The Invisible Library

A History of Reading, by Alberto Manguel. Technically, I started this one back in October but it’s a long and very dense book but well worth the time and effort. Everything from a brief history of paper to anecdotes about book thieves is here, all of it providing a sense of continuity and kinship with the ever growing (or diminishing, depending on who you talk to) society of readers.

I was especially impressed with the story about how Saint Augustine found Ambrose, a fourth century patriarch, silently reading in his study one day. This was shocking to Augustine, because until then, the idea of reading silently was an alien concept. People then did not put faith in words on the printed page, only in words that they heard. This is not so surprising, when we stop to think that at the time, the world was still very much built on the oral tradition. Few could read and those who possessed the ability were usually priests and scholars whose primary duty was conveying information in an authoritative manner to everyone else. Something was only so if you heard it with your own ears.

Contrast this with today, where we only believe something if it is written down (or burning phosphor into our eyeballs) and we see what a profound effect literacy and reading in general has had on us as a civilization.

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Update: I realised that counting down to 1 was sort of doing it backwards so I changed the numbers around, making this book #4, which means I’m really behind. I should be averaging a book a week, which means I should be at #6 by now. I’ve got some catching up to do.

Salon¹ reviews the starkly contrasted legacy of H.P. Lovecraft, just in time for the much anticipated collection of his stories about to be published by Library of America:

Lovecraft’s narrators routinely rave about the “hideous,” “monstrous” and “blasphemous” nature of their revelations. Wilson went on, again quite reasonably, to observe, “Surely one of the primary rules for writing an effective tale of horror is never to use any of these words — especially if you are going, at the end, to produce an invisible whistling octopus.” That octopus crack is a particularly low blow, since the most celebrated of Lovecraft’s stories and novels partake of what has been dubbed the Cthulhu Mythos, an alternative mythology involving an enormous and malevolent being whose tentacled head resembles a cephalopod.

In classic form, a Lovecraft tale begins with a narrator explaining that ordinarily he’d never impart the terrifying secrets he is about to relate, but some urgent cause compels him. Initially, apart from the occasional allusion to “unmentionable” horrors, the voice is relatively calm, authoritative and rational. Often the story is presented as a semi-scientific or semi-official report, compiled from multiple partial accounts. The story’s hero encounters some mystery — a strangely blighted plot of farmland, a friend or relative’s research into bizarre and secretive religious cults, nasty goings-on among the residents of a small New England town, etc. — and in the process of investigating it has his entire conception of the universe overthrown.

What Lovecraft’s typical protagonist ultimately discovers, underneath the placid surface of conventional reality, is the existence of heretofore unknown “gods” and other less exalted but equally unpleasant beings. Important figures in the mythos include Cthulhu (”The Great Sleeper”), Yog-Sothoth (”The Lurker on the Threshold”), Shub-Niggurath (”The Black Goat of the Woods With a Thousand Young”), Hastur (”The Unspeakable One”), the ever-popular Nyarlathotep (”The Crawling Chaos”) and the supreme entity, Azathoth, a “blind, idiot god,” who, we are told, resides at the center of the universe where he/it “gnaws shapeless and ravenous amidst the muffled, maddening beat of vile drums and the thin, monotonous whine of accursed flutes.”

Lovecraft intended this pantheon as a metaphor for mankind’s harsh encounter with the mindless, mechanical universe unveiled by modern science at the turn of the century. Extensively self-educated, he took a keen interest in science (this makes the scientific passages in his stories particularly convincing) and wrote about astronomy, chemistry and other fields for newspapers and journals. “All my tales,” he wrote, “are based on the fundamental premise that common human laws and interests and emotions have no validity or significance in the vast cosmos-at-large.

I’ll admit, Lovecraft isn’t the greatest prose stylist to come out of New England but he does have style, of a singular sort, and that is why he’s popular. Someone once said that what makes poorly written pulp stories and movies fun is the enthusiasm of their creators. MST3K proved this: even if you can see the wires on the flying saucer, you can still enjoy the story if the people involved in creating it have an unswerving commitment to the internal reality and genuinely convey their sense of glee at their work, whistling invisible octopus be damned. And that’s why fans of Lovecraft love his stories– they are illustrative of an imagination that, like the reoccurring evil fungi in his stories, is unrestrainable. They may not be the prettiest creations in the world but you’ll never forget them.

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Ron Moore, the creative mind behind the new Battlestar Galactica series on the Sci-Fi channel, talks about the cancellation of Enterprise over at the BG blog. He makes an interesting point, that for the first time in about 25 years, there is currently no Star Trek movie or series in development, which gives the truefans some room to breathe and create. I suppose he’s right. The fans were the ones who kept the fires burning during the late sixties and early seventies, before Trek fandom really had an identity or a voice. For better or worse, they kept interest in Star Trek alive until the execs at Paramount realized there was life (and money) to be had Out There in the stars.

The problem is, was it really worth it? Sure, TNG had its moments of glory and the first six Star Trek movies aren’t too bad (though three and four have their cringe-worthy moments, flat pacing or just silly dialogue) but really, what has there been since the end of the Next Generation? DS9 took a while to catch on and is really only popular with a subset of Trek geek (and there really is such a beast) while Voyager and Enterprise were just experiments in prolonged boredom, the sort of endurance tests usually reserved for astronauts being sent into low gravity for months on end. “Sure, you can handle three months of jogging in place on the International Space Station but can you deal with the Xendi War, bitch?!”

The scary part for even faithless Trek fans like myself is the inescapable fact that at some point probably in the not too distant future, their will be another Star Trek movie, or Vygr help us, another series. One can only hope that the eggheads in command of the Enterprise actually talk to the fans and find out what they should do before committing atrocities like Chief engineer Trip and Topal’s ill-fated love again. Not that I think they will listen but it’d be nice.

If they decide to go the route of another series, which seems likely, since that’s the franchise’s bread and butter, may I suggest a new Enterprise Crew aboard the E? A new captain, a whole new crew and some fresh ideas would go a long way to revitalizing the stale odor left behind by Bakula and his merry crew of mannequins. Or, if you’re going to go boldly backwards once more, how about a series that captures the spirit of the old series? The adventures of Captain Christopher Pike and the crew of the Enterprise before Kirk came on board? There’d be some great dramatic tension, knowing that he’s a doomed soul but it gives the writers some restrictions. They can’t screw up continuity too badly, since we know what happens to Pike and we know that that young Vulcan science officer, Mr. Spock goes on to do some great things, later.

I even have an idea for your pilot episode: It’s a year since the uneasy truce was made with the Klingon empire but not everyone is taking the peace so well. A rouge Commodore and his loyal crew hijack a few starfleet vessels and decide they’re going to start a private war with an equally deranged Klingon commander and it’s up to Captain Pike, Spock and the Enterprise gang to stop them before they insight a full blown war. There’s plenty of room to maneuver there and just imagine what you could do with creative set design and special effects, what sort of polish you could get out of recreating the old bridge and sixties style futuristic look? If done right, it could be a pop art extravaganza. If done wrong, it could be kitsch hell.

The Guardian reviews The End of Faith, by Sam Harris:

Harris, whose background is in philosophy and neuroscience, giving him an unusually comprehensive overview of the human mind, blames the current surge of religious extremism on the fact that nominally secular societies have continued to treat certain religions as if the tenets of their faith were established fact, rather than subjective beliefs bolstered by the weight of tradition, and to allow them public platforms as long as they don’t overstep the mark.

In a radical attack on the most sacred of liberal precepts - the notion of tolerance - Harris blames religious moderates for perpetuating a climate of acceptance that nurtures extremism. It is not good enough, he argues, for moderates, or even liberal atheists, to insist that governments should accommodate freedom of personal belief, because beliefs are directly responsible for actions. ‘Moderates do not want to kill anyone in the name of God, but they want us to keep using the word “God” as if we knew what we were talking about.’ Moderates, in any case, only arrive at their position by editing out the more unpalatable elements of their respective texts and assimiliating modern cultural developments.

He also points out that we in the West only have the luxury of indulging those who claim to have absolute knowledge about the afterlife because we have been fortunate enough to live in a society that separates church and state. Those, such as the late Stephen Jay Gould, who have encouraged a ‘loving concordat’ between faith and reason could not afford to do so if the church had real political influence, as is increasingly the case in Bush’s America.

[…]

Yet his central argument in The End of Faith is sound: religion is the only area of human knowledge in which it is still acceptable to hold beliefs dating from antiquity and a modern society should subject those beliefs to the same principles that govern scientific, medical or geographical inquiry - particularly if they are inherently hostile to those with different ideas. It’s easy to laugh at the man who believes aliens are sending him messages through his hairdryer, but we don’t let him run schools or make public broadcasts as if his view were anything other than a delusion. It’s less amusing that international policy is decided by men who believe that the book beside their bed was written by an invisible deity and is above doubt or questioning.

This book has been on my wishlist for a while. Looks Like I definitely need to check it out as it presents an interesting conundrum I’ve been wrestling with for a while.

For some reason, many atheists and agnostics feel that we must counter the lack of tolerance on the part of the Fundamentalists by being all inclusive, even of the batshit lunatics trying to stuff the Bible down our throats. The problem is only made worse by moderate and open minded Theists, who have been dodging a big shiny bullet for centuries: by refusing to confront the fundamentalists in their own ranks, they’ve made us do the dirty work, facing off with 31 flavors of regressive wackos while they pick lilies in the field, while still playing True Believer on Sunday Mornings. But as long as the moderate and progressive Mullahs on both sides continue to ignore and thus, silently give consent to the reign of the fundies, they are just as much to blame for the war on Culture and should be held acountable by those of us who have a vested interest in preserving Civilisation from the Religious, namely anyone who with two brain cells to rub together.

I’ve been in bed for the last two days with a pretty nasty cold. I’m feeling better now but haven’t had the energy for posting or writing much (or doing anything else besides watching Barbarella on AMC). I still have a bit of a cough and a headache but otherwise, I should be back to blogging and everything else tomorrow.