Posted Saturday, June 14
OK, I'm Really Going to Spoil A Plot This Time

Oh boy am I gonna spoil it.

If you are even considering ever reading Chasm City, by Alastair Reynolds - well, plan to get your memory wiped first if you read a word further in this post. I'm going to spill all the beans, because - well, they have a weird aftertaste that I want to sort of smack and savor and then, perhaps, rinse away. (While I'm thinking about it, here's an Amazon link, with a freebie first chapter to diddle you.)

Still here? Righty-ho.

OK, the opening and middle-game are very competently executed and unusually inventive, but nothing genre-bending, form or content-wise. You asked for space opera, you got it. Fast paced; suitably smart, capable hero (former military sniper turned mercenary; perhaps you have met his hardboiled fictional like before?) He jumps through colorful technological rings on cue, as nuclear fireballs explode just behind, illuminating the stylish sets to good effect. I sank with pleasure into my deckchair as the pages practically turned themselves. I sipped my Singha beer.

Subgengre: revenge plot, which - if you've ever read The Stars My Destination, by Alfred Bester (and if you haven't, what the hell are you doing wasting your time here!) - you know can be a fine thing. Chasm City isn't quite in the same class as Bester's genuinely genre-bending classic, but Reynolds is going along fine. (Sip of Singha.)

And perhaps this is also the time for a minatory digression: innocent readers should never, ever crack the spines of Bester's last novels, Golem100 and The Deceivers. The latter, if I recall, opens with a sentence containing the staggeringly inadvisable adverb, 'statelily'. As in, 'he walked across the spaceport statelily.' Yeesh. And that's just the first sentence. (Yes, the language should have something to plug that genuinely existing semantic space that 'stalelily' would cover if it were a word. But, since the language doesn't, work around.)

As I was saying, the revenge plot is fine and promising: track down, across light-years and time, that man who killed your boss and the woman you love. I'm with you, guy. (Crack open another Singha. Ah!) Then, the twists set in. Memory problems. Our hero may not be who he thinks he is. In fact, he may be two someone's he doesn't think he is. And, indeed, that proves to be the case.

There, I gave it away - I warned you!

Now here's the thing about this book. The two people our one hero turns out to really be, instead of (and/or in addition to) himself, are both complete bastards. Psychotic villains. Well, maybe you suspected as much already. It wouldn't be very exciting to get your wiped memories back and find you're really - a decent guy, family man. There has to be something sinister in any long-buried autobiography. The inelectable laws of narrative insist on this elementary point.

Right. So that's not the odd part. The odd part is that, in the end, our hero has basically reassembled the shards of his memory and personality, and he has synthetically emerges as - this is consistent with genre expectations, drumroll please - a better man. But: his improvement is really more or less stipulated. It isn't really shown.

What is shown, among other things, is a final showdown between our hero and the guy our hero thought he was, but turns out not to be - because he's really this other guy (two guys) - who our hero, when he used to be who he's just remembered he really is (pause for breath) fed to a really big snake. The real guy, I mean. But he lived, and now he's come to seek revenge on the guy who thought he was him, and who has himself been seeking revenge all this time. (Confused? Good. I haven't completely spoiled it, then. Read the book to solve for all those anaphoric pronouns I just scattered about.)

If someone fed you to a giant snake, and you lived, mightn't you be a bit peeved? (Wouldn't that be a reasonable response?) But our hero assures us this gentleman has been turned evil, evil by the into-the-snake episode. And so our now good hero must kill his enemy. Which he does by - well, I won't give it away. It's a jaw-dropper, in more ways than one.

But I digress. The two psychotics our one hero used to be, but now we are assured he is quite different, have a very particular psychology. They are insanely shrewd, making enemies and then - when they've got enemies - it sort of seems to them they've got to kill their enemies. So they do. And sometimes they methodically carry out ingenious, long-term plots, building up devilish monuments to their own twisted selves; and sometimes they are, quite impulsively, quite destructive - in ways harmful to their own self-interest. Example: seeking out and laboriously boarding an alien ship, only to blow it up unnecessarily, instead of (say) harvesting technology that might be used (say) to carry out long-term plots or annihilate enemies. Oh, and these fellows are charismatic. They have a knack for gathering allies, hapless but useful accomplices who fail to reckon the depths of the depravity they are associating themselves with until it is too late.

It's all quite well done, really.

And - finally, stupid me states his point - at the end, our hero is stipulated to have become a better man. But he is, apparently, behaving exactly as he always has. The guy I fed to the snake has turned evil and is out to get me. Another example: at the very end, he is getting set to go kill a suffering alien - so he says: put it out of its misery - when he might, instead, alleviate its suffering, and profit thereby; so you calibrate the true motive (guy likes blowing up aliens, I say.) And even though killing the alien will quite possibly bring about the death of an entire city, many of whose residents are nevertheless apparently cheerfully willing to ally themselves with this seeming psychotic blower-up of poor aliens.

Which might seem to add up to a cracking good read. And it is. Eight thumbs up. But. Well, I dunno. The reading I just gave you - the guy is still evil - is not clearly what the author intends, although it seems to be supported by the text, in the ways I have just outlined. The book feels like the guy should turn out good, and he says so, and is stipulated to. But - well, I dunno. It's like if you read a Tom Clancy novel and at the end you felt sure that Clancy had managed to imply that, all this time, Jack Ryan was really a terrorist at heart. It might be the cleverest Tom Clancy novel ever. But, then again, it would be just too weird. Not twisting the genre, just tearing it. Like ending your story: and then I woke up! Not satisfying. Absurd. Not clever undermining of expectation but pointless nose-thumbing. The case of Chasm City is not as stark as that, by any means, but I find myself torn between the conclusion that Reynolds has produced an ingenious but unsatisfying bit of over-subtle undermining; or else he just screwed a few things up in the telling.

I liked it.
Posted Friday, June 13
Have The Reps Jumped The Shark?

I know, I know. I promised to spoil plots. But I'm tired, so rather than engage in intellectual heavy-lifting, I think I'll pontificate vastly about matters of huge import to the future of our great Republic.

From the WaPo:

The House narrowly passed an $82 billion bill yesterday providing tax relief for 6.5 million poor families, along with tax cuts for military families and astronauts who die in shuttle missions.

Death and taxes. Fair enough. Must the whole military family be on the mission, or would it also count if a shuttle, say, landed on a whole one? Also, if a shuttle lands on a military family, they get a break, whereas the astronaut's family - watching the ghastly, loophole-riddled tableau from Canaveral - is flat out of luck?

But this isn't really what's on my mind, folks. I'm thinking about - trying to think about: our hominid ancestors on the veldt never had to deal with stuff on this scale, so I'm not really built for it - the $350 billion tax-cut thingy. And now this $82 billion afterthought in the aftermath. I'm a Dem myself, but not unamenable to rational discourse on the subject of tax-cuts and budget deficits; I just don't see where the Reps think they are going, let alone going next.

Yes, yes, they ride high on Bush's coattails, yet our nation remains divided pretty sharp, Reps and Dems. (That the flapping of the wings of a few butterfly ballots should have tipped the balance! To this day we can only shake our heads in dumb cosmic wonder.) And now this. I look and rub my eyes in disbelief and look again, and it still looks like a few percent declaring pre-emptive class war on the rest - which, in a democracy, if one does not take the sensible precaution of disenfranchizing the rest beforehand - seems electorally dumb, whatever one makes of its morals. (I suppose there is the advantage of surprise. That can't last.)

I'm not usually the sort of Dem who habitually talks as if all Reps all want to melt down babies for Soylent Green for Halliburton. Really, I know better. So it's a bad sign that I'm at a loss to discern, at the present time, a coherent Republican vision of what the country should look like. I mean: how is it supposed to run? On Soylent Green? (Surely not. That's my point.) Politicans who propose to run the country should have talking points ready to go on questions like this. And yet:

For nearly two weeks, GOP lawmakers have grappled with how to provide a higher child tax credit for the parents of 12 million children left out of the recently enacted $350 billion tax cut law. Liberal groups and Democrats have rebuked GOP leaders for removing the provision, which had been included in the earlier bill. Republicans responded, although some seemed reluctant.

"This is raw politics," said Ways and Means Committee Chairman Bill Thomas (R-Calif.), who sponsored the House bill. "Someone figured out a way to get on prime time in an impassioned way before the election."

When the worst, 'rawest' tactic to which you can accuse the enemy of sinking is informing voters about your legislation in an 'impassioned way' on TV - well, that's sort of weak, man.

Will future historians look back on 2003 as the season when the GOP, after a long and widely-popular and generally successful post-Reagan run, finally jumped the shark?

Stay tuned for a very special election year 2004.

UPDATE: Thanks to Matthew Yglesias for linking so kindly. And I must heartily agree with the commenter who initially misread his post as 'God jumps shark', and who opines it would be an intriguing theme. But, since I am no learned exegete of the Book of Revelations - surely the likeliest candidate episode - I shall persevere in writing only what I at least think I know. (For all I know, the medievals may have long since settled the scholastic tickler: can God make a shark-jump so big even He can't make it?)
Posted Friday, June 13 (OMG!!!)
Man in the Mirror

Salon is worried about black people getting nose jobs. (You will have to watch an ad). Why? A recent study by the American Society of Plastic Surgeons "Rhinoplasty in the African-American Patient," has sparked Erin Kaplan's ire.

The study...advanced a novel-sounding theory that nose jobs for blacks are now less about diminishing ethnic appearance than about preserving it. ...The pitch contended that "with this shift in attitude, plastic surgeons who appreciate ethnic concepts of beauty and the unique anatomic characteristics of the African-American nose can create the most consistent and best results."

Kaplan's response is rather stern:

But my initial suspicion of black folks getting nose jobs holds. It's difficult for me to believe that anybody black getting their nose done isn't doing it to some degree to look more white and less black -- such is the still considerable burden of history.

It's hard to know exactly what to say to this; surely there is some truth in it (but...anybody?). Kaplan is also right that a generous helping of hucksterism and sales-boosting has been sprinkled all over this study along with the high-minded talk about "African-American beauty." Nonetheless, it is hard to take Kaplan completely seriously when she adduces the phrases "broad and flat dorsum," "slightly flaring alae," and "ovoid nares" as evidence that the "study unwittingly evinces...oppression in [its] medically dispassionate descriptions." I don't think the bare phrase "ovoid nares" exactly reeks of oppression, even if a picture in which typically black characteristics are painted as uniformly negative is obviously problematic.

The main point which struck me about this, though, is that adopting Kaplan's view has perverse consequences. That is, white people will be allowed to have all the nose jobs they want, for whatever reason, and the worst that will be said about them is that they are vain (even if they want stupid, ski-jump, nose-job noses). Black people who want nose jobs, on the other hand, will be regarded as motivated by subtle self-hatred in the best cases, and as repudiators of their heritage in the worst. The punishment they will get for this is having to employ plastic surgeons with no idea how to make a plausible black nose, since it seems to be bad for plastic surgery associations to publicize the techniques required. Something has gone a bit wrong here.

I, personally, would like to get a nose job, if I could afford it, because my nose has been broken twice, reset once, and then broken a third time [I want you all to know I had nothing to do with any of this. - John] It looks fine, really, [Yes, it does. - John] and my better, more actualized self would learn to love that crooked part. The real me wants a nose job [Not in the family budget this year, hon'. - John]. I can't help but feel that if I were black I would like to employ a plastic surgeon who could absolutely guarantee that I would not look like Michael Jackson. You knew he was going to come in here somehow. [Yes, I did. - John.]
Posted Thursday, June 12
How I Did Nothing For A Week - WARNING: CONTAINS MUTLIPLE PLOT SPOILERS!

We're back!

Didn't see a computer monitor - hell, nary a newpaper nor scintilla of CNN - for more than a week. Didn't hear about Howell Raines resigning until last night. Quite perspective restoring, may I say. As in: what the hell do I care what Howell Raines does, really? (Metaphysically? Deeply?)

Well, OK, there was one unfortunate TV moment, one brush with the ever importuning wings of the angel of modern media. Turned on the hotel room box. There was Chris Farley's eager-to-please fat mug, getting hit by a falling rock. Then a giant eagle picked him up and he screamed and fought. Then Zoë screamed, 'Guuuuwy [guy]! Scawy [scary]!' I turned the channel. 'Guwy! Way [go away]! Chanow!' Then there was the hotel channel, showing a still image of the view of our hotel pool, practically the view as from our balcony. Took Zoë out to see the pool. She gets excited: 'Same!' She has made a deep connection. Looks at the sky anxiously. 'Scawy guwy?'

She was still talking about the 'scawy guwy' three days later. Daddy made him go away, honey. You're safe. 'Wight. Yeah. Ay know.' Looks worried. Looks like I'd better start saving for therapy.

Other than that - and one unfortunate bout of apparent food poisoning that foiled my snorkelling on James Bond Island, a.k.a. Jame Bond Island, a.k.a. Jame Bone Island (linguistic drift is more like riptide in these waters) - it was heavenly.

OK, that Chris Farley thing wasn't a plot spoiler. Couldn't spoil it any more if I tried. Here's the thing. We read - ah! - six glorious sci-fi volumes on the beach. That's pretty much all we did. I was going to spoil them all for you tonight, in a critical sort of way. But I'm tired. Tomorrow is soon enough. I'll have pictures up by then, too.

So I lied about the plot spoilers. Big deal.
Posted Tuesday, June 3
A Journey Begins; Remembrance of Things Past

Dear Readers, in an attempt better to understand Leo DiCaprio, the management of this quality blog are going to spend a week on a little Thai island - yes, the one where they filmed "The Beach". Well, actually, we're starting on Phuket [pronounced as in, 'ah, Phuket! - well, almost.] Then moving to the island next to the one where they filmed that thing I haven't actually seen, which is a marine preserve. As the nice people say:

Formerly formed as Pee Pee Island Village Beach Resort & Spa, now the name has been changed for correct and official spelling to "Phi Phi Island Village Beach Resort & Spa". [Pronounced 'pee pee'.] True to our philosophy, a peaceful privacy is for all visitors' dreams.

It will be rough. A blogging hiatus, then. Then we will show you nice pictures and tell you about the stack of sci-fi paperbacks we plowed through. (Thanks for the recommendations, Henry. I'm counting on your good judgment in space opera. I want this vacation to be one for the record books of relaxation.)

Also, I've written some obnoxious stuff in recent months. But no hate email. Go figure. Inordinately bragging about what a couple of vacation lucky-ducks we are may be our best shot at getting a rise out of someone we don't even know.

And now here is my link for the day (requires institutional subscription.) A fine Philosophy and Literature essay, by Mark Bauerlein, entitled "The Humanities in Love With Themselves".

It opens as an 'I remember when' tale of English graduate school in the 80's. But it turns into a brilliantly observed and elegantly understated undermining of Robert Scholes' new book, The Crafty Reader.

Why will this be interesting to those not burning for critical report of Professor Scholes' latest doings?

What can I say? It's a bit like seeing all those bland old folks Proust writes about - all gray and nice to each other. That would be Scholes' perspective on his discipline and colleagues. Of course, being gray and nice himself, he hardly notices what he is showing us, as he shows us. But we notice because Bauerlein has made of point of telling us how they were all so different when they were young. The wonder of it is that these can be the same people, so worn down by time they can't be bothered to fight anymore. This state of highly-mannered decrepitude Scholes' terms 'craftiness'. Bauerlein looks on bemusedly.

Well, OK, OK. 'Proustian' suggests heights of stylistic achievement far beyond Bauerlein. And there are a few sour notes. (Don't get too excited about this thing I'm recommending.) But I do find this essay to be unusually packed with a lot of insights and observations that will be of quite general interest to students (like myself) of malaise in the humanities.

And when you're done with that, there's a Richard Rorty interview in the same issue in which the old guy is surprisingly sharp, so it seems to me.
Posted Monday, June 2
A Non-Journey Begins

I recently discovered Timothy Burke's Easily Distracted blog. Hope he posts again soon. I recommend all of his sidebar pieces, and I'll now say just a bit about Why Journals (Mostly) Suck.

It somewhat assuaged my conscience to read such a thing, since I ranted to similar effect here, then conditionally repented here. It's unseemly for me, a philosopher, to be always tut-tutting at the neighbors - the cultural studies/literary studies folks - and their unseemly ways. But the fact is: I would be those folks, not a philosopher, if it weren't for their unseemly ways. So I'm a legitimately interested party, albeit a bystander. (Another day I promise to fault philosophy journals for their faults. Fair is fair.)

Burke's analysis (he's a historian/cultural studies guy) seems correct as far as it goes. I won't summarize. Obviously a large part of the problem is professionally obligatory overproduction of what all-too-often proves mediocre (and worse) material. I wrote something about this that was rather long and mediocre .... so I deleted it. Just like that! Ha, ha! A non-journey of a thousand miles begins by not taking the first step!

And, while I'm on the subject of academic good and evil, and since it's my week for plugging Ftrain: via Ftrain, a page with a picture I can only describe as academically beyond good and evil. Which people usually assume will be: more evil! But it could be sort of good. Or neither. The guy's blog is pretty funny, too. Oh, and then, via Ftrain, a little something the proves that, even if you don't force them, some people will just compulsive over-produce questionable stuff all on their lonesome. And I suspect I do mean lonesome.
Posted Sunday, June 1
Mysterious Orient Photoblogging Continued

In many ways Singapore is commercially like the good 'ol US of A - same products, same packaging. Sometimes not. Very occasionally very not.


Google tells me nothing I didn't already know. Darkie Toothpaste became Darlie Toothpaste a couple decades back.

·From Darkie to Darlie

"Pandemonium in a toothpaste" was the way that the Herald Tribune headlined the controversy over Darkie during the late 80s. The brand was a sufficiently strong market leader in various Asian countries that Colgate decided to acquire an interest in the Hong Kong company which owned the brand. Unfortunately, the Darkie trademark, which gave the brand's packaging a prominent identity, was a black man with shining white teeth. While not distasteful to Asians, sections of American society, including some of Colgate's shareholders, found this racist.

So what's with the logo migrating onto diapers? This much is for sure: it is odd to see this smiling at you from the shelf of a thoroughly modern supermarket.


Posted Sunday, June 1
Did They Know About Twisted Stuff in the 50's?

This post musically brought to you by:
"Inspiration Information", by Shuggie Otis.

Contra John's post of yesterday, at least some people were aware of the existence of sexual weirdness as early as 1951. Consider the following from Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. (Is it really necessary to say “mild Invisible Man plot spoilers”? If so, then WARNING: MILD INVISIBLE MAN PLOT SPOILERS. [And if you haven't read Hamlet, the hero dies at the end. - ed.]) This stuff's from close to the beginning, anyhow. And if you haven’t read it then you ought to go do that instead of wasting your time on the internet. Shoo! Git on! Go!)

Our narrator is showing a white millionare, Mr. Norton, around the town which is the site of his black college. We have already heard from Norton that his daughter, now dead, was

…a being more rare, more beautiful, purer, more perfect and more delicate than the wildest dream of a poet. I could never believe her to be my own flesh and blood. Her beauty was a well-spring of purest water-of-life and to look upon her was to drink and drink and drink again…

Our hero makes the mistake of taking a route which passes by an antebellum log cabin housing a shamed family – both mother and daughter are hugely pregnant, and the father is father to both children. Mr. Norton is fascinated:

“They say that her father did it.”
“What!”
“Yes, sir…that he gave her the baby.”
I heard the sharp intake of breath, like a toy-balloon suddenly deflated. His face reddened. I was confused, feeling shame for the two women and fear that I had talked too much and offended his sensibilities.
“And did anyone from the school investigate this matter?” he asked at last.
“Yes, sir,” I said.
“What was discovered?”
“That it was true – they say.”
“But how does he explain doing such a-a- monstrous thing?”
He sat back in his seat, his hands grasping his knees, his knuckles bloodless. I looked away, down the heat-dazzling concrete of the highway. I wished we were back on the other side of the white line, heading back to the quiet green stretch of campus.
“It is said that the man took both his wife and his daughter?”
“Yes, sir.”
“And that he is the father of both their children?”
“Yes, sir.”
“No, no, no!”
He sounded as though he were in great pain. I looked at him anxiously. What had happened? What had I said?
“Not that! No…” he said, with something like horror.
…
“Would that be the man?” Mr. Norton asked.
“Yes, sir. I think so.”
“Get out!” he creid. “I must talk with him.”

And what does he have to say?

“You have survivied,” he blurted. “But is is true…?”
“Suh?” the farmer asked, his brow wrinkling with bewildrement.
“I’m sorry sir,” I said, “but I don’t think he understands you.”
He ignored me, staring into Trueblood’s face as though reading there a message which I could not perceive.
“You did and are unharmed!” he shouted, his blue eyes blazing into the black face with something like envy and indignation. Trueblood looked helplessly at me. I looked away. I understood no more than he.
“You have looked upon chaos and are not destroyed!”
“No suh, I feels all right.”

Now, honestly, what are we meant to think is going on? Suddenly the mysterious ailment which took his daughter’s life after a trip through Europe together looks more suspicious: “The best medical care in the world could not save her. It was a lonely return, a bitter voyage. I have never recovered. I have never forgiven myself.” Could anyone, however blind as to the possibly unpleasant overtones of a 'double header for dad', fail to connect these dots?

Coming up next: Belle proves that, pace Philip Larkin, sex was not invented in 1963 or whatever.