The Invisible Library

Over at the Socialist Review, Mark Bould muses on the subject of H.G. Wells legacy (by way of the new Spielberg-Cruise movie). He makes an interesting point about the failure of our utopian dreams to manifest properly:

In his early scientific romances Wells depicted the vast expanse of space and time, and our relative insignificance. Like Darwin, Marx and Freud, he punctured the illusion of bourgeois man’s centrality. The Time Machine (1895) and The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896) recast humankind as one species among many, as a temporary condition found somewhere between ape-like ancestors and devolved descendants. The War of the Worlds (1898), originally serialised during Victoria’s golden jubilee year, explicitly criticises the Tasmanian genocide while Martian invaders lay waste to the heart of the British Empire. These vivid early novels are rich in ambiguity. Moreau is a fabulously blasphemous gothic replay of the Garden of Eden and a Swiftian satire on modern man’s self-image. The beast-men that Moreau creates demonstrate humanity’s place in Darwin’s universe. They embody the struggle between evolution and ethics. They are estranged versions of proletarian and colonial subjects. And Wells keeps all these possibilities in play, not permitting his novel to collapse into some monolithic allegory.

In 1926, when Hugo Gernsback launched the first pulp science fiction (sf) magazine, he called for ‘the Jules Verne, HG Wells, and Edgar Allan Poe type of story’. He quickly reprinted 14 stories and novels by Poe and Verne, but reprinted 26 by Wells. Consequently Wells has often been dubbed the ‘father of science fiction’. However, in the US pulp tradition, Wells’s offspring were rather poor pupils. Its first decade was dominated by small-town bigots (as scared of the future as they were of women, people of colour and the working class) and dreadful writing. In the second decade the generation of Robert Heinlein bootstrapped themselves into competent-enough prose but abandoned Wells’s metaphorical and moral complexity. Instead they championed reactionary renegades and unfettered capitalist expansion. They fantasised about purity, mastery and unbounded energies. Mostly, their offspring still do. Wells’s real children are to be found in Britain, in Olaf Stapledon and George Orwell, M John Harrison and Gwyneth Jones.

Curiously, Wells’s own sf novels after The First Men in the Moon (1901) fall into the error which so debilitates the pulp tradition he ‘fathered’. Too often, from Gernsback to the Roddenberry-Lucas-Spielberg complex, a spaceship is just a spaceship and a robot is just a robot. They are there because they are there, not because they mean anything. Similarly, when Wells turned his art to the task of changing the world, he forgot that it was also necessary to fantasise it. He fixated on utopia’s plumbing rather than the vision utopia allows you to imagine. Blueprints became more important than hope. Utopia demands such a radical transformation of self and society that it is unimaginable and inexpressible. But in the later Wells, as in most subsequent sf, social transformation became merely about superficial things.

We get so lost in the plumbing that we forget to fill in the gaps in our own ethics and pragmatism with a few judicious fantasies. This is an important detail that we often forget, in politics and in life: that however great and shiny and new our ideas may be, they need to be tempered not just by the practicalities of human nature but also supported by the breadth and depth of our imagination.

If no one had envisioned a world without slavery as the backbone of commerce, we never would have had the Civil Rights Movement. But also, we can’t get lost in dreamland, mistaking metaphors as the real thing. Robots aren’t just Robots. Likewise, homosexuals, socialists, and terrorists aren’t just cardboard cutouts, stand-ins for our fear and self-loathing. They are intrinsic parts of the world around us. And if we spend our time fighting CGI-bogeymen and Queers in rubber masks, then we won’t bother to address the real reasons that those forces exist: that in our dreaming of the World of Tomorrow, we got so swept up in making sure the sky scrapers were high and the cars fast, that we forgot to include everyone in the fantasy.

I just received an e-mail from a friend who works at the Library of Congress:

There are rumours floating about that if [current Librarian of Congress, James H.] Billington retires, Bush would assign Lynne Cheney.
HORRORS!

Horrors is right. As Bob Harris put it, this isn’t Government, it’s Dada performance art.

Yahoo News (AFP):

LONDON (AFP) - Young girls who enjoy classic romantic fairy tales like “Cinderella” and “Beauty and the Beast” are at greater risk of becoming victims of violent relationships in later life, a British researcher says.

A study of both parents of primary school children and women who have been involved in domestic abuse claims than those who grew up reading fairy tales are likely to be more submissive as adults.

Susan Darker-Smith, a graduate student who wrote the academic paper, said she found many abuse victims identified with characters in famous children’s literature and claimed the stories provide “templates” of dominated women.

[…] “They believe if their love is strong enough they can change their partner’s behaviour,” Darker-Smith said. “Girls who have listened to such stories as children tend to become more submissive in their future relationships.”

I always suspected there was something unwholesome about the way Cinderella’s mind worked. Of course, it’s not like we’re really allowed to say that Fairy Tales warp little girl’s minds but it strikes me as common sense that if you use a submissive princess as your role model, you’re going to end up in a heap of hurt as an adult. Nothing ever ends happily ever after.

I’m currently reading a fairy tale that pretty much explicitly says this, The Princess Bride. William Goldman lays it out plain and simple: life isn’t fair. Things don’t end happily, or neatly. They don’t really end, either.

Fifteen minutes after they are reunited, Westley and Buttercup have an argument. Westley chides her for not being that bright, and she gets on his case for not being dead. They still love each other and as anyone who’s seen the movie knows, they do ride off together at the end but not before having to overcome doubts, complications, promises made and broken, and realizing that perfection, while it sounds like a nice thing, is more trouble than it’s worth. Princes aren’t charming, they’re selfish. Princesses aren’t beautiful, they’re vapid. Pirates on the other hand, understand real inner beauty and appreciate the value of true love.

(Link via Jessa Crispin at Bookslut)

Kevin and I were in need of some mindless entertainment last night, so we went to see Sahara. Surprisingly, it was a lot of fun. I expected the standard bad dialogue and gagging oneliners but there weren’t any. Too my surprise, it was a tightly plotted adventure movie and Penelope Cruz didn’t completely suck.

The most implausable plot element, the Civil War Ironclad that sails across the Atlantic and gets lost in Africa, isn’t all that far fetched, especially when we consider the benchmark film for all other action adventure stories involves a search for the Lost Ark of the Covenant. The pending ecological disaster subplot dovetails nicely with the treasure hunting plot, which is a plus. I fully expected to be swinging back and forth from maudeline eco-histrionics to cut throat adventure but was pleased with how the script writers, all sixteen of them, managed to segway from one to the other and back again without breaking anyone’s neck or stretching credibility too far.

On the Indiana Jones scale of adventure movies, I give it 4 out of 5 fedoras.

I’m feeling the effects of too much Grad School today. I’m tired, in that mentally exhausted way I haven’t been since… Well, end of last semester. This time is different, though. I’m done with School, forever this time, in about three weeks. Then a bit of a vacation. Then it’s continuing on with the job search. Should be fun.

Also, I’ve made a few changes to the sidebar, added a few new links and divided the links into two categories, Arts and Letters and Current Events. Not exactly the most descriptive cataloguing system in the world but it’s a start. Obviously, there’s some overlap as sometimes writers bitch about politics and sometimes political wonks blather about what they’re reading. But you get the idea.

Speaking of blather, Norbizness at Hairy Elated Ferret bulletin Board has announced the winner of the knock down drag out best comedy movie ever for all time competition: Dr. Strangelove.

This story may have gotten ignored in the ruckus surrounding Pope Palpatine* and the slow-motion car wreck of Tom Delay’s political career but the results of it will far outlive both:

For more than a century, it has caused excitement and frustration in equal measure - a collection of Greek and Roman writings so vast it could redraw the map of classical civilization. If only it was legible.

Now, in a breakthrough described as the classical equivalent of finding the holy grail, Oxford University scientists have employed infra-red technology to open up the hoard, known as the Oxyrhynchus Papyri, and with it the prospect that hundreds of lost Greek comedies, tragedies and epic poems will soon be revealed.

Just roll that last bit around in your head a moment. Classics literature thought last for the last 2000 years, rediscovered. As if that isn’t enough to tweak your noggin, savvy this:

In the past four days alone, Oxford’s classicists have used it to make a series of astonishing discoveries, including writing by Sophocles, Euripides, Hesiod and other literary giants of the ancient world, lost for millennia. They even believe they are likely to find lost Christian gospels, the originals of which were written around the time of the earliest books of the New Testament.

I’m a big fan of new knowledge. When that knowledge may make the superstitious squirm, all the better. This could shed new light on our collective cultural history and heritage, and allow us to better know where we came from and thus, better decide how to get where we want to go as a civilization. This transcends Popes and politics. This is all about the business of being Human.

(Link: SciAm Blog)

ABC News:

VATICAN CITY Apr 19, 2005- Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger of Germany, the church’s leading hard-liner, was elected the new pope Tuesday evening in the first conclave of the new millennium. He chose the name Pope Benedict XVI and called himself “a simple, humble worker.”

So much for the hopes of love, peace and a more tolerant, progressive Catholic Church.

UPDATE 4/20: Pope Palpatine’s Wild Berlin Adventure

A lot of people are making hay over Pope Benni (minus the Jets) and his Hitler Youth escapade. We’re told by the talking heads and those in the know that well, gee, everyone was in the Hitler Youth back then, so we shouldn’t hold it against him. Sorry folks, the “just following orders” excuse didn’t fly in Nuremberg and it ain’t flying now.

For some reason, we’re now to believe that the German Teenagers of 1933-45 were the only ones in history who weren’t rebellious by nature. Right. Sure. He was drafted into the Hitler Youth and went along for the ride, just like a lot fo other young kids did. Children are impressionable and regret the choices they make. A lot of Germans got caught up in the mob mentality of the Nazi party. That’s what was so scary about the Nazis: they tapped into a secret desire and gave everyone involved an excuse to give in to their dark side. But that’s not an excuse. It’s never an excuse.

When you’re 14, you can still tell right from wrong, even if everyone else is doing the wrong thing.

Also, we’re expected to believe that this man is an exceptional member of the human race, virtuous and sanctified. Except for the years he was in the Hitler Youth, The he was just another German kid going along with the crowd. Who just happened to grew up to be Grand Inquisitor.

Mike, at the Corpuscle has an interesting take on the ID debate:

We can’t know, of course, why Sir John’s outfit is putting up the money for (post-)Dr. Murphy’s research. Based on what we do know, however, we can probably assume that somebody thinks that studying the possibility of changing universal constants will lead to some sort of evidence of God.

Which, you know, I think is great. As long as the research is intriguing, and the experiments are rigorously performed, and so long as it’s their own money and not mine, who the hell cares why the money is put up? And I’ll tell you what, I’m in a hell of a lot better position, as an atheist, if they do prove God exists than a believer would be. I mean, then I could go, “Oh. Okay. What do you know? There’s a God.” The believers, on the other hand, would have a cataclysmic crisis of faith, which is to say they wouldn’t have any faith at all anymore. How can you have faith in the existence of something that you already know exists? I’d stay away from the subject, were I them. But, hey, it’s no skin off my nose.

The horror for me would be if everything the most obnoxious, radically-right, fundamentalist, fire-and-brimstoner types say about God turns out to be true. You know, being a mortal, if my situation gets so god-awful I can’t stand it anymore, I can at least kill myself and flee into the eternal peace of oblivion. If, however, I am immortal and I am faced with an eternal being that demands I love him no matter how despicably he behaves… well, where you going to go then? There’s Hell, I guess, but from what I hear that ain’t no picnic. You’re looking at eternity, pal, either burning in Hell or sucking up to a right-wing nightmare.

He makes an interesting point in that True Believers have a lot more to loose than us Atheists. After all, if it turns out there is a God but he’s not the all-Punishing firespitter that the likes of Pat Robertson and Tom Delay have been worshiping for years but instead is, say, all wise and compassionate, with a killer sense of humor, who actually means it when he says, “Blessed are the peacemakers,” then Pat and Tom are royally fucked. Whereas Mike and me and Carl Sagan can say, “Sorry for not believing in you there, God but we didn’t have a whole lot to go on.” and God would say, “Hay, no big deal. You guys were more concerned with the search for truth and knowledge, which is an admirable quality. I figured you guys would catch on eventually, so don’t sweat it.” Which would really piss of The Hammer and Dr, Robertson, since they would be pretty much proven to be what we’ve suspected all along: ignorant jackasses who get a kick out of bossing people around and nosing in on the business of others while hypocritically wearing a pious suit and fancy, Sunday ass-kicking shoes.

Mike goes on to nail exactly what fascinates me most about dingbat theories and whirligig thinking, “We live in a culture where crackpot millionaires spend their own money methodically researching out-there questions, and maybe in the process they find answers that will take us to places we never dreamed of being able to go.” If not for wooly thinkers like Thomas Edison or Nikola Tesla,¹ we wouldn’t have lightbulbs, telephones, alternating current, radios or motion pictures. Creativity leads to some pretty unusual corners of the mind, where often, unexpected but usueful things are to be found. And nothing is more creative than a crackpot trying to prove to the world that he is right.

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1. Edison had some unusual ideas about the soul and spirits in general while Tesla thought he talked to aliens. Other oddball geniuses include Newton, who not only defined the way we think of gravity but was also a deeply religious man and an ordained minister. Hook, who refined the microscope, drank mercury on a regular basis.

To LC member, Rivka who, on Monday gave birth to a baby otter.