Books

The Brilliant Ignoramus: Sherlock Holmes and the Universe at Large

April 30, 2011
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The Brilliant Ignoramus: Sherlock Holmes and the Universe at Large

By Mike Gray One purported purpose of fiction seems to be an attempt to understand the human experience through stories. Science fiction has always been highly equipped to handle this problem by viewing culture and individuals through the lens of technology or fantastical concepts. Explaining life as we know it, or might one day live it, is certainly the task of all good science fiction. Similarly, the stories and enduring character of Sherlock Holmes provide a lens through which the human experience can be explained. Commenting on why Sherlock Holmes speaks to him specifically, Nicholas Meyer notes that, “They constitute a sort of secular bible.” For many, growing up with science fiction, the experience is similar. In an unreasonable world, the greatest science fiction can frequently comfort us, while at the same time forcing us to confront our greatest fears. And the ultimate impact of Sherlock Holmes is the same. — Ryan Britt Arriving late in a century of breathtaking material advancement, Sherlock Holmes could be said to embody the late Victorians’ idea of scientific progress: Essentially, Holmes believes any mystery can be approached, and a solution deduced, scientifically, by gathering necessary data, and drawing conclusions based

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Atlas Drugged — The Addictive Essence of Ayn Rand’s Juvenile Philosophy

April 22, 2011
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Atlas Drugged — The Addictive Essence of Ayn Rand’s Juvenile Philosophy

By Mike Gray A recent film, derived from a novel, has excited comment, some laudatory, some highly critical: Rand is something of a cultural phenomenon — the author of potboilers who became an ethical and political philosopher, a libertarian heroine. But Rand’s distinctive mix of expressive egotism, free love and free-market metallurgy does not hold up very well on the screen. . . . . None of the characters express a hint of sympathetic human emotion — which is precisely the point. Rand’s novels are vehicles for a system of thought known as Objectivism. Rand developed this philosophy at the length of Tolstoy, with the intellectual pretensions of Hegel, but it can be summarized on a napkin. Reason is everything. Religion is a fraud. Selfishness is a virtue. Altruism is a crime against human excellence. Self-sacrifice is weakness. Weakness is contemptible. “The Objectivist ethics, in essence,” said Rand, “hold that man exists for his own sake, that the pursuit of his own happiness is his highest moral purpose, that he must not sacrifice himself to others, nor sacrifice others to himself.” If Objectivism seems familiar, it is because most people know it under another name: adolescence.

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The Bible: Too Cultural for Secularists

April 21, 2011
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The Bible: Too Cultural for Secularists

By Mike Gray . . . . unformed and uninformed by literature, language languishes. And language is the very currency of thought. When it is devalued, thought itself is diminished. Today the biblical allusions that were once every American’s rightful inheritance may elicit only puzzled looks, or, worse, pass completely unnoticed in the detritus of our deconstructed, disconnected dialogue. One school of linguists assures us that language is just a mask for privilege and status, anyway, rather than something of intrinsic and inexhaustible value. The Bible may now be reserved for ceremonial occasions only. What is lost to American culture when the Bible isn’t simply ignored but actively banned? There was a time when the Bible and Shakespeare were recognized as twin pillars of not just English literature but Western civilization. Wherever the English-speaking peoples went, these books would go, for they were compact storehouses of wisdom, strength and beauty. Even the humblest cabin along the American frontier might have a family Bible and maybe a copy of Shakespeare’s plays. Those books would introduce a young Abe Lincoln to life and thought, and it showed. One day it would show in the language he would mobilize on behalf of nothing

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Fun and Games a Goofy, Violent Romp — And That’s OK.

April 18, 2011
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Fun and Games a Goofy, Violent Romp — And That’s OK.

Fun and Games, by Duane Swierczynski. Mulholland Books, available in June 2011. by Warren Moore Duane Swierczynski is known both for his work in crime fiction and writing for comic books. In his new novel, Fun and Games, he seems to combine elements of both, giving us a loud, pulpy textual equivalent to a summer action movie, with elements of both Quentin Tarantino and Richard S. Prather. It’s a book destined to be a guilty pleasure, but the pleasure is definitely there, and that’s a writer’s first job. The premise is interesting: Los Angeles — and particularly Hollywood — is the base of a clandestine group of “fixers”, rather like “Mr. Wolf” from Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction writ large. They construct and produce narratives that cover up various things the Powers That Be want covered up, from negligent homicide to assassination — in fact, it’s implied a couple of times that the group may have been responsible for the JFK shooting. They are efficient and lethal, with resources including untraceable poisons, seemingly limitless budgets, access to vast databases, and an array of weaponry that would make James Bond’s Q envious. They’re known as The Accident People, and the novel is the

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Prose & Poetry Update

April 18, 2011
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Prose & Poetry Update

I’m back and I’ve decided to drop the “Weekly” from the post’s title. At least until I hit a good, say, three months of regular weekly updates. Without further ado, here’s a few links for the fiction and poetry fans visiting the American Culture. To start things off, a few literary quotes concerning education: “Reeling and Writhing, of course, to begin with,” the Mock Turtle replied; “and then the different branches of Arithmetic–Ambition, Distraction, Uglification, and Derision.” - Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventure’s in Wonderland “At forty you stand upon the threshold of life, with values learned and rubbish cleared away.” - Algernon Blackwood, A Prisoner in Fairyland “There is no education like adversity.” - Benjamin Disreali, Endymion “So long…as we consider finance, industry, trade, agriculture merely as competing interests to be reconciled from time to time as best they may, so long as we consider ‘education’ as a good in itself of which everyone has a right to the utmost, without any ideal of the good life for society or for the individual, we shall move from one uneasy compromise to another.” - T. S. Eliot Short Fiction Shtetl Days by Harry Turtledove “Jakub Shlayfer opened the door and walked

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Oxymoronic Headline of the Week

April 16, 2011
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Oxymoronic Headline of the Week

By Mike Gray And the winner is … CNN’s Jessica Ravitz for “Leading atheist publishes secular Bible”: The question arose early in British academic A. C. Grayling’s career: What if those ancient compilers who’d made Bibles, the collected religious texts that were translated, edited, arranged and published en masse, had focused instead on assembling the non-religious teachings of civilization’s greatest thinkers? What if the book that billions have turned to for ethical guidance wasn’t tied to commandments from God or any one particular tradition but instead included the writings of Aristotle, the reflections of Confucius, the poetry of Baudelaire? What would that book look like, and what would it mean? Decades after he started asking such questions, what Grayling calls “a lifetime’s work” has hit bookshelves. “The Good Book: A Humanist Bible,” subtitled “A Secular Bible” in the United Kingdom, was published this month. Grayling crafted it by using more than a thousand texts representing several hundred authors, collections and traditions. The Bible would have been “a very different book and may have produced a very different history for mankind,” had it drawn on the work of philosophers and writers as opposed to prophets and apostles, says Grayling, a philosopher

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Zeitgeist Alters a Classic War Novel

April 16, 2011
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Zeitgeist Alters a Classic War Novel

From Here to Eternity has been in print since Scribner originally published it in 1951. That version won the National Book Award in 1952, a year it was up against The Catcher in the Rye and The Caine Mutiny, among other titles. According to the New York Times, it “is frequently cited as one of the best American novels of the 20th century.” Not content with accepting the novel’s iconic status, James Jones’ heirs have decided this American classic must bow down to the vulgarity and identity politics currently admired by modern culture. When the classic novel From Here to Eternity was published in 1951, a few things were gone that had been in the original manuscript: explicit mentions of gay sex and a number of four-letter words. … Sixty years later Mr. Jones’s estate has made a deal to reissue a digital version of the book that restores those cuts. This begs the question: Why? Clearly, these edits didn’t harm the work’s status among literary elites. So what do readers gain in re-reading, or reading for the first time, this novel with the vulgar language and mentions of gay sex restored? Some may respond that this is the book’s

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Of Ambiguous Utopias and Heterotopias

April 15, 2011
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Of Ambiguous Utopias and Heterotopias

By Mike Gray Odonianism is anarchism. Not the bomb-in-the-pocket stuff, which is terrorism, whatever name it tries to dignify itself with; not the social-Darwinist economic ‘libertarianism’ of the far right; but anarchism as prefigured in early Taoist thought, and expounded by Shelley and Kropotkin, Goldman and Goodman. Anarchism’s principal target is the authoritarian State (capitalist or socialist); its principal moral-practical theme is cooperation (solidarity, mutual aid). It is the most idealistic, and to me the most interesting, of all political theories. — Ursula K. LeGuin Science fiction (SF) presents possibilities for writers to explore “what-if” societies that never existed or could never actually exist, given the inertia that inheres in all known cultures. Two SF novels that explore the “what-if” theme are Ursula K. LeGuin’s The Dispossessed and Samuel R. Delany’s Triton. In The Dispossessed: he action takes place in a two-planet system — each planet is, in effect, the other planet’s moon. The larger of these two planets, Urras, is a world much like the Earth we know — divided among a number of competing governments, the best of which permit private property ownership and a relatively free market, though subject to heavy taxation. The

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The New and Improved God

April 14, 2011
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The New and Improved God

By Mike Gray It seems that to many, the God of the Bible has become quite unacceptable to society—at least certain portions of His personality. His holiness makes us uncomfortable. His justice seems a little harsh. His righteousness seems totally out of touch with our culture as a whole. So, what are we to do with a God that makes us feel uncomfortable and inferior? It’s easy, we perform a lobotomy. We simply perform an operation to remove the offending attributes! That sounds outrageous, of course, but it is happening in the Evangelical world. You don’t have to look far for examples. Not long ago the rage was a novel named The Shack. It presented a God that was far more palatable, more gentle, more feminine, more understanding, more weak than the God of scripture. After all, the God of scripture demands that sin be punished, that righteousness prevail, that His children die daily to the power of a cruel instrument of execution called the Cross. The God of The Shack was something like a lobotomized God, where all the offending characteristics had been surgically removed by a very sharp pen. The danger was never what The Shack included about

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‘Sloth, by Mark Goldblatt, Deconstructs the Deconstructionists

April 12, 2011
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‘Sloth, by Mark Goldblatt, Deconstructs the Deconstructionists

By Lars Walker One of the most interesting tricks of the mystery writer is “the unreliable narrator.” When you aren’t sure if you can believe what the storyteller tells you, it adds a whole level to the puzzle. Author Mark Goldblatt has added a further level of complexity. Not only does the narrator of Sloth (released last year by Greenpoint Press) sometimes deceive the reader, he may in fact not even exist. He never tells us his name. The only name he ever uses in the story (one chosen in order to deceive the woman he loves) is Mark Goldblatt, the name of the actual author of the book. But he didn’t borrow it from his author. He borrows it from his friend Zezel, who is an author and uses it as a pseudonym. (Or is he and does he?) You see the kind of book we’re dealing with here? Mark Goldblatt (the real one, I mean. S. T. Karnick assures me he actually exists, and that’s good enough for me) has written a parody of postmodern novels in which he out-deconstructs the deconstructors. Layers of meaning and misdirection are everywhere (as well as a lot of word play and

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Hayek and SF

April 12, 2011
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Hayek and SF

By Mike Gray Jeff Riggenbach continues his exploration of how libertarian thought and thinkers have impinged on science fiction (SF). Riggenbach finds libertarian echoes in the works of two well-known SF authors, William Gibson and Alfred Bester — although these writers may not have been conscious of them. In Gibson’s Pattern Recognition, the central character is: . . . . Cayce Pollard, a 32-year-old independent marketing consultant with a rare skill set to offer the advertising agencies and design firms that make up her clientele. She is, Gibson tells us, a sort of “dowser in the world of global marketing,” a person whose job is “finding whatever the next thing might be.” As she explains to a hopeful young designer of hats at one point in the novel, “What I do is pattern recognition. I try to recognize a pattern before anyone else does.” Cayce fits the Hayekian paradigm of how a limited mind can make the greatest use of information that is constantly in a state of flux: he peculiar character of the problem of a rational economic order is determined precisely by the fact that the knowledge of the circumstances of which we must make use never exists

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Is Music an Example of “Exaptation”?

April 11, 2011
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Is Music an Example of “Exaptation”?

By Mike Gray The embedding of words, skills, or sequences in melody and meter is uniquely human. — Oliver Sacks, Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain It would be altogether opposed to the principle of evolution, if we were to admit that man’s musical capacity has been developed from the tones used in impassioned speech. — Charles Darwin, Descent of Man Our susceptibility to musical imagery indeed requires exceedingly sensitive and refined systems for perceiving and remembering music, systems far beyond anything in any nonhuman primate. — Oliver Sacks, Musicophilia What benefit could there be to diverting time and energy to the making of plinking noises? … As far as biological cause and effect are concerned, music is useless … It could vanish from our species and the rest of our lifestyle would be virtually unchanged. — Steven Pinker Since there is clearly no adaptive advantage to music, evolutionary biologists and psychologists have relied on the concept of exaptation: a process describing features that, in an evolutionary framework, were originally selected for one purpose but have since been co-opted for a different purpose. — Greg Demme egardless of all this—the extent to which human musical powers and susceptibilities are

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"Culture is the expression of the guiding philosophy of the day."—Murray Rothbard
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