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.