Posted Sunday, April 6 Heart of Darkness Meandering home early Sunday morning - such, such are the wages of a wife and child home in the States - I discover that Matthew Yglesias has kindly linked while I was out eating dumplings, playing chess, drinking beer and watching The Thirteenth Warrior on VCD; yeah, I'm a real party animal. Grrr. (Please come home, honey, I miss you.) Thank you kindly, Matthew. By coincidence, Matthew then posts about the new Stanley Kurtz essay, "Democratic Imperialism", about which I was just this afternoon attempting to formulate some serious thoughts. But first, eight hours of sleep. Until then: what would you have said, two years ago, if someone had told you you would be taking completely seriously an ambitious blueprint for Western imperialism, written by a man named Kurtz? Just thought I should ask. Posted Saturday, April 5 Great Blix in a Bathyscaph! Just last week I was earnestly reassuring panicky readers that giant squid are not 'out to get us.' But now - such are the hazards of punditry - I read this about newly-discovered mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni. Bigger than a London Bus? Swimming on the surface, not just in abyssmal, Antarctic depths? "We'd like to give this animal the name colossal squid in order to have a common name for it as opposed to just the scientific name," said Kat Bolstad, research associate at Auckland University of Technology. "We feel that colossal conveys both the size and the aggressiveness of the animal. "This animal, armed as it is with the hooks and the beak that it has, not only is colossal in size but is going to be a phenomenal predator and something you are not going to want to meet in the water." I think if these scientists really wanted to say it all in a name, they should have done more than put down their Latin dictionary. They should have picked up a slang dictionary. Perhaps (in honor of Bill Paxton's character in Aliens) they might have considered calling it the "we're fucked, we're doom-ded, game-over squid". Just a thought. Perhaps it would be possible to get the 'unique swivelling hooks' on this moster's tentacles declared to be WMD. Then we could send the lately unemployed Mr. Blix on a new mission beneath the waves. In semi-related news: think of the worst thing you have ever found while cleaning out your fridge; then be humbled as you read this story. Posted Friday, April 4 From the Unfathomable Nomenclature Desk (Hold the Milk and Sugar, Please) OK, this was a few days ago - and I quote: (CNN) – Kuwaiti officials believe it was an Iraqi Chinese-made Seersucker missile that struck a closed shopping mall in Kuwait City early Saturday, the first such hit on Kuwait in the war. Why is there a thing on earth called a 'Seersucker Missile'? I mean, if seersucker - the material - was made out of silk, you might think it was some sort of pun on 'silkworm' (which I must say is a weird name for Chinese missiles to begin with.) But no, seersucker is cotton or, in a pinch, rayon. Just look at the nice things you can make with it here and here. Maybe there is some sort of sinister etymology suitable for a device of destruction? So Bartleby tells me, the word is actually Persian in origin, which is admittedly at least approximately regionally correct - give or take a country and a language. But the Persion etymology is shir [milk] + shakar [sugar]. Does that sound threatening? 'Milk and sugar from above! Let Ahura Mazda sort 'em out! And Ahriman, too!' Fortunately, coalition forces have reported great success knocking these garments from the sky. Manufactured jointly by the Rayon Corporation, Lockheed Muslin and Fur Control, the Corduroy Missile Defense System - combined with Burberry track-via-missile (BUTVIM) and S9 "stitch in time" early warning radar - has exceeded CENTCOM expectations. Best I can figure, seersucker just sounds sort of...sinister. All those snakey 'ssses'. Like Sauron, or Sleestack or Sark. So long as you don't know what it means. Like 'impala' seems like a cool name for an acre of Detroit steel until you actually see one of the tiny darlings hopping around. And the silly fact of the matter is: This. Joke. Has. Been. Told. Before. Way back in 1978, in issue 4 of Dave Sim's Swords of Cerebus, our intrepid Aardvark first meets that eternal champion of Michael Moorcock parody, Elrod of Melvinbone (talking like Foghorn Leghorn). Two pages later the black blade shatters, never to be heard from again. And Elrod goes on to have a fine career as a sidekick to Artemis Strong in his various Roachly incarnations. But apparently the Iraqis still don't get the joke. Posted thursday, April 3 Yesterday I promised reflections on hostility to J.R.R. Tolkien. But no one cares whether I keep that promise or not, and something else has caught my eye: a round-table debate about the prospects for democracy in the Middle East in the pages of The Prospect. Consider this claim by Adam Garfinkle: In different degrees, Arab societies lack three prerequisites for democracy: the belief that the source of political authority is intrinsic to society; a concept of majority rule; and the acceptance of all citizens' equality before the law. Without the first, the idea of pluralism-and the legitimacy of a "loyal opposition"-cannot exist. Without the second, the idea of elections as a means to form a government is incomprehensible. Without the third, a polity can be neither free nor liberal as those terms are understood in the west. Now I am a pessimist, more or less of the Josh Marshall school, about the likely long-term political benefits of our Mesopotamiam military adventure. That said, Garfinkle's judgement seems unduly negative. For one thing, it is not entirely clear that one can have these three things without having a democracy. So what he calls prerequisites are more like constitutive components. That's not quite it. Let me try again. There is an is/ought waffle. Of course Arabs don't believe in majority rule in their countries, or equality before the law in their countries, or that political authority in their countries flows from the aggregate will of the citizenry. Those beliefs would be false. (The average Arab is not a fool, I am going to assume.) Garfinkle will, of course, respond that he means that Arabs do not believe in these things as values, as ideals, as things that ought to be. He even goes so far as to deny that Arabs have the 'concept' of majority rule or the 'idea' of pluralism. Well, I dunno. . . Maybe I am a naive Westerner, blithely colonizing the mind of the Other with my conceptual schemes, but I do not think these notions are difficult to grasp. At any rate, the evidence of absence adduced by Garfinkle seems like pretty strong proof of presence. If no one can invoke the authority of unquestioned a priori truth, it follows that the majority should decide which path to follow. Westerners regard this as common sense but, for entirely understandable reasons, most Arabs do not. One expects to hear next about how Arab rulers fancy themselves in possession of unquestionable, a priori political truths. Not at all: For millennia, most middle easterners lived in moderately-sized villages whose organising principle was usually that of the clan or tribe. They also lived in an insecure world of many dangers, putting a huge premium on preventing rifts within tribal society. Governance invariably revolved around a form of consensus-building. Leadership, usually centralised and hereditary, engaged in open-ended negotiation with the dominant males representing the main branches of the clan; problems were discussed, compromises and understandings reached, and in return all swore personal loyalty to the leader. But surely consensus-building demands shrewd, practical grasp of the reality of plural opinion; and it at least implicitly - functionally - acknowledges the value of majority rule. (Consensus does not mean everyone agrees; that never happens.) At any rate, anyone who comes to the bargaining table with nothing but a pile of a priori chips he is unwilling to bargain away, under any circumstances, is going to go home unhappy. Sounds like parliamentary politics as usual to me. This methodology was absorbed into and sanctified by Islam, wherein a leader comes to his position through a consensus of elders (ijma) and remains in power through the acquiescence of the community (umma). Now I realize Garfinkle is not saying - nor would it be right to say - that the ideal form of Islamic government is a liberal republic with a powerful president. But is it really believable that a people who have this as their ideal will be completely incapable of conceiving how a democratic republic with a powerful president might function, or that it might be a good thing? Now consider in this light the idea that someone who wins 54 per cent of the vote in an election should get 100 per cent of the power, while the person who wins 46 per cent should get none. This strikes those used to consensus decision-making as not only illogical but dangerous - an invitation to civil strife. This is why when Hafez Assad used to win 98.5 per cent of the vote - which we saw as perverse - it did not strike a typical Syrian as very odd. Historically speaking, too, it is worth noting that consensus forms of decision-making have been far more prevalent than democratic ones. Nor do consensus forms of decision-making equate to tyranny or despotism. Traditional Arab and Muslim governance has been patriarchal and authoritarian, but it has been law-based, participatory at some level, and viewed as legitimate by most of the ruled most of the time. If you ask me, the idea that 54% should get to gorge on the whole pie should strike everyone as illogical and a dangerous invitation to civil strife. That's why in the United States, for example, the framers of the Constitution wisely abjured such a radical model in favor of a consensus-based approach. A President with a 54% majority cannot stiff the 46% who voted against him, nor should he be able to. There are checks and balances. Tribal leaders must be consulted, placated, so forth. (Nor, for that matter, is there even any hint of tension between the typical Western judgement that Assad's 98.5% 'majority' was abominably perverse, and the typical Syrian judgement that there was nothing the least bit odd, i.e. out of the ordinary, about it.) Consensus-based government just is plural democracy - or representative republicanism - of an admittedly freewheeling, sharp-elbowed sort. I am, admittedly, skirting a number of large issues. For example, the Arab leader does not, in point of historical practice, let the umma vote him out of office every fourth year or so. But it is not a large conceptual step from the implicit grant that the leader leads by the acquiescence of the led to the conclusion that bums should be throw-outable. Which brings us to the practical mechanics of throwing bums out. Turn on CNN or BBC or any other major news outlet for round the clock coverage of this sticky process. The fact that democracies - like moon launches, like brain operations - are ticklish things may seem to suggest that democracy itself is brain science or rocket science, i.e. conceptually difficult. It strikes me that this is not the case. So the problem, then, is not irrigating the dry desert of the Arab mind, that alien seeds may sprout. The problem is figuring out how to turn rather simple, well-understood, substantially shared notions into stable, lasting political instutitions. This must be done under adverse practical conditions, to put it mildly. The Arab on the street is skeptical about the prospects for democracy imposed at gunpoint. But that is actually a good sign - a tiny beacon of hope on a dark horizon. Why shouldn't he be worried that all these bombs are dropping for nothing; for some new boss, same as the old boss? You would have to be an idiot to look out at all this and think it was going to be easy. Posted Wednesday, April 2 Belle reports that she and Zoë have arrived, safe and sound, in Washington DC. Zoë was very good and charmed everyone on the ‘ayewpane’. Of course she did. Nervous Japanese fellow-fliers on this JapanAir flight were wearing surgical masks – Hello Kitty surgical masks. Such juxtaposition of Sars and Sanrio is rather ghastly, don’t you find? And now what shall we talk about? I’ve just finished – and closed with a heavy, satisfied ‘whump’ - The Scar, by China Miéville. (And you can read a substantial excerpt from this fine fantasy novel at the author’s website.) And before that, I read Miéville’s Perdido Street Station, which won acclaim and awards a couple years back. I think The Scar is even better. It took me a while to warm to Miéville. We had a moment of miscommunication, he and I. He comes wrapped up and recommended by reviewers as the rightful heir to the mantle of Mervyn Peake (to whom a very fine website has recently been dedicated. There are poems I had not read and pictures I had not seen and first edition covers and much wonderful stuff. May I recommend, in particular, this delightful envisioning of Carroll’s walrus and carpenter; and this rather fey Alice.) As I was saying, Miéville comes billed as the new Peake, and he acknowledges Peake as a main influence. And – well, yes, I can see it. And it isn’t fair to blame Miéville for departing from his model (a debt of gratitude is not an obligation to plagiarize, after all.) Nevertheless, what Miéville has gotten from Peake is not what I like best about him: the grotesque whimsy and compulsive, self-delightedly overblown verbal energy of the Gormenghast trilogy. Haven’t read it? Think Edward Gorey writes The Pickwick Papers. Better yet: read it. And by the by, here is a nice Edward Gorey cover gallery. As I was saying, every Peake character is a puppet, and Peake’s language dances these finely crafted artifacts about in the most astonishingly skillful – above all visual - manner. It would be very natural to stage Gormenghast as puppet theater, except it would be less impressive that way because, after all, one expects to see puppets at a puppet theater. To meet with them – to really see them leaping off the page – in a novel; that is a more unique aesthetic achievement. Here, let me give you a sample (from Titus Groan). A description of Rottcodd, the curator of the Hall of Bright Carvings: Entering at seven o’clock, winter and summer, year in and year out, Rottcodd would disengage himself of his jacket and draw over his head a long gray overall which descended shapelessly to his ankles. With his leather duster tucked beneath his arm, it was his habit to peer sagaciously over his glasses down the length of the hall. His skull was dark and small like a corroded musket bullet and his eyes behind the gleaming of his glasses were the twin miniatures of his head. All three were constantly on the move, as though to make up for the time they spent asleep, the head wobbling in a mechanical way from side to side when Mr. Rottcodd walked, and the eyes, as though taking their cue from the parent sphere to which they were attached, peering here, there, and everything at nothing in particular. . . And then, one day, a visitor: At the sound of the door handle being rattled, Rottcodd sat up suddenly. The thin bands of moted light edging their way through the shutters barred his dark head with the brilliance of the outer world. As he lowered himself over the hammock, it wobbled on his shoulders, and his eyes darted up and down the door, returning again and again after their rapid and precipitous journeys to the agitations of the door handle. Gripping his feather duster in his right hand, Rottcodd began to advance down the bright avenue, his feet giving rise at each step to little clouds of dust. When he had at last reached the door the handle had ceased to vibrate. Lowering himself suddenly to his knees he placed his right eye at the keyhole, and controlling the oscillation of his head and the vagaries of his left eye (which was forever trying to dash up and down the vertical surface of the door), he was able by dint of concentration to observe, within three inches of his keyholed eye, an eye which was not his, being not only of a different color to his own iron marble but being, which is more convincing, on the other side of the door. And the speeches! These particular passages I just quoted don't do Peake justice since they don’t contain any of those marvelous guysers of verbal bombast and hyperbole that so many of his characters emit on a regular basis. Oh, all right. Here’s just a sample (again from Titus Groan). “New tell me this, my stenching cherubs. Tell me this and tell me extra quickly, who am I? Now tell me extra quickly.” “Swelter,” they cried. “Swelter, sir! Swelter!” “Is that all you know?” came the voice. “Is that all you know, my little sea of faces. Silence now! And listen well to me, Chief Chef of Gormenghast, man and boy, forty years, fair and foul, rain and shine, sand and sawdust, hags and stags and all the rest of them done to a turn and spread with sauce of aloes and a dash of prickling pepper.” “With a dash of prickling pepper,” yelled the apprentices, hugging themselves and each other in turn. “Shall we cook it, sir? We’ll do it now, sir, and slosh it in the copper, sir, and stir it up. Oh! What a tasty dish, sir. Oh! What a tasty dish!” “Silence,” roared the Chef. “Silence, my fairy boys. Silence, my belching angels. Come closer here, come closer with your little creamy faces and I’ll tell you who I am.” Wheee! I've read these books probably ten times. But I digress. The point is: Miéville isn’t like this. He isn’t a comic writer. And he certainly doesn’t go off into such amusing verbal jigs and capers around grotesquely contrived physical details and events. Miéville’s achievement isn’t linguistic (like Peake’s) but imaginative (which Peake’s is as well.) Miéville has created a world (‘subcreated’ is Tolkien’s term of art for this activity) that seethes and writhes and overflows, clinks and clanks and steams and sparks, with characters and creatures and cities and seas and deserts and mountains and machines and magic and (pause for breath); and it has that ‘thick’ quality that all the most delightful fantastic fiction does. You have absolute confidence that this world you are in goes on and on. (And the next detail is sure to be even more unpleasant than the last.) Here in Perdido Street Station, for example, we hear of Mayor Rudgutter and of a peculiar institution of the city of New Crobuzon: Like mayors before him, Rudgutter liked to compare the civilization and splendour of the City-State Republic of New Crobuzon with the barbarian much in which inhabitants of other lands were forced to crawl. Think of the other Rohagi countries, Rudgutter demanded in speeches and editorials. This was not Tesh, nor Troglodopolis, Vadaunk or High Cromlech. This was not a city ruled by witches; this was not a cthonic burrow; the seasons’ changes did not bring an onslaught of superstitious repression; New Crobuzon did not process its citizenry through zombie factories; its parliament was not like Maru’ahms, a casino where laws were stakes in games of roulette. And this was not, emphasized Rudgutter, Shankell, where people fought like animals for sport. Except, of course, at Candebar’s. Every night the evening’s entertainments would begin with an open slot, a comedy show for the regulars. Scores of young, stupid, thickset farmboys, the toughest lads in their villages, who had travelled for days from the Grain Spiral or the Mendican Hills to make their names in the city, would flex their prodigious muscles at the selectors. Two or three would be chosen and pushed into the main arena before the howling crowd. They would confidently heft the machetes they had been given. Then the arena’s hatch would be opened and they would pale as they faced an enormous Remade gladiator or impassive cactacae warrior. The resulting carnage was short and bloody and played for laughs by the professionals. Now there is a comic tinge to Miéville’s take on this ghastly tableau, obviously. But it isn’t like Peake’s relentless puppeteer whimsy. At the very least, we have distinct senses of ‘grotesque’ at work. Miéville fills his pages with blood and guts and spew and puke and other voluntarily and involuntarily released bodily fluids and secretions and ichors and spitsear acid and so forth. Peake, by contrast, fills his pages with comic caricatures that are stipulated to be naturalistic portraits of their subjects to the very life. That said, Miéville isn’t just a gross-out artist. He is truly a master of the little dropped detail and hint, as the above passage shows. Some of the stuff you just heard about gets explained more or less immediately, and some in due course. And some you just may get to hear more about if you wait patiently for 500 pages. For example, read the rest of Perdido Street Station and start into The Scar and you’ll hear a bit more about those witches – one of them having been Shangaied onto an enormous floating city called Armada, where she meets the book’s heroine, Bellis: “I’m from the Firewater Straits” She laughed at Bellis’s raised eyebrow, the incredulous look. “From an island called Geshen, controlled by the Witchocracy.” She tasted her dwarf Armadan chicken. “The Witchocracy, more ponderously known as Shud zar Myrion zar Koni.” She waved her hands mock-mysteriously. ‘City of Ratjinn, Hive of the Jet Sorrow – and suchlike. I know what you New Crobuzoners say about it. Very little of which is true.” “How were you taken?” said Bellis. “Twice,” said Carianne. “I was stolen and stolen again. We were sailing our whim-trawler for Kohnid in Gnurr Kett. That’s a long, hard journey. I was seventeen. I won to the lottery to be figurehead and concubine. I spent the daylight strapped to the bowsprit, scattering orchid petals in front of the ship, spent the night reading the men’s cards and in their beds. That was dull, but I enjoyed the days. Dangling there, singing, sleeping, watching the sea. But a Dreer Samher war cog intercepted us. They were jealous of their trade with the Kohnid. They had a monopology – do they still?’ she added suddenly, and Bellis could only shake her head uncertainly, I don’t know.’ Nor does Miéville tell us. Another couple hundred pages yet further along you get to find out about the un and ab-dead rulers of High Cromlech, if you are curious. Not that it’s all like this, by any means. Miéville’s novels aren’t just built up by steady accretion of semi-incomprehensible yet intriguing hint. Mostly he writes taut page-turners, actually. Very fast-paced. But the atmospherics and incidentals are delightful and help distinguish him from the dull pack of genre fantasy writers. And here’s a thing about Miéville. He’s violently anti-Tolkien. This from his website. Ahem: Tolkien is the wen on the arse of fantasy literature. His oeuvre is massive and contagious - you can't ignore it, so don't even try. The best you can do is consciously try to lance the boil. And there's a lot to dislike - his cod-Wagnerian pomposity, his boys-own-adventure glorying in war, his small-minded and reactionary love for hierarchical status-quos, his belief in absolute morality that blurs moral and political complexity. Tolkien's clichés - elves 'n' dwarfs 'n' magic rings - have spread like viruses. He wrote that the function of fantasy was 'consolation', thereby making it an article of policy that a fantasy writer should mollycoddle the reader. That is a revolting idea, and one, thankfully, that plenty of fantasists have ignored. From the Surrealists through the pulps - via Mervyn Peake and Mikhael Bulgakov and Stefan Grabinski and Bruno Schulz and Michael Moorcock and M. John Harrison and I could go on - the best writers have used the fantastic aesthetic precisely to challenge, to alienate, to subvert and undermine expectations. Of course I'm not saying that any fan of Tolkien is no friend of mine - that would cut my social circle considerably. Nor would I claim that it's impossible to write a good fantasy book with elves and dwarfs in it - Michael Swanwick's superb Iron Dragon's Daughter gives the lie to that. But given that the pleasure of fantasy is supposed to be in its limitless creativity, why not try to come up with some different themes, as well as unconventional monsters? Why not use fantasy to challenge social and aesthetic lies? Now it seems to me that this is a mixture of half wrong and all wrong. This will be my text for tomorrow. More generally, anti-Tolkien sentiment as expressed (for example) by David Brin; and Edmund O Wilson in his undeservedly classic essay, “Oo, those awful Orcs”. Until tomorrow, then, loyal reader. And hi, honey. I know you are going to read this. Kiss the kid and tell her I love her.