This week: Strife at Sea

Posted on June 16, 2014 by smellincoffee

This has been a productive week in fiction, of the short kind at least.  On Saturday afternoon I finished Power, Inc,  and that’s another one down from the to-be-read-list.  That list has altered a touch; I was using the wrong title for a Frans de Waal book I own. (In honesty, all of his hey-look-chimpanzees-have-moral-instincts-too books are blending together for me.) Reviews or comments for both Power, Inc and The World Until Yesterday will follow this week. What’s next? The Great War at sea, that’s what.   I’ve also got my annual Fourth of July reading all lined up, so the TBR challenge may get put on pause for a few weeks while I dive into the American Revolution.

Quotable

All these, however, were mere terrors of the night, phantoms of the mind that walk in darkness; and though he had seen many spectres in his time and had been more than once beset by Satan in divers shapes, in his lonely perambulations, yet daylight put an end to all these evils; and he would have passed a pleasant life of it, despite of the devil and his works, if his path had not been crossed by a being that causes more perplexity to mortal man than ghosts, goblins, and the whole race of witches put together, and that was — a woman.

p. 14, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow

The Cressey was sinking fast, like a heavy oil drum which had been split in target practice. ‘She carried far over’, Wedigen continued, ‘but all the while her men stayed at the guns, looking for their invisible foe. They were brave and true to their country’s sea traditions.

p. 54, The Great War at Sea, A.A. Hoehling

“We do not want the world any longer furred over with organic life, like what you call the blue mould — all sprouting and budding and breeding and decaying. We must be rid of it. By little and little, of course. Slowly we learn how. Learn to make our brains live with less and less body; learn to build our bodies directly with chemicals, no longer have to stuff them full of dead brutes and weeds. Learn how to reproduce ourselves without copulation.”
“I don’t think that would be much fun,” said Winter.

p. 173, That Hideous Strength, C.S. Lewis

To Be Read Takedown Challenge

Antifragile, Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The Vikings, Robert Ferguson (6/7/14)                                      
Power, Inc; David Rothkopf (6/14/14)
An Edible History of Humanity, Tom Standage
Small-Mart Revolution, Michael Shuman
The World Until Yesterday, Jared Diamond (5/29/14)
Fighting Traffic: the Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City, Peter Norton
Earth, Richard Fortey
Good Natured, Frans de Waal
Galileo’s Finger, Peter Atkins

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That Hideous Strength

Posted on June 13, 2014 by smellincoffee

That Hideous Strength: A Modern Fairy Tale for Grown Ups
© 1945 C.S. Lewis
384 pages

Mark Studdock is a newly married sociologist who has been given the opportunity of a lifetime; the chance to work with a promising and ambitious new research institute setting up shop in his sleepy home of Edgestow. Mark likes to rub shoulders with the progressive element within the college, and the idea of working with people whose dream is to offer to the world rational solutions to social problems — well!  That’s too good an opportunity to pass. Alas for Mark, good intentions mask fouler ones.  The National Institute for Coordinated Experiments is set on making the world in its own very rational image, yes;  no more, they hold, should be a man be constrained by tradition, by illogical authorities, by the limitations of flesh and blood. It has a vision for a world, but Mark soon discovers that that vision is a paradise in which humankind is distilled into pure consciousness, and the tired Earth freed from its mounds of organic infestation to the point that it resembles N.I.C.E’s view of a heavenly paradise, the Moon.  

Such a sinister dream isn’t exactly what Mark would have expected from a research institute, but slowly and by degrees he is drawn deeper and deeper into the N.I.C.E’s conspiracy against mankind; seduced by the very propaganda he is tasked with writing and cowed by their threats to undermine his prospects and imperil his life should he not give them his full devotion.  His increasing entrapment is a burden on an already strained marriage, and here enters the second star of the book, his wife Jane. The Mrs. is being visited by nightly visions that reveal evil at work, hidden behind archetype and the fog of sleep, and the N.I.C.E. wants her abilities in their corner.  Their ambition is nothing less than the creation of a new breed of man, rationally superior and free from of the body; they defy the natural order of the cosmos and promise brutality to any who interfere. Those who disagree with them are wrong, and in need of education; those who resist merit death.  Against this sinister plot, however, stands the literal heir of King Arthur, a traveler of the stars who calls himself the Pendragon. He is the leading man in a resistance of light, whose greatest hope is to find the resting place of the ancient wizard Merlin, and awake him so that he can channel the power of the angels of the solar system and defeat the Devil’s work.

This is a very peculiar piece of fiction, the finale of a “Space Trilogy” that sounds like science fiction but is inspired more by fantasy, British mythology, and Christianity. The Christian worldview undergirds the virtuous characters, and their conversations often turn to moral philosophy, not because the heroes are absent minded but because the villains are wrong at a fundamental level. They see man as perfectible and the body loathsome, when in truth (says Lewis),  it is not the body that is corrupt but the human soul, having fallen into sin, and it is by no means perfectible except by grace. The Cosmos is likewise good in itself, declared as such by God, and it is beyond man’s ability to improve it or create himself in his own image.   It is not the human body that is corrupt, but the soul within it that has fallen into sin. The actual plot and characterization freely mixes elements of SF and fantasy, so that cosmic allies awaiting Merlin’s offering are not just angels, not just Greek deities, but ethereal space-beings waging for an opportunity to triumph over one of their own who is now rebellious. It’s the Lucifer myth for a new age, and one that. links itself to the West’s classical heritage,  a heritage defended here as the moral champions insist on the reality of natural law that the N.I.C.E. is attempting to overthrow.

It’s an interesting combination of theology and fantasy-fiction; Lewis’ background in Renaissance and medieval literature is on full display here as he steeps the narrative in mythic importance. Considering the horrors the 20th century had already endured in the name of science — Nazi eugenics and Soviet-style “scientific socialism” — little wonder Lewis regarded its elevation with skepticism. The tale is a sustained criticism of modernity, from its belief in technocracy to the increasingly triumphant  spirit of moral relativism taking root. Lewis’ heroes are an embattled minority, a pocket of grace in an England that has lost its way, and presumably he felt the same of himself and other Christian apologists. He makes the same arguments in The Abolition of Man, in which he writes that, having divorced himself from natural law,  having declared that all things are subjective,  all that is good and worthy within man has been cast way, abandoning himself to follow every vain and self-destructive impulse. The villains here are men without chests, literally speaking*, all head and no soul;  their concern is with ideological visions, so much so that they can view the wasteland of the Moon as a paradise, and the bounteous Earth as a fetid horror.  Undoubtedly Lewis,  taking in the atmosphere of the 21st century, would say the same of us; we, who cover meadows alternatively with parking lots and frankenfoods,  whose every ambition seems to be fixated on losing ourselves in the world of the screen, whose appreciation of morality is as such that presidents who order the remote-controlled destruction of neighborhoods in undeclared wars are lauded with a medal for peace.  The hideous strength has grown no less obscene nor less potent in the decades since this work’s publication.

Confusing, but thought-provoking.

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The Vikings

Posted on June 12, 2014 by smellincoffee

The Vikings: A History
© 2010 Robert Ferguson
464 pages
UK title: The Hammer and the Cross: A History of the Vikings


            VIKINGS!  For students of western civilization, the word has quite the mystique. Invaders from the frozen north, flying across the seas on dragons-head ships, wreaking havoc on seaboards and penetrating deep into Europe’s heartland to cause even more. Kings and priests feared them;  behind them, cities were cast into smoke. For decades they were the unholy dread of Christendom, but theirs is a history not limited to battle and chaos. The Vikings is a history of the turn of the second millennium in Europe, of not only the northern clans but of the civilizations they altered; the English, Russian, Norman, Italian, and even Arabic.  As the last of Europe’s pagans roamed far and side, from Constantinople to North America, so to does Ferguson explore not only their military and political strivings, but their religious culture as well.  Although Vikings is a weighty work, dense with information, it’s presented as-such; there’s no  overall idea to  tie each section together, and because their wanderings were so broad the reader is thrown from place to place in every other chapter. There’s no want of detail;  Carolingian politics, variations in the Heathen religion, and even home sites at archaeological digs are given extensive consideration.  For those interested in the Vikings, and their impact on European history at this time, The Vikings will be a worthy source of information; for the  only slightly curious, however, its density may be intimidating. 

Related:
Daily Life in Anglo-Saxon England , Sally Crawford

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The Legend of Sleepy Hollow

Posted on June 12, 2014 by smellincoffee

The Legend of Sleepy Hollow
© 1820 Washington Iriving; illustrations 1966, Leonard Fisher
58 pages

Long ago in a quiet part of the north country near Hudson Bay lived a superstitious and gangly schoolteacher whose amorous affections for a local heiress threw him headlong into trouble. The man’s name? Ichabod Crane, and if that name sounds familar to you, so might the Tale of the Headless Horseman. Though I’ve been familar with Crane, the Horseman, and name “Sleepy Hollow” since childhood, I have never read the story.  It’s a short story, a fantasy-horror tale with a comic main character in a barely independent America. While I initially peeked into the petite volume to learn where the tale went (ending in dread mystery),  surely it was worth reading for the language alone. Irving’s prose is ornate, yet highly readable, like the rare piece of cursive writing that is rendered artfully without slowing down communication.  The work has the added appeal of painting a picture of an America still very much wet behind the ears;  America is still more a colony than a Nation, and the Dutch population of Sleepy Hollow have not yet been ironed out of existence by the forces of cultural homogenization.  It is thus not only an elegantly-told short story perfect for occasions such as Halloween, but a charming piece of early Americana.  Another example of such is the story of Rip Van Winkle, also laden with Dutch characters though much shorter.  I trust the name and story are singularly familiar to most;  the tale of a happy-go-lucky farmer who has a lie-down under a nap and wakes up twenty years later to find  his wife dead, his country a republic, and his town burgeoning is also captivating.

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Global Weirdness

Posted on June 10, 2014 by smellincoffee
Global Weirdness: Severe Storms, Deadly Heat Waves, Relentless Drought, Rising Seas, and the Weather of the Future
© 2013 Climate Central
224 pages
          



Global Weirdness is a climate briefing for the civic body; short, well-organized, and to the point.  Produced by Climate Central,  the book is divided into three parts; the first reviews the science of climate change, considering not just greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and water vapor, but contributors from Earth itself.  A second section examines what effects of climate change we are currently witnessing, and the final part makes tentative guesses about what changes we might see in the future.  Weirdness, despite its playful title, is a serious and cautious work.  The authors’ essential point is that we on Earth are in the midst of a climate change, a gradual heating; the trend is long term, and not defied by the vagaries of daily weather.  The trick is that the Earth is a massive place, and its climate enormously complicated; the chaos-wheel set in motion by one factor has consequences we cannot predict. What is clear is that the Earth as a whole is getting warmer, and its weather more unstable;  increased stress is inevitable for both humans and especially the global ecosystem.  More disturbingly, there’s not a great deal we can do about it; even if the global civilization suddenly stopped emitting greenhouse gases on an industrial scale, the planet would still continue to heat for a hundred years thereafter because of delayed actions. There exists presently no silver bullet; none of the alternative energy sources are particularly attractive.   Weirdnessis a call to awareness that we are in for a rough century. 

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This week: POWER! unLIMITED POWER!!!!!!

Posted on June 9, 2014 by smellincoffee

Dear readers:

First, of literary interest, last night I discovered a “Classic Tales” podcast that features readings of classic stories. I haven’t figured out how to access their archives prior to February, but just on the front page are performances of Around the World in 80 Days and Shakespeare’s Coriolanus.  I’m going to try my first tonight.

This last has been a relaxing week, filled with mostly fiction and the steady working-through of The Vikings.  After discovering a free Kindle book, I read my first Ayn Rand in Anthem and found it largely engaging save a bit of preaching at the end. It’s hard to mess up a good man vs state story, though. The Danes were successfully taken on, and that’s another victory over the mighty To-Be-Read list.

  1. Antifragile, Nassim Nicholas Taleb
  2. The Vikings, Robert Ferguson (6/7/14)                                         
  3. Power, Inc; David Rothkopf
  4. An Edible History of Humanity, Tom Standage
  5. Small-Mart Revolution, Michael Shuman
  6. The World Until Yesterday, Jared Diamond (5/29/14)
  7. Fighting Traffic: the Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City, Peter Norton
  8. Earth, Richard Fortey
  9. Age of Empathy, Frans de Waal
  10. Galileo’s Finger, Peter Atkins



Power, Inc may be next.  It’s going to have competition, though, because yesterday I made my usual library raid and brought home a small pile. I went in with a focus on working out a series of American Revolution readings, though, so they won’t surface until closer to the end of the month.  Closer to the fore will be Jihad vs. McWorld, by Benjmain Barber, and White Trash: Race and Class in America,  ed. Matt Wray and Annalee Newtiz.

Quotable:

We stood together for a long time. And we were frightened that we had lived for twenty -one years and had never known what joy is possible to men.

I know not if this earth on which I stand is the core of the universe or if it is but a speck of dust lost in eternity . I know not and I care not. For I know what happiness is possible to me on earth. And my happiness needs no higher aim to vindicate it. My happiness is not the means to any end. It is the end. It is its own goal. It is its own purpose.

Rand, Ayn . Anthem

Well, until next week — may your characters engage, your plot twists thrill, and your claims be thoroughly footnoted!  Happy reading.

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Anthem

Posted on June 7, 2014 by smellincoffee

Anthem
© 1938 Ayn Rand
128 pages

In a dark future, the triumph of collectivism has created a global society deteriorating to near-medieval conditions.  Man is utterly broken by the state, dominated by institutions from birth onward. Raised in cohorts in government offices, not by families,  children come of age at fifteen and are assigned their lot in life by the governing authorities.  They toil as drones for the next thirty years before being consigned the House for the Useless, where if they are lucky they will find some meager pleasure in the social programs before being execution as a burden to society.  The state and society are all, so triumphant that even the pronoun “I” has been extinguished.  The human spirit, however, is irrepressible.

Equality 2521 is a sinner in the hands of a suffocating state, a young man who yearns to study the ways of the world and perhaps even to become a scholar, but who is consigned to be a street-sweeper. After stumbling into an abandoned subway tunnel, Equality finds himself for the first time alone, and there in the dark with just his thoughts for company, a psychological journey begins. The tunnel, which he and a couple of sympathetic friends keep hidden from everyone else, becomes their sanctuary, a place for Equality to read books and experiment with the things he finds in the rubbish, a place where he eventually discovers that there are things not written in the Global We’s philosophy. There is Electricity, and if he can realize its power he can make the world a better place. Breathlessly he takes his findings to the convention of Scholars, who promptly imprison him for many manifold presumptions (among them, threatening to put candle-makers out of work). Happily for him they are incompetent at incarceration, since so few people have ever rebelled against them, and soon he’s escaped to make his fortunes elsewhere.

Anthem is a short work, a novella of no more than 90 pages; I read it chiefly because it was available for free on Amazon, and the delicious irony of something of Rand’s being offered for free was too good to pass put. Altogether it’s the tale of an individual’s self-realization, his struggle for consciousness. Eventually he does, and as in 1984 his rebellion is urged onward by forbidden love for Liberty 5-3000, and given safe harbor by the wild;  the rugged forests outside the bleak We-ruled cities are teeming with life and energy. But among the wild are grown-over homes, and inside them books which reveal how much was lost.  Ultimately Equality and Liberty shed their old identities and emerge as Individuals, and  here the book descends into preaching.  All of the lost passion of twenty years comes bubbling up into Equality’s realization that the individual is sovereign, the individual makes the world, and so carried away by it is he that when Liberty professes, “I love you,” he replies with a half-page speech about the importance of names and the individual.

I have never Rand before, and will own a bias against her, one I’ve had since listening to a radio interview with her years ago. Even so, I enjoyed this work for the most part; any tale of man versus the state, of  the natural vs. the contrived, is sure to win me over despite the overweening pronunciations of the last few pages  Considering  that the union of the happy couple results in a pregnancy, there is hope that the book’s heroes will learn what the childless Rand never did, that people are born into society as surely as fish are born into the ocean. It is a society of the family, however, a natural one, where we are reared by the bone of our bone and the flesh of our flesh, not an artificial and imposed “Global We”.    Even so, this is a fascinating little book, well worth the time spent reading it; regardless of my animosity toward Rand’s praise of selfishness, hers was a quick and artful pen.  The similarities between this and 1984 make it a beacon of hope after Orwell’s singularly depressing work about the triumph of the state.

Related:

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Divergent

Posted on June 5, 2014 by smellincoffee
Divergent
© 2011 Veronica Roth
487 pages


Every major city has problems with organized gangs, but the Chicago of Divergent’s future has nothing else. The entire society is organized in five factions devoted to an ideal;  Dauntless, Abnegation, Erudition, Amity, and Candor. These five subcultures prescribe virtually every aspect of life; occupation, manners, dress, and living quarters.  Every year, on their sixteenth birthday, young people submit to a test that informs them which faction best suits their personality. A rare few defy this sorting serum, however;  they are Divergent, and their very existence is taboo. Such is the premise of Divergent, a young adult sci-fi thriller that succeeds in  thrilling despite some problems.
 Our lead character and hero is Beatrice, soon to be called Tris. Tris has been raised by the  semi-religious Abnegation, who strive for selflessness and are trusted with the governance of society. Beatrice, soon to be called Tris, loves her family’s ways but can’t help but feel she doesn’t  belong there. When her inconclusive test results giver her the option of choosing, she bolts factions and becomes Dauntless. Her new faction, the society’s warriors and guards, place a premium on battle skills and ferocity.  Most of the book is taken up with Tris training for initiation; if she fails, she will be homeless.  Considering that the training involves teenagers violently sparring with one another (with the occasional knife thrown),  and the  plot eventually ends in rebellion against an establishment reigning with the machinery of the state,  little wonder it has been compared to The Hunger Games.
 Unlike The Hunger Games,  the insurrection is not one of the oppressed against an oppressor, but of one sect against another, manipulating  others to do its bidding. The Erudite, who are less wise  here than presumptive elites,  think little about society being run by simpering religious folk. They intend to seize power through sinister technocracy,  and Tris soon finds her allies as against her as everyone else.  Though she prevents catastrophic defeat, her victory is necessarily minor given that there are two more books in the series. Divergent is a touch more risqué than The Hunger Games, and not nearly as violent (yet).  The premise is contrived, especially when the primary danger of being Divergent is that such individuals pose a danger to the exact technology and plot used by the Erudite to start their coup.  Either the Erudite have been scheming this for a very long time,  Divergency is dangerous for other reasons, or that was a boo-boo.  The entire intellectuals vs. virtuous religious angle is obnoxious,  and the villains are more flatly Eeeeeeevil than one would expect for a teen audience. The ever-sympathetic challenges of a young person being removed from the safety of childhood and having to adapt to a new environment and new people provide a familiar story with plenty of excitement, with some exploring of moral horizons thrown in.  In my view Divergent’s best virtue is the value placed on family; while its society urges that Faction comes before family,  Tris  uses the lessons learned from her parents to help guide her transition into her own brave new world, and later relies on their help in the coup. 
Problematic but fun, Divergent is best for older tweens and teens.
Related:
  • “Profession“, Isaac Asimov.  In a future society where people’s professions are assigned to them by a testing computer, one man finds himself at a loss when he is declared un-assignable. 
  • The Hunger Games, obviously.

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The Smoke at Dawn

Posted on June 5, 2014 by smellincoffee

The Smoke at Dawn
© 2014 Jeff Shaara
528 pages




The bells of the South in 1863 rang death knells, not peals of joyous victory. In July, on the same day that Lee’s army suffered a staggering loss at Gettysburg,  General Grant of the Union army took possession of Vicksburg, and within it gained complete command of the Mississippi river. The South fractured and its strength wasted, the Confederates needed a fresh triumph. In November, General Braxton Bragg commanding rebel forces in Tennessee thought he might be the man to deliver it. After routing a Union army, he cornered them in Chattanooga, where he hoped a quick siege would see their surrender and regain the South its lost momentum.  The Smoke at Dawn is the story of the Chattanooga Campaign, of armies stumbling in the night through battlefields that soar into the sky.  It’s also the tale of commanding personalities, of men set at odds even against their comrades. The third book in Shaara’s new Civil War series is a third triumph for the author — and General Grant. 

Like Shaara’s other works, The Smoke at Dawn is a swiftly-moving narrative composed largely of the thoughts and conversations of generals commanding the battle. This combined with more conventional narration is highly effective at putting the reader into the generals’ position without being rambling.  Many of the characters are familiar names; Grant, Longstreet, and Sherman among them.  The greatest maneuvers and best battlefield performances, however, are put on by generals who fame has ignored.  The focus on the generals from across the field give the reader a strategic understanding of what is happening, allowing witness of the way the armies wrangled around one another, attempting to control supply lines or use the river to land by stealth and deliver devastating stealth attacks. The river puts the generals in the curious place of sometimes being closer to their foes than their friends;   Generals Thomas and Grant, commanding, can view Burnside’s own headquarters  from their own positions.   
As in his more recent work, Shaara also employs a few infantrymen to deliver combat scenes; the most notable here is Fritz Bauer, a Wisconsin orphan who would be alone in the world were it not for his best friend Willis. When Willis leaves the volunteers for the regular army, Bauer follows suit, and their course through the campaign gives not only plentiful action scenes, but the realization that soldiers often fought not for ideals but for their comrades. The book as a whole is steeped in the power of human relationships;  the obstinate and autocratic Braxton Bragg’s contemptuous attitude toward his subordinates withers away his own army’s effectiveness.  He earns no one’s trust save Jefferson Davis’, spending the entire battle fighting with his own officers and  once sending an entire corps away just to be delivered from a potential threat to his authority. Between Bauer’s devotion and Bragg’s contempt is the happy medium of rivalry,  most prominently Sherman’s running duel with his equally highly effective Confederate counterpart. Despite Sherman’s reputation and Grant’s high esteem of him,  Sherman can’t seem to best Patrick Cleburne.  For all of Bragg’s discipline and Sherman’s speed, however, ultimately the battle’s upset is decided by unpredictable forces — like a diversionary force that advances further than planned, attempting to avoid being slaughtered by artillery, and results in routing  an entire army. 
Readers of Civil War fiction will find The Smoke at Dawn most attractive. The fourth book in Shaara’s series will concern the Fall of Atlanta.
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The Penelopiad

Posted on June 2, 2014 by smellincoffee

The Penelopiad
© 2006  Margaret Atwood
224 pages

             
Which is worse, waiting twenty years for a rascal of a husband to return home while simultaneously managing his kingdom, raising his son, and fending off scores of suitors – or being upheld as a saint for doing it?    Everyone mocked Penelope for her loyalty while she lived, and derided her for not doing more to discourage the suitors dining locust-like from his orchards, but now that she’s dead, she’s become a paragon of chastity and wifely duty?  It’s a little too much to take, and from the Asphodel Fields, the shade of Penelope reflects on her life. The Penelopeiad is the story of the Odyssey from her view, largely comic though sometimes regretful as she explains why she acted as she did. Penelope’s narrative is interrupted from time to time by a chorus of maids, in keeping with Greek theater.  The maids, Penelope’s servants before Odyssesus ordered their deaths, are the touchstone of her regret. For decades they were her daughters by proxy, her conspirators against the gold-hunting boors infesting her hall, her only friends – and Odysseus slaughtered them! Helen of Troy makes frequent appearances as Penelope’s opposite, a beautiful and wicked betrayer of men who even in death enjoys teasing them. Although The Penelopiad is fully grounded in Greek mythology, modern quirks abound;  the chorus parts move from verse to anthropology lectures and then a mock-trial that ends in a fantasy showdown between Athena and the Furies. It’s great fun that doesn’t diminish the original source.


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