big-Endians only go to war when the king demands that the egg be broken at the small end, when there’s coercion. Swift thought he was illustrating absurdity of small differences, but he really showed the root of war: power.
Forgive me if y’all already know about this bloke (as I’ve been away for a bit), but I recommend the Disaffected Podcast for its examination of Cluster B personality disorders and their manifestation in the Current Moment.
He’s a gay man, formerly a left-wing activist, whose mother has Borderline/Narcissist personality disorder. He describes her as a cross between Joan Crawford and Piper Laurie’s character in Carrie. A holy terror to be raised by. He’s had to cut her off to maintain sanity.
He is really good at identifying the disordered female-flavored Cluster B things today’s women do, and having no emotional need to please women, he doesn’t take any of our shit. It’s a refreshing take.
I recommend starting with Over the Borderline, where he details the horror of being raised by a crazy woman, using Mommie Dearest as a case in point.
See also, the modern, progressive university.
Question – what is the safety harness for? Is it to prevent her breaking her hip if she weebles too enthusiastically?
As a lawyer, I can say that no doubt those represeting the insurance company insisted. Indeed, on the risk analysis scale for musical tours, I suspect Madge is on one end and Tay-Tay on the other.
[ Googles Tay-Tay. ]
There’s so much I have to learn.
I suggest your life would be greatly improved by un-learning much of it.
[ Starts massive scrapbook of happening pop artistes, orders glow-sticks, whistle. ]
Now that it is in public domain…
I’ve seen some well done “Mickey Mouse as Big Brother” satires over the years. Maybe we’ll see more of them, now that Disney’s lawyers are not a threat.
Maybe we’ll see more of them,
TPC comes through with many besides Gulag Vasily to brighten the GWONT.
Just remembered: Air Pirates: 70’s underground comic artists intentionally infringe Disney copyrights. I don’t really understand what happened, because I only heard a little bit, all from people on one side of the issue. And Harlan Ellison was not someone I trusted to tell the full story on anything he cared about.
From the ACME Upstairs Library School:
from the link:
I rather thought she made a fool of herself from the start.
That’s a deeper cautionary tale for the young: Be very careful about the road you choose.
I rather thought she made a fool of herself from the start.
Indeed, but small mercies, at least she has clothes on in that clip.
Meanwhile, “I am powerful…powerful guy“. Repeat after me, “All Cultures Are Equal™”.
from the above link:
“Sky News once conducted a survey of men near Johannesburg in South Africa; of the 38 men they interviewed, 28 admitted to having forced a woman to have sex with them. The reporters were shocked at how candid their answers were.”
This is an clip from My Neighbor the Rapist, a BBC Africa Eye documentary. Also on Facebook.
I think we are all agreed that the West should treat such people with militant intolerance. But how about the Westerners who deny reality and demand that we welcome millions of such savages?
Witch/shaman in Peru unsuccessfully attempts to stop a landslide.
Follow the link to Reddit for the original clip without dubbed audio.
All Cultures and Belief Systems Are Equal.(TM)
That page seems to be gone, I assume it was a King Canute-type moment but messier and with actual harm to the incanter?
Isn’t it Steamboat Willie and not Mickey whose copyright has ended?
That page seems to be gone
My apologies: I screwed up the link.
Here is the un-buggered-up link.
And here is the Reddit page it points to, just in case.
Another example: Asimov’s Foundation series (7 novels) and his Robot series (4 novels). I bailed after the fourth Foundation novel and never even finished the third Robot novel. Further absurdity: Asimov merging the two series into one. Oh, please.
Also: I recall a number of writers talking about how their publishers pressured them to write sequels to stories they preferred to be done with: The fans could be counted on to buy them whereas a new unrelated novel was a less certain moneymaker. Asimov talked about his publisher telling him they would publish the book he wanted to write if he would write another sequel–or so I recall after many years.
Looks like drink prices are going up again.
If Dibbler shows up again with his bargain booze, do not buy it.
It’s only the Steamboat Willie version that’s transitioned to public domain. You can be assured Disney will still hound anyone daring to encroach on their protected IP.
Another reminder of the utility of ebooks.
No worries on that score. The memory of the last round hasn’t faded.
“Asimov’s Foundation series (7 novels)”
W? Seriously, didn’t know it went beyond 3. Ah well.
(realizes that dates end of reading SF…)
Would it be a bit much to suggest they be made to submit to the rape they would excuse?
It’s the Steamboat Willie version of Mickey.
It occurs to me that there are some who would flinch at the word savages. Or who would tut, or chide, or hiss indignantly. Which makes me wonder what precise level of savagery would make them feel more comfortable hearing it.
One of the reasons Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle partnered with Michael Flynn and Steven Barnes on books was to work around contractual demands for a sequel to The Mote in God’s Eye. The Gripping Hand (the sequel) was good but didn’t have quite the substance of its predecessor.
Given what they’ve excused in the past it seems unlikely there is any barbarity they wouldn’t condone. Just look at recent events in Harvard Square.
See also the pompous eruptions that followed entirely apposite use of the word feral.
“my neighbor the rapist”
while crime stats in Europe might be accurate, comparisons of US to crime in much of the world is trash because no one keeps count.
And of course, best of all – you can read your ebooks over and over again and each time they will be new and excitingly different – re-rendered to conform to the latest woke ideological proclivities.
I did not know that. Thanks.
Agreed. Entertaining, but not memorable.
Side note: The novel attempted to solve the terrible trap that the Moties were in. (Doomed to endless Cycles of unconstrained population growth followed by war and collapse in a sealed-off solar system.) And the human Empire forced thereby to find a way to end the Motie menace (lest they escape their solar system, overrun the galaxy, and wipe out humanity in galaxy-wide cycles of boom and bust and war.) I seem to have read other sequels which were written to solve the insoluble problems portrayed in the first novel. The sequels were never as good, and the solutions were sometimes rather contrived.* Furthermore, a key point of the first novels was the existence of terrible situations for which there is no solution–a useful moral lesson for we humans who live in a tragic world where this is sometimes the case. Attempting to abolish the tragedy of insoluble problems (see also Thomas Sowell et al on how life is all about trade-offs) sometimes seems like a childish evasion of reality. Better to stick with the more adult message of the original story.
* Remember Tom Godwin’s short story “The Cold Equations”? (Stowaway must be jettisoned out the airlock lest everyone die because there would not be enough food and oxygen to reach the destination.) A number of writers attempted to “prove” that the stowaway need not die, but all these were in my mind dishonest evasions of the conditions presented in the story and obvious fact that space ships only carried limited quantities of food and water and breathing air.
Oh, but surely the liberty-minded Jeff Bezos would never allow that! /sarc
I can imagine a day when the left has so much power that Amazon removes all politically incorrect authors from its library (leading to their removal from buyers’ Kindles) particularly such heretics as David Horowitz and Ayaan Hirsi Ali.
Now, I have been told that ebook library management apps such as calibre could be useful: You import your ebooks into the calibre library where they are safe from alteration or deletion by the ebook publisher. However, I have not investigated how apps like calibre deal with Amazon’s DRM and how this affects the accessibility of those ebooks and what readers can do.
As I understand it, many Western European countries do not keep (or keep secret) data on the ethnic identify of criminals. Supposedly the Scandinavian countries are particular stupid in this regard. (“If we don’t publish the data, nobody will know that we are betraying our own citizens, and it’s much more important to be Nice to savages.”)
How dare you suggest such a thing. And today, on the High Holy Day of the Remembrance of the Great Insurrection. For shame.
You underestimate their game. By keeping all such statistics under one umbrella of ‘citizen’ it enables them to use even greater power to suppress the ‘citizens’ by eroding their otherwise inalienable rights to free speech, weapons, fertilizer, etc.
Screw Amazon, your own local governments are engaged in such behavior in the libraries you pay for with your tax dollars. Slowly, gradually. Because the bindings are deteriorating and/or because “no one is reading them”. Try donating books to your library, good books, useful books, not the modern trash fiction. See what roadblocks they throw up.
Well, ebook vulnerabilities is a legitimate question deserving attention.
I have already written off libraries for donating books, and intend to find individuals and organizations that will have a serious interest.
I agree. But Amazon is its own entity. Somewhat. Though their abuse/rewriting of books to make them more politically correct needs to be addressed far more loudly and broadly. But then conservatives being the losers that they are…
Of course these tech monopolies are becoming governments themselves. Funny how the left screamed about the evils and dangers of monopolies (rightly so) while declaring monopolies where they didn’t actually exist (Microsoft at one time) but are all good with them now.
it’s much more important to be Nice to savages
They ARE acting normal
Would watch.
And Israel (aka Little Satan) is second for murder rate????
Based on that blatant political grandstanding, I question all the rest of it.
Two thoughts: Are terrorist crimes lumped into those numbers? What is the ethnic breakdown of offenders? Are they disproportionately Arab?
Would you watch it ironically or unironically?
pst314:
Even taking into account the higher rates of violence in the Arab population – it is still nothing like the rates of violent crime in Eastern Europe or other countries.
Highly unlikely.
King Tut?
*ducks*
He’s my favorite honkey so…?
I express a similar statement about diplomacy, which boils down to: “What cha gonna do about it.”
Check out the Dating Delusions channel on YT. Guy looks at women’s profiles on Bumble and other dating sites, especially those with anger issues, princess issues, and long lists of requirements in their men. These are from women 40+, many of them with clear issues with eating, yet they expect to attract someone to put up with their issues.
For balance, he includes one profile from a woman who does it right.
I don’t know if this is true — and I hope someone can set me straight on this — but I understand that homicides in Britain are only counted if someone is tried and found guilty. Is there a stat on the rate of suspicious murders in the UK?
You’re a wild and crazy guy.
How did I miss this hilarious crackpottery? Too loony even for the Guardian: Gwyneth Paltrow educates us: water just doesn’t like bad vibes and you should buy a water bottle containing a healing crystal.
Ironically, “novel” derives from the French or Italian, meaning “new”. I guess I’m actually reading “olds”.